Category: Software

Install The Snap Version of Chromium

Today’s article will teach you how to install the Snap version of Chromium – the opensource browser from Google. It’s akin to Chrome, but without all the proprietary bits and bobs. This isn’t a difficult article to follow, but may have some information that was easy to miss along the way.

Chromium is also the source for many other browsers, from Brave to Opera, they’re all Chromium underneath – including the Edge browser from Microsoft.

You’ll find things like syncing your passwords and history isn’t really possible with Chromium’s default configuration. Those bits are proprietary, and Google doesn’t want third parties using their resources, so those bits have been disabled for some time now.

However, it’s still very much a usable browser – and I’d know that sorta thing. After all, I’ve made it pretty clear that I’ll try any browser at least once! I’m often checking out the browser market and trying new browsers. With that, I can say that Chromium is generally easy to work with, has the features I use, has great support, and has a ton of available extensions.

Snap Version?

Snap? Yes, this article is about installing the Snap version of Chromium. I actually wrote an article about how to install the non-Snap version. (It was a horrible article written while I was very ill – I need to go back and edit it.)

Snaps are Ubuntu’s (will work on most every distro, with a little effort) ‘new’ package management system. It’s meant to be easier for both you and the developer, as the developer needs to only package one version. As for it being easier for you, it’s meant to avoid needing dependencies and does things like run in a secure container. It has some differences to, and some similarities with, both AppImages and Flatpaks. 

Snaps are happening. If you don’t like them, you’re going to have to put some effort into not using them – if you want to use Ubuntu and official Ubuntu flavors. Mint is an exception – currently. We’ll see how long they hold out and which side of history they end up on. Still, if you want to use Ubuntu, you might as well adjust and start using Snaps.

In fact, in Lubuntu 22.04, you’ll find that Firefox defaults to a Snap version. That’ll likely be mentioned in the release notes that nobody ever reads, so, we’ll have to see how folks deal with that change. I wonder how many won’t even notice the change?

Yes, there are complaints about Snap applications – some of them even valid complaints. It doesn’t matter. This is the direction Ubuntu is going and there’s no stopping them. I will link to this page again, just to show you how easy they are to use. You might as well jump on the train, ’cause the destination is set for Ubuntu’s locomotive. 

On a personal level, I don’t really mind them. They’re a bit wonky when compared with traditional repositories or PPAs. They do things like save the previous version, so that you still have access to the application if the newer version is buggy. They also take up more space, as one would expect if dependencies are included with each Snap. Indeed, they even take longer to load. Much of that is mitigated by having more modern hardware or being just a little patience – they don’t take all that long to load, after all. They also have some pretty great features.

So, yeah… This article is about a Snap application – specifically Chromium. It’s not terribly complicated – but there’s a second step that many don’t realize and I want to bring attention to that step.

Install The Snap Version of Chromium:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. 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.

Once you have your default terminal emulator open, you can just install Chromium with the following:

That’s all well and good, but it’s actually just a limited version of Chromium. Perhaps for licensing reasons, I’m not actually sure, you’re probably not done at this point. Well, many people will not be done at this point.

If you, like those many people, want to play things like proprietary media (i.e. DRM encumbered media like Netflix) you actually have to install another package. This step isn’t really all that clear and you’re kinda left blind to figure it out for yourself. Hopefully this makes it a bit more clear for those seeking information about installing the Snap version of Chromium.

Again, it’s not hard. This is not a difficult article to follow. It’s just that it’s not all that clear. You next need to install chromium-ffmpeg. Your regularly installed ffmpeg is not adequate, you need a Chromium specific version. The command is pretty logical, once you know that you need it.

And, that’s actually all you should need to do. Having done that, you can restart your browser and you should be able to use DRM-protected music and video. Yes, you should be able to use Netflix – but not Peacock, ’cause they’re just jackasses.

Closure:

See? I told you that it wasn’t that difficult to install the Snap version of Chromium. It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes before you’re watching videos and listening to the music. We can argue the merits of DRM some other time, but this is not the article for that.

Well, I mean, you can offer opinions in the comments and feedback, but no amount of opinion will stop me from telling folks how to do this. If they want to consume DRM-encumbered media, they are free to do so, and this is one way of doing so. No amount of opinions offered will sway Ubuntu from this course.

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.

How To: Find Your Man Pages’ Location On Disk

Today’s article is going to teach you how to find your man pages’ location on disk. It may not be a very useful skill, but it’s one that will come in handy in a future article. (That’s called ‘foreshadowing’!) Well, it seems likely that it’ll come in handy with a future article.

By the way, if you’re curious about why the first lines in these articles are often ‘forced’, it’s because of search engine optimization. You can blame the search engines, but it works.

Many of you will be familiar with the which command. You can use that to locate a binary for an application. For example, you can go with:

Which will output something along the lines of:

And that’s great. If that’s what you need to know, that’s what you need to know. However, what if you want to also know where your man page file is located? 

It should come as no surprise that Linux will happily spit that information out, so long as you know the correct incantations. And, for that, you have Linux Tips – where I’m gonna tell you how to find your man pages’ location.

Man Pages Location:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. 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.

The tool we’re going to be using is similar to which, and even spits out the same information. The tool in question whereis and the man page describes it as:

whereis – locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a command

As you can see, it’s a pretty simple command. It will also only show you the source if you actually have the source. In most cases, you have compiled binaries and that’s what your system uses. It’ll happily locate the binary just like the which command does.

So, let’s test it… Hmm… Let’s test it with the ‘ls’ command:

whereis command in action
See? It does exactly what i told you it would do! That’s why I make the big bucks!

So, if you want to know where your man pages are located for a specific applications, this is an easy way to do that. Obviously, it’s the 2nd bit of information. Though, I suppose if you only want the output to contain the path to the man pages, you could use a command like this:

That will just spit out the path to the man page, if that’s all you want to see. Try it with a few different commands and you’ll lock it into your memory – ’cause you never know when it’s going to come in handy.

Closure:

And there you have it… You have another article! This is just one of many articles, so feel free to browse around. You might even learn something new! I’ve officially written so many of these things that I can’t actually remember them all. I legit need to search first and make sure I haven’t already written the article. (I probably should have devised a system to avoid this, but the search function appears to be pretty good and effective.)

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.

Remove The Firefox Title Bar

If you, like me, appreciate clean and simple layouts then the Firefox title bar is annoyance. Firefox’s title bar wastes space, adding unneeded clutter. I have a dislike for that sort of stuff. If you too happen to dislike it as much as I do, this article will tell you how to remove the title bar from Firefox.

If this site’s aesthetics doesn’t make it obvious, I really like my layouts to be simple. I don’t like wasted space that doesn’t give me information that I need. That’s one of the reasons I use Linux – I can make the OS get out of my way and get my work done. If I had the skills, I’d make this site ‘responsive’ so that it filled wider screens better – just to avoid that wasted space.

I admit, it’s pretty picky and maybe a bit over the top, but I really do like the entire screen to have information I need on it. Other than a few applications, everything I do is in full screen. I sometimes don’t even bother with a desktop background – because I never see the desktop.

I believe the more technical term would be that I like an ‘information dense’ working environment. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me. For example, as I write this, I have 92 tabs open. See:

92 open tabs

See? I wasn’t kidding. That’s a bit more than normal, but not much. It’s what I do. Firefox isn’t usually among my open apps, actually. Oh well…

I also have multiple browsers open. Yeah, I have a problem… (My other main browser has ~60 tabs open.)

Remove The Firefox Titlebar:

So, what am I talking about? How can you fix this in Firefox? Well, a picture is worth 1,000 words… 

firefox title bar
That. That there is wasted space. That’s the kind of thing that annoys me.

It’s actually easy to get rid of, if you know where to look. So, this won’t be a taxing article – it’s an article that anyone can follow!

Firefox needs to be open, of course. Once open, look in the upper-left. You’ll see three vertical dots and those open the menu for customization. Click that and then click on “Customize”. Then, simply scroll down and untick the box for Title Bar.

disable firefox title bar
It’s easy, once you know where to look. Also, I suck at editing images. I seriously suck…

You don’t even have to restart the browser. It really is that easy to get rid of this annoyance. While you’re there, you can also customize a few other visual elements, so you might as well do that while you’re there. That and a theme and you’ve made your Firefox browser into your own.

Closure:

And there you have it, a nice and simple article that tells you how to remove the title bar from Firefox. It’s not dreadfully difficult, but it is an article! Maybe I should do one for Chrome/Chromium? That’d be another simple article that might be useful for people looking to maximize their screen’s real estate.

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.

How To: Install Eclipse On Ubuntu 20.04

Today’s article will tell you how to install Eclipse on Ubuntu 20.04. Though I suppose that, technically, it was tested on Lubuntu. Still, it should work for any Ubuntu official flavor and probably any derivatives. 

Eclipse is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Java. I’m pretty sure it’s number one in that role, or really close to it. It’s also useful for other programming languages, so I thought I’d check it out. It’s actually just a couple of commands to install Eclipse on Ubuntu, but it can be a little confusing, and I figured I’d document it here. 

I didn’t spend all that long using it, as I’m not really a Java dev, but I did look around and I can see why it’s popular. It’s fairly intuitive and there’s a plugin for anything you can think of. Seriously, there’s a lot of plugins – like ~1500 of them. I’m a bit under the weather, so you get what you get today.

Not being a Java developer, and mostly just being curious, I really can’t say that it’s a good IDE. But, it did look intuitive – things were where I expected to find them – and there’s a robust community surrounding it. On top of that, the list of plugins is huge and there were plugins to cover a lot. So, you might as well take a look if you’re looking for an IDE. This is programming software, so its popularity is almost certainly deserved and for good reason.

Install Eclipse On Ubuntu:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. 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.

Usually, you just install stuff from the Snap Store and that’s it. Installing Eclipse is actually a little different. It’s actually written in Java and  so will need a JRE. That’s not actually included in the Snap. That right there kinda makes me wonder about how well Snaps will fill their roles into the future – as being complete packages is one of the Snap goals.

That was it. That was the ‘trick’. You can now install an up-to-date Snap version (as there have been older versions in the default repositories and PPAs). To install via Snap, you just:

Once that has run its course, you can test the Eclipse IDE to see if it’s what you need in your programming tool-chain. It wasn’t all that hard and you should now have the most recent Eclipse installed. The Snap should stay updated regularly, much more regularly than the old repository way. So, there’s that. Which is nice.

Closure:

And there you have it. This article is nice and easy, and short! It’s also one more said and done, thankfully. I was feeling a bit icky when I wrote this one, so it’s definitely not a great article – but it is an article!

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.

How To: Install PIP In Linux

Today’s article is going to teach you how to install PIP in Linux. PIP is a reverse acronym meaning ‘PIP Installs Packages” and it’s a handy tool for the installation and management of Python applications. This article should be pretty short and easy for anyone to understand. 

This article is going to be pretty basic, merely telling you how to install PIP and not a whole lot more. The reason I write this article is because it needs to be written. I should also point out that Python is a programming language, though I’d expect most visitors to know that already. But, yes, this article needed to be written.

See, I wanted to tell you about a lovely piece of software (or three), but they all need to be installed with PIP. So, rather than write out the long installation instructions for various distros and package managers each time, I figured I’d make a single article that told you how to install PIP.

That’ll save some time and effort. I can refer back to this when those articles are written. There are many Python applications that can be installed with relative ease – just like you’re installing from your regular Linux repositories. PIP’s Python applications can be installed and uninstalled in the terminal while using PIP, so it’s quite easy.

So then, let’s learn how to…

Install PIP In Linux:

Installing PIP requires a terminal. 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.

Once you have the terminal open, you can install the appropriate PIP. Most folks will be using Python 3, but a smattering of people will still be using Python 2. I will list the installation instructions, where applicable, with Python 2’s instructions first.

Debian/Ubuntu/derivatives:

SUSE/openSUSE/derivatives:

Fedora/derivatives:

RHEL/CentOS/derivatives:

Arch/Manjaro/derivatives:

Slackware:

Read Install PIP For Slackwaare Instructions.

The basic usage of PIP is pip install <package>, pip uninstall <package>, and pip search <package>. My readers are smart enough to understand that without further instructions. You can also learn a lot by using man pip. Now you know how to install PIP in Linux.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have an article telling you how to install PIP in Linux, enabling you to install Python packages/programs quickly and easily inside the Linux terminal. It’s also one more article in my series of articles. I’m now well within a month of when the project is allowed to end and I still have a lot of articles left in me, so I’d expect it to keep going for long into the future. Or at least until someone steps up and takes the site over for me.

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.

Linux Tips
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.