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63 Articles

This issue we’re seeing how many operating systems Jonni can run on one PC. We asked our writers what’s the most OSes they’ve had on a system, and why. Jonni Bidwell Well, the poor PC that was forced to accommodate seven distros for the cover feature could probably fit another one on. Or we could try installing Windows on it. Methinks then there would be zero operating systems – working ones, anyway. Nick Peers I’ve had numerous dual-boot systems in my time, including one MacBook configured to dual-boot macOS and ElementaryOS. But with ever-increasing processor cores and RAM, virtual is the way to go – I’m frequently running multiple l Linux OSes on my 32GB Ryzen 2700 PC... David Rutland I don’t dual-boot, and I never have. One time I…

Flexible friend

Things used to be simple: you’d have a master boot record that pointed to a bootloader and away your operating system went. But, of course, people wanted more features and something called security, so LILO appeared and then Grub, and Windows had BCD and Secure Boot was added along with TPMs and now there’s Pluton. Yet even with all the new layers and security there’s no reason why you can’t multi-boot as many operating systems as you like, and we’re here to show you how! We’re also using the release of Linux Mint 21 as an excuse on how to get it installed alongside the popular rectangular aperture OS from Microsoft. In a final attempt to see off his ancient all-in-one PC Jonni’s installed seven operating systems booting alongside each…

Flexible friend

Debian embraces DuckDuckGo

Usually when a distro announces that it’s ditching Google for another default search engine, privacy campaigners – and anyone concerned about how their online activity is tracked and shared – would be pleased. However, Debian has managed to provoke more concern after it announced it was switching from Google because of the alternative search engine it’s chosen: DuckDuckGo. While DuckDuckGo was once touted as a privacy-focused search engine, it caused outrage when it emerged the team had an agreement with Microsoft that allows search content data to be shared between the companies, and enables Microsoft trackers to run on third-party sites. Security researcher Zach Edwards found that while trackers from Google and Facebook are indeed blocked by DuckDuckGo, Microsoft trackers are permitted, sending data to the company’s services such as…

Debian embraces DuckDuckGo

PINE64 drama as moderator quits

We’ve often talked about PINE64’s projects, including the PinePhone and PineBook. The company caught our eye by producing devices with an admirable commitment to both open source software and hardware, and with the PinePhone brought us a Linux-powered smartphone when other projects, such as Ubuntu Touch, failed. However, there’s been a bit of ugly drama, with Martijn Braam, a moderator for PINE64, publicly quitting and writing a lengthy blog post (https://bit.ly/lxf294pine64quit) about why. It’s not easy working for the PINE64 team, with Braam citing the decision by PINE64 to switch from supporting a range of distros, to focusing on Manjaro. The last straw for him was a change to how the PinePhone Pro boots, which forces Manjaro to boot from eMMC storage, rather than enabling users to choose and boot…

Hacked tractor plays Doom…

We always love seeing iconic PC game Doom running on surprising hardware, and the talented hacker known as Sick Codes (https://bit.ly/lxf294sickcodes) recently did just that at the recent Def Con event (https:// defcon.org). However, it wasn’t just for fun, because there was an important message with the project. It was also a lot of fun, however. Sick Codes hacked the touchscreen interface of a John Deere tractor to play a special farm-themed mod of Doom (made by @Skelegant – see more of their work at https://bit.ly/lxf29skelegant), which includes fighting pigs and harvesting corn to replenish your health. Very appropriate. However, it also revealed that the US-based tractor manufacturer was playing fast and loose with software under the GPL compliance. The idea that John Deere is making money from open source…

Hacked tractor plays Doom…

STOP THE SPRAWL

"According to StackOverflow’s survey for this year, cloud platforms take up the top three slots in the ‘Most Wanted’ category. Building cloud native applications means thinking about how to use distinct microservices for each function and connect them up efficiently. Using the cloud, you can scale those services up as you need them, based on containers. Google’s Kubernetes is now the default for this, enabling you to automate all those tasks. This approach is great when it helps you build new services quickly. However, when you have individuals all using their own preferred services, it’s easy to suffer from sprawl. This soon becomes unwieldy over time, as well as becoming more expensive to run. To get the most out of the cloud it’s important to collaborate on what that framework…

STOP THE SPRAWL

MANAGING EXPECTATIONS

"We took on some new (to us) Linux servers onto support recently. Both the client and we knew that there was a lot of work needed to make them secure and reliable. It can be daunting when the work required looks like a mountain, and you’re standing at base camp surrounded by piles of equipment. It’s also very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “While we’re doing all that work, we might as well [insert additional work tasks here]”. Of course it’s a mistake to think like this. A much better approach would to be identify a few key critical issues and resolve them. Yes, that still leaves other issues to be resolved, but already the servers are in better shape. No long downtime. No big expense for…

MANAGING EXPECTATIONS

Canonical embraces RISC-V

Canonical announced in 2021 RISC-V compatibility for Ubuntu, enabling its popular Linux distro to run on the open-source processor architecture. It’s now increased support by announcing an Ubuntu release for the StarFive’s VisionFive board. This single-board computer runs on the JH7100 SoC, which is based on a 64-bit RISC-V dual-core processor that runs at 1GHz, making it one of the more powerful RISC-V boards out there. Along with 2MB L2 cache and 8GB of RAM, it should be able to run Ubuntu well, and as the Canonical’s blog post about the new support states (https://bit.ly/lxf294ubunturisc), “The availability of Ubuntu running on the VisionFive board comes as the result of the joint work between Canonical and StarFive’s engineering teams”, and an image of Ubuntu 22.04.1 for the VisionFive board can be…

Canonical embraces RISC-V

Flathub undergoes key changes

Flathub (https://flathub.org), the base for Flatpak, is one of the most popular methods of distributing programs for Linux, no matter what distro you’re running, and it aims to make donating to developers quick and easy. This enables users to show their appreciation while helping to reward developers – and also encourage them to keep their programs updated and maintained. Codethink, a team of open source experts working on the project (www.codethink.co.uk) recently revealed what the project has achieved since it joined in February 2022, including “a login flow for developers via GitHub, GitLab, and Google,” and a Stripe-powered donation system, which can be seen on the Flathub beta website at https://beta.flathub.org. The blog post (https://bit.ly/lxf294flathub) also talks about what’s in store for the project. The donation infrastructure is set to…

LibreOffice 7.4 released

LibreOffice 7.4 Community is now available to download from https://bit. ly/lxf294libreoffice, with some useful new features. The latest version now supports WebP (but Effy still doesn’t–Ed) images and EMZ/ WMZ files, adds a search field for the Extension Manager and improves the documentation for the ScriptForge scripting library. Elsewhere, Writer, the suite’s word processing program, benefits from improved change tracking and new typographic settings for hyphenation, while Calc, the spreadsheet application, supports up to 16,384 columns and adds extra functions to the AutoSum widget. Meanwhile, Impress, the slideshow application, receives support for document themes.…

LibreOffice 7.4 released

AI GETS IN YOUR FACE

"Over the past few years, different video codecs have been developed to meet the needs of various applications. The quality of the reconstructed video using these codecs is excellent at medium-to-low bitrates, but it degrades when operating at very low bitrates. While these codecs leverage expert knowledge of human perception and carefully engineered signal processing pipelines, there has been a massive interest in replacing these handcrafted methods with machine-learning approaches that learn to encode video data. Using open source software, Collabora has developed an efficient compression pipeline that enables a face video broadcasting system that achieves the same visual quality as the H.264 standard while only using one-tenth of the bandwidth. The face video compression algorithms rely on a source frame of the face, a pipeline to extract the important…

AI GETS IN YOUR FACE

MX LINUX 21.2 This second refresh of MX Linux 21 has been released, and while it’s still based on Debian 11 and comes with the Linux kernel 5.18, it also features several important bug fixes and updates. The base is Debian 11.4 “Bullseye” and with this release mx-tweak now makes it easy to disable Bluetooth, and features user interface improvements, and bugs have been fixed in mx-installer. If you’re already running MX Linux 21 then you don’t need to reinstall – just check the update channel. To find out more, see the release announcement at https://bit.ly/lxf294mxlinux. MABOX LINUX 22.08 Mabox Linux is a rolling-release distro based on Manjaro and with a customised Openbox window manager, and the latest refresh is now available to download. It comes with the LTS Linux…

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.0- rc4 (Release Candidate 4) following the earlier closure of the “merge window” for what will become the Linux 6.0 kernel in a few more weeks. Last issue we speculated that Linus was likely to go with the “6.0” naming for this cycle, and that turned out to be right. As Linus himself said, however, “Despite the major number change, there’s nothing fundamentally different about this release – I’ve long eschewed the notion that major numbers are meaningful, and the only reason for a ‘hierarchical’ numbering system is to make the numbers easier to remember and distinguish.” On a lighter note, it’s well known that Linus likes to keep kernel minor numbers to roughly what can be counted using all of his “fingers and toes”, but…

"I moved house earlier this year. Like many others, the pandemic changed life for me and my wife, and in some ways for the better. I had traditionally thought of myself as a “city cat”, and for the better part of several decades I lived right in the middle of Cambridge, Massachusetts. But in the past few years, I’ve realised that I don’t need to be in the middle of town any more, and that further out means the usual trade-offs enabling more space, including for geekery. As a result, we bought a house with enough room for a basement lab expansion. For the first time I have a dedicated space that’s not also my home office. But now I have the new space, and with it a need to…

Q Bloated Debian This Debian 11 is my first attempt to explore Debian and I truly loved it for its stability and user-friendliness. I’m dual-booting Debian with Windows 10. I was wrong to set the Debian partition of 40GB only (2.6GB/41.8GB available). A short while later it seems the hard disk is full and many programs won’t install. I’ve removed many unnecessary applications, yet I still can’t install new ones. What must I do to regain new space or to enlarge the partition? Joe Wyatt A In our view, 40GB is more than enough for even the most generous of installations, even with multiple desktop environments, so you must be losing space elsewhere. If you have set up a separate partition for /home, your home directory is the first place…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email lxf.letters@futurenet.com. Fedora vs Ubuntu I’ve been installing Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 36. (I’m using the DVD from Linux Pro magazine – thanks for continuing to provide a DVD! In the past when a Linux magazine quits including a DVD it has fairly quickly quit publishing the magazine, too – asubscription renewal consideration.) Fedora 36 has installed very smoothly, and Ubuntu a little less so. Ubuntu 22.04 runs fine – it was just getting it on to the partition I wanted that was difficult. Using the “Windows” button to make the Fedora 36 GNOME dock appear is feeling a…

REVIEWS AMD Ryzen 5500

SPECS Socket: AM4 Process: TSMC 7nm FinFET Cores: Six Threads: 12 Cache: 384KB L1, 3MB L2, 16MB L3 Clock: 3.6GHz (4.2GHz boost) Mem: DDR4 3,200MHz, two-channel, no ECC, 128GB max PCIe: v3.0 20 lanes TDP: 65W GPU: n/a Cooler: Wraith Stealth A MD released the Ryzen 5 5500, its cheapest CPU of this generation, nearly a year and a half after the first Zen 3 chips graced our PCs. Seeing as we’ve got Zen 4 chips due before the end of 2022, can this processor make an impact in such a tight time frame, and what’s been dropped to hit that budget price tag? The second question is much easier to answer than the first because we know exactly what the Ryzen 5 5500 does and doesn’t have, compared to…

REVIEWS AMD Ryzen 5500

DragonflyBSD 6.2.2

IN BRIEF BSD-based distros are completely different to Linux-based distros and at the same time, achingly familiar. DragonflyBSD is definitely not for beginners, and the documentation while being comprehensive is not always helpful. Undocumented errors will send you to forums and YouTube. So just like Linux? Dragonflies are glittering and gorgeous relics from another age. With a sheer size that distinguishes them from other lessdazzling insects, they zip, helicopter-like, in straight lines – defending their territory, and searching for food. Dragonfly is also a distro, and unlike the majority of distros found in the hot, savage jungles of Linux Format, it isn’t a Linux one. It is, instead, part of a tiny and oft-overlooked subset straight from the Jurassic era (excuse Dave’s flowery prose BSD fans – Ed) of OS…

DragonflyBSD 6.2.2

KDE Neon 2022.08

IN BRIEF KDE Neon isn’t an official Ubuntu Flavour. Rather, it’s a KDE project with an Ubuntu core, with an emphasis on good looks and ease of use. Almost everything is extremely intuitive, and for the parts that may not be, there’s excellent and accessible offline documentation. Neon isn’t a distro, we were told. It’s a mere repository for KDE software, they said. But KDE Neon feels like a distro to us, and the average user will immediately recognise it as such. It’s proudly billed as the “latest and greatest of KDE community software packaged on a rock-solid base”. The base in question is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which upon install immediately upgrades itself to 22.04), and we fail to see how the fact that KDE Neon is loaded with KDE…

KDE Neon 2022.08

IN BRIEF NuTyx is a simple easy-touse distro with an unusual package manager, which stays out of your way as much as possible – almost to the point of anonymity. Coming with a range of desktop environments (or none at all), NuTyX has a flavour to suit you whatever distro or other OS you’re coming from, and its undemanding system requirements make it perfect for use on an old laptop. NuTyX is an impressive French Distro with a small footprint. With the base version weighing in at a mere 715MB, it can fit on a single CD, and will run on any 32- or 64-bit system which can boast a paltry 1GB RAM. The distro is built using Linux From Scratch (see LXF286), and offers a unique package manager. In…

Emmabuntüs 4-1

IN BRIEF Emmabuntüs is a Debianderived desktop distro from France, with features aimed at newcomers to Linux (who are also from France). Developers have made some interesting, although not necessarily wise, choices with installed packages and defaults. Emmabuntüs could be a daily driver for new Linux users who don’t mind the odd translation error or stumbling into a Francophone charity appeal. Based, on Debian, and with the lightweight Xfce and LXQt desktop environments available, Emmabuntüs is a lightweight distro designed with older machines in mind. It’s one of only a few distros with an up-to-date edition for 32-bit machines, but there’s no ARM version available. The current stable version is Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 1.02, although if you’re willing to take a chance, an unstable version of Edition 5 is…

SPECS Minimum OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i3-3225, AMD Phenom II X6 Mem: 8GB HDD: 30GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050, AMD Radeon RX560, 2GB Vram Recommended OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K, AMD Ryzen 5 1600 GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, AMD Radeon RX 580, 6GB Vram You can tell a lot about a game’s soul by what it deems a ‘perk’. Fallout 3, for example, thinks being better at murdering women is one. In Modern Warfare it’s dropping a grenade after death like a smug ghost. In Psychonauts 2, Double Fine will sell you a ‘beastmastery’ pin badge modifier that allows Raz’s psychic fist—usually used for thumping and tossing—to stroke woodland animals. You spend money to hurt fewer things. Honestly? It’s…

Creative-writing tools

HOW WE TESTED… We took a couple of our halfformed story ideas and ran them through each program to see what they could do to help us develop them into finished pieces. We focused on examining each tool’s core set of planning and organising tools, from structuring your narrative to helping you record vital information about the various elements that make up your story. We also looked at additional helper tools, from templates and questionnaires to stats helping you track your creative progress. We also examined each applications’s user interface – is it easy to navigate? How cluttered is it? The last thing you need is a tool that’s too distracting to help you focus. And with distractions in mind, we also examined their core writing tools – what help…

Creative-writing tools

Installation, upgrades

All five products are simple to install, but only three can be installed through a repo or platform that guarantees automatic updates. These include Manuskript, which can be installed through snap and flatpak, and novelWriter, which offers both stable and testing PPAs for Ubuntu users. In addition, oStorybook is available through Arch Linux’s own repo. (A word of warning for Manuskript users: after installing through Software Centre, make sure you select Permissions and switch on ‘Access the NetworkManager service…’; otherwise it won’t run.) All five tools provide downloadable .deb packages – some also offer .rpm and source code, like Bibisco and ManuSkript. Quoll Writer is currently only available in beta, while oStoryWriter is written in Java, so you’ll need the required runtimes ( sudo apt install default-jre ) before installing…

Installation, upgrades

User interface and navigation

Leading the pack in minimalism is Quoll Writer – understandable given that its toolset is less extensive than its peers. It opens with a simple two-paned interface – navigation on the left, and a multi-tabbed pane giving you easy access to multiple areas of your novel at once. Bibisco and novelWrite follow the same two-paned structure, only without the tabs. Instead, Bibsico makes use of a back button to retrace your steps. novelWriter provides visible stats about the selected chapter or scene, and provides a few buttons that bring up tools like project details and writing stats in separate windows. oStorybook’s user interface looks dated as well as a little overwhelming at first glance, but everything is configurable and you can even undock items as floating windows to clear space…

User interface and navigation

Standout features

All of the tests we perform help us rate key aspects of these creative-writing tools, but you need to spend quality time with each to gauge just how intuitive it is, whether it suits the way you work and – ultimately – if it possesses the tools you need to help improve your writing skills and turn that long-dormant story idea into something more concrete. Overall, none of the five programs we tested is a complete dud. Each has its pros and cons, and each has its own unique features, too. Which one becomes your creative-writing tool of choice may come down to which one possesses a specific feature or applies it in such a way as to make it your go-to creative-writing tool going forward. If you’re struggling to…

Standout features

Planning your novel’s structure

Organisational tools are the prime reason for choosing a creative-writing tool over your word processor. All five provide dedicated sections to record key characters, locations and items, from relatively simple freeform boxes (novelWriter and Quoll Writer) to more guided help that encourages you to record details you might not otherwise consider. Bibisco even provides you with the means of linking images to these along with additional details. Both it and oStoryboard score best in this department, however – offering you the choice of freeform text or detailed questionnaires to work through. The tools also vary in offering you help with developing storylines and threads. Quoll Writer has a simple Ideas Board, while novelWriter offers a freeform notes section for developing plot ideas. oStorybook offers a Dedicated Plot (Actions) tab for…

Planning your novel’s structure

Keep your stories organised

Writing long-form pieces is rarely as simple as starting at the beginning and writing all the way through. What a good creative-writing tool will do is provide you with tools to help you write out of sequence. The weakest tool in this regard is Quoll Writer. Here, the primary form of organisation is chapters, with an option to create scene ‘markers’ that are inserted as pins or worked on loosely via the Ideas Board. These then appear nested under the chapter in the navigation pane; however, they contain no actual text of their own. Other tools provide more flexibility – whether it’s writing individual scenes to make up chapters or a mix of the two depending on how you want to work. These are effectively written as independent text files,…

Keep your stories organised

Write and export your story

Once you’ve organised all the elements of your story, you’ll want to get on with writing it. While all five tools offer a built-in editor, none hold a candle to a word processor. Are there things they can do to improve your experience? First, do they offer a distraction-free view, enabling you to focus on the writing at hand? The answer is yes for all except oStoryboard – its editor may be more powerful than its peers, but its Typist view merely expands the Editor to fill the screen without removing any page furniture. Of the others, Bibisco manages to combine some formatting tools with the ability to switch between its editor and distraction-free view. Quoll Writer requires you to first enter full-screen view then click a headphones icon to…

Write and export your story

Helper and search tools

When it comes to providing you with extra help when you need it, our creative tools shared some similar traits, but diverged widely in others. Only Manuskript provides any form of templates for new projects, while novelWriter includes a demo project and oStoryboard offers (French-language) demo files via its website. Beyond basic word counts, Bibisco offers a complete analysis section whose offerings include chapter lengths, distribution of key elements like characters, locations and narrative strands across your novel. Manuskript provides a simple frequency analyser for words and phrases, while oStorybook provides a series of bar charts for such elements as how often characters appear to accompany its word count toolbar. novelWriter’s Writing Statistics window helps track your progress by word count and time per session. Ultimately, we found Quoll Writer’s…

Helper and search tools

Once you’ve started using a creative-writing tool to help plan and plot your story, you won’t revert to relying on a single LibreOffice Writer document for your stories ever again. All five tools in this Roundup will help you organise your existing notes into some coherent whole. They’ll also assist you with capturing ideas as they form while providing a relatively easy means of getting your story down on paper. There’s a reason why none of the tools here secured a 9/10 rating – even the very best lacked useful features found in rival programs. Nevertheless, we have no hesitation in making Bibisco our winner. While you may baulk at the asking price, there’s plenty in the free Community Edition to showcase its capabilities: a slick (if not quite perfect)…

MULTI-BOOT MINT 21!

When Windows 10 was released Microsoft stated that it would be the last version. For a time we believed the company… Yet Windows 11 is here and if you’ve just bought yourself a new, TPM 2.0-bearing PC you’d be forgiven for thinking, “How the heck do I get rid of this?” Well, we don’t condone killing OSes (even proprietary ones), so we’ll show you the next best thing: how to dual-boot Windows 11 (or 10) with Linux. If you’ve never heard of Linux before, don’t worry – we’re basing the tutorial on Linux Mint, one of our long-term favourite distributions that’s ideal for beginners (also, bravo you for picking up a Linux magazine!). Mint is based on Ubuntu, so has a solid foundation and that enjoys five years of support…

MULTI-BOOT MINT 21!

Taking precautions

Dual-booting is great. You can have a Windows install for proprietary applications (be it overpriced office suites or convoluted CAD packages) and those AAA games that don’t quite work with Proton. And when you’re done with those, you’re just a three-fingered salute away from Linux, where you can do everything else. But what happens when it goes wrong? Well a quick DuckDuckGo search gives one an idea: “Windows updated and broke Grub”, “Windows corrupted my exotic Linux partitions”, “Windows boot manager upsets my chihuahua”. Okay, one of those may not be real, but dual-booting has undoubtedly caused problems in the past. We endeavour to make the experience problemfree in the present. Before you get to installing Linux, you need to ensure that Windows is in a state which hopefully will…

Taking precautions

Installing stereo operating systems

First, if you’re on old hardware, or hardware that’s otherwise still using the old MBR (Master Boot Record, also known as MS-DOS) style partition tables, then you’re strictly limited to four primary partitions. It turns out you can install Windows 11 on such a device (by addition of various Registry keys), or perhaps you have Windows 10 on an MBR drive already. In this setup Windows will occupy three primary partitions. It’s possible to add one or more logical partitions, but these must exist within an ‘extended’ partition, which is itself counts as a primary partition. So in an MBR setup, provided you or whoever put together your PC haven’t added extra primary partitions, there’s just enough room to fit Linux Mint (or whatever distro you like) on there. Of…

Installing stereo operating systems

Tweaking the Mint

The “Installation type” dialog that pops up when you click “Something else” is a little intimidating at first glance. You should see a map of your Windows drive and a colour-coded list of its partitions, as well as any free space in between them. If you’ve got another drive it’ll likely appear at the bottom of the list, so scroll down to it. If it’s unformatted you’ll need to click New Partition Table and accept the warning that all current partitions will be removed. Don’t use this option on your Windows drive unless you don’t want to use it ever again! (Is that abad thing?–Ed) You’ll now be able to select the free space in the new drive and create partitions for KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE “The simplest setup is to…

Tweaking the Mint

Logical Volume Manager

Besides dual-booting Windows, you might be interested in dual-booting another Linux distribution, or even multibooting several distros. It’s fine to have multiple Linux distros sharing the same drive. There are a few things to watch out for, but in general the penguins play nicer together compared to Windows. Thanks to flexible modern filesystems, you can even resize partitions while they’re mounted, although unless the need is urgent it’s always going to be safer to unmount first. Thanks to GPT partitioning there’s no need to worry about fitting in another distro (unless you’ve gone a bit wobbly and installed about 126 already). And thanks to UEFI booting you’ll never lose the ability to boot either distro. In fact, most distros will enable you to boot any sibling OSes from their boot…

Logical Volume Manager

RS Group loses its 10-year Pi licence

RIP OLLY CLARK Sad news reached the UK Linux and Raspberry Pi community that Oliver Clark, Olly to his friends, sadly passed away. Olly was a titan of the community. He was there at the grass roots, helping everyone around him. In the early days of the Raspberry Pi he was there for the first Raspberry Jam in Manchester, helping children and adults get to grips with the new tech. It was also where Olly casually sat on a tabletop, which caused the table to flip and launch an LCD monitor into the air. Thankfully it landed without any issue. We also can’t forget the “dongle-chain” that saw HDMI converted to VGA using every dongle known to man, only to realise that his laptop had VGA after all. Olly was…

RS Group loses its 10-year Pi licence

Low-Profile ICE Tower

IN BRIEF A low-profile, no-nonsense cooler that eschews the RGB aesthetic for straight-up great cooling. The 40mm fan and unusual heatsink arrangement work in our favour and the Raspberry Pi 4 is kept cool, even when overclocked. GPIO access is a stretch, but can be achieved with clever workarounds. Looking more at home on a muscle car than a Raspberry Pi, 52Pi’s latest over-the-top cooler does away with the flashy RGB fan, and gives us a more subtle cooling boost. The Type B Low-Profile ICE Tower Raspberry Pi 4 Cooler (catchy name – Ed) looks like an air intake strapped to the SoC of the Raspberry Pi 4. Assembly is straightforward and you’ll soon have your Pi 4 running like Greased Lightning. A thermal pad offers decent contact between the…

Pimoroni Trilobot

SPECS Chassis: 2x front wheel drive Ball castor 2x 110:1 DC motors Grippy wheels 1x HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor 2x FR-4 PCB Headers: 40-pin Pi GPIO 2x Qw/St 1x servo 5x garden sockets 1x I2C 1x Pi Camera Power: via Pi GPIO Size: 150x106x 53.4mm Trilobot is a well-designed and easy-to-use robot kit from Pimoroni designed to be Pi 4-powered. For £50 (excluding the Pi, camera and battery), we get a well-designed chassis that uses two FR-4 PCBs to provide a light yet strong chassis containing all of the electronics necessary for building a robot. The build is straightforward, and is full of exquisite touches. The main PCB is where we see the electronics that make this project. On this board is a single DRV8833 motor controller, the GPIO header for…

Pimoroni Trilobot

Stream live data to custom web pages

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at bigl.es. YOU NEED > Raspberry Pi Pico W > DHT11 temperature sensor > 3 x MtoM jumper wires > Half breadboard > Internet connection > A computer > Get the code from: https:// github.com/ lesp/LXF- PicoW- DHT11/ archive/ refs/heads/ main.zip The £6 Raspberry Pi Pico W has caused quite a stir, offering Wi-Fi for just £2 more. What was usually the domain of the Raspberry Pi Zero W, or other Wi-Fi microcontrollers such as the ESP32 and ESP8266, is now seeing the powerful RP2040-powered board muscle its way in. . Wi-Fi connectivity provides an easy means to send data, be it to remote devices, or in…

Stream live data to custom web pages

Create a Pi-based media centre with Kodi

OUR EXPERT Michael Reed has been spending so much time with Kodi of late that his mum thought he’d finally got a girlfriend. Kodi is a cross-platform application that can turn a device such as a Raspberry Pi into a fully fledged media centre. It presents the user with a simple interface to move between different types of media that are automatically categorised. It can handle video and audio files that are located on multiple sources, and it can even access streaming media sources that are located on the internet. Add a remote control and you’ll be able to launch movies, TV shows and music, play DVDs and access shared drives. You may never need to leave the couch again! We’re going to take the approach of installing Kodi next…

Create a Pi-based media centre with Kodi

SAVING THE SMART HOME

This month we’re going to look at some of the reasons smart homes can work against us. We’ll be considering hardware issues running self-hosted systems as well as what happens if vendors decide they don’t want to provide certain services any longer, if they want to introduce a subscription charge or that they simply become bankrupt and can no longer function. Finally, we’ll be looking at ways that we can mitigate these problems by having stable equipment at home and running services to keep traffic in our home networks. The first thing to discuss is unreliable hardware running any self-hosted systems. Your author experienced problems for a number of months when running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi with micro-sd cards, followed by reliability problems using a virtual machine on…

SAVING THE SMART HOME

Manage kernel modules

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is in love with Go and Python, but Rust has been on his mind quite a bit lately. The modern Linux kernel supports many different modules, which provide additional features and functionality. This could be support for USB devices, network protocols and other hardware. Only those elements that are of use for a large selection of users are an integral part of the Linux kernel, whereas other components are relegated to modules that users can enable at will. The advantage of working with modules to enable additional functionality is that you don’t have to recompile the kernel, or even restart your machine to make use of the new feature set. Released under the GPLv3 license, Kmon is a nifty tool designed to help you manage Linux…

Manage kernel modules

Set up your smart phone as a webcam

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers has been playing around with computers for over 30 years, and has been dabbling with Linux for the best part of a decade. Need a mobile internet protocol (IP) camera, but don’t have the funds to purchase one? Want to make better use of your mobile devices – even the old ones that are gathering dust at the top of the cupboard in the spare room? Then DroidCam is the answer. This tool enables you to link your mobile to your PC so you can access its video camera as a webcam on your desktop. Whether using it to chat with others or even as an additional camera for video creatives (see the box, facing page), DroidCam has you covered. Installation DroidCam exists in two parts:…

Set up your smart phone as a webcam

Get to grips with Solaris

OUR EXPERT Michael Reed sometimes feels like he’s OpenIndiana Jones when exploring an unfamiliar operating system. QUICK TIP OpenIndiana’s website offers USB and DVD ISO installation images. The images are also offered as a textmode installer version and a minimal installer version. You need to know your way around a Solaris-style operating system to employ the latter option. OpenIndiana is an operating system that aims to recreate the Solaris operating system. It uses some of the same source code as Solaris mixed with modern open source alternatives. Solaris was a commercial, Unix-derived operating system offered by Sun Microsystems, and then Oracle, to power various workstations and servers. It is, itself, derived from various earlier Unixes such as System V, SunOS and BSD. This incarnation is a different lineage to Linux…

Get to grips with Solaris

Getting started with Cura and 3D printing

OUR EXPERT Alastair Jennings has been obsessed with 3D printing for well over a decade. And it all started with a large, heavy, noisy and frankly terrible 3D printer. Just purchased your new feature-packed 3D printer, but failing to reproduce the high-quality prints you’ve seen advertised? Don’t worry, this is quite common, and even though the sample print that shipped with the machine may have printed perfectly well when it comes to printing your own models, things can start to go a little astray. If you’ve already extracted a decent print from your machine, you’re well on the way to a happy 3D printed life. This tutorial will still point out a few tips and tricks to help that continue. If you’ve roughly set up the printer and prints are…

Getting started with Cura and 3D printing

How to make better cut-outs in GIMP

OUR EXPERT Karsten Günther is a long-time LaTeX, Linux and GIMP user, and has written a number of books on these topics. The isolated parts of an image contained on a separate layer can usually be used either in the same image, or another image as additional elements. They can also emphasise certain parts of the image. Every form of collage, for example, is based on this technique. We’re going to look at a number of common methods that GIMP and the G’MIC plug-in offer for isolating image elements, often known as cutouts. In principle, the task is quite simple. The desired parts of the image – the motif or the “foreground” – are marked with a selection and then either copied and pasted as a new layer. Alternatively, the…

How to make better cut-outs in GIMP

The art of hiding messages in plain sight

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford used invisible ink as a kid. Many years later he learned it was called steganography and discovered it’s gone digital. QUICK TIP Most steganography is network steganography. However, the term has a specific meaning of embedding information in network control protocols. For example, information could be hidden in optional fields in a TCP/IP packet header. The year is 499BC and Histiaeus tires of his stay in Susa. He conspires to secretly start a revolt in Ionia against the Persians, something that would give him the excuse for his return. But how to send a message to Aristagoras without discovery? According to Herodotus, in his classic work Histories – which chronicled the Greco-Persian Wars, and is considered to be the first ever piece of historical literature –…

The art of hiding messages in plain sight

NOURISHMENT FOR THE SOUL

Back in 2014 Red Hat partnered with CentOS, which for years had been rebuilding and repackaging the sources for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and distributing them under a free licence. Some pundits were curiously optimistic by this odd alliance. A RedMonk writer wrote, “This move by Red Hat represents the logical embrace of an adjacent ecosystem.” Most were puzzled and some were deeply cynical. Erstwhile Linux Format regular columnist Doc Brown, never one to mince his words, suggested replacing “embrace” by “stranglehold” in the previous quote, and suggested that “adjacent ecosystem” was “Dilbert-speak for competitor”. Brown’s words were borne out when Red Hat announced in 2020 that it would be sunsetting CentOS in favour of its own CentOS Stream, which would track ahead, not behind, RHEL. In response…

NOURISHMENT FOR THE SOUL

Version: 1.20.4 Web: https://syncthing.net Taking a backup is often suggested as the best means to guard against accidental data loss. While that’s a prudent strategy, another could be to use a file-sync tool such as Syncthing, which can easily duplicate your sensitive data on another computer on the network, or across the internet. There’s no need to install the Syncthing server – you can just download, extract and run it. When you run Syncthing from a terminal as a normal user, it’ll fire up a browser and take you to its administration interface. By default, this interface is only accessible from the same computer, but head to Actions>Settings>GUI and change the GUI listen address to 0.0.0.0:8384 to access it from any computer. Remember, however, to also set a GUI username…

Version: 0.6.1 Web: https://github.com/meowtec While reducing image size isn’t all that difficult, to do so without compromising on image quality can be challenging. Thankfully, this is an area where Imagine excels. You won’t find Imagine in software repositories of most modern desktop distros. But that’s fine because the project is distributed as an AppImage package. Download the latest .AppImage from the project’s GitHub Releases page, and run chmod +x Imagine-*. AppImage to make the file executable. Launch Imagine with the ./Imagine-*.AppImage command, or by double-clicking the file from a file manager. The tool features an intuitive interface, and you can click the Add button at the top-left to add files, or drag and drop them into the interface. All images are displayed as thumbnails, with pertinent information, such as file…

Version: 5.5.6 Web: http://homebank.free.fr/en Ever notice how many sci-fi movies often find a way to remind us that maths is constant across the universe? Closer to home, worrying about income and expenses is just as much a constant, with most people struggling to keep tabs on their spending during the current cost of living crisis. HomeBank is a personal finance and money management tool to help you track the flow of funds. It even boasts of powerful filtering tools and graphs, which will enable you to analyse your spending habits and identify where savings can be made. You’ll find HomeBank in the software repositories of most popular desktop distros. The project doesn’t provide an easy-to-install binary, meaning you have to run the old trusted trifecta of ./configure , make and…

Version: 2.10 Web: https://desktop.jitsi.org The Jitsi project isn’t a single program, but rather a set of applications. The project’s namesake application is a VoIP and instant messaging tool that has an impressive set of audio and video conferencing features. As a VoIP client, Jitsi enables you to make calls using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). It has the usual softphone features in that it can mute, put on hold, transfer and record calls. It can also make registrar-less SIP calls to other Jitsi users on the local network. You can use Jitsi to make video calls to one user or to several on both SIP and XMPP networks. Jitsi is also a very capable IM client with several unique features, including the ability to stream and share the desktop of…

Version: 1.6.0 Web: https://beets.io Back before the world switched to online streaming services (speak for yourself youngster!–ED) for their multimedia needs, music was collected and stored on disk drives. If this is a familiar scenario you might enjoy working with Beets. The project strives to help you organise your music collection once and for all. Using the MusicBrainz database, the tool automatically updates the metadata on your music files as it catalogues your collection. This includes album art, lyrics, genres, tempo and much more. You can also fetch metadata from Discogs and Beatport, or even have Beets guess the metadata using the songs’ filename or the acoustic fingerprint. These and many other features are available courtesy of the myriad of plugins that can be used to further enhance the functionality…

Version: 1.59.0 Web: https://rclone.org There’s no such thing as being too cautious when it comes to protecting sensitive data. It’s not just malicious attacks and external threats, either – something as innocuous as a misdirected dd command can wipe out all your data. Backups are the only way to ensure that your data remains safe from known, unknown and even imaginary threats. Rclone is a nifty little CLI tool that supports over 40 different cloud storage solutions to help you safeguard your data on remote sites. You’ll find it in the software repos of most popular desktop distros, but the project also offers a distro-neutral binary that you can place in a directory in your $PATH to complete the installation. If that sounds like too much work, you can instead…

Version: 0.12 Web: https://vifm.info Your desktop environment already has a graphical file manager, but there also exists a variety of text-based file managers. Vifm is one such file manager, and its claim to fame is its adherence to a Vi-style key bindings. This has made it popular enough to be part of the software repos of many popular desktop distros. If your current distro has an older release on offer, you can download the AppImage binary from the project’s website. Next, make the file executable by running the chmod +x vifm-*.AppImage command. You can then launch Vifm with the ./vifm-*. AppImage command. The project boasts of some very useful and convenient features, such as the ability to create bookmarks for frequently accessed directories. While this is common for many graphical…

Version: 0.53 Beta Web: https://unvanquished.net On the face of it, Unvanquished appears like any other first-person shooter set in a futuristic, sci-fi setting. But the game has a rich history and was one of the first cool-looking open source shooters that could stand up to its proprietary brethren both in terms of gameplay and looks. Unvanquished requires about 600MB of disk space, though of course playing online will involve downloading several extra content packs, such as mods and custom game levels. The game has modest hardware requirements and would work flawlessly even on a dual-core machine with 4GB of RAM. Installing the cross-platform game on Linux is fairly straightforward. Just grab its compressed launcher, extract it and fire it up. The first time around it’ll ask you for permission to…

Version: 022 Web: https://bitfighter.org Bitfighter is a team-based multiplayer game that involves navigating your space ship across the vastness of space, as you collect flags, shoot enemy ships and evade incoming gun fire. This 2D arcade game requires dexterity of limbs and quickness that would surprise many FPS aficionados. You might even get a jolt from the how to play instructions, which span 17 pages! You won’t find Bitfighter in the software repos of many distros, but thankfully the project releases an AppImage that renders installation virtually moot. Download the AppImage from the project’s website, and run chmod +x bitfighter-*.AppImage to make the file executable. You can now launch the game with ./bitfighter-*.AppImage , or by double-clicking it from a file manager. The first step is to decide if you…

Version: 3.11 Web: www.aescrypt.com We don’t have to convince you about the need to encrypt your files. Keeping files behind usernames and passwords no longer cuts it. But while there’s no dearth of encryption tools, most of the good ones come with a learning curve. Furthermore, using them requires firing up another program to encrypt the files, and then navigating through menus to choose the appropriate settings. The usability break discourages most people from securing their files. AES Crypt is a welcome break from all this jumpingthrough-hoops malarkey. It’s one of the simplest encryption tools to install and use. Simply download and extract the installer from the tarball on its website. Then run the installer, which will prompt for superuser privileges before launching the graphical installer. To use the tool…

Version: 22.7.0 Web: https://smplayer.info Across-platform graphical frontend to the venerable mplayer command-line media player, SMPlayer can play virtually all known formats in circulation. The application is pretty similar to VLC in terms of form and function. While the default interface lacks finesse and looks like an over-glossed cousin of VLC, you can change its look and feel by selecting one of the four alternative interfaces. Besides a minimal interface, there’s also one that lets you drape it in a new skin. You can also switch to a custom icon set and widgets style. SMPlayer offers several installation options. You’ll find it in the official repos of every major desktop distro, and it’s also available as a Flatpak, an AppImage and a Snap package. If you have snap support enabled in…

Recreate the classic Pac-Man in Python

OUR EXPERT Andrew Smith is a software developer for NHS Digital, and likes video gaming and scripting in Python QUICK TIP Call your variables something meaningful so that you can easily identify what part they play in the program. This issue we’re going to look at a game of Pac-Man created in Python using the PyGame library. The code for this project has been adapted from https://pacmancode.com where the original source code can be downloaded. We’ll install and setup Python 3.10 for the benefit of this tutorial. For those that have Python/PyGame already installed, Python 3.8+ should be a good-enough version to use with this tutorial. Type the following to install Python 3.10 and PyGame: This project uses the numpy Python library and can be installed using pip by…

Recreate the classic Pac-Man in Python

Add useful dialogs to terminal scripts

Credit: https://github.com/v1cont/yad OUR EXPERT Karsten Günther is a long-time LaTeX, Linux and GIMP user, and has written a number of books on these topics. There are some dialog programs for the shell, most of which are based on Dialog and Zenity, such as Yad. This program is optimised for direct use on BASH and can accept input as well as display output. Here, we’ll first look at some very simple examples. The main advantages of Yad are the many dialog forms that the program supports – over 20, in fact – and that the developer continuously maintains it. Currently, version 12 is up to date and can be found in the repositories of most distributions. Yad is controlled by three types of options. First, a “mode” is defined in which…

Add useful dialogs to terminal scripts

Getting started with the powerful eBPF

Credit: https://ebpf.io Part One! Don’t miss next issue! Subscribe on page 16 OUR EXPERT Mihalis Tsoukalos is a systems engineer and a technical writer. You can reach him at www. mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. QUICK TIP Get the code for this tutorial from the Linux Format archive: www. linuxformat. com/archives ?issue=294. The subject of this tutorial is eBPF and is the first in a series of tutorials about eBPF and its capabilities. eBPF stands for Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, but despite its name it’s not restricted to just network packet filtering. More accurately, eBPF enables users with root privileges to load and execute custom programs inside the kernel of the operating system, which, in simple terms, is at a really low level. After a custom program is loaded, it’s verified for…

Getting started with the powerful eBPF

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