Table of contents for November 2017 in Linux Format

This issue we asked our experts: When you’re not streaming exciting, engaging and informative media around your homes, how do you stay entertained while using Linux? Jonnni Bidwell Linux is very entertaining – you can stream YouTube clips straight to the terminal, for example. There’s also a bit of a cottage entertainment industry emerging whereby phone-scammers are pranked into trying to figure out Linux systems, with hilarious results. “There’s no Start menu”. Nate Drake Variety is the spice of Linux. I often use The GNOME Tweak tool to install colourful new themes and icon sets while working. I also keep the point-and-click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky running in one corner. Does anyone know how to get past the weird eyeball? John Knight In some ways I’m a grumpy luddite:…

After the success of Nintendo’s NES mini and SNES mini compact consoles, which emulate classic games in micro cases designed like the larger originals, Atari has revealed it’s releasing the Ataribox (www.ataribox.com). This compact machine will come with a number of classic Atari games preinstalled, but unlike Nintendo’s offerings, the Ataribox will run on desktop components, as well as a form of Linux that should make tinkering with the box easier. The Ataribox will be available in two models – one with a classic wood grain front, and another that’s black and red – and will include an HDMI output, four USB ports and an Ethernet cable port. It’s also planned to support SD cards, which could make it straightforward to bring games, media and other content to your Ataribox.…

KORORA 26 Creating a Linux distribution that’s easy for new users, while providing advanced tools for experts, is a tricky balance to get right. Korora, a Fedora remix, attempts just that, and the latest version brings a host of new features including Cinnamon 3.4, GNOME 3.24, a new default desktop view with KDE Plasma 5.10, and an overall polish of the user experience. To find out more, and to download, visit https://kororaproject.org/about/news/korora-26-is-here. KALI LINUX 2017.2 For security testers and researchers, Kali is an essential distro, because it collects a number of security and forensic tools together in a Debian-based operating system. The latest version is now available and brings package updates from Debian’s Testing branch, along with a number of new utilities including hurl, a hexadecimal and URL encoder/decoder and…

Pi Wars 2018 Prepare to shout, “Roboteers, stand by!” Pi Wars has become an annual tradition in the same vein as the Pi Birthday weekend, and in 2018 it’ll celebrate four years of robotic carnage. Competitors from around the world come to Pi Wars, which is a two-day, challenge-based robotics competition for Raspberry Pi-controlled robots. These robots are created by teams who then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points with the chance to win prizes and trophies. In previous years, Pi Wars has seen teams from schools, families, groups of hobbyists and solo roboteers all battle for robotic supremacy. Pi Wars is a great event for those eager to build robots. Not only do you learn key programming and engineering skills, but you also get the chance to…

Documentation is usually the weak point in hobby projects, which is a pity when the solutions they come up with are so elegant. This Roundup found similar results, Android Virtual Device has all the documentation and support you can dream of, and when you use it together with Android Studio it’s even better. Genymotion has a great FAQ with the essential solutions to get you started, and if you’re going pro there’s a paid version. The documentation is top class and is clearly aimed at active developers. It’s the best around. Android_x86is very mature and has fantastic documentation, with a great FAQ. Community help is via Google Groups. It’s active and can help you when you run into problems. Anbox is so new there’s even documentation for getting it installed…

“You’ll discover how to stream your media to just about any device you can think of…” These days, we consume media – from music and photos to movies and TV – on a variety of devices in various locations. Digital media is both liberating and yet constricting at the same time. If you’ve built up a huge media library and want quick and easy access to it from any location, then you need a media server. A media server enables you to collect all your media together in one location – your PC’s main storage, a USB-attached drive or even a network-attached drive – and then access it from just about any smart device you own. These could be other computers, your phone or tablet, even the set-top box or…

By default, Emby will save all your recorded TV programmes in its own folder using filenames determined by your electronic programme guide’s (EPG) description of a show. If you want to place recordings into your media library, you’ll want to take some additional steps. First, navigate to the Live TV section under the Server Dashboard and switch to the Settings tab. From here you should choose where to save your recordings. Click the magnifying glass button next to Default Recording Path to select a specific folder, and then do the same with the two optional paths for movies and TV series if you want to save your recordings to the same folders as your media library. Next, scroll down and verify the ‘Automatically convert recordings to a streaming friendly format’…

We’ve seen how Emby uses plug-ins to support a range of TV tuners, but there are plugins that expand other aspects of the server, too. There’s the Auto-Organise plugin that’s used to automatically filter media into the correct folders, but if you select Plugins under Extras in the Manage Server dashboard and switch to the Catalogue tab you’ll find other plugins too. Many of these are used to help you organise your library – Auto Box Sets simplifies the task of creating film collections, while Gamebrowser enables you to link in your game library to Emby and even launch games using supported front-ends. IPTV makes it possible to import internet-hosted videos into your library Look out for Premium plugins, which aren’t free (PlayOn for example), plus plugins marked as Supporter,…

Shutter “Shutter has a number of useful editing tools for annotating an image” Screenshot tool Version: 0.94 Web: www.shutter-project.org Shutter is the program that you should launch instead of The Gimp if you want to label something on a screenshot, or obscure some details within it that you’d rather not make public. It’s perhaps the smartest and the most fully featured screenshot tool available on Linux (you can read about its closest rival, KSnip, in LXF223). Shutter hasn’t seen any updates since 2014, so the new version is a pleasant surprise. However, there aren’t too many changes this time around, apart of a few fixes that improves Shutter’s stability when exporting images to Imgur and Dropbox. But what’s got us really interested in the latest version of the program…

Our expert Les Pounder is a freelance maker and hacker specialising in the Raspberry Pi, micro:bit and Arduino. Les travels the UK helping people to learn maker skills. He writes a blog at http://bigl.es. For this month’s project we shall build our own door security system, which can be used to log who enters a property using inexpensive RFID (radio frequency identification) cards. These RFID cards are read using an RFID reader – the RFID-RC522 – which gives a unique ID for each card. This is checked against a dictionary of accepted cards, and if found a relay is triggered, disconnecting a 12V circuit used to power the magnetic lock. Watch your fingers, though: the magnet is strong and can supply 280kg of force! High and low There are two…

So what’s all the fuss about using an additional Wi-Fi card? In short, there are several modes that are potentially available on network cards. These modes include Monitor, Infrastructure, Mesh and Managed, as well as a few others. Most of the time users won’t have to understand or even make use of the modes. As a result the hardware manufacturers don’t spend much effort on making cards that work well with monitor mode. While putting this article together, it took several attempts to find a USB card that works for Raspbian. It’s possible to find out which modes your network card works with using the command iwconfig info wlan0 (or other wireless interface). This will give various groups of information, including details on Supported modes. By default, Kismetconfigures the network…

Run a new program on a single chosen core: The -c switch chooses the core (in this case, 1, the second core) and gparted is the command of choice. Run a new program on multiple cores: In this situation, GPartedis being bonded to the first, second, third and fifth cores. Note that “0-2,4” would be equally valid syntax as “0,1,2,4”. Check the PID of an existing process: Note the missing CPU number – this is presumably meant to be run before this next command. Next, change the affinity of an existing process: This instruction would assign the fifth and sixth processor cores to an already running program that was running with a process ID of 20,000.…

If you’ve not yet decided whether or not 360-degree video is for you, try taking some 360-degree photos with your phone to see if you’re likely to catch the bug. There are plenty of apps – including the default Android camera app, if your manufacturer hasn’t replaced it, or the Google Street View app – that will enable you to sweep your phone in front of you and stitch together a perfect sphere of images around where you’re standing. The Street View app, as the name suggests, makes it possible to upload 360-degree stills directly into Google’s mapping database. The trick to getting good 360-degree photos is to stand as still as possible and try to move the phone and not your hand. Although it’s nigh on impossible to be…

Syncing Google Calendar with Evolution is straightforward thanks to its native support. Navigate to the Calendar section and select the Calendar option when you click the down arrow next to New. In the window that appears you’ll see a drop-down menu for Type. Simply select Google and provide the relevant information. Bear in mind that if you’re using two-factor authentication then you’ll need to generate an application password. For other webmail services you can point to your private iCALlink with the WebDAV option. You could also download an ICS file and import it into your local calendar, but changes won’t automatically sync back to the server. Unfortunately, Thunderbird is less straightforward; support for calendars at the time of writing could charitably be called experimental! You’ll need to install an add-on…

It’s worth knowing how to use ask queries. You can select individual pages, properties or all pages in particular categories. Properties can be selected by enclosing the property name square brackets followed by a double colon ‘::’ and the value you wish to filter on: [[Has Distribution::Ubuntu]]. You can use {{PAGENAME}} to dynamically populate the query with the current page name, or a ‘+’ to match all values for that property. A chain using the same property to form a hierarchy (Mint is based on Ubuntu is based on Debian) can be followed by repeating the property in the query. [[Has Distribution.Has Distribution::Debian]] will return ‘Mint’. You can select pages belonging to given categories in a similar way except you only need a single colon ‘:’ to separate Category from…

To write your own Python script and take advantage of eBPF you should first have an idea of what you want to achieve. Put simply, you can’t accidentally create a Python script that uses eBPF and does the job! The following eBPF script, which is called hwBPF, just prints a static message on the screen every time a new process is created on your Linux system. It’s the simplest form of an eBPF script: From the Python code of hwBPF you can see that the C program is kept in the myProgram variable and loaded using the BPF(text= myProgram) command. The trace_print() Python function is a bcc routine that reads eBPF data and prints it on the screen. The bpf_trace_ printk() function of the C program is a kernel facility…

There’s no switch statement in Kotlin because it’s been replaced by the when statement, which will be illustrated in the useWhen.kt Kotlin program. The most important part of useWhen. kt is the following: You can do many clever things with the when statement such as using ranges and having a default case, which is declared using the else keyword. Additionally, you can use expressions as in the following in a when statement: If this case, the when statement evaluates the first and the second logical expressions and a branch is executed when it is true. Note, only the first branch that matches will be executed. Executing useWhen.kt will create this output:…

Our expert Kent Elchuk is an experienced web developer who’s built many web applications for high schools, colleges, small businesses and personal pleasure. Back in issue LXF225, we covered how to set up Linux and build very basic Cordova apps. This time, we will take things up a notch and make an app that can do more than just open a web page from an app button. By the time you get to the end of this short article, you’ll know how to build an Android app using Cordova that will be able to do a range of tasks: from using the Wordpress REST api to return json strings and getting images from your camera and sending them to a remote server. The first step to building an app is…

Linus Torvalds had a simple ambition for his pet OS project: world domination. We waited years for Linux to gain traction on the desktop, only to find it sneaking on to people’s mobile phones instead. Now there’s another avenue of attack: the living room. The Kodi box/ stick is becoming ubiquitous – often for the wrong reasons, but it’s there nonetheless. Most people using one have no idea what Kodi is, let alone the Android operating system that they run and its Linux roots. Of course, this also means that if they’re even aware of the term free software, they think it means getting content for free. Kodi has suffered in terms of reputation with the association of its work with a piracy platform, but it isn’t the first to…

BBC Basic is back! Did it ever go away? We explain how you can enjoy the olden days and relive your BASIC coding youth. Administeria is back! Pop those sysadmin hats back on, we re-enter the deepest and darkest dungeon of Linux Format Towers. Distro building is back! Screw you Ubuntu, we’re building our own distro! Create a custom desktop, add your own apps and bundle it up. Custom desktops are back! Stop having new desktops heaped on to you – we Roundupthe best of the crop for you to run and enjoy. Contents of future issues subject to change – we might be too busy singing Back in Black.…

We all want to be successful, in one way or another, don’t we? And when it comes to our favourite kernel the same is true. Most people want to think that they’re backing a winner, right? It’s a bit puerile, but obsessing on Linux usage figures (even if it’s just web browsing) does at least give some tangible bread crumbs to rally around. Forget the two billion active Android devices,(1) overlook the 498 of the top 500 super computers running Linux,(2) ignore the 98 per cent of the top million websites(3) powered by Linux… lately people seem to be most excited that mainstream Linux use(4) topped 3.3 per cent, creeping closer to the 3.8 per cent of Mac OS X 10.12 users. Our tribe is bigger than your tribe, my…

Last issue we reported on the Librem 5, a device that’s being billed as the world’s first free and open smartphone with end-to-end encryption built in. It’s currently raising funds via crowd sourcing (https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5 – due to end 31 October), and the project has now had a major boost with the news that the GNOME Foundation is partnering with Purism, the company behind the Librem 5, to make it a reality. The GNOME Foundation promises to provide hackfests, tools, emulators and build awareness that surround moving GNOME/GTK onto the Librem 5 phone. This is a big sign of confidence in the project at such a crucial time in raising funds, with Neil McGovern, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, saying that “having a Free/ Libre and Open Source software stack…

“At The Linux Foundation, we believe that the open source projects with sustainable ecosystems are the ones that matter, because they provide a codebase and security that can be relied on. And there’s a consistent pattern among these projects. First, developers create open source projects. Those projects are used in products, and value is created from those products. Finally, that value is reinvested into the projects. This virtuous cycle defines sustainable open source projects, the kind that you see hosted at foundations like The Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation and others. Many individuals and organisations don’t understand where their project stands though, and how to make sure it’s sustainable both now and in the future? That’s why we’ve released free resources to help anyone who wants to get involved in…

Open CAD When it comes to CAD, interoperability is key for me. To that end, code can be ported from OpenSCAD into FreeCAD via FreeCAD’s OpenSCAD workbench. There’s a handy tutorial here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=G66zAjnZpcc. From Inkscape, there’s an Extension to Generate from Path /Paths to OpenSCAD, available here: www.thingiverse.com/ thing:25036. There’s also an openSCAD Export add-on for Blender: https://github.com/graphicsforge/io_mesh_openscad. The advantage of porting OpenSCAD code over to FreeCAD is the expanded variety of export options available over OpenSCAD’s limited choices. Mike Covington, WA, US, Neil says: Thanks for the CAD tips. With an open source approach being used more widely with 3D printing, in the maker community and being pushed into the creative 3D world with Blender and even gaming engines via Unrealet al, interoperability is an important cornerstone. Linux Nexus Having…

“Ideally you’ll install the server portion of Emby on an always-on 24/7 device” Your streaming media setup requires two components: a server and one or more clients. The server is what powers your media streaming library, and you then access it through a variety of clients depending on what platform – desktop, mobile or smart device – you’re connecting from. We’ve chosen Emby (http://emby.media) as our media server. It offers a polished user interface, adds lots of useful detail to your media by downloading metadata and artwork via internet “scrapers”, and includes extra features such as multi-user access and playback on a wide range of devices. Upgrading to the Emby Premiere option (prices start from £3.99 a month) gives you lots more choices, including live TV and DVR facilities, as…

1 Locate incorrect media Emby should tag your media correctly, but you can manually edit and add information and artwork (metadata) to any media file, such as home videos. Click the slide-out menu button and choose Metadata Manager under Admin. Browse your library using the left-hand pane to select an item, such as a TV show, season or an individual episode. 2 Find automatic match If you spot a mismatch, press the vertical ellipsis next to the Save button and click Identify. Enter one or more criteria – most mismatches are caused by shows sharing the same name, so entering a year will help. Alternatively, locate the show on one of the supported databases and enter its ID number to ensure you get the perfect match. 3 Manually edit metadata…

1 Install the add-on Open Kodi, then navigate to System>File manager and double-click Add source. Enter http://kodi.emby.media into the <none> field, name the source Emby and click OK. Now browse to System>Settings>Add-ons>Install from zip file and select Emby>repository.emby.kodi-1.0.3.zip. Finally, select Install from Repository>Kodi Emby AddOns>Video add-ons>Emby. 2 Configure the add-on Click Install. After installation, Emby will attempt to detect your server – select it followed by your username, then install the add-on to control playbook. Choose whether or not to enable music, and tap Yes to enable direct streaming should you need access outside of your home. Once done, click the add-on and choose Configure to edit settings – Sync Options is a good place to start. 3 Add a skin While the add-on syncs your library, tap OK followed…

1 Configure live TV Open Emby in your web browser and navigate to the Settings section. Select Server Dashboard, scroll down and select Live TV under Extras. Start by clicking the + Add button next to Tuner Devices. If you’re running a HD Homerun Connect, click Detect My Devices and let Embyscan the network for it. Select it under New Devices and then click Save. 2 Add via service Some services are supported via plugins, including TVHeadEnd, so if you have that set up as your back-end, select the Services tab to install the plugin. It should appear under Installed Services. Click the vertical three dots next to its name and choose Settings to enter the information needed to access your back-end – username and password in TVHeadEnd’s case. 3…

The beauty of Linux is that it’s perfect for headless access, so once configured, hide your server away somewhere out of sight and administer Emby through any web browser, then make sure SSH is enabled on your server for those times when you need to access the OS remotely. Ubuntu uses OpenSSH – so if necessary, install it as follows: You can then log in through any other computer or mobile using an appropriate SSH-compatible client, such as the cross-platform Termius (www.termius.com). Alternatively, simply log on through the Terminal on another Linux machine running OpenSSH: Substitute hostname with the host name or IP address of your server, and username with your user account name from that computer. If you need access to the desktop, then configure access via VNC –…

Reproducible builds can benefit proprietary software/firmware, too. You will recall the Volkswagen emissions scandal of 2015, in which diesel vehicles were fitted with ‘defeat devices’. These detected when they were being tested on a rolling road and forced the engine into being much more environmentally friendly than it would otherwise be. It’s been estimated that some 11 million vehicles (not just VW’s) were affected in total. Outside of a test environment, vehicles actually exceeded legal emission limits, emitting dangerous levels of nitrous oxides, but possibly saving some fuel in the process. To prevent such cheating in future, the idea of open sourcing engine management code was mooted. This may one day happen, but for now these are closely guarded secrets. Even if they were not it’d be hard, given past…

Back in August we saw the release of the latest Raspbian. This time it moves away from Wheezy to become the first Raspbian based on Debian Stretch. The biggest change is how the network interfaces are named. In previous releases the wired interface was eth0 and wireless was wlan0, but with Raspbian Stretch they’re now replaced with Predictable Network Interface Names (http://bit.ly/debian-new) that provide a consistent interface name based upon the MAC address of the interface (for USB devices such as the Pi) or the index numbers provided by the BIOS for other devices. Predictable Network Interface Names aren’t new – distros such as Mageia have been using them for a number of years – but this sudden change has caused a small rumble in the Pi Community. Projects that…

We’ve made a great tool that will open a door if a valid card is presented, but how can we find out our ID number so that we can add it to the dictionary? The solution is to can create another Python project in Thonny and this time we call it card-check.py. We start the code by importing the SimpleMFRC522 library and then create an object that will enable a connection to the reader. Next, we need to print some instructions to the user. Then we start a loop that will try to run the code contained within. Inside that loop we read the card details and then print them to the Python shell. The final two lines handle the user when they exit the application. Save the code and…

Our expert John Knight When he’s not playing video games in French, John can usually be found beating a bass drum down to a kind of smooth paste. In this new world of multi-core computing, tasksetenables a user to bond a program – or “assign affinity” – with a specific CPU or CPU core. Why? In certain situations, tying a process to a single core can reap performance benefits by a more efficient use of CPU caching. Furthermore, tasksetalso enables you to spread processes across multiple cores, giving you ultimate say over how certain load is spread in the system. This is a topic full of jargonese and scary hexadecimal values, so rather than give a comprehensive account of taskset’s workings, we hope to break tasksetdown to its key and…

Our expert Adam Oxford is a journalist and Code for Africa StoryLab Fellow. He’s writing online courses to teach newsrooms how to use the latest digital tools – including 360 video cameras. Looking back it seems strange, but some of the first “killer apps” for smartphones were augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) in nature. As early as January 2009, just 18 months after the original iPhone appeared, there were already several star chart maps that used the built-in GPS and accelerometer to track the night sky using the phone screen. It seems strange because ever since then, AR and VR have been the Next Big Thing. Always exciting, always promising… but never quite compelling enough to hit the big time. Pokemon Go! came and went, leaving a million…

This tutorial operates on the assumption that you’re using a free webmail account or want to sync work email with your mail client. While this does cover the usual scenario for most people, you might be interested in hosting your own mail server. There are a number of reasons why you may want to do this. Perhaps you’ve become concerned about your webmail provider’s security and privacy practices, or maybe you want to set up email accounts for everyone in your household. If this sounds like your cup of tea, then one of the most straightforward ways of hosting your own email is installing iRedMail. This is a full-featured, open source mail server that will manage email, calendars, contacts and spam automatically using its in-built components. In addition, the suite…

Ask queries can also be versatile. Along with the page name you can specify which fields to return and the parameters controlling the output format. It’s worth reviewing the documentation and list of available output formats at www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Result_ formats. The same information on a single page can be presented in a number of different ways to emphasise some aspect of the data, such as a bar graph for number of downloads and a timeline for support periods. If you have a large set of pages with several properties, the ‘datatables’ format can be useful as it provides a dynamic search feature to filter the result set. Each format has a documentation page that details the various parameters, which will work with that particular format. Generally, you can limit the number of…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos Mihalis Tsoukalos is a UNIX Administrator, a Programmer, a DBA and a Mathematician who enjoys writing articles and learning new things. He is the author of the “Go Systems Programming” book. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. It’s time to get serious with Kotlin! We’re going to learn about two critical subjects: Kotlin Data Types and Control Flow, which includes arrays and lists as well as for, while and do-while loops. Additionally, you’ll learn more about ranges, exception handling and null safety. Soon you’ll be writing your own command line utilities in Kotlin! Data types Kotlin offers support for the standard data types: various types of integers, floats and doubles as well as boolean variables and strings. What’s key is that you can define…

Our expert Nate Drake After salting away his pirate treasure, Nate now works as a technology journalist, specialising in cybersecurity and retro tech. At midday on Saturday 6 December 1941 the Japanese Government instructed its ambassador to the US, Kichisaburo - Nomura to stand by for a 14-part message, to be presented to the US Secretary of State at 1pm the following day, after which he was to destroy the coding machine on which the message was received. If this news came as a surprise to the Japanese diplomats, they would have been further astonished to know that most of the message had been decoded and rendered into English by the US Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) hours before they delivered it. Unfortunately, this came too late to prevent the Japanese…

Once you’re happy with the base app, you can build on various other libraries that provide bells and whistles, such as datepickers. This tutorial will not add anything - it’s more of a ‘good to know that’ reminder. Now that you have Cordova set up and are using NetBeansas the editor, you can add libraries into your project too, such as Jquery mobile. To add a library, right-click Site Root and click Properties. Select CDNJS, then click Add and search by name (for example, Jquery). Then click Search. At this point, you have access to libraries and files and can add them to your project. Once you choose to add the libraries, NetBeanswill download them and add them into the js/libs folder. You can access them with script tags in…

A nasty new Bluetooth exploit, known as BlueBorne, is making its around the world, affecting unpatched Android, Linux and Windows devices. According to researchers (who published an in-depth whitepaper on the exploit at http://bit.ly/2xjlmki), devices that haven’t been recently updated could be compromised by an attack from within 32 feet or 9753.6 millimetres. Worryingly, all the device needs to do is have Bluetooth turned on – there’s no need for the user to click any malicious links or pair with an unknown device. Android and Linux devices are said to be most vulnerable to this attack, because Bluetooth runs with high system privileges, and are vulnerable to memory corruption exploits. So, make sure all your devices are updated with the latest security patches. Canonical has teamed up with Microsoft to…

“Linux Kernel 4.14, the new long term support (LTS) branch of the project led by Linus Torvalds, is set to be released this November, bringing with it a significant change in the maintenance life cycle of Linux overall. LTS branches have recently enjoyed at least two years of maintenance after their releases. However, at Linaro Connect in San Francisco, a few weeks back, Iliyan Malchev (Google) announced that the maintenance life cycle for LTS kernels would triple to a six-year cycle starting with version 4.4. The extended time will encourage hardware vendors to adopt the latest available LTS. While this change is particularly appealing for devices such as smartphones running Android, it’ll also be beneficial to Google’s new Project Treble, which focuses on addressing another important issue: the fragmentation of…

I’m surprised at my own reaction to the news of the demise of the Unity desktop. When I read the news, all I could think was: let the whole Ubuntu thing go the way of Unity! I first came to Linux through Ubuntu, more than a decade ago, and was very pleased with it… until it stopped working. Suddenly I couldn’t get my system to carry out many of the tasks it had previously done so easily. I was eventually able to move to Linux Mint with the MATE desktop and later to Linux Mint Debian Edition and SparkyLinux. While Ubuntu brought me to Linux, I felt so badly deceived when it abandoned me for Unity that I’ve sustained a longstanding dislike of the whole Ubuntu project. Suddenly, with news…

Once your emulator is running, it’s time to install your favourite apps. On a regular Android device, you would have Google Play or even FDroid. In the emulators, you’ll usually have to install Gapps to have access to the Play Store. There are other ways to add applications to your virtual phone. You can use Adb towards the virtual device: this works in both the emulators and the containerised solutions such as Anbox. Android_x86 comes with the Play store installed by default, making it very quick to get started. In the case of AVD you can run regular installed applications or the application you’re developing in Android Studio. Installing applications using Google Play is included in some of the images, but not all of them. Another way to install from…

If you can jump through all the troubleshooting hoops that are involved when installing AndyOS through Wine, then you might want to check it out. This is a commercial software that relies on Virtualbox, but the ISO file isn’t available from the web page. However, it may be interesting to test out if and when the developers decide to support Linux. They have had an alpha test for Linux which recently closed, but they haven’t released any official plans to move on with a Linux version just yet. AndyOS installs with a Windows installer but if you use the Winepackage then you can actually get the install running and have it running in a Winesession. The thinking behind AndyOS is that it caters for the needs of gamers and so…

ON NETWORK DIAGNOSTICS“Tcpdump is an incredible Wireshark equivalent for command line nerds” Sean Finney is a contract engineer and Raspberry Pi tinkerer who’s almost completed the switch to becoming a full-time Linux user. He’s a jack of all trades: involved in programming, fault diagnosis and fighting with LibreOffice’s take on .docx compatibility. He owns heavy machinery, but so far hasn’t used it to destroy his laptop. He was good enough to share his experiences and advice with us… Linux Format: What’s your background? Sean Finney: I’m an electrical engineer/PLC (programmable logic controller) programmer by trade. I would say my job role is quite unique in that respect – it’s so diverse. One day I could be stripping a machine down, repairing and rebuilding, the next project planning, the next, resolving…

While build reproducibility as a whole is progressing well (see the graph, right), it’ll be some time before general users can join in the effort for everyday packages. However, reproducibility has been identified as a priority for certain packages, including the Bitcoin Core client and Tor. These projects, being concerned with people’s (magic internet) money and privacy, have good reason to embrace any means of furthering their security. To that end both have adopted Gitian for building and distributing their binaries. Gitian was developed by the Bitcoin community who, being a small group, realised that the handful of machines (developers’ personal laptops usually) they were using to build the official client, represented single points of failure. Development started in the early Bitcoin days, back in 2011. Given the volumes of…

In brief... Designed for the Pi Zero range, but compatible with all 40-pin GPIO Pis, this board offers a safe and robust introduction to working with the higher voltages commonly found in home automation devices. It comes with analog inputs, buffered 24V tolerant inputs and an SPI interface, and can become the heart of your project. A home monitoring and automation board for £12? Surely that’s not possible? Well gang, it’s time to readjust your levels of expectation… The team from Pimoroni has released another of its Raspberry Pi Zero W sized “pHAT” boards. The Automation pHAT is a tiny board, designed for the Pi Zero, but compatible with all 40-pin GPIO Pi. It features plenty of solutions for working with higher voltage devices, and comes with a line of…

Our expert Stuart Burns is a virtualisation specialist for a Fortune 500 company. When not create cloud-based servers he can be found fiddling with Linux systems and creating interesting things. One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is that it’s so portable and small. To illustrate that fact while doing something interesting, this tutorial will reveal how to configure a Pi 3 to run from a car cigarette lighter while enabling the driver to collect Wi-Fi location and other data using a USB GPS and an external USB Wi-Fi module. We’ll then explain how to map this data in Google Maps. Start off by downloading the Raspian Lite Image file from www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian. Download the zip file and unzip it. Ensure that only the image file is extracted. There…

Entirely inconclusive. Even scaling DiRT Rally up to all the CPU cores and scaling it back to one, the differences were negligible (GPU limited?–Ed) – particularly with the FPS counter jumping all over the place depending on what is in the player’s view. That doesn’t mean the exercise is wasted though: different games and different programs will have varying results, and number-crunching games like the XCOM or Football Manager series might make for interesting tests. In other experiments we played with Netflix under Chrome, which has an irritating habit of dropping frames when given a default spread across all cores. However, when we set the affinity to two cores, performance was rock solid. On the flip-side, after hearing on a video that the PlayStation 2 had a dual CPU setup,…

The rules of 360-degree video haven’t been written yet, so stylistically you’ll be inventing them as you go along. There are some practical things to consider when shooting that’ll give you the best footage to work with, though. Remember that whatever camera you work with, 360-degree video is stitched together from multiple picture in much the same way as a panoramic shot on your camera or phone. You’re most likely to see rather odd effects where those seams meet. The most obvious areas are directly above and below the camera. Depending on the model, you may end up with weird artefacts, black dots or an invisible spot. When you’re shooting a regular video, you need to think about framing a shot for the benefit of the viewer. With 360-degree video…

Our expert Bobby Moss develops cloud microservices for a global IT consultancy and its clients. In his spare time he works on free software projects and tinkers with old hardware. In the age of cloud email providers, smartphones and machine-compiled JavaScript you’d be forgiven for thinking that the mail client should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Yet every Linux distribution, commercial operating system and mobile device bundles one by default. There are many reasons why you should use one. The most obvious is you can still access your contacts, calendars and email on your laptop when there’s a broadband outage or you’re travelling without Wi-Fi. You can also encrypt messages with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) keys instead of relying on fallible encryption schemes from your service provider. The…

Our expert Jamie Munro Information governance professional Jamie has used MediaWiki to build information asset registers and risk management tools. He likes to link all the things. Wikis can be powerful tools, but with great power comes the responsibility for the unholy, unstructured mess your users will inevitably create. This is especially true if, as is often the case, your wiki will contain pages that share a common information structure and should be displayed in a similar structure. If you ask 10 people to create a wiki page about a Linux distribution of their choice, chances are you’ll end up with 10 different variations containing information that’s relevant and 10 different ways of displaying it. If you also wanted to have a separate summary 10 distributions, and details of release…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos is a UNIX administrator, a programmer, a DBA and a mathematician who enjoys writing articles and learning new things. He’s the author of Go Systems Programming. We’re going to start monitoring Linux systems at the kernel level using eBPF, which comes with all recent Linux kernels, so it’s not even a third-party solution. Bear in mind that to effectively use eBPF you’ll have to know what you’re doing (that’s me out! – Ed). This tutorial will concentrate on ready-to-use eBPF command line utilities that you can easily install and modify, because they’re written in Python. We’ll also talk about developing your own eBPF scripts for those of you who prefer to live dangerously! About eBPF EBPF stands for Enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter and is an in-kernel…

In the Kotlin tutorial of the previous Linux Format issue, we mentioned the term Null safety. Now it’s time to learn more about this important Kotlin characteristic, which makes your code easier to read and much safer. First, look at the following example of Kotlin code: This code won’t compile because the default Kotlin behaviour doesn’t permit you to assign a null value to a variable. The generated error message will be null can not be a value of a non-null type String , which shows exactly what’s going on. However, you can change that behaviour with the use of the safe null access operator, which is a question mark: Kotlin goes a step further and requires you to check a variable that can be null before using it. Bearing…

The table demonstrates the switch positions as keys are pressed on a Purple Machine, assuming that Twenties Switches 1, 2 and three are the fast, medium and slow switches, respectively. The sixes switch continues to advance one position forward with each key press. The fast switch does the same until the sixes switch reaches position 25, at which point the fast switch stays still (position 4 in this case) and the medium switch advances forward one position (in this case to position 1). If the sixes switch reaches position 24 and the medium switch is at position 25, the slow switch advances forward one (in this case from 5 to 6). The medium and fast switches remain still. The end result was that the twenties alphabets would not repeat until…

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…