Índex per April 2022 a Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell The records tell of a rogue who, masquerading as a GCC packager, managed to sneak an arcane stanza into the source. The result was that whenever a certain string was input to any program compiled by this tainted GCC including new versions of GCC)… ah well, that would be telling! Nick Peers I’m perfectly happy to compile stuff from source so long as the instructions are clear and legible so I don’t have to think too hard about it. However, if an up-to-date snap, flatpak or AppImage exists, I’ll always take the lazy option and choose that. Les Pounder I don’t compile much from source: a project found on GitHub, or an emulator for an old computer. The last serious project I compiled from source was before the…

Keith Edmunds is MD of Tiger Computing Ltd, which provides support for businesses using Linux. It’s mostly a straightforward task to find out what software powers a web server. A simple examination of the returned headers will often display the version of Apache, and frequently the version of PHP, too. A well-known site that I recently looked at was running Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.4. The headers gave the exact versions, but we don’t need them. The Apache website states that, “No further evaluation of security risks will be published for 2.2.x releases” after December 2017. As for PHP, even the most recent version of 5.4, 5.4.45, was released over six years ago, with security support ending at the same time. This website is a high profile e-commerce site, and…

The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced a new version of LibreOffice (https://bit.ly/lxf287tdfblog). LibreOffice 7.3 Community brings a number of new features and fixes that are primarily aimed at making the switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice much smoother for new users. Interoperability between the suites has been improved, including the performance of LibreOffice when importing Office files, such as .doc, .docx and .xlsx. Change tracking has been changed to better work with Microsoft docs, and LibreOffice’s Help tool has been improved, and again focuses on making the software as welcoming as possible to ex-Office users. According to The Document Foundation’s blog post, LibreOffice 7.3 Community’s new features were developed by 147 contributors, while 641 volunteers have helped create localisations for 155 languages – and the latest version launched in 120…

Jon Masters has been involved with Linux for more than 22 years. I enjoy following technical discussions on Twitter. In the pandemic era, when we can’t meet up so easily at conferences, this is a good way to keep in casual contact with a number of folks, as well as to gauge the “pulse” of what’s happening in the broader community, beyond the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), or any one specific Linux distro or project list. There are many talented folks who you can interact with directly, including numerous developers. One of those I enjoy following is Alyssa Rosenzweig. She’s perhaps most famous for her work leading the Panfrost project, which develops Open Source drivers for Arm’s Mali GPUs (used in many phones and other devices, but with a…

What we want to see are the products of a vibrant community such as active forums and a healthy ecosystem of tutorials. Linux Mint has the benefits of being one of the most popular Linux distributions in its own right. Although it ploughs its own furrow to an extent, most fixes that work on Ubuntu still work with Mint, even though you may have to adapt them slightly. The official Linux Mint forum is highly active and has many sections. Mint is well known online, and there are plenty of tutorials to be found without too much effort. The Bodhi website frontpage points users to the official wiki. This is handy because the Moksha is intricate and non-standard. Pop!_OS has an unofficial forum (https://pop-planet.info/forums) that has some activity and where…

OUR EXPERT Mats Tage Axelsson would love to broadcast about all things Linux 24/7. We’re sure that it would be must-watch TV. We all spend an inordinate amount of time consuming video and music. Many of these services are streamed via browsers, but that’s not always the best way to enjoy it. Another key issue: where to display it? Sure, you can watch videos on your laptop – and let’s face it, you probably do – but how often do you just hop over to the sofa to continue enjoying a classic album or the latest must-watch TV series (I’m literally catching up with Buffy – Ed)? With the correct setup, you can make this happen. You can also store your own media on a server and stream it to…

ZOTERO Credit: www.zotero.org OUR EXPERT Nick Peers says Zotero is the answer to his haphazard organisational systems. Zotero bills itself as your personal research assistant. It’s a free tool for not just collecting notes from a variety of sources, but also organising them, sharing them and even using them as citations and bibliographies within your documents. Zotero exists as two primary components: a desktop client and a browser extension, known as a web connector. This component enables you to capture all or part of a web page and add it to your collection. More on how that works shortly. By the time you read this, installing Zotero may be a simple affair using the Zotero-deb wrapper (see https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-deb) for details, but at time of writing the author was in the…

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MOODLE Credit: https://moodle.org OUR EXPERT David Rutland believes it’s impossible for a person to be either be overdressed or overeducated. People who know him agree that he is neither. Education, education, education. If you were around in 1997, you probably remember the then soon-to-be Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s top three priorities for his first term in office. Education is important. Developing young minds to be skilled in English, maths and the sciences means that as the current crop of youngsters grows to adulthood, you’ll be able to have informed and valuable conversations with them, civilisation will move forward propelled by their sharp intellects, and maybe they’ll even find a cure for our own rapidly ageing frames before it’s too late. For seemingly endless chunks of the past two years, schools…

Version: 0.2 Web: https://github.com/miraclx/freyr-js we have yet another music downloader for you here today! However, let’s step away from the threadbare Youtube-dl and its numerous frontends this time, because FreyrJS was made to support other music services. Be aware that doing so may breach specific service’s terms and conditions of use, that you will have agreed to. The legality of doing so could vary as per your region’s laws, too. So you know. Even if you have a paid subscription to any of the alluded to services, you never have access to your tracks as files. That limits your freedom to enjoy your music library outside of the official vendor-provided apps. FreyrJS tries to fix this by communicating with those services’ APIs and fetching the original music files. All you…

OUR EXPERT Mihalis Tsoukalos is a systems engineer and a technical writer. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. The main benefit of using a binary tree or a tree in general is that you can quickly find out if an element is present or not, compared to performing a linear search. Trees are also good at modelling relationships and hierarchical data. Let’s begin by discussing the basics of binary trees before we start implementing binary trees in Python. Get to grips with the basic concepts Strictly speaking, a tree is a directed acyclic graph that satisfies the following three principles. First, it has a root node that’s the entry point to the tree. Second, every vertex, except the root, has only one entry point. Third, a path connects…

Compiling the kernel from source was always a key moment in many Unix courses. After all, there was a time when everyone who wanted to seriously learn how to admin a system would need to learn this skill. Not that it’s that complex a thing to do – you just need the right files, tools and a modicum of time. Rightly so, modern Linux distros have neatly hidden away this complexity with just outliers such as Gentoo (see LXF276) or Linux from Scratch (see page 48) requiring this step. As always, getting your hands dirty with such things is a fantastic learning experience. And Jonni’s here to step you through the process. He reveals everything you need to know about building your own kernel, the benefits and tweaks you can…

Senators in the US are once again pushing for the EARN IT act to be made law. If passed, the act would bring in sweeping internet regulations that some fear would give third-party companies and the government access to the private messages of civilians. It could even lead to penalties for companies that offer end-to-end encryption, which would affect messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage. The EARN IT act also focuses on Amazon, with creators of the act accusing the company of not properly scanning content it hosts on Amazon Web Services. With many websites using AWS, this could mean that large swathes of the internet are scanned by governmentapproved software such as PhotoDNA, which integrates with law enforcement databases. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the act at https://bit.ly/lxf287earnit.…

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.17-rc4 (Release Candidate 4). The RC was named Superb Owl in honour of the US Super Bowl annual American Football game, which is often misspelt. The name is meaningless as far as the kernel is concerned, and is only referenced in a single place, but Linus does like to use it for running gags. There was recent coverage on the Hacker News website claiming 5.17-rc2 had been released as I Am Satoshi (a reference to the anonymous Bitcoin creator). That turned out to be a fake joke commit by kernel developer Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) that, thanks to a GitHub quirk, could be confused as coming from an official clone of Linus’s tree. That Polkit vulnerability Another month, another security vulnerability. This month’s fun…

Get creative? I would like to know if your organisation prints a magazine dedicated solely to open source multimedia for artists who are using the full suite of creative software such as Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, Blender, OpenShot, Audacity and GDevelop and anything that’s relevant individually or in combination, much like computer arts. In other words, everything open source can offer an independent artist, graphic designer, games programmer/developer, photographer, film maker and special effects including music that the modern art environment now demands. I find that the content of Linux Format is just too general for my interests and only ever occasionally throws a few crumbs aimed specifically at the open source multimedia artist. Otilia Chanetsa Neil says… I’d love to cover more creative elements, but the remit of the magazine…

By default, Pop!_OS offers a recovery partition, which is a bootable copy of the installation media. The installer, when run from this environment, can detect the existing Pop!_OS installation and carry out a ‘refresh installation’ to repair any damage when the installation is damaged. In addition, standard Linux software can be run from within it because it’s a live environment. Zorin OS has facilities for installing and running Windows programs on a fresh installation. As such, from the get-go it’s possible to right-click .exe or .msi files and select ’Install Windows Application. You can install WINE on other distros to achieve the same effect, but on Zorin OS this functionality is set up by default and integrated into the user interface and documentation. Zorin OS also includes a custom application…

Now named Coolest Projects Global, this is your chance to have your maker project revealed to the world this year – and it doesn’t even have to be finished to be eligible for entry! The aim of Coolest Projects is for young people to have their amazing array of projects showcased for all to see, to offer inspiration, to get mentoring, to generate excitement and perhaps to get some merch and prizes! The event is open to anyone up to 18 years old, working either independently or in groups of up to five people. The final event in early June will be a live online celebration that everyone can join in with. Registration for the event is open until 11 May. Projects can be registered in the following categories: Scratch,…

IN BRIEF With the sleek good looks of an Apple device, FLIRC’s Raspberry Pi Zero case has the cooling power to keep even an overclocked Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W cool. It also looks great on our keychain and desk. GPIO access is good, and your micro SD card is well hidden inside the aluminium case. You might be wondering why anyone would need a case for a Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s a fair point: the Raspberry Pi was designed to operate in the open – something that co-creator Pete Lomas has said at numerous events. However, cases protect the Pi and in the case of FLIRC’s £13 Raspberry Pi Zero case it also keeps the Pi cool, too. This isn’t FLIRC’s first Raspberry Pi case. FLIRC’s Raspberry Pi 4…

XACE Credit: https://github.com/lawrencewoodman/xAce OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker. He blogs about hacks and makes at bigl.es. We go back to 1982 to discover that not all home computers came with BASIC. The Jupiter Ace, from the Cambridge-based Jupiter Cantab Limited computer company was an oddity of the era. The Jupiter Ace looked like a cross between a ZX81 and a hot rod and we quite like that. The design of the Jupiter Ace was down to its creators Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers, who had previously been part of the ZX Spectrum design team. The Jupiter Ace had 2KB of dedicated video RAM, which offered a performance boost over the ZX Spectrum. Packing a Z80 CPU running at 3.25MHz and a…

HOME ASSISTANT Credit: www.home-assistant.io Part One Don’t miss next issue! Subscribe on page 16 OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has been a fan of the open source methodology for over two decades and uses Linux and other tools where possible. QUICK TIP A huge number of smart home manufacturers are supported, including Ikea Tradfri lights, Phillips Hue and the Unifi network controller. Find out more: www.home-assistant.io/integrations. Smart Home and Internet of Things devices have been popular for a number of years now. Unfortunately, the Internet of Things doesn’t have the best name in terms of security issues, thanks to poorly coded or secured devices. How many times have we read about hardcoded administrator-level accounts being left enabled on devices? Canonical and Microsoft provide IoT platforms with security in mind. When using…

Michael Meeks is general manager at Collabora Productivity Collabora Online (COOL) 21.11 has arrived. It packs online collaborative document-editing goodness into an easy-to-obtain update. We packed another year of rendering and interoperability development into the LibreOffice Technology core. COOL itself brings a swathe of UX improvements. One piece I worked on is performance: profiling and optimising our client-side Javascript to make the experience slick and smooth. Previously, we thought any interaction issues were caused by network latency or by excessive server-side work. However, after doing end-toend profiling we found the browser was the primary culprit. After persuading it not to re-render the DOM on each web-socket message we got a big step-change in slickness. Other big wins were background document saving, accelerated multiuser editing, and a mature diagramming component. Another…

A major milestone has been passed for FreeCAD development, with the nonprofit FreeCAD Project Association (https://bit.ly/lxf287fpa) being set up in Belgium. The aim of the association is to protect FreeCAD’s existence as a free, community-owned project, and will help raise funds and act as an official body. It won’t be used to rule over or own FreeCAD, but to help communicate with other projects and third parties. FreeCAD (https://freecad.org) is an opensource 3D modeller, primarily used for designing real-life products and objects. It’s a popular free alternative to AutoCAD for architects, and the formation of this association has been warmly received by its users.…

Matt Yonkovit Head of open source strategy and silly hats at Percona Recently, the open source community has seen big questions about security and safety. First, we had Log4j that affected tens of thousands of applications. Then two widely used Javascript libraries – colors and faker – were sabotaged by the maintainer responsible for them. He claimed he was tired of other companies profiting from his work. Over the past 20 years, a common argument against open source has been that you can’t trust it. The argument goes: “Open source is not maintained by a single entity. Malicious things can make it into the source code. Do you really trust the creators?” This was rekindled when University of Minnesota researchers submitted Linux patches with defective code to see if they…

Neil Bothwick likes turning readers’ woes into wins! Q Prickly display issue Is there something I can use to collect all my LAN data/network/disk space information into a dashboard? I have several computers running (including virtual machines) and I want to send their data to a dedicated server that will show me all the information on one screen. Derrick Long A There are a number of ways of collecting this information, depending on what you want to do with it. Based on your brief description of your needs, Cacti (www.cacti.net) would seem to be a good fit. Cacti is a web application, so you’ll need a web server such as Apache installed on one computer on your network, then install Cacti on that. This can be done by downloading a…

YOUR GIFT! WORTH £50 Don’t miss out, subscribe now! Product features » The PowerKick wireless power bank delivers functionality and convenience. Its clever suction cups secure the charger to a smartphone or other device while charging. » The built-in kickstand props the device up in either landscape mode for video viewing or portrait mode for video conferencing, all while charging. » Indicator lights provide information on the status of device charging, as well as the current charge of the 10,000mAh lithium polymer battery. SUBSCRIBE NOW! www.magazinesdirect.com/lin/a26b Call 0330 333 1113 and quote A26B DON’T MISS! Includes 5 years of Linux User & Developer issues PLUS: Exclusive access1 to the Linux Format subs area! 1,000s of DRM-free PDF back issues and articles! Get instant access back to issue 66 (May 2005)…

Pop!_OS 21.10 Mint 20.2 Cinnamon Bodhi Linux 6.0.0 Lubuntu 21.10 Zorin OS 16 Core R4 Michael Reed likes all of his alternatives to be as alternative as possible. HOW WE TESTED… Having installed each distribution, it was time to start playing around. This consisted of using the distribution for a while to carry out typical desktop computer tasks such as browsing the web and running software such LibreOffice. We also tried installing some software using the package management facilities of the distribution, noting any difficulties along the way. In addition to the standard desktop computer tests, we loaded each of the distributions up on an old laptop fitted with 2GB of RAM and a 1.66GHz single core hyperthreaded CPU, because we were curious to look for problems when the system…

Linux, if you want to be annoyingly precise about it, isn’t a complete operating system. It is but a kernel. And like the kernel of a seed pod, it requires all the surrounding bits to be useful. A bootloader can happily load a Linux kernel with no init system specified, and it will just sit there. Without userspace applications (for example, systemd in the first instance) telling the kernel what to do it will simply idle. Yet it has the potential to do anything. The kernel includes everything you would think of as being a low-level component of the operating system, as well as some things you might think belong elsewhere. This includes drivers, filesystems, network protocols, schedulers (process and I/O), memory allocators and all kinds of other treasure. In…

PJ Evans cut his teeth on home computing in the 80s, and is now technical director at The Very Good Email Company. My name is PJ Evans of House Sinclair. Well, that was me in the 1980s when I fought against pretenders to the eight-bit throne such as House Commodore or those sneaky Welsh Dragons. Although we may have had our differences on colour-clash versus brown soupy displays, one thing we could all agree on was that the BBC Micro belonged in the classroom, despite the fact we seethed with jealousy at Elite. However, I was won around by the Beeb’s User Port: a simple way of talking with the outside world. With the help of my design technology teacher, my GCSE project hooked up a BBC to a brace…

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 > Any Pi > Raspberry Pi OS > Pimoroni Micro Dot pHAT > Get the code: https://github.com/lesp/LXFMicro-Dot-News/archive/refs/heads/main.zip Lately there’s been a lot of news – some good, most of it bad. And to keep up with the constant series of events and developments from around the world we constantly check our devices… but what if a Raspberry Pi could give you the news headlines every five minutes? This project uses Pimoroni’s Micro Dot pHAT to scroll the news across the vibrant red displays, keeping you up to date. Micro Dot pHAT comes as a kit, which means that we need to solder each…

FZF Credit: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for affordable geeky memorabilia. hen looking for files on the desktop, you may often rely on the search feature of your favourite file manager. The conventional searching approach is to apply an exact search, so that only files or directory that are a perfect match to the search string are displayed. A fuzzy search, on the other hand, performs an approximate search, and instead of identifying exact matches, displays matching results with each keystroke. The fzf utility identifies itself as a general-purpose fuzzy finder. Released under the MIT License, the crossplatform tools can be used across all flavours of Linux. Installing fzf Despite the usefulness of the…

ISSUE 286 March 2022 Product code: LXFDB0286 In the magazine Not all VPNs are created equally – find out how to avoid second-rate services and maintain your privacy online with our in-depth feature. We also test five GUI text editors, show how to build a distro from the ground up using Linux From Scratch, emulate an MSX, set up multi-boot USB devices, code a 3D game world, and reveal the tools for managing your passwords from the command line. ISSUE 285 February 2022 Product code: LXFDB0285 In the magazine Stay one step ahead of the nefarious perpetrators of ransomware with our in-depth feature. We bring you tutorials on rock music effects, offline password management and creating a virtual network lab. Discover how to set up a temperature display for your…

LIBREOFFICE Credit: www.libreoffice.org Part Two Missed Part One? Turn to page 62 to get hold of it EXPERT Michael Reed is a Linux nerd and a selfpublished author. Guess which one pays the bills. QUICK TIP If you need help when using LibreOffice for your book project, the LibreOffice website has a comprehensive traditional manual. See https://documentation. libreoffice.org. We’re going to take a basic ebook and make it shine with the help of images such as photographs and charts. We’ll also add some features that are appropriate for non-fiction books, such as tip boxes, an index and citations within the text. Finally, we’ll get a bit further into what it takes to upload your files to services that can print books or make them available as ebooks. This month’s tutorial…

Alexander Tolstoy is back with another fine collection of open source tools to make more of your time at the Linux coal face. Weather Widget 2 » Fancontrol GUI » Wine » DaedalOS » FreyrJS » Chmod-CLI » Rescuezilla » Warble » SpaceHuggers » Efiboots » Ehh Version: 2.0.4 Web: https://github.com/blackadderkate/weather-widget- This new Plasma extension is the long-awaited update of the original Weather Widget created by Martin Kotelnik. It used to support two data providers: Open Weather Map (OWM) and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute public weather service (Yr.no). However, that older widget hadn’t been updated for a while, and over time it dropped support for Yr.no because it changed the API (and was also renamed to Met.no). Luckily, the project was revived by a new developer and came back as…

Version: GIT Web: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS The abundance of open source web applications means that sooner or later we’ll be seeing more of them integrated into complex projects. A good example is WinXP (LXF280), a mock-up of the older Redmond-made OS run inside a browser. While that was just an amusing diversion, the idea of having a working desktop implemented as a web site is still a good idea. The DaedalOS project is an effort to create a webbased desktop environment and make it usable for daily computing. Running your own copy of that desktop is easy because it involves just three commands ( ) before you can start using your local DaedalOS instance at http://localhost:3000. The web page has been styled to look like a classic Windows desktop with a bottom…

Version: 1.0 Web: https://github.com/Elinvention/efiboots The boot process of an average modern Linux UEFI-enabled system isn’t something you need to manually adjust. However, thanks to Efiboots we can have a better insight into the internals of a typical UEFI system running Linux. Efiboots is a graphical interface to efibootmgr, a command-line utility that enables you to add, delete, sort and alter EFI boot entries from Linux. Normally, those entries point to drives with EFI System Partitions (ESP), or EFI-compatible boot loaders, such as Grub2- efi, Shim or rEFInd. You may want to delete obsolete entries (for example, those left over from previous Linux distros that you no longer run) or change the boot order using efibootmgr. This is a powerful tool, but it’s also not easy to use. Efiboots tries to…

Part One Don’t miss next issue! Subscribe on page 16 OUR EXPERT Mark Gardner is a software developer and blogger with over 25 years of IT experience. You can reach him at www.phoenixtrap.com and @markjgardner. QUICK TIP The map function is designed to transform a list or collection via a function. You could use a for each loop, but the map has the advantage of returning a new list or collection, enabling you to chain other methods or functions, like the -Mojo oneliner does with join(). So much of the modern web is driven by services and front-end interfaces talking to APIs that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that everything is ultimately presented in a soup of HTML markup. In the absence of a well-structured interface or…

PYTHON Credit: https://github.com/jtmfam/Gh0stenstein Part Two Missed Part One? Turn to page 62 to get hold of it OUR EXPERT Andrew Smith is a software developer for NHS Digital, has a bachelors degree in software engineering and a master’s degree in computer networks. For this tutorial we’re continuing from last issue’s Python tutorial. Don’t worry, you’ll have access to the full code. In the previous instalment we gave an overview of the mechanics and mathematics, explaining how the player (featured in first-person view) could move and navigate around the game world we created. As much as this was done to some level of detail, it still left our 3D world looking a little blank and boring. We’ll now focus more on building objects in the game world rather than further explaining…

Easy video sharing YouTube? More like BooooTube! We bring you the better, easier and more open way to share your videos online. So random! Max-out your entropy and keep dev/random topped up with the most random numbers this side of a white-noise generator. Satellite photography There’s terabytes of space-based imaging out there – discover how to get it and how to process it, in the name of science! Rust and Linux It’s the new go-to language for Linux and rock-solid, memory secure code. We get you started on coding open source tools. Contents of future issues subject to change – we might been replaced by a machine learning routine.…