Table of contents for September 2023 in Linux Format

IN BRIEF Fatdog is the puppy who grew up. It contains an excellent web browser, plus productivity, media and image-editing tools. It loads in seconds and has an excellent package manager. SPECS CPU: 600MHz Mem: 1GB HDD: 600MB Builds: x86_64, ARM Every dog has its day and for the team at Fatdog, there have been many. The project started out in 2008 as a simple extension of Puppy Linux. Any experienced Linux user will tell you that Puppy’s designed to be lightweight and easy to use, but the number of customisation options and requirement to install extra software to have a workable OS make it unsuitable for beginners. Fatdog (as the name suggests) is the pup grown up. Its developers have placed emphasis on a fatter – that means more…

Understandably, all of these distributions only offer 64-bit builds. They all have some capability as a live distro. For U some of them, the preferred base distro will come down to personal preference and previous Linux experience. AV Linux is based on MX Linux, which itself is based on the stable branch of Debian. This gives command-line tools that will be largely familiar to users of other Debian derivatives, such as Ubuntu and Mint. It draws its packages from the MX Linux repositories, which is a mixed blessing. In some areas, these repositories are ahead of what Ubuntu Studio has to offer in the way of audio software; in other areas, Ubuntu Studio has the more up-to-date packages. Fedora Jam and Fedora Design Suite are spins of Fedora Linux, and…

Fedora Design Suite ships with an app selection that focuses on art, design and publishing, with a few F multimedia apps (Pitivi, Audacity) thrown in. For audio and music work, it’s on the same level as a standard Linux distro. Fedora Jam, Ubuntu Studio and AV Linux offer a very similar overall package, in that they are all packed with music apps and tools. In each case, the application selection is extensive but free of duplication. Each of them has favoured Ardour as the DAW. Sure enough, for each of those distros, the first time we ran Ardour, it carried out a scan and discovered around a dozen instrument plugins and around 50 effects plugins. Those three distros didn’t offer all of the same things, but we struggled to put…

We’ve chosen the best-known dedicated media-creation distro, Ubuntu Studio, as the overall W winner. KDE Plasma is a good fit for media work as it follows the traditional paradigms of how desktops work, while offering clarity and ease of use. The user interface is great, the application selections are sensible, and the customisations that have been carried out will save a lot of work, particularly for beginners to this area of Linux use. There are intrinsic advantages to being part of the Ubuntu family when troubleshooting. AV Linux has a good selection of applications and tools, and it’s well optimised. The MX Linux side of things adds dozens of useful tools to the stable Debian base. For better or worse, it’s designed for the user who likes to tweak things.…

IN BRIEF Squeezing the Raspberry Pi Pico into a smaller form factor, while packing in USB C and Ethernet, the Waveshare RP2040 ETH Mini looks great, but suffers from poor documentation and overly complex steps to get a project going. Others have attempted to use Ethernet with the Pico, and they have come off slightly better than this board. We wanted to like this board, truly. Waveshare’s RP2040 ETH Mini distils GPIO pins into the bare minimum, but we are never left asking for more. We’ve got 14 digital IO pins, which also provide access to SPI, I2C, UART and three analogue inputs. Sure, we don’t have every pin from the RP2040, but we sacrifice those for efficiency. Just 47x21mm, this is tiny, with a USB C port at one…

Canonical has taken stewardship of LXD, the extension for managing LXC (Linux Containers). The Linux Containers team explicitly pointed out that everything else LXC will remain under its stewardship: “Canonical, the creator and main contributor of the LXD project, has decided that after over eight years as part of the Linux Containers community, the project would now be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects.” As to the reason why, it does seem to boil down to the fact that over the last several years, there has been limited development of LXD, and that under Canonical’s guidance, it can more tightly integrate it into the various versions of Ubuntu, and extend the functionality to enhance the whole container experience on Linux. For those using LXD, there is no…

Alot of Red Hat users never get beyond yum install A tmux -y or basic package installation. However, when things go wrong, there is a golden Yum parameter switch that may help save the day. And Yum is also useful for seeing who did what and when! The Yum command has a history parameter that is useful for troubleshooting. On an RHEL/Rocky/ RH server, it enables administrators to see who ran what command, the issues, the operation with packages and even what the system did during the configuration. Was a package installed, removed, upgraded or removed? Yum history can tell you. Unfortunately, yum history or dnf history functionality is unique to Yum-based servers. There is no similar functionality in Apt package management systems. Apt has some commands such as apt…

Cloud services have something to offer almost every kind of business. In fact, if you believe Amazon’s hype, we’re heading for a C world where companies of all sizes run entirely on remote servers. Microsoft treads a little more cautiously, focusing on hybrid architectures, but either way, it seems certain that the cloud is integral to the future of many businesses. The challenge is, it’s not always easy to tell which cloud platform will be the best fit for a particular role in a particular organisation. That’s partly because the different providers make broadly the same promises, enabling you to deploy services almost on a whim, and scale them up or down with minimal management. But while the fundamentals might seem identical, as soon as you start to look in…

SPECS SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G, Adreno 619 graphics, 6/8GB RAM, 128/256GB storage Battery: 3,905mAh Display: 6.3-inch IPS 1,080x2,340 Rear camera: 2x 48MP Front camera: 25MP Netherlands-based Fairphone has made a name for itself with its eponymous line of modular, N repair-friendly and, well, fair phones. Besides being made in factories where employees enjoy “good working conditions” (sounds familiar–Ed) the phones use ethically sourced and recycled materials, and it places sustainability at the heart of its operation. It has just announced, for example, that the Fairphone 3, launched in 2019, will see Android 13 and a stated aim of two years of support. It continued to support the Fairphone 2 (which launched in 2015 with Android 5 and was upgraded to Android 10 in 2021, see LXF210 for review) until March…

HOW WE TESTED… Media creation is a very broad spectrum. The requirements for something such as drawing with a tablet might be very different from those for recording music. For one thing, setting up an art station might be a good use for an older computer, whereas audio recording tends to hit the hardware resources to a greater extent. Many of the smaller support tools for audio work, such as utilities and plugins, can be quite fiddly to get working. For example, there is often no universally agreed on location for plugins. Most Linux installations require quite a few tweaks to work efficiently for audio creation and we wanted to make sure that each of these distros was adequately optimised in advance. It’s not really fair to say that a…

The requirements of a GUI that’s used for multimedia aren’t massively different from that of a normal desktop. The interface should be quick and easy to use, as you often need to be on the ball when using Linux as the hub of your studio. In the case of distributions that offer a large number of tools, the launcher should be convenient and make use of categories. Clarity in areas such as launch icons is welcomed. We expect customisation features that are easy to use, because when you’re working on creative endeavours, you often need to customise the layout to enable your workflow. To us, that means that you can easily make top-level selections such as changing the overall theme and the font size, as well as adjusting small details…

Fedora Design Suite has an emphasis on some of the best graphics tools that Linux has to offer. Inkscape, Krita and GIMP are the standouts. It’s nice to see diagram-creation application Dia, photo editor Darktable and the 3D graphics behemoth Blender, too. There are a few other smaller art-orientated tools included, but it’s a fairly basic collection of applications. The idea might have been to avoid overwhelming the user, but we would have accepted duplication of features if it meant a greater number of tools. Ubuntu Studio is a strong distro for audio work, but it also offers a good selection of art and graphics applications. Inkscape, Krita and GIMP are present, among others. On the video side, we have Kdenlive and the excellent screen-recording application OBS Studio. We…

Everyone knows about Docker. In fact, a lot of users conflate containers E and images with Docker. However, in today’s world, there are many alternative choices, including Podman from Red Hat. Part of the reason Red Hat created Podman was to allow it to run rootless and daemonless, thereby running more securely by default (a Docker group has to have root privileges to run). Just because it is Red Hat doesn’t mean it leaves other Linux vendors out in the cold. For example, performing sudo apt-search podman on an Ubuntu server reveals all the default tools to install Podman. The building of new images and so on requires more RH tools (all free) but it also includes a cute GUI for container and image management. The containers work the same…

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LXF307 will be on sale Tuesday 19th September 2023 Mapping mad! Reader’s choice: you asked for more mapping ventures, we deliver ways to create and monitor your own terrain-based projects. Thoughtful photos Leverage the power of DigiKam and get your digital photography collection under control, catalogued and fully curated. Virtual private servers made simple That’s quite a mouthful, but setting up and running a basic VPS won’t take anywhere near as long and won’t cost much either! Cloud storage What’s the best open source option for storing your files in the sky? Don’t worry, we’ll let you know! Content of future issues subject to change. We might have got stuck camping in a muddy field……

SECURITY EU passes Cyber Resilience Act EU states have agreed to draft legislation, despite opposition from the Linux Foundation and others. Is this the end of open source in Europe? The Cyber Resilience Act was proposed in September 2022 and mostly seems to target interconnected equipment such as IoT devices. In theory, it ensures minimum standards for connected devices as well as requiring mandatory security updates. As well meaning as the legislation is, the impact on open source development could be devastating. In April, more than a dozen open source industry bodies, including the Linux Foundation Europe, wrote an open letter to EU legislators asking them to reconsider the current wording (https://newsroom.eclipse.org/ news/announcements/open-letter-europeancommission-cyber-resilience-act). In theory, the Act exempts “free and open source software developed or supplied outside the course of…

SPECS Size: 8TB Model: ST8000 DM004 Cost per TB: £15.25 Interface: SATA 6Gb/s Form: 3.5-inch Tech: SMR RPM: 5,400 Cache: 256MB Max rate: 190MB/s Power: 5.3W Workload: 55TB/year MTBF: N/A Warranty: Two years One of the least expensive 8TB hard drives you canbuypopsitonourlistofbestharddrives,but this comes at the cost of performance, warranty and reliability. Seagate uses SMR technology to boost capacity up to 8TB at a relatively low price, but this has a negative impact on performance in write workloads and consistency. The 5,400rpm spindle speed doesn’t help, either. The BarraCuda does well in read workloads and is adequate for use as media and backup storage; however, the competing 8TB WD Blue that costs around 50% more uses faster CMR technology, making it a better buy for general storage. Seagate’s…

IN BRIEF Peppermint OS is visually rich and the Calamares installer makes setup a dream. The Welcome Hub also has a good range of suggested software but it has minimal bundled apps. SPECS CPU: 1GHz Mem: 1GB (4GB recommended) HDD: 10GB (32GB recommended) Builds: x86_64 Like many great ideas, Peppermint OS was conceived after a night in the pub. If you’re wondering about the moniker, one of the lead developers, Kendall Weaver, also works on Linux Mint. The name itself comes from the creators’ desire to build on Mint’s success but also add web integration, hence the extra zing of ‘Peppermint’. The project has had a mixed history, previously being based on Lubuntu and incorporating elements of the LXDE desktop environment. These days, however, there are two main branches of…

All the distributions, apart from Fedora Design Suite, have the JACK system installed and configured, which is what A most Linux audio apps expect. Of those four, only Fedora Jam lacked the customisation of adding the user to the ‘audio’ group, something that makes audio apps run more smoothly. A slight wrinkle affecting them all is that their base distros now run on PipeWire, a new audio system. This means you may still have to tweak your system for best performance. AV Linux uses the Liquorix Kernel (https://liquorix.net), a special build of the Linux kernel that is tuned for multimedia work in areas such as swap usage, process scheduling and CPU frequency. The compromise is that it gives lower throughput in some situations and consumes more power, something to bear…

For most media-creation work, you need a fairly well-specified computer, and none of these distros is F designed for low-end hardware. However, multimedia work tends to push a computer to its limits, so it’s still worth considering if a distro is efficient. AV Linux keeps things light, in typical fashion for an Xfcebased desktop. Fully updated when freshly booted to the desktop, it used only 467MB of RAM and 13GB of disk space. Fedora Design Suite is a heavyweight, eating 1.5GB of RAM on a fresh boot to its desktop, but it only used 6GB of disk space.  Ubuntu Studio wasn’t that far behind and reported 1.1GB of RAM in use on a fresh boot. That amount doesn’t break the bank and KDE Plasma isn’t designed to be a lightweight…

The Modicia OS website looks a bit messy, and the PDF manual is out of date. The development team offers support to users who make a donation. In short, there isn’t much free support and you have to seek documentation for the individual components rather than for Modicia OS itself. As you might expect for an official Ubuntu flavour, Ubuntu Studio is extremely well documented, with extensive support options. For example, the documentation section has mini manuals on subjects such as using common Linux music tools and apps, and setting up audio hardware. One problem is that some of the documentation isn’t as up to date as it should be. There are real-time chat communities using the Matrix and IRC systems. In most situations, you can find the troubleshooting help…

Back in April 2023, the Pi Foundation announced a new online code editor B called Code Editor (we like simple things – Ed) as part of its work to teach children to write code. The editor – which you can try at https://editor.raspberrypi.org – was developed for numerous reasons, but largely so young coders could test out code in their browsers as part of online tutorials,using low-bandwidth, low-power devices. It integrates with their Foundation accounts and ensures safeguarding along the way. Open sourcing Code Editor enables other organisations to use and contribute to the project. The Pi Foundation is asking for feedback and submission of contributions via the usual pull request on the relevant gits. The project has been split in two: the front-end UI and the back-end API. The…

The £4 Raspberry Pi Pico is powered by a dualcore ARM CPU, and in this tutorial we will learn how to run two threads of MicroPython code independent of each other. The code in core 0 will wait for a user to press a button, and when they do, the code will choose a random number to emulate a D20 die roll. If the user is unsure what to do, a simple instruction will scroll across a seven-segment display, a TM1637 connected to the Raspberry Pi Pico using I2C. The second core will run a light show, designed to entice the user to try our project. The light show is powered by a stick of WS2812B RGB LEDs, commonly known by the Adafruit brand of NeoPixels. These RGB LEDs require…

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