Table of contents for December 2017 in Linux Format

This issue we asked our experts: We’ve been discussing the past RAGE over desktop changes in Gnome 3, Unity and KDE4. What open source or Linux change has caused you red-hot rage? Jonni Bidwell Linux doesn’t make me angry any more. Not even the flaky suspend/resume support that sees my machine crash every couple of days since Kernel 4.13 came out. Not even the fear that installing a new distro is going to wipe out extant GRUB or UEFI entries. These things keep you on your toes. Nate Drake As an InfoSec Specialist, I was apoplectic about Canonical’s ill-advised move to include Amazon products in Ubuntu’s Unity Dash searches a few years ago. The latest LTS release of Ubuntu also includes Snap packages that have access to all your keystrokes…

For 26 years the Linux kernel has gone from strength to strength, with more developers, companies and users contributing, changing and using the kernel than ever before. However, a number of challenges also have also arisen, and as Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer, wrote in Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement released in October 2017 (http://bit.ly/enf-sta), the Linux kernel’s current licence, GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 (GPLv2), is no longer as robust as it should be. This is because ambiguities in the GPLv2 licence have been exploited for patent trolling and monetary gain – concepts that the Linux kernel was specifically created to avoid. This has spurred Greg and other kernel developers to announce in the statement that the Linux kernel licence will now include an additional permission,…

“The results of the 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report, which analyses the work done by 15,600 developers over more than a decade, are in – and Linux is growing faster than ever. The average number of changes accepted into the kernel per hour is 8.5, a significant increase from the 7.8 changes in last year’s report, translating to 204 changes every day. The 4.9 and 4.12 development cycles featured the highest patch rates ever seen in the history of the kernel project. Since the last report, over 4,300 developers from more than 500 companies have contributed to the kernel, with 1,670 of these developers contributed for the first time, comprising about a third of contributors. Also of interest is the number of unpaid developers may be stabilising, with these developers…

While Canonical has ditched its convergence dream of having Ubuntu run on smartphones, it appears Samsung has taken up the mantel by enabling owners of its Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note 8 smartphones to install a full desktop version of Linux when used with its DeX docking system. Installed as an app, Linux on Galaxy could be the answer to running a full desktop version of Linux from a pocketable smartphone device. It’s still a work-in-progress, but the potential here is huge, with the DeX dock enabling the smartphone to be attached to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. As the Samsung press release announcing Linux on Galaxy (http://bit.ly/samsung-linux) states: “whenever they need to use a function that is not available on the smartphone OS, users can simply switch to the…

Makerspaces Collective knowledge gets puts into practice Just around the time we write this (27 October 2017), Blackpool Makerspace is preparing to throw open its doors to the public for the Crafts Council Make:Shift:Do event (www.craftscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/makeshiftdo). This annual event challenges a space to take part in a national programme, but each space is free to suggest its own session ideas and these are listed on the Crafts Council website. This year will see Blackpool Makerspace taking part for the third time. It’s tackling 3D photography with a view to 3D printing the output. To take the pictures the team are building a camera rig using multiple Raspberry Pis and an Arduino that will control the rotation of the object in the rig. All of the photos are then sent to…

The Pixel 2, with its five-inch screen, doesn’t look like the future of smartphones. It easily fits into one hand thanks to its palmable dimensions and light weight. A few years ago, this would’ve been considered a phablet, but today, next to the Note 8, it’s a normal-sized phone. It’s now IP67 waterproof (which means that they can go underwater up to one meter’s depth for up to an hour) and retains a glass-and-metal design on the back, albeit with less glass toward the top compared to its predecessors. The fingerprint has been moved onto the textured aluminium portion of the back, while the camera remains on the glass side and has a protective ring around it now. You won’t find a headphone jack on this phone or even USB-C…

If you can spare the RAM and resources, there’s no beating the big beasts of desktop environments such as Gnome and KDE. Those looking for something lightweight yet mainstream have the choice of XFCE and LXDE. These are also officially supported by popular distros like Fedora and Ubuntu with dedicated editions for each. Sometimes, a desktop environment can be overkill, and many users make do with only a window manager. If you’re up to the challenge, try your hands at the incredibly resourceful Blackbox, Openbox or IceWM window managers. They aren’t resource-intensive and offer great customisation options despite their minimalist credentials. Some distros, such as Puppy Linux, only ship with a window manager, and this allows for a fast distro that works well on even an older machine. Although Ubuntu…

Upgrading from 17.04 is a straightforward process. If you’re patient you’ll probably be offered the upgrade soon after the official release. If this doesn’t happen, then open the Software & Updates tool, go to the Updates tab and make sure the “Notify me of a new Ubuntu Version” drop-down is set to “For any new version”. Alternatively, you can force the updater’s hand by opening a terminal and issuing the following incantation: $ sudo do-release-upgrade Upgrading from 17.04 (or 16.04, if your machine didn’t get hosed in the process) means that you’ll retain the Unity desktop as well as having Gnome installed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having both installed and you’ll be able to choose from the login screen whichever of the two suits your whim. Some will want…

The mobile OS landscape is dominated by Android and iOS, and it’s a sad fact that many open source projects haven’t quite worked out (see our feature in LXF228). So even though Ubuntu Touch (with its Scopes and weird gestures) wasn’t quite anyone’s cup of tea, news of Canonical ceasing its development still made us shed a collective tear. However, we were heartened by the news that the UBPorts community will be picking up its development. UBPorts has released two Over The Air (OTA updates) and successfully ported Ubuntu Touch to a bunch of devices. Up until recently, UBports’ builds have been based around the aging 15.04 Ubuntu base, but now progress is being made (in particular for the Fairphone 2, the world’s first ethical, modular, hardware upgradeable smartphone –…

A few years ago my life changed. A new job role meant I was responsible for single-board computers and tools for electronics hobbyists and digital makers. This was a bit daunting as I had no experience of electronics or coding. It’s fair to say I didn’t know my Raspberry Pi from my Arduino. Three years later and I still don’t claim to be an expert in any of these areas but I’ve developed new products for BBC micro:bit and Codebug, I’ve delivered training sessions on using the BBC micro:bit for physical computing, I’ve run kids’ wearable tech workshops and I’ve helped to organise a Maker festival. I got to this point with a lot of help from my friends. The Maker community is the coolest, most inclusive and friendliest bunch…

In this tutorial we used the browser on our Raspberry Pi with Node-RED to write the code for the dashboard. However, we can also write the code from another computer – all we need is the IP address of our Raspberry Pi. The simplest way to do this is to open the terminal on your Pi and type $ hostname -I This will return a one-line IP address. If there are multiple IP addresses then your Raspberry Pi is connected via Ethernet and Wi-Fi at the same time, then choose one IP address and use that. With the IP address to hand, on another computer or tablet visit the IP address followed by port :1880 to see the Node-RED interface. For example our Pi was at 192.168.0.7:1880 So now we…

1 Install prerequisites Insert a Wi-Fi device capable of packet injection. Check that the Pi can detect it by opening Terminal on your Pi and running the command ip a . Next, install the scapy packet manipulation tool with sudo pip install scapy then clone the wifijammer tool from Github by running git clone https://github.com/DanMcInerney/wifijammer.git . Change to the wifijammer directory with cd wifijammer . 2 Start Wifijammer script If you want to start the script with default settings then run sudo python wifijammer.py . It will search for the most powerful wireless interface and turn on Monitor Mode. It will then hop over all available wireless channels, identifying both access points and any connected clients. Next, it’ll then send a deauthentication signal from each client to the AP and…

Around late 1973/early 1974, necessity dictated Steve Johnson take an old Model 37 Teletype and build upon an existing program, typo – which was good at finding common typographical errors, but was ultimately limited in functionality. Somewhere inside Bell Labs, a magnetic tape containing a million English words appeared that was whittled down to a core component file containing the most essential words: 2004 at the time, resulting in the file w2004. With some clever experiments in English syntax, the new Unix pipe system, and a healthy imagination, Steve created the first real spellchecker protoype. The final pipeline looked like the following: 1 input text => list of words 2 sort 3 uniq 4 remove words also in w2004 5 reverse the word 6 Apply suffix rules (now prefix rules)…

In the main text we mention that you can click and drag the bottom-right hand corner of a cell to quickly repeat its contents or expand calculations to include a wider range of data. As you continue to use this technique, you might find that you want one specific cell or the column letter to remain the same. However, because all the cell addresses are variable by default you’ll annoyingly find you have to always manually fix it afterwards. The same happens if you copy and paste a cell containing a formula. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. Adding the dollar ‘$’ symbol can make part of a cell address ‘absolute’ so that it doesn’t automatically change when you click and drag to expand the range like before.…

Our expert Tim Armstrong is the Network Architect at Nerdalize. He specialises in design and implementation datacentre and ISP networks. He’s often found wasting his free time on Twitter@HelpImAnExpat. “Ooh, check out that packet!” It seems like we can’t go a week right now without hearing about a new 10Gbps-capable devices – from popular NAS appliances (such as the DS1817 reviewed in LXF228) to Asus entering the Ethernet market with a 10GbE aka 10G desktop switch, which looks more like part of a high-end audio system than a network switch. Even though we’ve been hearing similar sentiments since Netgear’s XS708E a few years back, 10G may finally be ready for Consumer and SoHo networks. We’re going to cut through the marketing noise and take a look at how you can…

You can access your OpenVPNserver through a variety of platforms – there’s an official client for Windows, Android and iOS (visit www.openvpn.net for details), while MacOS users can use Tunnelblick(www.tunnelblick.net). Transferring the .opvn configuration file varies from device to device: you can simply copy the file to C:\ Program Files\OpenVPN\config in Windows, for example, or double-click it to import it into Tunnelblickon MacOS. If you’re running an Ubuntu client, you can install some additional packages and manage your connection through the GUI-friendly Network Manager. Open a Terminal and type the following: Once installed, open the Network Manager from the menu bar and select Edit Connections, then click Add. Choose ‘Import a saved VPN configuration…’ from the drop-down menu and click Create. Select your .ovpn file and click Open, then verify…

Our expert Sean D. Conway By night, a community newspaper reporter. By day, an overseer of information technology security for a Canadian ISP. We all expect privacy and security when we work online. In an online transaction the destination should be clearly identified and the information only be available to the two parties. Protocols like SSL/TLS provide those functions. We’re going to run though an overview of SSL/TLS: introduce the OpenSSL software package, generate SSL/TLS certificates and configure a web server to use the certificates to support HTTPS requests. SSL (secure sockets layer) is a secure methodology for setting up an encrypted secure link between a website and a browser. Think of this as a tunnel that the data will pass through, which doesn’t permit any hosts from understanding the…

Oracle has its preferred tool for managing certificates called keytool, part of the Java development toolkit (JDK) install that contains the toolkit. The intention is to build a file called a keystore that contains keys and all certificates needed to establish the trust: To begin generate a public-private keypair in a file referred to as the keystore: Next generate a CSR for webserver using the keys from the keystore. Note the alias used here. You’ll need to use this alias later on, when you’re importing the certificate: Then build a chain of trust by importing the CA chain of authority certificate into a keystore. Finally import the webserver certificate produced by the CA: Discover more at https://docs.oracle.com.…

Although the BASIC interpreter is rather clunky and text-based, you can add a dash of colour if you wish. The simplest way to do this is to use the COLOUR command. In Terminal, run brandy then enter LOAD myname.bas , for example, to load your script. Type 15 COLOUR 1 to tell the interpreter to output all text as red from Line 15 onwards. Type RUN to see the result. You may see when the program has finished running, that all text you type is red. Consider inserting another line towards the end of your program (before the END statement), stating COLOUR 7 to change the text back to white. If you want to keep your lines neatly spaced 10 digits apart, use the command RENUMBER . If you want…

Strictly speaking, random number generation is not a systems programming topic. However, being able to create random numbers through Kotlin might help you when you want to test things or generate random passwords. The name of the Kotlin program that will be used is random.kt. It accepts three parameters: the number of random integers you want to generate, plus the minimum and maximum values of the generated integers. The most interesting part of the code is this: random.kt defines a new function named random(), which you can see by looking at the Kotlin code of random.kt in Figure 1 on the opposite page. The random() function is applied to a range and does all the work for us. Please note that random.kt uses the java.util. Random library in Java for…

The nights are drawing in here on the UK, which means two things: the start of endless Christmas adverts and a new Ubuntu release. There’s not much we can do about the former except bring you an early present in the form of one of our Ubuntu multi-desktop extravaganzas. This Ubuntu release is already significant in a couple of ways. The first is that there’s no longer a 32-bit release. 32-bit packages are still available and so you could still install it from a net install disc, but with such old hardware you may be better off with a lighter desktop, like the LXDE version (opposite). The desktop is the other major change. After many years of going it alone with its Unity desktop, Ubuntu has switched to the more…

People love being passionate and it seems nothing gets people more worked up than meddling with their desktop environment. Gnome 3 was originally released back in April 2011 – that’s over six years ago – and yet people are still posting sweary rants online as if the release had just happened. There was a similarly strong reaction when Ubuntu switched to the Unity desktop in Ubuntu 11.04, with people rage quitting Ubuntu hoping it all crashed and burned.And yes, we still get letters to this day stating the like. Messing with the way people work, overhauling their personal space – you’re tinkering with people’s lives and that can certainly enrage. How much responsibility do FOSS projects have to deliver results that please (pander to, perhaps...) everyone? How much responsibility do…

With Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” out in the wild, attention is being directed to the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release, and Mark Shuttleworth has announced (www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1518) what the next version’s alliterative animal-based name will be. Brace yourselves for… Bionic Beaver. According to Shuttleworth, the beaver is an ideal animal to name this version after as, he says, “It’s builders that we celebrate – the people that build our upstream applications and packages, the people who build Ubuntu, and the people who build on Ubuntu”, hence the mascot is “a mammal known for its energetic attitude, industrious nature and engineering prowess.” Meanwhile the ‘bionic’ part of the name is a nod to “the relentless robots running Ubuntu Core.” So, what will this bionic beaver bring (sorry)? Cloud support gets a big…

We’ve been keenly following the progress of Purism’s crowdfunding efforts for the Librem 5 Linux-based smartphone, so we’re pleased to see that it managed to beat its goal by some margin. The funding goal was a still ambitious $1,500,000, but in the end the team was able to raise an incredible $2,146,495. This shows how much appetite there is for a smartphone running open source software, with a ‘standards-based freedom-oriented’ operating system based on Debian. Now that the Librem 5 has been funded, Purism will start building and shipping the handsets to backers. If you’ve missed out on the fundraising part, don’t worry, as you can still order the device from https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5, and you’ll be added to the shipping queue. The phone costs $599 and includes free worldwide shipping, and…

CAINE 9.0 As the name suggests (it stands for Computer Aided INvestigative Environment), this is a distro that offers various tools for digital forensics, with tools easily added as software modules and presented in a user-friendly interface. It’s based on Ubuntu, and version 9.0 brings Nirsoft suite with launcher, WinAudit, MWSnap, Arsenal image mounter, FTK Imager and many other tools. Check out the project’s news page at www.caine-live.net/page6/files/category-release.html for more information and instructions on how to download and install it ANTIX 17 This lightweight operating system is based on Debian 9.2 and its developers have now dropped systemd, choosing instead to use SysV init. It supports both 32- and 64-bit processors, features four windows managers, a full LibreOffice suite, a customised 4.10.5 kernel with fbcondecor splash and lots more. Designed…

Hate without end From the first I’ve hated Ubuntu with a passion. I’m a very simple bear and no expert. I want to communicate with my computer as if it were running Windows XP. It’s simple for those of us who don’t want the bother of memorising key strokes, instead of following a simple menu. I like to be able to right-click on my desktop and create a shortcut or a text file. (Why does this raise Mr Shuttleworth’s hackles?) Each time you hype a new version of Ubuntu I try it and discover that it doesn’t want to help. It gets in the way. Every time I go back to relax into the comforting haven of Mint. It’s easy to use, I don’t have to change my way of…

The Arch Linux Wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org) is one of the greatest resources of information for almost all Linux projects, and the desktop environments are no exception. In fact, the Arch Wiki features more practical information about the DEs on our list than you’ll find on their own websites! Surprisingly, Pantheon, designed in-house by the Elementary OS distro, doesn’t even have a website. It barely merits any mention on the project’s website or blog. The official documentation provides a quick introduction to features such as hot corners and workspaces, but that’s it. Apart from an About page that serves as an introduction, Enlightenment doesn’t boast much documentation. Sure, there’s lots to learn from the project’s website if you’re a developer looking to contribute to the project or EFL, but if you’re a…

All the projects on our list support basic configuration options and let you change the wallpaper, set window themes and define fonts, icons and cursors. To configure all the above elements on Pantheon, use the Customize Look and Feel tool. You can similarly use the LXQt Appearance Configuration Tool on LXQt to change the cursor, icon theme and so on. If you wish to tweak the Panel, right-click and click Configure Panel. From here you can customise the panel position, its size, and even define a background colour. Some of the widgets on the panel are also configurable. Click the Widgets tab on the left sidebar. Now select a widget and click the Configure button to play around with the available options. You can also configure the Panel to be…

“It’s probably the most radical change to desktop Ubuntu since Unity was introduced…” That special time is upon us already. We daub our cover with Ubuntine orange, calls to action and whatever number of exclamation marks the marketeers think works best. We back up our data, we say farewell to our 17.04 installs and we tell you all about the new Ubuntu on the block. But if you take a look at Ubuntu over the past, say, five years then, on the surface at least, very little has changed. This, we would hitherto have told you, is A Good Thing: it shows maturity, stability and a preference for gentle improvements as opposed to knocking everything down and starting over. All very well, but it makes our poor writers’ (oh shut…

In brief... Designed for the Pi Zero range, but compatible with all 40-pin GPIO Pis, this is an entry-level kit based around two robust L293D motor controllers. This means there’s plenty of power for small- to medium-sized robots requiring four-wheel drive. The kit is compatible with many programming languages thanks to an easy GPIO pin reference. Building robots with your Raspberry Pi is incredibly popular and not a day goes by without a new robot being unleashed upon the world. Moving from a simple two-wheeled robot, often with a balancing caster at the head of the robot and powered by a single H-bridge motor controller, is often seen as daunting, because now there’s a requirement for more motors and another H-bridge. The MotoZero controller provides an alternative and easy-to-use board.…

Our expert Nate Drake retreated to an offshore location while writing this article to ensure that only his own devices would be cyberterrorised, whereupon he grew a beard to rival Robinson Crusoe’s. As Alfred notes in The Dark Knight, some men just want to watch the world burn. This is especially true for impressionable ‘script kiddies’ who first discover hacking tools. Filled with youthful exuberance and high-energy drinks, they eagerly download and run the first tools and programs they find. This would be easy to laugh off as the follies of youth, if not for the fact that in so doing they can cause considerable damage. In this guide we’ll be exploring a rather nightmarish Python script for the Raspberry Pi named wifijammer which makes use of the scapy packet…

Our expert John Knight When he’s not playing video games in French, John can usually be found beating a bass drum down to a kind of smooth paste. Novice users may have wondered what this character is | . That’s a pipe. Though not often mentioned, they’re some of the coolest things to come out of Unix. So let’s rediscover what pipes are. Invented by Douglas McIlroy in 1973 at Bell Labs, pipes connect one program to another to combine functionality. Without getting too technical, the core utilities of Unix systems are designed to follow a standard stream system: programs have a STDIN (standard-in) and STDOUT (standard-out). Programs can then take the output of a previous program in the stream, and connect it to their input via a pipe. This…

Our expert Bobby Moss develops cloud microservices for a global IT consultancy and its clients. In his spare time, he works on free software projects and tinkers with old hardware and writes words! Whether you’re tracking your finances, your game collection or the progress of your favourite sports team, spreadsheets are a ridiculously useful tool to have in your computing arsenal. Since the invention of VisiCalc and the rise of Microsoft Excel, these powerful tools have matured to include a whole host of features, most recently those we’d typically see in word processing applications like automatic formatting wizards and tools to generate attractive-looking reports. We last covered spreadsheets back in LXF140, which was long before LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org, its parent project. We opted for the former over the latter…

Believe it or not, 10Gbps is not always enough to support the company’s needs: as a result, you’ll frequently see network engineers resorting to bonding two or more interfaces together to double the throughput. This has the bonus of providing port redundancy for both the switch and the device being connected, whether it’s another switch or a high-throughput end-point. However, there are many terms for bonding and, depending on the vendor, there are also overlapping terms, therefore we felt it would be helpful to provide a brief overview. Switch vendors frequently refer to bonding as Link Aggregation Groups (LAGs for short), Port Aggregation, Port Trunking, Link Bundling, or Interface Teaming. MacOS refers to it as a Link Aggregate Virtual Interface. Windows Server refers to it as NIC Teaming, whereas Windows…

The SSL files can come in a number of formats and sport a range of extensions. It would be ideal if the file extension reflected the format used, but not so. Don’t assume because the extension is correct, the file format is correct. Let’s look at the formats and the preferred extensions. PEM: (privacy enhanced email) is a Base64-encoded ASCII file format used to hold certificates and private and public keys. It’s preferred by open-source software. RFCs 1421-24 defined the format. It failed on its original purpose as a method to secure email, but the container format is still used. The file contains -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- <certificate or key> -----END CERTIFICATE----- statements. The files containing this format may have a .pem, .key, csr or .cer extension. DER is a binary version…

Our expert Dr. Sinitsyn A lapsed KDE committer with 0.16 GSoC pupils per year, so he has plenty of time to build Linux clouds and write words. Open Source vs just being open S say you’re a company that’s decided to open source some of its code. Perhaps you want to solicit some community resources to help you develop and maintain it. Or maybe your competitors are open source and customers aren’t going to take you seriously unless you’re open as well. Whatever the reason is, you create a GitHub account, push the code and hire some design studio to make you a cool-looking landing page. Now you’re all set, right? Wrong. What will happen to your GitHub account and domain name if your company goes out of business? Or…

Although creating a Kotlin version of wcis a good exercise, it’s also important to be able to test the performance of the Kotlin version and compare it to the performance of the version of the utility that comes with your Linux system. The tool that will be used for measuring the execution time of wcand wc.kt is the handy timecommand line utility. The sizes of the two files that will be used are: The output you will get from the timeutility will be similar to this: Figure 4 above shows the performance of wc.kt and wcwhen executed twice, in order to process the two relatively large text files. As you can see from the chart, the Kotlin utility does a pretty good job. However, wcis still the king of speed!…

“ So what did you make of KRACK? Was it an OMG moment, a bit of a worry or a meh moment? Or maybe you haven’t heard? In which case, stop reading now and read through this month’s lead news story over there on the left. I’ll be right here, waiting for you to finish... Okay, so the truth is that it’s not the first security vulnerability to stick its head over the parapet, and it won’t be the last. Remember, WPA2 is only a way of encrypting data between the WiFi device and the access point: nothing stops you encrypting the data sent over WiFi. And maybe you’ll have to: in reality, most of the devices affected by KRACK will never be patched. So what can you do? Use…

“Modern vehicles are loaded with sensors that report values constantly. These range from the simple, and often rarely changing such as door sensors, to the speedometer and GPS sub-system that broadcast all the time. On-board computers have to analyse and react to these signals in isolation with limited context awareness. Each time a value changes, a signal is emitted on one or more of the data buses. We can do better. Collabora assisted in creating a fully open source vehicle signal manager (VSM) that offers to process incoming signals, evaluates them against a set of pre-compiled rules and hopefully re-emits the right signals to the right processes. This helps centralise the signal processing, accelerate the software development environment and greatly improve testing capabilities. VSM has been contributed as a GENIVI…

I can’t believe that no one’s written in to complain about the sudden removal of the Answers page from Linux Format. As an early subscriber to the magazine of at least 10 years, I have found the Answers page invaluable in pointing out problems before they occur, useful snippets of code, things to avoid, and so on. All useful, but what the Answers page was most useful was for the breadth of the different kinds of users who wrote in from newbies to experienced coders. Please bring this beloved feature back from its all-too-early grave. I appreciate the editorial problems confronting you with a limit on pages available, but surely you can find room for two pages with a feature that spoke to ALL your readers. In all other respects…

The Core i9-7960X is a sensible alternative to the monster 18-core i9-7980XE. Not to put too fine a point on it, but beyond the Core i9-7900X, it becomes hard to justify buying any of Intel’s Core i9 products, especially for gaming tasks. You still need a good reason to go beyond the base level i7-7800X, or a Ryzen 7 1800X, at least from a CPU performance standpoint. Sure, the additional cores can help speed up video encoding times, and the 7960X has four complete (more or less) i7-7700 chips inside it, but unless you’re waiting on your CPU to catch up, you’re better off putting your cash elsewhere. Power use from the Core i9 parts is very high. While there are many elements to total system power draw, we only…

Drifting somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, the lunar transfer station Tacoma lies empty and abandoned. An incident has forced the crew to evacuate and you, Amy Ferrier, have been sent to investigate and recover its omnipresent AI, Odin. But even though the six people who ran the station are long gone, their presence is felt all around you. Venturis, the corporation that owns Tacoma, has 3D recordings of every second of the crew’s year aboard the station, which you’ve been granted access to. And it’s through these ghostly memories that you’ll learn about the people who lived and worked there before the accident. It’s a mystery that grabs hold of you the instant your magnetic boots clamp to the station, and never lets go. When you first float…

Eye candy is an important consideration when deciding on a desktop environment. All of the projects on our list perform admirably on this front, offering animations and other assorted effects to please you – but all these offerings come at the expense of system resources. While the bulky DEs such as Gnome, KDE and Unity all require accelerated graphics and oodles of RAM, the projects on our list aren’t that needy. Enlightenment and LXQt are quite happy working on machines that fall on the lower end of the spectrum. They are both fast to boot into – but whereas Enlightenment works as advertised, LXQt on both Ubuntu and Fedora frequently reported errors and would sometimes become unresponsive. While the current release of Budgie isn’t a resource hog either, this is…

It’s possible to, as it were, bring Unity 7 back from the dead on a clean (or having removed it and realising almost too late that you loved it after all) install of 17.10. It’s had a few bugfixes, and will continue to receive them, but if you’re looking for new features prepare to be disappointed. Technically, it’s been a mothballed project for years, with development (until last April, when it was kyboshed) focused on Unity 8. Unity 7 will be supported for the lifespan of 16.04 (until 2021) though, and in some form or another it’ll be in the Universe repository for the 18.04 LTS too. All that’s required is: $ sudo apt install unity Sticking with what you know is all well and good, but now is a…

Canonical has deliberately made its Gnome tweaks as non-invasive as possible. This is in stark contrast to how desktop components, such as GTK and the Gnome apps, were heavily patched to fit with Unity. There’s no doubt that considerable effort has been made to recreate something of Unity’s look and feel – it’s just been done in a way that’s harmonious with the underlying technologies rather than orthogonal to them. The two most substantial changes, the Ubuntu Dock and the Ubuntu theming, are implemented as a Gnome extension and a Shell Theme, respectively. But there are other docks and other themes, and indeed there’s the standard Gnome arrangement featuring no dock at all. Those either willing to brave life without an always-on launcher or those already used to Gnome can…

“Storyboarder will help you create a storyboard or comic” Drawing application Storyboarder Version: 13.2 Web: http://bit.ly/story-b Let’s be honest here: most of us aren’t artistically inclined by any stretch of the imagination. Yet sometimes even Linux users succumb to their creative urges and want to express their emotions in the form of drawings. Of course, there’s no lack of Microsoft Paint clones in Linux, and we even have the gorgeous GIMP that competes with the industry standard Adobe Photoshop, but for this review we’ll focus on developing a composition from scratch, rather than employ clever image-manipulation techniques. Storyboarder is a program that, as the name suggests, is designed to help you create your own storyboard or comic strip. It can even handle the groundwork for developing basic animation. It’s simple…

Our expert Les Pounder Les is a freelance maker who works with organisations such as Raspberry Pi Foundation and the micro:bit Foundation to promote maker skills. He blogs at bigl.es. When we think of using the GPIO on a Raspberry Pi, we instantly think of Python. However, in this tutorial we’ll introduce how to use Node-RED – which is a graphical language for IoT devices – to control and respond to input/output from the GPIO. The circuit for this project is quite simple because it focuses on using Node-RED to control LEDs (outputs) and reacts to button presses (inputs). Build the circuit as per the diagram and when you’re ready power, up your Raspberry Pi. Node-RED comes pre-installed on the Raspberry Pi, but before we start writing code we first…

By default the wifijammerscript will try to send a deauthentication packet to the broadcast address of every access point (AP) that’s within range. Most APs ignore such packets, to avoid exactly this kind of attack, so once you’re certain that your APs aren’t vulnerable use the command line argument -d to skip this. If your APs use a specific channel then you can also target this, which is a more preferable proposition than hopping across the entire spectrum. See the step-by-step article (right) for information on using these arguments. If your wireless device isn’t particularly powerful you may have more joy deauthenticating devices by increasing the number of packets sent during the wireless attack. To do so, use the argument -p <number> . By default the script will send one…

Let’s introduce a carrot into this pipeline! We’ve been avoiding putting it into the main article so as not to overly complicate things, but for any readers who have been following along comfortably and want to go further, read on. So far we’ve used pipes largely to output things to screen, but if you want to output things straight to a text file, carrots are here to save you. A carrot simply works by adding a > sign, followed by an output filename. If you take Brian’s hardware error command, we can alter it so that it outputs any errors to a text file you can email later, like so: Note that a single carrot wipes any file content that may exist and starts again. If you want to append…

By default, Calcwill save your file as an .ods file rather than an .xls or .xlsx (both Excel formats). This is because it uses The Document Foundation’s ODF (Open Document Format) standard by default. This has been ISO-approved and is increasingly being adopted by public sector organisations and businesses who want to make data more accessible for various different platforms and devices. As we mention in the main text, LibreOffice uses the Extended ODF standard, which means you might find some minor features don’t work properly in other office suites that implement stricter versions of it. This isn’t laziness on the part of the developers of those suites: it’s partly a question of where they allocate resources and mostly the fact that the extended functionality might not have been incorporated…

There’s a famous aphorism: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. To help you avoid that ignominious fate, LibreOffice Calc has a macro scripting subsystem for automating repetitive tasks. The simplest way to create a macro is to manually record an action. You can normally do this from Tools>Macros>Record Macro. If this is missing from your Tools menu you can activate it by ticking the Enable Macro Recording box in Tools>Options>LibreOffice>Advanced. When you’re done, click Stop Recording and save the action so you can trigger it later. However, there are limitations to this approach. Actions are only recorded in the current window; mouse movements are ignored (so no click-and-drag); and changing Calc’s in-built options isn’t repeated in later runs. For…

Our expert Nick Peers is taking an active interest in privacy and security, given the state of today’s world. Although he’s more than happy to broadcast his love of A-ha to anyone who’ll listen! Just how secure is your internet connection? The answer is often, “Not very”. One of the most insecure places to surf the web or check your email is via a public Wi-Fi hotspot. After all, you don’t know what security measures – if any – these shops or companies have put into place. What you need is a guaranteed form of encryption to keep your business private, and that’s where a virtual private network (VPN) comes in. VPNs are designed to add an extra layer of security to the internet and other public networks. They basically…

Browsers trust root CAs. In order to become a root CA, a company must comply with and be audited against security and authentication standards established by the browsers. Browsers have a list of pre-installed trusted CAs, known as the Trusted Root CA store. When a CA issues a digital certificate it contains the public key of the owner. The private key isn’t publicly available, unsurprisingly. The certificate is validated by the CA, so that the public key contained in the certificate belongs to the person or organisation which requested the certificate in the first place. A CA verifies an applicant’s credentials, so that users and relying parties can trust the information held with the CA’s certificates. It’s not difficult to create a certificate. Browsers only trust certificates that come from…

Our expert Nate Drake Nate wishes to devote this article to his father, who said no-one would ever pay him to sit around playing video games. How would you like to be king for a day – or perhaps 10 years? This is the scenario in which you’re placed when you play the text-based strategy game Hammurabi, where the well-being of your population rests on your ability to harvest bushels of grain and feed them to a starving populace. While text games are rather old-hat these days, certain readers may remember those heady days when virtual fawning servants would beg to report the state of affairs in Sumeria to you. The game Hammurabi was popularised through the BASIC programming language. BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), was originally released in…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos Mihalis is a UNIX administrator, a programmer, a DBA and a mathematician, as well as the author of Go Systems Programming. You can reach him at http://www.mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. The area of systems programming in Kotlin basically includes techniques for reading and writing files. Bear in mind that if you ever try to write any serious application in Kotlin, you will most likely need to deal with files and directories, so make sure that you understand the topics of this tutorial. Moreover, this tutorial will also present sample code for generating random numbers and creating threads in Kotlin. Reading time When you want to process a file, the first task you should do is to check whether the file exists or not. The following Kotlin code,…

The big news with this month’s distro releases is that Canonical has abandoned Unity as the default desktop for Ubuntu in favour of Gnome 3. Unity debuted on the Ubuntu desktop with 11.04 and was part of Canonical’s plan to have a unified interface across all devices, desktops, netbooks and phones. In reality, Unity failed to live up to its name and caused divisions, with many objections to the new interface, and forks of Ubuntu using different desktops. Yet the company stuck to its guns and continued to develop and improve Unity. Of course, any change like this will generate a vocal response, which isn’t necessarily representative of the majority. Gnome 3, on which Unity is based, created a similar level of hoo-ha when it debuted on Fedora. Ubuntu’s objectors…

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