Table of contents for July 2016 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell I don’t usually like new things, experience tells me they’re not to be trusted, which is why I’ve only eaten broccoli soup for the last decade. That said, I continue to be impressed at how the Plasma desktop is evolving. Just add the KSuperkey extension for easy menu/dash access. Neil Bothwick I’ve recently started using Python 3. I know it’s only about seven years old, but I found that it’s stable enough for my needs, although others seem to want to let it mature for longer before making the switch. That’s how much I like living life on the bleeding edge, people! Nick Peers I’ve been looking for a decent media cataloguing tool for years, and have finally found it—Data Crow (www.datacrow.net). It’s Java-based, so cross-platform, but has…

“Hold up. Is this for real? I’ve checked outside for flying porcine figures, and pinched myself plenty, so it must be real. Someone over at Microsoft has decided to bring the Bash shell to Windows. To say that it’s just the Bash shell is incorrect, actually. Someone has brought the Ubuntu operating system to Windows. Canonical and Microsoft are collaborating on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) project, which will bring the full range of the Ubuntu server core to the Windows operating system. The WSL is more than just a terminal. It’s more like a translation layer that changes Linux syscalls to Windows equivalents—like a reverse Wine. This project is aimed squarely at developers who are running Windows machines, but need to develop for Linux. Even then, it’s not…

PyCon UK 2016 Cardiff is the host city for this fantastic event. Set over 4 days from September 15-19 at Cardiff City Hall, PyCon UK is a mix of workshops, talks, sprints and presentations. Expect to see lots of Raspberry Pi-, micro:bit- and Python-powered projects at this event, which also has integrated an Education track for teachers. PyCon UK also has a fantastic social track for swapping ideas with other attendees. http://2016.pyconuk.org Liverpool Makefest 2016 You can still get your tickets for Liverpool Makefest. Taking place in Liverpool’s Central Library, this one-day event takes place on June 25 and has allocated 1,700 tickets already! There will be 150 makers from across the community, including Code Clubs, R2D2 enthusiasts and crafters. This event is free with workshops and talks from noted…

There’s a a detailed user manual with Evolution which covers all the PIM components. It will also help you sync the manager to Microsoft Exchange servers and solve common issues. Evolution also includes a printable quick reference card with a list of shortcuts for common tasks. If you’ve got some questions, you can subscribe to the project’s mailing lists or head to its IRC channel. Kontact also has a handbook that details the various components. There’s also an informative Tip of the Day feature. There’s some information on the various components on Kontact’s page in the KDE UserBase wiki and the project also dispenses help via a mailing list and an IRC channel. Mozilla Lightning doesn’t include any documentation and instead directs you to the Help section on its website.…

Some PIMs can take on new functions via plugins. Unfortunately, Osmo isn’t one of them. Evolution outsources some functionality to plugins which are all enabled by default. These include functions like an attachment reminder, the ability to automatically fill your address book as you reply to messages, save calendars or task lists to disk, and publish calendars to the web etc. Only the mail and the calendar components in Kontact support plugins. Just like Evolution, the four plugins of the mail component are all enabled by default. The calendar also has four plugins that can be optionally enabled, eg there’s a plugin that’ll add a link to Wikipedia’s This Day in History page to the calendar and another does the same for the Picture of the Day. Like Evolution and…

Piwigo Don’t fancy handing over your images to a third-party image-sharing service? You can always set one up on your own server with Piwigo. Once installed, you can start creating albums and upload images. You can also upload images to a Piwigo instance using a desktop photo manager, such as DigiKam (see below). Piwigo will automatically try to fill image properties, such as title and tag from the EXIF data. The photo gallery software automatically resizes images into different sizes to suit all kinds of screen resolutions and can also watermark them. Visitors to your hosted Piwigo gallery can post comments and rate your images as well as mark them as favourite. You can also create an RSS feed. Piwigo has decent privacy controls, and you can also extend a…

Laidout This is a desktop publishing app that’s particularly useful for working on multi-page, cut and folded booklets. The app’s approach to imposing pages is broad enough to allow non-rectangular pages. Thanks to this feature you can use it to create just about any sort of layout on pieces of packaging. When working with books and magazines, Laidout allows editing in either the master printing page order or as spreads. Its developer has been using Laidout to lay out his comics into books for over a decade now and also uses it to make small booklets by chopping up tabloid-sized paper. The latest version uses the Cairo library for rendering graphics. Laidout actually does some desktop publishing tasks, such as impositioning, better than well-known open source DTP, Scribus, but is…

XAMPP The idea behind XAMPP is to put out a single convenient package that you can use as a sandbox to test and develop web applications. It produces an open source cross-platform web server solution stack that consists of the Apache HTTPServer, MariaDBdatabase, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages along with several other libraries and tools. It also bundles important modules and you can install additional PHP modules via PEAR. It also supplies libraries such as libjpeg, libpng, and libzlib, which are required by several popular open source web apps. To assist with administration, the suite bundles phpMyAdmin to manage the databases, and the secure and speedy ProFTPD FTP server along with other utilities. Installing XAMPP is simple and well-documented. Once you’ve installed it…

Maker skills are constantly evolving but there are a few keys skills that provide a foundation for makers. First, always be curious: ask ‘How, why does this work?’ A good hacker will always question how a device works and even take it apart to find out more. Second, think laterally. Look at a problem and think of ways to solve it. Don’t dismiss ideas too quickly, no matter how wild they may seem. Be supportive of others, help others to understand when they get stuck; offer support to those that require extra help for larger projects and one day you may well need their help. Practical skills are important, eg soldering is seen as a core skill as it can be used to repair old technology and invent new tech.…

“Now based on Chromium code and renders nearly all of the web perfectly.” When we last reviewed the Qupzilla web browser back in 2013 [see HotPicks, p70, LXF166], we focused on its fast launch time, tab support and relatively small memory consumption. A lot has changed since then, and we decided to revisit Qupzilla because of the dramatic update that’s been long-awaited and warmly welcomed. As you might know, for years there hasn’t been a single web browser built with the Qt interface library that could be considered decent competition to Firefox or Chrome. Konqueror was nearly abandoned, while Qupzilla, Rekonqand Otterwere still not mature and feature-rich. As a result, KDE users were unable to use modern heavyweight websites with a native and Qt-centric web browser, while Gnome could with…

Hi, I’m Sam Aaron and I’ve created a powerful new kind of musical instrument called Sonic Pi. Instead of a traditional instrument where you might strum strings or whack things with sticks live, you need to write code—we’re calling this live coding. Sonic Pi is entirely free and open source and is installed by default on Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian as well as being available for Debian, Ubuntu and others. I designed Sonic Pi with the aim to find a harmonious balance between three core principles: It needed to be simple enough for the 10 year old within you, joyful enough for you to lose yourself in play and powerful enough for your own expressions. After practicing live coding daily with Sonic Pi for over a year, I can perform in…

Our expert Les Pounder is a maker and works with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver its Picademy training. He writes a blog full of hacks at http://bigl.es Getting started with electronics is a fun, if a little daunting challenge. You have all of these components that do something but where do you start? Well, why not the Explorer HAT Pro? This is a platform for experimentation that offers a forgiving interface for the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO). We can use sensors, motors and capacitive touch inputs with the HAT to create all manner of projects. In this tutorial, we’ll cover a few things you can do along with a little electronics. For this project you’ll need any 40-GPIO pin Raspberry Pi (B+, Zero, 2 or 3), the latest Raspbian…

The first task you’ll need to undertake is to grab the latest version of Hypriot from http://blog.hypriot.com/downloads or https://github.com/hypriot/image-builder-rpi/releases. Let’s assume it’s in your ~/Downloads folder. This image is zipped so your second task will be to unzip it, ensuring you have the required 1.5GB available: This image of Hypriot is now ready to be dd -ed to a handy SD card. In our case, we’re calling the SD device /dev/sdX and to check where the card is mounted on your machine, plug it in and type lsblk to see a list of block devices and their associated nodes. When you’ve got this information, you’ll need to transfer the image like this: Once that prcoess is done your SD card will be ready to go. Alternatively, check out Hypriot’s own…

Most hardware issues can usually be traced to drivers, and Linux is no exception. We’ve seen how the lspci -v command can reveal which driver (or module) is linked to which device. Another tool for displaying these modules is lsmod, which displays a comprehensive list of all modules that are currently in use. The ‘Used by’ column lists which hardware devices each module is linked to—multiple entries are common because some drivers come in multiple parts (your graphics card requires drivers for the kernel and X server, eg). Armed with a combination of lspci -v and lsmod you can identify which particular module is being used by a specific hardware device. Once you have the module name, type the following to learn more about it: modinfo <module> . Replace <module>…

If your driver installation failed for whatever reason and your computer will no longer boot, there’s a fix in recovery mode available that can help. While turning on the system, press the escape button at the Grub bootloader, and choose ‘recovery mode’ for your kernel. Drop down to ‘root shell’ and run the ATI uninstaller using the following commands. Note, don’t mistype any of them as they could break your system, especially the rm –rf command. $ cd /usr/share/ati/ $ sh ./fglrx-uninstall.sh $ cd ~ $ rm -rf /etc/ati/ $ apt-get remove -purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrxamdcccle Next, run the following command to restore your xorg.conf file to its default settings: $ dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg Now your computer should be able to boot with the default radeon drivers the next time that…

One of the biggest issues in 3D printing is overhangs. Ideally, you’ll create a model that doesn’t have any, but unfortunately for the vast majority of prints that just isn’t possible. To get around the issue you can add small supports to your model that will reinforce the construction as the layers of the model are being built up. Then once the model is complete they can be quickly removed. Supports take a few seconds to add and thankfully don’t have to be added manually. In Slic3r click onto the Print Settings tab and then scroll down to the Support Material settings. Make sure you click the ‘Generate support material’ and adjust the pattern spacing and raft layers to your particular print’s requirements. Depending on the printer and material you’re…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos (@mactsouk) has an M.Sc. in IT from UCL and a B.Sc. in Mathematics. He’s a DB-admining, software-coding, Unix-using, mathematical machine. Hopefully, you’ll be feeling more comfortable with Rust, which means it’s time to deal with a subject that’s very important in systems programming and Operating Systems: file I/O. Rust’s strict programming rules come in handy when dealing with files because it reduces errors and bugs and allows you to concentrate on what really matters—which is the algorithm and the operations that you want to perform. First, we’ll present some simple examples before continuing with more advanced topics, such as processing text files and memory-mapped file I/O. This tutorial will also cover some important Rust topics, including pointers, pattern matching and the usize and isize types. If…

Our expert Jonni Bidwell is tired of people asking him what fuzzing means and has taken to answering the question by holding up a picture of a rabbit. Despite the name half-implying those warm and fuzzy feelings (increasingly rare as middle age marches on), the practice of fuzz testing is in fact pretty brutal—at least if you are the program being fuzzed anyway. Ultimately any program accepts input, whether in the form of command-line options, data from a web form, incoming data packets and GUI events etc. Ideally, these are all correctly formatted and easily parsed by the program, which processes them and hopefully goes on to produce sensible output. But sometimes it doesn’t work like that—maybe a packet/file gets corrupted or the user uses the wrong number of dashes,…

Booting from ISO I followed your tutorial on Gummiboot in LXF194 and have found it a much simpler way of booting my computer. I was fine with the old Grub but Grub 2 became a nightmare to understand, so the simple boot files of Gummiboot are a welcome return to sanity. On the other hand, Grub 2 does allow me to keep an ISO image of SystemRescueCd in my /boot partition and boot directly from it in case of problems—it saves having to keep a rescue disc or USB stick handy. I have searched for a way to do this with Gummiboot but have so far failed, is it possible to boot an ISO in Gummiboot using the loop mounting as you can in Grub 2? Oliver Collier First of…

Speaking of lightweight, here is a distro that may well be filled with helium. Light it may be, but orthodox it certainly isn’t. 4M Linux uses the JWM window manager for a start, which may not have encountered before. Like the other distros, it boots as a live environment and can also be installed to your hard disk, but even the installation process is different. You need to prepare a partition beforehand (one is all it needs) then run the installer. That means you need a partition editor, which you can find in any of the *buntu distros.…

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…

We’re celebrating the best in the open source world this issue, by picking our top 100 tools of the open source crop. The one proviso being this is an impossible job, with tens of thousands of projects, tools, services, applications and more in constant development, singling out a meagre 100 as the best seems somewhat presumptive. But we’ve tried and selected 100 tools you really should try. Some are old stalwarts you’ll know and love, others are cutting edge technologies well worth investigating. We’ve stuck on the whole to desktop tools, so everyone can give them a spin. To help you jump to the tools you need we’ve split them into handy categories and roughly ranked them in order of excellence. Again, they’re all good but we wanted to try…

Firefox is recruiting the millions of users it has around the world to help figure out what new features should be included in its open source web browser. It’s doing this with its new Test Pilot Program, which enables users to try out new experimental features and feedback to the team at Mozilla so it knows what they think about them. Crucially, you can easily turn the features on and off at any time, so if there’s an innovative new addition that has broken the web for you, it’s easy to revert back to the standard experience. Mozilla is also promising full disclosure of the type of information users are share with them while using the Test Pilot. According to the Mozilla blog, you’ll be able to test out the…

RASPBIAN 2016-05-10 The popular Raspberry Pi operating system Raspbian, which is based on Debian, has an updated build with a number of new features. Top of the list is fixing the flaky Bluetooth support that was brought in with the Raspberry Pi 3 and making it much easier to enable through the Raspbian UI. Bluetooth audio is now supported, and an SD card copier tool is now included to make backing up Raspbian quick and easy. Elsewhere Scratch, Sonic Pi, Node-RED, BlueJ and PyPy have been updated and the Linux kernel has been updated to version 4.4. To find out more check out the release notes at http://bit.ly/RaspbianUpdate. RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX 6.8 A new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is now available to download. Now six years…

Anti-APNG I believe it’s newsworthy that Google is effectively blocking the inclusion of an already ready patch to include APNG support in Chromium/Blink. Google’s reaction is so blatantly against the community and so clearly in protection of Google’s own WebP that nobody uses that I can’t help but clench my fists. I would very much appreciate if you could spread the news to your readers and colleagues so that theiInternet may finally be free of the legacy of GIF. Here’s the thread: http://bit.ly/LXF212apng Oleg, Russia. Neil says: I understand your frustrations in that Google appears to be unwilling to support a format you want. But perhaps the bigger picture here is that both GIF and APNG are deprecated formats in a modern web world? I do agree that it’s odd…

Three of our selection: Evolution, Lightning and Kontact allow you to mark the days and the hours that constitute your working week, which is a fairly useful tweak. All the applications enable you to choose the colour for upcoming tasks. Evolution also allows you to choose where to display reminders and how long to do so before the appointment. Lightning houses all relevant settings under the calendar heading which houses four tabs. You can change the date text format, select the timezone, choose the default duration and start and end time for events and tasks, customise the behaviour for reminders. Makagiga has very minimal settings for the various components. You can change the colour theme, line width and margin of the notepad component. Similarly, you can choose to refresh the…

uGet Grabbing files from the internet can be an easy affair if you use the lightweight uGet download manager. By default, the application relies on the curl library but if you install the aria2 package on your distro it can take on some additional features, such as the ability to download torrents and metalinks, in addition to the standard download protocols, such as HTTP and FTP. uGet is an all-round download manager, it features a download queue, can pause and resume downloads and also accelerate your downloads by grabbing files from multiple parallel streams. You can use the download manager to prioritise the download queue and even regulate the speed of the individual downloads. The manager also includes an easy-to-use scheduler and can shutdown and hibernate your computer once it’s…

Brackets The open source Brackets IDE from Adobe is an easy-to-use HTML editor and code generator. It’s lightweight and has a very unassuming interface with numbered lines and the current position listed in the status bar. To help you create HTML web pages, the IDE comes with support for CSS and JavaScript. The app also supports syntax highlighting for these languages along with intelligent code completion. You can also ask the IDE to automatically close all braces. Pre-packaged binaries for Brackets are available to download from its website and when you open Brackets for the first time, you’re thrown straight into an HTML-based tutorial file with accompanying CSS, which is a great way to start exploring. The left-hand column lists the working files, and beneath that is a folder view.…

Qubes OS Adistro for security conscious users, Qubes OS works on the principle of security by isolation and divides the computer into a series of virtual machines or domains using Xen. Each virtual machine only has access to the services that it needs to perform the designated function, thus limiting the potential security threat. Despite all that virtualisation wizardry, Qubes offers a coherent and streamlined desktop. The install-only distro is based on Fedora and allows the user to install either KDE, Xfce or both the desktops. Besides the minimal graphical desktop, everything else in Qubes, including network cards and even disks, are separate virtual machines. The VMs are known as security domains or AppVMs and each of these has a different level of security defined in a template. By default,…

The Makerfaire brand isn’t just limited to large-scale events. Recently, the Makerfaire scheme has reached out to schools and educators to bring the Makerfaire experience into the classroom. School Makerfaires are a new edition and offer educators a simple template for constructing their own event. Generally, they don’t require any capital investment and just requires the school to sign up to a contract. The next tier up is a Mini Makerfaire. These events require an investment of time and money to make happen. Typically Mini Makerfaires are planned at least six months in advance and require the backing of a number of makers from the local community. In the UK, we’ve seen Mini Makerfaires in Manchester and London and they typically attract 2,000 to 4,000 visitors over a weekend. The…

Sadly, there are very few success stories when it comes to locating and bringing hackers to justice for SIP fraud. Catching the criminals is extremely difficult due to the fact the crime is usually committed in another country, crossing multiple jurisdictions. Even though the victim may operate in a country with an advanced cyber crime unit, the chances of retributive justice are slim to none. This harsh reality often spells financial disaster and can, in some cases, put businesses out of action or leave individuals with considerable personal debts to pay. There are no regulations in place that require carriers to reimburse customers in the event of fraud. So unlike credit card fraud, where you can call your bank and dispute suspicious charges, SIP fraud is a different matter and…

In this tutorial, we chose the top of the range Pro model but the basic version of the Explorer HAT comes with the same functionality that we cover. To reduce the cost the basic model has neither motor controllers nor any analog inputs or unprotected breakouts from the GPIO. The other board in the range is the Explorer pHAT, [see Tutorials, p64 LXF210]. The Explorer pHAT comes with analog inputs and the motor controller but loses the breadboard as it’s is made to fit on top of the Pi Zero, but can be used with any 40-pin model of Pi. To save space and cost, the Explorer pHAT has no touch inputs or connectors for crocodile clips, so can’t be used for this project. It’s also missing the LEDs, but…

This tutorial was inspired by and borrows heavily from Docker Pirates’ guide to setting up a Docker Swarm, which we strongly recommend you check out (http://blog.hypriot.com/post/how-to-setup-rpi-docker-swarm). There, the docker-machine tool is used to provision eight Raspberry Pi’s and connect them together in a swarm. The process involves creating and distributing a token, creating a Swarm Master and then enrolling seven loyal agents. Docker Swarm is a relatively new tool—in the early Docker days, links between containers were only (natively) possible if those containers were both on the same host. Thankfully, this is no longer the case, and tools like Docker Swarmand Docker Network make easy work of setting up distributed applications. If you are in possession of a spare Pi, then it’s reasonably straightforward to take this tutorial to the…

Our expert Afnan Rehman is a veteran PC and Linux gamer and is always in hot (but carefully monitored) pursuit of the best performance in the latest games. Graphics drivers: Choose and install the right graphics drivers on Ubuntu The hunt for gaming performance on Linux is a constant and ever-changing challenge. The market for discrete graphics cards has become dominated by the two graphics giants: Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). This has meant the decision boils down to one simple question: Which company’s graphics card do I buy? But once you delve deeper into the details this question becomes quite a complex one. The answer will change depending on your price/ performance preferance; your operating system; other components in your computer; and at times even where you live.…

Our expert Alastair Jennings has been building and reviewing 3D printers on a regular basis for Linux Format and Techradar.com. Through trial and error he’s found what works and what absolutely doesn’t. 3D printing Install the software and learn the skills you need to get printing Nothing comes close to the satisfaction of building and completing your own 3D printer. But now that all the wires and components are together, it’s time to fire it up, commission and prepare for the first print. In order to get started aside from the printer itself there’s quite a list of software that you’ll need to download and install before continuing. Some of the software such as Pronterface (www.pronterface.com) we covered very briefly before when talking about commissioning the printer, and in this…

Our expert James Hunt is an open source developer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center on the Clear Linux distro. ReStructuredText Using rST and creating visuals for your documents To some, creating documentation in plain text is considered somewhat crude: it might be good enough for writing a quick reminder to yourself but hardly appropriate for producing serious documentation. This tutorial seeks to dispel that myth by showing the facilities available to a console junkie who wishes to use plain text, but who won’t compromise on output quality. We’re going to encourage you to write your documentation in text, specifically in reStructuredText (rST). With the wealth of excellent graphical tools available for producing documentation, why would anyone in their right mind want to take a non-graphical approach and use plain…

Put simply, both usize and isize types are pointer-sized integer types—their actual size in bits depends on the architecture used. The problem that usize and isize types solve is having a type that’s big enough to hold any pointer or any offset in a data structure. This is an elegant solution to the presented problem because both usize and isize types are related to the architecture of the current system. On the other hand, an u64 variable is always 64 bits. However, bear in mind that the range of numbers that usize and isize can represent can change because it’s based on the platform you are compiling your code for so don’t make any assumptions about their size.…

Our expert Emily Ratliff is senior director of infrastructure security for the Core Infrastructure Initiative at The Linux Foundation. 1 Decide your goals First, decide whether you are looking only for security issues or whether you are looking for all types of correctness issues. Fuzzing finds a lot of low severity issues which may never be encountered in normal use. These may look exactly like security vulnerabilities with the only difference being that no trust boundary is being crossed, eg if you fuzz a tool that only ever expects input to come from the output of a trusted tool, you may finds lots of crashes which will never be encountered in normal usage. Are there other ways to get corrupt input into the tool? If so, you have found a…

Linux Format is proud to produce the biggest and best magazine that we can. A rough word count of LXF193 showed it had 55,242 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…

I thought this was some kind of dance, why would I want it on my Linux computer? That’s a different kind of Samba, this one is an open source version of the Windows SMB/CIFS networking protocol. So it’s a Windows program? No, it’s Linux/Unix software that implements the Windows SMB protocol, hence the name. SMB, what’s that? SMB (Server Message Block) was a Microsoft protocol for file and printer sharing, among other things. It was superceded by CIFS (Common Internet File System). These are the methods by which Windows computers share folders and printers. Aha, so it enabless me to access shared folders on Windows machines? Yes, and the other way around too. Samba has client and server programs. The client can mount shares on Windows computers, and the server…

Create the ideal FLOSS image-processing workstation Image processing and transform your photos into works of art. Next-gen browsers There’s no need to use a hulking, big-name browser anymore, lightweight options are better and faster. Audio editing Take your audio editing skills to the next level with the best open source tools to create the next big hit. Contents of future issues subject to change – we might be trapped inside our home server…

We have some bad news for people that are rocking older hardware: Debian has dropped support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors, which means the i386 architecture now requires a 686-class processor. This includes processors, such as the AMD K5 and K6, Cyrix III, Intel Pentium and Pentium with MMX. This class of processor will be supported in Jessie until at least 2018. For more information read the official announcement on the mailing list: http://bit.ly/Debian686. Jolla has been given a much needed shot in the arm with the news that a Russian software company, known in English as ‘Open Mobile Platform’ will be licencing its Sailfish OS in a bid to develop a domestic Russian operating system for mobile devices. This follows news that the Russian government intends to reduce…

Community News Playful Pi fun at Open Data Institute, Leeds. This month, we hear from Andy Clark in Leeds who took part in a recent community project: “I was asked by Emma Bearman from Playful Leeds if I could help people add enchantment to everyday things. Emma wanted a workshop combining arts and technology and it was key for those participating to do it without having to learn a lot of coding. The main theme was gnomes and how to enhance them to be interactive rather than passive. “We used the Raspberry Pi 3 as this gives Playful Leeds a general-purpose board that can be used in future workshops, and we used the Node-Red application, which is a visual tool for wiring the internet of things accessed via a web…

Computing is my job. I’m a Computing teacher in Ayrshire and have been a subscriber to your awesome magazine for a number of years. I saw the light in 2010 during my university course and have never looked back towards Windows, or at least not willingly. I regularly have discussions with my National 5/Higher pupils about Linux and it’s very surprising how many of them have a general understanding of it, or are at least aware of it. Last month one of my Linux connoisseur pupils told me I should watch Mr Robot, a TV series which follows a ‘hacker’. When I watched it, I was blown away. I would say that 99% of the systems they are running are Linux and the commands are all accurate and theoretically possible,…

There aren’t many ready-made PIMs in addition to the ones mentioned in our Roundup. Many popular ones such as iCal and Chandler aren’t developed anymore. If you are not averse to online alternatives there’s Google Calendar and RemeberTheMilk.com. Uber geeks can use the org-mode to add PIM functions to the Emacs text editor. You can also use individual applications for the various PIM functions. There are several capable task management applications and services, such as Tasque, Task Coach, Getting Things Gnome, TaskFreak and Trello. These apps will also help organise and manage todo lists. Some users have modest requirements that can be handled by non-automated solutions. If your requirements are fairly simple, you can also use the default calendar application embedded in your desktop environment in combination with a simple…

zuluCrypt You can control access to the data on your computer using user accounts and file permissions, but the only reliable mechanism to keep your personal data to yourself is to encrypt it. Using the graphical zuluCrypt, you can create an encrypted disk within a file or within a non-system partition or USB disk. It can also encrypt individual files with GPG. ZuluCrypt has an intuitive user interface and you can use it to create random keyfiles and use these to encrypt the containers. Italso includes the zuluMount tool that can mount all encrypted volumes supported by zuluCrypt. It can even mount encrypted TrueCrypt volumes and enables you to make a mount point public and share it. In addition to encrypting individual files, zuluCrypt can also perform block device encryption…

When the Raspberry Pi was announced it was trumpeted as an educational device with the admirable goal of getting more computers into schools and more children coding. Did the Raspberry Pi Foundation know that it would find uses in so many other areas, such as automation, robotics, games – not to mention a couple in low Earth orbit – and so many more? They probably had an idea of the extent of its uses but not of the sheer impact on so many areas. What has this got to do with sysadmin stuff? The Raspberry Pi is also finding use in cluster computers. If you are deploying a server farm containing many powerful computers and want to test it, you have a couple of problems. The first is the cost…

You should check whether you can use your backup software to store ACLs, and whether it will restore them later, if needed. If you find that it doesn’t, you can back them up separately with getfacl , like this: Include this file in your backup, then after restoring from the backup you can then restore the ACLs with: As other people will have created files in the shared directory and you can only set ACLs on files that you own, this command should be run as root, while the getfacl command can be run as a normal user provided that the user is allowed to read all files in the path.…

Our expert Jonni Bidwell wants to put linuxformat.com into a container. And then bury it. Docker is everywhere. It’s increasingly difficult to be on the internet without reading about it and how it’s changing the world. But, for mere mortals at least, getting anything more than a basic overview of what it is and what it does can often prove an arduous quest. A cursory explanation is easy enough: Docker leverages existing Linux technologies (LXC, cgroups, namespaces, advanced filesystems and miscellaneous voodoo) to create containers in which applications may be deployed in isolation. Containerisation’s roots go back to FreeBSD jails and Linux chroots, but Docker images are much more robust: Access to resources on the host machine are managed; the container has a separate process tree and its own virtual…

Our expert Nick Peers learned plenty about lsusb when configuring a Raspberry Pi Zero-based AirPrint server for his iPad using Raspbian and CUPS. Terminal Learn how to access useful informationa about your hardware Regardless of what desktop you use, beneath it all lies the shell, a command-line interface that gives you unparalleled access to your PC. In this series, we’re exploring different ways in which you can immerse yourself in the Terminal by learning practical new skills and in this tutorial, we’ll cover how to get key information about the inner workings of a system running Ubuntu (or another Debianbased distribution (distro)). There are plenty of system information tools accessible through your Unity desktop environment, but they’re scattered here and there, and rarely offer much in the way of detailed…

One common error that pops up around the end of the catalyst driver installation is the MESA error indicating that the installation wasn’t completed correctly. The easiest way to tell if your installation was affected is by checking the flgrxinfo output. If there is any mention of the word ‘mesa’ in the output, you may need to do some troubleshooting. If you run into this error there are several steps that are known to work to fix the problem. First, make sure that the restricted-modules package which is installed corresponds to the kernel you are running and that you are able to load the fglrx driver by issuing the command $ sudo modprobe fglrx . You may also try to unload the radeon and dri modules as well as the…

There are some interesting alternatives to markdown. An excellent contender is Org-mode, which is a hierarchical outline editor mode for Emacs. Although you can use Org-mode perfectly well to write documentation, you should be aware that it’s very reliant on the editor to make sense of the .org file format. You really wouldn’t want to edit an .org file in an editor that doesn’t support Org-mode as the Org-mode format adds in ‘noise’ in the form of asterisks (lots of the blitters). Also, if you get tempted to use some of org-mode’s many features, you’ll bloat the document with lots of extra meta-data (magic comments, tags, properties and timestamps eg). We find that Org-mode is excellent for taking notes, but not for writing documentation. However, your mileage may vary.…

In the previous tutorial [Tutorials, p88, LXF211], we covered how Rust supports four pointer types that can be categorised in two sets: references and raw pointers. Raw pointers are defined as *const T and *mut T; you can find in-depth guidance on raw pointers at http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.pointer.html. When you dereference a raw pointer you should use an unsafe block, because there’s no guarantee that the pointer is pointing somewhere safe. If you don’t, Rust will generate an error message, such as: There are also mutable references that allow you to mutate the variable you are borrowing. The following code shows that you need to include an extra block because you cannot use another_var while yet_an_var is in scope: Please note that you should use mut for both another_var and yet_an_var as…

Automated software analysis can be divided into two branches: static and dynamic. The former involves looking at code in situ whereas the latter involves running the code (either physically or virtually). Static analysis can reveal possible shortcomings using formal methods—those involving intensive study of, eg, the underlying logic and data-flow for the program. One of the original tools for doing this with C was Lint, and the term ‘linting’ is still used today describe the process of finding suspicious or extraneous bits of code. Dynamic software analysis is only useful for the parts of the code that are executed during the testing. As a result getting a good set of test inputs is critical, so code coverage tools (which record which functions and branches run in a given test) are…

When you boot your favourite Linux distro, you probably see a pretty splash screen. That’s Linux doing an impression of a swan, calm and serene on top but all sorts going on underneath. If you boot without the splash screen you will see a lot of text flying by. The first part is the kernel setting itself up, recognising hardware and loading drivers. But what if something doesn’t work right and you want this information? The kernel keeps a ring buffer, a buffer of fixed size, that keeps the most recent messages. You can view this with dmesg , (normally viewed through a pager): You can also use grep to filter relevant entries, so to search for disk-related messages you could use $ dmesg | grep sd . Most of…

There’s no doubt that Ubuntu is an extremely popular distro, and there are good reasons for this in terms of the user experience. That’s not enough to explain its domination of the consumer Linux; there are other distros that are equally as good from a technical point of view, have as friendly – or friendlier – desktops and great community support. Even people that don’t use Ubuntu regularly can see and respect its advantages; it’s a choice that many people make by default, and many other distros make when deciding to use it as their base. Contrast that with Systemd, just mentioning its name will have raised the blood pressure of some of our readership. It’s an alternative to the established systems, has good technical merits and is well supported.…