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…

In stunning news, which is apparently NOT a late April Fools joke, Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical will be dumping the Unity, Mir projects and ultimately the goal of 'convergence'. Canonical is also planning to then return to GNOME as the default desktop by the release of Ubuntu…

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…

Now, yours truly isn't much of a cook, but I am trying to improve on that. With that in mind, the new GNOME Recipes application caught my eye and I decided to check it out. GNOME Recipes is still in development and its included library of recipes is certainly not exactly exhaustive, so I'm looking…

In my data-cleaning work I often make up tallies of selected individual characters from big, UTF-8-encoded data files. What's the best way to do this? As shown below, I've tried grep/sort/uniq, AWK and Ruby, and AWK's the fastest. The trials also revealed an unexpected problem with the uniq program…

In news sure to please all Firefox users who also use the Netflix streaming service, it's now possible to do so without any user-agent tweaks or hacks. It now works out of the box, as Netflix themselves have finally done the necessary changes in the background to make Firefox recognised as a valid…

A bit over a month following the beta release of GNOME 3.23.91, the GNOME project has now released the latest version of the GNOME desktop, now at version 3.24, codenamed Portland. Some of the new features and fixes include: Calendar: A new week view, plus allowing Drag & Drop events to…

If you are fortunate enough, your new shiny install of Baldurs Gate 2 Enhanced Edition will Just Work™. If you're on a fairly, what I call "late-model" distribution such as Arch Linux or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or even one of the latest (non-LTS) versions of Ubuntu, you might run into…

CAT Interstellar is an intriguing little indie game project currently in Early Access by Ionized Games set on Mars, during a time where humanity is in the middle of terraforming the Red Planet. Rather wisely, rather than sending and risking a bunch of humans on the planet, the powers that be…

That title ain't a mistake folks. And in truth, the title could have had even more words crammed in had I not been so conscious of not making it virtually unreadable. Streets of Rogue is exactly that, though: a rogue-like, an action-adventure with Grand Theft Auto (the old school ones) and RPG-lite…