Table of contents for June 2016 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell I’ve sort of spoiled the surprise by playing with the latest daily builds. I would say I look forward to moving the launcher to the bottom of the screen, but I’ve discovered that I actually prefer it hidden on the side. I’m positively agog about arcane errors from Mir, though. Neil Bothwick I’m not looking forward to that much in Ubuntu 16.04, because it’s an LTS release. That means it is full of stable and reliable software and I prefer life on the bleeding edge. I firmly believe in the maxim “If it ain’t broken, fix it until it is”. Matthew Hanson Although they may be little things, such as being able to move the Unity Launcher bar, but it’s the tweaks to the user interface that I’m…

After entering beta in September 2015 (and issuing over 1.7 million certificates to 3.8 million websites during that time), Let’s Encrypt, the free automated open certificate authority, is now leaving beta. The Let’s Encrypt service is provided by the Internet Security Research Group (https://letsencrypt.org/isrg) with the aim of allowing anyone who owns a domain name to obtain a trusted certificate for free. In a statement on the Let’s Encrypt website (http://bit.ly/LetsEncryptNewsponsors) the team believe that it has gained enough experience and confidence in its systems that it no longer feels the beta label is required. The team isn’t alone in that confidence either, with founding sponsors Cisco and Akamai renewing their Platinum sponsorships for three years, while Gemalto, HP Enterprise, Fastly, Duda and ReliableSite.net all joining as new sponsors. With…

“Nearly everyone who uses the web uses encryption, though it usually remains invisible. Log on to Facebook? You’re using crypto. Amazon? Crypto. Twitter? Crypto. Google? Yep, you get the idea. All of these sites use public-key encryption and the X.509 system of certificates to prove that the machines serving up the web pages are who they say they are. This means that even if you’re not a crypto geek and don’t use device encryption on your phone or don’t use PGP-encrypted email, you use crypto every day. I spent a week at the RSA Conference in March 2016, where this issue was addressed in nearly every keynote. The FBI versus Apple fight was the elephant in the room whenever a government employee or crypto expert was speaking. Secure chat If…

All the way down, here in Namibia, Linux Format is about the only magazine on Linux. For the last couple of years I enjoyed it. At the beginning of a new month I started looking forward to the next one. Most of the time our local book store only gets its copies at the end of the month. Anyway, while living in Africa it’s a good thing to learn some patience. Years ago, through Linux Format, I learned about the Arduino, at that time it was something new here. Even in South Africa one could not buy them. That has changed; now it takes me just ten days after ordering online, before I get one from South Africa, to my home in Namibia. At present an important part of the…

Oggcamp Don’t plan the funeral just yet! Oggcamp is looking like a possibility thanks to the open source community. At the time of writing, conversations are happening via the organiser mailing list and a number of community members have stepped forward to take on the roles. There’s still an opportunity for you to help organise Oggcamp. All you need to do is sign up to the organiser mailing list and let them know how you can help. Without the community Oggcamp cannot happen! You can read more about oggcamp at http://oggcamp.org and sign up to the mailing list at https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/oggcamp Euro Python 2016 The Spanish city of Bilbao plays host to Euro Python from July 17-24. The organisers have received around 100 papers across five talk tracks. The week-long event…

Just like paid services, all projects behind the firewall distros in this Roundup offer a large number of documentation and support in the form of guides, wikis and forums to handhold you through common deployment. The IPFire project hosts detailed documentation in wikis, as well as its English and German forum boards in addition to the IRC channel and dedicated mailing lists. OPNsense also has forums, a wiki, IRC and very detailed documentation covering every aspect of deployment. Furthermore, the project has over a dozen howto’s on popular configurations/setups, such as configuring traffic shaping, web filtering and setting up a guest network etc. The best source of documentation for the pfSense distro is its handbook which comes with a Gold Membership subscription. Besides this there’s a wiki, forums, mailing lists…

Besides the main Ubuntu release, several official Ubuntu spins have also taken part in the 16.04 LTS release cycle and put out new versions of their respective distros. Kubuntu 16.04 will be the first LTS release based on the new but now stable Plasma 5.5 desktop. It couples this with applications from KDE Apps 15.12 along with LibreOffice 5.1 and Firefox 45. Gnome users can experience Gnome 3.18 with Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS. The distro also allows users to test drive the upcoming Wayland display server by installing the gnome-sessionwayland package and then selecting ‘Gnome on Wayland’ from the login screen. The Ubuntu Mate distro makes its LTS debut with a variety of minute changes to improve performance and stability. The Synapse launcher is now fully integrated with the Mate…

If you’re hardware is up to it you can try out Vulkan right now. Bear in mind that it’ll be a while before there are any real-world performance gains, since these rely on developers explicitly targeting Vulkan. In fact, using the experimental drivers will more than likely slow things down at this stage. Since there’s a reasonable chance of breaking your system (especially if you’re using the Nvidia driver) we won’t provide specific instructions. For the brave, though, they are available for suitable Nvidia hardware on Ubuntu 14.04 or 15.10 on Trent Reed’s blog (http://bit.ly/InstallingVulkanOnUbuntu). For Intel graphics use the canonical-x/ vulkan PPA and then install vulkan-utils and mesa-vulkan-drivers. Arch Linux users will want to install the vulkan-icd-loader package and then install either nvidia-beta (from the AUR, but note you…

“It contains a number of trendy retro filters, such as 1977, Brannan, Gotham, Hefe and Nashville.” Selfie-obsessed Instagram fans and bearded Unix gurus are perhaps two entirely different crowds, but the typical Linux user will still want to stream their photos and watch what other people share. Instagram doesn’t ship an official client for Linux, but there are some alternatives, such as Photostream,an Elementary OS apps, and XnRetro from the XnView developer. The first is quite unstable and is a simple – yet buggy – wrapper for the Instagram website, while the later isn’t open source. To the joy of all Gnome users, the latest release of the beautiful desktop environment, also known as Gnome Shell,includes a feature that fills this gap and offers Instagram-style filters directly to your Linux…

To be selected for Picademy feels like getting your letter to Hogwarts, because it offers access to a world of magical making and hacking. I was delighted to spend two days in March at the Google Garage in Manchester learning about how to use the Pi in education. Day one saw us taking on a whistle stop tour of many different ways a Pi can be used to teach computer science. We lit LEDs on a breadboard; created music in Sonic Pi; laid gold and silver blocks in Minecraft; used an Explorer HAT to power a motor; and took photos using a Pi camera. As the first day drew to a close, we were challenged to think of a project which used some of our new skills. On day two…

Our expert Les Pounder is a tinkerer, maker and hardware hacker who loves helping others to hack. He works with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver Picademy and blogs at http://bigl.es. Making music with your Raspberry Pi is easy thanks to Sonic Pi. But what if we could control the GPIO pins at the same time? Using components, such as buttons or sensors to shape the performance of our tune would add an extra dimension to compositions. For this tutorial you’ll need: any model of Raspberry Pi running the latest Raspbian distribution (distro); an internet connection; three LEDs; a breadboard (remove the loaf first); three 330Ohm resistors; and three momentary switches. All of the code for this project can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/LXF211SonicSampler and you can download a diagram of…

While Pi MusicBox is capable of playing M3U playlists, there is – as yet – no means of actually creating and managing them within the server. Thankfully, playlist creation is built into various supported clients, including both mobile apps and web-based front-ends. One of the best apps we’ve found for this job is Mopidy Mobile on Android, but you’ll need to connect it to Pi MusicBox manually using your Pi Zero’s IP address (get this via SSH using ifconfig if necessary). Once done, you’ll not only have complete control over your Pi Zero, but you can set up playlists relatively easily too: click the ‘Edit’ button (the pencil icon) followed by the ‘Create’ button, give your playlist a suitable name and tap ‘Save’ followed by ‘Done. Next, switch to the…

Our expert Nick Peers now finds the Terminal a safe, familiar haven, after years of shying away from it, having been exposed to dozens of distros in the past few months. Terminal Learn how to access and edit config files and create new ones The Terminal is one of Linux’s most important tools, and however enamoured you are with your desktop’s point-and-click interface, you can’t avoid it forever. This series is designed to ease you gently into the world of Bashand the command line, and having introduced the basics of the Terminal in part one while exploring how to use it to navigate (and manage) your file system in part two, we’re going to examine how you can use it to change key system preferences in our third instalment. Linux…

1 Get VirtualBox Head to www.virtualbox.org and download Virtual Box 5 for your operating system be that Windows or OS X. Install it and be aware you’ll need around 20GB of space drive space to store the virtual OS file. You’ll also need the Ubuntu ISO file from www.ubuntu.com or our LXFDVD. Once installed start it and click the ‘New’ button and call it Ubuntu. 2 Create a machine Choose Ubuntu and the bits should match the ISO you downloaded, click ‘Next’. Under Memory we’d recommend 2048, but if you have an 8GB PC 4096 is best. You can leave all the rest as default settings, apart from the dynamic hard drive size. The default is 8GB, we’d suggest at least 32GB just in case. Finish and click Start to…

1 Make room To create an empty partition for your Ubuntu installation, you’ll first have to squeeze your existing Windows partition. Fire up the Disk Managementtool in Windows, and right-click your main partition that’s typically assigned the drive letter C. Then select the Shrink Volume option from the pop-up menu. 2 Shrink Windows This brings up the Shrink dialog box which shows you the total size of the hard drive and the maximum amount of space that you can squeeze out of the selected partition. To create a new partition, specify the size of the partition in the space provided in megabytes and click ‘Shrink’ to start the process. 3 Updates & plugins After your computer boots from the Ubuntu installation medium, it’ll display a checklist. Make sure you toggle…

Our expert Alastair Jennings has been building and reviewing 3D printers on a regular basis for Linux Format and Techradar.com. Through trial and error he’s found what works and what absolutely doesn’t. 3D printing printing Discover the essentials so you can build your own 3D printer The idea of 3D printing is fascinating; set a printer going in a public place and it’s sure to quickly gather a crowd. The basic technology is amazing to watch, as layer upon layer is built up to create a 3D object. Fused Filament Modeling (FFM) is the most popular process and it will be this type of 3D printer that we’ll look at in this tutorial. The basic principles of FFM are incredibly simple; a thin thread of plastic, known as filament, is…

Lead screws are rare on Prusa i3 machines due to the cost and a quick search on the internet will show you why. However, the difference that they will make to Z axis accuracy is huge. Threaded bolts – which are commonly used – are really only designed to hold things together, they just happen to be the right size and length to suite most home 3D print builds perfectly. However, although the thread and bolt might feel smooth enough, the accuracy of distance cannot be guaranteed. Just lay a threaded bolt on a flat surface and roll it and you’ll more than likely see it isn’t 100% straight. A lead screw on the other hand is designed to provide accuracy and as with polymer bearings they have been designed…

The messaging platform used for this tutorial is called Telegram (http://telegram.org) and was launched late in 2013 by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, who previously created the Russian social networking platform (VK). Its growth has been quite dramatic, with over 60 million active users towards the end of 2015. Telegramoffers apps for Android, iOS and even Windows phone, and you can send voice messages, photos and other files as well as just basic text messages. Like other messaging platforms, Telegramuses your mobile phone number to identify you and initially uses SMS to authenticate access. Unlike many other messaging apps, once you’ve authenticated on your phone, you can then add as many clients as you wish including tablets, desktops (Linux, Windows and Mac) and even a browser-based client all connected using the…

RStudioprovides a comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for R. It’s open source and, like R, is available for many operating systems as well as Linux. With RStudio, you can create scripts, run them and view results as well as environment variables in the same IDE window. It provides many features commonly used in IDE environments, such as syntax highlighting, integrating Help and debugging, managing R projects and so on. RStudiorequires that you’ve already installed R on your Linux box. One of the features that we really like about RStudiois the option to view currently installed packages, search a package online with the ability to download and install new packages. While in the R environment you have to run commands to import data, Rstudio enables you to import data files (TXT…

Static global variables are similar to constants, but the program uses the memory address of the variable instead of its value. Due to their nature, static global variables can be mutable but this is an ‘unsafe’ operation and should be used in an ‘unsafe’ block of code. The following code defines a Static Global variable: As you can see, the developer must specify the type of a static global variable for it to be valid. Most of the time you’re only going to need to use a ‘regular’ const variable, which behaves in a similar way to a C language #define statement.…

New distro, old software Q I am attempting to install Picasa on to Ubuntu 15.10 without a great deal of success. When looking on the internet I tend to come across smug comments such as ‘this is rather an old program—use Shotwell’. The simple fact of the matter is that I personally find Shotwellclumsy and inelegant for some of the things I do, and I prefer some of the editing and print options available in Picasa. I’m also used to Picasa’s cataloguing for my library of photos going back many years. Russell Boyce A The problem is that support for and development of Picasa for Linux ceased four years ago. Not that it was really supported that well, it was basically the Windows version with a bundled Wine. Running older…

System tools Essentials Checkinstall Install tarballs with your package manager. Coreutils The basic utilities that should exist on every operating system. HardInfo A system benchmarking tool. Kernel Source code for the latest stable kernel release, should you need it. Memtest86+ Check for faulty memory. Plop A simple manager for booting OSes, from CD, DVD and USB. RawWrite Create boot floppy disks under MS-DOS in Windows. Smart Boot Manager An OS-agnostic manager with an easy-to-use interface. WvDial Connect with a dial-up modem. Reading matter Bookshelf Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners Get to grips with Bashscripting. Bourne Shell Scripting Guide Get started with shell scripting. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S Raymond’s classic text explaining the advantages of open development. The Debian Administrator’s Handbook…

Another year, another Ubuntu release. It feels almost relentless but without its six-month release schedule would Ubuntu have come as far as it has in such a short time? Ubuntu 16.04 is here and with it comes ‘The Convergence, the culmination of a host of technologies that are going to change forever how we use mobile devices and desktop operating systems. It’s the logical progression, as mobile devices start to gain desktop-levels of computing power, existing mobile OS’s are going to be left wanting. Ubuntu is stepping in to fill that gap and you don’t have to be interested in any of this to benefit; to accommodate the new flexibility required to fit into the many different shapes and sizes of device screens, Ubuntu already had a scalable interface, but…

canonical is planning to include OpenZFS in Ubuntu 16.04, with the announcement (http://bit.ly/ZIsinUbuntu16_04) claiming that OpenZFS support is “one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time.” While the inclusion of ZFS – a combination of a volume manager and filesystem – can be seen as an exciting addition, thanks to features such as copy-on-write cloning, automatic repairs and efficient data compression, not everyone is happy. In a lengthy post (which can be read here: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/zfs-and-linux) for the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman explains how ZFS, developed by Sun Microsystems for Solaris, uses the Common Development and Distribution License, version 1.0 (CDDL), which is incompatible with the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL). While he does not call out Canonical by name, it’s pretty…

IP FIRE 2.19 The 100th update to the IPFIre project’s 2.19 branch has been released, and to mark this milestone the latest update includes some substantial features, including a 64-bit build for the first time ever, along with an update to the Linux kernel to Linux 3.14.65. IPFire is a distro that combines high level security with ease of use, and is controlled via a web-based interface. It also includes a custom package manager, Pakfire. You can find out more about the latest release at http://bit.ly/iPIire2_19Core100. PRIMTUX EIFFEL The latest version of the education-orientated PrimTux distro is now available to download. This distro comes with educational programs, LibreOffice 4 and games that’s all been packaged with a user interface that has been specially designed for young children in mind. Developed…

Help teachers to teach Your local schools and colleges need you. Since 2014 the Raspberry Pi Foundation has run Picademy, a two-day training course for educators that focuses on the Pi in the classroom. At Picademy, the cohort – a term used to describe the attendees – are led through a full day of Pi skills. For example using the Picamera, Minecraft, Sonic Pi and Robotics. These are skills that some makers might take for granted, but our teachers need this primer to help them learn just what the Raspberry Pi can do. During day two of Picademy, the cohort have the time to consolidate their learning and produce a project in order to be certified. Typically these projects range from simple LED sequences up to advanced projects incorporating sensors…

Two popular firewall distros we didn’t include in this Roundup are Smoothwall Express and IPCop. Both haven’t had a stable release in quite a while, but IPCop is being actively worked on and will be putting out a new release soon. Then there’s also the feature-restricted community edition of the Endian Firewall as well as the Zeroshell firewall router distro for embedded devices. You can also add firewall functionality to your existing gateway server. ClearOS and Zentyal are two gateway servers that are used as firewalls as well. On the other hand, if you are the DIY type, you can build your own firewall appliance as well with little effort. One approach would be to use an ARM-based plug computer or a Raspberry Pi and install a minimal Linux distro,…

An Ubuntu LTS release is always a special affair. The primary goal of the Ubuntu developers is to provide a stable platform that can run reliably for the duration of the extended support cycle. On top of it, they must also take into account future developments in the larger open source software ecosystem that might have a direct bearing on their support infrastructure. For instance, Ubuntu 16.04 doesn’t support AMD’s proprietary fglrx drivers any more as AMD has announced plans to wean users away from its proprietary fglrx driver to the open source amdgpu drivers. Last the term Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will be supported until 2021. Unlike traditional Ubuntu releases, LTS releases come out every two years and continue to receive updates for…

COREOS PROPERTIES“It’s very consistent so it actually behaves more like an embedded OS.” Brandon Philips previously worked for industry giants SUSE and Rackspace. He is one of the original founders of CoreOS, where he is currently Chief Technology Officer. We caught up with him at last year’s OSCON to get the lowdown on CoreOS’ eponymous Linux distribution, based around Docker and tailored for truly massive server deployments. Linux Format: Tell me a little about CoreOS, can you give me an introduction for a lay person such as myself? Brandon Philips: We started CoreOS about two and a half years ago and the basic idea was we wanted to help build out back-end infrastructure. We started with that by building a new Linux distribution, and that distro turned out to have…

Back in my brief and not particularly illustrious stints as a manager I became slowly submerged under a rising tide of that modern scourge—email. Daily reports and requests for ‘resources’ (call me only fashioned but I much prefer the term ‘people’) to work on some urgent piece of work. The list was endless. Email was a terrible way to keep up with the day-to-day events in a team, though. It was with some relief that, leaving the ivory towers of corporations and their ‘enterprise’ email clients (Lotus Notes—shudder) and general reluctance to use the likes of IRC, I was able to replace email to some extent with group messaging. Slack has become the current poster child of this increasingly common practice. There are alternatives, of course, some are open source…

While I was writing this article, perennial open source favourite O’Reilly published a new book called Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. I’m lucky enough to have one of its Safari subscriptions which gives me access to the whole library, so I eagerly queued it up to see what the chapters on monitoring might look like. There is indeed a description of Borgmon and a rough date given for its creation (around 2003!). The descriptions of how Borgmon works are very familiar having dealt with Prometheus beforehand. Indeed, there’s a box entitled Time-Series Monitoring Outside of Google, which specifically singles Prometheus out as sharing many similarities (it also mentions Riemann, Heka and Bosun as alternative projects). An interesting choice of words is used here however: “This chapter describes…

Having trouble buying a Raspberry Pi Zero? There was a good reason, it turns out that production was put on hiatus so Sony could concentrate on banging out a million of the new Raspberry Pi 3 models, that’s how many had sold by mid-April! During the break the Raspberry Pi team took the chance to update the Pi Zero adding a new – undisclosed at the time of writing – feature. Eben Upton took to the Pi forums to say it wouldn’t be Wi-Fi and that the cost would stay the same. Assuming that everything is going well, the new feature should be revealed by the time you read this. We suspect a handy status LED. The other interesting news is that hopefully by the time you read this the…

The Raspberry Pi is well known for its GPIO, General Purpose Input Output, pins. These pins were added to enable the Pi to be merged with electronics projects and to read and control devices. The main module to interact with the GPIO is called RPi.GPIO and for many years this has been the default library. While being relatively easy to use for those familiar with Python, RPi.GPIO can seem daunting to new users and there are a number of steps to configure and use the pins. In mid 2015, Ben Nuttall (spelt with two ‘l’s), community manager at the Raspberry Pi Foundation got together with a few community members to create a new module for interacting with the GPIO. Not a module that would replace RPi.GPIO, rather introduce the GPIO…

Should you want to access the underlying operating system behind Pi MusicBox, you can do so via SSH. First, enable SSH in Pi MusicBox via ‘Settings’ under ‘Network. We’d also recommend changing the default password (which is PiMusicBox) too, which can be done from the MusicBox section. Click ‘Update settings (reboot)’ and once Pi MusicBox is up and running again, open Terminal on your PC and set up a SSH connection with the following command: ssh root@musicbox.local . Type yes when prompted, then enter the root password. Once you’ve logged in, you can access the PiMusicBox configuration file by using the following command: Here you can quickly tweak the same settings you see via the web interface. Note: The file itself is stored in plain text for all to see,…

One of the big advantages of using the Terminal is that it gives you the sudo command, which allows you to run programs and access the system with root user privileges. If you want to edit configuration files outside of the command line using an editor such as Gedit, you’ll need to give it root privileges to access certain files. You can technically do this using sudo , but this isn’t the recommended approach, because if you use sudo to launch Geditand then edit files in your home directory, they’ll end up owned by root rather than your own user account. Instead, use the following command to launch Gedit(or indeed, any graphical application such as Nautilus) as the root user: gksu gedit . You’ll see a window pop up asking…

Our expert Neil Mohr says many people think his work is remote, but really he’s working smarter not harder. Unless management ask, then he’s working much harder and not smarter. Remote desktop Take control of your Linux and Windows PCs remotely One is never enough. These days most people – especially Linux using enthusiasts – are likely to have more than one PC in their homes, perhaps even home servers, media boxes, laptops and more running a host of operating systems. The annoyance is when you want to use more than one at once. Sure, with a laptop you can have that next to your desktop, but what if you’re slumped in front of the TV and need access to the desktop upstairs? Enter remote desktop. This comes in many…

Our expert Chris Notley is a network specialist and has spent the last eight years trying to regain some control at home after the birth of the his daughter, Emily… Mostly, he admits, in vain! Telegram el ram Use the Telegram’s bot API to customise home automation The explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a plethora of connected devices and sensors available for the home and with it a profusion of smartphone apps to control them all. Many IoT vendors publish an Application Program Interface (API) that enables other forms of interaction with their devices. This tutorial shows how to use the messaging platform Telegram (http://telegram.org which was launched in 2013 and now has over 100 million active users) to build a custom interface that can…

Our expert Rafeeq Rehman is a consultant and author with interests in emerging technologies, data science, InfoSec and IoT. R is an open source implementation of the S language and an environment to perform statistical computations, analyse data, plot graphs and other functions. R is one of the commonly used scripting language by data scientists and is a must have in your tool box if you are aspiring to be a data scientist. Many Hadoop [see LXF208] distros support running R scripts in the Hadoop environment making the job of data scientists simpler. You can use R interactively or create R scripts to perform more complex and repetitive tasks. R is available on many operating systems including Linux. You can download and compile the source code or get a pre-compiled…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos has an M.Sc. in IT from UCL and a B.Sc. in Mathematics. He’s a DB-admining, software-coding, Unix-using, mathematical machine. This time, we’ll be using the tutorial to help you become more comfortable with Rust Functions, Modules and Error Handling as well as some other Rust features. We’re going to cover how to develop and package your functions and make them autonomous entities that you can easily transfer to other computers. You’ll also learn how to deal with errors, because bad things (typos! – Ed) happen all the time. Last, we’ll cover pointers and vectors. In the previous Rust tutorial, we used Rust 1.6 but this one will use Rust version 1.7 which has just come out. The first function that you will have to implement is…

1 DOS to desktop Q Running PCLinuxOS 64-bit KDE, I use DosBox for some DOS programs and this works fine, However, I find that if I select the program’s directory in Dolphinand click on the EXE file, DosBox opens with the selected program running. I would like to have an icon on the desktop which would do the same as clicking on the file, Is this possible? If so how? I have created an icon, and tried several combinations of the command and all fail with ‘KDEinit could not launch. The program’s path is HOME/DosProgs/Species/Nature.exe and all its files are in the same directory. Dave Pritchard A The simplest way to create an icon for an executable program or file in KDE is to drop the file onto the desktop.…

I’m confused about backups. What should I back up, how often should I do it and what software should I use to do it? You should back up anything you can’t afford to lose. That’s most of your personal files, particularly irreplaceable things like photos. Anything that can be downloaded again is not so important, although you would have the inconvenience of downloading it all again if things went wrong. If in doubt, backup your whole home directory. What about the operating system? Back that up too? It is often quicker to reinstall than restore an old installation from a backup, but you should keep copies of any settings you have changed. Usually a backup of /etc is sufficient. How often should I do it? That depends on how often…

If you’ve been looking forward to running a laptop with Intel’s new Skylake processors (the sixth generation of Core I CPUs), then we have some bad news. Although Linux 4.5 plays nicely with most aspects of the mobile processors – including improved integrated graphics performance – the power management side of things appears to be a bit broken – with many components continuing to draw power when not in use, and not dropping into deeper power saving states. This results in laptops running Linux and a Skylake processor having pretty awful battery life. Hopefully this issue gets sorted quickly – there’s already been rumblings about a fix – but for the moment it’s best to hold off buying a Skylake-powered laptop for now. A crucial security bug in Windows and…

Samsung M.2 Your article in LXF207 [Reviews, p17] about the Samsung PRO 950 SSD has whetted my appetite for an upgrade to my desktop computer. Can you recommend a suitable motherboard and CPU which would allow me to install and run Kubuntu using this SSD as the root and home drive please? Internet searches only refer to Windows and that only a few boards can boot from this SSD so I am a bit hesitant to take the plunge and purchase without further guidance. Alan Reid, via email Neil says: I’m glad you found the review helpful – I like putting in the odd cutting-edge hardware review to keep readers up to date – I’m never sure how interested readers really are in these types of reviews (but I find…

Blackpool Makerspace Blackpool Makerspace, 64 Tyldesley Road, 10am every Saturday. https://blackpoolmakerspace.wordpress.com Bristol and Bath LUG Meet on the fourth Saturday of each month at the Knights Templar (near Temple Meads Station) at 12.30pm until 4pm. www.bristol.lug.org.uk Coding Evening Help teachers learn Computing and have a beer. http://www.codingevening.org Egham Raspberry Jam Meets at Gartner UK HQ every quarter. http://winkleink.blogspot.com Lincoln LUG Meet on the third Wednesday of the month at 7pm, Lincoln Bowl, Washingborough Road, Lincoln, LN4 1EF. www.lincoln.lug.org.uk Liverpool LUG Meet on the first Wednesday of the month from 7pm onwards at DoES Liverpool. http://liv.lug.org.uk/wiki Manchester Hackspace Open night every Wednesday at Wellington House, Pollard St E. http://hacman.org.uk Surrey & Hampshire Hackspace Meet weekly on Thursday evenings from 6.30pm at Games Galaxy, Farnborough. www.sh-hackspace.org.uk Tyneside LUG Meet from 12pm, first…

Virtually all the distros in this Roundup offer a host of paid services. IPFire offers paid support through Lightening Wire Labs which provides custom solutions to enterprises that use IPFire. The company also offers customised hardware appliances that integrate well with your infrastructure. OPNsense has multiple commercial support options. The annual subscription to the business support package costs €299 (£236). There are also professional services designed for larger deployments, integrations and custom changes to the distro. You can also purchase support packages for your pfSense deployment which includes technical support, configuration assistance and a configuration review. The pfSense project also conducts training with the cheapest course starting at £699. Besides retailing a version of the Sophos UTM for larger organisations, it offers support packages via its resellers. Sophos also offers…

“The Ubuntu distribution is at the cusp of introducing a major overhaul with lots of changes.” Every six months, the Ubuntu developers and ardent community of users and fans celebrate the arrival of a new release with almost religious fervour. The hoopla around the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release is no different, except for the fact that this one ushers in enough changes to actually do justice to the adulation. The Ubuntu distribution (distro) is at the cusp of introducing a major overhaul with lots of changes to the back-end infrastructure that will have a direct bearing on the rendition of the desktop. The primary thrust behind the makeover is Canonical’s aspirations to take the project beyond the confines of the desktop. If you recall the ‘successful failure’ of the Ubuntu…

The Samba project (www.samba.org) revealed details of a collection of vulnerabilities in April (patches are available—the flaw affects Linux and Windows). Underpinning the other CVEs was one dubbed ‘Badlock’ (CVE-2016-2118), which handily came with its own logo (http://badlock.org). On the Red Hat Enterprise Linux blog (http://bit.ly/BadlockStory) a fascinating explanation was posted as to how the exploit was discovered and the fix developed. The underlying bug was discovered by a security analysis tool (Defensics) which performs fuzz testing, ie it generates invalid or unexpected inputs. A single packet from this tool revealed that Samba (and subsequently, Microsoft’s Active Directory) had issues with its DCE/RPC protocol specification. DCE/RPC allows a connection to be created and have various resources associated to it. A man-in-the-middle attack is possible to effectively take over this connection.…

With the huge amounts of data available via a system like Prometheus, choosing what to monitor could be said to be more difficult than before. Prometheuscomes out of the box as effectively a barebones system, in comparison to say, Nagios with Check_MK, where hundreds of monitors and thresholds are provided from the beginning. This does give the opportunity for a fresh start though and a chance to concentrate on what is really important. Given the origins of Prometheus in Borgmon it was interesting to see in the Site Reliability book mentioned across the page (see p49) what Google consider to be the main areas to focus on. They refer to these as ‘The Four Golden Signals’: Latency (the time it takes to serve a request), Traffic (a measure of how…

Our expert Nick Peers has been ridiculously overexcited by this project, and having integrated it into his home stereo system has foolishly attempted to upgrade it to Jessie Lite/ Mopidy 2.0. Send help! AirPlay remains a great way of wirelessly piping music through your home, but even basic AirPlay speakers come with a hefty price tag attached. In many cases, you’ll already have a perfectly serviceable stereo system in place, so why spend a fortune on another speaker (or pair of speakers) when you can put together your own wireless AirPlay receiver for around £50? Better still, why limit yourself to AirPlay, when your receiver can do so much more too? We were inspired to try this project by a desire to make full use of a 25-year-old Pioneer stereo…

Our expert Neil Mohr never fancied compiling the Linux kernel on his Amiga, so had to wait until Corel Linux and Ubuntu appeared, so it was handy he had a lovely Pentium MMX to run it on by then. Things are so much easier today… Ubuntu Get started with Ubuntu and Linux in record time, it’s quick and easy Honestly, modern Linux is easier, faster and less hassle to install than any recent release of Windows. That’s the truth. No messing with keys, no worrying about activation and no digging out that lost install disc or USB drive. The beauty of Linux is that because it’s free software anyone can download (or pop in a handy cover disc) and start using it. You don’t even have to install anything! Linux…

1 UNetbootin Linux To run Ubuntu from a USB stick, you first need a USB drive at least 2GB in size, 8GB would be ideal. You’ll need the Ubuntu ISO file from www.ubuntu.com as discussed in the VirtualBox walkthrough (see p71) and we’ll use the download tool UNetbootin from http://unetbootin.github.io. This installs the Live Disc ISO file directly to your USB drive. 2 Install Ubuntu The tool can download the ISO image, but it’s best practice to do this yourself. So select Diskimage, locate the file in the Download folder. Use the Ubuntu storage box to create reusable space—512MB should be fine use more on larger sticks. Ensure you have the correct USB drive select in the bottom pull-down menu and click ‘OK’ to create the drive. 3 Boot and…

LIFX has an extensive API, which is published at http://api.developer.lifx.com. Its API allows control of every aspect of its lamps, including: brightness and colour; switching the lamps to previously defined states (scenes); as well as interesting features; such as causing the lamps to pulse or breath a colour temporarily (useful for sending alerts or just scaring people)! Each API endpoint uses different HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT) and the required parameters are well documented on their developer site. All of the endpoints return results in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) that can be easily processed. In order to allow multiple lamps to be controlled, most of the endpoints require the use of a selector to specify the lamp. In our tutorial, we’ve used labels as our selector, which are defined when…

The help() command is an easy way of getting help on other R commands. By default, the help() command will display information about using the help system itself. To get help on a specific R command, you have to use the command name as an argument to the help() command. As an example, if you need help on getwd() command, you would use command help("getwd") on the R prompt. There’s also a shortcut method for getting help. Instead of typing the whole command help("getwd") , you can also use ?getwd on the command prompt, instead. This will serve up the same result as the full command. In many cases you may know a particular concept that you want to use, but can’t correctly recall the R command. Also you may…

The unwrap() method takes a value out of an option type and allows you to use the actual value. This method is mainly used for getting strings, vectors and unique pointers out of option types without the need to copy them. The following slice of Rust code demonstrates the usefulness of the .unwrap() method to read a command line argument: Note: If the value is ‘None, your program will panic. The similar unwrap_ or() allows you to handle related situations as it provides a default value.…

Linux Format is proud to produce the biggest and best magazine that we can. A rough word count of LXF193 showed it had 55,242 words. That’s a few thousand more than Animal Farm and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis combined, but with way more Linux, coding and free software (but hopefully less bugs). That’s as much as the competition, and as for the best, well… that’s a subjective claim, but we do sell way more copies than any other Linux mag in the UK. As we like giving things to our readers, each issue the Star Question will win a copy or two of our amazing Guru Guides or Made Simple books – discover the full range at: http://bit.ly/LXFspecials. For a chance to win, email a question to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, or post it…

Much is made of Linux’s  suitability for older, less capable hardware—probably too much. It’s a good example of the flexibility and choices provided by Linux distros, but should it really be seen as a defining factor? Yes, it’s great that old hardware can continue to live a useful life thanks to lightweight distros, but do we really want Linux to have the reputation of the operating system for knackered hardware? It shouldn’t be forgotten that Linux is also the OS of choice for many of the world’s most powerful computers. Last year’s list of the top 500 supercomputers showed that 486 of them run Linux—it was ‘only’ 485 the previous year. That’s the strength of Linux. Not that it runs on the old box you found under the stairs, but…