Table of contents for July 2024 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell I’ll always have a soft spot for Enlightenment, as used in Bodhi. It seemed so futuristic in 2006, and provided endless things to configure when I had lots of other stuff I should’ve been getting on with. Tiling window managers and tmux-ed terminals are timeless, though. Michael Reed I was a fan of KDE 3 as the technical user’s system and Gnome 2 as the business and education desktop. Credit where credit’s due, the Windows 95 layout with the task bar and app launcher on the bottom (which they both ‘embraced’) is an efficient system. Nick Peers Mine is Ubuntu’s flavour of Gnome. It is my day-to-day desktop, after all. However, I’m also keeping a keen eye on Pantheon, Elementary OS’s desktop environment. It’s modern, sleek and slowly…

LibreOffice 24.2 Writer and Calc manuals are available for free as standard ODT and PDF files from https://books. libreoffice.org. They have been edited by a small group of volunteer contributors: Jean Hollis Weber for Writer, and Steve Fanning and Olivier Hallot for Calc. Previous versions of the guides, on which the updated versions are based, were edited by other volunteers: Antonio Fernández, Dave Barton, Gordon Bates, Bruce Byfield, Kees Kriek, Rafael Lima, Skip Masonsmith, Leo Moons, Kieran Peckett, Gillian Polack, Peter Schofield, Felipe Viggiano and Zbyszek Zak. Anyone who needs to get up to speed with the new versions of Writer and Calc will find these two books invaluable. The guides are an addition to LibreOffice’s extensive online Help system. Windows and Linux users can choose to download and install…

On 6th June, it will be the tenth anniversary of the launch of Kubernetes, the container orchestration tool developed by Google. It was developed to make it easier to deploy software in a repeatable and predictable manner using container images, then manage those workloads over time. Since launch, Kubernetes has grown from a nascent technology useful for very geeky workloads into a platform that is used every day. It is deeply complex and technical, but aims to get the most out of cloud computing deployments by automating common steps and making it easier to run in the cloud. One important element in its success is that it is open source, given over to the Linux Foundation under the Apache License as the bedrock for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The…

Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 6.9 release candidate (RC) 7. It is rare to go beyond this point in a development cycle, and thus likely that 6.9 will be released imminently. Probably the most interesting stuff in this release is under the hood, but a few things stand out as of interest to end users. This includes support for AMD SNP (Secure Nested Paging) Confidential Compute guest VMs. It may also be interesting to note that Linux 6.9 will officially deprecate the venerable ext2 filesystem driver. Support for older filesystems will exist most likely for decades – many people have used ext2 on SD storage to easily avoid journaling wear issues, though this can be disabled in ext4 – but users are being encouraged to avoid ext2 because it…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linux-related 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. VPNs for Linux Roundup After reading for many years how we should use a VPN for privacy on the web, Google’s recent moves persuaded me to try. Thinking that GUI apps would be more convenient, I tried PIA, but the installer fails with a permissions error that I couldn’t work around (Linux Mint 21). Despite me sending full details including the error messages, the helpdesk was useless and I had to give up and get a refund. So next I tried Surfshark, but its installer gave even more errors, and again it couldn’t help so I had…

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, posted the sad news that Jack Lang, one of the original co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, passed away on 23rd April after a long illness. Born in 1948, Lang matriculated into Emmanuel College in 1966. He was a well-known entrepreneur and business angel in Cambridge. For Raspberry Pi fans, he is perhaps best known as one of the original co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the educational charity linked to the popular single-board computer. Lang was also a trustee and chairman of the board of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. He also became a non-executive director and chairman of the board of Raspberry Pi Ltd, the Raspberry Pi trading arm, which oversees development of the single-board computers. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton added his memories: “It’s very…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in New Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years, and lawyering for 10. t might sound we’re joking, but if you think about it, the periodic table is one of the most I easily recognised icons in the world. Certainly on a par with lab coats, stethoscopes, thermometers and Lego pieces. Anyone who looks at it knows exactly what it is. Some people are even required to memorise it as part of their studies, while others still quote it as a display of their nerd quotient. Although you could quickly do an online search to look up elements should the need ever arise, offline utilities have the advantage of offering pertinent information…

ISSUE 315 June 2024 Product code: LXFDB0315 In the magazine Discover how to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and join us on a journey through the world’s most popular distro’s 20-year history. And don’t miss our Roundup of hacker distros, an in-depth look at the impending Epochalypse, detailed tutorials on live-streaming audio via the terminal, setting up Gnome, editing images in Krita, and archiving C64 tapes, and plenty more besides. ISSUE 314 May 2024 Product code: LXFDB0314 In the magazine Join us as we explore Linux’s infiltration of Windows, and discover how you can also get Windows apps running in Linux as we uncork the latest Wine release. And let’s not forget a Roundup of time trackers, tutorials on vulnerability audits, setting up a home ebook server, streaming games, and…

OUR EXPERT Neil Mohr hasn’t got an artistic bone in his body and finds copying is very flattering. Last issue, we took you on a whirlwind tour of Krita, largely ignoring the fact that it’s primarily designed for digital artists and concentrating instead on getting used to the interface and looking at how it can be used for basic photo editing; selecting areas in various ways, manipulating colour and brightness, and touching up areas with the clone brush. With the basic interface introduction out of the way, we can now spend time taking a closer look at Krita’s powerful Brush Engine. It enables Krita to mimic a host of natural drawing media and allows users to customise brushes to their needs. While this all works fine with a mouse,…

SPECS SoC: Qualcomm QCM6490 EL, 64-bit Clock: 8-core, 4x silver 1.9GHz, 3x gold 2.4GHz, 1x prime 2.7GHz GPU: Adreno 643L 812MHz Mem: 8GB Screen: 6.5- inch 90Hz OLED, 1,224x 2,700, 880 nits, Gorilla Glass 5 Storage: 256GB, up to 2TB microSD Cameras: Main 50MP Sony IMX 800 OIS + EIS, UW 50MP Sony IMX 858 EIS; Front 50MP Samsung JN1 EIS Video: 4k 30fps, 1080p 120fps, 720p 240fps Comms: 4/5G (nano SIM+ eSIM), Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 LE, NFC, USB-C 3 OTG Sensors: Facial, fingerprint, magnet, cccel, gyro, compass, light, proximity Location: GPS/ AGPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo Battery: 30W QC3 4,200mAh removable OS: Android 13 Warranty: Five years, IP55, MIL-810H Size: 76x9.6x 162mm, 212g While every other smartphone manufacturer bombards us with numerous new models W every year, Fairphone…

OUR EXPERT David Bolton worked for several years as a postal game developer back in the late ’80s for what was then the UK’s largest postal game company. QUICK TIP There’s an old saying that you should always validate your inputs. Even if you wrote the part of the website or mobile app that accepts orders, you should still validate them in your program that reads and processes them. It’s easy to make mistakes. W e’re going to relive the heyday of the play-bymail craze by creating our own multiplayer browser-based game. In this two-part series, we’re looking at what you need to set up a game and providing an overview of the games processing. It’s only called postal because that’s how these games used to be run from the…

Everyone thinks they know best when it comes to desktops. Having just looked at 20 years of Ubuntu, it was funny to recall users complaining when the Unity desktop was introduced and then users complaining when the Unity desktop was retired – for what was a mostly identical Gnome desktop experience. From Cinnamon to Budgie to Mate and Xfce, the range of open source desktops is wide and well supported. So, this issue we’re taking a good look at the latest KDE Plasma 6, something we haven’t done in far too long and arguably the most powerful desktop around. I’m sure you’ll tell us if you disagree! It’s an ideal time, too, because not only has the KDE project updated the Plasma desktop, but it’s also rolling out the new…

On 25th April, Microsoft announced that, in partnership with IBM, it has released MS-DOS 4.00 under the open source MIT licence. This release of the OS, which originally came out in 1988, includes its source code, binaries, disk images and documentation. The impetus came from British researcher Connor ‘Starfrost’ Hyde, who contacted CTO Ray Ozzie about his software collection. While working for Lotus, Starfrost had received some unreleased beta binaries of DOS 4.0 on floppy disk. Volunteers imaged these and digitised the paper manuals ahead of the project release on GitHub. The following day, Michal Necasek, operator of the popular OS/2 Museum blog, posted an article in response entitled ‘How Not to Release Historic Source Code’. Necasek acknowledged it’s “brilliant” that Microsoft has made MS-DOS 4.00’s source code available,…

April 2024 marked a milestone in the realm of extended reality (XR) development as the Khronos Group unveiled the highly anticipated OpenXR 1.1 specification. It signifies an important leap forward by consolidating multiple OpenXR extensions into the core spec. Users can enjoy simplified programming and streamlined cross-platform development processes for XR applications. The integration of several extensions into the core specification not only fosters wider adoption but also provides developers and vendors with a unified foundation, ensuring consistent and seamless cross-platform user experiences. Notable extensions promoted to the core spec include XR_EXT_ local_floor, XR_VARJO_ quad_views, XR_EXT_palm_ pose, XR_EXT_uuid, and XR_KHR_locate_spaces. Monado, the cross-platform open source XR runtime, has received significant updates to align with the features and specs of OpenXR 1.1, ensuring compatibility and optimal performance for developers and users…

A recent patch series removed support for the IBM PowerPC 405. If you worked on embedded Linux devices around the turn of the century, you will have encountered many of these. They were (briefly) everywhere back in the twilight years of the PowerPC architecture. This was a time before Apple had moved to x86 (and ultimately, Arm), when PowerBooks were called such because they had PowerPC processors inside. I was a huge fan of the PowerPC architecture at the time, since it was RISC-based and used in my first big commercial embedded Linux projects – a piece of scientific instrumentation. Also, Arnd Bergmann posted patches that remove support for older Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier). Ostensibly because EV5 is the last processor in the kernel that can’t support native byte…

WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO! Visual Studio Code LibreOffice Writer LyX Google Docs FocusWriter HOW WE TESTED… Fortunately, the author happened to be working on a fiction book project while writing this article. This made it possible to shift the main body text between the different editors and put in some serious hours of text creation to get a true picture of what each editor was like to really use on a book-length project. While working, the project was moved between a desktop and a less powerful laptop to make sure that the systems could work with a smaller screen and less powerful CPU. In the case of going from Markdown format to ODF format, we used the Pandoc tool. This enabled us to import…

I’ve recently come back from Pi Wars (https://piwars.org), a Raspberry Pi robotics event hosted at the William Gates Building, Cambridge (the same place that I first interviewed Eben Upton back in 2013). Pi Wars was created by Mike Horne and Tim Richardson as a non-destructive version of Robot Wars. Teams from around the world (USA, Netherlands and Nigeria) took part in a series of challenging courses and tasks. Day one saw younger roboteers take part and it was awesome to see so many eager children learning to code and build robots using the Raspberry Pi. From simple, cheap robots, all the way to incredibly sophisticated builds. On the second day, it was the turn of the adults, and their builds were more complex than the younger makers, but both age…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his projects at http://bigl.es. YOU NEED Pi Pico W I2C LCD 4x F2F jumper wires Code: https://github.com/lesp/ LXF316/archive/refs/heads/main. zip The Raspberry Pi Pico W excels at being used with online APIs for a myriad of data sources. T We’ve used it to read the news, tell us who is on the International Space Station, and now we are building a portable weather station that uses OpenWeather’s API to tell us if we need an umbrella. W is for weather Holding the BOOTSEL button, connect your Pi Pico to your computer. Go to https://bit.ly/LXF306Micro Python and download the version of MicroPython for your Pico/Pico W. Open your file manager, go to the…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers has been playing around with computers for over 30 years, and has been dabbling with Linux for the best part of a decade. QUICK TIP Use the Whatis tool to quickly get a summary of any tool you enter after it – for example, whatis apt . For a more detailed explanation of a tool, including all its supported commands and flags, use Man instead: man apt . There’s no escaping the Linux terminal. This is your gateway to accessing Linux’s command-line interface (CLI) or shell. While all operating T systems have an underlying CLI, none are more visible than the terminal. If you’re new to Linux, it’s tempting to studiously avoid it, but there are very good reasons for at least acclimatising yourself…

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford had a Microtan 65, bought in kit form, as his first ever computer. He eventually expanded it to run Basic, then underwent some soul searching to decide if he could justify the cost of upgrading it to 8K of RAM. Although the Sinclair ZX80 is commonly thought of as the machine that kickstarted the ’80s home computer boom in the UK, an earlier machine may have also played a part, as we saw two issues ago. The Science of Cambridge MK14 (see LXF314) came three years earlier, was cheaper, and sold in significant numbers. But even the MK14 wasn’t alone in these pre-ZX80 days, which brings us to our subject here. In 1979, a now barely remembered company called Tangerine Computer Systems introduced the Microtan 65…

Mayank Sharma hasn’t compiled software in ages, and is surprised how quickly devs have taken to the three platform-independent package management formats. IMAGE MANAGEMENT DigiKam Version: 8.3.0 Web: www.digikam.org igiKam bills itself as a professional photo-management app, but it does a nice job D of dealing with them in such a manner that it appeals to all kinds of users. Although designed as part of the KDE desktop, the app works well on any desktop environment. You can find DigiKam inside the official repos of virtually every distro, but the best option is to grab the official AppImage from its website. Once downloaded, give it executable permissions either using the file manager or with the chmod +x command. The app has a first-run wizard that asks you for the folder…

Part Two! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT Ferenc Deák never throws anything away, which is why he still has all his demoscene files. QUICK TIP You can find and clone all the code from the GitHub page: https://github. com/fritzone/lxf-demologia Last month, we had a short introduction to SDL2, and created a more-or-less usable L coding framework on which we can base our implementation of some of the most notorious effects of the ’90s demoscene. This month, we are continuing the recreation of those effects, and introducing some auxiliary mobility into the not-so-dormant screen we created last time. The fire effect was one of those quick-and-dirty effects of the ’90s that seized the attention of spectators at a demo party and ensured instant recognition from your…

RED HAT 9.4 Red Hat 9.4 is now available on x86, ARM, IBM Power, IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE platforms to existing customers. New customers can also benefit from a free 60-day trial. The Image Builder has received an overhaul. Users can now specify arbitrary custom mount points, with the exception of those reserved for the system itself. The OS also has upgraded security, with support for passwordless biometric authentication and SELinux 3.6. Read more at www.redhat.com. LIBREELEC 12.0 LibreELEC is an independent fork of OpenELEC. The project website describes it as “just enough OS to run Kodi media centre”. The latest version (dubbed Omega) has changed all 64-bit capable ARM systemon-a-chip devices, including the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5, from ARM to AArch64 userspace. The Linux kernel itself has…

Neil Bothwick believes that Whatever your level, email it to answers@linuxformat.com he is the reincarnation of Alan Turing. Q Hotting up Debian I’ve started using Linux through Debian and so far so good. However, something that’s pretty essential to how I use my computer is the various shortcuts AutoHotKey provided in Windows. In AutoHotKey, I had a script that played an MP3, located in my files, every 20 minutes, which was an alarm notice for me; I had various text replacement tools that enabled me to enter long strings of text wherever I happened to be typing by just typing an arbitrary code phrase and pressing Space; and I had macros that would do things like run a Java file from the command prompt just by pressing F9. Evie Burke…

Of you’ve never heard of KDE, you’re missing out on a fantastic desktop experience. Or maybe you have heard of it, but recall it bringing your system I to a crawl in the 2010s. Rest assured those days are gone and despite looking beautiful, KDE Plasma (to give the desktop its proper title) is quite light on resource usage. Trying out the latest KDE Plasma offerings used to be tricky. You’d generally have to wait until the release cadence allowed for it to be included in a major distribution. Even then you’d run into packaging or compatibility issues. But thanks to KDE Neon, this is no longer the case. KDE Neon is based on Ubuntu, but includes the latest KDE workings, so you get all the newest desktop offerings on…

In this new series of articles, we are going to investigate some of the plumbing that is used to give us the incredible experience that we are used to with Linux distros. This ranges all the way from the kernel that performs interactions directly with the hardware to Wayland, the display server used to support our graphical user interfaces. Along the way, we will also meet PipeWire, which is used for audio and video routing around our systems. In some cases, we will also discuss the tools that these technologies are on the way to replacing, such as PulseAudio for audio playback and the venerable X in the case of Wayland. Let’s begin at the beginning, introducing the Linux kernel, as this performs the direct interactions with your hardware and…

OUR EXPERT Christian Cawley is so obsessed with retro gear (particularly the 16-bit era) that the first game he installed on his Steam Deck was Zool, a 1992 Amiga platformer. QUICK TIP You don’t need a Steam Deck to enjoy Batocera emulation fun, there’s a standard x86 PC build ideal for any spare laptop or PC you have. If you own a Steam Deck, you probably know that it’s a remarkable handheld gaming PC that runs on a custom version of Arch Linux. With access (via an integrated Steam client) to a vast number of games released primarily on Windows, the Steam Deck can run just about any current game. This is thanks to a combination of factors, not least the Steam Proton compatibility layer, which (in general terms) uses…

OUR EXPERT Nate Drake is a tech journalist specialising in cybersecurity. He placed his first Linux video call via Skype in 2007 to ask his girlfriend to buy him some Smarties. QUICK TIP If you’re installing certain software like the UVC driver in Linux, you need to download packages specific to your kernel version. If you’re unsure which you have, simply open the terminal and run uname -r . If you’re new to Linux it’s easy to fall for the stories peddled online that the OS is terrible for more advanced activities such as gaming and videoconferencing and you should stick to Windows or Mac OS. Still, the Linux desktop’s market share has climbed to over 4% in 2024 and it seems developers are paying attention. A number of popular…

Recently, one of my mechanical hard disks started to fail after only four months. Sending it back was easy, and I knew that the data on it was safe because it was fully encrypted with LUKS encryption. If anyone tried to get a sneak peek of the disk, they wouldn’t be able to see much other than seemingly random data. Of course, it is critical to use good encryption before you actually need it, because in these modern times of NVMe disks, there is no fully proven way to overwrite all the blocks, given the way that error correction works on solid-state disks. Similarly, a failing disk can not be guaranteed to be erased effectively because write access can be locked out, with read access left active. LUKY CHAP Created…

NEXT MONTH LXF317 will be on sale Tuesday 25th June 2024 Get to grips with Flatpaks Stop Snaps, punt packages, away with AppImages and switch to the best app system with Flatpaks. Top terminals! Everyone’s happy with Bash but there are alternative command-line shells out there to try – and they’re free! Accelerating AI Discover how to top out your GPU for AI optimisations and accelerating your machine-learning systems. GIMP 3.0 It's slated for a May release, so we’ll take a first look at the biggest release in years for the key graphical editor! Content of future issues subject to change. We might have been taken to the tip……