Linux Format

Red Hat’s decision to kill off CentOS is still having repercussions in the industry. Rocky Linux, an alternative to CentOS created by CentOS co-founder Gregory Kurtzer and announced as soon as Red Hat’s plans became known, has just received a major b

"2021 is off to an exciting start in the land of VR on Linux. Monado, the OpenXR runtime for Linux, is now an officially conformant OpenXR implementation! The Khronos listing of conformant OpenXR 1.0 implementations, which previously included Faceboo

I’d always say the biggest security threat to any system is the human using it. That’s not because said human is malicious or incompetent – people make mistakes, after all. But that’s compounded when you’re effectively tricked into making mistakes by

"We’ve started getting lots of enquiries about Azure. (Tiger Computing is are a Linux support and consultancy business.) So why the interest in Azure? Microsoft itself says “Linux is the fastest growing platform on Azure” and “Linux based images comp

Android 10 has been ported to the RISCV-based XuanTie C910 cores, and impressively it runs with working graphics and even touchscreen support. A video of Android running on RISC-V has been posted on the project’s GitHub (see http://bit.ly/LXF274Andro

LibreOffice, the free and open source office software suite, has had a busy start to 2021, which shows the project is as ambitious as ever. The team delivered LibreOffice 7.1 Community (download it from http://bit.ly/LXF274LibreOffice7) that features

This Debian fork, which is designed to give users a version of Debian without relying on systemd, has a new version out that supports three alternative init options: OpenRC, SysV init and runit. You can also install lilo, an alternative bootloader to

"In January Elastic announced a software licencing change. This means that search project Elasticsearch and data visualisation tool Kibana would no longer be available under Apache 2.0 and instead will be under Elastic’s own license and MongoDB’s Ser

Grafana is fancy and all, but I’m pleased that my Pi generates graphs from CSV files with Gnuplot, then displays them on a TFT screen. It’s amazing how even though you’re only dealing with 240 pixels, hours can be spent tweaking the axes and layout t

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.11, just in time for Valentine’s Day 2021. In his announcement, Linus noted that just because it was Valentine’s Day didn’t mean it wasn’t a good time to do some kernel testing, “Because I’m sure your S

Linux uses some complex data structures to track its internal state. Much time and effort has been spent optimising the choice of algorithms and the structures in memory that they operate upon. Yet there’s always room for improvement, particularly wh

"We’re coming up on 12 months since the beginning of the pandemic. Many of us are fortunate to be able to work from home, and any attempt to complain about the times we live in needs to be placed in context. We could have it so very much worse. Yet m

Last issue we reported on Red Hat’s decision to discontinue CentOS 8, its popular distro for enthusiasts and small businesses, and the fallout from that decision is still rumbling on. Originally meant to be supported until 2029, Red Hat’s announcemen

Linux has two main tools for finding files: locate and find. The former works by keeping a database of files on your system. It’s fast, but limited to files that were present when the database was last updated. Most distros install a cron script to k

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 in

I’m a frequent reader of your great magazine, although I confess that I read a copy from my local library in the Blue Mountains, Australia. So I’m not contributing much financially I’m afraid. My email is to request or suggest that at some stage you

OS: Android 9.0, Debian, Sailfish Display: 5.99-inch 18:9, 2,160x1,080, 403dpi (main), 1.91-inch touch OLED (front) CPU: MediaTek Helio P70 quad core GPU: Mali-G72 MP3, 900MHz RAM: 6GB SSD: 128GB Storage: microSD, eSIM, 2x nano SIM USB: 2x USB C Comm

DEVELOPER: Planet Computers WEB: www.planetcom.co.uk PRICE: £721 FEATURES 9/10 PERFORMANCE 8/10 EASE OF USE 7/10 VALUE 7/10 The Cosmo Communicator needs stable front-cover display software to truly supplant your current phone. Rating 8/1

Developers of Skroutz, an eCommerce platform used in Greece, found a ‘fairly old’ bug in the Linux kernel. In a blog post (see http://bit.ly/LXF274kernelbug),Apollon Oikonomopoulos explained that “every now and then, an rsync transfer from a source s

Model: SB-RKT4P-2TB Capacity: 2,000GB Interface: PCIe Gen4 x4 Controller: Phison PS5018-E18 NAND: Micron B27 96-later TLC Rated seq. read: 7,100MB/s Rated seq. write: 6,600MB/s Endurance: 1,400TBW Warranty: Five years ■

DEVELOPER: KDE WEB: https://neon.kde.org LICENCE: Various FEATURES 9/10 PERFORMANCE 9/10 EASE OF USE 8/10 DOCUMENTATION 8/10 Excellent showcasing of KDE. You might not use it as a daily driver, but it’s well worth checking out nonetheless

The “not quite a distro” from the KDE team, built on an Ubuntu 20.04 foundation, but featuring the latest pickings from the Plasma desktop, KDE Applications and Frameworks suites and Qt libraries. See also Kubuntu, KaOS and Manjaro KDE. ■

DEVELOPER: Siduction team WEB: https://news.siduction.org LICENCE: Various FEATURES 9/10 PERFORMANCE 9/10 EASE OF USE 8/10 DOCUMENTATION 7/10 A fine, functional distro that shows Debian Sid is not just for people who like to spend time fi

DEVELOPER: Vivaldi Technologies WEB: https://vivaldi.net LICENCE: Freeware FEATURES 8/10 PERFORMANCE 8/10 EASE OF USE 8/10 DOCUMENTATION 8/10 If you don’t mind a proprietary browser, this is much more interesting than Chromium and every b

DEVELOPER: Aarne Hunziker WEB: https://yachtclubgames.com PRICE: £17.99 GAMEPLAY 8/10 GRAPHICS 8/10 LONGEVITY 7/10 VALUE 8/10 Cyber Shadow isn’t the peak of the side-scrolling action genre, but it’s only a couple of shuriken throws away.

We assessed the window managers on a dual-core processor machine fitted with 4GB RAM and running Manjaro Linux. Our reason for choosing this particular distribution was the availability of the latest release of the different window managers in its re

DEVELOPER: Sabrent WEB: www.sabrent.com PRICE: £400 (2TB), £199 (1TB) FEATURES 9/10 PERFORMANCE 9/10 EASE OF USE 9/10 VALUE 9/10 The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB offers excellent synthetic performance, class-leading throughput in the real wo

You can edit Awesome by making changes to the ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua file but it doesn’t exist by default. You have to first create the ~/.config/awesome directory manually, and then copy the sample rc.lua file from the /etc/xdg/awesome directory.

There are dozens of window managers for Linux distros, but not all are available in the software repositories of most distributions, and some haven’t seen a new release in years. Openbox, Fluxbox and JWM are incredibly robust and popular stacking wi

The biggest threat to home users is social engineering. A text message might dupe you into visiting a web site that looks exactly like your bank, a cold caller might ask for personal information, or a PDF attached to an innocuous-looking email might

You may wish to have the SSH daemon listen on a port other than the default (22), to avoid the most primitive of port scans. You can do so by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config and changing the Port directive to something obscure like 2222, restarting SSH

Public Key Cryptography always seems a little like magic when you first hear about it, and this article is unlikely to demystify it any, but one (ahem) key point is that public keys should be as public and widely known as possible. We’re not jeopardi

In 2015 I started using Raspberry Pi computers in the classroom. It was my first teaching post. I’d been using them for a while outside of teaching, but I could have never predicted the change bringing in just a few Pis would enable. It was transform

Thonny is an easy-to-use and refreshing Python editor that’s been part of Raspberry Pi OS for some time. In a recent update it’s seen support for the new Raspberry Pi Pico added. This formidable editor hides its power from the user, enabling them to

DEVELOPER: University of Tartu WEB: https://thonny.org LICENCE: MIT FEATURES 8/10 PERFORMANCE 10/10 EASE OF USE 10/10 DOCUMENTATION 8/10 Pythonistas of all skill levels should give this easy-to-use editor a go. With Thonny you can focus o

DEVELOPER: Fyde Innovations WEB: https://github.com/FydeOS LICENCE: BSD 2-Clause FEATURES 7/10 PERFORMANCE 7/10 EASE OF USE 8/10 DOCUMENTATION 7/10 A competent and capable ChromeOS alternative for the Raspberry Pi, but it’s not ready for

An open source implementation of Chrome OS based upon Chromium. It looks and feels like an official product, but it has been developed for use with recent models of the Raspberry Pi. FydeOS also supports running popular Linux programs and tools, ena

The Raspberry Pi 4 and 400 both have USB 3.0 ports, which we can use to boot via a USB-to-SATA adaptor. After using the Raspberry Pi SD Card Copier to copy our install to a blank SSD, we can open a terminal and open raspi-config: Navigate to Advanc

This multimeter could also have been written in C. Doing so would have forced us to miss out on various libraries, which led to more compact code. In today’s age of high-performance microcontrollers (this is a 100MHz class unit), sacrificing some eff

The Raspberry Pi Pico is impressive in that it provides a highly flexible development environment. For reasons of convenience, the following steps were performed using the stock MicroPython firmware readily available at www.raspberrypi.org/documentat

The community pushes back over official support for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code repro in the Pi OS. On 25 January Raspberry Pi OS received an update that was neither posted to the GitHub repository, had an announcement or discussed beforehand (ht

Both alternating and direct current are lethal. Don’t perform experiments with voltages larger than 50VCAC or 120VDC. For safety reasons, stay below 25V AC and 60VDC – and if you have cardiac problems, be especially careful of AC. Neither the publish

Creating a high-accuracy instrument is an interdisciplinary task. One nice area of improvement involves the reference voltage fed into the ADC. The Raspberry Pi Pico board doesn’t enables us to harness the entire capabilities of the RP2040 microcontr

Even though it’s a command line utility, you can use tmpmail in conjunction with graphical browsers such as Chromium or Firefox to view email messages. The command tmpmail -b firefox 124234740 will open the specified message in Firefox, instead of th

Visit the Syncthing forum (https:// forum. syncthing.net/) if you run into any problems or have any questions. There’s a built-in search tool as well as an ‘all categories’ filter to narrow your searches (Howto and Support are worth a look). To redu

The FT2332H board’s name probably refers to the RS-232 serial interfacing standard. Now largely superseded by USB, it’s still used in some applications, for example if you need to exceed USB’s maximum lead length of 5m. If you have any equipment with

Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and when not writing about Raspberry Pi he is found tinkering with old computers. MS-DOS is not case sensitive, unlike Linux. So QBASIC and qbasic are one and the same. DOSBox has a basic form of his

Different colour channels contain varying amounts of digital noise. This will be important if you want to display your black and white photo as a large print, and could influence your choice of how much of each colour channel to use in the mix. Cut

They might not be black and white, but sepia photographs are certainly monochrome. We’re all familiar with these historic-looking photos, but we might not be aware why they have their characteristic colour. It’s not a result of the passage of time on

If you aren’t using Arch Linux and don’t want to reboot your computer to use a live disc, you can do the whole job in a virtual machine, including compiling the kernel, but booting Qemu from an ISO image. Once you’ve done that, much of the process is

You can create a standalone executable version of your space shooter. Run pip3 install pyinstaller to get the dependencies sorted, then pyxelpackager shooter.py to turn shooter. py into an executable. Create your own image sprites in the pyxel engi

Don’t start the emulator while the image file is still mounted on the host. Giving two operating systems access to the same filesystem is asking for trouble. Enable CONFIG_ IKCONFIG and CONFIG_ IKCONFIG_PROC in your kernel config. This makes the ke

If Mermaid isn’t to your liking, try Vega and Vega Lite, which enable you to create graphs and plots. Both grammars are based on D3.js and JavaScript. Learn more about Vega and Vega Lite at https://vega.github.io/ and at https:// github.com/vega/vega

Another useful tool that can help you create graphs and plots is Graphviz (http://graphviz.org). It’s is a collection of tools for manipulating graph structures and generating graph layouts that supports both directed and undirected graphs. It offers

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

Typora is a stable and easy-to-use Markdown editor and reader that also supports Mermaid and works on many operating systems including Linux. On an Arch Linux machine you can install typora by running sudo pacman -S typora . Adjust the command to mat

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