The latest desktop usage numbers shows that Linux is in use on 10% of the systems used. Most of this comes from browser hits and various internet data, and there are other approaches that also get that estimate close or above the 10% usage line. Going back many years, Apple was about 10% to Microsoft's Windows, so what is most likely happening is that more and more people are ditching the large corporate model and finding that they can use their existing hardware, without adware and spyware, and still accomplish what they need to. Yes, yes, we know that if you are running something purely proprietary that requires Windows or Mac OS, then you need to stick with that, but most people just want a browser and some office tools, and these are completely usable from a Linux desktop.

Vent alert! Every once in a while, we run into a comment or post that is adamant that Linux is free, and the services we provide are some sort of scam. This is truly annoying, as there is a lot of work to keep up-to-date with dozens and dozens of distros, verify, deal with inventory, shipping, and all the things that actually cost money involved in the service we provide.
"Writing down your thoughts is like clearing the cache on your computer. It frees up mental bandwidth."
For those that don't need or want our service, that is great, and more power to you. Perhaps you should also not go to fast food places, restaurants, car washes, and the myriad of other services that our economy provides. Please don't disparage our efforts and our customers. End Vent

Also, on July 12, the US Postal Service once again increased their pricing, along with changing the weight options, pushing up prices for the USPS Ground Advantage service, so we've once again had to update our shipping costs. Also, while DVDs and CDs can use the media mail rate, USB Flash drives cannot, so there is no other option that is more cost effective than the USPS Ground Advantage.

Also, not surprisingly, US Postal Service costs have increased, and we have had to adjust shipping prices to cover these costs. UPS costs get calculated on the site, so these reflect actual UPS costs, but we have had a fixed price for basic US Post shipping, and with recent increases, the default base cost we have held steady for years no longer covered actual costs.

Since we began, we've treated shipping as a pass-through cost, as our customers can choose the option that best meets their needs. We believe our customers appreciate that we simply charge for our services, and don't use the shipping and handling charges as a profit center, but by that same token, we don't want to lose money on this important aspect of the entire concept of getting Linux on media into the hands of our customers. We truly appreciate and are thankful for our growing base of customers, and the fact that many customers make repeat purchases as Linux continues to improve and expand.

More & more distros are releasing "EFI" or "UEFI" required bootable versions, meaning a non-UEFI system won't do much of anything. Often, non-UEFI systems won't even show any issue, or error, they simply will sit there and do nothing. We have started to indicate this in the distro description so if you see a "UEFI"l designation in the description, be sure you have a newer/UEFI based systems. For those having no idea what UEFI means, here is a quick overview:

UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface. It is a replacement of the old PC BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), which had various limitations and the industry all agreed it made sense to enhance and drop the old (orginal IBM PC) approach. As a quick explanation of how the BIOS or UEFI fits into the puzzle, imagine the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and basic computer hardware - CPU, memory, hard drive, monitor. So when you turn on this hardware, what does it do? Where does it start reading instructions for the CPU? The BIOS was a starting point to initialize the hardware, input and output devices, and enough instructions to start loading an operating system (i.e. load a boot program from the hard drive (or floppy, or CD/DVD, or USB, or Network)). Originally the BIOS was a ROM (or Ready Only Memory), and slowly evolved into flash memory (that can be rewritten/updated, but typically required a special process to do this). So BIOS evolved into a firmware interface, and various players in the industry wanted to do things like customize systems, so the "extensible" aspect was added, and other players wanted the Secure Boot concept, where only things authorized by the hardware manufacturer could actually boot and control the hardware (but note this is also extensible for a more general approach), or could be bypassed with a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) that supported the "old" way to boot (i.e. the BIOS way). In order to make this work for all the players in the industry, a consortium got together to define this Extensible Firmware Interface, so we all now have the "Unified" Extensible Firmware Interface being the way personal computers are designed and built. A few other notes: UEFI is processor agnostic and supports x86, x64, ARM, etc. Instead of low-level assembler, UEFI has implementations in C language. There is a UEFI form that promotes the UEFI specification. Intel originally owned an EFI implementation, so the UEFI is more collaborative. ACPI was handled to the UEFI forum - this is the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface which manages things like system, device, processor power management, configuration plug and play, battery, system events, etc.

We have also added a few "By Request" items with "Untested" - this is because the distro provider has specific machine or graphic card requirements, and we do not have a machine that meets these specific requirements, so are unable to boot and test the release. We are able review the partitions and data on the media, but we have always tested and verified downloads to make sure that what deliver is bootable and imaged correctly. So this is not something we would do except with a By Request distro and acceptance of the risk by the requestor, and this is indicated with "Untested" added to the description.

LinuxCollections.com provides media services to both new to Linux "newbies", as well as experienced Linux users who use our service for the convenience. Thanks to all our repeat customers, and we appreciate the support which helps us market Linux to people who still don't realize what Linux can do for them...

Simple Screencasting (using VLC as viewer)

This grabs the display (x11grab -i :0.0+0,0 at the x,y of 0,0) with 1400x940 pixels portion of screen and streams via tcp to the network when the stream is opened on a separate machine using the same IP address/port 6666. The quality -q can range form 1-31, and there is some serious latency (and no audio). But it is a simple approach using a single command (ffmpeg) and a readily available VLC utility. There are ways to do different things (such as the audio), but it can also be a challenge to get the syntax and tie into your system correct. This should be pretty easy to duplicate (just use your correct IP address!). You can then dig into ffmpeg and other examples to do other things. This is on a Debian host.

Setting up reminder e-mails

There are 3 elements to this approach - a crontab entry, a runreminders.sh script, and a folder called reminders that has reminder as files named with the date to send the reminder via e-mail (i.e. you need to create these files, embed the script, and put in the text for your reminder (and make sure the file is executable as a script))

The easiest way to create a "new" reminder is to copy an existing reminder, e.g. cp 2025-05-01 2026-06-01, then edit new reminder to change script (if needed).

Also, you can add a cleanup section to runreminders.sh to clear up "old" files (but you may not want to if you want a history of these reminders)
This could be something like:

for rmfile in `find /home/user/scripts/reminders/* -mtime +10`;
do
  echo Removing this file: $rmfile;
  rm -r $rmfile
done
Note: This uses the file modification time, so depending on how you create the reminders, this may not work the way you wish. You could be a less than check in the else condition in runreminders.sh to delete older files, e.g. if [[ "$CHKDATE" < "$CURDATE" ]] ;

Below are the 3 pieces:

crontab entry (typically crontab -e to edit & update crontab for user)

#Reminders run at 6am every day, refer to /home/user/scripts/reminders/readme.txt
0 6 * * * sh /home/user/scripts/runreminders.sh


runreminders.sh

Note - if using sh (vs. bash), the syntax below will not work, but this is easily resolved by making a sh script that runs bash to run the bash script, e.g.

#!/bin/sh
# Filename: runreminders
# want bash for if check, use this to call runreminders.sh with bash from crontab

/bin/bash /home/user/scripts/runreminders.sh

exit 0
(And change crontab to run runreminders vs runreminders.sh)

#!/bin/bash
# Filename: runreminders.sh in /home/user/scripts
# Date Revised: 2025-02-05
# Overview - run every day, looks for file with date filename, and if match
# to current date, sends e-mail (script/reminder embedded in actual file)
# so reminders folder has files like 2025-05-01, 2025-12-11, 2026-01-01, etc.

CURDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`

for item in `ls reminders/*`
do
  CHKDATE=`basename $item`

 # echo $CURDATE
 # echo $CHKDATE

  if [[ "$CHKDATE" = "$CURDATE" ]] ;
  then
   echo "Current date $CHKDATE is equal to $CURDATE - Sending Reminder EMail!"
   ./reminders/$CHKDATE
  else
   echo "Current date $CHKDATE is not equal $CURDATE"
  fi

done

exit 0



The file readme.txt explains what is in the reminders folder, with a sample script embedded - to start, you can copy readme.txt to YYYY-MM-DD, e .g. cp readme.txt 2026-01-01, then delete everything up to the #!/bin/bash line, save it, and finally make it executable, e.g. chmod a+x 2026-01-01

readme.txt file
readme.txt

reminders sub folder, used by ../runreminders (in crontab)

Format must be YYYY-MM-DD

Refer to existing file for script, e.g. the file name 2028-05-12 is tagged
to be executable as a script, (e.g. chmod a+x 2028-05-12), and has the
following script

File YYYY-MM-DD:

#!/bin/sh

# sendmail command line optons:
# -i - do not treat lines starting with dot specially
# -t - read recipients lists from message headers: TO,CC,BCC
# -v - use verbose mode (describe what is happening)
#
# The empty line separates mail headers from mail body.
# Without -t recipients should be listed after command line options.

REMDATE=`basename $0`

#echo $REMDATE

FROM='mail@example.com'
TO='Your Name '
/usr/sbin/sendmail -i -t << MESSAGE_END
To: ${TO}
From: ${FROM}
Subject: Reminder E-mail - $REMDATE

This is the reminder to do something you wanted to be reminded about, sent on $REMDATE
MESSAGE_END



LinuxCollections.com How To Video - Introduction to GUI Development

File: README.txt
Files used in examples/video:
mountoptiso.sh,
build, hello.c,
buildx, hellox.c,
buildgtk, helloworldgtk.c,
buildwayland, hellowayland.c, xdg-shell-protocol.c

Introduction to GUI Development
(the Graphical User Interface)

To begin with, we are going to start with a very basic C program, to lay the groundwork for
development, and cover some very basic "getting started" foundational items.

We will be using our Debian USB Developer Collection from LinuxCollections.com
All references will be on the Debian system and using the apt system (apt-get) to
install development tools, libraries, and header files.

We will indicate command line text by ending with "[Enter]"
Script code will be separated with ################## lines
Source code will be separated the /*********************/ lines

To start with, we use a new hard drive, install Debian 12.7.0 with ALL Desktop environments
(so we are able to test/work with different Window Managers/Desktop Environments)

Then we copy all the ISO files from the USB to the /opt/iso location, and as super user (root),
we mount all these iso files and add them to the sources.list for apt, so we have access
to ALL packages. The specific steps would be as follows:
1) su/password, run as root
2) cd /opt
3) mkdir iso
4) cd iso
5) cp /media/[user]/USB_Boot/boot/iso/*.iso . (THIS WILL TAKE AWHILE!)
6) cp /home/[user]/code/mountoptiso.sh .
7) ./mountoptiso.sh

So one of the reasons for these details are to help people new to Linux to
understand what is needed to do development work. So where to start?

The Debian wiki has a Building Tutorial, so let's start there...

For reference, this is the site that covers modifying Debian source
https://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial

As outlined there, the very first set of packages to be installed are listed.
Even if we aren't going to modify Debian packages, let's get these installed
so we have a good base for doing development work.

For required build tools, etc., make sure to install essentials, e.g.:

apt-get install build-essential fakeroot devscripts[Enter]

At this point, we can actually build (compile) source code and create
working programs. Let's do that with the basic Hello World! program.

See the build script and hello.c
#################################################################
#!/bin/bash

#build script

echo "Begin..."

gcc -o helloworld hello.c

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Hello built!"
else
echo "gcc compile failed with exit code $?"
fi

#################################################################
/***************************************************************/
/*********************************************************************************************
* hello.c
********************************************************************************************/
#include
#include

void main(void)
{
printf("Hello World!\n");
}
/***************************************************************/

For the XLib / X-Window example (buildx, hellox.c) you will
need the X11 XLib headers and libraries. The Debian package is
"libx11-dev" - to install:

apt-get install libx11-dev[Enter]

The buildx script looks like this:
#################################################################
#!/bin/bash

#buildx script

echo "Begin..."

#apt-get install libx11-dev

gcc -o helloworldx hellox.c
#gcc -o helloworldx hellox.c -lX11

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Hello built!"
else
echo "gcc compile failed with exit code $?"
fi

#################################################################

As noted in the comments, this package is required

We won't be including the source code due to the increasing length,
so you have to reference the file directly - hellox.c

For the GTK example (buildgtk, helloworldgtk.c) you will
need the pkgconf (Package Configuration), and the GTK-4 headers
and libraries. The Debian packages are "pkgconf" and "libgtk-4-dev"
To install:

apt-get install pkgconf[Enter]
apt-get install libgtk-4-dev[Enter]

The buildgtk script looks like this:
#################################################################
#!/bin/bash

#buildgtk script

echo "Begin..."

#apt-get install pkgconf
#apt-get install libgtk-4-dev

gcc $(pkg-config --cflags gtk4) -o helloworldgtk helloworldgtk.c $(pkg-config --libs gtk4)

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Hello built!"
else
echo "gcc compile failed with exit code $?"
fi

#################################################################

For the wayland example (buildwayland, hellowayland.c) you will
need the wayland headers and libraries. The Debian package is
"libwayland-dev"
To install:

apt-get install libwayland-dev[Enter]

The buildwayland script looks like this:

#################################################################
#!/bin/bash

#buildwayland script

echo "Begin..."

#apt-get install libwayland-dev

gcc -o hellowayland hellowayland.c xdg-shell-protocol.c -ggdb3 -lm -lwayland-client `pkg-config --cflags --libs pangocairo` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cairo`

#to build with full debug information add in -ggdb3
#gcc -o hellowayland hellowayland.c xdg-shell-protocol.c -ggdb3 -lm -lwayland-client `pkg-config --cflags --libs pangocairo` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cairo`

if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Hello built!"
else
echo "gcc compile failed with exit code $?"
fi

#################################################################

As one final note, we introduce valgrind, which is a development tool that can find memory leaks. It is too involved to go into here, but we want you to be aware of it. Refer to valgrind documentation and examples to learn about it. Note in these 4 examples, the high-level ones (GTK/Wayland) have memory leaks, even though there is code to clean things up on exit.

apt-get install valgrind[Enter]