Episode: 2772
Title: HPR2772: My applications and software part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2772/hpr2772.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 16:37:39

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This is HPR Episode 2,772 entitled, My Applications and Software Part 3.
It is hosted by Tony Hume, AKA Tony H1212 and is about 10 minutes long and carries a clean
flag.
The summary is a short show about the software I use in Linux Mint.
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Hello, I can public radio listeners.
This is Tony Hughes from Blackpool in the UK, here for another episode.
In my recent episodes, HPR2738 and HPR2746, I talked about some of the applications and
software I regularly use for my day-to-day use of Linux Mint.
This follow-up show will continue with a few more of the same.
To start off with, if you've got an install of any computer, at some stage you're going
to want to print out documents and photos or just whatever it is that you need to print
out, basically.
The most common way of doing this to connect a printer to a Linux system is the use of
Cops, which stands for the Common Unix Printing Software.
Printing in Linux with this utility is fairly well supported.
If you don't have a recent printer, it's a good chance that Cops will be able to find
a driver for your particular model.
If a Linux one hasn't been supplied when you bought it through the manufacturer's
or through the manufacturer's support site.
In the menu you just search for print and it will bring up an application for adding a
new printer.
Do a search for your particular printer model and then it'll give you an option of it.
It can't find an exact match for your particular printer.
It'll give you an option to add a generic driver that should get your printer up and running.
I found that most HP and Epsom and a few other models work fairly flawlessly once the
printer software has been installed, although it's a little bit more complicated if you've
got these devices that also include a scanner.
You may find that you've got to jump through a few hoops to get the scanner working on
those models.
Generally you should be able to get your printer working fairly easily with the Cops in Linux.
The next piece of software that I use is around disk management for partitioning and formatting
disks.
I use a couple of utilities.
One's G-Parted, which I've been using for many years.
This is a fully featured disk management tool for formatting and partitioning disks.
Just be aware that if you want to partition the disk that's actually installed in the
machine, you'll probably need a live USB stick or CD with G-Parted installed to be able
to do it while the disk is installed in the machine.
Or you'll need to attach that particular disk to another machine that's got Linux on
it with you parted installed, because obviously you can't partition the disk that's being
used to run the machine.
But yeah, G-Parted is a fairly good tool for wiping and repartitioning and formatting
disks.
Great thing to get to grips with.
Another one which I've just recently come across is a utility called Disks, which is installed
with Linux Mint out of the box.
And as well as being able to partition and form that disk, you can actually use this
as a backup utility to clone images and have a clone of the disk stored elsewhere.
Obviously, depending on the size of your hard drive, you can either do a full disk image
which you may need to store in a larger hard drive off the machine or with this piece
of software, you can actually just image particular partitions.
So if you have your hard drive on your main machine, SDA partition to have a separate
home folder, which you can use with other installs, you can just copy the partition that's
got the actual live Linux installation on it.
So you could actually image that and save that as a backup and you can just reinstall
that if needed at some future date.
So that's dispartitioning and disk utilities.
The next one many people use to read PDFs is Document Viewer, I'm not to come across
a distribution, it doesn't have some form of PDF viewer, but in Linux Mint out the box
it's called Document Viewer and basically it's just what it says in the tin, it views
PDFs, nothing fancy, you can't really do anything else with it other than read PDFs,
it's good enough for that, if you want something a bit more complex for editing PDF, there
are other pieces of software available, but this particular one is just a basic viewer
so that you can read PDF files.
So if you've gone through them, you may want to add other software to add a piece of
software that will edit PDFs and these three tools in Linux that you can use for that
adding new software.
The first one is the software manager which is a GUI based software installer and that's
in Linux Mint it's available under the menu by default, it's the top one on the system
but you may find it in other distrares it might be hidden in the menu somewhere but software
manager is a fairly easy one and in Linux Mint also it includes the management of FlapPacks
as one of the options is to install FlapPack versions of various pieces of software.
The second software manager is the Synaptic Package Manager and this is the GUI package
that enables you to do apt without having to go into a command line or terminal and
you can open the Synaptic Package Manager.
The great thing about Synaptic Package Manager that I find is you can actually type in
a type of software and it will find you utilities and pieces of software that are related
to that so if you don't know exactly what you're looking for you can just type in video
and it will come up with all the packages that are to do with video and then you can
have a scroll through and see if you can find something that fits you built.
So I sometimes find that useful if I don't know what a piece of software is called and
then finally I mentioned it just briefly then obviously this is the terminal and in
the terminal you can open the terminal and run apt commands for updating the system and
installing new software apt get install and then the name of the package will quickly find
that package, tell you how much is going to download and what dependencies it's going
to download and then you'll be able to install it.
So if you know the name of the package and you know what you're going to have to type
into the terminal to get that package then using the terminal to install software can
sometimes be a bit quicker than having to jump through the hoops of going into the software
manager or going into the synaptic.
So quite often I'll find myself particularly when I'm doing updates I'll find myself
just opening terminal and doing pseudo apt get update pseudo apt get upgrade and my system
will be updated straight off no problem and just finally you know we're talking about
the terminal this one piece of software that is actually terminal based and that's that
I use and that's get I player and this is a little utility that's useful for if you want
to view or listen to online content that's available in the I player, BBC I player either
videos or audio you can download them and listen to it you know watch or listen to them
on your host machine and get I players a nice piece of software.
If you're not sure how to get hold of it or install it if you do a search for get I player
install instructions on in a web browser you'll soon find plenty of instructions on the
internet about how to install get I player.
So cracking little piece of kit and it means that you can you don't have to watch something
online before the 28 days are up or however long it is that they'll leave it available
for you to to watch online well that's it for a better note for this episode I might
come back with a few more or I might change track and do something else for the next
episode well that's me Tony Hughes in Blackpool in the UK signing off for now thanks for listening.
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