Luke's Ubuntu and Linux Hacks

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) Background Rarely am I jealous of "anything Windows," but one of those is the Windows Power Tool that takes a screenshot of an image file and allows you to OCR any text in the image. But while I covet an exact replica for Linux use, I have settled on NormCap as my favorite alternative. I tried some other Linux alternatives, but I won't waste time and space on details of why I did not like them.  My only beef with NormCap is that the Flathub version simply will not work on my Ubuntu 24.04 machine. I am far from being a programmer, but my guess is that it has something to do with a clash between t...

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) RANT (or skip and go straight to HOW TO...below) I love Catfish, the search engine, and I use it extensively, especially when I need to search an attached USB drive (MyPassport) for content text, which cannot be done in Files (Nautilus) on an Ubuntu machine (despite the promises of the OS 24.04 release). When 24.04 was released, I decided to forego my umpteenth Upgrade and do the “full monty” fresh install. After the install, I was totally dismayed and very irritated to discover that virtually all the programs I run were now available only as snaps, not only in the initial install, but post-install in the Sof...

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted sections for the problem and the fix.) Background Rather than upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 after many years of doing nothing but upgrades, I decided that a new, or fresh, full install might be a good idea. It was, overall, with very few glitches. One of those glitches was installing one of my favorite (and crucial to my work) applications: Calibre. What I Did I boogied over to the Calibre website and copied the code for the binary install, same as I had done for several years to both install Calibre originally, then to do version upgrades. What Happened When I opened a Terminal and pasted in the Install code, I got this result: You are missing the syst...

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted section s for the problem and the fix.) SITUATION BRIEFING: When I first installed FreeFileSync, instead of just downloading the free (non-donation copy) from the FFS website , I decided to install the Flatpak version I found in Gnome Software. I don't want to say necessarily that was a mistake—but it would turn out to be a minor inconvenience when I later purchased and installed the Donation Edition of FFS.  I had only been using the free version of FFS for about a month when I decided to make a donation and opt for the Donation version of the software. Now, on the FFS web site I was reassured that I did not need to worry about uninstalling th...