Índex per May 2022 a Linux Format

A new project called Tow-Boot aims to make booting Linux on ARM better and most consistent. As the Tux Phones website explains (https://bit.ly/lxf288tuxphones), unlike x86 PCs that use BIOS or UEFI for lots of boot tasks, with ARM it’s often handled by the operating system, which leads to inconsistencies with booting and troubleshooting if anything goes wrong. With an increasing number of ARM-based smartphones running Linux being released, addressing these inconsistencies is more important than ever, especially if Linux phones are going to be accepted by mainstream users. Currently, most ARM devices use U-Boot to boot Linux, but Tow-Boot, a fork of U-Boot, that uses the upstream U-Boot and provides builds for supported hardware to ensure consistency between devices. Boot selection for various distros is also included, along with graphical…

MSX memories It was with great delight that I read the article in LXF286 on the MSX emulator. That took me back to the early 80s when I had a Yamaha MSX computer, the one with the built-in FM synthesiser. I would spend hours on that tinkering about, playing Chuckie Egg and Alien 8, and inputting music scores for the synth to play. It would be nice if that FM synth was emulated at some point in the MSX emulator. In those days we didn’t have PCs, but I worked in what I believe was Scotland’s first computer shop (which opened around 1976). Back then we worked with Cromemco computers. They were 21-slot S100 bus-based, with a Z80 CPU and built like Sherman tanks. They were capable of running seven simultaneous users, each with…

Back in the day, Slax made a name for itself as being one of the easiest distros to customise, despite being based on the unforgiving Slackware. Even after all these years the distro hasn’t lost its charm and is just as functional and ever. The latest 11.2 release comes after around two years of inactivity. As always, the release is available for both 32- and 64-bit machines, and its ISO image weighs in under 300MB, making it a wonderful option for powering virtually all kinds of machines. While you can burn the image on to optical media, to get it onto a writable one like a USB stick you’ll first have to loopback-mount it, before copying its contents to the USB. You’ll then have to run a script from inside…

The most basic statistic, number of views, is a good indicator of how well your video is doing, and all of the sites provide this. It’s even better if you can obtain more detail. For example, you might find out that your videos lack broad appeal or that people are tuning out after 20 seconds, and this can give you insight on how to improve your videos. All YouTube accounts come with access to the YouTube Studio dashboard, and from here you can examine detailed stats for all of the videos on your channel. This gives you information on factors such as the age and sex of your viewers, typical viewing times and quite a lot more – to the point of it being a bit daunting at first. Facebook…

To few people’s surprise we’re declaring YouTube as the overall winner. It’s deservedly one of the most-used sites on the internet. In every category it received at least an acceptable score. It scored highly in areas such as platform support, and for both curated and algorithmically generated video discovery. Apart from being the strongest all-rounder among video sharing sites, YouTube also has the advantage of being, by far, the largest social video site on the Internet. If you wanted to use one of the other sites for your own videos, you might be better off posting on YouTube and then mirroring or linking to the content. However, we weren’t without criticisms of YouTube. We are disappointed that Google has failed to innovate in terms of new features for the platform…

The first step with your Raspberry Pi is to write out an SD card with an operating system on it. The official Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) is the best place to start. It has its own lightweight desktop, dubbed Pixel, and out of the box it can do most tasks you’d expect from a desktop. The Pi Foundation provides its own cross-platform Rpi-Imager tool for downloading and writing a selection of OSes (see www.raspberrypi.com/software), but you can use anything you like including our favourite tool for the job, Balena Etcher (https://etcher.io). Follow the instructions (below) to get the desktop edition Raspberry Pi OS written to an SD card (technically a microSD card unless you have an original model Pi). You can use this method to write out any of the other OSes we’ll…

MX Linux is a popular distribution. It breathes new life into old kit (just ask our collection of ThinkPads) and for over a year now it’s done the same to Raspberry Pi. The latest beta, codenamed Ragout 2, sees the popular Linux distro continue with a 32-bit OS based upon Raspberry Pi OS (itself based upon Debian Buster). Designed for the Raspberry Pi 3 and above, MX Linux is lightweight and nippy, if you have the RAM. More on that later. The Fluxbox-based desktop is highly configurable, with a neat dock to the left, and the usual system tray and notifications area to the bottom. To the right is Conky, which enables you to display system information and stats using configurable panels. We love Conky, which was introduced via CrunchBang…

We’ve decided to see how viable a Raspberry Pi 400 is as a Linux-based ‘daily driver’ machine, and attempt to use it for day-to-day tasks in place of a standard desktop PC. The Pi 400 itself has similar specifications to a Raspberry Pi 4, but the whole thing is contained inside the keyboard unit. As part of the test, the bulk of this article was written on the Pi. We’ll start at the beginning, by looking at the device itself. Sat on a desk, the Pi looks like a white compact keyboard, but it’s a tad heavier and fuller once you turn it over in your hands. Around the back, there are various connectors. From right to left these are: Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, two USB 3.0 sockets, USB C…

Upon hearing the words “office suite for Linux” there’s a good chance you’d think immediately of LibreOffice. Yes there are others, but LibreOffice (with a couple of exceptions) has for many years been the de facto standard for wrangling documents on Linux. Not only that, but The Open Document formats have become so widespread that businesses and even the UK government uses them. The applications may been mocked for looking like Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the late 90s, but there’s no denying they’re a powerhouse of productivity. Also, we never liked Microsoft’s ‘modern’ ribbon interface… But have you ever stopped to think how this huge project is maintained and sustained? Perhaps you’ve heard of The Document Foundation, perhaps not. For years this has been lobbying and advocating for digital…

Credit: https://github.com/jarun/nnn Back in LXF249 (simpler, happier times – Ed), we discussed the FFF file manager, which scoffs at traditional file managers in its appearance and functionality. Our tool of choice this issue, nnn, is cut from the same cloth. The project was originally forked from Noice, which is a small ncurses-based file manager, hence the name Noice is Not Noice (nnn), but the project has since dropped the acronym and now prefers to be known only as nnn, or n³ Many distributions carry nnn in their software repositories and the project’s GitHub page (https://github.com/jarun/nnn) provides a list of these, and the version of nnn on offer. Unfortunately, many distributions carry older versions of nnn in their repositories, but if you’re running the latest releases of Debian 12, Fedora 34+.…

Keeping track of filters can become tricky, but beneath the filters list you’ll see some buttons that are designed to help make things easier. You can compile a list of ‘faves’– filters you use frequently. Click the Add Fave button and a new Faves section will appear at the top of the list. Naturally you’ll also find a button for removing a fave from this list, plus one to rename the fave should you want a more descriptive entry. Another way to organise your filters list is with coloured tags, which can then be used to filter the view. Right-click a filter and you’ll see an option to assign it one of six coloured tags. Once assigned, simply click the colour wheel beneath the list to choose which colour (or…

Credit: http://b-em.bbcmicro.com/arculator The names Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser are forever linked to Acorn computers, the BBC Micro and the fun BBC TV movie Micro Men, which documents an important era in the home computer wars. But they, and many others, are also linked to a chip that’s in our pockets, TVs and our Raspberry Pis. There was a time when Arm, the CPU platform that powers our world, was a gamble. Launched in 1987, the Acorn Archimedes range of computers were powered by the Arm CPU. Arm stood for Acorn RISC Machine (later changed to Advanced RISC Machines Ltd), and were a departure from CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) CPUs common in many machines of the era. The Acorn 300 series ran on an Arm 2 CPU, which performed…

Credit: www.home-assistant.io Part Two Don’t miss next issue! Subscribe on page 18 Home Assistant enables data from home automation equipment to be accessed from a central location. It can also access systems in the cloud, but where possible, data is kept on the local LAN. In LXF287 we covered how to install and configure the system as well as set up a dashboard containing basic information about the weather. In part two we’ll be creating regular snapshots for safety purposes, creating automations and adding users. Blueprints is a fairly recent addition to Home Assistant where users can make their scripts or automations available to other users. This makes it simple for complicated automations to be made available to others with a few clicks. Blueprints can be accessed by opening the…

Credit: www.gimp.org Photographs of the Earth taken from space are a part of everyday life, appearing on TV and newspaper weather reports. This state of affairs dates back little more than 60 years, though, to when TIROS-1, the first weather satellite, was launched. How things have changed in the intervening period. By the end of April last year, 971 satellites were in orbit for the purpose of Earth observation. And unlike the early days, these satellites aren’t just operated by governmental organisations: several commercial enterprises now supply photography of the Earth’s surface. But publicly owned satellites are still important. If you want to learn about the technology, the good news is that these satellites have the undeniable advantage of free access to raw data. We saw this in LXF273 when…

Credit: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox Paper is an honest medium. Once committed to the page by Future’s heavy iron, the images and words in this magazine are unalterable, and could, potentially, last the many centuries until the prophesied year of the Linux Desktop finally arrives. The same is not true of the internet. Data is ephemeral, and updating a website or an individual page takes seconds. Wiping an entire website from existence, along with all of the words and images it contains is as simple as rm -rf /var/www/. In 2000, one of the largest bodies of knowledge concentrated online was Encarta, an epic site with more than 60,000 articles. Yet by 2009, Encarta was dead – pounded into irrelevance by the free and vastly superior Wikipedia. In 2010, encarta.com redirected to a…

Our subject here is random numbers, and how to generate them. And to be honest, we wouldn’t blame you if you think that sounds as enthralling as watching paint dry. What’s more, if we were to quote the definition “a random number is a number chosen as if by chance from some specified distribution such that selection of a large set of these numbers reproduces the underlying distribution” – whatever that means – we fear that might reinforce your view. We have to admit, though, that we presented that particular mathematics definition just to be mischievous, and we promise to do our very best to keep you entertained. The fact is that generating random numbers isn’t as straightforward as we might hope or expect. In this article we’ll delve into…

Here at LFX we’ve got a bit of a thing for investigating our computer heritage by emulating important machines from days of yore. So it seemed appropriate to introduce Virtual ERNIE that you can find at https://ernie.virtualcolossus.co.uk. This is an online emulation of ERNIE 1, the first Premium Bond random number generator, which used electrical noise so it was a processor of so many of today’s TRNGs. Like many of the best emulators, this one provides a photorealistic representation, and you can even rotate it to see the back as well as the front. To start, just set it running so you can see it generating winning numbers. Click the Start switch on the right-hand panel of the console. The green light above the switch will illuminate to show that…

Version: 1.5.8 Web: www.scribus.net The publishing industry heavily relies on professional page layout and design software (desktop publishing – DTP), which in most cases is Adobe InDesign. Both printed and PDF versions of Linux Format are prepared using this software. Scribus is an open source alternative to InDesign. We haven’t heard from its development team for quite a while, but the program has recently seen a new release and we were keen to find out what’s new. Launched decades ago as an open source rival of QuarkXpress (another proprietary publishing suite), Scribus has since become a professional-grade tool that enables you to create books, magazines, periodicals, posters and more. The interface sports a few spaceefficient toolbars with small icons, leaving the most of the screen’s real-estate for the content. Scribus…

Version: 0.7.1 Web: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search Some people think that the quality of Google’s search results has dropped due to sites’ SEO optimisations, adverts, a shift to non-indexed chat-based forums, and the chaotic growth of the web. However, the biggest concern is the uncontrolled spread of ads, trackers and analysis tools that slow down searches and may also violate your privacy. Whoogle Search is a privacy-aware search engine that wants you to use it instead of Google Search. Whoogle provides the same search results as Google, but without ads, IP trackers, Javascript injections, blobs, cookies and so on. The instructions provided via Readme.md explain how you can deploy Whoogle Search. There are various PaaS hosting solutions such as Heroku, a clustered version with Kubernetes, more third-party hosting platforms for both desktop and…

SPARKYLINUX 2022.03 This latest snapshot of the Debian-based distro’s rolling release is based on Debian Bookworm, which is in its testing phase. The Linux kernel is now 5.16.11 (and you can obtain 5.16.12 and 5.17-rc7 in Sparky unstable repos), along with updates to Calamares, Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice. The user interface has also received an update with a new dock-like application launcher, and its repos have a new way of being signed. To find out more, check out the release announcement at https://bit.ly/lxf288sparky. LINUX FROM SCRATCH 11.1 Linux From Scratch is a project for people looking to create their own Linux systems, and a new version has been released that updates a range of elements, including updates to glibc 2.35 and Binutils 2.38. The Linux kernel has also been updated…

Bad editor! I was very disappointed with the GUI text editors Roundup in the latest issue [LXF286]. You seem to imagine everyone only writes code in text editors and wants a plethora of complexity, multi-user working and plug-ins to boot. Well, I’m here to tell you that there’s a whole bunch of people who think those are CODE editors, which is a small sub-set of text editors. Lots of people want to jot things down and maybe connect them together in various ways on their local storage, and there are bloated programs like Obsidian that do that, but no simple straightforward ones. Whatever happened to the Unix paradigm: do one thing and do it well? Ian Thompson-Bell Neil says… Who said you can’t please all of the people, all of the time? Sure, this…

Bluehost has spent the past two decades establishing itself as one of the largest web hosting providers, home to over two million domain names. In addition to providing a range of shared, VPS and dedicated hosting plans, this past decade the provider has focused its energy on being the best WordPress hosting provider in the market. The hosting provider prides itself on plans optimised for WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. Bluehost has WordPress specialists available to tackle any queries you may throw at them to get the most out of your server deployment. While the plans may seem slightly more expensive than its peers, a quick look at the features on offer will dispel such notions. Unlike some other hosting providers that charge a premium for some of the most basic…

Released after almost a year of development, the OpenMandriva developers didn’t plan to have a 4.3 release, but decided to create it to push the changes made behind the scenes without keeping users waiting a few more months for version 5.0. OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 is available as an installable live media. In addition to the generic 64-bit release, there’s also a version built specifically for the current generation of AMD processors including Ryzen, ThreadRipper and EPYC. The developers claim this version outperforms the generic 64-bit release by taking advantage of new features in the AMD camp. This is also the first OpenMandriva release that’s available for 64-bit ARM devices. Installable images for popular ones such as the Pinebook Pro, as well as for single-board computers including the Raspberry Pi, are…

MassOS is an indie distro that puts a lot of emphasis on being lightweight and minimal, which it does thanks to a written-from-scratch design and a curated list of default programs. The distro also promises to help users stay on the bleeding edge, and touts the example of OpenSSL 3 and FFmpeg 5 libraries in the official stable release. While we appreciate the effort, the examples would probably be lost on the desktop users it’s targeting. We could be wrong about that though, since the distro doesn’t explicitly specify the kind of users it’s pitching anywhere. Another notable, but poorly explained feature is the distro’s promise of providing updates twice a month, which are optional and never forced on users. Again, the advantages of adopting this strategy aren’t explained. MassOS…

Video discovery can take two forms: automated suggestions that are generated by algorithms, and curated selections of material. Both approaches have their merits, and ideally, we’d like to see both options on offer. Sometimes, you go looking for online video because you’re in the mood for a specific type of video or even a specific video. Accordingly, the search results should be helpful and relevant. It’s also important to consider the social aspect of social video because you’re often interested to see what an individual or an organisation has produced. One thing to consider when comparing the different video sites is that much of the same content is available across all of them. Therefore, the type of suggestions that the site has to offer has a massive influence on the…

YouTube has a partner program that shares advertising revenue with the creator of the video. There are some requirements before you can join it, such as having 1,000 subscribers. As with all of these platforms, you could always approach a company and offer to mention its product in your video. This is called ‘sponsorship’ and YouTube marks sponsored content to inform the user. YouTube’s massive popularity means that there’s a chance of making a decent amount of money, if you can somehow create the right content. To make a substantial amount of money from YouTube content you need a substantial number of views. A lot of viewers employ an ad-blocking plugin when browsing, and so there’s no ad revenue generated in those cases. Taking a different approach, Vimeo places an…

1 Download Rpi Imager Download Raspberry Pi Imager from www.raspberrypi.com/software. There are Linux, Windows and macOS editions. Double-clicking the .deb file will install it on Debian-like flavours of Linux (including Ubuntu). Then find a suitable SD card (at least 8GB for a desktop OS; the GUI-free version of Raspberry Pi OS can fit on a 2GB card) 2 Find an OS image Insert the SD card, check there’s nothing important on it, and start Rpi-imager (which should have appeared in your Applications menu). If you’re just getting started choose the Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) option, or you’ll find a 64-bit edition (for Pi 3 and above) and in the menu beneath. Alternatively, select Use Custom to supply your own image file. 3 Write the image Select Choose Storage and choose…

Credit: //github.com/tweepy/tweepy The Raspberry Pi Sense HAT is a science lab that connects to the Raspberry Pi for an “out of the world” experience. Right now there are two of these boards on the International Space Station, collecting data and running code created by children. In this tutorial we’ll keep our feet on the ground, but will broadcast our sensor data across the globe thanks to Twitter and a little Python code. The hardware build is simple. With the Pi powered off, connect the Sense HAT so that it fits neatly on top of the Pi. It should not overhang. When done, connect your keyboard, mouse, HDMI and finally power to the Pi. The Sense HAT will display a bright rainbow pattern on boot. Connecting to Twitter On the Pi…

Canonical offers a Raspberry Pi build of Ubuntu Linux, but what’s it like to run? In most respects, it’s the standard Ubuntu experience. Most differences between Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu stem from the fact that Canonical don’t seem to have made that many concessions to the more constrained specifications of the Pi, but bear in mind that with 4GB of shared memory, the Pi isn’t constrained for light desktop use. Having been in use for a few hours, with the official operating system and four browser tabs in Chrome, two LibreOffice Writer documents and the Dolphin file manager, a total of 1GB of memory was used up. Under a similar load, in Ubuntu, 1.5GB was used up. Ubuntu took around 53 seconds to boot up, compared to around 30…

Today we have a few office suites to choose from on Linux (OnlyOffice, WPSOffice, and yes OpenOffice.org is still alive), but LibreOffice is far and away the market leader. We asked Michael what had contributed to its success. “The Linux community have been the primary evangelists for LibreOffice. Support and investment from SUSE and RedHat, and work from Debian and Ubuntu has been vital to making all FLOSS savvy people aware of LibreOffice. That is combined with a large network of friends working together around the code localisation, documentation and spreading the word, as well as a diverse set of companies from giants to start-ups investing directly (or via paid services). “Add in some support from our donors over the years, and we have a formidable feature edge over the…

Version: 3.2 Web: www.falkon.org After three years of silence, the Falkon development team has rolled out the 3.2 release of the web browser. Even though it’s just another point release, we were keen to take it for a thorough test drive, and here’s why… For years Falkon has been one of the most capable and stable members in the group of second-tier browsers. It’s perhaps the most useful if we narrow down our scope to Qt-based browsers only (sorry Otter!). Falkon is essentially a front-end to QtWebEngine, a Qt-backed shared component that provides a repacked Chromium rendering engine for various Qtand KDE-related programs. The release notes on the latest version of Falkon state it’s based on Chromium 87 – not the cutting-edge version, but still a recent one. At least…

Version: 1.4.5 Web: https://github.com/dharple/detox Compatibility issues between Linux and Windows, or Mac and Windows have long existed. Beyond obvious differences in available applications, there’s also another minefield: filenames. Copying a file between two computers has more caveats than you might expect. Long file names become truncated if a FAT32 thumb drive is used; files and folders with special characters in their names may not copy at all; and names with non-English characters are another concern, especially when dealing with files inside a ZIP archive. The Detox developers are perfectly aware of the situation. This small command-line tool is intended to normalise names and therefore avoid such file-naming problems. Detox does what you would do when faced with poor-looking file names. The application contains a series of filters that automatically eliminate…

Version: GIT Web: https://github.com/AndreyBarmaley/qxkb5 Qxkb5 looks like another alternative applet for managing keyboard layouts, but in fact Qxkb5 provides a Qt5-based interface to existing keyboard configurations stored in files such as 00-keyboard.conf in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d. It doesn’t, however, mean that you need to edit Xorg configuration files manually – Qxkb5 has a dedicated field for running a custom setxkbmap command under Settings>Xkb. The field contains a working command template, which you can either leave intact or adjust for another key combination (Alt+Shift, Ctrl+ Shift, and so on). Qxkb5 also acts like an advanced layout manager and helps you define custom layouts using a per-application approach. Say you want a messenger window to always have a given layout, a word processor to always follow the system-wide layouts order, and some other program…

Version: GIT Web: https://github.com/andychase/gbajs2 Nobody knows for sure how many open source games there are, but sometimes you may feel as though you’ve tried them all. The exception may be one-person projects that can only entertain you for perhaps an hour or two at most. We’ve been trying to unearth some gems from among the many solo projects out there, and have found an amazing Game Boy Advance (GBA) emulation project. Gbajs2 offers a quick and easy way to run lots of high-quality games right inside your web browser. The project strives to deliver the best possible GBA emulation experience using Javascript and HTML5 components such as Canvas and Web Audio. There’s the live demo server at https://andychase.me/gbajs2 that you can try right away, although it doesn’t take much effort…

Google Project Zero, a team of security researchers at the search giant, has released a new blog post (which can be read at https://bit.ly/lxf288gpz) detailing how fast various businesses have responded to security vulnerabilities between January 2019 and December 2021, and the results are particularly flattering for Linux developers. According to Google Project Zero’s data, 96 per cent of security issues were fixed by Linux developers before 90 days. This is the standard deadline that Google Project Zero gives companies once it’s passed on a bug report. This is the highest percentage out of the companies listed by Google Project Zero, narrowly beating Google itself, which fixed 95 per cent of security issues by day 90, and a lot higher than Apple (87 per cent), Mozilla (90 per cent) and…

The Framework Laptop now supports Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS out of the box. As the announcement on the Framework community website explains (https://bit.ly/lxf288frameworkubuntu), installing Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS is straightforward and offers compatibility with the laptop’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and fingerprint scanner without having to make any tweaks – several workarounds were needed in previous Ubuntu releases to get these to work. This makes the user experience of the Framework Laptop much smoother, which will hopefully increase its popularity. If you’d like to find out more about the laptop, you can check out our sister website TechRadar’s review at https://bit.ly/lxf288-framework-review.…

The Steam Deck is a gaming system that Swiss Army Knife fans would love. Valve decided that a handheld gaming PC would only work if it had a big screen, two big analog sticks, trackpads, and access to a proper Linux desktop underneath its friendly UI. The Steam Deck isn’t immune to that archetypal jack-of-all-trades problem. After two weeks with it, it’s not a replacement for a desktop PC or as portable as a Nintendo Switch, but it’s something else, a sweet spot right in the middle. It’s the turbo-charged Switch Pro that Nintendo will never make… For most new big budget games, locking the framerate to 30fps is going to be mandatory for stable performance and practical battery life. With the framerate capped at 60, Deathloop drained the battery…

Absolute Linux is one of the handful of distros that attempts to spin a vanilla Slackware release into a desktop distro that’s usable by mere mortals. The project’s namesake distro is based on the stable Slackware release, which has just received a major new update in the form of Slackware 15 (check our review in LXF287) six years after its last one, Slackware 14.2 in 2016. A couple of weeks later, the Absolute Linux project has launched a new release, based on the newest Slackware. And Absolute Linux 15 lives up to its reputation as a ready-to-use Slackware spin. The release is version-compatible with Slackware, and the developer claims that users can use virtually any package from the same version of Slackware on Absolute without issues. The distro, much like…

Read Cells is gorgeous. Smooth animation, evocative pixel art and gratifying effects cast the game in a good light from the off. Its moody fortresses and haunted villages are atmospheric but never drab, and each zone introduces a new splash of colour to the game’s palette. Defeated enemies erupt in a shower of glinting gems, and weapons strike with gratifying force thanks to on-point sound design. These touches gild a superbly executed movement and combat system. You have a double-jump and a dodge-roll that grants a brief but vital window of invincibility. You can chain these into midair dodges and powerful ground-slam attacks – and that’s without factoring in the game’s many weapon choices. Spending your riches Your access to gear is gated by Dead Cells’ progression system. You collect…

This area puts the social in social video, because it’s important that videos can be interacted with by the viewers. At a minimum, we want a userbase to be able to leave comments and rate videos, and all of the sites could manage this. Of course, the best promotion is when the viewers themselves can post links to your content, and all of the sites that we have tested had a facility to post a link to a video on all the major social networking sites. Since Google took control of YouTube, it has actually removed some of the social interaction facilities such as the ability to post videos in replies to other videos and a option for users to post private messages to each other. Videos can be voted…

YouTube has a simple built-in video editor, and it’s good enough to trim footage that’s been uploaded. It can also add music tracks to the video from a library of free tunes that range from typical ambient backgrounds to pop and rock songs. We prefer a full offline editor such as Kdenlive or OpenShot, but it could certainly be used in a pinch. YouTube can automatically generate subtitles. It isn’t perfect, but it’s bound to improve accessibility for those that need it. Vimeo and Odysee both have a download link for most videos. YouTube and Facebook support live streaming of content with a free account, but it’s a paid-for feature with Vimeo. It seems fairly arbitrary whether or not Facebook downscales a given video to a lower resolution. This is…

These days Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) is the standard OS for Pis. But it wasn’t quite always this way. In the very beginning Pidora, an experimental Fedora spin, was the leading effort, while Raspbian started off as a couple of hobbyists doing a mass rebuild of Debian. Things soon changed, and once “hard float” support was added to Raspbian (enabling it to use the Pi’s floating point unit for a nifty speed boost) in 2012 it rapidly became a de facto standard. The following year the project was adopted by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who hitherto had left the software side of things to the community. Several other OSes appeared in the early Pi days, including RaspBMC (a port of the legendary XBMC Xbox Media Center) and a port…

The Raspberry Pi has a close relationship with the final frontier – though we’re disappointed that The Foundation hasn’t made it to Terminus, yet – with projects sending Pi up in high-altitude balloons and the Astro Pi coding competitions on the International Space Station. The latest Pi in space is part of the NASA-backed GASPACS project, short for Get Away Special Passive Attitude Control Satellite. Designed by undergraduate students at Utah State University, it’s a tech demonstration of an inflatable boom that doubles as a passive attitude stabilisation device, making use of aerodynamic drag available in low Earth orbit. It takes the shape of a CubeSat that’s 10cm square, and was transported on the SpaceX CRS-24 at the end of 2021 to the ISS where it was launched from the…

We tried two Pi distributions with a similar purpose: to boot into a menu-driven graphical environment that gives easy access to installed emulators and games. Recalbox was easier to set up. In contrast, we had to resort to the command line while setting up RetroPie. Once it was up and running, we were impressed with Recalbox’s overall aesthetic. As you move between console and computer emulators, you’re met with illustrations of the machine with some information about its specs, while charming chiptune music plays. Recalbox also came with some games already installed. Once a game is launched, it runs inside a faux CRT monitor border with a screen filter applied for the authentic retro look. The emulators themselves were similar, and the Pi 400 could handle most 2D machines such…

1 Correct lighting problems Photo a bit murky or over-exposed? Navigate to the Lights & Shadows category and look at the Equalize Light and Equalize Shadow plug-ins. The latter has a single control – Amplitude – while the former offers two modes (range or covariance) and can be applied to individual colour channels. Try the Pop Shadows filter if Equalize Shadow doesn’t meet your needs. 2 Sharpen blurred images G’MIC offers a range of different sharpening tools – most can be found under Details, while the Multiscale, Octave Sharpening and Tones filters can work some magic on more blurry shots. Others worth looking at include Magic Details and Mighty Details, both of which offer effective sharpening without creating too much noise. 3 Remove speckles and noise Old photos often suffer from physical damage…

Our emphasis has been on processing Landsat images using GIMP because this approach enables you to understand what needs to be done and why. However, while fewer choices might be available to you, the LandsatLook website is able to generate colour or false colour images corresponding to various band combinations. So, once you’ve got up to speed with the principles using GIMP, this provides you with a much easier way to see any part of the world in a new way and, in so doing, generate some attractive-looking Landsat images. While you’re exploring the Earth in LandsatLook, you’ll notice that one of the options at the top of the page is for Bands and, by default, it shows Presets Natural Colour. However, if you look at the other options, you’ll…

Version: 2.1 Web: https://github.com/rafatosta/zapzap We want to mention QtWebEngine again. This time it powers another desktop program, which might come in handy for many users. Zapzap is a cross-platform desktop Whatsapp client that’s backed by both PyQt6 and PyQt6-Webengine. This is yet another example of using the latest Qt6 stack for bringing web apps closer to traditional desktops. The Whatsapp website offers official apps for Android, iOS, Windows and macOS, but not Linux. Zapzap attempts to rectify this by providing a custom desktop program that looks and feels like an official tool made by the Whatsapp team. Zapzap is a wrapper for https://web.whatsapp.com, that has always been available to everyone since the launch of Whatsapp, Linux folks included. It’s not the only one of its kind (think WhatsappQt), but perhaps…

Version: 0.4.7 Web: https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext There are few Windows-only applications that we’re envious of. One is Notepad++, a versatile and expandable editor, which many consider a state-of-the-art tool for dealing with text documents. In LXF229 we reviewed Notepadqq, an independent, crossplatform clone of Notepad++. This month we’re looking at Notepad Next – another attempt to bring Notepad++’s functionality closer to Linux users. Notepad Next is a modern Qt-based project that’s compatible with both Qt5 and Qt6. Although Notepad Next doesn’t save opened files silently in the background, its interface is remarkably close to the look of Notepad++. Not just the icon set that’s used for the tool bar, but also its many dialogs that have taken inspiration from the original editor. Press Ctrl+F to access the familiar find and replace dialog,…

Version: 3.0 Web: http://freeciv.org Freeciv is a highly playable and attractive open source strategy game. It’s not the first time we’ve covered it (see LXF242), but this time we’re celebrating the long-awaited 3.0 release. Freeciv 3.0 had been in the works for almost four years, and there are some noticeable changes worth reviewing for both veteran Freeciv players and newcomers. The game is a libre clone of Sid Meier’s Civilization II with some advanced features borrowed from Civilization III, and certain homegrown features specific to Freeciv. The first thing we noticed upon starting a new campaign is that the hexagonal topology is now used by default instead of an isometric one. In fact, hex view doesn’t mean that the map view is totally flat because it’s a combined hex-iso view…

Part One Don’t miss next issue! Subscribe on page 18 Rust has become a key language for the Linux kernel and beyond. This series on systems programming with Rust will cover the basics, including memory management, working with command line arguments and environment variables, the cargo tool and writing tests. You’ll learn how to work with files and directories, file I/O, UNIX processes, concurrency and network programming. Installing Rust You can use the package manager that comes with your Linux distribution to install Rust. On an Arch Linux machine, you can install Rust by running pacman -S rust with root privileges – this will also install the cargo tool (explained later on). New, stable Rust versions are released every six weeks) and sometimes without full backward compatibility. You can find…