Inhoudsopgave van April 2025 - Linux Format

This month, we’re putting our readers through our Hacking Academy, so which old-school type of hack are you most proud of? Jonni Bidwell In a feat worthy of Odysseus, I managed to get a modern version of Apache running on a certain server that was running a very outdated OS. The fiendish process, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone, involved creating a binary-compatible virtual machine and unspeakable horror. Michael Reed I made use of the built-in exploit database on a pentesting distro. In minutes, I had command-line access on an old Windows PC. Apart from anything, it rams home the fact that you should never connect an old machine to the internet. Security updates, people! Tam Hanna Some years ago, owners of Palm OS PDAs not made by Sony did…

“I have recently been to two of Europe’s most popular open source community events: FOSDEM in Belgium and State of Open Con in the UK. So, what are my biggest takeaways? On the community side, there is no shortage of passionate people. Everyone who makes it to these events has an interest in technology, helping their projects grow, and collaborating with more people to solve problems. The depth of feeling is always amazing and inspiring. On the other side, companies involved in open source have to build and sustain their operations, and that means creating profitable business models. A big challenge to this is telemetry. While we are keen to share our projects for reuse, we don’t have enough data on where they are used or where we might want…

Flathub users already know that the site neatly categorises available apps into groups such as Networking and Education. This has now been supplemented with a We Games category, which is further subdivided into games, game launchers, emulators and game tools. There’s also now an On The Go category to group together Linux apps for mobile devices. So-called Flathub Fixer Bart Piotrowski has also posted on the site blog, announcing changes to the store’s infrastructure. This will mainly focus on improving compatibility with its continuous integration system Buildbot, as well as work on its successor.…

“There’s been a lot of talk about maintainer burnout. Many projects have a single maintainer who works in a hobbyish capacity. Over time, their project becomes popular and derives paying customers. The developer starts experiencing the demands of large numbers of users who expect more than the developer can offer in terms of their time. The demands come to a head and the developer has to look out for their own wellbeing, day job, family, whatever else is going on. The Linux kernel has plenty of subsystem maintainers effectively going it alone, and has experienced its fair share of burnout stories. So, it is with this in mind that I ponder this month’s Rust-related drama. As you’ll learn (see main story), the lead developer of Asahi Linux has stepped away…

SPECS Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) Bands: 2.4GHz: 2x2, 688Mb/s 5GHz: 3x3, 4,323Mb/s 6GHz: 3x3, 8,643Mb/s Speed: 13,654Mb/s CPU: TBC Mem: 1GB RAM, 128GB flash Ports: 2x 2.5Gb/s WAN/LAN, 2x 1Gb/s, 1x USB 3.2 Support: Mesh, beamforming, Size: 159 x 72 x 186mm The ZenWiFi BT8 shares its design language with the more expensive ZenWiFi BT10. In fact, the two mesh router systems share the same exterior dimensions. The outside is finished in a matt white, and the plain aesthetic should allow the wireless nodes to fade into the background wherever you place them in your home. At least when looking at the nodes, the primary differentiator between the ZenWiFi BT8 and the ZenWiFi BT10 is the port arrangement on the back. The ZenWiFi BT8 provides a 2.5G port for WAN/LAN…

Power-user distributions Michael Reed tries some Linux distros that throw ease of installation out of the window in favour of customisation and a learning experience. Linux has come a long way over the years, and it’s now possible for a beginner to install it themselves thanks to distributions such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora. However, we’re looking at an entirely different breed of distro here. These power-user distros are tricky to install but provide useful benefits over the more run-of-the-mill options, because they are far more customisable and they give the user a deep insight into how a Linux system actually works. In each case, you’re going to have to roll your virtual sleeves up and get stuck into the command line to carry out an installation, effectively manually…

Ever wanted to be a hacker? Of course you did, that’s why you got into Linux. Or maybe it was because Windows is too expensive. Either way, we’re here to teach you some hacker tricks. Hopefully not anything that’ll get you in trouble (that’s up to you), but certainly some techniques you can use right now to test security on your home network or remote servers. We’ll introduce BackBox, a distro dedicated to penetration testing, security research and hacking. It’s got everything you need (and probably a lot you don’t) to begin your adventures. We’ll start with port scanning – part of the information-gathering phase of any attack – to find out what services are running on your machines. For this we’ll use Nmap (Network Mapper, as featured in the films…

If you want to defend your own network, and indeed if you’ve just broken into someone else’s network, you’ll want to map out all the machines and services running on there. Nmap does this (it’s literally short for Network Mapper), but we want to go further. The natural next step is Zenmap, Nmap’s official GUI. This isn’t installed in BackBox but you can remedy this (on any Ubuntu-based distro) with sudo apt install zenmap. That adds an icon to your applications menu (in BackBox, it’s in the Internet submenu). If you don’t run it using the ‘as root’ option, you get a warning about some scan types not being available, as we covered and which we’ll go into more detail about. The Zenmap interface is easy to navigate and keeps…

When Raspberry Pi floated on the London Stock Exchange on 11th June 2024, it was awarded the LSE’s Green Economy Mark. This recognises that not only are the Pi Foundation’s products efficient but they actively displace other less sustainable technologies. Just some of the activities that help add to these are eliminating plastic packaging where possible, shrinking packaging sizes and working on efficient production methods. One is the new intrusive reflow soldering process for the Pi 5. This both saves energy and reduces the physical manufacturing footprint at the factory, while increasing throughput. While some might scoff at green credentials, these literally contribute to lower costs, increasing efficiency. Now that the Foundation is a public limited company, it’s created a Sustainability Committee to oversee activities like these. Roger Thornton, the…

SPECS SoC: Allwinner T527 8-core ARM Cortex-A55 1.8GHz RAM: 2GB/4GB LPDDR4/4X Storage: MicroSD, eMMC, M.2 NVMe SSD Comms: Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 2.4/5GHz, Bluetooth 5.0 USB: 4x USB 2.0, 1x USB 2.0 Display: 1x HDMI 2.0 4K@60, 1x MIPI DSI, 1x eDP1.3 Camera: 1x 2-lane MIPI-CSI, 1x 4-lane MIPI-CSI GPIO: 40-pin Pi pinout Audio: 3.5mm audio jack PSU: USB C 5V 5A Size: 89 x 56 x 18mm OrangePi has released a slew of boards over the years and one of its latest is the OrangePi 4A, which, as the name suggests, takes aim at the older Raspberry Pi 4’s market. The OrangePi 4A is an octa-core CPU with onboard M.2 NVMe SSD support. It could be an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 if you don’t need the absolute horsepower.…

ISSUE 325 March 2025 Product code: LXFDB0325 In the magazine Protect your network with our in-depth guide to firewalling your home, and take a deep dive into Intel’s new Arc series of GPUs. You can also discover how to up your password security, contribute to OpenStreetMap, stream audio with Auracast, relive the world of data punch cards, and upgrade your router. Plus, discover the best screen recorder, catch up with open source news, and more. ISSUE 322 December 2024 Product code: LXFDB0322 In the magazine Power up the latest version of Fedora, and join our meditation on AMD’s new Zen 5 architecture. Plus, find out which is the best big-name browser, code your own captcha, create a mesh VPN, manage your ebook library, capture infrared photos on your Pi, upgrade your memory,…

Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT Today’s desktop PC market is dominated by AMD and Intel processors, so there can be little doubt over what ISA (instruction set architecture) the majority of Linux users are employing. This, of course, is the x86, and according to a recent survey of Linux gamers conducted by Steam, 73.6% use AMD chips and 29.6% use Intel CPUs. Beyond gamers, ARM also gets a look-in, of course, thanks to the Raspberry Pi and Android deployed on the dizzying array of mobile devices. Despite this, it would be far short of the mark to consider Linux as restricted to a particular family of hardware, as is the case with Microsoft Windows. By way of contrast, Linux is almost certainly the operating…

The singularity is a currently – as far as we know – fictional event when technology advancement spirals out of control with unforeseen consequences for human civilisation. A common part of this is an artificial super intelligence, able to take self-determining decisions at a level far above standard human levels, which at this point doesn’t seem much beyond whether we need more raw milk next Tuesday, but the point still stands. As it is, AI is here, though by standard metrics, it currently costs $10,000 in compute time to match standard humans at regular tasks. This doesn’t mean that generative AI with its ability to mimic human voices and animated facial expressions isn’t already outfoxing standard humans. In this AI everyday reality, what we are seeing is a new wave…

LXF327 will be on sale Tuesday 1st April 2025 Dump Ubuntu! We stack up the best Ubuntu alternatives so you can run Ubuntu without having to deal with Ubuntu! Hacking Academy We start a new section following hacking trends, tools and tutorials, so you can stay up to date with attack vectors. Open fitness Use open hardware and open source software to track and manage your health with custom monitor solutions. Open Document Format We delve into the exciting world of document formats, how open rules business, and automating via the terminal. Content of future issues subject to change. Yes, we are on holiday!…

Hacking an education It’s that time of the year when we break out the latest hacker’s toolkit and get you up to speed. Rather than cover Kali again, we’re rolling BackBox out. In Tux’s Hacking Academy, we get you up and running, take you through the critical tools, start you playing with some exploits, and outline what you need in a dedicated hacker’s Wi-Fi adaptor – they’re not all built equally. I can’t think of a better way to learn about how Linux and networks function than hacking away with key tools and a dedicated distro. It’s obviously no surprise that open source and Linux have always been at the fore when it comes to these low-level analysis tools. Through serendipity, this issue we’re also talking to the founders of…

The GTK development team has unveiled some major updates during the recent FOSSDEM 2025 Hackfest in Brussels. The programmers have been working towards both the upcoming v4.18, as well as laying some groundwork for GTK 5. One of the most controversial changes is the deprecation of the X11 and Broadway back-ends. At one stage, Broadway offered a useful way for GTK apps to output to modern HTML5 within web browsers. However, it was never widely adopted. Despite this, both back-ends will be supported until the end of life for GTK 4. In response to online complaints, the GTK team pointed out that this won’t happen until the release of GTK 6 – around 20 years from now. The GTK project has also implemented some cut-offs for older platforms: the minimum…

GPARTED LIVE 1.7.0-1 This live distro isn’t intended as a daily driver. However, it does provide a basic graphical environment (courtesy of X.org and Fluxbox). From here, users can launch a number of tools for analysing and partitioning hard disks. New versions are made available roughly once a year. The latest release of GParted now includes support for recognising NBDs (network block devices). It has also introduced experimental support for Bcachefs single device filesystems. See https://gparted.org. SOLUS 4.7 Solus is an independent rolling release distro that’s focused on desktop computing. It uses a forked version of the PiSi package manager called eopkg. The flagship edition uses Budgie but other desktop environments are available, including Gnome and Plasma. The latest version (code name Endurance) now offers new software centres with bundled…

Linus Torvalds announced the first couple of Release Candidates for what will become Linux 6.14. Among the new features are the usual internal refactoring and device driver updates, but also completed support for the ntsync Windows compatibility feature that will benefit gamers. A number of changes were merged to further development of drivers in Rust, including PCIe support. Perhaps the biggest piece of news is how ‘tiny’ the 6.14 release will be when compared to recent kernels – it will have ‘only’ half a million lines changed and 10,000 individual commits (collections of patches). For almost any other project, that would be massive, but for Linux, that’s down 30% on a normal development cycle. Linus attributed it in large part to the timing with end-of-year holidays, noting, “I really feel…

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Of the systems we’ve looked at, Gentoo offers the most insight into how a Linux system works, partially because its systems are so basic and partially because the packages have to be compiled and configured. Package manager Portage doesn’t do as much for the user automatically as, say, apt. For example, we installed X11, but we ended up without some essential packages and couldn’t start the GUI. We had to resort to searching online to understand the meaning of the errors we were seeing. Being frank, once you’ve built a fully working Gentoo system, the other systems we’re looking at are a cinch, and that means we must have learned something useful from installing Gentoo. Like all of the systems, you’ll learn something about how Linux works by using NixOS.…

Malicious hackers might use all kinds of techniques to foist their malware on to unsuspecting targets. Getting a payload (something that an attacker wants to execute on a target machine) into a well-protected target network might not be as simple as adding a dodgy attachment to an email. Don’t get us wrong, this (and sending malicious links) still works a lot of the time. But if a target is too canny (with the filters, firewalls and what have you) for these techniques, then some additional know-how is required. This might involve exploiting some vulnerability that an attacker has inside knowledge of, or it might involve paying an initial-access broker for login credentials. Once inside a network, our intrepid attacker needs some means of executing the payload. That payload might be…

Raspberry Pi certainly started 2025 with a bang, releasing yet another new product. This time it is a 16GB model of the Raspberry Pi 5. It is essentially the same board as the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB, with the newer D0 stepping that offers a more power-efficient system-on-a-chip, with portions of redundant functionality removed from the chip (the functionality has been moved to the RP1 southbridge), and a 16GB LPDD5X RAM chip used instead. So, what does this new Raspberry Pi 5 retail for? Well, here is the kicker: £115. That is around £40 more than the 8GB Raspberry Pi 5, and to be honest, the 8GB model is enough for most users. Those who will benefit the most from the additional RAM are people interested in containers such as…

OUR EXPERT YOU NEED A Pi 5 NVMe SSD NVMe HAT Cooling for your Pi 5 The Raspberry Pi 5 is already a speed demon, but there are ways and means to squeeze even more performance from it, and in this tutorial we will be doing just that. We’ll be swapping our microSD storage for a PCIe 3.0-based NVMe M.2 SSD for around £40, but that will be the only cost. After that, all the upgrades are free. They just require a little work. We’ll be overclocking the CPU to get some extra free performance, and changing the RAM timings to get the most from them. Finally we shall be enabling a means for the Pi CPU and RAM to work better together. Best of all, this is already set…

OUR EXPERT A good story is one that you can tell repeatedly for everyone’s amusement. It’s even better when you can tell the same story for different purposes. For instance, in a decade long ago, on a computer long since scrapped, he who shall not be named accidentally dd-ed an ISO image into a hard disk partition instead of a USB drive, resulting in the complete loss of data. This is a story that we’ve told repeatedly when talking about the risks of dd, but more importantly, to reiterate the benefit of backing up essential files and data. While there’s a number of backup solutions to choose from, most feature a graphical interface that might not be to everyone’s liking. For CLI enthusiasts, there’s a featureful alternative. Restic is a…

OUR EXPERT In today’s digital landscape, efficient document management and collaboration are crucial for both personal and professional workflows. Synology NAS (network-attached storage) devices have long been popular for their robust file storage and sharing capabilities; if you’re running an off-the-shelf NAS at home or in your office, there’s a high chance it could be a Synology model. By integrating OnlyOffice Docs with your Synology setup, you can elevate your NAS from a simple storage solution to a comprehensive document editing and collaboration platform. Docker is the simplest method for most people to install OnlyOffice Docs on their Synology NAS, and this articles covers all the steps that are required. Set up your Synology NAS device Ensure your Synology device is connected to your local network and powered on. Access…

SYSTEMD MANAGER SysD Manager Version: 1.6 Web: https://github.com/plrigaux/sysd-manager Systemd is the de facto startup and service management system for Linux distributions. You use it to start, monitor and terminate services or daemons on Linux. Although these days you don’t really need to manually manage system services very often, when you do, you have to drop down to the command-line interface. If that isn’t your thing, you can get help from the SysD Manager utility, which enables you to manipulate Systemd services from a graphical interface. On Fedora-based distributions, you can install SysD Manager through its COPR repository. First, make sure you have the core DNF plugins with sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core. Then enable the application’s repo with sudo dnf copr enable plrigaux/sysd-manager, before installing it with sudo dnf install sysd-manager.…

Part Three! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT So far in this series, we have covered how the classic programming language Basic (Beginners’ All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) can still be used today to code games like Mark Buckwell’s Cosmic Invaders. In the first instalment of the series, we created code to establish a basic title screen. The following month’s tutorial covered loading the basic game elements, such as the player ship and bases, as well as the invaders themselves. If you followed the steps in last month’s Managing Movements boxout, the player ship also now can be moved left and right using the Z and X keys respectively. The aliens now also move from side to side and downwards towards the player. As the current sample script…

“In 2025, the Open Document Format (ODF) celebrates its 20th anniversary as an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard. ODF was developed with the aim of providing a vendor-neutral, open standard for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. ODF is supported by all major office suites based on LibreOffice Technology – LibreOffice, Collabora Office, NextCloud Office and Zeta Office – and several pieces of proprietary software, such as Microsoft Office. Governments and institutions worldwide have embraced ODF for public administration, ensuring long-term document accessibility and reducing reliance on proprietary software. However, too many governments still ignore the fact that a proprietary format represents a significant cost for the community as it keeps user-generated content hostage to the proprietary software vendor. The 20th anniversary is a reminder of the…

“If you’re not familiar with VR terminology, lighthouse tracking is a positional tracking system for VR headsets and controllers. It tracks the movement and position of devices in 3D space with high precision. There exists an open source, community-driven implementation of lighthouse tracking called Libsurvive. This project contains free tools and libraries that enable tracking on lighthouse and Vive-based systems, and can run on any device. It currently supports both SteamVR 1.0 and SteamVR 2.0 devices, and is also easily usable with Monado, the cross-platform, open source XR runtime. Recently, I had the pleasure of announcing an exciting new chapter for this open source tracking system as the project transitioned its ownership to Collabora’s GitHub organisation, where two people in our XR team will be official maintainers. The previous maintainers,…

That not syncing feeling Q I have been using grsync over SSH for years to back up some folders password-less from my main computer to a Netgear ReadyNas Duo V2 without issue. Recently, I decided to do a clean install of Linux Mint after years of rolling updates. When I re-installed grsync and created RSA keys and tried to copy them to the NAS, I started to get connection problems, with errors like: Can you please give me some advice on the correct way to set it up? Ronald Zec A It looks like reason the connection is failing is that later versions of OpenSSH no longer support RSA keys by default, so if they are disabled on either your computer or the NAS, you will see a message like…

All of the distributions we’ve looked at can be turned into typical desktop Linux systems by adding an unprivileged user, a desktop environment and some desktop apps. When evaluating Gentoo as a daily driver distribution, the first problem is that it takes quite a lot of expertise and work to get it into that state. Portage is a highly robust and reliable package manager, but as it’s source-based, adding a new package can take a long time. Gentoo deliberately omits some automatic systems, another barrier to making quick, easy changes. Once it’s up and running, Slackware is fairly easy to use when it comes to package management. It’s a less common format for binary packages, and some non-open source packages such as the one for Google Chrome have to be…

If you were, hypothetically, going to hack a machine, or indeed if you wanted to check the security of a machine under your control, the first thing you might do is see what services it is running. An internet-facing machine may be running a web server (such as Apache or Nginx), some variant of SSH (Secure Shell, for remote textual logins), a database (such as MariaDB, but it shouldn’t be accessible from the outside world) or any number of other more obscure services. Devices on your (or someone else’s) LAN (which on the whole shouldn’t be accessible from the internet at large) might be running print servers, file sharing (such as a NAS box), Internet of Things (IoT) gateways or anything else you’d care to name or run. These services…

If you want to be a serious ethical hacker, it’s crucial to have the right tools. Chief among these is a USB Wi-Fi adaptor that supports commonly used penetration testing tools such as the Aircrack-ng suite. The internal Wi-Fi card in your laptop or PC is unlikely to be suitable. Firstly, this is because you’ll probably want to remain connected to your chosen wireless network while you’re engaging in ethical hacking. Your bundled Wi-Fi card also won’t necessarily be compatible with pentesting distros such as Kali or BackBox. Your first consideration when it comes to finding a suitable Wi-Fi adaptor is whether it supports monitor mode, aka RFMON (Radio Frequency MONitor) mode. This means that with the right software, the adaptor can monitor traffic on a wireless channel without being…

IN BRIEF An alternative Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian Bookworm and designed for the Raspberry Pi 4, 400 and 5. The OS offers a bloat-free refined desktop experience. Everything is easy to find and we can use the OS for watching media, writing code or browsing the internet. It offers most of the Raspberry Pi OS experience and features in a pleasant package. MX Linux is a lightweight alternative to the official Raspberry Pi OS and you would expect that it would be a lesser product compared to the official OS. But MX Linux 23.5, powered by Debian 12.9 Bookworm and using Xfce 4.20, is a joy to behold. We tested the latest iteration on a Pi 5 4GB, the sweet spot for price and performance. After flashing to…

OUR EXPERT Even though legacy network operators improved their IoT networking game significantly, there are still situations where non cellular systems work better. After all the dust around the Sigfox organisation’s bankruptcy has lifted, a large and smiling winner remains: the LoRa/LoRaWAN network protocol developed by Semtech. Not only has it managed to take its place in the wireless industry without political turmoil, but the technology works both in a peer-to-peer and in a network fashion. Furthermore, the availability of a wide array of development boards means that you can get started without having to get involved with any surface mount soldering. Espressif + Module = Win! Hardware developers working on wireless systems show a Pavlovian reaction towards Espressif’s ecosystem. However, Espressif does not currently provide a LoRa-capable microcontroller. Instead,…

OUR EXPERT Fancy running Android apps on your desktop? Then you need Waydroid. Unlike other attempts to emulate your mobile’s ecosystem, Waydroid installs Android in an LXC container, giving it direct access to your system’s hardware. Waydroid also integrates your new Android install directly into your desktop, making it possible to run mobile apps and native programs side by side in almost seamless fashion. Thanks to full hardware acceleration, your choice of x86 and ARM (via translation) apps and games run smoothly. You can also set up file sharing to both access and transfer files between Android and Linux. Better still, Waydroid is relatively easy to set up and configure – and armed with our tutorial, you’ll have all the tools and tips you need to run just about any…

OUR EXPERT Remote desktop connections are nothing new. More than 20 years ago, the venerable VNC protocol enabled this writer to access their Vienna-bound workstation from abroad. Furthermore, accessing the headless CVS server was made much easier via its VNC service. In practice, however, VNC is not particularly comfortable. Firstly, the workstation that is to be remote-controlled usually needs to publicly expose the port where the VNC server will wait for commands. This requires router configuration and is a first-grade attack vector for every type of miscreant seeking to add a new machine to their botnet. Keep in mind that Towarisch Haxxor never sleeps and that port scans explicitly search for VNC services. On the other hand, a service such as TeamViewer requires the inputting of an ID – punching…

Part Two! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT In this article, we’re writing and running two programs. One, called CardShuffle, does the timing of three slightly different ways of shuffling a deck of 52 cards to see which is fastest. The second program, PokerGen, outputs a text file of 1,000 lines of seven cards per line. You can download a ZIP file containing the Rust sources and project files from GitHub at https://bit.ly/lxf326code. Unzip and then open VSC in either project folder. In next month’s instalment, a third program (PokerHand) will read this file line by line and determine the best five-card hand from the seven cards for each set as quickly as possible. As usual, the project files were created with the cargo new command. For…