Table of contents for March 2017 in Linux Format

This issue we asked our experts: We’re replacing proprietary online services with open source options. What’s your favourite or most essential open source service? Jonni Bidwell I really appreciate when websites make all their code open, like Gaming on Linuxhas just done (thanks Liam). But I’ve been using ownCloud/Nextcloudpretty much since being in this job. And it’s never let me down once. The Dropbox client used to be terrible, maybe it’s better now, but that point is moot. Nate Drake I recently switched from backing up my files with Dropbox to using Nextcloudon a home server. [Ed—we swear we aren’t taking backhanders from Nextcloud.] The data never leaves your place and you can verify it’s encrypted server side. You can also store terabytes of data, all for the cost of…

“We are living in an age when data is generated at unprecedented volumes and speeds, particularly in the corporate world. According to industry estimates, data is expanding at a rate of at least 50% every year, and it currently comprises 80% of all corporate assets. Not too long ago, all data would have been stored in conventional data centres – physical, onsite hardware facilities that were managed with little automation. However, their many inefficiencies, coupled with their increasing ineffectiveness in dealing with the burgeoning amount of data being produced, made it imperative to search for a viable alternative. Enter the cloud – an off-premise form of computing, where data storage takes place over the internet. According to IDG’s 2016 Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey, the average company runs 45% of its…

I am a student in a Cyber Security program, at my local community college, and a long-time Linux user. Tonight in class, we were working to install Snort into a Fedora build, and another student suggested we use Security Onion. After some thought and research at home, I began to wonder if Linux Format had ever written up either Snort or Security Onion, and it appears that the answer is no. That lead me to wonder if you had ever thought about doing reviews on the various tools used to ensure security, like Snort or Security Onion. I know you have distributed Kali; how about an issue focused on the tools used by ethical hackers? I realise the line is pretty narrow between the ethical and non-ethical hacker; but you…

It really shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a long list of BSD-based OSes that are under active development and can be transformed into a desktop for everyday use. There’s Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, which swaps out the Linux kernel and uses the FreeBSD kernel instead together with GNU-based userland utilities and glibc. It’s developed by the Debian project, which maintains two ports based on the FreeBSD kernel, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. Similarly, there’s Gentoo/ FreeBSD and Gentoo/OpenBSD, that aim to port unique Gentoo features such as the Portage package manager to FreeBSD. You can use OpenBSD itself as an everyday desktop. OpenBSD’s sole purpose is to be the most secure OS, which usually puts it at odds with convenience. While it’s certainly possible to use OpenBSD as a desktop platform, this isn’t…

Google Maps is an extremely useful service, especially now that it’s good at planning journeys using public transport. But letting the search giant know where you’re going and when you’re going to be there is just spoon-feeding it data to add to your profile and allows it to get marginally richer by sending spaciotemporally relevant ads our way. Much better would be to support the community oriented OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. It’s supported by a not-for-profit foundation which you should join for a paltry £15. OSM has been around since 2004, when Steve Coast decided to take a stand against proprietary map data in the UK and felt a Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach might work. Since then map data has been collected by volunteer surveyors and GIS enthusiasts or contributed by various…

If you’re interested in hosting your own services and your home internet connection has the bandwidth to support them (and your ISP permits you to do such things), then it’s entirely to possible host these things at home. However, a Virtual Private Server may be a better option—inviting the internet onto your home network should only be done with security precautions in place. A suitable starter VPS can be had for around £5/mo. If you’re setting up your own email server then you’ll need to pay a registrar for a domain name and a DNS provider. For web-facing services (such as Nextcloudwhich we’ll cover later), a subdomain will be sufficient, and this can be arranged through a dynamic DNS provider such as DuckDNS. For web services where personal information or…

 Allen Samuels is a veteran of the storage industry, having worked for Citrix and Weitek before moving to Sandisk in 2013. (Sandisk and Western Digital merged in March 2016). He’s on the advisory board member for Ceph—the open source distributed object store and filesystem that’s set to revolutionise storage as we know it. We caught up with him at LinuxCon in Berlin last December to discuss the technology, the ethos and, as high performance flash-based storage becomes ever more cheaper and reliable, whether or not we should consign all our spinning rust hard drives to the scrap heap. ON THE PERSISTENCE OF HDDS “Tape drives never went away. Spinning rust is never going to go away either.” Linux Format: So why don’t you start by telling us a little bit…

Head to the I2P Router’s home page (http://127.0.0.1:7657/home) and scroll down to Applications and Configuration and click ‘Torrents’ to open I2PSnark. Once the application opens, ignore the main options for now and click the ‘Configure’ button at the very bottom of the screen. The Data Directory field shows the location where files will be downloaded. By default this is ~/.i2p/i2psnark. Change this to another folder or external drive if you wish. You can change the dark default ubergine theme to something a little easier on the eye here if you wish, as well as change the number of tunnels to be used for incoming and outgoing BitTorrent connections. Scroll to the bottom of the page to examine the trackers. As you will note these are all eepsites with .i2p domains.…

As mentioned in the main article, Mesosphere (http://mesosphere.com), one of the authors of Mesos, provide commercial support for DC/ OS with their Mesosphere Enterprise DC/OS product. But what are the differences between that and its open source sibling? As might be expected, support options play a big part here. Contracts are available for 24x7 and 9-5 offerings, with prices based on the number of nodes (physical or virtual) that exist within the environment. It looks as though the enterprise version also adds a bit of extra polish that goes down particularly well in the corporate environment; LDAP/Active Directory integration (for identity management), secrets management (for secure storage of credentials and keys) and role based access to containers, jobs and services are all sure fire ticks in the box for the…

Hello, I’m Rachel Rayns. I’m a maker and artist based in the east of England. I previously worked at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and now I’m making products with The Pi Hut. My favourite thing about the Raspberry Pi computer and the maker movement in general, is how it can foster personal empowerment in people who don’t know they’re makers—yet! Whenever I tell new people about the Pi, I can’t help but feel like I’m sharing the secret of some superpower. Things don’t have to act the way large electronics companies have decided—you can change things! You can choose! Want your hallway light to turn on when you pull up in your driveway? Make it! Grandma always falls asleep with the TV on? Make something to solve it—and make it…

All electronics devices are built using components. These come in many forms, some small devices require surface mount components which are soldered on top of a board. Some larger devices use through-hole one, which are typically bought from hobbyist stores. These are inserted into holes on a board and soldered to pads on the opposite side. No matter the component, it’s built into a circuit. Building the circuit for this project requires quite a few through-hole components. First, we use LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) that illuminate when current is passed through them. We use LEDs as a method of output, the light sequence that a player must remember in our game. To limit the current that each LED draws we use a resistor, if we didn’t do this then the…

Once your Voicecommandsoftware is up and running, you can edit the configuration file to add new commands or modify existing ones. Run the command sudo nano /root/. commands.conf to view the configuration file. As you’ll see, most of the lines begin with a # symbol, which means the Pi ignores them. Delete the symbol to activate the line. If, for instance, you want to change the keyword that activates the voice recognition software from ‘Pi’ to ‘Jessie’, you would change the line from #!keyword==pi to -!keyword=jessie . If you use the Firefox web browser instead of Midori, you may also want to change ~Internet==midori & to ~Internet==firefox-esr & . The software can run any command. For instance, to open the desktop by saying the word ‘desktop’, add the following line…

As an accidental admin, your first challenge is going to be connecting to your server in the first place. In your web control panel, you might see an option to open a Terminal or console in your web browser, but this tends to be quite a laggy way of doing things. It’s better to open up a Terminal window on your own machine (if you’re running Ubuntu just press Alt+Ctrl+t, if you’re on Windows you’ll need an application like PuTTY). Now, at your command prompt, type ssh username@ yourserver.com (or you can replace yourserver.com with an IP address). The ssh command will open a secure shell on the target machine with the specified username. You should get a password prompt before the connection is allowed and you will end…

Our expert Adam Oxford has been writing about tech for 20-odd years and using Linux exclusively for about half of that. His current business, htxt. africa (www.htxt.co.za), is based in the spiritual home of Ubuntu, Johannesburg. Laptops can be tricky things to get your favourite brand of Linux distribution (distro) working on. Despite the fact there are fewer ways for an owner to physically customise a laptop – you can’t upgrade the graphics card like you can on a desktop – there can be more variation in terms of component combinations even within the same model number than there is for a desktop PC. In particular, hard drives and wireless chips tend to be slightly less well-supported than desktop versions because the technology tends to evolve faster in mobile than…

Our expert Mayank Sharma is a technical author and former contributing editor at Linux.com but now spends his time playing Linux games all day in his underpants. Gaming pad Play games with a controller and setup profiles using AntiMicro The vast majority of games for your PC will have been written with the mouse and keyboard in mind, but sometimes you can’t beat playing a game using a proper gamepad, whether you prefer an old-school joystick or console-like controllers, and in the case of some games, such as Hyper Light Drifter, they are designed for gamepads. Ubuntu is rapidly becoming a popular choice for gamers thanks to its official Steam for Linux support and its lean demands on system resources—and when it comes to using a gamepad with Ubuntu, the…

Should you need to repair the Ubuntu bootloader after trying to install a dual-boot system, the Ubuntu wiki has some great instructions for helping to repair the bootloader. The link is https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows. The recommended way would be to use an Ubuntu live CD or USB that you created when first installing Ubuntu. The simple graphical way is to insert your disk or flash drive, reboot the computer and boot into the live CD environment. From this environment, you can choose the Boot Repairtool which is built into the Live CD. The boot repair guides you through solving more frequent problems, such as those associated with dual-boot and can also generate error reports that you can share on forums or email to your genius friends who are more Linux savvy to…

You can automate the installation of CentOS (and other RPM-based distros such as RHEL and Fedora) by using what are known as kickstart files. These are text files that contain instructions for the Anacondainstaller. The instructions vary and can include language and localisation settings, the layout of the partitions as well as authentication information for the root user. You can also use kickstart files to select package groups and individual packages that you want to install. You can use different kickstart files for installing different types of systems, such as a web server, a mail server or a graphical desktop. What makes the kickstart file so powerful is that it enables you to embed scripts that are executed at key stages of the install process. This means that you can…

When Unix was first introduced, computers were less capable as they only had a single CPU and a small amount of RAM. In order for Unix to be multi-user and multi-tasking, it had to be able to run each individual process occasionally, which means that a process should have multiple states, which is what you get by looking at the value of psutil.Process(PID).status(). So, a process can be ready-to-run, running, waiting, blocked, sleeping, terminated or in a zombie state (see diagram on left). The last state is rare and shows that there was something wrong with the way the process was terminated. Additionally, when a process is in waiting, blocked or sleeping state, which means that it’s not running for some reason, it can reside either in memory or on…

Single board computers and microcontrollers all have one thing in common—they need a community to keep them alive. There are many boards on offer, some with huge communities, such as those following the Arduino and Pi. With MicroPython, there’s a strong community of Python enthusiasts, of which there are many across the world, and whose interests also reach into the world of physical computing/hardware hacking. This was most evident at Electromagnetic Fields 2016, also known as EMF Camp. This festival provides a Glastonbury-like event for those interested in maker activities. But one of the most common activities for the festival goers is the conference badge. In recent years conference badges have become more than “name holder”, rather they come with hackable hardware. EMF Camp has a tradition of hackable badges…

One factor in the security of Linux is that you are usually running as a user without root privileges. However, there are times when you need those privileges, usually for administrative purposes, so you need to switch to the superuser (or root). This is traditionally done with the su (switch user) command, but that gives full root access, allowing the user to do anything that root could for as long as they are logged in. It also requires them to have the root password. Wouldn’t it be safer if users were only allowed to run as root for the commands they need? This is what sudo does. The configuration file, /etc/sudoers, contains a list of commands that each user is allowed to execute with root privileges. Running sudo somecommand prompts…

In the USA there’s the Fourth Amendment, here in Europe there’s the European Convention on Human Rights and both protect an individual’s rights when it comes to government interference over person, possessions and private life. In the past that largely meant the government couldn’t just waltz into your property and seize any documents (or persons) it felt like, listen in on your private conversations or stop you from moving around the country without a damn good reason. Sounds reasonable, right? It seems in the internet age those rights no longer apply. This isn’t tinfoil hat stuff, it’s happening right now. In the UK the new Investigatory Powers Act – that gives many governmental agency the power to freely view your internet history – has come into place. Meanwhile in the…

Libreboot (see Tutorials LXF214) started life three years ago with a lofty ambition to replace proprietary BIOS firmware, and to be a distribution of Coreboot without binary blobs. Unfortunately, the good work the project has achieved has often been overshadowed by the antics of its head developer and original author, Leah Rowe. This includes her calling for a boycott of the Free Software Foundation only a year after it was endorsed by the organisation, and a few months after it officially became part of the GNU Project, due to alleged mistreatment by the FSF (which it denies) of an employee. She then accused FSF of “not letting Libreboot go”, and according to Libreboot contributor Damien Zammit, she had decided to separate from GNU unilaterally, while forwarding her personal views as…

BITKEY 14.1.0 The first version of BitKey, a Debianbased distro aimed at Bitcoin users, is now available to download. It brings tools for secure air-gapped Bitcoin transactions, and includes warpwallet, coinbin and libbitcoinexplorer. You don’t need to install the distro – it comes as a live CD and is stored in RAM, and uses the TurnKey GNU/Linux build system to create a secure live CD with all the tools even the most paranoid Bitcoin user needs. Find out more and download the ISO at https://bitkey.io. ARYALINUX 2017 AryaLinux 2017 is a source-based distro that’s been built with Linux From Scratch and uses a source/ ports-style package management, with a custom package manager called alps. The latest version is 64-bit only and comes with package updates and a new set of…

Find and join a LUG Alpinux, le LUG de Savoie Meet on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month at the Maison des Associations de Chambéry. www.alpinux.org Bristol Hackspace Studio G11, 37 Philip Street, Bedminster, Bristol, UK, BS3 4EA http://bristol.hackspace.org.uk Cheltenham Hackspace The Runnings Trading Estate, Cheltenham. Thursday from 7pm. www.cheltenhamhackspace.org Huddersfield Raspberry Jam Meet 4th Saturday of the month at Huddersfield Library, https://huddersfieldraspberryjam.co.uk Hull Raspberry Jam Malet Lambert School, Hull. Every other month. See Twitter for details. https://twitter.com/hullraspjam Lancaster and Morecambe Makers Unit 5, Sharpes Mill, White Cross, Lancaster, Wednesday evenings 6.30pm till late. https://lamm.space North Kent Raspberry Pi User Group Every two weeks at Medway Makers, 12 Dunlin Drive, St Mary’s Island, Chatham ME4 3JE https://nkrpug.wordpress.com Preston Hackspace 28A Good St, PR2 8UX. Open night is 2nd…

Good documentation and support go a long way in helping adopt any BSD OSes. MidnightBSD doesn’t seem to agree with this notion; the project has an official guide that helps install the OS and work with its mports package management system, but for everything else it directs users to the FreeBSD handbook. Alternatively, you can look for help on the mailing list or direct any queries to the developers at the published email address. GhostBSD is marginally better. Its documentation is in a wiki, but there’s not much of it besides a FAQ and a handbook that’s still being written. In addition to the IRC channel, the project has fairly active forums to help sort issues and share tips and tricks. The majority of the documentation for NetBSD is FAQs.…

“There are plenty of alternative services that don’t involve divulging your personal data.” Abandoning (or at least reducing your dependency upon) proprietary services needn’t be about being some weird information vegan (to use a phrase from Cory Doctorow). It should be about a genuine concern for the increasing amount of data we’re handing over to companies, how they are using that data to profile our online behaviour and how those profiles and relationships are used to bombard us with targeted advertising. Microsoft and Google know a great deal about users through their respective smartphone OSes, Facebook and Twitter use the ubiquitous Like or Retweet buttons to track users’ behaviour all over the web. And this is a shame, because there are plenty of alternative services that don’t involve divulging your…

WhatsApp last year rolled out end-to-end encryption across its network, an effort which we applauded. It takes a great many smarts to get this working seamlessly and transparently, and it’s a shame when news outlets start peddling stories about bugs or backdoors which aren’t really there. That isn’t why we should worry about WhatsApp, we should worry because its network is owned by Facebook. While data sharing for advertising purposes has been ‘paused’ in the UK and Europe, there has been no indication of how long this reprieve will last. Our recommendation for secure messaging is the amazing Signal, by Open Whisper Systems. The underlying Signal Protocol is the same as that used by Whatsapp, but Signal is open source (see https://github.com/WhisperSystems) and not owned by Facebook. The app is…

We’ve looked at setting up and using a default Nextcloud instance. But as the admin you can tinker with several settings to tailor Nextcloud to your requirements. To access these settings, roll down the menu next to your username and select the Admin option. This takes you to a page that lists several settings that affect the entire Nextcloud installation grouped under various different heads such as Server settings, Server info, Usage report and more. The Server info option is different from the others in that instead of helping you tweak any settings it only visualises various details about the Nextcloudserver such as the load on the CPU, memory usage and more. Head to the Sharing section to configure the policy for sharing files on the server. Here you can…

Another issue, another column on orchestrating containers? I can hear the exasperation from the LXF readership already. But wait, before you flip the page and go looking for Hot FOSS (Hint: see p48) and whatnot stay just a little while (i.e. don’t go to p48) and indulge me while I talk about DC/OS, one of the bigger contenders in this crowded market. DC/OS is relatively new as an open source project (having only been released in April of 2016) but has its roots in the Apache Mesos project (which in turn came out of the Berkeley as an open source version of Google’s Borg system) and is backed by a company called Mesosphere (the original authors, who sell an enterprise version). Anyone who used Twitter a few years ago might…

Our expert Nate Drake is a freelance technology journalist that specialises in cybersecurity and retro tech. There’s a scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where Scotty and Dr McCoy are offered the opportunity to use a computer and are somewhat bemused when it fails to respond to voice commands. The film was made over 30 years ago and voice recognition has taken huge leaps forward since then. The Raspberry Pi has not been left out, and with the help of an inexpensive USB microphone and some suitable software, you too can have your Pi search YouTube, open web pages, launch applications and respond to questions, simply by speaking. The Raspberry Pi has no built-in soundcard or audio jack, so you need a USB microphone or a webcam with…

When you open a Terminal window within Linux, it can be a bit disorientating. But the words that sit in front of the flashing cursor will tell you where you are. The first word is the name of the user you’re logged in on, and it’s followed by an ‘@’ sign. The second word is the hostname of the machine you’re logged into. If you open up a Terminal on your desktop, usually the username and hostname are the same. So you’ll see ‘myname@myname’. When you log into a remote server, though, they’ll be very different. This information is followed by a colon which is followed by the path to the directory you’re in, followed by a dollar sign. When you first open a Terminal, it will usually print yourname@yourname:~$.…

There are a lot of settings you can configure in Linux to help with battery life: from ordering the CPU to slow down or fiddling with disk settings to stop hard drives whirring into action unnecessarily. Over the years, distros such as Ubuntu has become pretty good at managing hardware in the most efficient way possible, but if you do want to try and improve battery life, you could do worse than install TLP. It’s not as effective as it used to be, but on low-end hardware it may yield good results. TLPis designed to give you full control over settings that affect power consumption: from turning off SATA interfaces completely to reducing power to the Wi-Fi radio. It’s complex and you should be careful while using it, but it…

You’ll notice that when you boot from a shutdown state there’s a certain order to things. The Windows operating system or the Linux one will be given priority and unless you press keys during startup you’ll end up automatically booting into one system or the other, whether you wanted to or not. This is a common issue that’s easily remedied. You can use the EFI Boot Manager tool that you can access from an Ubuntu Live CD. Once in the Live CD environment open a terminal and install EFI Boot Manager with the following: Next use the following command to find out the current boot order situation: You’ll get an output that looks something like this, with the boot order listed: To change the boot order, we will have to…

If you need the robustness of CentOS in a server distro that’s easy to rollout and administer, grab yourself a copy of ClearOS Community Edition. One of the biggest advantages of ClearOS over other similar offerings is its larger repos of supported server software. The distro supports over 80 free services for various roles including a network server and a cloud server and more. In addition to common servers such as a directory server, database server, mail server, web server, FTP server, content filter and more, you can use the installation as a seedbox and a Plex Media Server. ClearOS also includes several system and network management tools for creating backups, managing bandwidth and RAIDs etc. New admins who aren’t sure of the components to install can use the Feature…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos is a Unix administrator, a programmer, a DBA and mathematician. When not writing articles, he’s knee-deep in learning new programs to (write about). You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu and @ mactsouk. The main advantage of psutil, the Python module that provides information on system processes and use, is that it’s cross-platform, which means that the code will work without changes on all operating systems. After you read this tutorial and see the practical examples, you’ll know how to use the psutil module in your own projects, especially if you are a Linux system administrator or a developer of a complex application. In order to install psutil for Python 3 you’ll need to perform one of the following two actions: The following interaction with the Python…

Our expert Les Pounder is a maker and tinkerer who loves hacking with new components and boards. Generally, he can be found in pound shops looking for hacks. He writes a blog at http://bigl.es MicroPython might sound like programming Python in a tiny font, but it is, in fact, a leaner implementation of Python 3 that’s been optimised for use on microcontrollers. It was originally created by Damien George in 2013 as a crowd-sourced project for funding a language development, hardware testing and development platform, which is now known as the pyboard. The original funding target was smashed many times over and the project grew to incorporate other devices, such as the popular ESP8266 – the low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/ IP stack and MCU (Micro Controller Unit) –…

This month we answer questions on: 1 Controlling mount points 2 Manipulating the PATH 3 Resetting passwords 4 Reading a disk image 5 Running KDE apps on GNOME ★ Reading the systemd journal 1 Moving mount points Q My desktop distro is Gentoo Linux, which began from a Linux Format DVD! Last year, I decided it was time for a new box. My system is on a SSD and /home is on a Seagate Barracuda with a media adaptor and a hotswap rack. It all works well, with one exception: the hotswap rack drive I currently have is automounted at /media. It’s a 1TB drive with two partitions. I’d like this to mount at a location on / I call /hotswap rather than /media. Perhaps LXF has a suggestion on…

★ Another journal Q I’m having a problem with a new install of Debian Jessie on a new laptop. After installing bumblebeenvidia, the system freezes when I boot (keyboard is dead, can’t ssh in). Ah! I thought. Look at the logs. So I booted to another version of Debian on the same machine and looked at /var/log on the iffy system. There were no entries in any files I could see with a date stamp corresponding with the attempted boot. I know how to look at the journal for the currently running system, but how do I view the journal from another system? Where is the file? Ian Couchman A Systemdstores its journal files in a number of locations. Volatile logs are kept in /run/log/journal and persistent ones in /var/log/journal.…

The good thing about open source is that anyone can take a piece of software and make any changes they want. The bad thing about open source is that anyone can take a piece of software and make any changes they want! This is why software such as Ubuntu and Firefox have conditions about distributing modified copies. You are free to change the software as you want, but you cannot redistribute your version unless you remove the original branding. This is not about protecting the companies’ intellectual property but their reputation. Ubuntu would not be too pleased if we put a broken fork of its distro on the DVD and called it Ubuntu. So when we produce a desktop remix of Ubuntu, we leave the original ISO unchanged – you…

System tools Essentials Checkinstall Install tarballs with your package manager. Coreutils The basic utilities that should exist on every operating system. HardInfo A system benchmarking tool. Kernel Source code for the latest stable kernel release, should you need it. Memtest86+ Check for faulty memory. Plop A simple manager for booting OSes, from CD, DVD and USB. RawWrite Create boot floppy disks under MS-DOS in Windows. Smart Boot Manager An OS-agnostic manager with an easy-to-use interface. WvDial Connect with a dial-up modem. Reading matter Bookshelf Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners Get to grips with Bash scripting. Bourne Shell Scripting Guide Get started with shell scripting. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S Raymond’s classic text explaining the advantages of open development. The Debian Administrator’s…

In the first big release as part of its new update processes, Wine 2.0 has now been released. The latest version of the software that allows Windows apps (and even intensive games such as the new Doom) to run in Linux. The new version bump brings a ton of new features including DirectX 10/11 support, Office 2013 support, plus a ton of bug fixes, including a number for playing games, and includes better support for Windows apps such as Visual Web Developer Express 2008, Battle.net launcher and SMARegisTry Backup installer. See www.winehq.org. PulseAudio 10.0 has been released, with improved VoIP capabilities. It allows the Bluetooth profile to automatically switch when using VoIP apps with a Bluetooth headset – it now switches from the A2DP profile (used for listening to music)…

Pi of Things I read with interest the Super Pi article, and in particular the IoT part. I have been looking for some time at using a Pi as a hub for IoT devices, instead of proprietary systems that come with their own hub. In theory, you could end up with several hubs, and all current systems seem to have dubious security standards at best. I’m also keen to make some of my own IoT devices. To that end, I have discovered and purchased from a talented guy in the US, who has developed, makes and sells an Arduino clone called a Moteino, that is very low power and, at its smallest form, only 3 x 2.2cm, with a radio tx and rx attached using the SMI band. He has…

In brief... Socket: 1151 Cache: 8MB Type: 64-bit SSE: 4.1/4.2, AVX 2.0 Process: 14nm Cores: 4 Threads: 8 Clock: 4.2GHz Turbo: 4.5GHz TDP: 91W Max memory: 64GB DDR4 Channels: 2 GPU: Intel HD Graphics 630 Clock: 350MHz Max: 1.15GHz Units: 24 OpenGL: 4.4 Displays: 3 Virtual tech: VT-x, VT-d Kaby Lake is the eighth processor iteration since the introduction of the Intel Core series that started with Nehalem. For eight years, the company has pressed to push the advantage in its processor lineup, and each and every time it’s managed a marginal 10–15 per cent performance increase. This process has been based around the concept of Tick-Tock. A new architecture would be designed based on the latest transistor size, then that transistor size would be shrunk the following year. For…

Here we are switching to a completely different OS rather than trying out a different Linux distro; the differences are going to be quite considerable. Again, DragonFly BSD, MidnightBSD and NetBSD are as discrete as they come. Everything about these OSes: from their console-centric live environment to the instructions in their text-based installers to the partition names, the filesystem and their package managers all require some getting used to. You can’t use any of these BSDs without first reading the documentation. Even after you’re done with them, you need to be prepared to visit forums to troubleshoot as you ease your way to the desktop on either of these OSes. Yet despite all of this, we didn’t have one error-free install on MidnightBSD, either on virtual or physical hardware. You’ll…

Canonical’s project hosting site and bug-tracking Launchpad has been around since the early Ubuntu days. Many Canonical projects, including Launchpad itself, are hosted here. Initially Mark Shuttleworth rejected calls to open source the project. However, the community’s chagrin persisted and the software was eventually released under AGPL v3 in 2009. The site is now more popular than ever, and we haven’t seen a proliferation of almost-but-not-quite compatible Launchpad clones in the wild, so it’s fair to say that this was a good decision. It is home to some high-profile projects, such as Linux Mint, MariaDBand elementary OS. Massive open online course (MOOC) provider EdX has been entirely open source since 2013, allowing anyone from anywhere to study anything, in many cases for free. Thanks to the platform’s licensing, educational institutions…

Whatever services you’re running, it’s never a bad idea to run them over HTTPS, and thanks to Let’s Encrypt this can now be arranged for free. It’s unlikely that you will find yourself, like Levison, slapped with an order from a secret court to reveal the private keys. Managing certificates can be a tedious affair, but the EFF has come to our rescue with certbot, a simple tool for fetching and deploying SSL certificates. Given only a domain name (dynamic DNS ones are fine) and optionally an email address (in case revocation is required) it can generate a certificate and have Let’s Encrypt signed it so that it will be accepted by all major browsers. For Apache users, it can reconfigure things to start serving with the newly hatched certificate…

Volunteers needed A small news story that caught my eye recently was the reported issues with the NTP Pool project (www.pool.ntp.org). Traffic to the pool increased by a large amount (something like a twentyfold increase at its highest point). After some investigation, it was determined that a buggy version of the Snapchat app on the iPhone was to blame and the company to its credit dealt with it very quickly. But it did highlight that this widely used resource – timeservers used by millions of clients – runs on systems donated by volunteers. At the time of writing, there are 3,606 servers in the worldwide pool which seems quite a small amount in relation to the amount of work they actually do. Of course, it’s likely in your professional capacity…

If I had to pick a market leader in the container management space at the moment, Kubernetes seems to be the project to look at (although Dockeris constantly adding to its open platform). The Google-backed open source version of its own in-house system has grown in popularity in the last year and there seems to be a scramble to support it within other offerings (e.g. Rancherand OpenStack). So how does it compare to DC/OS? Kubernetes doesn’t attempt to handle the same range of applications that DC/OS and Mesos do, being purely container based. Mesos is a bit lower level than Kubernetes, concerning itself with CPU and memory resources (the whole ‘distributed kernel’ concept) and DC/OS covers a wider range of target applications (as we shall see next month). Kubernetes can…

Internet suite Seamonkey   Version: 2.46 Web: www.seamonkey-project.org “One of the most complete, powerful and feature-rich browsers.” The Mozilla project has been the home of the Firefox browser since 2004, but it’s worth considering that the reason for creating a brand new browser revolved around the bloat of the Mozilla Suite, which itself was born from work on the open-sourced Netscape Communicator. So, while Firefox became the flagship product in Mozilla, the classic Mozilla Suite continued on live and was later named Seamonkey. Today, Seamonkey is one of the most complete, powerful and feature-rich browsers even when put against either Firefox or Chromium. Seamonkey Suite consists of a web browser, email client, WYSIWIG web page composer and an address book manager. Other features can be added as add-ons from the Mozilla…

Our expert Les Pounder works with the Raspberry Pi Foundation delivering its Picademy training He also likes to tinker with electronics and toys and blogs at http://bigl.es The Simonmemory game was particularly popular when we were growing up. This was an electronic game that used LEDs and big buttons to challenge players to remember and repeat a complex sequence. We’re going to make our own version using a Raspberry Pi. In this tutorial, we’ll use coloured LEDs (one blue, green, red and yellow) and four momentary buttons/switches which we’ll assign to each LED and we’ll be using Python and GPIO Zero to code the project. You can use any model of Pi, but you’ll need the latest Raspbian Pixel Release. You’ll also need four 220 Ohm resistors (orange-orange-brown-gold), a half-size…

Once installation of Pi AUI Suite is complete and you have run sudo voicecommand -c to set it to listen, you need to prime it with a keyword. By default, this is ‘Pi’, but feel free to alter this to something easier, such as the word ‘Jessie’. Next, try out a few of the built-in voice commands: YouTube Saying ‘YouTube’ and a video title automatically loads a full-screen video of the first relevant YouTube clip. This is similar to Google’s “I’m feeling lucky”. Say ‘YouTube’ and the name of the video in which you’re interested, e.g. ‘YouTube fluffy kittens’. Internet Saying the word ‘internet’ launches your web browser. By default, this is the Pi’s built-in browser Midori, although you can change this. Download Saying the word ‘download’ plus a search…

Our expert Adam Oxford runs South African tech news site www.htxt.co.za. He learned many of these lessons the hard way. Are you an ‘accidental admin’? Someone who realised, too late, that they were responsible for the workings of a Linux server and – because something has gone wrong – finds themselves lost in a world of terminals and command lines that make little sense to normal humans? What is SSH, you may be asking yourself. Do those letters after ‘tar’ actually mean anything real? How do I apply security patches to my server? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. And to help you out, we’ve put together this quick guide with essential Linux commands that every accidental admin should know. Becoming an accidental admin While we’d argue that they should, not…

User permissions are one of the most important parts of Linux security to understand. Every file has a set of permissions which defines who can see a file; who can read and write to a file; and who can execute a file as a program. A file which can be seen by web visitors, but can only be changed by a specific user, is just about as basic as it gets when it comes to locking down a server. The problem is that some files need to be changeable and some don’t—think of a Wordpress installation for a blog. You want Wordpress to be able to write some files so it can update them, but there’s also a lot of files you don’t want it to be able to change—and…

1 Watch your settings Got a high DPI screen and tired of having to open up System settings to change the display scaling whenever you plug in an external monitor? Here’s how to use hotkeys to quickly switch between two common configurations. First of all, with your monitor unplugged from a second screen, open up a terminal and type: 2 Tweak your settings Leave that terminal open and go to System Settings > Displays. You should see a line that says something like {'eDP1': 16} appear. The number 16 means that the scale factor is 2:1 for the built-in display. An 8 means 1:1 etc. Take a note of what it says, and plug in your second screen. Now change the scaling factor and resolution to something comfortable for both…

Our expert Afnan Rehman is a student, Linux tinkerer and general computer geek who breaks everything first so you don’t have to. Dual boot Learn to dual-boot both Windows and Linux on the same PC We live in a world where multiple operating systems hold a share of the desktop market and applications aren’t always available on every platform that you want them to be, it’s often necessary to have more than one OS available ready to boot. Virtual machines offer only a partial solution to this problem as do compatibility layer technologies such as Wine. The solution is to dual-boot two OSes on the same machine. The boot managers of modern day OSes can manage multiple systems and allow the user to choose which one to boot at startup.…

Our expert Mayank Sharma is so sceptical that he has to verify his authenticity every time he wakes up in the morning. He’s also a veteran tech writer… or so he says. CentOS How to set up the distro and automate installs with kickstart The goal of the CentOS (short for Community ENTerprise Operating System) distribution (distro) is to deliver an enterprise-grade operating system without the costs usually associated with such endeavours. It delivers on its enterprise promise since it’s compiled from open source SRPM (source Red Hat Package Manager) files from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distro. RHEL is based entirely on open source software and is required by the GPL licence to release all of the source code to anyone who has a subscription. Red Hat does…

In order to successfully use system modules such as the very useful psutil, you will need to know how Linux handles processes, ports and other system properties. A Linux process is an execution environment that contains instructions, user-data and system-data parts and other kinds of resources that are obtained during runtime. There are three categories of processes: user, daemon and kernel processes. Unless you have special privileges, you won’t be able to control processes owned by other users including processes that deal with the Linux system and support various Linux services. Each process really has two user IDs: the effective user ID and the real user ID. Similarly, each process has two group IDs: the effective group ID and the real group ID. You might wonder what the point is…

In this tutorial, we focused on the BBC micro:bit for our introduction to MicroPython. But this is not the only board to support the language, rather there are many more alternatives: The pyboard The original board developed in 2013 by Damien George is a smaller development board that shares some similarities to the micro:bit, such as a 3-axis accelerometer. It also uses a STM32F405RG micro controller, Cortex M4 CPU that’s clocked at 168MHz, and has 192KiB of RAM for your projects. But what if your project is bigger? Fear not as the pyboard comes with a microSD card slot! Additionally, the pyboard comes with 29 IO pins. There’s no dedicated MicroPython editor for this board, rather you plug the board into your computer and use a standard text editor to…

Linux Format is proud to produce the biggest and best magazine that we can. A rough word count of LXF217 showed it had 65,010 words. That’s a few thousand more than Animal Farm and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis combined, but with way more Linux, coding and free software (but hopefully less bugs). That’s as much as the competition, and as for the best, well… that’s a subjective claim, but we do sell way more copies than any other Linux mag in the UK. As we like giving things to our readers, each issue the Star Question will win a copy or two of our amazing Guru Guides or Made Simple books – discover the full range at: http://bit.ly/LXFspecials. For a chance to win, email a question to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, or post it…

What is Wine? The name is an acronym of Wine Is Not an Emulator. So, if it’s not an emulator, then what is it? Well, it is a sort of emulator [NO!–Ed] really. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows Application Programming Interface (API) on top of X and Unix. Does WINE let me run Windows on Linux? Not exactly. Wine is a compatibility layer between Windows programs and Linux. When you run a Windows program with Wine, the program thinks it’s running on Windows, but the calls it makes to Windows functions are translated into Linux calls. Do I need Windows installed to use Wine? No, but Wine will use Windows DLLs from an existing installation if you have them. If not, it has its own alternatives.…

March Master The Terminal Take control of the ultimate interface to any operating system, the Terminal; work smarter, not harder! More privacy! We test out the best privacy distros so you can stay safe and secure while you’re online. Easy file sharing Not all file sharing is bad sharing, we take a look at the open source file sharing options. There are no three words more sexy in the English Tiling window managers language than those—let’s do this! Contents of future issues subject to change – we might never want to leave the enveloping blackness.…