Series 2 Episode 9 – This fortnight we discuss vi like command line file manager, vi keybindings in firefox, other web search options, the release of Ubuntu 17.10, Command Line Linux tools and another epic Irish saying, have a listen.
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to the long awaited Bumper Edition of Season 2 Episode 9 of the Binary Times, it’s something to look forward to! Between Halloween and the recent release of Ubuntu and flavours 17.10, there’s a lot to talk about!
02:01 Mark tells us that he’s been busy at work and moving his home office, so finally there’ll be no more talk of tidying the office (we hope!)
02:44 Wayne’s been doing quite a bit in the Linux world, so much he’s not sure where to start! vifm gets first mention, which Wayne likens to midnight commander. Mark thinks he’ll stick with midnight commander, but may give vifm a go. Wayne likes vifm over midnight commander because of the vi keybindings. Some links to go with this piece:
vifm info on tecmint
vifm manual
vifm colours
vifm quick start tutorial
Useful Keys

    ga - calculate the current highlighted directory size

    zo - show dot files

    zm - hide dot files

    e - explore selected file in current pane

    cW - Rename file (but not extension)

    cw - Rename entire file

    dd - Delete selected file

    p - copy deleted file in current location

    P - Move deleted file in current location 
    09:49 Wayne reads out some feedback from our listeners, this one from Maurizio about dd and progress status. Type the following to see the progress of the dd command:
    <span class="mono">dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null count=1M status=progress</span>
     As well as this excellent advice, you can use the <a href="https://linux.die.net/man/1/pv">pv</a> (pipe viewer?) command to achieve the same effect, a simple example of using pv is as follows:
    head -c 1M /dev/random | pv > /dev/null
    12:58 Wayne tells us about a "new" firefox plugin called <a href="https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx">vimfx</a>, a legacy <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimfx/">firefox plugin</a>. It provides you with vim keybindings within Firefox. Links to addons compatible with firefox 57+ are given in the previous link. Wayne goes on to tell us that <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/">firebug</a> has been replaced by <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools">firefox's built in developer tools</a>. Mark wishes that citrix integration will be coming to Firefox... links for citrix are as follows:
    <a href="https://www.citrix.com/downloads/citrix-receiver/linux/receiver-for-linux-latest.html">Citrix receiver for Linux</a>
    <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CitrixICAClientHowTo">Citrix Ubuntu Community Help Wiki</a>
    20:12 Waynes reveals that he is no longer using <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/">duckduckgo</a> and is now using <a href="https://www.startpage.com/">startpage</a>, labelled as "the world's most private search engine". Mark thinks <a href="https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-completes-yahoo-acquisition-creating-diverse-house-50-brands-under-new-oath-subsidiary">Yahoo may have been acquired by Verizon</a>.
    26:12 The guys talk about the 17.10 release of the various flavours of Ubuntu, namely <a href="https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/1710">Ubuntu 17.10</a>, <a href="https://kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-17-10-artful-aardvark-is-released/">Kubuntu 17.10</a> and <a href="https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-artful-final-release/">Ubuntu MATE 17.10</a>. In the totally off topic section Mark mentions that he might try a new release of <a href="https://chakralinux.org/?about">Chakra OS</a> to replace Ubuntu on his Thinkpad.
    50:35 Under the hood, Wayne says vifm is his under the hood, Mark mentions that rysnc has a progress option, --progress</p> 
    <p>51:47 Irish saying of the podcast is "Oíche Samhain ar fud an domhain" Halloween night around the world.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Series 2 Episode 8 – This fortnight we have a special guest interview with Alex from the Steam based Open Source Community, using Ubuntu in the office, Librem 5, more MATE tips, Command Line Linux tools and another epic Irish saying, have a listen.
00:24 Wayne introduces Series 2 Episode 8 of the most Action Packed Binary Times so far from a murky Bristol while Mark regails us with tales of hurricanes and bad weather that has been and on the way. Fairly Action Packed so far!
02:46 Mark tells us he’s been doing bits and pieces with Ubuntu MATE and is quite excited about a discovery of his from yesterday, called KolibriOS, an OS written entirely in Assembler/FASM which he intends to install on an old pentium 3 machine he has lying around to play some old strategy games on. Minimum specs are just 8MB RAM and a couple MBs storage. Wow!
06:20 Wayne and Mark mention the interview they conducted with Alex / Squid that is to follow later in the show. Alex runs a community group on steam called Open-Source Community in which he promotes open source technologies and the guys talk to him about his method of doing so on a proprietary platform among other things.
07:00 Wayne tells us some more things about Ubuntu MATE and gives us all a tip to get rid of the broken battery message which is to run dconf-editor using synapse, go to org->mate->power-manager, uncheck notify-low-capacity. Annoying message gone and forgotten about, hurray!
09:19 Wayne describes how he installed Ubuntu MATE with Remmina, realmd, krb5-user and kerberos, software-properties-common, python-software-properties and packagekit. His main concerns were his email, access to networked storage drives and printing. He’s pleased to say the whole thing has been quite successful and not a terrible idea at all.
16:18 Wayne has purchased some maker books from a previous Humble Bundle and has this tip for us from the Linux for Makers book, which is this: when using sudo apt upgrade you don’t need to type y or Y, just hit the enter key and you’re done. It’s the small things that make the difference!
18:47 After Mark warns of potential dog barking, he tells us that the Librem 5 phone from Purism has been crowdfunded! This is great news for anyone who cares about their privacy while using a mobile device.
22:08 Wayne apologises for some down time on the binarytimes website. Mark suggests if more people would support on us on patreon then we could afford a high tech company to give us 99.99% uptime instead of self hosting.
23:39 Wayne introduces our interview with Alex / Squid in which we discuss all things open source. Alex mentions a number of cool opensource projects, including Zorin OS (you can find how Zorin OS is being used by the Italian city of Vicenza here), Reactos, an open source replacement for Windows and findx, an open source search engine that respects your privacy. Alex also mentions that another way to follow his open source travails besides his Steam Open-Source Community work is to check out his youtube channel. We hope you enjoy!
41:44 Under the Hood! Mark kicks it off with a discussion around moreutils, a “collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.” Quite a few interesting tools that are worth checking out.
45:06 Wayne asks Mark about iotop as a lead into his own Under the Hood, which is an epic Under the Hood, and that is sudo iftop, to monitor network traffic. How epic is that! [note: A really good article on iftop can be found in the Linux Journal
49:49 Irish saying of the podcast is Beidh muid ar ais – We will be back!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Series 2 Episode 7 – This fortnight we discuss incorporating Linux into MS Office environments, Ubuntu Mate for new users, how much there is to learn, Wire, Command Line Linux tools and another epic Irish saying, have a listen.
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Season 2 Episode 7 of the binary times with the news that it’s slightly misty in Bristol (register mistybristol now!) while Mark informs us that it’s slightly more than misty in Kilkishen. It’s that time of year, you can expect another six months of this kind of chat at least!
01:34 Mark tells us that he’s finally managed to break his desktop PC OS as well as finding Ubuntu 17.10’s gnome interface slightly frustrating. Wayne tells us he sticks with one distro to avoid re-learning and has shelved Ansible at the moment for much the same reason. Mark goes on to tell us about some exciting events at the Ubuntu Hour in Ennis.
05:10 Wayne tells us he’s been tinkering away, researching command line bits and bobs and being inspired by Bryan Lunduke’s minimalist inclinations.
06:26 Wayne brings us onto our “So you’ve installed Ubuntu MATE, now what?” section by describing a new user’s experiences including queries regarding how to change settings and where to find these settings, as well as updating the system and liking Libre Office over Microsoft Office and the “always on top” feature. Mark and Wayne do a quick battle of the desktops with no clear winner. Wayne finishes by pondering the futility of the naming the calculator galculator in Ubuntu MATE and the unnecessary difficulty that will give to new users but surmises that other than that the changeover to linux has been a huge success. Wayne goes onto mention that his boss bought his son a Windows PC for college and Mark mentions how his son prefers Windows for gaming.
17:51 Mark reveals the shocking news that he won’t have fibre broadband til the end of 2018. Wayne reckons that’ll be just in time for us to have sorted out the podcast!
18:40 Mark has some tips for everybody! The first is to listen to the IRL podcast, an amazing podcast that Mozilla have created discussing real online issues and the future of the web. His second tip is the EFF’s Surveillance Self – Defense page, another wonderful resource for teaching you how to have safer online communications. Wayne needs to get onto the EFF website for the laptop stickers.
20:27 Wayne can use Office 365 on Linux!
21:00 Wayne goes on to tell us that he uses Virtualbox for testing images and the like and recently had some issues with FreeNAS not having enough space when running an update. He used vboxmanage to resize the virtual image like so:
vboxmanage modifyhd “FreeNas.vdi” –resize 6000 (6 GB)
See also this link to extend disk and file systems in virtual box for further information. Because the filesystem is ZFS it was not possible to use gparted etc. to expand the volume into the newly created space, Wayne’s looking into how to do that, using previous shownotes, aren’t they great!
25:26 Wayne is looking to upgrade his Windows work PC to Ubuntu. He needs to figure out how this will affect the way he works. The guys then discuss the tedium of licensing and the few applications that make it difficult to go fully open source, namely Active Directory, RDP and the most applied application throughout histroy, change.
34:15 Wayne announces that we use Wire to do the podcast and that the wire server code is now all open source.
35:19 The guys figure that it’s time for Under the Hood so Mark starts off with something that’s not particularly under the hood, but interesting and under the hoody none the less. Ubuntu Tutorials is a great place to find tutorials on all aspects of installing and running ubuntu.
36:43 Wayne starts with what flows though him and that’s administering linux systems:
man hier is a handy command to explain the linux file system hierarchy.
Wayne’s second under the hood tip is iotop, a simple top-like I/O monitor. To run it, simply type:
sudo iotop
43:45 Irish saying of the podcast is “An bhfuil tú réidh” Are you ready. Good lead in to this one!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Series 2 Episode 6 – Back to normal again and we discuss installing Ubuntu 17.10, Firefox education, Raspberry Pi SSH tips, Shut up Windows 10, Command Line Linux tools and another epic Irish saying, have a listen.
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Season 2 Episode 6 of the binary times by telling us that he loves Autumnal weather. It’s cloudy in Bristol and cloudy, windy and raining in Kilkishen. Wayne informs Mark that clothes are available to keep the rain away and will send on some links on same. Podcast Gold!
02:49 Mark tells us that he’s installed Ubuntu 17.10 with the new default gnome desktop, and so far he thinks it’s not so bad. He also discusses ubuntu-restricted-extras and the microsoft true type core fonts which sparks a conversation around finding common ground between using free software and free software formats and proprietary software usage.
07:55 Based on Wayne’s slowly moving towards using more free software in his life, he decided to try Lineage OS 14.1 once more on his Samsung Galaxy S III without any google apps. It didn’t go well as the new os refused to recognise his sim, resulting in him going back to Cyanogenmod.
11:19 Wayne tells us that he’s completely moved over to using duckduckgo and he doesn’t miss google at all. Mark agrees and finds he doesn’t even have to use !g anymore.
12:41 Wayne continues on his freedom loving march by telling us that he’s replaced his Chromecasts with Kodi boxes running on Raspberry Pi Zero Ws and he can control them remotely from his phone using Kore. Mark admits to still using Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and other proprietary media formats using DRM and mentions the recent tragic events where EME has been accepted by the W3C.

17:18 Wayne talks about the hurdles you need to overcome to get into the Raspberry Pi, and tells us of a neat little image writer called etcher that makes it easy to write an image to the SD card without overwriting anything else by mistake. Mark reminds us of dcfldd and how it gives more visual cues towards the progress of the write than dd.
21:28 Wayne tells us about archive.org. The guys love it, recommend it and love the mission statement.
24:36 Wayne shockingly provides a Windows 10 tip. ShutUp 10 is a little freeware tool that allows you to turn off windows 10 chatty features. Both agree that the OS will still be talking back to the mothership anyway, just not as much. Mark agrees that this is a good tip. Mark’s tip to shut up Windows 10 is to download Ubuntu or Ubuntu MATE, create a startup disk and replace Windows altogether.
27:44 Mark tells us about Firefox’s educational addons.
28:50 Mark talks about games for Ubuntu MATE and linux in general. He lists out several, starting with arcade type games:
Frozen Bubble – apparently responsible for Debian being late for a release!

SuperTuxKart – soon to be available on steam
First Person Shooters (FPS) would include:
Nexuiz Classic
Xonotic
Sauerbraten
Smokin Guns
Assault Cube
Alien Arena
Unvanquished
Some strategy examples include:
0AD
Free Civ
The list goes on!
30:41 Mark talks about the Open Source Community on Steam, its owner and lauds his philosophy of promoting open source within proprietary communities.
31:54 Mark tells us that reddit is another way to find out more about open source gaming. Mark goes on to tell us that the Humble Bundle Store is currently giving away Outlast and admits to using Steam despite his freedom loving stance, currently playing Dreamfall Chapters and Shadow Warrior. He rationalizes it by telling us he does his gaming on Linux.
34:44 Mark has a strange start to Under the Hood where he tells us first how to maintain a stable system before going on to give us his tip for installing random packaged debs from the web and that is to use dpkg –contents randompackage.deb to see the contents of the deb package and to see where the contents will be installed. Mark goes on to mention getdeb as a place where he gets his games from.
39:42 Wayne’s under the hood is another controversial one and it is how to turn off the ssh default password enabled message. He has good reasons to do this, honest! So to remove the message, type the following into a terminal:
sudo mv /etc/profile.d/sshpwd.sh /etc/profile.d/sshpwd.sh.old
Of course all the usual disclaimers apply.

43:45 Irish saying of the podcast is “Tá sé ag cur báistí” It is raining. Us Irish love talking about the weather!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Software Freedom Day Special – In this episode we talk about software freedom day, what is open source and free software, why would you want to use it. We also talk about open communications and the Librem 5 smartphone, have a listen.

Software Freedom Day – Woohoo!

    In their contribution towards the celebration of <a href="https://www.softwarefreedomday.org/">Software Freedom Day</a>, the guys talk about <a href="http://www.freeopensourcesoftware.org/index.php?title=Main_Page">Free and Open Source Software</a>, have their say as to <a href="https://www.softwarefreedomday.org/about/why-foss">Why use Free Software?</a>, chat about the impact free and open source projects like <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/">Mozilla</a> have had and are having and how <a href="https://ubuntu-mate.org/">Ubuntu MATE</a> and <a href="https://linuxmint.com/">Linux Mint</a> are great introductions to free software, inform us of a great tip for using <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/">duckduckgo</a>, and finally tell us about the <a href="https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/">librem 5</a> crowdfunding campaign and why it is such an important project to back.
    Happy Software Freedom Day!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Series 2 Episode 4 – In this episode we talk about Marks foray into the Python programming language, more Ubuntu Mate goodnes, Wayne plays with Gpiozero library, Command Line Linux tools and another epic Irish saying, have a listen.
00:24 Wayne introduces the show once again with a weather update for Bristol while Mark tells us it’s a bit muggy in Kilkishen
01:13 Mark tells us he’s been working his way through Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes and is chomping at the bit to get to the projects. Wayne finds programming is something that you have to do on a regular basis or forget about it, Mark thinks that’s much like everything, and that’s why the show notes are a good reminder to us all!
03:38 Mark continues to tell us he installed Linux Mint 18.2 on his Dad’s PC. He didn’t install Ubuntu MATE on the PC due to his Dad already using and preferring Linux Mint on a Dell laptop that he has. He goes on to offer a tip on synchronising gmail contacts with Thunderbird and that is an add-on called gcontactsync and also that the default address book is called abook.mab and it can be found in the hidden Thunderbird profile folder.
08:30 This brings up a conversation on Outlook and Office 365, how Thunderbird might be used as the email client instead of Outlook and the pros and cons of such a move. Mark suggests Evolution might be a better fit due to its groupware capabilities. Mark goes on to suggest Kolab Now as a replacement for Office 365. The guys try to drum up some support for their patreon account for when Wayne relies entirely on his podcasting career for his income.
16:00 Wayne changes topic to talk about his latest Raspberry Pi adventures, in which he and his son built the laser trip wire project to prank Wayne’s partner!
18:25 Mark tells us that stack skills have a Raspberry Pi Mastery bundle course available now for $31, though there are plenty of other free resources available on the net.
19:02 Wayne tells us about Ben Nuttal’s gpiozero library. He goes on to tell us about a keynote that Ben Nuttal made at pycon russia last year that is well worth a watch.
22:19 The guys discuss the end of systemau, “An Australian Technology podcast with a linux bent.”
25:18 Mark moves on to the “So you’ve installed Ubuntu MATE, now what” section with a discussion of what other applications you should install. Applications mentioned are Google Chrome (Firefox is the preferred browser of both the guys), Gimp , Inkscape and MyPaint. Mark tells us how much he likes the Ubuntu MATE Software Boutique and goes on to say that the accessories section is well worth a look. Mark tried the Mutiny panel from the MATE Tweak Tool but he experienced a crash so reverted to the MATE panel. He expects to try it again in 17.10. The guys ponder the best way forward for Mark’s main desktop, fresh install or further tweaking.
38:02 Mark kicks off Under the Hood with a discussion on htop and top. Wayne installs htop on everything, as well as vim-gui-common. Mark also mentions nmon, a nice cli tool which gives a graphical representation of various system elements
40:29 Wayne has an Under the Hood too, more vim tips.
Vim provides the :s (substitute) command for search and replace;

The :substitute command searches for a text pattern, and replaces it with a text string.
There are many options, but these are what you probably want:
:s/foo/bar/g
Find each occurrence of ‘foo’ (in the current line only), and replace it with ‘bar’.

:%s/foo/bar/g
Find each occurrence of ‘foo’ (in all lines), and replace it with ‘bar’.

:%s/foo/bar/gc
Change each ‘foo’ to ‘bar’, but ask for confirmation first.
44:30 Irish saying of the podcast: Cén t-Am É? or what time is it?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download