Installing a free VPN in Linux

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I recently thought I would try installing VPN (Virtual Private Network) on my machine.

This is generally used by people who want to mask their true location as it allocates an IP address in another country.

I had no particular reason apart from the challenge and the curiosity.

Most of the searches gave results on how to connect to premium services and I wasn’t going to pay for something just for an experiment.  Eventually I found a simple solution that uses OpenVPN (a free service).  I’m putting here just for my own future reference because I had a hard job finding it!

sudo apt install golang-go openvpn git
git clone https://github.com/adtac/autovpn
cd autovpn
go build autovpn.go
sudo install autovpn /usr/local/bin/

That should do the job!

To enable VPN open a terminal and launch –

./autovpn/autovpn CA

Note that the CA is a country code (in this case Canada).  You can try other country codes or even leave out that code altogether but I found that CA was the most reliable.

It will prompt for your password and search for a server.  Once it announces “Initialization Sequence Completed” then you are connected.

Not also that the terminal must not be closed during the session.  Just minimise it.

If the connection doesn’t work, go back to the terminal and CTRL+C.  That will offer the choice of stopping the service or trying another server.

Just as a side note, according to whatsmyip.com I’m currently located in Montreal……. 😉

Linux Mint 19 Tara

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

It’s been over 200 days since this site was updated.  I think that’s more an indicator if the reliability of Linux than anything else.

Last Friday week I downloaded Mint 19 Cinnamon Beta.  It hadn’t been officially announced but the ISOs were up on the server so I downloaded a copy.

Initially I thought of testing it in a VirtualBox but then decided I would grab some space on my hard disk and do a triple boot (Windows, Mint 18.3 and Mint 19).  I expected some minor problems, considering this was an early Beta, but there were none.

The first thing I noticed was the artwork.  There is a lot more of it!  But then I started messing around with it and found quite a few differences.  Some little niggly faults have been ironed out, Google Earth runs without any tweaks (I tend to use GE as a benchmark as it is usually quite problematic) and there were some additions.  Also I got the distinct impression that 19 is a lot faster than its predecessor, but not having any benchmark tests I don’t have any figures on that.

Possibly the most noticeable addition is Timeshift.  I would describe this as a cross between Windows Restore and Backup.  It takes a copy of everything on its list, whether that is the root software, the Home partition or whatever you fancy and does this on a predetermined regularity.

Frankly I was so impressed with 19 that I decided that it was more than good enough to become my primary OS.  This did lead to some problems as my test partition I had created was considerably smaller that the old working one so I decided to do a ton of resizing and moving of partitions.  (I wrote a light-hearted account of that process on my other site).   Apart from the moving and resizing I also created a small partition specifically for Timeshift, to keep the backup files is a separate area in case of disaster.

So far I cannot find a single fault with 19.

I’m a happy camper.

Stylish

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

One of the greatest irritants (for me) on the Internet is the site that somehow thinks it is being trendy when it uses pale text on a white background.

Generally when I come across such a site I get out of it fast unless the information is important in which case I struggle on and curse the designers.

I use ManageWP to manage (!) several web sites.  As this is a tool I use very frequently, the contrast is important, particularly such information as how many sites require updates.  However, they are sadly being ‘trendy’ and feel obliged to display such information in light grey on a white background:

Grey text on white

Now apparently there is little I can do about this short of complaining to the crowd who run the site.

But then there is Stylish.

Basically Stylish allows you to apply CSS styles to any or all of the sites you visit.  Naturally it only applies on my browser so it entirely a personal preference thing.  Unfortunately (for some) it requires a fairly good knowledge of CSS and how to discover which selectors on a web page you want to modify, but there are a load of styles already to download for the most popular sites if you so wish.

I applied the following snippet of code to my ManageWP Stylish:

@namespace url(https://www.w3.org/1111/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("orion.managewp.com") {}
body {
color: black !important;
}
.dashboard {
color: black !important;
}
span.filter-count.badge {
color: black !important;
}
.custom-checkbox {
border: 1px solid #999 !important;
}

This is applied automatically to the web page and this is the result:

Black text on white

There was also a problem with my WordPress editing pages which I have been trying to solve for some time.  It was the same sort of problem – writing or editing text in the Post Editor was difficult as the text appeared grey on a white background.  It took me a long time to realise that it wasn’t the font colour that was the problem but actually the font itself.  Once I had worked that out, I thought about changing the font face on all the sites I edit but that would have been tedious, so I just applied a modification using Stylish.

body#tinymce.wp-editor,
.wp-editor-container textarea.wp-editor-area {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

Now any site that I edit will have a nice clear font.

Text samples

Click to enlarge

It’s a handy little gizmo!

Incidentally, this is not a sponsored post – I just thought it might be of some help….

 

Firefox 57 – moving those tabs

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I recently upgraded to Firefox 57.

The first thing I noticed was that half my add-ons had disappeared and the layout and font had changed.  The most irritating one was the tabs on top, and no way to move them down.

I eventually found a fix for the tabs.

Create a file called userChrome.css and paste in the following –

/* Puts tabs on the bottom */
#TabsToolbar {
-moz-box-ordinal-group: 2;
border-bottom: 1px solid #888 !important;
}
#nav-bar{ border-top-width: 0px !important; }

Find your Mozilla default ‘profile’ folder and move that file into a sub-folder ‘chrome’.  If ‘chrome’ doesn’t exist, then create it first.  Close and reopen Firefox and the tabs will appear below the other toolbars.

However that still didn’t resolve some other issues I had with the new release.

I discovered Waterfox!

I downloaded it and ran it.  I was impressed to say the least.

It doesn’t interfere with Firefox and its settings and includes the options of importing all Firefox’s settings.  When the browser opened after the import, there was the familiar screen and I had to check that I was in fact running Waterfox in the ‘Help -> About’ menu.

Not only was it exactly like Firefox but it had imported my theme, bookmarks, tabs, add-ons, passwords and all the rest.  Even better, it had restored a load of add-ons that had become redundant in Firefox 57.  The only strange anomaly was that the actual contents had reverted to the tabs and pages that existed on the 1st July, but that was no bother whatsoever.

I haven’t yet found any problems with Waterfox.  It uses the same add-ons and themes repository as Firefox, but now virtually all are now compatible instead of the ‘chosen few’.  I still have Firefox installed as an emergency backup but for the foreseeable future, Waterfox will be my default browser.

 

Google Earth on Linux Mint 18.3

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Out of curiosity I downloaded Linux Mint 18.3 (Beta) today and installed it in a virtual machine.

Again, curiosity got the better of me and I installed Google Earth using just Software Manager.

Naturally I expected the same old problems with Panoramio images, but no – it worked “out of the box”!  No more special scripts to load libraries or anything like that.  It’s fully functional.

Wonders will never cease?

UPDATE:

Wonders did cease.

When I did the full install (as distinct from using a virtual machine) GE failed again.  It locked on the initial screen showing the top bar, the menu and little else.

I eventually found the culprit –

Using Synaptic, remove the file xserver-xorg-video-intel

GE now works fully and properly.