Table of contents for October 2018 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell This year has been pretty action-packed. I’m excited about getting Bodhi 5.0 on my Eee 901. Finding out that the DXVK work I wrote about in LXF238 was sponsored by Valve as part of its Protonfork of Winewas pretty hot, too. All hail GabeN! John Knight Ever since Mint dropped KDE support this release I’ve had to look elsewhere. Kubuntu was too buggy, but I’ve found KDE Neon to be pleasingly solid. GalliumOS has had a major update recently, so my dual-boot hacked Chromebook will getting that installed, alongside Phoenix OS. Adam Oxford What’s impressed me this year has been the relatively painless transition of Ubuntu from Unity to Gnome 3 this year, and the ongoing improvements from Canonical to get closer to Gnome’s most current release. I’d…

“I’m amazed how many businesses permit inappropriate mails to be sent every day, even to the extent that they use them to help manage their IT infrastructure. No, not that type of mail. The type that says, “Backups ran successfully”, and which are mostly deleted before they’re even read. More to the point, the ones that you wouldn’t notice were missing if, say, the backups didn’t That’s not what mail is for, and using it in that way is lazy system management. If you’re responsible for looking after any Linux servers, implement some monitoring. It’s less than an afternoon’s work to set up something like Nagios although, as they say on the Beeb, “other monitoring solutions are available”. You won’t be monitoring everything on day one, but you’ll be monitoring…

Life is Strange: Before the Storm has been released by Feral Interactive for Linux and macOS. Linux Format regrettably reviewed this prematurely in LXF237 but we’re happy to say it’s now official out. Min. spec: Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit, Intel Core i3-4130T 2.9 GHz, 4GB memory, AMD R9 270 or Nvidia GTX 680 GPU with 2GB VRAM. The full game is available to buy online for £20.22. Available now from: https://store.feralinteractive.com.…

More Manjaro please I have an old Asus F3J laptop from 2005. The only Linux I could run on it was a 2014 version of PC LinuxOS. I recently tried to update it to a more recent version of said OS. No joy – obscure Grub and disk errors a-plenty. However, I run Manjaro within VirtualBox on my desktop PC. How about trying this OS on my laptop? I thought. It booted eventually to the live (XFCE) version. Now it’s installed on the hard disk with an Easy Sync wireless USB stick, it runs faster than it ever did – and with the very latest Manjaro version! So don’t discard your old hardware, try experimenting. Maybe you could run some future articles on Manjaro, as it’s the second highest ranking…

Alpinux, le LUG de Savoie Meets on the first and third Thursday of the month at the Maison des Associations de Chambéry, France. www.alpinux.org Build Brighton Thursday evenings is open night. www.buildbrighton.com Little Sandbox 5 Brasenose Road, Liverpool L20 8HL. Open maker night is Tuesday 6-9. Kids clubs are Monday (six to eight years) and Wednesday (eight to 12 years). www.littlesandbox.co.uk Leeds Hackspace Open night every Tuesday 7pm-late, open day second Saturday of the month, 11am-4pm. www.leedshackspace.org.uk Horsham Raspberry Jam Park side, Chart Way, Horsham. www.facebook.com/hackhorsham rLab Reading Hackspace Unit C1, Weldale Street, Reading. Wednesdays from 7pm. http://rlab.org.uk Huddersfield Raspberry Jam Meet every month at Huddersfield Library, typically the fourth Saturday of each month. https://huddersfieldraspberryjam.co.uk Medway Makers 12 Dunlin Drive, St Mary’s Island, Chatham, ME2 3JE. www.medwaymakers.com Cornwall Tech Jam Second…

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…

While email clients may appear to have not changed much since their debut on the Linux desktop, the different applications are constantly working on adding new features to please existing users, and attract new ones. In addition to accommodating for touch devices, many applications also support advanced features such as delivery notifications. This is especially useful when working with an IMAP account, such as that of GMail. Much like the perfect web browser, or text editor, there’s no clear answer as to which is the best email client. The ideal feature set for a desktop email client depends on the intended use. A casual home user probably doesn’t have any need for features such as delivery confirmation or scheduling, which would be relevant to business users. Despite many viable alternatives…

Mailspring’s default installation is the sum total of what’s on offer. You’re provided with a few more features if you opt to subscribe to the Pro version, at a cost of $8 per month (£6), but it still doesn’t give you as many features as you can get with the other tools. Claws is a straightforward email client, and you must resort to its plug-ins if you want additional features, such as a news aggregator. One such add-on is the ACPI notifier plug-in, which can light up the new email light on some laptop models, from Acer and Asus, for example. You can also opt from one of several themes to change the appearance of the interface. Evolution’s default installation already has several plug-ins installed and enabled. In fact, many…

BEGINNER DISTROS DEEPIN An elegant-looking Debianbased distribution that uses an intuitive custom desktop along with a host of custom tools. PINGUYOS Its customised Gnome rendition will impress new and old desktop Linux users alike, but it has stringent requirements. ELEMENTARY OS Another aesthetically pleasing distribution with beautifully crafted desktop and apps, only limited by its default cache of programs. ZORIN OS Its USP is the appearance altering tool that’ll make the Gnome desktop similar to that of Windows, which will comfort new users. LINUX LITE Its host of custom tools such as its software utility and welcome screen make light work of regular desktop tasks. ROLLING DISTROS MANJARO Based on Arch Linux, it focuses on user-friendliness and supports editions based on the Gnome, KDE and Xfce desktops. SABAYON A 64-bit…

ON WANTING TO JOIN THE ARMS RACE… “This was in the 1980s and there was huge amounts of money in Strategic Defense Initiative-type projects, and really I wanted to build rail guns and gamma ray lasers” Eleanor McHugh describes herself as a privacy evangelist and freelance reality consultant. Her “accidental career” has seen her working on avionics, satellite comms, broadcast TV and, latterly, digital identity systems. She’s also a speaker at Ruby and Go conferences. We met her at the O’Reilly Software Architecture conference in October 2017 to find out more. Linux Format: You’ve had quite an illustrious career path: trained as a physicist, worked on aircraft systems and are now involved with digital identity management. It’s quite dizzying just thinking about it. Can you tell us a bit more…

A core new feature of the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ was the ability to deliver power to it over a wired Ethernet connection, known in the biz as Power over Ethernet, or PoE. It was announced back in March 2018, and six months later the HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) that enables people to use the feature has been released. The new HAT is different from most other add-on Pi HATs in that it’s stackable. The board connects to both the 40-pin GPIO and the four-pin header for the PoE. The HAT is single-sided, which ensures that it fits within the footprint of the Pi once it’s installed within the official Pi case. A 25mm fan has been included, which is designed to assist with overall system cooling. The fan…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is a freelance maker who works with organisations such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote maker skills. Read his blog at bigl.es. Books come in all shapes and sizes but what they have in common is a unique reference number called an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) that acts as a unique identifier. In this project we’ll learn how to search ISBN numbers using a Python GUI application and then check how much the book is selling for online. Set up your Raspberry Pi and power up to the Pi desktop. Insert your USB barcode scanner, and it should be set by default to scan a code and automatically “press” the Enter key. If not, there should be a sheet of barcodes with your scanner…

TFT LCD display technology is common in notebooks and laptop computers. Over the years the displays have slowly replaced old CRT screens. The TFT LCD display consists of a grid of pixels. The technology uses a transistor to drive each pixel. Having a transistor driver for each pixel means that the pixels can be switched on and off easier and faster. The TFT design embedded in the screen also reduces crosstalk between the pixels. Crosstalk is when the signal for one pixel bleeds or crosses over onto another pixel. Reduced crosstalk provides better resolution, thus improving image quality. TFT LCD technology is the standard for small display screens. The connection framework of the small display purchased for this project is designed to plug directly into Pi male header from the…

OUR EXPERT Alex Cox always uses the wrong tool for the job. Once he went for a night out in Bath wearing actual beer goggles. Things got very messy… The German artist Joseph Beuys once said “Everyone is an artist.” He didn’t mean it literally – that’s the thing with lasting quotes, they’re rarely entirely straightforward – but figuratively; everyone has within them the essence of an artist, the ability to create. You can be artistic with everything you do, and with all the tools at your disposal. So let’s create, and get a little silly, with a tool that’s absolutely not meant for visual art in the form of Audacity. You’ll know Audacity as that stalwart, ubiquitous, fully featured audio editor and recorder. It’s possible that it’s already been…

Windows 10 includes a tool that can be used to create a recovery drive from the installed system (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4026852). After booting into Windows, type recovery driveinto the search box to locate the tool and then launch it. You need to supply a fresh 16GB USB drive (or one you’re happy to recycle – because all existing data will be overwritten) and ensure you select the option to backup system files when prompted because this option makes it possible to use the recovery drive to reinstall Windows. Lenovo also offer a Digital Download Recovery Service (https://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/solutions/ht103653) (DDRS) that you can use to download the files needed to create a Lenovo Recovery USB key. It, like the Windows recovery drive, also requires a 16GB USB drive, but downloads everything it needs from…

Remember that line in the VPN configuration file for auth-user-pass ? We need to change that so that credentials file we just created is called automatically. This means you need to change that line to auth-user-pass vpnlogin . You can do that manually for the three or four servers that you think you’ll use the most, and then just set-up scripts to start those servers when you need them. But what if you want to pretend you’re in Sweden for a day, or South Africa? Can you even remember what the VPN password was? Nord VPN supplies over two thousand different config files, one for each server with both TCP and UDP protocols. To edit all those files at once open up an SSH connection to your Pi and navigate…

JACK is the foundation upon which most advanced Linux audio programs are based, but it’s also tricky to get going. Qtractor’s developer has already developed a comprehensive utility for this, QjackCtl, so try opening it and press Start. If you’re lucky it will start first time, but even then, you’ll need to make a few tweaks. The first thing to try is disabling Realtime, and then adding your user to the audio group. The MIDI driver will most likely be set to none, so you’ll need to choose Seq from the menu. Note that JACK might fail to start if you’re using something else that’s running audio, since it won’t be able to grab exclusive sound card permissions. You may need to logout if this is so, and it’s always…

OUR EXPERT Mihalis Tsoukalos has forgotten more things than you’ll ever know!. Monitoring is what separates professional system administrators from amateurs and it can save you lots of time and energy. This tutorial is about Muninand Monitand how you can use them to monitor a Linux system – you will certainly appreciate the simplicity of the Monitsetup process and the elegant output generated by Munin. Although software like Muninand Monitwill make the job of Linux monitoring easier, the most difficult thing is deciding what to monitor, which mainly depends on the tasks and the configuration of the Linux server. Dynamic duo Munin is software that generates pleasing and informative graphics about the operation of a Linux machine. Monit, on the other hand, is an easy to install yet powerful monitoring…

Munin that Monit are not the only monitoring software available. Others include Nagios (www.nagios.org), MRTG (https://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg), Cacti (www.cacti.net), Zabbix (www.zabbix.org see LXF179), Icinga (www.icinga.com), OpenNMS (https://opennms.org) and Ganglia (http://ganglia.sourceforge.net). All tools have advantages and disadvantages – the best way to be able to choose between these different monitoring tools is to try them first and then decide what works best for your particular needs. MRTG uses SNMP and is pretty easy to install and configure. However, it can only monitor things without being able to deal with the services of your Linux machine. Cacti (see LXF135), MRTG and Munin use RRDtool for creating their graphs, which means that they will have a similar output. Nagios, (see LXF111) on the other hand, is more powerful, but requires more time to learn…

TASK MANAGER Zanshin Version: 0.5 Web: https://zanshin.kde.org Many KDE users get nervous at the very mention of the word akonadi and prefer to turn this information management service off. Despite this prejudice, Zanshin – a Plasma-centric organiser – works like a charm and proves that Akonadi is more useful than you might expect. From the end-user perspective, it looks like a neat, smart and super-productive tool for getting things done. Zanshin is powerful, yet it has a very low entry barrier, which means that you just launch it and start adding new items instantly. The design of Zanshin implies integration with a resource entity such as Google Calendar and Tasks, Microsoft Exchange Server, a DAV groupware resource, or a local iCal calendar file. Once you’ve added the resource, you can…

If you’d like to take a look at the inspiration behind this article and where a lot of the code comes from you can find it at https://github.com/ MorpheusArch/LinDiag . If the program has a command line variant of it, you can script it. The shell’s great for scripting a lot of CLI-based programs and applications – everything from VoIP applications like Asterisk to performing repetitive tasks. Try to comment on the code when you can. You can indicate comment lines that are ignored by the script with # and commenting your own code can save a lot of headaches and trouble if you decide to return to it later on.…

This issue is a celebration of the best open source distros. We’re recognising the achievements of thousands of unsung developers, coders, testers, organisers and documentation writers. Day in, day out, they’re working on open source projects, making git commits, filing bug reports and packaging tirelessly to bring us a bounty of free and open source software to choose from. I think it’s far too easy to take that for granted. So this issue we’re taking a while to stop and appreciate the best distros that have arrived in 2018. The sheer diversity that Linux and the GPL offer is staggering. It enables the same kernel to have software wrapped around it to specialise in every area of computing: cloud servers, security and penetration testing, NAS devices, IoT devices, scientific research,…

There’s some great news for Linux users who are considering AMD’s latest Threadripper CPUs. Benchmark tests run by TechSpot (http://bit.ly/LXFTechSpotBench) showed that these high-end processors performed better in the mega-tasking tests in Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS than they did in Windows 10. While the 32-core 2990WX performed brilliantly in both Windows and Linux, the performance difference when using Ubuntu was occasionally stark. For example, in the Stockfish 9 test, a free and open source chess engine, the 2990WX saw a 23 per cent performance boost when running in Linux compared to Windows. In the John the Ripper test, which is a password cracker, the increase was even more impressive, with it performing the tests three times faster in Linux than in Windows. In almost every test AMD’s 2990WX performed noticeably better…

A recent newsletter (which can be read at http://bit.ly/LXFLubuntuNews) announced that Lubuntu, the popular distro based on Ubuntu, will be ditching the X.Org Server for Wayland by default. According to a Q&A in the newsletter, Simon Quigley, the main developer of Lubuntu explains that, “The X implementation is old and won’t be updated to address the way desktop Linux is used today. Window managers are an afterthought, and many things aren’t implemented correctly. Wayland is a modern take on the Linux display system.” This won’t be an overnight development, however, because it will take time to solve some of the problems that will invariably arise. For example, Lubuntu’s default windows manager, Openbox, will need to be ported to the Mir display server, which is compatible with Wayland. Lately its core…

KODI V18 LEIA – BETA 1 In a release announcement (which can be read at http://bit.ly/LXFKodi18Beta1), the first beta build of Kodi v18 has been revealed in preparation for the final release. According to the announcement, this version has proven to be “quite solid to use as a daily driver for those who were brave enough to try it out.” This version includes plenty of new features, which are listed in the changelog at http://bit.ly/LXFKodiChangeLog. 4MLINUX 26.0 This minimalist distro designed for both desktops and servers has a new version out, and comes with a plethora of new and updated packages. These include LibreOffice 6.1.0, GNOME Office, Dropbox 55.4.171, Firefox 61.0.2 and Thunderbird 52.9.1. There have also been updates to the 4MLinux LAMP server, and more information can be had…

Oggcamp 2018 Two days of FOSS, fun and reminiscing. The other day I was in Sheffield which for 2018 was home to Oggcamp. Now in its ninth year, this event still draws those interested in free culture and open source technologies from across Europe. Oggcamp 2018 took place at Sheffield’s Hallam University over two days, and as well as two tracks of unconference talks, there was a conference track with notable speakers from emerging technologies. For the children, there was a CoderDojo, hosted by Ben Nuttall, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s community manager. Over the two days there were many great talks, I particularly enjoyed a talk on resurrecting O2’s “Joggler” project (a 2009 Intel Atom-based “photo frame”-styled computer) using a customised version of Ubuntu. At the end of day one…

I’ve (not) got the power Q Excited by the release of the Pi 3 B+, I finally got around to getting its predecessor. Managed to snag a bargain on eBay, complete with a case. I was impressed at how quickly it boots and how much better it does normal desktop things (web browsing, in particular YouTube, and LibreOffice). However, I noticed a small lightning graphic appearing in the top right-hand corner periodically. After some investigations I found some log messages saying undervoltage detected . If I switch to the experimental vc4 driver, then the lightning bolt disappears, but the messages are still in the log. I’m confused by this, because the same power supply works fine for my phone and older Raspberry Pis. William Burnside A A few people have…

Q In issue 238 of Linux Format (August 2018) Marcel Foust asks about ways of finding his Pi on the network. You left out an easy way. Assign it through DHCP. All you need is the MAC address of the network interface device on the Pi. Most routers use a very simple DHCP server, which usually has something called “DHCP Reservation” or the like. Using this you can reserve an address for your Pi. I prefer to run my own DHCP server – on a Pi running ISC DHCP as it happens (as opposed to dnsmasq). In /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf  you use the host to assign a specific IP to the MAC: This has the advantage of predictability, but obviously some initial setup time is required. I always make a…

Unlike the last time we ran a Roundup of email clients (LXF151 – seven years ago!) when we installed the different applications on their native desktop environments, we’re running all of them on the Budgie desktop this time around. Most distributions carry these applications in their software repositories, and we’re running the latest available versions of each of them. The only exception is Thunderbird, because its latest release isn’t yet available in the software repositories, and we had to install it manually. Most email clients are similar in appearance, but we’ll be testing these tools on their performance, their search capabilities and ability to handle junk and spam messages. We’ll also keep an eye out for any standout features on offer, and their support for IMAP and POP accounts. Extending…

While online services such as Yahoo and GMail continue to tweak their interfaces every few years, desktop mail clients are far more lax with their appearances, with seemingly no change having taken place since the introduction of the modern email clients decades ago. How do you then explain the popularity and continued existence of desktop clients? One of the reason for this is their tight integration into the desktop, which means pop-up notifications for incoming messages. Add to that features such as queueing messages, their anti-spam measures and support for encrypting your messages, and it’s easy to see why these applications can boast of such vast user communities. The first and only task that a mail client should do well is connect easily with the different accounts and send and…

As is often the case, we restricted ourselves to graphical applications for this month’s Roundup, Before we turn to the command-line alternatives, there’s still some graphical ones that we must mention. If you like Claws Mail then you should also devote attention to Sylpheed, since Claws was forked from it back in 2005. Interestingly, both tools have a nearly identical feature set. Gnome users can also try Geary, but it isn’t as feature-packed as Evolution. If you’re feeling nostalgic, and remember the days of Netscape, Seamonkey Mail is a viable alternative and offers all the useful features as the rest, such as spam detection and message filtering. Then there’s Mutt, which is an incredibly robust mail client. You’ll need to install and configure other command-line utilities such as Procmail to…

As users make their way to Linux, one of the first peculiarities they encounter is that there’s no single one Linux. The concept of distributions is fairly foreign to a majority of new users migrating from the shores of proprietary desktop operating systems. Longtime readers wouldn’t flinch at the fact that Linux is essentially just a kernel, but Linux, the operating system that most people refer to is actually the distribution: a collection of software consisting of the kernel and all the support programs that a user would need. On the face of it, all distros borrow from the same common pool of apps and libraries. However, a Linux distro is more than the sum of its parts. All distros, especially the mainstream ones, put in several hundred hours working…

Remastersys has always been one of the most popular scripts for transforming a customised Ubuntu installation into a bootable ISO image. It drew inspiration from Mandriva’s mklivecd, but was written for Ubuntu. When the original script ceased development, it was forked by several other projects, most noticeably Bodhi Linux and PinguyOS. We’ve used the Bodhi Linux fork called Bodhibuilder in this article and you can just as easily use PinguyOS’s fork named Pinguy Builder. Besides these, there’s now something of an official fork of the original script. Dubbed Linux Respin, this script is hosted at the original remastersys.org website. Unlike the other two however, Linux Respin focuses on creating custom spins from Debian and Linux Mint. There’s also a version that will work on one of Free Software Foundation’s favourite…

LXF: Your career’s been a pretty amazing journey. Puts my trajectory from tax monkey to algebraist to vagabond to pretend journalist to shame. Not sure I have the same common thread thing going on… EMcH: The weird thing is that the common thread that links all of my “career” is nothing to do with programming, it’s auditing. That’s not unnatural. My mum was a senior tax inspector and I grew up having to have audited accounts. When I was doing the aviation stuff, I also designed the audit trail system that we used to prove we’d done what we actually claimed we’d do. Then when I was doing the sat-comms stuff I ended up designing methods so they could prove they were ISO 9001 compliant, even thought they had no…

Dabbling with emulation and the like can fairly rapidly lead to legally murky waters. In the US copyrights last for 75 years, so even ROM files of early arcade games are off-limits. Even if you own an original copy of the game on one platform, you’re not entitled to download another (getting data off Amiga formatted disks requires special hardware, for example) for use on an emulator. Just because a title is no longer available doesn’t entitle you to download it. However, old PC games are readily available for cheap on auction sites, fairs and stoop sales (which is like a yard sale if you live in Brooklyn). The century old “first-sale doctrine” covers this legally. For older titles you’ll need a USB floppy drive, and apparently computers now don’t…

Five years ago the government introduced a computer science curriculum; a positive move for an increasingly digital nation. But while the UK is facing a huge skills shortage, the number of students taking the subject is declining. While the nation struggles to resolve its digital crisis, one glimmer of hope for our future is the Raspberry Pi. Aside from being affordable, it’s a fun way of making hardware and programming accessible to young people of all ages. As exciting as coding is, it’s when combining the Raspberry Pi with physical computing projects that the mini computer comes into its own. I’ve run over a hundred sessions on physical computing for young people and adults over the past few years. Nothing beats that moment where your learners go from feeling overwhelmed…

Teaching how to create a GUI to children is often fraught with peril! This prompted ex-teacher and current Raspberry Pi team members Laura Sachs to create GUI Zero as a means to simplify the process of creating applications. GUI Zero takes the form of a simple Python library with which we can create tkinter-based GUI elements such as windows, dialogs and pop-up boxes. Laura wanted to create a simple library that would work with children from primary school to A levels (seven to 18 years) and enable them to use a clear syntax that they would readily understand. Laura’s work is documented at https://lawsie.github.io/guizero and she, together with Martin O’Hanlon, is creating new and inventive ways to add new features to the library. Such as adding support for animated GIFs,…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and avid Arch Linux user. He’s always on the lookout for geeky memorabilia. As with almost all categories of software, Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to terminal emulators, more commonly referred to as terminal applications. Depending on your distribution, and desktop environment, you already have a couple of these installed on your machine. This default application, although useful, presents little more than a white-text-on-black background colour scheme out of the box. While the colour scheme isn’t relevant to productivity, a little more zing can’t hurt, especially if you spend a lot of time on the terminal. In any event, the default terminal makes for very dull (YES!–Ed) screengrabs for our readers. Thankfully, there are a number…

Audacity is a fun way to do semi-predictable glitchy things to your images, but it’s not the only way. Opening up a bitmap file in a text editor is a fun escapade; you can (blindly) chop chunks out and paste them in other places. You can repeat the same sections for an authentic glitchy look, or slice out entire parts. To go more extreme, you can even do a find and replace operation on the characters within – but we’d recommend clipping out the first few bytes of the file before you start, then pasting them back in later, to ensure you don’t accidentally start killing your ability to view the image later on. You could also have a little fun with a hex editor. Install something like GHex and…

We backed up the ThinkPad before starting Windows (it began starting but holding the Power button down quickly sorted that). We booted into Clonezilla and navigated its text-based menu wizard. We configured a keyboard (optional, but we aren’t in the USA), and chose to work with disks or partitions using images and to use SSH Server. These options create a backup image on another computer connected using SSH. You must next configure networking (DHCP is the easiest) and then enter the username, host, path and password that SSH should use. Next, select either Beginner or Expert mode; the latter offers more options that enable you to choose the underlying tools (such as partclone or ntfsclone) and apply options to them. However, the defaults should work fine if Windows was properly…

OUR EXPERT John Knight when he’s not laying down a sick drum beat, he’s pontificating about how gaming will help Linux take over the world! For those not in the know, Qtractor is a Qt-based (https://qtractor.sourceforge.io), Linux-only Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) designed around JACK. However, the term DAW may put readers on edge, as Qtractor was meant to be a MIDI sequencer with some DAW features, but it’s safe to say the project has gone way beyond that! Qtractor is a big program with many components and possibilities, so we’ll barely be able to scratch the surface. Nevertheless, we can at least show you the basics so you can hit the ground running and take it further yourself. The best way of tackling this beast is probably to start with…

This is definitely more advanced territory and we don’t have the space to cover this properly, but to show you where to start, right-click on a track in the left panel and the Automation sub-menu should be at the bottom of the list. From here you can choose from core mixer features like Gain or Pan, or automate plugins activated with the track. After you have chosen what you want to automate, your track will change appearance with a burgundy line through it. Click inside the track and the line will bend and conform to individually placed nodes, and if you want a different shape to your line, you have multiple options under Automation > Mode. To hear what changes you’ve made, right-click on the track in the left panel…

Find out more about Munin at http://bit.ly/LXF242munin , and Monit at http://bit.ly/LXF242monit .And head to http://bit.ly/LXF242mundoc , http://bit.ly/LXF242md1  and http://bit.ly/LXF242md2 for documentation. You can quit the Monit server process by executing monit quit or service monit stop with root privileges, and stop the Munin node process by executing service munin-node stop with root privileges. All Munin utilities are plain text Perl scripts, which means you can easily modify, read and debug them, change their output, and rewrite them in another programming language, etc. As a matter of fact, if you find that Perl is a pretty old programming language you can port Munin to Go or Rust!…

OUR EXPERT Dr Sinitsyn is a cloud infrastructure developer at Yandex by day, an open source contributor by night, with interest in everything from AH to X509. Remember those old April Fool’s news stories about Microsoft releasing some of its goodies for Linux? Internet Explorer in RPM seemed too ridiculous to fool even a zero-day Linux newbie, yet it was a trend around 2000. While it’s true that Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office for Linux have yet to be seen; frankly speaking, we don’t miss them too much. But on the server-side, Microsoft’s attitude obviously changed some years ago, and yet another, Microsoft-baked, open-source project doesn’t make too much of a buzz. Really, with Microsoft releasing Azure Cloud Switch (essentially a Debian-based distribution), hell must have frozen over, so why…

Perl (see LXF145/151/206)is sometimes referred to as a ‘glue language’. That is, the aim was to stick together otherwise incompatible pieces to produce a working something. If this sounds like a shell script, it is. Of course, Perl wasn’t created in a vacuum, and its author, Larry Wall, thinks the language borrows “some of the best features of sed, Awk, and sh”. Take hashes. Officially called associative arrays, they are the same as in Awk. There are less obvious similarities as well. Remember how you do a summation in Awk? A typical solution would be: awk ‘{sum += $1}; END {print sum}’ $1 exists in Perl as well, but that’s a false comparison. Here, it refers to the first record’s field; in Perl, it’s the first capture group in a…

There are a few things that can trip you up when you begin shell scripting for the first time – even if you’re a seasoned veteran of shell scripting. This applies to whiptail and non-whiptail related shell scripts. One of the common ones can cause the script to hang the terminal and this is usually because there’s no entry point for the script to start. An entry point in this example would be the authcheck function we made to check if root was running the script. So make sure you have authcheck at the bottom of the shell script so it knows to go there first, and from there can move elsewhere. Another common pitfall is that your functions don’t carry over. A little like carrying the one in math,…

All the two-dimensional CA we’ve look at are played out on a rectangular grid, but hexagons and equilateral triangles also offer additional possibilities. Some cellular automata produce visually attractive results, so experimenters have investigated whether they can make pleasant-sounding music. It’s a challenge to find ways of mapping the cells into musical notes, but interesting yet strange results have been demonstrated. Some people are now experimenting with four-dimensional cellular automata. The biggest challenge is displaying the result which, of course, somehow has to be mapped into three-dimensional space. The results are impressive.…

Having seen 1D and 2D CA, it’s no great leap of the imagination to turn our attention to three-dimensional cellular automata. There are some 3D CA packages available but to start, you might like to get a feel for them using the online facility at cubes.io. Although there’s plenty to keep you occupied at cubes.io – in fact they claim that over a trillion trillion trillion rules are possible – each cell only has a six-cell neighbourhood (N, W, W, E, up and down). Because the neighbourhood doesn’t include diagonal neighbours, which would increase the number of neighbours to 26 in three dimensions, this tool isn’t a good 3D equivalent of the 2D Game of Life. rithmschool.github.io/game-of-life-3d addresses this issue and, while it’s not nearly as polished as cubes.io, nor…

Have to ever been to a Linux User Group (LUG)? There’s been some interesting discussion on the UK Lugmaster mailing list recently about the future of LUGs and it seems many are well attended and useful. You may think that in these days of instant communication and social media that physical meet-ups are a thing of the past, but that’s not the case. I’m involved with Liverpool LUG (LivLUG), where we have monthly meetings, usually featuring a talk by one of our members or the occasional guest, followed by an adjournment to a local pub where things rapidly go off topic. The focus of LUGs has changed over recent years. With the popularity of the Raspberry Pi, IoT hardware and even Android devices, the focus is no longer purely on…

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

Better video editing Traditionally the poor man of the open source world, now FOSS editors can go head-to-head with the best of the rest. 3D imaging Step into another dimension… well, a third dimension as we explore how to manipulate 3D images with open source. Secret servers Set up a stealth server on your network! Run a web server that only you know exists and is hidden from everyone. Saving social networks Can open source social networking save people from themselves or will it just create an even bigger monster? Contents of future issues subject to change – we might be too exhausted from all the fleeing.…

IN LESS THAN A WEEK, THE NUMBER OF GAMES THAT CAN BE PLAYED FROM STEAM IN LINUX GREW BY ALMOST 1,000 A post on the Steam community forums written by Valve representative Pierre-Loup Griffais has revealed an update to Steam Play (see http://bit.ly/LXFSteamPlay).The upshot is that Windows games can now be played on Linux using Proton, a modified version of Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator), without too much stress being placed on system resources. According to Valve, Proton is based on Vulkan, a popular open-source graphics API that’s multiplatform, which means it runs on Windows, Linux and macOS (and other operating systems), rather than APIs such as DirectX, which is Windows-only. You can view Proton’s code on Github at http://bit.ly/ProtonGitHub. The new Steam Play is good news for not…

“While we know that technology can’t prevent natural disasters from occurring, we do know that it’s a critical tool in our toolbox that can help save lives and minimise property damage. With this in mind, The Linux Foundation stepped up to answer the Call for Code along with IBM, the UN Human Rights Office, the American Red Cross, David Clark Cause, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and a global community committed to minimising the impact of the more frequent natural disasters that occur. The inaugural Call for Code challenges the world’s 22 million developers to tackle and find solutions around disaster preparedness and recovery. The winning Call for Code solution and team will be awarded a $200,000 prize along with an opportunity to pitch their idea to a venture capitalist.…

Just last issue (LXF241) we reported on Liberapay’s problems, having been apparently kicked off Mangopay, the payment processing platform that Liberapay used. This resulted in Liberapay recommending its users empty their wallets to quickly pay projects or creators that they support. It now seems that Liberapay is back in business, with a Tweet posted on 9 August (http://bit.ly/LXFLiberapayTweet) stating that, “Good news: the processing of payments through Stripe is now live!”. Donors can go to http://bit.ly/LXFLiberapayDonors to check to see if their donations are ready to go through, while if you receive donations you can head to http://bit.ly/LXFLiberapayDonation.…

“When I started working on open graphics, it was in a bad place. Changing your monitor meant arcane reconfiguration. When the patchy hardware support; didn’t work – well, it was the user’s fault for choosing ‘the wrong hardware’. The experience these days doesn’t compare: a slick experience running on both hardware so new you can’t buy it, and so old proprietary drivers don’t support it. Maintaining this success needs new developers. But with our focus on the code, we had neglected developer experience, with arcane and fragmented processes new developers found impossible to understand. freedesktop.org’s graphics projects are shifting to a self-hosted GitLab instance. This enables developers to have modern issue tracking, send merge requests and review with modern tooling, and ensure that code builds and works with CI. Projects…

PYCONIE 2018 PyCon Ireland takes place on 10-11 November 2018 in the Radisson Blu hotel, Dublin. This weekend event has talks and workshops detailing the latest advancements in the Python language. Find out what’s on offer by visiting https://pyconie18.python.ie. BARCAMP MANCHESTER Taking place at Auto Trader’s Manchester office on 29-30 September, this weekend event offers you the chance to learn more about the diversity of the community. Makers, coders, hackers, crafters, knitters and computer scientists all meet in one place where the barrier between a speaker and attendee is broken down and everyone has the chance to share their passions! You can learn so much from a Barcamp and better still, the event is totally free! More details and ticket information are at www.barcampmanchester.co.uk – see you there! ADA LOVELACE…

Q After a fortnight of wrestling with Mint 19 I have given up. These are my reasons: 1 I could not get cups-pdf to work (no trouble elsewhere). 2 XSane could not access my Brother MFC-845CW (using Brother’s proprietary driver). Again no trouble elsewhere. 3 My Windows XP virtual machine running under VMware couldn’t access Samba shares. A virtual Windows 10 on the same platform is fine. Again, no trouble elsewhere. Alan Secker, via email A They keep telling us printing and scanning gets easier with each new distro release, but this seems to be subjective. It’s hard for us to test as we don’t have that kind of hardware lying around. Here are some guesses: 1 Cups-PDF hasn’t been updated since February 2017, which I suppose isn’t that long…

Arma 3 was originally released way back in 2013 for Windows. So why on earth is a review appearing in 2018 in a Linux magazine? Good question! To begin, the developer Bohemia only released a beta for Linux towards the end of 2015. That’s still a full three years ago, but it’s only just released the latest 1.83 version for Linux during 2018. To make things more confusing, if you look at Arma 3 on Steam it only displays a Windows version as being available, but if you buy and install on Linux you’ll get the so-called Linux “beta” – the reasoning here is there are features in the Windows release that will never be in the Linux version. So it’s easy to think there is no Linux release at…

For this test, the awarded score is cumulative from the quality of documentation to the ease of configuring new accounts. Unlike the other tools that work flawlessly with most IMAP and POP accounts, GMail considers Claws Mail as an unsecure application. You’re required to enable access to ‘Less secure apps’, from within GMail before you can configure Claws to fetch messages. Failure to do so results in a login failure message, even when you provide the correct password. Unfortunately, despite the user manual and FAQ on the website, the Claws documentation doesn’t discuss this hiccup of working with GMail. Evolution is similarly difficult to configure with Yahoo, but like the other tools, the program can automatically fetch all the pertinent details when configuring GMail. You can access the thorough documentation…

Our distros have been tested against various parameters that vary from one category to the next. For instance, when evaluating a beginner-friendly product we pay attention to the custom tools and other tweaks that help increase the distros’ usability. That’s because a new Linux user needs to be handheld through everyday computing tasks as they get familiar with the lay of the land. While choice is the hallmark of open source, it’s a distraction to a first timer. A good beginner-friendly distro helps users by making choices on their behalf. Some go to the extent of forking popular apps to write customised versions that can be handled by newbies. Generally speaking, a distro aimed at the inexperienced user should be easier to use than your typical desktop distro. For server…

The scripts in this feature will help you turn your installed flavour of Linux into a distributable medium that you can then pass around. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you really want to get a feel for what it takes to create a custom distribution, from the grounds up, then you need to lock yourself in a room for a week with a copy of Linux From Scratch (www.linuxfromscratch.org). Linux From Scratch or LFS as its popularly known, is actually a book, which painstakingly hand-holds you through the time-consuming process of putting together your own Linux distribution. The book’s offered as a free download and you can even grab a printed edition at the bookstore. Once you’re through with LFS, you’ll end up with a system that’s…

LXF: People discussing these things tend to conflate the meanings of ‘privacy’ and ‘security’. Thoughts? EMcH: As I said earlier, you don’t have a right to privacy in this country. And that’s a good thing. Privacy tends to go hand in hand with conspiracy, with racketeering, all kinds of bad stuff. The distinction I make when I give talks is that security is an absolute. If you’re going to claim that you have a secure system you must keep the bad stuff just as secure as the good stuff. It must not reveal anything about crimes just as it mustn’t reveal anything about personal indiscretions. Privacy can reveal crimes, but not personal indiscretions. Privacy isn’t a right, nor is security. They’re both things that we trade off various things with…

OUR EXPERT Sean D Conway has just retired, swapping his position as a senior IT security specialist at a Canadian national telecom carrier, for a life of Pi and model trains. The goal of this project is to display static content on a small screen, to simulate the ubiquitous advertising billboard signs. Back in LXF239 we built a model drive-in movie theatre. This was such a success that the model railroaders requested we create a “HO scale” (standard 1:87 scale) billboard displaying advertisements, similar to those found along roads and the sides of buildings. A 3.5-inch Raspberry Pi touchscreen using thin-film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) is ideal for this project. The 26-pin female header from the display board plugs directly into the Pi GPIO pins, eliminating the need…

Another popular command-line tool to impress your colleagues and peers is Neofetch. The very narrow purpose of this nifty little tool is to provide all the pertinent system information in an aesthetically pleasing display. You can install Neofetch from the software repositories of most distributions. The tool can be used to quickly ascertain essential information such as current distribution, host machine, CPU, GPU, total memory, screen resolution, desktop environment, uptime, etc. Since most of this information can be ascertained separately, the advantage with Neofetch is that it enables you to quickly share all the essential details with a single screenshot. The cleverly named config.conf configuration file is stored in the ~/.config/neofetch directory. You can enable even more elements such as CPU usage, CPU temperature, IP address and more. You can…

OUR EXPERT John Lane consults and writes about Linux. Now on a ThinkPad, in the garden, with a beer… Lenovo’s ThinkPads are the world-famous business portables with the IBM heritage, with the T series being the traditional ThinkPad laptop range. Lenovo claims they’re as tough as nails and reliable enough to keep you productive in any environment, thanks to their MIL-SPEC construction. And they’re great Linux machines, too! In this tutorial we will install Linux on a new ThinkPad and virtualise its Windows license after taking a system backup, just in case we ever want to return the laptop to its shipping condition. You’ll need at least one USB stick of at least 16GB, but you’ll find it handy to have two or three to use for different bootable images.…

OUR EXPERT Adam Oxford spends his time between writing, teaching, mentoring and camping in the South African landscape. Caring about your online privacy and actually following best practices to protect it are two different things. As Linux Format readers, it’s likely that you know the principles of what we should do to avoid the great data collectors and geo-locators in the sky, but maintaining constant vigilance is an effort that soon gets tiresome, if not downright impossible. For example, you know that you should be using a VPN to avoid ISP-level filters imposed by various pieces of UK law. Setting up and using a log-free VPN service from your Linux desktop is straightforward enough, but what about all the other devices in your home? For example, if you use a…

If you’re serious about sound editing, use a dedicated PC for the job. Keep the non-audio hardware simple: you don’t need an ultra-powerful CPU; on-board video will be fine – save the PSU watts for the sound card. Those little dark squares in the corner of each track are for making easy fades. If you want more control over fades, open the Clip window by choosing Clip > Edit. Export your audio, from the main menu with Track > Export Tracks > Audio and follow your nose. WAV is ued by default, but from the system options you can export to all kinds of formats like AIFF and VOC.…

1) Choose your track At this point it’s probably a good idea to press your track’s solo button, S, unless you’re determined that first you want to hear the new plugin’s effect against the whole song. Otherwise, right-click your chosen track in the left pane for tracks and choose Track Properties. 2) Choose your plugin(s) From the new Track window, choose the Plugins tab and then click the Add button. Depending on what you’ve installed, you will now have a Plugins menu that may have hundreds of entries! In the top right is a drop-down box for filtering what kind of plugin you want, such as LADSPA or VST for example. Choose the plugin you want and press OK. A new window may appear depending on whether or not the…

If you have a problem with either Monit or Munin, troubleshoot their log files. Monit’s main log file is located at /var/log/monit.log; and Munin’s log file directory should be at /var/log/munin/. As an example, execute the grep FATAL /var/log/munin/* command to scan all Munin log files for FATAL errors. The following kinds of entry from /var/log/munin/munin-update.log come in handy when you want to learn more about the operation of Munin: 2018/08/01 12:05:01 [INFO]: Starting munin-update 2018/08/01 12:05:05 [INFO]: Munin-update finished (4.52 sec) To see how often munin-update is executed, use grep and get the info from /var/log/munin/munin-update.log. The following entries verify that Monit‘s process and its web interface have started: [EEST Aug 1 10:45:49] info: Starting Monit 5.25.1 daemon with http interface at [127.0.0.1]:2812 [EEST Aug 1 10:45:49] info: ‘ubu’…

“That’s old hat. Don’t do it.” How many times a day do you hear these words as an IT specialist? But what exactly makes a software technology age? In the real world things are simpler. Old cars consume more gas, pollute more and run slower than modern ones. Old hats (yes, the real old hats) go out of fashion, yet you probably only have to wait a few years before they’re back in vogue again. Some things – like the Mona Lisa, for example – don’t age at all. Put simply, an old something either doesn’t perform as well as a new one, or it doesn’t age. Here, “perform” might mean a measurable quantity such as speed or (more often) someone’s personal impression of such a quantity. In a virtual…

First and foremost, Perl comes with its own documentation system called perldoc. In case your Linux distribution complains about the perldoc command being missing, make sure you have a relevant package installed, as it may not come as a default. Perldoc spans three areas: language manual, language reference and modules documentation. Each of these is organised into sections typically called perl<something>, and you simply run perldoc perlfoo to get the topic you are after. There are quite a few sections really, but we find ourselves opening ones more often than the others: perlfunc – Perl functions. This includes a categorised list of what Perl can do out of the box. Handy if you’ve forgotten the syntax or are looking for the way to accomplish a simple task such as deleting…

When you work with functions it’s important to remember the layout of them. You declare their name like authcheck and then use these ( ) brackets to ensure the function contains the next lines of code. After that come the curly brackets. These are important as well and you may have noticed as we work down the shell script that the bottom curly bracket moves with the options. This is because the options that we permit the user to select are part of the same function and therefore must follow the curly bracket. Another thing that can cause headache to shell scripters is forgetting these brackets or forgetting where to put them. If you’ve ever coded in C and had to deal with a semicolon being in the wrong place…

The Game of Life might have started out as a curiosity, but it’s been shown that it can be used to implement logic structures such as AND gates, OR gates and inverters. Binary 0s and 1s are represented by the absence or presence of gliders so an intermittent stream of gliders can be viewed as a binary number. When we bear in mind that these and similar logic gates are the fundamental building blocks of all logic circuits, which in turn can be used to create a computer, it’s clear that the Game of Life is capable of universal computation. In other words, it could do anything a laptop PC or even a supercomputer can do. Life enthusiasts have built general-purpose computers using their favourite cellular automata. One recent Life-based…

HAIL THE NEW KING! Manjaro Gnome 17.1.12 64-bit Not so long ago, it felt as if every new distro that appeared was a respin of Ubuntu. That wasn’t such a bad thing: Ubuntu is a solid base and provides software for making respins that was fairly easy to use and consistent. But it did mean a parade of distros that were almost but not quite Ubuntu. Then people cottoned on to Arch Linux, a distro aimed at the more expert end of the market, but one that provided greater opportunities for customisation. So now we have a number of distros that use Arch Linux as their base. One of the pioneers in this approach was Manjaro and we have the latest release on the DVD for you. There are a…