Linux

August 18, 2021

Install Photoshop CC on Linux

No, this is not GIMPShop or any other dirty hacks that attempt to make GIMP/Krita look or feel like Photoshop. This is the real Photoshop. And no, Adobe hasn’t changed their mind about making a native Linux version available either. As you may have guessed, despite the fancy new splash screen, this is just Photoshop CC running on Wine, but it has been repacked so the installer does everything for you. If you already have a PS + Wine in place there’s no need to read this.

Bits of warning though, I’m not entirely sure this is legal since the authentication part appears to be bypassed also. While I do have an active subscription to Adobe CC, I haven’t been able to find a way to sign in with this. If this repo gets popular Adobe might kill it, so just keep that in mind.

Anyway, you can find the instruction here in this Github, I’m not going to mirror the instruction in this blog post (unless the repo goes down for some reason, in which case, let me know in a comment below)

July 25, 2021

Setup a family printer with a Raspberry Pi 1, CUPS and Canon LBP 2900

Ok so after using it as an Media Server (OSMC, Kodi), Audio Server (Volumio, Moode), and most recently a CloudFlare DDNS updater on top of Raspbian Lite, I’m running out of things to do with my old RPi. I figure there’s one thing I haven’t tried turning it into: a print server. So that’s what we’re gonna do today.

Now this is actually one of the most common usage of the Pi so there’s already plenty of guides out there, and there’s really no information in this post that can’t be found elsewhere on the Internet, but I’m gonna do a write up anyway, purely for the sake of documenting my process.

For the software we’ll be using CUPS running on top of Linux, naturally, since we don’t have a lot of options on that front. For the hardware, we’ll be using a first gen Raspberry Pi for the print server part, and Canon LBP 2900 for the actual printing.

Now this printer is interesting really, because despite being one of the most popular printers here in Vietnam, it’s not in the list of printer supported by CUPS. I reckon its popularity is fueled by its economical nature, it’s one of the very few laser printers that fall into the ‘cheap to buy, cheap to maintain’ segment (it costs like $150 brand new, and cartridge replacement is like $3.85, which is insane!). So getting it to work with CUPS is going to require a bit more works, but thankfully there’s an open source driver out there that somebody reverse engineered to our benefits, so we’ll be using that.

February 16, 2021

Google Drive File Stream alternative for Linux

A cloud drive is more or less an essential part of everybody’s workflow these days. For those utilizing Google’s service like I am, then Drive File Stream (now renamed to Google Drive, again) is one of the first installer you run whenever you setup a new Windows or Mac OS system. Its biggest appeal comparing to a traditional sync client like Mega.nz or Dropbox is that it doesn’t take up a shit ton of space on your own hard drive, because the files aren’t actually synchronized with your computer. They are only downloaded on an on-access basis. Now this is not something that most people who’s using Google’s 15GB drive would be concerned about, but for people like me who’s approaching 4TB, local synchronization is pretty much out of the question.

Google’s lack of attention for a native Linux client for Drive File Stream has always been one of the major hurdles to people like me who were looking to migrate my entire workflow to Linux (along with Adobe’s apps, but the recent rise of web based design tools like Figma has greatly mitigate my need on Adobe). Luckily, like everything else with Linux, when a multi billion dollar corporation fails to provide a tool, the open source community steps in and save the day.

Introducing google-drive-ocamlfuse, more or less the closest you can get to Drive File Stream on Linux

February 4, 2021

Bootstrap Studio 5.5.1 running on Linux

Just installed Manjaro KDE Plasma today after Deepin 20 totally let me down. One of my worries when switching to Manjaro is software availability (or lack thereof). Most pre-packaged softwares on Linux comes in either Debian flavor (.deb) or Red Hat flavor (.rpm), and Manjaro is well, neither. It’s Arch-based.

Luckily, its user repo is pretty massive. I was able to find almost everything I wanted on AUR (Arch User Repository), and pretty much everything is up-to-date, unlike Deepin’s shitty ‘App Store’. Proprietary softwares however, are harder to come by.

One of them is Bootstrap Studio.

I was super relieved however, to learn that the developer chose to release the linux binary as an AppImage as opposed to DEB or RPM. Which means it’s super convenient to work with.

Since it’s electron-based, it basically uses the same binaries for Windows, OS X and Linux. So if you wanted to, you can replace app.asar with the same file from another platform and it would just works™.

Why would you want to do that? Well if you’re here then chances are you already know why.

What you basically want to do is grab the AppImage, run it with the flag --appimage-extract, which will extract everything to a folder called squashfs-root. Just go in there, replace the file, then repack everything with the command appimagetool -v squashfs-root and you will have what you want.

Just don’t tell anybody about this, m’kay?

May 25, 2019

How to install the latest version of NodeJS on MX Linux 18 “Continuum”

I recently needed to install a couple of packages using npm on my MX Linux box. Now MX Linux is fantastic distro, but their repos leave a lot to be desired.

I basically did a standard sudo apt-get install nodejs, I soon realized that this version of node is severely outdated, and thus utterly completely useless, as you can’t even call npm from the CLI. So I turned online for help, surely someone else must’ve come up with a working solution.

Turns out, somebody did.

The problem is, it didn’t work.

Not on my installation of MX Linux anyway. The script always failed with this message

## Your distribution, identified as "Continuum", is not currently supported, please contact NodeSource at https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/issues if you think this is incorrect or would like your distribution to be considered for support

This puzzles me a lot because Continuum was clearly listed as one of the supported distributions right inside the script itself. So I turned to Reddit for help, and they delivered. It appears that listing Continuum alone wasn’t enough, you actually need to append MX or mx-linux in front of it to be identified correctly.

So long story short, here’s the instruction on how to install the latest release of Node.js on MX Linux 18 Continuum

November 26, 2018

The best way to install and manage your fonts (even without admin rights)

If you’re a font hoarder like me, you’re likely to have a folder somewhere in your cloud drive that has hundreds of thousands of TTFs, OTFs. However, the process of installing fonts had always been a daunting one.

Normally, on Linux, the poor UX ideology means you have to resort to the terminal to get things done, a most unituitive way. On Windows,you can just type the word ‘Fonts’ in the Run dialog and get access to the font folder, while it’s not ideal, it’s still far better UX than OS X and Linux. However, on Windows, there’s one major obstacle, you need admin right to get access to the system font folder. At least on OS X and Linux, you can install the fonts locally.

Historically, people had to resort to a dirty workaround, that is to install PortableApps.com. It’s a messy hack as this app wasn’t specifically designed for this purpose.

Thankfully now we have a more elegant solution.

November 10, 2018

Zeplin Desktop client for Linux

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, we now have an excellent tool for screen design to work on right there on Linux. But what about design handoff? With Figma, normally you have 2 choices for handoff: one is Avocode, the other is Zeplin. Most people would prefer Zeplin since Avocode is a subscription based abomination. But there’s one problem for Linux screen designer: Zeplin does not have a desktop client for Linux. Now this isn’t much of an issue like other softwares because they have a webapp, but you can’t integrate Figma with the webapp, unfortunately.

After looking around, I realize Zeplin, like many other great web-based apps, was built on top of the execellnt ElectronJS framework, that means porting it is fairly trivial. After murking around, I came up with this, let me know if it works:

Download zeplin-linux-x64.tar.gz

Made with nativefier

So now that we’ve managed to make desktop client for both Figma and Linux, it should be trivial to integrate them right? Well not really, turns out the folks over at Figma currently only has the integration option enabled for their Windows and Mac client. If you’re a designer working on Linux right now, and need Figma & Zeplin integration, consider spamming their support blog for this feature. I mean, we did that hard part, creating the desktop clients for them, right? All they need to do now is enable integration between the 2 apps.

October 30, 2018

Installing Figma client on Deepin Linux 15.7 Desktop

Grab install.sh from this Github and just run it.

It’s that simple, really. This is why the opensource community is great. The Figma team had failed to create a native Linux desktop app for over 2 years (which is still nothing compare to Google on their promise to launch a Google Drive client for Linux), and yet an unknown individual managed to do it in his/her spare time.

Why would you need a desktop app when Figma works in your browser, you ask? Here’s a hint: Native Font! I mean Figma did a great job integrating Google Fonts in their app (I figure that would be sufficient for 90% web-related design work). But any real designer would have to have their own font collection, and not being able to use it in their favorite design tool is just bad design.

Note: if for some reason the install script fails, you can always download a premade AppImage for Figma from the same Github

September 17, 2018

Installing multiple WordPress modules for Bitnami WAMP Stacks

wordpress tweet image db7682f0029f47f5e947e11e079a9f33

I absolutely love Bitnami due to its sheer simplicity in making the process of setting up a local web stack a complete breeze, especially how adding modules like WordPress, Drupal, Magento etc. is as easy as installing Skype. There’s one thing that bothers me with the module installers though, is that there’s no multi installation option available during the installation process. Well after a bit of digging around, I realize that the option is there, but for some reason it’s not baked into the GUI installer. Instead you’d need to pass the option using the command line interface. That’s not a problem for me but many people who’s not familiar with the CLI may find it a hassle, which it is. But once you get the hang of it, it’s actually the easiest way to add additional installation of a webapp to your development stack (yes, even easier than doing it manually since you don’t have to go through the database creation process).

To install the WordPress module into an alternative location, you need to use the switch –wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG where NEW_BLOG is the directory you want to install your copy of WP in.

Specifically, here’s the instruction for each platform:

Windows

shell> ./bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-windows-installer.exe --wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG_NAME

Only use sudo if the stack was installed as root.

sudo chmod a+x bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-linux-x64-installer.run
sudo ./bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-linux-x64-installer.run --wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG_NAME

Mac OS X

hdiutil mount bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-osx-x86_64-installer.dmg
/Volumes/WordPress\ Module\ VERSION/BitNami\ WordPress\ Module.app/Contents/MacOS/installbuilder.sh --wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG_NAME

Once you have the module installed, you will be able to access it through http://localhost/NEW_BLOG_NAME

(if you launch it using the launcher, it will still go to the default address http://localhost/wordpress, you will need to enter the address manually in the URL bar).

Bitnami is a great product and hopefully the company will have enough money to afford a read developer who could put this simple option in the GUI installer soon.

August 19, 2018

Install Unity3D on Deepin Linux 15.6

DoQnK01

Okay this post is nothing but a link, which is this one:

Download Unity 2017.4.9f1 (latest version as of this post (yeah I know, it’s almost 2019 but I guess Unity isn’t big enough to hire a real Linux maintainer)

Seriously, that link should’ve been the first result when you google ‘Unity3D Installer for Linux’, but google thinks you want to read a blog post instead. Typical third rate search engine.