Table of contents for August 2019 in Linux Format

The South Korean government’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety announced that it is testing running Linux on government PCs. If the tests are a success, and Linux is rolled out to all PCs used by the South Korean government, it will be another big win for the open source operating system. Currently, most PCs used by the South Korean government run Windows 7, but with Microsoft’s free technical support ending on 14 January 2020, it appears the government is looking at ways to avoid the costs of continuing to use the ageing operating system. However, according to the Korea Herald (http://bit.ly/ LXF252KoreaHerald) the cost of moving to Linux – and buying new PCs – is expected to cost the government around 780 billion won (£519 million). Savings will be…

Conferences are binary: they are either community-led or run by corporations. But as with everything, there are exceptions.MiXiT (https://mixitconf.org/en) is an event with corporate levels of sponsorship and attendance which still feels like a grassroots event. There were around 1,000 attendees from across Europe inside the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, living and breathing the Lyon lifestyle for three glorious spring days. For two of these days there were talks and workshops from worldwide speakers, including topics such as the ‘third space’ (the increase in maker/hack/co-working spaces) and creating your own open-source project. The primary language at the conference is French, but there were also a selection of talks and workshops in English. In the sponsorship hall there were many big-name companies such as Red Hat and Microsoft offering up…

More accessible I can just imagine it now: your front cover depicting Tux in a wheelchair and his flipper in a sling. Awww! I just discovered how difficult it is to type with my right hand in plaster following surgery. So I got to thinking whether you could consider an issue of LXF containing an article on accessibility options. There are just a few ideas here, but I’m sure you could improve on my list. How can I fix ‘sticky keys’ on my Lubuntu laptop? What is the best voice-assistant for writing and reading text? Is there an easy to use screen magnifier? How to remap the buttons on a mouse? Setting up a touch screen… and so on. I know that some of these options are available to, er,…

The release of the GeForce GTX 1650 was inevitable, considering that none of the other Turing GPUs can fill the role of a budget graphics card. This is likely the final implementation of the Turing architecture, at least at 12nm. The GTX 1650 uses a new TU117 GPU, which is a smaller and thus less expensive variant of the TU116 that powers the Nvidia GTX 1660 (see our review in LXF251) and 1660 Ti cards. The key differences relative to the 1660 line are in the memory configuration and the obviously reduced number of streaming multiprocessors. As expected, the GTX 1650 has 4GB of GDDR5, clocked at 8GT/s – the same speed as the GTX 1660, as well as the previous-generation GTX 1060 cards. Four active memory controllers on a…

Generally we steer clear of new Ubuntu-based distros, but HexagonOS appealed to us with its home-brewed apps. After all, it’s logical to assume that anyone who has put in the time to write custom apps must have put in the effort required not to ship just another Ubuntu clone. HexagonOS doesn’t disappoint us for being an Ubuntu clone. We are instead let down by the distro’s liberal use of the 1.0 versioning. Why would anyone want to subject their project to a reviewer’s wrath, knowing very well that their distro is so full of rough edges that it might cut someone? HexagonOS is produced by a small Italian startup. It boots into a beautifully crafted Xfce desktop that sports the Arc icon theme, with flat icons that look elegant and…

Lightweight or not, a desktop environment is one of the most crucial elements of a distribution. Regardless of the features or application set with which a distribution ships, oftentimes it’s the look and feel, behaviour and responsiveness of the desktop environment which help you decide on a distribution. Perhaps this explains why most mainstream distributions spend a considerable amount of time polishing the desktop environment and ensuring a rich and rewarding user experience. But all of those careful design strategies go out the window when you swap the default environment with a lightweight alternative. That said, while the primary objective of these desktops is to save resources, it doesn’t mean they totally ignore the usability aspect. After all, no one wants to use a desktop that takes a negligible amount…

Just because these desktops are lightweight doesn’t mean they can’t provide the bells and whistles you get with mainstream desktops. As these elements inevitably increase the memory footprint of the desktop, some of the desktops bundle them inside a separate package, while others avoid them altogether. EDE doesn’t believe in offering any additional plug-ins and so you’re stuck with the default functionality. On the other hand, while Openbox can be extended by plugging in various components such as a file manager, the window manager itself cannot take on new features via plug-ins, extensions or additional modules of any sort. Lumina began life as a set of extensions to Fluxbox, a stacking window manager for the X Window System, and bills itself as having a plug-in-based interface design. This enables you…

Hard drives fail. They wear out, they get dropped, they get fried in electrical storms. Some of them, doomed from the start, come off the manufacturing line worse for wear. Potential drive failure is a good reason to back up your important files, but it’s an even better reason to deploy a RAID configuration. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/ Inexpensive Disks) enables you to use multiple drives to increase the resilience of your storage. RAID1 is the easiest configuration to explain: it mirrors the contents of one disk to one or more others. This means that all but one of the drives involved can fail and you still won’t lose any data. RAID0 doesn’t have any such redundancy, but rather ‘stripes’ data across drives so that it can be read…

Filesystems and indeed the media that they live on have come a long way. Cassettes, cartridges and punchcards didn’t even have a filesystem to speak of: data was just read as a single stream. From there we moved on to directory-less layouts, through to 8.3 filenames, then on to more recognisable features such as permissions and, latterly, journalling. Traditionally, storage has been stratified such that the RAID layer – be it software RAID via MD in the Linux kernel, hardware RAID via a dedicated controller, or so called ‘fake raid’ through the BIOS – is totally separate from the filesystem layer. As we’ve seen, though, RAID only protects against drive failure. If you have, say, a two-drive RAID1 system, and one of your drives starts writing jibberish without outright failing,…

Open source leads to freedom. Freedom leads to choice. Choice leads to angry, neverending Vi vs Emacs and similar discussions on the internet. This paraphrasing of Yoda’s famous quote sums up the open source community rather well – but it also leads in to our tutorial. For anyone who’s spent time on the terminal, the history expansion feature in Bash is unparalleled in its usefulness. Just as brilliant is the reverse search, which you can invoke with Ctrl+R. Reverse search lets you search for the specified keyword in Bash history, so that you don’t have to type in the same command over and over again, saving some precious time and effort. Written in Rust and released under the MIT licence, McFly is a replacement of the default Ctrl+R Bash history search.…

While Calibre can only open DRM-free books with its own ebook reader, you can still add Kindle content to your library (see http:// bit.ly/lxf252drm). From here you can transfer it to a Kindle app or device, but you can’t open it directly in Calibre – at least not without the help of a third-party plug-in. It’s called DRM Removal Tools for eBooks, which you can download and install following the instructions at http://bit.ly/lxf252drm2. Note that breaking DRM is illegal in many territories, even if you’ve purchased the original and simply want to remove any restrictions on what device you can read it on. Some DRM-protected ebooks – including purchases from Google Play Books – require Adobe Digital Editions, which isn’t available natively. We managed to get it installed and working…

The GIF format is from another age: originally created in 1987, tweaked in 1989, it was designed for simple, blocky colours. While you may hear that it only supports 256 colours, that restriction has been ‘hacked out’, by adding as many palettes of 256 colours as needed to an image (often bloating it significantly), and then changing the palettes across the picture. This can cause a lot of problems with size and loading times, with content deviating significantly from the original specification. Photos with millions of colours can often have a filesize, and thus a loading time, several orders of magnitude more than file formats actually designed for photography, such as JPEG, and newer, better-all-round lossless formats, such as PNG. Creators leap at animated GIFs, using (and some might argue…

The famous Mandelbrot Set likely springs to mind when talking fractals, but it’s just one of a whole group of fractals known as escape-time fractals. As it is there are several categories of fractals that are generated in quite different ways. Escape-time fractals are, perhaps, the most unexpected because, at first sight, it seems barely plausible that applying such a simple formula could produce an image that is visually attractive and literally infinite in the amount of detail it contains. By way of contrast, some of the algorithms used to generate these fractals might seem to be designed specifically to generate a fractal result – but nevertheless we promise to lead you on an astonishing voyage of discovery… Lost in the Sierpinski Triangle As fractals are so visual we’re going…

You’ve probably seen benchmark statistics reported about all manner of popular devices, but what exactly is a benchmark, and how can you run one on your own systems? A benchmark originally referred to a testing process for rifles, where the gun was mounted to a bench, rather than being held by a human marksperson: the bench was acting as the mark, hence benchmark. With several test firings, the spread of shots could be measured – the smaller the spread, the better the gun. Nowadays however it refers to any process that allows different methods, devices or processes to be compared with each other directly, based upon a standard reference. In computing, this is done by taking a set of reference tasks which reliably take exactly the same amount of effort…

Using Python, in this tutorial we’re going to hook directly into Minecraft to edit our player world and the characters within in it, all using Python. While Python 3 is an incredibly versatile high-level programming language, as you may know Minecraft was originally developed using Java, so we’re going to have to install a few add-ons to be able to hook directly into Minecraft with Python. Fortunately, Minecraft’s developers Mojang has released a version specifically for the Raspberry Pi – the Minecraft Pi Edition – that comes with an API for budding programmers, so we’re going to take advantage of this. The following tutorial will work whether you’re using a Raspberry Pi or a regular desktop variety of Linux. We’ve put together a package that allows Python to hook into…

ON-TREND DISTRO Pop!_OS 19.04 64-bit Pop!_OS is the bespoke operating system from Linux system builder System76. Naturally it’s been carefully tailored to work on its own hardware (which is great, by the way), but it’s based on Ubuntu so it should work on yours too. Awkward punctuation aside, it looks great, with its eye-catching desktop and slick installer. It’s more than your average Ubuntu clone too: for one thing it follows a rolling-release model, at least as far as applications are concerned, and for another it enables full-disk encryption by default. It also doesn’t include Ubuntu’s slightly worrisome data-reporting. The live Pop edition appears to launch straight into the installer, but don’t worry if you just want to try it out. That option appears after you’ve answered the localisation options.…

Cybersecurity company Intezer (www.intezer.com) has discovered a nasty piece of sophisticated malware, which it has dubbed ‘HiddenWasp’. It targets Linux systems, and as the company explains, unlike other malware that targets Linux for cryptomining or DDoS attacks HiddenWasp is a trojan that is used to remotely control target systems. Most worryingly of all, Intezer revealed in a blog post disclosing the existence of the malware (http://bit.ly/LXF252IntezerBlog) that HiddenWasp is still active and has a “zero-detection rate in all major anti-virus systems.” The authors behind HiddenWasp have apparently used a large amount of code from publicly available open-source malware, including Mirai and Azazel rootkit. Unlike Windows malware – which is often carefully written – Intezer says that Linux malware authors do not spend too much effort creating their software, instead picking…

ZORIN OS 15 Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based distro that’s ideal for people migrating from Windows, thanks to its user interface which is inspired by Microsoft’s operating system. The latest version, Zorin OS 15, comes with Zorin Connect (which is based on KDE Connect) for sharing between devices. It also introduces Zorin Auto Theme, which changes the desktop theme into Dark mode at sunset – and back to the normal theme at sunrise. For more information, visit the release announcement at http://bit.ly/LXF252ZorinOS15. 4MLINUX 29.0 This new release of the lightweight 32-bit distro – which focuses on maintenance, multimedia, miniserver and mystery – is now available. It comes with the Linux kernel version 4.19.41, updated desktop and server packages (including LibreOffice 6.2.4, GIMP 2.10.10, DropBox 73.4.118, Firefox 66.0.5, Chromium 74.0.3729.10) and…

Never one to judge a book by its cover, we let slide the fact that Robolinux’s website is very messy and a nightmare to navigate. Sure, we appreciate the fact that donations are key to sustaining the open source ecosystem, but we think this project goes a little overboard. Its developer’s heart is in the right place; he isn’t just seeking donations for himself, but that’s no excuse for the poorly designed website. Robolinux has three active branches: Raptor 8, based on Debian; Raptor 9, based on Ubuntu LTS; and Raptor 10, based on Ubuntu. Each branch has a bunch of releases for different desktop environments, including Cinnamon, GNOME, Xfce, MATE and LXDE, for a total of 15 ISO images. Once you do manage to navigate your way to the…

We last reviewed openSUSE more than three years ago and the distro has had some interesting updates and changes since then. It has reorganised, and starting with the 15.0 release last year, SUSE’s enterprise version and openSUSE are now being developed in tandem from the ground up. The openSUSE distro maintains two main branches. There’s a rolling release dubbed Tumbleweed, pitched at developers and experienced users. Leap is the regular distro that comes out once a year, and because of its alignment with SLE will not get any major architectural changes for several years, unlike its closest competition Fedora and Ubuntu. This apparent sluggishness helps openSUSE Leap pitch itself as a much more stable option that claims to be better suited for running servers and enterprise desktops. The Leap flavour…

With the exception of a couple, all the desktops in this Roundup are available in the repositories of mainstream desktop distributions. Arch, however, leads the pack, in that it gives you access to all the options via its official and community-supported repositories. You’ll also get good mileage with Fedora, thanks to its Copr build system which complements its repositories. Similarly, Ubuntu with its PPAs enables you to get your hands on a wide number of DEs. One word of advice though: the quality of packages in the community-maintained repositories varies widely and ranges from anywhere between rock-solid to barely usable. You might not get the best experience using packages from a community-supported repository as compared to the official ones. LXQt and Openbox are the two options that are universally available…

Since you’ve taken the steps to add a new desktop, it’s only natural you’ll want it to do your bidding by customising the way it works. All configuration options in EDE are housed inside the configuration window. It provides six tools to customise different but very basic aspects of the desktop including wallpaper, screensaver, calendar, volume and preferred apps. Advanced users can also set various other aspects of the desktop by manually editing configuration files. Openbox users can customise the window manager using the Openbox Configuration Manager (obconf) app. This helps you customise little else besides various aspects of the window manager. For instance, you can use it to change the default appearance and apply themes, and change the behaviour of the mouse and the position of the taskbar. You…

We’ve all been there: a shiny new Linux distro comes out and you want to install it, but you already have your favourite distro installed alongside Windows 10 – and while there’s free space on the drive, it’s all enclosed in the OS partitions. Ideally you’d buy another drive, but that costs. You could resize your Windows partition and move your Linux partition to the left, but experience has told you this takes time and there’s a reasonable chance Windows won’t boot afterwards. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could effortlessly add, remove and resize partitions without extended wait times and the nail-biting prospect of failure? Well, you can’t. You can’t because Windows doesn’t support LVM. But if all you have are Linux partitions, then good news: LVM can make…

ZFS was released for the OpenSolaris project in 2005, so it predates Btrfs, the ‘other’ next-generation filesystem. When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, no further OpenSolaris code was released, leaving ZFS languishing. Even before this though, the CDDL licence under which OpenSolaris was released had been considered incompatible with the GPL, so no ZFS code ever made it into the Linux kernel. The OpenZFS project has continued to work on ZFS and provide CDDL-licensed code for BSD, UNIX, Linux and macOS. Under the aegis of OpenZFS, the ZFS-on-Linux project provides an out-of-tree module for Linux, which Canonical’s lawyers deemed fit to include in the Ubuntu 16.04 repositories. It’s not widely used, but this may change in Ubuntu 19.10, which is currently exploring enabling this module by default, and hence offering…

1 Write an install medium If you have an Nvidia graphics card you’ll want to fetch the Nvidia build from https://system76.com/pop and burn it to a DVD or write it to a USB stick. If you have trouble booting Pop!_ OS from the LXFDVD (or have no DVD drive), you should write the ISO file from the Pop/ directory (or the link above) to a USB. 2 Make space Start windows and open the Disk Management tool. The easiest way to find it is by opening the start menu and typing the first few letters of ‘disk man’. Right-click the C: drive and choose Shrink Volume. Make some space for Pop. Pop recommends at least 20GB, but if you can spare it, use it. 3 Boot Pop! Boot Pop!_OS and…

Robots and the Raspberry Pi go hand-in-hand. There are countless kits on the market and all are vying to be the ‘best’ or ‘easiest’ to build and use. 4tronix has a long history of building robots specifically for the education market, and with PiBug we see their latest robot in its growing army. PiBug is a little different to other robot builds. Rather than include a chassis onto which we connect our Raspberry Pi, the Pi becomes a major part of the chassis. Coming as a collection of three circuit boards, motors and screws, PiBug is held together via a series of brass columns that connect through the four screw holes around the edge of the Raspberry Pi. Via a short series of instructions on the website we were able…

Living under the ground has benefits and disadvantages. While the person who treats himself to a subterranean living space starts to appreciate an absolutely noise-free sleeping experience, managing underground real estate challenges even experienced landladies such as my wife. The inspiration for this story struck when she had to travel to Germany for business: she wanted to keep an eye on the humidity and temperature levels of our headquarters. The development of the semiconductor industry has led to smart sensors which combine a sensing element with conditioning logic. Output is handled via hardware buses such as I2C, the bus which we’ll use in the following tutorial. The Texas Instruments HDC2010 is an excellent temperature sensor; it not only takes care of temperature, but also keeps an eye on humidity. All…

Streaming videos on the web is increasingly popular, and YouTube is the chosen platform for many. Almost any device can stream video to YouTube, but what if you want a dedicated streaming solution? The Raspberry Pi is a great choice for this, giving you the option to stream anything you like, just as long as there is an unlimited network connection. You’re limited only by your imagination, with the Pi and its camera module ideal for everything from a YouTube-based baby monitor to running live presentations (see the box over there for more ideas). With a good network connection, the right Raspberry Pi set up, and a YouTube channel stream URL, you can have your Raspberry Pi YouTube streaming video camera up and running in just a few minutes. Streaming…

Why go to the trouble of manually copying ebooks to all your wireless devices when you can stream them on-demand over your local network? Calibre has a built-in content server that, when enabled, can be accessed through any web browser – either on another computer or through your mobile device. It’s incredibly simple to use: simply click ‘Connect/share’ and choose ‘Start Content server’. Then click ‘Connect/share’ again and you’ll see the IP address plus the port number (8080 by default) you need to type into your remote web browser. You can also browse the library on Android devices through the Calibre Companion app. The web interface is simplified and optimised for touch support – you’ll see a list of thumbnails you can tap to view a summary, and access options…

TERMINAL EMULATOR Hyper Version: 3.0.2 Web: https://github.com/zeit/hyper There’s no lack of terminal emulators for Linux, but fortunately this is a really smart one. Hyper is coded entirely with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, powered by Electron. At the same time it’s reasonably compact and very robust. Of course this is beneficial for any application, but in the case of Hyper we have some remarkable extra features that make it stand out. The first is performance. Don’t look at the high memory consumption – every Electron app seems to suffer from this. In real-world cases, Hyper sports shorter input latency and faster text output. The easiest way to prove it is to run something like $ time cat big_ file.txt in both Hyper and your current terminal, and compare in real time.…

Google, it appears, is planning to disable ad-blocking extensions in Chrome for everyone but enterprise users. In January 2019 Google first announced that it was planning to change Chrome’s extensions system, called Manifest V3, but many had hoped that the backlash to the proposed changes – which would dramatically impact the efficiency of ad-blocking extensions – would cause Google to change it mind. Unfortunately, it appears not. As 9to5Google reports (see http://bit.ly/ LXF252ManV3), Manifest V3 alters the permissions system for Chrome’s extensions, and stops the webRequest API in Chrome from being able to block ads and requests before they are downloaded. This is an essential component for many modern ad-blocking extensions, and the removal of that feature has worrying security implications. After all, if an ad does contain malicious code,…

We always like to see the progress of open-source RISC-V processors, and it looks like RISC-V BOOM, also known as the Berkeley Out-of-Order RISC-V Processor, is coming along nicely. This is a synthesisable and parameterisable open source RV64GC RISC-V core written in the Chisel language. According to the RISC-V BOOM website (https:// boom-core.org), this is an ASIC-optimised core, but it is also usable on Field Programmable Gate Arrays and was built at University of California, Berkeley in the Berkeley Architecture Research group (https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu).…

PYCON AFRICA The first ever pan-African Python conference takes place from 6-10 August in the coastal capital city of Accra, Ghana. There will be talks, workshops, community events and the all important ‘code sprints’ where projects are created and maintained. The event will have talks in the broad subject groups of Python and Data, Web, General Python and Python community. There will also be sessions aimed at younger coders, along with workshops to help educate. More details and tickets via: https://africa.pycon.org. SCRATCH CONFERENCE EUROPE From 23-25 August 2019 the city of Cambridge, UK, will play host to the 2019 incarnation of the Scratch Conference Europe. This event is aimed at educators who use Scratch to educate and create content for education. This is a hands-on, show and tell, learning event…

Blue Hat Now that IBM has purchased Red Hat, what plans does it have for Fedora and CentOS? Is its interest only in enterprise cloud uses of Red Hat Linux, or will it do any more creative uses of Linux? It has stayed out of consumer computing for quite a while now and a new series of computer products – laptop, workstation, tablet and so on – based upon Fedora Linux would be quite interesting, but I rather doubt IBM is feeling that creative these days. Maybe it will be very hush-hush about its plans if it’s going to do anything exciting. I have been disappointed that HP and Dell have not pushed Linux more aggressively, and it would be nice if IBM stepped into that void with new hardware…

The fact that this distro which is designed to work with reconditioned computers ships as a 3.3GB ISO image feels a little strange. But then its developers had to take into account the possibility that a majority of its users would not have access to the internet. This explains why it includes virtually all popular open-source apps as well as several commonly used proprietary ones. In our experience, the ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ philosophy doesn’t augur well and only ends up confusing the user. The Emmabuntüs project maintains several editions and the one we are reviewing is based on current stable Debian Stretch v9.9, featuring a customised Xfce desktop. Boot into the Live environment and you’re greeted with a first-boot wizard to help you setup the desktop. One of…

Initially at least, it’d seem counterintuitive that anyone would want to change the default desktop environment (DE) of their distribution. After all, the leading distributions spend a considerable amount of time fine-tuning the user experience. Some are even actively involved in the development of the DE to ensure that it meets their expectations. However, the default environment, pretty much like the factory installation, is designed to suit most common workflows. Despite all their refinements and functionality, some DEs are just a hindrance, especially for tasks that need the least amount of graphical oomph. Then there are those of us who have interacted with computers all their life with a DE that conforms to the traditional desktop metaphor, and so don’t really see the advantages of newfangled desktop shells. Another group…

One of the ways some desktops help you conserve resources is to offer matching lightweight apps for common desktop tasks such as file management, text editing, image viewing and so on. Others leave it to the user to pair the lightweight desktop or window manager with third-party lightweight apps. EDE belong to the latter category. The goal of the desktop is to provide a desktop environment only, and you will have to add even the most common apps like a file manager. Openbox similarly concentrates on being a lightweight window manager that you can complement with third-party light apps. It’s the same story with Moksha. Since it was designed to ship with Bodhi Linux, the desktop borrows the few essential apps that are bundled with the distribution. The other two…

Taking app launch times as an indication, all the options in this Roundup are equally lightweight and responsive, and don’t give us much to choose between in terms of performance. So instead we’ll concentrate on their other aspects and determine our winner using the tried-and-tested mechanism of elimination. Lumina loses out for the simple reason that it wasn’t designed for Linux. It also isn’t available in the repos of many distributions, which makes installation a tall order for most users. We are really pained to deny Equinox a podium finish, especially since it performs extremely well and doesn’t score too badly in terms of usability. However, the project isn’t as actively developed as its peers, and you can’t always find it in your favourite disto. Moksha gets on the podium…

Have you ever run out of space on Linux? It can be quite annoying. At best you have to move some stuff, or (shudder) do some disk-based (tidy your room!–Ed) housekeeping. If your root filesystem runs out of space terrible things can happen, especially if it’s on a server you’re not logged into. You can’t log in because the system wants to write a login record, but there’s no space to do that. Even on a desktop you are logged into, strange and unpredictable behaviour might be observed. You might be unable to logout; you might, in your haste, forcibly reboot and find that you have to boot another distro to remedy the situation, as now you’ve corrupted your filesystem and there’s no space to repair it. This is one…

1 Create a partition table Start the Gparted utility, which is included on all good live media. Select the drive you’d like to format from the top-left. From the menu, select Device > Create Partition Table. Use the GPT format unless you have some reason not to – it allows large partitions. Heed the capitalised warning before clicking Apply. 2 Create an EFI partition UEFI booting requires one (and only one, even if multiple drives are present) FAT32 partition to house EFI images. If one exists already, do not format it! It doesn’t need to be large – most distros default to 500MB. Create it by selecting the unpartitioned space and choosing Partition > New. Choose ‘fat32’ from the filesystem drop-down menu. 3 Create other partitions You may want to…

1 Installing Write the ISO from the LXFDVD (it’s in the OMV/ directory) to a USB stick using dd or Etcher. Boot that on your soon-to-be NAS box. The interface is pretty old-school, but don’t be intimidated. Just work your way through the options and hit Go. Be aware that the installation will indiscriminately destroy everything on the target drive. 2 Log in Reboot and the machine should tell you its IP address and offer a login prompt. It may instead helpfully tell you it can’t see the network, in which case log in as admin with the password openmediavault . Run ip a and hopefully you should see an IP address. Visit this address from a web browser on your network. 3 Create RAID Log in to the web…

There have been a few notable efforts to humanise Linux. Today we’d say – and feel free to disagree – that Linux Mint and elementary OS are the most friendly-to-use and all-purpose distros out there. These are of course indebted to Ubuntu for providing a solid foundation and superlative package selection – which in turn owes something to Debian. But it’s also arguable that much of this popularity is, or at least was, a result of dissatisfaction with Ubuntu’s desktop. People who didn’t like Unity loved Cinnamon, and the people who did like Unity didn’t like GNOME 3 (which Ubuntu has used since 17.10). Pantheon, the macOS-like desktop of elementary OS, is attractive not just to fans of fruit-based fashion companies, but to anyone frustrated with over complicated configuration, inconsistently…

This issue we’ll learn how to use the Explorer HAT Pro to work with analogue electronics by creating two projects. First we create a simple light-detecting nightlight, then we create an electronic candle that we can blow out. But first we need to set up our equipment. With the power turned off to your Raspberry Pi, place the Explorer HAT Pro so that it connects to all 40 GPIO pins, and so that it fits neatly above the Pi. Now connect your keyboard, mouse, HDMI and so on to your Pi and boot up. For the next step you will need to connect to the internet using Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Once connected, open a terminal, the icon for which is found in the top left of the screen. In the…

1 Prepare your text Open your word processor and import the text of your book. First, you need to format the text using the built-in text formats: for example, select any chapter titles and format them Heading 1. You can then apply Heading 2 and other headings to sub-headings in the document – these will then appear in the table contents. When done, save the file in HTML format. 2 Create an empty ebook Open Calibre and choose ‘Add books > Add empty book (Book entry with no formats)’. Enter the author and title details, and opt to create an empty ebook in either EPUB or AZW3 format. Click OK and an empty book will be created. Click Edit Metadata to add additional information about your book, plus attach or…

We’re accustomed to thinking of lines and curves as one-dimensional, planes and surfaces as two-dimensional, and solid objects as three-dimensional. The number of dimensions is a measure of how many figures we need to define a point in the object. So, with a line or curve we need just one – the distance along it; with a plane or surface, we need two; and with a solid object we need three. With fractal figures all this changes, and we find that the number of dimensions is fractional. Take the Koch Curve (which isn’t the same as the Koch Snowflake), for which the first few iterations are shown below. It has a behaviour intermediate between a curve and a surface. If we look at any point on the curve – the…

Since supercomputers rely heavily on their high-speed network to let computations be distributed across many nodes, it’s important to test how well this works. There are two ways this can be done: weak scaling tests, where the problem size grows with the number of nodes used, and strong scaling tests, where the same problem is divided into smaller and smaller chunks. Sombrero supports both kinds of tests, defaulting to strong scaling, since that is the harder problem. If you have enough computers available, you can run a strong scaling test. First, set up a set of node lists, called nodelist1.txt, nodelist2.txt and so on, using multiples of 2 and 3. Then, to plot the results: gnuplot> set style data linespoints gnuplot> plot for [i=1:6] ‘strong.dat’ \ using 1:(column(i+1)) title ‘SOMBRERO…

1 Tabs support Press Ctrl+Shift+T to open a new tab. There’s also a plug-in that will make it open to your current directory. 2 Go multiplexing Break one Hyper terminal into many. 3 Edit preferences The configuration file is the place to change fonts, adjust letter spacing and set custom colours. 4 Enjoy fast rendering Hyper automatically selects the Canvas or WebGL renderer to deliver a very smooth visual performance. 5 Use the ‘$ hyper’ command Append ‘--help’ to learn more, or use ‘-v’ to review Hyper’s JS internals. PDF COMPARE TOOL DiffPDF Version: 2.1.3.1 Web: https://gitlab.com/pianoslum/diffpdf Despite the fact that PDF came from the world of commercial publishing and the imaging business, the amount of open source for handling PDFs is impressive these days, and no one could say…

Nowadays, quite a few data architectures involve both a database and Apache Kafka, which is a distributed streaming platform and the subject of this tutorial. You can also find Kafka described as a publish-subscribe message system, which is a fancy way of saying the same thing as it being a distributed streaming platform. As Kafka is optimised for speed, it doesn’t offer too many facilities to users or administrators – like the ones offered by relational databases – and Kafka commands are long and difficult to remember, worried yet? Don’t worry as here we’ll look at the basics of Kafka, including plenty of the commands and two Go utilities for working with it. Installation We’ll use Kafka from a Docker image. The main reason for this is that Kafka has…

Better photo management You don’t have to use Shotwell – we test the best open source photo managers to see which are best for super snaps. Music to your ears Linux sounds awesome for music and we prove it by setting up a digital audio workstation. Ancestry with Gramps Track your family tree with the best open source genealogy tools – we get you up to speed on how to research your past. Monitor everything! Get to grips with the best monitoring software. We run Nagios on the Pi to help keep a track of everything. LXF 253 will be on sale Tuesday 30 July 2019…