Category: Geek Software of the Week: Linux Edition!

SteamLink App for Raspberry Pi

MakeUseOf.com – “While the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have the hardware to run standard PC games, it is good enough to stream them. This is possible thanks to the Steam Link software from Valve, which lets you stream games from a PC.

With the games you want to play installed on your PC and streaming enabled, setup is simple. Just connect your Raspberry Pi to your TV and run:

sudo apt install steamlink

And, you can learn more about using StreamLink with the Raspberry Pi here.”

Q4OS is a Linux distro designed to be a Windows user’s intro to Linux. Free, fast and cool looking, it is awesome!

https://www.q4os.org/

“(A) fast and powerful operating system based on the latest technologies while offering highly productive desktop environment. We focus on security, reliability, long-term stability and conservative integration of verified new features. System is distinguished by speed and very low hardware requirements, runs great on brand new machines as well as legacy computers. It is also very applicable for virtualization and cloud computing.

Get professional support for your business. The team behind Q4OS is ready to provide any kind of system customization, including core level API programming as well as user interface modifications. For any form of commercial support ask at support@q4os.org.

We are currently seeking business partners to accelerate development, in order to build the perfect operating system for professional use. If you would like to participate, fund or make an investment in Q4OS, please contact us at partner@q4os.org.”

Yes, it is no longer under development, but it still works on old Macs!

https://refit.sourceforge.net/

You can use rEFIt to manage partitions on your old Mac to convert it to boot Ubuntu Linux! I did on my Mac Pro 1,1 2006 system!

Burning a CD

If you just want to try out rEFIt without affecting your computer, you can burn rEFIt to a CD-R (or CD-RW) and boot from that. The distributed .dmg and .cdr disk images are ready to burn. See the burning instructions for details.

Automatic Installation with the Installer Package

Both disk image distributions (.dmg and .cdr) also contain the new installer package. It will install rEFIt on your Mac OS X installation volume and make sure it is active. This is now the recommended way to install and use rEFIt.

The steps to install rEFIt this way are as follows:

Download and mount the rEFIt-0.14.dmg disk image.
Double-click on the “rEFIt.mpkg” package.
Follow the instructions and select your Mac OS X installation volume as the destination volume for the install.
If everything went well, you’ll see the rEFIt boot menu on the next restart.

Manual Installation on the Mac OS X volume

If you don’t want to use the installer package, you can do a manual install instead. This section explains how to do a manual install to your Mac OS X installation volume, which requires no additional volumes or disks. It is possible to install rEFIt elsewhere; see the following sections for that.

Here are the steps for a manual install:

Download the ‘Mac disk image or any of the other two binary distributions from the home page. Double-click to mount or unpack them.

Copy the ‘efi’ folder from the rEFIt distribution to the root level of your Mac OS X volume.
Open Terminal and enter the following commands:

cd /efi/refit
./enable.sh

When prompted, enter the password for your user account.

If everything went well, you’ll see the rEFIt boot menu on the next restart.

Note: If you get a message saying ‘No such file or directory’ in the last step, then you didn’t put the ‘efi’ folder in the right place in step 2.

This manual installation method has a drawback that you should be aware of. Since you’re not using rEFItBlesser, Mac OS X updates will disable rEFIt, and the rEFIt menu will show up even when waking from Safe Sleep.

Installing on a separate volume or external disk

If you’re uncomfortable with having rEFIt on your Mac OS X volume, you can install it on any other volume, as long as it is formatted in the HFS+ (“Mac OS Extended”) format. For example, you can install rEFIt on a USB flash drive.

The installation procedure is basically the same as explained above — copy the ‘efi’ folder to the root of the volume, and run ‘enable.sh’ inside the ‘efi/refit’ directory. The path in Terminal will be different, for example ‘/Volumes/MyStick/efi/refit’ if the volume is named ‘MyStick’.

If you want, you can use the provided ‘rEFIt.icns’ icon as a volume icon.

Installing on the EFI System Partition

It is also possible to install rEFIt on the hidden ‘EFI System Partition’ on your internal disk. This is recommended for advanced users only, and will not be detailed here. You will need to use bless with the –mount and –file options. Consult the man page for bless for more information.”

Guake is a drop-down terminal (hit F12, and “BAM!” there it is!) for Linux! It is designed to look and act like the messaging widget in the game “Quake” thus the odd spelling on the name. It is pretty cool, and very handy!

Guake – Drop-Down Terminal

“Guake is a dropdown terminal made for the GNOME desktop environment. Its style of window is based on an fps games, and one of its goals is be easy to reach.

Guake is written mostly in python and has a little piece in C (global hotkeys stuff). The code is placed in the src directory. Files and images are in the data directory. Translation stuff is in the po directory.

Features? Bugs? Information? Visit: https://guake.org/“

This is a super useful utility!

phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP, intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations on MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle. Frequently used operations (managing databases, tables, columns, relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc) can be performed via the user interface, while you still have the ability to directly execute any SQL statement.

phpMyAdmin comes with a wide range of documentation and users are welcome to update our wiki pages to share ideas and howtos for various operations. The phpMyAdmin team will try to help you if you face any problem; you can use a variety of support channels to get help.

phpMyAdmin is also very deeply documented in a book written by one of the developers – Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management, which is available in English and Spanish.

To ease usage to a wide range of people, phpMyAdmin is being translated into 72 languages and supports both LTR and RTL languages.

phpMyAdmin has won several awards. Among others, it was chosen as the best PHP application in various awards and has won every year the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards as “Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins”.

phpMyAdmin is a sixteen-year-old project with a stable and flexible code base; you can find out more about the project and its history. When the project turned 15, we published a celebration page.

Features

• Intuitive web interface
• Support for most MySQL features:

– browse and drop databases, tables, views, fields and indexes
– create, copy, drop, rename and alter databases, tables, fields and indexes
– maintenance server, databases and tables, with proposals on server configuration
– execute, edit and bookmark any SQL-statement, even batch-queries
– manage MySQL users and privileges
– manage stored procedures and triggers

• Import data from CSV and SQL
• Export data to various formats: CSV, SQL, XML, PDF, ISO/IEC 26300 – OpenDocument Text and Spreadsheet, Word, LATEX and others
• Administering multiple servers
• Creating PDF graphics of your database layout
• Creating complex queries using Query-by-example (QBE)
• Searching globally in a database or a subset of it
• Transforming stored data into any format using a set of predefined functions, like displaying BLOB-data as image or download-link
• And much more…