Author Archives: Ron Wills

Command Line TTY Devices

By | November 21, 2019

If you’re just joining us, this is the second article is a series of introductory articles to the command line. The beginning of the series starts with the article “The Command Line”. This might seem like an odd place to start. Most articles would probably start with the shell, but the shell is a large… Read More »

The Command Line in a Graphical World

By | October 31, 2019

With the invention of the Graphical Interface, GUI, computers became more accessible for the general public. With the increased accessibility, the technology became exceedingly popular and can now be found in every part of our lives. The draw back of the GUI is its inefficiency. From computer resource usage and work flows, there are some… Read More »

Local Chat 1.4 Released

By | August 3, 2019

This release adds scripting utilities to the lchat client. This includes sending messages to the local chat room and the creation of chat bots. The message, -m, option This allow scripts and programs to send messages to the local chat room. For example: lchat -m “That’s it, I’m all done” The chat bot, -b, option… Read More »

Linux on the Desktop

By | April 10, 2019

Recently, Linus Torvalds made some comments on why Linux has not found the level of success on the desktop as it’s rivals Microsoft Window and Apple. Much of his reasoning comes down to fragmentation, to many desktops competing with each other giving to many options for its users. Apparently, this competition and diversity has been… Read More »

Local Chat 1.3.2 Released

By | April 9, 2019

This release now uses pkg-config to configure the ncurses library. This ensures that wide character support is used across all platforms if it is available. The home page for the project can be found here.

Passwordless SSH Login using Keys

By | April 7, 2019

There are many advantages to being able to access a remote system through ssh without requiring a password. Automating updates and backups with scripts is one example. Even the need to login into a system frequently is another example. Here, I’ll show you how to setup an RSA public/private key pair to authenticate the connection.… Read More »

Local Chat 1.3.1 Released

By | April 3, 2019

This is just a bug fix release. The systemd service script has been fixed for the chat unix socket permissions. It used to only allow root to access the socket, now anyone in the users group can access the socket and use lchat. FreeBSD doesn’t seem to have wide character support by default in their… Read More »

The Command Line

By | March 16, 2019

The text terminal can be a scary place for those that are new to the Unix/Linux world. That’s where we come in. The terminal has been around since the beginning of Unix in the yearly 1970’s and has yet to be matched in ability and flexibility. The goal of this site is to make sense… Read More »

Local Chat 1.3 Released

By | March 16, 2019

This release is mostly just an internal rewrite of the client code to keep things more manageable and easier to add features in the future. Along with the rewrites a couple of features were added as well: Unicode is now supported where the terminal supports it. Better input line editing for messages. Home, End, Left… Read More »