Jim Hall

5850 points

Minnesota

Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.

Open Sourcerer People's Choice Award People's Choice Award 2018 Linux Contributor Club Author

Authored Content

Learn Bash by writing an interactive game

Programming a simple game is a great way to practice a new language and compare it against others you know.

Test GNOME apps on this Linux reference platform

Introducing GNOME OS, the plain-vanilla Linux reference platform that makes it easier to test GNOME applications and bug reports.

What I love about the newest GNOME desktop

Check out the top new features in the GNOME 3.38 desktop.

Design a book cover with an open source alternative to InDesign

Use the open source publishing software, Scribus to create a cover for your next self-published book.

Origin stories about Unix

Brian Kernighan, one of the original Unix gurus, shares his insights into the origins of Unix and its associated technology.

Two people chatting via a video conference app

Meeting for the first time after 26 years of open source collaboration

Open source is great because people from anywhere can get involved, but it can be lonely. Take advantage of the proliferation of video conferencing tools available to make…

Authored Comments

Jim Hall

9 Apr 2020

Print double-sided documents at home with this simple Bash script

Oops, that is my error when prepping this for an article. I moved the pages= definition down to where it gets used for the B sides (thought that would make it easier to read) but I forgot there's an echo statement at the start that references $pages, and a sleep command up above that sleeps for the number of seconds equal to the number of pages.

Sorry about that. Yes, the pages= definition should be at the top of the script.

Jim Hall

27 Mar 2020

How to create a personal file server with SSH on Linux

That's a good link and reference to spinning down hard drives. In my case, I have quite a lot of free space in /home on my microSD card. Not mentioned in the article is a USB fob drive that's mounted as /backup that I use for other things.

Neither is particularly fast for writing huge amounts of data (like doing a full backup of my regular Linux desktop PC) but it's just fine for making a backup copy of a project folder, or storing some things that I wasn't ready to delete but didn't need to keep.