Table of contents for January 2021 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell My trusty desktop PC’s power supply has given up the ghost, so I’ve been enjoying laptop life lately. Pop!_OS really flies on the Dell XPS 13, but it’s only a matter of time before I install Arch. And then it’ll only be a matter of three to five days before everything is working. Christian Cawley I run Puppy Linux on my HP Envy 17 because it’s the only OS that enables this creaking desktop replacement to come close to meeting the potential of its impressive spec. If I could run Linux on my phone, I would –I’m looking forward to the Pro1 X in 2021. Nick Peers I’ve traditionally used Linux primarily on my desktop, or in a virtual machine. But I have big plans: to upgrade my…

“Good IT management means services aren’t affected when things go wrong. Redundancy, backups, auto-scaling, monitoring… they all contribute to that goal. But sometimes disasters occur, despite everyone’s best efforts. They’re rare events, but always have a significant impact. The data centre goes offline. AWS has an outage. The disk controller throws a wobbly and writes all over your RAID array. Enter the Disaster Recovery plan. For the likes of British Airways, the DR plan will be a multi-million pound plan (which hopefully has been improved since its 2017 outage). For most businesses, though, the DR plan may be no more than half a dozen pages answering a few key questions. What if the office is unavailable (oh, we’ve answered that one)? The data centre? The IT team leader? Internet outage…

“Apple announced its Arm-powered Macs recently that use its own “Apple Silicon” M1 CPUs. This was big news for the computing industry because of the associated performance and battery life claims that came alongside the new devices. It was also big news for those of us who work on Arm Linux kernel and software development. While the new Macs are not so locked down that you couldn’t run a Linux kernel on them, they’re also nonstandard at the bare metal level, meaning that you’d need to heavily modify an OS such as Linux to run on them. However, the Macs support full speed virtualisation and provide the frameworks needed to make Linux run under an emulated hardware environment. It’ll finally be possible to get faster than x86 laptops that can…

Q Sticking the boot back in I tried to install Manjaro (after reading your article on it) on an old Acer laptop that could no longer update Windows 10 as it’s only a 32GB SSD. I thought I was doing well and was happy using it, but had issues with it not shutting down and only booting up when AC power was plugged in. I got around the boot issue by disabling TLP, but wanted a proper fix. I changed a TLP setting to ignore AC, and prioritise battery and now it won’t boot at all. I’ve read articles that suggest using an installation media and mounting the old boot partition, but then what? Should I mount a different partition that contains the rest of the filesystem to edit…

For most general-purpose productivity applications, the most obvious way to compare a selection of products is to take a detailed look at the documentation. You’d then try each out program’s functions in a way that’s as close as possible to the way they’d be employed by most users. While that might not sound particularly ground-breaking, we need to point out that this was exactly the way we tested these presentation packages, presenting our findings in various categories. However, given our philosophy of choosing as diverse a selection of packages as possible, this wasn’t as easy as if we were reviewing a selection of products that could be described as competing head-to-head. For this reason, we also attempted to consider the unique selling points of each and come to a view…

The Presentation element of the WPS Office suite is another conventional offering and, together with the other parts of that suite, tends to be favoured by those who want a lightweight solution. If Sozi appeals to you, then Prezi works in a similar way but is provided as a cloud utility. It’s a commercial offering, although there’s a free option with reduced features. Moving on to a rather different solution from anything reviewed here, reveal.js is described as a framework for producing beautiful presentations in HTML, and it’s based on HTML 5 and CSS. In addition to enabling you to create presentations to be hosted online, it also supports PDF export to permit offline presentations. Finally, we come to the online Canva. It’s not a dedicated solution for presentation –…

When you boot the Pop medium the initial screens guide you, slightly hurriedly, to the installer. Before you rush into installing anything, however, you should try out Pop’s live environment by clicking the Demo mode button (pictured) after the localisation screens. This will give you a chance to get used to the desktop and possibly identify any hardware problems that could turn into showstoppers. Functioning wireless networking should be first on your list of things to check. If you run into difficulties here, visit the official Pop support page at https://support.system76.com/articles/wireless or find out which driver is (or should be) in use and have a scan through the Ubuntu documentation. Then check that videos play smoothly in Firefox, that your brightness and multimedia keys work and, if appropriate, what happens…

Pop!_OS is one of few distributions to offer out-of-the-box support for full disk encryption. This is something that’s more relevant for laptop users because there’s a higher risk of theft. And without some kind of encryption, if your laptop does get purloined then the thief has access to all your files. They don’t need your password. Only to remove the drive and plug it into a different machine. Other distros have support for home directory encryption (via EcryptFS), but this has its limitations. The home directory is meant to be relocked when you log out, but if something goes wrong and this doesn’t happen (and there have been bugs that cause exactly this behaviour), then a determined attacker could gain access if the laptop was left in standby mode. Then…

Looking beyond UBports there are a number of other noteworthy Linux on phone projects. The Mer (Meego reconstructed) Project launched in 2013 to continue the spirit of Maemo and Meego (which was discontinued when Samsung announced its own Tyzen OS). Mer was not so much a distribution as a middleware layer of tools sitting above the kernel, which would provide the essentials of an OS to anyone brave enough to build one. These days, Mer has been folded into the Sailfish OS project, which adds the proprietary UI featured on the Jolla smartphone. Mer makes use of Wayland, systemd and libhybris. The latter is a system that makes it possible to run Glibc-based apps (such as one would find on a regular Linux system) on devices whose driver stacks rely…

We’d hoped to offer a solid Debian-based Arm distro for Arm Chromebooks, but pickings are slim. You can try the Kali Arm images at www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux-arm-images, but the keyboard didn’t work with our Asus C100P. If you have time on your hands it also offers the Build Scripts, so you could try it yourself. Specifically for the Arm Asus Flip C100P/C201 models there’s PrawnOS at https://github.com/SolidHal/PrawnOS/releases. This is still early in development, and the C100P image is an Alpha. It’s also a blobless Debian release, so you’ll need an external USB Atheros AR9271 (or the rarer AR7010) Wi-Fi adapter. It’s likely you don’t have one of these and we had issues getting the internal Wi-Fi working with the non-free firmware packages, so we’re going to suggest you run this off a…

OUR EXPERT Christian Cawley is a technology writer and Doctor Who fan. Sigh. QUICK TIP The Pi 4 works as a daily driver. But if there’s something you can’t do with it, go and use your wheezing desktop and come back to the low-budget, environmentally friendly Pi. Popular desktop collaboration tools are hard to come by for the Raspberry Pi. While Slack has a desktop version, its browser interface is a smart alternative. For Asana, browser access is straightforward, and easier to switch between multiple accounts than the mobile app. Mozilla Firefox might be a popular alternative, but if you’re expecting to use your Raspberry Pi as a desktop replacement, Chromium currently offers the best support for vital web tools that you will need. Much has been written about using…

The Raspberry Pi boasts a range of cases across all device form factors. But only a few of these can be treated as productivity devices. For example, a LEGO-compatible desktop replacement is less suitable than a case with space for a fan. Something that looks like a computer, rather than a toy, can subconsciously affect how you work. Consider anything that looks tidy and uniform. The official Raspberry Pi 4 case (£5), for example, is a strong option. Alternatively, the Aluminium Armour heatsink case for the Pi 4 (£12) is geared towards performance. For something more like a traditional PC desktop, the Argon One Raspberry Pi 4 case (£24) resembles a small form factor PC. It also has the benefit of all port connectors being placed at the back of…

“Could some of this be automated?” you might have asked yourself while reviewing the procedures for package creation. Thankfully, there’s a well-established tool that attempts to make things easier. CheckInstall keeps track of the build process and automatically creates the package for you. Even better, it can create packages in Slackware, RPM and deb format. CheckInstall even has uses outside of package distribution, because you can use it to add compiled software to your own system through standard package management. This also means that you can remove it from the system, using the standard package management tools. To use CheckInstall, carry out the first part of the build process ./configure and make as normal. However, instead of invoking sudo make install to install, run sudo checkinstall . From this point,…

While fdisk can’t be used to resize existing partitions, you can modify partitions with the parted utility. The process isn’t without risk however, so make sure you have a complete backup of all your data, and more importantly, very good reason to mess about with nonempty partitions. A read-through of the manual can’t hurt, either. To begin, you’ll have to start parted much the same way as fdisk. Before anything else, change the default unit for describing the start, end and size of partitions to MiB by pressing ‘u’ and then typing MiB when prompted to specify the unit. Depending on your disk and partition size, you can also opt for GiB as the unit. Before you can expand, or shrink a partition, it must first be removed from the…

Jami is cross-platform: it works on all three major desktop platforms, and Android and iOS mobile. Once you’ve set up your Jami account on your main PC, how do you go about logging into that account from other devices? Unlike other platforms, logging in with your Jami username and password won’t cut it: as an additional security measure, you must start the process of adding a new device from your existing PC. Click the Settings button next to your account name, then click ‘+ Link another device’. You’ll be prompted for your password – once entered, click ‘Export on the network’. This temporarily exports your account to the ‘Jami distributed network’ – see https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ring-project/wikis/tutorials/Jami-distributed-network for details. A PIN code is generated and displayed on-screen, and you have five to 10…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers has been playing around with computers for over 30 years, and has been immersing himself in Linux for over a decade.. QUICK TIP Another place to find files you can install through the Software Centre is Flatpak (https:// flatpak.org/). Install it with the following commands: $ sudo apt install flatpak $ sudo apt install gnome-softwareplugin-flatpak Whether you’re just starting out with Ubuntu or are looking to fill some gaps in your essential knowledge bank, you’ve come to the right place. Read on to discover 10 tips that will give you a solid foundation in using Linux on your PC. Back up your data Data loss isn’t something that happens to other people – it can strike without warning even if you’re not tinkering with the kernel.…

In this series we’ve looked at the demoscene for each machine and one site has been a source of information. Pouet (www.pouet.net/index.php) is a repository and historical resource akin to a museum. On this site you can access the demos for all the major machines along with the history and details of the teams that created them. If you’re seriously into the demoscene then this is an essential resource. The demoscene was fuelled by demo parties, one of the most influential being “The Party” that ran from 1992 to 2002 and became the model on which many others were formed. At these events, rival groups would compete in various categories on many different platforms. These friendly rivalries formed friendships, collaborations and projects akin to any other community. The demoscene may…

Firefox ships with Lockwise, its own built-in password manager. We still favour Bitwarden (www.bitwarden.com),though. It’s cross-platform, so works across all major browsers on your PC as well as your mobile devices and can be used to store more than just web logon passwords. After installing the add-on, it’ll appear in two places: as a side panel and as its own browser toolbar button. If you’re on a secure PC, you can even bypass the need to enter your master password each time you launch Firefox and use it: click Settings and choose ‘Unlock with PIN’ to provide a quicker way of unlocking your vault. When using the password generator to create random, strong passwords, make them 14 characters or longer to put them beyond the reach of brute-force hackers. Keep…

The easy answer is to just run Janus-UAE2. However, you’ll need to have the Amiga Kickstart files, which you then need to select in the ROM section of Properties. Kickstart files can be legally purchased with Cloanto’s Amiga Forever package at www.amigaforever.com. But you can do that on almost any OS. Icaros features AmiBridge, which integrates Motorola 68000 (M68K) emulation into the desktop. Although there’s a free AROS replacement emulator, we found it too slow to be usable and low on compatibility. Fortunately AmiBridge has scripts based around Amiga Forever. If you insert the CD and run AmiStart (found under AROS>System> AmiStart>Amistart), there’ll be a computer icon on the far right. This opens a menu with the entry ‘Integrate Amiga Forever’. Click this and a window appears asking for a…

The basic premise remains the same: the player drives a visual representation of a car across the screen. Sometimes they’re racing other players, sometimes just themselves. Rally racing is the name for the latter, in which players attempt to get the fastest possible time on a given track. Competitive racing is the former, where players attempt to beat another player – real or computer generated – to the finish line. In either instance, obstacles can be placed in the player’s way to create more of a challenge. Racing games these days tend to allow for a selection of vehicles and modifications, but their origins are more humble in nature. The first racing game, Space Race, wasn’t even a car at all. Released in 1973, this was a two-player arcade racing…

If you fancy trying out another minimalistic form of computation you could try Brainf**k (we’ve censored the official name). It differs from a TM in that it’s a programming language so you don’t have to deal with states, but in common with TMs, it operates on a one-dimensional list of memory locations that a pointer can move along, one location at a time. Like a TM it has just eight instructions, which are represented by single ASCII characters. The instructions move the pointer left or right, increment or decrement the value at the pointer, output or input the value at the pointer, and implement a loop. Despite its simplicity, like the TM, this language is universal. Brainf**k interpreters for Linux are common, as are compilers, both as source code and…

THE LXF LIBRARY Advanced Bash Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners Get to grips with the basics of Bash scripting. Bourne Shell Scripting First steps in shell scripting. The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric S. Raymond’s classic text explains the advantages of open development. The Debian Book Essential guide for sysadmins. Dive Into Python Everything you need to know. Introduction to Linux A handy guide full of pointers for new Linux users. Linux Dictionary The A-Z of everything to do with Linux. Linux Kernel in a Nutshell An introduction to the kernel written by master hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman. The Linux System Administrator’s Guide Take control of your system. Tools Summary Overview of GNU tools. GNU Emacs Manual Six hundred pages of essential information! Producing Open…

Get Linux on your laptop! There’s no doubt many of you already have, but just as with running Linux on a desktop there’s more than one way of getting things done for your laptop. Truth be told, laptops of old were more akin to butchered desktops and so things – software wise at least – transferred more easily for Linux users. Over the years hardware designers have steadily optimised mobile hardware, to the point where getting Linux on mobile devices has become increasingly difficult. Some of that is deliberate lockdown (the bad sort, of course) of hardware, but also modern power-efficiency tricks can trip up operating systems designed for desktop use. Elsewhere, obscure, almost bespoke peripherals can leave missing modules that are hard to track down. So we equipped Jonni…

Devices running Android 7.1 or earlier, may find the internet getting smaller in 2021. Let’s Encrypt, one of the world’s biggest certificate authorities, with around 30 per cent of all web domains using its certificates, is ending its partnership with IdenTrust on 1 September, 2021. Along with the company’s own ISRG Root X1 root certificate, Let’s Encrypt’s certificates were also cross-signed with the DST Root X3 root from IdenTrust. This means from that date, browsers and operating systems without the ISRG Root X1 certificate won’t work with websites and services using the certificate. As Let’s Encrypt’s blog post (https://letsencrypt.org/2020/11/06/own-two-feet. html) states, “older versions of Android will no longer trust certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt,” with anything older than Android 7.1.1 likely to encounter issues. While that version was released in late…

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.10-rc5, which he described as “the largest rc5 we’ve had in the 5.x series”. Still, nothing particularly bad stood out in this latest Release Candidate kernel and if things remain on track then we can expect Linux 5.10 to be released early in 2021. While the typical end-of-year holidays usually have an impact on productivity, you wouldn’t know it from the rate of ongoing development and RFC (Request For Comment) development patches hitting the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Asymmetric processing There are some interesting macro trends in computing today. For decades, the free ride that was Moore’s Law almost guaranteed us that computers would get faster every year. With that promise waning in the recent past, the existing trend toward more complex…

When running multiple computers behind a NATed internet connection, you often have only one public IP address. What happens when you want to run servers on more than one of your computers? It’s fine if you’re running different services, a web server on one box and a web server on another, say. In that case you set your router to forward by port. When you want to use the same port on more than one computer, things start to get a little more sticky. A reverse proxy can help. It looks at incoming requests and decides, using rules you have configured, where to send each request. This way you can have requests to http://mail.example. com go to the webmail server on your mail machine and http://www.example. com go to your…

We didn’t find it plain sailing getting up to speed with all of the packages. Although many users barely look at user documentation, preferring to learn by using the software, with one of our packages you might find that approach tough going, and with another you’d be pretty much guaranteed to fail. User documentation and other sources of support are, therefore, not just the icing on the cake. LibreOffice Impress is well catered for. There’s a Getting Started Guide and a Base Guide for the LibreOffice suite as a whole and an Impress Guide, even though the latter is pegged at version 4.2. Beyond this, there’s lots of community support including online help and mailing lists. For Calligra Stage there is an Introductory Handbook for the Calligra suite and a…

You can install Linux on anything these days, from robots to routers to refrigerators. And most of the time a friendly installer will have it running on a desktop PC in minutes. In theory this should be the case for laptops too, but ever since there was Linux there has been all manner of accompanying bugbears and gripes peculiar to them. And we’re not talking about easy things like turning off Secure Boot. Oh no, we’re referring to proprietary disk formats that prevent installation, strange mobile chipsets and dual-graphics devices duelling with one another. Basically the stuff of nightmares. We don’t want to discourage anyone from installing Linux on their laptop, quite the opposite. The chances are anyone installing a major distribution today will hardly run into any difficulties. Hardware…

The Pi 400 design process aka lefty bias Insights into the design and creation of the latest Raspberry Pi device reveal something surprising… One of the many great things about the Raspberry Pi Foundation is the openness it takes with how its devices are designed and manufactured (see features, LXF182). Now a fresh blog post shines a spotlight on the design process behind the latest Pi 400. One of the odd areas that’s covered is the placement of the USB port, which is over on the left-hand side. As many have pointed out online, this forces the mouse cable to cross over all the other connections – for right-handed users at least. Is this lefty bias? Simon Martin explained: “The PCB shape had to be defined early on so that…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance creative technologist. He blogs at bigl.es. YOU NEED Any 40 pin GPIO Pi model An Explorer HAT Pro from Pimoroni 3 x Male to male jumper wires 10K Ohm Resistor (Brown-Black-Orange-Gold) 10K Potentiometer Small DC motor An internet connection Get the code: https://github.com/lesp/LXF271-Node-RED-Explorer HAT/archive/main.zip QUICK TIP Unsure as to what a node does, or what data it produces? Fear not. Click any node and the information column will show the properties and example code for the node. The Explorer HAT has been the star of a few tutorials in your favourite Linux magazine, but we’ve always used it with Python. Yet did you know that we can also use it with Node-RED? This is an event-driven…

Day 0 “Sensing that preparation would be key to the success of using a Pi 4 as my main computer for a working week, I spent Sunday preparing the system. This meant installing software, checking printer access and confirming key online resources worked. Fearing processing bottlenecks, I settled for the 8GB version of the Pi 4 and connected it to a spare monitor. A standard USB keyboard and mouse were attached, along with an external HDD for storage. This was to prevent overuse of the microSD card as well as to ensure any saved work could be retrieved in the event of a crash.” Day 1 “Monday is almost always heavy on emails. Using Chromium, I was able to juggle several tabs, mostly email accounts and LinkedIn, without too much…

Rather than using your day-to-day Linux installation for the build procedure, it’s good practice to use a virtual machine within a virtualiser such as VirtualBox or VMware. This way, you can start with a fresh, completely standard installation. Of course, you can have a selection of different distros in place for package building duty using a virtualiser. In addition, virtualisers enable you to take a snapshot of the unaltered machine to carry out some experiments with and then revert the VM to back to its original state afterwards, so that you always start with a standard system. You’ll want to keep the Linux system installation fairly plain, but don’t forget to add the virtualiser extensions to the installation. You’re going to need quite a bit of cut and paste for…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers remembers the adage of never working with animals or children after doing grabs for this tutorial… QUICK TIP Jami supports SIP, which is used for VoIP services. Click Advanced on the main welcome screen to log into your account. Note, however, that you can only contact other SIP users via your SIP account – it’s completely separate to Jami’s own communication protocols. The new version of Jami now supports plugins, so expect to see third-party developers take full advantage. For now, you can make use of the GreenScreen plugin to modify your background during a call. Everything’s handled locally to preserve network bandwidth, but you’ll need a NVIDIA card (and drivers) to take full advantage. Your Jami account details exist only on your own devices. If…

Some programs are distributed as downloadable files from the internet – how do you run or install these? Files distributed as AppImages (https://appimage.github.io) are effectively portable applications: copy them to a suitable place within your Home folder, then right-click the file and choose Properties>Permissions tab. Tick ‘Allow executing file as a program’ – you can now launch the program simply by double-clicking its file. It’s a similar process for .sh files, but after changing the file’s permissions, right-click inside the folder and choose ‘Open in Terminal’, then issue the following command: $ sudo ./file_name.sh For Ubuntu, avoid RPM files in favour of DEB files. Once downloaded, double-click a DEB file and it’ll open in Software Centre, enabling you to install it with a few clicks. Programs installed via DEB files…

This author’s first experience of Amstrad was in high school. The tutor group met in the Business Studies room and in there were a range of Amstrad PCW machines. The PCW range were “business machines” designed for office use; they came with a green screen monitor, one or two three-inch floppy drives, a dot matrix printer and a compact keyboard. Inside was the same Z80 processor and either 256KB (PCW 8256) or 512KB (PCW 8512). These machines ran CP/M Plus, a version of the CP/M operating system, but in class Locoscript, the word-processing application, was mostly used. Notice the name, Locoscript… Locomotive BASIC anyone? There was also a version of the same BASIC as used on the CPC 464 but it had many of the commands removed. Amstrad had a…

OUR EXPERT Kseniya Fedoruk is a documents expert at OnlyOffice and spends her nights and days making your docs better. Document collaboration is key to successful working from home – and never more so during the current worldwide pandemic. And to protect those documents you’re going to want end-to-end encryption. A brand-new feature In OnlyOffice is Private Rooms. These are protected workplaces for encrypted collaboration where every symbol you type is encrypted using the unbreakable AES-256 algorithm. Private Rooms work via the OnlyOffice desktop programs’s interface to encrypt and decrypt the data on the client and make the endpoint secure. All the documents you work with in Private Rooms are encrypted once they’ve been created or uploaded. All inputs made by co-authors – including objects and images – are encrypted…

There are many places you could take this going forwards. For reasons of space and readability, we’ve left out processing of other useful fields from the source XML file. As well as RatingValue , each business gets a score for ConfidenceInManagement , Hygiene and Structural . Concerning the index mappings, we’ve omitted much talk of the keyword data type. It’s used for structured content that you want to narrow your search for, as opposed to the free text we’ve indexed the business names as. In the XML files there’s a LocalAuthorityName field that would be a prime candidate for this. Mappings documentation is at www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/mapping.html. Since June 2020, the exports are also available in JSON format. We found it was almost treated as an afterthought and often needed more pre-processing…

OUR EXPERT John Knight spends his days dodging wildfires, maskless citizens and spiders… always the spiders when not writing about open source.. QUICK TIP  Configuration windows will often have the choices of Save and Use. If that’s confusing, Save will store the configuration to be used now and in the future, whereas Use will only try the setting during boot. Even though keyboard-driven cutting and pasting doesn’t work for the file manager, it does work for text. Just remember to use the Right Amiga key instead of Ctrl. If you don’t have any Amiga (aka. “Windows") keys, or you only have just the one, F11 and F12 will act as substitutes for the left and right Amiga keys, respectively. Are you tired of modern PC desktops and want to use…

At some point you’ll need to copy files on to your AROS machine before you can enjoy all that fancy multimedia goodness. The most obvious method is via a USB flash drive, but initially we had trouble getting USB flash drives to appear on the system at all. Then we realised our mistake: AROS doesn’t currently support Linux or NTFS file systems, so to copy files from your other computer, you’ll need to format your USB flash drive as FAT32. The Icaros documentation recommends FAT16 file systems, but we think this is an unrealistic choice with its 2GB drive limit and annoying 8.3 filename restriction. USB storage devices such as flash drives will trigger an information box, which you can dismiss, or even disable if you hate information pop-ups. Amusingly,…

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford is fascinated by how simple computer architectures – such as a Turning Machine – can do anything the most powerful supercomputers can do. QUICK TIP Alan Turning might not have built a physical realisation of his theoretical computer, but Mike Davey has. See www. aturingmachine.com. It works on a real tape, erasing old symbols and writing new ones as it goes. Behind the scenes it’s controlled by a Parallax Propeller microcontroller. “How fast is a Turing Machine?” is surely a daft question since it’s a theoretical computer. For a mechanical implementation, though, Mike Davey (see page 92) came up with some estimates about his creation – from 3.1 operations per second to 6.2 seconds per operation. Go to www. redfrontdoor.org/ turingmandelbrot.to see how the Mandelbot Set…

CREATIVE DISTRO MIN SPECS: 2GB RAM (4GB RECOMMENDED), 20GB DISK Pop!_OS 20.04 Our cover feature hopefully gives you plenty of reasons to install System76’s Pop!_OS on your laptop, but it’s a fantastic choice for your desktop, too. Plus there’s slightly more chance your desktop has an optical drive so you can fire up the DVD without delay and see exactly what you mean. If you want all the stability and support of Ubuntu (sans the Snap packages), but with a stylishly different take on the Gnome desktop and featuring so many little tweaks and thought-out conveniences as would be hopeless to attempt to list here, then you should check out Pop!_OS. We’ve gone with the LTS version, based on Ubuntu 20.04, because it will be supported for five years. A…

“It’s that time of year where luminaries across the tech world try to predict what will happen in the next 12 months. First, a safe bet… database as a service (DBaaS) will continue to grow. DBaaS is the leading way to consume databases as it’s more convenient for developers and non-DBAs, which is most of us. However, most DBaaS are proprietary, so we’ll see more open source solutions emerging to fill this gap. We’ll also see plenty of innovation in languages and data models. SQL is the de facto standard for relational databases and for the majority of the database market, but there’s an increasing focus on SQL-like languages such as N1QL from Couchbase and CQL from Cassandra. For time-series databases with Prometheus, there’s promQL, which is gaining a lot…

“Since our previous update on Monado we’ve been focused on achieving two key milestones: conformancy and Android support. Thanks to the OpenXR Conformance Test Suite being publicly available and Open Source, Monado 0.4 passes all of the OpenXR conformance tests with both OpenGL and Vulkan, on desktop with a simulated device. The Monado runtime can now be installed as an .apk, enabling OpenXR clients like the hello_XR example from the Khronos OpenXR SDK to run standalone on Android-based devices, and officially enabling Android support on Monado. Initial orientation tracking using the IMU (orientation and acceleration sensors) found in about every modern smartphone is now supported, enabling you to view OpenXR applications in VR via Google Cardboard and Daydream displays, with distortion correction values. In the future, you’ll be able to…

Ben Widawsky (Intel) posted an RFC patch series adding CXL (Compute Express Link) support to the Linux kernel. CXL devices use the same physical links as PCIe (PCI Express) but they have a new protocol that allows more than just PCI TLP (Transaction Layer Packets). It adds three types of CXL devices, and a “type-3” memory device that enables expansion memory to be added to systems other than via DDR slots. This should mean that future systems can add much larger amounts of certain memory types, such as Storage Class Memories (NV-DIMMs, say). Tom Lendacky (AMD) posted version 3 of patches enabling SEV-ES (Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Encrypted State). These build on existing AMD encrypted virt technology, but add protection for the register and other CPU state of the “guest”…

We’d love to try and answer any questions you send to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, no matter what the level. We’ve all been stuck before, so don’t be shy. However, we’re only human (although many suspect Jonni is a robot), so it’s important that you include as much information as you can. If something works on one distro but not another, then tell us. If you get an error message, please tell us the exact message and precisely what you did to invoke it. If you have, or suspect, a hardware problem, let us know about the hardware. Consider installing hardinfo or lshw. These programs list the hardware on your machine, so send us their output. If you’re unwilling, or unable, to install these, run the following commands in a root terminal and…

There have been a number of performance and resource usage issues with Gnome, and in particular Canonical’s builds of it since it was reinstated as Ubuntu’s default desktop. Everything from jittery animations to spamming the journal with arcane javascript warnings. These were for the most part fixed in the LTS, which we’re now happily running on a number of our machines. Yet, somehow things feel even smoother in 20.10. Sure, it still eats a lot of memory, but as long as you have at least 4GB of RAM you’ll be fine for casual computing. Distros are getting bigger and bigger (the Groovy Gorilla ISO is 2.7GB, which limits which ones we could fit alongside it on our DVD), but such is the way of things. Our initial 20.10 install occupied…

The mainstay of so many sales presentations – software for editing and displaying slides – as most famously typified by Microsoft PowerPoint, has traditionally been thought of a business tool. Things have changed though. First, equally functional software is now available for a variety of operating systems, including Linux. And second, non-business applications have mushroomed to include school classes, university lectures, church sermons, club talks, conference presentations and even pub quizzes. We think it’s fair to assume, therefore, that selecting a good presentation package is of potential interest to us all, hence this Roundup. The most obvious type of presentation software could be thought of as Microsoft PowerPoint lookalikes and we’re looking at two in this category, namely LibreOffice Impress and Calligra Stage. However, it was our aim to cover…

First we need to think about sharing presentations in a form that your colleagues can view and edit. So it’s good to note that LibreOffice Impress, Calligra Stage and Google Slides support the main presentation software formats of PPT, PPTX (PowerPoint) and ODP (OpenDocument), either as their native format or for import and/or export. However, in our experience, Stage isn’t as good as Impress at correctly interpreting a PowerPoint file. Sozi is quite dissimilar, primarily because of its totally different way of working. This means that importing something generated in Sozi into PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress would be pointless. A presentation comprises the base poster, an HTML file and a Sozi file, and while it can be presented in any browser, it can only be shared with another Sozi user…

Nokia’s Maemo (and the cult classic N900 phone with slide-out keyboard that ran it) has been lamented as a missed opportunity for Linux to establish itself as a mobile OS. Likewise lamented was Ubuntu Phone which, alongside the Unity desktop and Mir display server, Canonical disbanded in 2017. THE BENEFITS OF LINEAGE OS “If you do want to make phone calls and run regular Android apps, a popular option is LineageOS, which grew out of Cyanogen Mod.” It’s not all doom and gloom though. If you have an N900, or indeed one of a considerable number of supported devices, then you can run PostMarketOS and have the complete Linux experience on your phone. This is probably not recommended for your primary phone though: a device being supported doesn’t necessarily mean…

If you’re messing around with the base operating system you need to take precautions. Google has created a pretty simple emergency recovery system that just needs you to install a Chrome Extension and then enable it to write a back-up recovery OS to a spare 8GB (or larger) USB drive. Be aware this can take an hour, so do it when you can leave your device running and plugged in. Head to the Google Web Store and get the Recovery Utility here (https://bit.ly/lxf271recover). Follow the instructions, click the model number for your device when this is displayed (as above) and then let it download, create and test the image. With that safely in the bank you can go and do unspeakable things to your Chromebook, safe in the knowledge that…

Why do makers make things? I’d argue it’s because they have a reason to make. Whether to turn a profit professionally, to create something for the home or just to express their artistic streak, no-one makes without a reason. This is why Tim Richardson and myself decided, back in 2013, to start Pi Wars, the robotics challenge competition for the Raspberry Pi. With seven challenges, plus technical and artistic merit to consider when building your robot, the competition gives makers that reason to embark on a project. From professional robotics makers to families who just want to give it a go, we’ve seen people truly inspired by the challenge of bringing a robot to the event. This has sparked their interest in electronics and programming and they have taken it…

The Explorer HAT Pro has two motor terminals which we can use to make things move. We shall use the inject node, which is already in the flow, to start this section of code. The first node is a button node, found in the dashboard. Connect the output of the inject node to the input of the button. Double-click the button node and set the group to [Explorer HAT Experiments] and the Label to STOP!. When clicked the payload to send is a number (0) and the topic is motor.1. This is an emergency stop button for a motor connected to motor 1. From the dashboard drag a slider node. Connect the output of the button to the input of the slider. Edit the slider node to use the same…

A standard Raspberry Pi might be lightweight and pocket sized, but it’s about as portable as a ball and chain. Desktop productivity in 2020 has the important dimension of flexible working, the ability to “hotdesk” and work from anywhere. This is something that a Raspberry Pi can’t do without a battery and portable display. In fact, the more items you realise you need, the more cumbersome it becomes. Should you just switch to a laptop, or even a tablet? Well, it’s a smart alternative, but there’s no reason to abandon the Raspberry Pi entirely. An increasing number of portable Raspberry Pi systems are available, from the Piper project box to the pi-top 3. Throw in things like the RasPad 3, a tablet-style Raspberry Pi with the option to hook up…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for pocket friendly geeky memorabilia.. QUICK TIP Commands in the command-mode are context sensitive. This means that the ‘L’ command to list all supported filesystem types won’t work from the main command mode of fdisk. You must first type ‘t’ to change the type and only then can you use the ‘L’ command. Despite the constant push for user-friendly and intuitive graphical applications over the past decade, command-line utilities remain popular for performing a vast number of tasks. Whether its cloning your disk, transferring files across the network, communicating with peers, or even accessing social media, you can do it all from the relative comfort of the Linux shell. Partitioning…

AUDIO TAG EDITOR Puddletag Version: 2.0.1 Web: https://github.com/puddletag/puddletag This program is good news for anyone who still maintains a local offline music library in 2021 (Go on… – Ed). After all, who doesn’t want to leave subscription services behind and enjoy their favourite tunes without third-parties getting involved? Unfortunately, if your music files come from different sources then their tagging conventions may also differ. That’s when we need a decent audio tagger. Puddletag is a versatile audio tag editor with everything you need for music library housekeeping. Puddletag was designed to work with directories, so you can tell it to load your entire collection (~/Music, say) and carry out all corrections from a single mission-control-like dashboard. The list of tracks looks more like a spreadsheet. Use Ctrl or Shift to…

OUR EXPERT Simon Quain works as a site reliability engineer who likes finding open datasets online to play around with in the Elastic Stack. QUICK TIP If you need to increase the resources available to Logstash or Elasticsearch, edit the -Xms and and -Xmx parameters in their respective config/jvm. options file which is set to 1 gigabyte by default Once you’ve defined a mapping for a field in Elasticsearch it can’t be changed. If you change your mind, you’ll need to delete the index, recreate the mapping and then reindex your data. A quick way to index ratings for multiple authorities in one go is to download several files, concatenate them together into one file so that each of those file’s contents is on a new line and then run…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers made Firefox his default browser for the second time a few years ago. As the only serious holdout against the Chromium browser engine, he feels it’s his FOSS duty... QUICK TIP Sign up for an account with NextDNS (https:// nextdns.io ) and you can add extras such as ad- and tracker blockers to Firefox at the DNS level. If you do this, when setting up DNS over HTTPs, choose Custom under ‘Use Provider’ to input the NextDNS URL associated with your account. Anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the Google way of thinking should be using Firefox as their default browser. It’s easily the equal of Chrome, and when you make use of a Firefox account, you can keep your tabs, bookmarks, add-ons and other settings in sync…

OUR EXPERT Calvin Robinson is a former assistant principal and computer science teacher with a degree in computer games design and programming. QUICK TIP Have a play around with different colour schemes, and if you’re feeling particularly fancy try designing your own car. You can always edit our car in Gimp, rather than starting from scratch. It’s handy to print commands to the console when developing and testing a game. However, don’t forget to comment out any print() lines afterwards – we don’t want to spam our player. Consider building on the knowledge gained from this tutorial to implement a ‘Pause’ button. This would need to make use of PyGame’s text tool, a rectangle to display it and some buttons. Over the past few issues we’ve taken a look at…

USING THE LXFDVD Using Linux for the first time can be very confusing. It’ll most likely be unlike anything that you’ve operated before, especially if you’re used to Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS. Generally our DVDs are designed to be run directly, which is to say that when you first power on your PC (or Mac, see below) it should ‘boot’ from the DVD – so before Windows or macOS even starts to load – with Linux running directly from the DVD. This trick is known as a Live Disc. It enables you to try out the various versions of Linux without having to install or change anything on your PC. Just remove the DVD, restart your PC and it’ll be exactly as you left it. While many systems will…