Free Software – Don's House of Fine Patisseries

December 1, 2024December 1, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 7: Desktop applications

Previous chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

Using your computer of course requires some software beyond the base operating system; fortunately, most desktop linux distributions not only have repositories of freely installable software, often more common software as decided by the distro’s maintainers are pre-installed on the system at the same time as system installation.

This post is concentrating on the popular office suite LibreOffice which includes a drawing program, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, and a database application. While this post will show a few functions of each part, it is in no way intended to be a tutorial, but rather a cursory demonstration of each, leaving the exploration of each to you, the reader.

In this post I occasionally refer to operating systems beyond Linux. Also, contrary to my usual habit of not editorializing in this series, I offer the following: Many Linux software suites are largely, although importantly, not completely compatible with other known equivalents on other systems. They will often be able to open and edit files created by them; however, the compatibility and drop-in replacement value of each piece of software for the other (regardless of in which order) is often variable, sometimes quite substantially.

Note that occasionally, some screenshots were taken at different times for the sake of completeness, but presented in the order seen here, for the sake of the narrative.

Pinning Apps to the Dock:

Start from the Activities (hot corner in the upper left hand corner (the horizontal bar; either just quickly move the mouse there, or if necessary, click on the the horizontal bar):

I searched for “Lib” which brought up three of LibreOffice’s apps: Writer, Calc, and Impress, and I right clicked each one …

Searching for installed LibreOffice components

… each of which I pinned to the dock at the bottom, one at a time:

Templates:

Note: In this post, the use of existing document templates found on the internet will be generously relied upon in order to demonstrate in a cursory fashion some of the resources available to desktop users — both of free software packages and other systems as well — as well as to simplify the mounting and development of the narrative using said existing documents. The site www.freedesktop.org, by happenstance, is frequently used, as is the templates section of www.libreoffice.org. Of note, especially on the former site, there are a number of templates which are in languages other than English, and some which have been on the site for several years, using older formats. Hopefully, the language barriers as the cases may be will not be too difficult to surmount given online translation services, while the older file formats are normally seamlessly supported by current software suites, with the ability to save in modern formats.

Users are of course free to create documents from scratch as they would on any system.

Going back to the activities screen, choose the Firefox icon (orange and blue, on the left at the bottom):

In the address bar, enter the address of a search engine, such as www.duckduckgo.com:

Search for templates. In this case, I specifically asked for templates appropriate for LibreOffice, which brought me to www.opendesktop.org:

In the search bar, I searched for LibreOffice, which gave me the following options:

… and chose for ODF Text Templates (for word processessing):

Browsing through the templates, I chose a CV template, for “Tux the Penguin — Brand Ambassador and Mascot”:

… which I downloaded:

On the activities screen, I opened up the Files application:

Drawing:

… and this is where I learned that the downloaded CV template was not what it seemed. 🙂

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured drawing software. One such piece is LibreOffice Draw, which functions similarly to Microsoft Visio, allowing for some basic-to-not-so basic graphical manipulations, editing, basic draughting, and inserting texts.

From the Files program just opened, I navigated to the Downloads directory, where the CV was located after downloading, and despite having believed that the CV I had downloaded was a text document, the file format in fact proved to be a drawing format:

I double-clicked on the CV file, which, since LibreOffice Draw isn’t always a part of a Fedora base installation, launched the software store, and having found LibreOffice Draw in the Fedora repositories, offered to install it, which I accepted:

CV file double-clicked, launching the software store in order to install required software

Once LibreOffice Draw had been installed, I asked that it be launched:

After closing the offer to see the “What’s New” notes, I went to the File dropdown menu to open the file:

… and navigated over to the Downloads directory, where the CV was located.

I clicked on the CV file to open it:

In Draw — depending on the nature of the input file — various existing texts can be modified, as well as many basic-to-not-so-basic graphical manipulations. In the case of this file, the file was designed such that the text could be modified:

To manipulate images, the picture of Tux (the penguin) was double-clicked to select it, the right mouse button was clicked, and the “Rotate or Flip” option was selected:

… and I chose to flip the picture of Tux upside-down:

Some modestly — or more complex — drawings, including multimedia documents such as the CV shown above, can be created and / or modified, which I leave to the reader to explore.

Word Processor:

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured word processing software suites. One of the more popular such pieces is LibreOffice Writer.

I returned to the opendesktop.org website, and chose a business card template to open in a word processor — LibreOffice Writer.

I navigated to find a business card template:

opendesktop.org template for business cards

… and downloaded the file:

Similar to how the CV above was opened, the business card template was opened, without having to go through the installation of LibreOffice Writer:

Business card template opened in LibreOffice Writer

The text of the first card was changed to a “Desktop Linux: Revealed” theme:

Name and contact details on first card changed

The modifications were also saved:

Returning to the opendesktop.org templates, I chose the “Organica Business Forms” to download:

The page for the Organica Business Forms was opened:

… and the file downloaded:

Template downloaded and directory opened

The business forms were compressed in the .tar format, analogous to .zip files:

Directory with downloaded file, which was double clicked

The archive was double-clicked, revealing a directory contained within:

.tar file double clicked, opening up the archive

The directory was double-clicked, revealing several templates: Business cards (different from above), a fax cover sheet, four different kinds and sizes of labels, an invoice, and a letter:

Going back to Writer, the letter file was double-clicked, which again opened the file in LibreOffice Writer:

A space was added between two paragraphs:

The “Table” drop down menu was opened:

… and the “Insert Table” option was chosen:

… which opened up a window to determine some settings for the table to be inserted:

Window opened to set table characteristics

A table with five columns and five rows was selected:

The table was selected, and the right mouse button was clicked, revealing a contextual menu:

The option “Table Properties” was selected, bringing up a window:

The button for all lines under “Line Arrangement” was chosen in the Borders tab, in order to insert borders around all the cells of the table:

The “Ok” button was pressed, returning me to the document, showing now all the cells of the table with borders:

Text was added to a cell in the upper left hand corner (“Linux Desktop”):

A number of other cells were filled in:

The “File” drop down menu was opened:

… and the file was saved:

As with the previous section, I leave it to the reader to further explore LibreOffice Writer to see the various options in the various menus, and the various kinds of text documents that can be created.

Spreadsheets:

Much like other popular desktops, Fedora Linux has several fully functional and fully featured spreadsheet software. One of the most popular such pieces is LibreOffice Calc.

After saving the business cards, I returned to the freedesktop.org website, browsing the spreadsheet templates:

opendesktop.org page sorting for spreadsheets

I chose the Amortization Schedule:

opendesktop.org page with amortization schedule

The amortization Schedule was downloaded:

Similarly to previous files, the Amortization Schedule was opened (file double clicked in the file download directory).

Amortization schedule opened in LibreOffice Calc

Several of the balance figures was selected, revealing how the value us calculated in the formula bar:

Amortization schedule, cell calculation revealed

I chose to modify the table, by adding a value of 1000 in the “Extra Principle Payment”, to change the values of “New Balance” …

… and then I changed the value to 500 to see how it affected the values of “New Balance”.

Again I leave it to the reader to further explore mounting spreadsheets of their own using their own data.

Slide Shows / Presentations

At the opendesktop.org collection of templates, I chose a slide show template to download:

opendesktop.org page sorting for a presentation template

I chose a template to download …

… and downloaded it:

Again through the files directory, I double-clicked on the downloaded file:

File in download directory double clicked

… which opened up the file in LibreOffice Impress:

Presentation opened in LibreOffice Impress

I began editing the title line — in the process, using the wrong branding for this series!

The text colour, white, didn’t have enough contrast for my taste, so I selected the text …

… and went into the options area on the right to by clicking on the letter “A” with a red underline, to change the font colour:

Text colour changed through menu icons on the right

The font colour was changed to a greenish-blue colour:

Other text was changed and added:

I changed to the second page, and similarly started to change the text:

Text can be changed as per your needs, as well as pages added through copy / paste or other wizards available.

The drop-down file menu was chosen, so that I could save the file:

Once the file was saved, I opened up the drop-down file menu again, and chose “Export As” so that I could export the file as a PDF. (Editorial note: As mentioned earlier, while there is a good amount of compatibility between LibreOffice and other office suites, it can be disappointingly incomplete, which I have particularly seen and experienced with — but not only — slide shows. For more of a discussion of such from the perspective of the usefulness of PDFs, please see my post on the subject.)

The file drop-down menu was clicked again, and the option “Export As” was clicked:

File menu opened to export the file as a PDF

Exporting to PDFs can be rather easy and direct, or, as I am going to show a little bit here, allows for a large amount of choices …

… including protecting PDFs with passwords for opening:

Tab with options for password setting for opening PDFs

Passwords were set for both opening as well as for “permission” which means to allow editing of the PDF (see my post on the subject), and the slide show was exported as a PDF:

… and the OK button was clicked:

As usual, I leave to the reader to explore further. Also, within LibreOffice itself it has a wizard to help the user create a number of presentations with various backgrounds and layouts.

Database:

LibreOffice also includes a database module, called “Base”, which is similar to Microsoft Access; it is essentially a front end manager — a gui interface — for the actual database software behind it that it leverages.

Before I show a properly mounted database, I will show some screenshots about how to start.

Starting from the home screen, the activities corner (hot corner) in the upper left was clicked:

On the Activies screen, “libreoffice base” was typed into the search bar, and the option to install LibreOffice Base, which is not always installed in a base install, was offered:

Activities screen accessed, and “libreoffice base” searched for; the option to install Base was offered

The option was double-clicked, which brought up the “software store” with the choice of LibreOffice Base …

Software store opened to allow for installation of Base

I double-clicked on the option, bringing up the information page on the package and the offer to install it:

I clicked the “Install” button:

Once LibreOffice Base was installed, an “Open” button presented itself:

The “Open” button was clicked, lauching LibreOffice:

A wizard came up to select a database:

Wizard opened to allow choice to launch Base

The presented option was accepted, and the “Next>” button was clicked, bringing up a “Save and proceed” window:

The “Finish” button was clicked, opening a Save window:

Finish button clicked, allowing for the creation of a database

Once that was done, the following screen came up, in order to start creating a database:

Note that from this point on, I am showing some very basic things, and I will soon recommend a tutorial, which will better show how to use the software than I could ever present.

I clicked on the “Table” icon, which brought up a Table Wizard:

I chose the “Personal” category, on the premise — in the context of this post, anyway which presumes that many readers may be seeking to use linux at home and not just at the office, and that a database might not as easily appear to be a personal piece of software.

I pulled down the suggested list of topics:

… and chose “Recipes” for what I presume are obvious reasons — we all eat, and presumably many people have a personal collection of varying sizes (here’s my collection of recipes, incidentally NOT in a database format, at https://www.malak.ca/food).

Some field names were suggested:

I clicked on “Name”:

… which moved it over to the column on the right:

I also chose other sample tables:

… at which point, I clicked on the “Finish” button, leading to the following screen:

Finish button clicked, leading to a data entry page

I started entering data:

I chose to save my changes:

At this point, I am going to direct you to a far better tutorial than I could ever present, even in the most cursory of fashions:

As of the writing of this post, a rather complete tutorial on using Base can be found at thefrugalcomputerguy.com/seriespg.php?ser=15/ (no doubt amongst countless other similarly excellent resources):

TheFrugalComputerGuy.com LibreOffice Base tutorial page

Although I think it best to leave the tutorial to TheFrugalComputerGuy, I will show a small database in action:

Starting again at the desktop screen:

The activities screen was accessed through the upper left hand hot corner with the mouse:

The Firefox icon (orange, on the left on the dock at the bottom) was clicked:

I went to my favourite search engine, duckduckgo.com:

Search engine opened (in this case www.duckduckgo.com)

… and I searched for “libreoffice base templates”:

I chose the “Templates & Extensions” link, the second link above, at the LibreOffice.org site itself:

I clicked on the green “plus” sign to the right of “Boost your creativity with templates”:

… which led to the following page:

On the left, there are a number of filters under “Add tag filters:”, and clicked on “Base”, bringing up the following page:

I chose the “MyRecipes” template for LibreOffice Base:

I scrolled down to quickly assess the files, finding them eminently interesting for the task at hand:

The download button was clicked, and the file downloaded:

The files program was opened, and the newly downloaded file was highlighted:

The .zip file was double-clicked, creating a directory of the files (ok I accidentally created the directory three times!)

One of the directories was double-clicked and opened:

The “ReadMe.txt” file was double-clicked and opened:

The .odt file was opened as well:

Instructions and general description file checked

The “MyRecipes1.jpg” file was double-clicked, opening a screenshot:

Screenshot of database operating consulted

The FoodPix directory was opened, showing pictures of the recipes in the database:

From the database’s main directory, the database was opened:

After looking about, the “UpdateRecipes” option was selected:

Which opened up one of the recipes:

The database author chose to have an active Pantry list with checkable items, no doubt based at least partly on their recipes; by having it dynamic, when asked to create purchasing lists, the database can exclude pantry items already on hand:

Said shopping lists can be generated from the “1MainMenuSwitchboard” option:

Main menu switchboard created by the author to navigate through their recipes and other functions they programmed

Given that the “switchboard” is based on macros, the Tools pull down menu was opened::

… and the “Options” option was clicked:

“Options” option clicked, opening an options window

The Security option was chosen:

… and the “Macro Security” button was clicked. The security level was set to low, as per the author’s suggestion:

Back to the Switchboard:

The “Mark Recipe List” button was clicked, and I decided to mark three of the recipes:

In trying to close the window, a window asked if I wanted to save my changes, to which I clicked “yes”.

The “Grocery List for Marked Recipes” button was clicked:

Grocery list option chosen from main menu

… producing a grocery list based on the recipes, which was automatically opened in LibreOffice Writer:

Grocery list created for the selected recipes

The next chapter will look at graphics.

October 18, 2024October 18, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

Previous Chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 5: Gnome Extensions, and Basic File Management

Note: Although it has been a while between posts and I had planned on another subject for what would have been this post, given the time lapse I decided to take advantage of a new version of Fedora that had been released to show how to easily upgrade the OS version, in this case, from version 39 to version 40. Note that many different versions of linux (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc.) have similar functions and upgrade paths; since I began using the automatic upgrade tool in Fedora in about 2018, I have had good experiences.

Firstly, the “Activities” screen happened to open when I logged into the system, and I chose the software icon in the dock on the bottom (the white “shopping bag” with the red, black, and blue symbols):

Which brought up the following screen, telling me that there were general updates, and that a new version of Fedora was available:

The system updates were first chosen and downloaded:

Once the updates were downloaded, the system was ready to be rebooted for installation:

The “Restart & Install” button was chosen to confirm the reboot:

Restart and install updates dialog box opened

The system rebooted:

… and updates were installed:

Once the updates were installed, the system rebooted:

System rebooted after installation of updates

… leading to the login screen:

… where I entered my password:

Once logged in, I clicked on the software icon again in the dock, and chose to download the upgrades for Fedora 40:

Software store opened again, and upgrade packages downloaded (2%)

Once the upgrade packages were downloaded, the “Restart & Upgrade” button was pressed:

All packages downloaded, and Restart and Upgrade button pressed

… which required authentication, so my password was entered:

Authentication required for the major changes

The system asked again if I wanted to restart and Install the upgrade:

Confirmation requested to restart and upgrade the system

The “Restart & Install Upgrade” button was pressed:

Once the upgrade was complete, the computer rebooted:

The login screen came up again:

And again I provided my password:

Once logged in, new artwork for the new version came up, as well as a notification that the system had been upgraded to the new version (in this case, Fedora v.40):

Just to finish off some checks, the menu at the power button was opened, in order to open the settings screen, accessible from the little gear second from the left on top:

The settings were opened:

I noticed that the name of my computer was curiously changed back to “Fedora” in the upgrade:

System renamed after curious change by upgrade

Then I chose the “System Details”, showing that the system had indeed been updated to version 40:

Confirmation that the system had been upgraded to Fedora 40

Next chapter: Using common pieces of desktop software

August 20, 2024October 18, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 5: Gnome Extensions, and Basic File Management

Previous Chapter: Desktop Linux Unveiled : Chapter 4: Installing Linux

In this chapter, Gnome Extensions will be briefly discussed, and basic file transfers and manipulation will be highlighted.

Gnome Extensions

Gnome was designed to be extensible, or have its behaviour be changed with extensions. There are hundreds of extensions, most produced by volunteer programmers.

Launch Firefox from the dock at the bottom of the screen (the icon at the left). Firefox will launch, leading to the Fedora Project main page (a setting you may wish to keep, or change at a later time.)

In the navigation bar, enter the site https://extensions.gnome.org. (Some distributions may manage extensions locally; Fedora has opted to only do so partially.)

Click on the link “Click here to install browser extensions”, which will eventually allow for the installation of the Gnome Shell integration tool.

Click on “Add”:

I recommend that you click on “Allow this extension to run in Private Windows” and press “okay”.

As of when the following screenshot was taken, here is page one of the available extensions, along with a brief description:

To install an extension that interests you, click on the black switch that will be set to “Off”.

Click on “Install”:

Sometimes, an extension will be incompatible with the current version of Gnome, and the page will say as much:

When you have selected all the extensions which interest you, close Firefox:

Basic file manipulation:

Starting from the main screen, click on the activities bar in the upper left hand corner:

… leading to the activities screen, with the dock:

Click on the blue rectangle meant to resemble a filing cabinet, in the centre.

For convenience, I moved the window to the left, and it “snapped” to take up half the screen:

The activities screen was accessed again, to access the dock, and right-clicking on the file manager icon:

Choose “New Window”, in order to launch a second file manager window:

The size and location of the second window were adjusted in order to have a second window on the right:

Before moving on, I am going to point out that I personally like file listings with full information; however, files can be displayed with previews (the following shots were taken after the following operations were completed):

By hovering the pointer over a button with four blocks in it, you can toggle between lists and icons:

Clicking on the icon will change the filenames to icon size:

Hovering over the same square icon can revert to a list view.

At this point, you can insert a USB key with some files or a backup, or a CD/DVD drive, or a portable USB hard drive.

In this case, I decided to copy some files from the computer hosting my website, and some file backups. Clicking on “+ Other Locations” reveals, as per the window on the right, access to other computers accessible to your computer:

I entered into the address bar at the bottom of the window the address of my website, and telling the file manager to use the ssh protocol to securely access the location:

As part of the initial connection, my computer asked me to confirm if I wanted the connection, since it was the first time this instance was connecting to my website. Should you get such a challenge, click on “Log In Anyway”:

My website server presented an authentication challenge:

I entered my username and password, chose “Remember password until you logout”, and clicked on “Connect” (you may choose either of the two other options, at your discretion):

Once there, I navigated to a directory with some photos from a past birthday celebration for my grandmother:

Wishing to copy all the files on my server (on the right) over to the computer (on the left), the first file was selected by clicking on it …

… and then scrolling down to the bottom of the file list, and while pressing on the CTRL key, clicking on the last:

Instead of drag and drop, I right clicked my mouse over the right …

… which opened a contextual menu, in which I chose to create a folder, leading to the opening of a dialog:

A name for a new directory, in this case reflecting that it was from my grandmother’s birthday one year, was entered into the dialogue, and the directory was created:

The previously selected files on my server were transferred via “drag and drop” to the newly created directory:

A photo was selected, and a right click opened a contextual menu, offering a number of options. The first, “Open With Image Viewer”, was selected …

… opening the selected photo.

On the local machine, I clicked on “Home” …

… then on “Documents”, while on my server, I navigated to another directory where I chose a PDF document:

This time, I used a right-clicked contextual menu on my server side to chose “Copy To” to copy the document over to my local machine.

The file was then selected, and a contextual menu (right click) was opened, which offered “Open with Document Viewer”:

… opening up the document, in this case about how to make a backwoods washing machine:

Again on my server, I navigated to another directory, this time in my backups:

… and selected another file to transfer, in this case, a spreadsheet:

The spreadsheet was dragged and dropped onto the local machine:

Recognizing the file extension as that of an OpenDocument spreadsheet file, LibreOffice was launched:

… and the file was opened, in this case, for a table of prices for a number of items I sell at a flea market near my cottage:

Back to the file transfers, a video file in a directory with pictures and videos of my cat was selected …

… and dragged and dropped over to the local machine, and the file selected and right clicked, revealing a contextual menu, allowing for the opening of the video file:

The Gnome Videos player was opened; since the relevant codec had not been installed in the base install, Videos asked if it should attempt to install the codec, which it proposed might be available in the software repositories:

The “Find in Software” button was clicked, leading to the following window:

The required codec (“GStreamer Multimedia Codecs – H.264”) was chosen for installation; once installed, a video of my cat, playing with a feather toy, was shown:

Another file, another spreadsheet, was selected on my server …

… and dragged over to the new setup:

Using a right click contextual menu, the new selected file was opened:

… revealing my shopping plans for a large amount of soup I was going to cook for a community meal:

Another file, a text file, was selected on my server …

… and dragged over to the new setup:

Using a right click contextual menu, the new selected file was opened:

… and a text editor window opened up with the text file:

Many other things can be done with the file manager, including launching template documents in a click if templates have been placed in a templates directory.

Next Chapter:

Chapter 6: Upgrading the Operating System

February 26, 2024March 18, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 3: Preparing to Install Linux

Desktop Linux: Unveiled is a series of posts that show how to start using Linux.

Previous Chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 2: Common Linux Distributions

In this post, acquiring a computer on which to install Linux, as well as downloading and writing a Linux distribution on a USB stick, will be shown. Fedora Desktop Edition will be used as an example, although at this point, setting up the installation USB stick can be done with any other distribution — which is most of the common ones — that allows for such an installation.

(Note for future reference, graphical installation with other distributions will be similar, but each may have some nuances and differences between them.)

Hardware — the computer on which Linux is to be installed

First, I recommend that as a newcomer, whichever linux you decide to install, that you decide to do the installation on a separate computer, such as an old computer, on its own. By doing this, you will not reduce space on the hard drive / SSD on which your current OS is installed, especially in taking account the space for data you may to transfer over to the Linux system, nor will you have to deal with the intricacies and occasional perils of dual booting or data loss on your current computer setup, nor will you have deal with the myriad and occasionally confusing issues that may surround virtualisation. Finally, by having a separate computer to “play” with, you will be able to start over again in the event that something goes wrong, or if you decide that you’d like to try a different Linux distribution.

The current (2024) webserver for www.malak.ca

The above photo is taken from a page from a recent (February 2024) presentation the author made about their web server, which hosts https://www.malak.ca (the website hosting this blog), using an old computer with a BIOS creation date of 2008.

Acquiring a computer:

“Old” computers are not unusually difficult to acquire; you may already possess one in storage.

Use an old computer you may be wishing to replace, or already be in the process of replacing, or even a several years-disused computer of which you may not yet have disposed;
Buy, or barter for, a used computer from family or friends;
Buy a used computer from a local computer repair person, who may have a storefront and may sell refurbished computers;
Speak with your employer; depending on their policies, they may be willing to sell you older equipment of which they would like to divest themself(ves);
Check reputable online markets;
Buy a new dedicated computer (only recommended once you become convinced of the cost/benefit regime).

Check the “minimum requirements” page of the distribution you choose; my current bare minimum specs are a Core 2 Duo 64bit processor, 4GB memory, 40GB hard drive (the current, as of late 2023, Fedora Workstation recommendation), and a spare USB 2.0 port (such as after other common USB peripherals you may be using, like a mouse and keyboard), in order to use the installation USB stick (which will be shown lower down in this post). (As desired or required, don’t forget to get a used screen.)

For the purposes of introduction to, and the exploration of, Linux, the old mechanical hard drive with such an old computer is likely adequate; however, SSD cards and extra memory will dramatically increase performance of older equipment. Further, as of posting, SSD cards in the 250GB range are typically very affordable to either add on later, or purchase for immediate use including installation of the system, while memory cards appropriate to the motherboard are usually readily available and inexpensively as per the above list regarding sourcing an old computer.

Downloading and creating a USB installation stick:

A USB stick is required for this step; Fedora’s installation image as of version 39 in late 2023 is approximately 2GB; hence a 4GB USB stick would be recommended going forward.

I am recommending the use of Fedora Media Writer to create the installation media, which can be run on Windows or Mac (as well as Linux, of course!) Should you choose another distribution, you can use a downloaded image from another distribution’s download page (see Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 2: Common Linux Distributions for a few suggestions of other distributions; see below regarding choosing other Fedora desktops, or creating installation media of another distribution).

(Note that the following screenshots may have been created out of order, however are presented in the order required for the narrative.)

To get the Fedora Media Writer, visit https://getfedora.org (I start off using screenshots from Windows):

Click on the circle indicating the latest release (in the shot above, 39), which will bring you to the following screen.

On this screen, click on “Download Now”; don’t worry, you aren’t committing yet.

On the following page, click on the green download button for Fedora Media Writer, either for Windows or for Mac:

A licence agreement window will pop up. This is for the Gnu Public Licence version 2, the licence under which the Fedora Media Writer is licensed. Click on “I agree”.

The next screen will ask where to install Fedora Media Writer on your computer, and it will suggest a location to install it on your hard drive. Click “Install”:

Once Fedora Media Writer is installed, click on “Next”:

… and click on “Finish”:

Launch Fedora Media Writer:

You may be asked to allow the app to make changes to your device. Click “Yes”.

At this point, you can either choose to have the Fedora Media Writer download Fedora automatically, or, you can download a distribution of your choice, and ask Fedora Media Writer to use that distribution instead (the “Select .iso file” option):

Going with the “Download automatically” option above, which by default chooses a Fedora distribution, on the next page (below), choose “Official Editions”:

Should you wish to try another desktop instead of the standard Gnome Desktop in Fedora Workstation Edition, you can choose the “Spins” option above, which will list the following drop-down menu:

Under the choice taken, the next screen is the “Write Options” for the USB stick, which at this point should be inserted in a USB port. Choose the latest version of Fedora (in this case, 39), the hardware architecture, and the USB stick to which you wish to write the installation media:

Click “Write” in the above screen, and Fedora Media Writer will begin writing to the USB stick:

The screen will automatically change to indicate that the written data is being checked:

Once finished, you can click on “Finish”.

Should you wish to try out Fedora without installing it on your computer first, you can follow the instructions on the screen to restart the computer and try a live, temporary version of Fedora. This will not affect your hard drive in the least, unless you choose to install … which I am not recommending, since I am recommending that you install on a completely separate computer (see beginning section).

Next Chapter

Chapter 4 will show the installation of Fedora Workstation.

February 11, 2024February 14, 2024

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 1: What is Linux?

Desktop Linux: Unveiled is a series of posts that show how to start using Linux.

In this post, Linux will be briefly explained and briefly compared to other common desktop computer operating systems.

First, what is an operating system?

An operating system (OS) is the software that makes a computer run, like Microsoft Windows, or MacOS. It is typically able to provide a way for users to operate the computer, and translate the instructions so the computer can run them. It also coordinates all the computer’s resources such as its CPU (central processing unit), memory, hard drive, and other components of the computer, as well as coordinate the user’s programs and data.

What is Linux?

Most people understand “Linux” to be a complete operating system like Windows or MacOS. However, strictly speaking, “Linux” is in fact just a part of the operating system, the central part called the kernel. Common usage has had “Linux” to informally refer to the whole operating system.

“Distributions”, (usually) complete and integrated collections of software built around the Linux kernel, can be legally built and distributed by anyone with the abilities and inclination because of the way the Linux kernel and the other software usually used with it are licensed, although most people choose to use an established distribution.

Distributions vs. Operating Systems

Linux distributions usually contain full linux-based operating systems, as well as extra software often not traditionally included in operating systems, such as office suites, media players, graphic design software, educational software, games, various apps, as well as other software such as server software. Although not all of the software is installed at the same time, they are typically all easily available in central locations called “repositories”, similar to app stores on MacOS and Windows; much is available free of charge, too!

Free Software vs. Proprietary Software

A lot of software available under Linux — and a growing amount under Windows and MacOS as well — is called Free Software, or sometimes Open Source Software. As a contrast, a substantial amount of Windows and MacOS software is called Proprietary Software.

Many people hear the expression “Free Software” and assume that it means that it is free of monetary charge. Some may even question its quality on the basis of such a lack of price.

Although free software is often (though not always) given away free of charge, and most common free software is of very high quality, the expression “Free Software” in fact refers to “freedom”, specifically various freedoms granted to the users of the software. These freedoms include the freedom to run the software for whatever purpose you wish, the freedom to study how the program works as well as make any changes that you wish, the freedom to share the software with others, and the freedom to share software you’ve modified with others.

Some of these freedoms require that the source code, or “recipes” that people can read and understand, be available to anyone and everyone.

The various licences used to allow this often tend to foster cooperation between various parties, often allowing groups who might sometimes be competitors to also cooperate with each other, creating common software that each group can then package together to present according to their own vision. Within this cooperation, software sometimes is developed quickly, and often many programming bugs are found and corrected quickly.

Some common free software licences are the GPL and the LGPL, which specifically give the recipient of the software the above freedoms, and require the sharing of the source code to the software, and any changes you may have made to it, when distributing the software. Other common free software licences are the BSD licence, the MIT licence, and the Apache licence, which have very few requirements but which permit users to use, modify, and distribute the software, while retaining copyright and some disclaimers notices.

In contrast, proprietary software is usually controlled by very restrictive licenses that keep the source code hidden, doesn’t allow users to distribute the software to whomever they please, doesn’t allow users to modify it or fix bugs even if they are able to were they to have access to the source code, and may even dictate how the software may or may not be used.

Next Chapter

Chapter 2 will list some popular Linux distributions that people use on their computers.

February 6, 2024

Présentation au sujet de mon serveur web — 06 février, 2024

Ceci est une petite note afin de souligner la présentation au sujet de mon serveur web que je vais donner ce soir au Linux Meetup à l’ÉTS au centre-ville de Montréal.

C’est intitulé “Deux frères, deux serveurs” et représente ma partie d’une présentation double avec mon frère.

*****

Just a little note to draw attention to my presentation about my webserver that I will be giving (in French) tonight at my local Linux Meetup at ÉTS in downtown Montreal.

It is titled “Deux frères, deux serveurs” (yes, it’s in French, and means “Two Brothers, Two Servers”), and the presentation represents my part of a double presentation with my brother.

December 11, 2023December 12, 2023

Updating a (very small) fleet of computers to Fedora 39

I have been using Fedora Linux since 2008. I would update by re-installation my computers regularly to new versions after end-of-life. Complete, manual re-installs ended in 2018 or 2019 when I started using Fedora’s command line upgrade feature after having observed it in action. Throughout it all, I have sometimes experienced technology change adventures along the way.

I have five active computers, all which were ready to update to Fedora 39 in November, 2023: Three were running on Fedora 37, and two were running Fedora 38. Normally, I try to keep to the same version of Fedora on my fleet of computers — although I will format with the current version of Fedora mid-stream when I format a new or a new to me computer, or a new hard drive or ssd, and try to use a version (that of the majority of computers) until end-of-life, usually roughly 12 to 13 months. I settled on odd numbered versions several years ago, on Fedora 15, by happenstance, and a desire not to be reformatting different computers every six months depending on when their end of life fell.

As such, I proceeded to upgrade my computers.

Since the recommended method of update for Fedora is by the command line DNF upgrade command (here’s my archive), or to use the graphical method in the “Software” “App Store”, I proceeded to upgrade my machines on the command line.

(Note: Some of the screenshots and photos used in this post were created during the various upgrades, while some were re-created ex post facto for the sake of mounting this narrative.)

Webserver: Fedora 37, Workstation Edition, Legacy BIOS (Dell Vostro 420 Series)

First, I updated my home web server using the above-cited DNF upgrade commands (as root; see further down in this post) :

dnf upgrade --refresh
dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=39
dnf system-upgrade reboot

Note that the upgrade plugin was already present on the server, hence my having omitted the step of installing the plugin. Important note, minor in my head although critical to my experience, is that my webserver uses the Workstation Edition, not the Server edition.

All went smoothly, with one small quirk: After the upgrade and later that evening while at a restaurant, I wanted to check my website for something, and it was down. I thought little of it beyond the frustration in the moment. When I got home, I let my brother know in the hopes he might help … but in the process, I saw that the machine’s light in the power button was amber, and I had an idea that there was a software power management issue. I pressed the button, and the machine popped to life; I then went into the power management part of the settings in the gnome settings, and found the “automatic suspend” setting had been turned on to “when idle”.

This was odd. This was an established system I originally installed back in April, 2021, when I upgraded the machine’s mechanical hard drive to an SSD. To be clear, powersaving on idle was *not* a previous setting (ie. the server was always to be on to be a 24/7 webserver, the machine’s only active function, besides its passive function as a backup server), and it appears to have been a change in default settings somewhere around Fedora 38; it appears to be a power saving policy (here’s my archive).

VPN Server: Fedora 38, Server Edition, Legacy BIOS (HP Compaq dc7700 Small Form Factor)

My next upgrade was also fairly simple and straightforward. It was on a machine I found in a building slated for demolition in about 2016, and is a P4-3.4GHz single core machine, which I had been using as a world community grid node for years, but which had been inactive for months, after there having been little work for it for months when WCG moved from IBM to the University of Toronto. (I also suspect that the UofT may have decided to shift most of its tasks to GPUs, which I don’t think the machine possesses, and in any case I did not properly research let alone confirm this, beyond the apparent lack of work units being sent to it.)

A problem I’d been having for years with this machine was that it would not reboot without manual intervention, apparently due to a time error; this suggested a dead bios battery. I tolerated this for years, but this summer I finally installed a new battery in the machine, resolving the issue.

I reformatted the machine with Fedora 38 Server Edition given its age and lack of memory, and I renamed the machine, having some misgivings about its former name. I offered its use to my brother, who uses it as a VPN server for the household here, particularly to simplify assisting our mother in her computer use. I generally leave the machine alone: VPNs are a nebulous thing I don’t understand very much at all; I understand SSH filesystem tunnelling, and the parts between that and VPNs are too nebulous for me to understand.

But to wit: Up to this point I was neglecting the machine, letting my brother deal with it, but as a result the machine would often go unupdated for weeks at a time. In mentioning that I’d embarked upon the process of upgrading my computers all to Fedora 39, I mentioned that I liked to keep my fleet of computers all aligned on the same version of Fedora; I mentioned that at that time, due to new installs, I had two out of five computers on Fedora 38, while the rest were still on Fedora 37. With the comment that I wanted to keep my fleet on the same version, my brother encouraged me to maintain responsibilities for updates and yes indeed to upgrade this machine in particular, to keep it in line with the rest of my computers.

As mentioned, the upgrade went smoothly and with one exception was rather unremarkable: The suspend on idle mentioned earlier was not invoked, which I learned while researching the issue above is a feature not invoked in the Fedora Server Edition (here’s my archive).

Dell XPS 13 Laptop: Fedora 37, Workstation Edition, UEFI

Next, I updated my Dell XPS 13 (note: 2021). Again, this was an easy process with the dnf upgrade command.

One of the items to do in a couple of lists to do after installing Fedora 39, “17 Things to Do After Installing Fedora 39” (here’s my archive) and “Things to do after installing Fedora 39 Workstation” (here’s my archive) was to do firmware updates, using the following commands:

sudo fwupdmgr refresh –force
sudo fwupdmgr get-updates
sudo fwupdmgr update

Which, of course, I did. (There were indeed some firmware updates to be installed.)

Here’s what the process looks like on my XPS13 (Screenshots and photos taken after the fact, on a subsequent series of firmware updates):

Firmware updates a few weeks after upgrade

At this point, I was invigorated by being able to perform firmware updates on my XPS 13 laptop (which admittedly had not been the first time I had done so under linux, but no matter.)

However, a couple of weeks later, I noticed that an extension wasn’t working: My XP13 has a touchscreen display, and Gnome has an onscreen keyboard that pops up contextually when text is to be entered, occupying a major amount of screen space; I had been using the “disable-touch-osk” extension by sulincix, which stopped working with the upgrade to Fedora 39.

On screen keyboard disabling extension not working

This leads to a gripe I have for the Gnome developers: Stop breaking extensions with each new version of Gnome, or provide *some* kind of stable API or environment or whatever is needed so that the extension developers don’t decide to abandon their extensions because Gnome keeps on shifting so much that they have to work excessively hard every six months just to maintain their extension.

This led to the next two computers I have, which are a 2015 Acer laptop, and a 2014 Dell Inspiron desktop.

Acer Laptop: Fedora 37, Workstation Edition, UEFI — but using Legacy BIOS

I have been having problems using UEFI in my Acer laptop since I received it new in 2015; the Fedora live media would boot up, and I could install Fedora under UEFI; however, it would never boot up afterwards. My only solution seemed to be to use legacy bios. Nonetheless, hope springs eternal, this was the time to try again to install under UEFI.

I should note at this point, as mentioned above, that my home server (2008) and my VPN server (2007) are both rather old computers and pre-date UEFI and use legacy BIOS, while my XPS 13, Acer laptop, and Dell Inspiron desktop, are all UEFI machines. I make these distinctions because of conversations I had in which on the one hand, it was suggested that I perform a baremetal reformat of the Acer laptop in order to sidestep a problem I had been experiencing when I’d allowed the battery to drain completely, forcing a reset to defaults in the BIOS and hence to UEFI boot, making my setup with legacy-BIOS unbootable; on the other hand, I concluded “It’s 2023; it’s absurd not to be using UEFI on UEFI machines.” (Of course, the use of older, legacy machines predating UEFI are a different issue altogether, and for them, said point is moot.)

In addition to this comment about using UEFI, and the potential to have any UEFI firmware upgrades as discussed above, I decided that my Acer laptop needed to receive a baremetal format, given the accumulation of a lot of software on the system that I didn’t use (many though hardly all installed because of a presentation I gave in 2021); I decided that instead of package hunting and manually uninstalling them all — including dependencies that decide not to uninstall — it seemed more efficient and effective to do a clean install.

Fast forward to this round of upgrades, I upgraded the installation using a downloaded Fedora 39 image, and I went through various upgrades and setups, such as Gnome extensions, and some software installations. Suddenly I remembered that I had not changed the boot sequence from legacy bios to UEFI, so … I started over.

Several installation attempts later, including trying Fedora 36 (with an intention of upgrading through to version 39) based on some advice playing around with the various BIOS settings trying to get just “the right” settings, none worked, and I finally resigned to reinstalling yet again under, and continuing to use, legacy BIOS. Sigh.

Setting the Boot sequence to Legacy BIOS

Before setting up in legacy mode, I had a flash of inspiration: Since I was nonetheless able to boot the live media under UEFI (which I knew wouldn’t otherwise be used afterwards), I attempted a firmware update as per the above. To my mild disappointment, there weren’t any firmware updates for my Acer Laptop:

I continued with the installation under Legacy BIOS mode, and set up the desktop with the various Gnome Extensions, installing software not in the base installation, and customizing settings and the like.

I once again faced a few pet peeves I have about how Fedora is set up (incidentally through Anaconda, but by itself not Anaconda issues, best I can tell):

A long time ago, for Fedora 21 at the latest, Fedora stopped listing my home city of Montreal in Anaconda. Sigh. (I think I choose New York, which is in the same time zone.)

Fedora uses sudo by default, which I don’t like: I go by the notion of “Don’t be afraid of root; respect it, but don’t be afraid of it” — when you have to do root-y stuff, log into root, do what you have to do as root, and then sign out of root. (Yes, I am aware of the advantages of sudo, even beyond its convenience and short term elevations of privileges, such as logging of *who* elevated their privileges to do *what*; I just wasn’t taught that way, and on a single user system, I don’t see much value to it; hey maybe that’s just me.) As such, with each new install I perform, I have to, ironically using sudo under my default user account, assign a password to the root account, and then, remove my default account from the wheel group.

First, a password was set for the root user:

Then, after logging into the root account, I edited the /etc/group file (here’s my archive) …

… by removing my user account from the wheel group (highlighted):

The next thing that irked me was that in Fedora Workstation Edition, it seems that Anaconda no longer has an option (read, without the qualifier “it seems”) to set the hostname during the installation. While I understand that it is a trivial enough thing to set as per the following, under the default régime of the default primary user having sudo privileges … it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that should still be in the system installation part. (As in, I wonder how many new users have “fedora” as their machine name for a significant amount of time if not forever, being unaware that it is (only) a default placeholder name, unaware that it can be changed, and unaware of how to change it.)

Fortunately, this is easily set in the Settings / About menu, *if* you don’t remove your default user from the wheel group, or at least haven’t yet, and therefore still have sudo privileges:

Note that in the above screenshot, the option appears shaded out because since I had already removed the primary user from the wheel group, effectively disabling sudo, my (default user) account did not possess the requisite permissions to edit the hostname.

Changing the hostname on the command line is also not particularly difficult, using the command “hostnamectl set-hostname new-name”

… or, editing the /etc/hostname file, by entering the command “nano /etc/hostname” as the at the command line and as the root user:

Then, once in the /etc/hostname file, enter the host name you want (in the case of my Acer laptop, “reliant”, as in the USS Reliant from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan movie.)

(More on changing the hostname can be found at the Fedora documentation page (here’s my archive) and techadmin.net (here’s my archive), among many other sites)

And on this install, I noticed that the extension Vertical Overview by Ralthuis, which among other things, allowed for the dock on the Activities page to remain vertical and on the left edge of the screen, instead of on the bottom of the screen, was broken, something I hadn’t noticed when upgrading my XPS13. Note: Check lower down in the section for my desktop.

Dock moved to the bottom of the activities screen due to a broken extension (note screenshot recreated after the fact)

On this point, I installed a number of Gnome extensions that I like, unfortunately not the one mentioned above, as well as adding apps to the dock, and other optimizations I commonly perform.

After these items, I installed Gnome Evolution, modified the installation’s setup such as pinning apps to the dock, and checked the power management issue listed above. During the install process, I was able to specify that third party repositories could be enabled; after install, I installed the free and non-free repositories from rpmfusion, as well as Rémi’s RPM repository. I transferred my data from the backup I had created earlier onto my laptop. (See next section on my Desktop).

Finally, I had to activate the flathub repository (here’s my archive) in order to be able to install software that I use that is distributed as flatpaks, such as Signal (a secure texting app):

… and then Signal was installed from the Software App:

Minor note: I don’t recall having to enable the flatpak.org repositories before, although I may be wrong.

This leads to my final computer to upgrade, my desktop:

Dell Inspiron: Fedora 38, Workstation Edition; installed Legacy BIOS, Machine UEFI

When I purchased the computer new in 2014, Fedora 21 installed easily under UEFI.

In the summer of 2023, I upgraded the mechanical drive to an SSD, and I had installed Fedora 38 the SSD; the Dell Inspiron had difficulty recognizing Fedora 38 media, so I took an old pre-UEFI computer, inserted the SSD, and installed Fedora on the SSD. I don’t recall if I knew to change to legacy BIOS once I transferred the SSD to the Dell, or after an error or two, I realized the error, and made the change in the setup. The installation worked, although I was slightly irked.

Come time to upgrade to Fedora 39, I performed the command line DNF upgrade covered earlier, dealing with some of the consequences like the power management and idling issue above. Additionnaly, I noticed something else that irked me regarding the power button (changing it from “Suspend” to “Power Off”:

“Power Button Behavior” setting changed from “Suspend” to “Power Off”. Call me old school …

However, in the intervening time I had experienced the UEFI crisis above, so I first performed a backup of my data to my backup folders on my web server, mildly surprised by how much I was behind in my manual backups.

Unfortunately from this point on, my desktop proved to be the most challenging to upgrade properly.

Having downloaded a copy of the install media for Fedora 39 and burned it onto a usb stick, as well as still having the Fedora 38 Server Edition DVD (which I had forgotten was the F38 Server Edition, instead erroneously assuming that I had gone to the trouble of burning the F39 Workstation Edition onto the DVD), and I tried to install Fedora 39 from both media. I tried several settings in the setup menu, to no avail: The motherboard categorically refused to recognize either, simply displaying an error message vaguely communicating a sense that it didn’t like the media. In looking through the internet for pages on the subject, including the Dell website, I was mildly piqued that solutions commonly referenced burning the usb stick using particular software under Windows (to which strictly speaking I have access, but not on the computer in question), and often just assuming that there would be a Windows partition on the computer. Putting aside knee-jerk reactions, I assumed that this would not address the issue since the solutions appeared to assume a conflict with Windows which could not exist on my machine, or that the Fedora media-writing tools were inherently unable to operate correctly.

I gave up for the moment, changed the boot settings back to Legacy BIOS, and used the untouched Legacy BIOS install for roughly a week while dealing with other upgrades and life in general.

After roughly up to a week, I remembered something I’d read a week or two earlier that said that the UEFI shim for Fedora versions 37 and 38 (and I presume, given my experience, Fedora 39 as well), was not working for some motherboards “due to a difficult certification process for this component“, (here’s my archive) and that a workaround was to install Fedora 36, whose shim was known to work, then proceed through the command line upgrades to Fedora 39.

Fedora 36 was downloaded and burned on a usb stick, and the settings in the boot menu were changed back to UEFI. Fedora 36 was installed — successfully! …

… and the updates were performed, after which the command for the version upgrade was performed, to bring it to Fedora 38. However, the system would not reboot on its own; a quick fsck command corrected some “dirty code”, which it corrected, and I changed some boot settings about booting and automatic on at certain dates. Once this was done, the upgrade to Fedora 38 continued:

DNF upgrade command working; yes, my screen is dusty!

I again performed a dnf upgrade to Fedora 39, and had to repeat the fsck command in order for the system to properly reboot.

To correct this rebooting issue, an empty file named “fsck” was created in my home directory.

Backups were restored, and work similar to what I’d performed on my Acer laptop were performed regarding sudo, root, renaming of the box, evolution, extensions, pinning apps to the dock, and the like were performed.

After yet another week or so, I noticed that my backups had not fully been transferred, and began transferring the balance. In the process, my computer indicated that it did not have enough space on the hard drive; I suspected that during the previous install that I had not correctly removed the previous install, so I reformatted yet again.

So I repeated the installation and upgrade process, this time ensuring that all space on the drive was reclaimed, and repeated the above processes, both specific to the computer as well as other things generally required as part of the upgrade.

During the initial setup, I discovered an extension that brings back the vertical view: V-Shell (vertical workspaces) by GdH, and it seems to do what I want, although on the desktop there is a setting that brings up the (vertical) dock, workspaces, and app search space over the workspace; comparison with another setup allowed me to find the setting I wanted.

And, to repeat myself: Gnome, do you hear me? Stop breaking extensions!

Now — so far — the computer seems to be working, but as this whole process over a month has shown, I should give it at least a week to find out if there are any other issues.

Final Thoughts

I don’t read the upcoming changes for new versions, nor do I research in advance problems that people have been having. I discover the problems, changes, and challenges along the way, and as such for me Fedora reveals itself as per my usage and discoveries — no doubt leaving a lot hidden to me — not only over its roughly 13 month lifespan, but also over the first few weeks of using it, and, interestingly, over the installation process itself, especially when it’s over several machines of different eras and manufacturers and technologies.

As this round of upgrades in particular has shown, as well as years of using Fedora Linux, using Fedora Linux is an exercise in bleeding edge.

Now, barring unforeseen changes, additions, and the like, I’m looking forward to roughly a year of Fedora 39 goodness!

May 28, 2023August 13, 2023

New malak.ca internet connection

www.malak.ca is hosted by myself on an old desktop computer in my bedroom, using my home internet connection. The general specs are:

Dell Vostro 420 Series (64bits) — BIOS date of October 24, 2008
Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Quad CPU @ 2.66GHz (with hyperthreading), with a clock speed of 333MHz; L1d cache 128KiB (4 instances); L1i cache 128KiB (4 instances); L2 cache 6MiB
8GB (4 x 2GB) memory, clock speed 800MHz
HD: 240GB SSD (OS and blog)
External USB hard drive: 1TB (static website data and other stuff)

Currently, it is running Fedora Linux version 37 Workstation Edition. Using the Server Edition for such a small, home-grown vanity project seemed unnecessary given a comfort level with the Workstation Edition and, since at its core, the two editions are subsets of the same OS. Ultimately, missing packages from one edition compared to the other are a “dnf install” command away. (As for a longer-term distro, I have always been a Red Hat user, so Debian or an Ubuntu LTS release aren’t interesting to me, while the new community respins of RHEL have neither captured my imagination, nor do they hold sufficient appeal anymore on a technical level.) Hence, I started from the Edition with which I and my brother (the technical heavy-lifter) are familiar, which allows for the (admittedly rare) use of a GUI as needed.

The filesystems are with ext4 on the boot partition of the SSD, as well as on the external USB hard drive; I use ext4 because I’m used to it, but can’t truly say I know, or can recommend, one filesystem from or over the next. UPDATE: I checked the filesystems and … the boot partition is ext4, and the SSD’s data portion seems to have defaulted to BTRFS; there you go, proof I don’t know much about the differences between various filesystems and their comparative advantages and disadvantages. 🙂

I have been hosting my personal website at home since at least December 2017 on a few used computers (I think the current computer is at least the fourth since transferring my website from a friend-of-my-brother’s web hosting service):

December 2017: IBM ThinkCentre, circa 2003 era and running CentOS 7.X (retired due to a suspected thermal event)
Sometime after 2017 and until April 2020: A Core 2-duo circa possibly 2010 era, running various current Fedora versions up to version 31 (repurposed due to power issues)
April 2020: IBM ThinkCentre, circa possibly 2006 or 2007 era, running Fedora 31 to Fedora 37 (retired due to unknown problems causing constant reboot cycles, which were not fully investigated)
The current 2008 era computer installed in February 2023: Dell Core 2 Duo, 2008, (described above) using the same SSD and therefore instance of Fedora 37 from the previous IBM ThinkCentre

But to wit, since hosting www.malak.ca myself, it has always been on my home internet service, a DSL line with a (now-)paltry 6.05MBit-ish down and, what, 0.67MBit-ish up capacity, which for reasons beyond the scope of this post had not been upgraded for (best I can remember) over 20 years.

Time marching on and the increase of devices in the household meant that while still minimally usable and just functional, the internet connection regularly became inadequate for daily use, and barely usable for things like weekly simultaneous videoconferences (and with slightly-more-than-tacit rules of “no other internet usage during said weekly dual videoconferences” and the like.) The slow internet access, especially the slow uplink, affected a blogging project started in late 2020 showing pictures of the preparation of my recipes from my collection by limiting photo sizes not only as a good idea for reasons of netiquette, page layout and formatting, but as an outright necessity given the limited upload capacity (thank you WordPress for lazy-loading!)

Well, last week we finally upgraded the internet package to cable with 120MBit down and 20MBit up. Interestingly, we had had a cable modem for a few years in the late 1990’s until it became quite unusable and made a switch to DSL; as a side note, a box, some equipment inside it, and some cable wiring from that period were still attached to the outside of the house, not having been removed at the time, and were still compatible and usable when we got the install last week.

As such, www.malak.ca now has decent upload speeds!

April 5, 2022April 7, 2022

Overview of Open Source / Free Software for PDF files

This post is a translation of and (somewhat of an) adaptation, as well as slight update, of a presentation I gave in November, 2021, at a meeting of my local Linux Meetup. This adaptation includes some extra limited mockups of demonstrations performed live during the presentation.

The presentation was put together using Fedora Workstation (a general purpose version of Linux, in this case specializing in being a desktop workstation), highlighting some software either installed by default, or available in the Fedora Linux and rpmfusion software repositories (“App Stores”). It is therefore not intended to be a complete exposé on all available open source / free software options for PDF, even under Fedora Linux, let alone GNU / Linux in general, or other systems.

It should be noted that the presentation’s original target audience was a French-speaking group of Linux enthusiasts, Linux professionals, and other IT enthusiasts and professionals familiar with Linux. Most of the listed software would typically be available in standard or easily accessible Linux software repositories (“App Stores”). Beyond the world of GNU / Linux, free software is generally available for use on other systems, and, barring instances of a specific given package offered with paid warranty support, are usually also free of charge to download, install, and use.

In the case of the software highlighted in this post, all are either free-of-charge, or represent the free-of-charge version.

The Value of a PDF File

Context / Situation:

Take the case of the exchange of a document between two computers — such as between one running Linux, and another running Windows (or vice-versa) — and each computer is endowed with a different office suite, such as LibreOffice (cross-platform) on one, and Microsoft Office (Windows / Mac) on the other. (Of course, other possibilities exist, such as Calligra Suite (cross-platform), Pages / Numbers / Keynote / etc. (Mac), Corel Wordperfect, Google Docs, etc.)

LibreOffice, and in days gone by, OpenOffice.org, have long been touted as being “compatible” with MS Office; this purported compatibility, however, is disappointingly nowhere near as good as I and many others would like to believe.

As such, each user will open the shared document, which will be displayed according to each suite’s interpretation of the file, and may find that the actual displayed content on their screen could be different — sometimes substantially so — from the intended original display of the document. Text lines may be cut off; fonts may not be available on one or more of the systems, causing font substitution; font sizes may be changed, or text size may be different while substituting a different font due to the lack of the specified font; certain symbols may not be available on some systems; table effects may not work, or objects inserted into tables may not function or be displayed as expected, such as the insertion of a spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, I would estimate that said disappointing lack of “complete and perfect” “drop-in replacement” compatibility is a very common experience in comparing many well-known pieces of proprietary software and their open-source counterparts — not just LibreOffice and MS Office. Personally, as a Linux user, I have experienced this lack of complete compatibility a number of times since beginning to use OpenOffice.org in 2005 and Linux in 2006. Since then, I have also seen the incompatibility in action on a number of occasions during varying presentations under completely unrelated circumstances in which the presentation files were produced in one suite, and attempts made to show them in another were met with varying degrees of disappointment, sometimes leading to complete failure.

Example PDF

The PDF at this link is a somewhat varied although basic document created for this presentation (you will need a PDF viewer); images of the PDF are shown below. It was developed in order to use throughout the presentation as an example PDF to demonstrate the various given points at hand. It should be noted that the PDF was written in French because the presentation’s original target audience was French-speaking.

The following four images are jpeg images of the pages of the PDF document linked to above, and which I created in LibreOffice Presentation. It should be noted that, for the sake of argument, the pages could have been created in another format, such as a word processor, a spreadsheet program, or a drawing program, for instance.

Page 1 — Song lyrics to be displayed for a Karaoke Night

Page 1, the lyrics to a French song, such as one might want to display during a karaoke event among friends

Page 2 — Expenses list for a Luncheon

Page 2, a fictitious list of expenses for a luncheon

Page 3 — TV Listings

Page 3, a fictitious TV listing for an evening, with some Linux in-jokes and some in-jokes specific to the original audience

Page 4 — Flea Market Poster

Page 4, a fictitious flyer for a local flea market

The above document — represented here in jpeg format directly produced from a PDF of the document — was originally prepared in LibreOffice Presentation, and therefore correctly represented the original document.

However, the following four images are jpeg images of the pages of the PDF document I created in Microsoft PowerPoint (you will need a PDF viewer) into which I imported the original LibreOffice Presentation, in order to demonstrate the relative lack of compatibility between, at least in this case, LibreOffice Presentation and Microsoft Powerpoint.

Page 1 — Song lyrics to be displayed for a Karaoke Night

Changes: Text fonts and font sizes, causing text to be cut off the page

Page 1, note the changes in fonts and font sizes

Page 2 — Expenses list for a Luncheon

Changes: Text fonts, and improper translation of symbols

Page 2, note the changes in fonts, font sizes, and improper translation of symbols

Page 3 — TV Listings

Changes: text fonts, font sizes, and lack of background colours in the various cells

Page 3, note the changes in fonts, font sizes, and lack of background colours in the various cells

Page 4 — Flea Market Poster

Changes: Text fonts, font sizes, corrupted translation of spreadsheet table in the centre of the flyer

Page 4, note the changes in fonts, font sizes, and the completely corrupted translation of the spreadsheet table in the centre of the flyer

The value of a PDF:

PDF files are generally well supported across multiple platforms and software, generally regardless of platform, and will usually be displayed in a virtually identical fashion on all systems; in the case of discrepancies, they are usually inconsequential.

However:

There exists a certain perception that, short of having Adobe Acrobat Pro (a commercial, closed source piece software), PDF files are difficult to edit and modify, allowing for a certain view that PDF files are more secure. This is a case of “security by obscurity”, since editing and modification may be performed by many pieces of software, besides but of course including Adobe Acrobat Pro.

PDF files may also benefit from a perception of being less susceptible to viruses and malware, such as through macros. Suspicious files, regardless of format, should always be checked when there is reasonable doubt, particularly under certain environments.

Warning:

Be careful when using some PDF software downloaded from random websites on the internet, or websites which advertise PDF modification: The may add watermarks to the resulting file — this may be undesirable, and embarrassing, particularly if the software, website, or their output aren’t vetted prior to distributing the resulting file.

PDF Software which adds a watermark to edited watermarks when using an unregistered version

Further, websites providing PDF editing services may have very reasonable terms of service for editing your document, limiting their responsibilities toward you. By submitting a document to an external website, it may may not be able to protect personal privacy, nor be able to guarantee to not divulge commercial or industrial secrets or confidential personal information contained in the submitted document: They may become the victim of a hacking, or become the target of legal proceedings, not to mention potential dubious or unscrupulous intentions operators might have to begin with. Or, they may simply be unwilling to formally engage in such responsibilities in the absence of a paid service contract.

Sample from a website listing their conditions of use

This article’s objectives therefore are:

Firstly, presenting the utility of PDF as a useful format for distributing documents to a wide audience, without having to concern oneself with what software individual audience members may or may not have access to, if at all, and regardless of reason(s);
Secondly, presenting safe, free software and open-source software options for using and editing of PDF files;
Thirdly, beyond the general promotion of free and open-source software and PDF editing, this article is not about promoting nor deriding particular OSes or software packages, or strictly speaking their strengths or weaknesses.

As such, if a particular system or software package suits your needs and / or purposes, you should use it.

However, if a given preferred solution is costly software, perhaps your organization (or your family) may find it to be financially worthwhile to only purchase a minimum number of licences and only install it on a minimum number of designated computers, instead of needlessly on every computer in your organization (or family).

A simple cost / benefit analysis would be worthwhile: You should consider whether you wish to pay $5, $10, $15, or more, on a recurring basis (perhaps monthly), per computer on which such software would be installed. The costs, be they one-time costs or recurring, should be considered against how often the software may be used, perhaps in some cases only once or twice monthly — perhaps overall, let alone for each individual instance, depending on your organization’s size, needs, and other considerations. Further, it should be considered what operations are typically executed, especially if they simple operations such as joining multiple PDFs, or extracting a page or two, which can be easily performed by many, using any of a multitude of software packages you can get without cost, as opposed to perhaps more technical tasks which may justify costly specialized software.

Creating PDFs from an established document

To begin with, most software which create documents will have an option in the File menu or elsewhere to Print, or Print to Document, or an Export function, which will offer PDF as a format:

PDF (creation) Options in the “Export as PDF” option in LibreOffice

At the risk of skipping ahead to the PDF splitting section below, note that it is a common option to be able to selectively output some, instead of all, pages to the resulting PDF, thereby avoiding the question of having to later split the PDF to get only the desired page(s).

Overview of PDF Software

Perhaps (or perhaps not) to the surprise of many, there are many software packages and suites which will:

Display PDF files
Combine, divide, and export PDF files, as well as reorder pages within a PDF;
Edit PDF files, such as the overall files and the file metadata, as well as the PDF file content
Import and display PDF files according to particular strengths (The Gimp, Inkscape, e-readers)

Displaying PDF files:

Here are some examples of software which will display PDF files directly:

Evince Document Viewer (Gnome Project)
Okular (KDE Project)
Firefox and Chromium (Web Browsers)
PDFSam (limited free version; there is also a commercial version with more capabilities); a version for Debian derived Linux systems is available on their website

Here is a very short list of software which will open and display PDF files and allow editing, each according to their strengths, but whose primary function is not PDF display:

LibreOffice (Office Suite)
Calligra (Office Suite)
The Gimp (Image Manipulation)
Inkscape (Vector Graphics Editor)

Evince Document Viewer

Chromium (web browser)

Okular

Software to Combine PDF files

A relatively common activity is to combine multiple PDF files into one file — such as, separately scanned pieces of paper, or PDF files produced separately, perhaps by different people.

Here are some examples of software which will combine PDF files:

PDF Mix Tool
PDF Arranger
PDF Mod
PDF Jumbler
PDFedit
PDFTricks
PDFSam
LibreOffice
Calligra Suite
The Gimp

Combining PDF files in PDFArranger

Software to Divide PDF Files / Extract Pages

Another relatively common activity is to divide a PDF File, or extract one or more pages from a PDF file.

Note that if you are the creator of the document, as shown earlier, the software you used to create the document likely allows for you to selectively export individual or multiple pages to PDF in addition to exporting the entire document.

Here are some examples of software which will divide PDF files / extract pages:

PDF Mix Tool
PDF Mod
PDF Jumbler
PDFedit
PDFTricks
PDFSam
LibreOffice — allows to print and / or export one or more pages
Calligra Suite — allows to print and / or export one or more pages
The Gimp — allows to print and / or export one or more pages

Splitting a PDF File with PDFMod

Removing pages from a PDF file using PDFMod

PDF Editing

Here are some examples of software which will edit PDF files to varying degrees:

LibreOffice permits the possibility of creating a hybrid PDF and .odt / .ods file (word processor or spreadsheet files), which will allow for the PDF to be more easily edited by any suite that is able to edit .odt and .ods files; create a document with LibreOffice, and in creating a PDF, choose Export — General — PDF Hybrid (incorporating .odt / .ods file)

Other software to edit existing PDF files:

LibreOffice Draw
The Gimp
Scribus
PDFedit (old, but good)
jPDF Tweak (old, but good)
PDF Mix Tool (Basic functions)
https://itsfoss.com/pdf-editors-linux/
https://alternativeto.net/software/pdf24-creator/?platform=linux
PDFFill (pdffill.com) (Windows)

In my personal experience, PDF editing — and ease of doing so — can vary wildly according to what one wishes to do, as well as wildly according to the nature of the source PDF. I have had excellent experiences editing a PDF created from a CAD software drawing (presumably created using commercial CAD software such as AutoCAD), and whose individual elements could be manipulated in LibreOffice Draw. I have also used LibreOffice Draw to insert text zones, arrows, and scanned signatures into PDFs. Conversely, documents composed primarily of scanned images — including text and forms — may require more image manipulation skills to edit, modify, and manipulate individual and specific elements of the document, depending on your objectives.

What you can do will also be dictated by which software package you choose and its strengths and weaknesses.

For instance, it should be noted that the phrase “Editing a PDF” can be a nebulous thing which can mean many and different things to many and different people. For instance, actually editing document text directly in the PDF may be what one understands and expects, while the strengths of a given piece of software may lay elsewhere.

LibreOffice has some PDF import functions, as well as imperfect document layout functions. Depending on the source PDF document, it can be quite effective at editing text directly.

Note from the closed-source world: I once had an excellent experience with a moderately-difficult-to-edit PDF using Microsoft Word, which included being able to edit the text — and presumably save in MS Word’s native file format.

Importing and editing a PDF in LibreOffice Draw (note the imperfect import):

In the case of my example PDF, LibreOffice Draw allows for some direct editing of the text (Notice the word “MODIFIÉ” with a brick-red text colour replacing some of the text):

Importing and editing a PDF in Scribus, a desktop publishing programme:

The Gimp can insert text zones into a PDF, and which text zones themselves may be edited within The Gimp; however, its strengths lie in dealing with a PDF as an image, and editing image characteristics, while editing the text as one might in a word processor might be more challenging.

Importing a PDF file into The Gimp, image manipulation software:

Adding a text zone to a PDF in The Gimp:

Note the insertion of a text zone under the first line, saying “TEST document”

Exporting Text, Cut & Paste, and .odt File Creating

Depending on the source PDF and its nature, “cut & paste” may work (as opposed to not working at all), and may even “work well”, although this may be wildly variable according to the source PDF document. However, even in the best case, this method will normally only copy the actual text, and some of the images, from your PDF document; it may not usually be particularly useful in actually replicating the PDF document formatting.

As for other document and content formats, such as drawings, pictures, and text rendered into images, other sections of this post should be consulted (ie. using LibreOffice Draw or The Gimp for drawings; optical character reading (OCR), including OCRFeeder, etc.)

In addition to the mention of LibreOffice above, OCRFeeder is software that acts as a front end to optical character recognition software, and is able to import PDF files, and then export in HTML, plain text, OpenDocument (.odt) format, and of course PDF. Again depending on the source file, results may be variable, although the results are usable.

OCRFeeder in action and ready to export a page of the example PDF to ODT format

… and here is an image of the exported .odt file (word processor file) of the page viewed and created in OCRFeeder, then opened in my word processor (LibreOffice):

Ironically, as this case shows, the changes (or lack of adequate recognition and / or translation of the original layout) can be as great or even more as can occur by simply sharing documents between not-fully-compatible-though-similar software suites. However, though far from perfect, it is arguably usable, depending, of course, on how much effort you are willing to devote to replicating the original document layout — and then making your desired changes, and finally creating a new PDF document.

Exporting to other file formats:

As has been (indirectly) demonstrated several times throughout this post, PDF files can be imported into software that isn’t specifically dedicated to PDFs, and then allow for the resulting imported file to be exported into other formats. For example, The Gimp was used to create most of the working images for this post: In the case where PDF files were to be displayed, the PDF files were imported into The Gimp, and then exported in jpeg or png formats. This type of conversion — from PDF to another given format — can often be done by other pieces of software (to varying degrees) according to their strengths or weaknesses.

Photo Editing with PDFs

The Gimp is fully functional image processing software, very similar to — but, unfortunately, not fully compatible with nor a perfect drop-in replacement of — Photoshop. Using The Gimp, you can import a PDF and edit the image(s) directly, or extract photos and other images through a variety of means, such as selecting the area of the photo, copying the selected area, and creating a new document from the clipboard.

Here is a The Gimp having imported a PDF of a photo of myself on a cruise:

PDF of a photo of the author imported into The Gimp

During the live presentation, I gave the hypothetical example — for the sake of levity — of a barber who particularly likes sideburns, and seeing mine in a PDF, decided to clip out one of my sideburns from the photo …

Selecting a region of the photo and creating a new document therefrom

… and then notice on how I was starting to go grey at the time :

The beginnings of some greying in my sideburns

It is taken as an understood that use of The Gimp to manipulate the photo can be continued at this point — such as how my sideburns might look after a colouring, or to compare side-by-side against other people’s sideburns — and then the result exported as a PDF.

PDFTricks allows for resizing of images in PDFs, principally compressing and reducing the file size to the order of “large”, “medium”, “small”, and “extra-small”, as well as image exporting to .jpg / .png / .txt formats, and file merging and splitting.

During the presentation, the PDF document above composed of the photo of myself on a trip was run through the software’s “extreme compression” option. The following is a clip from a screenshot from a file manager, showing the size difference between the the original file, and the newly created compressed file:

File size difference before and after processing file with PDFTricks

LibreOffice Draw allows for some image manipulation.

LibreOffice Draw being used to manipulate an embedded image

In this particular situation, the night sky drawing in the karaoke page of the example PDF I created was selected, and the various options directly available were shown. However, as mentioned earlier, I have imported PDF documents of building plans and modified them to include notes showing were works were performed, or to add signatures to documents.

PDF Forms

PDF Form Creation

LibreOffice Writer and Calligra Suite are fully-featured for the creation of forms. Unfortunately, I am not particularly adept at creating forms.

Filling PDF Forms

Evince — if the PDF form was designed to be interactively filled
Okular — if the PDF form was designed to be interactively filled
The Gimp — allows for text areas to be inserted, as well as photos, drawings, and the like
LibreOffice Draw — allows for text areas to be inserted, as well as photos, drawings, and the like

Here is an example form found at https://www.aloaha.com/sample-fillable-pdf-forms/ — a sample tax form which I began filling out for Mickey and Minnie Mouse, using Evince:

Fillable form being filled with the names of Mickey and Minnie Mouse

Final Choices:

Viewing / displaying PDF files : User’s choice (usually a system’s default PDF viewer is adequate, or a web browser)
Combining and splitting PDF files : PDFMixTool
Editing PDF files : User’s choice (depends on objectives and source file; The Gimp and LibreOffice Draw are good contenders)
Adjusting PDF file size : PDFTricks
Form creation : User’s choice
Form filling : User’s choice (usually a system’s default PDF viewer is adequate, or a web browser)
Exporting PDF to other formats : OCRFeeder (for .odt); LibreOffice Draw (Photos and images); The Gimp (photos and images)

Note on Linux availability of the above software:

Here are some screen shots from my system’s installed repositories (Fedora Stable; Fedora Updates; rpmfusion.org — free and non-free)

PDF software easily accessible from my computer’s software repositories (“App Stores”):

Gnome Software list of available PDF software from various software repositories on Fedora Linux

As this list suggests, there is lot of software available which have varying PDF abilities, ranging from being dedicated PDF software of various kinds, to other pieces of software with other principal functions but with PDF functions ranging to simple importing from and exporting to the format, to being useful within the limits of the software’s main functions to manipulate PDF files in some way(s).

Summary:

This presentation’s goals are to highlight:

how PDF files are well supported most of the time on most systems, while the various pieces of software, between two versions, typically a well-known closed source project and an open-source counterpart, for document production, are not as compatible with each other as we may want;
free software while avoiding the security risks inherent to using unknown and potentially dangerous websites, as well as software which is easily available for routine tasks as well as to reduce costs;
the possibility of editing PDF files with various pieces of free software which are easily available in most Linux distributions’ repositories — as well as often easily available for other platforms — albeit occasionally with variable success.

Questions taken during the presentation:

A question asked midway through the presentation expressed a certain surprise that The Gimp can be used to edit PDFs. As mentioned earlier, The Gimp is able to import PDF files, and perform various functions on the file according to its strengths (image manipulation).

A participant asked at the end during a question period about a recommendation for software to affix signatures to documents. I replied that I was not aware of any open source official signing software with digital traceability, simply because that I had not done any research on that subject; however, an image of a scanned signature can usually be inserted in a document using The Gimp or LibreOffice Draw, or as a document is being created in a word processor.

A final comment recommended the use of LibreOffice Draw, based on the commentor’s frequent use of it to perform a number of the functions listed here, to which I’d commented that I had asked my employer’s IT department to install LibreOffice on my work-issued Windows-based laptop computer in order to be able to perform some drawing-modification functions as part of my employment.

Enjoy sharing and editing PDF files!

UPDATE 20220407:

Signing PDFs can be performed with jPDF Tweak.

JPDF Tweak can also encrypt and add passwords to a PDF.

March 17, 2016April 27, 2020

ADTE Colloque 2016

Today I attended the ADTE Colloque 2016: The annual conference in Montreal (home for me) for a Quebec association with goals to promote free software in education.

Overall, the conference and its logistics were reasonably well organized; as far as the implementation of the event went, it seemed to go hitch free. Rooms that were appropriately sized were available, enough chairs were in place, there were no problems with the sign in, the microphones worked, the lunches arrived, and so on.

My interest was to see Richard Stallman, who was the keynote speaker.

Before he started his speech, I got to see his laptop almost closeup: He has a GNU sticker on it, an FSF sticker on it, and a small Trisquel sticker on it. I managed to ask him what the model was; an IBM Thinkpad X60, reconditioned, slightly upgraded, and marketed by a company called Gluglug.

Given that the conference was in French, Mr. Stallman presented what was no doubt his standard speech on free software, in French. (Let’s clear this up now: I’m a native English speaker, but Montreal is a predominantly French-speaking city; as such, since I live in Montreal, *of*course* I speak and understand French fluently.) Although I knew in advance that his French was competent enough to make his presentation in French, I was pleasantly surprised and very impressed that technically it was better than moderate in calibre, and that he could maintain it for over two hours with barely two or three requests to provide the French equivalent of a word or expression. And despite a fairly thick non-native speaker accent, it was almost surprisingly easy to follow.

His speech, although it appeared to be one of his standard speeches, went on too long in my view; 2.5 hours had been allotted for the presentation and questions, and I thought he could have accomplished the same thing in about 100 minutes, including questions.

I found that there were three downsides to his presentation:

– The “Church of Emacs” routine was off-topic or at least beyond the scope of the conference. Given what amounted to be a public audience, it was out of place. A cute parlour routine or pub talk in its own right, but out of place there.
– His comments about not having children were completely out of place, however legitimate they may be in their own right, and at best were poorly presented.
– Mr. Stallman apparently is losing his hearing, and asks people to speak a little more slowly, and clearly enunciate all their words. This is understandable, especially when those asking questions are not speaking his mother tongue; further, Quebec French and accents can be difficult even for native French speakers not accustomed to them. At one point, someone who forgot to speak extra clear and a bit more slowly elicited his ire as he either lost his temper, or whined like a child, repeating admittedly for the umpteenth time for the person to speak clearly and more slowly.

As for the rest of the conference:

The overall conference had a few quirks. The iPads at the registration desks were funny and out of place, given the topic of the conference. The glaring and blatant use of a Microsoft Windows computer on the overhead projector was a weird oversight to the point of being shocking, regardless of the fact that for all intents and purposes it ended up only being used to display the wifi network and password, and one minor demonstration during a roundtable discussion. This was addressed in the first question period by an irate participant who venomously commented on it and expressed his feeling of being insulted, to the applause of roughly at least a third if not half the participants.

For me, the first round table, before Mr. Stallman’s speech, left something to be desired. I thought that they could have been better organized instead of being just “I’m Tom Smith and this is what I do. Oh, and this is what I know about free software.”

The second round table, after Mr. Stallman’s presentation, was a bit meatier and not quite as disappointing as the first. There was an IT person who was trying to slowly provide Free Software by placing it in their pool of software available to staff at his institution, alongside other software. Another panelist provided a good and enlightening response to a question, to the order of “Try explaining *that* to a powerful teachers’ union!”

My brother said the comments then as well as elsewhere in the day felt like we were still in 2006 instead of 2016 given their nature, such as:
– “Well GNU/Linux is hard to install” (I found it easy to install in 2008, and installing other software and fixing settings is something one does on any platform);
– “LibreOffice isn’t fully compatible with MS Word” (that’s a very nuanced conversation that strictly speaking is technically correct, but mostly trivially, IMO);
– “I’m accustomed to program X”;
– “I didn’t know that you could do that using free software”.

The lunch included in the admission fee was fine albeit a bit too frou-frou for my tastes, and totally inedible for my brother’s admittedly very narrow tastes. I would have hoped that there might have been more than three or four tables in the trade show part of the conference, which was held in the large lunch room area, but that’s neither here nor there.

The two afternoon sessions I attended were on the subject of “Accessing the Moodle Community”, and the ProjectLibre software.

The first presentation on the Moodle Community seemed a bit off and probably confusing to most of the participants, being a bit obscure and technical. However, once I re-read the title in the day’s schedule, I realized that it *was* on topic (both for the conference, and, on topic for his presentation.) Disappointingly, the presenter was delayed by a good fifteen minutes, for technical reasons: He could not use his computer for his presentation, given that for some reason he was unable to plug it into the projector. He then tried to present his slides prepared in LibreOffice with a computer using MS Powerpoint, which did not like his slides. He finally had to install LibreOffice on the supplied computer which was effectively permanently connected to the projector, or the setup otherwise effectively precluded the use of his own computer. He should have been prepared with the slides saved in PDF format, but to his credit he had placed the presentation online so that he could access it easily, in addition to having brought it on his computer.

The second presentation was a bit better as it at least was a demo of free software that can be used by educators / schools / etc. to either to manage their projects, what kind of software can be taught in schools, etc.

However, I thought that the two individual presenters I saw had two failings beyond what I mentioned earlier about the Moodle presenter:

– They only had about half an hour each; they could have done with at least another 15 minutes each. Each went over their allotted time; in any case, they should have timed things better in their presentations given that they knew of their time limitations, or should have known, given the announcements online and in the printed schedules liberally distributed during the conference.
– They should have been coached in advance with “ok, present what you want the way you want, *BUT*, please spend the first up to five minutes answering these five questions, such as a brief description of what the software / project / topic is, what its use could mean to the participants, etc. etc. etc.” In addition, I thought that each unfortunately were unprepared for people asking questions and making comments during the presentations, which could have been handled with “Could you wait until I finish my presentation, at which point I’d love to take your questions and feedback.”

Overall, however, I did love participating in the conference.

Update 27 April 2016:

Here is the link to the ADTE’s conference recap page (in French) (and here’s my archive)

In it are links to YouTube videos of Mr. Stallman’s presentation as well as a number of links to speakers’ quick resumé of what they spoke about to even sometimes slides of their presentations, again normally in French.