Table of contents for November 2023 in Linux Format

Matthew Holder A friend convinced me to install Slackware on a spare PC to learn about Linux. I then decided to share the pain of dial-up internet across multiple devices – imagine the speed shared between three machines! I haven’t looked back or stopped learning since the year 2000. Les Pounder A magazine coverdisc in the late ’90s. Not sure of the exact distro but it was RPM-based. It got me interested enough in Linux to download Corel Linux, then Mandrake. I later switched to SUSE, then distro hopped for a while before settling with Ubuntu. Mayank Sharma I first installed Linux back when installing Linux was a project in itself. My dad read about the Halloween Documents and ordered the official Slackware CD set. To install Linux back then…

Download managers can be an excellent way to juggle multiple file transfers in parallel, but in the case of the Free Download Manager for Linux, it’s been a surefire way to infect systems. While Free Download Manager itself is a legitimate app, in September Kaspersky researchers discovered that the developers’ website had been compromised. Between 2020 and 2022, users were being redirected to a dodgy Debian repository containing a malicious version of the program. Once installed, the fake download manager tampers with Cron to make sure it starts up each time users log in to the Linux operating system. It then launches a reverse shell, which it uses to collect sensitive data, such as system information, browsing history, saved passwords and cryptocurrency wallet files, as well as credentials for cloud…

SPECS Size: 2TB (1TB option) Type: PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0 IC: Phison PS5026-E26 Mem: Micron 232-layer 3D TLC Seq: 10,000MB/s read/write Endurance: 2,000 TB TBW PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been teased for what seems like an eternity. In spite of all the chat, few drives are available, even less so from the big-name SSD makers. Seagate belongs in that category, and its FireCuda 540 leads the Seagate charge into the brave new world of PCIe 5.0 SSDs. For now, that new world is a very expensive one to buy into. All PCIe 5.0 SSDs carry a massive price premium over PCIe 4.0 drives. Seagate is positioning the FireCuda 540 as an allround option. There are obvious benefits but it also carries an excellent endurance rating and comes with three years…

IN BRIEF Mageia is derived from the Greek word for magic and it’s easy to see why: installation media for every taste, plus a revamped setup wizard. The Control Center also makes configuration easy. SPECS CPU: 1GHz Mem: 512GB (2GB recommended) HDD: 20GB Builds: i586, x86_64 In 2010, the company that owned the assets to the popular and easy-to-use Linux distro Mandriva was liquidated. Shortly afterwards, a number of former Mandriva employees and volunteers from the Linux community announced the creation of Mageia. Unlike Mandriva, this OS is backed by a non-profit organisation based in France (Mageia.org). The project snowballed and to date hundreds of developers have collaborated to produce nine stable versions of the OS every one to two years. If you decide to take the latest Mageia 9…

Hark back to the early days of social media, and you’ll recall just how wild it was. While we’re now used to the standard uniformity of Twitter/X and Facebook, it’s easy to forget how pioneers such as MySpace sold themselves on how crazy you could make your page. When you’re designing your own little corner of the internet, you want it to look nice, and you want your users to feel that they can make it their home. If they can’t, they may look elsewhere. Misskey is the standout winner, as it enables you to customise virtually every aspect of your instance’s appearance to suit the theme of your server. Although it comes with Japanese catgirls as standard, there’s nothing stopping you from changing the theme, icons, layout, avatars and…

Social media is supposed to be social. It’s in the name, and the phenomenon has been compared to a town square or a village pub, where you can grab a pint, sit down at a table, and pitch in with your opinion on the latest football performance (it was a disgrace). Alternatively, you and your mates should be able to sneak off to a private snug and discuss marital woes away from the cacophony of other voices. The layout of the venue should facilitate both of these conversation modes, while also talking to people in the pub next door through a handy hole in the wall. Discussion is top priority with Lemmy. It’s built around the idea of positing an idea or article, and then talking about it. Conversations are…

We warned you before, but now it’s here – the new Astro Pi Mission Zero for 2023/24 has blasted off! If you want to take part, you have until March 2024 to register and enter your coding project. As a reminder, Astro Pi Mission Zero tasks young people with writing a simple Python program to take a reading using a sensor on one of the ISS Astro Pi computers and display a personalised pixel art image for the astronauts on board the ISS. This can be entered as an individual or team project. This year’s theme is ‘flora and fauna’, to help remind the ISS astronauts of the beauty of Earth’s natural wonders. The overall aim is to display pixel art or animation on the Astro Pi’s display and take a…

QUICK TIP Pop can be downloaded from https://pop.system76.com/. Apart from being a typographical nightmare, Pop!_ OS, which we’ll refer to as Pop from A now on, is a Linux distribution sponsored by System76, a US-based company that sells laptops, desktops, servers and peripherals. System76 specialises in providing the devices it sells with support for either Ubuntu or Pop, which come pre-installed. Selling devices with Linux is no simple task because drivers need to be written where they don’t currently exist and configuration needs to be made for function keys and other built-in hardware. So, let’s have a look at Pop and see what it provides that isn’t available from other distributions. Pop is based on the most recent Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release and its take on the desktop…

IN BRIEF Cargo’s website builder excels in its user-friendly interface and customisable features, making it a solid choice for creating sites. Although its performance and pricing face competition, which may be a setback for some users, its ease of use and creative options shine, setting it apart. Cargo is a website building service that provides a platform for creating and designing websites C with a focus on visual aesthetics and userfriendly functionality. Its interface is designed to facilitate the smooth arrangement of content, including images, text, multimedia and interactive elements, enabling you to showcase your work, products or ideas in an engaging and visually appealing manner. Through its intuitive dragand-drop interface and customisable templates, Cargo enables you to craft unique and dynamic websites that reflect your creative ideas. Design and…

Version: 0.3.1 Web: https://missioncenter.io System admins go to great lengths to keep an eye on the resource utilisation on the systems in their realm. But it’s always a good idea even for desktop users to do the same to ensure all is hunky-dory with their computer. Every desktop distro ships with a task manager that usually does a good job, but some still leave room for improvement. Mission Center is a dedicated system monitor and task manager that does an excellent job of helping you keep track of the apps and processes running on your installation, and how they are using resources. It’s available as a Flatpak and can be installed with flatpak install flathub io.missioncenter.MissionCenter . You can use the app to monitor the overall CPU, memory, disk and…

Version: 6.4.1 Web: https://ferdium.org The idea of a unified messaging app isn’t new, but widen the app’s mandate to cover not just messaging services, but all kinds of web apps, and you’ve got a winner. Ferdium does just that thanks to its support for over 200 web apps and services. Ferdium puts out both RPM and DEB binaries, but is also available as distro-agnostic Flatpak, AppImage and Snap packages. Use flatpak install flathub org. ferdium.Ferdium to install it from FlatHub. When launched, the app gives you the option to create a free account. This ensures you can access all your configured services across all your Ferdium installations across different computers. For the privacy conscious, there’s also the ability to use the app without creating an account, but you lose the…

Version: 2.2.11 Web: www.srb2.org Sonic the Hedgehog was a mainstay of ’90s console gaming. Sonic Robo Blast 2 (SRB2) combines Sonic with another behemoth of the era: Doom. SRB2 is built using a modified version of the Doom Legacy port of Doom, and has been in development since 1998. The developers don’t distribute binaries for Linux, and instead point to the Flatpak created by its community that you can install with flatpak install flathub org.srb2.SRB2 . The game features several levels and the gameplay is similar to the original, but has been boosted to three dimensions. Another addition in SRB2 is the multiplayer mode that enables players to either play together as a team or against each other. The game has several multiplayer modes, including Coop, which is the same…

The LibreOffice Document Foundation can rightly feel proud of the fact that there have been over 1.5 million downloads of LibreOffice 7.6. The number of users is probably much higher, as many versions of Linux come with the office suite preinstalled. New features include a very welcome wizard to insert page numbers into Writer, better support for drawing styles in Calc, and a navigation panel for switching slides during presentations for Impress. Find out more: https://bit.ly/lxf308libre.…

SPECS GPU: Navi 32 Arch: RDNA 3 Process: TSMC 5nm + 6nm Clock: 2,124MHz (2,430MHz boost) Mem: 16GB GDDR6, 256bit, 624GB/s Stream: 3,840 Compute: 60 RT cores: 60 AI cores: 120 ROPs: 96 Cache: 64MB TGP: 263W, 2x eight-pin Die: 200 + 150mm² Trans: 28.1B Codec: 4K h264, h265/ HEVC, AV1 How much value do you put on ray tracing as a gamer? That’s got to be the question at the forefront of your mind if you’re considering dropping £500 on an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. Because if you are 100% sold on ray tracing, you probably need to consider whether you’re actually willing to pay another £100 for the privilege of extra RT performance and drop the cash on the RTX 4070 instead. If, however, you’re convinced rasterised…

IN BRIEF Far from being labyrinthine, Ubuntu 23.10 offers an easy setup, along with a revamped Gnome desktop, making tiling and arranging workspaces much easier. Searches are global and there’s a new App Center. SPECS CPU: 2GHz dual-core Mem: 4GB HDD: 25GB Builds: x86_64, ARMv8, AArch64 The Ubuntu blog describes the word Mantic as being “used to describe one’s ability to prophesy or reach into the future”. This is exactly what the LXF team is attempting to do in testpiloting a daily build of the OS prior to the official release on 12/10/23. The Minotaur was a mythical halfman, half-bull who guarded the halls of the impenetrable labyrinth of Crete. Luckily, this is totally at odds with our experience of Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur, which fully lives up to the…

Linux is justifiably famous for running on anything from a pregnancy test upwards, but more complex software requires more powerful hardware, and the architecture of your machine matters, too. And just because you can get your fediverse software to run on your ancient Pentium Core Duo with RAM measured in megabytes, it doesn’t mean it will be usable. For many readers, a Raspberry Pi is ideal for hosting your fediverse server, thanks to its low price and running costs. But this does limit you in terms of the fediverse servers you can easily run. Mastodon, Misskey, and Akkoma support ARM64 architecture out of the box, complete with Docker images. Lemmy does support ARM64, but for Docker images, you’ll have to check out the unofficial masquernya/lemmy-arm64 repository. We were unable to…

The fediverse is all about doing things your own way while maintaining compatibility with other fediverse servers. Unlike homogeneous services such as Twitter/X, each fediverse server type has a different purpose. This can be to facilitate discussions, publish longform articles, showcase images, or share your communal love of music. Alternatively, it can be to cram thousands of users into a virtual room and let them scream at each other. Before you set up your instance, you need to decide what type of community you want to build and how your users will interact with each other. If you’re building around a common interest, what special features does each instance type have that differentiates it from the rest? An instance geared towards longform threaded discussions doesn’t cut it if most of…

It’s a long-standing criticism of large social networks that moderation policies make the experience terrible for everyone. Your own posts get banned for some trivial reason, while libels are spread about you by others. Before you know it, someone invokes Godwin’s law and it’s all over. Moderating social media is difficult, and as the admin of your own network, the task falls to you and any volunteer mods you can rope in to scour their eyeballs with bleach on a regular basis. Moderation is fairly straightforward on all five instance types. It has to be. As the instance owner, you’re legally on the hook for illegal content and copyright violations if you don’t act promptly. Ideally, users should be able to easily flag posts that violate your terms of service…

There are multiple ways to install Jellyfin on your server. You’ll find instructions across a range of distros at https://jellyfin.org/docs/ – taking Ubuntu as an example, open a terminal window and issue the following commands: $ wget -O- https://repo.jellyfin.org/install-debuntu.sh $ sudo bash This launches a script to add and configure the Jellyfin repository, install Jellyfin and configure it to start automatically with your server and run in the background continuously. Verify the server is running by opening your web browser and navigating to http:// localhost:8096 or, if you want access from another computer on your network, http://192.168.x.y:8096 (192.168.x.y is, of course, your server’s IP address). When you see the welcome wizard, close your browser, then reboot your server and connect again to verify the service is configured correctly. Prepare your…

IN BRIEF The Pi 4 remains a solid choice; it doesn’t need active cooling and has rocksolid support. If you don’t need Linux, just the GPIO, then the £6 Pi Pico W has proven itself to be a versatile microcontroller. However, if you want the best single-board computer around, the Raspberry Pi 5 is your new leader. After the longest wait between flagship Pi models ever (the Pi 4 was released A in June 2019), the Raspberry Pi 5 is finally here and it’s early! Eben Upton had said no new Pis in 2023, but here we are… The Raspberry Pi 5 claims to have two to three times the processing power of the Raspberry Pi 4, already a powerful single-board computer. Available in 4GB and 8GB RAM capacities (with…

Version: 0.9.0 Web: https://crates.io/crates/parallel-disk-usage Linux has no dearth of tools for reporting disk usage. One of the most frequently used routes is to restrict the output of Du using its plethora of options, before piping the output into a variety of other tools, such as Sort. While this works for small directories, on much larger ones it doesn’t just take a considerable amount of time, but without the right options, also produces illegible output. That’s where Parallel Disk Usage (PDU) steps in. Not only is it a lot faster than plain old Du, but it also produces visually appealing output. PDU’s written in Rust and can be installed with its Cargo package manager. To install Cargo, you’ll first have to install Rust with curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh . This…

Version: 1.40.5 Web: www.hoptodesk.com There are tons of very competent and popular remote desktop apps. Most of them make it remarkably easy to share your screen, as well as remote control and access other devices. HopToDesk is one such application: a remote desktop tool that’s designed to provide lots of useful features without compromising on security and privacy. Unlike other similar tools, such as TeamViewer or AnyDesk, HopToDesk is free for both personal and business use, and is available for all popular desktop and mobile operating systems. The project puts out binaries for popular distros including Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and others, and is also available as a distro-agnostic AppImage. Just grab the AppImage, make it an executable either from the file manager or with chmod +x , and double-click on…

Version: 1.0.7 Web: https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2 Another classic from the ’90s, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 was one of the most popular fantasy turn-based strategy games of the era. Fheroes2 is a recreation of the game that has been written from scratch and promises to deliver the charm of the original along with improvements to the gameplay, graphics and logic. The game is available in the official repos of popular distros such as Fedora, but the developers recommend you grab the game from Flathub with flatpak install flathub io.github.ihhub.Fheroes2 . To play the game, you need a copy of the original. When you launch Fheroes2, it gives you three options. The recommended one is to grab the original from GOG. If you have the original on a CD, you can go…

Version: 4.5.0 Web: www.thestampweb.com/albumeasy If you ask us, the most popular software in the world is open source. And that holds true I even on the other end of the spectrum, when it comes to niche software. And they don’t get any more niche than AlbumEasy. If you like to collect stamps, you can use AlbumEasy to print custom pages to stick them on. To install the software, grab its tarball and extract it, then move the extracted folder to an appropriate location, such as ~/AlbumEasy. Now change into this folder and launch the application from the CLI with ./AlbumEasy.sh . If your desktop can display desktop icons, you can also run the config script with ./CONFIG , which creates a desktop shortcut for the app and also moves the…

Newsdesk THIS ISSUE: GNU turns 40 Gnome hits 45 OpenTofu looks tasty LibreOffice downloads soar Kernel embraces AV1 Remember those annoying people who tell you it’s not called Linux, but GNU/ Linux? This dates back to May 1983 when Richard Stallman used the Stanford bulletin board to announce plans to develop a free Unix-like operating system called GNU. The name itself is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s not Unix”. Stallman’s philosophy of free software scored a very deep line in the sand between visionaries like himself and private companies producing proprietary programs. In 1985, Richard founded the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF) to support the free software movement. It continued existing GNU projects and also hired developers to produce more free software programs. The FSF also pioneered the concept of…

On 20th September, the Gnome Project was proud to announce the longawaited release of Gnome 45, code-named Rīga in honour of the organisers of this year’s Gnome community conference. We were treated to a preview of all Gnome 45 has to offer while testing daily builds of Ubuntu 23.10 (see review, p.24). The biggest change to the desktop is that the Activities button is no more – instead there’s a small workspace indicator. Handily, it’s dynamic in that it indicates which workspace you’re currently using. The search feature has also been overhauled. Not only are searches faster and less resourceintensive, but the Nautilus file manager now enables users to run global searches, not just within their home folder. The searches themselves can now be ordered in a more useful way,…

Since 2021, the Linux kernel has been preparing to support encoding/decoding the royalty-free AV1 codec. It began with a “request for comments” patch series by Collabora’s Daniel Almeida for implementing the stateless AV1 user-space API within the media subsystem. The first uAPI tentatives needed seven versions on the mailing list before finally being considered stable in June 2023. The latest Linux kernel (v6.5) includes patches that enable support for AV1 uAPI as well as two stateless video decoders: one for the Rockchip RK3588 and one for MT8195, a MediaTek SoC. Find out more (see left) https://bit.ly/lxf308av1.…

Mike Bedford’s article on FOCAL in LXF301 reminded me of my senior year of high school in 1973. I took a course in Basic programming on a DEC PDP-8/e with 8k of magnetic core memory and two ASR-33 teletypes like the one pictured in the article. I remember there was a manual for FOCAL in the classroom and maybe a paper tape for it, but since it took 45 minutes to reload the Basic interpreter through the TTY’s paper tape reader, I never saw it tried. Perhaps because it had the imprimatur of Dartmouth College, Basic was more popular with local schools. DEC computers were also quite common because they were (relatively) inexpensive and DEC seemed to promote them for educational use, perhaps hoping that students would favour them in…

IN BRIEF Qubes does something we thought impossible. It provides nextlevel security with easy management from a centralised colour-coded interface. A hefty ISO and lack of multiboot are a small price to pay. SPECS CPU: 2GHz (Intel VT-d/ AMD IOMMU) Mem: 6GB HDD: 32GB Builds: x86_64 While there are numerous security-focused Linux distros, Qubes can be compared to Fort Knox. This Fedora-based OS was first produced in 2012. The latest testing release (4.2.0-rc3) was made available in September, and will go through at least one more round of tests before a stable version is made available. We’ve focused this review on the latest stable version of Qubes (4.1.2), which was released in March. Qubes uses so-called security by isolation to prevent apps from interacting in a way that could compromise…

SPECS Minimum OS: Ubuntu 18.04+ 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i5 6400 Mem: 8GB HDD: 10GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce 770, AMD Radeon R9 290, Vulkan required Recommended OS: Ubuntu 20.04+ 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i5 8500 Mem: 16GB HDD: 14GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce 1060, AMD Radeon RX 5500 The story of our first campaign in Old World, where we led our Greek civilisation to global domination, is equally the story of Rome, our greatest nemesis in this sprawling turn-based 4X. When we first met the Romans, they were extremely friendly, offering gifts and hospitality, but it was a poisoned chalice – literally. A sickness spread, and Roman gestures of friendship were the source. We demanded justice and compensation; Rome wanted war. It would take nearly 200 years until we got our…

Installing software on Linux isn’t always the easiest, and if it was, magazines such as this one would have a hard time justifying their existence. If your aim is to deploy and run your own social media server, you don’t want to waste time going through a complicated installation process, trawling through GitHub issues, or following a step-by-step guide to compiling and configuring multiple components from source. Ideally you should be able to get your fediverse server up and running in under an hour – or an afternoon at most. Complicated setups are a definite disadvantage if you want to start getting social in a hurry, while a one-liner install script would be ideal. In testing our five fediverse servers for ease of setup, we count the time and complexity…

To run a successful social media empire, you need a service that looks good on the go, and allows users to access their feed in comfort and doom scroll on the train, in class or while on a first date in a fancy restaurant. Fortunately, there are official and unofficial mobile solutions of variable quality for all five of our candidate instance types. The ActivityPub protocol is standard for all fediverse instances, so in theory, every mobile client should work with every server type. Mastodon, as the largest and best known name, has its own branded app, featuring dark mode, polls and a collection of cute elephant mascots. It’s fine, we guess, and great for scrolling chronologically through posts by people you follow on your home server and elsewhere. For…

This is going to sound like the kind of cop-out you’d hear at a primary school sports day, but there’s no clear-cut winner here. We picked these particular five fediverse servers because they’re so very different. They’re designed for different types of user, different use cases, and for admins with varying levels of expertise. While Akkoma is this writer’s own personal favourite, we can’t recommend it to everyone, and it’s best used as a single-user instance or with up to a few dozen local users. The interface, although switchable, is best suited to informal conversations and captioned images. Likewise, Lemmy is better suited to debates and discussions, and does a fair job of imitating Reddit. However, outside this use case, it’s not really the best in any other area. This…

Red Hat and a few other distributions have stopped shipping the muchbeloved Screen utility. It’s effectively a software console that you can run in the background. Tmux is not as easy as Screen, but moving forward, it’s is the new standard on certain distros. Tmux, short for terminal multiplexer, is a powerful command-line tool that facilitates multiple sessions within one terminal window. It’s especially useful for remote work, scripting and command-line multitasking, so here’s a concise guide to using Tmux. Start by entering tmux to initiate a session. Inside, you’ll observe a green status bar indicating the session’s active state. Want to return to your regular terminal momentarily? Press Ctrl+b d to detach. Re-enter a detached session with tmux attach . For organised multitasking, name your sessions using tmux new-session…

IN BRIEF NordVPN is an appealing VPN provider with top-of-therange performance, loads of features, and a reassuring no-logging audit. It’s not the cheapest, and we have a few small issues with the app interfaces, but the company has added a bunch of welcome improvements recently, and overall it’s a polished and professional service that delivers good results for most users. Panama-registered NordVPN is a hugely popular VPN provider with more than 14 million customers. The company sells itself on features, and there are plenty to explore. The NordVPN network has 5,600-plus servers in 85 locations across 59 countries. We ran tests on several locations to confirm that its servers are physically located in the advertised countries, and it was good news all around. From Costa Rica to Estonia, UAE to…

Version: 11.1.2 Web: https://floorp.app Firefox is certainly a popular web browser, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, and Floorp attempts just that. Based on the popular open source browser, Floorp markets itself as a feature-rich flexible alternative. It is available as a portable app on Linux, and also offers a PPA for Ubuntu users. The most convenient option is to use the distro-agnostic Flatpak release – install it with flatpak install flathub one.ablaze.floorp . On first launch it does appear quite similar to Firefox with a few UI differences. For starters, you can import your bookmarks, passwords and more from an existing Firefox installation by logging into your Firefox account. That said, the browser, based on the Firefox ESR release, has stripped the Firefox telemetry code. In terms…

Version: 5.15.3 Web: https://ulauncher.io The search bar in the Applications menu in modern desktops is pretty useful for finding apps and documents. Ulauncher does all that and more, and is a whole lot more configurable than your built-in application launcher. It is available in the official repo of Fedora, and can be installed with sudo dnf install ulauncher . Ubuntu users can install it through a PPA with: $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:agornostal/ ulauncher $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install ulauncher Launch Ulauncher – if your desktop has a system tray, you’ll see the app’s icon in there. Even if your desktop doesn’t have a system tray, you can press Ctrl+Space to invoke the Ulauncher search bar. You can start typing and Ulauncher runs through all of your installed…