Índex per June 2021 a Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell OpenMediaVault server can install Portainer in a single click, and despite running many a container on very modest hardware, it never once fell over during my labours. If only the same could be said for me, who suffered plenty at the hands of IPv6 these past weeks. Neil Bothwick I switched to Bitwarden a while ago. It was easy to set up my own server and the program works with my desktop, browsers and phone. Now I have all the benefits of convenient, centralised password management, without storing anything sensitive on anyone else’s server. Nick Peers For me, it has to be Signal. Open-source, transparent and everything is properly encrypted end-to-end for maximum privacy. The program has evolved to support group video chat too, so why anyone continues…

“After a couple of weeks of hype, a company I know made a big announcement last week. You know what happened of course: its website couldn’t cope with the sudden surge of traffic. Embarrassment all round. There’s no excuse for that these days. Setting up autoscaling on a cloud provider such as AWS is straightforward, but only if you know how to do it. Their system was set up by their web developer, and he didn’t know how. Horses for courses. Web developers are great at designing and building websites. Linux administrators are great and designing and building Linux systems. When one person tries their hand at the other’s job, the result is often not pretty. Not knowing how is fine. Not knowing how but doing it anyway and setting…

Google has been using the Rust programming language for Android’s new Bluetooth stack (code-name Gabeldorsche, see http://bit.ly/LXF276Gabeldorsche) in a bid to improve security. The company has been busy adding Rust support to its mobile operating system for the past 18 months, and work on Gabeldorsche started with Android 11 – but is not in use. Rust offers compile-time checks when enforcing object lifetime/ownership, reduces the need for sandboxing, and uses runtime checks on memory accesses. All these activities have little impact on performance. Work on improving Bluetooth security is welcome considering recent revelations about a series of security flaws in the Linux Bluetooth subsystem, BlueZ. Known as BleedingTooth, these zero-click vulnerabilities would enable nearby attackers to “execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges on vulnerable devices.” You can read more about…

“There are many other motivations behind Rust, which appears similar in some respects to C++, with a few hints of Pascal and Python thrown in” Tinus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.12-rc7, noting that it was likely there would be (relatively rare) RC8 (Release Candidate 8) this time around due to the large number of patches that went in at the last minute, in particular to address a few networking concerns. All of which means that the next merge window (period of time during which disruptive changes can land), and all of the goodies that brings, is likely to be in time for next issue. Meanwhile tremendous advancement in support for Apple “M1” Macs being able to run Linux natively. This bare metal support has come at a ridiculously…

It’s barely worth mentioning at this stage but Linux systems are still waiting for Vulkan-based raytracing to appear. While Nvidia and AMD cards now both offer affordable performance levels, AMD is yet to release a driver with the required extensions either in a packaged driver or AMDVLK, which will be part of the v21.x major update later in 2021. Even then it’s likely that Linux will only see gaming raytracing through Valve’s Steam Play using VKD3D-Proton, which enables DirectX 12 raytracing to be implemented through Vulkan. There are some Vulkan-based demos that show off the potential of raytracing but even so, the large performance hit for a minor increase in visuals means that this feature is of minor interest, for now at least.…

Remember when email, web browsing and working with office files were tasks handled by different desktop applications? While you can still use dedicated applications for each of these tasks, it’s now possible to perform all these functions, and even more such as watching videos, listening to music files or radio from the comfort of a web browser. For most desktop users, the web browser is already the first application that’s fired up on boot. Firefox and Chromium, and even Chrome, have long been among the most popular browsers on Linux. Most desktop distributions, unless they’re geared for low-spec devices, offer Firefox or Chromium as the one of the first two as default web browser. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t alternatives that you can choose. In fact, there are…

The vast repository of add-ons available for Firefox and Chrome/Chromium helps explain their popularity. Brave and Slimjet are both based on Chromium and support most of the extensions available for it. In fact, both the browsers directs you to the Chrome web store should you decide to look up extensions. After identifying an extension you wish to use, click the Add to Chrome button to install it. Vivaldi aims to provide as much functionality as possible out of the box, which is why it doesn’t expend effort towards providing extensions. However, it too supports installing Chrome extensions. Falkon offers an ad-blocker, mouse gestures, a PIM and a handful of other extensions out of the box. Even though users have long asked for additional extensions, such as HTTPS everywhere and other…

If you try the above on a Pi you’ll find Docker works but Compose doesn’t. We downloaded an x86 docker-compose binary, when the Pi needs an ARM one. And sadly there’s no official ARM builds yet. To remedy this you can compile Compose yourself, or (much easier) install the community-composed Compose through Pip, the Python module installer: You’ll also find there’s no armhf build of the official MariaDB image, but that’s okay because the generous humans at linuxconfig.org provide one, which you can avail yourself of by replacing mariadb with linuxconfig.org/mariadb in the docker-compose.yml. At the time of writing, there’s a slightly bizarre Docker problem on a few Pi distros (including those based on Debian Buster such as the official Raspberry Pi OS) involving an outdated libseccomp, which the Docker…

This month we take a look at CircuitPython, a programming language designed to simplify experimenting with low-cost boards. On a fresh install of Raspberry Pi OS we need to open a terminal and run a few commands to ensure our system is up to date and ready to install CircuitPython: Then we install/upgrade setuptools, a Python toolkit to manage Python package installations: Next we make sure we’re in our home directory (/home/pi), then we use the Python packaging tool, pip3 to install Adafruit’s Python Shell tool: The final two installation steps are to download an installation script from Adafruit, and then run that script using Python 3: During the installation it may state that you’re using Python 2. It’ll prompt you to update – do so. After a few minutes…

The kingdom of Lesotho is an enclaved country within the border of South Africa. Domain registration is open to everyone, but is handled by local registrars, making it slightly less accessible to the average Joe Webuser looking for bargains with a more well-known service. As with the country itself, the Lesotho registrars are a treasure trove of untapped resources. A few quick searches gave us ga.ls, si.ls, ap.ls, and more abbreviated puns than we could throw a fistful of nai.ls at. We also tried foo.ls and nip.ls just for fun, and yes, at the time of writing, both are still for sale. Registering any domain would set us back 1200 ZAR (about £60) through https://zeecom.co.ls, A better deal can be found with http://leo.co.ls (£11). However, this company requires registrants to…

Gentoo has a special way of packaging its software and maintaining the system. You end up with a file system full of files, just as you would in many other distributions. Some developers have taken another route to handling the ultimate system. NixOS and Guix don’t put the files in the directories you expect. Instead, they put it all in a store. The store is a directory that contains all the binary files. At first, this may seem wasteful and limiting, but take a closer look. The files have unique names that the system highlights for when you want to run a particular application. Or, even better: your development environment. Thanks to this system, you can run applications that use different versions of their underlying libraries. It’s great for testing…

What’s the best way to administer your headless server remotely from another machine inside your local network? You can al ways ssh in of course, but a friendlier approach will give you access to key metrics as well as the ability to perform various tasks through a more user-friendly GUI via your web browser. That’s the premise behind Cockpit, and in this tutorial we’re going to explore its best features. While Cockpit is aimed primarily at the headless server market, you can also use it to monitor your desktop from another machine. As well as studying key metrics in real time, you have access to system logs, plus tools to manage users and services, configure storage and networking, check for and perform updates, and access a command-line session from your…

If you’re unsure about a change that you’re going to make (such as when working on the handle in this tutorial), press Ctrl+D to duplicate the object. Move it out of the way, then click the eye icon in the Outliner to make it invisible until you need it again. It’s often useful to hit ‘numeric pad 5’ to switch to Orthogonal drawing mode. This means that perspective is entirely switched off. If you’re stuck we’ve included various Blender models on the DVD and at https:// linuxformat. com/archives. Use the grid and snap modes if you want to keep objects lined up with each other. For a project like this, with small objects, change the grid scale by using the Overlay icon menu, located in the top right-hand corner.…

The iconic shape of the Commodore PET is hard to miss and this shape has adorned our desks since 1977, but it has also popped up in films and TV shows over the years. In the 1980s if you wanted a computer for set dressing, the PET was a cheap and iconic means to do just that. The PET turned up in multiple episodes of Airwolf, Knight Rider, Street Hawk and it would usually be in the bad guys office or secret research facility. A testament to the longevity of the PET, we see two in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, protecting the planet via a defence grid and as a video phone. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is an unlikely place to find a PET. But…

OnlyOffice Private Rooms are protected workplaces for encrypted document storing, sharing, editing, and co-authoring. In these rooms, every symbol that you type is encrypted using the effectively unbreakable AES-256 algorithm. Private Rooms are available for users of OnlyOffice Workspace and work via the OnlyOffice desktop app’s interface to encrypt and decrypt the data on the client and make the security endpoint. OnlyOffice Desktop Editors enable you to protect your files with digital signatures, passwords, and watermarks to guarantee a higher level of safety and security. OnlyOffice desktop application is a free open-source office suite pack that comprises offline editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations highly compatible with OOXML formats (.docx, . xlsx, .pptx). It’s also possible to connect the program to the cloud (OnlyOffice, Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile) for online…

The stack that we’ve used in the main part of this tutorial is an integer stack. So, because the integer stack cannot represent floating point numbers, if you were to type 3 2 / . , Forth will respond with 1 , which is the absolute value of the true answer of 1.5. This doesn’t mean that floating point numbers can’t be handled. They can, but using a different stack, and Forth decides which stack to push numbers onto, depending on the representation of numbers. So, for example, if you type 3 it will be pushed onto the integer stack, whereas if you type 3e0 , it’ll be pushed onto the floating point stack. Although the Jupiter Ace enabled you to push 3 onto the floating point stack by typing…

Prometheus pulls data from its data sources, which means it needs to know where to look for this data. Additionally, each data source (including all presented Python applications) should wait for Prometheus to read its data using an HTTP connection. The visualising process requires at least three steps: collecting the metrics in the Python 3 script, storing the metrics to Prometheus and visualising the metrics in Grafana or some other software. This tutorial mainly deals with the first two steps.…

KEEP IT SECRET, KEEP IT SAFE MIN SPECS: 2GB RAM Tails 4.17 The internet is far from anonymous. Everywhere you go you leave a trail of breadcrumbs (not to mention cookie crumbs) that lead back to you. On top of that, your browser keeps a complete history of every site you have visited and even caches pages and images to speed things up next time you visit them. If you want to avoid all this and want a way of browsing completely anonymously, Tails may be the right choice for you. This is a live distro, so don’t look for an install option – that would defeat the point of it. Being a live distro, everything it uses is loaded in RAM, nothing touches your hard disk. When you turn…

They’re not Google’s photos, they’re mine! To the surprise of no one Google has ended the free photo storage feature of Google Photos. Now any photos you take that are uploaded to the Google Cloud contribute to your overall storage usage. Previously, you could choose to have Google compress photos and they were stored for free, but offering to store billions of Android user’s photos for gratis isn’t a viable long-term strategy. Surprise! Phrases like “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” or “if something is free, you’re the product” spring to mind, but more to the point Google’s expanded its empire as far as it can and offering freebies is no longer required. It’s time to pay up. But as usual, here at Linux Format Towers we like…

Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a compatibility layer that enables developers to run a Linux environment (with command-line tools, applications and more) directly from within Windows 10 or Windows server, without having to dual-boot or run a virtual machine. It’s been warmly embraced by the community as well, and Canonical has recently announced the availability of the Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview. This new version for WSL is designed to test certain features, and is based on the latest development branch of Ubuntu. New tools are included, as well as an official Ubuntu theme for Windows Terminal. As the announcement explains, the Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview will be regularly updated with new features that will be coming to Ubuntu on WSL in the future (read more at…

LINUX LITE 5.4 A new version of this Ubuntu-based distro that’s aimed at beginners has been released. Version 5.4 is, as the release announcement (which can be read at http://bit.ly/LXF276LinuxLite) admits, a “modest” release but it still comes with some important additions. There’s a new Papirus icon theme, plus new wallpapers, along with various bug fixes and improvements. This remains an excellent distro for people looking to move from Windows to Linux for the first time, and an extensive user guide will help people get to grips with the distro. JINGOS 0.8 JingOS is an interesting distro: it’s an Ubuntu-based build that’s designed for tablet computers, and can run full desktop Linux applications .This makes it more versatile than Android. The latest version now runs on x86_64 devices, and comes…

“Perhaps the most bizarre story of the past month has been the surprise return of Richard Stallman (RMS) to the Free Software Foundation, and the controversy that’s resulted. While he may have been the original founder of the FSF (and the GNU project, which authored the GPL licence used by Linux), his departure in 2019 came after remarks he made highlighted a historical pattern that was completely out of step with contemporary efforts at a more inclusive community. In the wake of his return, many projects have questioned their association with the Free Software Foundation. But beyond that, the occasion has caused some to re-examine the common practice among GNU projects of copyright assignment and use of “or later” licence clauses. Linux is licenced under version 2 of GPL. Linus…

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 a robot), 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 and…

In addition to AlmaLinux, there’s another RHEL binary compatible distro under development. Rocky Linux is being stewarded by one of the original CentOS co-founders, Gregory Kurtzer. The distro is aiming for a Q2 2021 release and will also be managed by a foundation. Kurtzer has also launched a company to support the development of Rocky Linux as well as other high-performance computing projects. Elsewhere, the fallout of the CentOS debacle has also forced Red Hat to extend its program for developers and allow RHEL to be used for free in up to 16 production servers. The releases don’t come with any official support options, but Red Hat insists the offer isn’t a sales programme and there will be no follow-up from sales representatives. Furthermore, if you’re an existing RHEL subscriber…

Web browsers are among the most intuitive applications so we won’t test them on available documentation, even though this is an area where Falkon is severely lacking. As always, we want a feature-rich browser that can suitably replace the default offering on your desktop. Since most users connect to the internet from myriad devices, at the very least you should be able to sync data across devices. More importantly, we’re interested in the security and privacy features that you can expect from these programs. These features, however, should not come at the cost of usability. Of equal importance is the ability to access additional features through the use of extensions and plugins. We’ve also subjected the browsers to online benchmarking and standards compliance tools, such as Acid3 and the HTML5…

There are actually quite a few web browsers that are better at juggling the available resources than the web browsers that come bundled with your favourite distro. Some browsers, however, have a much smaller development teams, which means they don’t see an update as often as mainstream or popular browsers. But if you want a browser that doesn’t take up too many resources, Midori is a viable option. You’ll find it in the software repositories of most distributions, and the project has undergone some major changes in recent years since it merged with the Astian foundation. If your sole objective is anonymity as your surf online, the Tor browser might suit your needs. Keep in mind, however, that it’s only intended for browsing, and not to access streaming multimedia content.…

Some people, preferring to avoid unnecessary thumbnailing, cataloguing, configuring and hosting complications (and PHP applications), choose to manage their photos as regular files. Some people feel the same way about their music collections, and keep their OGGs and FLACs in directory hierarchies according to tempo, chronology, genre or whatever else suits their purpose. If this sounds like you and already have your photos as you like them, but are looking for a bloat-free back-up solution to SSH your photos somewhere safe, then Duplicity is worth a closer look. It works incrementally, so once the first backup is done, only new data is stored, meaning subsequent runs are much quicker. It can optionally encrypt data as well for added privacy (and we’ll look at this with Nextcloud too). Duplicity stores backups…

See the three-step guide below to get an archive of your Google Photos. The archive is organised by year and includes metadata corresponding to each image in the form of .json files. These consist of album information, descriptions and geodata that have been added via Google photos, as well as EXIF data from the original images stripped from their downloaded counterparts. Extract the archive, taking care to ensure you have sufficient space. Note that if it’s a huge file and you’re extracting it to slow, or network, storage, it’ll take a long time to extract. So either make yourself a cup of tea or make enough space on the fastest storage you have to hand. You still have the original archive, so you can safely delete these once they’re uploaded.…

Lychee is a much simpler program than Nextcloud. It only enables you to upload photos into galleries and displays them, but it does so very well. A VPS with 1GB of RAM will occasionally run out of memory when doing complex things with Nextcloud. It happened to us over the course of this feature (it’s also quite common during the update process). Most of the time this is easy to recover from by restarting the MariaDB service, but it’s still annoying when you refresh the interface only to see an unhelpful HTTP 500 error. CONFIGURE ACCESS TO LYCHEE “If you also want friends to be able to log in then it’s best to keep the admin account for administrative functions.” Lychee by comparison is much more lightweight, so you should…

It was nearly 10 years ago, September 2011. I was at a conference in Oxford, where I met Eben and Liz Upton. In the “gadgets showcase”, Eben and Liz were showing off some interesting new hardware: a credit-card sized circuit board called a Raspberry Pi. Eben went on to speak about the background to the project, and his passion to bring it to market – an affordable computer that any child can own, learn to code, and build hardware projects. Once the first Pi Model B was launched six months later, techies like me started to snap them up and see what we could build on these Linux-powered boards. The Open Source community quickly embraced the opportunity to create new things, and to share with each other. My main experience…

CircuitPython from Adafruit is a Python-based programming language that works on devices of all abilities and sizes. Our introduction to CircuitPython was via a $4 Gemma M0 board given away at PyCon. This tiny board had very little RAM and a tiny amount of flash storage, but it could control NeoPixels, emulate a keyboard and more thanks to a library of drivers and a friendly community. That same language is what we used in this tutorial on a Raspberry Pi. CircuitPython devices, including the new Raspberry Pi Pico, appear as USB flash drives with a file, code.py, that can be edited in a text editor or a “proper” IDE. Saving the file triggers the board to automatically restart and run the code. Need a library? All of the drivers and…

Finding out other people’s secrets is always a fun way to waste time – especially if it doesn’t involve doing anything which is actually illegal. Seeking out self-hosted URL shorteners online is an excellent way to spend a lazy Sunday morning. The security flaws in both models of URL shortener are obvious. Anyone who knows the service exists can guess at what URLs are likely to lead somewhere, which is important to us. By choosing to have the shortest URLs possible, we’re essentially opening up our bookmarks to the world. They’re there for anyone to guess at. We’ve already told you what lxf.by/1 leads to. It would be fun to guess at lxf.by/2 or so on. The initial Polr setup enables you to specify that more difficult URLs are generated,…

If you’ve tried to install Gentoo and you are still waiting for the compile, you should know that you have alternatives. Depending on your requirements, there are many options for how to access the full power of Gentoo while reducing some of the initial hassle. One solution is Redcore Linux. This distro uses the Gentoo packaging system, but also supplies binary packages so you can avoid compiling the system. While this is great, you can also find other versions that are specialised distributions. A famous one is Porteus Kiosk. The developers designed it to be a Kiosk that can be used in public spaces. You may have used it to check in at the airport. They also made it extremely lightweight and added an installer that detects your hardware. Another…

The original Commodore PET had only 4KB of RAM and a 1MHz 6502 CPU. It’s not the most powerful computer, but at that ttime expectations weren’t as demanding as they are today. The Commodore PET had a number of games, from simple, text-based adventures such as Adventureland, Mystery Fun House and Pyramid of Doom. As developers became comfortable with the PET, we saw games with better graphics and sound slowly appear. Lander, a game where we have to successfully land our craft on the moon, used the PETSCII glyphs to draw a convincing lander. Fire! was a game where we fly a helicopter over burning buildings used a similar means to draw the graphics. A favourite of ours is the PET version of Space Invaders, a game which at the…

The game engine we’re using comes complete with a comprehensive level editor, so if you’re not a fan of designing levels in arrays there’s a toolset at hand. Execute world_editor.py to play around with the default level map; we recommend editing levels before creating them from scratch. There’s no obvious key map, so here are the controls: O to change tileset; S to go alternate between edit and select screens; L to go to the next area; P to go back to the previous area; N to mark the starting position; E alternates between the edit mode between title, actor and hero. When in edit mode, O changes actor; H hides or shows the bounding box; T changes the tile type and C clears the level. By actor we mean…

USING THE LXFDVD Using Linux for the first time can be very confusing. It’ll most likely be unlike anything that you’ve operated before, especially if you’re used to Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS. Generally our DVDs are designed to be run directly, which is to say that when you first power on your PC (or Mac, see below) it should ‘boot’ from the DVD – so before Windows or macOS even starts to load – with Linux running directly from the DVD. This trick is known as a Live Disc. It enables you to try out the various versions of Linux without having to install or change anything on your PC. Just remove the DVD, restart your PC and it’ll be exactly as you left it. While many systems will…

“It’s nice to let someone else take over occasionally. For example, you might want to hand over database management to a service provider to free up capacity and focus on key business initiatives. Managed databases are increasingly popular – in our last survey, 45 per cent of respondents used some form of Database as a Service tool. Managed services and DBaaS make it easier to deploy databases alongside applications. They also take care of some of the most common database requirements, such as conducting regular backups. However, it’s crucial you pick the right approach for your environment. If you need to tweak your database for performance reasons, a DBaaS platform isn’t the right fit. Instead, you might be better using a managed service to run the database on your behalf.…

Purism, the company behind the Librem 5 smartphone, which is being built with open-source software at its heart, has announced that progress has been continuing apace. While Librem 5 phones are being sent out to early backers, Purism has been sourcing additional hardware so that the next group of backers can receive their handsets. The team has also been working hard on the software, and now both the front and rear camera work. As taking photos is one of the most popular things to do with a smartphone, this is a big step indeed. Support has also been added for hardware-accelerated video playback using the iMX8mq’s Hantro VPU, which will free up the CPU for other tasks. Find out more about their progress at http://bit.ly/LXF276Librem5.…

“The Panfrost project started as a reverse-engineering effort to understand Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPU internals. It evolved to focus on the development of a Gallium driver, which was extended to support new GLES and GL features, and a new compiler back-end was added to support Mali Bifrost GPUs. With the Panfrost driver becoming more mature, the natural next step was to work on an Open Source Vulkan driver for those GPUs. Released late March, the first preview of this new open source driver, aptly named PanVk, already has enough functions implemented to have vkcube running! Of course, this driver is still in its early stage of development. This means it lacks almost all core features that would make it usable for real-world applications, and optimisations have been left…

Q Unresolved issue After a reboot, my trusty Lenovo W510 will be idle on all cores to the tune of 98 per cent. Temperature of the CPU will rest between 40 and 50°C. I’ll browse the internet, and perhaps open my Hotmail account and all remains well, until something triggers the systemdresolved to decide that it needs to take over the CPU, drive usage to 100 per cent CPU, and the temperature up to 80°C. I have tried to do the sudo kill -9 pid for systemd-resolved, which restores CPU availability and drops the temperature, but that leaves me without DNS services. I have scoured the askubuntu archives for clues – they blame dnsmasq competing with systemd-resolved in the few articles I have found. But I don’t have dnsmasq as…

What’s a Linux? Firstly I must say what an excellent article from Mike Bedford on controlling real-world hardware on your PC. Will he be doing a follow-up ? If you’re looking for ideas, how about interfacing with devices over Wi-Fi? Hopefully, that doesn’t look too much like an article for an electronics magazine, because I guess now we’ve been shown how to send and read ones and noughts, the emphasis shifts to electronics. Turning to the main point of my letter: why didn’t you cover the architecture (if that’s the right word) of a Linux machine as part of its defence? One reads that Macs, Unix and Linux are all of similar builds and its these builds that provide some protection… or have I been misled? When I bought my…

There are a number of benchmark tests that you can subject web browsers to. The outcome can help you decide if a particular browser will aid you in your efforts to watching online streaming content or be totally useless for conferencing, for example. Bear in mind, however, that these tests aren’t a perfect substitute for test-driving the software yourself to find the best fit for your needs. For this Roundup, we’ve subjected our selection of browsers to the Acid3 as well as the HTML5 tests. The latter is used to determine how well a browser supports HTML5, while the former tool tests the browser on a variety of parameters and then reports the findings. All the browsers scored 97/100 on the Acid3 test. This is expected because most modern browsers…

When invitations to Google’s new mail service found themselves in the hands of the great unwashed the world of free email changed forever. No longer did users have to make do with a handful of megabytes of storage, obnoxious adverts and the terrible fear that at any point a connectivity failure would dash the missive you were currently working on into oblivion. Now users could enjoy 2GB of storage, and further enjoy watching that quota rise, ever so slowly, in real time. Yes, there were adverts, but they were small and textual. They were also relevant because they were chosen by algorithms that fed off the contents of your email. Later, Google would add free, unlimited storage for all your photos and later still, free storage for up to 50,000…

If you want to put your photos somewhere that isn’t Google, then there are a few options. Obviously there’s iCloud and OneDrive, but these won’t be to everyone’s tastes. DropBox has excellent photo management facilities, and is easy to set up on mobile such that your photos are automatically uploaded to the cloud. The free tier only allows for 2GB of storage, but if you’re willing to pay £5.99/month you can get a thousand times that. Dropbox integrates with Google Photos so migrating your data across couldn’t be simpler. There’s no shortage of other cloud storage providers, though – for example, Box or I-Drive,. These don’t really have photo-specific features, but they have a free tier and are competitively priced beyond that. One worthy of mention is pCloud, which besides…

Our subject here might be digital mapping, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate something of our mapping heritage. The story of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his part in the Jacobite Rising of 1745 is well known among historians. What’s less well known was the concern among the British military. Detailed maps of the Scottish Highlands, which were considered crucial for countering the threat, were pretty much non-existent in the mid-18th century. The Ordnance Survey, the UK’s official mapping agency, refers to this historical event as being a key factor in its foundation in 1791. Some of the first maps that were produced by the Ordnance Survey were at a scale of 1:63,330, which isn’t too dissimilar to the 1:50,000 Landranger maps which are popular today. Within a short…

Any URLs you use with your URL shortener will potentially be viewable by other people, especially if you’re using simple URLs. You may want to think twice before linking to anything which is copyrighted or which you otherwise might not want your mother to see. There’s a simple technique to prevent a disabled service from starting. Just use the sudo systemctl mask <service> command. Cockpit 215 has all the functionality you need, but it’s easy to update to the latest version (238 as of writing) via the backports repository – just issue the following command: sudo apt install cockpit/focalbackports. You’ll lose access to cockpit-docker, however. If Cockpit is installed on multiple machines on your network, you can administer them from the same Cockpit instance. You’ll need a ssh server running…

Gentoo provides a range of options for compiling your kernel. The default is to compile the source manually, which can yield the best results since you then have every detail correct. However, this can also lead to errors for many users. One solution is to use the genkernel tool, which takes care of all the work. The drawback with this method is that it creates a kernel that supports everything. You end up waiting a very long time for the compile and missing out on a lean kernel. You also have the distribution kernels (both the vanilla and the Gentoo variant). Other users have also contributed binary kernels that you can download using the emerge command. There’s even a package for the Raspberry Pi. Other special tools are also available…

After identifying the bottlenecks responsible for slow boot times, you can use the systemctl command to stop and disable unwanted services. For instance, in the example discussed above, smdb, nmdb and networkmanager are some of the services that are holding back other services. To stop these services and disable them so that they don’t start at boot, run the following commands: $ sudo systemctl stop smdb $ sudo systemctl disable smdb The first command only stops the currently running service, but the second command ensures that the service won’t be started automatically at boot. However, even after you disable a service, you might still find it running during a subsequent reboot. This happens when another service depends on a disabled service and starts it. You can get a list of…

By default, all connections on Cockpit are done over the secure https:// protocol using port 9090. If you’d like to change this to another port, do the following: $ cd /etc/systemd/system $ sudo mkdir cockpit.socket.d && cd cockpit.socket.d $ sudo nano listen.conf You’ll be greeted by an empty file. Insert the following three lines: [Socket] ListenStream= ListenStream=9090 Change 9090 to whichever port you want to listen on (443 if you don’t want to specify a port when logging in). You can add additional ListenStream=xxxx lines beneath this to add more ports to listen on, too. Press Ctrl+X, followed by Y and Enter to save the file. Finally, issue the following two lines: $ sudo systemctl daemon-reload $ sudo systemctl restart cockpit.socket You’ll be logged out, so to log back in,…

The Commodore PET has a “quirky” keyboard and it’s sometimes tricky to find the right key. If you need a little help then there’s a virtual keyboard. Press F12 and scroll down to the Virtual Keyboard option. Next, press Enter to open the keyboard, select a key and then press Enter. On the later Commodore PETs there was a command that would cause physical damage to the CRT monitor of a PET. Don’t do this on a real PET! On our virtual PET we can safely use POKE 59458,62. Don’t want the hassle of downloading an emulator? No worries – you can get your fix online at www. masswerk.at/pet. We can tweak our settings for games, coding and load some applications via the PRG library.…

It’s not necessarily the best resource for learning the Forth programming language, but the Jupiter Ace User Manual makes interesting reading if you want to know more about this historic machine and how it uses Forth. You can download it from the Documents tab at www. jupiterace.co.uk. If you want a more realistic Jupiter Ace experience than xAce is able to offer, and if you have an iPad, there’s an iOS emulator which looks interesting. Written by Edward Patel, who wrote xAce, the main advantage is that it supports a genuine-looking Ace keyboard. Reverse Polish isn’t only a quirk of Forth. It was also used in several pocket calculators of the 70s and 80s, including the Sinclair Scientific with its strange purple display, plus several HP models.…

AUDIO EDITOR Audacity Version: 3.0 Web: www.audacityteam.org Version 3.0 of the renowned Audacity is finally out, following last summer’s 2.4.2 update. For those unfamiliar with the program, Audacity is a multi-track audio editor, which enables you to master a podcast by combining several tracks in one project (such as the vocals and background music), remove noise, apply reverb and other effects, and more. It’s a high-quality open source application that’s suitable for both hobbyist and professional tasks. One of Audacity’s features makes it possible to manually select input and output sound devices, enabling you to avoid PulseAudio in favour of ALSA if necessary. The interface contains a chunky main toolbar at the top with the track area below it. Audacity looks clean and uncluttered, yet it has an impressive number…

We can alter the text of our game in dialog.py – we can go into much deeper detail than just changing the font face, too. Size (down to height and width), background colour, border colour, text position, and frame can all be adjusted. We’re using free and open source images for our zombie runner game, but you’re welcome to download your own sprite packages, or even better, create your own. In the run_n_gun\ run_n_gun_data directory you’ll find tile sets for the level maps, and animated sprites. We’d love to see your creations – if you’ve had a go at creating your own sprites and level maps, please share your screenshots with us on Twitter: @linuxformat.…

Prometheus pulls data from its sources, which means it acts as a client in order to get its data. This is a crucial detail that you should keep in mind while developing applications that collect Prometheus metrics. In practice, this means that apart from collecting the desired metrics, the Python script should also offer support for HTTP connections each time Prometheus asks for metrics. Prometheus supports four different types of data: Counter This is a cumulative value that’s used for representing increasing counters. The value of a counter can stay the same, go up or be reset to zero, but it can’t decrease. Counters are usually used to represent cumulative values such as number of requests served so far or the total number of errors. Gauge This is a single…

THE LXF LIBRARY Advanced Bash Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners Get to grips with the basics of Bash scripting. Bourne Shell Scripting First steps in shell scripting. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S. Raymond’s classic text explains the advantages of open development. The Debian Book Essential guide for sysadmins. Dive Into Python Everything you need to know. Introduction to Linux A handy guide full of pointers for new Linux users. Linux Dictionary The A-Z of everything to do with Linux. Linux Kernel in a Nutshell An introduction to the kernel written by master hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman. The Linux System Administrator’s Guide Take control of your system. Tools Summary Overview of GNU tools. GNU Emacs Manual Six hundred pages of essential information! Producing Open…