Table of contents for November 2021 in Linux Format

Keith Edmunds is MD of Tiger Computing Ltd, which provides support for businesses using Linux. I was talking to a company recently who told me they’d written their own system monitoring application. I was curious: why would they do that? No one outside the organisation knows about it, so new staff have to be trained on it. They can’t Google any questions they have. Interfacing with other systems (for example, to handle out-of-hours alerts) requires more coding. And it isn’t even that good. Reading between the lines, I suspect the sunk cost fallacy is in play here. They’ve spent so much time and money developing it that throwing it away feels wasteful. So they spend even more time and money on it… Open source software excels in some areas, and…

In some rather pleasing news for users of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, Canonical has announced (https://bit.ly/lxf282canonical) that both LTS versions of the distro will have their lifecycles prolonged to 10 years, in what the company is calling the “Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase.” The idea is that these will give companies that are still using the distros on their machines more time to plan and implement upgrades. As Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Product Manager at Canonical, says, “We are bringing an operating system lifecycle that lets organisations manage their infrastructure on their term.” After the controversy over Red Hat cutting short the CentOS life cycle, it’s good to see Canonical doing the opposite with Ubuntu.…

Jon Masters has been involved with Linux for more than 22 years. I continue to be shocked on a regular basis by the rapid rate of progress in the community that is porting Linux to the Apple M1 (Apple Silicon) Macs. As of this writing, and as reported by one of those involved (Alyssa Rosenzweig), “git status says the lines of code added for the Apple M1 is over 9,000”. She is able to use the internal storage, HDMI, USB, Ethernet and much more as she works on enabling support for graphics (she is running GNOME on her M1 Mac). At first glance, I (almost) wondered why anyone would bother. After all, support for virtualisation on that hardware is first rate and you can run a Linux guest VM faster…

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…

These projects are built in many languages. However, they all end up with the languages needed for your site: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To get things to work, you need to use web-based techniques. To use the projects, though, you do not need to be fluent in the languages designers wrote them in. Only when you feel you want to contribute does this become a serious consideration. It does affect contributors, though. You should consider whether you need to tweak the programs themselves or not. Most work you will do is tweaking aspects of the final result. To do this, you need to know the templating language, which is built on the idea that you can write HTML with variables and conditional statements. The other things you need are YAML,…

Back in 2015 Microsoft decided that it loved Linux. It loved it so much that it built a whole Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which enabled Linux programs and development stacks to run natively. The official statement even involved a heart emoji, which we would have reproduced here but putting in-line images in the body text apparently causes alarm bells and wisps of smoke at the printers. Anyway, heart or no, some people were sceptical of Microsoft’s intentions, with memories of the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” mantra and the 1995 Halloween papers still fresh in their minds. But it does really seem like Microsoft wants to accommodate Linux users (well, developers mostly), rather than force a mass defection. A successor, WSL 2.0, was announced in 2019, which was built around a…

Ellora James is a fourth-year student who’s taking a university degree course on ethical hacking. I was first introduced to the Raspberry Pi back in high school, and I’ve been hooked ever since printing my first “Hello World” in Python. Recently, I started a YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/c/ElloraJames), where I share my latest Pi projects. The accessibility of the Raspberry Pi and the supportive community behind it has no doubt played a major role in my decision to pursue a career in ethical hacking. Had I not borrowed a Raspberry Pi from school and started learning Python, I may never have discovered my love for programming. Ultimately, that led to me choosing to study computer science in school – something that I had never considered before. Starting my YouTube channel has…

Scratch is meant for learning to code. It uses blocks to depict code and we can build sequences (algorithms) with relative ease. If something goes wrong we can take it apart and diagnose our code. As we’ve covered in previous issues, Scratch can also be used with the GPIO of a Raspberry Pi to learn electronics and in this tutorial we shall learn how to work with inputs such as buttons and a PIR sensor to control simple outputs such as LEDs. Don’t let the simplicity of this fool you. Adding the PIR sensor to our robot project (LXF279) and tweaking the code will enable our robot to detect an obstacle, and then move around it. But before we can do that we need to know the basics, so here…

The National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) has a standard for the formatting of GPS information. ASCII text, comma delimited lines of data transmitted from the GPS satellites are referred to as sentences. The first word of each sentence is prefixed with $GP (i.e. global positioning) and defines the data type. For a more detail description about these or other NEMA data types see http://aprs.gids.nl/nmea. Some of the standard NMEA-0183 datatypes include: Datatype NEMA description GPGGA: Time, position and fix GPGSA: GPS receiver mode, satellites used in the position solution GPASV: Number of satellites in view, ID numbers, elevation, azimuth GPRMC: Time, date, position, course and speed GPGZDA Pulse per second (PPS) time message…

The 4004 is considered a four-bit processor, but what do we mean when we talk about a processor’s “bit-ness”? It has been described as the width of all the processor’s registers and busses, but it’s not at all that simple. For example, we’ve seen that the 4004 only had four-bit registers so it could only do four-bit arithmetic, but if that extended to the address bus, it would only have been able to access 16 memory locations. The address bus continued to be wider than the data bus in most processors up to 16 bits, and we were told that the main reason for migrating to 64 bits was to access more than the 4GB limit imposed by 32-bit processors. It didn’t increase to 64 bits, though – after all,…

When creating a new archive, you can also use the --compression or the -C command option to create a compressed backup archive. Borg defaults to using LZ4, which is fast but offers little compression. Borg also supports other compression algorithms such as zstandard, zlib and lzma. You can use a mix of compression algorithms for different archives within the same repository. This is because deduplication is done on the source data chunks. With the exception of the default LZ4, all other algorithms expect a compression level. For zstd, the compression levels range from 1-22, while for zlib and lzma, the options are 0-9. borg create --compression lzma,4 repo/path::archive-name data-sources creates an archive using the lzma algorithm. You can also direct Borg to decide for itself whether the data needs to…

ISSUE 281 October 2021 Product code: LXFDB0281 In the magazine Discover how to customise the Mint 20 desktop with our in-depth feature. We explore virtual private servers, assess five open source art programs, build a Pi-powered pinhole camera, recreate pseudo-3D racing games and emulate the Atari 800. DVD highlights Mint 20.2 “Uma” and Elementary OS 6.0 “Odin” (both 64-bit). ISSUE 280 September 2021 Product code: LXFDB0280 In the magazine As Linux hits 30 years, we show how the kernel became a worldwide phenomenon. We take a look at terminal browsers, plus show how you can make your mark in desktop publishing, build a Pi Nextcloud server and run Linux distros from yesteryear! DVD highlights Pop!_OS 21.04 (64-bit), and classic Linux distros (32-bit, unsurprisingly). ISSUE 279 Summer 2021 Product code: LXFDB0279…

There were many models of TRS-80. Some were compatible with each other, such as the Model 1 and 3. The later model 4 was backwards compatible with software written for the 3, but that was it. The TRS-80 Model 4 was a faster and better-specced machine with integrated disk drives. The Model 4P was a portable version of the Model 4, and by portable we mean “luggable”. For true portability we have to look to the TRS-80 Model 100. The TRS-80 Model 100 wasn’t a “true” TRS-80. Rather, it was a rebadged Kyotronic 85, so software compatibility between the machines was broken. The Model 100 was the tablet of the 1980s. It had a comfortable keyboard, decent LCD screen and it ran for up to 20 hours on AA batteries.…

Last issue we went into depth on selecting and standing up a bare VPS running Ubuntu Server (https://bit.ly/lxf281lxfserver). If you missed it go back and catch up, else on a fresh install get Apache up and running this way. Ssh in as root, eg. to your new server. Create a new, non-root user with its own home directory skeleton using the useradd command: followed by a new password for your new user using the passwd command: Grant your new user sudo powers so you can actually get things done by typing the following: After this you should log out as root and log back in as your new user. Update and upgrade the already installed packages using sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade commands and start adding packages which…

Optical filters are defined by the size of their thread, and this must match the thread on your camera’s lens. Excluding expensive professional lenses, this might vary from perhaps 27mm with compact cameras to upwards of 58mm for DSLR lenses. However, if you have more than one camera, or multiple lenses for your DSLR, you don’t have to buy multiple sizes of each filter. Instead you can just buy filters to match your largest lens and add some stepper rings which enable you to fit filters to your smaller lenses. This applies to the traditional circular filters, but rectangular filter systems might also be of interest. The basic kit comprises a holder to which you fit a rectangular filter, and one of several sizes of screw adapters. This is another…

Alexander Tolstoy has a secret trick for correctly spelling the name of this month’s opening HotPick… Version: 3.2.0 Web: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka ooner or later most of us will experience a hard drive running out of space. This may be due to the ever-growing assets under the home directory, the abundance of downloaded Linux ISO files, or simply because of too many Flatpaks and Snaps that are known to devour disk space. No matter the reason, it’s time to figure out what exactly occupies so much space, and as such we’re going to go a bit further then simply analysing disk usage with Baobab or Filelight. Czkawka is designed to track down unnecessary files. It enables you to remove file duplicates, large files, empty directories and other stuff that you probably don’t…

Version: 1.0 Web: https://github.com/Cykelero/timefind The internet remembers everything – so they say. In fact the web is more like a river and we all sit on a wooden platform that drifts with the current. We see what happens today and what had happened in the not-so-distant past, whereas older things often become swamped under torrents of content, or even lost forever. That’s where the Internet Archive, aka the Wayback Machine comes into play. Of course you can go to its web site and manually roll back time to see how a web page used to look before, but we’ve got a tool that does it better. Timefind is a NodeJS-based utility that automates Web Archive searches in such a way that you can quickly find out the first and the…

Version: 0.8 Web: https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr This is an amazing Linux trick that enables you to steal a process’s terminal output and reconnect it to another terminal session. Reptyr can perform ‘re-pty-ing’ of any process in Linux and thus makes it possible to detach a process from one PTY/TTY terminal session and attach it to another. The idea makes use of the ‘leading terminal’ concept, which is key to Linux. As such, every process in a session has the same controlling terminal, and each terminal belongs to at most one session. If a terminal fails, its child process is killed too, which is best avoided. Perhaps the best example is running something inside an SSH session and getting disconnected. Reptyr enables you to leave the child process running even if its host…

According to the HTTP protocol you can define the HTTP method of a request, and RESTful services are no exception. POST is used for creating new resources, GET is used for reading (getting) existing resources and PUT is used for updating existing resources. PUT requests should contain the full and updated version of an existing resource. Additionally, the DELETE method is used for deleting existing resources. Finally, PATCH is used for updating existing resources. A PATCH request only contains the modifications to an existing resource. The most commonly seen HTTP status codes are 200, this means that everything went well and the specified action was executed successfully; 201, which means that the desired resource was created; and 202, which means that the request was accepted and is currently being processed…

Object Orientated Programming (OOP) techniques have been used throughout the Star Fighter project. The two main Object Orientated tools that have been used are classes, creating instances of classes (commonly known as an object) and inheritance. A class can be looked as a template for the object to be created that contains operations known as methods and variables that are known as properties in the world of OOP, which all can help determine how the object will behave once it’s created. Let’s look at an example that can be found in the source code: A class here in the above example is declared as PlayerBullet, which is the name of the class itself. Within the definition of the class there exists what’s called the class constructor. Here’s an example of…

START HERE USING THE LXF DVD 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…

So after saying it would never exist, Microsoft felt it necessary to launch Windows 11. Why do we care? Well we don’t, but it’s neat to note that the Linux kernel now comes baked into Windows as part of WSL 2.0. It means people can try out and use Linux and its FOSS ecosystem more easily than ever before. We know many see this as more Microsoft ‘embrace and extinguish’, but this is different. Microsoft can’t own the Linux kernel, can’t shut it down – all it can do is attempt to make access to Linux as easy as possible from within Windows. My view is this simply opens Linux to a wider audience, which has to be a good thing. Right? In this issue Jonni – the poor boy…

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is one of the best recent additions to the Windows OS as it adds everyone’s favourite kernel to Windows. In this very issue we look at WSL 2.0, which is built into Windows and enables you to run Linux executables natively in Windows 10 and Windows 11, with WSL 2.0 including the Linux kernel. It’s handy for devs working on Linux projects but using a Windows PC, for example, and it’s certainly been one of the more popular aspects of Microsoft’s embrace of open source. However, security researcher Black Lotus Labs has discovered malware that uses WSL to avoid being detected by antivirus tools. In a blog post outlining their findings (read it at https://bit.ly/lxf282wsl), the researchers reveal they have “recently identified several malicious files…

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 5.15-rc1 (Release Candidate 1), noting that at just over 10,000 non-merge (non-administrative) commits, it is “in fact the smallest rc1 we have had in the 5.x series. We’re usually hovering in the 12-14k commit range”. He called out the new (writable) support for NTFSv3, as well as support for an in-kernel SMB (Windows network filesystem) driver that aims to play nice with the userspace Samba project and its utilities. With the release of “-rc1” came the requisite closing of the “merge window” (period of time during which disruptive changes are allowed into the kernel) which had been “one of the messier merge windows”. As Linus says, “Part of it was self-inflicted damage from me trying to enable-Werror much more aggressively”. What he had done was attempt…

says “mo Tux, mo problems” Q Key issue I’m working on setting up for a switch from Windows 10 to Ubuntu (20.04 LTS) and getting all I would want or need from Windows to Ubuntu. I’m stuck on my PGP keys. I want to export them from Windows to Ubuntu. I find no easy way to do it. I need to export both public and private keys from Windows (I’ve tried with Kleopatra with no solution that works for me yet) and import the same into Ubuntu and into Thunderbird. Steve Cox A There are two ways to do this. The first is to copy your entire GPG dataset from Windows to Linux. On Windows 10 this is stored at C:\Users\ username\AppData\Roaming\gnupg. Copy this directory to ~/.gnupg and make sure everything is owned and only…

Mats uses all the tricks he knows, and then some, to keep his old machine going. There are a ton of ways to make webpages, and most require some sort of build system on the page itself. It also requires a team of web developers for all the features that will drive sales and hook people into your site. If, on the other hand, you decide that some of your creations just need a public space, then not that much is needed. If you create a site using the big web hosting companies, a text editor is not well supported. To publish these types of sites, you must use their built-in site builders and edit on the page. This makes it really easy to create a good-looking site. Moving to…

There are plenty of themes for the three major ones in this selection. You can see from the selection on their listings that they have embraced known technologies. The most likely choice is Bootstrap, which dominates in the space. If you want to use other frameworks, there are many but you will need to put in a lot of work making your own theme that uses it. This may be less of an issue than it seems at first. The format for a theme is very similar to any other. You can use this to transfer a theme that you like from one to the other. It is more complex than regular use, but far from a serious programming or web design challenge. The themes are all supported by a…

From the Linux side, your Windows C: drive and everything in it is available at /mnt/c and from the Windows side, you can see your Linux filesystem(s) from Explorer by following the Linux shortcut (it has a penguin icon) below OneDrive, This PC, Network and what-have-you. While handy, you shouldn’t let Linux programs do I/O heavy operations on /mnt/c. Why? Well read on… If you run the mount command, you’ll see that /mnt/c uses some sort of exotic Plan 9 (9p) filesystem to mount a drvfs volume. You’ll also see that the root Linux filesystem lives on its own block device (/dev/sdc or such) and that there are mount points for WSLg (the helper distro that enables tools to run seamlessly with graphics and audio). In WSL 1, drvfs is…

There’s a version of Scratch which is still as easy to use, but it provides more options for electronics projects. S3GPIO was created and is maintained by veteran Raspberry Pi hacker Simon Walters. Installation is via a bash script, found at http://simplesi.net/s3gpio and once installed we run the application and find ourselves in the familiar Scratch interface. But from here we can control sensors, addon boards and even NeoPixels (WS2812 RGB LEDs), which are notorious for their exact timing requirements. S3GPIO runs via the web, so it’s a little slow on older Raspberry Pis. A 3B+ and upwards should be fine. Using S3GPIO is a little trickier than Scratch. We first have to remember that the pin numbers refer to physical pin numbers, not the Broadcom GPIO reference that we…

Most people are concerned with time. Some of us are even obsessed with trying to create time. If you master your time, you can get more done and do more things you enjoy. As Theophrastus said, time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. GPS receivers depend on a constellation of satellites and ground stations to compute their position and time. The satellites constantly transmit position and time data over radio frequency ranging from 1.1 to 1.5GHz. Using the data provided from a minimum of four satellites and geometry process called trilateration, the GPS receiver module can accurately calculate its position and time. The data sent down to earth from satellites contains information that GPS receivers use to determine their time and position. If you want more information…

The 4004 might have required lots of instructions to carry out the simplest of jobs, but the speed also depends on the clock speed and architecture. The clock speed was 740kHz, so just a bit below 1MHz and several thousand times slower than today’s latest and greatest. Clock speed alone doesn’t tell the full story. With initiatives such as multiple cores, and superscalar architectures in which each core contains several execution units, today’s processors can execute many instructions in parallel. Prior to these innovations, there had been moves to execute a single instruction per clock cycle, but this came well after the 4004. To quantify this, the 4004’s single-byte instructions required eight clock cycles per instruction, and this doubled with two-byte instructions. The processing speed was less than 92 KIPS…

Credit: https://github.com/marchellodev/sharik Sharing files between two devices on the same network should be straightforward, right? However, anyone who’s wanted to quickly shunt a file to or from their mobile device, but struggled getting shared folders set up that all the machines on their network can see or access, might have something to say about that. You could try setting up a pair of synced folders using a tool like the wonderful Syncthing, or make use of cloud storage such as Google Drive or Dropbox, but these all come with their own pitfalls. Synced folders can result in data loss if used incorrectly, while cloud storage has question marks over its security. This is where a tool like Sharik (https://github.com/marchellodev/sharik) comes in. It’s designed to make it easy to send files…

Writing this feature involves a lot of resources and we wanted to share them with you, so that you can get up and running with your emulator and the real hardware. TRS-80.com has lots of resources for beginners and old hacks. There we learnt about the BASIC syntax for this machine, and helpfully the site has a reference page which breaks it down into common programming topics. See www.trs-80.com/wordpress/info-level-2-basic-language. The emulator used in this tutorial was trs80gp and its website at http://48k.ca/trs80gp.html is a gold mine of information. We made extensive use of it when learning to use the emulator. TRSDOS is a little different to what we are typically used to and so we needed the TRSDOS and Disk BASIC reference manual in order to steer us true. Find…

Thousands of people host their own servers, either at home or on a VPS, and their reasons for doing so vary from the need to have everything completely under their own control to trying to push the tech giants out of their life altogether. Their setups will vary as much as their reasons for having them! We’ve gone with an Ubuntu server install for the Linux Format VPS, purely because it’s the most common option, and there is a tonne of support out there for Ubuntu. Likewise, we’re using Apache for our proxy server and MariaDB for our main database. You don’t need to follow us exactly. You should have fun with your VPS and configure it in the way that makes the most sense to you. Want to run…

If you’re going to be using real optical filters, you ought to be aware of the concept of the filter factor. Your camera’s metering system will take it into account, but it pays to bear it in mind. Most filters reduce the amount of light entering the camera. With a neutral density filter that’s the whole reason for using it, but with other filters it’s a side-effect that will affect the exposure. This reduction is expressed as a so-called filter factor. A filter factor of 1 means that there is no reduction in light, 2 means that the light is reduced by a factor of two (ie. 1 stop), and so on. To give some examples, a skylight filter has a filter factor of 1.1 while with a polarising filter…

Building CentOS was hard work. This is an important point. It’s easy to say, “Well, you just grab all the source RPMs, remove the branding and build them.” But that’s not so simple. In the early days – before there was a formal build infrastructure – packages tended to be built on maintainers’ home PCs. This was tedious work, and it also made onboarding new CentOS developers tricky. And the build process for CentOS itself was, at least for a time, not so well documented. CentOS always strived to not patch anything that would take it further from RHEL than it needed to be. But sometimes as a result of errors in Red Hat’s own packaging, such extra patches were a necessity. And, for a time at least, talk of…

In recent years it’s become common for services to be deployed in Kubernetes as Docker images, so it would be handy to learn how to create a Docker image for the RESTful server developed in this tutorial. The process is easy, provided that you have the appropriate Dockerfile. The screenshot (below) shows the contents of the Dockerfile used for creating the Docker image for the RESTful server that uses gorilla/mux developed in this tutorial. The key here is to put your source code under $GOROOT (the actual value doesn’t matter because this depends on the Docker image) to be able to use Go modules and create the binary executable inside the Docker image that you’re using. To make the final Docker image smaller in size, the building of it requires…

Matt Yonkovit is Percona’s Head of Open Source Strategy and a member of SHA (Silly Hats Anonymous). PostgreSQL is currently ranked the “most wanted” database according to Stack Overflow, and DB-Engines crowned it DBMS of the year 2020. By the time you read this, PostgreSQL 14, the latest version of the open source database and is a great example of the power of open source. The licence allows it to be shared, used, forked and built upon. Hundreds of different companies, commercial and open source, have created spin-off versions. In an effort to ensure long-term supportability and quality, maintainers have tightened control over what makes it officially into a release. While this may not sit well with all contributors, the great news is that PostgreSQL’s architecture was designed to allow…

Paragon Software has announced that its previously commercial-only NTFS3 kernel driver will now be mainlined, and should be coming with Linux 5.15. NTFS is a proprietary file-system designed by Microsoft for its Windows operating systems, and support for drives formatted in NTFS has always been either flakey or simply non-existent in Linux and macOS, so this move is certainly welcome. We reported on Paragon’s decision to bring its patch to the kernel back in LXF272, and earlier this year Linus Torvalds called on a new NTFS driver to be merged with the kernel (https://bit.ly/lxf282linusntfs). With the 5.15 kernel, it looks like he got his wish.…

Stéphane Cerveau Senior Software Engineer, Collabora GStreamer is a powerful multimedia framework with over 30 libraries and more than 1,600 elements in 230 plugins providing a wide variety of functionality. This makes it possible to build a huge variety of applications, however it also makes it tricky to ship in a constrained device. Luckily, most applications only use a subset of this functionality, and up until now there wasn’t an easy way to generate a build with just enough GStreamer for a specific application. Thanks to major changes introduced recently to the GStreamer build system, you can now use it to generate a minimal, custom GStreamer build, tailored to a specific application, or set of apps. When building embedded systems, there is often a need to do some sort of…

Dave Jones reported a several-minute slowdown in boot time caused by newly cleaned-up support in the kernel for VPD (Vital Product Data) that can be read from various PCI devices. Unfortunately, his rather common network adapter was an example of a device with a bogus VPD config, and this was used by Linus as a justification for reworking the code to avoid the boot slowdown. Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds noted that September 17th 2021 was “actually one of the core 30-year anniversay dates: 0.01 was uploaded Sept 17, 1991”. He also noted that that release was never publicly announced, but “in many ways this is the true 30th anniversary date of the actual code”. So there we have it!…

Back in the not-so-good old days when computers had only one hard drive and 640K was enough for anyone, it was acceptable to refer to partitions by their device nodes: /dev/hda1 and so on. As more devices were connected to our computers, this because a problem: for example, the partition that is /dev/sdb2 today could end up as /dev/sdc2 tomorrow. To avoid this issue, many distros began to use filesystem UUIDs to identify what was mounted where. This works because UUIDs are 16-digit hexadecimal strings that are (almost) guaranteed to be unique, but it was sorely lacking in the human-friendliness department, meaning that most distros had two lines per device in /etc/fstab, one with the UUID and a comment line explaining what the heck this meant. You can avoid this…

You hypocrites The article about ‘hypocrite commits’ (LXF277) reminded me of an incident that happened 20 years ago. (To save space and to avoid “Mike-splaining” I’ll assume everyone will either remember, or can look up, information about the American TV series Survivor ). Around August 2001, newspapers and media networks went wild over reports that an unknown ‘hacker’ had discovered the identity of the winner of that season’s Survivor . Never mind that they couldn’t identify this hacker, nor verify the claim. And never mind that there were far fewer ‘netizens’ than there are today, the average person couldn’t verify it, either. They said that Jervis won, so it must be true. So, two weeks later, when he was ‘voted off,' the same news people waved their virtual – as opposed to virtuous –…

We wrote our content using Markdown, creating five sites. The content was all placed in a local directory, though the files are all synchronised to Git repositories. Static site generators are actually fairly simple collections of scripts that take your text and convert it to HTML using templates and your settings. Simple systems have a tendency to become big, so we also choose some smaller systems, MkPage and staticsite, for those of you who want to tinker. We installed the code locally using a package manager where possible and made the structure that constitutes a site on our local machine. Using this as a setup, we created a site for each language and wrote posts and changed themes to our heart’s content. We have used several themes to see what…

Gatsby (https://www.gatsbyjs.com) creates static sites with the same techniques and ideas as the rest of this collection of scripts. The big difference is that Gatsby uses React heavily. This makes it possible to create store pages, WordPress and other content-driven websites. BUt it also makes it necessary for you to know React. Nodejs must also be installed. With all these demands, you are moving up to a much higher style of web development. If you wanted to use a static site generator to make things simpler for you, you’ve come full circle and you are starting to program a webpage. Even though this package creates a static page, this is going a step further in terms of learning. Most people will be happy to stay with one of the other…

TPM chips have been around for most of the past decade. TPM 2.0 was introduced in 2014, and most motherboards from 2016 onwards include one. TPM can be implemented in firmware too (so-called fTPM), at a slight cost to security, since some new Spectre/Meltdown-type attack could, in “theory”, be leveraged against it. Still, fTPM is good enough for Windows 11’s requirements. You might need to enable TPM via the UEFI (classic BIOS is also not supported), where it goes by so many names that Microsoft made a friendly help page (see https://bit.ly/lxf282-mshelp-tpm2) TPM is fully supported on Linux, and can be used to secure SSH keys (see http://blog.habets.se/2013/11/TPM-chip-protecting-SSH-keys---properly), unlock LUKS encrypted volumes (via systemdcryptenroll or Clevis) or even make Secure Boot even securer (https://threat.tevora.com/secure-boot-tpm-2). There are separate software stacks for…

Getting an actual Linux desktop running on WSL 2.0 on Windows 11 proved a little tricky. In fairness, WSL was built to run applications, not to act like a conventional virtual machine. It’s not really surprising that Gnome and KDE won’t work. They rely on all sorts of daemons and services running in the background holding all the components together. Brave souls have managed to get the Xfce desktop working nicely on Windows 10 with Ubuntu 18.04, but this didn’t work for us on Windows 11 with Ubuntu 20.04. If you’re running Windows 10, then you’d be well advised to try out running Xfce via the X410 server. It should be a matter of and then setting the DISPLAY environment variable correctly. A major change in WSL 2 is that…

After years of having to make do with the NTFS-3g FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) driver to read and write to Windows NTFS volumes in Linux, a driver is finally coming to the kernel. Actually there has for a long time been a kernel driver (since 2001 in fact), but it only ever provided read-only support and was overlooked by most people. NTFS-3g was a valuable crutch for people who worked on dual-boot systems, but compared to native NTFS its performance was weak. On older systems in particular it would consume a lot of CPU cycles for the underwhelming rate at which it wrote bits. The new kernel driver, dubbed NTFS3, comes from Paragon Software, a commercial provider of cross filesystem, partitioning and network management tools. NTFS has been around since…

Node-RED is a flow-based, event-driven programming language that uses nodes, similar in concept to Scratch blocks, but many times more powerful, which are joined to create a flow. Flows are triggered by an event – for example, checking the status of a website, then using the returned data to trigger a series of other events. For Node-RED 2.0 we see support dropped for older Node.js releases, enabling the project to introduce a number of behind-the-scenes improvements. Front of house and we see an improved text editor, Monaco, which is the same as used in Visual Studio Code. For now this is an optional upgrade, and by default the traditional Ace editor is active, but all we need to change is one line in our config file and Monaco is ready…

Credit: https://launchpad.net/cubic art of the beauty of Linux is the freedom of deployment that distributions offer, but when installing it for yourself or others you’ll want to change things. So, why not make your own version, or ‘respin’? That’s what a tool called Cubic is for, and we’re going to look at how you use it to modify the standard Ubuntu installation ISO and bend it to your will in terms of content and aesthetics. As for the difficulty? If you can install packages from the command line and boot from an ISO in a virtual machine, you should find it easy to get started with Cubic as the defaults were always usable in our experience. We’ll start with the simplest example of just adding some new packages and rebuilding…

In 2019, to shake up the container world. Red Hat introduced Universal Base Images (UBI). These aim to solve the problem of containers not being portable, since they have to be rebuilt whenever they’re deployed elsewhere. Red Hat’s UBI images aimed to define standard package sets and runtime languages to make container builds repeatable across deployment targets. Now, thanks to AlmaLinux’s Cloud and Containers SIG (Special Interest Group), UBI-compatible images are available for AlmaLinux, too. They offer four variants: Base, Micro, Init and Minimal. The latter uses microdnf instead of the full fat DNF package manager, so doesn’t need Python to run. When it’s built it occupies only about 100MB. Micro is even smaller, and doesn’t even have a package manager. Fewer moving parts means less room for vulnerabilities to…