VFsync

If you don't have access (direct or remote) to a computer running GNU/Linux there are several options, one of which is vfsync.

VFsync (for Virtual File Synchronization) is a secure file synchronization system.

 *   In a web based virtual machine. The files can be manipulated with all the standard Unix commands and imported or exported to the host system.
 *  In a small Desktop based virtual machine. It is faster than the web based virtual machine and unlike other virtual machines, no disk image needs to be downloaded.
 *  With a small standalone client directly running on the host system. 

Links

• vfsymc

Notes

You won't't be able to do everything in the posts on this site, or tutorials elsewhere, however you can still do quite a lot, so this should be a good opportunity to learn until you can find other solutions. There are a few links below. I am not going to recommend or endorse a particular solution..

As there is a demand for technical skills in areas such as cloud compiuting and cybersecurity then knowing how to use GNU/Linux and similar unix systems is probably essential, as would be understanding powershell, I am not sure if this is the case, but AI needs to run on servers, which are mostly likely to be powered by GNU/Linux. I will leave readers to do their own reserach.

More Links

• Raspberry Pi
• Banana PI
• Tinkerboard
  • Armbian
• Windows subsystem for Linux
• Wikipedia – Virtual Hosting
• GNU/Bash
• DuckDuckGo
• PowerShell

There are numerous options at

• Vern.cc
  • Vern.cc Matrix
• https://tildeverse.org/

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Learning,#GNU,#Linux,#Remote,#Shell,#Vfsync

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Bash scripting 18 – Using data files 4

So, carrying on from the previous article(s).

Using the guide at [2]. We can set a few labels up so the graph looks nicer.

Once in gnu plot you can issue commands, then run replot to redraw the graph.

gnuplot> plot 'log.csv'
gnuplot> plot 'log.csv' with lines
gnuplot> set title 'Example Plot'
gnuplot> set xlabel 'x axis'
gnuplot> set ylabel 'y axis' 
gnuplot> replot
gnuplot> set key top right
gnuplot> replot

By running replot we can see the results are what we want before carrying on.

All this is just a small sample of what can be done, I will explore more on this once I have some useful, rather than randomly generated data to plot or do things with.

References

1 gnuplot 2 gnuplot examples

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Bash,#Bashscripting,#Files,#UsingDataFiles,#Data,#gnuplot,#graphs

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Bash scripting 17 – Using data files 3

So, carrying on from the previous article(s). I am going to be using gnuplot to display the data. I found a useful site, that has examples of how to use the software, from basic to more advanced examples.

Notes: As with bash gnu plot has command history, so you can use arrow keys to move up / down between previously entered commands.

Based on the information at [2] we can produce a very basic plot of what is in log.csv

Load GNUPlot

gnuplot

and enter

plot 'log.csv'

This example isn't all that good really, but it at least produces some output. I have modified one of the examples further down that page

plot 'log.csv' using 1:2 with lines, 'log.csv' using 1:2 with lines

So the following data set

0, 1
1, 10
2, 10
3, 7
4, 2
5, 1
6, 15
7, 0
8, 19
9, 3

Should produce something like

Adding extra columns

We probably need more than two columns. This is easily done by modifying the loop in the script gendata1.csv. It is a good idea to copy this to a new script so it keeps the original as is

cp gendata1.sh gendata2.sh

As gendata1.sh has write permissions, these will be preserved in the new copy of the file. We can now edit gendata2.sh

echo "number" "data" # for reference, not written to file 
for ((i = 0 ; i < 10 ; i++)); do
    echo $i, $((RANDOM % 20)), $((RANDOM % 20)) # echo to screen (stdout)
	echo $i, $((RANDOM % 20)), $((RANDOM % 20)) >> log.csv # write to file
    #write_csv $(($i, $RANDOM % 10))
done

So all we are doing here is adding in, note the comma

, $((RANDOM % 20))

As the only difference between the lines

echo $i, $((RANDOM % 20)), $((RANDOM % 20)) # echo to screen (stdout)
echo $i, $((RANDOM % 20)), $((RANDOM % 20)) >> log.csv # write to file

Is that the first line, writes to the screen, it may be better to test the script out, check it does what you want, then modify the line that writes to a file once you are happy.

References

1 gnuplot 2 gnuplot examples 3. GNU Plot and LaTeX, included for reference

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Bash,#Bashscripting,#Files,#UsingDataFiles,#Data,#gnuplot,#graphs,#BashScripting

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Bash scripting 16 – Using data files 2

So, carrying on from the previous article(s). I am going to be using gnuplot and awk, and see what I can do with the data generated by my script.

It would be useful to be able to remove content in the file we are using with awk, so new data is not added to existing data.

We can do this by running:-

echo " " > log.csv

This should ensure the file is empty

we can then rerun

./gencsv1.sh 

And check contents with

echo csv.log

So according to the article, we can list the data in the 2nd column

awk -F, '{ print $2}' log.csv

 2
 7
 14
 4
 5
 7
 17
 19
 0
 19

and on a similar note, to list what is in the first column

awk -F, '{ print $1}' log.csv

and we can calculate the sum using

awk -F, '{ sum +=$2} END { print sum }' log.csv
94

and the average

awk -F, '{ sum +=$2} END { print sum/NR }' log.csv
8.54545

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Bash,#Bashscripting,#Files,#UsingDataFiles,#Data,#BashScripting

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Windows Recall

• Microsoft are bringing back their Recall feature

There are serious security and privacy concerns about this feature, and even if you opt out of it, it does not mean your data is safe.

Time to switch to replacement operating systems and start to learn them. Don't forget also that Windows 10 support ends in August. You may be forced to upgrade to Windows 11 on your hardware, or depending on when you bought the computer, upgrade the whole computer with a new one just so you can run Windows 11.

Links

• Linux Mint
  • Linux Mint Matrix
• Devon & Cornwall Linux user group
  • Devon and Cornwall matrix

Tags

#Microsoft,#Windows,#Recall,#Privacy,#Security

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Bash scripting 13 – Linux permission table

As previously mentioned scripts need to be given permission to run. This table should help with the process of working out what permission to set on a file or script.

I think the usual default is 755 which gives the user read, write, execute. Both the group and other users of the system get read and write.

For the most part, you can set execute permission on a script with

chmod +x scriptname.sh

	READ			WRITE			EXECUTE
USER	GROUP	OTHER	USER	GROUP	OTHER	USER	GROUP	OTHER
400	40	4	200	20	2	100	10	1

The markdown code for the above is

|         | **READ** |         |         | **WRITE** |         |         | **EXECUTE** |         |
|:-------:|:--------:|:-------:|:-------:|:---------:|:-------:|:-------:|:-----------:|:-------:|
|  _USER_ |  _GROUP_ | _OTHER_ |  _USER_ |  _GROUP_  | _OTHER_ |  _USER_ |   _GROUP_   | _OTHER_ |
| **400** |  **40**  |  **4**  | **200** |   **20**  |  **2**  | **100** |    **10**   |  **1**  |

Which may be useful. I used Tables Generator to help create this.

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Bash,#Bashscripting,#Files,#Permissions.#chmod,#Read,#Write, #Execute

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Bash scripting 12 – Files and Grep

Rather than make a video for this, I decided to just make a blog post so that I could include downloadable or at least copy / pasteable components.

Grep stands for GNU Regular Expression Parser, In essence and among other things, it can read (or parse) a file and report on contents, or in the case of this, find a specific string of text.

lorem Ipsum, is standard in the printing industry as it is dummy text used to fill on a page. I have pasted below an example and it just happens to explain further.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.~

If you copy and paste the above and save in a text file called lorem.txt we can do some neat stuff with grep and a few other commands. I am not an expert at this, so this is some of what I picked up while researching this post.

Firstly we can find a specific word (or string) in the text with

cat lorem.txt | grep the

we can also do

grep the lorem.txt

Both will search the file lorem.txt, display the file contents and highlight the word 'the' from the text.

This is great, so what else can we do

In a short file, the number of times a word may appear may be less than 5 or 10. So we could just count manually. As discussed in a previous video, the command wc or word count, does what it says and counts the number of words.

So I found the following

cat lorem.txt | grep -o the | wc -l

Which gives the output as 6 which is how many times the word 'the' appears in the text.

As with other commands, there is a man page so

man grep

and

man wc

Should provide useful information, you can also search for information with duckduckgo and there are numberous tutorials on line.

Hope this is useful

Chat

I am on the Devon and Cornwall Linux user group mailing list and also their matrix channel as zleap, it is better to ask there, that way others can answer too.

Tags

#Bash,#Bashscripting,#Files,#TextSearch,#StringSearch,#Grep,#wc,#WordCount

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DCGLUG Meetings – March 2025

The Devon and Cornwall GNU/Linux Users' Group still run regular meeting, These currently take place with a virtual meeting on the 3rd Saturday of the month and a social meet up in Plymouth on the 4th Saturday. More details below:-

• 3rd Saturday (from 12) – Jitsi. Meet
• 4th Saturday, Plymouth social. 1200 onwards at the Moments Café

69A New George Street, Plymouth, GB PL1 1RJ

We are also on our Matrix Channel

Other links

1. Astro-pi
2. Youth Hacking 4 Freedom
3. Coolest Projects
4. Mission Libre
5. Raspberry Pi
6. Arduino
7. Linux Foundation Certification journey
8. LinuxFoundation Mastodon
9. EdX LinuxFoundationX: Introduction to Linux
10. FreeCodeCamp – Command line for beginners
11. Luanti

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SFD 2024

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and encouraging its use.

I have set up an event for Paignton, details are here and below.

Date : 21st September 2024 Time : 11 am to 13:00 Location : STEAM Café & Discovery Centre 13 Torbay Road, Paignton, Devon

If you would like to get in touch, please send a message via the lug list or drop in to the DCGLUG Matrix channel.

Poster

For more general information on Software freedom day, please see the Digital Freedoms website.

You can also drop me a message on Fediverse / Mastodon

Video

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