Linux Format Annual Linux Format Annual (2024) - Vol. 7

Welcome to the Linux Format Annual 2024. We hope you’re ready to shake things up a bit, because this latest compilation from the makers of Linux Format magazine is going to equip you with the tools you need to free yourself from the likes of Windows, bulk up your defences and maximise your Linux experience. From discovering the best (well, we think so) open source software available and meeting the freedom fighters who started the movement to liberate programs for the masses, to taking back control of your passwords and levelling up your Linux career, let us help you to better protect your privacy, dig into the latest projects and get ahead in the world of Linux.…

Graphics on Linux is complicated. On Windows, you have one driver model and one graphics API (DirectX… okay there are multiple versions, and subsets such as Direct2D). On Linux we’ve lost count. And it’s always been tricky, as anyone who’s tried to run X11 in 2000 will testify. Efforts have been made to simplify things, and in a way they are. AMD and Intel cards, thanks to open source drivers, will generally work out of the box on most desktop distributions. Even hardware requiring Nvidia’s proprietary drivers will work automagically in Ubuntu and Fedora. In future this driver will be free, too. Until then the open source Nouveau driver continues to improve, and (thanks to Nvidia finally releasing signed firmware) should provide much-improved performance for newer cards. However, there’s more…

Porting the X Windows System from (various flavours of) Unix to Linux was in some ways key to its success. A GUI, no matter how primitive, enables richer applications to be developed and richer content to be produced. In the mid-90s the only displays users needed to worry about were CRT monitors. Y’know, those heavy, retina-burning monsters whose depth was at least that of their screen’s diagonal. These work by sweeping a beam (okay, three beams if you want colour) of electrons back and forth with a given frequency, and then up and down with a slightly lesser frequency. These are the horizontal and vertical scan rates Even in this lawless era (which tolerated such atrocities as Chris Evans on The Big Breakfast) there were standards, one such being the…

The first consumer 3D graphics cards appeared under 3DFX’s “Voodoo” branding in late 1996. These were add-in cards that still required a regular video card (or chip) to display 2D scenes. But they enabled games like Tomb Raider, Descent, Grand Theft Auto and Unreal to use 3DFX’s proprietary Glide API and render things (well, some things) much faster than software rendering. A number of other proprietary 3D graphics APIs appeared around this time, including the S3 3D Engine (used in Virge cards), the Nvidia Multimedia Library, the Creative 3D Library (used in Blaster 3D devices) and the even more imaginatively titled ATI 3D C Interface (for 3D Rage hardware). Silicon Graphics, makers of expensive workstations, also had a proprietary API, in the form of IRIS GL. This could do 3D…

For a long time, users of middle-aged Intel hardware were stuck using the venerable i965 Mesa driver. This caters to a range of hardware, from Broadwater (2006) to the HD and Iris graphics found in some Skylake chips (2015). For older hardware there’s the i915 Mesa driver, not that such hardware had much in the way of 3D capability. Newer, so-called Gen8 graphics and above (from Broadwell through to the latest Xe graphics) is supported by the Iris Gallium3D driver. The i965 (and i915) driver dates back to before the Gallium framework was developed, and throughout last year there were calls to retire it. However, Mesa aren’t in the habit of mass-scale hardware abandonment, so until a replacement was finalised, i965, and other ‘classic’ Mesa drivers were granted a reprieve.…

There are some great tools for probing, tweaking and otherwise tinkering with GPU on Linux. Most of these are vendor-specific. Intel provide a number of utilities via the intel-gputools package. Once installed you can run $ sudo intel_gpu_top to see how busy your GPU is, how much power it’s using, whether hardware video codecs are in use and more. It’s also handy if you get confused about which ‘Gen’ your graphics are. If only we’d known about it two pages back… AMD’s Catalyst Control Centre on Windows enables you to overclock your GPU and its memory, as well as tweak fan profiles. Corectrl on Linux makes it possible to do exactly the same thing, but probably with much less bloat. Corectrl is available on Fedora, Arch Linux’s AUR or you…