Table of contents for October 2023 in Linux Format

The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 7.6 Community on its blog on 21st August. This will be the last release numbered in this way, as TDF intends to switch to a calendarbased system moving forward. We took the time to view the helpful YouTube video summarising the main upgrades (https://youtu.be/AB7TbrkCTSA). For instance, the suite now supports touch zoom gestures for touchpads in the main view, while the Linux Format team was also delighted to discover that Writer now incorporates one-step insertion of page numbers. You can find out more at https://wiki. documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.6.…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email letters@ linuxformat.com. No sense! While I agree that you can’t run pfSense on a Raspberry Pi, I take issue with the assumption that pfSense doesn’t support the ARM architecture (Build Your Own Hardware Firewall, LXF305). I own one of Netgate’s 1100 appliances, which is based on a dual-core ARM Cortex-A53 1.2GHz processor. Likewise, the Negate 2100 is also based on the same processor. Admittedly, users have to purchase these ARMbased products from Netgate to run pfSense on ARM and cannot just install this code on their own generic ARM device. One feature I would advocate that wasn’t mentioned…

IN BRIEF Window Maker’ is an X11 Window manager that enables you to relive the glory days of OS X with colourful appicons and a clunky interface to boot – provided you have the patience for setup. SPECS CPU: 1.0GHz+ Mem: 512MB HDD: 5MB Builds: Any In describing Window Maker, we can do no better than quote the homepage: “Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep desktop environment, although it can run standalone. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP user interface.” NeXTSTEP was an operating system based on Unix-derived BSD. After its developer’s acquisition by Apple in the mid-’90s, elements of the NeXTSTEP GUI were integrated into OS X. If you…

SPECS Minimum OS: Ubuntu 20.04+ 64-bit, Arch Linux CPU: 64-bit Pentium class 2GHz Mem: 3GB GPU: OpenGL 3.2+, Vulkan HDD: 8GB It’s hard to believe it’s taken Failbetter this long I to try its hand at a visual novel. The studio has always had the most engrossing, amusing and evocative writing in the business, but it has an uncanny knack for hiding that writing behind mechanics that wear on our nerves. Between browser games and roguelikes, the studio’s wit keeps ending up blunted by repetitive gameplay loops. Only Sunless Skies, so far, has managed to strike a good balance. So, it must feel like Failbetter has finally found a perfect home with the visual novel genre, right? Well, kind of. While many of Mask of the Rose’s mechanics are interesting…

By default, Nextcloud has some apps already configured, such as a photo manager with basic editing and slideshow capabilities. There are also email, calendar and contacts apps, and a note-taking app that integrates with an app for mobile devices. Beyond that, there is an excellent marketplace with apps that cover pretty much every area of functionality you’d expect, along with some niche areas such as GPX viewers for visualising outdoor activity data. Overall, it’s an excellent system. With OwnCloud, some of its functionality is provided by apps behind the scenes, but it doesn’t ship with any extras configured. Thankfully, it has a built-in, categorised marketplace with ratings. It doesn’t have as many apps as Nextcloud, particularly if we’re talking about the type that a home user is likely to want,…

he Nextcloud website provides a desktop client application file synchronisation tool as an AppImage T package. This is implemented as a Qt app, and it lives as a green tick icon in the status panel area of your desktop. Once you’ve added a folder from your computer for synchronisation, any changes to files in that folder are sent to your Nextcloud server. The other clients all worked in a similar way. For the OwnCloud file sync, we chose the AppImage rather than adding the official repository. Once running, it worked in the expected way. For example, we added a folder containing around 320 PNG files that totalled 150MB and these were sent over the network in about 15 seconds. We didn’t encounter any performance problems with any of the clients,…

Elegoo has entered the speed race with a much faster version of its popular Neptune 3 Pro, the E Neptune 4. It is speedier thanks to a hidden install of Klipper firmware, plus everything that made the Neptune 3 Pro a favourite 3D printer for beginners. SPECS Vol: 225x225x 265mm T ype: PLA, PETG, TPU (up to 300°C) Extruder: Direct drive Nozzle size: 0.4mm high flow Platform: PEI textured spring steel sheet, heated Levelling: Auto, inductive probe Sensors: Runout Comms: USB, LAN Control: Colour touchscreen, removable Footprint: 475x 445x515mm Weight: 8.3kg Current pricing makes this quite a bargain in the field of fast printing. However, the way Elegoo chose to integrate Klipper is confounding. It’s hidden in the background, granting the user speed while making its other perks difficult…

Any sysadmin with more than a week of work under their belt knows SSH, but there are many tips and tricks that often get missed. An example is troubleshooting SSH. When trying to SSH from a Linux box to a server using the SSH command, adding the parameter -vvv provides lots of verbose output and is ideal for troubleshooting why the SSH session won’t connect. Another odd thing we see is people taking all sorts of steps to be able to copy files to another system. The scp command is really useful here because it enables the administrator to copy files between servers without additional software or even ports being opened. After all, scp is essentially ‘copy via SSH’. Depending on the data in question, it may not be the…

IN BRIEF There’s lots to like about Bitwarden. It has rock-solid security options bolstered by the app’s open source status. It works with virtually every device and browser you could think of – so it’s impressively versatile, too. Bitwarden takes a different approach from most password manager tools because it’s released under the open source licence. But there’s more to like about this app beyond it being open source. Bitwarden promises easy, powerful security within minutes, unlimited password and device support, and secure, encrypted sharing. Subscriptions begin for free, and for many this is more than sufficient, because it supports an unlimited number of passwords and device syncing. Typically, rival companies’ free plans limit users to just one active device, so this is a real selling point for Bitwarden. Sharing…

f you’re not ready for Wi-Fi 7, that’s understandable. Most of us haven’t caught up with Wi-Fi 6E yet, which only hit the I mainstream around 2020 while we were distracted by other issues. Strictly speaking, though, Wi-Fi 6E wasn’t a new standard. While it introduced support for wireless networking in the 6GHz frequency range, it’s otherwise based on the same 802.11ax spec as Wi-Fi 6. It could have been called Wi-Fi 6.1. So it’s getting on for four years since the last major Wi-Fi update – which is about par for the course. From the original 802.11b release in 1999 onwards, each generation has reigned for between four and six years, before being replaced by something smarter and faster. Wi-Fi 6 was adopted in 2019, and Wi-Fi 7 is…

On16th August 1993, the late and great Ian Murdock announced the Debian Linux Release as an alternative to SLS (Softlanding Linux Systems). The name itself was a portmanteau of Ian’s (then) wife Debra’s name and his own. Successive Debian distribution code names are based on the names of characters from the Toy Story films, such as the most recent Debian 12 Bookworm. Releases do not follow a fixed schedule but come out roughly every two years. Unstable releases are always code-named Sid, after the character who regularly mutilated his toys. Despite its great age, millions of users, and the fact it’s the basis for other popular Linux distros, such as Ubuntu, Debian isn’t the longest actively maintained Linux project. That honour belongs to Slackware, which turned 30 in July. Debian birthday…

SPECS Capacity: 8TB Model: WD8002FZWX £ per TB: £35.63 Interface: SATA 6Gb/s Factor: 3.5-inch Tech: CMR Speed: 7,200rpm Rate: Up to 238MB/s Cache: 128MB Power: 8.7W Noise: 34dBA Workload: N/A MTBF: N/A Warranty: Five years The WD Black is supposed to be the pinnacle of consumer hard drives and resides above the WD Blue in WD’s product stack, but things aren’t always what they seem. That can be particularly true with storage products with differing types of componentry but the same name. For instance, the 8TB WD Black here comes with less DRAM cache and a lower sustained transfer speed than another version of the drive that has the exact same 8TB WD Black naming, sticker and branding — the model number is the only way to tell the difference…

IN BRIEF What do you mean, “We only cover Linux?” This open source BSDbased OS has it all: a slick setup, clear UI and advanced features far beyond your basic firewall. SPECS CPU: 1GHz dual-core Mem: 2GB HDD: 8GB Builds: x86_64 OPNSense is one of the most popular specialist operating systems designed specifically for firewalls and routers. It boasts a proud ancestry, given the OS is a fork of pfSense, which itself is a fork of the now (sadly) defunct m0n0wall, built on the FreeBSD operating system. We’ve delved into OPNSense’s lineage as FreeBSD places a strong emphasis on security, such as ACLs (access control lists), MAC (mandatory access control) and support for OpenSSH. Like FreeBSD, OPNSense also has an integrated mechanism to handle automatic updates. Unlike FreeBSD, which can…

We are mainly interested in the file-management W facilities of these systems. To a degree, we expect a user interface that places a slightly different emphasis on layout from that of a file manager for a desktop operating system. Typically, one wouldn’t expect to carry out the same sort of detailed file management when working with files in the cloud; however, we do expect to be able to carry out the standard operations such as copying, moving and deleting without too much difficulty. The majority of file management in the cloud tends to consist of file browsing. To this end, we appreciate views such as one showing the recently added files. Large thumbnails are also appreciated, along with easy access to favourite folders. Pop-up context menus are always nice, as…

It’s worth noting that Linux symlinks and network mounts can enable remote storage in cases where the I cloud server can support local file storage but not a desired storage option. However, if not officially supported, performance may not be ideal. Filestash supports a wide range of storage back-ends, and it’s easy to add new resources via the admin interface. STFP (part of SSH) is the recommended back-end for local file storage, for example. As you might imagine, if you want to access proprietary services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, various measures have to be taken to obtain a security key. The days of simply employing a username and password for such things are sadly gone. Once these have been added, they appear when you log in. OwnCloud supports…

Artificial intelligence payloads are commonly associated with high-power systems that cost a fortune. This, however, is a misleading impression – a(relatively) cheap Raspberry Pi and a few simple peripheral devices are all you need to take your first steps into the fascinating realm of artificial intelligence. The following pages demonstrate a wide variety of possibilities – while some tasks, such as the recognition of faces, are common, you can also look forward to some more advanced tasks that you would usually expect to require larger workstations. Finally, we will also move our llama.cpp implementation to a 4GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4. Creating custom and home-built AI systems using Python is not only lots of fun, but it also gives you some basic experience of workflow, which can often…

Even though our face-detection routine uses higher-level libraries, the universal OpenCV library is also required; it provides various value-added services, such as methods that convert images between various colour spaces. Given that a manual installation of OpenCV is a higheffort task (and requires hours of compile time, as discussed at https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-piopencv/), the following steps take a different approach. We’re using the precompiled packages described at https://lindevs.com/install-precompiled-opencv-onraspberry-pi, which can be downloaded from https://github.com/prepkg/opencv-raspberrypi. This provides an OpenCV library that is in principle ready to run and contains all elements except for the GUI support, which the repository maintainer chose not to include. Be that as it may, the actual installation of the OpenCV library is accomplished by deploying a DEB package, which is downloaded using Wget: : $ wget https://github.com/prepkg/opencv raspberrypi/releases/latest/download/opencv_64.deb…

As stocks of the many Raspberry Pi models steadily improve, we’re now A coming to the end of a difficult period for the Pi community and the world at large. So, how bad was it and how is it improving? To find out, we contacted RPiLocator, a service that sprang up to help Raspberry Pi fans locate precious Pis. Thanks to its data, we can see the highs and lows. Using the number of restocks as a proxy for product availability, we can see that Raspberry Pis as a whole were 271% more available in July 2023 than July 2022 (394 restocks versus 106). And, among particular models of Pi, the Pi Zero 2 Wgrew the most, going from one to 56 restocks year-on-year. Since Upton announced that million-unit months…

IN BRIEF This is a topquality VPN that exceeds our expectations in everything from platform coverage and privacy, to ease of use, unblocking abilities and excellent customer support. More expensive than most, but you can see why. E xpressVPN has ramped up its investment in third-party audits over the past year, and the results are spectacular. While other providers expect you to be impressed by a single app audit from years ago, ExpressVPN released the results of 11 audits in 2022 alone. Another recent highlight is Keys, ExpressVPN’s highly configurable secure password manager that comes free with your subscription. Significant new features include support for saving credit card details and secure notes, and even importing credentials to Chrome. This is excellent news, but Keys is being rolled out gradually, and…

Wind the clock back just five short years to early 2018. Valve’s gaming Steam Machine had just been removed from its online store after failing to sell in sufficient numbers. There were various reasons for this, but the biggest culprit was that Steam Machine was using a Linux operating system, which wasn’t compatible with most Windows games. Valve did try to be more platform-agnostic by offering Steam Play. One of the perks of this was that if players bought, say, the Windows version of a game, they could also access the Linux version. Still, most developers declined to go to the trouble of creating Linux versions of Windows games, so it was little use to players. Valve’s next move was a game changer to end all game changers. Partnering with…

On 9th July, Linus Torvalds announced the general availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) development milestone of Linux kernel 6.5. As of 27th August, the stable version has been released and will be incorporated into operating systems such as Ubuntu 23.10 later this year. The kernel now defaults to AMD P-State Active EPP for modern Ryzen systems, which will improve power efficiency. (EDAC) Error Detection And Correction subsystem updates for the Ryzen 7000 series have also been included, which will allow for reporting of hardware errors via the kernel log. Gamers will be delighted to discover an improved controller driver for the Nvidia Shield, as well as rumble support for Xbox controllers. Kernel 6.5 also includes initial support for USB 4 v2.0 thanks to Intel,…

MAGEIA 9 Mageia started life in September 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux. Unlike its forebear, the OS is a community-based, notfor-profit project, and is based in France. Although Mandriva fell by the wayside in 2011, Mageia has enjoyed nine stable releases since its inception. The default desktop is KDE. Mageia’s online repositories also support installation of every other major desktop environment, and prebuilt images are available for Gnome and Xfce, as well as the Plasma desktop. Learn more at www.mageia.org. KALI LINUX 2023.3 A favourite of penetration testers everywhere, Kali is named after the Hindu goddess who maintains the balance of good and evil. This reflects the fact that the OS contains a number of tools used for hacking but which are intended to help users improve their…

SPECS GPU: Navi 33 Arch: RDNA 3 Process: TSMC 6nm Clock: 2.6GHz boost Mem: 8GB GDDR6, 128-bit, 288GB/s Stream: 2,048 Compute: 32 RT cores: 32 AI cores: 64 ROPs: 64 Cache: 32MB TGP: 165W Die: 204mm² Trans: 13.3B Following the release of the Radeon RX 7900 XT, AMD surprisingly followed up with the ‘budget’ second desktop RDNA 3 GPU, the Radeon RX 7600. It’s easily the cheapest of the current generation of GPUs from either AMD or Nvidia, though it’s important not to overlook Intel’s Arc cards, at least regarding value. AMD promotes the RX 7600 as a card for mainstream 1080p gamers. Its purpose is to bring competitive performance plus the latest technology and features down to an affordable price point. But don’t go expecting wonders from the RX…

IN BRIEF Rhino Linux is a worthy successor to its predecessor, providing an amazing Xfcebased desktop incorporating the latest Ubuntu code. If you can handle potential instability, take the Rhino by the horn. SPECS CPU: 1.5GHz dual-core Mem: 2GB HDD: 20GB Builds: x86_64, aarch64 They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day and the same is true for Rhino Linux. The project went through five betas before its official release in August. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because lead developer AJ Strong worked on Rolling Rhino Remix – autility to convert Ubuntu into a rolling release Linux distro by tracking the devel packages. While Rhino Remix reached end of life last October, Rhino Linux has picked up the cudgels and also follows a rolling release…

We used the (still maintained) 10.x version of OwnCloud because we felt the rewrite, called Infinite Scale, hasn’t W caught up in terms of the ecosystem of compatible apps yet. Because 10.x is tied to PHP 7, rather than PHP 8, it can be a difficult manual install, so we installed the Docker version. The website offers a full range of distribution-orientated packages and VM images for most virtualisers as well as Docker images, but there was no mention of a Raspberry Pi version on the download page (however, it can be installed unofficially). Nextcloud offers an installer script that can be used if you already have a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server installed and configured, and there is a ready-made VirtualBox image and an official Docker image.…

Seafile has a simple app that’s available for Android and iOS. You can either enter the URL of your server (which S can be an IP address) along with your username and password, or enter the details of professional hosting if you have paid for that. Once it’s running, you can browse your files, download them and launch media files. It worked fine with the image and video files that we tested it with. The files are presented in list format with icon previews alongside some file details. In many ways, the simplicity and functionality reminded us of Seafile itself, and it’s well suited to mobile use. A corner hold-down button gives access to further options, including the ability to share. The share options seemed to include all of the…

Within moments of visiting the OwnCloud website you’re hit over the head with information about paid enterprise W solutions. Extra features include things like a branding tool, LDAP, enhanced Microsoft Teams and Office Online Server support, along with fine-grained enhancements. We couldn’t see much that users outside the enterprise world would want. The Nextcloud website doesn’t offer a simple feature comparison or price list. As with OwnCloud, it is sometimes difficult to be absolutely clear about what features are included in the enterprise edition. For example, monitoring is mentioned, but the free version also has real-time monitoring, which seems to be the same as the screenshot on the enterprise page. In fairness, most of the features with the paid version are things like 24/7 tech support, early access to security…

Long gone are the halcyon days when the Raspberry Pi platform consisted of just one or L two models. We are using the Raspberry Pi 4 due to the availability of the Neon ISA, but that is just one of the necessary considerations. Image processing is one of the lowest hanging fruit known to AI developers, so obviously a camera module is required – the problem with that is the availability of multiple different candidates waiting to fill the gap. We are using the Camera 2 module we purchased some time ago – while it lacks autofocus and might not be the most cutting-edge offering, the image quality (in well-lit areas) is more than enough for our needs. Keep in mind that AI algorithms can usually cope very well with…

Our first test involves running the LLaMA payload – discussed in LXF304, O it creates a ChatGPT-like bot that runs locally. Due to the extremely large size of the model, which has to be obtained via BitTorrent, this task cannot be completed solely on the Raspberry Pi – instead, a workstation is required to handle some of the more computationally intensive preparation tasks. Furthermore, be aware that the quantisation steps have to be performed once again even if you’ve done them in the past. The LLaMA framework receives frequent upgrades – trying to use a recent version with an ancient quantisation leads to errors. Excursus: swap it Since advanced operating systems became available on all kinds of workstations, expanding the working memory by using remanent memory in a process called…

IN BRIEF It looks cool, but it’s not necessarily there to keep your overclocked Raspberry Pi cool. This enclosure is more to keep everything tidy and it does that really well, thanks to a series of shelves and plenty of space. If cooling is what you need, look at 52Pi’s Ice Tower coolers and leave this jet engine enclosure on the shelf. Raspberry Pi cases come in all shapes and sizes, but the 52Pi ZP-0088 Rack Tower is far from a case, more of a jet engine-styled enclosure. Our review model features four shelves, on which we can store a mixture of Raspberry Pis and 2.5-inch SSDs. Any model of Pi, from the B+ onwards, can be used with the shelves. This is thanks to Raspberry Pi standardising the M2.5…

Last issue we reviewed Murena’s Fairphone 4 (its latest and greatest offering loaded with the L privacy-respecting /e/OS). We noted a few rough edges, but on the whole were very impressed. So much so that we decided to dedicate four pages to /e/OS. DeGoogled Android is nothing new, but until now no one’s come up with a satisfactory solution to replace those ever-so-convenient Google services and Play Store apps. With /e/OS, you get full Play Store access (if you want it), your own privacy-respecting cloud services, and a beautiful and unique user interface. Thanks to MicroG, the dreaded machination that is Google Play Services has been expelled. And thanks to the Murena cloud, you don’t have to miss out on centralised storage, contact management and notes. Your data is stored…

Over time, Docker deployments can consume a lot of space. Not only do they take up room, but they also create clutter and orphaned containers – computer cruft. Performing a docker ls command may well reveal lots of dated containers that have been downloaded and often forgotten about or perhaps intermediate build images. Speaking from personal experience, in a large production environment, the reclaimed space can be in the tens of gigabytes. The thing is, it’s not just containers that consume resources but images, too. In this short guide, we cover the necessary steps you should take to reclaim space and tidy up a Docker environment. Firstly, to see what kind of space is consumed, use: $ docker images ls -a The -a is important because by default the output…

LXF308 will be on sale Tuesday 17th October 2023 WordPress is 20! As WordPress celebrates its latest milestone, we set up a home web server for sharing tasks, messages and more with it. COBOL can almost retire! Now pushing 64, we look at where COBOL came from and what keeps it running on a host of mainframes around the world. Happy Domesday! You can’t say we’re all doom and gloom around here as we revive the BBC Domesday Project and find out how to run it again. Get fediversed! Make Big Social quake in fear as you fire up your own social sharing server and get connected to the growing fediverse. Content of future issues subject to change. We might have been taken out by Big Social. Sounds fun,…