Table of contents for February 2024 in Linux Format

Matthew Holder On my ancient HP MicroServer, I run FreeNAS, so I can centrally store my data. RClone enables me to copy data to and from various cloud platforms. Completing the package is Home Assistant and various containers, so I can tie all of my smart home gear together. Les Pounder I use Pi-hole on an old Raspberry Pi behind the living room TV. Why? Well, I’m sick of adverts popping up everywhere, and running ad-blocking software on every device is a chore. Install Pi-hole, point the devices to it, and bang! The ads are gone! Michael Reed I get a lot of my information from books, and I have a huge collection. Much of the library I’ve amassed is out of date by most people’s standards, but I like…

My crystal ball is only slightly better than a second-hand Magic 8 Ball, but gazing into it for a preview of 2024 provides a little clarity. Namely, non-stop hype for AI/ML and direct impacts on open source. Money and resources follow hype, so projects and efforts that don’t have an AI/ ML cast are going to have a harder time finding support. This is worse than previous hype cycles around things such as Linux containers, Kubernetes and open source IaaS – which all solve real and immediate problems. AI/ML, on the other hand, is mostly a solution in search of a problem – or a solution to the problem of ‘vendors want more revenue’ – while there’s plenty of real problems needing attention. Case in point, the real need for…

PipeWire 1.0 was released late November (see right), a major milestone in a long journey that I had the opportunity to be a part of. When rumours about PipeWire being a possible successor to PulseAudio had begun circulating in 2018, I was working on a project that was using PulseAudio in an odd way and wanted to explore other solutions. The first PipeWire hackfest was announced that summer and I signed up for it without hesitation. The rest is history. Thanks to a strong collaboration with Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), the WirePlumber session manager was born shortly after. PipeWire has strong potential to solve problems outside the scope of the Linux desktop, and WirePlumber is a key component in that. By being the orchestrator behind PipeWire’s graph, it was designed…

Linus Torvalds announced one of the final Release Candidates for what will be Linux 6.7 (-rc5), making us on track to start the new year with a shiny new 6.7 kernel, and the corresponding twoweek merge window for new features that will eventually stabilise into 6.8. Just in time for the new year, the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) is moving servers as vger.kernel.org is finally decommissioned. Hopefully folks won’t notice the transition to modern infrastructure. That was 2023 2023 was another very busy year in the Linux community. It started with the Linux 6.2 kernel cycle, the first to include baseline useful bits of Rust language support. Also included was Apple Silicon M2 Macs (6.4, in May) and mount-beneath (6.5, in September) for updating the underlay layers of overlay…

YOU NEED Pi Pico or Pico W A buzzer 15x M2M jumper wires 7x push buttons Large breadboard Blu Tack, modelling clay, doublesided tape Code: https://github.com/lesp/ LXF311-Pi-Ano/archive/refs/heads/ main.zip As I write this, Christmas is on the horizon and it’s got me thinking of my childhood. My mother bought me a small piezo-speaker piano in the hope that I would learn to play. That dream was never realised but I did learn to take it apart and see how it worked, and now we can do that using the Raspberry Pi Pico. In this tutorial, we are going to use a Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W running MicroPython to create a Pi-ano. We’ll use the Solfège syllables, a music education method used in schools to teach pitch and basic music…

Shell history is one of the most useful and powerful tools at your disposal if you spend S a lot of time working with the CLI. While you can easily tweak the settings on your preferred shell to store 500, 2,000, or even more commands, Atuin offers something far superior. It replaces the traditional shell history with a SQLite database, but more importantly, it gives you the ability to sync your CLI history across different machines. Once installed, Atuin rebinds the Ctrl+r and the up arrow key, used to reverse look up previously executed commands and access the history respectively, with a full-screen history search interface. You can also get stats on the most executed commands, or look up commands based on exit codes and more. Best of all, Atuin…

Part Two! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! ADVENTURE GAME STUDIO Credit: www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk In part one of this series, we indulged in the nostalgia of playing classic point-and-click games from the ’80s and ’90s, such as Monkey Island, Broken Sword and Beneath a Steel Sky. We also covered setting up one of the best and simplest-to-use game editors for the genre, Adventure Game Studio (AGS), which can create games to be run on Linux. AGS has excellent documentation and sample files, which we used to set up your first room and define walkable areas for the character. We also discovered how to have the character walk behind objects, as well as set clearly defined edges for the room, so the game knows when to load new areas. The…

KIVY Credit: https:// kivy.org OUR EXPERT Matt Holder is an IT professional of 15 years, Linux user for over 20 years, user of plenty of home automation gear and selfprofessed geek. In this article, we are exploring Kivy, learning about its GUI language and how this links back to Python code and developing an application that can run on multiple platforms. Kivy is supported on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android and iOS. By the end of this article, we will have developed an app that runs on desktop Linux as well as Android. We will also have introduced the necessary concepts to create a simple stopwatch application, rendered our simple user interface, written the logic to update the text and perform the counting function, as well as compiling an APK…

Who said history repeats itself? First there was Netscape and everyone used it and it turned out bad. Then there was Internet Explorer and everyone used it and it turned out bad. Now everyone’s using Chrome (laughs in Firefox) and Google is about to effectively ban ad blocking, which is bad. You can read more about the Manifest v3 plans and more in our news, but beyond using Firefox for general browsing, we’re looking at how you can protect your entire network from the corporate takeover with Pi-hole. This gives you better control over what can enter your network and it blocks malware at the gate before it can even get to any devices. So, you have less to worry about when you have family members using phones, tablets, computers,…

n 21st November, Jehan Pages, the lead developer of the GNU Image O Manipulation Program (GIMP), announced on Patreon that the muchanticipated GIMP 3.0 is tentatively scheduled for release at the Libre Graphics Conference in May 2024. In broad terms, the plan involves releasing a development version in December 2023. Naturally, this will require a GUI feature freeze, which is set for mid-December, allowing coders to halt new feature development and focus on bug fixes. However, this means that long-awaited features, such as full support for non-destructive filters attached to layers, may have to be included in a patch release instead of being part of GIMP 3.0 itself. GIMP’s new API allows it to make much better use of colour spaces and models. However, rewriting the API will…

Like every year, there will be two new major releases of LibreOffice in 2024 – version 24.2 in February and version 24.8 in August– the numbering no longer being progressive. In 2024, there will be many accessibility-related innovations, the result of the Document Foundation’s investment in this area, with a dedicated developer. Accessibility is a fundamental factor for software like LibreOffice, which aims to be a reference for everyone, especially those who need support because they are members of a minority. Of course, there will continue to be innovations related to interoperability with Microsoft Office’s proprietary formats, which continue to be a problem due to their poor or nonexistent adherence to the standard. LibreOffice offers an excellent level of compatibility, the result of constant analysis and benchmarking by the devs.…

A recent data corrupting bug in the ext4 filesystem served as a timely reminder about the benefits and limitations of ‘stable’ kernels. The goal of the ‘stable’ kernels is to allow end users and developers to run with the latest and greatest, without having to track upstream. The problem turned out to be an innocent-looking patch that had been added in 6.1.64, but that had a subtle dependency upon another kernel patch that had been omitted in the backporting process. Consequently, Debian users (most worryingly, those who opt for unattended automatic deployment) began to see corruption on their ext4 filesystems with a potentially quite significant impact. The community had some pushback about the lack of good upstream focused automated testing that might have caught this. Contrast this with Enterprise Linux…

HOW WE TESTED… Our testing system this time was Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. This detail is important because Linux applications such as file managers tend to inherit the theme and icon-set options of the underlying desktop environment. Some of the features also rely on subsystems of the underlying distro. For example, network and archive mounting might rely on GVfs or KIO services on Gnome or KDE systems respectively. For the archive testing, we created some example ZIP archives and downloaded some ISO images to test the systems. We made sure that we actually carried out some file management jobs to roadtest each file manager and throw up any awkward moments with each user interface or technical glitches once they were under the strain of actual work. In the…

QUICK TIP As ever, you’ll get the best results from your Raspberry Pi if you set this project up on a fresh installation of your favourite OS. We used Raspberry Pi OS Lite. One of the key strengths of the Raspberry Pi is its fire-and-forgetability. That key quality O where you can set instructions and let the machine simply perform the assigned tasks is incredibly useful; there is no chance of automatic restarts following unwanted updates, for example, or antivirus scans disrupting scheduled tasks. Hook up some external USB storage and the Pi can become a data server (for example, a PC backup system, as in LXF310). A similar setup can be used in a different way: to serve ISOs to the BitTorrent network. No, don’t choke on your pastry;…

QUICK TIP If you feel ‘admin’ is too insecure a username for your main account, after setting your password, browse to the MotionEye configuration folder and open motion.conf in a text editor. Uncomment the # @admin_ username admin line and change admin to your choice of username. Save the file – the change is immediately applied. Worried about your home security? Looking for a system that lets you set up multiple cameras around your property, but which won’t break the bank or require you to invest in an expensive monthly subscription while entrusting your video footage to some unknown third-party cloud hosting service? The obvious solution is to invest in a dedicated NVR – network video recorder – but why tie yourself into a single expensive proprietary ecosystem when you…

We’re sure we’re not the only ones who have tried to download a large W file while watching Netflix at the same time. The stuttering and buffering will drive you crazy. There is no simple built-in way to manage local network I/O. The fix? Wonder Shaper. It’s a cute little app that enables you to use the command line to set a rate limit (Kb/s) for the local device. Using it in such a fashion is a rough and ready way to manage I/O allocation. To install Wonder Shaper, just use: $ sudo apt install wondershaper Setting up the speed limit on the device is quite simple: $ sudo wondershaper enp0s1 5120 1024 This would set the device enp0s1 to allow a five-megabit download and one-megabit upload. It can be…

Part Two! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT Ferenc Deak is still not convinced that Malbolge wasn’t the right choice to create a Linux shell, but now there is no turning back. It’s C++. n the debut chapter of this shell series, we successfully implemented the execution of I applications within our freshly minted shell, aptly named lxf-shell. As we embark on the next part of our adventure, our sights are firmly set on one particularly distinguished feature no shell should live without: the art of redirecting application output to destinations far more interesting than standard output. Output redirection is a feature that allows you to control where the output of a command is sent. It enables you to capture or redirect the standard output and…

KALI 2023.4 Beloved by pen-testers everywhere, Kali’s latest iteration includes Gnome 45, giving it the benefit of better search features in Nautilus and full-height sidebars. Kali Linux AMD64 and ARM64 will also now be available on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure marketplaces. There’s a Raspberry Pi 5 image, too. Kali also now uses mirrorbits to optimise installation and updates of packages. There are a number of new security tools as well. Learn more at www.kali.org. MABOX 23.12 Mabox is a relatively new operating system, having first been released as recently as 2020. It’s designed to be a lightweight Linux distribution, featuring a customised desktop based on Openbox. The latest version uses the LTS version of the Linux kernel (6.6) but there’s also an ISO image available for older hardware that…

Q Access all areas I’ve recently retired and now I’m learning about Linux and have installed Linux Mint on a spare laptop. I used to write MS Access database projects for the office where I used to work. I’d like to create some projects for myself and friends, and there was a feature that I used back then. Access allows you to store the data and tables on a server and distribute a front-end app of forms, queries and reports that users could use on their PC to access the database, basically a client-server app. I was wondering if you know of any Linux database apps that work in a similar manner. I didn’t see anything like that in LibreOffice Base and that’s the extent of my knowledge of database…

Adverts are a plague on the internet – although we’ll grant that in their current form, they’re less intrusive than in days A of yore. It’s easy to look back on the late 1990s and early 2000s web through the haze of rosetinted glasses and view it as a utopia of high-quality independent blogs, free websites for everyone, and an explosion of experimental design along with non-predatory social media. Lay your spectacles aside for a moment and consider that most of what you recall is wrong. The internet at the turn of the century was never a utopia. Yes, you could get a free site from GeoCities, but you can make a better one today with GitHub Pages. Visually, the web was horrific, and adverts were both gaudy and omnipresent.…

Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! From the pioneering machines of the ’40s to the home computers of the ’80s, we’ve put F some fascinating computers through their paces via emulation in LXF. But they were all digital, and this ignores an important part of computing’s heritage. The electronic analogue computer was important for scientific applications until the early ’80s. To give these intriguing computers the recognition they deserve, we’re turning to emulation to reveal their secrets. In this first of two articles, we emulate a very simple machine, then move on to a more sophisticated one next month. We’re not looking at a specific analogue computer, though – we’re emulating a generic one, as models didn’t differ as much as in the digital world. So,…

Stuart Burns is a Linux administrator for a Fortune 500 company specialising in Linux. I’ve been growing dissatisfied with living in a Mac OS-centred world, so have swapped my £1,800 MacBook Pro for a £250 second-hand ThinkPad as an experiment. The result? It was great. Stuff that never worked on the Mac (looking at you, dualmonitor support) worked out of the box with Ubuntu on a T480. Why do it? For one, in my opinion, Apple has been going down a route that betrays the Linux-friendly original hacker ethic: near zero repairability, the creeping of ‘You must log in to use the App Store to install this app’ and adverts. Secondly, I wanted to see if it could do all the work stuff I could do on a Mac. So…

Recoll »Polybar »Curtail »Betterbird »Bleach» Bit FileZilla» JDownloader 2» Gods »Deluxe »Naval »Battle »Fantascene »Audacity can’t go out and risk being choked to death by the toxic air. Instead he makes do by finding apps that are a breath of fresh air. DESKTOP SE ARCH Recoll Version: 1.36.1 Web: www. lesbonscomptes.com/recoll The find command is pretty handy for finding files embedded in your filesystem. Even if you don’t want to get down to the CLI, most modern file managers have a find function that’s dexterous enough to get the job done. But neither of these offer the functionality you get with Recoll, which can dig up documents based on their content, even inside email attachments and compressed archives. Recoll only offers source packages, and installing them takes some doing.…