Table of contents for October 2020 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell It’s amazing what one can achieve when one turns off social media. There are so many other more interesting avenues of distraction. Oh wait, working smarter... Nextcloud’s Notes app is great for keeping track of websites and words that would otherwise be lost to the vagaries of memory. Les Pounder My top tip is to edit your .bashrc file and add handy commands to automatically fetch information. I have set mine up to get the latest news and show the current CPU temperature every time I open a new terminal. You can run any command via .bashrc! Nick Peers If, like me, your thoughts and inspirations vanish as quickly as they appear, you need some way of getting them down on (virtual) paper. And what better tool than…

“There’s one interview question that will enable you to differentiate those who are, or will become, the most talented Linux technical people from the rest of the pack. The clue lies in the word ‘talent’. My daughter gets annoyed when I tell her that she has a talent for art. By any reasonable measure she does, but she sees my reference to talent as an insult. It’s as if it’s somehow easier for her because she has ‘talent’. Her view is that she is passionate about art and thus willing to invest lots of time in it, which she does. Arguably if I spent as much time practising art as her, I’d be better at drawing (an astonishingly low barrier). To her, talent is simply passion plus time rather than…

“When Linux 5.2 was released, a new feature was added to support optimised case-insensitive file name look-ups in the Ext4 filesystem – the first of native Linux filesystems to do it. Over a year has passed since this (controversial) feature was made available, and work continues to build on top of it and make it more and more useful for system developers and end users. Case insensitivity is, by default, disabled in the kernel and is simply there for very specific use-cases. In other words, it’s a per-directory ‘opt-in’ feature. Nevertheless, many continue reacting negatively the instant they hear about this feature, questioning why it even existed in the first place. This feature directly improves Wine support for Windows applications running over Linux, and solves an important bottleneck on the…

The RISC-V architecture may be about to gain support for booting using UEFI. Atish Patra posted version 5 of a patch series that includes the necessary ‘efi stub’ support used to hand off from a suitable bootloader (such as GRUB2, widely used on x86 and Arm systems already) to a RISC-V build of Linux. This should improve the ability for distributions to release general-purpose versions for RISC-V systems without needing to tailor to each platform. Sumit Semwal posted an updated (version 5) set of patches adding support for “Anonymous VMA naming patches” to Linux. VMAs (Virtual Memory Areas) are used to represent memory allocated by programs, and anonymous memory means that not backed by an underlying file, such as malloc allocations done at runtime. It should be easier to boot…

A container in Linux is an area of the computer that is isolated from most of the rest of the system. It may contain a program and all the files and libraries needed to run that program, or it may contain an entire operating system. Programs running in a container may appear to be running on a normal computer, but they only have access to those resources that are within the container or any devices assigned to it, whereas a computer running on the host computer has access to everything. This is not the same as a virtual machine; memory is shared, as is the kernel, so it is more efficient. Putting a single application in a container – Docker is probably the most well known implementation of this –…

We carried out the tests on an old laptop to make sure none of the packages needed advanced hardware to do the job. To install the software we looked for as many options as we could find. Note that choosing an install option can affect the function of modules and external packages. To test the packages, we found problems from textbooks and tried to follow them with the software at hand. What we learned helped us assess how useful it will be for you. However, as these packages are more powerful than that, we also look at how you can use them for scientific course work. At the very least you can help your own understanding of the things happening in our world. The news covers current events with data…

The suggestions in this article shows you a range of packages that can help you in your research. Whether you’re learning or are creating something new and fantastic, these packages are the cream of the crop. With the Linux world the way it is, though, you can also choose from many others. Take a look at SageMath. Built with Python 3, it also uses the well-known underlying packages NumPy, SciPy and SymPy. It also uses many other packages; it’s described as a mathematics software system. The reason is that it combines what is already built into a cohesive system. The list of packages is very long. If you are into programming, this is a very strong alternative. If you aim to teach children mathematics, you have even more options –…

The open Home Automation Bus (openHAB) can connect all the diverse IoT appliances that may or may not be beginning to proliferate around your home. Typically these devices all have their own, often proprietary applications, but often under the bonnet they use open source protocols – and when they don’t, people have figured them out enough to plug them into openHAB. We’ve covered installing it (and indeed Mycroft over the page) back in LXF249, but this time around we’re going to do it a little differently, because Canonical recently released the openHAB Ubuntu Appliance for the Raspberry Pi. This means we can write their SD card image, boot it and have a fully functional web-based home automation server. In order to use these Ubuntu Appliances (there are currently four others…

Collabora has just released the latest version of its enterprise edition of LibreOffice: Collabora Office 6.4 (see www.collaboraoffice.com).Alongside that offering is another enterprise release, Collabora Online, which provides an online version of the office suite that can be plugged into a file sync and share host via the Web Application Open Platform Interface (WOPI). A free version of Collabora Online – the Development Edition, aimed at home users – is available, and it can be connected to your Nextcloud instance to provide functionality not entirely dissimilar to Google Docs. The easiest way to set it up is to use the Docker image and follow the instructions at https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline. The CODE docker image listens on localhost:9980, so for this to be accessible to the outside world the instructions use an Apache…

For many of us, the price tag was a key part of what got us into free software. But giving everything away for free does not a viable business plan make, and many successful free software projects got that way by discovering sustainable funding streams. These might be in the form of donations, subscriptions, sponsorship or merchandise (there’s no better way to support your favourite project than owning a mug with their logo emblazoned on it). Or it might be in the form of a paid-for, premium version, which may include extra support or extra features. We regularly run features telling you to ditch proprietary services and join the self-hosted revolution. But those services, be they Gmail, Dropbox or Zoom, are all free, and running your own will cost you…

The PC; the personal computer; the IBM-compatible. Whatever you want to call it, somehow it has maintained a dominant presence for nearly four decades. If you try to launch any program written from the ’80s to the 2000s onwards, you have a good chance of getting it to launch: your PC has backward compatibility going right back to the ’70s, enabling you to run pieces of history as though they were from yesterday. In fact, your computer is brimming with heritage, from the way your motherboard is laid out to the size of your drive bays to the layout of your keyboard. Flip through any PC magazine and you’ll see everything from bulky desktop computers to sleek business laptops; from expensive file servers to single-board devices only a few inches…

The battle for which company and OS will rule the PC starts with the beginning of the PC itself. Mention “DOS” and Microsoft DOS will come to mind, but there are plenty of variants. Enter Digital Research’s CP/M-86. CP/M was the original ‘DOS’, shipped with most non-proprietary machines. IBM originally planned to use CP/M-86 with the PC, but negotiations went sour when IBM wanted to pay Digital Research a one-time fee, rather than ongoing royalties. Meanwhile, Microsoft had purchased a clone of CP/M-86 from Seattle Computer Products, 86-DOS (aka QDOS – Quick and Dirty Operating System). This was re-branded to MS-DOS and IBM’s PC DOS, available for the PC. After Digital Research threatened legal action, IBM gave customers the option to buy either CP/M-86 or MS-DOS/PC DOS. MS-DOS/PC DOS was…

OUR EXPERT Christian Cawley has gained weight during lockdown, mostly from spending too much time with Raspberry Pis. He hopes to lose weight with some extra micro:bit projects. You probably think of the Raspberry Pi as a useful computing tool that can also handle a bit of emulated gaming. But there are plenty of games that you can install on the Raspberry Pi without needing an emulator. Open source games for Linux, classic games that have had the source code released, and games written in Python are all available. If an Arm-compatible build has been distributed, the game should run. First person shooters, shoot-’em-ups, strategy games and more are all ready to install on the Raspberry Pi. While simple to install, though, configuration can be tricky – especially when it…

In addition to creating custom triggers, you can also install extensions to expand Espanso’s feature set. These extensions, called packages, provide additional functionality. You’ll find a number of packages at https://hub.espanso.org. To install a package, you need to run the espanso install packagename command. For instance, you can run espanso install basic-emojis or espanso isntall all-emojis to install the emoji packages. Once installed, you’ll be able to insert emojis by using their name, such as :smirk:. :grin: and so on (while enjoying the irony of writing a word in order to create a picture). Install the arrows package with the espanso install arrows command if your writing involves drawing of arrows. You can now create a right-arrow with \rarrow, a tick with \check and so on. Each package has its…

To speed up note creation, MindForger supports ‘stencils’ – bare-bones templates. In the case of notebooks, these create a single Markdown file comprising a series of barebones notes based on the type of stencil you chose; with notes, the Markdown file is a template for that section only. You can duplicate notebooks and notes using the Clone command, but it’s better to set up your own barebones notebook or note – you can use MindForger or any markdown editor – and then copy the .md file you create into the relevant folder inside mindforger-repository – either stencils/notebooks or stencil/notes. To do this from within MindForger’s own markdown editor, set up your note, then after clicking Remember and approving your choice, click Edit to copy and paste the content into a…

OUR EXPERT Kseniya Fedoruk is a documents expert working at ONLYOFFICE, she lives to make your documents the best looking things on the planet!. Creating bibliographies, or searching and managing publication references is probably not an everyday task for those who are working with documents online. Nevertheless, if you’re writing a research paper, a book or something to be studied in academic circles, then as a rule you’re required to include a bibliography or a list of references that have helped you to put together your article. This job can be done manually, but it’ll take up a lot of your time. The easiest way to create a bibliography easily and quickly is to use dedicated applications that can perform this task automatically and within seconds. ONLYOFFICE is an open-source…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance creative technologist. He blogs about his discoveries at bigl.es. YOU NEED Linux! Amiga Kickstart ROMs Amiga Workbench 3.1 disk images Back in 1989 Tim Burton’s Batman movie was in the cinema, and advertising campaigns were in full swing to promote the Caped Crusader. At Commodore, its marketing team had signed a deal with Warner Bros. Pictures and Batman was to be on the Amiga. The Amiga 500 “Batman Pack” was our introduction to the Amiga and it started a life-long love for the machine. But the Amiga 500 was not the first machine. That honour goes to the Amiga 1000 as used in 1985 by Andy Warhol to digitally alter a photograph (look up the flood-fill bug…

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford likes to play around with the maths of sound. It shouldn’t come as a surprise – music is mathematically based, after all. Established in 1958, the Radiophonic Workshop was created, according to the BBC, to produce incidental sounds and new music for radio and television. It was known for its pioneering work in electronic music and music technology. Just two years into the Workshop’s existence, Delia Derbyshire, who had recently graduated from Cambridge with a degree in music and mathematics, joined the BBC as a trainee assistant studio manager. Within a couple of years she’d been assigned to the Radiophonic Workshop. It was here that she famously produced the Doctor Who theme tune, which had been composed by Ron Grainer. Delia had to use a mix…

Not quite the music of Doctor Who, but here’s something else you might like to try, that’s most definitely one of the show’s classic sound effects. Using Audacity, make a short recording of your voice. Say whatever you want but, to really get into the spirit of Doctor Who, how about saying “exterminate”? Be sure to speak slowly and emphasise the “ex” and the “term”. Next, head over to https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Effect_Plug-ins, download the ring modulator plug-in and install it in Audacity, following the instructions in the link near the top of that page. Now it’s time to create a bit of magic. Select all of your audio recording using Ctrl+A. Now, select Ring Modulator from the Effect menu and then, in the dialog box choose 30Hz as the modulation frequency, change…

I’ve never done so many video conferences, to the point where they’re not even called that any longer, they’re just ‘meetings’ once more. While a lot of these have been through LXF Tower’s Google Meet system, I have had the pleasure of using Jitsi, and my word it’s accomplished – but then why wouldn’t it be? Open source office solutions are no longer ‘also ran’ options, but first-world choices. Last issue we caught up with LibreOffice 7.0 and its many advancements, being used in governments and enterprises around the world. This issue we’re focusing how an open source smart home office looks and runs with a bit of help from the Raspberry Pi. From setting up a low-overhead video conferencing system to collaborative document editing and sharing, to more mundane…

“The Register recently ran a piece in which Microsoft’s representative to the Linux Foundation board, Sarah Novotny, talked about the potential barrier to entry imposed by plain text email and mailing lists for kernel development. The piece sparked a lot of (heated) debate about the relative merits for and against continuing to develop Linux in the way that it has been almost since day one. I would like to add my voice to those who support Sarah’s points. Linux continues to grow in terms of contributions, with 5.8 being one of the biggest releases yet. But at the same time, the community of kernel developers is overall an ageing one that faces challenges in the years ahead. Development today is conducted using the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List), a list…

We’d love to try and answer any questions you send to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, no matter what the level. We’ve all been stuck before, so don’t be shy. However, we’re only human (although many suspect Jonni is from the future), so it’s important that you include as much information as you can. If something works on one distro but not another, then tell us. If you get an error message, please tell us the exact message and precisely what you did to invoke it. If you have, or suspect, a hardware problem, let us know about the hardware. Consider installing hardinfo or lshw. These programs list the hardware on your machine, so send us their output. If you’re unwilling, or unable, to install these, run the following commands in a root terminal…

Mathematics has always been, and still is, a theoretical approach to understanding the world around us. Since this is the case you need to get data in and out from these applications. The most obvious way to do this is to export files. As you will see, you can also communicate directly with other devices and even servers that collect information. Many Linux Format readers will have projects at home, perhaps to do with home automation. To support these projects, you can use available communication protocols. Scilab and Octave have packages to do this; they support serial, socket and more. Together with the serial port, you can also add an Arduino package. This makes it easy to have sensors on the Arduino and connect directly to your mathematics module. Engauge…

Creative ingenuity and the ability to cram a network stack into the smallest of things have gifted us, over the past few years, some pretty funky home innovations. Legacy (classical?) home dwellers may see little merit in upgrading to a Smart Home, but we have some uniquely Linux ideas that may persuade them. Having a smart home needn’t mean having Alexa (the voice of Amazon’s Echo) eavesdropping on your every word. Nor does it mean the nameless entity within a Google Assistant reporting back to the mothership whenever you leave the bathroom light on. The Mycroft home assistant can do all the good bits of these voice devices, but without the more chilling data-collection aspects. Best of all you can run Mycroft on a Raspberry Pi. But there’s more to…

If you can join a room from multiple locations but don’t see any other participants and are stuck with a message telling you you’re the only one here, port forwarding is almost certainly the culprit. In some configurations the extra port 4443 will be necessary. Your next stop should be the log files. JVB and Jicofo’s are located in /var/log/jitsi and Prosody’s is in /var/log/prosody. It’s handy to delete these after a configuration change so that you don’t get confused by previous logs. Alternatively use tail to view the last few entries. After any configuration change, you’ll want to ensure that you restart all the services, which is a matter of: You might want to add nginx to that list, particularly if you’ve changed anything that will affect the frontend,…

When you’re running a home server or VPS, Docker is pretty great because you can add services without messing (too much) with the underlying system configuration. As we saw with Nextcloud though, even with just four Docker containers things were starting to become unwieldy. EMAIL MADE EASY “It’s often been said (including by us) that setting up an email server properly is hard. This is true, but we can set up a rough and ready container.” Portainer is a Docker management system that aims to restore order to your containers. It comes in two parts, server and agent, which both ship as Docker containers. We’ll only need the server image for this initial foray. The agent is used to marshall Docker Swarms, which are another way of connecting containers together.…

Without the Apple II, it’s possible the PC would never have existed. Although a subject of debate, it’s generally agreed that the Apple II was a primary influence on the PC. Many IBM engineers owned one – as did many customers, who found that they could easily do jobs such as working on spreadsheets that were nearly impossible on a giant mainframe. Sporting an 8-bit MOS 6502 processor, with between 4KB and 64KB of RAM, it debuted in June 1977 for a base price of $1,298. It had an incredible production run, selling from 1977 to 1993. Developed by Steve Wozniak, the Apple II stands in stark contrast to products developed by Apple’s lesser Steve (Mr Jobs). Chiefly, the Apple II is designed around an open architecture, with a removable…

Boston Dynamics is a robotic design company that is most famous for its BigDog autonomous walking quadruped robot – especially so for the old clips of it being kicked and pushed around by its creators, fearing this could instigate the singularity and a robot uprising. We jest, of course, future robotic overlords. The modern evolution of BigDog is Spot (www.bostondynamics.com/spot), a $75,000 robot you can buy – or can now ape using a Raspberry Pi and the Spot Micro Quadruped Project. Created by Michael Romanko, the full design and code is up on GitHub, and was originally a project pulled together to help teach himself C++, Python and robot control. The chassis is based on an existing ThingVerse 3D-printed model that was originally devised for an Arduino-based project. Mike took…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is an Associate Editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance Creative Technologist. He blogs about his discoveries at bigl.es. YOU NEED Raspberry Pi 4, 2GB min Windows, Linux or macOS PC A 16GB microSD and reader Wired internet connection Details for this tutorial can be found at http://bit. ly/LXF268pi Raspberry Pi OS, formerly Raspbian, has been the official operating system since the Raspberry Pi arrived in 2012. But over the years there have been a few attempts to port the popular Ubuntu distro to the Pi. With Ubuntu 20.10 being released in October 2020 – the first Ubuntu to be officially released for the Pi – we thought it would be fun to see if we can install Ubuntu 20.04 on a Raspberry Pi 4, and…

Incredibly, the Raspberry Pi supports almost all major game controllers, which means you’re going to be able to enjoy your chosen game with the top gaming equipment. In the case of Doom, this is something that simply wasn’t an option when the game was first released. There’s a very good chance you could exceed your previous scores on the game from back in the day – but first you need to make sure the controller is right for the game, then set it up. Unless, of course, you simply prefer the mouse and keyboard method of play, which was perfect for Doom in 1990-whatever. However game controllers are far more advanced and customisable these days. Doom was next to unplayable with a standard joystick, and not much better with a…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers is dreaming of a new, more powerful server setup. MindForger can do the planning… now all he needs is a lottery win.. Are you the kind of person who takes a scattergun approach to project-management? Do you struggle to stay on top of everything from an upcoming class project to recording gift ideas for someone’s birthday? Then MindForger could be just the tool you need. The program enables you to organise your life – whether work, personal or a combination of both – into notes and notebooks, which can be adapted to a wide variety of needs. Notes are written in the universal markdown format and can be assigned various properties to make them easy to find while steering you towards getting tasks completed within a…

The Amiga 1000 released in July 1985 was the start of the Amiga series of computers and the first model looked more like a traditional PC of the era. Retailing for $1,285 in 1985 ($3,100 adjusted for inflation in 2020) the A1000 was an impressive machine, but it wasn’t exactly a cost-effective entry for the home computing market. In 1987 Commodore released the Amiga 500 that retailed for $699 ($1,600 in 2020) and provided the same user interface and experience as the more expensive A1000. The A500 saw massive sales in the UK and Germany, with the help of bundled games, such as the Batman pack, various movie tie-ins and a curious deal with a crisp manufacturer and a puzzle/platform game. The A500 was updated to the A500+, which saw…

Here we’ve concentrated on the original Doctor Who theme, but it’s changed many times over the years. If you fancy creating something different, therefore, you have plenty of options to choose from and you’ll easily find online recording of all the main variants. Another classic Doctor Who sound effect to try out is the noise of the TARDIS dematerialising. Oh, and if you’re wondering, it’s been attributed to “the wheezing of the time rotor, possibly because of the Doctor leaving the handbrake on”. If you want to document your attempts at recreating the Doctor Who theme tune, and if you have an element of musical knowledge, you might like to try out MuseScore. Officially described as composition and notation software, it does much the same job for music that a…

OFFICE SUITE LibreOffice Version: 7.0 Web: www.libreoffice.org One of the most successful and best-known open source software has recently seen a major release. Of course that’s LibreOffice, a must-have software for Linux productivity workstations and the closest rival to the commercial Microsoft Office. In July there were some controversial rumours about labelling the 7.0 release as the ‘Personal Edition’, but shortly after developers the Document Foundation reverted their decision and left the branding intact (only updating the splash screen with stunning artwork). If you go to the ‘About’ dialogue, you’ll see that even the limitation to ‘individual use only‘ has also gone, which should further reassure plain mortals. LibreOffice 7.0 brings sizeable changes, both visible and less obvious. These include padded numbering in Writer (first numbers use 0 as a…

A perfect power distro Set the controversy thrusters to full power as we proclaim which Linux distro is the most powerful of all! Stream your life Stream your gaming, broadcast your desktop and generally learn how to get more from Open Broadcast Software. Raw photography Open source has some of the most powerful Raw photography tools – so why aren’t you using them? History of the PC – part two How Windows took over the world with the Pentium processor, and how something called Linux crept out of the research labs. Contents of future issues subject to change. We might be too busy binge-watching Babylon 5.…

“Observability comes from control theory and means that you should be able to determine or infer a system’s state by its output. For some setups, this can involve using strace and grepping through logs, but the number of machines that DBA’s are dealing with is exploding, and finding failure points is often like finding a needle in a data haystack. In the DevOps era, observability demands tools that can aggregate logs, metrics, alerts visualisations and now tracing. Tracing enables you to follow a transaction through a system — by combining all these sets of data together, you can get a complete view of your service. Setting up a system that handles all these has been difficult in practice, but there are a lot more tools now. At Percona, we use…

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 5.9-rc3 (release candidate 3), which he has described as being a fairly calm release cycle overall. Among the many new features and drivers for hardware merged this time around are security and scheduler fixes. Intel platforms have gained support for FSGSBASE while Arm platforms now use the newer ‘schedutil’ CPU frequency governor. The inclusion of FSGSBASE support means that context switch (the time taken to switch from running one process – tasks in kernel speak – to another) latency will decrease. Since Linux uses context switches to enable it to run many tasks on a single CPU, as well as every time a program makes a ‘system call’ into the kernel for some service it needs, reducing this time is a net win. Meanwhile, Intel platforms…

Q No news is not good news Following the demise of knode, I had to choose an alternative newsreader and found Pan. I am currently running it under Linux Mint 20 – or to be more accurate, I was until 21 July. Since then I can neither send or receive messages. The log reports: “Unable to connect to “news.eternalseptember.org:119": 483 encryption required It is the same when I switched to news.aoie.org. I cannot find anything on the internet that might explain this. I can both receive and send using Thunderbird but I prefer a dedicated reader. Alan Secker A This is indeed odd; I have tried both Pan 0.145 and Pan 0.146 and cannot reproduce this problem. The message implies that an encrypted connection is required, but I was…

Why would yo want to do mathematics on Linux? Is not mathematics over when you leave school? No! Maths is fun. You may also have forgotten much of what you should have learned in school. With the packages in this Roundup we’ll show which you should choose for what purpose. While you can use all the packages here for learning, there are two in particular that are much better at teaching, rather than giving you results for some project. You will see that you can even control a drone with the help of mathematics. You will also be in good company because many university professors use these packages as teaching aids, as well as teachers in “lower” schools. At least two of the packages we are looking at were developed…

We usually consider maths as separate from our daily lives. This is despite the fact that most big decisions are made based on calculations – we just don’t notice. With this disconnect, mathematics education is of utmost importance. The packages in this collection are to teach mathematics in many ways, some more than others. GeoGebra is centred around education. As mentioned earlier, the manual runs in the client. With a plethora of resources on the website, you can start teaching very easily. If you are a professional, they have paid services also. GNU Octave is more centred around getting results for problems. Many professors have written their thesis by finding insights with Octave. Exporting to LaTeX and other formats is well supported, using the programming language included. With that said,…

To the cynic, all this new smartification of everyday items seems to involve putting networked computers in places where they’re not needed, and needing so many companion apps on one’s smartphone to keep tabs on all these smart things. In so doing, one opens all these devices (and possibly your phone too) up to attack. Some manufacturers are better than others at keeping their IoT things secured, and many attacks could be prevented by users changing default credentials. Since 2016, Raspberry Pi’s no longer ship with the SSH service enabled because it’s too easy to spot them when they’re exposed to the Internet. But there’s a lot of smarthome projects that are fun, safe, and will bring some degree of joy to your home. Lots of these are variations on…

There’s still a couple of first generation Raspberry Pis keeping things ticking over here at LXF Towers. These older models are great – just look at our Pi 2 running Volumio – but lots of projects (such as Mycroft) will require more CPU power, so for a lot of projects you’ll see at least a Pi 3 is recommended. If you have a Pi 4, you can even run a Jitsi instance that can handle a few callers with no problems. The trouble is, these later models require much more power, so it’s important to use a power supply (ideally the official model) that can provide a steady 5.1V supply at up to 2.5A. Cheap USB power supplies can cause all kinds of hard-to-diagnose problems, so if something’s behaving oddly,…

Regulars will be familiar with our ranting and raving about how great Nextcloud is. And it keeps getting better – the latest edition of the self-hosted storage and sharing platform, Nextcloud 19, sees it transformed into a complete Collaboration Hub. CONTAINERS ARE GREAT “Multiple instantiations of the same container aren’t really a space issue, since the layers of the union filesystem are shared between them.” If you already have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or equivalent stack set up on a home server or VPS, you can easily add a Nextcloud instance to it, either by extracting an archive to your web server’s root directory, or by copying the Web Installer PHP file there and running it directly. Setting up a LAMP stack (or indeed a LEMP stack with…

If you’re feeling adventurous, it is possible to install Jitsi Meet on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB (the 8GB version will perform better though). This isn’t officially supported and setup is a little complicated. Also our Pi 4s are all locked up in Future Towers until such time as it is deemed Covid-proof. We were feeling extravagant so we took advantage of Mythic Beasts’ commitment-free, per-second billing and rented ourselves a remote Pi 4. Mythic Beasts’ offerings use PXE booting and mount the root filesystem via NFS from their own storage arrays. This means you’re not at the mercy of unreliable SD cards, and also allows you to rent up to 250GB of storage. We were more frugal, and went with the minimum 10GB; this costs just over £10…

Donation platforms such as Patreon and Indiegogo have enabled many projects to thrive. But these services have to make money too, and generally use proprietary software. Liberapay.com, by comparison, is run by a non-profit organisation and all of its source code is on GitHub. Liberapay exists to help people who contribute to the commons, whether it’s in the form of free software, media or words. Current projects on Liberapay include the K9 email client for Android, UBPorts (the community effort to continue Canonical’s abandoned Ubuntu Touch effort) and GIMP. Oh, and Liberapay itself. Such are the perils of being a non-profit organisation. Around half of web sites use Google Analytics (GA), which is provided for free because it provides Google with all kinds of useful data. But there’s a huge…

The version of Ubuntu/Xubuntu that we installed in this tutorial comes with many great applications, but we thought it would be good to install a couple of extra handy tools to enhance our install. The first is neofetch, a tool to show system information in a friendly and easy to read manner. From the terminal type the following to install. Run the command to see the details of your Raspberry Pi. Another handy tool is Bashtop, a system monitoring tool that shows CPU, RAM and storage usage, as well as network statistics and running processes. To install Bashtop we need to download the file to our Pi. Then navigate to the bashtop directory. Finally copy the command for use anywhere in the system. Run the command.…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi. An avid Arch user, he’s always on the hunt for discount geeky memorabilia. Whether we’re executing your favourite commands, frequently accessing certain directories, websites, or signing off email messages, we do a lot of repetitive typing during the course of the day. A lot of this effort can be saved by using text expansion tools such as Espanso. Espanso is an Italian word meaning ‘expand’ – and that’s precisely what the tool does. It lets you create a list of keywords or snippets which you can associate with longer words, expressions or even sentences. Any time a configured keyword or snippet is encountered, Espanso automatically replaces it with the text. Released under the GPLv3, this minimalist utility also supports just…

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In 2020 the range of aftermarket products to upgrade your Amiga is growing! For the old workhorse A500 and A500+ we see add-on boards to replace the CPU with a more powerful unit. Thanks to a clever design, the new CPU can be slotted over the old and it’ll bypass the original CPU. The A600 and A1200 are the most interesting area for mods. Here we can purchase accelerator cards, such as the Vampire range from Apollo Accelerators. For €300 we can add a 68080 CPU, which is faster than a 68030 running at 800MHz! 128MB of FastRAM provides ample RAM for all Amiga tasks. We can also connect to monitors at 800x600, which may not sound like a big deal, but that’s much better than the Amiga 600 default…