Linux Friendly Product Review PS2 to USB Keyboard

I had an old keyboard sitting in my garage and thought it would be nice to use it on my laptop when I'm at home. So I went on Amazon and looked for a PS2 to USB converter for a keyboard. I should mention that I'm an Amazon affiliate but I only review products that I've used on this blog. Also if the product sucks, I'll tell you it sucked. This product however, did not suck and did exactly what it was supposed to do.

The Story ...

So the other day I found my old desktop computer keyboard in the garage. I remembered how much I liked the keyboard, unfortunately it was PS2 and I didn't think it would work in my laptop. Then I thought maybe I could find a PS2 to USB converter and plug it into my USB port on the laptop.

So off I went to radio shack and thought I would just get a PS2 to USB converter and all would be well. Luckily radio shack didn't have one. The girl at the counter didn't even know what PS2 to USB was. The Old Hack Shack,  Radio Shack just keeps getting crappier.  Next choice was to go on Amazon and order one. I looked at a couple different converters and discovered by reading the reviews that you can't just use a standard PS2 to USB that you would use for a mouse. This was news to me and I was really glad I figured this out before I placed my order.

Apparently, you should get a special PS2 to USB for a keyboard. For a keyboard the USB adapter needs to convert the signal from the keyboard, otherwise it will not work. This then brought up the dreaded question of "will it work with GNU /Linux ?"

My understanding of this is that if the device you're purchasing meets the  "standard device specification"  or the "standard device protocols" of the device it should work in your Linux box. This isn't always the case, Linux can be a fickle friend, but for the most part, if you follow this rule the device should work.This goes for sound cards, video capture devices, and anything USB related.

Problems usually arise when companies deviate from the industry standard specification and then fix the problem using proprietary drivers. This can make it difficult to use the product for a Linux box, unless of course you write code and can create your own device drivers.  I, myself, can not perform such a task. 

So I did a little research online, and I couldn't really find out a lot about the PS2 to USB keyboard converter. I had a good feeling though and it only costed a whopping $9.00 so I took a chance. The item arrived in a couple days, I plugged my PS2 keyboard into the USB converter, plugged the converter into my computers USB port and all worked great. I now have a standard desktop ergonomically correct keyboard to use when I'm working at home on my laptop.

This was literally plug and play. This is something that is happening more and more with Linux devices and I can't say how happy it makes me. You have to love unwrapping a product, installing it in your computer, and it works right out of the box. 

So if you have a old PS2 style keyboard lying around and you want to plug it into a USB port this converter worked great on my Linux rig running Fedora20.

As always thanks for reading. I have more information on fonts and font management to post in the next few days. Feel free to comment and have a great day ! 

What the font !

 The last couple days, I've been working with fonts. So you can bet the next couple posts to the blog will be about , you guessed it , FONTS ! Not the most exciting topic but if you do a lot of design work , fonts may be of interest to you. If you don't do a lot of design work or change around fonts at all, then these next few posts will probably be pretty boring. In advance, sorry !

Doing some artwork for a customer the other day I thought it was a good time to upgrade and expand my font library. I just couldn't find the right font for the job. So I stopped everything, and started looking around for a font library I could purchase. Because this was a commercial job I wanted a font pack that was commercial use, and if possible royalty free so I could use it on multiple jobs.

I did a little research on font management using GNU/Linux, downloaded a new font manager, more on that in another post, and started searching for a new font pack. I went to Amazon and found this package 5000 fonts. It was just what I wanted and only $29.99. Perfect.

The package was available for digital download, and I was a little concerned about the format the package would be delivered in. Amazon didn't give any information about the file itself, ie; zip, rar, etc... So I figured I'd take a chance, worst case scenario, I download the package, if it's an executable .exe I'll open it on a friends computer, extract the fonts I want and then leave the file in my ftp server for safe keeping and further use down the road. 

Amazon unfortunately decided to use a Windows or Mac only downloader. WTF, I just want to download the file, by all that's holy and unholy why would you do such a thing ? Wwwhhhyy ? I couldn't even download the file. So I then called Amazon, told them of my plight, and the customer service rep instantly  refunded my money.

The strangest thing about this story is that according to the Amazon customer service rep I spoke with, the customer service department uses Ubuntu. The customer service rep said they can't even use half of Amazons services , and didn't understand why the company wouldn't make the website more Linux friendly.

Now, I can't watch movies on Amazon, and I can't participate in digital downloads. That really sux because I spend a lot of money on their site. Hopefully they make the sight more Linux friendly in the future. 

With that said, I'm on a mission today for commercial use font packs that are Linux friendly. I'll be posting my results, along with a little information on the new font manager I downloaded.  I guess the moral of this story is , if your looking to use the Amazon digital download service for software, and what not, you're not going to be doing it with a Linux machine !

On a final note, if anyone has any suggestions on where to download some decent commercial use fonts, please feel free to comment.

The Bastard Child Of My Blogs May Update

Welcome May,

For the May update, all I can say is I want and need to start posting here more.  This has become the bastard child of my blogs. I figured when I started using Fedora 20 full time I would have all kinds of original content to post all the time. I figured things would break, things would need to be fixed and coming up with ideas would be easy. This is not what's happened.

It's been roughly about 13 months since I started using Linux full time. In that time I've really had no serious problems to report. Everything has been running fairly smoothly for the most part. With that said, the lack of problems is part of the reason for the lack of content. As I find interesting things Linux related I post them here. No problems, nothing to report, nothing happening except me using an alternative operating system. MAJOR BORING NEWS THERE !

So, I love this blog, and have no intention of quitting it. I think I'm going to start adding youtube vids. Some from other people and some of my own. I also think I'll be doing some software reviews, and information on some of the different programs I've found useful. Finally, because most of the programs I use are running on a GNU Linux machine, I'll be adding some tutorial links from some of my other blogs on Photography and Graphic Design using Linux related software and apps.

If anyone needs any cool cloud brushes for Gimp. Check out the link in this post from my Photography blog for some great cloud brushes. 

Thanks for reading. Updates coming soon this month I promise.Thanks for following, and to my Google plus peeps thanks for the love and support on G+. Anyone on Facebook I just added a Notes On Using Linux page there as well. Not much there currently but I just created it today.

I Wonder If It's Really Him ? God is that you ?

God ? Is that you talking ?

@NewAeonDesign It's called GNU/Linux, actually.
— Richard M. Stallman (@BigDickStallman) April 26, 2014

My reply :

@BigDickStallman sorry :(
— New Aeon Design (@NewAeonDesign) April 26, 2014

Not being sure if I was actually in the presence of a deity I was at a loss for words and feeling a bit ashamed.

First 24 Hours With Fedora 20

Happy Happy Happy ! Fedora 20 rocks !

First 24 hours with Fedora 20 and everythings all good ! The install went great using fedup, and really couldn't of been any easier. I have to admit I was more than a bit concerned, and was relieved that the upgrade went so smoothly.

For the most part I didn't notice any major changes,  some new log viewers that I didn't notice before. Something I'll have to play with down the road. Fedora 20 also seems to use a little more of my system resources. Nothing major, and nothing to bothersome. I'm going to have to go through the log files soon and look for errors. I had one freeze up, but it's a problem I had with Fedora 18 as well that I was able to replicate in Fedora 20. It just hasn't been a big enough nuisance to have to fix. I'll save that fix for a boring rainy day when I need something to post.

Anyway, enough with this techno babble ! For the tweeted version : Fedora 20 good, fedup rocks, and I'm as happy as a fat kid with cake !

fedup Fedora 18 to Fedora 20

So, I really didn't get fed up with Fedora 18, but I used fedup to upgrade to Fedora 20 and was pretty happy with the results. I was considering trying another distro, but was really happy with Fedora 18, then today I came across some software that I wanted to try but it was only available for Fedora 2O. I looked into updating my system and fedup was the suggested solution to upgrade. I had access to a really fast internet connection today, so I decided if I was going to try this , today would have to be the day. This saved me a ton of time on the downloading packages part of this post. All in all the entire process took about two hours. Here's what I did and what happened.

NOTE: You must use su or sudo for all commands ! If you don't have a really fast internet connection add some time to your install for package downloads. This could take some time.

So I decided to try the fedup upgrade from Fedora 18 to Fedora 20 . The first thing I did was read the wiki on fedup here.

As per the instructions I did a full system update to insure everything was compatible with fedup.

yum update

I'm glad I did this because I did make a few changes to Grub that I forgot about and that may have affected the upgrade. The update reset grub back to it original configuration. 

Once Fedora 18 was fully updated I installed fedup

yum install fedup

You want to make sure you download fedup-0.8.0-3  as per my research earlier versions can be buggy. Once fedup was installed I rebooted the computer to make sure all the changes and updates took effect.

Once the computer rebooted I typed

fedup --network 20 --nogpgcheck

Unfortunately I didn't notate my notes as to why, but the --nogpgcheck is necessary when updating from 18 to 20 but not when updating from 19 to 20 . 

At this point if you don't have Chrome browser installed everything should go easy peazy. Skip the Chrome steps.  If you do have Chrome installed continued reading.

Chrome

So here's where I ran into my first problem.

Downloading failed: failure: repodata/filelists.xml.gz from google-chrome: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

Google-chrome and google-repositories really goofed me up good for about 15 minutes.  If you run google-chrome uninstall it.

yum remove google-chrome

yum clean all

yum clean metadata

Then disable the google repositories

yum-config-manager --disable google-chrome

Once I did this I ran the

fedup --network 20 --nogpgcheck

And everything went fairly smoothly from there. fedup took care of just about everything. At the end of it, where it asks to reboot, I ended up with a couple warnings but at that point I think its almost to late to make any changes. I did some research before I did the reboot and it looked like the warnings were bugs, and o.k. to ignore. This was kind of scary, but all went well. If you get any warnings USE A SEARCH ENGINE AND MAKE SURE ITS BUG AND NOT AN ACTUAL PROBLEM. I think it should go without saying as well that you may want to backup any important data before you upgrade.

Once I rebooted , the entire install took a little over an hour on my computer. No problems at all, all data, and most of my configurations remained unchanged.  For a little clean up I simply did :

rpm --rebuilddb

I want to research doing additional clean up, because I know there are a lot of unused files left behind. After I do some research, that may be a post for another day.

And that's it, your done ! Hope this goes as smoothly for you as it did for me and enjoy your update Fedora 20 install. Good luck !

Appending Sequential Numbers To A Word Or File Using Linux

I needed to append some sequential numbering to a word to use in a list. For example :

word01
word02
word03
word04

The sequence of numbers had to go from 1 - 4999. Now I could of wrote this out 4999 times but that would of been painfully boring and probably would of given me a terrible case of carpal tunnel by the end of it all. Plus I use Linux, there must be an easier way to do this and there is ! It's called seq

If  you open up the terminal of your choice and type man seq it pulls up a small man page with a few options you can use. The option were interested in is the -f option. This is the printf style floating-point FORMAT. If your interested in getting a better understanding of this click here. Here's a basic command using this format with output:

seq -f "%04g" 6

output:

0001
0002
0003
0004
0005
0006

 The "%04g" gives us 4 digits starting with 0001 and continues on to 0006. This is pretty basic. We need to append these numbers to a word now, and start with 01 and go up to 4999. Heres what we do :

seq -f "yourword%02g" 4999

output:

yourword01
yourword02
yourword03

And this goes on till it reaches yourword4999. That would of been a lot of typing.

So now we need to put all this into a text file for another program to reference. Here's what you do.

seq -f "yourword%02g" 4999 > reference_file.txt

By adding the greater than symbol it pipes the output to a text file.

You can name the text file whatever you want. For my purposes it was a list file for another program I was running. Each word pointed the program to a numbered dir on a computer. You could also use this to create sequential file names.  For example:

touch $(seq -f "yourfilename%02g.txt" 10)

This would create yourfilename01.txt to yourfilename10.txt.  

 This is a great little program and with a little imagination you could really put this program to great use.