Table of contents for March 2023 in Linux Format

Cooler Master offers a range of air and liquid CPU coolers, so is very popular with gamers. To date, though, in order to fine-tune cooling options, you had use CoolerMaster’s proprietary Windows-only MasterPlus+ software suite. But there is hope. At CES 2023, Cooler Master announced it would redesign the suite to be open source, as well as include an API. Still, a fully-featured Linux version of MasterPlus+ won’t be available immediately. When pressed by CES attendee Albert of www.boringtextreviews.com, Cooler Master admitted that by switching to open source, the suite may work with other coolers besides its own. However, currently this would mean you won’t be able to use CM-specific features such as TMS (Thermal Management System). Cooler Master has also announced support for running software in the cloud. Time will…

Last month, at the RISC-V summit, Android’s director of engineering, Lars Bergstrom, voiced his support for supporting RISC-V ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) on Android. Currently, the ARM architecture services almost all modern phones but this can be problematic, given in 2022 the company filed a lawsuit against Qualcomm. RISC-V, on the other hand, is open source. This means any company could use RISC-V compatible software and chips cost-free. The biggest obstacle is implementing Android RunTime (ART) support to allow developers to emulate apps. Google hopes to do this later this year.…

ALPINE 3.17.1 A “minimalist OS designed primarily for routers, servers, firewall hardware and VPNs”, Alpine boasts a small download fingerprint, can be set up quickly and even runs in RAM. It uses BusyBox to share app resources and has a hardened kernel. The latest release includes a fix for a rather worrying OpenSSL bug (CVE-2022-3996), as well as security upgrades to Chromium, VLC and Ruby. Find out more at www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.17.1-released.html. PISI LINUX 2.3.1 Based on Pardus OS, originally developed with support from the Turkish government, Pisi, like Pardus, uses the PISI (Packages Installed Successfully as Intended) Python package management system and focuses on desktop users. Setup is easy thanks to the walkthrough from the built-in Captain manager. The latest release, Pomegranate, includes the LibreOffice suite once again, as well as…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email letters@ linuxformat.com. Print me A comment on t he 3D printing article in LX296: it said nothing about Linux; nothing about software needs, supporting libraries, preferred languages, user skill set or levels; and nothing about how open source has fostered the development of 3D printing (only that it has fostered it). And although it provided some history of the development, even that was superficial. It’s not evident what the reader is supposed to do with the content of this article. As a result, it came across too much as just promoting the 3D printing market, not providing a…

IN BRIEF One of the new CentOS alternatives that has a strong commercial backing and is headed by an original CentOS developer. SPECS CPU: 2GHz (single-core) Mem: 2GB HDD: 10GB Builds: x86-64, aarch64, ppc64le, s390x At Linux Format, we’re very into Debian-based Linux, but don’t want you to think that we’ve anything against RPM distros. One of the best known is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), a commercial version of Linux. This may sound counterintuitive, as the whole ethos of Linux is one of free and open source software. Red Hat does make its source code publicly available but also sells subscriptions and training. Other developers can use RHEL’s source code to make their own distros, as is the case with Rocky 9.1 Rocky Linux was originally pioneered by one…

HOW WE TESTED… We’ve decided to focus on application installation, but we haven’t ignored the installation of system components, and we’ve given that subject its own section. We looked at the process of making a package, but we found that the procedures for standard, traditional packages such as RPM, AppImage, Flatpak and Snap were similar. None of them was really beginner-friendly, but we wouldn’t expect them to be. We searched the repositories for apps such as GIMP and Kdenlive to get a sense of the relative freshness of packages available in each format. We also took into account that some formats are more popular than others on the websites of open source projects. When examining traditional package managers such as RPM and DEB, we’ve had to give an aggregate assessment…

By .default, Snap packages have little access to the alternative directory and run it from there. system. The package creators themselves are able to switch on certain access to resources. Furthermore, the user mode tools for managing Snaps allow refinement of these options. For example, the Snap Store allows users to switch the permissions of an application on and off to access the network, audio facilities and the home folder, among other resources. Snap has a small problem with its sandboxing because it was created by Canonical and designed to work, first and foremost, within Ubuntu Linux. For this reason, it uses a system called AppArmour for its security features, meaning that distributions that use a different security system (such as SELinux) don’t have all of the same security features…

Some formats include the dependencies within the archive. Apart from the advantages of portability, this means the developers (or packagers) can make their own choices about the included versions of libraries, which can lead to a more stable and performant version of an application. Independence from the system leads to larger package sizes. In the case of Flatpak, AppImage and Snap, you could have a package where the app itself was the smaller part of the archive. Traditional package managers take a different approach, and in some cases, only a small amount of storage is required to add an app to the system when using a tool such as apt on a Debianderived distro. Having said this, it’s worth considering that apps tend not to take up a lot of…

Wto experience open source Android on the widest range of consumer hardware. There’s a huge community of super-talented developers (most active on https://forum.xda-developers.com) constantly updating and building LineageOS releases new and old for specific models of devices. So, even if there’s not an official release for your device, a quick DuckDuckGo will likely return someone on XDA proffering a build – with varying degrees of device support; do you really need the camera? – for your obscure Chinese-made mobile device. Let’s take some time to look through the latest release details of LineageOS 20, but also some of the other features and advantages the project offers. As we mentioned, LineageOS rose from the regrettable disintegration of the Cyanogenmod project in late 2016. This also explains the odd version numbering LineageOS…

The Arduino IDE, used by makers and hackers for over a decade, has received a fresh coat of paint. But under the hood, someone has souped-up the engine. Les Pounder loves tinkering with hardware, so when Arduino revealed its latest IDE, he had an excuse to tinker some more. IN BRIEF improvements for board management and software libraries. the Arduino IDE has seen massive Under the hood T he venerable Arduino is the genus of the current generation of maker boards. Sure, there were PIC chips before it, but Arduino democratised access to cheap hardware. That hardware was great, but the software lagged behind. Last year, Arduino released a beta of Arduino IDE 2.0 and it has now been officially released. So, we see the Arduino IDE modernised with a…

I mage manipulation apps come in all shapes and sizes, but their list of features is usually inversely proportional to their usability. Fotoxx is a good exception. It offers a rich set of retouch and edit functions that go beyond merely changing brightness, contrast and colour, and yet it isn’t all that cumbersome to navigate. The app has comprehensive image management functions and can, for instance, help you sort through your gallery using the metadata in the images. It can also import and edit RAW images, which makes Fotoxx suitable for professional photographers as well. Like most dedicated image editors, Fotoxx enables you to select an object or area within an image using various tools such as freehand outline, follow edges, select matching tones, and so on. There is a…

If you’ve ever wanted to run multiple Linux shell commands at the same time, you’ve probably used either Tmux or GNU Screen. These tools, however, are usually used to run much more long-lived processes. If you have a bunch of commands that you run in parallel, regularly, look at Mprocs, which also displays the output of each command separately. Mprocs is written in Nodejs, so to install it, first grab the Nodejs package manager (npm) using your distro’s package manager. For instance, on Fedora use sudo dnf install npm , or install it on Ubuntu with sudo apt install npm . When it’s done, install Mprocs with sudo npm install -g mprocs . To use Mprocs, simply run the tool along with a list of commands you want to run…

Do you need to use different apps to open the same type of file depending on what you want to do? For instance, while you usually want to open an image in an image viewer, sometimes you want to send it to an image editor instead. In such a case, the Open With context menu option comes in really handy. But if you need to make this choice a lot, bringing up the Open With dialog box can become exhausting. Junction is a nifty little app that makes it a little easier to choose the correct app to open a file. With Junction installed, simply set it as the default app for opening a particular file type. When you now doubleclick to open the file, Junction pops up and displays…

Newsdesk THIS ISSUE: Valve champions open source»Rival to Google Maps»Cooler Master API»Debian dumps Python 2»Google takes a RISC Eight years ago, Linus Torvalds said that Valve may save the Linux desktop. It seems his words were prophetic, as Valve’s handheld gaming computer, the Steam Deck, comes with its own distro, SteamOS. Being Linux-based, Windows games on the Steam Deck have to run through Steam’s own Proton compatibility layer. In theory, this saves developers the trouble of creating a Linux port – and, indeed, many titles do work out of the box. Still, Valve’s realised the value of the open source community in helping to keep on top of the patches and updates needed. In an interview with The Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais revealed that Valve has hired over…

Google Maps comes installed on almost all Android phones, so the tech giant’s app dominates the navigation scene. In 2022 alone, it was downloaded over 13 million times. It’s unsurprising, then, that a number of tech firms have banded together against the Google Goliath. In December 2022, the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the creation of the Overture Maps Foundation. The foundation will be an open source programme for curating and collating map data across the world. TomTom, which has struggled against Google’s market dominance, is one of the key players. Other backers include Meta, Microsoft and Amazon – so no small fry. You may note that those other three don’t make a point of selling navigation software, but Facebook (as it was) did buy Mapillary in 2020, which specialises…

SPECS Capacity: 2TB Format: M.2 2280 80mm Interface: PCIe 4.0 x4, NVMe Seq. read/write: 3,500/ 2,800MB/s Endurance: 640TBW Security: N/A Warranty: Three years The Kingston NV2 is one of those SSDs that is simply too good to be true. The price is exceptional, especially at 2TB, and it is sold as a PCIe 4.0 drive. Yet it has no definitive hardware inside and its performance for both of our samples is distinctly bottom of the barrel. It also runs a little hot and inefficiently in our testing. The NV2 follows Kingston’s previous NV1, a drive very much in line with Kingston’s philosophy of providing cheap drives at scale. The NV2 is similar in that it uses a hodge-podge of hardware – different controllers and NAND flash from drive to drive…

IN BRIEF Starting as an Ubuntu spin-off, Mint has grown and matured with its own desktop direction and suite of easy-to-use system tools. SPECS CPU: 64-bit (single-core) 2GHz Mem: 2GB (4GB recommended) HDD: 20GB (100GB recommended) Builds: x86_64 Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past 15 years, you’ll almost certainly have heard of Linux Mint. The OS is based on Ubuntu (in the case of this release, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS), meaning you have access to almost all Ubuntu applications out of the box. “Out of the box” should perhaps be the tagline for Linux Mint, as the developers have placed a real focus on ease of setup and deployment for desktop users. Mint comes bundled with the ability to play almost all media formats. Traditionally, this has included…

Weach system has to offer when carrying out the basic operations, such as installing and updating packages. The GUI has its place, but we were particularly keen to see how well they all worked from the command line. There’s a slight problem of fragmentation, even within a single distribution, when it comes to traditional package managers as they often use different commands for different operations. OpenSUSE’s Zypper is an example of an admin utility that ties everything together, but they’re not all like that. Searching for a package and installing it from the command line also works well when using a traditional package manager front-end such as APT under a distro such as Debian or Ubuntu. One problem with traditional package managers is that they tend not to distinguish between…

In keeping with this Roundup in general, we’re placing a greater emphasis on the installation of applications rather than system components particularly. Reviews and ratings are important in this respect. They can give you a heads-up if a current release exhibits regressions, and they usually contain comments about the implementation of that package within that particular packaging system. It’s worth considering the packaging system when evaluating a Linux distribution. The ideal situation, when talking about application installation, is when the distribution has a shop application that includes Snap and Flatpak as well, giving the user maximum flexibility. On the other hand, we appreciate native GUI tools that are specific to a given format, too. If the shop application of a distribution doesn’t support all the packaging formats that you’re interested…

If you install from the distro repository using a native packaging system, that system should be able to retrieve the dependencies for you. If you are manually installing from an archive such as an RPM or DEB, you may have to go on a hunt to track down the needed dependencies, and this can be complicated. If you want to add something outside of the repository system (such as a newer version of a component), you can run into brick walls when it can’t be done. Things go up a notch in difficulty when it comes to upgrading individual components by using a source code package, because you have to locate the development dependencies in addition to those needed to run the component. Because there are fewer safeguards in place,…

Oalways fun, but escaping the Borg on mobile deserves a treatment all of its own. From the moment you put your Google Account credentials into the setup screen, your phone/tablet/TV stick starts feeding data to Google’s silos. Search history, GPS location history, call logs, contacts and much more are by default shared with the company. Its PR outlets boldly claim that it doesn’t sell this data, but it does use it to sell highly targeted ads. As you’ll have noticed. Pause for a second to consider the resolution of the profile that all this data provides. Then pause for another second to consider the second-level data obtained by cross-referencing it with billions of other users. By now you might be feeling ill at ease. But fear not, because we’re here…

I Hardware interview, Eben Upton was asked, “Why is there no shortage of RP2040-based products?” Upton’s answer – “We took some big risks” – lead to the revelation that Raspberry Pi purchased 500 wafers in 2021. The offer and decision to Good things do purchase 500 wafers came through within a day, Upton said. Per wafer, there can be between 21,000 and 22,000 RP2040 dies with a die size of roughly 2mm square. Upton then compared the “big chip world”, where dies are 30mm square, which would gain 2,000 cores per wafer. Upton then did the maths and from 500 wafers, each yielding 21,000 dies, there are around 10 million RP2040 chips. This ‘stockpile’ of chips from 2021 is what many of us keen Pico users are currently consuming, be it…

SPECS Sensor: Sony IMX708, 7.4mm Res: 4,608x 2,592, 11.9MP Video: 1080p50, 720p100, 480p120 Focus: Motorised Focal: 4.74mm Depth: 10cm to infinity FoV: 66h, 41v (120-degree) F-stop: F1.8 Size: 25x24x 11.5mm There’s no new Pi model this year but here’s the Camera Module 3 at £25 for standard or £35 for the wide-angle version. The new module brings more pixels, rivalling the High Quality Camera’s 12MP while keeping the smaller sensor-on-a-board form factor. What’s new about this tiny camera is autofocus. This is the first official Raspberry Pi camera with autofocus, although Arducam’s (see LXF289) highresolution camera delivered that functionality last year. The Camera v3 updates the original’s sensor-on-aboard form factor to pack a 12MP Sony IMX708 sensor and autofocus. It also comes in four versions: standard, wide angle, NOIR…

Having worked in IT departments in schools for over 10 years, painful memories exist of the agony felt by staff and students alike over the time it took to perform operating system updates. This was made many, many times worse when people began using Chromebooks, where updates were carried out seamlessly in the background and all that was required to access the new version was a reboot of the device. This is one technology used by a more modern OS, where two partitions are used to store the current OS and the upgrade, and if anything fails, the boot can revert to the older version. In this feature, we are going to introduce Fedora Silverblue (which uses the Gnome desktop environment), which is an operating system that uses very different…

Saber still identifies itself as a work in progress, but we found the cross-platform app to be very usable. You can install it from Flathub with flatpak --user install com.adilhanney.saber . The app has a simple interface. Click the + icon to create a new note. The fountain pen is the default writing tool, and there’s also a highlighter. For both tools, you can select from one of eight listed colours, the default being black. You can also swap the fountain pen for a ballpoint if you prefer, and set its size anywhere between 1 and 25, with the default being 10. Similarly, for the marker, you can choose a size between 10 and 100, in increments of 10, with 50 being the default. Besides these, in terms of tools…

If you love Firefox and are really concerned about your privacy on the internet, but don’t want to spend time equipping your browser with the relevant extensions, LibreWolf is for you. The app hosts repos for various distros, but can also be installed from Flathub with flatpak install flathub io.gitlab.librewolf-community . It looks pretty much like Firefox, since it’s just a customised version of Firefox designed to increase protection against popular tracking and fingerprinting techniques. It does this by making certain under-thebonnet tweaks to Firefox. For instance, it zaps all the telemetry and data collection procedures, and disables features that can be abused, such as search and form history, form autofill, Firefox sync, disk cache and such. The app also clears temporary files on close, and enables HTTPS-only mode. It…

Who doesn’t love trains? With Libre TrainSim, you can experience being at the helm of one of these brilliant people movers. It puts you in the driver’s seat of a virtual train with a first-person view of the controls and tracks. Passengers scurry across the platform to board your train, (going on strike?–ED) there are tracks from all across Germany, and you even get some shaking in the cabin in the latest version. Download the compressed archive for Linux from the project’s website. $ unzip Libre_TrainSim_Linux64_v0-8.zip $ cd Libre_TrainSim_Linux64_v0-8 $ ./Libre_TrainSim.x86_64 You can load up a track straightaway and start controlling a train, but that isn’t a good idea. Instead, we suggest you take advantage of the game’s tutorials to learn the ropes, which includes everything from boarding passengers, closing…

While Debian is praised for its stability, users know this comes at the price of using older programs. While Python 2 was officially retired in January 2020, for the sake of continuity, Debian 11 (Bullseye) came with it bundled. Debian has now virtually removed Python 2 altogether from the ‘testing’ and ‘unstable’ releases. The python package is now gone, as is /usr/bin/python. Users of legacy Python 2 apps can still manually install the python-is-python2 package to get them running. This change does only apply to the ‘testing’ and ‘unstable’ versions of Debian. The ‘stable’ branch of Bullseye still has it but developers are working on removing it from Debian 12 (Bookworm) altogether. The Python project also has a detailed web page on how to use Lib2to3 and Python tools such…

SPECS Socket: AM5 Process: 5nm TSMC Cores: 16 Threads: 32 Clock: 4.5GHz (5.7GHz boost) Cache: 1MB L1, 16MB L2, 64MB L3 Unlocked: Yes GPU: AMD Radeon 2-core RDNA 2, 400MHz Mem max: 128GB DDR5- 5200, ECC support, 2-channel PCIe: v5 24-lanes TDP: 170W. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is the vanguard for a whole new generation of CPUs from AMD. At its most basic level, this is a straight 16-core, 32-thread CPU, packing a pair of eight-core compute chiplets together with an I/O die to get all the data into and out of the processor package. Zen 4 is a derivative architecture built from Zen 3 with fundamental differences: it’s built on a new 5nm process node from its long-time TSMC foundry partner, while the I/O die (IOD) has shifted…

SPECS Minimum OS: Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit CPU: Quad-core 64-bit Mem: 8GB GPU: 2GB VRAM, Vulkan 1.2 or OpenGL 4.2 support The infamously bewildering ending to 1991’s Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge left players longing for resolution that subsequent Monkey Island games never delivered. Three decades later, and after effectively saying it would never happen, key members of the original team –including series creator Ron Gilbert –have made the game that picks up after the final moments of LeChuck’s Revenge. And they subvert our 30-year-old expectations about what happens next immediately. Return to Monkey Island’s mischievous opening confidently asserts that this is the authentic Monkey Island experience we’ve come for: sharp, self-aware and brilliantly silly. It bombards you with gags but the characters you meet aren’t just comedic props, and the…

System package formats (such as RPM and DEB) are linked to the Linux distro they were created on. There are tools for converting from one type to another, but we’re not taking those into account as they are not fully reliable. Even between distros from the same family, traditional packages are not reliably portable. For example, a DEB archive created on Debian may work on Ubuntu, but there’s no guarantee; even different versions of the same distro might be incompatible at package level. Portability of system package formats is poor. Snap is widely supported, particularly in the mainstream distributions. If it’s not installed by default, it can generally be added, but that does involve an extra stage for the user, and not every small distribution supports Snap. Much the same…

Traditional package managers have an advantage for integration with the underlying system as installing components into the system is their raison d’être. This means that an application usually inherits the desktop settings of the system and is available from the application launcher of the desktop environment. We would expect system components installed in this way to be available to other installed software. Installing from a source package can cause integration problems. Although this method adds the component or application to the system, often the package manager and the desktop environment of the system are unaware of its presence. However, typically, the application runs in much the same way as it would have done from using a traditional package manager though. AppImage doesn’t score highly in this section as it goes…

The Android Open Source Project is where manufacturers can stay secure. manufacturers start when they want to port Android to a new device. Manufacturers add in the drivers (and other hardware-specific code), as well as perhaps custom UI overlays. If this all passes Google’s muster (see box on previous page), the device can be shipped with Android pre-installed. Those wanting to compile custom ROMs for that device may find that the manufacturer has open sourced the code they added in (namely device trees, hardware libraries and things that end up in the vendor partitions), but this is rarely the case. Even if they provide something, drivers for the GPU, cameras, GPS and the baseband modem itself will more than likely only exist as proprietary blobs. Those are no use for…

According to Eben Upton, India has a massive Raspberry Pi community and it could be a viable location for future official Pi stores. These You ca n always p-p-p-pick up a Pi! would be the first ones not based in the UK. The original store opened in February 2019, located in the heart of Cambridge – the Raspberry Pi store is found on the first floor of the Grand Arcade shopping mall. Upton hinted at a possible second Raspberry Pi store in the UK, with Leeds looking to be a candidate. Right now, an extended pop-up store looks likely, giving Raspberry Pi time to understand “what the next chapter” looks like. Raspberry Pi has had other pop-up stores around the UK. The first was on London’s Oxford Street and since then…

Upscayl is a wonderful little app that calls on advanced AI models to upscale and sharpen low-res images into ultra-HD resolutions. The app works with images in JPG, PNG and WebP formats. In addition to working with individual images, it can also batch process multiple images at one go. Upscayl is available as an AppImage for Linux users, so grab the latest release from the project website and make it executable, either using the file manager and heading to properties, or with chmod +x . The app has a simple interface, which divides the image upscaling task into several easy-to-follow steps. The first is obviously to point the app to the low-res image. If you toggle the Batch Upscale option, the app enables you to point to a folder instead…

Myuzi is an app for streaming music from YouTube. The best thing about it is that it has no ads and doesn’t require an account. The app is available as a Flatpak, so you can grab it easily by using flatpak install flathub com.gitlab. zehkira.Myuzi . As you’d expect, the app has a straightforward interface, with a couple of tabs at the top. Since this is the first time you’ve launched the app and don’t have any playlists yet, switch to the Search tab to find and queue some music. Now enter some terms in the search box to find some music, such as the name of an artist, or a track’s title. Once you’ve found something you’d like to listen to, simply click on the track and allow Myuzi…

If you think driving a train is cumbersome, piloting a plane should be infinitely more difficult, right? Not if it’s a plane that fires lasers in Infinite Shooter. All you need to pilot this craft is control over the arrow keys to move your plane right and left to dodge enemy artillery fire, and to use the spacebar to fire your weapon. As a 2D scroller, Infinity Shooter isn’t the first to employ this type of gameplay. In fact, this genre has been done to death. But the mix of the right soundtrack, the flowing motion and flips of the aircraft, the futuristic-looking, geometrically perfect enemy spaceships and the simple-but-effective graphics make the gameplay surprisingly addictive. You can install the game’s Flatpak with flatpak install io.github.pastthepixels.InfiniteShooter. The aim is…

You’re playing with fire if you aren’t using two-factor authentication for any of your online accounts that support it. While it isn’t exactly foolproof, having online apps verify your identity with an OTP token along with your password is still a lot better than relying on a password alone. OTPClient is a nifty little app that helps you manage OTP tokens for various accounts and services, from within an intuitive app that has built-in encryption. The app is packaged for several distributions, but you can just go ahead and grab the distro-agnostic Flatpak with flatpak install flathub com.github.paolostivanin.OTPClient . On first launch, you have to choose an encryption password to secure the database for the app. Remember, there’s no way to recover a forgotten password, so please be careful. After…

HydraPaper is a wallpaper manager designed to work around the lack of functionality on many desktop environments to set a different wallpaper for each monitor in a multi-monitor setup. The app accomplishes this by scaling and merging different wallpapers into one and setting it as spanned across the monitors. HydraPaper currently supports all the popular desktop environments, including Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon and Budgie, and has experimental support for the Sway window manager as well. The app is available for various distros, but again your best bet is to use the distro-agnostic Flatpak with flatpak install flathub org.gabmus.hydrapaper . When you launch it, the app automatically displays all the monitors in your setup. Underneath this list, the app displays the contents of the Pictures folder by default. The folder icon in…