Software Archives • Page 15 of 33 • Linux Tips

Fix The Application Menu For Shutter

Today’s article is pretty niche, one where we fix the application menu for Shutter. On one hand, if you don’t use Shutter, this probably isn’t the article for you – but you can still read it and learn something useful. On the other hand, it fixes a ‘problem’ with Shutter and I think this is a fine time to cover it.

So, if you use Shutter, read on! (Hint: Even if you don’t personally use Shutter, you can still benefit from this article.) You’ll just need to understand what was done and how to apply it to other shortcuts.

By the way, Shutter has been mentioned here (and elsewhere):

Take, Edit, And Upload Screenshots With Shutter

I use Shutter all the time. It’s my go-to when I need to share a screenshot. It’s handy and I recommend it to anyone who has to deal with a lot of screenshots. I also use Flameshot, but that’s less often.

Alas, when you install Shutter it wants to put the application menu shortcut under something like ‘Utility’, so it appears as an administration tool or doesn’t show up where you’d expect it to be. This is just silliness.

What Shutter should do is should show up under ‘Graphics’ in the application sub-menu! So, that’s what this article will do. It will show you how to fix the application menu for Shutter so that it shows up under ‘Graphics’.

This article shouldn’t be all that long. It seems to me that it should be pretty brief… We’ll just have to wait and see!

Also, as mentioned above, this article should be easy enough for my readers to extrapolate into resolving other application menu gaffes/choices. It’s a nice and easy article. Or at least I hope it is…

Fix The Application Menu For Shutter:

Now, when I did this, I did it with the GUI. You will not be doing it in the GUI, if you follow this article’s advice. When you do it graphically, it’s still pretty simple. It looks something like this:

: Fixing the application menu to show Shutter under the ‘graphics’ heading.

That’d be a bit convoluted to explain because everyone’s using a different desktop environment and different file managers. So, instead of doing this is a GUI, we’re doing to do this in the terminal. (Of course we are.)

Open your default terminal now. If you don’t actually know how to, you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, enter the following command:

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/shutter.desktop

1	sudo nano /usr/share/applications/shutter.desktop

That will open the .desktop file with Nano.

From there, scroll down to where you see “Categories” and change the ‘Utilities’ to ‘Graphics’. With that done, you need to save your changes. As we’re using Nano, you save your changes by just pressing CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER

The results should be immediate, though I’ve seen this require logging out and back in again. For the most part, it should just work – and it should work immediately. When you next open the application menu, you should find Shutter where it belongs – under the ‘Graphics’ sub-menu.

Now, you can do this with all sorts of other applications. If you don’t like the existing category, just change it until you do like the category. When you change that, the shortcut should appear in the expected sub-menu.

Feel free to try this will all the applications you want. It should work with any of them. If you do decide to do this in a GUI, you’ll need root and the files need to be edited as though they’re plain text. Enjoy!

Closure:

And there you have it… You have another article. In this article, you’ll have learned how to fix the application menu for Shutter – and other applications. Best of all, you’ll have done it in the terminal, which means you can do this with pretty much every operating system without needing to change the commands. The terminal is pretty awesome.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Show RAM Information With Ramfetch

Today’s article is going to be an interesting one, an article where you learn how to show RAM information with Ramfetch. For many of you, I expect Ramfetch will be a completely new application, which is nice. However, this article should be simple enough for even a new user. Read on and learn more about your RAM!

By now, you’ve seen some of the following articles:

Neofetch
Screenfetch
CPUfetch

Well, this time around, we’re going to be using a similar application – but one meant specifically for RAM. The name of this application is ‘Ramfetch‘. Let’s just say the idea will be familiar, as you’re already aware of similar applications. At the end, you end up with a handy screen to screenshot to show your friend and family – or to learn from. Bragging rights is always a good reason!

So, then why would you want to do this? Well, Ramfetch gives you some good information about your RAM. It’ll do the basics, like show you what’s free, what’s available, and the total amount of RAM. But, it shows you quite a bit more than that, and it’s data worth looking at for those who want to know more about their RAM.

What we’ll be doing is cloning a git repository, moving a file, and changing the permissions to ensure it can be executed so that you can run the command from anywhere within the terminal.

You’ll need ‘git’ installed, and that should be installed by default in pretty much every major distro. If it’s not, check your package manager – or simply follow the URL in the article and perform the operations manually.

With all that said, let’s just jump into the article!

Show RAM Information With Ramfetch:

Of course, you’re going to need an open terminal. Ramfetch is a terminal-based tool. So, open your default terminal emulator. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

UPDATE: Without letting me know, they changed things up. Follow these new instructions.

With your terminal open, let’s clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/WhoseTheNerd/ramfetch

1	git clone https://github.com/WhoseTheNerd/ramfetch

Now, let’s move it to a directory where you can always use it from the terminal, regardless of which directory you’re in:

sudo cp ramfetch/ramfetch /usr/local/bin/

1	sudo cp ramfetch/ramfetch /usr/local/bin/

The next step is to make Ramfetch executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ramfetch

1	sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ramfetch

With that said and done, just execute the ‘ramfetch’ command to show RAM information with Ramfetch. It’s simply:

ramfetch

ramfetch

Your output might look a little something like this:

There you have it. You can now show RAM information with Ramfetch! Pretty simple, huh? There’s no man page and the ramfetch --help command doesn’t really show you any other ways to run Ramfetch.

Here’s a better image, as supplied by the author of Ramfetch (o69mar):

Another Ramfetch image. — It does indeed look better, so there’s that!

Closure:

There’s another article said and done. Welcome to the new year and I hope you had a safe New Year’s Eve this year. We start the new year off with a simple enough command, learning how to show RAM information with Ramfetch.

I’ve not missed a publication schedule yet, so we’ll see how much longer this can go on. (I’m sure I’ll miss a publication deadline at some point, but today is not that day. In fact, I wrote this days ahead of time!) So far, so good! I never thought it’d reach this level, by the way.

How To: Quickly Restart The Cinnamon Desktop Environment

Today’s article is going to be a pretty quick and easy article, where you learn how to quickly restart the Cinnamon desktop environment. It shouldn’t be a very long article, and I’d say it’s easy enough for a beginner to process. So, if you’re interested in restarting the Cinnamon DE, read on!

Obviously, this will only apply to those folks who are using the Cinnamon desktop environment. Well, no… I do believe it also works in the GNOME desktop environment. As I understand that it’s a holdover from GNOME, which is what Cinnamon is based on. Alas, I don’t have anything running GNOME right here in front of me, so I’m not going to test that.

On the off-chance that you don’t know what desktop environment you’re using, that’s easy enough to learn. You can just read this article:

How To: Determine Your Desktop Environment

If you want to skip reading that, just open the terminal and run the following command:

echo $DESKTOP_SESSION

1	echo $DESKTOP_SESSION

The output of that command will tell you what desktop environment you’re using. If the result is ‘cinnamon’, then this article applies to you!

Anyhow, if you leave your computer on for a long time, you might find that Cinnamon is eating up a bunch of RAM and CPU. You can clear that out by logging out or rebooting, but there’s a much easier way to restart the Cinnamon desktop environment. This article will show you how.

Restart The Cinnamon Desktop Environment:

This time around, you don’t even need to open a terminal!

With your keyboard, press ALT + F2 and you should have a new window open up on your screen. It looks like this:

Now, all you need to do to restart the Cinnamon desktop environment is press the letter R and then press the ENTER key.

That alone, that little shortcut, will restart your Cinnamon desktop environment, meaning it may free up some RAM and lower the amount of CPU that the desktop environment is using.

Bonus:

You can actually run other commands from there. I don’t know all of them, or at least I don’t know if I know all of them. I’ve been unable to find an exhaustive list and I only know of a few shortcuts you can use in this run screen.

There’s a shortcut, like ‘rt’ that will reload your theme (useful for theme creators). It just reloads the theme, and doesn’t actually restart Cinnamon, though it may kinda look similar.

This won’t apply to too many of my users, as my readers are generally beginners, but you can also enter ‘lg’ into the shortcut window.

If you were using GNOME instead of Cinnamon, it’ll open up “looking glass”, the GNOME debugger.

If you’re using Cinnamon, it opens up Melange – the Cinnamon debugger. Debuggers can be useful if you need it and know what you’re doing with it.

The goodness doesn’t stop there!

If you want, you can put ‘firefox’, ‘gedit’, ‘leafpad’ or other applications in there. So long as those applications exist in /usr/bin, they should load just fine from this run screen. You can use this shortcut to open pretty much any application that has been installed via the normal means.

If you want to load something that’s not installed from this screen, you can do that too. You just need to enter the path to the application you want to open. Something like, ~/Downloads/LibreWolf.AppImage will work, according to my testing.

Closure:

There you have it! You’ve learned how to use a hidden run menu to restart the Cinnamon desktop environment. On top of that, you’ve learned that it can be useful for all sorts of other tasks. It’s a pretty handy shortcut, one you can open without taking your hands off the keyboard to use a mouse. That right there is quite a bonus in and of itself!

How To: Cancel Your LastPass Account

This is just a PSA type of article, about how to cancel your LastPass account. Below are the reasons why you might want to cancel your LastPass account and how you can go about actually canceling that account.

Below is a copy of a recent email from LastPass:

Dear LastPass Customer, 
We recently notified you that an unauthorized party was able to gain access to a third-party cloud-based storage service which is used by LastPass to store backups. Earlier today, we posted an update to our blog with important information about our ongoing investigation. This update includes details regarding our findings to date, recommended actions for our customers, as well as the actions we are currently taking.
We thank you for your patience and continued support of LastPass.
The Team at LastPass

Click the link in the quoted text for more information.

I can no longer trust LastPass with my passwords and wanted to quit their services, closing my account. The only link I could easily find was at the bottom of their email – and that would simply unsubscribe you from their email list.

With the help of @Condobloke on Linux.org, I was eventually able to find how to close my LastPass account (so I’m told by LastPass). When closing my account, they asked for a reason. The reason I gave was:

I no longer have faith in your security

For the record, I had never used LastPass for anything. I had just signed up for an account. I never actually used the extension or their services.

Cancel Your LastPass Account:

The first link you’ll see is in their email, and all that option does is remove you from their mailing list. You’re ONLY unsubscribing to their email list, not actually removing your account.

That’s this link:

http://417-klk-478.mktoweb.com/lp/logmeintransact/UnsubscribePage.html?mkt_unsubscribe=1

Link left plain on purpose. That link will ONLY remove you from their mailing list. It will not delete your account. So, I recommend deleting your account before removing yourself from the mailing list.

To delete your account, you need a link provided by @Condobloke:

https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php

Again, the link is left plain on purpose. That link will only get you started.

When you have logged in and clicked the button to remove your account, your account is still not deleted. You need to check your email and they send you an additional link. You can use that link to remove your account, remembering to confirm it when they ask time and time again.

When they ask you for a reason as to why you’re removing your account, you might want to tell them that it’s because you can no longer trust their security. They had the chance to be secure and failed. They might be making the ‘right steps’ now, but those steps should have been made before now.

What You Can Do:

If you’re going to use a password manager, you are better off getting one where you control the data. That means you want an ‘offline password manager’ that’s free and (hopefully) open source (so it can be audited, if need be).

I do not have enough experience with offline password managers to make a recommendation. I also am not going to be the one to suggest a specific product only to find out I sent you barking up the wrong tree. So, my suggestion is that you use your favorite search engine and look up ‘offline password manager’. Then, pick what you think works best for you.

I’ve done some looking and this article looks solid. I make no recommendations based on that link, it just looks pretty thorough to me. The article may contain errors and I’m not responsible for that, as I lack the time to dig deeper into this due to a rather impressive winter storm.

Good luck and do due diligence before deciding on a specific offline password manager platform. Read reviews, check security history, make sure it’s easy enough for you to use, and make sure it works with the software you intend it to work with.

Closure:

Well, I don’t use the ‘News’ category often, but this seemed like an important article to get out there. It’s time sensitive so it’s not going to be scheduled for publication, it’ll be published as soon as I’m done proofreading it.

Stay safe out there. Remember, “Practice safe hex!”

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

Find A Command’s Binary

Today’s article should actually be fairly short and simple, as we learn how to find a command’s binary. For those of you who are new, I’ll do what I can to make this more clear. At the end of the day, all should become clear and it really shouldn’t take all that long.

So, when you run a command in the terminal, you’re calling the binary file that is that program. This is also true when you’re starting a command in a GUI environment. You’re loading a binary file. Well, no… You could be loading some sort of script – but most of the time you’re going to be loading a binary.

Well, what we’re going to do is show you where to find these binaries by using the ‘which’ command in the terminal.

HINT: They’re generally tucked away in /usr/bin/!

The command we’ll be using is the ‘which’ command. It’s a very simple command to use when you just want to find a command’s binary. If you run the ‘man which‘ command (not the sandwich made from burger) you’ll find it is described accurately, and as thus:

which – locate a command

And, that’s really all the command we need for this exercise. It’s dirt simple, but still worthy of its own article. Ready?

How To: Find A Command’s Binary:

Yup. You guessed it. We’ll be using the terminal for this article. We do that a lot at this site. So, open up your default terminal emulator. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, try any one of the following:

which dir

which dir

Or:

which firefox

1	which firefox

Perhaps:

which teamviewer

1	which teamviewer

That’s right, the entire usage is just:

which <application>

1	which <application>

It even works for proprietary things, like:

which google-chrome

1	which google-chrome

If you want to be more curious, you can even find the binary for the very ‘which’ we’re using in this article:

which which

1	which which

See? This is so dirt simple that an absolute n00b can be up and using the ‘which’ command pretty much instantly! Using the terminal doesn’t have to be complicated. You can get comfortable using the terminal in just a few days and you’ll be better for it.

Closure:

So, yeah, that’s all the article you really need when your goal is to find a command’s binary file. It’s not even a wee bit difficult – and is a great way to explore the terminal when you’re new to it. Have fun!