updates Archives • Linux Tips

Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #23

Today’s article is just a meta article, an article that I fail to write every month. The more astute readers of this site will see the #23 and realize how bad I am at keeping to a schedule. Writing meta articles isn’t fun. Writing meta articles doesn’t result in sharing valuable information. These meta articles cover the state of Linux Tips. That’s it.

So, things are going well… Things are going very well from many perspectives. Things are going better than ever!

Why not just throw some data…

For the past year or so, I’ve used a browser extension that helps me write better. It also has a weird feature that sends a weekly message that lets you know how you’re doing. I’ve not yet shared that data, so let’s share that!

Some Meta Stats:

This is just for the past week…

I wrote more than 91% of the rest of the users.
At the same time, I was more accurate than 73% of their users.
For better or worse, I used more unique words than their other users at 93%.

Amusingly, I used about 3500 unique words in the past week and that’s somehow enough unique words to stand out. I didn’t think my vocabulary was that expansive, but I’m constantly assured it is.

Anyhow, my “tone”, as determined by the plugin…

I’m 19% informative.
I am also 17% assertive.
Then, I guess I’m 13% direct and 10% confident.

I have no idea how they came up with those numbers.

Anyhow, there are some writing stats. Keep in mind that I write for more than just this site. I write a lot of text elsewhere.

Some Site Numbers:

So, we’ve seen some income in sponsored articles, which is nice. Not relying on Google is okay. It’s less income than Google was, but at least you’re not currently wading through ads. We may have ads again in the future, so we’ll have to wait and see. If you don’t want to see ads, you can always donate. 🙂

We’re currently averaging over 1,000 visits per day. I’ve noticed that we surge ahead and then sort of taper off. It’s like we have some record-breaking months and then we slowly taper off just a little. Then, we have new record months. Last month was not a record-setting month but it was still well over 1,000 visits per day.

Most of my traffic comes from the United States – which would be expected.
You tend to visit for 228 seconds each time you visit.
The average viewer is using Chrome, Chromium, or a Chromium derivative.

These are the most popular pages:

How To: Remove AppArmor From Ubuntu
How To: Convert JPG to PNG
How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server

Those change around a little but they seem to be the most common.

For the record, most of my traffic comes from Google.
That’s followed by DuckDuckGo.
The next is traffic from Linux.org.

About 92% of you are using Linux already.
Less than 4% of you are using Linux.
Just about 3% of you are using a Mac.

So, those numbers make perfectly good sense. Getting good numbers from your statistics isn’t an easy task. Various stat applications excel at different things. But, those numbers are fairly similar to what I see elsewhere.

Closure:

That’s right. This was just a meta article. Things are going okay, or at least way better than I ever expected. I don’t have any sponsored articles lined up so we’ll have to see how that goes this month. I’ve changed my policy quite a bit, letting folks know that I can be flexible. So, we’ll see what happens.

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Automate Updates In Linux Mint

Today’s article will be a fairly simple one and is limited to Linux Mint users as we learn how to automate updates in Linux Mint. That seems like a good idea to me. Ideally, this will continue working without any intervention, but we’ll see…

So, I’m not sure how long this has been an option. I only noticed it fairly recently. If you’re not already aware, you can automate updates in Linux Mint. It’s a pretty simple task and won’t require much more than a mouse – or maybe a terminal and then a mouse.

This can be a touchy subject. I’m firmly in the camp of immediately installing all updates. I want my system to be as secure as possible, which means applying the updates as soon as they are available. So far, this mostly appears to work.

Updates often come right before public disclosure and proof-of-concept samples. While it’s true that an update can bork your system, that’s easily fixed and such a rare thing that I don’t even consider it as a reasonable reason not to apply updates.

I also consider it my duty, my obligation, to keep my systems secure. An insecure system doesn’t just impact you. An unsecured computer can be used as a proxy, a command center, a spam relay, or a node in a DDoS attack, among other things. As a good netizen, I keep my systems updated.

So, why not automate that stuff when I can?

Automate Updates In Linux Mint:

In your system tray, down on the right, look to see if you have an icon that looks like a shield. If you do not see the icon, press CTRL + ALT + T and type in mintupdate. Both of those things will open the Update Manager in Linux Mint.

At some point along this path, you’ll be asked to enter your password. Do so.

That will open this window:

to automate updates in Linux Mint, start with opening up the update manager — Your theme may mean this has different colors or whatnot, but it should look like this.

Next, you’ll click on ‘Edit’.

You need to click on the Edit button to move to the next step of automating updates in Linus Mint — This is a pretty easy step. Heck, they’re all easy steps! You’ve got this! I’m sure of it!

You next want to open Preferences and click on Automation.

You'll need to edit the preferences to automate Linux Mint Updates. — Just in case you’re confused, I added an arrow for you! (My CDN is going to hate me.)

When you’ve done all of this, you’ll face a new screen.

This new screen is where you edit your automation settings. This new screen is where you enable automatic updates in Linux Mint. It looks like this when I’ve configured it to my liking:

Enabling automatic updates in Linux Mint via the Update Manager preferences. — You can configure those however you like, but I enable all of them. You do you, I guess.

Make sure you have a viable backup process.

As you can see, I’ve chosen all the things. I’ve chosen to automate all the updating that I can do. If anything, I wish I could increase the frequency. I suppose I could set up a cron job for this, but a handy GUI is fine for this task. This way will also update Spices ~~and Flatpaks~~. So, there’s that.

I’ve had this setting enabled for a little while now and I’ve verified that it has been working as expected. If you want to automate updates in Linux Mint, you can do that – and it’s not even difficult.

Update:

No, it doesn’t appear to update Flatpaks. I’ve given it a few tries and it does not.

Closure:

I like automatic updates. I use that sort of feature online with my various websites. Scheduled updates performing themselves is a good thing to me. You may be more cautious, but I throw caution to the wind. I haven’t had an update nuke my system beyond a 2-minute repair job in forever. I haven’t even had a 2-minute repair job in years. That’s good enough for me. You can make your own choices. Regardless of your choices, be sure to backup your system regularly.

Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #15

Today’s article is just a meta article, one where we cover the state of Linux Tips (this site). It’s just a chance to sit down and share what’s going on with the site, a chance to not write something technical. So, for another meta article, read on!

This will be mostly about the month of February. See, I didn’t write any meta article(s) in February. It just didn’t cross my mind and it was a shorter month than the months surrounding it. So, I suppose, this will be about February.

I try to write these meta articles once a month, but they’re never really formally scheduled. They just get written when I remember to write one and when I have the urge to do so. I should probably pick a specific day of the month and write them on that day, but where’s the fun in that?

So, about February…

The State of Linux Tips:

February only has 28 days. Because of this, Linux Tips did not have more traffic than the month before. If February had been 29 days, I’d have had slightly more traffic than was had in the month of January – which has 31 days. (Traffic for this month appears to be breaking all sorts of records.)

Like always, the vast majority of my traffic came from Google. However, that number has jumped a great deal. I had about 6200 visitors from Google in the month of February. The site’s getting more and more popular, or so it seems.

In February, I had 12,655 unique visitors. In January, that number was 12,885 unique visitors. So, if February had been just a few hours longer it’d have had more unique visitors than the month prior. I’m going to put that one in the ‘win’ column!

Google’s definitely taken me out of the doghouse, but the ad clicks are worth less than they used to be before they put me in the dog house. Amusingly, this coincides with my CDN deciding the amount I had been paying is an ‘introductory rate’ and will be doubling the cost. I bought a bunch of credits, hoping that they’ll still be worth the same as they are now.

That’s not actually a complaint. They provide a great service and the cost isn’t that much. I know, I ask for donations and I have ads, but the reality is that the site will remain online for the foreseeable future.

The expenses aren’t so great that I can’t handle them. If they ever do become more than I’m willing to pay, I’ll be sure to let folks know and let folks decide how much they value the site. But, really, don’t worry about it all that much. We’re good!

Some Linux-Tips Numbers:

Hmm… How about the three articles AWstats tells me had the greatest traffic numbers?

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using
Screenfetch vs. Neofetch, You Decide!
How To: Restart TeamViewer From The Terminal

That’s a bit interesting, as here’s what Google says were my top 3 pages:

It agrees with the #1 slot.
The #2 slot (according to Google) is the TeamViewer article.
How To: Stop, Pause, and Resume Processes Running in Your Term

But, Google’s not very good with counting traffic. Google seems to me to not count anyone that doesn’t allow the Google cookie. So, if you’re blocking ads appropriately, you are also probably blocking the cookies from the blocked sites. That means Google isn’t very good at counting traffic.

For example…

According to Google Analytics, my monthly visitors for February was a total of ~4800 people. (That’s pretty amazing, as the previous month was like ~4200.) It does say that I was in the search engine results some 365k times. But…

In reality, I had almost 13k unique visitors and a total of ~17.5k total visits.

So, for all the complaints about Google tracking people, they’re not very good at it. Also, they really suck at figuring out what kind of ads I’d like. I’m not allowed to click on them, but I do see them. They’re seldom for anything I’m interested in.

Still, you should whitelist this site and Google wants you to only click on ads that are of legitimate interest to you. Don’t just click ads to be nice. I appreciate that, but it’ll just screw me over in the end. As it is, Google loves to call clicks invalid for reasons I do not know.

Closure:

There’s still a lot going on here. There’s still more articles to write. I could use a bit of a break now and again, so speak up if you’re wanting to write an article for the site. (And you’re not looking to use my site to boost the ratings of unrelated sites, of course…)

We’ll see when the next meta article comes along, but it probably won’t be in the month of March. It could be, I dunno… Oh, and I chewed through about 20 GB of bandwidth with 5 of those GBs being gratis.

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 Linux News

Today’s article will be really easy for anyone to follow, as I share how it is I find Linux news. It’s amazing how many people don’t keep up with any Linux news. Read on, as this is sure to be a fairly short article.

I might even speculate that most Linux users don’t keep up with Linux news. I’d speculate that it’s an even smaller group that does things like read the release notes for their updates and upgrades. They don’t read the notes about software upgrades and they don’t definitely don’t pay attention to what’s going on at the project(s) level(s).

This is too bad. There’s a lot to learn and gathering information is good.

These are the people who are then surprised by things that were covered in the release notes, just as people are surprised by changes that have been covered by the journalists. (Well, I’m going to call them journalists for the sake of this article, and to avoid unneeded complexity.)

Now, I admit that I’m not always as diligent as I would suggest others be. I can be pretty lazy. I might even move to a new distro point release without actually reading the release notes. So, do as I say, not as I do!

Or not…

Just keep up with what you want to keep up with. For the most part, you’ll be just fine. Anyhow, I am not feeling all that great and I need a quick/easy article. So, you get this article about finding Linux news.

How I Find Linux News:

Below, you’ll find some links to news sites that I use when I want to keep up with Linux news. If you have your own sites, feel free to add them as a comment below. If you want your site added, feel free to ask in a comment below and I’ll take a look.

My first stop is quite often just an aggregator. It’s not complete, but it’s useful. I’ll often visit some of their aggregated URLs in person. If you just visit one site, this is a good choice:

tuxurls.com

My next choice is a site that tends to have plenty of content. I try to catch them daily, but obviously don’t always have time to do so:

linuxtoday.com

This next choice also has a ton of content. In theory, you can comment on the stories, but there’s not a lot of community involvement in those regards. Still, they tend to have a bunch of Linux news:

lxer.com

This next one doesn’t always have the same amount of content as some of the others, but it’s usually pretty good. Plus the site is well-designed and it even looks like a proper news site:

linuxinsider.com

If you want less content, but things like tech data and well-thought-out articles that tend to be a bit more in-depth, then you would do well to consider this site long-lived Linux news site:

phoronix.com

This next site tends to have some good content – and it’s reader-supported. As such, you will find there’s some decent commentary here. If you don’t know what to think about an article, you can head to the comments and someone will tell you what to think! See:

lwn.net

There are more but this is the final one I’ll list. I know, not everyone likes Google. But, their news section is usually pretty good at finding Linux news that might not have been covered elsewhere. I actually tend to check this one fairly frequently. The link should work for you, regardless of where you live:

news.google.com/search?q=Linux

So, those are a few of the places I go to for news. You should also consider finding your distro’s news outlet (often a blog of sorts). There you can keep up with distro-specific things and find stuff like release notes. You should be able to find that on your own.

Closure:

There you have it, you have another article. This time, we’ve seen a few of the places I go to when I want to find Linux news. I try to keep up with a bunch of it, and some subjects interest me more than others. If nothing else, you may want to consider keeping up with the news published by the distro you’re using. You’ll know more and not be surprised when changes happen.

Prevent Application Updates With ‘YUM-VERSIONLOCK’

I recently wrote a similar article, illustrating how you can use ‘apt-mark’ to prevent application updates. While that was handy, it only applied to those who use APT as their package manager. It offered nothing of value to those who use YUM.

This article will explain how you can prevent application updates with ‘yum-versionlock’. You will learn how you can temporarily prevent application updates when you have no choice but to.

In the previous article, I explained that you should always use the most up-to-date software that you can, at least if your system is connected to the public internet. Software updates provide security fixes, not just bug fixes.

Not updating means you’re vulnerable and your vulnerabilities may impact other users. For example, your computer may become a part of a botnet, a spam relay, or even be used as a command and control device for those things. As a global citizen of the ‘net, you’re obligated to do what you can to minimize harm.

So, it is possible to prevent application updates, but you really should only do so when it’s absolutely necessary. In an ideal world, you’d be able to always use the updated version, but we don’t live in that world. We live in the real world, where we have things like compliance and compatibility issues.

YUM, what is it? YUM stands for Yellowdog Updater, Modified. It’s a package management utility for RPM based distros. You’ll find YUM in distros like RHEL, Fedora, and even OpenSUSE. It’s fairly widely used, though many of the RPM-based distros are more prominent in the server space than they are in the desktop space.

These days there’s actually DNF (which stands for Dandified YUM – don’t blame me, I don’t name these things) but that’s not important today. Today, we’ll be using ‘YUM-VERSIONLOCK‘ to prevent application updates.

Prevent Updates with ‘yum-versionlock’

Unlike ‘apt-mark’, you’ll need to install something in order to do this. It should also be mentioned that there are other ways to accomplish this, but this is the easiest way to prevent application updates. Using versionlock is the most straightforward way of accomplishing this.

First, you’re gonna need to crack open your terminal. You can do that by using your keyboard. Just press CTRL + ALT + T.

Once your terminal is open, you’ll need to install ‘yum-versionlock’. You can try this first:

sudo yum -y install yum-versionlock

1	sudo yum -y install yum-versionlock

If that gives you an error, I can’t figure out where the name changed, then you can most likely install it with:

sudo yum -y install yum-plugin-versionlock

1	sudo yum -y install yum-plugin-versionlock

Once you have it installed, you can check the man page to see how you use it. Even if you installed it with the second command, the man page is still found at:

man yum-versionlock

1	man yum-versionlock

The one-liner quite accurately defines versionlock as:

yum-versionlock – Version lock rpm packages

Anyhow, to use it to hold a package at its current version, you simply use:

sudo yum versionlock <package_name>

1	sudo yum versionlock <package_name>

NOTE: The command supports wildcards. You can use an asterisk with this command. The command will give you feedback. You can also use ‘add’, but it’s redundant.

If you want to remove the lock, which you should do as soon as realistically possible, then the command is fairly evident. It’s just:

sudo yum versionlock delete <package_name>

1	sudo yum versionlock delete <package_name>

If you, like me, don’t always keep the best notes and don’t have the greatest memory, then you can list the locked packages with this command:

yum versionlock list

1	yum versionlock list

There’s no need for elevated permissions with that command, but it will take a little while for it to complete. It will output any locked packages and you can unlock them individually. Again, you can use wildcards in this command.

However, you can remove all the locks with just one command:

sudo yum versionlock clear

1	sudo yum versionlock clear

As you might expect, that removes all the locks and your system will resume updating normally. You should not keep software locked to one version for long. Though you may be using a LTS-type distro, only getting minor point release upgrades, you are still getting security updates. Keeping your system secure makes you a good netizen.

Closure:

And there you have it. Another article in the books, this one explaining how to stop updates for specific applications. Thanks for reading and feel free, nay encouraged, to leave feedback. If you have any ideas for articles, feel free to share them. You can also contribute by writing your own article. I’ll even edit it up for you!

Don’t forget that there’s a newsletter (we never spam or share your address with anyone, it’s all in-house) and you can even donate. I’d kinda like the site to at least pay for itself, simply out of principle. If not, there are ads you can unblock! Even if you do none of those things, there are good odds that I’ll keep this site up, running, and interesting.