Table of contents for March 2024 in Linux Format

Living in the open source world means if you want to sit on the cutting edge of development, you can. Nightly builds, compiling the kernel from source, grabbing Git repositories, if you want to try the latest, no one is going to try and stop or gatekeep you… Generally, though, that sort of thing can be exhausting, which is why it’s usually just interested devs who sit on those particular cutting edges. But there is another way. Since the dawn of Linux, helpful individuals and groups have pulled together all the right sources and binaries, and created handy distributions of everything you need in a cutting-edge OS. Back in the mists of time, Debian grew into a fundamental building block of the Linux world. More recently, Arch Linux and Gentoo…

LibreOffice 24.2 Community, the new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite and the first to use the calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M), is now available at https://bit.ly/ lxf312lo for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), Mac OS (Apple and Intel) and Linux. But what really sets LibreOffice apart from other office suites is that it is based on a single software engine for all environments: desktop, cloud and mobile. This architecture enables LibreOffice to offer a better user experience and produce identical and perfectly interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the open ODF (ODT, ODS and ODP) for digital sovereignty-conscious users and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers…

When you look at MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, they each have a vibrant community that reflects its chosen databases. PostgreSQL has a community-driven development process that actively includes its user communities through meetings, mailing lists and online. MySQL is centrally developed by Oracle and its community seems to have diminished as HeatWave has become the main priority. And Mongo’s community has peaked after its licence change flattened enthusiasm for the product. MySQL could learn from the PostgreSQL community, in that more actively seeking community involvement pays off in more customer buy-in and goodwill. PostgreSQL is vibrant and unlikely to need to borrow anything from the other two’s communities. MongoDB’s community will continue to dwindle after the licence change issues. Will this affect the long-term success of the company? No. But it…

Significant ongoing work is happening to support CXL (Compute eXpress Link), which supports more contemporary mechanisms for attaching IO devices to modern systems. Among its various modes, the most popular is .mem (CXL.mem), which effectively allows for serial-attached memory modules much like PCIe plug-in cards as an alternative to DDR. While it won’t replace the bandwidth and latency characteristics of DDR any time soon, CXL.mem is growing in popularity as an additional tier of memory within very large systems. The ongoing work includes updated patches to support new system calls (mempolicy, mbind and so on) intended to improve bandwidth utilisation for processes using CXL memory. “Additional uses for kexec have emerged, including that of live updating machines without a reboot.” Alex Graf posted some really nice looking patches titled “kexec:…

Computing never sits still, as new hardware features arrive and software is updated to take advantage of them, so new flaws, bugs and security issues appear. OS architects devise new ways to counter filesystem errors, memory leaks and privacy issues, with Linux always leading the way. We’ll dissect the problems that next-gen distros are solving, before introducing the concepts that solve the issues and give examples of next-gen distributions you can try today. The main players in the Linux distribution space are all committing huge amounts of developer time to creating the most reliable experience possible. Using the techniques that we’ve had available for at least a decade, progress has been excellent, but after all this time, advances have arguably slowed down as the experience has become better, so where…

MEALIE Credit: https://mealie.io OUR EXPERT David Rutland has finally moved on from his student days of living on jacket potatoes and baked beans. His friends and family are relieved. Everybody eats. The chemical reactions upon which life depends break down complex molecules and release the energy needed to build other complex molecules, build bodies and build brains (careful now!–ED). Contrary to certain historical beliefs, man can live on bread alone – but it’s nutritionally better if it’s a keema naan with extra pea flour. Even so, the finest curry house cuisine fails to inspire if you have the same thing every day. So, it should come as no surprise to discover that recipes are some of the oldest examples of writing that still exist today. Visit the Yale Peabody Museum…

Part Two! Catch up by ordering back issues on page 62! OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford is fascinated to see how analogue computers of the ’60s and ’70s can demonstrate chaotic systems, even though chaos theory wasn’t popularised until much later. As we saw last month, although analogue computers might seem ancient, they gave digital computers a run for their money until the early ’80s. Their particular strength was solving differential equations, so they were used for simulation, primarily in scientific and technical applications. In the first part of our exposé of electronic analogue computers, we turned to emulation to see how they worked and how they were used. Specifically, we emulated a simple analogue machine – not too dissimilar from the ones that were used in education – but that…

Mayank Sharma can’t believe it’s already that time of year when he has to find a distraction as the F1 circus goes on hiatus. After he’s done picking HotPicks, that is. PHOTO MANAGER Shotwell Version: 0.32.3 Web: https://wiki. gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell here’s a reason why Shotwell is the default photo manager on virtually every distribution T that uses the Gnome desktop. It has all the features you would expect from an everyday photo manager, with the added benefit of some very handy photo-editing functions. The app is now available as a Flatpak, which means you can use it on any desktop environment. Use flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Shotwell to install the app on any distro that’s set up to install Flatpaks. On first launch, the app automatically imports photos from the ~/Pictures folder,…

LXF313 will be on sale Tuesday 5th March 2024 Jonni Bidwell drags us kicking and screaming back to the ’80s to rediscover the true meaning of hack. That’s a nice filesystem… Be a shame if something nasty happened to it! We explore what makes a filesystem, what can go wrong, and why you’d change. Coding your CAD We’ve let Tam Hanna loose with OpenSCAD (as he wrote the book on it) and we might regret this, but he’s using it to print cigars… Easy retro gaming Dedicated distros help you get retro gaming with ease – we put five of the best to the test, so we can relive our gaming past. RAID your SSD Have a pile of SSDs lying around? Perhaps it’s time that you combined them into…

Nate Drake I’ve had great fun taking Maestro for a spin, a Unix-like kernel and operating system written entirely in Rust. So far it’s ported most Linux system calls and even has its own boot system and package manager. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next. Les Pounder I have a deep love for CrunchBang Linux. Since that project ended, I’ve been using BunsenLabs and CrunchBang++ on my old Lenovo X220. If you have old kit and want to keep using it, CrunchBang/BunsenLabs can squeeze a little more life from it. Michael Reed I always keep a copy of EasyOS on a flash drive. It’s an odd distribution, with a really weird take on the root user, but it can get you out of many awkward…

Traditionally, VA-API (Video Acceleration API) on Linux has not been supported in Chromium for GPU-based hardware acceleration, because it targeted the libva-x11 library. VaapiWrapper has now been updated to remove the usage of libva-x11 and the legacy VaapiVideoDecodeAccelerator. This means Linux Ozone/Wayland can share the same code path as Linux Ozone/X11. The VA-API X11 library uses the DRM library instead . Even though this pull request has been merged, code contributors are still pragmatic: “In so far as Linux + VA-API is not a supported platform (IOW it’s a best effort), this will allow developers and users to try and make it work on their machines.” Updates like these tend to divide online opinion, with die-hard X11 adherents repeating the claim that “Wayland breaks everything.” KDE developer and…

In December, the latest version of Weston, Wayland’s reference compositor, was released. Weston 13.0 comes with multiple fixes and important changes, notably the ability to load multiple back-ends simultaneously. This can be used to load VNC, RDP or PipeWire back-ends for remote access alongside the native DRM back-end. There is also now the ability to have multiple overlapping outputs. This enables you to have aDRM output that is simultaneously streamed remotely via PipeWire, while still taking the most efficient display path. This work is not fully complete and currently requires additional code in Weston’s front-end to enable; however, we are looking forward to this support being seamless in the next release. This was made possible by a largescale rework of our internal scene-graph representation and damage tracking, something that will…

ReiserFS is known for two reasons, one far less savoury than the other. It was the first journalling filesystem to be added to the official Linux kernel. Unfortunately, more people today are likely to know of ReiserFS because of the actions of its author, who murdered Nina Reiser in 2006. Following the events, the company continued its work for some time, but eventually moved on. ReiserFS has languished for years. It still has users, and, of course, legacy filesystems may be out there for mounting. It was interesting, then, to see a message from Fredrick Brennan, who reached out to Reiser from prison. The response Brennan received may be worth broader reading, simply for the bizarre (and hopefully unique) circumstances. In the long letter, Reiser not only admits to his…

I’ve been part of the Raspberry Pi community since its inception. Back in 2011, we heard whispers of a new single-board computer (SBC) and gasped in awe as we heard the spec – and the price. Before the Raspberry Pi, SBCs were typically £100+ and used mainly in embedded applications. A £35 Linux computer that could also dabble with electronics? What wasn’t there to like? There have been attempts to dethrone the Raspberry Pi and, sure, some of them have more RAM, a better CPU and extra features. So, what keeps us coming back to the Raspberry Pi? The GPIO. Those 40 pins (26 in the original model) are the gateway to learning new skills, and for a decade they have been used to build an amazing and eccentric mix…

Credit: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi, India. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years, and lawyering for 10. No matter what your system specification is, even if you are running a 12-core machine with hundreds of gigabytes of RAM or more, you will experience bottlenecks. And you will want to use a system monitor to see just what nefarious process is hogging your resources. This is the law. It’s also why there are so many resource monitors on offer for Linux distros. For most Linux users, Top is the de facto system monitor, and you can think of Btop as a super-charged variant. Written in C++ and released under the Apache Licence 2.0, Btop itself boasts a rich pedigree. The project…

OUR EXPERT Christian Cawley owns an original Commodore 64, an Amiga 1200, and a BBC Micro, but incredibly he doesn’t have enough time to use them all. Who would have guessed? QUICK TIP Power supplies for old equipment can be unreliable. New, modern PSUs and reconditioned supplies can be bought online, with an eBaybought power block costing up to £40. Digging through some old boxes, this author found a shoebox full of 5.25-inch floppy disks. D Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, having owned a Commodore 64, with a 1541-II disk drive. A lot of time was spent on this computer, with activities ranging from playing games (the usual) to creating very basic digital art and using software such as Shoot-’Em-Up Construction Kit (SEUCK) and Graphic Adventure Creator. The…

OUR EXPERT Neil Mohr won’t spend a penny on anything new and fangled – his children rarely visit. Ethernet is 50 years old. We ran a feature wondering why it E hadn’t died off back in LXF310, and the simple answer is that it just gets faster. Most home users have been pootling around with Gigabit since the early 2000s, things for consumers are not really any faster 24 years on. In data centres, 40GbE and 100GbE are common, with even 200/400GbE being experimented with. Here in the home office, uploads may top 20Mbp/s and downloading at 108Mbp/s over fibre, moving PDF files around, remote desktoping, SSHing to servers, and accessing the odd networked VM locally. It tends to be things that Gigabit is fine for, but faster is always…

Q Really big numbers I’m fairly new to Linux and run Linux Mint 21 on my desktop. Every time I try to open an XLSX sheet that I have either been sent or downloaded, I get the error message below: Warning loading document abc.xlsx The data could not be loaded completely because the maximum number of columns per sheet was exceeded Is there a way to overcome this or know what has been lost, if anything? Ian Madley A Looking at the sample sheet you sent, which produced no warnings in LibreOffice 7.6, there are no sheets with large numbers of columns. The column limit in LibreOffice was 1,024 up until version 7.3. From LibreOffice 7.4 onwards, the column limit was increased to 16,384, so you are unlikely to hit…

HOW WE TESTED… We installed everything on to Linux Mint, and all our notes about installation are based on that. However, part of the idea of a password manager is that your logins should be easily available across multiple platforms. We installed the latest, stable release of each tool, and this meant we typically had to perform a manual installation. In each case, we imported a sizable password collection that we had exported from the Google Chrome web browser, giving us real-world credentials to work with. All of the password managers come with web browser plugins, offering autocomplete functions. We tested the plugins to make sure that they worked, but we didn’t notice any standout features because they all operated in the same way. For this reason, we decided not…

By the time you read this, there should be 90,000 freshly baked Raspberry Pi 5s hitting the supply lines every week. This is an uplift from the already high 70,000 weekly number Sony’s production was cranking out. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton shared the promising news with us, along with pictures, which he says he took during a recent factory visit. It shows dozens of panels filled with Raspberry Pi 5 boards that are about to be tested and packed for shipping. Each panel in the picture contains nine Pi boards. “Uplift to 90ku is mostly due to bringing more test heads online in the auto test pods,” Upton explained. “Sony really are quite remarkable.” Sony runs the factory in Pencoed, South Wales (see LXF182), where Raspberry Pi boards are…

Credit: http://nodered.org OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at http://bigl.es. YOU NEED > Pico W > Breadboard > DHT11 sensor > 3x male-tomale jumper wires > Network > Code: https://github.com/lesp/LXF312-PicoW-MQTT/archive/refs/heads/ main.zip The Internet of Things (IoT) is hard, right? Wrong. It is easy thanks to MQTT and Node-RED. For this tutorial, we are building a simple Raspberry Pi Pico W-powered sensor that sends data to a Pi-powered dashboard running on Node-RED. The protocol that we’re using is called MQTT and there are more details in the boxout (opposite page). There is only one sensor connected to the Pico W. This is a common DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, which can be picked…

Credit: https://jami.net OUR EXPERT Nick Peers would love to say he only uses open source, private messaging systems, but convincing others of the merits of Signal (never mind Jami) is a tough sell at times. QUICK TIP For a technical guide to Jami, visit the site’s documentation at https://docs.jami.net/en_US/- there’s little practical explanation for how to use Jami, but lots of technological detail, including how Jami’s distributed network works to connect you securely to your contacts. Looking for an alternative messaging and communications platform that isn’t leakier than a colander and doesn’t demand personally identifiable information when you sign up? You need Jami (https://jami.net). It may not attract the same levels of attention as the big boys, but reduced visibility usually means less unwelcome attention – helped by the fact…

In the first part of this series, we covered setting up the first room of your point-andclick adventure, including the engine, palette I and walkable areas. We also interacted with objects, by looking at them and adding them to the inventory. The player can now use the wrench inventory item on some machine pieces to assemble a broken robot. With the robot up and running, it’s time to give it a voice. Conversations are a natural part of any pointand-click game, providing useful hints. NPCs can also sometimes be persuaded to give players useful items. Crafting characters In the series so far, we’ve covered two of the main types of things with which your player can interact: items and hotspots. However, AGS also supports a third type: characters. A character…

OUR EXPERT Ferenc Deák is sure that the usual suspects of programming languages fit for writing a shell have been exhausted, so he sticks to C++. QUICK TIP The code for the LXF Shell can still be found at https://github. com/fritzone/lxf-shell. Previously in our LXF Shell series, we reached a stage P where we could execute applications (LXF310), and looked at how to properly redirect the output of an application (LXF310). For this latest instalment, we are planning how to implement the input redirection for the shell, and as a final touch, how to bring all these together and create a shell that can sequentially execute applications by piping input and output between them. Input redirection Linux input redirection in a shell enables you to change the source of input…