Ion_ore
Finland
Tutorials
| Title | Score | |
|---|---|---|
| 9 years ago | Installing drivers for Epson XP-102 and Epson XP-103 on Linux Mint 17 (bug workaround) | 5 |
Software reviews
| Software | Score |
|---|---|
| org.jdownloader.JDownloader "Practically unusable. The downloaded files aren't saved in the directory you specify, instead they go into some strange folder under /proc/ and you need to do a search to find the stuff you downloaded. I recommend using the official installer from jdownloader.org instead." |
2 |
| mediainfo-gui "Invaluable tool for inspecting media files. However, on a multi-monitor setup the window always opens on the left-most monitor which can be annoying. The "View" setting also doesn't stick, it always defaults to "Easy" which only displays a fairly limited amount of information, so you always need to manually click View -> Text if you want the full output. The version in the repository of Linux Mint 19.1 is currently 17.12 from December 2017, which is quite old and doesn't have support for some of the latest formats, namely AV1. If you need some of the latest features you can manually download and install the latest versions of the required packages from the official website." |
4 |
| qpdfview "Fast PDF viewer with a nice user interface. Handles large and complicated PDFs like a champ, unlike Mint's default PDF viewer, Xreader, which can choke on complicated PDFs and take many seconds to load the next page. Great choice for people who want a fast PDF viewer like MuPDF but don't want to do everything via keyboard shortcuts. Also a good Sumatra PDF replacement for people coming from Windows." |
5 |
| mupdf "Possibly the fastest PDF viewer on the planet. Whereas Mint's default PDF viewer, Xreader, can choke on complicated PDFs and take many seconds to load the next page, MuPDF does it all instantly. I've yet to encounter a PDF it has trouble loading. A drawback, however, is that it doesn't have a proper GUI and most operations are done via keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts can be found in the manual page (type man mupdf in the terminal), but some of the more common ones are searching (done by pressing the / key, typing in the search, and pressing enter, n and N keys find the next and previous results) and going to a specific page (type page number and press g)." |
5 |
| viewnior "The best minimalistic image viewer that isn't too minimalistic (ie. it has a GUI). Start-up is much faster than Mint's default image viewer, especially when using a slow hard drive, and switching from one image to antoher is quick." |
5 |
| mcomix "Much superior to Comix, which hasn't seen an update in 5 years. MComix can open PDF's and passworded archives, for example, and has more translations." |
5 |
| keepass2 "KeePass2 is probably the most useful single piece of software I use daily. A few years ago I was using the same few passwords for every website I registered on, which is terribly insecure; if my password for one of the websites was ever revealed, the attacker could use that password to log in to many of my other accounts. The solutions for this would be using a complex password and using a different complex password for every website. However, having one complex password is difficult enough to remember, and having multiple complex ones would be impossible. So, what should I do, write my passwords down to a text file or a piece of paper? Obviously not, since if anyone ever stumbled across that particular file or notebook, the security of all my logins would be compromised. I'm a humanist, but I don't trust my fellow humans that much. This is where KeePass2 comes in. With KeePass2, you create a database, encrypted with one master password, that holds all your logins. You enter details about your login to the database: a title for the entry (for example "Amazon.com"), your user name, you password, and the website's address. You can also add notes, which is useful when you need to have multiple email addresses for one account or set security questions. The database has multiple categories, which are "General", "Windows", "Internet", "eMail", and "Homebanking". You can create your own categories, so you aren't limited to only those mentioned. There is also a search feature, which is useful for those who don't want to categorise their logins or people who just have hundreds of passwords. There is always a compromise between security and convenience. KeePass2, however, feels that choosing a balance between them should be in the user's hands. The most basic choice is the first one any KeePass2 user has to make, and that is choosing the method of securing your database. A KeePass2 database is encrypted with a master key, which is generated from a master password, a keyfile, or both of them. A master password is like a normal password but with the word "master" added to emphasize its importance. KeePass2 gives you an estimate of your master password's strength as you're entering it, a useful feature that helps you pick a secure password. The other part of the master key is a keyfile. If you choose to use a keyfile, you will be required to point KeePass2 to that exact file every time you open your database. Any file will do, the only requirement is that the file doesn't change. Using a keyfile increases security, but can also become a serious problem if you don't have a backup of the keyfile: if you lose the file or the file changes, your database will stay shut forever. The master key options, however, are only one way to of adjusting the balance. There are several other, such as defining the number of key transformations, which makes dictionary attacks against your database more difficult at the cost of increased loading and saving times. You can choose to lock the database after it hasn't been used for a specified amount of time. You can change the time the password stays on your clipboard after copying it (by default it's 12 seconds). There are more, but you should explore them yourself. The program is feature-rich, and there are many choices one can make, options to fiddle with, and features to test out. One of my personal favorites is the auto-type feature. Instead of copying and pasting your username and password by hand, you select a login form in a website or an application, then find the entry for that login in your KeePass2 database, right-click the entry, and select "Perform Auto-Type" (or optionally just press "Control+V" with the entry selected). Lo and behold, you will see the previous window brought fort, and your username and password rapidly typed into their respective forms, and the login is performed, as if you just pressed Enter after the information was typed. This saves time and effort and is, along with the built-in password generator, probably the most useful single feature for me. It's not all roses, however. KeePass2 is developed in C#, which is largely a Windows-specific programming language most often used with the Windows-only, proprietary .NET Framework. The Linux version is provided using Mono, an open-source project seeking to create multi-platform .NET Framework-compatible tools. Perhaps partly due to this, and the many different GUI toolkits used across Linux distributions, and possibly due to lack of developer interest, KeePass2 doesn't use the host system's graphical theme. Instead, you get the classic gray-white Windows theme, familiar from the 90's Windows operating systems (and perhaps from modern Wine versions). This doesn't really affect usability, but some minor features of modern Linux toolkits and desktop environments won't work, such as using the scrollbars with a mousewheel when the KeePass2 window is inactive in the background. There are also some missing Windows-specific features, still visible on the Linux version, and other bugs, many of them Mono-related. One of them is the occasional difficulties with copy-pasting text from KeePass2 to some applications (in my case JDownloader). Even with the silghtly out-of-place visual look and small bugs, I heartily recommend KeePass2 for anyone with over 5 logins to different places. If you're currently using a cloud-based solution for password management, such as LastPass, and have started to feel uncomfortable with having someone else manage your password for you, you can use KeePass2 in conjunciton with a cloud service such as Dropbox to provide largely the same functionality with better overall security. If you're currently using KeePassX, the last stable release of which was in 2010, I recommend that you switch over. It may sound and look unattractive, with the icky Mono-dependence and all, but the overall security and feature improvements of KeePass2 over KeePassX (which is based on KeePass 1.x) are worth it. Unfortunately you can only import KeePassX's .kdb files in the Windows version of KeePass2, as the import library for that format is Windows-only, but if you can handle exporting your passwords to a clearly readable KeePassX XML format for just a moment, you can import your passwords using Linux. If you're worried about the XML file leaving traces to your hard disk, erase the file with "srm" from the "secure-delete" package. This review was written on 25th of July 2014 on Linux Mint 17 for KeePass2 version 2.25+dfsg-1ubuntu0.1" |
5 |