Category: Software

Restoring Google Search To Chromium When Installed In Linux Mint

Well, that’s a long headline, but it’s not easy to compress the idea of restoring Google Search to Chromium when installed in Linux Mint! However, this is another article that is just me scratching my own itch. You’ll understand what I mean soon enough, I hope. I mean, I think I can describe it well enough.

Also, I’m using a new keyboard. I wore the last one out. That always slows me down for a little while. Ah well… I digress, and needlessly so…

So, let’s say you’ve done a fresh install of Linux Mint. Let’s also say that you decided you want to use Chromium. Fortunately, Chromium is in the default Linux Mint repositories. Given the ease of this operation, you go ahead and install Chromium in Linux Mint with the following command:

Everything appears well and good – until such a time as you decide you want to search from the search bar. At that point, you’ll notice that Chromium in Linux Mint uses a different search engine. This should be easy to change (and it is) but when you look in the settings you’ll see that Google Search is nowhere to be found.

There’s a resolution for this! We won’t even need the terminal.

I’ll presuppose that you’ve already installed Chromium, so we’ll skip that part. You can figure that out if you haven’t already figured that out and are now curious about adding Google Search.

Restoring Google Search To Chromium:

First, you will want to open Chromium, click the three vertical dots in the upper right, and select ‘Settings’.

From there, you look to the left to find the ‘Search engine’ option and click on that. Chances are good that you already tried this, assuming you’ve wanted to restore Google Search to Chromium.

You next click on ‘Manage search engines and site search’, which is where we want to be to edit search engines in Chromium.

Scroll down to ‘Site Search’ and click on ‘Add’, like so:

adding google search to chromium in linux mint
See? It’s a pretty basic concept. The rest is also easy. We can restore Google Search!

That’s going to pop up a new window that looks like this:

adding a new search engine in chromium
There aren’t many fields to be filled out – and Google isn’t your only option.

Under ‘Search engine’, add: Google 
Under ‘Shortcut’, add: google 
Under ‘URL’ add: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s 

Note, that the %s is where your search terms would go in the website’s URL. If you wanted to add Ecosia, for example, you’d use this in the last section:

Be sure to click the ‘Add’ button when you’re done.

By the way, the ‘Shortcut’ is the text you’d type to manually pick that search engine. You start your address bar query with the shortcut text, add a space, and then add your search terms. That will let you pick among the various search engines manually. In the above example, you’d first type ‘google’ and that’d give you results from Google Search.

Of course, you can just make Google Search the default…

Make The New Search The Default Search:

If you want, you can make the newly added search engine the default search engine. That’s what I did, but it’s entirely up to you. You could always just preface the search with the word/letter you put in the 2nd second and manually select your search engine.

To make the newly added search the default search, simply click the three verticle dots next to the new entry and set it as the default. Like so:

Make the newly added search engine the default search engine.
  Tada! It’s default!

That’s all there is to it. You’ve now made the newly added search the default search. When you search from the address bar, it will use your default search engine. If you highlight and right-click to search, it will now use your new default search engine.

Notes:

I mentioned Ecosia and gave an example. It’s pretty easy to find the right URL. Go to the search engine (or site search engine) and enter ‘example’ into the search bar.

If you did that here on Linux-Tips, you’d get this:

To add this site as a search engine, you’d replace ‘example’ with %s. Like so:

If you wanted to add Bing, you’d do the same thing:

Verify that you can remove the gibberish:

(And you can…)

So, the result needed to add Bing as a search engine would be:

 You can generally do this with any sites you want – so long as they’re reasonably accessed and have the search term included in the address bar. If you wanted to search Linux.org from the search bar, you’d use:

Yes, that will work and it will still properly filter the results according to date. It’s pretty easy. As I mentioned, I’m mostly scratching my own itch with this article. This was a change I needed to make and I thought it’d make a good article. I’ve decided to make it more thorough, showing you that you can do more than just restore Google Search to Chromium.

This will also work with browsers based on Chromium. If you are using Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, Chrome, etc., then you can almost certainly manage your search engines just like this. I tend to have a few search engines configured but I mostly rely on Google Search as it seems to consistently work best for me. You do you, however.

Closure:

Well, there you go. It’s pretty easy to learn about restoring Google Search to Chromium when installed in Linux Mint! (That’s such a long headline…) The concept is easier than trying to make a concise headline out of it. I dare say this is the longest headline I’ve ever had. Search engines are not going to like it. Hopefully, the content makes up for that!

If you’re still reading this far, you might as well know that Google uses a different address in their search settings. It’s a convoluted thing and I hope I get this right…

However, you don’t need all that. You’re fine (as far as I can tell) with the basic option I gave above. But, I figured I’d include this just for the sake of completeness. Good luck restoring Google Search in Chromium when installed in Linux Mint! It’s not that challenging and I’m sure you can figure it out.

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Unzip .gz Files With gunzip

You can just as easily do this in a GUI, but we’ll be using the Linux terminal to unzip .gz files with gunzip. Why? Because we can! You never know when you’ll be limited to a terminal and need to extract the files found in a .gz file.

If you do some searching around the web, you’ll see that .gz files are made with gzip. If you do some more digging, you’ll learn that gzip is both a file type and the name of the application. The .gz files are referred to as gzip files.

While you may encounter just plain .gz files, you’ll often find them as ‘tar.gz’ files, meaning they’ve been prepared for tape archives. You can read about that here:

Let’s Decompress A File (tar.gz) In The Terminal

You won’t need to install anything for this article. The tools will be installed on any major distro – and even on most minor distros. Gzip has been around for more than 30 years, at the time of this writing, and is widely used – even though there are many other compression tools out there. The .gz format is not patent encumbered, nor is it proprietary.

We’ll be using gunzip to unzip .gz files. If you check the man page, you’ll see:

gzip, gunzip, zcat – compress or expand files

As you can see, that means it is the right tool for the job. You can just as easily use ‘file-roller’ in your GUI to unzip .gz files. You have choices!

It’s currently a Sunday evening and my last few articles have been quite long. I think we’ll keep this one short. I might as well…

Unzip .gz Files With gunzip:

As I mentioned earlier, you can do this with a GUI application. We’ll be unzipping .gz files in the terminal. Just press CTRL + ALT + T to get your terminal open and we can begin.

The first thing you need is a .gz file.

Download example.gz here: Link

With that freshly downloaded, you can use cd to get to your ~/Downloads directory (or whichever directory you used):

Now, you can simply extract the contents, like so:

If you want to extract multiple .gz files at one time, try this:

If you want to extract all the .gz files in a folder, try this command:

There you have it. That’s all you need to know if you want to unzip .gz files with gunzip. It’s not even a little complicated. Anyone can figure this one out.

Closure:

I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d keep this one short. There’s no reason to make it all that long and it’s a weekend. It’s also a holiday weekend and you got a lovely article on Saturday. This one is just a simple task, for those who might want to unzip ..gz files with gunzip – in the Linux terminal. It’s pretty easy!

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 site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

List Installed Software In Lubuntu

There may come a point in your Linux journey where you must list the installed software in Lubuntu. This is easily done and I will show you a couple of quick ways to get this list in the terminal. So, if you want to list installed software in Lubuntu, this is the article for you!

I’m writing this article because it’s quick and easy. I won’t make this article as long as I’ve made recent articles. We’re just going to get to the point, more or less. I will show you a couple of different ways, each with its own merits. You can decide which way works for you.

The article headline and related material reference Lubuntu. That’s because I’m using Lubuntu when I write this article. I am a Lubuntu member, after all. It makes sense that I’d be using Lubuntu!

Plus, it’s a weekend. I’ve formalized the idea that articles written during weekends will be easier. I have a life outside of writing articles and doing other things to help the Linux community. (It’s amazing, but it’s true!)

However, you can use these commands on anything that uses dpkg or apt. That means you can use these commands on Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and myriad other distros that use .deb files as their software packages. These commands are fairly universal across those distros and you shouldn’t have any issue running either of them on any of those machines.

Caveat:

The following commands will not show you Snap packages or flatpak packages. Software installed by those means does not show up in these commands. Only software installed with dpkg/apt (which includes all .deb packages even if you used a GUI installation method) will be shown.

Fortunately, that’s not a problem.

To show flatpak applications:

To show Snap applications:

AppImages aren’t really installed and I can find no way to list those that make sense. Sure, we could use the find command and list any .appimage file, but that won’t tell us if you use it. We’ll just ignore those for the sake of simplicity and to stay within the realms of ‘reasonable’.

List Installed Software In Lubuntu:

In the opening paragraph, I mentioned that this was something you’d be doing in the terminal. That means you need an open terminal. As you’re using Lubuntu, you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and QTerminal should open right up.

With your terminal now open, the first command we’ll be using is dpkg. This will not show all the installed applications at the same time. This outputs a nicely formatted list. You can see the version of the software on the right. It’s easy to understand.

It will show you a page at a time and your arrow button lets you scroll down to see them all. To exit the list, you press the Q button on your keyboard. To list installed software in Lubuntu with dpkg, you simply run the following command:

The second command might be a little more useful, but it’s not formatted nearly as nicely. This time around, we’ll be using the apt command. If you don’t know, apt is basically a front end for dpkg. Now you know.

If you want to use apt to list installed software in Lubuntu, you would just run the following command:

That will spit out the entire list, though you could pipe it to the less command. To do that, try this command:

That will output the list a page at a time. Like the above dpkg command, if you want to exit the list, you just press the Q button on your keyboard.

This command is also useful to create a list of installed applications. Again, this won’t list Snaps or flatpaks, but it will list the traditionally installed applications. That means it’s pretty useful to create a list, especially if you want to recreate the system later. To do that, just run this command:

There you go, you now have a handy list of installed applications in Lubuntu! Pretty easy, isn’t it?

That’s all there is to it today. 

Closure:

Yeah, it’s a weekend. This article might just break 800 words, so it’s not nearly as long as many of my recent articles. This time around,  you’ve learned how to list installed software in Lubuntu. It wasn’t even that complicated and you’ve been given the choice between two commands. Just pick the one that works for you and commit it to memory. You’ll be golden and have taken one more step in your route of Linux learning.

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 site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

And Still Another Way To Find Files By Extension

Today we will cover a subject we’ve covered before, as we discuss yet another way to find files by extension. This is Linux! We have options! There are so many ways to find files by extension – and this is one of the more interesting of those ways. So, if you want to find files by extension, this might be the article for you.

You might be interested in previous articles that covered this topic:

Another Way To Locate Files By Extension
Yet Another Way To Find Files By Extension

You can search to find more. This is a task that has all sorts of ways to accomplish it. Some ways are easier than others. I’d say that the method we use to find files by extension in this article will be fairly easy. There’s not a whole lot to it.

We will be installing software. We’ll be installing mlocate but the man page will refer to it as plocate while the command we’ll be using will just be locate. Sound confusing? Well, it is. Don’t worry, the directions are still simple.

mlocate:

We’ll be installing mlocate as our tool to find files by extension. We’ll do this in the terminal, a fairly universal way to do things. Pretty much every distro is going to have at least one terminal available. You can usually open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.

When you do get mlocate installed, you can check the man page with ( man locate). There, you’ll see that locate is described like so:

plocate – find files by name, quickly

Yes, it has now been called mlocate, plocate, and locate. No, I do not know why. I do not think I’ll try to find out why. This is just one of those things you sort of accept and move on. Please feel free to research this and leave a comment. I’m not terribly curious, but other people might be.

With your terminal open, we can get mlocate installed with one of the following commands:

Debian/Ubuntu:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

RHEL/CentOS/etc:

OpenSUSE/GeckoLinux/etc:

There are other package managers. If your package manager isn’t covered, just go ahead and search for “mlocate” and you’ll likely find that it’s available by default.

Configure mlocate:

Now that you have mlocate installed on your system, you need to update the database. The locate command requires a database. On slow systems with many files, this can take a few seconds. It should not take long on a modern system.

The only command you need to run at this stage is this:

Let that finish. It should not take very long. If it’s taking a long time, something might be amiss.

That’s all you have to do. The database will happily keep itself updated, though may take a short while to do so. If you add a new file, it might not be in the database immediately. In theory, this lag could mean you miss something – but the odds of that are rather low unless you’re constantly generating additional files.

I guess that means we should talk about using the locate command.

Find Files By Extension With The ‘locate’ Command:

As the title indicates, our goal is to find files by extension. We’ll be using the newly installed and updated locate database. The syntax is really simple. You’d just run a command like this:

For example,  you can find .iso files this way. That command would look like this:

That command will find everything with .iso in the name. If you have a foo.bar.isotext file that’s not really an .iso file, you’ll have to ignore that result because the locate command is going to find it.

But wait, there’s more!

You can limit the search to just a single directory. The command may not look conventional, but the syntax is as follows:

Let’s say that I want to find all the files ending with .iso in my ~/Downloads/ directory. That command would be simple. It’d look like this:

An example output might be something like this:

using the locate command to find files with a certain extension
It’s not hard to use the locate command to find files by extension. You’ve got this!

See? It’s not too hard to use the locate command. You can do more with the locate command, but this is just using it to find files by extension. Read the man page to learn more about it.

EDIT: Closed parentheses thanks to @Osprey.

Closure:

Well, this is a fairly short article. This time around, we just used a different method to find files by extension. There are lots of tools at your disposal and we use the locate command for this one. Just remember to update your database before you use it. Other than that, it’s pretty simple. It’s easy enough for new folks to use it!

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 site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Install A More Current Version Of LibreOffice In Linux Mint

Today’s article won’t be too difficult for most readers as we install a more current version of LibreOffice in Linux Mint. This is something we do from inside the terminal, but I’ll include clear directions that are simple enough for anyone to follow. If you do have issues, you can always leave a comment.

In reality, this applies to any distro that can take advantage of PPAs (Personal Package Archives). You could even make distros that don’t support PPAs out of the box support PPAs, such as Debian or ElementaryOS.

In fact…

Enable PPAs In Elementary OS

You might also want to read:

How To: Add A PPA To Ubuntu

But, adding a PPA will just be one step in today’s article. There will be more to it and none of it will be technically challenging, so long as you can follow directions.

What Is LibreOffice?

As you’re using Linux Mint, your version of Linux came with LibreOffice already installed. You can think of LibreOffice as being an alternative to other office suites, such as the venerable Microsoft Office.

LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice that was made after Oracle acquired the rights to OpenOffice. I don’t have any statistics, but there’s a lot of evidence that would suggest LibreOffice is now the more popular of the two – at least in the Linux world.

If your distro has a full-blown office suite installed by default, it’s probably going to be LibreOffice. It’s because of this that I strongly suspect that LibreOffice is more popular than the original OpenOffice. There are other office suites available for Linux and all sorts of alternative applications for the applications contained in the LibreOffice suit.

You can read more about LibreOffice here:

LibreOffice Project Page

For the uninitiated, LibreOffice provides the following:

Writer: A word processor
Calc: A spreadsheet editor
Impress: A presentation app
Draw: A vector-drawing program
Base: A database program
Math: A math-formula editor

So, LibreOffice is pretty handy, with lots of tools available. Best of all, it’s free as in beer and liberty.

About Updating LibreOffice:

If you want a more current version of LibreOffice, it’s not all that taxing. Here’s why you might want a more updated version of LibreOffice:

This is the version currently installed in Linux Mint:

current version of LibreOffice installed in Linux Mint
There’s probably nothing wrong with using an older version of LibreOffice.

This is the current version of LibreOffice that’s available on their site:

this is the current version of LibreOffice that's available on the project page
This is the version you could have if you wanted to. If you want to…

So, you can have a newer version of LibreOffice because the PPA we’ll be using is meant to provide just that. The PPA provides you with a newer version of LibreOffice than what’s already installed. 

Do You Need This Updated LibreOffice:

No, no you probably don’t. Not only can this cause issues with the application’s stability, but it may also introduce new bugs. This comes with a caveat or two.

If you’re dealing with a show-stopping LibreOffice bug and it’s fixed in the more recent versions, that’s a good reason to move to the cutting-edge versions of LibreOffice. It’s also a good thing for those who are just curious about the latest features in LibreOffice. If you’re interested in helping out and reporting bugs, this too would be a good reason to go through this process.

When you add the PPA, there’s this warning:

Most of the packages in this PPA have only experienced minor testing — in fact it is the place to enable a wider audience to test packages before they are published into the distro proper. In general, this PPA is _not_ for the average user to install without a closer look (if it would be, its packages would be in the main repositories). OTOH, it is _way_ _better_ to use packages from this PPA than using the *.deb files that The Document Foundation provides upstream, which are intentionally build against a very old baseline for maximum compatibility. So, _if_ you want to be on the bleeding edge, do it here, not with upstream *.debs.

Read that carefully. Make sure that you understand the risks involved. Do not do this without realizing the potential consequences. This can break things. This almost certainly will break things.

Those things will be limited to LibreOffice. You don’t have to worry about it breaking your whole system. There’s little risk of that happening, so don’t worry about that. But, you will be using the latest and greatest versions of LibreOffice.

For the overwhelming majority of people, using the default version of LibreOffice in Linux Mint is going to be the path of least resistance. While this article does specify Linux Mint, this is also true for the other distros out there. If you ride the bleeding edge too long, you will get cut.

The Current Version Of LibreOffice In Linux Mint:

As I said way back at the start of this article, you’re going to need a terminal for this. Once you have that terminal open, the rest is pretty easy. You just need to commit to it. So, press CTRL + ALT + T to open your terminal and let’s get this show on the road.

First, we’re going to add the PPA. That’s easy.

That’s going to output a bunch of text. At the end of it, it will tell you what to do. Specifically, it will say Press Enter to continue or Ctrl+C to cancel and you’ll just press the ENTER button to continue adding the PPA to your list of repositories.

The next step is to update the database of software that’s available to install via your repositories, including the ones you’ve added manually like this one. That’s a command everyone should know by now.

Seeing as you’re there, and to ensure that you have the latest available packages installed before the next step, run this command:

Now, if there’s a newer package of LibreOffice in the default repositories, that command will also update that. However, that will not install the latest and greatest LibreOffice in Linux Mint. 

No, no… You have one more step to install the most up-to-date (available) version of LibreOffice in Linux Mint. To do that, just run the following command in that same terminal window.

That will get you the latest version of LibreOffice that’s currently available in the official LibreOffice repositories. It’s about as bleeding edge as you can get. It may not give you the absolute latest, as it sometimes takes a little while to add the new software to the repositories, but it’ll be a much newer version than the version that was installed by default.

Your result might look something like this:

The results of installing the most current version of LibreOffice on Linux Mint
There you have it, the latest available version of LibreOffice installed in Linux Mint.

Is this something you want to do? Do you need the latest and greatest version of LibreOffice? Are you ready to deal with the potential bugs and are you ready to help the community by reporting any bugs you find? If you’re just a curious sort of person, this might be something fun to try. Otherwise, you might just want to leave well enough alone and be happy with the version that has been tested and deemed ready for full release.

Closure:

Well, this article turned out longer than I expected it to. That’s okay. I’m sure you can handle it. It has pictures! That might help! Well, they probably won’t help but you only need the text. The pictures are just decorative and mildly informative. They’ll be out of date in less than a week.

You should give this serious consideration before you decide to do this. I’ll do an article in the future that will tell you how to undo this should you decide you want to back out of it. That’ll be a nice article and should be easy enough for anyone to follow. After all, if they made it this far they can probably make it the rest of the way.

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 site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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