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100 Articles

Jonni Bidwell Mint has been great for ‘fixing’ various old XP machines. Auntie Ethel loves it – she’s currently learning ROP exploits in order to exact revenge following some poor adjudication at the bridge club. As well as being accessible, it has the most wonderful squelchy effect on the context menu. It’s reason enough to get a new video card. Neil Bothwick It has to be the colour. While many people switched to Mint because of the old-school desktop environments, for me it was the chance to have a desktop that was anything but a murky brown or purple. Please don’t tell me defaults can be changed when all it takes is a switch of distro. Matt Hanson My favourite feature of Mint is actually the Cinnamon desktop environment. It’s…

Jonni Bidwell The cowsay and fortuneprograms and the /etc/motd file can all be combined with some cunning scripting to give your users random aphorisms from a talking cow when logging in. Alternatively, you could issue abuse based on the username. Much more useful than what version of Linux the server is running. Neil Bothwick The best advice I always manage to ignore is “once it is working, don’t mess with it”. In particular, I find that upgrading your mail server ten minutes before you intended to go to bed is an excellent source of sleep deprivation for the foolish, as you try ever more desperate solutions as a direct result of increasing fatigue. Nick Peers Does your server support link aggregation, as many NAS drives now do? If so, remember that while 802.3ad aggregation is…

Information wars

2016 is turning out to be an exciting year for GNU/Linux distro releases. First we had the release of the class-leading Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and from that a host of spin-off distros have been slowly appearing. The next most popular release is Linux Mint 18. Based on that LTS Ubuntu release, this next big Mint release brings with it a host of huge changes to the popular distro. To celebrate Linux Mint 18 being released, we’re running a comprehensive feature on what’s new and exciting in this release of Mint, from its all-new X-Apps to the new improved Cinnamon desktop that so many know and love. We run you through the install process, look at how Mint is built, examine where it went wrong with its security in the past,…

Information wars

Serving you since 2000

» In this modern world with all-powerful mobile devices, ever-present internet connections and storage devices measuring in the multi-terabyte level you’d be excused for thinking a self-supported home or office server is as dead as the dinosaurs. How wrong you’d be. Ever since I realised I needed a dependable back up solution I’ve run a home-built server even if broadband manages to reach gigabit levels, I’ll still want to control where my backups are stored and have instant access to them. Once you have a server stood there ready to serve, it’s trivial to start adding services to its rank of abilities. File serving, backup, download manager, torrent box, media streamer, remote access, virtualisation hypervisor and even a streaming game server. Combine a home Gigabit LAN and good wireless connectivity and you…

Serving you since 2000

Open hardware is poised for success

“One day we may no longer have to compromise by using closed hardware to run open software.” Free and open hardware has long been a dream for many of us who want devices in the hands of as many people as possible, no matter their background, while banishing the reductive spectacle of patent wars that can hold back so many promising technologies. Sadly, the practicalities of open hardware has made the road to an open and free hardware reality a long one, but it looks like we may finally be there. Later in this issue, we have an essaybyRichardStallman(see p44) extolling the virtues – and looking at the complicated ethics – of free and open hardware. One of the key dilemmas of the open source community is whether using closed design…

Open hardware is poised for success

More distros drop 32-bit

“Building i386 images is not ‘free’, it costs build, QA and validation time.” t he European Union, David Cameron, almost all of the Labour Shadow cabinet… all are going out of fashion or disappearing completely, but will 32-bit distributions (distros) follow suit? Painfully forced UK politics comparisons aside, the fate of Linux distros that support 32-bit hardware is once more up for debate, with Ubuntu’s Dimitri John Ledkov suggesting in a mailing list in June (http://bit.ly/32BitDebate) that Canonical should consider dropping support for 32-bit distros in the near future. He did so pointing out that 32-bit hardware is becoming ever more uncommon, with third parties dropping support, and that “Building i386 images is not ‘for free’, it comes at the cost of utilizing our build farm, QA and validation time……

More distros drop 32-bit

Linux now has 2% of the desktop market, rising from the 1.63% it had in August 2015. In a graph published by Net Market Share (http://bit.ly/LinuxMarketshareDesktop), there was quite a jump in June 2016. At 2.02% market share, Linux is still behind Mac OS (8.19%), and Windows still has a huge lead with 89.79% of the market as of June 2016. By the time you read this, the numbers may be even be slightly higher for Linux. The way Net Market Share collects its data is from browsers that visit certain websites that are included in the network of HitsLink Analytics and SharePost clients, which is made up of 40,000 websites and brings data from around 160 million unique visits per month. So while this gives us a very good…

Google vs Oracle: jury sides with Google

The long-running legal fight between Google and Oracle over the use of Java APIs in the Android operating system could finally be drawing to a close, with a federal jury concluding that Android does not infringe on Oracle-owned copyrights. After three days of deliberation, the jury decided that Google’s re-implementation of 37 Java APIs was protected by fair use. In a statement made after its victory, a Google spokesperson commented that: “Today’s verdict that Android makes fair use of Java APIs represents a win for the Android ecosystem, for the Java programming community, and for software developers who rely on open and free programming languages to build innovative consumer products.” Oracle, which acquired the Java programming language with its purchase of Sun Microsystems, sued Google over the APIs back in 2010, and…

Google vs Oracle: jury sides with Google

Big names continue to get behind Linux

Another month and another round of great news for Linux gamers. At this year’s E3 gaming convention Dell announced new Steam Machines in its gaming enthusiast Alienware range. These console-like PCs can be plugged into TVs in the front room and run the Debian-based SteamOS operating system. With the latest Intel Skylake CPUs and Nvidia GTX 960 graphics cards, these Steam Machines will play the latest blockbuster games with ease, and an increasing number of these games are being ported over to Linux thanks to Valve. AMD also took to the stage to announce that its new Radeon RX 470 and Radeon RX 460 graphics cards, which are based on its eagerly anticipated Polaris architecture, will ship with both open and closed source Linux drivers. Nvidia has also offered Linux…

Big names continue to get behind Linux

Canonical announces universal Snap packages

We often report on falling outs and acrimonies among open-source teams and projects, so it’s also nice to talk about when they all work together. Canonical has recently announced that developers from various Linux distros, as well as a number of companies, are collaborating on the universal Snap package format, which will allow a single binary package to work on any Linux desktop, server or device. Among the names connected to the project, which can be found at http://snapcraft.io, are Dell, Samsung, the Linux Foundation, The Document Foundation, Krita andMycroft,alongwith contributors to Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, OpernWrt and other distros. Snap packages are designed to be easy to create and make it simpler for third parties to create Linux applications that work securely on a number of distros. Snap packages can now…

Canonical announces universal Snap packages

After six years it looks like Sony is finally going to pay PlayStation 3 owners, after it removed the ability to install Linux in March 2010, which annoyed many people who’d already bought the console only to find a much trumpeted feature had been taken away from them. While the deal is still being thrashed out, it looks like Sony will pay $55 to any PS3 owner who had a console manufactured between November 2006 and September 2009 and can prove they lost the use of Linux. If you don’t have proof you may still be able to claim $9. You should get an email from Sony (if you signed up for the PlayStation network) detailing how to claim. Security researcher Dymtro “Cr4sh” Oleksiuk has found another critical vulnerability in…

Microsoft has announced that FreeBSD 10.3 is available directly from its Azure Marketplace as a ready-made virtual machine image. Microsoft has been investing in making FreeBSD a “[first] class VM guest on Hyper-V, enabling performant networking and storage capabilities that for the first time, made it possible to run production FreeBSD workloads in Hyper-V environments”, according to Jason Anderson, Principal PM Manager of the Open Source Technology Center at Microsoft. By getting FreeBSD through the Azure Marketplace, you’ll get technical support from support engineers, something that the FreeBSD Foundation doesn’t offer (instead relying on the community to offer support). According to Justin T. Gibbs, President of FreeBSD Foundation, this is “quite a significant milestone for FreeBSD community and for Microsoft to publish a supported FreeBSD image on Azure Marketplace. We…

Collabora Online

“This month was extraordinarily busy as we prepared and polished an initial release of several years of work as Collabora Online, which brings LibreOffice to the cloud and your browser. Getting all of the final bugs fixed, and user experience polished for our first release was all consuming. The first release has basic editing functionality – simple text and formula editing, shape manipulaton and so on. While the editing tools are simple, we render a large number of documents at high fidelity – re-using the proven LibreOffice engine and give a real WYSIWYG editing experience. We also support Shared Editing – allowing multiple concurrent viewers while a single person edits the document – very useful for team work. Clearly our security and scalability is built around Linux’s powerful architecture and a…

Collabora Online

Kill all package managers!

“The first-boot Linux experience is one of the best things about the modern Linux desktop distro. First of all, many Linux desktop distros come pre-installed with the likes of Firefox and LibreOffice, but you still need to get the other things. Doing this usually takes just one or two entries on the command line. You then relax as the system does its magic. It’s awesome, but there’s a problem with the Linux package manager ecosystem, and it’s the fact that there’s an ecosystem of package managers at all. Packed field There’s a slew of package systems to choose from: Debian, Ubuntu and its derivatives (such as Linux Mint, see our Feature, p32) use APT; Fedora and Red Hat use Yum; OpenSUSE uses ZYpp, which is compatible with Yum; Slackware has…

Kill all package managers!

BARUWA ENTERPRISE EDITION 6.8 Baruwa Enterprise Edition 6.8 has been released for download, and supports the ACME client protocol, which brings ACME-compatible Certificate Authorities into the fold. In the release (found at http://bit.ly/BaruwaOS6_8), it’s explained that “Baruwa will now request Certbot certificates for the HTTPS and SMTP TLS services if you do not have a CA issued certificate. Certbot certificates are supported by a wide range of browsers so you should no longer have the warnings generated…” To download head over to www.baruwa.com. MANJARO LINUX 16.06 Manjaro Linux, an Arch-inspired distro that uses a rolling release schedule, has reached version 16.06 and features the Linux kernel 4.4 and 10 alternative kernel versions, giving the distro an extensive selection of kernels. The Xfce edition comes with version 4.12 of the environment and the Manjaro Settings…

kDe neon 5.7 Fresh off the heels of the newly-released KDE Plasma Desktop 5.7 comes KDE neon 5.7, a Kubuntubased distro that specialises in fast development that allows it to take advantage of a cutting-edge desktop stack, which includes the latest version of Plasma. As well as KDE Plasma 5.7,itfeatures Qt 5.7,aswellas improved Wayland integration,a new system tray and a new task manager. To find out more visit the release announcement at http://bit.ly/KDEPlasma5_7. ZenwALk LinuX 8.0 The latest major version of the Slackware-based distro, Zenwalk Linux 8.0, has been released after what it calls a “long development blackout”. It comes with updates to essential programs (such as LibreOffice 5.1.3, Chromium 51, MPlayer 1.3 and FFmpeg 3.0.1), as well as the Linux kernel 4.4.14 and the Xfce 4.12.1 desktop environment. The…

So embarrassing

Personally, I think you’re the best computer magazine regardless of OS, I’ve been reading you since roughly about LXF35. Now that I’ve flattered you, may I make one complaint? Please lose the Sans Serif fonts. They are an evil plot by Redmondites to make people stop reading. Besides being ugly and hard to see, you will condemn us to spend our lives distinguishing ‘1’ from ‘l’ from ‘j’ from ‘I’ from ‘i’, all of which appear similar in the Sans Serif fonts, not to mention trying to tell ‘m’ from ‘rn’. Otherwise, keep up the good work! David R. DeSpain, Texas, USA. Neil says: You’ve discovered our dirty secret, run for it lads! We’ve talked about changing these – as it certainly makes code and terminal commands harder to read – but…

So embarrassing

RAID it You know, you’ve been posting some darned useful articles recently. Back in LXF206 there was one on RAID [Tutorials, p76]. I remember messing with that back with Ubuntu 10.04, with the objective of building a high-reliability PC. I even got to scripting the RAID build, to make it easier and faster. Then in LXF207 you had a review of Fedora Security Lab [p20], and put it on the cover-disk of LXF208. So far, so brilliant. Next step? How about an article on how to install Linux on a RAID set? Back with Ubuntu 10.04, Canonical produced the ‘Alternate-build’ CD, with a simple text-based installer to make room for the RAID additions, but not any more. An article on how to augment and process a standard-release would be ooh-so-helpful.…

Disc numbers First the good news: I like the magazine (I’ve been taking it since about LXF18), so keep up the good work! I have one small little issue: I like to file the cover DVDs (I have a storage box for 5.25-inch floppies which is well-suited to this), and I’ve noticed that from LXF193 onwards that have you put the issue number on the DVD but not on the cardboard envelope for the DVD. This has meant that if I want to see the issue number that an LXFDVD relates to I have to take it out of the envelope. I’ve resorted to writing the issue number on the back of the cardboard envelope, but it would be good if you could go back to printing it on the front,…

Get thee to a Hackathon Make cool things and stretch your skills with other enthusiastic hackers. Conferences and Barcamps are great, you get to meet and chat with your peers while learning some new skills. But where can you put those skills to the test? Well, one of those places is Hackathons. These happen all over the world and generally focus on either a language or a topic. At some events you’ll find hackathons happening in parallel, either officially or unofficially. PyCon UK’s Education track, for instance, has seen teachers and developers hacking together to make cool projects based around Python and the Raspberry Pi. At OggCamp, children were encouraged to take apart cheap electronic toys and turn them into something else. Another hackathon is Hack Manchester, a 24-hour coding event where developers create…

Since you started doing them, I’ve been closely following the Raspberry Pi articles, but I never really had the time and/or X incentive to actually get one and do something with it, although I did make note of potential projects I may get around to at some point. Now I do have the time and incentive. The more I read up on it the less sure I am on what to use at the heart of the project. I had originally thought it would be a toss-up between Pi or Arduino, but now I’m reading about the Beaglebone, the ODROID-C2, and the Banana Pi. Unless it was in one of the rare issues I don’t get due to being out of the country, I don’t think you have done a…

Community events news

Get Digitl No that’s not a typo, Get Digitl is a hackathon taking place at Google’s Campus in London on August 20-21. We found out about this via Yasmin Bey, EU Digital Girl of the Year 2015 and co-organiser of this event. Over the two days you will work as a team completing challenges and learning new skills. All of your food needs are catered for and you are free to bring your laptop, Pi or tablet to work on. http://getdigitl.com Hack Manchester 2016 October 29-30 sees the return of Hack Manchester, a 24-hour coding competition that takes place in the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Working in teams, developers have a day to plan, develop and test their application or project, but at the end of the time they must…

Community events news

North West Makefest buzzing Liverpool Makefest 2016 doubles attendance. Liverpool Makefest was the surprise hit of 2015 and generated quite a buzz around the North West of England. In 2015 they saw 1,800 people in attendance, so could they beat that in 2016? The answer was a resounding “Yes”, with attendance doubling to about 4,000 people attending the free one-day event in Liverpool’s Central Library. For 2016 the number of stalls doubled, offering plenty of interesting project ideas for makers of all ages. At this year’s event we saw makers large and small. Local astronomy groups demonstrated how they are using Raspberry Pi and 3D printers to augment their hobby. Children demonstrated their Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects and offered hands-on sessions for interested parties. We also saw the low-cost…

Dell XPS 13 (2016)

In brief... OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS CPU: Intel i7 6560U (2.2-3.2GHz) with Iris 540 graphics Display: 13.3-inch touchscreen QHD (3,200x1,800) RAM: 16GB Storage: 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD Ports: 2x USB 3.0 Thunderbolt 3, SD card Comms: Dual band 802.11ac Wi-Fi (2x2 MIMO), Bluetooth 4.1 Webcam: 720p Battery: 56WHr Size: 304x200 x9-15mm Weight: 1.29kg Dell began offering Linux support through its Project Sputnik initiative, which culminated in the release of the original XPS 13 Developer Edition in 2012. First, this machine looks nice, seriously nice. Thanks to the amazingly thin bezel, Dell has effectively squeezed a 13-inch screen into an 11-inch form factor. This ‘InfinityEdge’ screen is a thing of beauty. We reviewed the QHD+ glossy touchscreen model and were in awe of the crisp edges and vibrant colour reproduction. Reflections in daylight diminish the display’s brilliance, but not to the point of…

Dell XPS 13 (2016)

Community events news

Oggcamp 2016 Sadly, time has beaten the new organising team for Oggcamp, which will return in 2017. This will be the first “break” in the popular Oggcamp event since it was started in 2009. The team are working to find suitable locations across the UK, with a number of venues on offer. Stay tuned! http://oggcamp.org PHP North West 2016 PHP has been powering the web for many years and is the backbone to the Wordpress platform. But in an ever changing world, with the PHP framework ever evolving, developers need to keep their skills sharp, and there is no better place than PHPNW. Taking place in Manchester from September 30 until October 2, this event offers talks, workshops and a hackathon. Plenty of opportunities to keep your PHP skills sharp…

Community events news

Shuttle XPC Cube

Specs Form factor: Shuttle Socket: Intel LGA 1151 Chipset: Intel Z170 Express RAM: 4x DDR4 2133MHz Audio: Realtek ALC892 7.1 Ethernet: Intel i219LM Gigabit Onboard: 4x SATA 6.0, 1x RS232, 1x front USB 3.0, 1x front audio, 1x front USB 2.0, 2x 5-pin USB Bays: 4x 3.5-inch HDD bays Slots: 1x PCI-e x16, 1x PCI-e x4, 1x M.2, 1x Mini-PICe Back: 1x LAN, 6x USB 3.0, 1x eSATA, 5x jacks in/out/side/rear/centre, 2x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI Size: 332x216x198mm PSU: 500W 80 PLUS silver The computing world has seen a variety of form factors come and go. However, it’s easy to forget that vendors have been trying to break away from the mould since the early 2000s. One of the first was a Taiwanese manufacturer called Shuttle, which pioneered small-form factor cubes—they are so small you’ll need a pair of them to fill an average…

Shuttle XPC Cube

In brief... OS: Ubuntu Touch 15.04 OTA11 CPU: MediaTek quad-core 1.5GHz GPU: Mali-T720 MP2 600MHz Display: 10.1-inch, 1,920x1,200, 10-point touch RAM: 2GB HDD: 16GB (10GB free) Comms: GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n dual-band Ports: Micro-USB, OTG, 3.5 mm jack, MicroSD, micro HDMI Cameras: 8MP main, 5MP front Power: 7280mAh Size: 246x171x 8.2 mm, 470g The first release of the Bq Aquarius M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet suffered some crippling issues, with the promised OTA11 (Over The Air) update released mid-June we’re taking a fresh look at the update to see if our verdict has changed. Getting straight into the improvements, we’re glad to report that overall responsiveness has hugely improved—where previously the mouse felt sluggish it’s now smooth; where windows felt horrible to move they’re now responsive; where scrolling and flicking objects was muddy and slow they’re now slick. This in itself…

In brief... A simple to use Linux distro aimed at nontechnical people. Updates are automatic and the whole feel of the OS is much more ChromeOS or Android rather than a traditional Linux distro. Unlike a lot of things (and people) today it remains capable in the absence of an internet connection thanks to the preloaded resources. See also: Android x86, elementary OS, RemixOS, Ubuntu. Endless OS is fairly unique in that it was originally only available on Endless’s range of budget machines, launched in January following a successful Kickstarter last year. Its machines (the Mini and the One) were aimed squarely at developing countries where internet access is a luxury, with a good portion of their storage devoted to an offline edition of Wikipedia, besides all manner of other useful apps.…

Dell Chromebook 13

Specs CPU: 1.7GHz Intel Celeron 3215U (dual-core, 2MB cache) Graphics: Intel HD Graphics GT1 RAM: 4GB DDR3L Screen: 13.3-inch 1920 x 1080 Matte FHD LCD Storage: 16GB M2.NGFF Solid State Drive, MicroSD slot Optical drive: None Ports: 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, HDMI, headphone and microphone combo jack Connectivity: Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 802.11AC, Bluetooth 4.0 Camera: Built-in 720p HD video camera Weight: 2.17kg (4.8lb) Size: 382 x 252.5 x 20mm (15.04 x 9.94 x 0.78 in) W x D x H Perhaps high-end Chromebooks were inevitable, but it looks like the Chromebook Pixel has started a trend. This new Dell model features an FHD screen, more memory, and more processing power than one might expect – or arguably need – from an average Chromebook. Perhaps it is…

Dell Chromebook 13

LibreOffice Online

In brief... An online implementation of part of the LibreOfficesuite that ties into OwnCloud. This is limited in features and to documents, spreadsheets and presentations. See also: OwnCloud Documents, Google Docs. As part of its push to conquer the office world with open source Collabora has released version one of COOL or COllabora OnLine. It’s part of the wider Collabora CloudSuite effort that’s attempting to deliver LibreOffice to every type of device running both on and offline. Currently in its version one state Collabora is aiming this at enterprise deployments (typical government and business installations) where the system can be integrated into an existing infrastructure. As an individual though you’re able to deploy your own COOL instance via the Collabora CODE initiative at www.collaboraoffice.com/code where you can grab a pre-built 64-bit VirtualBox image…

LibreOffice Online

Specs CPU: 1.6 GHz Intel Celeron N3060 (dual-core, 2MB cache, up to 2.48GHz with Turbo Boost GPU: Intel HD Graphics 400 RAM: 4GB LPDD3 Screen: 11.6-inch, 1,366x768 SSD: 16GB eMMC Ports: 2 x USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, headphone/ microphone combo jack, SD card reader Comms: Intel 7265 Dual-Band 802.11ac 2x2 Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.2 supporting WiDi Cam: 720p HD webcam Weight: 1.2kg Size: 292 x 200 x 22mm (W x D x H) The Asus Chromebook C202, with its giant keyboard font and rubber bumpers, may look like an alphabet-singing ‘My First Laptop’, but, this Chromebook is no fragile toy. Designed with the student in mind, the Asus C202 is built to weather all types of day-to-day adversity, be it backpack G-forces, clumsy adolescent hands or careless tosses in the classroom.…

Specs... OS: Ubuntu 12.04+, Steam OS+ CPU: Anything with SSE2 support HDD: 200MB Something is chewing through a door on the derelict space station, Volgograd. So far it’s been a safe and worthwhile excursion. Now, though, it feels like we’ve overstayed our welcome. We quickly command the scouting drone to return to the docked dropship, but just as it speeds past the door that’s being chewed through, there’s a loud beeping. The console informs us that a second drone, which is powering a generator, is being damaged by another ‘something’ Driving the second drone away from the new alien threat disconnects the power supply, which means doors in the station remain inactive. The scouting drone is now trapped in the room it’s in, the one with the door that is about to give way to…

In brief... Alpha Objects, the company behind the Taz 6, is a keen supporter of the open source community and as such offers free blueprints of the Taz 6, alongside its entire line of printers, online. The production model is finely finished using only high-quality parts and is hard to match in terms of quality and reliability. Visually, the initial difference between the Taz 6 and its predecessor the Taz 5 isn’t a great deal – a few design refinements and the self-levelling print base. However, scratch beneath the surface and the number of refinements across the entire machine is significant. The self-levelling base adds to the printer’s ease of use and adopts the same principles as the excellent LulzBot Mini. The build volume sees a change to 280 x…

Fast web browsers

“For those of us that can do without the unnecessary frills, there are several alternatives.” Our selection Dillo Midori Netsurf Qupzilla Slimjet The web browser is the one application that we all use extensively on a day to day basis. For a majority of us, it’s the first thing that we fire up when logging into our computer and going by the increasing number of useful online applications that pop up every month, and the meteoric rise of Chromebooks, our reliance on the web browser is only going to increase. The mainstream web browsers, such as Firefox and Chromium, are equipped with a wide range of features that makes them very malleable and useful for a variety of online activities. However, these features have a negative impact on the browser’s speed and memory footprint, especially after you’ve been…

Fast web browsers

As well as being lightweight—what else do these web browsers offer? Dillo, eg, is designed particularly for older hardware. It includes tabbed browsing and basic bookmarking facilities. There’s also a search engine toolbar and the browser can fetch pages over HTTPS—but that’s about all you can do with the Dillo browser. NetSurf is a little better. It started out as a web browser for the RISC OS and like Dillo uses its own layout engine. NetSurf also provides typical web browser features, including tabbed browsing, bookmarks and also includes download and history management. Some of the features of the web browser, such as the cookie management, were ported from being RISC-only to other platforms when the browser participated in the Google Summer of Code. This also led to the development of…

In brief... The distro for those that want both stability and features has another outing. With Gnome 3.20, support for Flatpak images and improving Wayland support, there’s a lot to explore. The Mint 18 release stole the fanfare a bit last month and we all but missed Fedora slipping out its latest offering. But better late than never, and better late than having to fight with early release bugs, we hold our breath and prepare for a deep dive. Fedora is reasonably fluid with its release schedule—it’s been about a six-monthly one for the last three releases, but Fedora 21 didn’t appear until almost a year after its predecessor. Fedora’s oft-stated goal, to lead and not follow, means that it is often the first (fixed release anyway) distribution (distro) to…

AMD Radeon RX 480

Specs GPU: Polaris Process: 14nm FinFET Transistors: 5.7 billion Compute: 36 Texture: 144 ROPs: 32 Core: 1,120MHz Memory: 8GB GDDR5 @ 8GHz Bus: 256-bit TDP: 150W Ports: HDMI 2.0b, 3x Display-Port 1.4 HDR Surely this is the year of the graphics card? Think about it: we have the advent of VR, high refresh rate 1440p gaming, and not one but two die shrinks all occurring within the last 12 months alone. But let’s face facts. It’s all well and good having £400+ graphics cards, but what really matters is making our platform more accessible. Welcome then AMD’s first 14nm Polaris offering, the RX 480. Aimed squarely at the mid-range market, this £220 graphics card is designed to supplant Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970 from holding the title of value king, and…

AMD Radeon RX 480

Security and privacy

Given the nature of the web, we wouldn’t want you to switch to a browser that doesn’t take steps to ensure your safety online. Dillo, eg, can accept cookies but this blocks them by default due to privacy concerns. Additionally, while most web browsers retain the web cache and history after you’ve exited the app, Dillo automatically clears them both which is its way of ensuring both your privacy and the browser’s performance. Netsurf ships with a variety of features to protect your privacy. It disables JavaScript by default and you can ask it to block pop-up windows and hide adverts without using a plugin. The browser can also send a Do Not Track request to websites that adhere to it and enables you to specify a period for storing history…

Security and privacy

Standard compliance

A lightweight browser alternative doesn’t make much sense if it can’t properly render the websites you often visit. We used three online benchmarking tools to gauge their compliance (see, How we tested). However, Dilloand Netsurfcan’t run any of the tests because they lack JavaScript support. However, you wouldn’t have a very enjoyable browsing experience with either since they also can’t play Java content. Dillo is particularly bad with many popular websites as it has limited CSS support. In contrast, Midorisupports all popular standards and scores a perfect 100 on Acid 3 along with Qupzillaand Slimjet. On the HTML5 test, Midori loses points for not supporting WebGL 3D graphics and WebRTC and scores 356/555. However, Peacekeeper awards it 6/7 for its HTML5 capabilities. The Peacekeeper test kept timing out for Qupzilla which doesn’t…

Standard compliance

Screencasting apps

“You too can create screencasts to demo or review your favourite piece of software with little effort.” Our selection DemoRecorder Kazam ScreenStudio SimpleScreen Recorder VokoScreen Besides cute kitten videos, YouTube and other video- streaming websites also host loads of video-based tutorials on all kinds of software. In fact, an increasing number of software developers are choosing to create screencasts instead of authoring plain text-based tutorials and documentation for any new projects. Screen casts are an excellent tool for developers as they provide a chance to show-off new features and their intended functionality instead of forcing a development team and its technical writer to rely on pure wordsmithing skills and a user’s ability to visualise their use for a feature. For pretty much the same reasons, screencasting software has become an…

Screencasting apps

User experience

Each browser in the Roundup has its strengths and weaknesses. Some have more features than others while others, perhaps, strip away too much functionality for your taste. Also, simply piling features isn’t always a good idea since not all features are useful for everyone. Given the intrusive nature of the internet, privacy and security features are more important than some others, which is why we’ve rated these separately. All said and done, we’re on the lookout for the web browser that strikes the right balance between features and performance. To become the daily go-to browser, it should be able to work with and render the popular websites and online services as intended. It should also be able to do this without taxing the hardware even after long periods of use. Dillo The browser…

User experience

While all the applications can capture the action on the desktop with ease, some offer more aids than the others to enrich the process. So, eg, while all applications can record the full desktop, they also enable you to limit the scope of the recording by defining a limited area on the desktop. Kazam, SimpleScreenRecorderand VokoScreen also allow you to select and record particular windows only. ScreenStudio and VokoScreen can also record video from the webcam during the screencast which is a definite plus. During our testing, all the applications made flawless screencasts of the Nexuiz first-person shooter (www.nexuiz.com) in both windowed and full-screen mode. All the apps offer options to record audio from both the microphone and speakers. When recording videos, some applications can be controlled via their icons…

The primary reason for switching to one of these browsers is to save resources. In our tests, the Blink-based Qupzilla consumed 160.9MB on launch. This figure rose to 462.9MB after some rigorous multi-tab browsing. Midoriand Slimjetwere slightly better—Midori eats 64.9MB of RAM, Slimjet took more than double at 134.78MB. However, after using them for some time, Midori’s RAM footprint increased to 201.66MB while Slimjet increased to 168.86MB. Not surprisingly, the two browsers with the lowest memory footprint are Netsurfand Dillo. They both use custom engines and can’t display the same amount of content that the other browsers can which is reflected in their RAM usage as well. Netsurftakes up 38.44MB of RAM when launched and goes up to 171.32MB after an hour-long browsing session. In contrast, Dillo launches with just 9.3MB…

While we like the browsers for their frugal use of resources, it’s nice to have access to some extensions and plugins to enhance their functionality. Both Dillo and Netsurfare a disappointment in that aspect since neither supports any form of plugins. In contrast, both Qupzillaand Midoriship with all the supported extensions within the browser which makes it convenient to bring them into service. Qupzilla ships with just eight plugins but they are all very useful. One enables you to navigate the web using only the keyboard by overlapping all the links with keyboard shortcuts while another lets you navigate using mouse gestures. There’s also the information manager plugin which tracks various pieces of personal information that can be used to auto-fill a form with a keyboard shortcut. Another useful plugin is…

Streaming support

While we’re rating these applications primarily for their screencasting abilities, some also offer the option to stream them live to video-sharing websites or include preset settings to make screencasts ready for specific sharing platforms. If you’re looking to stream your screencasts, stay away from Kazam and VokoScreenas they both don’t offer this option. DemoRecorderhas a bunch of export scripts with their parameters optimised for creating videos for YouTube. The application offers different scripts for creating screencasts in low-resolution, 720p HD and Full HD resolutions. Besides these, there’s also an option to make high-quality lossless videos for web publishing using Flash which uses a combination of HTML, SWF and FLV. The other two screencasters, SSR and ScreenStudio, both enable screencast streams directly to online streaming services. SSR can stream to a…

Streaming support

Configurable parameters

While the browsers ship with usable defaults, you’ll want to modify certain settings to suit your workflow. The ‘Tools’ button in Dillo lists four functions, which enables a few things by default, eg the display of remote and embedded CSS. However, for customising more useful settings such as the default font, you need to manually edit Dillo’s configuration file. Netsurf has a six-tab Preferences window for changing the appearance, positioning and the behaviour of tabs. You can use the Content and Privacy tabs to enable the pop-up and advert blocker and modify the size of the caches. Midori also has a Preferences window but has more tabs and options than NetSurf. This is where you enable Midori’s bundled extensions. You can also change the browser’s startup preferences as well as its…

Configurable parameters

A screencast falls between a simple screenshot and a fully fledged video. The same can be said about a screencast’s controls and capabilities—you get more tweakable options and settings than you get with a screenshot capturing utility but not as much post-editing control offered by video-editing software. That said, there are enough parameters in the average screencasting application to present a usability challenge to a developer. While most applications we tested have a simple layout, we’re on the lookout for the one that’s the most intuitive and exposes the most number of controls without cluttering the interface and confusing the user. There are several steps to recording a screencast and a good option should guide the users through them. DemoRecorder For this Roundup, we’ve used the full 30-day trial version…

Support and documentation

Kazam, VokoScreen and ScreenStudio offer no in-application documentation. Kazam also doesn’t offer any documentation on its website but there’s a forum for support. VokoScreen’s website lists a handful of tips and hints and a solitary demo video in German. While there are no forums, the application enables you to contact the developer via email to resolve any issues. ScreenStudio also only has basic install instructions on its website that gives an overview of the application’s features and basic usage. The developer is an avid YouTuber and the official channel is full of screencasts of various Linux application and games that show off the app’s capabilities. All the options in DemoRecorder’s interface include a Help button, which opens the man page for the CLI utility that powers that feature. On its…

Support and documentation

“Renders websites flawlessly and ships with quite a few plugins to extend its default functions.” The objective of this Roundup was to help you find an alternate web browser that consumes less resources than the one that ships with your distro, by default, without forcing you to change your browsing habits. In terms of low resource usage, there’s no beating Dillo. Thebrowser loads in a jiffy and renders pages just as quickly. However, that in itself isn’t enough for us to recommend it. In its quest to cut the fat, Dillo has trimmed off several vital organs that are essential for consuming most of the content on the web these days. Netsurf too isn’t of much use for pretty much the same reason. It does render more websites properly than Dillo, but…

While the primary task of the applications is to create screencasts, many of them offer additional features and functionality. The visible functions are also assisted by back-end functionality that kicks in only under special circumstances, eg, the lightweight Kazam works wonderfully if it’s installed on older computers or inside virtual machines. In addition to screencasts, Kazam can also capture screenshots as well. You can also use SSR on older machines as the application can automatically reduce the framerate depending on the available processing power. You can also use the app to preview the recording area which can be a great time saver for certain people. ScreenStudio’s biggest add-on is its ability to stream to other websites and create a customised interface for the screencast. VokoScreen includes the ability to playback…

Also consider...

It might come as a surprise but there are actually quite a few web browsers that are better at juggling the available resources than the web browsers that come bundled with your favourite distro. If you’re looking for something absolutely minimal, there’s no beating the Surf web browser. This doesn’t include any graphical components and is designed to be controlled with the keyboard. Similarly, the Conkeror browser is also designed to be operated only by keyboard and was created by the same developer of the, suitably named, Ratpoison window manager. Another minimal browser is Uzbl which has features such as downloads and cookies but can only display one page per instance. More graphical options include the WebKit-based Reconq, which is no longer under development but still works well enough. The QtWeb browser…

The Ultimate Home Server

“Share photos throughout your household, schedule cloud backups and much more.” Running Linux on your home computer is something of a rite of passage, all the more so when it becomes your main operating system. Friends are bemused as the incantations you type give rise to arcane console output, error messages, or pictures of cats. They ask if they can run Linux too, and you say something enigmatic like: “I can only show you the door, you must walk through it”. They usually stop being your friends at that point. But that’ okay, you don’t need friends, you have Linux… and unlike your erstwhile friends Linux is also a great server OS. And a home server is a great substitute for friends. Well maybe not, but in this tutorial we’ll show you…

The Ultimate Home Server

While you can use a dedicated transcoder, such as Handbrake, to transform the screencasts into any format, it’s more convenient to have the screencasting support a wide variety of containers and codecs to save the screencasts in our preferred format. Kazam, VokoScreen and ScreenStudio don’t offer much flexibility in this regard. VokoScreen only enables to you record in either the MKV or the AVI formats with the MPEG4 and libx264 codecs. Similarly, Kazam only supports VP8/WebM, H264/MP4 and the AVI video formats. ScreenStudio does a little better and enables you to record to a file in either FLV, MOV and MP4 formats. You can also choose between different profiles that can change various parameters for size and quality, ranging from 240p all the way up to 1080p. If you’re using…

Configurable parameters

Kazam includes a simple three-tab Preferences window that offers very little flexibility. It enables you to select the speaker and microphone capture devices and adjust their volume levels. You can also toggle the countdown splash that appears before the app begins recording. From under the Screencast tab you can change the framerate for the capture which defaults to 15FPS. There’s also a pull-down menu that allows you to choose between the default H264 (MP4) and the VP8 (WebM) containers. You can also ask the application to save recordings automatically by just selecting a directory and specifying a filename prefix. Similarly, all settings in VokoScreen are housed within the Settings tabs. Here you can choose the default location for storing videos. You can also choose the default video player which is…

Configurable parameters

Building and configuring

Not that long ago we would’ve spent a good page talking about hardware considerations – back then hardware support was something of a minefield – here we’ve squished it all into a box. Things still aren’t perfect on Linux, but serious hardware incompatibilities tend to be reserved for laptops, so any issues you run into elsewhere tend to be pretty minor and easily corrected. In theory, you could cobble any old bits together and make a server, but old components (particularly disk drives and power supplies) have a habit of breaking and broken is generally not a good state for a server to be in. Further, when these components do break, replacements are often only available second-hand (and often at a vastly-inflated price) and so may not last long. Also that…

Building and configuring

Adding a RAID setup

The next step is to set up software RAID array using mdadm. Let’s suppose we have two 1TB drives, which can be had for about £30 a pop nowadays. There is a natural aversion to sacrificing capacity, it would be tempting to have two large partitions (one on each drive), but if one drive fails you lose half your data, and by Murphy’s law it will be the good half. You could be even more reckless and conjoin multiple drives together (JBOD) into a single logical volume, but here if one drive fails you lose all your data. Don’t hate your data. There’s also a common misconception that your drives have to be identical for RAID. This isn’t true, and in fact there’s a reasonable argument for using different drives,…

Adding a RAID setup

A lot has changed since the last time we rated screencasting applications back in July, 2009 [RoundUp, p30 LXF120]. All the options sans one are now defunct and the sole remaining option, DemoRecorder which aced the competition in 2009 brings up the rear in this one. DemoRecorder has an expansive set of features, but the competition has caught up. Its case is not helped by being proprietary, fairly expensive and doesn’t have the most appealing of user interfaces. Then there’s Kazam which is lightweight and has one of the most simple and intuitive of interfaces. However, the application can’t record from webcam which we think is a fairly important feature. Even when you look beyond this, Kazam offers fewer controls over the screencast as compared to some of the others.…

Also consider...

There aren’t many Linux screencasting apps that are still actively developed besides the ones that are covered in this Roundup. RecordItNow and RecordMyDesktopare good examples of apps that haven’t been updated in over half a decade but still work well. If you don’t want the fancy features and conveniences that come with the dedicated screencasters we’ve covered, you can also use VLC and the console-based FFmpeg to make screencasts. In VLC, head to Media > Open Capture Device and select Desktop from the pull-down menu. To use FFmpeg to record your screen, fire up the terminal and enter: You can also use the Open Broadcaster Software which is designed for live streaming the desktop. However, you can also save the screencast to a local file instead of streaming it over…

Also consider...

Establishing a static IP

“We need an address that is of the same shape as that of your router.” By default, Debian will request an IP address from your router using DHCP. This means though that on next reboot it may well end up with a different IP, which will make SSHing in from elsewhere on the network a challenge and also flummox any port forwarding arrangements later. Some broadband routers will allow you to reserve an IP for a machine based on its MAC address, which is one way of solving this problem, but we can also just set up a static IP on our server. We need an address that is of the same shape (by that we mean belonging to the same /24 subnet) as that of your router—the IP address it has…

Establishing a static IP

Getting remote access

Being able to access your server from anywhere in the world can be very handy, but running internet-facing services carries risks. If we allow outside access to the SSH service, then we really should have strong passwords, or (better) use keys. It’s reasonable to disable access to the root account (if you set a password for it during the install, otherwise it’s already disabled), instead logging in as a lowly user and using sudo for privileged operations. This is controlled with the PermitRootLogin setting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config which you can set to No or, if you want to allow root to log in using a key, prohibit-password (the default on Debian). It’s probably a good idea to check that SSH is working first though, so try and log in from another machine:…

Getting remote access

“Mint has risen through the rankings to become one of the most popular Linux distros.” Mint’s motto, ‘From freedom came elegance’, speaks to an entirely different class of distribution (distro): one that isn’t shackled by commercial interest and one that actually wants to be pleasurable for desktop users. Linux Mint was born 10 years ago out of lead developer Clement Lefebvre’s desire to build a distro that was both powerful and easy to use. Now it has risen through the rankings to become one of the most popular Linux distros out there. Linux Mint has definitely become something much bigger than its first nickname ‘Ubuntu with codecs’. It now features its own desktop, core applications and support channels. Along the way there have been hiccups and detours, but the project…

One of the most noble duties any home server can perform is sharing files. Whether it’s to store the gigabytes of bangin’ psytrance tunes you’ve amassed, or just a place to put things when you can’t find a USB stick to throw at your co-habiters, having some central and communal storage space is incredibly useful. Unix-like OSes have their own filesharing protocol called NFS which has been around since the 80s. This is certainly an option, but not one we’ll indulge today. Instead we’ll use Samba, which is an implementation of the sharing protocols used in Windows. This has the advantage that our server will be accessible to any Windows or Mac, as well as any iOS or Android devices. Before we set up Samba it’s a good idea to set up…

Emby and Webmin

A media player such as VLCor mpvwill happily open a file on your server remotely. But try skipping back and forth and you’ll discover that SMB is not a particularly good way to stream media. Especially if you envisage streaming to multiple users. Emby, on the other hand, is a media server that can serve content from your server or DLNA (the most horrible acronym ever created: Digital Living Network Alliance) devices. Emby delivers streams via HTML5 and can dynamically compress them according to network conditions. Note that this can use a lot of CPU, so serving a few users at once might result in jittery (or outright stalled) playback. Emby can use GPU acceleration for this purpose though, provided the appropriate drivers are installed – it currently supports as an…

Emby and Webmin

Cinnamon 3 desktop

Cinnamon is Mint’s unique and admired desktop environment and rebels against hyper-modern desktops, such as Unity and Gnome 3. It doesn’t have an inexplicable moral objection towards tray icons, like the latter, and it doesn’t insist that your taskbar/pager/launcher be super-glued to the left, like the former. Instead it provides what users have been used to: a taskbar at the bottom, a menu to its left and a system tray to its right. This metaphor has been refined and modernised over Cinnamon’s five-year lifespan, where it has borrowed the best of other desktops and introduced its own innovations. As is de rigeuer these days, you can search for programs by typing a few characters while the menu is activated. This has been the case for ages, but it’s extra-useful in…

Cinnamon 3 desktop

For a long time, the default Cinnamon theme has been Mint-X. And with good reason, it offers a simple, clean look that subtly guides the user to where they want to be. In Mint 18, the default is still Mint-X, but poke around in the Theme settings and you’ll find a new one called Mint-Y. In Mint, different themes can be applied to different desktop components: window borders, icons, controls, mouse pointers and desktop etc. If you set all of these to Mint-Y you’ll see the future of Linux Mint. Apparently, it’s not ready for the masses yet and will be tweaked further according to user feedback, eg it’s only available in one colour. That said, it already looks pretty good to us. It’s got some flattish elements without being…

Expand and extend

“For a start, if you have a spare pair of speakers look into setting up mpd.” We’ve done most of the groundwork required for any server. But we haven’t really considered security, and it’s worth saying a few words about this. Having only SSH visible to the outside world is a good start, especially if only key-based access is possible. If the key is stolen though, or (if you were lazy and allowed password access) the password guessed then your whole machine is vulnerable since that user has sudo rights. Some people only allow non-sudo users to log in, but this then precludes being able to do grown-up tasks. Trade-offs between security and convenience are commonplace. Having our services only visible to the LAN relies on the fact that our network…

Expand and extend

Getting started

You’ll find Mint 18 on the LXFDVD, just follow the quick guide below to get it installed. For the benefit of digital readers, those without optical drives or those that want to install a different edition (or indeed those whose discs have mysteriously gone walkabout), we’ll tell you how to create your own installation media here. You can do this from any operating system. The first step is to choose and download an ISO image from https://linuxmint.com, follow the Download link at the top and choose your version. At the time of writing, Cinnamon and Mate editions of Mint 18 are available, but hopefully Xfce and KDE editions will have been released by the time you read this. Also available is LMDE2, which is a rolling-release based on Debian Stable…

Getting started

Stay safe, people

ON NEW AREAS OF SECURITY “My research area is Human-centric Security, which is sort of made-up.” Laura Bell is CEO of SafeStack, a software security company based in Wellington, New Zealand. Current security discussions tend towards catchilynamed and beautifully branded vulnerabilities, but SafeStack wants to talk about the elephant in the room: humans. We caught up with her at OSCON ‘15 to talk about how to address the plenitude of our species’ security failures. Linux Format: So we’ve seen an awful lot in the news about high-profile software vulnerabilities with logos, people talking about ‘cyber armageddon’, and a lot of people generally worried about the state of software security. But by far the most common attack vector is people giving away information—humans are still fallible, maybe even more fallible than Adobe Flash? Laura…

Stay safe, people

Free hardware and free hardware designs

“Design comes before hardware. Thus, the concept we need is of a free hardware design changes.” To what extent do the ideas of free software extend to hardware? Is it a moral obligation to make our hardware designs free, just as it is to make our software free? Does maintaining our freedom require rejecting hardware made from nonfree designs? Free software is a matter of freedom, not price; broadly speaking, it means that users are free to use the software and to copy and redistribute the software, with or without changes. More precisely, the definition is formulated in terms of the four essential freedoms. To emphasize that ‘free’ refers to freedom, not price, we often use the French or Spanish word ‘libre’ along with ‘free’ Applying the same concept directly to hardware, free hardware means…

Free hardware and free hardware designs

Installing Mint 18

1. Boot the LXFDVD Ideally, starting your computer with the DVD in the drive should bring up the stylish menu pictured below. Unfortunately there’s a lot that can go wrong here, you’ll need to make sure Secure Boot is switched off and also that your machine will boot from the optical drive before other devices that have operating systems on them. There are some pointers at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromCD. 2. Choose your poison We’ve provided the two most popular versions, Cinnamon and Mate on the disc. Mate is more suited to older hardware (it’s also your only choice if you have a 32-bit CPU), but it will work just fine on newer machines. It’s ideal if you yearn for the simpler days of Gnome 2. Choose your version and press ‘Enter’. Start…

Installing Mint 18

Advanced installs

A standard install will create two partitions (three on UEFI machines): one for the OS and a swap partition. This is a perfectly reasonable set up, but some people prefer to tweak things a little, eg it’s common to have a separate /home partition so that in the event that something terrible happens the OS partition can be wiped and reinstalled, without touching any user files or settings. Be aware that if you install a different distro with this trick, then the settings saved in the /home partition may not be valid and could cause problems. A separate home partition is straightforward to do from the installer, just choose the ‘Something else’ option. The current disk layout will be displayed. Assuming we are nixing everything on the drive, we can…

“The production of quality desktop- and distro-agnostic bread and butter applications” Lead developer Clement Lefebvre explains that the X in X-Apps is a reference to the underlying X server, ‘ex’ as in the previous way of doing things, and also the algebraic notion, hinting at generality and universality. Any distribution aiming for ease of use needs its garrison of core applications. The discerning user expects a text editor, an image viewer, a media player and a document reader. Enter xed, xviewer, xplayer and xreader, respectively. The ‘X-Apps’ initiative has as its goal the production of quality desktop- and distribution-agnostic bread and butter applications. Back in the halcyon Gnome 2 days, this need was satisfied by Gnome’s own offerings (gedit, Eye of Gnome etc.). Beyond the GTK2 widget library (which is…

Kapow! Sysadmin!

Recently, I visited a little independent comic store near to where I work to subscribe to a couple of titles for my kids. The shop owner took my email address and said that he would be in touch when new issues arrived. Not hearing anything for a while, I popped back in to the store to find they had a backlog of issues waiting for me. “I thought you’d be in touch?” I said to the owner. “I don’t have time, we’ve got loads of comics waiting to be picked up’ he replied, waving his arm behind him where I could see shelves of boxes stuffed with issues and dividers with people’s names scrawled on them. I suggested that was a lot of stock to have to carry and he…

Kapow! Sysadmin!

Mate and other editions

The Cinnamon desktop grew out of the Mint Gnome Shell Extensions (MGSE) and while it retains much of what many perceive as the traditional desktop metaphor, it also uses a number of shiny new features and desktop effects. There’s all sorts of fancy things, such as the squidgy menus, that rely on modern OpenGL extensions to work. Many of these can be disabled, but users of older hardware (particularly graphics hardware) will likely want to install something with less demanding. The natural choices here are Mate, KDE and Xfce since there are official Mint releases featuring these desktops. Xfce, which first appeared back in 1996, has long-positioned itself as a Ralph Nader type candidate, an alternative to Gnome and KDE. It aims to be lightweight, but not barren of features.…

Mate and other editions

Google open sources ‘Parsey McParseface’

Google (who makes no secret of its research into machine learning) recently open-sourced SyntaxNet, a neural network framework implemented in TensorFlow (Google’s open source software library for machine learning). Google says it can be used as a foundation for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. The release includes all the code needed to train new SyntaxNet models as well as ‘Parsey McParseface’, an English parser trained by Google that can be used to analyse text. With its name being a nod towards the recent controversy regarding the naming competition for the UK research ship, RRS Sir David Attenborough (the name that won the popular vote being ‘Boaty McBoatface’), Parsey McParseface is touted as the most accurate model in the world and built on machine learning algorithms that can learn to analyse the…

Google open sources ‘Parsey McParseface’

Building communities using Discourse

Anappealingpartof Discourse istheway it attempts to create a harmonious online community in a way quite unlike other forum software I’ve seen. There is a long post detailing the Discourse team’s thoughts andapproachon how best to tackle this at http://bit.ly/TheArtofCivilisedDiscourse. Withina Discourse site isa defaultFAQ topic which attempts to set the tone for a site (eg, the sample heading is: This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion). These are difficult to disagree with (although, this being the internet, someone is bound to take offence) and could probably be used in most public forums both on and offline. New users are, at first, placed into a ‘sandbox’ which is a novel method of dealing with trolls and spam. While they are at this level of trust (which, at the lowest level, they will…

How it’s made

Building a desktop is no mean feat and maintaining one is even harder. Especially when you’re chasing a target moved by the evolution of upstream libraries. There are still a bunch of Gnome 3.18 libraries installed, but many are only there in an ancillary capacity, with Unity they are inextricably connected. On top of these are libraries specific to Cinnamon, some that are patched versions of Ubuntu counterparts. There’s a few older libraries forked from Gnome 3 that need to be maintained too—the newer versions being inseparable from Gnome. And then there’s all the applications. There’s a lot that’s easy to overlook too: The login screen that you don’t think about (MDM), the window manager you don’t see (Muffin), the update manager that helpfully finds the fastest mirror for you.…

Mint criticisms

“Mint only offers up to Level 3 updates, which doesn’t include the kernel or graphics stack.” Like Ubuntu faced back in the day, Mint has faced criticism from various factions. This criticism had a resurgence in February when the official website (http://linuxmint.com) was hacked so that users attempting to download the Mint ISO were redirected to a malicious ISO of Mint with the Tsunami backdoor. None of this has any bearing on Mint the distro (the hacker exploited weaknesses in the forum software and Wordpress to do the dirty deed) but it precipitated a wave of criticism nonetheless. Some of this was irrelevant, eg questions like why were Mint using MD5 to hash its images? When the attacker could also have used a more secure hashing algorithm and changed the…

Mint criticisms

Like quite a few readers I suspect, I do a bit of hosting for people ‘on the side’. This ranges from small websites to slightly more involved arrangements. One of the latter (a site which runs a forum for Middlesbrough FC fans (I had to get Boro’s glorious Premier League promotion into this column somehow or other)) approached me asking whether I could spare them some more space. They wanted to replace their old, phpBB based site with one running something called Discourse. Could I take a look and see how difficult it would be to set up? Not expecting much I agreed—and I’ve been very impressed. In fact, I don’t know how I didn’t hear about this brilliant software until now. To paraphrase the words of the project, Discourse (http://discourse.org)…

And there’s more…

There are some other cool features built into Discourse or that come bundled with it that are worth mentioning. It’s quite easy to import data from other forum software such as PHPbb or Disqus using some supplied scripts (take a look at http://bit.ly/DiscourseImportScripts). This makes migration a lot easier than having to dump data manually or in the worst case write off what might be a lot of data. It’s very easy to configure Discourse to use a CDN(content delivery network) in front of your server. This might be useful for a very busy forum, or to protect it from DDoS type attacks. In the app. yml file mentioned in the main article, simply uncomment the DISCOURSE_CDN_URL setting, amending it to the pull address for whatever CDN is decided upon. A…

Community relations

Kara Sowles is Puppet Labs’ Community Manager, who by lucky coincidence happens to also enjoy making stop-motion movies using actual puppets. We met her at OSCON 2015 to talk about planning tech events, cultural differences, hungry sysadmins and the special importance of community in the tech sector. Linux Format: Puppet Labs is famed for all kinds of complicated provisioning and cloud-conjuring tools, but there’s a lot more to the organisation than making and maintaining software. Tell us about what you do there. Kara Sowles: I’m Community Manager, which means I help build and support programmes that support the community that we have. And when I say community I mean the whole thing – enterprise users, the thousands of open source users, contributors, people at the company... it’s a really broad…

Community relations

“QOwnNotes will automatically generate the index tree” QOwnNotes is an easy-to-use notepad application, which combines several useful features, including Markdown support and OwnCloud integration. The very first time you start the application, you’ll be asked to choose a storage directory for your notes, with the ~/Owncloud/notes being offered by default. Then you can open the OwnCloud settings section of QOwnNotes and specify cloud details. Of course, you’re softly pushed to use OwnCloud and benefit from notes synchronising, but this isn’t a mandatory requirement. QOwnNotes will also warn you about tracking anonymous usage data for the sake of transparency and improving the software—if you don’t want this, press Open Settings and disable the feature. Using QOwnNotes is very easy, especially as it supports Markdown, which is very easy to learn if you’ve not used…

Build your own drone

“The latest open source drones are challenging more expensive rivals with advanced features.” WHAT YOU NEED Raspberry Pi Zero Erle Robotics PXF Mini Erle Robotics PXF Mini Power Module HobbyKing Spec FPV250 100mm male to male servo cable FlySky-i6 controller Edimax AC EW-7811UAC RC XT-60 connectors Quadcopters (drones) used to take hours of practice to master as even the simplest manoeuvres, such as takeoff and landing, could prove difficult. Learning to fly one took time and ultimately determination and before you even took to the skies there was the small matter of building one. Now that there’s a good selection of pre-built and programmed drones on the market, you can go into major High Street retailers and buy one directly off the shelf. Drones such as the 3DR SOLO, Parrot…

Build your own drone

“Neural Style bridges the gap between science and art.” Ever wondered how auction houses set prices for their auctions and why certain things are so expensive? Despite the fact that most of us are not involved in the art business, each and every Linux user has the potential to get a little closer to painting a masterpiece and, who knows, maybe cashing in on that highly manipulated market. And no, you don’t need to attend classes, all you need is some decent source material and a neural network. Neural Style is a wonderful piece of open source software, which bridges the gap between science and art, and brings the study A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style (by A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker, Matthias Bethge) closer to reality. The idea behind Neural Style…

Get the autopilot level

Due to the small size of the drone it’s quite difficult to keep things neat as you tuck in wires, wrap insulation tape and zip ties around the frame in order to hold everything together. Whilst it might seem fiddly and time-consuming to make sure that the PXFMini, Raspberry Pi Zero combo are absolutely level, it’s one of the most important aspects of the build! From the outset of building the frame you need to continually check that everything about your build is as accurate as possible. The frame kit that we’ve used in this project does the job well despite it being cheap, but there are some of the parts, including the frame legs, that take a bit to fit correctly and have a habit of dropping out. The…

Get the autopilot level

The first flight

Before you start double check your drone and make sure that everything is in place and all wires are secure and taped to the frame. As this will be your first attempt at flying the drone remove the propellers so if anything does go wrong the drone will at least stay exactly where it is rather than bouncing round the room poking eyes out and smashing ornaments. Start by switching on the controller making sure that all switches are in the up position and the throttle is in the lower position. Now connect the battery to the power module and you should hear a beep as the board starts loading which can take up to a minute to complete. Another beep will highlight the end of the boot sequence and…

“It monitors elements outside your house via a geo-IP service.” We’ve already seen several attempts to make desktop backgrounds dynamic or even animated. The usefulness of such a feature isn’t that obvious, but it looks good. We recall that almost eight years ago Fedora was the first Linux distro that shipped with an animated background. That was just a picture that slowly changed its colour based onthe time of day. WeatherDesk is a fresh recent project that’s a little bit more advanced in a way that it triggers the change based on weather at your location. WeatherDesk is a relatively simple Python 3 script, which monitors elements outside your house by means of a geo-IP service and Yahoo Weather API and triggers the wallpaper change according to the real-time weather results. WeatherDesk…

“It displays everything you type in a semitransparent pop-up bar.” While some Linux users prefer rocking with their super-cool desktop by themselves, others don’t mind sharing their best practices with others and recording screencasts. There are tonnes of dedicated tools for doing that in Linux, from classic Qt-Recordmydesktop to the tiny indicator built into Gnome Shell’s top bar. But these don’t display keystrokes that you press, and once you find out that it’s possible, it’s one of those killer features that makes you wonder how you did screencasts without it. You could, of course, just speak what keys you’re pressing or, if you don’t mind making things a little more complex, include extra subtitles. Luckily, there is a simpler way to do it with Screenkey. This small application was inspired by the…

An open source mid-

This week I was reading an article that mentioned the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the essay (and later, book that’s often included on the Linux Format cover disk) is now 19 years olditfamously influenced Netscape into releasing the code for its web browser. I’m sadly all too aware of my own ageing, especially after a visit to the gym, but it was a solid reminder that a significant period of time has passed outside my internal monologue gave me pause for thought… Or what might possibly be termed a ‘mid career crisis’. Put simply, I don’t feel as though I’ve done enough when it comes to open source, in both terms of producing projects of my own or contributing to others. I mean, not everyone can be a Torvalds or…

“Kronomoter is a true KDEcentric app and it offers lots of settings to configure.” Sometimes we just need a small but helpful application that does its job without any complications. Kronometer is, perhaps, a perfect example of this and a very helpful accessory for Linux. Stopwatch applications can be found easily enough for smartphones, because their main purpose is to help runners and trainers etc. However, Kronometer is a neat yet powerful desktop stopwatch application that originated somewhere in the depths of the KDE project. Its name is self-descriptive, but you should be aware that stopwatch apps in Linux have two main use cases: one copies classic sports-related behaviour (for taking time measurements) and another is for productivity, work estimation and motivation. In that context, you shouldn’t mix Kronometer with other…

Relax and recover

“A backup automation tool that’s designed to create regular snapshots of your Linux system.” There are plenty of backup solutions for Linux and even though not everyone is into creating regular backups, it’s hard to dispute that doing regular snapshots of your precious data is a good idea. Of course, we should do it before a disaster occurs, so please create a safe copy of what is valuable on your drive. Apart from caring about data, another point of concern is your Linux system itself. All extra repositories (repos), tips, tweaks and updates that you’ve made after your initial installation, are valuable as well. Relax And Recover, also known as REAR, is a backup automation tool that’s designed to create regular snapshots of your Linux system. What’s more important, these snapshots are…

Relax and recover

Google unveil ‘AI’ Chip

At Google’s IO conference in May, the search giant unveiled a new component that has quietly been introduced into its data centres and which powered AlphaGo, the system that defeated Go champion Lee Sedol in the highly publicised set of matches earlier this year. TPU (or Tensor Processing Unit) is a custom ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) for running machine learning applications, specifically tailored for TensorFlow (www.tensorflow.org, an open source library for ‘machine intelligence’). Google has been using these chips to improve the relevancy of search results (‘RankBrain’) and to increase the accuracy and quality of maps in its Street View application. Google claims that it has found TPUs have delivered an order of magnitude better optimised performance per watt for machine learning, giving a three- generation leap of Moore’s law.…

Google unveil ‘AI’ Chip

Just when I think I’ve got a handle on what elements make up a modern Linux-based infrastructure, a bunch of new ideas come along or start to gain traction. Being effectively freelance, I like to at least cast an eye over them – they might prove beneficial to my existing clients, or an opportunity to use them might arise – eg someone could request a proof of concept demo to see how a new technique fits in with their existing infrastructure. Of course, the benefit to you, dear reader, is that you get to share the fruits of my labour. So over the next couple of issues I’m going to take a high-level look at a couple of concepts (some might unkindly call them ‘buzzwords’) which have gained a bit…

“Smartctl can detect an ageing device’s state before it’s too late.” Linux has always been the perfect place for testing different sorts of hardware and this time we’ll take a closer look at hard drives. We’re all aware that drives tend to fail after prolonged use, but you can hardly predict a failure without any feedback from components. Hard disk monitoring firmware was introduced by IBM in 1992 for its IBM 9337 Disk Arrays for AS/400 servers, but it took significantly longer for the self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology (S.M.A.R.T.) to reach the majority of consumer-grade hard drives. Of course, all modern storage devices, from flash drives and SSDs support S.M.A.R.T. now. In Linux, you can retrieve that sort of information using Smartmontools, a specialised toolset for inspecting ATA/ SATA and SCSI/SAS…

“So captivating that in minutes you’ll be deep in treatments.” Simulators remain popular even though they stem from an era when personal computers didn’t have as much horsepower as they do today. Some simulators are better than others; we were so impressed with the transportation system in OpenTTD [see HotPicks, p54, LXF207] that we can’t help playing it regularly now. But we didn’t expect there to be another game that would reel us in. CorsixTH is an open source clone of Theme Hospital, where you run your own hospital and cure patients. The original game dates back to 1997 and the recreated CorsixTH adds support for contemporary operating systems, high-screen resolutions, SDL graphics and some extra options. CorsixTH requires the data files from the original Theme Hospital or you can use…

The twelve-factor app

The ‘Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon’ is the name given to situation where a person comes across a piece of information for the first time and they suddenly begin to see it again elsewhere repeatedly. This is certainly the case for me and the ‘twelve-factor app’, which has cropped up for me all over the place since hearing about it just this month (while doing the research for this article). Its the name of a methodology for building software as a service applications which meet a certain set of criteria. This isn’t new (I’m just late to the party), it was developed by one of the co-founders of the popular platform as a service company, Heroku, and the influence of the companies offering will be clear to anyone who’s used it. Despite this,…

So how is this in any way different to Platform as a Service (PaaS) then? The comparison can be confusing—after all, I would simply deploy my application to a PaaS provider and not worry about servers there either. Serverless architectures though, differ in that they are expected to bring the whole application up and take it back down for every request if necessary. A PaaS infrastructure would never do this and sits as a halfway house between serverless and Infrastructure as a Service architectural patterns. Scaling is seamless in the serverless world too (at least, in the utopia it hints at) whereas a PaaS provider will charge for adding additional scale (which is usually very costly). How can I avoid the overhead of starting up a JVM instance when I…

“Alex can do super-jumps after scooching down to charge it up.” For everyone who used to play Super Mario or similar platformers, the modern TSC project is a must-play. The name stands for The Secret Chronicles of Dr.M, and is a fork of Secret Maryo Chronicles with a similar plot. It’s impressive how many old platformer arcade games survive and remain popular given the fact that the hype of original video arcades from the 1990s is long over. Still projects like TSC are alive and don’t give up. So let’s take a closer look at the game. You play as Alex, a smart boy who has to save the day by killing baddies, passing challenges and beating bosses. During the game he does all the usual platform game tropes: collecting points, power-ups…

“A built-in checker helps you to avoid common mistakes.” Photography enthusiasts who have managed to build up at least a few gigabytes in their ~/Pictures directory, will be aware that an image collection requires regular sorting and tagging to remain clean and logical. Once you stop caring about your photo collection, it soon becomes troublesome to find that precious needle of a memory inside your directory’s virtual haystack. Enter Xpiks, a photography focused application that has little to do with classic photo organisers. With Xpiks you can add keywords to your images and upload them to a remote host. Nothing new? Well, Xpiks is different and here is why. First off, it’s quite strict in forcing you to keep your tags tidy and correct. For each image, Xpiks will require you to fill…

“Those who are keen on home recording will appreciate the guitar overdrive pedal effect.” Ekois a sound wave editor that recently hit version 5.20, yet there are very few people that have ever heard of this small but very useful application. We think that Eko has received very little attention considering what it manages to achieve as a one-man project, but it’s worth taking a closer look at it. Eko may look minimalistic and sometimes resemble simple wave editors, such as KWave, but there are many features with some extras that you will not find even in Audacity. It’s best to start exploring Eko from its Functions menu, which includes silence and noise generators, fade in/fade out feature, wave normaliser and offset editor etc. By default, Eko opens the extra…

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