Installing Flatpaks In Linux

Today we’re going to have a pretty easy article where you’ll learn about installing Flatpaks in Linux. I’m writing this article because I want to write another article. Once I write this article, I can write that article!

I did write a previous article about installing Flatpaks in Lubuntu. I want this to cover more distros than that, so that’s one of the reasons for this article.

So, I asked AI to tell us about Flatpaks… Let’s see how it did.

“ChatGPT, explain Flatpaks in Linux please.”

Flatpak is a modern packaging format for Linux that aims to simplify the distribution and installation of software applications across different Linux distributions. Here’s a breakdown of Flatpaks in under 600 words:

What is Flatpak?

Flatpak is a technology developed for Linux-based operating systems that allows developers to package applications and their dependencies into a single, portable format. These packages, called Flatpaks, are designed to run on any Linux distribution, regardless of its specific package management system.

How does it work?

Flatpak packages contain everything an application needs to run, including libraries, dependencies, and runtime environments. This eliminates compatibility issues with different distributions and ensures that applications run consistently across different Linux systems.

Key Components:

  • Flatpak Runtime: A standardized environment that provides essential libraries and services needed for applications to run. Runtimes are shared among multiple applications, reducing duplication and ensuring consistency.

  • Flatpak Builder: A set of tools that developers use to create Flatpak packages. Builder automates the process of bundling applications and their dependencies, making it easier to package and distribute software.

  • Flatpak Repository: A centralized location where Flatpak packages are hosted and made available for download. Users can add repositories to their system to access a wide range of Flatpak applications.

Benefits:

  1. Cross-Distribution Compatibility: Flatpaks are designed to work on any Linux distribution, simplifying software distribution and installation for developers and users alike.

  2. Isolation: Each Flatpak application runs in its isolated environment, with its own set of dependencies. This improves security and stability by preventing conflicts between different applications and system libraries.

  3. Sandboxing: Flatpak applications can be sandboxed using various security mechanisms, such as containerization and permission controls. This reduces the risk of malicious software compromising the system.

  4. Upstream Compatibility: Flatpak packages are often built directly from upstream sources, ensuring that users get the latest versions of software with minimal delay.

How to use Flatpak:

  1. Installation: Most Linux distributions provide tools for installing Flatpak support. Once installed, users can add Flatpak repositories to their system to access a wide range of applications.

  2. Searching and Installing Apps: Users can search for Flatpak applications using the command-line interface or graphical software centers. Installing a Flatpak is as simple as running a single command or clicking a button in the software center.

  3. Running Flatpak Apps: Once installed, Flatpak applications appear alongside native applications in the system menu. Users can launch them like any other application, and they will run within their isolated environment.

Drawbacks:

  1. Storage Overhead: Flatpak applications include their dependencies, which can lead to increased storage usage compared to traditional package management systems.

  2. Performance Overhead: Running applications in a sandboxed environment can introduce some performance overhead compared to native installations, although this is usually minimal.

Final AI Thoughts:

Flatpak is a promising technology that addresses many of the challenges associated with distributing and installing software on Linux. Its cross-distribution compatibility, isolation, and security features make it an attractive option for both developers and users looking for a more streamlined and secure software ecosystem on Linux.

So, that explains Flatpaks according to ChatGPT. I think it did a great job in this role, but that’s all I wanted ChatGPT to do for me.

Installing Flatpaks In Linux:

This is going to require a terminal. Some distros will have Flatpak installed and be able to install Flatpaks from the GUI. So, open up a terminal before proceeding. You can usually open a terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T but some of you will have to open a terminal via your application manager.

Some distros will come with Flatpaks already enabled. If you have Flatpaks already enabled, you can skip this article. To find out if you have Flatpaks already enabled, run this command:

If that returns a version number, you already have Flatpaks installed.

By the way, if you have Flatpaks enabled but not the centralized repository (FlatHub) then you may still need to run the following command:

Anyhow, now on to the installation instructions:

Debian/Ubuntu:

Linux Mint:

Already Installed.

Fedora/CentOS:

Already Installed.

RHEL:

Rocky Linux:

SUSE/OpenSUSE:

Arch:

Manjaro: 

Already Installed.

There you go. Those are the distros I usually cover. One of those commands is going to work for most of you. If those commands do not cover you, you can likely install Flatpak from your repositories. It should be fairly easy.

As you can see, more and more distros are starting to ship with Flatpaks enabled by default. I’ve seen more of this since Ubuntu started shipping Snaps by default, so maybe those distros are trying to provide something similar while not relying on Ubuntu.

Anyhow, once you’ve done this, you can visit FlatHub to start installing software:

FlatHub

Then, I shared the command earlier, if you find the repo isn’t working properly, you can run the following command to try to fix it:

That should do it. You can now use Flatpaks and I can write that future article!

Closure:

If you’ve ever needed to know about installing Flatpaks in Linux, this is a start. This is the preparation and, once done, you should be able to install software from the repositories easily enough. There are a ton of great applications that you can use after installing Flatpaks in Linux, or at least enabling Flatpaks in Linux.

Also, this seemed like a bit ‘over-the-top’ as far as ChatGPT responses go. It was more verbose than it usually is. I did decide to include all of the output as it does make for a more interesting article. That’s far more than I’d have written about the subject. 

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A Quick Look At The Shutdown Command

This is going to be just a quick article about a command many of you will be familiar with, as we take a quick look at the shutdown command. This is pretty basic and something everyone should be familiar with.

Our pure-GUI users will just shut the computer down with the menu option but sometimes a GUI is unresponsive. There are other times when you don’t have GUI access, as there’s no desktop environment loaded. When this happens, you can still shut the computer down. To do this, you can use the shutdown command.

There’s not a lot to the shutdown command, but the good news is that you won’t have to install anything to use it. If you’ve got a Linux system, you’ve got access to the shutdown command.

In fact…

shutdown:

As I said, you won’t need to install anything to use the shutdown command. It’s something that’s built in. You can check the man page with the following terminal prompt:

If you run that command, you’ll see that this is the correct tool for the job. It will in fact shut down the computer, though it has a few options that we’ll cover. We won’t cover everything,  just the things you’re likely to need.

The man page describes the command like so:

shutdown – Halt, power-off or reboot the machine

See? If you want to shut the computer down (including halt and reboot) then this is the correct command for the job.

The Shutdown Command:

As mentioned above, this is a terminal-based command. That means you’re going to need an open terminal. If you press CTRL + ALT + T a terminal should pop up. If not, there’s a terminal in your application menu.

Some systems may require ‘sudo‘ for this. This is not true for all distros and you’ll need to discover that on your own. I’ll omit the sudo in this article.

The basic syntax is this:

That command will stop anyone from logging in and shut the computer down in five minutes. It’s the basic usage of the shutdown command.

If you want to shut down the computer immediately, try this command:

If you want to reboot, try this command:

Again, that will reboot the computer in five minutes and stop anyone from logging into the system. 

If you want to reboot immediately, add ‘now’ to the command like so:

You can also halt the system. If you halt the system, it will remain powered on but all CPU functions will cease immediately. That works just like the above commands. To halt the system in five minutes run this command:

If you want to halt the system immediately, run this command:

You’ll need to power the system down and back on with the power button.

You can also schedule a shutdown, reboot, or halt. To do that, you use the HH:MM (hours/minutes in 24-hour time), like so:

If you schedule a shutdown, nobody will be able to log in within five minutes of the scheduled shutdown command. You’ll remain logged in and people can log in until that time is reached, but after that time is reached no new users can log into the system.

There is more to the shutdown command but that’s all you’ll realistically need, even as a system administrator. And, if you don’t know this already, you’re a system administrator even if you’re just a basic Linux desktop user. You’re in control of your computer.

Closure:

I thought I’d cover the shutdown command because it’s something I haven’t covered yet. I started off trying to cover the basics first, but I didn’t cover everything. There are still basic functions that I’ve yet to cover. I’ll get to them eventually.

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Setting Up Coding Environments on Linux for Educational Use

With so many strong attributes, such as robustness and flexibility, Linux stands as a powerful platform for teaching coding among many other educational purposes. So this guide is meant to help educators and students set up a suitable coding environment when they are on this journey of learning to program.

Step 1: Choose the Appropriate Distribution of Linux

The first thing needed is choosing a suitable distribution of Linux. For novices, it is Ubuntu or Linux Mint, as these two can be user-intuitive and include many documented features and options. Some other users more advanced may incline towards Fedora or Debian for the vastness of packages and community support. If you want a comprehensive course for children programming that can work with these distributions, Codemonkey offers quite a few interactive coding courses.

Step 2: Install Required Software

Once the Linux system runs on your computer, you are supposed to install software in order to be able to code. Essential tools include:

Text Editors: Using Atom, Visual Studio Code, or Sublime Text for writing out code.

Compilers/Interpreters: If you’re going to teach a programming language, then just install Python, GCC for C/C++, or JDK for Java.

Version Control Systems: Git for tracking changes in code and enabling collaborative development.

Step 3: Setting up a Development Environment

Configure the environment post installation of the required software.

Customize the IDE: Most IDEs, and text editors, for that matter, will support the ability to easily change settings. Make slight changes to the settings to fit your educational needs, such as setting up auto-save, and enabling line numbering and syntax highlighting.

Install Extensions: Extend the functionality of VS Code to include linters, code formatters, and debuggers.

Create a Project Template – You can create project templates for subjects that students may use to jumpstart their assignments.

Step 4: Using Learning Tools

Think about including instructional and collaboration tools:

  • Code Sharing Platforms: Use tools such as GitHub Classroom to be able to distribute assignments and collect student submissions.
  • Interactive Learning Environments: Jupyter Notebook is a really good platform to write Python since you are able to see code and output in real time.

Step 5: Ensure Accessibility and Security

It ensures that every student is provided with the necessary resources for their needs.

Accessibility: Configure accessibility options available in Linux to accommodate all students.

Security: Install a firewall and regularly update to prevent unauthorized access to the systems.

Step 6: Documentation and Additional Support

Finally, give resources that can enable the learner to self-study:

  • Write Documentation: Provide tutorials or links to online tutorials, on tools and languages you are teaching.
  • Support Offered: Providing forums or chat groups where students can ask questions and help one another.

Final thoughts

Setting up a Linux-based educational coding environment first requires making extensive plans on all the necessary tools and resources and then going ahead to implement the laid plan. Through these steps, instructors can create a stable and effective environment in which their students can learn.

View Detailed Hardware Information

There are many tools for showing your hardware information and today we’ll get to view detailed hardware information. This is going to work in a variety of distros, so you probably won’t be left out.

We’ve covered many ways to view hardware information, be it all of the hardware or just some particulars. For example:

How To: Find Your CPU Information
Show RAM Information With Ramfetch
Let’s Install INXI
Find Your Graphics Card Information
Gather Storage Disk Information With ‘smartctl’

The list goes on and on and on… After all, knowing about your hardware is an important step in a lot of your activities. If you don’t know what you have for hardware, you’re quite limited in the steps you can take. You need to know that your system supports 64-bit to install some distros, for example.

So, today we’re going to examine another way of learning about your hardware. We’ll be doing this in the terminal and we’ll be doing it with a tool known as ‘hwinfo’. It’s a handy application that’s available nearly universally.

hwinfo:

You’ll find that hwinfo is a terminal-based (CLI) tool. If you look at the title of the application you can surmise its function – and it’s very much fit for function.

We’ll get to installing hwinfo, but you can see hwinfo is already installed with the following terminal command:

If it is installed, the output should look like this:

If it’s not installed, we’ll get to that in the next section.

Once installed, you can check the man page with this command:

There, you’ll see that hwinfo is fit for purpose. It’s described as:

hwinfo – probe for hardware

There’s also this blurb:

hwinfo is used to probe for the hardware present in the system. It can be used to generate a system overview log which can be later used for support.

So, you can see that this is indeed a good tool for showing detailed hardware information in the terminal. There are other such tools, but we’ll just be covering hwinfo in this article. There will be other articles and have been other articles. This is one of those subjects you’ll see more than once because there’s always more than one way to learn about your hardware.

View Detailed Hardware Information:

I mentioned that this is a terminal-based application. There are GUI tools but this is not one of them. Most of you can open a terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. Others may need to find a terminal option in their application menu.

With your terminal open, you can install hwinfo easily.

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

RHEL/Fedora/etc:

Gentoo/etc:

SUSE/OpenSUSE/etc:

Once you’re done with installing hwinfo, you can ‘just run it’ like so:

As you can see, that’s rather overwhelming. You could use grep, but there are many flags you can use to make this information more useful. If you check the man page (with man hwinfo) you’ll see this:

all, arch, bios, block, bluetooth, braille, bridge, camera, cdrom, chipcard, cpu, disk, dsl, dvb, fingerprint, floppy, framebuffer, gfxcard, hub, ide, isapnp, isdn, joystick, keyboard, memory, mmc-ctrl, modem, monitor, mouse, netcard, network, partition, pci, pcmcia, pcmcia-ctrl, pppoe, printer, redasd, reallyall, scanner, scsi, smp, sound, storage-ctrl, sys, tape, tv, uml, usb, usb-ctrl, vbe, wlan, xen, zip

Those are all the available flags. The syntax is simple:

So,  you could run this command to learn about your CPU:

The output from that is still more information than most folks are going to want. That information is there for those who need it. For everyone else, there’s the --short flag. That works like this:

In the case of the CPU, the command would look like this:

You can quickly get a list of all the flags (as you may not remember them all) with the following command:

Note that this is different from the --all flag which will display everything.

Closure:

Well, there you have it… You now know how to view detailed (and less detailed) hardware information, you get a choice with hwinfo. You can view detailed hardware information or you can use the flag to show just a summary. Use hwinfo according to your needs and enjoy it!

This seemed like a fine article to write. It’s a pretty basic application but it does have some useful output. It’s worth installing hwinfo just for when you need it, rather than waiting for when you need it and installing it then. That way the tool is read and waiting for you and one less step when you need support or trying to resolve a bug on your own.

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How To: Install Wine In Lubuntu

Today’s article isn’t going to be complicated or long as we are going to cover how you install Wine in Lubuntu. This should be straightforward and work with any modern version of Lubuntu.

I suppose we should start with the basics…

Lubuntu is a distro in the Ubuntu family. This is my favorite distro and I’ve covered Lubuntu-specifics in the past. However, these directions are going to work just fine on Ubuntu or even Linux Mint. They should also work just fine for Debian and any other distro that uses ‘apt‘ and some standard repositories. 

Wine is software used to run Windows software on Linux. It once stood for “Wine Is Not an Emulator” and it is indeed not an emulator. Wine is a compatibility layer that lets you run some Windows software on Linux. Not all Windows applications will run, and things like Windows drivers don’t work, but it can be a handy application for those who still rely on Windows software.

I’ll only cover the basics. There’s a lot to Wine (not WINE, at least according to the project page) and this is only going to cover how to install Wine in Lubuntu. Of course, other distros can use these same few steps, but I only tested in Lubuntu. (It’s a giant amount of software to download and my bandwidth isn’t the greatest.)

If you’ve tested this in other distros, let us know!

And, yes, I did test this in Lubuntu and Wine appears to be installed.

Install Wine In Lubuntu:

You can likely do this with the GUI software installation tools but we’ll do this in the terminal. As you’re using Lubuntu, you can open a terminal by simply pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.

Because you’re using Lubuntu, I can surmise that you’re using 64-bit. If you’re not, you’re using a very old version of Lubuntu. You should upgrade to a supported release immediately, or move to a distro that’s still supporting 32-bit hardware.

If you’re not using Lubuntu, you should read this:

Is My System Capable of 32 or 64-Bit Linux?

You’ll need to use a 64-bit CPU and operating system if you want to follow these directions with any hope of success.

The first thing we will do is enable 32-bit software from the repositories. This is just a simple command:

I don’t always remember to suggest you update your device, but it’s a good idea if you update now. You can update with this command:

With all of that done, you only need to install Wine in Lubuntu. That’s easily done:

That’s all there is to it, at least at the basic level. As I don’t use Wine, because I don’t use Windows software, I’m going entirely from my notes and a time when I did try to retain some Windows software. (Crimson Editor, I’m looking at you.)

Closure:

There’s a lot more to this, but that’s the gist of it. If you want to install Wine in Lubuntu, it’s not all that difficult. You may then want to do things like install Plays On Linux or whatnot, but I don’t think that’s technically required. So, this is just an intro to Wine. There’s much more to it.

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