Xubuntu

Bash: Interactive Script to Bring Window to Front or Open App

Ever find yourself rotating between multiple applications within the same single workflow? For me, I like to call it the holy trinity: VS Code, GitKraken and Firefox. When I'm working on a site, I'll inevitably spend almost as much time cycling from one of these applications to the other as I do writing code. I finally got so sick and tired of this that I decided to write a little Bash script to make rotating between applications just a little less cumbersome. Since VS Code has a terminal emulator, I can run the script from there to jump quickly to the next application(s) in my workflow.

Background: Multitasking Wears You Down!

Web development is a conglomeration of tasks; there's really no way around it. Having two monitors is a good way to get a bird's-eye view of everything going on within your workflow. If you like to maximize your windows, though, you're only ever going to get two applications to work with at any given time. On an average day, I'll have roughly 3 Firefox windows, a terminal, VS Code (with its own terminal emulator), GitKraken, Koala (SASS compiler) and maybe Virtual Box--all open at the same time.

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Bash: A Simple Script for Copying Files and Directories with SCP

This is a followup, of sorts, to an earlier post on file sharing in Xubuntu--which can be kind of a pain. I never looked seriously at SCP as a solution for file sharing because it's honestly tedious--true for both in-network and out-of-network sharing. With a little Bash scripting, though, SCP can be made a lot more practical. Here are a couple of short scripts that take the edge off.

Background

SCP is a command-line tool for passing files from one computer to another with SSH. That makes it a valuable tool no matter where those computers are: inside your home network, or off on some remote. The trouble I've always had with it, though, is remembering addresses: I can never remember the IP address of each and every device on my network, and some of the remotes I work with have really convoluted sub-domains. If it weren't for this, SCP would be a really great way to pass files from one place to another.

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Bash: A Simple Script for Changing Display Brightness with XRANDR

I run two external displays on my laptop; the brightness keys on the laptop don't affect them. I could probably find an app or extension for Xubuntu to handle dimming the displays, but since I spend a lot of time on the command line, it's just as easy to dim them from there with the help of XRANDR and a simple Bash script. This post outlines how to set the script up. I'll also cover an optional "night mode" that reduces blue gamma from the display.

If you're on Xubuntu, Ubuntu, or just about any other flavor of Linux, you're probably using the X server to handle your display configurations. That should also mean that you have XRANDR available on the command line. XRANDR can change display configurations in any number of ways, but today I wanna look at it for controlling brightness. Here's the deal, though: I don't wanna have to memorize yet another command line syntax just to dim my monitors. Whichever way XRANDR handles the dimming, I'm gonna move it into a Bash script and alias it so I can adjust brightness on the fly!

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Web Developer Workflow: More Useful Linux Bash Aliases

More Bash Alias fun. This time we'll look at Git, Drush and a few others.

Intro

This is a followup to another recent post discussing bash aliases meant to make your web-developer life easier. If this is your first Tango with Bash Aliases, head to that post for an intro to working with aliases. Otherwise--the list goes on!

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Launch Xampp from Linux Command Line -- The Easy Way

Quick and easy ways to Launch XAMPP from the command line with aliases.

Start & Stop -- The Easy Way!

You've installed XAMPP for Linux! Congratulations! Now that it's installed, how do you get it running? ApacheFriends has you covered for the basics, of course, but their methods make use of the command line, and aren't exactly efficient in terms of keystrokes.

If all you need to do is get services (Apache, MySQL, ProFTPD) started or stopped, ApacheFriends suggests you use the following:

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Weekly Recap: .htaccess Fun, Ubuntu Encrypted Drive Fun, Xubuntu Password Fun

Just a quick recap of all the fun I had this week. No great revelations here, but sometimes it just feels good to vent.

Don't Try This at Home, Kids

As a general rule I don't like to push changes to a client's .htaccess file during business. If you've ever had the pleasure of working with regular expressions (regex), you'd know why. This is largely a holdover, however, from my earlier days as a developer--when regex seemed about as intuitive as ancient Chinese.

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Xubuntu: How to Share Files

Having difficulty getting file sharing set up in Xubuntu? Stop banging your head against a wall: all you need is an SFTP client! PS: this should work for Zorin OS as well.

I was never able to get file-sharing to work on Xubuntu. I recall fooling around with Samba back when I first installed the OS, but it never really resulted in much. Today I was installing Zorin OS (another XFCE flavor of Ubuntu) on an older work computer and I stumbled across the exact same file-sharing predicament: there appears to be no working graphical method to setup network Samba shares.

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Ubuntu: Recovering Encrypted Files with Ecryptfs-Util

It's easy to get turned around on this, so here's a little walkthrough. Once you get the hang of it, recovering encrypted files should be more or less easy.

Background

One of my first Linux installs was Xubuntu on a 2008 MacPro (at two 3Ghz processors with 4 cores each, 15.6 Gb RAM, and an upgraded GeForce GTX card, it's still a contender in 2020). I bought the computer, prior to upgrade, for about $350 on eBay as a pet project, hoping it could take the place of my 2012 Mac Mini--a computer Apple was no longer looking to support with OS releases. The idea was to install Xubuntu on the MacPro and let one of Apple's last decent computers shine anew. At the time, it seemed like a pain to get Xubuntu to play nice with Apple's hardware.

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Drupal 9 Upgrade: Issues with Composer

The upgrade from Drupal 8 to 9 has been hailed by Drupal.org as the easiest upgrade in a decade. The first steps in the upgrade process look to be getting your testing environment in order... for me, that means working through a couple of nasty headaches with Composer (self inflicted... of course).

It's been a long couple of weeks...

... long...

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Enabling Japanese Language Input on Xubuntu

There's a lot of documentation for Ubuntu on how to setup foreign language inputs--not so much for Xubuntu (a.k.a. XFCE Ubuntu). Here's a quick walkthrough!

I run Xubuntu on my work computer; I'd run straight-up-Ubuntu, but it's just too late--too much of a pain to migrate at this point. For my foray into Linux distros, I wanted a light build and Xubuntu was my weapon of choice. For the most part, Xubuntu and Ubuntu are sibling OS'es, though. And, this means that if I ever need to figure out how to fiddle around with Xubuntu, the Ubuntu forums are generally the best place to start.

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