Inhoudsopgave van December 2023 - Linux Format

A ddlink has long been a budget alternative for SSDs, whether highend or low, and it has doubled down on this status by highlighting the new A93 as a ‘value’ selection. These are misleading descriptions because inexpensive drives such as the A93 can be surprisingly excellent performers, and adding a heatsink helps this one feel more premium. It’s also singlesided with 4TB of TLC, normally a holy grail for laptop users, but still an excellent choice for desktops if capacity is your priority. With the alternatives being older SSDs that, by their nature, take more power and produce more heat, the A93 feels more like an agile leader than a high-end wannabe. Shining star While this drive is unlikely to replace the stellar 990 Pro at the top of our…

A ccording to the official documentation, “SpiralLinux is a selection of desktop spins built from Debian GNU/Linux, with a focus on simplicity and out-of-the-box usability across all the major desktop environments.” In other words, installing it means you’re using a customised version of Debian. While Debianbased Linux distros are nothing new, the anonymous creator of SpiralLinux describes its parent OS as “a sprawling and impersonal organisation that does not focus on being friendly for the end-user”. Strong words, but they go on to explain that other variants don’t have the same resources as Debian, which is bad for the user if the alternative distro’s custom packages and repositories cease to exist. SpiralLinux is touted as a viable third way, given that it’s directly based on Debian, whose resources and package…

SPECS Vol: 220x220 x250mm Material: PLA, PETG, TPU up to 260°C Extruder: Direct drive Nozzle: 0.4mm high flow Build: PC spring steel, heated Levelling: Auto Sensor: Runout Comms: SD card Control: 3.2-inch colour with knob Size: 349x364 x490mm, 7.12kg This is the latest incarnation of the budgetfriendly Ender 3 printer. It’s proof that even after T making the new Core XY K1 its flagship model, the company hasn’t abandoned its beginner-friendly origins. This machine is a great choice for newbies because, unlike older Ender 3 models, the V3 SE is simple to build, has deluxe features, and is easy to use with step-by-step instructions right on the screen. It borrows points from other great Creality machines, with advanced auto levelling taken from the K1 series and the S1’s extremely capable…

Bash scripting is a cornerstone of the Unix and Linux world. It empowers developers, system B administrators and even casual users to automate tasks, process data and manage systems. But what if you could supercharge your scripting with the power of AI? It can turn out scripts faster than a human can. You just have to know how to ask the system nicely to do it for you. The essence of harnessing AI capabilities in Bash scripting lies in crafting the right prompts. Prompts can be thought of as asking the right question in a wellthought-out pattern. With effective prompts, admins can make the most of the model, helping to create powerful, efficient and clean Bash scripts. Here’s how… Clearly define your objectives: Before querying the AI system, it’s vital…

We’re continuing our look at running a selfhosted WordPress website on page 60, but publishing a personal website needn’t be costly or complicated. User-friendly platforms such as WordPress and Wix let you publish online for free – you might not even need to pay for web hosting. They give you everything you need to design and populate your site, maintain it and interact with visitors. Nearly half a billion websites are built on WordPress, while over 200 million people use Wix. But which should you choose? It’s not a case of one being better than the other. They approach the task from different angles. More apt would be to look at the jobs a personal website publisher needs to undertake, to see how each handles them. The best place to…

The Intel Arc A580 is finally here. Announced in 2022, we initially expected to see the card go on sale in early 2023. Functionally, it looks very much like the A750 and A770 8GB. The key difference is that four additional Xe-Cores have been disabled, along with the accompanying shaders and XMX units. It still has the full 256-bit memory interface, with the same 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM as the earlier Arc offerings. Right off the bat, the problem the A580 faces is that the street prices on the A750 is as low as £210, just £15 or so more than the launch price of the A580. Compounding this is the fact that Nvidia’s cheapest cards, the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060, are £220 and £280. The A580 should easily…

P isi Linux comes to us from Turkey and has been in active development since 2014. It follows a rolling release model. While it’s built from scratch from a stable base, Pisi is inspired by an older version of the Pardus operating system. The Pisi project is proud of its Turkish roots and by default the 2.7GB live DVD image is set to the developers’ native language. We found this simple enough to change with a press of F2. At the time of writing, Pisi is only available for x86_64 architectures. There’s no enterprise or server version, and the website states that using different desktop environments is still in beta. Still, the default KDE desktop is beautifully put together and the OS even loads a helpful welcome screen, which includes…

A fantastic report by the Raspberry Pi Foundation outlines how its A CoderDojo and Code Club are helping young coders around the world. CoderDojo was started in 2011 by self-taught coders James Whelton and Bill Liao in Co. Cork, Ireland. They wanted a social space for young people to learn code. It rapidly spread, and in 2017 the Raspberry Pi Foundation merged with CoderDojo. The UK’s Code Club, meanwhile, was created by Clare Sutcliffe MBE and Linda Sandvik in 2012 to help promote coding in after-school clubs and was also absorbed into the Pi Foundation in 2015. Jump to 2023 and the Pi Foundation’s Global Clubs Partner network involves more than 50 organisations in over 40 countries around the world. Its update outlines the seven new partners that joined since…

IN BRIEF Packing the power of the Raspberry Pi Pico into a board half its size, then adding 25 RGB LEDs seems like a dream combo. It works well, but the biggest issues are the lack of Wi-Fi and castellations for surface mount soldering. If you don’t need Wi-Fi or want to embed in your own PCB, then this is a fun board for less than £8. The Raspberry Pi Pico burst on to the scene in early 2021, a time when getting hold of a Raspberry Pi seemed impossible. The RP2040 SoC, Raspberry Pi’s first custom SoC, delivered an impressive amount of power for a chip costing $1. The £4 Raspberry Pi Pico was later improved with the £8 Pico W, but there is still a need for tiny…

IN BRIEF CDNetworks CDN Pro (previously known as CDN360) is a powerful and professional CDN from cloud computing expert CDNetworks, which also offers a host of other high-end cloud services. CDN Pro scores an immediate thumbs-up for its vast network of 250-plus points of presence (PoPs) all around the world. There’s decent coverage for North America and Europe, not so much for Africa or South America, but the real highlight is Asia, Oceania and CDN Pro’s China coverage of 70-plus cities – even giant Cloudflare ‘only’ has 37. CDNetworks uses QUIC (HTTP/3), GZIP and Brotli compression and its own custom technologies to accelerate all kinds of content, from static downloads to dynamic traffic, video streaming and more. If you’re using CDN Pro in a business, it’s likely you’ll want several…

OPEN SOURCE US/Chinese tech embargo hits FOSS collaboration Chinese-developed distro OpenEuler is denied entry to oss-security’s linux-distros mailing list. Is this the end of open source collaboration? In mid-October 2023, a contributor to the Linux distro OpenEuler created a thread on OpenWall to request the OS’s inclusion on the linux-distros mailing list. He pointed out that OpenEuler ostensibly meets all membership requirements, including the fact it uses all or mostly open source components, isn’t just a repackaging of another Linux OS and the community participates in security updates. While acknowledging the project’s eligibility according to the listed criteria, the request was denied by mailing list member and SUSE developer Marcus Meissner, who stated: “As far as I understand, US companies and US citizens are not permitted to work with Chinese…

Easy printing I remember TurboPrint from my early Amiga days and saw it mentioned on YouTube for Linux. Could you do a bit of digging and find out if it is still available for Linux, and if so, could you review it? Ian Learmonth Neil says… Thanks for your letter – it sparked the idea for the article that we’re running on page 56 this month. TurboPrint does still exist as a paid-for application (find out more at www.turboprint.info), but generally you shouldn’t need to use it. However, we do look at the whole issue of printing on Linux because it is currently changing. Thanks for your letter and keep writing in! Pis all round May we have an updated Roundup on distros for the Raspberry Pi 5 please? Also…

T ails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a Debian-based securityfocused Linux distro. Although its creators are keen to stress that there’s no such thing as complete anonymity online, Tails can come very close if used properly. Tails is a live OS designed to be booted from a DVD or USB stick. This means it runs entirely in RAM, which in theory means there’s no digital footprint left on the machine once you’ve finished using it. Upon shutdown, the OS even overwrites most of the used RAM data to prevent it being recovered through a cold boot attack. Naturally, this works both ways, in that you also can’t save any downloaded files, bookmarks or Wi-Fi password in live mode, which is why during initial setup, Tails offers to create a…

IN BRIEF Looking like something from an industrial future, the dualfan heatsink for all models of Raspberry Pi Zero is a cooling beast. Under load, it kept our Raspberry Pi Zero 2W cool, with and without cooling fans. Easy to build, great to use and superquiet – all of this for under £10 is a real bargain. All models of the Raspberry Pi are designed to be run without cooling. They typically thermal throttle at around 80°C, which is plenty of headroom to work the Pi hard. That said, after-market cooling solutions have been around since the Pi was released and the Pi Zero 2W is no exception. UK reseller The Pi Hut’s Dual-Fan Heatsink for Raspberry Pi Zero works with all models of Pi Zero and provides both passive…

SPECS Vol: 220x220x 250mm Type: PLA, PETG, TPU (up to 300°C) Extruder: Direct drive Size: 0.4 high flow Platform: PEI textured spring steel sheet, heated Levelling: Automatic Sensors: Runout Comms: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB C Control: One button Footprint: 466x374 x480mm Weight: 9.6kg In 2022, Anker surprised everyone with the remarkably fast AnkerMake M5, a premium bed slinger with AI print monitoring. Now it’s back with the £400 M5C and its 500mm/s top speed. One obvious thing is missing: the screen. Anker made an interesting decision to completely remove any kind of display from the M5C, favouring a giant ‘play’ button and a phone app. Phone apps for 3D printers are nothing new, but they are normally bonus features for monitoring your prints. AnkerMake’s phone app is required and it’s the…

As a Linux user, if you’ve ever visited a site secured by SSL, securely wiped a drive or digitally signed an email, you’ve made use of the Linux kernel’s built-in RNG (random number generator). It works by collecting entropy (disorder) from various sources, such as hardware RNGs, interrupts and CPU-based ‘jitterentropy’. This entropy is extracted using a secure hash function and used to seed a set of cryptographic random number generators (CRNGs). As long as the kernel’s running, entropy continues to be collected and the CRNGs are therefore reseeded with high-quality random bits. The bits generated by the kernel’s RNG are technically pseudo-random. This is comparable to someone rolling a die many times and writing down the results. Whenever you ask for a die roll number, you get the next…

IN BRIEF From the maintainer of Firefox and champion of web freedom, Mozilla VPN does feel like a service you can trust. Reasonably priced when taken for a year, it offers average speeds and a poor unblocking service. Mozilla VPN began life as a simple Firefox browser extension but it’s now a full standalone service that can shield all your internet traffic on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and something called Linux. The network has expanded recently and now offers 600-plus servers across 73 locations in 43 countries. Mozilla VPN is powered by Mullvad’s speedy and secure network. Some companies keep quiet about the fact that they’re reselling someone else’s service. Not Mozilla. Mozilla VPN’s feature list has grown considerably since launch. Now, the service competes well with many big VPN…