Table of contents for Summer 2019 in Linux Format

Google’s control over the internet – especially on Android devices, (get LineageOS–Ed) where it provides both the operating system and its most widely used web browser, Chrome – has long been a cause of concern for many people. One of Google’s biggest competitors in the web browsing space, Mozilla, is looking to challenge Chrome’s dominance with the release of Firefox Preview – a drastically reimagined version of its Firefox browser for Android devices (you can download it from http://bit.ly/LXF253FFPDownload3 ). As the name suggests, Firefox Preview is currently in early beta testing, with Mozilla promising a “feature-rich, polished version of this flagship application available for this fall.” This new version of Firefox will combine the privacy emphasis of Firefox Focus – a pared-back browser that prevents your internet browsing being…

The first BarCamp for me was in 2009. It was in my home town of Blackpool, and as I stepped through the door I was amazed that entire conference was offered for free! The spirit of BarCamp still lives on in the UK, but in a slightly diminished capacity – so I was delighted to see that Barcamp London was happening. I booked a train ticket and spent the day soaking up new things. Taking place over one day and one floor at the University of Law, this event was great. It covered topics as diverse as writing code as a recipe – in this case a rather potent drink – to using Node-RED with advanced VOIP technologies (which was so easy!). I also took part in an introduction to…

Power mad There is a more elegant solution to networking which doesn’t require running Ethernet cables all over the house, and that is powerline Ethernet. Devlo, BT and others produce these adapters. Plug an adapter into a power socket and connect an Ethernet cable to a device in one room, then do the same in another room (or even the same room) and you have a network using the electricity cables within the house. They’re also hidden, so you don’t need to rip up floor boards or drill through walls. It works for me between my office upstairs and lounge downstairs. Just had a thought: would it produce a private network to your friends’ or family’s houses using the electricity system, which would be secure? I don’t know what the…

We’ve seen the likes of Zorin OS before, in Pinguy OS and elementary OS. These are distros with tweaked desktops that take advantage of their Ubuntu base to ease new users into the Linux desktop. Zorin does the exact same thing, but the way it goes about it is what sets it apart from others. The newest v15 release is based on the latest update of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release. The distro’s goal is to package the goodness offered by Ubuntu into a system that’s made accessible thanks to its “familiar interface”. For this the developers have mutated the Gnome 3 desktop to sport a single panel along the bottom of the screen, which is very reminiscent of Windows’ taskbar. It completes the look with a traditional Applications menu…

Two of our generals dismount in the middle of a field to duel with their opposite numbers. The rest of the battle continues in the distance, but we’ve zoomed in to watch the flashy moves as the generals kick and stab each other. Occasionally a flurry of arrows or a riderless horse passes in the background, but we’re intently focused on something that looks more like a game of Tekken. Total War: Three Kingdoms embraces the story it’s inspired by, Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, rather than strict historical accuracy. Soldiers can run around the battlefield seemingly forever without getting tired. Their leaders are larger-than-life figures with complicated backstories and rivalries, who carry legendary spears and are able to defeat entire units single-handed. Characters like Cao Cao…

While it might seem strange that many photo managers include a photo-editing facility, the addition of editing features does make sense for a couple of reasons. First, if all you want to do are very simple operations such as rotating photos between portrait and landscape format, being able to do so inside your photo manager is so much simpler than having to break off viewing your photos to do it in a separate package. What’s more, some photo managers enable you to perform simple operations like this as a batch process, on several images at once. Secondly, if you want to be able to perform more advanced photo-editing operations, and haven’t already become attached to a particular editor, there’s a strong case for viewing your photo manager as a one-stop…

To a degree, there’s some overlap between viewing options and some of what we’ve already discussed in Organisation. For example, the date and tag hierarchical organisation provided by digiKam could be thought of as a viewing option, and some of the packages refer to what we’ve described as organisational methods as views. Here, though, we’re looking at the various ways of viewing the photos themselves, as opposed to how they’re organised hierarchically. All the packages enable you to view images as a grid of thumbnails, as a single photo with a film strip alongside, and as a full-screen image. While viewing thumbnails, the ability to adjust their size is useful, and all the software except picty provides a choice. While digiKam, Shotwell and XnView MP use a slider for this…

When you take a photo (or movie), together with the picture data your camera stores a whole bunch of extra info called Exif (Exchangeable Image File) metadata. This includes stuff like the picture orientation, exposure time and focal length. It also includes information about the camera model, the time and, if the photographic device has a GPS unit (like a smartphone camera), the GPS coordinates too. Some devices even store their serial number, much to the chagrin of one movie pirate. So you really ought to be careful about what you do with your photos, since this metadata betrays where and when you were. Obviously this isn’t a concern if you’re sharing photos with trusted viewers, since you’d probably tell them that anyway, but it’s not the kind of information…

1 Download Tails Boot your favourite OS and visit https://tails.boum.org/install. Click ‘Linux’ (see what we assumed there?), choose ‘Install from Linux’ then click ‘Let’s go’. The version on our disc is old (such are the perils of physical media production), so download the latest USB image – it’s around 1.2GB – using the green button. 2 Verify the ISO Follow the instructions to install the browser extension (Firefox and Chrome versions are available). Now click ‘Verify Tails 3.5’, navigate to the ISO and click Open. If all went OK, study the lengthy instructions to install the Tails Installer in Linux. This involves using Gnome disks, but you can also use the dd command. 3 Make a persistent USB Carry out the instructions to write the USB image and reboot using…

Linux sound editing has grown from a quirky alternative to a genuinely viable platform with respect and commercial support. Each year, more commercial audio products are released on Linux, as more companies start taking it seriously. But fear not. There is no need to buy – or even pirate – expensive commercial editing suites when all you need to create music is just waiting to be downloaded. As the proprietary commercial scene grows, the free software audio scene is growing even faster. With each year that passes, Linux music-making is becoming stronger and richer, with more quality applications than we can possibly cover. Entire distributions and variants such as Ubuntu Studio, KX Studio and AV Linux exist to create dedicated music-making machines, with low latency kernels to optimise recording performance,…

www.audacityteam.org Over the page we’ll be looking at fully fledged Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), and these programs can be daunting to say the least! If you just want to do some basic multi-track recording (that is, layering one take over another) without the complexity of a full DAW, Audacity is your best bet. Although it’s technically possible to do it, Audacity isn’t really suited to multi-channel digital recording, such as digital drum recording with lots of mics, as the interface is really geared around mono and stereo. However, it’s brilliant for home demos and has become something of a de facto standard for simple audio editing as it is intuitive enough for most people to navigate, while being powerful enough to do some serious wave editing. That said, Audacity has…

The digital audio workstation is to music editing what Photoshop is to graphic editing: an all-singing, all-dancing piece of software for recording, editing and mixing all sorts of audio. Traditionally DAWs have been complex, expensive and decidedly proprietary – think things like Pro Tools – but there are great Linux alternatives. Ardour is an open source, collaborative effort of a worldwide team. Over the past few years it has has undergone quite a few changes, so we’ll be giving that primary focus. We’ll also look at Qtractor very briefly – if you would like to know more, see LXF242 for a proper rundown. Although Ardour has plenty of MIDI capabilities, its MIDI editing prowess isn’t highly regarded, so we’ll just focus on audio editing for Ardour, and leave MIDI and…

The retro gaming explosion seems to be centred around two types of device: dedicated, sometimes licensed, revivals of original machines built to modern specifications, and open source SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. Veering away from this is the GameShell from ClockworkPi, which despite the similar name has no connection to the Raspberry Pi. It’s a modular device that can be bought in kit form only, but the result is a Nintendo Gameboy-like pocket-sized gaming machine that runs a host of retro emulation software. A successful Kickstarter campaign got the ball rolling with $290,000 worth of backing in 2017, and the console is now available to buy online. But do you really want a device that you have to build yourself? Of course you do! Featuring a Gameboy-style case, the GameShell…

1 Switch views Gramps divides its various functions into multiple views, which are accessible via the left-hand pane. 2 Context-sensitive The toolbar changes depending on the view selected: click this button to configure the dashboard and each ‘gramplet’. 3 Multi-paned Each view contains multiple panes split into columns. Individual panes on the dashboard are known as gramplets. 4 Customise view Click the cog to move a gramplet to its own window. Click + and – to expand or collapse its view. 5 Interactive Many gramplets are interactive; double-click a date on the calendar, for example, to see a list of ‘on this day’ events. 6 Add Gramplets To customise the main dashboard view, right-click on empty space and make your selection from the ‘Add a gramplet’ section.…

Gramps can be extended further with the use of free plug-ins. To see what’s available, select Edit > Preferences and click ‘Check for updated addons now’ under the General tab. You’ll see they’re split into various categories. Areas to focus on are Gramplet (lots of small functional add-ons), Gramps View (additional ways to view your research, including a pedigree and timeline view), Map Service (add Google Earth support), Quickreport (handy for the Dashboard) and Report (various options for presenting your family research). One example is the Place Cleanup Gramplet, which can help speed up place-name entry by allowing you to quickly add multiple hierarchical levels at once. Expand the ‘New: Gramplet’ section, tick ‘Place Cleanup’ and click ‘Install Selected Addons’. Once done, switch to Places view and then click the…

One popular choice for logging into Linux machines on Windows is puTTY. Admittedly, it only acts as a dumb terminal, but a command line interface is perfectly good for coding, especially when a fancy GUI would slow down the network connection. One possible drawback would seem to be the inability to generate live plots of machine activity using the beautiful graphics in Gnuplot (see John Lane’s article in LXF244 for an introduction), A live plot is a graph that’s periodically updated to reflect changes to its input data. That’s well within Gnuplot’s skillset, and can be coded using a while loop and calls to replot and pause . However, this tutorial describes a variation of that approach, where a shell script wakes up Gnuplot accordingly when it’s time to update…

1 Choose the right canvas size Slate suggests that your file should be square, but you can define any dimensions for a custom rectangular form. 2 Explore drawing tools Customise your brush, set the colour and go painting. The selection tool unlocks the crop image button. 3 Organise colours into palettes Slate can save and import swatches either in its own format, or from Paint.NET. 4 Enjoy precise colour control Easily change lightness and saturation of your swatches, with fine control. 5 Split the view into two parts This great feature enables you to concentrate on both details and the bigger picture at the same time.…

Eugene Myers, who works for the National Security Agency in its Trusted Systems Research Group, has been contributing SMI Transfer Monitor (STM) implementation code to the Coreboot project (https://coreboot.org), which is an open source alternative firmware to BIOS and UEFI. The fact that the NSA, which is a part of the United States Department of Defense, has started assigning developers to the project could cause concerns about the privacy implications of the US government’s involvement, especially as the NSA is known for rather intrusive surveillance techniques. But it’s worth pointing out that the NSA has worked on other open-source security projects before, such as Security-Enhanced Linux. It has also made the Ghidra reverse-engineering tool (https://ghidra-sre.org) open source, which is currently being used by Coreboot developers to reverse-engineer system firmware. The…

DEBIAN 10 ‘Buster’, the latest release of the popular Debian distro, is now available to download. Version 10 will be supported for the next five years, and includes over 13,000 new packages. Most of the software has also been updated, and as with previous versions of Debian, there is a selection of desktop environments including Gnome 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14 and LXDE 10, among others. Check out the release announcement at http://bit.ly/LXF253Debian10. WHONIX 15 The latest version of this Debian-based distro that focuses on anonymous internet browsing has been released. It uses the Tor network on top of a heavily customised Debian system that runs in multiple virtual machines for pretty impressive protection against malware and privacy leaks. Whonix 15 is based on Debian ‘Buster’ (see above), and includes features…

While a project’s website doesn’t have any bearing on the distro, it has to be inviting enough to appeal to new users. ArcoLinux has an oddly designed website that doesn’t immediately make the project’s noble intentions clear. Once you understand the project’s objectives, you’ll realise that its main website, along with a couple of others, are part of the learning process and are supposed to be navigated in a particular order as you level up your Arch experience. ArcoLinux is really an educational system that you can also use as a very capable regular desktop. Of the project’s three releases, the main one comes with three desktop environments, is chock-full of productivity apps and is designed for the average desktop user. Then there’s the minimalist ArcoLinuxD release, which ships with…

Most cameras and phones save photos as JPGs, a few use TIFF, and more expensive cameras use Raw files which have been processed less in the camera and potentially contain more information. In addition, if a photo has been edited, there’s a possibility it could have been stored in a different format, of which there are lots. Here we look at which file formats are supported for still photos and pass brief comment on whether video files are supported at all. All the packages support JPG, TIFF, PNG, BMP and GIF, while digiKam and XnView MP also support PGF – intended as a lossless successor to JPG but which has received little support. DigiKam, Shotwell and XnView MP appear to have a good level of support for Raw files, while…

Looking at all our seven tests, we have a clear leader in digiKam, which scored top marks, or equal top, in all but one. We would be surprised if it didn’t prove a clear favourite for most readers – and, because of its excellent user documentation, you needn’t even be concerned that such a fully-featured package involves a long learning period. Next up, we have two packages in the form of gThumb and Shotwell that tie for second place, by having exactly the same average score – down to the last decimal place. This isn’t to say that they excel in the same areas, though, so if you want to choose between them you should look at the individual test scores to see where they differ. The major areas in…

And at the same time, just because you live in an ostensibly free country doesn’t mean you should be blasé about privacy. Surveillance in all its forms is becoming widespread: CCTV, bodycams and contactless transactions are all handy ways for governments to track our activities in meatspace. But the trail of digital dust that our online activities leave behind is increasingly resembling the detritus left behind by the canal-cutting navvies of the 18th century. The problem is that this trail, particularly on social media, isn’t optional. Back in the 18th century you could always find a private space in the woods, have a tête-à-tête and be reasonably sure no one recorded it. That’s still true today – you just have to go further to find a secure space in the…

In this world of Slack and Discord and Telegram and whatever other communication platform is currently hip, it’s easy to forget about humble email. Email is pretty special in that it’s federated – you don’t need to use the same email provider as the person you’re talking to – and decentralised: you can be your own provider, if you can understand Postfix. These are ideas that are recently coming back into fashion. It’s also very old, and when it was invented there was very little thought given to security. As late as the turn of the millennium, most SMTP servers didn’t require authentication (which was the glorious old days for spammers) and even today some email is transmitted in the clear. Thankfully this fraction is very much a minority thanks…

We’ve usually been pretty impartial about which browser you should use, but we’re going to deviate from that slightly, at least for this feature. Chrome’s always been a slick browser, but all that Googleyness baked in makes us queasy. Chromium is a better option, being entirely open source, devoid of Flash and generally less dependent on Google services. It’s also easier to install than Chrome on most distros because of the rules about the latter’s redistribution. However, a change crept into both Chrome and Chromium last year that made us more wary. That changed concerned the ‘Sign in to Chrome’ functionality, which connects the browser to your Google account and can optionally sync bookmarks, extensions and browsing history – just like in Chrome OS. Up until Chrome 69, this option…

LXF: I was talking to James Turnbull earlier (see interview LXF251) about the importance of documentation. A lot of our readers are pretty critical about incorrect, indecipherable or nonexistent docs for various projects. DR: You really do need it. We’ve been trying to design our interfaces so that they guide you and you can find what you need in place. But people just give up, they go to the Google to find the answers – and the answers are there because someone wrote it down. My theory is, if it’s not documented it doesn’t exist or it doesn’t work. Because if you haven’t got to that level of sophistication, people won’t know how to use it, or they’ll use it incorrectly and then they’ll hate the product. So the challenge…

Surprise! June is not a traditional release date for a Raspberry Pi. In fact, this new version of the Pi breaks a few traditions. Firstly, it was released far earlier than predicted due to the BCM2711 System on Chip (SoC) being ready for production some nine to 12 months early. Secondly, there’s the price: there is now not just one price for a Raspberry Pi Model B, but three. At £34, the basic model comes with 1GB of RAM; for £44 there is a 2GB model; and for £54 there is a 4GB model. For this review we have chosen to look at the 1GB model as we can directly compare it to previous models of Pi. No matter the version of Pi 4, all come with a 1.5GHz 64-bit…

Portable Raspberry Pi solutions seem to come along with alarming regularity – usually with a 3D-printed chassis and an ill-fitting keyboard. Piper has released a kit that not only subverts the idea of a Raspberry Pi laptop, it mocks the idea of a portable system: a portable Raspberry Pi that you might not actually want to move and is made of wood. Shipping with over 25 laser-cut wooden components, 20+ electronic components, a 7,800 mAh rechargeable battery and even an eight-square-foot laminated blueprint, the Piper Computer Kit is quite unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. Part Raspberry Pi starter kit, part portable computing experience and part electronics beginner hub, the completed experience is unified by a customised Minecraft game. This teaches the young user of the kit the necessary electronics…

Network security is vital to the integrity of your data and hardware. Using a router with a firewall and computer security tools is wise, but to get a better idea of what’s happening on your network, you’ll need a monitoring tool. It might seem like the stuff of low-budget cyber thrillers, but a network monitoring tool can be effortlessly set up and put to work pinging the hardware on your network and scanning for intruders. This essentially means that you can learn right away when your devices on your network go offline (perhaps IoT or smart-home applications), and discover unauthorised connections to your router or other networked hardware. All you need is a Raspberry Pi and the Nagios software. Two versions of Nagios are available. There’s the Nagios XI series…

You can find a number of tips and tricks, a to-do list for future releases, a detailed explanation of unique concepts such as fingerprinting, database repairing, virtual filesystem and on at the project’s wiki, hosted on its GitHub page https://github.com/ oniony/TMSU. For offline use, you will find sufficient instructions on the man page, coupled with some examples. Even better, you can invoke the tmsu help <command> command to access instructions for a specific command. The command tmsu help dupes , for instance, gives you all the pertinent information you would need to use the fingerprinting feature to identify all the duplicate files in the current database. Wherever possible, the project provides helpful examples to enable users to make sense of the command options and what they do:…

Family history is the ultimate detective experience: gather evidence (known as sources) and then use the information provided to build up your family tree. This information is often referred to as ‘facts’ in family history circles, but a more accurate term is ‘claims’. All good historians know that you can’t take the information you receive at face value: it should be rigorously assessed for reliability and likely veracity, then compared with as many other sources as possible to enable you to determine each claim that’s made. This is summed up by the Genealogical Proof Standard – see http://bit.ly/lxf253gps. To help you manage your sources, Gramps follows standard practice in providing you with repositories, sources and citations. The source is the actual evidence you’re using, such as a certificate, other official…

All the free web applications on the internet give Linux users levels of productivity that was never available in the past. Thanks to web-based versions of applications like photo editors, note-takers and the obligatory office suite, people can use Linux and still easily collaborate with their counterparts. They can even use these across different machines, increasing their flexibility to work anywhere. But these services present several potential risks. Firstly, using some web applications comes with a price… literally. In many cases they use the ‘freemium’ model where the basic version is free, but the one with the features you really want will cost you. You also run the risk of the provider going out of business. They may not take your data down with them, but they may only give…

Databases and their management can often seem like a black art to those who don’t need or perhaps want to understand them. For most administrators, databases are a setup task – configured only when an application is installed and then left alone, forever. This is not good practice. In this article we’ll look at some basic database administration while trying to understand what goes into the database in terms of components and language – and learn how to keep them in tip-top condition, along with some tips and tricks to make life easier. A well-maintained database server makes for happy administrators. First, a quick overview of what databases are. As the name implies, databases hold masses of structured data. For the uninitiated, a simple example of structured data could be…

This tutorial has two aspects: a theoretical one and a practical one. In the theoretical part, you will learn about parsing, grammar and regular expressions; this is how languages are built and therefore understood in terms of construction and usage. In the practical part you will see how the Go programming language parses its code, and how you can use the related Go packages to explore your Go code and reveal handy information from it. Get regular The term ‘regular expression’ (regex) comes from computational theory. Something called a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) can implement such expressions. A DFA is a finite state machine that does not use backtracking. What? Well, backtracking occurs when the regular expression engine encounters a regex token that does not match the next character in…

THE COOL MATE EDITION MIN SPECS: RAM 512MB Disk space: 12GB PCLinuxOS 06.2019 64-bit Looking through the LXF archives, we discovered that the venerable PCLinuxOS hasn’t graced our DVD since 2013 – so we used this latest release to remedy this omission. Launched as a fork of Mandrake Linux back in 2003, and rebased on Mandriva in 2007, the project has amassed a dedicated following under the stewardship of the indomitable Bill ‘Texstar’ Reynolds. The project is funded by donations and produces a newsletter using Scribus – who says publishing (management–Ed) needs proprietary tools? PCLinuxOS is a rolling-release distro, and besides this MATE edition, two KDE flavours are available. We went with MATE because the full-fat KDE edition was just too big to fit, and we already have KDE neon…

While we’ve known for a while that Ubuntu would be dropping support for 32-bit hardware, Canonical on 18 June revealed that it was planning on going even further, by announcing that Ubuntu 19.10 would no longer natively support 32-bit libraries (http://bit.ly/LXF253Ubuntu32bit) – effectively preventing users from running 32-bit software. This includes popular applications like Wine and Steam, as well as many games. Canonical tried to head off any criticism by suggesting that developers of 32-bit software could publish their applications as Snaps, which will enable them to use the ‘core18’ runtime that 32-bit needs, via the existing Ubuntu 18.04 archive. Meanwhile, users were told they could try running 32-bit software in a virtual machine or LXD container – or run an older release of Ubuntu, such as 16.04 LTS. Understandably,…

BARCAMP MANCHESTER We really love BarCamp Manchester. The city is a hotbed of tech talent and it shows in this event. BarCamp Manchester takes place on 21-22 September at Auto Trader’s HQ. This event is where you need to be to learn new skills in tech, business and life. Oh, and it is totally free – so head over and get a ticket now! www.barcampmanchester.co.uk OGGCAMP 2019 OggCamp 2019 will take place on 19-20 October in Manchester’s Pendulum Hotel. Celebrating 10 years of talks, workshops and podcasts, OggCamp is an unscheduled event just like a BarCamp. There is even a kids’ track for eager hackers to learn skills. Get tickets and an offer for accommodation on the website. https://oggcamp.org PYCON UK 2019 PyCon UK takes place in Cardiff City Hall…

Hear me now Following up my letter in LXF252, something else you may like to know… Together with three other senior geeks, I built a digital studio for the Tynedale Talking Newspaper (for visually impaired people) in Hexham, Northumberland, UK. We don’t use audio cassettes anymore, so our listeners each get a free USB audio player on loan so they can listen to our weekly provincial newspaper (the Hexham Courant) together with our four-monthly audio magazine. We now have two Linux (Lubuntu 17) desktops, each capable of copying MP3 tracks to 80 USB memory sticks. Windows didn’t provide sufficient drive letters, but mapping 80 USB sticks through eight 10-way USB hubs was a relatively simple matter in Linux. Each copier is controlled via an event-driven touchscreen mimic-diagram based on TK…

Old-timers (Yes? – Effy) and greybeards will remember the time when desktop Linux was synonymous with Mandrake Linux (see LXF67/70). The project became too successful for its own good, and spun off a for-profit company that made the cardinal sin of laying off its founder. It changed owners a couple of times, and spawned at least one fork with each move that soon faded away from the conscience of the open source community. But we’re happy to discover and report that two independent community-based Mandrake derivatives are doing quite well. After all these years, one of them – OpenMandriva Lx – has finally started to replace some of its legacy tools with new ones, without losing their ease of use and dexterity. For starters, with the latest 4.0 release the…

While we suggest that ease of use is, in the broadest sense, the most important aspect of a photo manager, the way it organises your images – and the extent to which you can customise that – is arguably paramount. Of course, your operating system enables you to use folders and sub-folders to organise a photo collection without the assistance of specialist software. Indeed, some of our packages do nothing more sophisticated than offering an alternative way of navigating that folder structure. Even so, this doesn’t negate the benefit of these products, as you can see if you look at closely related features such as tagging and viewing. However, other software titles create, or allow you to create, an alternative structure or hierarchy which can offer benefits, as we’re about…

Here we’re bundling together two other important aspects of a good photo manager. First is support for photos stored on photo-sharing websites, and second is support for sharing your photos with individuals. While some of this can be achieved with no specific software support, built-in facilities do make life easier. We could find no support for online sharing in either picty or XnView MP. However, this conclusion was drawn only as a result of attempting to look through the various menus and controls, because the documentation is so limited for picty and nonexistent for XnView MP. There is a menu entry called ‘Web capture’ in XnView, but we couldn’t get it to do anything useful (sounds like it might be for capturing web pages? – Ed). All the other packages…

While we’re bigging up Mozilla, now’s a good time to mention that an utterly toothless organisation – the UK ISP Association – nominated Mozilla for its Internet Villain award, placing it alongside such gems as President Trump and the EU’s Article 13 Copyright Directive. Why? Because Mozilla plans on enabling DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH!) by default in Firefox, which would make it hard (boo hoo!–Ed) for ISPs to snoop on DNS queries. Setting this up at the OS level is probably beyond your average user (but we’ll show you how to do it later), so the villainary appears to lie in helping average users boost their privacy. DoH is no silver bullet, and there are legitimate concerns around any kind of centralised DNS, but this all seems pretty nonsensical to us. Oh,…

Thanks in large part to the efforts of Let’s Encrypt over the past few years, most websites are now served over HTTPS. This provides two things: authentication and privacy. Authentication in the sense that you can be sure that the website you’re looking at isn’t some kind of forgery, and privacy in the sense that communication between you and the webserver is encrypted. As such, HTTPS more or less thwarts the ability of a passive middleman to see which pages are being viewed, but out of technical necessity your DNS provider – usually your ISP – needs to see the domain name, and your ISP needs to see the IP address it resolves to. You can, and in a lot of cases should, use a VPN, but that just shifts…

There are other browser options. The privacy-centric Brave browser (https://brave.com) is based on Chromium and has an interesting funding model. Users are rewarded BAT (Basic Attention Token) for viewing ads. BAT is based on the Ethereum blockchain, and tokens can be bought for cash, or showered upon your favourite YouTube stars. We’re not really down with adverts, but if their revenue is used to develop better browsers, we might make an exception. There’s also the Ungoogled-Chromium project (https://github. com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium), which strives to be free of any and all Google web service dependencies, as well as enabling some enhanced privacy controls. In so doing, it challenges the notion that Chromium is pretty much Ungoogled Chrome. There are other, similar projects, most notably Iridium (https:// iridiumbrowser.de) and Inox, which is a modular…

LXF: You mentioned that there are problems with both old and new software, and the cost to fix these can vary wildly. Can you speak about that a little more? DR: Sure – I’ve got three examples. Let’s start with the Pathfinder vulnerability. That was a new one, in the sense that it was new code where a flaw was revealed by trying an untested workflow. What is interesting is that while the device was physically very far away, the economic cost of repair was relatively low in that it could be repaired over radio. The system had been designed to recover from unexpected failures. Now consider internet-connected security cameras (and other such devices) which get co-opted into botnets for Denial of Service attacks. Here’s an example of an old…

The app called Linux Multi Media System (LMMS) has become the daddy of loop-based music making and easy MIDI editing. The important bit of LMMS is the sidebar on the left, which has samples, file management and instrument plug-ins – and instrument plug-ins are what really power LMMS. Included are a bunch of weird instruments and different synthesisers, but we’ll be focusing on the component called Sf2 Player, which runs MIDI soundfonts, enabling you to compose MIDI-based music without external hardware. If you drag Sf2 Player onto the Song-Editor window it will create a new track. Click the track’s Sf2 Player button and a new plug-in window appears, with a piano and sound controls. If you click the piano now, no sound will come out of it – first you…

1 Add media to individuals Switch to People view and double-click a person to open their personal details window. Switch to the Gallery tab and click + to browse for and select a photo from your library. If you keep your photos organised in a single folder, we recommend ticking ‘Convert to a relative path’ before clicking OK to import the photo. 2 Crop in The Media Reference Editor will open. One of Gramps’ strengths is that it enables you to highlight part of the image – typically a headshot, which is then linked to the individual. Simply click and drag around the head. To resize the selection, place your mouse near an edge or corner, then click and drag the red square. 3 Add details Expand the ‘Shared Information’…

1 Switch views Click here to switch between Manage, Browse and Compare views. The latter lets you compare two or more fonts. 2 Open preferences Click the spanner icon to add favourite folders as font sources, plus adjust the way fonts are rendered and displayed. 3 Filter view Use this pane to target which fonts are shown in the right-hand panes. 4 Switch preview type Change view between waterfall (default), preview (shown above) and body text. 5 Collections Create your own custom list of fonts by switching to Collections. 6 Preview controls Use the slider to increase the size of text shown, plus range the text. Click the ‘a’ button to edit the preview text.…

1 Create directory structure Open the Files manager and click the hamburger icon to tick the ‘Show Hidden Files’ box if needed. Browse to your home directory and – if necessary – create a new hidden folder called .themes. Open the newly created directory and create another folder inside it called MyTheme, followed by another folder inside that: gnome-shell. 2 Create a CSS file Open the Terminal and type: Type the following first line into the empty file: 3 Finish the CSS file Now type the following line, changing <FONT_NAME> to the font family you want to use, before saving and exiting nano: 4 Apply new theme Install Gnome Tweak Tools if necessary, then install the User themes Gnome extension by turning on the switch on the User Themes page…

PIXEL ART EDITOR Slate Version: 0.7.0 Web: https://github.com/mitchcurtis/slate Our first pick is related to editing bitmap graphics. Despite the fact that this category is dominated by Gimp, there are many other smaller applications that – while they do less – have a much lower barrier to entry. Slate is a good example, with a nice balance between features and simplicity. On one hand, this is a classic Paint-like program with a basic set of drawing tools: pencil, eraser, bucket filler and colour picker. But at the same Slate has some useful advanced features, such as layers, support for animations and ‘double view’. The last one is interesting in the light of Slate’s main purpose: it is a tool for creating tilesets for retro and indie games. The author is Mitch…

Take notes everywhere! Taking notes, making lists, writing reminders – life is complicated, so we’re using open source to make it easier. Make Android better Isn’t Android that mass surveillance and data-collection system? Let’s make it more like a Linux OS we can love. Write some shizzle here… For that you’d want a better text editor. We test a bunch so you know which one is going to be best for you. Suck less, baby! We dive into the open source tools designed from scratch to work better and suck less. LXF254 will be on sale Tuesday 27 August 2019…