GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 30, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Graphics Stack

    • Video Cardz ☛ Over a decade later, AMD Radeon HD 7000 GPUs still receive Linux updates from one Valve developer

    • Hackaday ☛ A Walk Down PC Video Card Memory Lane

      These days, video cards are virtually supercomputers. When they aren’t driving your screen, they are decoding video, crunching physics models, or processing large-language model algorithms. But it wasn’t always like that. The old video cards were downright simple. Once PCs gained more sophisticated buses, video cards got a little better. But hardware acceleration on an old-fashioned VGA card would be unworthy of the cheapest burner phone at the big box store. Not to mention, the card is probably twice the size of the phone. [Bits and Bolts] has a look at several old cards, including a PCI version of the Tseng ET4000, state-of-the-art of the late 1990s.

  • Applications

    • HowTo Geek ☛ I Replaced Notepad++ on Linux With This Text Editor

      One of the most missed software when switching to Linux is Notepad++. Many Windows users love it due to its simplicity and programming-related features. There are many modern text editors on Linux that do a great job. After some searching, I've found one that I like a lot.

      My Experience With Text Editors on Linux

      With my time on Linux, exploring different distros and desktop environments, I had my chance to use many different text editors. There are the classic ones, such as Vim, nano, and Emacs, which still live up to their reputation. Then there are more distro-specific editors such as gedit, Mousepad, and Xed. All of them are great editors and have their advantages.

      What made text editing a much more enjoyable task for me than a boring chore, though, is Sublime Text. I first learned about it when I tried my hand at competitive programming challenges. Turns out, Sublime Text is not for programmers only; it's also a powerful editor for writers. That's when I fell in love with it.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Darren Goossens ☛ Update: using a website as your screen saver — Debian

      This post replaces an old one. The older post has some extra details that still apply.

      Say you want a website as your screen saver. On Linux, you can use a nice utility called webscreensaver. It relies on XScreenSaver, which some systems may not use.

    • Dan Langille ☛ Dell R730 – The session has timed out waiting for verification of the certificate – slot bifurcation details – plus NVMe plans

      I could have avoided all this work by walking to the basement and working from the physical console. However, that is not what I wanted to do. I want my VNC.

  • Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • HowTo Geek ☛ The Smoothest Way to Send Clipboard Text and Files Between Your Android and PC

        It’s absurd that in the year 2025, there isn’t a quick and universal platform-independent way to send text and files between a phone and a computer. You always have to rely on some mix of texting apps, email, or cloud storage to share files and text across platforms. Or so I thought.

        Turns out, the developers of KDE Plasma (the Linux desktop environment) have made an app that lets you seamlessly send files and clipboard text back and forth between any device. Let me introduce you to KDE Connect and show you how you can use it.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Session save in lockdown-mode fixed and improved

    I posted that lockdown-mode fixed for overlayfs:

    However, saving while in lockdown-mode is broken.
    

    Normally, you might not want to save anyway. Lockdown has two modes; #1 runs in RAM with all drive partitions unmounted, #2 completely disables the drives.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS Excalibur-series version 7.0.17 released

    Bumping from 7.0.16, this time just one thing has changed:

  • Session save in lockdown-mode fixed and improved — September 28,

    https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/excalibur/2025/7.0.17/

    Tonight I plan to work on the next bugfix; direct-save mode when running overlay.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian ☛ Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (July and August 2025)

      The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts [...]

      • Francesco Ballarin (ballarin)
      • Roland Clobus (rclobus)
      • Antoine Le Gonidec (vv221) [...]

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Boiling Steam ☛ Pop!_OS is Back After A Long Slumber with a 24.04 LTS version

      This post is a few days late since I was at the Tokyo Games Show when the news were out. I almost fell off from my seat when I saw that Pop!_OS was back with a new build based on 24.04 Ubuntu LTS (the current version is based on the now super OLD 22.04 LTS). Note that this is a beta image for now, so you might want to wait a little if you are currently using Pop!_OS.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Android Police ☛ I finally found the free open source document scanner on Android and I can't stop raving about it

      OSS Document Scanner sets a high bar for what a free and open source utility on Android should look and feel like.