Table of contents for August 2022 in Linux Format

We’re big fans of the Framework Laptop. Thanks to the device’s modular nature, users can easily swap and fix various parts of these laptops – a frustratingly rare approach these days. It looks like Framework Laptops are here to stay, because the company has announced that new models are available to pre-order (from https://bit.ly/lxf291framework) with the latest 12th generation Intel processors. These offer a significant upgrade in performance and efficiency, with Intel embracing the ‘big.LITTLE’ approach to CPU design. Such chips make use of both high-performance and lower-power efficiency cores, with the processor switching between the two depending on the computing tasks you’re performing. So, there’s improved performance when managing heavy workloads, while also improved battery life when you’re doing less-intensive work such as browsing the web. The flagship model…

Keith Edmunds is MD of Tiger Computing Ltd, which provides support for businesses using Linux. “Wikipedia lists 14 purely Open Source version control systems, but there’s one that stands head and shoulders above the rest: Git. Developed initially by Linus Torvolds and used to manage the Linux kernel source for the past 17 years, Git achieves that elusive goal of being simple to use in everyday cases and powerful enough for just about any situation that you can think of. If you don’t use a version control system at all, then I’d suggest you consider doing so. If all you’re maintaining is a few scripts, it’ll be easy to get started. Just the ‘diff’ facility alone makes life easier, and once you’re using that you’ll quickly find other advantages that…

Thunderbird, the open-source email client from Mozilla, saw its revenues rise in 2021 to a healthy $2.79m, compared to $2.3m in 2020. With the revenue almost entirely driven by donations, it means they rose by $500,000 to a new all-time high. Considering the tough financial situation that many organisations and individuals are facing, this is encouraging to see. The rise in donations is partly attributed to a newly focused donation appeal, with the Thunderbird team also making sure to engage with donors more directly. These funds will mainly go towards paying the wages of the 18 employees working on the project, who are gearing up for a major Thunderbird v.102 release later this year.…

Jon Masters is a kernel hacker who’s been involved with Linux for more than 22 years, and works on energy-efficient Arm servers. “Linux 5.19 will mark the passing of 12 years since the Arm “multiplatform” effort began with the merging of the final few fixes required to complete it. In 2011 Linus criticised Arm for being a fragmented mess, with many vendor SoCs (System-on-Chips) either not having upstream support, or code being in the kernel in such a manner that it had to be compiled to target a specific platform. It wasn’t possible to have a generic distro kernel that could run across many different devices as with x86. To address the situation, Arm created Linaro, a crossvendor industry consortium. One of the big projects Linaro began was support for…

gives your Tux a total tune up to keep it ticking along. Q Small screen VM I’ve been running Ubuntu and Linux Mint happily in VirtualBox for years. A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a PowerSpec G902 gaming PC. I haven’t been able to run Ubuntu 20.04 LTS full screen within Hyper-V. The choice of 2560x1440 screen resolution is never an option. I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that this PC has a dedicated GPU (Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080), not an APU? Henry Adams A This may simply be a case of not allocating enough video memory to handle this size of display. Go into the Display section of the settings and make sure the Graphics Controller is…

once left his Pi to cool on the windowsill. He soon got a bigger heat sink though. The Raspberry Pi series of single board computers has evolved from a quirky, low-powered platform for experimental and educational projects to a machine that’s powerful enough to take over many of the jobs that would have once required a traditional desktop PC. The Pi 400 and the Pi 4 are the top-end of the Pi range and they make light work of typical desktop tasks such as word processing and text editing, and they have enough power to be competent web browsers. We’re going to look at five distributions specifically aimed at turning the Pi into a competent desktop computer. For many, Raspberry Pi OS (formally Raspbian) is the default face of desktop…

Virtualisation… where would we be without it? We don’t actually know, but life would certainly be harder. Thanks to virtual machines (VMs), home users can effortlessly boot all manner of other operating systems. Those might be exotic flavours of Linux or (since you surely don’t really need an actual install of this monstrosity anymore) a Windows VM for those odd times where it’s handy. This can be taken to extremes, too. Thanks to PCIe passthrough, which we covered back in LXF273, you can sacrifice a whole GPU to your VM, enabling it to run games (or CUDA simulations) arbitrarily close to native speed. This time around we’ll look at a different but equally impressive technology in the form of Intel GVT-g. This makes it possible for us to segment newer…

We’ve barely touched on what Vagrant can do. And given nary a mention to other capable orchestration tools such as Chef, Puppet and Ansible, which can all work harmoniously with it. Vagrant is quite good at taking the pain out of virtual networking (spoken from experience? – Ed). For example, if you run vagrant ssh from the directory where we started our Arch Linux VM then you’ll magically be SSHt’ed inside. Not a made-up IP address in sight. If you want to resume your VM you can vagrant up it again, but that will recreate its original hardware configuration (and pull in any changes to the base image). Instead, get into the habit of using vagrant suspend to halt your image. After a clean boot, if you try and start…

Kevin McAleer loves bringing robots to life. Find him on Instagram and Twitter (search for @kevsmac). I’m Kevin McAleer and I make videos about robots (https://youtube.com/kevinmcaleer28). Each week I invite the audience to learn with me via my blog (https://smarsfan.com) as I build robots and then bring them to life with code. I love the Raspberry Pi and bought my first in 2012. What I hadn’t thought about at the time was how important the GPIO pins would be for this device. It would take a couple of years for me to master Python and connect the Pi to real-world sensors, motors, servos and lights. Ultimately, this led to me creating robots! I now create new robots every week for my growing YouTube channel. I use Raspberry Pis in most…

Credit: https://github.com/pimoroni/displayotron LCDs are great for quick and simple information feeds, and one particular model, Display-OTron from Pimoroni is especially fun. An easy-to-use Python library enables us to create menus, stream text and generate colourful backlight effects with very little code. Around the board are six capacitive touch buttons that make up a simple user interface. We’re going to use this board to create a device that will open websites without touching the keyboard. Screw the M2.5 standoffs into the two holes under the LCD screen. With the Raspberry Pi powered off, place the Display-O-Tron HAT on to all 40 pins of the GPIO. Now connect all of your accessories and power up the Pi to the desktop. Hardware installation is simple. Open a terminal and type the following to…

Systemd categorises units according to the type of resource they describe. Look to the type suffix appended to the end of the resource name to determine the type of unit here are a few key examples you’ll likely encounter: ›.automount unit file describes a mount point that will be automatically mounted. ›.device unit file describes a device that is recognised by the kernel and has been designated as requiring systemd management. ›.mount unit file describes a file system mountpoint to be managed by Systemd. ›.path unit file describes a path to a file or directory in the system. ›.scope unit files are created automatically by Systemd from information that’s received through external processes. ›.slice unit files describe hierarchically organised Linux Control Group nodes that manage system processes. ›A .snapshot unit…

As Ethereum continues to evolve and usage increases, limitations cause bottlenecks and higher costs for users. Designers devised Solana (https://solana.com) to counter this problem. Solana is its own blockchain with smart contract capabilities. Performance across several metrics is improved, and energy use and transaction times are considerably lower, as well. The first difference to Ethereum is that Solana is Proof of Stake, which saves energy and makes the network faster. Solana also has a system where some users are validators and others are delegators. Validators will run nodes that secure the network and delegators are users who want to stake their coins. The validators receive voting rights for the transactions on the network, helping to secure the network in the process. Validators also take a fee for their work. Solana…

For those stepping into the world of Ubuntu 22.04 for the first time, a potentially nasty surprise awaits: Wayland, the new desktop protocol that replaces X11. For the most part it’s a good switch – Wayland is faster and more secure, but it’s that additional security which poses a problem for screen-capture tools. On a desktop running the Wayland protocol, many screen-capture tools are unable to grab screens using their own capture tools. That’s because they’re not engineered to work with Wayland’s more robust permissions structure, and you can see this in action when you attempt to install and launch Spectacle through an Ubuntu 22.04 install running the GNOME desktop on Wayland – when the program opens, you’ll be told it “could not take a screenshot”. The problem doesn’t occur…

ISSUE 290 July 2022 Product code: LXFDB0290 In the magazine Expand your skill-set by exploring the formidable hacking tools within Parrot Security OS. Get the best fully-featured CMS for to host your web content on. We also explore sensors for the Pi, control Docker over the internet, emulate the Commodore 16, get to grips with FreeCAD Sketcher’s Workbench, and learn the history of Pop!_OS from System76 developer Michael Murphy. ISSUE 289 June 2022 Product code: LXFDB0289 In the magazine Discover what’s new in the latest version of Ubuntu with our guide. We bring you a hands-on review of Valve’s Steam Deck, rate five open source app stores, explain how to deep-clean your hard drives, get more from the Windows system layer Wine, run virtual machines with ease and emulate the…

Throughout this VPS tutorial series, (which is regretfully but inevitably drawing towards a close, unless there’s a huge outcry…), we’ve endeavoured to deploy software that’s hardware agnostic. Yes, we’re writing about deploying software on a 64-bit x86 server, but most of it will run perfectly well on the ARMbased Raspberry Pi 3 that you have gathering dust in the hidden bottom drawer of your bedroom armoire. In fact, this author has practically all of the published projects served for his own pleasure from a Raspberry Pi 4 B that’s nicely balanced on the (currently off) radiator behind his couch: PhotoPrism, a Fediverse server, Mealie, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, and a whole lot more. Unfortunately Bitwarden doesn’t play nicely with ARM64. This seems odd because the Raspberry Pi is one of the most…

Over many years, different packaging formats have been developed for Linux distributions, and two formats lead the field. Debian-based operating systems (Debian, Ubuntu and Mint to name a few) use the .deb format. These packages are installed using the apt packaging system (for example, sudo apt install barrier). Operating systems from the Red Hat family (Cent OS, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as well as Suse-based distributions will use the RPM packaging format and will use the dnf or yum software to install package (for example, sudo dnf install barrier). Other distributions may use deb or rpm, or may have their own format (such as Arch). Historically, Windows hasn’t had access to a package manager, which led to the creation of Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org). Once Chocolatey is installed, Barrier can be…

Version: 0.6.0 Web: https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/blanket While some of us prefer to work (or relax) in a silent environment, for many particular sounds can help improve focus, and can also help calm their nerves (see page 65 for more). Blanket is a simple and straightforward tool that helps generate different kinds of ambient sounds. You can use it to improve focus, but blocking other distracting noises, or to help relax as you take a power nap, or even doze off for the night. The program produces third-party packages for most distros. For instance you can install it on Ubuntu through a PPA with: Similarly, Fedora users can fetch it via the COPR repository with the following: The most convenient option, of course, is using the Flatpak, with: Blanket has a minimalistic interface,…

Version: 0.10.0 Web: https://github.com/ElTh0r0/stackandconquer StackAndConquer is a challenging tower conquest game that’s inspired by the board game Mixtou (https://spielstein.com/games/mixtour).Your objective is to build a stack of stones with at least five stones and a stone with the players colour on top. Ubuntu users can grab the game from its PPA with: Similarly, the project uses the OpenSUSE Build Service to produce builds for distros such as Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE. You can follow the simple instruction of its website to add the repository for your favourite distro, before pulling in the game. For a quicker and easier installation, you can grab the game’s AppImage file instead. The game is a standard two-player affair, one of which can be the computer. The game supports two levels of computer opponents. The DummyCPU…

The subject of this tutorial is signal handling and working with processes in Rust. We’ll begin by showing how to spawn a new process in Rust – the relevant source file is named spawnNew.rs – without doing anything useful with it, just to show you the simplest form of process spawning. So, the logic of spawnNew.rs is found in the following code excerpt: All of the work is done by the call to Command ::new() and the use of spawn() . As you might recall from the previous Rust tutorials, the expect() part is executed in case of error. As a reminder, you can replace expect() with unwrap(), but in that case you’re not going to be able to print your own error message. The screenshot (right) shows part of…

In order to determine the status of the files in a git working directory, we interrogate the repository using the git status --porcelain command. The --porcelain option makes it a bit easier for a computer to read the output. It simply proceeds the file path with an M for modified, D for deleted, R for renamed, A for added and ?? for untracked. A modified file has a different version in the repository from the version in the working directory, so your repository isn’t up to date: you haven’t committed your latest changes. An untracked file is present in the working directory, but doesn’t exist in the repository. Perhaps it’s a file that you meant to commit, but haven’t got around to it yet. A deleted file exists in the…

Get some photo flare Discover the photo-editing software that’s easy to use, super speedy and won’t melt your brain like GIMP. RISC OS relived We kick off a tour of open source operating systems to learn how they work, what they can do and where they came from. Let’s play Tetris! Pick up the skills to code a non-trademark infringing version of Tetris that you can control with an Xbox controller. Digital whiteboards Need to present your ideas live? Want to brainstorm a project online with your team? We test out the best tools to use. Contents of future issues subject to change – we might be too transfixed by the eye candy!…

It seems that Tux can safely visit Hell, because last issue it froze over when Nvidia announced it’s starting on the long journey to producing a fully open source driver stack. It’s clear this is going to be a drawn-out affair. Just look at what happened when AMD bought ATI back in 2006. A year on (mid-2007) it announced it would be open sourcing its driver stack, and the SUSE engineering team began work on the Radeon HD driver. I’m not even going to try and catalogue the saga here, but by 2012 there was the promise of same-day driver support for the HD 8000 range release. It never came, although by this point performance of the open source driver was getting competitive with the closed-source Catalyst driver. It wasn’t…

We always like to hear success stories of how governments and public bodies have switched to open-source alternatives that bring both accessibility and financial rewards, and Turkey is home to one of the most impressive recent examples. As the Fosspost website reports (https://bit.ly/lxf291turkey), the large Eyüpsultan municipality to the west of Istanbul has been migrating software used by its employees to open source since 2015. This includes running the Turkish Linux distro Pardus, which is based on Debian 11 (you can download it from https://bit.ly/lxf291pardus), as well as LibreOffice, VLC and GIMP. Software licences in Turkey are expensive and so moving to free and open source alternatives has helped to significantly lower administration costs that are ultimately met by the taxpayer. The lightweight Pardus distro also means that ageing hardware…

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.18, noting that there had been no “unexpected surprises” at the tail end of the development cycle. The new kernel includes support for Intel’s Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT), improved scheduling performance on AMD Zen processors, and switches to a more “modern” C language standard (C11) as a baseline (previously C89!). KernelNewbies.org contains the usual great detailed breakdown. IBT comes to x86 Among the many other features landing in 5.18, comes support for Intel’s Indirect Branch Tracking feature that adds landing pads to the x86 architecture. The new ENDBR instruction can be inserted into code, particularly at the entry to functions that are intended to be called from other code. The new instruction on its own doesn’t do anything, but on suitably enabled hardware…

You’ll often see the phrase “put it in a shell script” when instructions contain a series of terminal commands, but what is a shell script? At its simplest, it’s a collection of commands that are executed in sequence that you put in a file, like this: The first line tells the system what command to use to run the script, in this case the standard sh shell, or you could use bash. Save this as a file. It’s a convention to use a .sh extension, but this isn’t required. Set the executable bit to run it like any other program. The leading ./ is needed because the script is in the current directory and not in your command path. If it’s something you’ll use often, copy it to a directory…

Raspberry Pi OS was the lightest of the five distributions on test in this month’s Roundup. It took 29 seconds to boot into the desktop. At this point, we opened a terminal and typed code free-h, which showed that 266MB was in use. We then launched Chromium and browsed to the Linux Format (which is a somewhat feature-free) website. At this point 485MB was in use. Overall, that’s pretty impressive. Twister OS offers similar characteristics to its parent OS, Raspberry Pi OS. Booting to the desktop took 33 seconds, and at that point, 304MB was in use, and this climbed to 436MB when the included Chromium browser was navigated to the site, a similar overall outcome to Raspberry Pi OS. Performing the same test on Manjaro gave a power-on-todesktop time…

VirtIO is part of the magic that enables faster communication between the virtual machine and the hardware. Using a technique called paravirtualisation the VM talks through the thinnest of driver layers with the actual hardware. By default, Boxes uses VirtIO for storage and network purposes, and we’ve seen that we can enable it for graphics as well. Hopefully that part worked for you, but if not then we suppose it makes sense that the default QXL virtual video card from Red Hat is still the default. Most Linux distros include the VirtIO drivers by default, so they should enjoy that acceleration as guests without further tweaking. But if you wanted to virtualise another OS – say, Windows – then these drivers need to be added manually. Download them as an…

There’s no shortage of LCD displays for the Raspberry Pi, Arduino and other maker boards. We’ll start at the top end of the spectrum, with IPS displays. These are still LCDs, but they have rich and colourful panels that look great for media projects. The problem is that they’re more expensive, and quite fragile so should be kept away from heavy hands. They can also eat a large number of GPIO pins, so plan wisely. In the middle we have single-colour OLED displays. These panels are vibrant, clear and more robust. They come in I2C, and SPI versions, so they don’t consume too many pins and they can be driven via a microcontroller. They are cheaper than IPS, but lack the wow factor of fast moving media with high colour…

Systemd running as PID 1 (Process IDentifier) is the system and service manager for Linux operating systems. Since 2015, most Linux distributions have adopted Systemd, having replaced other init systems. Here’s a breakdown of Systemd’s key features: ›The design intent was to be backward compatible with SystemV init, handling the boot process for the Linux system. ›It maintains a list of logged-in users, running containers, virtual machines, system accounts, runtime directories and settings. ›It implements transactional dependency-based service control logic, keeping track of processes using Linux control groups. ›It manages services. ›It provides a logging daemon and a centralised location for all messages logged by different components in a Systemd-enabled Linux system. ›It supports utilities to control basic system configuration such as the hostname, date and locale, ›It starts and…

Current browsers aren’t yet ready for Web 3.0. Most browsers need, at least, a wallet extension to handle the initial Web 3.0 infrastructure system. Opera includes a built-in wallet, as does Brave, but Opera is more active in this space with a separate mobile browser called Opera Crypto. The regular browser has added a wallet in the side panel of the interface, so is in line with Brave. Yet, the Beta version of Opera Crypto shows a stronger commitment to the bright new future that Opera envisions. Specifically designed for handling Crypto sites, Opera Crypto defaults to keeping track of new Air-drops and news. You have the same wallet as the regular Opera. That wallet supports ERC-20 compliant tokens and most other tokens. Having a single wallet for all your…

When you first started to read about programming, you’ll have learned various rules that apply to most languages. For example, while you’ll have used the × and ÷ symbols in your early lessons in arithmetic, you’ll have been told that in coding * and/ are used instead for multiplication and division. With APL, all that and more changes. To illustrate that, using either TryAPL of GNU APL, execute 10 * 5 . Bizarrely, APL will respond with 100000, which you will probably recognise as 10 to the power of five which, in other languages would be represented by 10 ^ 5 or 10 ** 5 . If you really do want to multiply you should use 10 × 5, which uses one of the many APL symbols that aren’t used…

3 GREAT WAY S T O SUBSCRIBE Print, digital-only, and print+digital bundles! USA From $132 For 13 issues REST OF THE WORLD From $132 For 13 issues EUROPE From €100 For 13 issues IT’S EASY TO SUBSCRIBE! Visit www.magazinesdirect.com/linux-format Call +44 0330 333 1113 Lines open Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm, UK time…

Recorded music sounds exactly the same each time we listen to it, while a live performance will never sound exactly the same twice, even though the changes will be subtle. The idea of music that’s not set in concrete was taken forward by Brian Eno – former member of the 70s glam-rock band Roxy Music – and first brought to the public’s attention with his album, Generative Music 1, in 1996. Like any other album, Brian’s creation contained several named tracks, each of which played for a specified time. But it wasn’t supplied as an audio CD, or a vinyl record, and download and streaming services had yet to see the light of day. Instead it was PC software that was distributed on a floppy disc. The software implemented an…

This is where our favourite Bitwarden feature comes in. Unlike many other self-hosted password managers, if you own your own domain (as you obviously do if you’re using it to deploy Bitwarden), then the browser extension can create email aliases on the fly. You can then use catch-all email forwarding to ensure that emails are forwarded to your main account. The first advantage of this is that trackers attempting to build a profile on you based on your email address will be thwarted. There’s nothing to suggest that Presoak5036@lxf.guru is the same person as Shiny8246@lxf.guru or even Unbounded3922@lxf.guru. Aside from thwarting evil capitalists who want to create a dossier of everything you do online, using a randomly generated email address for each site you visit helps thwart evil capitalists who…

After slaving… er… scribbling for Linux Format for over a decade, Mayank Sharma likes to think of himself as the magazine’s Man Friday. Version: 2.0.1 Web: https://github.com/seadve/kooha Gnome’s built-in screen-recorder is one of the few that can record even when running on top of the Wayland compositor. However, not only is it hidden from the menus, even when activated, it offers no interface to give you any options for customising the recording. Kooha is a relatively new screen recorder for Gnome, which doesn’t only work on top of Wayland, but also offers the usual screen recording conveniences, and despite its minimal interface is chock-full of features. Kooha provides you with two screen recording modes. You can either record action on the entire screen, or restrict the recording to a secreted…

UNIX Signals are software interrupts that offer a method of handling asynchronous events on a UNIX system. Every application, apart from the trivial ones, must be able to deal with signals. Each signal can be identified either by its name or a numeric value; the former approach is easier to remember and therefore is the recommended way. To send a signal to a running application, you should have the right privileges or just be root. The most critical use of signals is for avoiding blocking situations. Blocking can happen when waiting for user input, reading a file or reading from a device. The kill-l command shows the list of available signals. All signal names begin with SIG, which isn’t always shown in the kill-l output (it depends on your Linux…

Matt Yonkovit is the head of open source strategy at Percona “When you have two options to decide between, your choice should be easier. For us in the world of open source, the decision between closed and open software has been an easy one for years. But choices in the real world tend to be affected by multiple factors. This can make it hard to know how to move forward. The challenge here is how to make the decision easy again, which can involve looking at issues in a new way. Today, the problem is less about open versus closed software, and more about easy versus hard for the developers that have to pick these projects. For open source to stay relevant, it has to move beyond being open from…

Mesa 22.1, the latest version of the opensource OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver, is now available to download and it comes with some exciting improvements. The headline feature is improved ray tracing support for AMD GPUs, which brings realistic lighting and atmospheric effects. It’s the hot new thing in PC game graphics, so it’s good to see it receive continued support for Linux. RADV, the Vulkan community driver, also gains Dynamic Variable Rate Shading (VRS) support, a nifty power-saving feature that’s used by the Steam Deck handheld console and will hopefully extend the battery lives of laptops. This release also helps pave the way for Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics cards, which is the company’s first foray into consumer GPUs to take on AMD and Nvidia. There’s also OpenGL support for Nouveau (the…

Xavier Claessens is a senior software engineer at Collabora “When developing an application or a library, it’s common to want to run it without installing it, or to install it into a custom prefix rather than on the system. Meson has always helped with that by setting rpath in the built executables so they can find their shared libraries within the build directory tree. However, it has some limitations: Windows doesn’t support rpath, DLLs are searched in PATH, and applications often need to find other resources: plugins, config files and so on. Many applications solve that with custom shell scripts that set various environment variables, like GST_PLUGIN_PATH, GI_ TYPELIB_PATH, etc… Since Meson 0.58.0, this can be done by using the meson devenv-C <builddir> command, and adding the needed environment variables…

A potential security hole was discovered in which someone with local console access (including a remote console available over the network) “could trigger the debugger”. The kernel debugger can be used to read/write to arbitrary memory, which isn’t usually a problem. But it can become a big problem if Linux is in “lockdown” mode due to Secure Boot. In such a situation, the kernel isn’t supposed to be able to run unsigned code, but if the kernel memory can be arbitrarily written then this is effectively the end result. Patches were issued to limit debugger behaviour under lockdown. Speaking of security, the “security-bugs” documentation describing the process for reporting and subsequent incident response by the kernel community was overhauled. It aims to be easier to read for those who need…

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…

YOUR GIFT! WORTH £50 Don’t miss out, subscribe now! Product features ThePowerKick wireless power bank delivers functionality and convenience Chargeyour devices wirelessly or via cables (either USB-A or USB-C) Built-inkickstand enables you to keep your device in landscape or portrait orientation while it’s charging Suctioncups secure the PowerKick to your phone for consistent charging 10000mAh lithium polymer battery Fastcharging capability SUBSCRIBE NOW! www.magazinesdirect.com/lin/a45k Call 0330 333 1113 and quote A45K PLUS: Exclusive access1 to the Linux Format subs area! 1,000s of DRM-free PDF back issues and articles! Get instant access back to issue 66 (May 2005) with tutorials, interviews, features and reviews. At linuxformat.com DON’T MISS! Includes 5 year s of Linux User & Developer issues CHOOSE YOUR PACKAGE! SIX-MONTHLY PRINT EDITION Only £33.75 Six months of Linux Format in…

Most of the official Pi documentation assumes that you’re using Raspberry Pi OS, which gives the distro a head start in that department. Documentation for the OS has its own section of the website, forming a fairly traditional manual. Note that a lot of solutions for Debian problems will work with Raspberry Pi OS. Ubuntu itself is extraordinarily well documented, with forums and manuals available and extensive support on the internet in general. The Raspberry Pi version is discussed within the main forums. Looking around the file layout shows that it’s more or less identical to the desktop editions. This means that the majority of desktop Ubuntu solutions will work here. To troubleshoot Twister OS problems, the usual path would be to search for Raspberry Pi OS solutions. Beyond a…

The Compute Module 4-NANO-B is an enticing prospect. It’s roughly the same size as a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, but with the power of a Pi 4. Disposing of the SODIMM form-factor found in previous modules, the CM4 has connectors for HDMI, GPIO, power and storage. To get the most from the CM4 you need a breakout board. Waveshare’s CM4-NANO-B is a breakout board for the CM4 that provides many of the features found in the Raspberry Pi 4, but at half of its size. The CM4-NANO-B is designed to accept the CM4 via connectors on the rear of the board. It works with all variants of the CM4, including the CM4 Lite. The key difference? The Lite lacks the onboard eMMC storage, but the CM4-Nano-B hides a micro…

When was the last time you changed? Okay, that question was pretty ambiguous. Let’s try again. As a systems administrator, you need to decide what knowledge is worth keeping and what force or energy you need to replace old knowledge? For you as a senior administrator, with years of support knowledge for systems that are still in service, having to decide what knowledge stays and what goes it can be extremely difficult. If you’ve been using Raspberry Pi’s single board computers since they were first introduced in 2012, then change should come as no surprise. The single-board computer hardware has gone through several revisions as it offers more and more features. If you’ve been using the Raspbian operating system (OS), new releases have brought in their changes. In 2022, the…

Data is stored on a blockchain using hash numbers. To find and remember these isn’t humanly possible. Just as DNS helps you find web pages by a recognisable name, so the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) helps you find web pages for Web 3.0 pages. To get started, you can buy your own page. Once you have an address, you can also store many other types of data. If you want to point it to your current web page, the best way is to create links in IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and link that to the ENS address. The addresses in this solution has a few top domains. These are smart contracts on the chain that you access when you register. Inside the contract you receive a position and you can…

You might have concluded that APL is an environment for sophisticated mathematical manipulation but definitely not a programming language. Certainly, many people use it as the former, but it’s a language and applications genuinely are written in APL. As a first step, execute the following, which defines the function Minimum Minimum ← {/ } . We’ll leave you to discover what the/ does (annoys the art editor?–ED), but the is the argument, which appears after a call to Minimum. Now try executing Minimum 6 8 10 2 4 and you’ll discover that APL gives 2 as the result. You might not think of a single line function definition as a program, but it’s the closest we’ve come so far. So much can be done in a single line of APL,…

Credit: https://sonic-pi.net To say that digital technology has revolutionised the world of music is a massive understatement. Starting with the introduction of the audio CD in 1982, and continuing through to today’s streaming services, for the vast majority of people, listening to music is a digital experience, despite the recent vinyl revival. And the change has been no less dramatic in the realm of music composition, performance, recording and post-processing. Music notation software has largely displaced pen and paper and, let’s face it, when did you last hear of music being recorded on a multichannel analogue tape recorder? Our subject here, though, falls between these two extremes of music consumers and professional musicians. Here too, digital technology comes to the fore in the form of what we’re calling algorithmic composition.…

Credit: https://bitwarden.com Passwords are a relic of the past – or so we’re told. An embarrassing hang-up from before the 20th century, when an exchange whispered through a gate at midnight could secure you access to exclusive clubs, pubs and secret societies. But passwords are, by nature, insecure. The main reason for this is because users need to commit them to memory and recall them on demand. A secure password will be 16 characters long and contain a truly random array of numbers, and symbols, as well as upper and lowercase characters. But no one is going to be able to recall-9#<5}d}y8Kt:BDC on demand, no matter what mnemonic tricks they choose to employ. No. Most internet users are going to use the name of their cat, or their spouse, celebrity…

Version: 5.0.0 Web:https://github.com/prateekmedia/appimagepool Universal file formats such as Flatpaks, AppImages, and Snaps have significantly reduced the amount of effort that’s required to install new applications in Linux. By decoupling it from the underlying package management scheme, such formats have helped to make the process consistent across distros. However, while these new packaging formats have their respective online application stores (Flathub for Flatpaks, AppImageHub for AppImages and Snapcraft for Snaps), what if you want to browse the available programs and then install them from outside the browser environment? AppImage Pool fills exactly that void. As its name suggests, it’s a desktop application store that enables you to search, download, install, and manage AppImages in any Linux distro The application store is available both as an AppImage, as well as a Flatpak.…

A process is an execution environment that contains instructions, user data and system data parts, and other types of resources that are obtained during runtime. On the other hand, a program is a binary file that contains instructions and data that are used for initialising the instruction and user data parts of a process. Put simply, a process is a program that runs. Each running UNIX process is uniquely identified by an unsigned integer, which is called the process ID of the process. There are three categories of processes: user processes, server processes and kernel processes. User processes run in user space and usually have no special access rights whereas kernel processes are executed in kernel space only and can access all kernel data structures. Server (Daemon) processes are programs…