TeamViewer; My Most-Recent Favorite Alternative To VNC.

Today’s article is going to be about my latest favorite VNC alternative, TeamViewer. It’s a surprisingly handy application that just works. Read on to learn more about it!

I’m a pretty big fan of VNC (Virtual Network Computing, from RealVNC). Actually, it’d be a bit more accurate to say that I’m a pretty big fan of remotely managing devices. Among the ways I do this, VNC is a nice way to do so graphically.

Basically, remote administration software such as this forwards the remote desktop to a window on my local desktop and allows me the control as though I was physically seated at the device. I have quite a few devices, and remotely manage the majority of them. I have computers in my house that I seldom physically use, I manage them all remotely. 

SSH is often adequate for anything I want to do, but not always. I can even forward SSH but not all applications work well with that. Sometimes I just want a GUI, as some things are best done in a GUI.

Besides, TeamViewer is free for personal use, and I like TeamViewer because it just works, even over the world wide web without knowing an IP address. I can use it to help friends and relatives by just talking to them long enough to get started.

Frankly, VNC can be a pain in the butt to configure and my favorite VNC client (RealVNC) is proprietary. So, using the proprietary TeamViewer doesn’t bother me. 

If you insist on opensource, this isn’t the tool for you. If you want something that is easy and just works, read on:

Getting and Using TeamViewer:

I’ll explain how to install it with Debian/Ubuntu/etc, but you can easily install TeamViewer for other Linux package management systems. Start by opening your terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

Once open, let’s grab the latest .deb with wget and install it. If you don’t have wget installed, you can do that with sudo apt install wget and then proceed with:

Copy and paste all three of those lines individually, of course. Press ENTER after each one. The last command should complete the process and would normally be the last step but this is proprietary software so you’ll need to run TeamViewer at least once in order to accept the license agreement. You can just do that in the terminal with:

That should pop up a window where can accept the license and keep on trucking.

Now, you’ll have to install TeamViewer on each device you want to manage and it’ll need to be installed on any device you wish to use to control the rest. Just be careful and read the prompts. It installs and works like a champ.

You’ll need to configure it on each device as well, allowing remote connections and setting up passwords as needed. It can check a centralized server, so the host doesn’t need to know things like ports and passwords.

It’s easily configured the first time, and once you’re done it a remote connection will hopefully look a bit like this:

TeamViewer in action.
This is what a connection might look like. It’s what mine looks like at this minute in time.

You can use this as a single instance or you can configure an account online with the management console to keep track of all your connections from a single point. You’ll spend a confusing amount of time making your browsers and devices ‘trusted’ status. All of this, of course, has obvious privacy implications.

Privacy & Security Concerns:

Again, they’re absolutely going to track your usage. They’ll know your IP addresses and the names of the devices you’re connecting to. They will know when you connect, how long you stay connected, and more. On top of that, they’ll know your email address, if you give it to them.

Having used them for a while, I see no spam from them and they’ve been nothing but acceptably and professionally behaved from my perspective. I don’t even get any regular newsletter emails from them. I think it’s safe to assume they’re currently not doing so. They do a whole lot of email verification steps if you want to trust devices.

Being proprietary, we have no idea what the source code looks like. We have no way to be sure that they’re not being malicious. They’re a business and they’d do poorly if it turned out they were malicious and using this information for spying or anything of that nature. 

If you’re running from an oppressive government, I’d probably not use them. They’re a business and that means they’re likely to respond to lawful requests – and laws around the globe can be pretty terrible.

In fact, if you’re doing anything that’s even remotely secure, I’d suggest not doing so over TeamViewer. Sure, when the application is terminated you can verify that it’s down, but at the same time don’t connect to your remote device to do your banking. That’d just be silly regardless.

As I stated above, I’m quite okay with the potential privacy and security implications. I don’t use Linux because of any philosophical reasons, I use Linux because it just works. If you’re different and object in some way, you should probably just move on and use alternative software to remotely manage your devices.

Closure:

And there you have it! It’s yet another article in the books, another article in the records. Traffic has been high lately, and that’s great. Things are growing in a linear feature and I’m okay with that. Even my Reddit sub is growing – at 50 viewers, up from just a few when I first took the sub over. So, things are going great.

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You Can, And Probably Should, Use VSCodium Instead Of VSCode

This article’s goal is to raise awareness of VSCodium, an open-source alternative to VSCode that has a couple of important benefits and changes. This isn’t the kind of article that I usually write, but it seems important to make people aware of the choices they have here.

This isn’t really a software review, nor is it really news. After all, if you’re in the business you’re already aware of VSCode (Visual Studio Code) and the benefits. If you’re not in the business, VSCode is a source code editor that comes with a bunch of features that make a programmer’s life easier.

VSCode is quite popular, made by Microsoft, and is available to Linux users. Microsoft has made VSCode’s source code mostly open (but not necessarily ‘free’) and VSCode is free-as-in-beer for anyone who wants a source code editor. It’s popular because it’s actually pretty good. 

It was released back in 2015, with most of the source code covered by the MIT license. In the 2019 SE Dev Survey results, it was #1 among respondents, which was the most recent I could actually find. By most accounts, it’s a great piece of software and a valuable tool.

Why VSCodium:

Not all of VSCode is open source and it’s only free as in beer. The source isn’t free as in libre, because it doesn’t preserve all freedoms. It also comes with telemetry, meaning that it reports on things like how you use the software, what software you’re using with it, what kind of hardware you’re using, and things like that. 

Many Linux users care about those two things. They want their software to have a permissive license. They don’t want their software reporting anything about them to anyone. Those are reasonable wants and the community is usually pretty good about providing alternatives.

In this case, they’ve changed the way it is compiled, and what is compiled with it. They’ve also packaged it for most operating systems out there. They’ve made a package available that’s entirely licensed under the MIT License (permissive, free) and made it easy to get.

I’m not going to duplicate a bunch of information by cutting and pasting. That’s also a good practice when the content may change, so I’ll just link to a couple of pages.

Visit the VSCodium home page, click here.
Visit the VSCodium code repo page, click here.

To get a feel for the project, and to see the vast amounts of effort the maintainers put into it, visit the first link. If you just want to find the right package to get for your system, click the second link. Those links will help you get VSCodium properly installed, usually in a pretty painless fashion. Worst case scenario, they show you how to compile it and how to make your own packages.

It’s so easy to install that I did so just to have access to it on this system, one I mostly only use for writing and browsing. It took a total of three commands. If you’ve done it properly, it’ll look something like this:

VSCodium's about page
That’s the current version, using the PPA method. It was an easy-enough process.

Just follow the installation instructions for your particular version of Linux and you shouldn’t have any issues. If you do, you can always raise issues at their GitHub link, leave a comment here, or drop us a line at Linux.org. Someone will help get you sorted.

By using VSCodium, you can have all the greatness that is VSCode while preserving the important liberties. It’s a great piece of software!

Closure:

This isn’t my “normal” type of article, but I’ve really wanted to make sure people are aware of the options when it comes to VSCode and VSCodium. This is one of those times when you can have your cake and eat it to. 

By the way, there are all sorts of great pieces of software out there. I’ve written a review, an introduction, and some comparative pieces. I think I may do more of them. They take about the same amount of time to write and edit, but there are some great pieces of software out there and people just aren’t aware of them. Feel free to drop an idea or the name of your favorite software as a comment. If you like these types of article, be sure to vote and comment!

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balenaEtcher: A Tool To Turn Linux .ISO Files Into Bootable USB Drives

balenaEtcher is a free software tool used to write .ISO files to USBs so that you can boot from them and install Linux. balenaEtcher is just one of many tools to do this, but it is both simple and effective. That makes it fit for purpose and is why it is getting its own article.

You’re going to need a blank USB drive, like a thumb drive. Well, it needn’t be blank but it should be. It needs to be large enough to meet the requirements of your distro – usually 4 GB is adequate. Larger is fine.

You’re also going to need the correct .ISO from the distro you’re trying to install. I have no way of knowing what that is, so here’s an article about picking the distro that’s right for you. You should verify the integrity of the .iso to eliminate it as a source of problems.

You’re also going to need to know how to boot to USB. That link will take you to an article that covers that, and includes DVD. It covers booting to something other than your default drive.

Finally, you’re going to need balenaEtcher. Head to this page and scroll down. If you scroll down, you’ll see many download options. It’s available for everything from Linux to MacOS.

Download the correct version for the operating system you’re currently using. If you download the AppImage, be sure to make it executable before trying to run it. Either way, you’ll need to download balenaEtcher (maybe install it) and then run it. That’ll vary depending on your OS, but they even have .deb and .rpm files available.

All set?

Let’s Use balenaEtcher:

With all those pieces in place, balenaEtcher is fairly self-explanatory. I’m going to assume you got it to work properly. If you can’t get it installed or running from the AppImage, just leave a comment and I’ll talk you through it for your system. You can also ask on Linux.org.

It’ll look something like this when you first open it.

balenaEtcher pick a file
In this case, you’ll pick “Flash from file”.

Then, you’ll click ‘Flash from file’ and doing so will let you navigate to and select the .iso you want to use. Do so, being sure to get it correct.

Next, you’ll select the target. The target in this case means the USB drive that you want to write the .iso to. So, that will be the smaller flash drive in most cases and will look something like this:

balenaEtcher in action
Select the right flash drive. Be very careful at this stage! This step can go horribly wrong!

There’s just one step remaining! You need to click the Flash button and wait for it to do its job writing the .ISO to the USB drive. It looks like this:

balenaEtcher in action
Click the ‘flash’ option and wait patiently while it does its job.

That could take a little while, though not all that long if you’re using USB 3.0. On USB 2.0 it takes a bit, so be prepared to wait – but not terribly long. 

When this is all done, just close the program and your new USB device should be ready. You should be able to boot your computer, select the USB drive as the boot device, and then install Linux. Most of the time, it goes just swimmingly. If it doesn’t, ask for help.

Again, don’t forget to verify the integrity of the downloaded .ISO before you do any of this. The process for doing that varies, and the distro will tell you how on their download page. Have fun installing Linux!

I’ll probably eventually take the screenshots of me installing Linux in a virtual machine, but I haven’t done that article yet. It seems like a good future article to write.

Closure:

Well, there’s another article. This is just a nice, quick article. It’s handy for when you need to know how to use balenaEtcher, or when you need to tell someone else how to use it. It’s one of the articles I’d expect to see people linking to on a regular basis. “Hey, this is how you use Etcher!”

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‘traceroute’ in Linux, Let’s Take a Closer Look!

This article will explain a little about ‘traceroute’ as a network diagnostic application. We’ll give a few traceroute examples, enabling you to figure out some networking issues.

Whenever I find myself unable to connect to a networked device, including websites online via the internet, one of the first tools I reach for is called ‘traceroute’. It’s not exclusive to Linux and you may know of the tool ‘tracert’ in Windows that does the same thing.

traceroute defines itself as this:

traceroute – print the route packets trace to network host

More realistically, it shows you the hops (devices) you go through in order to make a connection. See, when you connect to a different computer over the network, you don’t generally do so without going through other devices. Your data will travel through multiple devices to reach the source device and all those hops along the way are potential points of failure.

Sometimes those devices are under your control and you can actually do something about it. Other times, it’s just informative and all you can do is wait, or inform someone else and hope they fix it. If nothing else, you’ll know where your packets stopped or slowed down to the point of uselessness.

For example, there 13 hops (devices) between me and linux-tips.us.

traceroute in action
See? There are 13 hops to reach my destination. 

So, while that picture should explain it well enough, let’s get a little deeper.

Using traceroute:

You may find that traceroute isn’t already installed. If it isn’t, it’s absolutely in your default repositories. However you would normally install software is how you install this. If you look, traceroute is sure to be in there. So, go ahead and install it if it’s not already installed. For example:

Just adjust that to your package management system and it’ll be in there. It’s that important a tool that I’m sure it’s in there. In fact, I’m a bit surprised that it’s not always installed by default, but it isn’t.

Now, the most basic usage is just like you saw in the image above.

So long as you’re within 30 hops and use 60 or fewer packets, that’s going to work well enough. The information it spits out is what devices it has traveled through (their hostname and IP address) and RTT – Round Trip Times. There are three of them because three packets are sent. Ideally, you’ll see your destination listed last. If not, you’ll see the closest you got to your destination.

If you see an asterisk, that means the device didn’t respond as expected. Frequently, this means the device is blocking ICMP. You can try to get around this by using ICMP ECHO (-I) or TCP (-T) packets. However, both of those will require elevated permissions, or the use of sudo.

All of this is mostly informative – unless you’re in control of the network and devices.

When it’s a network and devices under your control, you can use this information to troubleshoot. You can see the device names and time taken for packet transit, narrowing down your choices for troubleshooting.

When you’re using this over the public internet, you’re subject to other people who control the devices. If you find a break along the way, about all you can do is wait – or maybe use the data to contact your ISP (or hosting provider, if it’s your site that you’re trying to reach).

There are other options with traceroute. You can change the port you use, you can send more or fewer packets, you can not resolve hostnames, and more. To see the rest of the traceroute options:

That will fill you in with the many other choices you have. I find I don’t really need the advanced options, but system admins may need some of the features. As a regular user, I just use it to troubleshoot my own connections on my private network or when I am having web hosting/connectivity issues.

Closure:

And there you have it. Another article is in the books, and this time it’s just a nice easy article about the venerable traceroute. If you don’t already have this tool in your toolbox, it’d be worth adding and adding a basic familiarity to your mental toolbox.

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How To: Properly Delete a User’s Account

Today’s article will show you how to properly delete a user’s account. It’s a pretty basic task and an astute observer would note that I’ve not yet written an article about creating user accounts. I may have to write said article at some point, because why not? This promises to be a pretty easy and brief article!

When you install some software, it may add a user. When you remove that software, it may just leave that user behind. You may have multiple people using your devices, or you may be working in a corporate environment. Either way, there comes a time when you may want to clean house and delete user accounts that are no longer necessary.

It can be just a little tricky to properly delete a user’s account, so I figure it’s something worth covering. The tool we’ll be using is ‘userdel‘ and my checking indicates it’s universal. Let’s get to it!

Delete A User:

I’m gonna assume that you already know the name of the user you’d like to remove from your system. With that information in hand, let’s open the terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard. 

Once you have the terminal open, you can do a basic user delete with:

If the user has a /home/user directory, you can delete that at the same time with this:

Seems nice and easy, right? Well, before you should run any of those commands you should be sure that the user is both not logged in and has no processes running in their name. If you do have either of those things, you will want to run this command before running either of the userdel commands above:

You can also try the -f (force) option with the userdel, but I’ve never had good luck with that. So, your better using killall before you use userdel. If you’d like to try it, here it is:

And that’s actually everything. There’s likely to also be a graphical way to delete users and that’ll depend on your desktop environment. Rather than play around with learning and documenting all those, you can just do it in the terminal where it’s easy enough and equally effective.

Closure:

And now you know how to delete a user account, and how to do it properly. Indeed, this is another article in the books and hopefully this one will help people for years to come. It’s a good idea to not have pointless users around on your system. If they exist, they can be used.

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.

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