Recently, our project received several MacBook Air laptops as part of a donation. MacBook Air laptops are wonderful in that they’re extremely thin and lightweight (around 3lbs). Unfortunately, not all MacBook Air laptops can run the latest (Monterey) macOS. For our refurbishing project, this isn’t a big issue, since we install and support Xubuntu Linux…
install-extras.sh (Script to install extra software on *buntu and Linux Mint Una)
Back in January 2022 I started working on a shell script to install extra software I thought might be helpful to people who buy a Linux computer from The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project. I called that script install-extras.sh. Many things have changed at our project over the past few months. I haven’t had time…
First impressions of the Godot game engine and GDscript
The itch to get back into game programming is back. When Opera bought Gamemaker I had a bad feeling about the direction of Gamemaker, and while they’ve added lots of features (including a beta of a Linux-native client) I absolutely detest the fact they’ve moved to a subscription model only. I bought both version 1…
Learning Gamedev on a Xubuntu Laptop (workspaces)
I’m fortunate enough to have both a desktop and laptop computer. My desktop has a lot more power, a better video card, and is connected to 2 x 24″ monitors, making it really easy for me to learn something on one screen and practice it on another. I prefer to use my desktop computer for…
Eliminating Xubuntu’s Alt key behaviour for gamedev
In the What can you do with a Thinkpad T430s running Xubuntu in 2022 article I mentioned that I was planning on using my T430s for gamedev using the Godot 3 game engine. One issue with running both Godot and Unity under Xubuntu is that both make use of the Alt key. Unfortunately so does…
What can you do with a Thinkpad T430s running Xubuntu in 2022
The Thinkpad T430s came out late 2012, making it almost 10 years old now. When I bought my T430s it came with no hard drive and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. I’ve since upgraded the laptop so it has 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. Currently the laptop is running Xubuntu 22.04 along with some…
Syncthing – Synchronizing my Android cell phone with Xubuntu
In the past couple of years I’ve had to “free” space on my Google drive account because it’s filled up with video and photographs I’ve taken with my cell phone. The first time I filled the drive it took me a very long time to download everything. I learned quickly that the best way to…
Install Google Chrome in Xubuntu Linux 20.04
Despite the fact that many concerns have been raised over privacy issues related to Google Chrome (link to a Wired web site page) it remains by far the most popular web browser. Google Chrome isn’t installed in Xubuntu Linux version 20.04 by default, and our Computer Recycling Project doesn’t install it in our customized version…
My Top 10 programs that run under Linux
Coming up with a top 10 list of favourite programs was more difficult than I thought after so many years of using different software under Linux. In fact the order of these probably changes often, and I haven’t included any command-line tools in this list despite the fact that several probably rank even higher than…