Home//Linux Format/November 2023/In This Issue
Linux Format|November 2023MEET THE TEAMMatthew Holder A friend convinced me to install Slackware on a spare PC to learn about Linux. I then decided to share the pain of dial-up internet across multiple devices – imagine the speed shared between three machines! I haven’t looked back or stopped learning since the year 2000. Les Pounder A magazine coverdisc in the late ’90s. Not sure of the exact distro but it was RPM-based. It got me interested enough in Linux to download Corel Linux, then Mandrake. I later switched to SUSE, then distro hopped for a while before settling with Ubuntu. Mayank Sharma I first installed Linux back when installing Linux was a project in itself. My dad read about the Halloween Documents and ordered the official Slackware CD set. To install Linux back then…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023TOFU FOR ALL!“You can read about HashiCorp’s licence rug-pull below-left. The community, after a few warning shots, forked Terraform as OpenTF. At the Open Source Summit Europe, the Linux Foundation (LF) validated and endorsed the project by putting it under the foundation’s umbrella as OpenTofu. This is important for two reasons. First, OpenTF would probably have succeeded without the LF’s backing. But endorsing the project and providing a foundation home (under a name less likely to be a trademark issue) all but guaranteed its success. This is important, since the LF’s member base and many projects under the LF’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) depend on and were designed with Terraform in mind. This allows the ecosystem to move forward, on a technical level, with minimal disruption. Secondly, this is a political…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Download manager was trojanedDownload managers can be an excellent way to juggle multiple file transfers in parallel, but in the case of the Free Download Manager for Linux, it’s been a surefire way to infect systems. While Free Download Manager itself is a legitimate app, in September Kaspersky researchers discovered that the developers’ website had been compromised. Between 2020 and 2022, users were being redirected to a dodgy Debian repository containing a malicious version of the program. Once installed, the fake download manager tampers with Cron to make sure it starts up each time users log in to the Linux operating system. It then launches a reverse shell, which it uses to collect sensitive data, such as system information, browsing history, saved passwords and cryptocurrency wallet files, as well as credentials for cloud…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023CODEC COUP“Released in August, Linux kernel 6.5 brought 22 patches that enabled support for the AV1 uAPI and for two stateless video decoders: one for the Rockchip RK3588 and one for MT8195, a MediaTek SoC. This is the result of several years of efforts by our team to bring up this new codec for stateless video decoding. Adding a new video codec is not simple work because it requires a stable uAPI and at least two drivers using it on different hardware. The two drivers are needed because they help prove that the uAPI can meet the various needs for hardware from different vendors. As a matter of fact, having more drivers would have been even better in terms of testing and coverage, but there are currently only two hardware IP…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Kernel WatchLinus Torvalds announced Linux 6.6-rc4, noting that the latest set of fixes were small and predicting larger sets of updates before the final 6.6 release. Thorsten Leemhuis’s Regzbot regression tracking efforts say “there’s not much to report wrt [with respect to] … regressions introduced during the current cycle, as many of those I tracked were fixed”. Fedora is on a quest to “confirm that the License field of all the RPMs is correct”, and this extends to the kernel package. Prarit Bhargava let everyone know that “during our investigation we discovered two files in the kernel … which from their descriptions imply that the code contained is not GPL”. The offending files are firmwares for AppleTalk network devices, the drivers for which have not been updated since 2006. Given that…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023AnswersQ Fill yer boots I cannot update the linux-firmware package on my Linux Mint 21 system. All other updates complete normally, but this errors out with the message ‘No room left to install.’ This makes no sense as I have a 1TB drive with plenty of free space. I can right-click and select Ignore The Current Update For This Package and everything appears to be running fine, but the next time, the update manager wants to update this again, with the same result. How can I get rid of this error? If that is not possible, how can I tell the system to ignore this particular update in the hope that the next version will fix this error? Cameron Knowles A Since the introduction of UEFI booting, a separate…11 min
Linux Format|November 2023Seagate FireCuda 540SPECS Size: 2TB (1TB option) Type: PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0 IC: Phison PS5026-E26 Mem: Micron 232-layer 3D TLC Seq: 10,000MB/s read/write Endurance: 2,000 TB TBW PCIe 5.0 SSDs have been teased for what seems like an eternity. In spite of all the chat, few drives are available, even less so from the big-name SSD makers. Seagate belongs in that category, and its FireCuda 540 leads the Seagate charge into the brave new world of PCIe 5.0 SSDs. For now, that new world is a very expensive one to buy into. All PCIe 5.0 SSDs carry a massive price premium over PCIe 4.0 drives. Seagate is positioning the FireCuda 540 as an allround option. There are obvious benefits but it also carries an excellent endurance rating and comes with three years…3 min
Linux Format|November 2023Mageia 9IN BRIEF Mageia is derived from the Greek word for magic and it’s easy to see why: installation media for every taste, plus a revamped setup wizard. The Control Center also makes configuration easy. SPECS CPU: 1GHz Mem: 512GB (2GB recommended) HDD: 20GB Builds: i586, x86_64 In 2010, the company that owned the assets to the popular and easy-to-use Linux distro Mandriva was liquidated. Shortly afterwards, a number of former Mandriva employees and volunteers from the Linux community announced the creation of Mageia. Unlike Mandriva, this OS is backed by a non-profit organisation based in France (Mageia.org). The project snowballed and to date hundreds of developers have collaborated to produce nine stable versions of the OS every one to two years. If you decide to take the latest Mageia 9…3 min
Linux Format|November 2023Fediverse serversWE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO! Roundup Akkoma Misskey Lemmy Mastodon Pixelfed HOW WE TESTED… The fediverse is all about choice. You can pick a server, decide you don’t like it, and go elsewhere. If you’re running your own server, it’s a little more difficult, as you’re also responsible for your users, and any changes will affect them, too. It’s important to get it right and to choose an instance type that suits your users and your own responsibilities as an admin. We tested based on usability from these perspectives, and deployed instances on a variety of VPS setups, along with a Raspberry Pi and a more powerful physical server. While we did load up our instances with virtual users to test moderation, threaded conversations and…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023Customisation optionsHark back to the early days of social media, and you’ll recall just how wild it was. While we’re now used to the standard uniformity of Twitter/X and Facebook, it’s easy to forget how pioneers such as MySpace sold themselves on how crazy you could make your page. When you’re designing your own little corner of the internet, you want it to look nice, and you want your users to feel that they can make it their home. If they can’t, they may look elsewhere. Misskey is the standout winner, as it enables you to customise virtually every aspect of your instance’s appearance to suit the theme of your server. Although it comes with Japanese catgirls as standard, there’s nothing stopping you from changing the theme, icons, layout, avatars and…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Holding a conversationSocial media is supposed to be social. It’s in the name, and the phenomenon has been compared to a town square or a village pub, where you can grab a pint, sit down at a table, and pitch in with your opinion on the latest football performance (it was a disgrace). Alternatively, you and your mates should be able to sneak off to a private snug and discuss marital woes away from the cacophony of other voices. The layout of the venue should facilitate both of these conversation modes, while also talking to people in the pub next door through a handy hole in the wall. Discussion is top priority with Lemmy. It’s built around the idea of positing an idea or article, and then talking about it. Conversations are…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023STREAMING MADE EASY!It wasn’t that long ago that selling the idea of a selfhosted and self-owned media server seemed like harking back to the days of the dinosaurs. “But everything’s on Netflix, iCloud and Spotify!” came the response. But as subscription costs keep rising and services suddenly start dropping content from their libraries, who’s laughing now? There’s no better solution to ensuring media is always available to you than by owning it yourself. But why compromise on the convenience of streaming services when your PC gives you the best of all worlds? Thanks to a triumvirate of beautifully written open source tools, you can set up streaming services covering all your media – from music and movies to audiobooks and even all those photos on your phone – without having to pay…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Back up and view photos and videosWhile it’s possible to create libraries in Jellyfin to stream your personal photos and home videos to the big screen, the question remains of how easy it is to transfer said content from your phone to your server. Taking its cue from your cloud provider, Immich is designed to provide you with your own selfhosted alternative – one that doesn’t come with expensive subscription fees, and which not only simplifies the task of transferring your photos and videos to your server, but also gives you the means of organising files by album, people, location and more. Immich installation Immich is supplied as a container, so you need Docker or similar to deploy it. Browse to https://documentation.immich.app/docs/install/requirements for the scripts and instructions you need – Docker Compose is the recommended route…7 min
Linux Format|November 2023Astro Pi Mission Zero blasts off into 2024!We warned you before, but now it’s here – the new Astro Pi Mission Zero for 2023/24 has blasted off! If you want to take part, you have until March 2024 to register and enter your coding project. As a reminder, Astro Pi Mission Zero tasks young people with writing a simple Python program to take a reading using a sensor on one of the ISS Astro Pi computers and display a personalised pixel art image for theastronauts on board the ISS. This can be entered as an individual or team project. This year’s theme is ‘flora and fauna’, to help remind the ISS astronauts of the beauty of Earth’s natural wonders. The overall aim is to display pixel art or animation on the Astro Pi’s display and take a…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023A BIG BANG!QUICK TIP Pop can be downloaded from https://pop.system76.com/. Apart from being a typographical nightmare, Pop!_ OS, which we’ll refer to as Pop from A now on, is a Linux distribution sponsored by System76, a US-based company that sells laptops, desktops, servers and peripherals. System76 specialises in providing the devices it sells with support for either Ubuntu or Pop, which come pre-installed. Selling devices with Linux is no simple task because drivers need to be written where they don’t currently exist and configuration needs to be made for function keys and other built-in hardware. So, let’s have a look at Pop and see what it provides that isn’t available from other distributions. Pop is based on the most recent Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release and its take on the desktop…11 min
Linux Format|November 2023Twenty years of WordPress websites!WORDPRESS Credit: http://wordpress.org Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT Michael Reed started with HTML website design while skipping between free ISP trials and using Mandrake Linux back in the ’90s. These days, he’s more of a WordPress and Ubuntu man. QUICK TIP As soon as you start working with this tutorial, open a plain text file to make notes about things such as the usernames, passwords, folder names and IP addresses you’re going to rack up. WordPress is a CMS (content management system), and it’s 20 years old this year. It W started life as a simple blogging platform but, over the years, its versatility has been greatly expanded by the developers. As well as its central purpose as a blogging tool, it can…15 min
Linux Format|November 2023Reviving the BBC Domesday ProjectDOMESDAY86 Credit: www.domesday86.com OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has worked in IT support for over a decade and always tries to utilise Linux alongside the other installed systems. The Domesday Book is an incredible piece of British history, compiled between 1085 and T 1086 as a record of the Great Survey ordered by King William I. It covered land usage and money owed to the king. Much of England and parts of Wales were surveyed. The book survives today and is stored at the National Archives at Kew Gardens. What does this have to do with us computer lovers? Well, during the ’80s, the BBC launched a project to mark the 900th anniversary of the book, because part of the BBC’s remit is not only to broadcast TV programmes, but…15 min
Linux Format|November 2023Beware of geeks bearing giftsLinux malware isn’t something any careful Linux user encounters very often. That makes it all the more shocking when it comes to light that there has been a Linux application in plain sight that wasn’t all that it appeared. Freedownloadmanager.org was offering a download tool for Linux users. However, behind the scenes, a trojan was offering its authors full access to the user’s machine. It also functioned as a data stealer, grabbing anything useful it found, including cloud provider credentials. The most startling thing about this was the fact that this trojaned software was first seen in 2020 but no one picked up on it. More information on this specific story can be found at https://bit.ly/45XeHJZ. While an interesting tidbit, it should also serve as a warning: when looking at…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023CargoIN BRIEF Cargo’s website builder excels in its user-friendly interface and customisable features, making it a solid choice for creating sites. Although its performance and pricing face competition, which may be a setback for some users, its ease of use and creative options shine, setting it apart. Cargo is a website building service that provides a platform for creating and designing websites C with a focus on visual aesthetics and userfriendly functionality. Its interface is designed to facilitate the smooth arrangement of content, including images, text, multimedia and interactive elements, enabling you to showcase your work, products or ideas in an engaging and visually appealing manner. Through its intuitive dragand-drop interface and customisable templates, Cargo enables you to craft unique and dynamic websites that reflect your creative ideas. Design and…3 min
Linux Format|November 2023Mission CenterVersion: 0.3.1 Web: https://missioncenter.io System admins go to great lengths to keep an eye on the resource utilisation on the systems in their realm. But it’s always a good idea even for desktop users to do the same to ensure all is hunky-dory with their computer. Every desktop distro ships with a task manager that usually does a good job, but some still leave room for improvement. Mission Center is a dedicated system monitor and task manager that does an excellent job of helping you keep track of the apps and processes running on your installation, and how they are using resources. It’s available as a Flatpak and can be installed with flatpak install flathub io.missioncenter.MissionCenter . You can use the app to monitor the overall CPU, memory, disk and…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023FerdiumVersion: 6.4.1 Web: https://ferdium.org The idea of a unified messaging app isn’t new, but widen the app’s mandate to cover not just messaging services, but all kinds of web apps, and you’ve got a winner. Ferdium does just that thanks to its support for over 200 web apps and services. Ferdium puts out both RPM and DEB binaries, but is also available as distro-agnostic Flatpak, AppImage and Snap packages. Use flatpak install flathub org. ferdium.Ferdium to install it from FlatHub. When launched, the app gives you the option to create a free account. This ensures you can access all your configured services across all your Ferdium installations across different computers. For the privacy conscious, there’s also the ability to use the app without creating an account, but you lose the…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Sonic Robo Blast 2Version: 2.2.11 Web: www.srb2.org Sonic the Hedgehog was a mainstay of ’90s console gaming. Sonic Robo Blast 2 (SRB2) combines Sonic with another behemoth of the era: Doom. SRB2 is built using a modified version of the Doom Legacy port of Doom, and has been in development since 1998. The developers don’t distribute binaries for Linux, and instead point to the Flatpak created by its community that you can install with flatpak install flathub org.srb2.SRB2 . The game features several levels and the gameplay is similar to the original, but has been boosted to three dimensions. Another addition in SRB2 is the multiplayer mode that enables players to either play together as a team or against each other. The game has several multiplayer modes, including Coop, which is the same…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Visualise smart- home sensor dataHOME ASSISTANT Credit: www.home-assistant.io Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has worked in IT support for over a decade, and always tries to utilise Linux alongside the other installed systems. QUICK TIP The complete code listing can be downloaded from https://github.com/mattmole/LXF308-309-API-GUI. Over the past decade or so, the computing world has changed immensely and we’re going to capitalise on one particular area to grab data from a source and display it on the screen in a fancy Dan interface. It’s a useful ability to have because you can quickly prototype displaying important information from a range of sources when needed. We’re going to work on an application that pulls data from the Home Assistant API and displays it in a GUI. This…11 min
Linux Format|November 2023At your serviceI recently expanded my home server’s RAID to 20TB, adding a fifth 4TB drive. It’s an ongoing upgrade process that’s probably been going on for a decade in one form or another, and running Linux ensures it’s always supersmooth. The only recent hiccup was that the Nvidia GPU driver started causing suspend issues out of the blue. So, I fell back to using the AMD Athlon 200G APU, which was surprisingly capable at transcoding even 4K video. This was my original ‘in’ to Linux: setting up a home file and media server. Back when Microsoft was getting draconian with licences, it just seemed simpler dealing with a Linux distro that you can install where, when and however you like, without bundled bloat and extra hurdles involved. So, if you’re picking…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023From Terraform to OpenTofuBack in August, HashiCorp, the vendor of deployment-automation tool Terraform, changed its software licence from MPL (Mozilla Public Licence) to BUSL (Business Source Licence). This means it is technically no longer FOSS. Crucially, the new licence forbids users from using source code to develop competing products. Shortly after, a splinter group announced that it was launching the OpenTF Project and released the official open source fork of Terraform, OpenTF. In September, the group renewed its commitment to FOSS by placing the project under the oversight of the Linux Foundation as OpenTofu – the fork’s new official name. The project members have also announced that the project will soon be submitted for entry into the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman, a key member of the OpenTofu team, says…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Millions of LibreOffice!The LibreOffice Document Foundation can rightly feel proud of the fact that there have been over 1.5 million downloads of LibreOffice 7.6. The number of users is probably much higher, as many versions of Linux come with the office suite preinstalled. New features include a very welcome wizard to insert page numbers into Writer, better support for drawing styles in Calc, and a navigation panel for switching slides during presentations for Impress. Find out more: https://bit.ly/lxf308libre.…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023SECURITY FIRST“The Document Foundation is releasing LibreOffice 7.6.2 Community and LibreOffice 7.5.7 Community ahead of schedule to address a security issue known as CVE 2023-4863, which originates in a widely used code library known as libwebp, created by Google more than a decade ago to render the then-new WebP graphics format. The new versions also fix other bugs and regressions and are available immediately from www.libreoffice.org/ download. All users of LibreOffice are encouraged to update their current version as soon as possible. For enterprise-class deployments, the Document Foundation strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a wide range of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs: https://bit.ly/lxf308lbinb. The Document Foundation does not provide technical support to users,…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023MAC MAGIC“I’ve started digging into the Asahi Linux port to Apple silicon. This is a multi-year effort to bring Linux to M-series Macs. They can already boot Linux kernels, support most of the hardware, and provide a good desktop experience. The underlying hardware is famous for being blazingly fast, so it is a joy to watch a compilation as the object files fly by on the screen. One of the best things about the project is that it is focused on getting supportable patches into an upstreamable state. For example, Asahi boots using a special bootloader (m1n1) that runs a mini hypervisor with all kinds of bells and whistles for debugging and testing new kernels. This loads a modified U-Boot, but unlike an embedded device, the U-Boot stack provides a UEFI…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023MailserverWRITE 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. Dull Chrome I give up. I’ve been using computers since the late ’60s, when I would program cards for the fledgling Midland Bank computers, then came programming games for my kids on a trusty Spectrum, and then the Acorn BBC, then moving on to Atari ST and early PCs, before ‘graduating’ to Unix systems and then finally Linux. On my laptop I have Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and on my desktop I have Mint 21.03. I like both OSes, for different reasons. My default browser is Google Chrome because it synchronised all my devices and computers so…5 min
Linux Format|November 2023AMD Radeon RX 7800 XTSPECS GPU: Navi 32 Arch: RDNA 3 Process: TSMC 5nm + 6nm Clock: 2,124MHz (2,430MHz boost) Mem: 16GB GDDR6, 256bit, 624GB/s Stream: 3,840 Compute: 60 RT cores: 60 AI cores: 120 ROPs: 96 Cache: 64MB TGP: 263W, 2x eight-pin Die: 200 + 150mm² Trans: 28.1B Codec: 4K h264, h265/ HEVC, AV1 How much value do you put on ray tracing as a gamer? That’s got to be the question at the forefront of your mind if you’re considering dropping £500 on an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. Because if you are 100% sold on ray tracing, you probably need to consider whether you’re actually willing to pay another £100 for the privilege of extra RT performance and drop the cash on the RTX 4070 instead. If, however, you’re convinced rasterised…6 min
Linux Format|November 2023Ubuntu 23.10IN BRIEF Far from being labyrinthine, Ubuntu 23.10 offers an easy setup, along with a revamped Gnome desktop, making tiling and arranging workspaces much easier. Searches are global and there’s a new App Center. SPECS CPU: 2GHz dual-core Mem: 4GB HDD: 25GB Builds: x86_64, ARMv8, AArch64 The Ubuntu blog describes the word Mantic as being “used to describe one’s ability to prophesy or reach into the future”. This is exactly what the LXF team is attempting to do in testpiloting a daily build of the OS prior to the official release on 12/10/23. The Minotaur was a mythical halfman, half-bull who guarded the halls of the impenetrable labyrinth of Crete. Luckily, this is totally at odds with our experience of Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur, which fully lives up to the…6 min
Linux Format|November 2023Hardware requirementsLinux is justifiably famous for running on anything from a pregnancy test upwards, but more complex software requires more powerful hardware, and the architecture of your machine matters, too. And just because you can get your fediverse software to run on your ancient Pentium Core Duo with RAM measured in megabytes, it doesn’t mean it will be usable. For many readers, a Raspberry Pi is ideal for hosting your fediverse server, thanks to its low price and running costs. But this does limit you in terms of the fediverse servers you can easily run. Mastodon, Misskey, and Akkoma support ARM64 architecture out of the box, complete with Docker images. Lemmy does support ARM64, but for Docker images, you’ll have to check out the unofficial masquernya/lemmy-arm64 repository. We were unable to…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Customising and special featuresThe fediverse is all about doing things your own way while maintaining compatibility with other fediverse servers. Unlike hom*ogeneous services such as Twitter/X, each fediverse server type has a different purpose. This can be to facilitate discussions, publish longform articles, showcase images, or share your communal love of music. Alternatively, it can be to cram thousands of users into a virtual room and let them scream at each other. Before you set up your instance, you need to decide what type of community you want to build and how your users will interact with each other. If you’re building around a common interest, what special features does each instance type have that differentiates it from the rest? An instance geared towards longform threaded discussions doesn’t cut it if most of…4 min
Linux Format|November 2023Moderation and safetyIt’s a long-standing criticism of large social networks that moderation policies make the experience terrible for everyone. Your own posts get banned for some trivial reason, while libels are spread about you by others. Before you know it, someone invokes Godwin’s law and it’s all over. Moderating social media is difficult, and as the admin of your own network, the task falls to you and any volunteer mods you can rope in to scour their eyeballs with bleach on a regular basis. Moderation is fairly straightforward on all five instance types. It has to be. As the instance owner, you’re legally on the hook for illegal content and copyright violations if you don’t act promptly. Ideally, users should be able to easily flag posts that violate your terms of service…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Install JellyfinThere are multiple ways to install Jellyfin on your server. You’ll find instructions across a range of distros at https://jellyfin.org/docs/ – taking Ubuntu as an example, open a terminal window and issue the following commands: $ wget -O- https://repo.jellyfin.org/install-debuntu.sh $ sudo bash This launches a script to add and configure the Jellyfin repository, install Jellyfin and configure it to start automatically with your server and run in the background continuously. Verify the server is running by opening your web browser and navigating to http:// localhost:8096 or, if you want access from another computer on your network, http://192.168.x.y:8096 (192.168.x.y is, of course, your server’s IP address). When you see the welcome wizard, close your browser, then reboot your server and connect again to verify the service is configured correctly. Prepare your…4 min
Linux Format|November 2023Stream audiobooks from your serverOne often overlooked component of a media server is audiobooks. In the past, we’ve recommended Booksonic, but in 2021 a new arrival quickly swept all before it to provide a serious alternative to Audible. Audiobookshelf (www. audiobookshelf.org) is your open source one-stop shop for self-hosted audiobooks and podcasts, and recent releases have even started to add support for ebooks as well. You can install it through Docker or natively – simply follow the instructions at www.audiobookshelf.org/docs/ for your chosen path. The native installation works out of the box, but if you wish to change any defaults – specifically which port it communicates on (13378 by default) – you need to edit the configuration file at /etc/default/audiobookshelf. Should you be planning remote access through Nginx Proxy Manager, you’ll need to set…5 min
Linux Format|November 2023Raspberry Pi 5IN BRIEF The Pi 4 remains a solid choice; it doesn’t need active cooling and has rocksolid support. If you don’t need Linux, just the GPIO, then the £6 Pi Pico W has proven itself to be a versatile microcontroller. However, if you want the best single-board computer around, the Raspberry Pi 5 is your new leader. After the longest wait between flagship Pi models ever (the Pi 4 was released A in June 2019), the Raspberry Pi 5 is finally here and it’s early! Eben Upton had said no new Pis in 2023, but here we are… The Raspberry Pi 5 claims to have two to three times the processing power of the Raspberry Pi 4, already a powerful single-board computer. Available in 4GB and 8GB RAM capacities (with…6 min
Linux Format|November 2023Fast file managementGOFUL Credit: https://github.com/anmitsu/goful OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years and lawyering for 10. CLI file managers have been around for decades. What makes some of the text-based C filed managers stand out – from other CLI counterparts as well as the graphical alternatives – is their unique appearance or workflow. Goful is such a CLI tool, and if you’re on the fence about switching to a CLI alternative from your current favourite, this might be the one that pushes you over the edge. Written in Go and released under the MIT License, Goful is a dual-pane file manager that does the traditional CRUD tasks (create, read, update, delete) but also boasts…6 min
Linux Format|November 2023How to enjoy free streaming TVJELLYFIN Credit: https://jellyfin.org OUR EXPERT Neil Mohr hasn’t got time to watch TV, though he catches the odd Bluey, which is a delightful children’s TV show and not what you’re thinking. Among the films, TV, books and music, our Jellyfin install from the main feature (page 34) A is looking pretty sweet, but then the boss goes and asks, “What about free TV?” And we wriggle our bums nervously and say “Probably.” Jellyfin, being a fork of Emby, being a fork of Plex, does indeed support TV tuners – including scheduling and recording of live TV programmes. While we’re not going to specifically cover TV tuner use, we are going to tap into the two systems it adds to Jellyfin, which enable us to stream live TV for free…6 min
Linux Format|November 2023ORANGE VS REDAs night follows day, a new kernel release has dropped. The 6.5 kernel seems to be general fixes for various bugs (for the x86/64 platform). There is also word that, separately, there is going to be a new version of the Vulkan graphics drivers for Intel Ark-based GPUs that teases at significant speed increases. In the non-technical world, you’ll be glad to read that the encrypted message intercepts submitted in the UK Online Safety Bill weren’t codified into law. The government says they won’t be made law until technically feasible, so will more than likely be looking to resurrect this in the future. Obviously, the policy makers don’t understand that encryption is everything or nothing! Within the corporate world, interesting things are afoot. The RHEL closed-source bun fight is bearing…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Seek and ye shall locateSearching for files in a command-line Linux environment can sometimes be a non-trivial task, especially when dealing with numerous directories and large data sets. Being able to perform these tasks via the Linux command line pays massive dividends, however, and makes you look good when you have mastered search. It also means that it is easy to automate the task and make it repeatable. It’s important to remember that Linux is all about using the right tool for the right job well, and chaining tools together to achieve an outcome. The powerful tools that can assist users in finding files include Find, Locate, and Grep. Let’s explore the basics and how to chain them together with pipes. Finders keepers Find is a versatile tool that searches for files and directories…3 min
Linux Format|November 2023Seventh level of networkingNetworking is one of those magical areas of technology where complex processes are made beautifully simple for the end user. Operations such as downloading a web page or backing up a file to a NAS appliance take just a few clicks or taps. Behind the scenes, though, there’s a lot of highly advanced engineering going on. Do you need to know about the under-the-bonnet technical details? Perhaps not. But if you have an understanding of what’s going on, physically and digitally, that can help you troubleshoot networking problems when they arise, and write your own programs that make efficient use of networked resources. It’s interesting, too – and the OSI model makes it highly accessible, providing an easy way to visualise the processes that makes a network tick. What is…10 min
Linux Format|November 2023Parallel Disk UsageVersion: 0.9.0 Web: https://crates.io/crates/parallel-disk-usage Linux has no dearth of tools for reporting disk usage. One of the most frequently used routes is to restrict the output of Du using its plethora of options, before piping the output into a variety of other tools, such as Sort. While this works for small directories, on much larger ones it doesn’t just take a considerable amount of time, but without the right options, also produces illegible output. That’s where Parallel Disk Usage (PDU) steps in. Not only is it a lot faster than plain old Du, but it also produces visually appealing output. PDU’s written in Rust and can be installed with its Cargo package manager. To install Cargo, you’ll first have to install Rust with curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh . This…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023HopToDeskVersion: 1.40.5 Web: www.hoptodesk.com There are tons of very competent and popular remote desktop apps. Most of them make it remarkably easy to share your screen, as well as remote control and access other devices. HopToDesk is one such application: a remote desktop tool that’s designed to provide lots of useful features without compromising on security and privacy. Unlike other similar tools, such as TeamViewer or AnyDesk, HopToDesk is free for both personal and business use, and is available for all popular desktop and mobile operating systems. The project puts out binaries for popular distros including Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and others, and is also available as a distro-agnostic AppImage. Just grab the AppImage, make it an executable either from the file manager or with chmod +x , and double-click on…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Fheroes2Version: 1.0.7 Web: https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2 Another classic from the ’90s, Heroes of Might and Magic 2 was one of the most popular fantasy turn-based strategy games of the era. Fheroes2 is a recreation of the game that has been written from scratch and promises to deliver the charm of the original along with improvements to the gameplay, graphics and logic. The game is available in the official repos of popular distros such as Fedora, but the developers recommend you grab the game from Flathub with flatpak install flathub io.github.ihhub.Fheroes2 . To play the game, you need a copy of the original. When you launch Fheroes2, it gives you three options. The recommended one is to grab the original from GOG. If you have the original on a CD, you can go…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023AlbumEasyVersion: 4.5.0 Web: www.thestampweb.com/albumeasy If you ask us, the most popular software in the world is open source. And that holds true I even on the other end of the spectrum, when it comes to niche software. And they don’t get any more niche than AlbumEasy. If you like to collect stamps, you can use AlbumEasy to print custom pages to stick them on. To install the software, grab its tarball and extract it, then move the extracted folder to an appropriate location, such as ~/AlbumEasy. Now change into this folder and launch the application from the CLI with ./AlbumEasy.sh . If your desktop can display desktop icons, you can also run the config script with ./CONFIG , which creates a desktop shortcut for the app and also moves the…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Write GUI apps in Pascal with LazarusLAZARUS Credit: www.lazarus-ide.org OUR EXPERT David Bolton has 30 years of Pascal programming experience under his belt, so knows a thing or two about developing GUI programming applications on Linux and other platforms. The source code for this example is zipped up in the file Lazarusexample.zip at https://github.com/David-H-Bolton/Projects. Just open the link in Firefox, click on the file, then the three dots on the right, and download it. Creating GUI apps in Linux is more complex than making simple apps that run in a terminal. C There are several ways that are mostly GTK-based with C or C++, such as GTK+/C, Qt/C++, FLTK/C++ and WxWidgets/C++. You can also use the Python library PyGObject. There is another, easier way if you don’t mind learning Pascal. Install Lazarus (see boxout opposite),…12 min
Linux Format|November 2023Free Software Foundation celebrates GNU at 40Newsdesk THIS ISSUE: GNU turns 40 Gnome hits 45 OpenTofu looks tasty LibreOffice downloads soar Kernel embraces AV1 Remember those annoying people who tell you it’s not called Linux, but GNU/ Linux? This dates back to May 1983 when Richard Stallman used the Stanford bulletin board to announce plans to develop a free Unix-like operating system called GNU. The name itself is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s not Unix”. Stallman’s philosophy of free software scored a very deep line in the sand between visionaries like himself and private companies producing proprietary programs. In 1985, Richard founded the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF) to support the free software movement. It continued existing GNU projects and also hired developers to produce more free software programs. The FSF also pioneered the concept of…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023Gnome 45 is comingOn 20th September, the Gnome Project was proud to announce the longawaited release of Gnome 45, code-named Rīga in honour of the organisers of this year’s Gnome community conference. We were treated to a preview of all Gnome 45 has to offer while testing daily builds of Ubuntu 23.10 (see review, p.24). The biggest change to the desktop is that the Activities button is no more – instead there’s a small workspace indicator. Handily, it’s dynamic in that it indicates which workspace you’re currently using. The search feature has also been overhauled. Not only are searches faster and less resourceintensive, but the Nautilus file manager now enables users to run global searches, not just within their home folder. The searches themselves can now be ordered in a more useful way,…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023AV1 decoderSince 2021, the Linux kernel has been preparing to support encoding/decoding the royalty-free AV1 codec. It began with a “request for comments” patch series by Collabora’s Daniel Almeida for implementing the stateless AV1 user-space API within the media subsystem. The first uAPI tentatives needed seven versions on the mailing list before finally being considered stable in June 2023. The latest Linux kernel (v6.5) includes patches that enable support for AV1 uAPI as well as two stateless video decoders: one for the Rockchip RK3588 and one for MT8195, a MediaTek SoC. Find out more (see left) https://bit.ly/lxf308av1.…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Distro watchFREEBSD 13.2 Linux Format is the home of open source, including alternative -nix operating systems, such as FreeBSD. Although the OS is a popular choice for servers, it supports a number of desktop environments and window managers for those willing to manually install the packages. The latest stable release includes better support for installing on SD cards, updated versions of OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and integration for VPN interface using WireGuard. Read more at www.freebsd.org. CACHYOS 20230917 CachyOS was first released in late 2022. It’s based on Arch Linux with a heavily optimised kernel BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) scheduler. The distro has its own repositories, and desktop packages are compiled with LTO and x86-64-v3 optimisation, security flags and performance improvements, especially for older Nvidia and AMD cards. Downloads are available for…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023ONGOING DEVELOPMENTRISC-V patches include an updated (version 9) series adding support for future AIA (Advanced Interrupt Architecture) interrupt controllers, and SCS (Shadow Call Stack, similar to the x86 and Arm features). A number of posted patches implement support for custom vendor-defined ISA extensions, such as conditional arithmetic and conditional select/move. These are fairly fundamental in any architecture, so there is an implication of gratuitous (binary incompatible) differentiation. Indeed, the discussion covered this scenario, saying that vendors A and B might collaborate to add non-standard architecture extensions together. Which would be interesting. Various updates to the Linux Plumbers Conference schedule were discussed, including the microconferences running alongside the main conference tracks.…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023LETTER OF THE MONTHMike Bedford’s article on FOCAL in LXF301 reminded me of my senior year of high school in 1973. I took a course in Basic programming on a DEC PDP-8/e with 8k of magnetic core memory and two ASR-33 teletypes like the one pictured in the article. I remember there was a manual for FOCAL in the classroom and maybe a paper tape for it, but since it took 45 minutes to reload the Basic interpreter through the TTY’s paper tape reader, I never saw it tried. Perhaps because it had the imprimatur of Dartmouth College, Basic was more popular with local schools. DEC computers were also quite common because they were (relatively) inexpensive and DEC seemed to promote them for educational use, perhaps hoping that students would favour them in…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Qubes 4.1.2IN BRIEF Qubes does something we thought impossible. It provides nextlevel security with easy management from a centralised colour-coded interface. A hefty ISO and lack of multiboot are a small price to pay. SPECS CPU: 2GHz (Intel VT-d/ AMD IOMMU) Mem: 6GB HDD: 32GB Builds: x86_64 While there are numerous security-focused Linux distros, Qubes can be compared to Fort Knox. This Fedora-based OS was first produced in 2012. The latest testing release (4.2.0-rc3) was made available in September, and will go through at least one more round of tests before a stable version is made available. We’ve focused this review on the latest stable version of Qubes (4.1.2), which was released in March. Qubes uses so-called security by isolation to prevent apps from interacting in a way that could compromise…3 min
Linux Format|November 2023Old WorldSPECS Minimum OS: Ubuntu 18.04+ 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i5 6400 Mem: 8GB HDD: 10GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce 770, AMD Radeon R9 290, Vulkan required Recommended OS: Ubuntu 20.04+ 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i5 8500 Mem: 16GB HDD: 14GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce 1060, AMD Radeon RX 5500 The story of our first campaign in Old World, where we led our Greek civilisation to global domination, is equally the story of Rome, our greatest nemesis in this sprawling turn-based 4X. When we first met the Romans, they were extremely friendly, offering gifts and hospitality, but it was a poisoned chalice – literally. A sickness spread, and Roman gestures of friendship were the source. We demanded justice and compensation; Rome wanted war. It would take nearly 200 years until we got our…6 min
Linux Format|November 2023Ease of deploymentInstalling software on Linux isn’t always the easiest, and if it was, magazines such as this one would have a hard time justifying their existence. If your aim is to deploy and run your own social media server, you don’t want to waste time going through a complicated installation process, trawling through GitHub issues, or following a step-by-step guide to compiling and configuring multiple components from source. Ideally you should be able to get your fediverse server up and running in under an hour – or an afternoon at most. Complicated setups are a definite disadvantage if you want to start getting social in a hurry, while a one-liner install script would be ideal. In testing our five fediverse servers for ease of setup, we count the time and complexity…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023Fediverse to goTo run a successful social media empire, you need a service that looks good on the go, and allows users to access their feed in comfort and doom scroll on the train, in class or while on a first date in a fancy restaurant. Fortunately, there are official and unofficial mobile solutions of variable quality for all five of our candidate instance types. The ActivityPub protocol is standard for all fediverse instances, so in theory, every mobile client should work with every server type. Mastodon, as the largest and best known name, has its own branded app, featuring dark mode, polls and a collection of cute elephant mascots. It’s fine, we guess, and great for scrolling chronologically through posts by people you follow on your home server and elsewhere. For…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023The VerdictThis is going to sound like the kind of cop-out you’d hear at a primary school sports day, but there’s no clear-cut winner here. We picked these particular five fediverse servers because they’re so very different. They’re designed for different types of user, different use cases, and for admins with varying levels of expertise. While Akkoma is this writer’s own personal favourite, we can’t recommend it to everyone, and it’s best used as a single-user instance or with up to a few dozen local users. The interface, although switchable, is best suited to informal conversations and captioned images. Likewise, Lemmy is better suited to debates and discussions, and does a fair job of imitating Reddit. However, outside this use case, it’s not really the best in any other area. This…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023Stream films, TV and musicOnce Jellyfin is set up, you’re taken to your home screen, which offers a variety of ways to view your media library: at the top are shortcuts to individual libraries, followed by the Next Up section, which helps you track your progress through TV shows by helpfully displaying partially played episodes as well as queuing up the next available episode for viewing. Beneath this you’ll see the latest additions to your libraries. You’ll find plenty of on-screen aids to help you navigate even the largest libraries. At the top are a range of library views, from Suggestions to Genres. Look out, too, for Favorites – which lists any media you’ve marked by clicking the heart icon next to it – and Collections, which enables you to group movies by your…7 min
Linux Format|November 2023RASPBERRY PI STILL RULESOver the 11 years that the Raspberry Pi has been with us, there have been countless contenders for its crown: Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Libre Computer, Asus Tinkerboard, Khadas and LattePanda, to name but a few. These boards vary in price from as little as £10 to hundreds of pounds, and offer GPIO and faster CPUs, and promise better performance. Sure, some of these boards do perform better than the Raspberry Pi, but there is always a trade-off. The Raspberry Pi 4 has a quad-core Arm CPU that now runs at 1.8GHz, and up to 8GB of RAM makes this a potent platform for projects. Boards such as the £230 Khadas Edge 2 Pro offer 16GB of DDR5 and an octa-core Arm CPU, but there is no GPIO. This little…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023Play Steam games on your Raspberry PiSTEAM LINK Credit: https://github.com/ValveSoftware OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blog about his adventures and projects at http://bigl.es. YOU NEED Pi 3B+ or Pi 4 16GB SD card Network A PC running Steam A wired gamepad Linux gaming used to be a laughing stock. Tux Racing or Neverputt used to be the limits of our entertainment. But over the years, games have been ported and created for our favourite operating system. And then something marvellous happened. Valve’s Steam Deck is a portable gaming machine powered by a custom AMD APU – but, more importantly, it runs a Linux OS. Using a mixture of Proton configurations, Steam OS can run many Windows games. Not every game is supported (we’re looking…6 min
Linux Format|November 2023Take command of your photo collectionFOTOXX Credit: https://kornelix.net OUR EXPERT Nick Peers may fancy himself as a wannabe photographer, but the sad truth is that without his vintage Panasonic bridge camera’s intelligent auto setting, he’d be screwed. QUICK TIP One of Fotoxx’s strengths is that it supports the RAW file format, not just for viewing and editing, but also for converting to other formats. There’s even a Batch RAW tool for converting multiple files on the fly. Are you on the lookout for a tool to organise, edit and manipulate your photos? Fotoxx is A a powerful free open source tool developed with one eye on semi-professional photographers, but you don’t need to be an enthusiast with an expensive digital camera to benefit from its powerful feature set. In this tutorial, we’re going to…14 min
Linux Format|November 2023COBOL: still going after all these yearsOUR EXPERT Mike Bedford has impressive knowledge of programming languages, but this month he’s turned his hand to natural languages, too. Following our recent exposé of several classic programming languages – most of them F largely forgotten or quirky – we delved into Fortran last month. Despite its age, the name is still familiar among coders and, although it was primitive in its initial guise, it would be wrong to describe it as peculiar. In fact, it was influential in the development of some of today’s most popular languages. Not only that, but it still plays an important role today. However, Fortran isn’t alone in that respect. Here we’re delving into another positively ancient language that continues to play a key role in so many areas. And to illustrate that…13 min
Linux Format|November 2023Red Hat says no more Screen time for you!Red Hat and a few other distributions have stopped shipping the muchbeloved Screen utility. It’s effectively a software console that you can run in the background. Tmux is not as easy as Screen, but moving forward, it’s is the new standard on certain distros. Tmux, short for terminal multiplexer, is a powerful command-line tool that facilitates multiple sessions within one terminal window. It’s especially useful for remote work, scripting and command-line multitasking, so here’s a concise guide to using Tmux. Start by entering tmux to initiate a session. Inside, you’ll observe a green status bar indicating the session’s active state. Want to return to your regular terminal momentarily? Press Ctrl+b d to detach. Re-enter a detached session with tmux attach . For organised multitasking, name your sessions using tmux new-session…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023NordVPNIN BRIEF NordVPN is an appealing VPN provider with top-of-therange performance, loads of features, and a reassuring no-logging audit. It’s not the cheapest, and we have a few small issues with the app interfaces, but the company has added a bunch of welcome improvements recently, and overall it’s a polished and professional service that delivers good results for most users. Panama-registered NordVPN is a hugely popular VPN provider with more than 14 million customers. The company sells itself on features, and there are plenty to explore. The NordVPN network has 5,600-plus servers in 85 locations across 59 countries. We ran tests on several locations to confirm that its servers are physically located in the advertised countries, and it was good news all around. From Costa Rica to Estonia, UAE to…3 min
Linux Format|November 2023Xournal++Version: 1.2.0 Web: https://xournalpp.github.io If you like scribbling notes, but can’t be bothered to move away from the computer I to find a pen and piece of paper, you’ll like Xournal++. Besides keyboard and mouse, the app also supports digital pens, and in addition to writing notes, it can also be used to annotate PDFs. It’s available in the repos of all the popular desktop distros, including Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE and their ilk, and can be installed from your distro’s default package manager. The project also produces distro-agnostic Snap, AppImage and Flatpak binaries, which don’t just simplify the installation, but also ensure you have the latest release of the app. The app has a busy interface that might confuse first-time users, but should quickly grow on you. After launching…2 min
Linux Format|November 2023FloorpVersion: 11.1.2 Web: https://floorp.app Firefox is certainly a popular web browser, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, and Floorp attempts just that. Based on the popular open source browser, Floorp markets itself as a feature-rich flexible alternative. It is available as a portable app on Linux, and also offers a PPA for Ubuntu users. The most convenient option is to use the distro-agnostic Flatpak release – install it with flatpak install flathub one.ablaze.floorp . On first launch it does appear quite similar to Firefox with a few UI differences. For starters, you can import your bookmarks, passwords and more from an existing Firefox installation by logging into your Firefox account. That said, the browser, based on the Firefox ESR release, has stripped the Firefox telemetry code. In terms…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023TouchéVersion: 2.0.9 Web: https://github. com/JoseExposito/touche If you use a laptop or touchscreen, you can increase your productivity by installing Touché. It’s a multi-touch gesture configurator that helps you use the touchpad more efficiently. Touché is basically a graphical wrapper around the Touchégg utility, which runs in the background and does all the heavy lifting. So, before you install Touché you need to grab Touchégg. The good thing is it’s probably already installed on your distro if you use recent versions of Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Elementary OS or Zorin OS. It is also available in the official repos of some distros, such as Fedora, and can be installed with sudo dnf install touchegg . Ubuntu users must grab it via its official PPA: Next, grab Touché as a Flatpak with flatpak…1 min
Linux Format|November 2023UlauncherVersion: 5.15.3 Web: https://ulauncher.io The search bar in the Applications menu in modern desktops is pretty useful for finding apps and documents. Ulauncher does all that and more, and is a whole lot more configurable than your built-in application launcher. It is available in the official repo of Fedora, and can be installed with sudo dnf install ulauncher . Ubuntu users can install it through a PPA with: $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:agornostal/ ulauncher $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install ulauncher Launch Ulauncher – if your desktop has a system tray, you’ll see the app’s icon in there. Even if your desktop doesn’t have a system tray, you can press Ctrl+Space to invoke the Ulauncher search bar. You can start typing and Ulauncher runs through all of your installed…1 min
