Table of contents for September 2021 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell Adobe Flash was born kicking and screaming (and otherwise animating colourful objects) into this world in 1996. This makes it just a little younger than Linux, and definitely not a thing the past three decades should be proud of. Nonetheless, we should all rejoice in its overdue demise. Les Pounder My highlight of the past 30 years is somewhat recent. Oggcamp is a FOSS event that I’ve been a part of since 2009. In that time Oggcamp has generated new communities and ideas. More importantly, friendships have been made, and that’s the true measure of Oggcamp’s success. Mayank Sharma Three decades is a long time, and though you weren’t specific I’m gonna skip getting married, and the birth of our mini human overlord from the highlights, and instead…

“I downloaded six floppies over my 14,400 baud modem (well, my employer’s modem to be more accurate). The downloads took about a quarter of an hour. Then I had to write the floppies out using rawrite.exe under Windows. I shut down Windows and rebooted the PC. Insert the first floppy... and the second... and so on. More time passes. Finally, ready to reboot again. Something about Bogomips flashes past, and then there’s a login prompt! And it was an amazing feeling. A pre-V1 Linux kernel in, I think, 1992. I could even set a task running then switch to another virtual console and do something else at the same time. Windows couldn’t do that. This is the future of computing. Put another way: how I completely misunderstood that Microsoft was…

Linus Torvalds has announced several Release Candidate (RC) kernels for what will become 5.14 by the time you read this. The 5.14-rc4 kernel (and later) include an important fix to the handling of pipes that’s required to properly fix a regression that had affected Android. The regression occurred because applications were assuming certain semantic behaviour not part of the specification, but instead part of the existing implementation. In such cases, Linux will always aim not to break userspace at almost all costs, even if applications are using an interface incorrectly. The only time this isn’t true is when a breakage is so isolated that it’s known not to impact anyone, or when a security vulnerability necessitates some kind of unavoidable impact upon userspace. This is why Linus regularly asks developers…

THE BASICS Q Is installing a swap partition a distro these necessary days? when A Usually prefers to not have , but swap some available software and it doesn’t hurt to give a small amount of disk space for one. The old rule of double the amount of RAM is excessive though, and may actually harm performance. The same amount of RAM is usually more than adequate for modern distros. Q What keep telling are these me man to read pages and people how do I access them? A Man documentation , or manual, supplied pages are with the many commands. They’re read with the man command, so man man gives the man page of the man command, in true recursive tradition. Man pages are meant to be read in…

LXF001 – The road ahead So Mr Veitch, Linux is the way forward, is it? The future alternative computing and all that? My experience of Unix-C machines only coverts the terminals at uni and I wasn’t impressed, although they probably had outdated kernels and were badly configured. I never even got around to installing Linux/APUS on my trusty PPCpowered Amiga. So is it worth installing Linux/APUS and the basic Red Hat distro, which appeared on an AFCD and joining the Linux revolution? I still remain to be convinced. Colin Buchanan Nick Veitch said… Linux is gaining momentum as an “alternative” OS and it’s probably being installed on more computers every day than any other OS. If you know a bit about computers, Linux isn’t that difficult. In many cases, the…

To explore the capabilities of these terminal-based browsers, we used them to access popular websites and tried to download data where applicable. We also attempted tasks that you would normally carry out on those sites. Once we had accessed a site, we made sure that you could find articles or files easily. With the many different ways to interact with other programs, we also tested how to download media and run it on your system. Looking beyond daily computing tasks, you may want to download data and process it, so we tested how to obtain the information in the correct format for use in a set of analysis programs. The amount of tasks you can carry out within a terminal-based browser is impressive, especially considering that most sites use performance-intensive…

Having a browser in the terminal is great, but you may be in another type of software: Emacs. If you are, consider exploring the eww browser, which presents your web page right there in Emacs. It even show pictures, to a degree. Search engines display nicely and you can continue in your favourite program. Downloading and saving the pages is at your fingertips and you can cut and paste as you would any other document. Cookies are handled and you can download the source in another buffer. That buffer will be in HTML mode, so highlighting works correctly. When rendering the page, eww will use the colours as defined in the page you’re downloading. There’s no JavaScript support and it handles nested tables poorly (according to the designer), but simple…

Developing software for supercomputers is expensive. During the 1980s, Cray was spending as much on software development as it was on its hardware. In a trend that would only grow, Cray initially shifted to UNIX System V, then a BSD-based OS, and eventually, in 2004, SUSE Linux to power its supercomputers. This was matched across the sector, and the top 500 supercomputers (www.top500.org) now all run Linux. Internet services have also all been developed to run on Unix systems. Microsoft and BSD systems do retain a good slice of services, but over 50 per cent of web servers are powered by Linux. Recent moves to virtual services with container-based deployment are all Linux-based. Microsoft’s cloud service Azure reports that Linux is its largest deployment OS and, more to the point,…

Being the root of all evil, whenever money is involved, things can turn nasty. So, when the big players in the enterprise and business markets began to see Linux distros as a threat, lawyers were called. A series of leaked Microsoft memos from August 1998, known as the Halloween Documents for the date they were released, detailed Microsoft’s private worries that Linux, and open-source development in general, was a direct threat to its business, along with ways to combat its uptake. This private view was in direct conflict with the company’s public line on the matter, though Steve Ballmer infamously called Linux a cancer in 2001. The documents are available at www.catb.org/~esr/halloween, and in them Microsoft predicted that “Linux is on track to eventually own the x86 UNIX market…” It…

Besides Linus, there are a few kernel veterans that, having devoted a good chunk of the past three decades to Linux, are still very much active contributors. In charge of the staging tree (mentioned above), as well as several other subsystems (and indeed the stable branch of the kernel) is Greg Kroah-Hartman (gregkh). Storage is the purview of Ted T’so, who’s the maintainer for the Ext4 filesystem, as well as the e2fsprogs suite of userspace programs for that and its predecessors. Ted works at Google on filesystems and storage, and in 1994 created the /dev/random interface. Alan Cox (of the original maintainers file) retired in 2019, but was active until then. The former maintainer of the network stack (which he rewrote in the early days) now runs Etched Pixels, a…

Our readers will be well aware that computing is an ever-evolving subject. Take the Raspberry Pi; one day there was no Pi, the next it’s being used all over the education system in all manner of ways. That in itself is a problem: how best to teach computing? Out of the problem comes a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the form of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre, hosted as part of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. The Pi Foundation states: “Through our research activities we hope to make a contribution to the field of computing education and, as an operating foundation working with tens of thousands of educators and millions of learners every year, we’re uniquely…

Using the desktop and mobile apps to use Nextcloud as a Dropbox replacement is unsurprisingly straightforward. It starts with the creation of a user account (you wouldn’t use an admin account!) that you can then login to the app with. With that done, you can begin configuring things to behave like your usual syncing app. Take image syncing from your phone as an example. Most people using Android with a Google account have a Google Photos auto-sync set up. It’s a smart way to stop you from losing important family and personal photos, after all. In the Nextcloud mobile app you’ll find an easy menu item to enable this Tap Menu > Settings then find Auto upload. Here, tap the folder on your phone that you want to sync, then…

Want to share a USB device with your virtual machine? You can easily do that via the Virtual Machine> Redirect USB Device menu. Handy for using USB flash drives with your virtual machine. Need to quickly use a live CD or DVD image? With QEMU we can quickly start the ISO, or a real disc with 1GB of RAM using qemusystem-x86_64 -boot d -cdrom image.iso -m 1024. By default, Virtual Machine Manager will store all of the hard disk images in /var/lib/libvirt/ images, but we can also specify our own destination when creating an image. Using the terminal it’ll default to the current directory from which command is invoked.…

Out-of-the box virtual machines that are installed in a VirtualBox environment use some pretty non-performant but safe base configurations, because the virtual drivers aren’t available in the OS base image. Installing the VirtualBox drivers is important. For Linux hosts, navigate to the VM console in question. From the VirtualBox console menu click Devices and select “Install Guest Additions CD image” to mount VirtualBox’s tools. Mount the image ( sudo mount /dev/cd0 /media ) and run the LinuxAdditions.run file. VirtualBox should now run through the installation of the performant virtual drivers. On Windows, repeating the same process of mounting the image will mean the CD will show up as a CD . Navigate to the CD and find the VBoxWindowsAddtions-setup64.exe file to install the tools. Sometimes however, the Linux install will…

If you have the time and resources to manage and maintain it then it’s possible to build a complete self-hosted SCA solution, including all of the reporting features that you need ,by utilising The OWASP’s Foundation DependencyTrack. This uses something called a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to carry out a lot of the same analytics and issue tracking as Snyk. SBOM of course being the output of another OWASP project: CycloneDX. DependencyTrack has a lot of good things going for it: a modern “dark mode” UI, policy compliance testing, impact analysis, time-series metrics, various SSO solutions, and it’s completely open source, too. However, it also has some significant downsides, such as needing to use a multitude of different tools to build the SBOM (which makes it difficult for projects…

To increase the difficulty of our sliding tiles game we could add timers. One method would be to count the number of seconds it takes to solve the puzzle and give the player an inverse number points. So, the quicker the solution, the more points earned. Those points could then be added on to a leader board with the player’s name. Alternatively, display a countdown timer and give the player a set amount of time to solve the puzzle. Once the timer reaches zero, we could move some tiles around to make things more difficult, or we could entirely wipe the board and display a ‘Game Over’ message screen. Instead of using timers to distribute points we could give the player points for the number of moves it takes them…

In the sage words of Kool & The Gang, “Celebrate good times, come on.” We are, of course, talking about me having edited over 100 issues of Linux Format <whispers from Jonni> but also that 30 years ago almost to the day a young Linus Torvalds announced on comp.os. minix that he’d started work writing a kernel (nothing big or professional like GNU) running on his i386 PC. The rest, as they say, is history. For this special occasion we’re taking time out to look back over those 30 years of Linux development (for which LXF itself has been around for 21 years) and ask how did that happen? We follow kernel growth over the years, reveal how distros expanded out of those early days to foster an open source…

Alongside the announcement of the Linux-powered Steam Deck (see opposite page), gaming on Linux is taking another exciting step forward with the Linux Foundation joining with other institutions, such as Adobe, Intel, Huawei and Red Hat to create the Open 3D Foundation (https://bit.ly/lxf280open3d), which will support open source projects that focus on 3D graphics, rendering and development. The first such project is the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), which is based on the Amazon Lumberyard engine, and will be made available under the Apache 2.0 licence. This will hopefully make developing games now more accessible and affordable, as devs won’t need to pay to licence it. Devs using the engine will be supported via “an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events.” Features included in O3DE will be…

“This month, we’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of Linux. On 25 August, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted his now famous introductory message to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os. minix: “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)”. If only he had known how impactful his work would be. Today, Linux is the dominant operating system of the modern cloud-based world, but it wasn’t always preordained that this would be the case. Younger readers probably don’t recall a time when Microsoft publicly called Linux a cancer and actively fought it (as contrasted by their contemporary friendly embrace and adoption). There was a time when Linux was seen as the biggest threat to many traditional companies who would later embrace it. Thirty years is truly an…

We’d love to try and answer any questions you send to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, no matter what the level. We’ve all been stuck before, so don’t be shy. However, we’re only human (although many suspect Jonni is a robot), so it’s important that you include as much information as you can. If something works on one distro but not another, then tell us. If you get an error message, please tell us the exact message and precisely what you did to invoke it. If you have, or suspect, a hardware problem, let us know about the hardware. Consider installing hardinfo or lshw. These programs list the hardware on your machine, so send us their output. If you’re unwilling, or unable, to install these, run the following commands in a root terminal and…

Graphics capability covers several angles, such as how frames align text and if images are displayed correctly. You won’t see it done perfectly in terminal browsers because since they aren’t designed for it in the first place. You may also want to have hints and help on display. Modern web sites usually use CSS to create order on the page. This means that without it, the site will need to be scrolled through when it’s supposed to be organised into columns. Stackexchange is an example where you need to scroll over two screens to get to the answer you’re looking for. You’ll find the conversation after some effort, but it will not look as intended. Browsh’s designer has made a conscious decision to handle this in an unconventional way. It…

25 AUGUST 1991 Linus announces on comp.os.minix Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, starts toying with the idea of creating his own clone of the Minix OS. 17 SEPTEMBER 1991 v0.01 Posted on ftp.funet.fi This release includes Bash v1.08 and GCC v1.40. At this time, the source-only OS is free of any Minix code and has a multi-threaded file system. NOVEMBER 1991 v0.10 Linux is self-building Linus overwrites critical parts of his Minix partition. Since he couldn’t boot into Minix, he decided to write the programs to compile Linux under itself. 5 JANUARY 1992 v0.12 GPL licenced Linux originally had its own licence to restrict commercial activity. Linus switches to GPL with this release. 7 MARCH 1992 v0.95 X Windows A…

Armed with some insight into what Glibc function calls are, we can now go one level deeper and begin to get a handle on some kernel calls. Going back to our directory listing example above, the first the kernel sees after the command is issued is an execve call. This is how all programs start and along with the filename and any command line arguments, a bunch of extra environment variables are also passed to this call. The opendir library call effects a series of stat kernel calls, which determine the status of files. Directories are files too, and the current and parent entries in a directory, denoted by one or two dots respectively, will get stat -ed along with any ‘real’ files. Every system call returns a value (sometimes…

We’ve looked at how the kernel works, and how people work on the kernel. So how about we finish with some fireside kernel lore. It’s always worth remembering that every new project has its detractors (we don’t care if you thought the old website was better) and Linux was no different. The Torvalds-Tanenbaum debates, referred to as a flame war at the time (but both parties stated there was never any personal animosity, despite the colourful language), started when Prof. Andy Tanenbaum posted on the Usenet group comp.os.minix in 1992 with the somewhat provocative title “Linux is obsolete”. Obviously that title didn’t age well, but his argument was essentially that (even back then) monolithic kernels were on their way out and that microkernels were the future. As you’ll see if…

The Pi Community is one of the Pi’s killer features. Aside from the price and technology, the knowledge that if/when your Googling fails you, there’s likely to be someone who’ll be happy to drop a hint, is invaluable. When I started working on picamera (naively assuming it would wind up a minor Python library for trivial camera usage), it was the community responding enthusiastically to the early releases that spurred me on to take the library further than I’d planned. Later, it was advice from the camera firmware devs (again via the community) that helped me conjure the more advanced features in that library. Most of picamera (or my other projects, like picraft or pisense) wouldn’t exist without the aid or support from this community. Having an active and friendly…

The Sense HAT was released in 2015, and is a scientific platform created for educational use, oh and in space! There are two Raspberry Pis currently inside the Columbus module of the International Space Station as part of a scheme with the European Space Agency where children can write code and potentially have it run on these high-flying Pis. The competition is called Astro Pi and it has been running since 2015 with code written by school children being run on the two space-hardened Raspberry Pis. Is there a north in space? Using the Sense HAT you can find out, just as one school did. Take a look at the project at https://astro-pi.org. The Sense HAT has sensors to measure temperature, humidity, pressure, magnetic forces, orientation and acceleration. It has…

If you’re running the Raspberry Pi Nextcloud server with a hard disk drive or SSD attached, it makes sense to have the full setup housed in a case. Various Raspberry Pi cases are now available with space for the PCB and a 2.5-inch drive, some with active cooling solutions, perfect for using the Pi as a data server. Perhaps most popular is the Argon ONE series of cases, which provide space for a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 alongside an HDD (https://bit.ly/LXF280-argon1). This model also features an internal 30mm fan and aluminium alloy upper case for passive cooling. Meanwhile, the Argon ONE M.2 Raspberry Pi 4 case enables you to connect superfast M.2 SSD storage to the Raspberry Pi 4, with the same cooling features (https://bit.ly/LXF280-deskpipro). This author’s personal favourite…

At the bottom of Midnight Commander’s interface, just above the list of Function keys, you’ll find a shell prompt. You can use this to run all manners of commands from within the file manager. For instance, if you don’t want to use the arrow keys to select a directory on each of the panes, you can instead select a pane, using the Tab key, and then simply run a cd command to switch to the directory of your choice. By default, the command prompt is active and awaiting user input, so any time you press a key that’s not pre-configured as part of a defined shortcut, you’re automatically typing on the shell prompt. The shell prompt can similarly be used to perform other operations. For instance, you can move files,…

When it comes to designing a document in Scribus, one rule of thumb applies: less is more. This means keep things simple for your reader, and prioritising readability and clarity over all else. Start by keeping your page layouts minimal and clean, and ensuring page elements don’t crowd each other out. Consider restricting the number of columns on the page to just two or three, and make sure the text flows logically between them. Readability is key when picking fonts. Again, keep the number to a minimum by using variations from a single font family – bold, black, italics and so on – to style different elements such as headlines or picture captions. Make sure the font family you choose matches your document’s theme – Comic Sans is rarely the…

Emulating old PC hardware with QEMU is cheap – it only costs us a little hard disk space. But what if we want to use real hardware? This is where things become expensive. Looking online we can see incomplete 486-era machines trading hands for hundreds of pounds. So that 486 DX2 66MHz you fancy is now just out of reach. Old PC hardware is expensive to ship and unless it’s in the hands of a collector, it often needs lots of work to make them ready for use. But say you do buy an old PC – what do you need to do? First, make sure you know your stuff before starting the job. Take care with electrics and chemicals for restoring a machine. If in doubt, seek the knowledge…

If you’re already using RSS feeds via one of the many web services then good news – it’s pretty easy to configure Newsboat to act as a newsreader for many of them. What’s that, you ask? As you might have noticed, most RSS feeds are limited to a small number of current articles – 10 to 30 or so (the Linux kernel mailing list, or LKML, is unusual at 100+). So if you’re not reading every day then it’s easy to miss articles over time. Another option is that it means you can keep your read article list synchronised across multiple devices because they’re all synchronising from the same online service. Some online RSS services that are compatible are theoldreader.com, newsblur.com, feedhq.org and bazqux.com. There are additional self-hosted options supported,…

As well as the media formats that have been discussed, Xibo can utilise a large range of resources to create effective digital signage displays. Audio files can be loaded as background music, calendar items can be read from, for example, a Google Calendar, countdown times can be displayed and clocks can be added to alert the user to the current time. Looking at more data-oriented items now, currency trackers can be added as well as displaying data from the tabular dataset objects. These data can be displayed by means of a ticker, table view or chart view. Information from other websites can also be embedded using the Embedded HTML widget. When using this though, make sure you have permission to display information from another source. While not strictly a media…

A lot of engineers like to rail against standards as pointless box-checking and in some cases they are. Especially when it comes to things like PCI-DSS. Fundamentally, any engineer can look at PCI-DSS and say honestly that it’s obvious, and that all of these things should be implemented anyway. But when you ask them if they do, the answer is most often, “No, not all of it”. When you look at certain companies that are compliant (or are applying for certification) and see how much effort they take to “limit the impact” of complying, you start to ask yourself, “If this is all obvious BCoP, then why is everyone afraid of it?”. These standards are here to provide a benchmark that consumers can look at and trust that the company…

ONCE YOU POP!_… MIN SPECS: 64-BIT CPU, 2GB RAM, 16GB DISK Pop!_OS 21.04 We might not be sure about the punctuation in Pop!_OS. But we are certain that since its inception in 2017 it’s fast become one of our favourite distros. Developed by System76 and pre-installed on its finely crafted Linux laptops and desktops, it’s great for beginners and pros alike. Pop has been innovating the bejesus out of the Gnome desktop lately. Most notably, the previous Pop LTS release (June 2020) introduced a tiling window mode, encouraging a smoother, keyboard-driven workflow. That evolved in the interim 20.10 release (with stackable tiles and exceptional floating windows), and in this fresh outing it’s better than ever. The desktop at large is now known as COSMIC (a beautifully wrought acronym for Computer…

USING THE LXFDVD Using Linux for the first time can be very confusing. It’ll most likely be unlike anything that you’ve operated before, especially if you’re used to Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS. Generally our DVDs are designed to be run directly, which is to say that when you first power on your PC (or Mac, see below) it should ‘boot’ from the DVD – so before Windows or macOS even starts to load – with Linux running directly from the DVD. This trick is known as a Live Disc. It enables you to try out the various versions of Linux without having to install or change anything on your PC. Just remove the DVD, restart your PC and it’ll be exactly as you left it. While many systems will…

THE LXF LIBRARY Advanced Bash Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners Get to grips with the basics of Bash scripting. Bourne Shell Scripting First steps in shell scripting. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S. Raymond’s classic text explains the advantages of open development. The Debian Book Essential guide for sysadmins. Dive Into Python Everything you need to know. Introduction to Linux A handy guide full of pointers for new Linux users. Linux Dictionary The A-Z of everything to do with Linux. Linux Kernel in a Nutshell An introduction to the kernel written by master hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman. The Linux System Administrator’s Guide Take control of your system. Tools Summary Overview of GNU tools. GNU Emacs Manual Six hundred pages of essential information! Producing Open…

“It’s thrilling to see Linux reach its 30th anniversary. From the famous “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional” Linus’ email to today, a lot has happened. Linux is everywhere… and on Mars! I believe that Linux will continue to evolve, adding countless new deployments for the next 30 years. Machines running Linux are expected to be functional for years, even decades, which means we need to provide kernel updates with new features and security fixes for a long time. To make this future possible, companies have to engage more with the community, submitting their code to the mainline kernel as fast as possible, in an upstream-first approach. The Linux testing and Continuous Integration(CI) capabilities also need to keep growing. The KernelCI project, which is bringing key industry players…

Throughout history, chess has seen fierce rivalries play out, but perhaps none like this. The open source Stockfish chess engine has filed a lawsuit against ChessBase, accusing it of violating the GPL 3 licence Stockfish is shared under, with ChessBase’s Fat Fritz 2 chess engine. This, the Stockfish team claim, is a derivative of Stockfish, but with some new lines of code and proprietary features. In an announcement regarding the lawsuit (https://bit.ly/lxf280stockfish), the Stockfish team state that “ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights.” So far, the team’s moves have resulted in the Fat Fritz 2 DVD being recalled and halted sales of ChessBase’s Houdini 6 product, which again is a derivative of Stockfish. Stockfish has…

“Over the past decade, many of us in open source have tried to improve inclusiveness and diversity in our communities. STEM programmes in schools, training programmes at corporations, and efforts within universities have all improved diversity. The barrier to entry for first timers can be very high and often off-putting. Currently, we aren’t always well set up to make new contributors successful when they try to engage. For example, I have seen project maintainers dismiss pull requests or bug reports if they’re not the same as those submitted by longtime contributors. We have to consider how we make the process easier, and offer assistance to those getting in touch for the first time. This covers all areas – from submitting bugs and contributing code through to getting help with documentation.…

Mark Rutland posted a patch correcting the kernel’s use of thread_info flags that previously weren’t guaranteed to be used in a safe manner by shared reader/writers. Matthew Wilcox updated his “Memory folios” patches to better support filesystem data stored in the Linux “page cache” by enabling large files to span multiple pages without wasting additional page table entries. Meanwhile, planning is underway for the upcoming (virtual) Linux Plumbers Conference, taking place at the end of September (20-24). This is a key (community-organised) event in the annual Linux calendar because it’s typically also co-located with the Kernel Summit and draws attendees working on all of the lowest level “plumbing” in the modern Linux software stack. With the event being virtual this year, it should be more accessible than ever. Now would…

LXF014 – What about Atari? I’ve noticed in your magazine that many Amiga-owning readers are concerned about the lack of support for their systems when it comes to Linux, and fair enough, the support for Amiga’s when it comes down to Linux is very poor compared to PCs. How often does this apply to Atari users then? My Atari runs Linux Debian (Potato) better and faster, than Mandrake 7.2 runs on the AMD – by quite a long way actually, but is there any support for me, and the rest of us? It took me days to actually get it installed, but when it finally did go, I was able to set everything up, even the graphics card – which it clearly states is not supported! (Yes, Atari’s do have…

Today’s web is full of graphics and tricks to deliver a great experience. All of this razzmatazz does cause some people to stop and wonder what it’s all for, when all you want to do is ask a simple question or look up a simple fact. Fetching all this data will take many times the data to make the site look great, wasting resources and your patience. If you’re usually on the command line anyway, using a text-based browser can make these tasks much faster. The enormous challenge is that JavaScript is usually needed for many sites. Also consider that content is arranged using CSS, which takes even more CPU and memory from your system. This begs the question: is it even possible to use a text-only browser without fancy…

Many websites require JavaScript to run at all times. Other question and answer sites, like Stackexchange, run fine without it. Another standard that has a profound effect on web pages is CSS, which is mostly used to style the page. This includes placing the content in columns. From the browsers on test here only elinks supports CSS and JavaScript, although browsh has all the functions supported by Firefox. Browsh is an exception for many cases. In the end it renders it all for you after having had it all handled by Firefox. The Lynx browser supports neither CSS nor JavaScript and it probably never will. You get speed and agility but not using these functions. The developers will most likely consider it an insult if you ask for this functionality…

Explaining what Linux is to senior management types can sometimes be tricky. An operating system, a monolithic kernel written in C, or a way of life are all valid answers. But so too is, to paraphrase Morpheus from The Matrix, “no one can tell you what Linux is, you have to experience it for yourself”. Fortunately, the fact you’re reading this magazine suggests you have some interest in Linux, maybe even some experience, and so we’ll treat you to a kernel deep-dive the likes of which would have management quaking in their boots. The Linux Kernel is at the heart of all your favourite distros. It’s the interface between hardware and software, so it contains all the device drivers, networking stacks and weird protocols required to get your system from…

Word processors like LibreOffice Writer can do a great job of sprucing up documents, but if you’re serious about page design, you can’t beat a dedicated desktop publishing tool. Scribus is capable of producing anything from brochures and flyers to full-blown newsletters, which you can print or share digitally via PDF as you see fit. It’s packed with powerful tools and options, but in this tutorial we’ll introduce you to the fundamentals of using Scribus: from changing existing content to designing your own documents from scratch. It can be installed or run several different ways: via AppImage, using its own dedicated PPA, or through Flatpak. While the stable version (1.4.x) is listed as ‘recommended’, it’s been effectively abandoned because the current development version (1.5.7) is on the cusp of replacing…

Scribus offers a third type of frame: Render Frames. These make it possible to easily insert specialist typesetting, such as musical notation and scientific formulas, into your document with the aid of third-party programs. Visit https:// wiki.scribus. net/canvas/ Help:Manual_ Renderframes for a guide to using it. Save time recreating frequently used elements: group, then choose Windows> Scrapbook to open the Scrapbook window. Drag your element on to here to store it securely. Drag the element out of the window to create a copy to reuse. Want to add page numbers to your document? Create a text frame in the usual way, then choose Insert> Character>Page Number or press Ctrl+Shift +Alt+P. The inserted page number will update automatically if the page is moved around.…

Back in the late 1990s this author chose their PC magazines by what was on the cover disc, something that had started back in their Amiga days. One month they chose a PC magazine that had something called Red Hat Linux on the second disc which was promptly installed on an AMD K6-2 333MHz PC. It’s fair to say that it wasn’t love at first sight. The sheer volume of application choices, the differing commands and file system was enough to scare this author back to Windows 98. A few months later and another coverdisc, and this time it was something different. It was still Linux, but Corel Linux 1.0 which was a little more “noob” friendly. The install went well and this was this author’s distro for quite some…

QEMU isn’t the only way to create virtual machines. VirtualBox from Oracle is a tried and trusted means to create virtual machines, but it can’t emulate older hardware as effectively as QEMU. Installing VirtualBox is a simple task of downloading the latest version from www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and then following the installation guidance. We’ve successfully virtualised many Linux distros, including Linux Mint and Fedora with VirtualBox, and we have also virtualised Windows installs for projects. VirtualBox has a straightforward process in which we create new machines. During the process we can create virtual hard disks that are either a fixed size, for example an 8GB image file, or we can dynamically create a file hard disk file that will grow to the maximum that the host OS expects. Once a virtual machine…

Using PHP functions, more advanced projects can be carried out. For example, if information is held in a dataset about meetings booked into a meeting room, then the current date and time can be used by the CMS to serve relevant content to the player. See https:// community. xibo.org. uk/t/getting-started-guide-datasets/14149. The forthcoming version 3 of Xibo contains lots of exciting features that are being developed, including interactivity, folders to store media, reworking of permissions and support for sending commands via RS232.…

Welcome The original issue 1 HotPicks, still going strong 21 years later! Welcome to this special edition of HotPicks dedicated to 30 years of Linux! As usual we’re covering the best open source software on the planet, but for this issue Alexander Tolstoy travelled back in time to revisit past issues of Linux Format, searching for the very best applications that proved to be the most useful and well-loved by the people. Revisiting early Linux Format issues is fun, educational and sometimes nostalgic. Many well-regarded software titles from the mid-2000s are no longer maintained and appear to have passed away. Many personal open source projects, which used to be hosted on self-made websites or public code hosting servers, no longer exist (who remembers BerliOS?). Even GitHub, which is the main…

Linux for creatives We round up the best creative open source software and show you how Linux offers professional-level artistic tools. Get your certificate Encryption and online certificates are complex – discover how you can get your sites more easily signed and secured. Cheaper, faster servers We explore the world of Virtual Private Servers: why you’d want one, what to look for, what to avoid and how to get started. Build a pin-hole Pi camera Take one Pi, add the HQ camera and recreate the most basic of cameras in the most elaborate way possible. Because why not!? Contents of future issues subject to change – as we might not survive another climate change summer :o(…