Table of contents for January 2024 in Linux Format

We’re trying to entice people to learn to use Linux, so what one piece of helpful advice would you give Linux newbies? (Apart from RTFM!) Matthew Holder My advice is to pick a well-supported distro, such as Ubuntu, which has a friendly and knowledgeable community to help in case of trouble. Then build your knowledge before attempting other distros, such as Arch. And there’s nothing wrong with dual-booting at the start. Les Pounder My advice is to try a few Linux distros. There is so much choice and it can be difficult to learn everything. So don’t. Try a few distros, get a feel for them and use that as a base from which to explore the OS, window managers, package managers and so on. Michael Reed If you’re…

Many users ask why LibreOffice is only available as a desktop application. They are probably not familiar with the LibreOffice Technology concept and are looking for an app with the same name for cloud and mobile. In the case of LibreOffice, the cloud and mobile apps have a different name because they are built from the LibreOffice source code by a company in the ecosystem and not by The Document Foundation. So, one must look for Collabora Online and Collabora Office for Android and iOS. Not only that, but there are companies such as Allotropia and Collabora itself that release a version of LibreOffice optimised for the corporate world, with Long Term Support (LTS) and Service Level Agreement. Other companies, such as Nextcloud, leverage the LibreOffice Technology development platform to…

Another sourceavailable licence is making the rounds, called the Functional Source License, or FSL for short. The tag line is “freedom without free-riding”. The goal? To delay competition with the vendor for (at least) two years. After that, the code reverts to Apache 2.0 or MIT. This seems more palatable than some other fauxpen source licences. It has some big question marks, legally, for companies that want to adopt the software. But it’s far more balanced between community and commercial. But open source isn’t about providing singlevendor advantage. Yet the discussion is tilted firmly towards letting vendors do the development and placing their goals above the larger community’s needs. Open source seems to have abandoned the idea that we come together to drive things like the Linux kernel or PostgreSQL.…

Linus Torvalds announced the release of several Linux 6.7 RC (Release Candidate) kernels, noting in his -rc1 announcement message how big this release already is relative to many “historically big releases”. The main reason for this is the removal of support for the ia64 (Itanium) architecture that we’ve covered previously and people knew was coming for some time. Among the other contributions to 6.7 are support for the (highly opinionated) bcachefs (“the COW [Copy On Write] filesystem for Linux that won’t eat your data”), and the ability to disable emulation of 32-bit system calls on 64-bit x86 systems. “The ability to disable emulation of 32-bit system calls doesn’t mean that 32-bit support is going away.” The addition of bcachefs has been many years in the making. Filesystems are not generally added…

Q Blank browser On page 85 of LXF307 is an item about the Min browser. I would like to use it, so I downloaded the DEB file. When I ran it, I found that it needed some extra files. These were gconf2, gconf-service and gconf-service-backend. I installed these files and made a fresh start. The program loaded and provided its icon. When starting there are two options: Start Browsing or Take A Tour. I took the tour, which worked OK, but when I started the browser, all I got was a blank screen. Please help me to get it working properly! I am using Ubuntu 23 LTS. Bryan Mitchell A Ubuntu 23.04 and 23.10 are not LTS releases, or was this a typo and did you mean you are running…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at http://bigl.es. YOU NEED Pi 5 USB 3 to SATA/NVMe adaptor NVMe or SATA SSD Pi 5 Active Cooler our shiny new Raspberry Pi 5 is the fastest flagship Pi ever. But can we Y make it a little better? Sure we can, we just need to overclock it, boot from USB and make sure that it is adequately cooled. In this tutorial, we will overclock the Pi 5 and show you how to install the new Raspberry Pi OS to a USB 3 drive. We’ll also pass on a few pearls of wisdom from our weeks of testing and using the latest Pi. Cases and cooling…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers loves his family history, and loves it even more now he can convert family biographies into editable text files without manually transcribing them first. Anyone who’s been faced with the arduous task of transcribing text from either printed material or a digital scan of printed text will no doubt have heard of optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCR is one of the earliest examples of machine learning, whereby a computer model is trained to recognise shapes on a digital image and translate those shapes into text characters. Once the shape of each letter is identified and translated into editable text, words followed by sentences, paragraphs and entire tracts of text can be extracted from the digital scan. OCR has roots going back to the 1980s, and…

Credit: www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk OUR EXPERT Nate Drake is a journalist specialising in cybersecurity and retro games. The first thing he did when discovering Linux in 2004 was play Beneath a Steel Sky. Be vigilant. The ’80s and ’90s were the heyday of the point-and-click adventure game. The setting T of titles varies but the basic premise remains – that of moving your character around a screen using your mouse, interacting with people and objects, and usually adding items to your inventory. These aspects of point-and-click games were one of the most maddening for those who grew up in an era when you couldn’t simply DuckDuckGo a solution, because these games were deliberately designed to make the player take counterintuitive actions. Who would have thought, for instance, that in order to defeat…

FILE MANAGER HiFile Version: 0.9.9.5 Web: www.hifile.app A file manager is an integral part of a desktop environment. And while most do an adequate job of handling files and folders, for a majority of users, they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. HiFile is one of the growing list of third-party file managers that make up for the shortcomings of the default ones. The app is available as an AppImage. Grab it from its website, and make it an executable via your existing file manager, or with chmod +x . One of the highlights of HiFile is that it’s lightning fast and lightweight. On first launch, you’re asked to select some basic settings, such as language and colour theme, which you can change later. It uses a dual-pane layout, which is…

As we dive into 2024 and a whole new year, isn’t it time you tried something new and exciting? There seems to be a steady tide of readers who have moved from Windows to Linux, but not so much because Linux distros have suddenly become so much better or easier to use – they’ve been incredible productivity engines for decades now and there’s a good argument that the latest iteration of Windows apes the Linux desktop more than ever. It seems the reason why most people move is the bloat surrounding Windows, which it simply can’t escape due to its corporate roots. Adverts, tracking, pre-installed nonsense, pushing Microsoft services and products, enforced hardware upgrades… Not that Linux distros manage to avoid all of these annoyances, it’s just never near to…

Ubuntu developer Canonical has unveiled MicroCloud, enterprisefocused software designed to simplify private cloud deployment. Built on Canonical’s LXD container infrastructure tool, Ceph, and OVN, MicroCloud emphasises ease of deployment, with Canonical’s website claiming you can “deploy your cloud with a single command”. It is aimed at minimising user effort, making it accessible for enterprises of all sizes. MicroCloud boasts automatic security updates via Snap, scalability from three to 50 Ubuntu-powered machines, and is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 open source licence. Canonical promotes MicroCloud as “lowtouch, efficient and reliable”, positioning it as an attractive option for organisations seeking streamlined private cloud solutions. This latest initiative is likely a strategic move by Canonical to drive Ubuntu Pro and support subscriptions. There are several support tiers available, as well as per-node pricing. Feedback…

NVK, the open source Vulkan driver for Nvidia hardware in Mesa, is now an officially conformant implementation of the Vulkan 1.0 API on Nvidia Turing hardware. You can even find it on the Khronos website under Conformant Products. It is the first time any Nouveau driver has got the Khronos conformance badge on any API. What does this mean? Practically, it means that we can pass the entire Vulkan conformance test suite. From the Khronos perspective, it means NVK now meets the bar required to claim to support the Vulkan API officially. (There are legal implications to this that matter to the Mesa project, but most users don’t care about them.) For users, it means the driver should pretty much work on Turing (GTX 16xx, RTX 20xx) and later GPUs.…

I recently attended the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). This was my first in-person major conference in a few years, and it was absolutely amazing to see so very many familiar faces. Plumbers is definitely the modern-day spiritual successor to older conferences where many of us first met at the turn of the millennium. It’s an event “by the community, for the community”, and it retains a grass roots feel. My main interest was Confidential Computing. I witnessed key maintainers like Greg Kroah-Hartman in the session dedicated to the subject, which included different architecture communities. It was amusing how similar their approaches all were, except for the mainframe person, who had very different opinions about how to handle device attestation and trust. I also enjoyed conversations around emerging architectures, and…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format,Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email letters@ linuxformat.com. Punched in the face! You should know better! The image attached to the Letter of the Month in LXF308 is not of punched cards at all. It is of folded paper tape. I have attached an image of real punched cards, attributed to use on a DEC PDP9. I do not recall ever working on that model – yes to almost every one of the PDP8 and 11 families, at least one PDP15, every variant of VAX and most Alphas. John The photo is, of course, paper tape. It appears to be six-track, which I’ve never seen.…

WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO! Linux Lite >> EasyOS >> AntiX >> Porteus >>Ubuntu Michael Reed has been using Linux for so long that he remembers when a live distribution booted from a floppy. HOW WE TESTED… As usual, we tested the distributions on a virtual machine for convenience. But we also wanted to get some insight into how well these distributions worked on genuinely lower-end hardware, so we tested the various flash drives on an old Asus laptop that we thought was typical of the type of older machine to be found in the back of an office cupboard. The specs included a 2.1GHz Intel dualcore CPU and 4GB of RAM; so, we’re not talking superlow specs. We kept an eye out for problems,…

OUR EXPERT Michael Reed has been fiddling with websites since the dial-up days and the 10MB of free hosting space that his ISP gave him. He doesn’t like to bring up such hardships now. Much. QUICK TIP When installing plugins, don’t install unnecessary ones, as they can slow WordPress down and introduce the possibility of conflicts. Credit: http://wordpress.org After installing WordPress and customising it in parts A one and two of this series, we’re ready to start extending its functionality with the plugin system. By the end of this series, you should be ready to handle every major aspect of managing a WordPress site. We’re now going to add the finishing touches so the site is ready to go on the internet for use by the general public. Managing…

Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT Ferenc Deak wanted to use Malbolge to create a Linux shell, but after several days in hell, he quickly came to his senses and continued the project in C++. Not that there is a huge difference… QUICK TIP Explore the code and build it yourself to gain a wider perspective on how everything comes together: https://github.com/fritzone/lxf-shell. In the Linux ecosystem, the shell is a vital component – a command-line interface (CLI) program, enabling users to interact with the underlying operating system through textbased commands. It acts as a bridge, facilitating communication between users and the core components of the operating system, which manage hardware resources and system services. This series of tutorials embarks on a fascinating journey on…

ORACLE 9.3 Oracle Linux is an enterprise-class distro backed by Oracle and built from source packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Despite Red Hat’s new source code policy, this version is still application binary compatible with the corresponding RHEL 9 Update 3 release. It ships with the newest Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 Update 2 (UEK R7U2) and also now supports automatic reboot of systems after patches are installed through DNF. Read more: www.oracle.com/linux. BACKBOX 8.1 BackBox Linux is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution for penetration testing and security assessments. Like version 8, the latest release (code name Sara) is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but version 5.15 of the kernel has been updated. Other improvements include an overhaul of the desktop environment. BackBox includes enhanced hacking tools such as…

There continue to be significant developments on the Rust front. In addition to newer language requirements and subsystem support in Linux 6.7, upstream is currently discussing a big change to the Android “Binder” IPC mechanism under the topic “Setting up Binder for the future”. In addition to rewriting the core of Binder in Rust, the proposal is to leverage this rewrite to reduce overall complexity, shorten the size of “thousand line functions”, and enhance the overall security story. The authors have “left the binderfs filesystem component in C. Rewriting it in Rust would be a large amount of work and requires a lot of bindings to the file system interfaces.” At the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) mentioned previously, there was the 2023 Linux Foundation (LF) Technical Advisory Board (TAB) election. Out…

There’s a myriad reasons for why you might have fallen out of love with your computer. Perhaps you’re tired of the constant updates and upgrades that slowly sap the life out of it unless you invest in expensive hardware upgrades (or even a completely new computer). Maybe it’s the slow erosion of your privacy as personal information is leaked, and your computer is targeted with adverts. Or you might simply hanker after a new experience, one that takes you back to a time when you still enjoyed computing. The answer to all these concerns is Linux. It’s supported for much longer than many OSes – up to 10 years, depending on Long Term Support options – freeing you from that constant upgrade/update cycle. Linux is also optimised for older hardware,…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi, India. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years, and lawyering for 10. Some messages are just too private to be shared directly with the recipient. Although the need might not arise often, it’s imperative that you know the right encryption tool if you want to share messages privately. But the word encryption conjures a jumble of other words, such as algorithms, ciphers, salts, public and private keys, and so on, which might seem like a little too much trouble to master when all you want to do is organise a surprise party for a beloved boss’s retirement. Enc bills itself as a modern and friendly alternative to GnuPG, which has long been the torch bearer for…

Credit: www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcsdl OUR EXPERT David Bolton learnt to program in Basic back in the dark ages, which helped him get an O Level in computer science long before personal computers were even a thing. The BBC Micro was launched 42 years ago, in 1981. Like other home computers of that era, T such as the TRS-80 and CBM Vic-20, it came with a built-in Basic interpreter. Unlike most other home computers, this wasn’t created by Microsoft but was one that Acorn had created. A former BBC engineer, Richard T Russell, who was involved with the BBC Micro development, has developed an excellent open source version of BBC Basic. You can find the source code on GitHub (https://github.com/rtrussell/BBCSDL). It’s cross-platform and comes in two versions: BBC Basic for SDL 2.0…

eploying new services can take a lot of time. Days sometimes. But D Docker can make life a lot easier for system administrators Containerisation can make deployment an extremely quick affair and management is simple. If the container goes wrong, delete it, redeploy, carry on. To give an example, if an ELK server needs to be deployed, it’s a bit of a chore, even with scripts. Deploying it with Docker takes less than 10 minutes from start to end. Doing it the ‘old-fashioned’ way takes a long time. What makes using Docker even better is that all these images are self-contained. Finished with it? Just docker rm it. Broken it somehow? Again, simply docker rm and then redeploy. If it works on one Docker install, it will work on another.…

We live in a wireless age. The latest Wi-Fi connections let us stream hundreds of megabytes per second through the air – shiny new Wi-Fi 7 routers are promising combined speeds of up to 40Gbits/s. With all this data swirling around us, traditional cabled connections may seem old-fashioned to the point of obsolescence. But while Ethernet can’t match the go-anywhere convenience of wireless networking, it still has several advantages over Wi-Fi. While older readers might recall token-ring wired networks of yesteryear or the original 10BaseT form for Ethernet, network cables have not stood still. While wireless advancements have had all the headlines, our durable cable friends have steadily improved in speed. With plans for 800GbE and 1.6TbE standards in the works, if you’re contemplating laying cables for a wired network,…

Credit: www.home-assistant.io Part three! Don’t miss previous issues, order on page 64! OUR EXPERT Matt Holder is an IT professional of 15 years, Linux user for over 20 years, user of plenty of home automation gear and selfprofessed geek. QUICK TIP The complete code listing can be downloaded from https://github.com/mattmole/LXF308-309API-GUI. We’re putting the finishing touches to our smart-home data application. Our aim is to pull data from the Home Assistant API and then render it on screen in a GUI. We’ve split the program into two and in the first article we wrote the library that interacts with the API. Last month, we started writing the GUI application and we covered the entity selection window. This month, we will write the rest of the app, which consists of the configuration…