Table of contents for February 2017 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell I burn white sage, place rowan branches and draw apotropaic symbols and engravings around the perimeter of my encampment. This keeps all malevolent spirits at bay. So this winter I’ve done the same for my computers. It works better than most commercial AV products, and my machines look and smell much better. Neil Bothwick I check the supply of boiling oil at each murder hole and pull up the drawbridge (after making sure the crocodiles in the moat haven’t been fed). I also have a number of webcams and IP cameras hooked up to a PC running motion, But that’s more for entertainment value when the local ‘entrepreneurs’ fall in the moat. Nick Peers There’s nothing worse than waking up and glimpsing something dark through a gap in…

“In hardware, processing is measured by Moore’s law, an incredible testament to the ability to squeeze more transistors onto an integrated circuit. Fifty years later we are watching software move at ‘cloud speed’, a phenomenon that allows daily and even hourly software releases. (Amazon claims to release software every 11.7 seconds!) When The Linux Foundation published its first Guide to the Open Cloud in 2013, everyone was furiously trying to build in functionality and enterprises were in the early stages of planning and testing. Navigating the cloud Three years later, not only have cloud projects consistently grown their user and developer communities, lines of code and commits—their software is increasingly enterprise-ready. This, in turn, has advanced many projects beyond testing and to deployment. As a result, there’s now a growing…

As much as I greatly appreciated your articles on the SuperPi [see Features, p32, LXF217] you got a few things wrong. Looking at portable power, one effective way is to use a portable phone charger. I use a TeckNet PowerZen with over 16,000mAh capacity, which powers a headless Pi 1 web server for about a day, currently available on you-know-who for £23. However, a comment on your careless use of terminology—mAh are not milliamps per hour they are milliamps hours. Furthermore, they are not power which is measured in watts. (To be precise they are actually millicoulombs representing the quantity of electrical charge with 1mAh equivalent to 3,600 millicoulombs.) What you are trying to say is that the total load current adds up to 2,000mA and if you want to…

In brief... The bolt-on VR system for (certain) Android phones from Google. Built for its Pixel range, it demands a high-spec phone and even then you’ll enjoy limited run time and a smaller range of games than competing systems. See also Gear VR, Oculus Rift. Ready to (possibly) transform your next Android phone into an immersive virtual reality headset for a convincing price is Google’s new mobile-based VR headset for the Google Pixel and Pixel XL. It tries to stand out from the Samsung Gear VR and Alcatel VR Goggles by Google emphasizing its included controller. Right out of the box, we waved around Google Daydream View’s tiny remote, and it acted as our essential navigation and gameplay wand. The fabric-coated headset design is also more comfortable than its competitors,…

TigerVNCwouldn’t be much help if you’re new to VNC. There’s next to no documentation on the website with just HTML versions of the man pages of the various utilities. The website also points to the project’s three mailing lists—one of which is meant for resolving user queries. TightVNCisn’t much better. The project’s website asks users to start with the FAQ that answers questions about the application’s security and usage. Reading everything from the release announcements to viewing the handful of screenshots along with their description, it’s easy to conclude that Tight VNC is a Windows-only product. As the new version isn’t available for platforms other than Windows, you wouldn’t find any documentation of the older version that does work on Linux. Vinagre is a little better with pointers to the…

“The prevalence of the ‘Smart Home’ poses security concerns which we’ve not faced before.” The latest series of the cyberpunk TV show, Mr. Robot, saw a ragtag group of hackers called fsociety break into a woman’s house by playing havoc with her smart home. A few lines of code and her stereo begins blaring, next her burglar alarm goes haywire and finally her thermostat is dialled down to such freezing temperatures that she’s obliged to walk around indoors in a heavy coat. Eventually, she gives up and moves out temporarily, granting the hackers their own trendy base of operations. In reality, it’s currently unlikely that so many different aspects of a home would be linked to one computer system and therefore could be so easily controlled. It’s more implausible still…

If you choose to build smart devices using the Raspberry Pi you will find that many of the home automation scripts can easily be run from the command line. If you think you can do without a colourful web interface, you could choose to connect remotely to each of your Pi-powered devices via SSH to run commands e.g to turn on your lawn sprinklers. There are a number of apps for Android, iPhone and desktop systems which support connecting via SSH. If you choose to do this you’ll need to follow some best practice to make sure that your connection is safe. The first step is to only allow access via SSH to the user you set up to run the smart device programs. It isn’t necessary to make system…

Try to place yourself in the mind set of an intruder—if you wished to enter a smart home undetected in order to steal or work mischief, one of the easiest ways to do this would simply be to cut the mains power. This isn’t very difficult to do as junction boxes are, by design, easy to access for maintenance work. What if, however, each smart device had its own power source, meaning it could keep functioning in case of a power cut? If you build your smart home using Raspberry Pi devices, this is something that’s easily done. Websites, such as AdaFruit and the PiHut, sell battery packs for the Raspberry Pi which can keep the devices functioning for hours or days depending on their specific function. The Raspberry Pi…

Early May 2012 Initial announcement of the project. Mid November 2012 Beta invitations close and the XPS 13-inch Linux Developer Edition goes live. Precisions were added within six months due to customer demand. Feb 2015 Linux Development 15-inch M3800 Developer Edition released. Early April 2015 A revised M3800 is released alongside a 4th gen XPS laptop. March 2016 Fifth-gen XPS released alongside new Precision workstations. End March 2016 Dell XPS 13 5th generation (with Skylake CPU) is launched. April 2016 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS becomes a supported operating system. Early Oct 2016 XPS 13 gen 6 with Kaby Lake processor launched. Now ships with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS as default.…

Even humble web browsing can’t be trusted to betray incriminating details, which is why the Tor Project is so vocal about using the Tor Browser Bundle, rather than just proxying your web browser of choice. The Tor Browser is built on the ESR (Extended Support Release) of Firefox, so it doesn’t have the latest features, but it does get regular and thorough attention from both Mozilla and the Tor Project. It also goes out of its way to make sure that the underlying Tor connection is sane, and can help ameliorate problems with NAT, proxies or firewalls. The best way to download the Tor Browser is straight from www.torproject.org (we won’t put a bit.ly link, but we will leave you to navigate to the right section of the website). Good…

GNU IceCat Hyper Darling myFinances SiriKali NewBreeze CuteReport QWeborf, Abiword Unknown Horizons Hexalate “The cornerstone of its liberation is the LibreJS browser extension.” Web browser GNU IceCat Version: 45.5.1 Web: www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla Flagship Mozilla product, the Firefox web browser has been a regular HotPicks entry, which isn’t surprising given that Firefox is one of the most recognised open source applications. However, it may still not be tfree enough according to some purists, including Richard Stallman (the software freedom activist and founder of the GNU project). So meet GNU IceCat, a liberated Firefox spin-off. The overall approach is similar to Un-googled Chromium[which we covered in HotPicks, p56, LXF218]. IceCat 45.5.1 is a major update to version 38, which was derived from Firefox in just the same way. The browser looks like Firefox,…

Our expert Les Pounder is a maker who loves to tinker with tech. He works with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver training to teachers and he writes a blog full of weird hacks http://bigl.es. Hold your Raspberry Pi in your hands, what you have there is a $35 Linux computer ready for you to learn, hack and experiment with. In many tutorials we’ve used Python as our main language, but another language that we can use is Bash, the language of the Terminal. In this tutorial, we’ll create our own menu system using an interface called Whiptailwhich will provide a graphical layer to a series of basic terminal commands. To create our project we shall use Geany, an editor that comes pre-installed on the latest Raspbian Pixel desktop. Geany…

The latest version of Minetest is available in the standard Raspbian repos, so installation is easy and simply a matter of: But enabling the experimental video driver requires a little more effort. If you omit this step Minetest will still work, but it will be excruciatingly slow, especially on single-core Raspberry Pis. Start the configuration utility with: Select option 7 Advanced Options, then scroll down to option number AC (it’s a number too!) GL Driver and indicate Yes to the experimental GL driver. This requires a reboot to take effect and when you exit raspi-config you will helpfully be asked if you would like to do just this, so say Yes. Despite the experimental reference, the new driver has been really stable in our testing and is unlikely to break…

We’ve focussed on alternative terminal emulators in this piece and they all work with the default Bashshell, which is the underlying command-line interface that you use outside of the desktop environment (don’t believe us again? Type echo $SHELL into the terminal and it should point to /bin/bash). Just as there are alternatives to the default terminal emulator in Ubuntu, so too are there alternatives to the Bashshell. One of our favourites is fish, which sits alongside Bashrather than replaces it completely. Install it like so: Once installed, invoke it from within any terminal emulator by typing: You’ll see the command prompt change to ‘~> -’ just start typing to see both syntax highlighting and auto-complete in action—can’t see the command you’re looking for? Press the right arrow to select it,…

For a very long time Linux distros used the SysVinit initialisation script to start services and daemons. The initis a daemon process that started as soon as you begin the boot process of your Linux distro. This made initthe parent process for all other processes. If, for some reason, the initprocess didn’t start, no other processes would be started resulting in what is known as a ‘kernel panic’. Because of its inherent shortcomings—init processes start serially, which means that a process would start only after the previous process was started successfully, which translates to slower boot times. Several alternatives were developed to replace init, such as the Mudar system, which was designed for Pardus Linux, and Upstart, which was originally developed for the popular Ubuntu distro. Systemd was similarly designed…

The git config tool, which is part of the Git client, is used to define the configuration variables such as name and email address etc. These variables are used to track the identity of any users making modifications to files in a collaborative project. The global configurations that are applicable for all git repos are stored in the ~/.gitconfig file located in your /home directory. The above two commands respectively set the username and email address for all repositories for the current user. However, if you wish to collaborate with different groups using a repo-specific email or username, you simply run the above commands from within the .git directory of your repos without using the --global command option. The repo-specific configurations are stored in the .gitconfig file within the repository’s…

By default, your code is stored on your PC, which means you need to manually run it from within Wyliodrin STUDIO. That’s fine during the testing process, but what if you want to be able to run it direct from your Pi? One solution is to open the Projects window, then click ‘Export ‘next to the project you wish to export. This allows you to save it as a standalone file with a .wylioapp extension, which you can then transfer to your Pi via File Explorer—the problem is, you’ll need to install Wyliodrin STUDIO on your Pi (see http://wyliodrin.github.io/WyliodrinSTUDIO) in order to run it – when connecting, choose ‘Chrome (Local Computer)’ to do so. A far easier option – particularly if you’ve completed your project – is to simply copy…

Drupal is not the only available CMS, there are plenty of other popular systems including WordPress and Joomla which will make you wonder which one to choose for your sites. The default look of WordPress has better aesthetics than both Joomla and Drupal. As a result WordPress is better for presenting photographs and other kinds of images. On the other hand, Drupal can handle big websites with high traffic without problems. Additionally, WordPress sites are easier to administer than both Drupal and Joomla sites; a busy Drupal 8 site is likely to need a dedicated administrator or a dedicated developer. However, the Drush command line utility is a major advantage for Drupal because you can do many administrative jobs from the command line without having to deal with menus and…

The way that D3.js works requires the developer to write more code than expected but offers more flexibility especially when you decide to create something different than the default. The d3.timeParse() function defines a parse string that will be used for converting a string into an actual date and the .data(anArray) function is used for reading your data from the anArray variable. The d3.scaleLinear() function creates a linear scale by getting a domain – a range of values – as input and giving a different range as its output. The other scale functions work in a similar way, but what changes is the output range, which is defined using the range() function. The d3.axisBottom(x) draws the X axis using the values defined by the x variable. Similarly, d3. axisLeft(y) draws…

Regular expressions help you perform sophisticated searches in a way that it would be difficult or even impossible to do otherwise. Pattern matching is a technique that allows you to search a string for a set of characters based on a specific search pattern that‘s dictated by a regular expression. If pattern matching is successful, it allows you to extract the desired data from the string, use it and replace it etc. However, regular expressions must be used with great care because they can generate difficult to find and hard to correct bugs!…

Linux Format is proud to produce the biggest and best magazine that we can. A rough word count of LXF217 showed it had 65,010 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…

Internal e-mail I need advice on how to structure and set up a simple internal-only email server for my IoT sensors. I don’t want this server visible to the internet. It might be nice if it could send outbound mail via Gmail, but that’s not a requirement. The main focus is to keep my data internal. All of the articles I find for setting up simple mail servers have linkages to the WAN, which I don’t want, e.g. if I install Postfix how do I make sure it works only via my LAN? Do I need Dovecot if I’m not using IMAP or POP? Internally, I use a nonroutable domain name for my LAN hosts. My overall architecture for my IoT is to keep it firewalled off from the internet…

We receive several questions each month that we are unable to answer, because they give insufficient detail about the problem. In order to give the best answers to your questions, we need to know as much as possible. If you get an error message, please tell us the exact message and precisely what you did to invoke it. If you have a hardware problem, let us know about the hardware. If Linux is already running, use the Hardinfo program (https://github.com/lpereira/hardinfo) that gives a full report on your hardware and system as an HTML file you can send us. Alternatively, the output from lshw is just as useful (http://ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter). One or both of these should be in your distro’s repositories. If you are unwilling, or unable, to install these, run the…

We have grown used to distro discs that boot to a live environment that you can try out and then install. This approach was pioneered by PCLinuxOS and popularised by Ubuntu. In that regard, the openSUSE distro on this month’s DVD is very old school as it’s purely an install disc. There’s no live environment, the only way to test it is to install it. While this may seem odd these days, virtualisation makes it easy to install and test a distro without touching your existing system, or you can install in a dual-boot or multi-boot configuration. It uses a different installation process, allowing you to choose which desktop and other packages you want to install, either individually or from a number of preset configurations to choose from. This is…

It’s time to… Escape Google! Take back your cloud, we fire up the best open services and servers to take control of your data. The “other” kernel Are you a dirty splitter? We round up all the major BSD variants so you see if the grass is greener elsewhere. Laptop Linux Make mobile Linux run a little longer with our feature on making the kernel far more battery friendly. Planning UK totalitarianism Now most parts of the UK government can view your online life, we look at getting your privacy back.…

We know 2016 was bad for security threats and 2017 isn’t looking any better. But with hackers turning their attention to poorly secured internet of thing (IoT) devices, rather than better secured servers or desktop computers, isn’t it about time you started taking your network security more seriously? This issue we take a long look at the rush by consumers to install insecure devices on their home networks, what you can do to lock down your own network and devices to help protect yourself, create a truly secure smart home built not only on Linux servers, but also Linux-powered IoT devices that you control. It’s these last two points that are just as important. Part of the issue with the IoT is the loss of ownership and control people have…

While Windows is still the operating system of choice for gamers (with Windows 10 now installed on 50% of Steam users’ PCs), 2016 was a fantastic year for Linux games, with over 1,000 new games that support Linux being released on Steam. This influx of Linux-supporting games has shown that games developers have taken notice of Linux, as well as encouraging graphics card manufacturers to make sure their hardware is supported in Linux with up-to-date drivers. All of this has made Linux a more viable Windows alternative for PC gamers looking to break free from Microsoft’s operating system. Even if a game doesn’t officially support Linux, there’s still ways to play it. For instance, the new DoomFPS has been showcased running on Ubuntu 16.04 with full Vulkan support via Wine(see…

SOLUS 2017.01.01.0 A new snapshot of Solus, an independent Linux distro that uses the eopkg package manager, has been released in two versions: Budgie and Mate. It supports mounting more devices over MTP, VLC media player can now play files over Samba and SFTP connections and it includes the 4.8.15 Linux kernel. It also has various improvements to the out-of-the-box experience of Solus. http://bit.ly/Solus2017_01_01_0 CALCULATE LINUX 17 This Gentoo-based project comes with a choice of KDE Plasma, Mate or Xfce desktops and is actually made up of three separate distros: Calculate Directory Server (that supports Windows and Linux clients), Calculate Linux Desktop (a workstation and client distro) and the live CD Calculate Linux Scratch. The main changes in 17 include a new server, Timeless, a GUI manager, overhauled appearance and…

Find and join a LUG Alpinux, le LUG de Savoie Meet on the first and third Thursday of the month at the Maison des Associations de Chambéry. www.alpinux.org Bristol Hackspace Studio G11, 37 Philip Street, Bedminster, Bristol, UK, BS3 4EA http://bristol.hackspace.org.uk Cheltenham Hackspace The Runnings Trading Estate, Cheltenham. Thursdays from 7pm. www.cheltenhamhackspace.org Lancaster and Morecambe Makers Unit 5, Sharpes Mill, White Cross. Open night on Wednesday evenings from 6.30pm till late. https://lamm.space Hull Raspberry Jam Malet Lambert School, Hull. Every other month. Check the Twitter account. https://twitter.com/hullraspjam Huddersfield Raspberry Jam Meet every month on fourth Saturday at Huddersfield Library. https://huddersfieldraspberryjam.co.uk North Kent Raspberry Pi User Group Every two weeks at Medway Makers, 12 Dunlin Drive, St Mary’s Island, Chatham ME4 3JE https://nkrpug.wordpress.com Preston Hackspace 28a, Good St, PR2 8UX. Open…

Specs Minimum: OS: Ubuntu 16.10 64-bit, SteamOS 2.0 CPU: Intel Core i3-4130, AMD FX8350 RAM: 8GB GPU: Nvidia GTX 680, 2GB (driver 367.57) HDD: 67GB NB: AMD and Intel graphics are not currently supported Recommend: CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K RAM: 16GB GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060, 6GB Two years on from the ‘Aug Event’, in which augmented people around the world were driven violently insane, killing millions. Ordinary people now eye every augmented person as killers. This is the world of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Augmented people are now second-class citizens, harassed by the police, viewed with suspicion and sent to live in slums. The city of Prague is at the heart of this anti-aug upswell, which also happens to be Jensen’s new home, thanks to his latest employer, counter-terrorist agency…

VNC isn’t the only protocol in town for accessing the remote desktop and you can use a few applications in this Roundup to connect to other protocols besides VNC. However, RealVNC, TightVNC and TigerVNC only support the VNC protocol. Both TigerVNC and TightVNC have a server as well but the latest version of the TightVNC server is only available for Windows and along with the desktop client, the version for Linux is for an older, unmaintained version. RealVNCtoo only supports the VNC protocol which it can tunnel through via SSH, but it’s the only client in this Roundup that has its own branded clients for the Android and iOS mobile platforms. Also, unlike some of the other clients, RealVNChas a multiplatform server component and works best when the clients are…

There are several other remote desktop clients and solutions that you can use out there. While we’ve only covered the most popular and actively developed VNC clients, there are several others. There’s KDE’s Krdc, TurboVNC, and x11vnc. Also as previously noted, VNC isn’t the only remote desktop protocol in town. Another popular one is the proprietary protocol NoMachine NX. If you aren’t averse to proprietary solutions there’s also the TeamViewer client and Google’s Chrome Remote Desktop tool. One solution that uses remote desktop sharing technology is iTALC. This is an open source solution for remotely accessing, controlling and managing classroom computers and uses VNC’s RFB protocol. And finally, if you just wish to access a single application and care more about security than sheer nippiness then you can just enable…

Smart locks can be expensive and can be easier to hack than pick. Some insurers won’t cover homes protected by smart locks, such as the Yale ‘Keyless’ Digital Door Lock (right), unless combined with a mortice lock as they currently don’t have an insurance rating. On the plus side they look very, very cool, so try to follow some best practices if you’re determined to go ahead with using one. Presumably, you will be installing a smart lock as you don’t wish it to be picked manually, [people still like to open doors during power cuts?–Ed] so try to find one that only opens electronically. That said, try to find a lock with an alternative method for entry. In the case of the Yale lock, you can enter a code…

Some smart hubs aren’t an integrated physical device, like Samsung’s, but are offered via a website, e.g. Wyliodrin (www.wyliodrin.com) or Prota OS (https://prota.info/prota) which can be installed on the Raspberry Pi. The underlying ethos of digital smart hubs seems to be avoiding the expense of buying an off-the-shelf solution, such as Amazon Echo, but also the trouble of building a system from scratch by connecting multiple Pis. The interface for such hubs is quite intuitive and sometimes may not involve any programming, but the use of flowcharts to determine the behaviour of different devices, such as the Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Samsung Smart Appliances. This said, there is little they can offer that software such as Home Assistant can’t do already, although it may take more time and patience. Many…

“The United Kingdom now has some of the strictest surveillance laws in the world.” Now that the Investigatory Powers Act has been enshrined into the statute books, the UK now has some of the strictest surveillance laws in the world [yay, UK no.1!–Ed]. ISPs are obliged to keep records of clients’ internet histories which can be accessed by a variety of organisations. VPN usage has skyrocketed as more and more people realise their communications may be subject to warrantless interception, or stored without appropriate protections, increasing the likelihood of theft by hackers. We’ve covered this from the other (client) side before—it’s easy to set up a Tor router using a Raspberry Pi [see Tutorials, p71 LXF196], to configure NetworkManagerto connect through a commercial VPN provider, or even to set up…

Mostly ARMless Linus Torvalds made his now famous announcement over 25 years ago, stating that his kernel would be 386 only. The processor is now 31 years old, yet our desktop and laptop computers are still using a backwards-compatible derivative of that architecture. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel did what Linus said it wouldn’t and expanded to cover other architectures. Much of the expansion is taking place with the various ARM architectures. These processors are mainly used in low-power devices, such as mobile phones and our beloved Raspberry Pi. They are reasonably fast and far more power efficient than the x86 CPU family. Modern phones and tablets use quad- (and octal-) core versions with accelerated graphics, they are hardly slow, yet when did you see a desktop running ARM? Sure, some…

Ansible has a configuration file that it looks for in a number of places. These are, in order of their priority: ansible.cfg in the current directory, followed by ~/.ansible.cfg and finally /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg. These are used to set up how Ansible operates. For instance, you may have a directory that contains all your playbooks and put ansible.cfg in here. Then you can set hostfile = hosts in here to have Ansible look for the hosts file in the current directory too. You then have a self-contained Ansible environment that you can easily back up or set up as a git repos. You can also set up variables for individual hosts or groups. These are found in the group_vars and host_vars directories in the same location as the hosts file. For example,…

My first encounter with the Raspberry Pi began at the school where I worked, when myself and a colleague, Dave Grainger, began to teach the girls at our school Computer Science in September 2014. We based a lot of what we were teaching them around the Pi and physical computing. Since then both Dave and myself have become Certified Raspberry Pi Educators and have taken the skills we’ve learnt and used them to further develop and enrich what we teach our students. Dave also graduated from the first Skycademy course and, under Dave’s direction, a group of students and I have had the pleasure of launching three Pi computers into the stratosphere attached to High Altitude Balloons and recovered them many miles away! We now also have a small team…

Our menu is awesome but it’s stuck inside a directory and rather cumbersome to use, so let’s add our menu as a command that’s available system wide. First we need to change the permissions of our script so that it is executable. Open a Terminal and navigate to where your script is located, typically /home/pi and use: Now that our script is executable we now need to trim the file name to remove the ‘.sh’. In a terminal, we shall use the mv command to alter the name of the file: The mv command is primarily used to move files and now we shall use the same command with sudo power to move our command to a directory that will enable any user to access the command. In the terminal,…

Minetest has three fundamental object classes: Nodes These are blocks from the world Tools Weapons or other implements. Craftitems Miscellaneous items (e.g. sticks, paper, minerals) When you come to writing your own mods, you’ll need to register any new objects you define in a file called init.lua , using, for example, the minetest.register_node() method. Any mod must contain at least this initialisation file, inside a directory contained either in ~/.minetest/ mods for per-user mods, or /usr/share/minetest/mods for global ones. As well as objects, you can also define crafting recipes, for example, if we add the following clause to the mobs mod’s init.lua file then we will be able to craft a Nyan Cat rainbow block using an apple and a block of dirt: If only real life, were like this.…

Our expert Shashank Sharma has been writing about open source software since 2004. He spends his days practising the art of being a trial lawyer in Delhi. Cockpit Learn how to administer remote servers from within a browser Cockpit provides a web-based interface for admins to monitor and manage multiple Linux servers. You can use it to start and stop services, inspect logs and perform storage management etc. Although designed for administrators, the lightweight and intuitive interface make it ideal for home servers and small businesses. However, unlike other admin tools Cockpit doesn’t have a vast feature list of its own. In fact, all it does is provide you a means to access your server and change settings. This is why Cockpit doesn’t require any configuration or infrastructure—it’s ready to…

Our expert Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and avid Arch Linux user. He’s always on the hunt for geeky memorabilia. Git Create your own repository and track file changes for quick rollback Git is a popular versioning control system (VCS) that’s designed to serve two essential tasks. First, it allows users to track changes to a file, which makes it possible to identify and correct mistakes. Second, its distributed nature means that a large number of users can edit these files at the same time. What’s more, the system can keep track of all the changes made by the myriad users independently. In the Linux ecosystem, Git repositories (repos) are frequently used by developers to allow everyday users access to the latest release of their software while…

Our expert Nick Peers has got big plans for his rapidly growing collection of Raspberry Pis. He’s hoping that Wyliodrin could help him break through the final frontier of smart home tech. Wyliodrin Wyliodrin Start programming IoT projects with your Raspberry Pi Ah, the good old Internet of Things. It’s starting to coalesce into something less gimmicky and more useful, but how do you get started with integrating it into your own projects? If you’re planning on using your Raspberry Pi, the answer will likely involve coding of some kind, and in most cases, that coding will be done in Python. This is all well and good, but if you’re new to programming or your Pi is running headless, you’ll want a more user-friendly environment to interact with it, which…

After a successful Drupal 8 installation, you will most likely need to install some modules. First, click the ‘Extend’ option to see the list of all your currently installed modules. On the right column there’s a small description about the purpose of each module. Please bear in mind that only the modules with a tick in front of them are enabled. You can find all available modules at www.drupal.org/project/project_module. A very handy module is called ctools (Chaos tool suite) and can be found at www.drupal.org/project/ctools. It’s mainly a module for developers that’s currently being ported to Drupal 8. Another very useful module for administrators is Administration menu and can be found at www.drupal.org/project/admin_ menu. This module changes the administration interface—once again this module is being ported to Drupal 8 and is…

You can use Google fonts in your HTML output, which makes it more beautiful. (The full list of Google fonts can be found at https://fonts.google.com where you can select the fonts that interest you). After selecting a font, Google will tell you the HTML code that you’ll need to put in your HTML file in order to use it. After embedding the required code, you will need some extra code to actually use the font. For example, if you selected the Bungee Inline font, you first need to put the next code into the <head> of your HTML document in order to load the font: Then, you need to write the following bit of CSS to modify the font of a text: You can see the how helloWorld.html will look…

There are two ways to execute Python code: as an autonomous script or by manually specifying the Python executable. Both ways work but creating autonomous scripts that look like shell scripts the better way to program Alternatively, you can run python and enter the Python shell where you can execute commands interactively. When testing code and learning new things, this is the preferred way of running Python code. Executing the Python shell produces the next output: As you can see, uses Python version 2.7.9. (See the top right for interactions with the Python shell where various search and replace operations are performed.)…

I’ve moved from Windows and I’m confused by installing software. Why can’t I download a file from a website to install it? Linux distributions (distros) go to great pains to ensure that all the software they offer works well together, so they provide a curated collection called a repository (repo). I see, is that the only reason for doing it this way? Most distros use some form of digital signing for packages, meaning you can be confident the software you install is as intended and not tampered with. That makes sense, what else? The package manager can download the list of packages regularly and let you know when updates are available, without you having to check manually or individual packages needing to ‘phone home’. So it’s more secure and convenient…

What is Linux? How do I install it? Is there an equivalent of MS Office? What’s this command line all about? How do I install software? Open Index.html on the disc to find out Installing openSUSE Leap 1 Partition your drive In many cases, the installer can make good decisions about the best layout for your partition. Don’t let the many subvolumes throw you, this is because openSUSE uses Btrfs by default. 2 Select your partition layout You can also create your own partition layout, using any or none of RAID, encryption, logical volumes or Btrfs subvolumes. Unless you know exactly what they want trust the installer. 3 Choose your desktop You are given a choice of KDE, Gnome or Xfce desktops, or none at all if you only want…

The Document Foundation has announced MUFFIN (My User Friendly & Flexible Interface), designed to make using LibreOffice easier and more enjoyable. The key principles of MUFFIN is ‘My’, which refers to the personal UI that will adapt itself to a user’s way of working—rather than a one size fits all UI. It must also be user-friendly, with a modular approach that will allow users to ‘set their own level of user friendliness’ although we’re not sure why anyone would deliberately want to create an intentionally un-user friendly interface. It must also be flexible enough to run comfortably on the wide range of devices running LibreOffice. MUFFIN will be available with LibreOffice 5.3, and you can find out more at http://bit.ly/MuffinOnLibreOffice. TechRepublic has released a range of predictions for 2017 (http://bit.ly/LinuxAt5Percent),…

Those books I thank you very much for the two books that you mailed to me. They arrived here yesterday. You see, our post is a little slow. I read the one about Ubuntu and will surely try a couple of things. The other about Ultimate Linux will next receive serious attention. Hopefully, I will know a lot more after reading that. I did have problems with my HP Scanner working with Linux. Then, your books arrived and there I find the solution. I followed the guide and it works! Next on the list will be Wine. Would it help if I partook some of the excellent wine that is produced hereabouts while trying to install Wine? Thanks again and all the very best. James Gibbens, South Africa Neil says:…

The ease of simply buying and installing a smart home solution out of the box is very tempting. Remember though that convenience can come at the expense of security. For instance, Google offers a ‘learning’ thermostat as part of its Nest series of smart devices. In 2015, TrapX Security demonstrated a type of ‘jailbreak’ involving the device’s USB port which enabled attackers to access a W-Fi network and other devices. Part of the success of such an attack is that many IoT providers don’t trouble to encrypt data like Wi-Fi passwords on the device to keep down costs. Other exploits are more obscure. In August 2015, researchers uncovered a vulnerability in Samsung’s Smart Fridges. The onboard display can show events from Google Calendar, but the fridge failed to verify SSL…

ON THE STAFF RESPONSE “In typical geek fashion people started to donate time and resources for free.” The whole juggernaut that is now Linux on Dell started as the brainchild of two core individuals, Barton George (Senior Principal Engineer) and Jared Dominguez (OS Architect and Linux Engineer). It was their vision that began it all back in 2012. It was long hours, uncertain futures and sheer belief that people really did want Linux laptops that sustained them. Here is the untold story of how Dell gained the top spot in pre-installed Linux on laptops. Where do you start when no one has ever really even touched such a concept? The duo did have some experience of the area before. George explained that the XPS and M3800 Linux developer’s laptops weren’t…

Tor can be found in all the major distro’s repos. The package in the Debian repos will not be the latest version, but it does see security fixes back-ported to it speedily so for all but the most paranoid it will be fine to use. Those of a paranoid bent may prefer to add the Tor Project’s own repos by following the instructions at https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en. Guidance from the Tor project explicitly advises against using the packages in the Ubuntu repos though, so if you’re using version 16.04 of Canonical’s finest create a file /etc/apt/sources/list.d/tor.list with the following contents: Replace xenial with yakkety if you’re running 16.10. Next fetch the Tor Project’s GPG key (this can be copied and pasted from the Ubuntu and Debian section of the website). and add…

Newsflash! There’s a new kernel out! OK, that’s not really news. In fact for the first half of December, it seemed more newsworthy when there was a day without a new kernel. What is different about 4.9 is that Linus Torvalds is “pretty sure” that it’s the biggest release ever. He is basing that on the number of commits that have been made. There have been releases with more new lines of code, but they had a small number of very large commits, sometimes due to reorganisation. Some of the increased code base is due to the inclusion of the Greybus hardware protocol, part of Google’s, now cancelled, Project Ara modular smartphone. This provides a high-speed interface for connecting parts of mobile devices and is already being used. There are…

Ansible is a free (in both senses of the word) and open source system. There is also Ansible Tower, a commercial management system for Ansible. Developed by Red Hat, Ansible Tower provides a graphical interface to Ansible, not only for developing and running playbooks but also for deploying them to other administrators or teams, as well as logging what was done where and by whom. It’s overkill for small networks, especially at the quoted prices, but may be worth considering when administering dozens or even hundreds of servers. Ansible itself scales well and is capable of managing that many servers without help, but Ansible Tower will help you manage who is managing the servers.…

Our expert Jonni Bidwell is inspired by all this crafting. Rather than keep up with containers, agile development and BUS1, he sees a happier and simpler future whittling spoons in the forest. The Minecraft Pi Edition, thanks to its Python API, provides an excellent way to introduce programming as well as a bit of 3D geometry. But it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as the commercial version of Minecraft and, furthermore, hasn’t seen an update in many moons. There’s even a petition to get Minecraft’s developers, Mojang to update it (http://bit.ly/MojangDevMinecraftPi). You should probably add your name to it. In the meantime, those wishing to add some code to their voxel-based adventures have a couple of other options. There are add-ons for the official (non-free) Minecraftrelease (such as ComputerCraftvia the Forge…

Our expert Nick Peers has been playing around with computers for over 30 years and has been dabbling with Linux for the best part of a decade. Terminal Change the default Gnome Terminal to an alternative emulator When you access the shell through Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, you’re employing the services of a terminal emulator or ‘terminal window’. Simply put, this emulates a command-line terminal in a desktop window. All of this is useful background information, but not exactly critical, which is why Ubuntu’s standard terminal window is commonly known as the Terminal. It’s packed with useful features and for many people is the only tool they’ve ever known for controlling Ubuntu from the command line within Unity (or indeed any Gnome-based desktop). But it’s not the only emulator out there,…

Cockpit comprises several different components. The cockpit-ws service launched by Systemd supplies the web server—the ‘ws’ stands for web server. The cockpit-ws service remains in the background, and is automatically activated when Systemd detects Cockpit trying to establish a connection on the default port 9090. A cockpit session also launches the cockpit-ws and cockpit-bridge programs which run in the background. The cockpit-ws program is the web service component of Cockpit and manages the communication between the browser and other components such as cockpit-bridge. The cockpit-bridge program is similarly used to transmit messages between the web front-end and the server. When you add another server to your Cockpit session, cockpit-ws establishes contact with it via SSH. It then takes control of the cockpit-bridge program that’s running on the newly added server…

The Git project relies on a vast and unique amount of terminology to describe its many functions. Here’s a look at the essential ones you need to understand to make sense of git versioning operations. clone This is used to refer to a local copy of the remote repo. branch This refers to a revision of a repo. commit Used to identify the process of saving changes to a file in your local copy. fetch You can use this command to retrieve any changes from the remote repo without merging them. merge Combine changes from one repos (remote) with another (local). pull Grab changes from a remote repo and merge them with the local copy. push This is used to send changes to a file in your local copy to…

The quickest way to get Wyliodrin running on your Raspberry Pi is to download the fully formed Raspbian image with Wyliodrin included. Advanced users can, however, add it on to an existing Raspbian installation, although be warned: it’ll take hours to complete and we strongly recommend you back up your install. First, boot or ssh into your Pi and download the Raspberry Pi install script: Once downloaded, open raspi-config ( sudo raspi-config ) and make sure the filesystem has been expanded. You also need to select ‘Advanced Options’ and select ‘A6 SPI – Enable/ Disable automatic loading’. Repeat for ‘A7 I2C – Enable/Disable automatic loading’ and ‘A8 Serial – Disable serial shell’. Now sudo nano /boot/ config.txt and add this line dtparam=i2c1=on . Save and exit, then sudo nano /etc/modules…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos (@mactsouk) has an M.Sc. in IT from UCL and a B.Sc. in Mathematics, which makes him a DB-admining, software-coding, Unix-using, mathematical machine. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu. Drupal 8 Install and configure a Drupal website, add modules and use drush Drupal 8 is a Content Management System (CMS) that can help you build powerful websites. This tutorial will deal with the installation process, the drush command line utility, various Drupal 8 modules and highlight some useful but less obvious parts of the system. At the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a working Drupal 8 website, so start reading! This tutorial will develop a real website that you can access from the internet. In order to do that, you’ll need to set up proper DNS…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos (@mactsouk) has an M.Sc. in IT from UCL and a B.Sc. in Mathematics, which makes him a DB-admining, software-coding, Unix-using, mathematical machine. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu. D3.js (Data Driven Documents) is a JavaScript library that can help you bind random data to the Document Object Model (DOM) and apply data-driven transformations to the document. This tutorial contains more code than usual because D3.js needs a lot of code to plot things, because you’ll have to define transformations, styles and attributes in order to get the look you want. The good thing is that the code is reusable. You can get D3.js as follows: After uncompressing d3.zip, you will get various files including d3.js and d3.min.js. These two files contain exactly the same JavaScript code.…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos (@mactsouk) has an M.Sc. in IT from UCL and a B.Sc. in Mathematics, which makes him a DB-admining, software-coding, Unix-using, mathematical machine. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu. Python Use search and replace with regular expressions and create a GUI Being able to automatically process text can save you time and energy. So let’s learn how to efficiently work with text files by picking up the basics of text processing in Python, including search and replace using regular expressions, converting a date format to another and developing a graphical interface to make life easier. As you might be aware, two Python versions are currently being used. This tutorial uses the ‘older’ version (Python version 2.7.x) but you will have no difficulty following this tutorial if you…

This month we answer questions on: 1 Easy firewalls 2 Changing terminal fonts 3 ClamAV virus scanning 4 Installing Office on Linux 5 Missing software from Ubuntu ★ Setting up local email 1 Elementary Firewall Q Being your average non-technical computer user who is trying his best to embrace Linux and all its wonderful choice of distros can you explain in really easy to follow instructions how to set up a firewall? I’m using elementary OS on one PC and also run Ubuntu 14 and 16 on two others. I know you have explained this a few times in your publication, but it never seems to be easy to set up and the instructions always seem to be complete gobbledygook to the average computer user! Also, is it true that…

Have you ever looked though your filesystem to see what’s taking up so much space on the hard disk? If so, you may have come across the /proc directory in the root of the filesystem and wondered if you could do without some of those thousands of files, taking up maybe more than a gigabyte of space. The answer is no, you can’t remove them. The good news is that they take up no space on your hard drive, because /proc is a virtual filesystem. It’s not a collection of real files on your hard drive, it is a reflection of the state of your system as seen by the kernel and provided in the form of a filesystem to make it easy to work with. /proc contains a huge…