Table of contents for January 2018 in Linux Format

This issue we asked our experts: We’re looking at running Linux on older systems, so what’s the oldest hardware that you’ve run Linux on? Other than your aging wetware... Jonni Bidwell I tried to get Slackware running on a 486 box circa 1996, but was unsuccessful. Some seven years later I would finally manage to install Linux (Gentoo) on an Athlon 1800. It got me through a PhD with only slight mental scarring. Lately I’ve gotten Rockbox running on an old MP3 player. Nate Drake In 2007 I supplemented my meagre student grant by recycling old computers from hospitals. One salvaged machine was a 1997 Gateway 2000 PC with a 166MHz processor and 16MB of RAM. It ran Mandriva for all of three hours before turning into a large metal…

“For years now the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conferences circuit starts with Linux Conf Australia (LCA). Now that might be a little too far for most Linux Format readers. However,right on the tail of LCA is FOSDEM, where more than 8,000 Open Source software enthusiasts gather in Brussels for a brilliant (and free!) two-day event organised by volunteers. Widely recognised as the best conference of its kind in Europe, the 2018 edition promises to be no different, with over 600 lectures, lightning talks and developer rooms. While the main track consists of talks specifically chosen by the FOSDEM programme committee and catered to a varied technical audience, the developer rooms are where most of the action takes place during the weekend. Organised by members of each Open Source…

Mozilla Grants have been quietly helping out various worthy causes and projects for a while now, and now Mozilla is matching any donation made to the Tor project, essentially doubling any donation you make. At the time of writing, $181,882 has been raised with Mozilla’s matching grant (with $90,941 donated from the public). You’ve probably heard of Tor (www.torproject.org), but if you haven’t, it’s a vital tool for allowing people – especially in countries with strict censorship – to access the internet anonymously, and is made up of a group of volunteer-operated servers, which makes donations – and help from companies such as Mozilla, so vital. Head over to https://donate.torproject.org/pdr to help this essential project, and the Mozilla Matching Grant will match whatever donation you are willing to spare. To…

Happy Birthday Lincoln LUG! Six years old and still as popular as ever. Lincoln LUG is run by husband and wife team, Philip and Becky Newborough, and the group meets at Lincoln Bowl, Washingborough on the third Wednesday of every month from 7pm. It held its inaugural meeting on 27 September 2011, organised out of a desire to have a regular social meet-up, and has recently celebrated its sixth birthday with lots of cake! Lincoln LUG keeps its meetings informal and inclusive, with discussion ranging across a variety of subjects, from politics, crafts and makerspace events, as well as the latest tech news. The group has established strong links and forged firm friendships with its neighbouring LUGs, and has regular attendees coming from afar. The LUG’s base is made up…

SPECS OS: Android 7.1.1 Screen: 6.01-inch, 1,080x2,160, Amoled, 18:9 ratio CPU: Octa-core Snapdragon 835, 4x 2.45GHz + 4x 1.9GHz Kryo cores GPU: Adreno 540 RAM: 6GB (8GB) Storage: 64GB (128GB), No SD Rear camera: Dual 20MP + 16MP (f/1.7, 24mm, gyro stabilisation), 2,160p @ 30fps video Front camera: 16MP (f/2.0, 20mm), 1,080p video Audio: 3.5mm jack, speaker Comms: WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, USB 3.1 Type-C Sensors: (A-) GPS, fingerprint, accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass Battery: fixed 3,300mAh Li-Po Dimensions: 154.2 x 74.1 x 7.25mm, 153g Looking at the OnePlus 5T, it’s hard to believe that the company that made it is less than four years old. This is a phone that manages to hold its own alongside flagship devices from companies that have enormous pots of money to spend on…

Debian is considered as one of the most stable Linux distros. This is why it’s so popular on servers and with system administrators and hosts a number of guides and manuals especially designed for administrators. In particular, new users will appreciate its FAQ as well as the installation guide. If you’re fond of working on the command-line, take a look at the Reference Manual, which focuses on getting things done from the terminal. Fedora also boasts of an active user community. The project hosts a knowledge base where users can post questions and find answers to common problems. This is in addition to mailing lists and IRC channels that can be used to interact with users and developers. Zorin OS continues in the footprints of its progenitor Ubuntu and provides…

If you’re not yet willing to let go of your favourite desktop environment there are a couple of tricks you can employ to make them lose some flab. You can start by turning off some of the fancy features that are taken for granted, such as the thumbnails preview in the file manager. If you open a folder with hundreds of files on a slow machine, the file manager will consume precious resources generating thumbnails. To turn off thumbnails on a Gnome-based machine, launch the Files file manager and head to Edit>Preferences. Switch to the Preview tab and set the value of Show thumbnails to Never. If you use KDE, go to System Settings and look for desktop effects and then turn them off. Similarly, the Nepomuk and Strigi features…

“Audacity now recovers more sound data in case of severe system freeze” Sound editor Audacity Version: 2.2 Web: www.audacityteam.org We’d love to write about Audacity more frequently, but new releases of this sound editor only occur once every couple of years, if that. The program is one of the most valued and useful open source apps: it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Audacity is the go-to sound editor, much like Gimpis the first choice for editing images. The application can be used for recording with a mic, overlaying two or more sound tracks, mastering podcasts, removing periods of silence, splitting a large recording into several files, normalising volume, reducing noise and re-encoding wave data into a different file format. Yet these features are just a small…

Our expert Les Pounder is a freelance maker who works with organisations such as Raspberry Pi Foundation and the micro:bit Foundation to promote maker skills. Les blogs at www.bigl.es. Making the jump from Scratch to Python is like moving from a bicycle to a motorbike. Both have handlebars and two wheels, but with a motorbike there’s more power and a steeper learning curve. So how can children easily move from block to text languages? One aspiring 13-year-old boy had the same thought and his response was Edublocks (www.edublocks.org). Joshua Lowe created Edublocks using the Blockly visual programming editor. Josh’s goal was to enable young coders to seamlessly move from blocks to text by providing a reference point between the two. Edublocks is coded using Blockly, which itself is mainly JavaScript,…

Despite the age of the games, with the exception of Dune 2000, gameplay in OpenRA is very sluggish on the Pi by default. You can tinker with this from within the games themselves by entering the Settings menu and altering the frame rate. You can also change the Mode from the default (Pseudo-fullscreen) to Windowed and even specify the window size. Click Reset to change settings to default or Back to confirm your changes. The game will restart. Getting the resolution right can be tricky. If you make a mistake open Terminal and run nano ~/.openra/settings.yaml . From here you can change the Graphics Mode and Window size. To give the Pi a real shot in the arm, enable the experimental OpenGL driver. Close any open applications, then open Terminal.…

Our expert John Knight When he’s not playing video games in French, John can usually be found beating a bass drum down to a kind of smooth paste. Tail is a core application of Unix-based systems, designed to read the end of text files. It can also be used for something else called piped-data too, but we’ll touch on that later (let’s not complicate things just yet!). Although “reading the end of a file” sounds pretty self-explanatory, tailis a chief tool in any expert’s arsenal, with many practical uses we’ll explore along the way. To get started, open a terminal in a folder where you have a text file that will serve as a good experimental example – the examples shown here will be a text file containing the lyrics…

Our expert Sean Conway spent 17 years designing, building and maintaining radio frequency environments before expanding his career to include PCs. Now if he could only find his keys to get back into the house… All you wanted to do was stream that video, copy that file or try to view a few photos, but the Wi-Fi chooses that exact moment to play up. It’s a problem we’ve all encountered. How do you troubleshoot a wireless connection? With some basic radio frequency (RF) transmission theory knowledge, an understanding of the local environmental conditions and a few simple Raspberry Pi Linux applications you’ll be better prepared to tackle Wi-Fi connection issues in the future and bedazzle fellow pub goers with your IEEE 802.11 knowledge, too! This tutorial make the assumption that…

Our expert Bobby Moss develops cloud microservices for a global IT consultancy and its clients. In his spare time he works on free software projects and tinkers with old hardware. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you’ll have come across at least one cloud file storage service offering free space online for backups and syncing documents across devices. Dropbox is probably the best known in Linux circles because of its excellent cross-platform support, but there are other great alternatives like MEGA, Spideroak and Ubuntu One (God rest its digital soul–Etd) that are also available. However, such services are far from immune when it comes to security and privacy concerns. For example, in 2016 Dropbox managed to leak 68 million user passwords in one breach. At…

While the AWS administration panel is user-friendly once you get the hang of it for most of the common components, performing deployments and setting up infrastructure each time through the browser can be laborious. This is particularly true if you have to do the same thing multiple times, want to duplicate the system you already have for testing purposes or are just trying out an idea that you plan to dismantle again immediately afterwards. Fortunately, the API behind Amazon Web Services is very comprehensive and extremely well-documented. As a result you could use scripting systems developed by the wider community such as Vagrant, Ansible or Puppet to automate the deployment of web applications, spinning up of dedicated servers and tearing down of instances whenever you need to. We’ve briefly covered…

The Wi-Fi Pineapple comes from the good people at Hak5 who have also given us the awesome Rubber Ducky device that we reviewed in LXF226. There are several models available, but the basic premise is that the device is a wireless auditing platform. The integrated PineAP uses a simple web interface to enable you to set up a rogue Access Point to which devices can connect. You can then perform a range of MITM (Man in the Middle) and other hacking attacks. The Pineapple is particularly effective at this: it responds to requests from device by attempting to identify as their favourite wireless networks. There are a huge number of modules for the Wi-Fi Pineapple. One of these is DNSSpoof. As the name suggests, this enables you to redirect traffic…

While it’s certainly fun to use osquery for introspection purposes (did you ever consider that you can SELECT from the kernel modules?), the primary use cases for it are security audit and compliance testing. To this end, osquery acts much like a distributed host-based intrusion system (HID): it inspects the node it runs on and tells you if anything is not in order. It’s true that a sufficiently sophisticated attack may be left unnoticed by osquery, yet in general, this approach is as secure as the ruleset. Osquery’s bundled packs come to rescue here. They reside in /usr/share/osquery/ packs. Our personal favourite is ossec-rootkit. As the name suggests, it looks for the traces that some rootkits leave in infected systems. As of the time of writing, only file signatures were…

Remember that authentication you added previously? Select Register and create a username and password you’ll remember. After that, you can make some modifications so you can get only your links from the table and see them when you log in. For starters, you can set a route for mylinks URL that points to a new MyLinks controller. The controller for the MyLinksController.php file is shown below in its entirety: After the controller, you can set the mylinks views just like home.blade.php . If you look at the top of home.blade.php you’ll see the first line is@extends('layouts.app'). As was mentioned previously, this means that the first part of the view is the file located at resources/views/layouts/app.blade.php. To breakdown the technical stuff, layouts.app translates to the layouts folder and the file begins…

Packages help you put Kotlin code in many source files, which will also help you put your classes into separate files. As a result, you’ll be able to copy the Kotlin code of an existing Kotlin class without having to copy unnecessary code or wondering whether you got all the required code or not! The general structure of a Kotlin package takes the following form: A package begins with the package keyword followed by the name of the package. The source code of a Kotlin package is saved inside a directory that’s named after the package name. In the previous code, you declared a package named magazines, which includes a class named LXF in it. You can now use the aforementioned package along with the LXF class defined in it…

System tools Essentials Checkinstall Install tarballs with your package manager. Coreutils The basic utilities that should exist on every operating system. HardInfo A system benchmarking tool. Kernel Source code for the latest stable kernel release, should you need it. Memtest86+ Check for faulty memory. Plop A simple manager for booting OSes, from CD, DVD and USB. RawWrite Create boot floppy disks under MS-DOS in Windows. Smart Boot Manager An OS-agnostic manager with an easy-to-use interface. WvDial Connect with a dial-up modem. Reading matter Bookshelf Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners Get to grips with Bash scripting. Bourne Shell Scripting Guide Get started with shell scripting. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S Raymond’s classic text explaining the advantages of open development. The Debian Administrator’s…

Can you feel it? The thrilling static in the air? It’s because the world’s top 500 supercomputers are now all run on Linux. The last couple of non-Linux Chinese holdouts have dropped out of the list, superseded by newer Linux-running replacements. An unstoppable combination of factors help foster this environment: generational expertise though open source in academia, research labs and beyond make it the prime choice for development. Built-in support for high-performance commodity components, drives down hardware costs and speeds development. The modular and scalable nature of the kernel ensures that it can be tailored to any task. Reliability, efficiency and more all mean that Linux is now the only choice for high-performance computing. That’s lovely, but how does it apply to your perfectly capable <cough> AMD Athlon XP from…

At the beginning of November, GitLab announced it was ditching its Contributor Licence Agreement and moving to the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). In the announcement (see http://bit.ly/git-lab-cert),GitLabs said this move was part of its commitment to “being good stewards of open source” and ensuring that everyone who wants to commit, can. Apparently, the previous Contributor License Agreement was seen as a deterrent to contributing to GitLab, hence the switch. The DCO (see https://developercertificate.org) aims to give developers greater flexibility and portability for their contributions, and according to GitLabs, it’s one of the reasons why Debian and GNOME are planning to migrate to GitLab. It was actually Debian developers who asked GitLab to drop the CLA, as many developers felt the original agreement was unnecessarily restrictive, and put off anyone…

KAOS 2017.11 An updated version of the rolling KDE/Qt-based Linux distro brings the latest Plasma Desktop (5.11.3, version fans), along with adding Elisa as the default music player – a move that was voted for in a recent poll of KaOS users. Plasma 5.11.3 has only been recently announced, along with KDE Applications 17.08.3 and Frameworks 5.40.0, and this latest version of KaOS is a great showcase for the new features, including improved password storage. To find out more about the release, visit: https://kaosx.us/news/2017/kaos11. FIREFOX 57 Billed as the biggest update of all time for the open source web browser, Firefox Quantum features a new engine that’s been designed from the ground up to be light and fast in day-to-day use. For anyone who has despaired at memory-hogging web browsers…

Simple security The internet is a system accessed by all, consisting of remote systems through which we access and share content. Security, privacy, confidentiality and invisibility within that system is like setting up a secure, private covert operation within a prison – an illusion. At least, if the prison is effectively doing what it’s intended to do. Doesn’t that presume those who designed the system either aren’t paying attention or haven’t admitted to themselves or to its users that their system is flawed? Or, at the very least, exercises favouritism to those who can move covertly within it (NSA, CIA et al)? Presuming such tools aren’t widely available. If they were, wouldn’t that make them ineffective? At the very least, shouldn’t the internet, then, best efforts aside (Tor and all…

Apart from the distros featured in this Roundup, there’s still more mainstream distros that ship with Gnome. OpenSUSE and Korora are the top two. The reason why the latter wasn’t included in our list is because its parent, Fedora, was already part of selection. Another Fedora derivative, Chapeau also didn’t make the cut for the same reason. If you want all the goodness of Fedora, along with a relaxed policy on what software can be included, with the added advantage of third-party software repositories enabled by default, Chapeau is just the distro for you. Gnome 3, with its vastly different approach to the desktop, spawned the development of Mate and Cinnamon desktop environments. But if you’re feeling nostalgic, try Stella. Based on CentOS, the distro features a stable, but severely…

You can also give your installation a performance boot by optimising its kernel. Virtually all distributions provide a “one-size-fits-all” kernel that’s compiled with generic options. You can, however, replace it and compile a kernel for optimum performance on your specific hardware. By default the kernel is configured with drivers to support a number of configurations. You can disable drivers and get rid of other unnecessary options to cut down the size of the kernel, free up some memory and also shave off some boot time. Another option is to apply a performance patch to a stock kernel. One of the most popular alternatives to the standard kernel has been compiled by Con Kolivas from lots of different performance patches. The kernel patchset is called -ck, and it has been built…

If you need more control over your custom distro, you can use build it on top of Arch or Gentoo. Both distros are available as minimal netinstall ISO images and help you put together a fully functional system one component at a time in a very LEGO-esque manner. The big difference between the two is that Arch is only available (there is archlinux32.org) for 64-bit machines, while Gentoo continues to target both the 32-bit as well as the 64-bit architecture. Unlike SUSE Studio however, the process of building a system from the grounds up using either Arch or Gentoo is fairly involved and quite cumbersome. It’ll also take up more time and eat a fair amount of bandwidth. Furthermore, the installations won’t be as portable as the install images you…

We’re all familiar with the “voices too quiet, explosions too loud” problem when watching media at home. Film directors like people to have to listen intently as chiselled jawlines whisper sensitive yet plot-critical information, and they also like viewers to feel like they’re in the middle of an explosion, rather than a few blocks away. This is fine with a THX surround sound system in an acoustically engineered space where these noises can be reproduced accurately. However, your home setup may not be of this fidelity, and even if it was, all kinds of things can still happen to the audio before it hits your speakers. What comes out has likely been resampled (your sound card may, for example, prefer 48kHz to 44kHz), downmixed (there are many terrible ways of…

Part of my role at Leeds Museums and Galleries (LMG) is to expand our digital offering both online and in-gallery, and with nine sites to our portfolio, there’s plenty of scope for trying out new things and developing projects! I taught Outdoor Education for a number of years. Although this may seem very different from teaching computing, I think there are many similarities. Both encourage the development of transferable skills such as problem solving and effective communication. There’s also often plenty of collaboration and teamwork, although with computing, your team – the Maker community – may or may not be physically with you. Either way, they’re still out there and ready to help. I was lucky enough to be a recent participant at a Picademy training event and it has…

As mentioned in the tutorial, Edublocks can also work with other pre-installed Python libraries. One of these is Minecraftso let’s take a moment to write a three-block project that will print Hello World in the chat window. In Edublocks go to Minecraft > General and build the following sequence to create a connection to Minecraft from our code. from mcpi.minecraft import Minecraft mc = Minecraft.create() Now let’s create the message in the chat window. From Minecraft>Commands add the following block to the sequence. mc.postToChat(“Hello World”) Before we run the code in Edublocks, we need to open Minecrafton our Pi to a world. Then return to Edublocks and run the code. Switch back to Minecraft and you’ll see your message on the screen. There’s much more that can be done in…

1 Clone the game engine Open Terminal on your Pi and enter git clone https://github.com/Mailaender/OpenRA . The game engine will start to download. Once the download is complete switch to the directory with cd OpenRA then install the necessary software to compile it by running sudo apt-get install nuget mono-complete liblua5.1-0 libsdl2-2.0-0 . Next, press Y to proceed with the installation. 2 Modify the configuration files Once the software dependencies have been installed, run nano configure from Terminal. On line six change usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu to /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf. Press Ctrl+X, Y, then enter to save and exit. Next, enter the command nano Makefile . Scroll down to line 36 and change dmcs to mcs. Save and exit in the same way. 3 Compile OpenRA and download files From Terminal run ./configure . Next,…

If you want to be sure your connection is safe, you can use an SSL certificate to encrypt the connection each time your messaging client passes the password to the Raspberry Pi. If you wish to connect your Pi’s chat server to the internet, it’s best to obtain your certificate from a legitimate certificate authority. This also makes it easier for your chat server to authenticate itself to other XMPP chat servers over the internet. Alternatively, you can generate your own self-signed certificate. This is generally considered less secure, and some XMPP messaging programs may refuse to connect to it, but it’s easier to set up. First, open Terminal on the Pi or connect via SSH and run the command: sudo prosodyctl cert generate yourhostname For example: sudo prosodyctl cert…

Our original aim for this article was to cover a project that had been sitting in the archives since the days of Myspace. To quote inotail’s website: “inotailis a replacement for the tailprogram found in the base installation of every Linux/ UNIX system. It makes use of the inotify infrastructure in recent versions of the Linux kernel to speed up tailing files in the follow mode (the ‘-f’ option). Standard tail polls the file every second by default while inotaillistens to special events sent by the kernel through the inotify API to determine whether a file needs to be reread”. However, when we contacted inotail’s author Tobias Klauser about the project, he replied: “Unfortunately, I no longer actively maintain inotail. As of version 7.5 of the GNU Coreutils (released in…

To configure wireless on a Raspberry Pi, the user has to edit the configuration file at /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_ supplicant.conf. wpa_supplicantis the IEEE 802.1X/WPA component that’s used in the client stations. The protocol implementation provides key negotiations with a WPA authenticator, controls the roaming, and the IEEE 802.11 authentication/association for the wireless driver. The user invokes the supplicant and submits credentials to establish the computer connection on a secure network. If the authentication succeeds, the authenticator permits the computer to connect to the network.…

NextCloud isn’t restricted to storing files and folders – you can also sync all of your contacts and calendars. Although importing entries from other web providers like Google can sometimes require a little trial and error, activating both through the browser is as easy as enabling them in the Apps section of the Settings menu. Thunderbird users will be pleased to know they can sync contacts and calendars stored this way with their favourite mail client. For names and addresses ensure you install the Cardbook add-on, then import the entries using CardDav via Addressbook and then New Addressbook Remote. You can find the necessary address for this from NextCloud by opening the Contacts section in the browser and clicking the hyperlink symbol next to the name of the contacts list…

Our expert Nate Drake gave up raiding crumbling temples to become a cybersecurity journalist. Since leaving Facebook behind, his productivity has increased 10-fold. Have you ever experienced the inward groan of frustration after a hapless elderly relative has explained that they installed some malicious software because a “Microsoft representative” called them up at home and persuaded them their machine was riddled with viruses, or handed over their credit card information for “verification purposes"? You may draw some comfort from the fact that these kind of attacks aren’t limited to the IT-illiterate. In 2011, an employee of none other than RSA Security LLC was persuaded to open a malicious attachment in a phishing e-mail, which is believed to have threatened the security of the company’s 2FA products. These type of “social…

Any operating system claiming to be secure needs something called audit logs. These are records of all important events that have occurred in the system, typically stored safely in a place the intruder can’t easily reach. You use audit logs to detect anomalies in the system’s operation or during an incident investigation if things went really wrong. For Linux, the audit framework plays this role. Events come from various sources, such as the filesystem layer in the kernel or init daemon (think systemd). They’re stored in the kernel buffer and reported via a Netlink interface to the daemon, auditd. The daemon stores events in the log and optionally handle to another daemon, audisp, to dispatch. It’s possible to search audit logs locally and build reports. It’s also possible to shutdown…

To install Laravel on Ubuntu, you can use a tool called Composer. Here’s how to install it: Navigate to the folder where you want to install Laravel, such as /var/www/html which is the default location for the Apache web server. To get there, type the following command: cd /var/www/html Now, you can install the latest Laravel with the next one-liner. Bear in mind that the installation will take some time and the console may look like it’s hanging there doing nothing; possibly at the beginning and during the installation process. Just let it do its thing and don’t stare at the blinking cursor with impatience. Maybe cook some Canadian maple syrup flapjacks and have a cup of tea while you’re waiting. One more note; the command below is for the…

We like to include at least one 32-bit distro on the DVD each month, to cater for our readers with older hardware. Even if you are using the latest hardware, you probably have an old box gathering dust somewhere that can be given a new lease of life with a suitable distro. However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find 32-bit distros. Many distros are now 64-bit only. It takes extra time and effort to maintain two sets of packages, particularly testing them all. Even Ubuntu, which isn’t short of resources, has now dropped 32-bit distros, although it’ll continue to provide the packages for a while, so there are still 32-bit respins. This month we’ve done something that may never happen again: we have five distros on the DVD and all…

* so, when we say ”best” that’ll be an entirely subjective measure… Protect thy passwords! In an age of internet insecurity we test the best and bravest password managers on the interwebs. Delicious Calamares! We explore the universal installer framework and how you can use it to build installers for any distro. Build a custom desktop Our Arch expert turns his hand to building a desktop from (almost) scratch – we’ll show you how! Pimp my desktop If building a desktop sounds too much like woodwork, we pimp one instead. Add some bling to your Gnome! Contents of future issues subject to change – we might get caught stealing hardware from Maximum PC……

“Ah, help desks. Sometimes it seems they’re anything but helpful. Maybe you work on one, but regardless, you’ve certainly used one. It sometimes seems that the only thing in common between the help desk staff and those seeking help is English – and even that isn’t always clear. Oh, and that applies no matter which side of the desk you sit! Here’s a quick and simple sequence that will make life easier. If you’re responsible in some way for a help desk, then you might want to encourage users to follow this. When you use a help desk yourself, those trying to help will appreciate it if you do this, I promise. When you contact the help desk, give them five items of information about the problem: 1 What you’re…

“This autumn, nearly 500 people joined us as The Linux Foundation took its networking projects on the road in Europe and Japan as part of the first Open Source Networking Days, hosted by Linux Foundation member companies. These one-day events in London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Tel Aviv and Yokohama enabled individuals working on projects like OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV and others to meet with project leaders. Attendees appreciated the opportunity to learn about the various components of the open networking stack, examine the integration and collaboration points between them, and map that to their strategies for rolling out cloud, SDN, NFV, MANO, and more across networks. Presentations from all the events can be downloaded at https://sites.google.com/linuxfoundation.org/osndays/home, where you can also find videos from the London event and additional resources. The next…

What can I or cannot use a Raspberry Pi for? VPN, NAS, server… the list seems endless. I’d suggest either printing a more detailed explanation for new users of Linux and how to do things in your magazine, or putting a step-by-step article online. Part of the problem is a lack of Linux User Groups in the US. For example, I have a Brother MFC, but there wasn’t enough information provided to explain how to connect it wirelessly (I struggled for three hours). Thank God I found Jack Wallen’s article on updates for Ubuntu. Finally, if there’s a website that goes into the minute detail for Linux and Pi, please let readers know! Mitch Stanley, Redlands, CA, US Neil says: Let me tell you about a website called Google… apologies,…

Debian and Fedora are suitable for a variety of roles. Out of the box, these distros are well suited for everyday users, but thanks to their vast software repositories, you can easily mould them to function as a gaming and multimedia station, or set them up as a web or file server and more. Compared to the other distros on our list, Debian features slightly dated software. Desktop users may want to shun it for this reason, but this feature especially, makes it ideal for running servers. Apart from CentOS, which is based on RHEL, Debian is one of the most popular server distros. Fedora, in stark contrast with Debian, is quick to feature new technologies and introduce the latest software to its users. If you’re interested in the cutting-edge…

“A large number of developers are working to make obsolete hardware usable again” A couple of years back Linus Torvalds rejected a patch for dropping support for 1995-era EISA-based platforms. He argued that it wasn’t broken and didn’t adversely affect the other parts of the kernel. But while the kernel can afford to support legacy hardware as long as they have even a single user, distributions and individual projects can’t afford that luxury. To make efficient use of their finite resources, distros through out 2017 have been dropping support for 32-bit platforms. Popular Linux distribution Elementary OS doesn’t even have a 32-bit version. Newer projects like Solus didn’t even bother to release a 32-bit version. It’s the same story with niche projects like the privacy-centric Tails Linux. Even mainstream projects…

Tiny Core Linux is designed for people who will go to great lengths to build a customised streamlined distro that only does what they want it to do. With an ISO weighing just 16MB, Tiny Core is the minutest of distros to boot into a graphical desktop. It isn’t derived from one of the mainstream distros and owes its slim stature to its lightweight components. Besides the recommended 16MB Tiny Core release, there’s an even smaller 11MB Core release that ships without a desktop and a 106MB CorePlus variant that includes multiple desktops and additional functionality, such as support for wireless network hardware. The distro is quick off the blocks and drops you to a plain desktop running the FLWM window manager. There’s an icon-based application launcher at the bottom.…

ON HIS LIFE-LONG LOYALTY TO LINUX“I try and use, promote and ship open source products wherever possible” Draško Draškovic is CEO and cofounder of Mainflux, an open source, industrial, Internet of Things Cloud platform written in Go and Erlang. He holds an MSc in electronics, telecommunications and industrial control systems from Belgrade University and is an expert on semiconductors, communication protocols and lots of things we can’t even begin to understand. Draško’s worked on a number of FOSS projects, including OpenWRT, U-Boot and OpenOCD, and has worked for a number of major hardware providers. This includes Texas Instruments, where he helped develop the popular OMAP chips which can be found in most every 2G and 3G mobile phone. Lately, he’s been working on IoT and 5G technologies, and most recently…

JACK (aka JACK Audio Connection Kit) has been serving hardcore Linux audiophiles since 2002. As its delightful recursive acronym (what happened to those? Ed) suggests, it enables apps to plug into one another and for audio to be routed hither and yon, and in real-time, too. Like PulseAudio (PA), JACK is a sound server that sits on top of ALSA (and many other hardware backends on many other platforms). It requires exclusive access to hardware, so can’t be used at the same time as PA, but that doesn’t mean the two can’t live side by side, cordially if not amicably. PA can be temporarily disabled, or routed through JACK while it’s in use, so there’s no need to uninstall it to try out JACK. Nor should you consider replacing PulseAudio…

In brief... The BME680 air quality, temperature, pressure and humidity sensor offers a small platform for science experiments based on all models of the Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Coming as a solder-yourself kit, the board aims to provide the maximum number of sensors, while taking up the minimum number of GPIO pins and space. There are many sensors on the market and by far the most common are those that measure temperature and humidity. Typically, these sensors use a myriad of connection protocols, from simple GPIO interfaces, to I2C and SPI. Yet by using many different sensors to accomplish a task we introduce more chances for problems occurring. So when the BME680 came out and promised to deliver an expansive platform of sensors in one tiny 3mm square sensor package,…

Our expert Nate Drake crossed swords with Oxford Uni’s debating team in 2003. Nate cited Hitler’s death in Red Alert as an example of the law of unintended consequences. The motion was duly carried. Hitler’s Time Travel Exemption Act as decreed by the website TV Tropes (www.tvtropes.org) states that all fictional attempts by time travellers to murder the Great Dictator will either fail or otherwise be disastrous. This, is in fact the exact premise on which Westwood Studio’s 1996 classic game Command and Conquer: Red Alert is based. In the alternate history of Red Alert, Einstein decided to turn his genius to creating a time machine rather than an atom bomb. He travels back to 1924, and kills Hitler with no more than a handshake. With no opposing Germans, the…

Our expert Mayank Sharma is a technical author and former contributing editor at Linux.com, but now spends his time playing Linux games all day. With Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Yahoo Messenger and ICQ to name but a few, there’s certainly no shortage of chat services today. The downside of all these services is that they’re closed-source, meaning the code used to design them isn’t released to the public. This makes it harder to detect security vulnerabilities, as well as the fact that you have to trust that big companies are keeping your private conversations safe. Federation is also definitely not supported by most proprietary chat software – for instance, someone using the official Google Hangouts app has no way of speaking directly to someone using AOL Messenger – which has…

1 Install Prosody Open Terminal on your Raspberry Pi or connect via SSH and run the command sudo apt-get install prosody , then press Y to confirm you want to install the software on your device. In the next step, you’ll need to change your configuration, so run sudo nano /etc/prosody/ prosody.cfg.lua . 2 Modify config file Scroll to the section labelled Virtual Hosts and change example.com to your domain – for example, 192.168.1.2 . Scroll up to the section named Server Wide Settings and, under Admins, change, to admins = {"admin@yourip"} – admins = {"admin@192.168.1.2"} , for example. Next, search for the words ‘allow_registration’ and change to true . Press Ctrl +X, Y, then Return to save and exit. 3 Restart and add an administrator Run the command sudo…

Inotify was created in the mid-2000s as a replacement for dnotify. To quote project co-author Robert Love: “inotify is a file change notification system—a kernel feature that allows applications to request the monitoring of a set of files against a list of events. When the event occurs, the application is notified”. Dnotify had fatal flaws, such as: only being able to watch directories; requiring continually open file descriptors leading to pesky “cannot unmount device” situations; using signals as an interface to userspace; and ignoring the issue of hard links. Robert Love continues: “inotify is an inodebased file notification system that does not require a file ever be opened in order to watch it. Inotify is able to watch any filesystem object whatsoever, and when watching directories, it is able to…

Engineering an antenna to create a specific signal radiation pattern is also dependent on the frequency of the signal to be transmitted. Antennae provide optimal power transmission when they’re tuned to the resonant frequency of the source signal. That means an antenna operates most effectively at a specific frequency. Some RGs provide an administration console to adjust the power and channel (in other words, the frequency) that the device is operating at. If there are a number of RG transmitting in an apartment block on the same frequency, then it can create problems for the receiving device to lock on to a specific AP signal, especially if the AP signal is weak compared to the others. Analyse the signals in your area and pick a channel that’s least congested to…

The path we’ve described in this tutorial is far from the only way to deploy NextCloud on AWS. You may have spotted for example in the EC2 admin console that there’s a related “container” service. Instead of hosting the entire system on a single instance (and therefore a single point of failure) you could split NextCloud from the LAMP server stack and deploy each onto their own isolated containers. This is brilliant when you need to scale up the system for an office of 100 or 1,000 users because you can park these containers behind the AWS Elastic Load Balancer. The main benefit of this setup is that containers can be spun up and destroyed as needed, which means your system is always available. Also, if one component breaks it…

DNS (Domain Name System) servers form the backbone of the internet. In layman’s terms, they act as a form of virtual telephone directory, translating human readable web addresses such as www.linuxformat.com to a machine-readable IP address (so in this case the Linux Formatwebsite becomes 80.244.178.150). DNS Spoofing, sometimes known as DNS Cache Poisoning, involves corrupting the data on a DNS Server to divert attempts to visit a certain website to the IP address of your choice – in this case the cloned web page you created with SET. You can use the free tool dnsmasq to create a custom DNS server and redivert traffic in this way. Open a Terminal and run sudo apt-get install dnsmasq-base to ensure the software is already installed. Next, create a configuration file by running…

Our expert Dr Sinitsyn Being a GSoC Mentor with an average 0.16 student per year, Valentine has lots of time to build Linux clouds. Sense of security emember when you first tried to R convert a Windows user to Linux? Which arguments did you use then? Perhaps you told them it’s free. This rarely works out in my experience: many users have already paid for Windows (either via the system it came happily pre-installed on or for a licence directly) and they’re not going to get a refund even if they move to Linux. So you quickly resort to the next argument: Linux is secure, and there are no viruses for it. Unfortunately, this isn’t entirely true. When Linux is configured correctly it’s secure, yet not impregnable - and the…

Our expert Kent Elchuk is a web artisan whose works include building and maintaining custom apps for colleges and an abundance of web authorship. Those of you with any experience in web development will likely have heard of frameworks, which are used to build web applications. With PHP, there are several options, such as Zend, Cake, Codeigniter, Yii and Symfony. And the most popular framework is Laravel. One example of an application built with such a PHP framework is the e-commerce shopping cart script called Magento, that’s used by companies such as Canon, Graze and Burger King. All frameworks are similar in concept. They use MVC, which stands for model, view and controller. This enables developers to build web applications relatively quickly, because logic and view are separated out and…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos is the author of the Go Systems Programming book. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. Kotlin in an object-oriented programming language, which means that everything in Kotlin is an object. This tutorial will explain how to create classes, objects, methods and properties, and it’ll touch on fundamental object-oriented concepts such as inheritance, abstract classes and polymorphism. So if you just want to learn more about object-orientated methods, this is an ideal primer too. Let’s get started! Hello World! Let’s begin at the beginning and start by presenting the object-oriented version of the Hello World program, which you might find strange at first, especially if you’ve never used Java before. So, the Kotlin code of hwOO.kt is the following: There are many different things happening…