Table of contents for June 2024 in Linux Format

On 20th March, Red Hat display driver software engineer Danilo Krummrich announced the creation of the Nova project, a Rust-based driver for Nvidia GPUs. This is no doubt welcome news to users of the open source graphics driver Nouveau, given that last year its chief maintainer at Red Hat resigned from the project. In the developer mailing list, Krummrich announced that Nova is intended to succeed Nouveau, with the aim to create a simplified, more modern driver: “Nouveau’s historic architecture, especially around nvif/nvkm, is rather complicated and inflexible, and requires major rework to solve certain problems (such as locking hierarchy in VMM/MMU code for VM_ BIND, currently solved with a workaround), and second, with a GSP-only driver, there is no need to maintain compatibility with pre-GSP code.” Danilo also appreciated…

DigitalPlat, FlyOS developer, proudly announces on its main page: “Imagine coding on your phone, connecting a keyboard and mouse, and effortlessly accessing your favourite tools like LibreOffice, VSCode, GIMP, Jupyter and more. It’s a complete Linux system that fits in your pocket!” Although many of these activities can be achieved on Android via Termux and Linux Deploy, FlyOS is optimised for mobile devices. Users use the device’s web browser to interface with the containerised version of Linux. The developers draw comparisons between FlyOS and WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which uses virtualisation to run a Linux kernel inside a lightweight utility virtual machine. In order to install on Android, users must first unlock the bootloader and have rooted their device – via Magisk, for example. They can then install the FlyOS…

SPECS SoM: LM4A (T-Head TH1520 12nm, Quad C910) RISC-V 1.5GHz GPU: Imagination BXM-4-64 GPU Mem: 16GB LPDDR4X Storage: 128GB eMMC + external NGFF SSD, microSD Display: 7-inch touch 1,280x 800 LCD, 1x mini HDMI Input: 72-key keyboard, RedPoint Camera: 2MP front-facing Audio: 3.5mm headphone, stereo speakers, MEMS microphone Comms: Wi-Fi 6, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.4 Ports: 1x USB 3 Type A, 1x USB 3 Type C, 1x USB 2 Type A Battery: 3,000mAh, 12V 2.5A Size: 180x140x 20mm L ooking like a ThinkPad that has been shrunk [a ShrinkPad? – ed], this little laptop isn’t a netbook but a RISC-V development platform. Inside is a RISC-V-powered SoM (system on module) SO-DIMM board connected to a carrier board. The SoM is a LicheePi 4A, similar to earlier Raspberry Pi Compute Modules.…

IN BRIEF Ubuntu 24.04 includes up to 12 years of support. This, combined with a dedicated firmware updater and security hardening, means it’ll likely outlive any hardware on which it’s installed. SPECS CPU: 2GHz dual-core Mem: 4GB HDD: 25GB Builds: x86_64, ARM64, ARMhf, RISC-V, s390x, ppc64le (POWER8 and later) This year is already special in that it marks 20 years since Ubuntu first graced Linux users’ desktops. April also marks the release of version 24.04 (code name Noble Numbat), the latest Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release. By default, Ubuntu 24.04 will be supported for five years, until June 2029. This covers all packages in the main Ubuntu repository. However, Ubuntu Pro subscribers can also benefit from an additional five years of support. Personal subscribers use Ubuntu Pro for free…

Debian-based Parrot Security boots straight into the live desktop, where the installer is invoked from an icon. It’s nice to see a distro that embraces Btrfs as the main partition format. Other than that, it’s a fairly standard Linux GUI installation experience. Like all of these options, there are instructions on the website to install onto a USB flash drive. Kali also uses Debian, and the installation is fairly standard but has a couple of extra questions, such as the domain name. There are two options for software choice but it’s unlikely that you’d decide not to install the security tools. You can, however, choose between Xfce (default), KDE and Gnome for the desktop. It’s also possible to select Expert Install for a text-mode installation that gives more control over…

Kali has it all if you want a pre-made networkhacking distribution. It has an impressive number K of editions to cover most installation scenarios, plus a slick-looking lightweight desktop and a huge set of built-in, well-categorised hacking tools. It also benefits from being the most popular hacking distro, so there are plenty of tutorials and many penetration-testing tool tutorials use Kali as a base. We suspect that the average Linux user could have Kali installed and be following a penetration tutorial within a morning if they already have some experience with networking tools. Parrot OS gives Kali a run for its money in most aspects as it features a stylish desktop, a comprehensive set of built-in tools and a decent variety of installation editions, too. For beginners, it’s worth considering…

It’s that most special time of the year when Canonical releases a new Ubuntu LTS. This I time, the creature it has loosed unto the world is Noble Numbat. And what a fine specimen it is. OK, full disclosure before we get stuck in: we’re basing our evaluation on the latest daily images. So, we’re ignoring some rough edges as we’re sure they’ll be smoothed by the time you read this. This does mean we may miss any final flourishes the team is holding back until the final release, but we’re sure you’ll forgive us. Before you rush to https://ubuntu.com/desktop to download the installation material, we’d like to offer a few pointers. If this is your first foray into the world of Ubuntu, or Linux in general, good news: we’re…

The key improvement to the latest Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 release is a T bump to support the most recent Linux kernel 6.6 LTS. The Debian 12-based operating system has had plenty of tweaks and comes with Chrome 122 and Firefox 123. Interestingly, it also features a new version of the Pi firmware and this can be flashed using the latest raspi-config tool to the Pi 4 and the Pi 5’s onboard EEPROM. Improvements to the current Wayland session have been implemented and there are speed boosts for opening the system Bluetooth and Network menus. This release also improves compatibility with alternative window managers and enhances the dark theme introduced in the previous release by ensuring some widgets are now correctly displayed. Plus, the popover windows from the taskbar have…

Oscilloscopes are expensive and largely reserved for makers or electronics engineers O who need to understand what a circuit is doing. We can’t make our own, simple oscilloscope and logic analyser with a £4 Raspberry Pi Pico, right? It turns out that with a Raspberry Pi Pico, some software called Scoppy and an old Android phone, we can do just that. For the low, low price, we can’t expect the earth. This won’t rival an expensive setup, but for most of us, it is enough to understand and get to grips with the equipment before we open up our wallet. In this tutorial, we learn how to configure a Raspberry Pi Pico as an oscilloscope and use the Scoppy Android app to read live data from a circuit. Note that…

Think email client and the obvious example is Mozilla’s Thunderbird. But whether you’re a T long-time Thunderbird user or looking for a new email client, you may find that Betterbird is – if you’ll excuse the pun – a better fit. That’s particularly true if you’re missing features that have quietly been dropped from Thunderbird in recent years. Betterbird is a fork of Thunderbird, but it’s careful to stick closely to its parent in what Betterbird describes is a “soft fork”. It closely follows the Thunderbird ESR release schedules to ensure it remains as secure as Thunderbird itself and is built from the latest version of Thunderbird ESR before applying its own fixes, features and customisations. All of Betterbird’s bug fixes are submitted upstream to allow Thunderbird to benefit from…

In late March 2024, Microsoft software engineer Andres Freund was flying home to San Francisco from his native Germany. He’d been doing some micro benchmarking and saw that his system’s sshd processes were using an unusual amount of CPU resources. This in turn was generating a number of errors in Valgrind. Andres explored further, finding this was caused by error messages centred around liblzma, one of the major components of XZ Utils along with xz itself. The source code for both of these are publicly available via GitHub, as are the associated binaries. XZ Utils can be found in almost every version of Linux, given that it provides lossless data compression. Freund initially believed that this issue only affected his own OS (Debian Sid). After more careful investigation, he discovered…

Since 2001, Distrowatch has helped Linux users make informed decisions by posting news and reviews of various versions of the OS. In late March, the National Cyber ​Incident Response Center (USOM) in Turkey decided to block access to the site for local users, though it’s not entirely clear why. USOM claimed that Distrowatch’s IP hosts “harmful software” and it’s a source of malware. Given the internet censorship in Turkey, a more cynical explanation is the government doesn’t want its citizens to discover privacyorientated distros to protect themselves online.…

There are two likely reasons we’ve not heard much about Regata OS. One: it’s from Brazil. Two: it’s based on OpenSUSE. In a world that seems to revolve around Debian/Ubuntu-based distros in the English language, stepping away from either is bound to create speed bumps. So, is offering a slick games-first distro enough to move past them? IN BRIEF An OpenSUSEbased distro from Brazil, maintained for almost a decade, this is a slick, wellpresented distro with a custom gaming angle that can double as your daily driver. SPECS CPU: 2GHz dual-core 64-bit Mem: 4GB HDD: 30GB Builds: x86-64 We first looked at Regata OS 22 in LXF293; 18 months on and two versions later, we have Regata OS 24 Arctic Fox, with the big update being KDE Plasma 6 desktop…

K ali works differently from the others as it has the security tools in the root of the app launcher. If you know what you’re looking for, the whole thing is searchable from the launcher. The ‘normal’ apps are located in the Usual Applications folder, and sure enough, the security tools are absent from here. The security tools are organised into 13 numbered categories, many of which have subfolders. As with all of these distros, Kali has a mixture of commandline and GUI tools, and if you click on a command-line tool, it opens a new terminal window. However, it’s not always obvious at a glance whether you are dealing with a GUI application as many of the command-line tools also have an icon. None of the distros handle this…

Diet Pi, the low-resource Swiss army knife of distros, runs on anything, so it’s fitting that there D is a new alpha version for the Raspberry Pi 5. After downloading the 170MB disk image – yeah, Diet Pi v9.1 is that small – we used Raspberry Pi Imager to write it to a microSD card. After the initial boot expanded the OS to use the card’s full capacity, we followed the Diet Pi setup screens. This can be done at the Pi, using a monitor, keyboard and so on. Or, we can follow the setup process over SSH – look for the Diet Pi machine on your network. The process involves configuring user accounts and choosing whether or not to disable a serial console. After setup, we are dropped into…

As opposed to music players, which can be used to enjoy your own music collection, radio A exposes you to new and, sometimes, old wonders that you otherwise might not come across. While some graphical music players let you stream internet music, CLI warriors might occasionally want to move to the music, too. Thankfully, the Curses-based internet radio player PyRadio fits the bill perfectly. We interrupt this broadcast with a special shout-out to our beloved editor Neil. Refer to the box (opposite page) to learn how one email changed the course of this tutorial. But more importantly, tune in next month to read what would have been this issue’s tutorial. We return you now to the regular programming, so you can learn how to play internet radio stations from the…

OUR EXPERT Ferenc Deák never throws anything away, which is why he still has all his demoscene files. Sadly, it also means his fridge is a no-go zone. It all started when this author’s beloved retro PC, used to host nostalgic gaming sessions, I suddenly suffered a nervous breakdown and decided not to boot any more. Only the noisy hard drive remained whirring away, when plugged into an adaptor, and burrowed in longforgotten backup directories lay an intriguing folder called scene. Once-lost source files from a bygone era appeared that showcased how to create vibrant graphics, smooth scrolls and spirited sprite animations. Heavily influenced by the rediscovery of those files, the author has delved into his demoscene past, with the belief that such insights should not remain confined to…

Previously in Linux Format… We covered how to write P 6502 (LXF312) first on a website and then using an assembler, and then how to develop for the Commodore 64 (LXF313). In this article, we’re continuing with the C64 but moving way from 6502 assembly language and instead we’re going with coding in C. Originally, we were going to use the CC65 C compiler but eventually chose an alternative, Oscar64 (https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64), instead. The main reason being that it appears to be more powerful, implementing most of C99 plus a lot of C++ features, and comes with a number of sample programs, including games. These include full source code, so if you want to write games or other programs, there are plenty of examples. The original idea for the Oscar64 compiler…

On 20th March 2024, Redis announced that as of version 7.4, the software will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available Licence (RSALv2) and Server Side Public Licence (SSPLv1). The Open Source Initiative characterises the Server Side Public Licence as a fauxpen licence. Organisations that use the licensed code for SaaS are required to disclose the entire source code of the service to users, rather than solely their modified version of the software. An open source fork has now been created, which uses the LGPL. See https://redict.io/.…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linux-related issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email letters@ linuxformat.com. Funny fonts I’ve just installed Linux Mint. It was very easy and it’s great, but the fonts are awful, as they have always been on Linux. The first thing I did was increase the font size to 15 in the system preferences, and turn on hinting to full. This made fonts look fuzzy, but at least they aren’t jagged. But on some websites, the fonts are still jagged. I tried installing Fontconfig and editing fonts.conf to force no bitmap fonts anywhere and to always use Liberation Sans for everything, but this had no effect. What’s a…

IN BRIEF CachyOS is a powerful and secure alternative to Arch, sporting its own secure kernel and custom apps. Use the intuitive installer to choose from a huge range of desktop environments and window managers. SPECS CPU: 1GHz Mem: 3GB (4GB best) HDD: 30GB (50GB best) Builds: x86_64, x86-64-v3 Stable versions of CachyOS have been released since late 2022. The OS itself is based on Arch Linux but it’s been heavily customised. Some of these changes are centred around speeding up the kernel using the BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Scheduler). The desktop packages are compiled with LTO (Link Time Optimisation), as well as enhancements for x86- 64-v3 and x86-64-v4 compatibility. While talking customisation, of all the Linux distros we’ve reviewed, CachyOS is one of the most flexible given that the downloadable…

Kali has a huge variety of install options, and these include images for ARM-based computers and pre-made virtual K machine images for most of the popular virtualisers. It’s even possible to install a version of Kali on to an Android-powered device. There are also containerised versions for low-overhead access to the Kali tools. This is in addition to the expected x86 and AMD64 versions for a normal PC. The website has instructions for making your own custom edition. BlackArch has three installation ISOs: Full, Slim and Netinstall. We went for Slim as the Full edition (22GB!) is only useful for installation without an internet connection. Netinstall installs a basic system, leaving it to you to add the optional tools manually. There are instructions to add BlackArch packages to standard ArchLinux…

L et’s get something out of the way from the beginning – some of these desktops adopt a ‘hacker’ aesthetic. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of normal functionality. There’s even something to be said for the desktops that don’t bother with a hacker look because it means that they are easier to use unobtrusively. We’re not going to mark up or down either way. Just bear in mind that some of these desktops make it look as though you’re hacking something. These distributions are designed to be occasional or secondary use systems rather than daily drivers, so we prefer to see a standard desktop and window layout to something that has to be learnt from scratch or that might…

These distros are focused on a technical area of computer use, penetration testing, but that doesn’t mean they’re T not suitable for beginners in this discipline. It’s not much of a surprise that a Gentoo-based distro like Pentoo is more complicated to use. Even installation requires some extra know-how. When Pentoo is booted, it doesn’t automatically start the graphical environment, and the network is disabled. The icon to enable networking wasn’t added to the desktop once we’d carried out an HD installation (a bug?), so we had to look online, on another computer, to find the command to get networking going. Gentoo is great, but it’s less well known than the Debian or Red Hat-derived distros, so the average Linux user would have to learn how to use the package…

You can download the Ubuntu 24.04 ISO image from the link above. It’s over 5GB, so won’t fit on a regular DVD. Unless you’ve got a thing for dual-layer optical media, you’ll want to write that image to a USB drive. This is more complex than just copying the file on to it, and you need specialist tools to do it. If you’re already running Ubuntu, it includes its own tool for this, called Startup Disk Creator. Otherwise, we recommend Etcher, which you can get from https://etcher.io. It runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Fire up Etcher, select the ISO you just downloaded and hit Flash. Now make a cup of tea while it’s writing. Exactly how to boot your freshly minted media depends on your system. Some give…

Besides the lack of Start menu, one of the most stark differences between Ubuntu and Windows is the way software (be it applications, drivers or games) is installed. While this is changing on Windows, many users are still used to downloading software from (sometimes questionable) websites in the form of an executable (or compressed executable) bundle. While things on Ubuntu (and other flavours of Linux) can be installed this way, the de rigueur way to install software is direct from Ubuntu’s repositories. This way, you can be sure that what you’re getting is what it’s supposed to be, and it will work with everything else installed there. The App Center is your gateway to these repositories, so let’s explore how the process works by installing something. One change Canonical has…

Without Ubuntu, the current Linux landscape would be unrecognisable. Back in October 2004, the first 4.10 (2004.10) release of Ubuntu, with its intriguing Warty Warthog code name, leapt from obscurity to being one of the most downloaded Linux distributions of the year. And that’s in spite of it sporting a less-than-attractive brown wallpaper. Perhaps the motto of “Linux for Human Beings” might have been on to something – radical departures such as enabling user accounts to make system-wide admin changes flew in the face of the classic novice-baffling Linux behaviour of the time. Being backed by an actual for-profit organisation was another departure, rather than the rag-tag hacking teams or lone coders that had preceded it, with those successes coming more by accident than by design. It seemed Ubuntu was…

In recent months, interest in Linux has exploded. Increasing numbers of users are finally turning their backs on the likes of Microsoft and Apple to dip their toes into the wonderful world of open source, privacy-first computing. But even if Linux becomes ever more user-friendly as the years pass, it can still be a bit of a culture shock when you scratch the surface. That’s where this new series comes in. We’re going to provide you with a beginner’s guide to key parts of Linux – perfect for newcomers, switchers and anyone who wants to brush up on their core knowledge. We’re going to focus on the most popular flavour of Linux out there: Ubuntu. We’ll be basing it on the latest version – 24.04 LTS – and that means…

Old data should be backed up, and it’s becoming easier to read files created and saved on other platforms. Thanks to emulation and advances in how data is read on old formats, you can back up cartridges, cassettes and even disks, from 8-bit and 16-bit systems. Here we’re looking at C64 cassettes. But why? We have a ton of old computer cassettes from 1984 to 1991. On there are seven years of data from games, software and over 84 months of accumulated activity. In some cases, the cassettes are personal fast-load backups made with the help of an Action Replay cartridge. But what we’re particularly interested in are the cassettes that hold data from art packages, tools like Graphic Adventure Creator, and other project work. The reckoning was that if…