Índex per November 2016 a Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell Around Halloween/Samhain conditions are pretty good for enlisting the help of ghouls, daemons, faeries and the like. These creatures can be quite loyal if bribed with the appropriate pixie dust. They know how to tune kernels, optimise TCP buffers and heal data errors. Just don’t make them angry. Neil Bothwick Are you saying that installing Linux on it is not super enough? To get more performance, I recompile everything with extreme compiler flags that must make it faster because it said so on the internet. Lights inside the case and stripes on the outside also give a noticeable boost. Nick Peers The best way that I souped up my Linux system was to switch to a solid state drive. Everything loads blisteringly fast and I’ve vowed I’ll never…

Microsoft’s dominance of office software faces a new threat with the news that the Italian military is ditching Microsoft Office in favour of open source alternative—LibreOffice. It aims to migrate its entire collection of desktop PCs – which total more than 100,000 – to the software over the next four years, and the first phase of this process has been completed with 8,000 PCs now running LibreOffice. As you’d expect from a military organisation, this process has a codename – LibreDifesa – and it is being assisted in this ambitious project – which is the largest transition to free software undertaken by a European public administration – by the open source advocacy group LibreItalia (www.libreitalia.it). Volunteers from the group are working with the military to train military trainers and support…

“It is said that the United States has a revolution every four years, when we cast our votes. While the system has its flaws, most would agree that voting is an important part of having a say in how our government functions. How we vote is one of the strongest signals that citizenry can send. That’s why protecting the vote is so important. I’ve said before that public institutions should turn to open-source software. When it comes to voting machines, however, the mere mention of electronic voting makes some people uneasy. Due to this danger, I think it’s clear that we cannot trust the software running on these machines simply because a company says we should. If our counties decide to use electronic voting, we need to get one thing…

Your’re annoying me. I’ve had a Linux Format digital subscription for about half a year now and I’m generally happy with the magazine. What’s really annoying me though is the iOS app which constantly offers all the back issues of the magazine at half price. First, it’s always the same discount under a different name; everyone who has been around for three month gets the same discount again and again. “Just switch off notifications!” you might say. Well, not so easy, because naturally I want to be informed of a new issue coming out. When I get a notification, I’m always like “Yay, new magazine is out”, just to be quickly disappointed because it’s just the same bloody back-issue offer. Second, Linux Format offers all its back issues for free…

While you can convince your buddies to move to a different IM client with better security and privacy, you can’t expect them to switch operating systems as well. Of course, in an ideal world everybody would be using GNU/Linux and this wouldn’t be an issue at all. But that doesn’t mean that folks using inherently less secure OSes can’t use a secure IM client. Thankfully, all the IMs in this Roundup support multiple desktop OSes in addition to Linux but only a couple support mobile platforms. CryptoCat, Retroshare and GoldBug can all be installed on Windows and Mac OSX as well. However, Goldbug treats Linux and Mac users as second-class citizens and only offers the latest version (3.0) to its Windows users. Also, Retroshare is the only client on test…

Having secure conversations over the insecure open internet is a growing concern for corporations and individuals alike. This is why in addition to the open source clients we’ve covered in this Roundup, there are a wide array of proprietary clients on offer as well. There’s a strong possibility that your current IM client enables you to add the OTR plugin, which you can use to encrypt your chats, for example Pidginis one such mainstream client that comes with OTR as an optional plugin. There’s also Wickrwhich allows users to exchange end-to-end encrypted messages and enables them to set an expiration time on the communication. The application is available for all major mobile and desktop operating systems, but if you need a secure app for mobile-to-mobile communication, check out ChatSecure, Signal…

The Pine 64 was a crowdfunded project that promised so much, but feels a little underwhelming. The board uses a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.2GHz and comes in 512MB, 1GB or 2GB of RAM versions. We’ve tried out the 2GB version, which is priced at $29. It has connections for CSI and DSI, camera and display respectively but these are not compatible with the Raspberry Pi camera and display. It comes with a 40-pin GPIO similar to the Raspberry Pi and the pin layout is also compatible, which means that add-on boards can be attached to the Pine 64. Note: It does require user intervention to compile the libraries necessary for the board to talk to add-ons. A version of RPi.GPIO exists for Pine 64, but it…

I dream of AI This monthly column has talked about ‘artificial intelligence’ before (and I’ve covered the subject in a few related stories) over the last year. I suppose you could say that it has grown into a fascination of sorts. I’m writing tonight having just plonked my pre-order for one of Amazon’s Alexa-backed products into a database somewhere in the vast (AWS) ether. I’ve been attempting to squeeze in enough study time to do one of the many available online courses or read one of the myriad books about this compelling subject. It’s the first time in a while that a technological advance like this has caught my attention in such a strong way (I’ve been devouring fistfuls of blog posts like the one seen here at OpenAI.com (https://openai.com/blog/infrastructure-for-deep-learning).…

Krita Webcamoid Wine Wireshark VirtualBox Fontweak Randrctl Ktuberling Chromium QDirStat CUPS “Krita is worth trying thanks to its very clean and welcoming interface.” Image editor Krita Version: 3.0.1 Web: https://krita.org When it comes to editing photos or other sorts of raster images in Linux, most users will tend to think of GIMP. This is understandable as it’s one of the most well-known open source projects. But there’s a relatively new GIMP competitor out there with a cute name (which means ‘chalk’ in Swedish). Krita is part of the Calligra bundle, a KDEcentric office suite, but it’s the only bold and actively developed component of that suite while the rest have received far less attention. Kritais a tool for manipulating images, and, of course, you can adjust your holiday photos with…

Don’t like the Ctrl+a binding? Or possibly annoyed by that startup message? Create a custom configuration file for Screenthat will apply your personal preferences every time that it’s run using the following command: You can populate this file with any or all of the following lines of settings, tweaking them as necessary, before saving and exiting. They’ll then be applied to the next Screensession that you launch: Finally, add a useful status line to the bottom of the Terminal window that makes it easier to see which session you’re currently in:…

The vast majority of PCs are capable of running a MythTV server, thanks to the fact that streaming and recording live digital TV is far less resource-intensive than processing an analogue signal. Your processor simply needs a Passmark CPU Mark of 500 or greater. To verify this, open System Settings > Details, make a note of your processor model, then go to www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php to find its score. Anything over 500 will happily record up to six digital HD channels while watching one. MythTV also recommends 1GB to 2GB RAM, but if you plan to run it alongside other software on your PC, aim for 4GB or higher. You also need to verify your graphics chipset or card is capable – it needs to be an Nvidia 8000-series or newer, ATI…

You can also use this method to boot an ISO image from your hard disk. Why would you want to do this? If you are sufficiently paranoid/cautious, you may prefer to have a rescue CD always available. Dropping an ISO into /boot and adding a suitable menu entry means you will always have one without having to hunt for the appropriate CD or USB stick. If you put the submenu entry in /etc/grub.d/40_custom, it will be added to the end of the menu ßautomatically, whenever you run: update-grub or grub-mkconfig .…

By default, your WordPress installation is only accessible from computers within the network it’s set up on. But that’s not to say that you can’t access it from the internet. The trickier and expensive solution is to get a static IP address from your ISP, and then poke holes in your router’s firewall to allow traffic from the internet to find your website. The smarter way, though, is to use a tunnelling service such as PageKite. It uses a Python script to reverse-tunnel from your computer to a subdomain.pagekite.me address. The service uses a pay-what-you-want model. The minimum payment of $4 (about £2.50) gets you 2GB of transfer quota for a month. Pay more to get more bandwidth for a longer duration and the ability to create additional .pagekite addresses.…

Our expert Nate Drake is a freelance journalist specialising in cybersecurity and retro tech, so far his CCTV system has recorded hours of footage of his cute pet cat sleeping. Raspberry Pi Establish your own home-wide security camera network Viewers of Crimewatch UK will be familiar with the grainy images of suspected criminals in off-licences and jewellery shops across Britain. Members of the public are asked to come forward and identify someone’s face from an image that looks like it’s been smudged with a calloused thumb. This is particularly hard for people used to viewing videos on YouTube and Vimeo in crisp HD. As much as we all would like to do our civic duty and bring people to justice, this is hard without buying a state of the art…

Kivy has its own language and as you would most likely have guessed, it’s called kivy language or KV Language. The language provides a simple way to build widget trees and handle associated bindings. This can be extremely useful if you are dealing with masses of widgets inside an app. Our coffee app would benefit from using the kivy language to clean up the code. However, to save time having to learn two languages you can handle the widgets within Python. Even so, check out how easy it is to a create button in kivy: Now to quickly explain the code, the parent widget is illustrated in the arrow brackets. Each child widget is indented thereafter. Button and Label are child widgets of BoxLayout which is a child of the…

To encode messages you’ll first need to navigate to where the handy enigma command line program is stored. Connect via SSH or open Terminalon the Pi and use the cd command to to do this e.g. $ cd /home/pi/bgneal-enigmaf3af458a5d2d . Next, examine your key sheet and determine which day’s settings you want to use. Decide on three random letters to use as the message key. You’ll next run a command to encrypt the message key. Leave the rotors in the same starting position as in your keyfile for now: For instance, if it’s the 29th day of the month, the initial rotor positions in your keyfile are ‘APJ’ and you want to use the message key ‘UVX’ you would write: This gives the text output ‘QMMZIY’. Next use the message…

The single most important task when dealing with data is making sure that you have your data in the correct format. As you don’t know in advance how your data is going to be used, it’s a good idea to extract the original data intact and then decide what to do with it. After getting your data, there exist many ways that can help you perform small or radical modifications to it. The following AWK script swaps the first and the second columns of a text file: Similarly, the next AWK code adds the first two columns of a text file and writes the result into a new column: AWK is very handy and allows you to do many things with the minimal amount of code, but it can’t replace…

Pipes We have often used shell redirection to speed things up, using > to send the output from a command to a file, or doing the reverse and using < to send the contents of a file to a command. This is because many programs accept data on standard input (stdin), and almost all of them send their output to standard output (stdout). These outputs are normally the keyboard and terminal display respectively, but redirection changes that. Pipes take this a step further and do away with the files altogether, using the output of one command as the input for another. The pipe is represented by the vertical bar character ‘ | . For example, when downloading a compressed disk image for a Raspberry Pi, rather than uncompressing and copying…

We receive several questions each month that we are unable to answer, because they give insufficient detail about the problem. In order to give the best answers to your questions, we need to know as much as possible. If you get an error message, please tell us the exact message and precisely what you did to invoke it. If you have a hardware problem, let us know about the hardware. If Linux is already running, use the Hardinfo program (https://github.com/lpereira/hardinfo) that gives a full report on your hardware and system as an HTML file you can send us. Alternatively, the output from lshw is just as useful (http://ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter). One or both of these should be in your distro’s repositories. If you are unwilling, or unable, to install these, run the…

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…

We know that some people scoff at the popularity of the Raspberry Pi, but selling in the millions and running the Debian-based Raspbian, why not think of it as one of the biggest selling GNU/Linux devices of all time? (Possibly because it is?) Surely that can only be a good thing and spreads contact with Linux to a wider and vitally younger audience? I recently listened to a FOSS (free and open source software) talk where the discussion centred on how any FOSS device could even come close to the success of the Apple iPhone. The talk turned to finding a niche new market or demand that no one else had thought of… Surely, I thought at the time, what they’re talking about here is the Raspberry Pi? Of course,…

Cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive have made uploading, syncing and sharing our files on the internet incredibly convenient, but this convenience often comes at a cost—both financially if you need more space than the rather paltry free offerings they provide, and also at a potential cost to your privacy, with high-profile security lapses making headlines. Entrusting your important data to the whims of a third-party company isn’t something we’ve been comfortable with, which is why the Nextcloud Box has our attention, as it promises the simplicity and user-friendliness of established cloud services while giving you complete control. True to its name, it’s a box with room for a hard drive (a 1TB USB 3.0 drive is provided) and a Raspberry Pi (either a Pi 2 or Pi…

Qubes Os 3.2 A Fedora-based distro, Qubes OS, has received a new update. Version 3.2 builds on the update from earlier this year. While much of the update concerns itself with polishing up Qubes OS, there’s a new feature that makes this update worth checking out: Integrated management infrastructure has been improved since 3.1 and now allows you to manage the insides of virtual machines, and not just the VMs as a whole, while still retaining security. You can download the latest version from https://www.qubes-os.org/downloads. CHapeau 24 Another Fedora-based distro, Chapeau has been updated to version 24. The idea behind this distro is to have a beginner-friendly operating system that includes software that isn’t permitted under Fedora’s licencing policies, such as RPMFusion, DropBox, Steamand Oracle VirtualBox. Chapeau 24 is based…

BarCamp Manchester Not in a bar, but there was a Pi-powered barman. BarCamp Manchester took place in September at City Labs and drew an eclectic crowd of makers, developers and techies for two days of unconference fun. An unconference is an event where there are no scheduled talks, rather the attendees are the speakers and fill up talks in rooms across the venue. Unconferences are exciting and offer talks that aren’t commonly seen on the circuit. Where else can you take part in a talk covering the history of error messages, ferrets or sign language? Under the stewardship of Claire Dodd, this event has come on leaps and bounds, offering a comfortable experience for veterans and newbies alike. The event offered a variety of talks. We took part in a…

In brief... A stylish, easy-to-use distribution that’s easy to install and easy to use. It’s probably closer to Mac OS than any other Linux desktop, and that, combined with the many instances of configurability being sacrificed in favour of simplicity, will likely put off many LXFreaders. See also: EndlessOS, KaOS, Linux Mint. It’s been about a year and half since the last major Elementary OS release (Freya). That version, while a little rough around the edges (some of which were smoothed with a couple of point releases), showed immense progress and promise, so we were excited to see what this incarnation brings. For those unfamiliar with Elementary OS, it aims (and succeeds) to be pretty and easy to use. It’s even a little coy about the fact that it’s a…

Truth be told, there aren’t many of us who’d be willing to migrate to a new application if the installation is found to be a long, drawn out process. This is especially true for a desktop-centric application such as an instant messenger. In this respect, the only application that really disappoints is GoldBug. While you can download packages for installing GoldBugfrom SourceForge or from its unofficial PPA, the IM only has Deb files for Ubuntu Trusty Tahr (14.04) which severely limits who can actually use the IM. Then there’s Retroshare which only has official packages for Ubuntu and Debian. But the website lists unofficial packages for OpenSUSE, Fedora, CentOS, Mageia, Gentoo, FreeBSD and Arch Linux. There’s also an unofficial build for Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian called PiShare which was released in…

“We explore how to build the ultimate Pi for use in a number of essential and common roles.” The Raspberry Pi has transformed the way we look at computers and computing. Thanks to its ridiculously low cost of ownership, you can build a fully functional computer for under a tenner and put it to all kinds of uses. But sometimes that choice can be overwhelming – this is a computer that has gone into space for goodness sake – but that shouldn’t stop you finding new and exciting ways to use it. The Pi’s versatility makes it the perfect tool for just about any task you could think for it to do. Looking for a replacement desktop for your PC? The Pi 3 has just about enough oomph – with…

ON THE JOY OF BASH “It’s ubiquitous, you can rely on Bash being available wherever you run.” Toby Jackson is Future Publishing’s Senior Infrastructure Engineer and an all round nice guy. They say he can stare into a directory listing and tell you the files and line numbers of code you didn’t even know were broken. We spent several hours chatting with him about the tools and tactics that keep Future’s manifold servers afloat, as well as enjoying several pints of the Bath Brew House’s micro-brewed ales. Emperor proved particularly popular. Linux Format: How did you get into computers in the first place? Toby Jackson: When I was in high school I did a work experience thing—we spent a week working in industry. I went to a chemical plant because…

The Orange Pi One retails for approximately $10 on Aliexpress and is powered by an Allwinner H3 Quad Core ARM Cortex A7 running at 1.2GHz and 512MB of RAM. To cut costs, the board comes with only one USB 2.0 port and 100MB Ethernet. It uses microSD cards for storage and audio/video output is via an HDMI port. There’s also a USB OTG port for additional USB devices. Power is supplied via a standard barrel jack supply of 5v at 2 Amps and it has a 40-pin GPIO which is claimed to be compatible with the Pi B+ and while this may be supported by individual pins, attaching an add-on board is problematic because of where the USB and Ethernet ports are located. Software for the Orange Pi is available…

One of the best uses for Screenis as a means to access your PC remotely. Sure, you can set up a simple SSH connection, but what happens if your connection drops? You lose all the work that you’ve done up to that point. However, if you decided to use Screeninstead the session remains preserved, allowing you to reattach it and carry on where you left off. Screen works exactly the same way over SSH as it does locally, so once logged into your PC remotely over SSH [Tutorials, p66, LXF214 for more on this], you can reattach an existing Screensession if you have left one running or start one from scratch to ensure that whatever happens to your connection, your work won’t be wasted and your head won’t hit the…

One area MythTV isn’t clear on is how you configure a separate partition or drive for storing recordings on when the drive isn’t automatically mounted at startup. If this is the case, first type the following command in a Terminal window: Next, open the Dash and search for ‘disks’. Open the Disks utility. Select your data drive on the left, then click on the partition you plan to use for your storage on the right. Click the Settings button underneath the bar chart and choose Edit Mount Options… Flick the Automatic Mount Settings switch to Off, then type /mythtv into the Mount Point box before clicking OK. Enter your password when prompted, then open Terminal and type the following command: This should automatically mount your storage in the /mythtv folder…

Our expert Neil Bothwick has a great deal of experienced with booting up, as he has a computer in every room, but not as much with rebooting since he made the switch to Linux. Grub Boot multiple Live distro images from a USB stick Almost all of the distribution (distro) ISO files on our cover DVDs are what are known as hybrid files. This means that not only can they be written to a CD or DVD in the normal way but they can also be copied to a USB stick with dd. The USB stick will then boot as if it were a DVD. This is a handy way of creating install discs for computers that don’t have an optical drive, but it has one significant drawback: Each ISO…

Our expert Mayank Sharma has no time to run a website, he’s far too busy writing about how to set up and manage Linux for all kinds of tasks on many systems for LXF’s loyal readers. WordPress Create a web presence for yourself the free and easy way One of the crown jewels of open-source software, WordPress is one of the leading proponents in the growth of read-write web. The nifty little tool helps roll out and serve all kinds of websites – from simple one-page personal blogs to complex portals that put out all kinds of content to users around the world. Its free price tag and easy-to-use interface make WordPress an ideal choice to power your web presence. It has an extensive back-end management interface that gives you…

MotionEyeOS supports multiple security cameras which will allow you to monitor a number of areas at once. If you’re using the official Raspberry Pi Camera Module or the Pi NoIR, then simply follow steps 1-3 in the walkthrough (turn to p78) to install MotionEyeOS on the additional Raspberry Pi and add the video stream on your main Pi. To set up a Pi with a USB camera, then read on. First, set up your extra Wi-Fi-enabled Raspberry Pi with a clean install of Raspbian but don’t connect your USB camera just yet. Next SSH into your PI and run sudo apt-get install motion to install the motion application, which will access your USB camera and stream the video. Type sudo nano /etc/motion/motion.conf to edit the main motion config file. Change…

Our expert Dan Smith always seems to be lacking two things: enough coffee and enough sleep. Kivy/Python Raspberry Pi Touch Screen Coffee Machine How would a coffee connoisseur describe a humble espresso after ‘cupping’ or what most of us would call taking a good whiff? I’ve heard one describe it as “like a brown bear running through a forest of berries and slipping over falling face first into a puddle of chocolate” That doesn’t even make sense. It sounds good, of course, and as long as they’re not describing instant coffee, it doesn’t matter. In the last issue, [Tutorials, p72, LXF216] we covered how to integrate greater temperature control into an espresso machine using a Raspberry Pi, a Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) controller, basic electronics and a simple Python Kivy GUI. The…

Our expert Nate Drake Nate wants to thank his long-suffering girlfriend, who had to forego her TV time while he sent streams of gibberish from his Enigma machine across the screen. Alan Turing famously said: “Some people thought we were at war with the Germans. Incorrect. We were at war with the clock” or at least that’s what Benedict Cumberbatch says as Alan Turing in the 2014 film, The Imitation Game. Regardless, Cumberbatch (as Turing) was referring to the Enigma machine which was being used by the Germans to encode military radio messages during World War II and to date had proved near impossible for the Allies to crack. In technical terms, Enigma machines were known as ‘electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines’. They resembled large typewriters and an operator would configure…

1 Language lapse I installed Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon from LXF214 on a HP 8440n without any trouble and Windows 7 also exists without trouble. But when it come to installing another language, Swedish, the setup language, English, starts to get mixed up. All the menus and map names are in Swedish but my keyboard flips between Swedish and English when Mint 18 starts. Now it’s stuck in English. What should I do? What command should I use in Terminal to have Mint 18 to stay in Swedish? Bengt Eriksson It sounds like you have installed and selected the Swedish language packs for your desktop, but the system locale is still set to English, as that was the language you used for installation. Linux is a multi-user system, so when…

Secure nothing I have a strange problem that started a couple of days ago after a small system update. However, I’m not sure if that was the cause. I cannot log into my banking sites, I can access bank home pages but not log in. The page times out. I can access Gmail and most other websites, Hotmail was slow but does log in. I tried traceroute after 12 or 15 tries it shows only asterisks. I called my ISP and it didn’t know. It called Telstra, my telco and they didn’t know either. I tried using my phone on Wi-Fi at home and had the same problem, When I turned off Wi-Fi and used mobile data, I could connect to the bank’s login. I’m using Firefox and Chromiumwith Lubuntu.…

The Ultimate Ubuntu 16.10 It’s that time of the year again when a new Ubuntu release lands, we turn our hand to make it even better! Boost your old PC Ubuntu is dumping 32-bit, so we explore how you can keep your ageing 32-bit bits going a bit longer. Chromebook revolution It’s the biggest-selling Linux laptop range ever, we explore which models will release your inner Tux. Get your VPN on We look at how you can get more from your VPN and how Opera is bundling one for free. Contents of future issues subject to change – we might still be waiting for our Ubuntu 16.10 download.…

Back in LXF214 [News, p7], we reported that it was likely that Sony would pay compensation to PlayStation 3 owners who lost the ability to run Linux on the game console after updating to a firmware released in 2010. Sony has now settled the class-action lawsuit and owners of the original PS3 in the US should be getting an email from Sony letting them know if they are eligible for a reimbursement of either $9 or $55. The larger sum is for anyone who can submit proof of their purchase and use of the Other OS functionality. A recent drama involving Chromecast and the open source Chromiumbrowser proved that while the internet is quick to take offence at Google’s latest machinations, it’s worth keeping a level head. The summary is…

LXF USA I’m a Linux hobbyist in Boston. Will there ever be a USA edition of Linux Format in 2017 or beyond? I think it’s time for a USA version that can be bought in Canada or the USA! I also think there should be a USA version on Zinio as well! Markus McLaughlin, Boston, MA. Neil says: It’s something that has been discussed as Linux Format sell a good few thousands copies to the USA, it even ranks very highly in the top technology titles sold on the US news stand—both real and digital. The issue is that splitting off a dedicated US title would leave us with a weakened UK/Rest of the World title and dedicated US title that likely doesn’t sell enough on its own to survive.…

FOSDEM 2017 Brussels, Belgium plays host to another two days of talks, workshops and exams covering the broad spectrum of free and open source software and hardware projects. FOSDEM is a massive event in the open source calendar and draws attendees from across the globe. It is the place to be to learn about the future of the open source community. There’s no registration required so get your flights booked now! https://fosdem.org/2017 Over The Air 2016 St John’s Church, Hoxton, Shoreditch, London plays host to another two-day conference for those working or interested in mobile development. This great event, which takes place 25-26 November, offers attendees the chance to work together in a hackathon, learn from their peers through a series of workshops and listen to inspirational speakers via lightning…

On paper, Goldbughas a manual in English as well as a detailed entry on wikibooks. In reality however, the English documents are very crude translations of the original German manuals and, therefore, many things don’t make much sense at all. We also didn’t find off-site, unofficial information on the internet. Retroshare provides a wealth of information including a FAQ, wiki, a blog, and forums. The documentation covers a vast number of topics to help new users get acquainted with the Retroshare network and the app. On the forums you’ll find platform-specific boards that tackle common problems and their solutions. qTox is fairly intuitive to use, but there’s also a user manual that explains the various functions and the features, while help and support is dispensed via mailing lists. The qTox-specific…

The Odroid C2 is one of Hardkernel’s mid-range SBC and comes with an ARM Cortex A53 (ARM v8) quad core 1.5GHz CPU, backed up with 2GB of DDR3 RAM. It features the typical 40-pin GPIO but it does not share the same layout as the Raspberry Pi, meaning there is no compatibility. At the time of writing, the Python GPIO library requires a number of steps to get working. The Odroid comes with an HDMI 2.0 port capable of 4K video output, four USB 2.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet are present. As well as plenty of ports for peripherals, storage is provided via a microSD port on the underside of the board but it is rather fragile. There’s also space for an eMMC card to be attached for faster storage.…

One accusation that could be levelled at Administeria –besides the one about it being submitted late (think of my angina!–Ed) each month – is that it concentrates a bit too much on the brand new and shiny side of things. Containers, time series databases, configuration management tools abstracting away tasks that used to take days of hand hacking together running on servers off in the cloud somewhere. That sort of thing, much as I’d like them to, don’t make up 100% of my workload. I’m not sat with my feet up, letting some machine intelligence do my work while I get on with finally completing NetHackregardless of how hard I try. Indeed, while I strongly believe we’re in one of, if not the best times ever to work in this…

Our expert Nick Peers has been playing around with computers for over 30 years, and has been dabbling with Linux for the best part of a decade. Terminal Set up Screen to run multiple shells from the one Terminal window Sometimes you’ve no alternative but to run more than one Terminal session – or shell – at a time. This is easily done from the desktop of course—just press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a new Terminal window and off you go. But your desktop can soon get messy, particularly if you’re forced to leave Terminal windows open while certain programs are running. And what if you’re not running a desktop (through choice or otherwise)? The solution to this problem is a program called Screen. This enables you to run multiple shells…

Our expert Mayank Sharma has no time to watch TV, he’s far too busy writing about how to set up and manage Linux for all kinds of tasks on many systems for LXF’s loyal readers. MythTV Create a free personal video recorder with this open-source software If you’re looking to turn your Ubuntu-powered PC into a home cinema, then MythTV is your new best friend. MythTV is a feature-rich media centre application capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray discs, watching digital movies, showcasing your photos and giving you access to your music collection. However, where it really excels is as a digital video recorder. All you need to do is supply a TV tuner, and you can use it to watch live TV, plus schedule recordings of all your favourite…

In this instance, we’ve created a flash drive that uses the old style MBR booting. While most computers of the last few years use UEFI, they still have a compatibility mode to boot from an MBR. So this makes our stick the most portable option, but if you need to boot your stick using UEFI, change the grub-install command to use the UEFI target, like this: This is a 64-bit target, as UEFI is only fully supported on 64-bit hardware. If you want to use your USB stick with 32-bit equipment, stick (sorry) with the MBR booting method.…

If you think rolling out a custom server is too much effort, you can set up a free account on http://wordpress.com. If you want more flexibility and can spare some dosh, you can use one of the several WordPress-friendly web hosts, such as http://bluehost.com, http://getflywheel.com and http://pagely.co.uk. Then there’s a couple of options that enable you to host your own instance of WordPress without the trouble of setting up a server. Bitnami stacks support a large number of cloud services, including Amazon Web Services, 1&1 Cloud Platform, Google Cloud Platform and more. There’s also Turnkey Linux, which can be used to deploy WordPress on Amazon EC2. Furthermore, the project also has OpenStack and Docker images. Both projects also produce images and installation bundles for quick deployments on your local infrastructure.…

When designing GUIs in Python use an image manipulation program such as GIMPto figure out what you want your GUI to look like, as designing the GUI through coding trial and error is a very time consuming method. If you are designing a GUI for a Pi 7-inch touchscreen ensure to set your canvas size to the same pixel screen resolution as the touch screen. In this case the Pi 7-inch touch screen has a screen resolution of 800x480 pixels. Once the canvas size is set you can start making layers. Create a separate layer for each widget in your app. The beauty about using a separate layer for each widget is it provides the freedom to move and manipulate without altering the other widget layers. Creating widgets with transparent…

Py-Enigma closely matches the settings for the original Enigma machine but adds the option to choose your own ‘Umkehrwalze'(reflector). These were hardwired into the original machines and usually weren’t changed in the field. For more information on what the reflector is and does see http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/enigmatech.htm#reflector but for now we suggest using type ‘B’ which was the one used by the German Army. The easiest way to store key settings is through use of a key file. Open Terminalon your Pi or connect via SSH and type: This will create a blank file. You write the settings in the format Day, columns, rotor settings, letter pairings and reflector. Paste in the below text by way of example to get started: You can adapt the keyfile to choose different settings and/or enigma…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos (@mactsouk) has an M.Sc. in IT from UCL and a B.Sc. in Mathematics, which makes him a DB-admining, software-coding, Unix-using, mathematical machine. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu. This tutorial will be a gentle introduction to statistical learning for developers and system administrators using R. All the required theory will be included here so you will not need to look elsewhere. Although you can use your own data, this tutorial will use simple data sets to make your life easier. You should have R installed and you should know how to start R or RStudio. Additionally, you shouldn’t be afraid of mathematics, statistics and probability, although what is going to be used here is relatively simple and straight forward. Let’s get started then. Imagine that you…

Linux Format is proud to produce the biggest and best magazine that we can. A rough word count of LXF193 showed it had 55,242 words. That’s a few thousand more than Animal Farm and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis combined, but with way more Linux, coding and free software (but hopefully less bugs). That’s as much as the competition, and as for the best, well… that’s a subjective claim, but we do sell way more copies than any other Linux mag in the UK. As we like giving things to our readers, each issue the Star Question will win a copy or two of our amazing Guru Guides or Made Simple books – discover the full range at: http://bit.ly/LXFspecials. For a chance to win, email a question to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, or post it…

What is cron? Cron executes programs automatically at predetermined times. How does it do that? It wakes up once per minute and checks the list of jobs that need to be done. If any are due that minute it runs them. Where is this list stored? There are a number of places where they are stored, the main system file is at /etc/crontab. There are also convenience directories at /etc/cron.hourly, / etc/cron.daily and so on. Any scripts that are dropped into these directories are run at the appropriate time. Why more than one location? The separate directories mean that software packages can install their own cron jobs to be run at the required interval, while the main crontab file determines exactly when they are run. Surely hourly, daily, weekly and…

When was the last time you recommended Linux to a nontechnical relative or friend? It’s a risk when that person only knows Windows. We all know how Linux does things differently and the Windows approach to many tasks just doesn’t work. That means that when you do recommend it, you are setting yourself up as that person’s tech support helpline—and you know they will use it. This is where distros such as Elementary OS shine. They are designed with Windows users in mind, which makes the transition less traumatic—not painless but a lot easier. Looking at the distros on this month’s DVD, Linux Mint 18 KDE may be an excellent choice for so many of our readers, but would you really recommend it to your aunt? It’s this diversity in…