Looking for a way to connect to your router but don't know its address? Here's how to get the IP address of your router in Ubuntu and other Linux systems.

The ripgrep-all is grep on asteriod. Apart from searching in text files, it can also search in PDFs, Word documents, E-Books, Zip, Tar archives files and more.

Looking for an unofficial desktop client for Microsoft To-Do on Linux? Here's one.

Linux Mint is one the best Linux distributions for beginners . Especially Windows users that want to switch to Linux , will find its flagship Cinnamon desktop environment very familiar.

Cinnamon gives a traditional desktop experience and many users like it as it is. It doesn’t mean you have to content with what it provides. Cinnamon provides several ways for customizing the desktop.

Reading about MATE and KDE customization guides, many readers requested similar tutorial for Linux Mint Cinnamon as well. Hence, I created this basic guide on tweaking the looks and feel of Cinnamon desktop.

7 Different Ways for Customizing Cinnamon Desktop

For this tutorial, I’m using Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 4). You can use this on any Linux distribution that is running Cinnamon. If you are unsure, here’s how to check which desktop environment you are using.

When it comes to changing the cinnamon desktop appearance, I find it very easy to do so as it is just 2 clicks away. Click on the menu icon and then on settings as shown below.

All the appearance settings are placed on the top of the window. Everything on “System Settings” window looks neat and tidy.

1. Effects

The effects options are simple, self-explanatory and straightforward. You can turn on and off the effects for different elements of the desktop or change the window transitioning by changing the effects style. If you want to change the speed of the effects, you can do it through the customise tab.

2. Font Selection

In this section, you can differentiate the fonts you use throughout the system in size and type, and through the font settings you can fine-tune the appearance.

3. Themes and icons

A reason that I used to be a Linux Mint user for a few years, is that you don’t need to go all over the place to change what you want. Window manager, icon and panel customization all in one place!

You can change your panel to a dark or light colour and the window borders to suit your changes. The default Cinnamon appearance settings look the best in my eyes, and I even applied the exact same when I was testing the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix but in orange colour.

4. Cinnamon Applets

Cinnamon applets are all the elements included at your bottom panel like the calendar or the keyboard layout switcher. At the manage tab, you can add/remove the already installed applets.

You should definitely explore the applets you can download, the weather and CPU temperature Indicator applets were my choices from the extras.

5. Cinnamon Desklets

Cinnamon Desklets are applications that can be placed directly to your desktop. Like all the other customization option, Desklets can be accessed from the settings menu and the wide variety of choices can attract anyone’s interest. Google calendar is a handy app to keep track of your schedule directly on your desktop.

6. Desktop wallpaper

To change the desktop background on Cinnamon desktop, simply right click on the desktop and choose “Change Desktop Background. It will open an easy to use window, where on the left side the available background system folders are listed and on the ride pane there is a preview of the images within each folder.

You can add your own folders by clicking the plus (+) symbol by navigating to its path. At the Settings tab you can choose if you background will be static or slideshow and how the background is being positioned on the screen.

7. Customize what’s on your desktop screen

The background is not the only desktop element that you can change. You can find more options if you right click on the desktop and click on “Customise”.

You can change the icon size, change the placement from vertical to horizontal and the spacing among them on both axis. If you don’t like what you did, click in reset grid spacing to go back to the default.

Additionally, if you click on “Desktop Settings”, more options will be revealed. You can disable the icons on the desktop, place them on the primary or secondary monitor, or even both. As you can see, you can select some of the icons to appear on your desktop.

Conclusion

Cinnamon desktop is one of the best to choose, especially if you are switching from windows to Linux , but also for someone who is looking to a simple yet elegant desktop.

Cinnamon desktop is very stable and never crashed on my hands, and it is one of the main reasons why it served me for so long on a variety of Linux distributions.

I didn’t go in much details but gave you enough pointers to explore the settings on your own. Your feed to improve Cinnamon cuztomization is welcome.

I have written about dual booting Windows and Ubuntu in the past. The process has improved so much in the last few years. Ubuntu and other Linux play very well with secure boot and UEFI now.

So, why I am I writing about installing Ubuntu with Windows 10 once again? Because these days Windows 10 Pro version comes with BitLocker encryption and hence when you try to dual boot like normal, it either refuses or creates issue.

I noticed it with my new Dell XPS 13. I bought the last Dell XPS in France and it was preinstalled with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Dell India had no option other than buying the Windows 10 version. In a way, that’s good because it helped me to write this tutorial.

To be honest, dual booting with BitLocker encrypted disk is also not complicated. It just involves the extra step of disabling encryption before starting the dual boot and re-enable it after installing Linux.

Don’t worry. I won’t leave you just like that with my words. I’ll show you each and every step with appropriate details.

Installing Ubuntu with BitLocker Encrypted Windows 10

Please keep in mind that I have used Ubuntu here, but the steps should be applicable to Linux Mint and other Ubuntu-based distributions as well.

Prerequisite

Here are the things you need:

• A Windows 10 system with BitLocker encryption.
• A USB key (also known as pen drive or USB drive) of at least 4 GB in size and no data on it.
• Microsoft account for saving the recovery key of BitLocker encryption (external USB can be used as well but MS account will be more convenient).
• Internet connection.
• Optional: External USB disk for making back up of your data.
• Optional: Windows recovery disk.
• Some time and patience (mandatory).

Step 1: Make a backup of your important data on an external disk

This is optional yet recommended. You should make a backup of your important files on an external disk because you are going to deal with disk partitions.

If you are not sure of anything, I suggest look for documents, music, movies and other important stuff you must not lose and copy them on an external USB disk. You can use an external HDD (slower but cheaper) or SSD (faster but expensive).

You may also use a pen drive for copying files and storing it on some other computer (if you have more than one system).

Step 2: Verify that you have BitLocker encrypted disk

First thing first, check if you actually have BitLocker encryption enabled. How do you do that? It’s simple. Go to file explorer and check if your main drive has a lock displayed.

Alternatively, just search for BitLocker in Windows menu and see if you have BitLocker settings.

Bitlocker Settings

Step 3: Back up recovery key and disable BitLocker encryption

Now that you know that you have BitLocker encryption enabled on your system, the next step is to disable it.

Before you do that, you must back up your recovery key. It is a 40 digit key to reset BitLocker encryption. Why? Because you are going to change the boot settings and BitLocker won’t like that. It will ask you to enter the recovery key to ensure that your encrypted disk is in safe hands.

You may back up the key on an external USB disk or to your Microsoft account. I saved it to my Microsoft account because it is easier to keep track of the recovery keys at one central place. Of course, you must ensure that you have access to a Microsoft account .

Verify that your recovery key is properly saved by going to this link and logging into your Microsoft account.

Once you have saved the recovery key, disable BitLocker encryption. The decryption process may take some time depending on how much disk space you had already utilized.

While you wait for the decryption to complete, you should go on and download Ubuntu ISO. Once BitLocker is disabled, you would notice that the lock has disappeared from the drive icon.

Step 4: Download Ubuntu ISO

While the disk is being decrypted, you should utilize the time in downloading the ISO image of Ubuntu desktop version. It’s a single file of around 2 GB in size and you may download it directly or use torrent if you have a slow and inconsistent internet.

Step 5: Create a live USB of Ubuntu

Once you have got the ISO, you should get a tool for making the bootable live USB of Ubuntu .

You may use Etcher on Linux , Windows and macOS. However, the way Etcher creates a bootable disk leaves the USB in a weird state and you’ll have a difficult time formatting the disk after the dual boot is over.

For this reason, you are using Windows, I recommend using a free tool like Rufus. Download Rufus from its website.

Plug in the USB key. Since the USB will be formatted, make sure it doesn’t consist of any important data.

Rufus automatically identifies the plugged in USB keys but it will still be a good idea to make sure that it is pointing to the correct USB. Then you should browse to the location of the downloaded ISO image.

You must ensure that it uses GPT partitioning scheme and UEFI target system.

Hit the start button to initiate the process of live USB creation. If asked, choose ‘Write in ISO Image mode’:

It will take a few minutes to complete the process. Once you have the live USB ready, the next step is the actual installation of Ubuntu Linux.

Step 6: Boot from live USB

With the live USB of Ubuntu plugged in to your Windows system, it’s time to boot into this live system. There are two ways to do that:

1. Restart the system and at the boot time, press F2/F10 or F12 to access boot settings. From here, move ‘booting from removable media’ up the order to boot from USB.
2. From within Windows, access UEFI settings and choose to boot from removable media. This will reboot the system and you’ll be booting from the USB.

I prefer the second method because you may have difficulties in with boot settings from the first method.

In the Windows menu, search for UEFI and click on ‘Change advanced startup options’:

Under the Advanced startup option, click on Restart now button.

On the next screen, click on ‘Use a device’:

Recognize the USB disk with its name and size:

Now it will power off your system and reboot into the disk you chose which should be the live USB disk.

Step 7: Installing Ubuntu with Windows

When you boot from the live USB, you should see the GRUB screen that presents you the option to try Ubuntu in live USB or install it right away. You may go with either option.

If you chose to try live USB, you should see the installation option on the desktop screen.

Clicking it will start the installation procedure that starts with choosing language and keyboard layout.

• Choose your language
• Choose keyboard layout

On the next screen, it asks for the kind of installation. Go with Normal installation. No need to download updates or install third-party software just yet. You may do it after installation completes. In my experience, it increases the installation duration and may create issues at times. I prefer to avoid it.

It takes a little time and then you see the Installation type screen. This is one of the most important parts of the dual booting procedure.

If you see the ‘Install Ubuntu alongside Windows Boot Manager’, it’s good news. You can proceed with the rest of the installation.

But if you are one of the unlucky ones who don’t see this option, you’ll have to quit the installation and do some additional efforts that I have explained under the expandable section.

Things are pretty straightforward from here. You’ll be asked to select a timezone.

You’ll be asked to enter a username, hostname (computer’s name) and a password. Pretty obvious, right?

Now it’s just the matter of waiting. It should take 8-10 minutes to complete the installation.

Once the installation finishes, restart the system.

You’ll be asked to remove the USB disk. You can remove the disk at this stage without worrying. The system reboots after this.

If everything went smooth, you should see the grub screen once the system powers on. Here, you can choose Ubuntu to boot into Ubuntu and Windows boot manager to boot into Windows. Pretty cool, right?

If you don’t see the option to install Ubuntu alongside Windows, quit the installation, turn off the system and boot into Windows. Here, make some free space on your disk by shrinking your disk size.

When you boot into Ubuntu, you should see this welcome screen.

You are at penultimate stage. The only remaining part is to re-enable BitLocker for your Windows partitioning, if you want encryption again. You may leave it unencrypted as well. It’s really up to you.

Step 8: Enable Bitlocker after installing Ubuntu successfully

Restart your system and select Windows boot manager at the grub screen to boot into Windows. In Windows, go to BitLocker settings and click on ‘Turn on BitLocker’ option.

Here’s an important thing. Each time you disable and re-enable BitLocker the recovery key changes. This is why you’ll be asked to back up your recovery key once again. Save it to your account once again.

On the next step, it asks if you want to encrypt the entire disk or only the used space. You can choose either option depending on your need.

Go with the new encryption mode:

Start the encryption. Please keep in mind that encrypting the disk will take some time (based on your used disk space) and consumes considerable processing power. Have patience.

Things look all set. Before ending the tutorial, I’ll also show you what to do when Windows asks for the BitLocker recovery key.

Bonus Tip: Using BitLocker recovery (when asked for it)

When you re-enable BitLocker, it can sense that the boot settings has been changed. For that reason, it will ask for the recovery key when you try to boot into Windows after re-enabling BitLocker.

It mentions the recovery key ID. The first eight characters are important to identify the correct recovery key.

On a mobile device or on another computer or boot into Ubuntu and then access your Microsoft account and look at the saved recovery keys.

You may have more than one recovery keys on the account of saving the key multiple times. This is where the recovery key ID comes in handy. Take a note of the 40 digit recovery key associated to that recovery key ID.

Enter this recovery key to unlock BitLocker and access Windows.

Don’t worry. It won’t ask you for the recovery key every time you boot into Windows. It is just when you make a change in the boot settings.

Were you able to successfully dual boot Windows 10 with Ubuntu and BitLocker?

I know it was long read with too many steps and images. I actually tried to give you all the necessary details so that you don’t feel uncomfortable or lost at any stage. I am also working on a video for these steps so that you can see things in action.

If you tried the tutorial, did it work for you? Do you still have problems or questions? Please feel free to ask in the comment section.

Many high-end laptops come with fingerprint readers these days. Windows and macOS have been supporting fingerprint login for some time. In desktop Linux, the support for fingerprint login was more of geeky tweaks but GNOME and KDE have started supporting it through system settings.

This means that on newer Linux distribution versions, you can easily use fingerprint reading. I am going to enable fingerprint login in Ubuntu here but you may use the steps on other distributions running GNOME 3.38.

Adding fingerprint login in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions

Go to Settings and the click on Users from left sidebar. You should see all the user account on your system here. You’ll see several option including Fingerprint Login .

Click on the Fingerprint Login option here.

It will immediately ask you to scan a new fingerprint. When you click the + sign to add a fingerprint, it presents a few predefined options so that you can easily identify which finger or thumb it is.

You may of course scan left thumb by clicking right index finger though I don’t see a good reason why you would want to do that.

While adding the fingerprint, rotate your finger or thumb as directed.

Once the system registers the entire finger, it will give you a green signal that the fingerprint has been added.

If you want to test it right away, lock the screen by pressing Super+L keyboard shortcut in Ubuntu and then using the fingerprint for login.

Experience with fingerprint login on Ubuntu

Fingerprint login is what its name suggests: login using your fingerprint. That’s it. You cannot use your finger when it asks for authentication for programs that need sudo access. It’s not a replacement of your password.

One more thing. The fingerprint login allows you to log in but you cannot use your finger when your system asks for sudo password. The keyring in Ubuntu also remains locked.

Another annoying thing is because of GNOME’s GDM login screen. When you login, you have to click on your account first to get to the password screen. This is where you can use your finger. It would have been nicer to not bothered about clicking the user account ID first.

I also notice that fingerprint reading is not as smooth and quick as it is in Windows. It works, though.

If you are somewhat disappointed with the fingerprint login on Linux, you may disable it. Let me show you the steps in the next section.

Disable fingerprint login

Disabling fingerprint login is pretty much the same as enabling it in the first place.

Go to Settings→User and then click on Fingerprint Login option. It will show a screen with options to add more fingerprints or delete the existing ones. You need to delete the existing fingerprints.

Fingerprint login does have some benefits, specially for lazy people like me. I don’t have to type my password every time I lock the screen and I am happy with the limited usage.

Enabling sudo with fingerprint should not be entirely impossible with PAM . I remember that when I set up face unlock in Ubuntu , it could be used with sudo as well. Let’s see if future versions add this feature.

Do you have a laptop with fingerprint reader? Do you use it often or is it just one of things you don’t care about?

Brief: Viper Browser is a Qt-based browser that offers a simple user experience keeping privacy in mind.

While the majority of the popular browsers run on top of Chromium, unique alternatives like Firefox , Beaker Browser , and some other chrome alternatives should not cease to exist.

Especially, considering Google’s recent potential thought of stripping Google Chrome-specific features from Chromium giving an excuse of abuse.

In the look-out for more Chrome alternatives, I came across an interesting project “ Viper Browser ” as per our reader’s suggestion on Mastodon .

Viper Browser: An Open-Source Qt5-based Browser

Note : Viper Browser is fairly a new project with a couple of contributors. It lacks certain features which I’ll be mentioning as you read on.

Viper is an interesting web browser that focuses on being a powerful yet lightweight option while utilizing QtWebEngine .

QtWebEngine borrows the code from Chromium but it does not include the binaries and services that connect to the Google platform.

I spent some time using it and performing some daily browsing activities and I must say that I’m quite interested. Not just because it is something simple to use (how complicated a browser can be), but it also focuses on enhancing your privacy by giving you the option to add different Ad blocking options along with some useful options.

Even though I think it is not meant for everyone, it is still worth taking a look. Let me highlight the features briefly before you can proceed trying it out.

Features of Viper Browser

I’ll list some of the key features that you can find useful:

• Ability to manage cookies
• Multiple preset options to choose different Adblocker networks
• Simple and easy to use
• Privacy-friendly default search engine – Startpage (you can change this)
• Ability to add user scripts
• Ability to add new user agents
• Option to disable JavaScript
• Ability to prevent images from loading up

In addition to all these highlights, you can easily tweak the privacy settings to remove your history, clean cookies when existing, and some more options.

Installing Viper Browser on Linux

It just offers an AppImage file on its releases section that you can utilize to test on any Linux distribution.

In case you need help, you may refer to our guide on using AppImage file on Linux as well. If you’re curious, you can explore more about it on GitHub .

My Thoughts on Using Viper Browser

I don’t think it is something that could replace your current browser immediately but if you are interested to test out new projects that are trying to offer Chrome alternatives, this is surely one of them.

When I tried logging in my Google account, it prevented me by mentioning that it is potentially an insecure browser or unsupported browser. So, if you rely on your Google account, it is a disappointing news.

However, other social media platforms work just fine along with YouTube (without signing in). Netflix is not something supported but overall the browsing experience is quite fast and usable.

You can install user scripts, but Chrome extensions aren’t supported yet. Of course, it is either intentional or something to be looked after as the development progresses considering it as a privacy-friendly web browser.

Wrapping Up

Considering that this is a less-known yet something interesting for some, do you have any suggestions for us to take a look at? An open-source project that deserves coverage?

Let me know in the comments down below.

One of the main reasons that a user chooses Arch Linux or an Arch based Linux distribution is the Arch User repository (AUR) .

Unfortunately, pacman , the package manager of Arch, can’t access the AUR in a similar way to the official repositories. The packages in AUR are in the form of PKGBUILD and require a manual process to be built.

An AUR helper can automate this process. Without any doubt yay is one of the most popular and highly favoured AUR helper.

Recently Morganamilo , one of the two developers of yay, announced that is stepping away from maintaining yay and starting his own AUR helper called paru . Paru is written in Rust compared to yay that is written in Go and its design is based on yay.

Please note that yay hasn’t reach the end of life and is still being actively maintained by Jguer . He also commented that paru may be suitable for users that looking for a feature rich AUR helper; thus I would recommend giving it a try.

Installing Paru AUR helper

To install paru, open your terminal and type the following commands one by one.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

Now that you have it installed, let’s see how to use it.

Essential commands to use Paru AUR helper

In my opinion these are the most essential commands of paru. You can explore more on the official repository on GitHub .

• paru <userinput> : Search and install <userinput>.
• paru — : Alias for paru -Syu
• paru -Sua : Upgrade AUR packages only
• paru -Qua : Print available AUR updates
• paru -Gc <userinput> : Print the AUR comments of <userinput>

Using Paru AUR helper to its full extent

You can access the changelog of paru on GitHub for the full changelog history or you can see the changes from yay at the first release .

Enable colour in Paru

To enable colour in paru, you have to enable it first in pacman. All the configuration files are in /etc directory. In this example, I use Nano text editor but, you may use any terminal-based text editor of your choice.

sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf

Once you open the pacman configuration file, uncomment the “Color” to enable this feature.

Flip search order

The most relevant package according to your search term is normally displayed on the top of the search result. In paru, you can flip the search order to make your search easier.

Similar to the previous example, open the paru configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/paru.conf

Uncomment the “BottomUp” term and save the file.

As you can see the order is flipped and the first package appears on the bottom.

Edit PKGBUILDs (For advanced user)

If you are an experienced Linux user, you can edit AUR packages through paru. To do so, you need to enable the feature from the paru configuration file and set the file manager of your choice.

In this example I will use the default in the configuration file i.e. the vifm file manager. If you haven’t used it you may need to install it.

sudo pacman -S vifm
sudo nano /etc/paru.conf

Open the configuration file and uncomment as shown below.

Let’s go back to the Google Calendar AUR package and try to install it. You will be prompted to review the package. Type yes and click enter.

Choose the PKGBUILD from the file manager and hit enter to view the package.

Any change that you make will be permanent and the next time you upgrade the package, your changes will be merged with the upstream package.

Conclusion

Paru is another interesting addition to the AUR helpers family with a promising future. At this point I wouldn’t suggest replacing yay as it is still maintained but definitely give paru a try. You can have both of them installed to your system and come to your own conclusions.

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