For any Xfce gurus who may have tried to emulate the Unity desktop look, or maybe just wanted to save a bit of screen real estate, this may not be new to you. For anyone else though, here's a tip on this neat functionality. It's no secret that the venerable Xfce desktop is very configurable,…

If you've ever given a slide presentation at a conference, you know the drill. Tell the audio-visual people what session your talk is in, then hand them a USB stick with your PowerPoint on it. The presentation has to be in Microsoft PowerPoint because the one and only laptop plugged into the data…

In part 1 of this article I showed how I used AWK on the command line to work up daily rainfall data for my home town, Ulverstone in Tasmania. I wasn't ready to analyse the data, because there were quite a few missing-data days. Some were part of accumulated-total series, where the rainfall total…

AWK is my tool of choice for processing plain-text data, so when I wanted to look closely at daily rainfall data for my home town, I fired up a terminal. In this two-part article I explain how the rainfall data were beaten into shape, mainly with AWK, so I could do my analysis. The commands shown…

I was preparing a slide presentation and wanted to show a block of random 8-bit bytes, like this: Naturally I didn't just type out that block of text on a slide, which would have taken maybe 10 minutes, or copy and modify some byte-text I found online. Of course not. Instead I spent hours dreaming…

When writing or editing scientific-type text in LibreOffice Writer, I rely a lot on its spellchecker. Unfortunately, the scientific terms I'd like to check aren't in the default dictionaries behind LibreOffice's spellchecking routine. There are two ways out of this dilemma. The first is to deal…

With the recent bombshell that Canonical is quitting the Unity desktop project as well as the overall goals for convergence and returning to GNOME, one can't help but wonder what Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will look like. However, as you will see it is very easy to tweak GNOME to look and feel quite similar…

I use the YAD dialog program quite a lot in my shell scripts. Written and maintained by Victor Ananjevksy, YAD is easy to use and has dozens of handy options. In previous Linux Rain articles demonstrating YAD (here, here and here), I used only the default YAD buttons, "Cancel" and…

I've just built my own GUI calculator (script below). OK, you're probably thinking "WHY? There are plenty of perfectly good GUI calculators for Linux. Why build another one?" And my answer is "Because the available calculators are way too powerful and don't do what I want…

Being a rolling release distribution that touts the ability to have the latest stuff, you'll often find the very latest software in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. In the official repos, anyway. Certain software that is procured from external repositories such as Packman, however, this is not always the case.…