Table of contents for September 2022 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell I did some BBC Basic back in the 80s, in between loading up Magic Mushrooms with a deft Ctrl-Break. But I don’t think I knew anything about what I was doing until I started with Blitz BASIC, which I think was on an Amiga Format coverdisk... Matthew Holder One of my first experiences with coding was learning BASIC, with my dad, on an Acorn A5000 device, running RISC OS. My love of interfacing hardware with software can be traced back to this time, when I was able to flash LEDs and detect the closing of switches from within a piece of code. Les Pounder I received a Commodore 16 as my first computer. I learnt the basics via listings provided in the manual. From there I went to…

The Tuxedo Stellaris 15 Gen4 is a powerful 15-inch laptop with an Intel Core i9-12900H processor, DDR5 RAM and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. To help keep those high-end components cool you can hook it up to the optional Tuxedo Aquaris liquid cooling system for extra performance without thermal throttling. While the laptop initially only launched with Windows preinstalled, it now comes with Tuxedo_OS, based on Ubuntu Budgie, and you can also install other distros. Prices starts at €2,599, and the Tuxedo Aquaris system is sold separately for €199. Find out more at https://bit.ly/lxf293tuxedo.…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email lxf.letters@futurenet.com. Poor support When is Linux support going to get better? I don’t mean software running on Linux because, on the whole, there’s everything I’d ever need, but when is Linux going to get better customer support? If you ring up about a problem with your broadband, say, and mention you’re using Linux, after a pause the response usually is, “Oh, we don’t support that.” I’m a paying customer – they should at least be able to offer the basic support script for Ubuntu or similar. Sid Otter Neil says… This is certainly a big issue for mainstream…

IN BRIEF Back from the ashes, Condres OS is a desktop distro that’s now based on Debian. The project doesn’t share the distro’s system requirements, but since it runs the KDE desktop environment, and only produces a 64-bit image, any computer with a 64-bit processor, 4GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk space should suffice for a relatively smoother user experience. Condres is an independent distro whose raison d’etre is to make Debian easy to use, and more accessible to all Linux users irrespective of their Linux chops. The distro’s first major release, Condres Plasma 1.0 is based on Debian 11. According to its developers, they’ll soon put out another release after rolling in their custom Control Center tool, which was available in the old releases. In its earlier avatar,…

SPECS Minimum OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i3 4130 or AMD Ryzen Memory: 8GB HDD: 125GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon RX 470, Vram 4GB Notes: Requires Vulkan, NVIDIA driver 470.xx, AMD Mesa driver version 21.0.3. Intel GPUs aren’t supported. Recommended CPU: Intel Core i7 4770 or AMD Ryzen GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, 8GB Vram The Total War series has grown from feudal Japanese battles and a simple board game-style campaign to this, Warhammer 3, where armies can hop between realities, where daemons and ogres clash, and where troops are led by flying monstrosities – including one that’s as customisable as an RPG protagonist. Creative Assembly has crammed plenty of surprises and oddities into this final act,…

The days of 3D printers arriving in kit form have long passed, although that option is still there if you feel the need. Today the preferred method for acquiring a 3D printer is to buy one that’s pre-built or at least partially assembled. Most 3D printers still require a little bolting together, even if it’s just attaching a tool head, loading the filament and popping in the power cable. Our five 3D printers on test have been chosen because of their ease of setup, with none taking more than 20 minutes to unpack, bolt together, power on and get started with printing. Of all the printers, the RoboxDual is the easiest to get up and running. It’s ready to use out of the box. Once the packaging is removed, the…

There’s a list of key features and functionality that you need to be aware of when shopping around for a 3D printer. Some of these features would have been simply nice to have a couple of years ago, but are now essential. The first feature that we mentioned in the previous section is auto bed levelling; its inclusion will save you hours of frustration. The next is the ability to swap out the tool head; the SideKick 747, RoboxDual and MK3S have a good selection of tool heads available, enabling you to print using a huge array of materials. The SnapMaker only features one 3D print tool head and this obviously limits the selection of materials that it can print with. However, because it’s a 3-in-1 machine it can also…

This month’s Roundup has assessed a selection of 3D printers that balance price, quality and usability. While there are many cheap and expensive printers on the market we’ve honed in on those spanning a price range of £500 to £1,200 and while there are obvious feature and quality difference when it comes to the print that you hold in your hand, the quality is actually pretty close. What differentiates each is the intended market and user. The Original PRUSA MK3S, for instance, is a must-have for 3D print enthusiasts, and it’s easy to see why when you look at the quality of the prints, ease of use and reliability. The MK3S also has a stronger community around it than any other printer. If you want to adapt or customise it,…

Today’s top developers learned to code through a number of very different pathways. We mentioned BBC BASIC earlier, but we didn’t mention FORTRAN, COBOL or any of the Algol family, which were de rigeuer for scientists, mainframe operators and academics respectively back in the day. FORTRAN (originally FORmula TRANslator) was developed by IBM in the 1950s and quickly became the gold standard for scientific computation and engineering. It’s still in use today, particularly on supercomputers working on numerically difficult problems such as weather prediction, fluid simulations and crystallography. BASIC was largely based on FORTRAN II. And Fortran (the dated portmanteau and shouty capitals have since been left behind) continues to be updated to accommodate modern coding practices, such as objects, parallelism and concurrency. C was developed by Dennis Richie in…

R eaders interested in programming languages will surely recognise the idea of a language being flavour of the month. However, in the interests of accuracy, we’d have to admit that the phrase “flavour of the year” or, more probably, “flavour of the decade” would be more appropriate. (looks at C++ – Ed) What’s more, you’ll probably recognise the names of once-popular languages that are now little more than the stuff of history books. Indeed, once a language passes its peak of popularity, we might think that a steady decline to obscurity is surely inevitable, and it usually is. But statistics reveal one language that’s bucking the trend by coming back from the dead. That language is Prolog, and the revival in its fortunes is due, in no small part, to…

As you can probably tell from its name, mStream is a music streaming server that’s designed to sync and stream music across multiple devices. With mStream you can access your music collection, and even sync all files between your devices for offline access. The tool is cross-platform, and works on Windows, OSX, FreeBSD, and Linux. The developers insist that as per their tests, mStream works flawlessly even on multiterabyte libraries. The tool has a minimal footprint on memory and CPU, and can effortlessly run on ARM boards such as the Raspberry Pi. The simplest way to set up mStream is to use one of the AppImages for your platform. Just grab the AppImage, either for the 64-bit Linux or for an Arm device, make it executable, and fire it up.…

Version: 12.42 Web: https://exiftool.org ExifTool is a flexible utility for working with photographic metadata. While many photo management tools enable you to view and edit metadata in images, the command-line ExifTool makes it possible to process dozens of images in a fraction of the time. ExifTool doesn’t need to be installed. You can simply download and extract the tools’ tarball and run it directly with the following: $ wget https://exiftool.org/Image-ExifTool-12.42.tar. gz $ gzip -dc Image-ExifTool-12.42.tar.gz | tar -xf - $ cd Image-ExifTool-12.42 $ ./exiftool <image file name> When you point the tool to an image file it’ll generate a long list of its metadata. In addition to JPG, ExifTool can handle a wide range of other formats as well as RAW and video files. By default, ExifTool shows you all…

Version: 0.8.5 Web: https://xonotic.org Xonotic is a free and fast-paced first-person shooter that includes arena-style gameplay with rapid movement and a wide array of deadly weapons. Although Xonotic draws inspiration from games like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament, it’s developed a style all of its own with stunning high-resolution graphics, immersive maps, weapons, characters, and more. Xonotic has nine core weapons and 16 full weapons. Each weapon has a UT-like secondary fire, giving you more bang for the buck. There are 16 different game modes in Xonotic, including classic modes like deathmatch and capture the flag. Xonotic has 18 official maps from small to large. Many more are also available from the community, including those ported from Quake. The game can be played online against other players or played…

RISC-V, the open standard set architecture (ISA), has surpassed a key milestone. It was revealed at the Embedded World conference that the number of cores in the RISC-V market has exceeded 10 billion, with Calista Redmond, the CEO of RISC-V International, claiming that, “What Linux is doing for software is very similar to what we are doing for hardware.” While this is just an estimate, it’s an impressive figure, and as the COSFONE website points out (https://bit.ly/lxf293cosfone), RISC-V took 12 years to reach this milestone, while ARM took 17 years to attain a similar figure. However, it’s worth remembering that ARM hit 10 billion cores in 2008, and back then multi-core processors were far less prevalent. Redmond predicts that by 2025 the number of RISC-V processor cores out in the wild…

SPECS Port: USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C Type: Native flash, Samsung V-NAND Storage: 256GB (32GB, 64GB, 128GB) Bridge: None Power: Bus SMART: No UASP: No TRIM: No Encryption: N/A Size: 33.7x 15.9x82.mm, 3.4g Portable SSDs have been in great demand over the past few years. Thanks to advancements in smartphones, the amount of user-generated content that needs to be backed up or transferred from one device to another has grown exponentially. While native flash controllers are now capable of delivering USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gbps) speeds with the latest 3D NAND, the ubiquitous thumb drive (aka UFD – USB Flash Drive) has also managed to evolve. Samsung’s MUF-256DA is a compact USB Type-C flash drive that’s available in capacities ranging from 64GB to 256GB, utilising a USB 3.2 Gen 1…

IN BRIEF Regata OS is a desktop-distro from Brazil that’s based on OpenSUSE. Designed as a daily driver for desktop productivity, gaming is the distro’s forte, and something it does very well thanks to behindthe-scenes customisations and graphical custom tools that help support its design goals. The project has ample documentation to hand-hold first timers. SPECS Minimum CPU: 2GHz Memory: 4GB HDD: 25GB Build: x86 64-bit only Regata OS, pretty much like the distro it’s based on, doesn’t get half as much attention as it should. Designed for the average desktop user, the highlight of the distro’s latest release, Regatta OS 22 “Discovery”, is better support for new hardware. It’s available for download in two editions, with one specifically designed for computers with Nvidia graphics hardware. The developers also point…

3D printers use slicer software that effectively slices up a 3D model into layers that a printer can understand. Cura, by Ultimaker, is one of the most popular slicers and the Kobra Max, SideKick 747 and RoboxDual all use a version or base their software on it. The Kobra Max utilises a profile, the SideKick 747 employs a custom build and the RoboxDual uses some of the code for its fully featured AutoMaker software. PRUSA can also make use of Cura, but also ships with a download of PRUSA Slicer which the Kobra Max and SideKick could also use. Once a stl, OBJ or 3mf file has been sliced in Cura or PRUSA Slicer the file can then be transferred to a machine. The SideKick 747, MK3S and Kobra Max…

All five printers in this Roundup employ auto bed levelling. This was one of the first big features to hit 3D printing, and its introduction removed hours of tinkering and adjustment. These days it’s a common option, and you should steer clear of any printer that doesn’t have this as standard. All five printers in this test handle the bed levelling process in much the same way, by dipping the nozzle down until it interfaces with the print bed. Throughout the testing process, we found that some microadjustment was initially required for the Kobra Max and MK3S, but the other three printers were always spot-on. However, if an adjustment was needed, then each printer includes the ability to adjust the Z-axis by micro increments. Running a 5x5 grid as an…

Previously, 3D printers were relatively dumb machines with small control boards that simply followed a set of commands to control the position of the tool head. Today they do much the same thing – it’s just that the software and machines are far more refined and accurate. Each of the printers in this test offers a different way to interact with the printer, either through an interface directly on the machine, through software or both. The Kobra Max and SnapMaker offer large colour touchscreens that make it straightforward to navigate options and settings. The SnapMaker screen is a level above all the other printers and adjustment features, and finding options is extremely easy. This small screen is backed up by the fully featured Luban software that can interact with the…

Working with your files locally is all well and good, but as soon as you start collaborating with other contributors doing the same it becomes difficult. In the early days of the Linux Kernel, patches were sent over Usenet and email, reviewed by Linus Torvalds, merged with the current kernel and all uploaded to an FTP site. Maintaining a consistent codebase this way is cumbersome, especially as contributions went meteoric in the mid-90s. The solution was to use a proprietary version control system (VCS) called BitKeeper. Code was now stored centrally and enabled developers to fork and branch the code with impunity, queue up their patchsets and generally not have to worry about singing from different source hymnsheets. For a time that worked well, but all good things must come…

IN BRIEF A reasonable £10 gets you a Raspberry Pi Pico with a builtin Ethernet jack. It’s an easy-touse board for the maker who wants their Pico-powered projects on the internet, collecting data and controlling devices via a remote connection. The board shares the same formfactor as the Raspberry Pi Pico, but is 24mm longer thanks to the Ethernet jack. Right now, getting hold of a Raspberry Pi is a challenge. The exception is a Raspberry Pi Pico – those boards are cheap to make and in plentiful supply. The problem with a Pico is that’s there is no internet connectivity (ok the Pico W is now out! See LXF292.) but what if we could have a Pico with a connection to the world? WIZnet’s snappily named WS5100S-EVB-Pico is a…

Version: 2.0.2 Web: https://asciinema.org Asciinema records exactly what your terminal displays. It saves your “movie” recording to a text file and then replays it on demand. These make for wonderful visual replacements for textual documentation. You can upload your movie to asciinema.org and share them just as you would any other video on the internet, and you can even embed your movie into a webpage. Asciinema is available in the official repos of most distros, and can be installed with sudo dnf install asciinema on Fedora, and with sudo apt install asciinema on Ubuntu/Debian. To begin recording a terminal session type $ asciinema rec terminal_session.cast The tool will alert you that it’s now recording all your actions in the terminal window. When you’re done, press Ctrl+D or type exit to…

Version: 1.7 Web: https://wiki.gnome. org/Apps/Frogr Before there was Instagram, there was Flickr, and it’s still the preferred image-sharing service for professional photographers. If you upload content to the service regularly, Frogr enables you to share content with the online service from the comforts of your desktop. The tool gives users access to Flickr’s basic upload features including the ability to describe images, tag them, set specific licences and geolocation information, and categorise them into sets and group pools. In addition to adding images to existing sets, you can also create new ones from the application itself. For more seasoned Flickr users, working on a large number of files, the utility offers the option of saving them all to a Frogr project file. You can then load the project at a…

Version: 1.9.0 Web: https://github.com/ ivandokov/phockup Phockup is a simple command-line sorting tool that organises photos and videos in folders by year, month and day. This works best when you want to backup the downloaded images to your NAS device, or the cloud for posterity. To install the tool first fetch the Perl module it depends on with either sudo apt-get install libimageexiftool-perl on Debian/Ubuntu, or sudo dnf install perl-Image-ExifTool on Fedora. Now grab the latest version of the tool, use Python’s pip package manager to fetch the requirements, and you’re good to go: $ curl -L https://github.com/ivandokov/phockup/ archive/latest.tar.gz -o phockup.tar.gz $ tar -zxf phockup.tar.gz $ sudo mv phockup-* /opt/phockup $ cd /opt/phockup $ pip3 install -r requirements.txt $ sudo ln -s /opt/phockup/phockup.py /usr/local/ bin/phockup Once installed you can use the…

While Microsoft Pluton was announced back in 2020, it’s only now that more details are emerging about what the hardware security solution designed to be built into CPUs and SoC (System on Chip) devices could mean for users. In particular, those who want to install open-source operating systems instead of Microsoft’s Windows software. There’s concern and cynicism over Microsoft’s plans, and while not all of it may be warranted, we can understand people’s misgivings. After all, the company hasn’t had a brilliant history with securing software at a hardware level, with previous attempts to stop malicious code running during bootup also being accused of blocking other operating systems, such as Linux, from being installed at all. As engineer Gabriel Sieben explains in a blog post (https://bit.ly/lxf293gsblog), Pluton is a collaboration…

LINUX MINT 21 The latest version of this popular Ubuntu-based distro has landed. Bluetooth is now handled by Blueman, which replaces Blueberry, and there’s also been improvements to Sticky Notes, which makes taking quick notes even easier. A new process monitor will also alert you if there are automated tasks (such as backups) that are running in the background and taking up your PC’s resources. Printing and scanning has been improved, and uninstalling unwanted programs is now much easier. For a full rundown, head to https://bit.ly/lxf293mint21. NUTYX 22.07.0 This French distro has brought out a new version, which brings several updates and fixes. Its custom package manager, cards, has been updated to 2.5.4, and there are new versions of glibc, binutils, xorg-server and more. The range of desktop environments that…

IN BRIEF An ArcoLinuxbased desktop distro that’s been tweaked to present a customisable Arch installation. It uses a combination of tools from the ArcoLinux project, together with its own to enable users to experience the dexterity of Arch Linux inside a user-friendly façade. The project doesn’t share system requirements, but as per our tests it’ll run on any 64-bit computer with 4GB RAM and about 20GB of disk space. AmOs is a new distro that’s based on ArcoLinux, which itself has only been around for just over five years. ArcoLinux is pitched as a platform to learn Linux the Arch way. Its developer has broken up the Linux learning process into six phases and the various ArcoLinux distros are part of those phrases. The final phase of the learning process…

IN BRIEF Porteus is a Slackwarebased portable distro that’s been designed and optimised to run from all kinds of removable media, including USB disks, SD cards and even CDs. It offers multiple desktop environments, from lightweight ones to fully fledged desktops, for appealing to a wide number of people SPECS Minimum: CPU: 32- or 64-bit x86 processor Memory: 768MB HDD: not required Build: x86, x86-64 Porteus 5 is the latest edition of one of the best portable and wellestablished distros. The Slackware 15-based distro now offers seven separate ISO images, each with a different desktop, from fully fledged options such as Cinnamon and KDE to lightweight ones such as LXQt, LXDE, Openbox and more. The ISOs of most editions weigh in at around 300MB thanks to Porteus’ design that keeps…

Anyone who’s been 3D printing for a while will know the frustration caused by a failed print. It happens, so to save time and money there’s one key step that will help to minimise the risk of a misprint. Ensure that the first layer for your print has been layered down correctly. To do this, watch as the printer outlines the model on the print base and then use the micro adjustment to raise or lower the nozzle by the minimum amount. What you’re looking for is for the liquefied filament to be pushed into the build plate rather than sat on top. Essentially, examine the line that’s being drawn and look for a flat top rather than curved. It’s as simple as that. Once the height is adjusted for…

Let’s start with the Kobra Max. While the nozzle can be replaced, there’s not much else you can do to alter its printing capabilities. This is the printer you want if you just want to get on and print on a small or large scale. Likewise, the RoboxDual might not look on the surface as if there are any upgrade options, but dip into its workings and those with an older model will find that it’s perfectly possible to upgrade the control board, motor drivers and more. Furthermore, there’s a good variety of tool heads upgrades that are available. CEL-UK has also developed touch screen and network upgrades that interface with the hardware and its AutoMaker software. From a machine that initially seems quite self-contained there are more options open…

We’re going to cover a couple of techniques in this adventure, hopefully making it possible for everyone to get at least some sort of a grasp on some of the rudiments of programming. Of course, many weighty tomes on this subject have already been written and cover much more than we can hope to do in a handful of pages. So we won’t be recreating Donald Knuth’s seminal The Art of Computer Programming (TaoCP) or Randal L Schwartz’s era-defining Programming Perl here. But hopefully we’ll inspire some who haven’t heard of those texts to check them (and other coding lore) out. It’s always rather daunting choosing a ‘first’ programming language. There’s plenty of contradictory articles online imploring you to learn Python, Ruby, JavaScript or PHP. And there’s as many telling…

IN BRIEF An aluminium case designed to bring a touch of class to your media centre setup while keeping your Raspberry Pi 4 cool, even under pressure. It features a recessed micro SD card slot and easy access to ports, but has limited GPIO access and HATs are out of the question. But if all you want is a Pi in the living room, then this is the way to go. When the Raspberry Pi 4 arrived back in 2019 it brought a serious upgrade in performance thanks to its quad-core 1.5GHz ARM CPU. High performance means heat and the Raspberry Pi 4 runs hot when put under pressure. Flirc is no stranger to the Raspberry Pi. It sells USB infrared controllers for home media consumption, but it also produces…

Kaspersky’s TinyCheck is a network tool that can help you identify activity that’s typically associated with stalkerware. The developers insist the tool goes about its job in a non-invasive manner by running on an external device, a Raspberry Pi, and monitoring its outgoing traffic via Wi-Fi. Kaspersky states TinyCheck can identify all known commercially available spyware and, in some cases, even sophisticated products like Pegasus. The tool works by creating a bridge between your smartphone and the internet. This is why you’ll need two different network interfaces on the Raspberry Pi, one of which has to be a wireless interface. This wireless interface acts as a Wi-Fi access point for your smartphone and the second one, which can be either wired or wireless, is for connecting to the internet. TinyCheck…

Version: 0.9.33 Web: https://damonlynch.net/rapid Rapid Photo Downloader (RPD) is designed for transferring photos and videos, and a lot more besides. It’s perfect for downloading, processing and organising photos and videos. The tool gives you complete control over how it processes and sorts the downloaded photos. Its default rules automatically transfer the downloaded photos inside date-based subfolders. You can also define custom rules as per your requirements. For example, you can ask the program to sort photos by their type, which comes in handy if you shoot both RAW and JPEGs. In fact you can create a complex subfolder hierarchy by defining naming rules based on specific EXIF values, such as focal length, ISO and so on. You can also specify an external USB storage device as the backup destination, and…

Version: 2.5.1 Web: www.scummvm.org ScummVM is one of the most popular virtual machine platforms for playing classic games. Scumm (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) is a scripting language that was originally created by LucasArts with the intention to assist in the development of its critically acclaimed 1987 game Maniac Mansion. The language has since been used to create many other classic titles. LucasArts designed these games for the systems of the day, like MS-DOS, Amiga and FM Towns. That means you can’t simply grab the game’s original files and run them on a modern machine. The ScummVM project implements a virtual machine that interprets Scumm games. It was originally designed to play LucasArts adventure games designed using Scumm, but now also supports a variety of non- Scumm games by…

Version: 1.32 Web: www. lesbonscomptes.com/recoll Most file managers have a find function to help you search for files. However, these lack powerful filtering mechanisms that you get with Recoll, which essentially adds a local search engine to your desktop or even your local network. Recoll is a graphical wrapper for Xapian, which does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Thanks to Xapian, Recoll can analyse and index text inside all the most common document formats, including those that are embedded inside others. For instance, Recoll will have no issues looking inside a text file inside a compressed archive, sent to you as an email attachment. In most cases, you can preview or open the files found with your search by just clicking on them inside the Recoll window. Recoll…