Table of contents for Summer 2018 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell Hate is such a strong word. And Arch Linux does almost everything so nicely. Having said that, I do hate when Systemd holds up the shutdown process, forcing me to wait 90 seconds or press Ctrl-Alt-Del seven times in two seconds to forcefully reboot. Who comes up with these values and why do they hate (let the hate flow!–ED) me? John Knight Such negativity! I don’t hate anything about Mint itself. However, the Debian packaging system has infuriated me for years. I have the same problems now as I did in 2003, where one little hiccup throws out the entire system! It’s time we came up with something more robust. Nick Peers “I’m still coming to terms with Ubuntu 18,04 LTS, but aside from the switch from Unity…

“I was once asked to look at a Linux firewall that was in place at a Premier League football club. The firewall wouldn’t boot, so no one had any Internet access, hence my presence. No one wanted to upset the lads training on the pitch – imagine the carnage if they found out they couldn’t check their Instagram and Twitter feeds once in a while! It had been set up, as these things so often are, by “somebody who has left”. That somebody had set up the firewall to PXE boot – that is, to download its bootable image from somewhere else, in this case a file server. My first thought was, “Why on earth would you set up a firewall to PXE boot?”. And then it occurred to me:…

Gentoo has announced that on 28 June an attacker gained control of the Github Gentoo organisation, with an alert (http://bit.ly/LXFGentooHacked) stating that, “All Gentoo code hosted on github should for the moment be considered compromised.” The breach has since been fixed, but a post on the Gentoo-dev mailing list revealed that the attacker “replaced the portage and musl-dev trees with malicious versions of the ebuilds intended to try removing all of your files.” Learn way more at http://bit.ly/LXFGentooMailing. So far, Gentoo hasn’t revealed how the attack happened. Thankfully, the attack was quickly caught, but the potential for damage was huge!…

DRUPAL EUROPE Drupal, the popular open source content management system has its European conference in Darmstadt, Germany on 10 to 14 September. You’ll learn about the future of the open web and open source via a panel discussion, and take part in workshops and sessions. More details at www.drupaleurope.org. LINUX PRESENTATION DAY 2018.2 Outreach is where we find new, interested members of the public who want to extend the life of their equipment, and keep safe online. Linux Presentation Day is your chance for your LUG to get out there and help those people. It takes place on 10 November 2018 and offers the chance to take your kit on the road. Your local library, shopping mall, school can play host to a day of Linux-fuelled evangelism and help. You…

Q Today’s desktops often want to access all kinds of external sources. That’s fair enough, what I’m concerned with is which (if any) services are listening locally, and how can I disable these. Of course, I know if I’m running SSH (and I can secure that using public keys), but is there a command that shows which services are listening and which ports they’re listening on? I know some things will only listen on the loopback interface, so are benign, but I also understand that things that listen on a local LAN address could be accessed via a router hack or by a compromised machine on my LAN. And what about services running over IPv6? They’re blocked by the router, but I don’t want to rely on this. I’m also…

The upside to choosing different desktop environments for each of the five distributions featured in this Roundup is that no two look alike. All the distros enable you to tweak the many different elements of the desktop such as wallpapers, widgets and themes. On KaOS, you can enable desktop effects, configure screen corners and edges to respond to swiping gestures, and even set up touch devices. All these settings and more pertaining to hardware and power management are in the Settings Manager. Manjaro also provides a central settings manager, and more relevant managers depending on your chosen desktop environment. There’s also a Manjaro Settings Manager, which provides quick access to native tools such as one to install and manage Linux Kernel, and another for graphics card drivers. Like Manjaro, PCLinuxOS…

WHY MINT JUST WORKS “Using the solid base of Ubuntu 18.04, and all the new goodness there, Mint adds a layer of finesse…” Finally the wait is over. The latest version of one of the most popular Linux distros has landed, and it comes packing a new look, new tools and, following Mint’s acquisition by Microsoft, new owners. Okay that last one was a lie, but it got your attention, and your attention is what this release deserves. Because it’s awesome. And just to be clear, Linux Mint is still independently developed and funded by donations, website advertisements and sponsorship. Mint veterans will find much of what they loved is lovelier than ever, and newcomers will find an OS that’s powerful, easy to use and good looking. Using the solid…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder promotes maker skills. He blogs ideas and projects at www.bigl.es There are countless projects for the Raspberry Pi, with most of those them written using Python. But did you know that the humble Bash, the same interface that we use to control our system, can also be used to control the GPIO? This is thanks to the Wiring Pi project from Gordon Henderson. In this tutorial we’ll introduce how to use the gpio utility to control the GPIO. All the software you need is pre-installed, so power up your Pi and open the Terminal! Project 1: Flash an LED The “hello world” of hardware hacking is to flash an LED. We start by building the circuit for this project, which sees an LED in a breadboard,…

If you don’t have a Pi with official touchscreen, there are plenty of cheaper alternatives for adding a controller to your multi-room audio setup. The obvious choice is to use your phone or tablet as a controller. Android users can control their LMS setup with the free Squeezerapp, which gives you access to all the core functionality you need: browse your library, build playlists and switch players. There are playback controls, you can manage any alarms you’ve set up, but there are some weaknesses. One of the most notable is the lack of an Album Artists view: if this is a deal-breaker then invest £3.99 in Orange Squeezeinstead, which has the missing view and extra features, too. If you want to control your music from an Apple device, then iPad…

While the project fell short of its initial aims, that doesn’t reduce the need to give credit to the resources that enabled the project. Sparkfun’s assembly guide of the camera kit (https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/setting-up-the-pi-zero-wireless-pan-tilt-camera) was the initial starting point. It establishes a working camera using the supplies provided in the kit. Second was the RPi Cam Web Interface reference material at https://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface, for exploring the workings of the camera application software. Third, the Github pan title resource at https://github.com/mhord/RPi_PanTilt_Cam, which provided the application. This link (https://kamranicus.com/guides/raspberry-pi-3-baby-monitor) was a resource found during an internet search examining a completely different solution for streaming video. The author introduced ideas that resulted in improvements to this design.…

OUR EXPERT John Knight When he’s not playing video games in French, John can be found beating a bass drum loudly. According to the website, “HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.” Although it’s certainly worth exploring, we should state that HandBrake is not easy to understand if you’re a novice – the program is clearly designed with the power user in mind. Nevertheless, with some tutorial scenarios we can hopefully break it down into something more easily digestible and make the interface less intimidating. HandBrake’s interface is slightly unconventional and can be confusing at first, but stick with it, as some parts function beautifully and really make HandBrake stand out from the pack. We don’t have space…

OUR EXPERT Mayank Sharma is a technical author who spends much of his time playing Linux games like there’s no tomorrow. Running Linux just because you think it’s safer than Windows? Think again. Security in Linux is a built-in feature and extends right from the kernel to the desktop, but it still leaves enough room to let someone muck about with your /home folder. Sure, Linux is impervious to viruses and worms written for Windows, but attackers have several other tricks up their sleeves to illegally access your precious bits and bytes that make up everything from your personal emails to your credit card details. Locking your data behind a username and password shouldn’t be your only line of defence, and isn’t enough to hold off a determined attacker. As…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers is a freelance technology journalist who specialises in A-ha!. You’ll no doubt be familiar with how Linux identifies the drives attached to your PC, and that Linux treats everything as a file – including folders (which is basically a file listing the files that make up that folder’s contents). But how are these files organised on your hard drive, and how do you access them through Ubuntu’s graphical file manager, Nautilus? Let’s start with the raw basics. Linux organises files in a tree-like structure that’s a little bit similar to Windows. The major difference being that while Windows physically separates drives into individual trees, with the drive letter at the top, Linux lumps everything together in a single file tree, with a top-level root (/) directory…

Despite only mains electricity harmonics being detectable at frequencies below 1kHz, uniquely, these frequencies enable communication through seawater. The US Navy used to have a submarine communication system at 76Hz. Experienced operators can still interpret Morse Code better than most software decoders. But newer modes of data transmission can decode signals that are so weak they can’t even be heard by ear. You’ll find some stations that are neither in the broadcast or amateur bands. Some just transmit strings of numbers . These are commonly thought to be related to espionage or organised crime.…

Version: 0.6.1 Web: https://github.com/codesardine/Jadesktop We love bringing innovative and ground-breaking Linux desktop environments to your attention. When Jade popped on to our radar, we were interested to see if it looked and felt different from Gnome, KDE or any other ‘lighter’ desktop. Jade is a HTML5, CSS and Python-based desktop that has its own layout, menu system and some cool extras, such as speaking menus and titles, as well as a customised selection of some more traditional GTK3 and Qt5 programs. The placement of its desktop widgets and indicators is certainly original, although in most cases you can’t rearrange them. The top-centre Applications button activates the grid view of available applications, which are grouped into categories. We tested Jade using the Manjaro WebDad spin and therefore some programs may be…

Version: GIT Web: https://github.com/cmdrkotori/qt314wall This program’s name reads like an obtuse answer to a brain-teaser. The official description reveals that it’s a slideshow generator for KDE, so you might reasonably think that Qt314wall creates animated slide shows from images. In fact, the program is a wallpaper changer that’s specific to KDE (both generations 4 and 5). Despite the fact that the KDE Plasma desktop is supposed to be extremely configurable, some features are still missing. Qt314wall fills the gap of automatic wallpaper changing, which is a feature that not immediately available in KDE. There are some technical obstacles in implementing this in KDE Plasma natively. For example, if you decide to add a context service menu to Dolphin for setting an image as a wallpaper, you’ll find that it will…

OUR EXPERT Dan Frost leads R&D projects in edtech, writes and podcasts about emerging tech, and business at blog.thebaseline.co . The world is digital, which means that communication is digital. Thus it follows that your digital products communicate with humans and other digital systems, creating millions of events every day. Unhelpful, nasty people can exploit this to create malicious bots that either pretend to be humans or exploit holes in your systems. If you’ve ever had to deal with a hack and if you’ve done forensic analysis of what happened, you’ll know that hack attempts and malicious code look suspicious. In this article, we’ll see how to use a combination of the logs of your own system and some accessible machine learning to create a system that alerts you when…

The example in this article is a bit of a toy example - it kind of works, but doesn’t touch on what else you can do with this or where it can go. So let’s see what else we can achieve… A major improvement would be using unsupervised machine learning to spot unusual log entries rather than what we’re doing here, which is training it to recognise bad (unusual) entries. This is called ‘anomaly detection’ and libraries like sklearn provide some algorithms for creating such models. The advantage is that you don’t have to go through and label the data. Instead, you prepare it (probably tokenising as we did here), then train the model to recognise ‘normal’. You could also port the idea to a completely different domain such as…

Have GNU/Linux distributions fallen into a dull routine of refresh and release? It would be easy for a casual user to get the idea that Linux distros aren’t innovating. Indeed, years can pass between major releases for long-standing distros such as Debian and Slackware. As you’d expect, it’s behind the scenes where there’s constant work on improving, securing and bug squashing. For many users, swan-like stability is key: keep everything on the surface calm and smooth, with frantic development activity well out of sight. There’s no doubt open source distros do offer this, but if you crave new horizons then there’s a continuous swarm of newly developed distros buzzing around the flowering core branches of the distro family tree. In a way, this issue is a tale of two distro…

At this year’s Google I/O developer conference, Google announced that Linux apps will be able to run in ChromeOS, its lightweight operating system that the popular Chromebook devices run on. Since that announcement, a number of Chromebooks have gained the ability to run Linux programs, and now 18 more Chromebooks have been added to that list. The support comes through Google’s developer channel, which enables developers to test out upcoming features. All of the new Chromebooks run on Intel’s Apollo Lake (and a single ARM model) processors, and include popular devices from companies such as Acer, Asus and Dell. Google’s Pixelbook and the Samsung Chromebook Plus were the first to benefit from Linux compatibility, and we’re glad to see Google is increasing the number of devices, while also bringing the…

ARYALINUX 1.0 This source-based distro, which is built using Linux From Scratch, and comes with a Python-based package manager and customised Gnome desktop, is now available to download. According to the release notes (which can be read at http://bit.ly/LXFArya), this is the first time a Gnome version of AryaLinux has been released, hence the new versioning system, and the plan is that it will be the default desktop environment going forward. PINGUYOS 18.04 The latest release of Pinguy 18.04 is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and features the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment. Several new features have been updated, including OpenGL version string 3.1, Mesa 18.1.1, and Nemo 3.8.3, while there have also been bug fixes and exFAT support is now enabled. However, support for 32-bit hardware has been dropped. Check…

Liverpool Makefest 2018 Innovation replaced silence in the city’s library The city of Liverpool’s Central Library played host to the fourth Liverpool Makefest. Across four floors of the library the many facets of “maker” met and showed off their wares. One stall was hosted by Jo “JSON” Hinchcliffe, who is passionate about children learning about space exploration using the most cost-effective tools. She’s keen to show access to space via rocketry and small satellites using open source practices. Across the other floors we saw hackspaces from the area showing off their projects. Hac Man (Manchester Hackspace) and DoES Liverpool had many great projects involving retro computers attached to the Internet and a soldering workshop. DoES also brought Made Invaders: a mixture of Nerf guns and Space Invaders powered by Arduino.…

Q Best Mint-editions I’m trying to install Mint Xfce on a Acer One 10 (Model S1003), which has Windows 10 pre-installed. Rufus doesn’t work. I’ve put Mint on a USB drive using Rufus and the Acer just boots to Windows. Having dug around on the web it appears that some 64-bit Acer One 10s have 32-bit EFI instead of 64-bit. This is way above my skill level, so I’ve rung Acer to get some help. Acer said for £60 it can sort this out. I don’t think this is right. So, as a long-time subscriber, I’m hoping you can help. I want to get rid of Windows 10 completely, and if you think there’s a more suitable OS then Mint Xfce, please let me know! David Brooks, by email A…

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…

Jolla’s Sailfish is a mobile Linux with an impeccable pedigree. It’s a direct descendant of the Nokia/Intel MeeGo initiative with a number of interesting features, among them its use of Wayland display technology, and its facility with touchscreens. Sailfish and Gemini should be a match made in heaven. Jolla has both a core team of professional developers and an active user community. The Sailfish image, which is now available for download via Planet’s site, is a community remix that’s based on beta versions of Sailfish 3.0. Its functionality is impressive, but it makes a couple of significant omissions – not least the software layer that enables users of official releases to run Android apps alongside Linux software. We also had some problems with the third-party flashing tool that’s been made…

The downside to fixed-release distributions is the lack of support after a specific period. Eventually, you must either update to a newer release, or run the risk of not being able to install additional software, or get security updates. This problem is alleviated with the advent of long-term support releases (LTS) that are supported for longer, as well as the automatic upgrade tools that many distros now support. These can help you migrate your existing installation to the latest release. In contrast, once a rolling-release distributions is installed it’ll never have to be overwritten, and you’ll always be on the cutting edge of the latest software so long as you update the system regularly. While all Linux distributions can be customised, some rolling distros with their minimalist offerings provide more…

KaOS and Manjaro host a number of user contributed tutorials on their forums, which is a mixture of links to other websites, or a barebones step-by-step guide on accomplishing certain tasks. KaOS also provides some documentation in form of detailed tutorials on many topics such as installation, hardware setup and security. Although there’s a search bar at the top of the documentation section, all of the limited number of articles on the above topics, such as setting up firewall with UFW, encrypting the home partition, and switching between free and non-free drivers for Nvidia graphics cards are listed in the sidebar on the left. In addition to the official forum and IRC channel in both English and German, Manjaro Linux also boasts of unofficial forums in various other languages. The…

The 4.15 kernel that shipped with Ubuntu 18.04 (the very same that ships with Mint 19) was pretty much new when the latter was released. As time marches on, security fixes will be applied promptly, and important new features will be backported from future kernel releases too. But not all features and hardware support will be delivered this way, so Ubuntu offers its users (and by extension Mint users) the Hardware Enablement (HWE) stack. Much of the demand for new features is related to graphics things, so besides a newer kernel, the HWE stack offers newer versions of userspace display components (Mesa, libdrm and all the X bits). With Ubuntu 16.04 the HWE release model, which used to introduce a new stack with each Ubuntu point release (and have these…

LXF: Jess, thanks for your time today. Please can you tell the Linux Format readers a little about yourself? Jess Ingrassellino: Hi everyone, I’m Jess and I’m a software testing engineer by day and at the weekends I teach Python to kids aged eight to 18. I’ve also been working on curricula and methods to reach out to the kids and to help teach teachers who are interested in technology, but don’t necessarily have the access to how to implement technology in the classroom. LXF: So what brings you to Cleveland and PyCon this year? JI: I’m at PyCon this year because I’m the chair of the education summit, which I’ve been for the past two years. I started volunteering in the education summit five years ago because I wanted…

Mail servers are able to determine if an incoming message has come from a reputable source. Blacklists are used to assess a server’s reputation, and there are mechanisms for updating these. This is in theory a good thing, since it rapidly propagates information about ‘bad’ servers, so that messages coming from them will be rejected. Unfortunately, messages from newly set-up SMTP servers that have no reputation will likely be rejected by the receiving servers. This is something of a Catch-22 situation: one needs to send mail to establish a good reputation, and one needs a good reputation to send email. And any rejected messages may be reported to blacklists, worsening that server’s reputation. So it’s possible to shoot yourself in the foot just by having a few test emails rejected.…

Community… one simple word that can help someone to go on and learn all about a new world. It’s also one thing that can make or break a new piece of technology. Luckily, it’s one of the stronger aspects of the Raspberry Pi and has added great value to the platform. Back in 2012 there were many who, at 6am, were frantically pressing F5 on their keyboard and helping to inadvertently, disrupt two of the UK’s premier electronic components supplier websites who were the first to publicly sell the Raspberry Pi. Much later quite a few had a Pi of their own. It was that fledgling community who were on hand to lead the way and teach inexperienced users how to make their Pi do awesome things. Then came the…

Wiring Pi (http://wiringpi.com), was created by Gordon Henderson and is a powerful PIN-based GPIO access library that offers an interface similar to C and, C++ for experienced developers. It works in a similar manner to the Arduino “wiring” system, so Arduino coders can feel at home controlling the GPIO of their Raspberry Pi. Using Wiring Pi we can still interface with the I2C and SPI bus so we can use existing components and devices that rely on these interfaces. The gpio utility that we use in this tutorial isn’t really Wiring Pi, but rather a quick Bash tool to control the pins. And speaking of pins, WiringPi and the gpio utility use different pin numbering to the standard Broadcom (BCM) mapping favoured by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. In the tutorial…

OUR EXPERT Sean D Conway has decided to put his 37 years of experience in electronics and computers into improving on the design of a baby monitor. . When the need for something becomes imperative, you often find different ways of reaching or achieving the end goal. We found the baby monitor that a family member had purchased somewhat lacking. So with thoughts of a Raspberry Pi-based design and a quick search of the internet, we decided to construct our own. We knew a project without a list of requirements tends to turn into an expensive development exercise with no finished product to show for our time and trouble. With carte blanche spending approval from the women who holds the household purse strings (you can’t attach a price tag to…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and avid Arch Linux user. He’s always on the lookout for geeky memorabilia.. Most modern Linux distributions ship with a couple of different shells installed out of the box. These Linux shells contain tools to help you achieve just about any task, such as moving or deleting files, accessing remote machines, executing scripts and managing users. The downside to this sheer power is the inherent capacity to harm the system. With lshell you can restrict a users’ access to a defined set of commands, entirely disable certain commands over SSH, implement timing restrictions and more! It makes sense to use lshell to restrict novice users from certain commands. This author, for instance, once accidentally overwrote a 40GB disk, while attempting…

Video codecs are the formats that compress raw video into something smaller and easier to handle. Although many kinds have existed, it all really started with MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) back in 1988. Advances in processing power meant video compression algorithms became more sophisticated, meaning you can squeeze more video quality into a smaller file size. DVD’s MPEG-2 was a big step up over MPEG-1, and video file sharing really kicked off in the early 2000s when DiVX/MPEG-4 was able to squeeze near-DVD quality video on to a single CD. However, each major step in video compression requires that hardware advance with it. MPEG-4 required a decently beefy PC back in the day, but eventually hardware MPEG-4 decoding was built into basic consumer devices such as DVD players and…

Virtually all malicious activity happens via processes running in the background. As part of your active security management plan, you should keep an eye on the running processes on your machine and immediately take action against any suspicious processes. You can use the top command to list all the running processes and highlight how they’re consuming the available resources on your computer. If you want a more user-friendly version of the running processes, install the htop utility from the repos. Every process is assigned a process ID, or PID, which helps identify and keep track of individual processes. Use the pgrep command to list the PID if a process, such as pgrep vlc . To kill a process you can use the kill command followed by the PID (Process ID)…

The International Telecommunication Union divides the radio spectrum into bands, each represented by a decade of frequency. SHF (super high frequency) covers 3GHz to 30GHz and includes the 5.8GHz ISM band used by WiFi, plus satellite TV. Next down is UHF (ultra high frequency) which covers 300MHz to 3GHz and here we find the 2.4GHz ISM band which is also used for WiFi plus Bluetooth, mobile phone networks, and terrestrial TV. VHF (very high frequency) covers 30MHz to 300MHz and covers FM and DAB radio. Next, HF (high frequency) at 3-30MHz is known as shortwave, followed by MF (medium frequency) which covers 300kHz to 3MHz and includes the medium wave band. Next is LF (low frequency) at 30kHz to 300kHz which is where the long wave band is found. The…

Getting data for machine learning can be a huge part of the work. Poke around in application and server logs for ideas of what you could be capturing. Most people treat logs as boring admin whereas they’re the source of some great ML magic! The tokenising done is just one example of preparing the data. Most data doesn’t come cleaned, so you need to learn how to do this. Read through the original data and ask “What can I see which might not end up int the model?” This is part of ‘feature engineering’. A missing but important step in the process is storing the model. Search for ‘model persistence’ in sklearn (other libraries have similar functionality) that effectively serialises the model to store either on disk or elsewhere.…

OUR EXPERT Kent Elchuk is a full-time web developer and Linux enthusiast whose spare time includes programming and hydroponic food production. Responsive frameworks have become the standard for modern web design. Yet when they were introduced, many experts were not convinced by their worth and saw them as a mere footnote on the internet’s development path. Not all experts are right… Historically speaking, it was around 2010 when web developers all over the world knew that these CSS frameworks, which made building one website for all viewing devices, were an incredible thing. At this time, most websites were coded with fixed widths, which made building them quite easy. From a typical web design point of view, responsive code was quite different and required you to adopt a new way of…

Inspecting an element gives us excellent access to make slight modifications to the code and view the changes in real time. Novice and experienced web developers alike use these tools on a regular basis. It’s hard to imagine working and fine-tuning a project without using the tool. After we right-click the page within our browser, and chose Inspect with Chromeor Inspect Element with Firefox, we’ll see the inspector load on the bottom of the page. On the top left corner of the inspector, there is a left-pointing arrow. When we select the left arrow, we can drag a pointer over the page and it will highlight elements. We can make it highlight anything like a large text heading, a row, a column or another combination of multiple elements. Once we…

“THE SAVE YOUR INTERNET CAMPAIGN GAINED OVER 700,000 SIGNATURES AGAINST THE PROPOSED LAW” The saga of the EU’s controversial internet copyright reforms rumbles on, with 318 MEPs voting against it, compared to 278 who voted in favour. The Copyright Directive was supposed to be a update to copyright laws in the age of the internet. However, the proposed law’s Article 13 added references to a contentious “upload filter” that would make it mandatory for any uploaded media to be checked for copyright infringement. Photo and video-sharing websites such YouTube and Flickr would be hit by these proposals, while smaller, newer or independent services could go out of business unable to complete. While it could impact personal uploads and creations. The Save Your Internet campaign gained (www.saveyourinternet.eu) over 700,000 signatures against…

“After 17 years of active development, and automated builds existing for some time for Fedora, Debian, MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android, the GStreamer multimedia framework is getting the infrastructure upgrade it deserves. Originally developed for the GNU/Linux desktop, the largest numbers of deployments for GStreamer in recent years have been on embedded devices, yet those scenarios had yet to be included in the GStreamer continuous integration (CI) system. With device manufacturers relying on GStreamer in security cameras, music players, smart televisions and more, the project’s ability to test hardware-accelerated codecs is crucial and that challenge is finally being tackled. While the entire project is in the midst of a migration from Jenkins to GitLab CI, work is underway to integrate embedded devices testing into the GStreamer CI. By integrating actual…

Have I Been Pwned is a service that (https://haveibeenpwned.com) enables you to check if your email address has been included in security breaches, and now Mozilla will be integrating the service directly in its Firefox web browser. The feature will be tested over the coming weeks, using HIBP information to search breach data using a new tool called Firefox Monitor. In a post about the new tool Mozilla explains (http://bit.ly/LXFPwned) that, “We decided to address a growing need for account security by developing Firefox Monitor, a proposed security tool that’s designed for everyone, but offers additional features for Firefox users”.…

“Open Networking Summit (ONS) is the industry’s premier open networking event, gathering enterprises, service providers and cloud providers to share learnings, highlight innovation and discuss the future of open source networking. After seven successful years in the US, ONS is expanding into Europe (25-27 September in Amsterdam), to provide the opportunity for more individuals to share, learn and collaborate on these important technologies. Confirmed keynote speakers include: Dr Paul Doany, CEO, Türk Telecom, talking about redefining the competitive landscape. Dr Catherine Mulligan, co-director, Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering, Imperial College London, discussing the intersection of networking and blockchain. Virtualizing the Central Office for Mobile Services: A collaboration and demo across companies including China Mobile, Nokia, Quortus and Red Hat, and open source projects including OpenAirInterface, Open Compute Project, and…

Alpinux, le LUG de Savoie Meets on the first and third Thursday of the month at the Maison des Associations de Chambéry, France. www.alpinux.org Build Brighton Thursday evenings is open night. www.buildbrighton.com Little Sandbox 5 Brasenose Road, Liverpool L20 8HL. Open maker night is Tuesday 6-9. Kids clubs are Monday (six to eight years) and Wednesday (eight to 12 years). www.littlesandbox.co.uk Leeds Hackspace Open night every Tuesday 7pm-late, open day second Saturday of the month, 11am-4pm. www.leedshackspace.org.uk Horsham Raspberry Jam Park side, Chart Way, Horsham. www.facebook.com/hackhorsham rLab Reading Hackspace Unit C1, Weldale Street, Reading. Wednesdays from 7pm. http://rlab.org.uk Huddersfield Raspberry Jam Meet every month at Huddersfield Library, typically the fourth Saturday of each month. www.huddersfieldraspberryjam.co.uk Medway Makers 12 Dunlin Drive, St Mary’s Island, Chatham, ME2 3JE. www.medwaymakers.com Cornwall Tech Jam Second…

I’m running Plasma using the proprietary Nvidia driver. It’s great for gaming, but watching videos - particularly streaming them in a web browser – results in a horizontal tear about a quarter of the way from the bottom of the screen. It’s particularly noticeable, and irritating, during scenes with lots of movement. How can I fix this and stop my friends telling me to just use Windows? John Sheppard, via space telegram A This is a long-standing bug that bothers the heck out of me too. Something to do with how the Kwin compositor interacts with the Nvidia driver makes it more of an issue on Plasma than Gnome, but this fix can work there too. First open the Nvidia Settings Panel, and then go to X Server Display Configuration>Advanced…

The distributions featured in this Roundup ship with a number of different default desktop environments. We’re running all of them on a quad-core machine with 16GB RAM. Unlike the situation from over a decade ago, rolling-release distributions are becoming increasingly common. So we’ll test these distributions for the default applications each offers out of the box. We’re also interested in the underlying package management system for these distributions, which can make or break the users’ experience with a rolling-release distro. As more and more new users – sometimes with limited Linux experience – begin experimenting with rolling-release distributions, documentation and support is also an important factor for this Roundup. With an ever-increasing number of such distributions popping up, we’ll also keep an eye on the USP for these projects, and…

Not only do the distributions featured in this Roundup provide a ready-to-use system out of the box, they actively strive to make the experience easy for all manners of Linux users, but especially those new to FOSS. Whereas KaOS has limited its focus solely to KDE, the other distributions all ship several variants favouring different desktop environments. Our selection of distributions for this Roundup has thus provided us a rare treat of having five different desktops on hand, and we’ve got one each of Budgie, Gnome, KDE, Mate and XFCE. Because each desktop environment has its own pros and cons, we’re not interested in similarities or differences. Instead, the focus of this test is on the distributions ease of use and their fun quotient. This is especially relevant as all…

If you want control over every aspect of your installation, look no further than Gentoo and Arch, which weren’t featured in our Roundup because of the self-imposed restriction of targetting newbie friendly, easy-to-install distributions. But if you would rather have the convenience of a rolling-release distro, without the hassles of a complicated installation, Chakra Linux featuring KDE is also a worthy alternative. It favours a half-rolling release cycle wherein the desktop environment and applications sit on top of a continually updating core system. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed provides the latest stable build of all software, is intended for those who wish for a RPM-based rolling-release distribution. For those with older hardware, antiX features the lightweight Fluxbox and IceWM. Chakra Linux featuring KDE utilises a half-rolling release cycle. It provides a stable desktop…

Cinnamon 3.8, Mint’s flagship desktop, was released at the beginning of May 2018 and features the impressive Mint-Y theme. In keeping with modern design trends, it’s smooth and flat. Mint-Y was available in Mint 18, albeit not the default, but has since been tweaked and polished to perfection. If you prefer the classic Mint-X theme that’s has been around since Mint 10, then don’t worry – it’s still available. Under the hood, there have been some major performance improvements, too. The Muffin window manager features snappier window rendering and the Nemo file manager is faster at transferring files to network or USB drives. It should also be noticeably quicker at rendering the contents of large directories. Furthermore, Nemonow enables you to save common searches, which will then be indexed in…

Mint uses Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer, which is well-reputed and almost certainly won’t break your system. You’ll find a walkthrough in our Ubuntu feature in LXF238, but the installer will tell you everything you need to know. If you plan on making Mint your only operating system, then you have nothing to worry about. Just make sure you really don’t care about any data left of the target drive before proceeding. If you’re planning on dual-booting with Windows on the same drive, then you’ll want to resize its partition from there as gParted and friends have a nasty habit of breaking newer NTFS filesystems. Where possible we’d recommend installing on a separate drive. If nothing else this will give your install more room to breathe. Either way, back up any important…

LXF: Hi Ewa, please can you tell the Linux Format readers more about yourself. Ewa Jodlowska: I’m the director of operations at the Python Software Foundation and one of my main jobs is overseeing the production of PyCon. LXF: So PyCon is “your baby?” EJ: It is, but I’m in the process of letting it go. I’m moving to an oversight role and not doing all of the operational work myself. LXF: What does PyCon mean to you? EJ: Multiple things, really. Because I’ve been doing it for so long, it means family. But beyond that, PyCon definitely means “community” to me. So when we talk about all the stressful parts of planning PyCon, which are usually the weeks leading up to it, that’s when I notice on social media…

Virtual users are similar to aliases, but the approach is much more flexible. We don’t need to map each virtual user to a particular system account, so we can use a separate database to maintain login credentials. If you’re thinking of starting your own world-beating email provider, you can see why this would be useful. We’ll just use a file to store credentials, since taking over the world isn’t on the list of priorities just now. Virtual users are all allied to a single user account, so we’ll set that up now with useradd vmail . Dovecot can hash passwords for us so they don’t need to be stored in the clear, which is healthy. We’ll create a virtual address virtual@myserver.com and set up a password for it. Run doveadm…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers Since part one, Nick has been experimenting with his new multi-room setup and enjoying his music… when he’s able to wrest his tablet from his eight-year-old daughter! (yes, he is a monster) Last issue we revealed how to build your own multi-room audio system for the fraction of the cost of a Bose or Sonos setup using your Raspberry Pi as a server with the open-sourced Logitech Media Server (also known as Squeezebox). This issue we’re going to fill in the missing gaps by adding a range of touchscreen controllers, which provide a more convenient means of playing and managing your library. Think of the controller as a glorified remote control, with the added benefit that it enables you to control any or all of the…

The BoM includes a detailed breakdown of the required kit. The Sparkfun online resources are sufficient to enable a customer to complete the kit build. The kit software is based on a project that has been tracked on a forum at the Official Raspberry Pi site (www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=63276).The Raspberry Pi camera web interface project is fully documented at https://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface. Confused? Why write an article about building a Pi mounted camera if the resources referenced provide all the instructions to do just that? Isn’t that redundant? If you recall, the whole camera project was based on the author not being satisfied with what was available. Using the resources as reference, the article tweaks and refines the details to guide the reader to the accomplishing the same task. In addition there are some…

Apart from lshell, other shells like Bash, Ksh, and Zsh all also feature a restricted shell. If bash is the default shell on your Linux distribution, you most likely already have rbash installed as well. The restricted bash, or rbash, is a restricted shell which limits some of the capabilities of bash. To check if you have rbash installed, open a terminal, run cat /etc/shells and look for /bin/rbash in the output. You can launch rbash by running bash -r on the terminal. To configure a user to default to rbash, instead of regular bash as the shell, run sudo chsh -s username , and then type in /bin/rbash. When running the restricted bash shell, users aren’t permitted to run cd , set the $PATH or $SHELL variables, redirect output…

DVD Ripping HandBrake doesn’t just rip from single video files, it also supports DVDs. You can find your disc if you look around in the Source window, or choose your disc drive under the File menu. Of course we respect copyright here at Linux Format, and will assume you have legal rights over anything you rip in your locality! Chapter Markers If you look under the Chapters tab, you can add, customise and even label your own chapters to give your file that extra professional touch. Grayscale Or as we say in the Queen’s English, ‘greyscale’. Check this option and your video will be converted to black and white. This is perfect for adding some moodiness to your movies or helping young film students be pretentious! Device Presets To quote…

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford has tinkered with radios since he was at school, even ones with valves, and claims to read Morse Code. Living, as we do, in a world of ubiquitous communication, it’s easy to gain a false impression of the radio technology which underpins all this. While this is empowered by Wi-Fi and cellular communications, neither offers anything close to global communication. Wi-Fi achieves a range measured in metres while even mobile phone signals manage only the few kilometres to the closest base station. Common wireless communication standards are in the UHF or microwave bands where the high bandwidth enables high rates of data transmission at the expense of range. However, at lower frequencies, such as the long- and medium-wave bands, range extends to hundreds of kilometres while…

When you’re receiving Morse Code or other forms of textual communication in the amateur bands, they’ll be harder to understand than voice transmissions. You’ll be using software to decode the signals to display a string of text, but that text will invariably contain jargon and abbreviations. Here we show you how to interpret what would otherwise be largely meaningless. An amateur contact will often start with one station making a CQ (seek you) transmission. The station making the transmission is inviting any station to contact them although they might specify CQ DX, which means they’re only looking for distant stations. This transmission will take a form similar to“CQ CQ CQ DE A0AAA”, often repeated several times, where A0AAA is the callsign of the transmitting station. If another station answers, the…

It’s certainly fun devising models to do specific and useful things. Often, though you aren’t the first to think of the idea. So you can either use a third-party service, such as AWS Guard Duty, or you can look to them as inspiration. AWS Guard Duty is a machine learning system for monitoring traffic to spot anomalies and react to them. It starts by training itself by monitoring your traffic for a few weeks, which involves flagging up traffic that’s suspicious. You decide how to react to it. You can trigger shutting down the server, or just lock it down. It’s worth spending a bit of time looking at how Guard Duty and others work, from the training phase to what action is taken. This can be great inspiration for…

I was talking to an engineer from SUSE at an event a few years ago. He observed how Linux users previously wanted the latest of everything, but these days they’re much more resistant to change. I think that both Unity and Btrfs were mentioned in almost the same breath. This month’s distributions reminded me of that conversation, because they all have their roots in resistance to change in the desktop environment. Are we really becoming that conservative in our approach towards open source? Running Linux used to be more of an adventure, even if in many cases it was more of a voyage into the unknown, especially when it came to hardware support - or rather, the lack of it. I suppose the real question is, what’s changed? Have we…