Ubuntu Linux

Tor Browser, previously known as Tor Browser Bundle, is a web browser that protects your privacy while you are surfing the Internet. It's a modified version of Mozilla Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) that includes TorButton, TorLauncher, NoScript and HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extensions, and the Tor proxy.
 

Its main purpose is to circumvent censorship by concealing its users' identities and their online activity from surveillance and traffic analysis. This is done by using using thousands of servers (Tor relays), multi-layered encryption, isolating each website you visit so third-party trackers can't follow you, prevent someone watching your connection from knowing what websites you visit, and make it difficult to be fingerprinted based on your device and browser info.

See how to install Tor Browser on Linux - you'll find 3 ways of doing this, using Tor Browser Launcher which automaticall downloads Tor Browser and install it for you, or manually, creating the desktop shortcut automatically though.

This article explains how to use FFmpeg to extract the audio stream from a video, either without re-encoding (keeping the original format), or converting the resulting audio file to CBR (constant bitrate) or VBR (variable bitrate) MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.
ffmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio/video source. It can also convert between arbitrary sample rates and resize video on the fly with a high quality polyphase filter. FFmpeg is a powerful tool that can do almost anything you can imagine with multimedia files. In this article, we are interested in using it to convert files, so we won't be taking a deep dive into its entire feature set. Before we look at using FFmpeg, first we need to take a quick look at what a media file exactly is.

Read more to see how to extract audio from video (with or without re-encoding) using ffmpeg from the command line.

Since Oracle Java 11 can't be directly downloaded from Oracle any more, the installer no longer works, so I created a new installer that requires the user to create an Oracle account, download the Oracle Java 11 .tar.gz archive (the same version as the installer), and place the archive in /var/cache/oracle-jdk11-installer-local/. After this, you can install the oracle-java11-installer-local package, and it will set up Oracle Java 11 for you on Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

This article on Linux Uprising explains how to use the new installer for Oracle Java 11, to install the JDK using a local .tar.gz that you've manually downloaded from the Oracle website, using your Oracle signin.

This article presents 2 tools for converting PDF documents to editable text on Linux, using a graphical tool (Calibre) and a command line tool (pdftotext). 

The GUI tool used to convert PDF to text presented in this article is Calibre. This application can also perform file conversions from the command line, but since that requires installing the full GUI, the article mentions a different, specialized command line tool for converting PDF to text called... pdftotext.

pdftotext has many options, including the ability to specify the page range to convert, maintain the original physical layout of the text as best as possible, set line endings (unix, dos or mac), and even work with password-protected PDF files. 

You can protect your Windows computer from DNS spoofing by using DNSCrypt Proxy. DNSCrypt is a protocol that authenticates communication between a DNS client and a DNS resolver, preventing DNS spoofing. The easiest way of using DNSCrypt Proxy in Microsoft Windows is by using a tool called Simple DNSCrypt Proxy. Read more about it on FOSS Uprising.

"install-java.sh" is an installation script for setting up Oracle Java Development Kit on Debian based Linux Operating Systems. While the developer says this is for Debian-based Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.), it also works on Fedora. It might also work on other Linux distributions but this was not tested.

To use the install-java.sh script to install any Oracle Java version on Linux, make sure that the "unzip" package is installed. While this is not used to install the JDK (it's only used for the Unlimited JCE Policy file, which this script can install, and is only available as a zip file), the script will not work without it.​

See Linux Uprising blog for details.

The install-java.sh script is quite versatile, allowing users to install any Oracle JDK major / minor version. You can use it to:

LibreOffice can create a fillable form document, which can then be exported to PDF, creating an interactive forms PDF. 

PDF is a very popular format for static document that doesn’t require changes. You may also have seen PDF files that come with form that you can fill in. In case you are wondering how you can create a PDF file with fillable form, here is one easy way you can do so, and it is free of charge, and on any platform (Windows, macOS or Linux), using LibreOffice writer.

See the article on Linux Uprising for how to create a document containing forms in LibreOffice Writer, and how to then export it to a Forms PDF document.

Common forms that can be created with LibreOffice, and then exported to PDF, include:

• Check box - a flag field that can be ticked or un-ticked, see e.g. language check box fields.
• Text box - a simple text edit, see e.g. Family Name field.
• List box - a list box where user selects one of the listed elements. See Gender field.
• Combo box - a combined list and text box; i.e. user can either use list or type a new text. See Country field.

Small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.

PDFArranger is very simple and easy to use, with only a few buttons in its toolbar, to open a PDF document, save the current modifications, zoom in or out, rotate or delete PDF document pages. To rearrange the pages in a PDF file, open the PDF document you want to modify, and drag & drop the pages to change their order.

Read more about splitting and merging PDF documents in Linux, as well as rotating, croping and rearranging PDF pages.

Some features are available in the application context menu - for example the Export selection option, which allows exporting some pages of the current PDF as a separate PDF document, is only available by right clicking a page (or multiple pages - hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple pages):
 

DNSCrypt is a network protocol which authenticates and encrypts Domain Name System (DNS) traffic between the user's computer and recursive name servers. It turns regular DNS traffic into encrypted DNS traffic that's protected from spying, spoofing, or man-in-the-middle attacks, thus improving the user's online security and privacy. Compared to v1, the 2.0 series of DNSCrypt Proxy, which had its first stable release back in February, was rewritten in Go, has support for DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTP, and it supports DNS caching. It also has a new configuration file format that's not compatible with the old v1.
 

DNSCrypt Proxy v2 is available in the Debian Testing and Unstable repositories, as well as the Ubuntu 18.10 repositories. There's also a PPA for Ubuntu 18.04 and Linux Mint 19. The PPA has packages for older Ubuntu / Linux Mint versions but I couldn't get it to work, so this article offers instructions only for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 18.10, Linux Mint 19, Debian Unstable and Debian Testing.
 

See how to install DNSCrypt Proxy2 in Ubuntu or Debian.

Some time ago Dropbox began to warn me about supporting ext4 as FS only.  The base file system needs to be ext4, and specifically not ecryptfs. i.e. if your home folder is encrypted, you need to put the Dropbox folder someplace else, eg. a separate ext4 partition.

To overcome this, you can use an utility called dropbox-filesystem-fix. This makes your Dropbox folder appear as if it's on an unencrypted Ext4 filesystem, no matter what filesystem you use, and you don't have to mount anything, you just have to run Dropbox with with a dropbox-filesystem library (LD_PRELOAD).

You'll need to grab the code from GitHub, compile the library (make) and replace the Dropbox startup entry with the dropbox_start.py script provided by dropbox-filesystem-fix.

If you need complete step by step instructions, check out this page from Linux Uprising blog.