Sommaire pour November 2024 de Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, The free software community loves it when FOSS projects find a place in the IT cosmos. When people who have never used Linux start talking about tools like LibreOffice and MariaDB, we get a warm feeling of accomplishment. However, many open source projects are maintained by for-profit entities, and once in a while, they fall off the open source wagon. There is still a large army of old-school business people who don’t get open source. What? You’re giving away your source code? What’s the point of that? How do you “extract value” from it if everybody can use it? You would think we would be done with this question by now, but actually it as gotten worse in recent years, due to the recent epidemic of large companies…

Supporting Older Tools One fascinating aspect of Linux involves balancing the need to support all users everywhere with the need to keep the source code as clean and maintainable as possible. For example, someone may have an extremely old computer with an old compiler and old versions of the other tools needed to build the kernel. While it’s possible for Linus Torvalds and the rest of the developers to continue supporting those old tools forever, should they do it? Linus believes they should not. As the build tools continue to improve over time, the kernel source tree no longer needs to compensate for the lack of this or that feature in those older tools. This allows the kernel developers to clean out code that is no longer needed because a…

Linux has always been centered in Europe and North America. However, in the last few years, India has started to become another center of activity. Currently, Linux has a 14.51-percent market share in India – almost three times above the world average [1]. Indian developers, many of them young, are contributing to popular distributions, and Indian-based distributions are also starting to appear, notably blendOS, which runs multiple distributions via containers, and BackSlash, a heavily-tweaked version of Ubuntu. Since March 2024, these distributions have been joined by Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) Linux [2]. What distinguishes BOSS from most distributions in any country is that it is government sponsored, with goals that are less about technology than about bridging the digital divide and helping to improve India’s technical infrastructure. BOSS is…

Attentive readers of this column will have noticed that the Go listings covered here often reference packages on GitHub, which the Go compiler picks up from there and integrates into the binaries as libraries. But you can’t always take, take, take. Instead, let’s contribute back! How hard could it be to write your own code and share it with the world on GitHub? Then programmers near and far can use it, saving them the time they could otherwise use to sing the originator’s praises. Listing 1: yttop.go By way of an example, a simple package that allows a Go application to store the passwords and API tokens it uses in an external file would be useful. These strings should never be part of the code, and not just because the…

Proficiency at the command line is the holy grail for many Linux users Sure, the desktop looks nice, and it proves that Linux can be friendly and colorful like Windows and macOS, but many advanced users would still rather be at a terminal window than clicking with a mouse. We do love our graphic file managers, though. Is there a command-line tool that can compete with Dolphin, Gnome Files, and the other desktop variants? If you’re looking for a speedy and flexible text-based file manager with many of the conveniences of the desktop models, you’ll be interested to learn about a plucky terminal gem called Yazi. We’ll get you started in this month’s Linux Voice.…

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If you frequently check the daily weather forecast, having your own weather station might be a good thing. However, professional devices are expensive, and they also mean that the amateur meteorologist is locked in to the display panels of the weather station vendor. As a rule, it is impossible to use the measured values in your own applications. The cost driver is not typically the sensors in the weather stations, but the display modules. A DIY solution could handle the measurement-only tasks, but the sensor technology must be energy-saving and weatherproof. This is not easy to implement in a DIY project and adds to the overhead and costs. As an alternative, you could use the sensors of a professional weather station and draw on the data it provides for your…

The fun of open source I have been going through my digital pictures this past week looking for illustrations to use in articles. Most of these pictures reach back to 1994 and are arranged by date and the city or event where they were taken. As I went through them, I realized a couple of things. First of all, there were not only people that had slipped my memory, but even the event or city had been “forgotten.” The amazing thing about the human mind, however, is that you never really forget anything that you ever consciously do, so even though I had forgotten about some of them, the pictures often reminded me of great times with great people. Free software was at the core of this. Throughout my lifetime…

#287/October 2024 Ollama Many Linux users are intrigued by Large Language Model (LLM) tools like ChatGPT, but if you really want to be methodical about testing and experimenting, why get tangled in the cloud? Ollama lets you run LLMs locally on a home computer. On the DVD: Debian 12.6 and Clonezilla 3.1.3-16 #286/September 2024 Git Ready The Git version control system is an integral part of the Linux environment. If you’re looking for a better foundation in Git, or if you already know the basics and are ready to start building Git into your own custom apps, we’ll make you Git ready. On the DVD: openSUSE Leap 15.6 and Tails 6.4 #285/August 2024 Kernel Expoilts Is Linux secure? Only if you keep up with the patches. This month we take…

Issue 289 / December 2024 Available Starting November 8 Will artificial intelligence send the entire profession of software development to the unemployment line? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from readily available coding tools that build in AI techniques. Next month we study some promising candidates. Also inside: • changedetection.io• Enumerating Resources• Anki• Videogame Preservation• And much more! Please note: Articles could change before the next issue. BE THE FIRST TO SEE WHAT’S NEXT The Linux Magazine Preview is a monthly email newsletter that gives you a sneak peek at the next issue, including links to articles posted online. Sign up at: https://bit.ly/Linux-Update…

New KDE Slimbook Plasma Available for Preorder All about power, the latest KDE Slimbook features an AMD 8845HS with CPU 8 cores, 16 threads, and up to 5.1GHz and 24MB cache. You’ll also find an AMD 780M GPU, with 12 cores and RDNA 3 and NPU, ready for local AI. While the Slimbook does not ship with AI software preinstalled, it does mean the hardware is ready for AI. With this latest iteration, you can get up to 96GB of RAM (DDR5 5600MHz), so you can imagine how fast the Plasma desktop will perform. Other features include an 83 Wh battery, four speakers, a full aluminum chassis, a 16" Wide Quad XGA display (2560x1600, 16:10, sRGB 100%, 120Hz, 400 nits), 2 x PCIe 4.0, and the Plasma 6.1 desktop environment…

Public clouds are doubtlessly the most convenient and cost-effective tool for individuals to use to access the latest neural processing unit (NPU) artificial intelligence (AI) accelerating hardware. Due to its high cost and lack of availability, it is hard for a freelance developer to justify acquiring one of the now famous (and infamous) NVIDIA A100 [1] Ampere cards with tensor processing units, with costs running into the tens of thousands of dollars and the cards destined for inevitable obsolescence as the newer Hopper (NVIDIA H100) [2] units arrive (as I am writing, I can see A100s advertised for $1.29/hour by a cloud vendor). The economic choice is easy: Develop the code offline and only then provision a souped-up cloud instance for the actual training or inference task. Low-cost development strategies…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software Desktop environment COSMIC Epoch 1 System76 is one of a very select group of companies that sell laptops, computers, and servers with only open source software preinstalled. To this end, System76 also bundles Pop!_OS on its devices. The distro is based on Ubuntu but traditionally has used a custom version of Gnome known as COSMIC. Aside from working with System76 hardware, one of Pop!_OS’s biggest draws is that it works out of the box with both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. The latest version of the COSMIC desktop is now available via Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS alpha. The System76 website also includes instructions for installing the desktop environment in major Linux distros such as Fedora and Arch, but…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to info@linux-magazine.com. SFSCON Date: November 8-9, 2024 Location: Bolzano, Italy  Website: https://www.sfscon.it/ The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON, is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFSCON promotes the use of Free Software in digital infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness. Join decisionmakers and developers to learn and get inspired. SC24 Date: November 17-22, 2024 Location: Atlanta, Georgia Website: https://sc24.supercomputing.org/ Atlanta is the…