Table of contents for January 2023 in Linux Format

Round this up WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email: letters@ linuxformat.com. Please could you do the following articles: a Roundup of speakers for desktop use – you could include the latest Canton Soundbase as one of the dearer options – and a Roundup of MOD/XM/S3M players, and where to get the players and music? Ian Learmonth Neil says… We generally avoid hardware reviews, especially when it comes to Roundups, largely because there’s more than enough open source software to keep us very busy until the end of time/print publishing. And by the time we’ve covered everything, we have to go back and review all…

IN BRIEF AntiX-22 uses lightweight window managers to provide a fast interface. As it’s based on the latest release of Debian, stability is virtually assured, even considering the huge number of pre-installed apps in the full version. This is a perfect version of Linux for newbies, given the extensive documentation and videos both built into the OS and online. SPECS CPU: Intel Pentium III onwards Mem: 192MB minimum (256MB preferred) HDD: 5GB for full install Builds: x86_64 I fyou’ve ever wanted a lightweight, ultra-fast OS that doesn’t compromise on stability, you may want to take AntiX for a spin. It is designed to work with both legacy and modern systems, and is based on the latest stable version of Debian. AntiX-22 is based on Debian 11.5 (Bullseye), though it…

Once you’ve installed Elementary OS, you’re whisked through a setup wizard. It repeats the questions about language and keyboard layout, then asks you to set up your user account. Enter your name, and a suggested username is given, which can be changed as you see fit. You also need to provide a password to protect your account – Elementary OS guides you towards one it deems suitably strong. The Device Name – your virtual machine’s name as it would appear on your home network – can also be changed at this point. Once done, click Finish Setup. You’re now prompted to log into Elementary – if you’re running it in VirtualBox, you’ll have seen the compatibility warning during installation, so click the power button in the top-right corner and choose…

For over 20 years, Audacity has been the leading crossplatform, open source audio F editor, with that instantly recognisable orange and blue headphone logo. Like many open source projects, it was created out of the need to solve an unusual problem: co-founders professor Roger Dannenberg and Dominic Mazzoni’s requirement for an adept cross-platform audio visualisation tool to help with their Query by Humming research, among other audio oddities. In 2021, Audacity was acquired by Muse Group and almost instantly ran into controversy over the introduction of telemetry and a new privacy policy. Since then, however, Muse Group has progressed Audacity’s development with muchrequested real-time effects, a seemingly unstoppable progression towards being a full audio-production suite and even an updated icon. We talked to Martin Keary, product owner at Audacity, about…

Version: 1.1.1 Web: https://glitterware. github.io/Passy/ If you want to use a password manager, but don’t want your credentials flying off to a remote server (even if encrypted), you need the offline password manager Passy. As its name suggests, Passy houses all your credentials on your local device – encrypted, of course. Passy can work with biometrics to help you quickly unlock the app using your fingerprint. Besides passwords, it can also store payment cards, notes, ID cards and identities, and can autofill them when required by apps and websites without much effort. The app is cross-platform and available for Windows, Linux and Android. The developers are working on getting the latest Android version on F-Droid; until then, you can grab the APK directly from the project’s website. On Linux, the…

Version: 1.1.1 Web: https://gitlab.com/ posktomten/texttospeech/ Text-to-speech systems, also known as TTS, were first developed to aid the visually impaired by offering a computer-generated spoken voice that would read text to the user. Although TTS software is still generally considered as an assistive technology tool, it can also be used in different ways. For instance, it is very helpful for people who have trouble reading, but studies have shown that it can also help anyone improve their writing and editing, and even improve their focus. TTS also provides another option for consuming content, especially when you’re on the go, by taking content away from the computer screen. Qtexttospeech is a straightforward TTS app that began life as a TTS library that developers could embed into their apps. Soon, however, the Qtexttospeech…

Version: 2.80.2 Web: www.etlegacy.com It’s been almost two decades since the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was released. It was a free multiplayer first-person shooter set during World War II and heavily focused on teamwork. Its legacy is continued by the aptly named ET: Legacy, an open source project based on the code of the original, which was released under GPLv3 in 2010. The ET: Legacy client/server is compatible with the last official Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory release. Meanwhile, ET: Legacy’s developers work on updating the engine to fix bugs and security exploits, shift to modern dependencies, upgrade the graphics and more. The game has plenty of servers around the world in addition to the one hosted by the developers. It offers both single and multiplayer gameplay via the use of different…

Version: 1.12 Web: https://hovancik.net/stretchly/ Working long hours on a computer can cause all sorts of physical discomforts. Staring at the W screen uninterrupted makes your eyes feel sore and often causes headaches. Not to mention the fact that stooping over the keyboard for long periods of time does a number on your posture. All it takes to avoid this discomfort, at least to some extent, is to take regular breaks, stretch your legs, and refocus your eyes and mind before you jump back in. Stretchly is a simple app that reminds you to take regular breaks at customisable intervals to ensure you don’t fatigue yourself. The app produces precompiled binaries for Deband RPM-based distros. There’s also a distro-agnostic AppImage that you can grab from the releases page, make executable, then…

SPECS Size: 2TB Type: M.2 2280 Controller: Samsung Pascal Mem: Samsung seventh-gen TLC VNAND PCIe: v4.0 x4 Spec: 7450MB/s read, 6,900MB/s write IOPS: 1.2M read, 1.55M write DRAM cache: 2GB DDR4 SLC cache: 226GB dynamic Endurance: 1,200TB Warranty: Five years With AMD recently joining the PCI Express 5.0 party with W its Ryzen 7000 CPUs, you might expect Samsung to roll out its first Gen 5 M.2 drives to suit. But no. The new Samsung 990 Pro remains a Gen 4 SSD. If you think about the current situation, a revised Gen 4 drive does at least make sense. While you may now be able to buy PCIe Gen 5 capable PCs from both Intel and AMD, the number of such systems out there in the wild is tiny.…

IN BRIEF Voyager Live seeks to give you the very best of both the Gnome and Xfce desktop environments, with a clean desktop, highly customisable interface via its own BoxVoyager app, and a raft of pre-installed applications. If you have a taste for the exotic and don’t enjoy downloading new programs, it may be for you, as long as you can deal with the idiosyncratic blend of French and English. SPECS CPU: x86-64 2GHz Mem: 2GB RAM HDD: 25GB (15GB for minimal install) Builds: x86_64 In 1901, chef Julia Chandler pioneered the first peanut I butter and jelly recipe. What once were two delicious spreads in their own right had now been combined into one of the greatest sandwiches of all time. French developer Rodolphe Bachelart has pioneered his Xubuntu-based…

Now you’ve familiarised yourself with the Elementary OS desktop, it’s time to start N putting your new operating system to good use. This, of course, involves installing new applications. The obvious source for these is the AppCenter via its Dock shortcut. This opens an app store, with a search tool at the top, some featured apps beneath and – if you scroll down – aseries of categories for you to explore. Whisper it quietly, but Elementary OS’s app store is rather short of well-known apps. That’s because it’s aimed at developers who release free and paid-for software that’s optimised for use with Elementary OS’s Pantheon desktop. Don’t worry, though, because open source programs usually exist in multiple different places. The first alternative source reveals itself when a search returns no…

Pandemic recovery really hit silicon production capabilities, with demand P for fabrication time way outstripping availability. One of the many fallouts of this was a huge shortage of Raspberry Pi models for consumers, with commercial demand being prioritised and absorbing most production output, leaving a dribble of Pi 4 models on the shelves alongside the Pi Pico. In an interview with Micro Center (www. youtube.com/watch?v=EiWov2GWgDc), Upton said: “If we accomplish one in thing in the next 12 months, it will be to rectify that situation,” clarifying that he expects all stock issues to have been resolved by this time next year. “There’s a vast difference between feeling confident that we’ll be free of shortages in a year and feeling that there will be a year of shortages,” Upton said, meaning…

Professional photographers only use RAW photos when they’re working on highquality images. But why and what for? How much extra effort do RAW photos entail, and is it worth it for hobbyist photographers? Let’s answer those questions here… The good news is that Linux users are in an enviable situation: some of the best programs for managing and processing RAW photos are developed under Linux and only occasionally ported to other platforms. On the other hand, RAW photography itself is considered time-consuming and labour-intensive. Nevertheless, three weighty reasons speak in favour of dealing with the subject and taking RAW photos: • For landscape photography, good illumination must be achieved across all tonal values, especially in difficult lighting conditions; both the sky should have structure, as well as the shadows in…

Version: 16.4 Web: www.shutterencoder.com Handbrake is arguably the most popular open source video converter, but it isn’t the only game in town. One of its peers is Shutter Encoder, which exposes the video-editing prowess of FFmpeg via a graphical interface. Right off the bat we’ll tell you that Shutter Encoder doesn’t have what you’d call a pleasing interface. A large part of this is due to the fact that unlike editing images, video editing is an involved and cumbersome process. On top of that, FFmpeg is a dexterous tool, and rolling all its functions into a graphical interface results in Shutter Encoder looking rather busy. The project does put out a precompiled binary for Debian-based distros, but you’re better off using the distro-agnostic AppImage. Grab the latest one from the…

Version: M109.0.5361.0 Web: https://thorium.rocks Chromium is a good open source alternative to Chrome without the Google bloat. If you want something even more streamlined, there’s Thorium, named after the radioactive element. The browser is built with the latest x64 trunk build of Chromium, which the developers patch and enhance to net a performance gain of up to 40% over vanilla Chromium, depending on the benchmark and operating system. In fact, the developers claim the browser won’t launch on CPUs older than the second-gen Core or AMD FX, thanks to the optimisations for the Advanced Vector Extensions. The developers have also tweaked the browser in other ways to improve the experience. For instance, parallel downloading is enabled by default and it includes plugins like Widevine, All Codecs and more. Thorium also…

Version: 3.0.0 Web: https://github.com/ jorio/CroMagRally The original Cro-Mag Rally was released in 2000 by Pangea Software as a Mac exclusive. T What we have here is a multi-platform port created with the permission of the original studio. In the game, you are a speed-hungry caveman called Brog who races through the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages in primitive colourfully named vehicles such as the Geode Cruiser, Bone Buggy, Logmobile, Trojan Horse and others. In addition to the vehicles, you also have an arsenal of primitive weaponry at your disposal, ranging from Bone Bombs to Chinese Bottle Rockets and Heat-Seeking Homing Pigeons! The game has both single-player and multiplayer modes. In single-player, you race against the computer, while multiplayer offers several different modes including Tag, Capture the Flag and Survival. Up…

IN BRIEF Ubuntu Unity 22.10 marks its first release as an official flavour. After languishing in development purgatory, the Unity 7 desktop interface is back with a vengeance. Coupled with a new port of the Yaru theme and Unity Tweak tool, users have granular control over the interface and can launch apps and files with the minimum of clicks and keystrokes. SPECS CPU: 2GHz dual-core 64-bit Mem: 1GB HDD: 25GB Builds: x86_64/ EM64T Controversial is the best way to describe the Unity Desktop environment. Pioneered in 2010 as an alternative to Gnome, Unity divided opinion. Many praised the slick interface, including a top menu bar, a handy app launcher and Dash, which could search your files and the internet. This caused controversy in 2012 when privacy advocates discovered some search…

You’ve road-tested several flavours of Linux and settled on the one you want to switch Y to. You might feel ready to ditch Windows completely, but in most cases, you’ll probably want (or need) to keep it running for a specific app or game. The key is not to rush anything. Start by disabling hibernation, which can interfere with dual-booting: right-click the Start button and choose Command Prompt (Admin) or Terminal (Admin) – whichever appears. Now type powercfg -h off and hit Enter. Next, take a fail-safe backup of your Windows system drive as it currently stands. This requires a drive-imaging tool, and our favourite Windows tool by far is Macrium Reflect Free (www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx). Once downloaded and installed, open Macrium Reflect and click Create An Image Of The Partition(s) Required…

ou’ve added Elementary OS alongside Windows, you’ve installed the apps you need Y for everyday life, what next? The walkthrough (below) touches on some of the fundamental aspects of Linux you need to tackle at some point: keeping your system updated, file and folder permissions, and the terminal. But before that, what else needs to be done to get you set up? Let’s start with accessing your Windows drive. It’s likely you have personal files and folders stashed in your personal user folder, and the good news is that Elementary OS can read and write data to and from NTFS-formatted drives out of the box. Open Files and you should see your Windows drive under Storage. Double-click this and navigate to the Users folder to find your user folders all…

IN BRIEF PiKISS from Jose Cerrejon is a collection of essential tools and applications for your Raspberry Pi, from system monitoring and retro gaming to your own VPN server, all from one simple user interface. Installation is via one line of code and PiKISS is available via the desktop, terminal and even over SSH. It’s free and it works really well. PiKISS from Jose Cerrejon is not just a clever name. The acronym KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) has been adopted by many products, but rarely does it work as well as this. PiKISS has been around for a couple of years and Cerrejon has poured a lot of time and energy into the project, so it has grown into a collection of tools that every Pi user needs. Compatible…

Version: 1.0.4-3 Web: https://github.com/ aphototool/A-Photo-Tool-Libre Many desktop distributions ship with an image viewer that also has basic image-editing M options. If you need more dexterity, there’s always GIMP. If you work with images, it’s worth spending the time it takes to master GIMP. That said, the app is still overkill if all you need to do is quickly touch up some images. That’s where the unimaginatively named A Photo Tool Libre comes into play. It’s an easy-to-use photoediting app that offers a handful of the most commonly used image-editing tools. You can use the app for everything from basic tasks such as rotating, cropping, straightening and resizing photos to more advanced tweaks, such as changing exposure, contrast and the colour of the images. A Photo Tool Libre isn’t available in…

Version: 4.3.4 Web: https://open-typer.github.io If you ask us, the best productivity hack is learning to touch-type. When you’re working on the computer day in and day out, shaving off those milliseconds adds up and helps you save a considerable amount of time. Plus, it’s easier on the neck, since you don’t have to stoop over the keyboard, which in turn reduces fatigue. The best thing about learning to touch-type is that you can go about it with little investment beyond your time, thanks to apps such as Open-Typer. This is a free and open source app that’s designed for anyone interested in learning how to touch-type. The app packs in dozens of exercises, each divided into several lessons. The lessons consist of touch, word, sentence and text exercises. Open-Typer is…

Version: 6.3.3 Web: www.asbru-cm.net If you log into remote machines frequently, you can save a lot of time and effort by using Ásbrú Connection Manager. This graphical app presents a nice user interface to help you define all kinds of parameters for your remote terminal sessions to save the effort it takes to define them every time you want to connect to the remote machine. Ásbrú has a straightforward GUI that’ll make sense to anyone used to creating remote connections. The most common settings for the connection can be specified in the main Connection Details tab. You can also define other parameters in the Advanced Parameters and Network Settings tabs. Ásbrú can integrate with KeePassXC to handle authentication and can connect to remote machines via a proxy server. It offers…

Version: 3.0.1 Web: https://github. com/Syllo/nvtop While Top is a good enough utility, a better option is Htop when it comes to monitoring and controlling system processes. Similarly, Nvtop is a Htop-like utility designed to display process information about your computer’s graphical hardware. Nvtop stands for Neat Videocard TOP, and it supports AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs. The tool can handle and display information about multiple GPUs inside a machine, including detailed information about processes, memory used for every GPU and more. It isn’t available in the repositories of popular distros and has to be installed manually. It doesn’t have many dependencies, and you can compile it yourself, but it’s a lot easier and faster to use its AppImage. Grab the latest AppImage from the releases page and give it executable…