Table of contents for January 2022 in Linux Format

Last year, Apple launched a range of MacBooks and Macs that run on its own ARM-based M1 SoCs, in a break from relying on Intel hardware. It also recently launched two new MacBook Pros that come with either the M1 Pro or M1 Max chips, which are vastly more powerful versions of the M1. Coinciding nicely with this launch, Canonical has announced an update to its Multipass project (https://multipass.run). This will enable people to run Linux on Apple’s M1 hardware via an Ubuntu virtual machine, which can launch with a single command. According to Canonical in a blog post that can be read at https://bit.ly/lxf284ubuntum1, “developers on M1 can now get running on Linux in as little as 20 seconds.” Because the M1 Macs run on a new architecture, Linux…

At the time of writing, the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey), and it looks like PC gamers are embracing Linux… very, very slowly. For the fourth month in a row, Linux is now installed on over one per cent of PCs involved with the survey, rising to 1.13 per cent. That may not seem like a lot, but momentum is going in the right direction, at least. While the Steam Survey only involves people who a) use Steam and b) agree to take part, that’s still a decent sample size that gives us an idea of kind of hardware and software PC gamers are using. With the Linux-powered Steam Deck handheld coming in 2022, we expect this percentage to climb even further.…

Perfect Linux Just how things have moved on in the Linux world from when I first took an interest in the subject back in the 90s. You didn’t have many variants to choose from in the beginning and you seemed to struggle to find things to put on the CD some months, but I always looked forward to picking up the mag from my newsagent and see what’s new. My favourite was SUSE at the time, but I tried OpenSUSE and RedHat all with the same fail rates on my 486. I even ran BeOS, which I lost months on trying to get to work. It did in a fashion, but it didn’t have any hardware or software support. I didn’t care, though: I just loved the look of it,…

Meet Alder Lake, Intel’s all-new 12th gen processor architecture. It’s a core part of what may well be the beginning of Intel’s push-back against a resurgent AMD, but more than that, it’s an extremely good chip. And that’s really what counts, right? This Core i9 12900K represents the very best in Intel’s desktop 12th Generation processors, and what that means is it houses the Alder Lake architecture in its most performant form. Alder Lake is Intel’s first desktop processor to use the Intel 7 process node, which was previously referred to as Intel 10nm SuperFin. Smaller process means less power, less heat, more speed. The next notable change of the lot is the hybrid Core architecture. Intel is stuffing all of the K-series 12th Gen chips with two types of…

Microsoft has released the Stable version of its flagship Edge web browser for Linux, as it continues to embrace the Linux desktop. The Redmond-based champion of proprietary software has been testing Edge for Linux through the Dev Channel since October 2020, and the Beta Channel since May 2021, before deeming it worthy for the move up to the Stable channel. With the release, Edge for Linux joins its mainstream peers that you can use on all major desktop and mobile OSes, including Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Linux. Oddly, Microsoft decided to share the news of Edge for Linux graduating to the Stable channel amid a string of announcements on the first day of its Ignite conference for developers and IT professionals. However, for reasons unknown it hasn’t done a…

The user interface is probably the most important distinguishing aspect of these programs. The all have the same core function, so it’s down to how accessible they make these tasks. It’s a fine balancing act between providing access to enough features without overwhelming the interface with a multitude of buttons and menu options. It is not just about the number of settings, but the way in which they’re organised. The programs that combine power and ease of use tend to have a fairly simple interface that you can do most things with, and options that open more detailed lists of settings should you feel the need. The ability to preview any video edits, such as cropping, beforehand is useful, as is the option to transcode a short piece of the…

here may be times you need to work with the audio component of a video. You may simply want to remove the video component leaving only an audio file, or you may need to modify the audio in some way, such as altering the volume or adding a second track, maybe a commentary. All of the programs can adjust the codec and bit-rate used to encode the audio. Here we’re looking at manipulating the audio content. Handbrake is able to add audio tracks. It also enables you to set the gain and compression of existing audio. However, it doesn’t have a facility to include only the audio, converting a video to an audio file. Shutter Encoder can strip the video from a file. It will also accept additional audio files…

Since the Pi 4 has more graphical horsepower than its predecessors, it’s capable of playing ‘movie’ 4K resolution (4,096x2,160 as opposed to ‘TV’ 4K which is 3,840x2,160) and 10-bit (HEVC) content. It might not yet be capable of driving two 4K displays at 60Hz, but it can certainly drive one. You need to enable that feature by hand, as it will make the SoC run a little warmer than usual. You’ll need to enable SSH access and log in to your Kodi box to do this, remembering that Kodi has only one account, namely root. So the incantation will look like ssh root@192.168.x.x . Remember you can always find Kodi’s IP address from the status panel. Once you’re in you’d usually run raspi-config to enable this, but LibreELEC doesn’t include this program. Instead you’ll have to…

Chances are, being a Linux Format reader you’ll have already heard of Pop!_OS. This is an open source distro for STEM and creative users, created by System 76. Until now, Pop!_OS has been locked to x86 CPU platforms. However, a new version, powered by the latest Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” 64-bit release and geared towards the Raspberry Pi’s Arm CPU, has been unleashed upon the world. After downloading the image, we flashed Pop!_OS to a fresh 32GB micro SD card and popped it into a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM. We followed the set-up assistant to get our install configured for our language and Wi-Fi requirements. The install process wasn’t totally smooth – in fact it stalled when selecting our language, but a quick reboot and we were…

Twice each year, in June and November, the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers are revealed. Eagerly anticipated by the high-performance computing (HPC) community, the Top500.org list paints a picture of computing at the top end, and the difference from run-of-the-mill PCs is stark. Perusing lists from the list’s 28 years highlights various trends, including one that will be of particular interest to Linux Format readers. From the dominance of Unix in the early days, a remarkable change has taken place more recently. After making its first appearance in 1998, Linux was powering the majority of the top 500 computers by 2004, it became universal in 2017, and it has remained the only operating system used in the planet’s top supercomputers ever since. Why is Linux the dominant operating system in high-performance…

https://github.com/schollz/croc The biggest downside to using USB drives for transferring files between machines is their size limitation. At least, until you leave the USB drive on a bench in the park, or a coffee table. That’s when you realise that security is the bigger issue. This is why file transfer utilities are so popular. Most provide a convenient mechanism to share files across machines. Croc is one such command-line utility, with an impressive feature set. Unlike many file-sharing utilities that only support transfer of files between machines on the same network, Croc enables you to transfer files to any internet-capable machine. Not only that, the utility boasts of end-to-end encryption, and supports resuming partial or incomplete file transfers. Go Croc You’ll have to install Croc on both machines before you…

The 1980s home computer scene was such an important time in our (GenX) lives. Intel was yet to make its mark in the UK, and we still favoured Commodore, Sinclair and Amstrad machines. In 1982 the Cambridgeshire-based Tangerine Computer Systems released its Oric-1. This was a 1MHz MOS Technology 6502 CPU powered 8-bit computer that came with either 16 or 48KB of RAM. It was designed and priced to compete with Sinclair’s Spectrum. The Oric-1 and the ZX Spectrum shared one design trait: an awkward keyboard. Where the ZX Spectrum used “dead flesh” rubber keys, the Oric-1 used small, thin plastic keys that were a typist’s nightmare. This issue was later fixed in 1983 with the introduction of the Oric Atmos, essentially an Oric-1 with a better keyboard and improved…

Btrfs is a filing system (see Roundup LXF283) that can be used as an alternative to the more commonly known ext4. You might think it’s risky to entrust all of your data to a relatively unknown filesystem, but in fact the Btrfs project was started in 2007, and it’s the default filesystem in some of the major distributions such as Fedora and SUSE Linux. So, it’s regarded as stable, and in fact, Btrfs has a lot of features that are designed to increase the safety of file storage. Having said all that, for all of the potential advantages, there isn’t anything extra that you have to learn for normal, day-to-day use. Butter my FS Why switch over to Btrfs? Well, unlike the ext4 filesystem, it uses ‘copy on write’ file storage,…

Version: 1.2.1 Web: https://github.com/sezanzeb/key-mapper Years ago, Linux reached a high level of hardware compatibility with most peripheral devices, including keyboards and mice. Most input devices will just work out of the box when connected to a Linux machine (a brave statement! – Ed). However, many people require more fine-grain control and extra features, such as the ability to assign custom actions or keys to auxiliary buttons on these devices. In LXF211 we reviewed Piper, a program for controlling the extra buttons on a gaming mouse. Yet even though it was good, the range of supported device was limited. This time we’re highlighting Key Mapper, a more versatile input device manager. This application can help you reassign any button of the keyboard to input a custom character, or carry out an…

Everyone loves 2D cellular automaton, to explore this exciting subject we’re going to use Game of Life as our working example. This isn’t to be confused with The Game of Life, the family board game that was first produced in 1960 and is still going strong today. So, let’s begin by explaining how Game of Life the non-board game edition works! Before we start you can get the code packs for this tutorial from the LXF Archive here: https://bit.ly/lxf284code. Game of Life doubles up as both a programming exercise and an introduction to theoretical mathematics and computer science (don’t let that put you off! – Ed), but in this tutorial we’re only dealing with the former. Although it might not seem it, the game is Turing Complete, which means that…

Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! Being able to reliably identify the physical location of an IP address is an important element for a lot of online activities. From ecommerce stores needing to calculate the correct sales taxes (or import regulations) to detecting fake social media accounts, knowing where visitors to your website are coming from is all vital information. Whatever your reasons, you’re left with two questions: how do you find out this information from an IP address; and can you trust the accuracy of the source? Most GeoIP (the industry jargon) services are slow at updating their databases, and are incredibly secretive about how they get their information. While some providers (like Maxmind) enable you to download a version of its database periodically, this…

New developer documentation from Valve (https://bit.ly/lxf284valvedoc) for game developers who want to create – or port – their games for the company’s upcoming Steam Deck handheld console recommends using Manjaro KDE for teams that don’t have access to early developer kits of the console. While Valve has sent out dev kits to some teams, it wasn’t able to send them to everyone who wanted one. However, according to the documentation, developers can test their games using Manjaro KDE and either a PS4 or PS5 controller, which will “give you the best coverage for the kinds of input Steam Deck includes (as it has trackpad and gyro).” Manjaro KDE is Valve’s pick, because the Steam Deck will be running SteamOS 3, which, like Manjaro, is based on Arch Linux, and will…

PDF editing The Linux Format review of PDF Mix Tool (page 81 of LXF281), starts with “Ever wondered why it’s not possible to edit a PDF document?” As I’ve edited hundreds, yes hundreds, of PDF documents one wonders where Alexander Tolstoy has been? Open a PDF with LibreOffice Draw, edit it and then export it. Master PDF Editor will also, though not as easily, edit PDFs. PDF Mix Tool does not edit PDFs. It will combine pages, but not edit text. A lot of PDFs written using MS WORD don’t display properly with Document Viewer (Evince), the default Mint PDF viewer. If opened in Draw and then exported (the file’s name changed), they will then display correctly. Delete the original and rename the new version to the original name. Sandy Ferguson Neil says… I think that was a rhetorical question, because he’s about to show…

NuTyx is a nifty little independent rolling-release distro that’s taken some of the best ideas from the CRUX distro to create a functional and lightweight desktop for the experienced Linux campaigners. Like most rolling-release distros, NuTyx occasionally issues snapshots that can be used to install the distro, such as the 21.10 release that ships with updated versions of critical components like the kernel, and the desktop environments. Despite being a one-man show, the distro supports a large number of desktop environments, from lightweight ones like Mate and LXQt to heavyweights like KDE and Gnome, and publishes different ISOs for them, including 32-bit ones for the lightweight desktops. For the past couple of years all NuTyx releases have sported a Live environment, which you can use to explore the distro and…

One morning in the New Mexico desert, a 27-year-old theoretical physicist turns up late for work. The next thing he knows monsters are spilling out of portals from another world, turning his colleagues into zombies, and generally making a mess of the top-secret Black Mesa Research Facility. The Half-Life series is really just one long bad day at work, and Black Mesa is a Valve-approved, fanmade chance to relive Gordon Freeman’s disastrous morning – but with prettier visuals, combat and physics lifted from Half-Life 2, bigger levels and other upgrades. Black Mesa sticks to Half-Life in terms of structure. You take the tram into work, watch in horror as the resonance cascade floods the facility with aliens, dodge headcrabs in the office complex, clash with the HECU Marines, deal with…

One key aspect of video encoding software is the range of formats it can handle, both input and output. Most of the programs score well in this area when reading from files, but only VLC and Handbrake offer easy reading from optical discs. Shutter Encoder has a DVD Rip function, but it didn’t seem to do anything beyond throwing out a Java error. Encoding options are a lot more varied. Most of these use FFmpeg for the actual processing and FFmpeg has a lot of options as well as several filters. It also means that they can support all of the input and output codecs that FFmpeg handles. The question with GUI programs that try to make transcoding more accessible to non-gurus is how much of this do you expose…

Each of these programs has its own advantages and disadvantages, and some additional features that may be useful to you. For example, Shutter Encoder is able to save generated videos directly to an FTP server, which is useful if you’re transcoding videos for web use. It also has other features aimed more towards video production, so is worth considering if your needs go beyond format or size conversion. Because of its simplicity, Curlew doesn’t have too much in the way of features, unique or otherwise. It does enable you to pass a directory of videos for batch transcoding. It also has an option to merge the videos as it transcodes, creating a single output file from multiple input files. These two features obviously complement each other well. VLC is able…

Ever since there have been Raspberry Pis people have been making media centres out of them. Even the original Pi, thanks to its VideoCore SoC, was able to play 1080p content smoothly, 256MB of RAM notwithstanding. Media centre distros quickly sprang up to exploit this and for a time using your Raspberry Pi as a media centre was seen, rather unfairly, as an unimaginative thing to do. Media players on Linux have a rich history (and MPlayer is still going strong), but the first to make it on to the Pi has its roots on the original Xbox in the early 2000s. Apart from being a platform for playing Microsoft’s Halo, this console was very popular with homebrew enthusiasts, since (thanks to easily exploited buffer overflows in popular titles) they…

Making and booting a LibreELEC SD card follows much the same procedure as any other Pi operating system. You just need to ensure you use the correct image. LibreELEC 10 only supports the Pi 4 at present, but this will change in future (see box, previous page). Download the image from the releases page at https://libreelec.tv/downloads/raspberry. For Pis Zero to 3, use the latest image from the previous 9.2 series which you’ll find by scrolling down. Or consider investing in one of the ‘other’ boards supported by the new edition, such as the Pine64. There’s also a generic image for running on a regular 64-bit PC, or a ready-togo virtual machine image. Oh, and there’s an official LibreELEC USB-SD Creator tool for macOS, Linux and Windows. But it didn’t work…

The Raspberry Pi 400 arrived in late 2020. Its GPIO is the same as the Raspberry Pi but rotated 90 degrees, which breaks compatibility with most HATs and pHATs. Adafruit’s Cyberdeck Bonnet is a 45 degree GPIO breakout that also provides Stemma/Stemma QT connections for compatible devices. Adafruit’s device connects to all 40 pins of the GPIO. The connection is strong, with no give when we use a little pressure on the board. There's no software installation required to use the Cyberdeck, but if we want to use the Stemma/Stemma QT ports (also known as Qwiic connections) then we need to locate the GPIO pins used in the connectors, which for Stemma QT are the I2C pins and work directly with them. The other method is to install the CircuitPython…

We’re pretty sure that your home network has plenty of devices attached to it. Ensuring files are backed up for all these devices, or sharing files between them, might be more tricky than you’d care to admit. That’s okay, you’re among friends here. A neat solution to such problems can be found by attaching a NAS (network attached storage) to your network. On it, you can store large media files, backups and other files of importance. You could use memory sticks, external drives and the cloud, but with some projects it makes more sense to store them at home and have them available to all the devices in your home. It may seem more logical to set up a file server. Remember, though, that you may need to use several…

The idea was simple. We sat around a table in the socially distanced (by about 400 miles) Linux Format-distributed HQ looking at the specs of the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 and someone said, “I bet you could run a half decent social media server off that.” “You’re on," said the editor. “I want 1,500 words by the first half of next week.” It was a couple of hours later when it was discovered that the launch day specs – eagerly repeated in almost all online publications – were not quite right. The Raspberry Pi OS would not have a 64-bit kernel on the £13.20 Pi Zero 2… at least, not for a while. Undeterred, we discovered a workaround that enabled us to use a second Raspberry Pi (a 4B…

The identity of the first supercomputer is debatable, and probably dates back to the late 1950s. However, one of the best-known early machines was 1975’s Cray-1, which optimised the original hardware approach. In these early days of the microprocessor, computers were nearly all based on CPUs built using discrete components, and which were designed for a particular machine by its manufacturer. In the case of the Cray-1, that processor was different from those designed for mainstream machines; it was a vector processor. Such an approach is now a feature of mainstream microprocessors, in enabling a single instruction to work on multiple values in parallel. Yet back in the 1970s, it was the sole domain of supercomputers. With the increasing availability and performance of microprocessors, in time all this changed. Instead…

1 Choose what to scan Stacer’s clean-up tool can scan for five types of file: package caches, crash reports, application logs, program caches, and trash. All are deselected by default, so tick an individual item (or items) to select them, or click Select All before clicking the blue magnifying glass button to perform your search. 2 Review results After the scan completes, you’ll see a summary of how many files of each type were found, and the total size of files within each category. To review what files have been found, click the > button next to a category. A list of filenames will be displayed, along with the amount of space that each file takes up. 3 Choose what to delete You’ll see tick boxes next to individual files…

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Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! This issue we’re going to build a software-based studio using Qtractor (www.qtractor.org), a powerful open source DAW (digital audio workstation). Qtractor is particularly strong when used as a MIDI sequencer. If the term MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry. Essentially, MIDI enables you to record every note that makes up a piece of music as a series of numbers. These numbers represent the exact time that the note was struck, it’s velocity (volume) and the duration of the note. MIDI also specifies the cables and signals needed to connect computers to instruments. Next month, we’ll delve further into Qtractor’s audio recording and manipulation facilities, which are fairly decent as well. MIDI became popular upon…

Part Three Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! Back in the early 2000s, RSS was the coolest gimmick in town. It was a way to get the latest headlines from your favourite blogs without needing to wait for your dial-up connection to load the complete webpage at 14.4kbps. A short snippet of text and a headline would let you know which Geocities sites had been updated, and independent bloggers would proudly syndicate their stories to other members of their webring to scroll in an endless ticker-tape parade across the screen. The garish displays are long gone (thankfully), but RSS is more powerful than ever, and in part three of our virtual private server (VPS) series, we’ll show you how you can use RSS to avoid trackers, blast past…

Snapper (http://snapper.io) is a well-known Btrfs helper tool that works from the command line. It can do most of the things that you can do with the bare Btrfs commands and more besides. There’s also a GUI front end that looks a bit like Timeshift. Snapper is now installed as part of Suse Linux and can tie into the YaSt configuration tool of that distribution. It works with deb-based distributions such as Ubuntu as well. One handy feature that we liked was that, by default, it snapshots the entire system every time the package management tools are invoked Unfortunately, at time of writing, Snapper needs a bit of tweaking to work on Ubuntu because of the way that Ubuntu names its root subvolume. It can be done, by following various…

Version: 1.3.1 Web: https://gitlab.com/mildlyparallel/pscircle A typical Linux workstation with a graphical desktop has a world of background processes that most people find hard to parse and fully understand. Moreover, randomly killing processes that seem useless or just odd often results in system errors. A better understanding of what’s what under the hood would come in handy, but traditional UNIX-era tools such as ps or top don’t help much. How about displaying processes as a circle graph? Step forward Pscircle, which gives you a much clearer representation of everything that your system runs. A Pscircle graph is worth a thousands words! How many child and auxiliary processes does your web browser spawn? Have Systemd tentacles have already wound their way down to your terminal window and desktop notifications? Looking around the…

Version: 1.0.8 Web: https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager Etcher, SUSE Imagewriter or Gnome Disks are the three most widely used utilities (not counting dd) for writing ISO images on to USB thumb drives. You’ll need to do this when trying out another Linux distribution on a bare metal setup instead of a VM. However, we’ve got a handy little application that has some cool advantages over existing tools. USB Imager provides a minimal GUI for doing a single job: flashing target USB devices, and it’s a cross-platform tool that provides the same experience under Linux, macOS, Windows and Raspberry Pi. However, while most other competitors support only ISO images, USB Imager has a longer list of supported input files. It can transfer any file you throw at it, but of course we were curious…

Version: 2.2.9 Web: www.srb2.org Sonic Robo Blast 2, or SRB2 for short, is a colourful, completely unofficial 3D game featuring Sonic the Hedgehog-like character. The fun thing is that while this a free community-made implementation of the original Sonic series that was once released for the Sega Genesis console, the actual SRB2 engine is based on Doom. To be more precise, the game makes use of the open source Doom Legacy engine (which is still actively maintained). Consequently, it’s not a classic platformer, but rather a first-person… runner! The artwork, the bright and happy ambiance and numerous in-house engine tweaks prevented us from saying ‘shooter’, especially since Sonic doesn’t actually shoot enemies – he jumps over them! SRB2 has a branching level system. There are several level packs called zones,…

Linus Gabriel Sebastian, known for his popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, recently posted a video (https://bit.ly/lxf284linustechtips) in which he attempts to move from Windows to Linux on his main PC. While the video highlights some of the issues that Windows users may encounter when using a Linux distro, there is a moment in the video where Linus tries and fails to install Steam. Steam is one of the easiest game launchers to install in Linux thanks to Valve, the company behind it, being a big supporter of gaming on Linux. When Linus encountered these issues, people began to examine what may be causing them. It seems that Linus’ choice of distro, Pop!_ OS, and its configuration were to blame, as the package dependencies can become convoluted, especially when installing…

Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that uses the OpenGL implementation of Mesa to enable hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has got it running on non-Mesa drivers, most noticeably Nvidia’s proprietary Vulkan driver, with some impressive results. With the Nvidia 495.44 beta driver and his latest Zink code, he discovered that the graphically intensive Tomb Raider reboot saw a big leap in performance. While Blumenkrantz admits on his blog (https://bit.ly/lxf284zink) that “I doubt that Zink maintains this performance gap for all titles,” this is still exciting stuff, and other games will benefit from this.…

Firefox has changed a lot over the past few years. NPAPI plugins were all but banished in 2017 when Firefox 52 was released. Firefox 57 (Quantum) brought a new look, a newly engineered browser engine and a new add-on architecture to replace the venerable XUL (XML User Interface Language). The XUL architecture was powerful, perhaps too powerful since it enabled add-ons to do pretty much anything they wanted, including to other add-ons, the browser core or even the underlying operating system. XUL (and XPCOM, Mozilla’s bridge between C++ and JavaScript) gave a vibrancy to the Firefox add-on ecosystem, but given the security implications it was axed in favour of the new WebExtensions mechanism. Such changes have their detractors, including, we dare say, the authors of the tens of thousands of…

Rather than spend another year or two in development, this distribution has been released into the wild. We’re big fans of flair here at LXF Towers, and this distro has enough of it to make up for all of its shortcomings. Itd Os is an Ubuntu 20.04-based distro that uses the KDE desktop. It describes itself as a user-friendly OS with a focus on privacy. While we can vouch for the user-friendly aspect, there aren’t any apparent or extra privacy measures that we could spot in the distro. As for its user-friendly nature, the distro’s developer has done a nice job of customising the KDE desktop to mimic the look and feel of macOS. To pull off the deception, the developer has used a healthy dose of Plasma and GTK…

FFmpeg can do more than decode a video from one format and encode it in another. Between those two steps it can apply a range of filters to the video. So how do these GUIs handle filters? Avidemux has a separate filters list, split into categories, from which you can add and configure filters. Avidemux doesn’t provide options for cropping and scaling in its standard functions, so it’s good to see that these operations can be performed with filters. Shutter Encoder doesn’t give direct access to the FFmpeg filters, but it does provide a selection of processing functions – mainly those most applicable to the program’s primary intended use as part of a video-editing workflow. HandBrake also has a decent number of filters available, but not the full FFmpeg set,…

Top spot goes to HandBrake. This is the most complete of the programs while still maintaining ease of use. Of particular note is the huge range of output presets, which mean you should rarely need to delve into the mysterious world of video encoding settings. Instead, just pick your intended use and let the preset take care of the details. The HandBrake GUI contains more options that the others, with the possible exception of Shutter Encoder, but it does so in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the user. The tabbed interface is a great help here, showing the details in small chunks. An honourable second place goes to Avidemux. While the program does look rather dated, the interface works well. The lack of a decent set of output presets, the…

LibreELEC was forked from OpenELEC, which began life in 2009 as a minimal Linux flavour for running XBMC. This also found its way to the Pi very soon after the latter’s inception. In 2017, though, the project was abandoned and most of the developers joined the LibreELEC project. LibreELEC describes itself as Just Enough OS (JEOS) to run Kodi and strategically times its releases to coincide with those of the latter. Kodi 19, codenamed Matrix, was a big release and in late August 2021 this was incorporated into LibreELEC 10.0.0. Since then there have been a few point revisions of both. When we wrote this feature, we used LibreELEC 10.0.1 with Kodi 19.3. By the time you read it, it’s likely that newer editions will be available. Breaking changes We were…

You might have seen the Ambilight system found on some Philips TVs, sometimes known as Bias Lighting. If not, the idea is quite simple: a perimeter of RGB LEDs is fixed to the back of the television, and these are light up in correspondence with what’s happening on screen. This has the effect of extending the image onto the walls behind the screen. There are a number of approaches to recreating this system with open source tools and plugging this into Kodi. The most popular is called Hyperion, which has been around for about as long as Ambilight TVs. Hyperion is flexible, and a common setup is to have Kodi running on a device, your PC say, and connected to an HDMI splitter and capture device. The HDMI capture is…

The evil space bats have formed an alliance with the cruel space hippos and we need to blast them back to their home world! Okay, in reality this is a simple space shooting game with a twist. It has two levels of fun and scores that vary depending on the level. So let’s save planet Earth! Scratch 3 should come pre-installed on your Raspberry Pi OS image, but just in case it is missing you can be installed from the main menu, under Preferences>Recommended Software. Scratch 3 is found in the Programming category – place a tick in the box and click Apply to install. Once installed, Scratch 3 can be found in the main menu under Programming. Open Scratch 3 (on first start Scratch may take a little while…

The financial costs of supercomputers are eye-watering, but so too can be the cost to the environment. It’s not surprising, therefore, that energy efficiency is of ever greater concern. Japan’s Fugaku, today’s fastest supercomputer, consumes no less than 28.33MW of electricity. That might sound a lot, and it is. It’s approximately the consumption of a UK town or city of 50,00 people. It’s not clear how much that would cost in Japan, although it was widely reported that the Titan supercomputer, which was the world’s fastest back in 2012, and which consumed 8.2MW, cost $9 million per year to run. We can imagine that it would also have been responsible for pumping quite a bit of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Starting in 2007, the Top500 list has been joined…

System monitoring tools are priceless. They provide an at-a-glance view of your PC’s health and performance, usually in the form of graphs and lists, spanning such areas as CPU, memory network and hard disk usage on the hardware side, and running processes and services on the software side. Ubuntu offers its own tool in the form of System Monitor, which you can open via the Launcher’s search tool. This provides three simple views: Processes, Resources and File Systems. The most graphical of these is Resources, with a mixture of line graphs and pie charts revealing CPU, memory (including swap), and network activity. The File Systems tab provides an at-a-glance view of all your mounted drives along with their capacity, file system type and available free space. The Processes tab is…

People often say that email is hard. At one stage it was considered too hard to be the subject of a standard four-page tutorial. By the time you’ve explained Postfix, Dovecot, chromalisting, MX records, DMARC and DKIM there’s not really much room left to describe everything else. And there’s a lot of everything else. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily ‘hard’, just complex. A good elucidation of this can be found at https://bit.ly/lxf284mail. One ‘turnkey’ offering is called Mail-in-a-Box (https://mailinabox.email), which doesn’t use containers. Instead, it’s meant to be installed on a single-purpose machine whose only job is to be an email server. Unlike lots of things featured in this magazine, MIAB is meant to be not at all configurable, beyond of course setting domain names and mail aliases. Sure,…

Getting JACK up and running is the first step for setting up a Linux-based studio, because nearly all Linux software requires it. We recommend using QjackCtl, a GUI-frontend, to control the JACK server. Note that by default, applications which don’t use JACK – such as a web browser – might not be able to produce sound while JACK is running. Upon running QjackCtl, you’ll be presented with a control GUI. You might get lucky and be able to press Play to start the server. However, we’d recommend at least checking the settings (Setup…). Start by checking that the Interface: field is pointing to the sound device that you want to use. Graphics cards often add sound devices and they can be at the top of the list, but perhaps you’d…

You don’t have to have a Btrfs system partition to make use of some of the Btrfs facilities. So, you might set up a Btrfs-formatted external drive to store server files that you could then snapshot and roll back using Btrfs. In addition, you might need an external drive with a Btrfs to use to store Btrfs backups. The easiest way to create a Btrfs on another drive is to use GUI tools such as GParted. If you’re working with a blank drive, you’ll have to create a partition table to begin with. Then create a Btrfs formatted partition of appropriate size. The usual warning applies: be careful when using a tool such as GParted. Make sure you know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, particularly when deleting existing partitions.…

Version: 3.0.1d Web: https://github.com/evuraan/edotool Edotool is a long-anticipated replacement of Xdotool, the famed X11 input device simulator that’s showing its age and doesn’t support Wayland sessions. Edotool works well in both X11 and Wayland, and provides you with many useful input features. Edotool can do more than just ‘X11 actions’ thanks to its Wayland support, but also goes one better than Xdotool in terms of automation. While you can move the mouse pointer and press keys with Xdotool, you’ll likely need a third-party utility to record the appropriate macro. Edotool comes with a built-in recorder and player for managing macros, meaning that you get a nearly feature-complete auto-clicker (yet with the CLI-only mode). To start with, add yourself into the ‘input’ group to use Edotool (mostly) without elevating privileges, and…

Version: 0.7.5 Web: https://gitlab.com/leinardi/gst Benchmarking a Linux system can be a challenging business due to a limited toolset. We’re not including manual measurements using an ordinary Bash command entered after time. Instead we’re interested in more professional utilities. One such tool is GtkStressTesting, a highly developed test suite designed for stress-testing your CPU and memory (but so far mainly the CPU). On the one hand, GtkStressTesting mirrors tools such as CPU-Z because it shows a wealth of information about the processor including clock, number of cores and detailed family specification, along with some main motherboard details. On the other hand, GtkStressTesting enables you to run sophisticated synthetic benchmark with one click of your mouse. The upper-left part of the window has a drop-down menu with the list of available tests.…

Version: 0.3.9 Web: https://github.com/thp/numptyphysics NumptyPhysics is the open source implementation of the famous Crayon Physics game. This kind of puzzle game invites you to harness gravity and draw objects that instantly behave like they would in real life. There are many such gravity simulators for Android too, but this time we’ll be playing a desktop game with no limitations and entirely ad-free. NumptyPhysics is an amazing, mature, and well-drawn game with lots of bright and colourful SVG graphics that makes use of the powerful Box2D engine. This is responsible for simulating a solid number of physical effects, such as gravity, friction, collision, restitution, stacking and many more. The game itself offers over 100 levels containing different puzzles with the same plot of making the red ball and the yellow star…

Version: 1.0 Web: https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx Not much has been – ahem – said about the Larynx speech synthesiser according to our brief searches online, which returned solely medical results. However, despite the fact that Larynx hasn’t received as many plaudits as the popular Festival, it’s more capable and based on newer studies. The engine provides a complete text-to-speech solution for nine languages and offers as many as 50 voices. Most of them serve English and German, but there are also variants for French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Swedish and Swahili. Larynx is based on two other open source projects that you can quickly find on Github. These are Gruut for phonemes detection, and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) for machine learning. We won’t go much deeper for the sake of brevity,…