If you have a touchpad on your laptop and use Ubuntu, this is how you can disable the device. I keep bumping the trackpad and moving my cursor or paging up or down. No longer.
Category: ubuntu
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Shredding
If you are like me, you may have a drawer full of old laptop harddrives, USB cables, SD card, PCI cards, PCMIA cards, and maybe a few motherboards. I don’t worry about it too much, as I used to have a trunk full of these odd items…that I never used again.
What you can do with old drives is quickly turn them into external storage devices for on-site backup, storage while traveling, or for sharing large amounts of files with friends and family when they visit your faraway abode. I’ve used this Sabrent enclosure that requires no screws and is right around ten bucks. Oh and the USB cable that comes with it is the standard USB 3.0 on both sides, so you can reuse the cable on other devices without worrying about micro-, mini-, or any other metric-prefix-type-USB.
Thankfully I am down to just four external harddrives: one 160GB, two 500GB, and one 1TB. There is really no point in keeping the 160, so I used the command line utility shred to overwrite any extraneous data.
If you have old electronics (even harddrives) you can recycle them at Best Buy or Staples so they don’t end up in a landfill somewhere.
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Software
After installing Xubuntu in lieu of Lubuntu I took a look at what applications I use on my laptop. Chrome is open almost all the time for email, blogging, checking finances, etc., so if you want to know about Chrome I’ll let Google it.
Desktop open-source applications make up most of the applications I use that are installed on my machine, with the exception of Chrome and Crashplan for Small Business. Sidenote: I went with Crashplan Pro after they ended support for personal users because of their end-to-end encryption, continuous backups, and support for Windows and Linux users
- LibreOffice: Have been using LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office for close to ten years with only minor complaints regarding formatting when opening documents between Office and LibreOffice. However, the formatting issues have gone down significantly. LibreOffice supports several extensions, such as Solver (for operations research optimization problems), so that is very helpful.
- VLC (audio and video files): Very useful for playing and editing videos and music files. Need to splice some mp3s for continuous playback? Play a DVD? Make a music playlist? All accomplished, all for free.
- GIMP (images): The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free substitute for Adobe Photoshop. I am not a master manipulator, but this program will allow you to touch up images, create vector graphics, and copy human faces to future memes waiting to go viral.
- Zim wiki (notes, writing projects): Useful for linking project notes, calendars, or any work you want to show linkages to. Also useful for blog page edits not yet ready for draft primetime.
- Calibre (ereader manager): Got an ereader? Like ebooks? Calibre can manage, convert, and otherwise edit your ebooks regardless of your hardware.
The below list of three web-based applications I use everyday for exciting tasks such as password management, email subscriptions, and to-do lists.
- Lastpass (password manager): There are password managers like it, but this one is mine. Used to use a spreadsheet with all my passwords, with a mediocre password, until I got wise six years ago.
- Gmail (seriously?): If you don’t know what this is, I commend your for your ignorance of cultural technological phenomenon over the past twenty years.
- Todoist (to-do list): This puppy works on my Android phone, work computer, and home laptop. You can label tasks, add them to projects, share tasks with others, and (best of all) implements a markup language that recognizes date references such as “File taxes on April 15th,” Take wife to dinner on 14 February” or “Train at Jedi Academy on Yavin 4 tomorrow.”
So if you are looking for open-source software for creating documents, editing videos, editing photos, or managing your productivity, consider the above options.
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Goodbye L, Hello Xubuntu
I’ve been using Lubuntu for almost five years following the ending of long term support for Windows XP on my Asus EeePC netbook. After upgrading to Lubuntu 18.10 a few weeks ago, the laptop refuses to show me a menu bar. It has also been very slow (first world problems…) for many moons now. So, I’ve decided to take the plunge and migrate to Xubuntu in lieu of Lubuntu.
We have been using Crashplan for several years now, so I can always download my files from their server, but took the last twenty four hours to copy my files to an external drive and will start installing Xubuntu shortly. If you have old harddrives, Sabrent makes an inexpensive enclosure that has no screws.
This means reinstalling ecryptfs for sensitive financial, legal, and medical files which is always fun.
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Lubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish
I finally upgraded my HP laptop from Lubuntu 18.04 to 18.10, but there was no familiar taskbar! I restarted for several days, until I finally searched for clues tonight.
Somehow in the upgrade, I think Openbox is managing the desktop instead of Light Panel. I right-clicked and found some menus and was able to get a terminal running. I cleared the cache and restarted, to no avail. I ran lxpanel from the terminal, and a blocky version of the taskbar I was used to came up. I also installed the Cairo dock to see what that would do.
Finally watched the intro video on the main Lubuntu site, which describes the LxQT desktop being the default. Maybe that is the issue…I’m trying to use the old desktop. Hope this helps you.
Update: Still no taskbar. Renaming desktop.conf didn’t help. Next step was restoring the system configuration for the main menu.
Update: Still no taskbar. Running Chrome through the right-click menu.