Linux Format -julkaisun June 2018 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

Jonni Bidwell I risked my work machine’s health and my own continued productivity/sanity by installing the daily image we used on our disc. These are the sacrifices I’m willing to make to ensure you glorious readers have a smooth cover disc experience. I’ve been keeping the image up to date and actually really like the new Ubuntu. But I still prefer Arch… Nick Peers Despite the name (Bionic Beaver? Really?), I shall be updating to Ubuntu 18.04. I’ll also be taking a fresh backup before doing so, because borked upgrades never end well and I’d prefer the security of a flawless roll-back option rather than having to unpick or reinstall from scratch. Les Pounder Ubuntu 18.04 is out and will I be upgrading? Well, yes. My trusty Lenovo X220 has…

The European Union has been looking to align its legislation with the copyright implications of the internet, with proposals known as the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. While some institutions have welcomed this, there’s also been concern. In her article, “Censorship machines are coming” (http://bit.ly/censorship-machines),Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament representing the Pirate Party outlines some of the objections. One of the most troubling aspects is the plan to introduce upload filters. According to Julia, Article 13, in conjunction with Recitals 38 and 39 of the proposed EU copyright reform, calls for internet platforms that are used to upload large amounts of content by its users, such as YouTube, or a photo-sharing website, to have to monitor user behaviour and filter future uploads to ensure…

“We’ve long known that the year of the Linux desktop is never going to dawn. It’s not because Linux isn’t capable – far from it – but because things have changed. People don’t want Linux or Windows or Mac. They want applications: to write a letter, carry out a financial analysis, improve their sex appeal in a photo. Office 365, Google Apps… whatever. It’s the same on the server side of the fence. Businesses want to run their Docker container. They don’t care whether that’s on Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or in that noisy room down the corridor. The level of abstraction has just gone up. As one open source advocate and business leader said to me last week, “The operating system is becoming irrelevant”. Sure, there’ll always be the…

Nvidia has joined a growing list of hardware and software makers that are dropping support for 32-bit operating systems, halting GeForce graphics card driver support at the end of April 2018. This means owners of Nvidia tech running a 32-bit OS will lose out on future updates and fixes. Nvidia has also given a date for when it will cease security updates: January 2019. These changes will affect its range of GPUs, from high-end enthusiast cards to low-end Fermi models. While many gamers are unlikely to have an Nvidia GPU running on a 32-bit distro and hardware, people who don’t feel the need to keep up with the latest games, but still require a discrete graphics card, may find themselves out of luck. As hardware reviews site Phoronix.com points out,…

Ubuntu two-step  Q I have a laptop that I use offline with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 on it. Besides those two OS partitions, I have two other NTFS ones (for data and VMs). My 14.04 install hasn’t been updated since 2016. Am I right in thinking I can’t apt upgrade my 14.04 install after 18.04 is released? How can I upgrade smoothly to 18.04? I’m a newbie and don’t really want to have to format the Linux partition and reinstall everything. My Wi-Fi seems to have stopped working with the captive portal at my library – could this be because the distro hasn’t been updated in such a long time? Oliver, via the LXF forums A Good news, Oliver. Ubuntu 14.04 will be supported until April 2019– the LTS releases come…

We’d love to try and answer any questions you send to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, no matter what the level. We’ve all been stuck before, so don’t be shy. However, we’re only human (although many suspect Jonni is a robot), so it’s important that you include as much information as you can. If something works on one distro but not another, then tell us. If you get an error message, please tell us the exact message and precisely what you did to invoke it. If you have, or suspect, a hardware problem, let us know about the hardware. Consider installing hardinfo or lshw. These programs list the hardware on your machine, so send us their output. If you’re unwilling, or unable, to install these, run the following commands in a root terminal and…

HOW WE TESTED… A CMS doesn’t require much more than a properly configured web server and database. You have many choices nowadays depending on the type of website that you wish to create. For this month’s Roundup we’re only interested in CMS options that can help you create a complete website, rather than the specialised ones that are dedicated to blogs and wikis. The choice of database, web server and scripting language makes little different to end users, but we’ve selected only PHP-based CMSs for this Roundup. Along with Apache web server, we’re using MySQL for our database. We’ll test the projects on the number of features that they offer out of the box, ease of installation and whether or not they support add-ons to extend their functionality. With ever-increasing…

CMSs are designed to serve one function: help you create a website with the minimum hassle. Once installed, a CMS shouldn’t get in the way of content creation. But a CMS is a complex piece of software. The sheer number of elements and configurable options for a typical modern website makes administration a difficult task. A good CMS must find the right balance between pleasing users and administrators alike. From creating users and managing their permissions, to extending functionality with add-ons and performing maintenance tasks such as backups and updates, the administration interface must find a way to help you navigate between the elements logically. Whether it’s with the help of a sidebar, or tiles on the Dashboard or via drop-down menus on the top bar, the CMSs on our…

There are a vast number of specialised CMSs that we couldn’t cover in this Roundup. One that we found quite attractive was Wagtail. Written in Python, the project uses the Django framework and claims to be built by developers for developers. This was reason enough to not consider it for inclusion, and its documentation, which is at times outdated, sealed its fate. We also didn’t want a CMS dedicated solely to e-commerce, but if that’s what you’re after then you should consider WebGUI, which is written in Perl, but hasn’t seen a new release in over two years. If you want to set up a CMS without having to create a database first, you might want to explore CMSimple, which stores content in HTML files, and doesn’t require a database.…

1 Download the official ISO If you re short on bandwidth and already running Linux, copy the ISO from our disc (it’s in the Ubuntu/ directory), install zsync and update the ISO: Now write the new image to disc or USB. 2 Boot the live medium Insert your disc or USB drive into the appropriate place and then boot your machine. The official image will work with secure boot (note that our disc will not), but finding the magic key to summon the boot menu or UEFI settings may take some trial and error on your part. F2, F10 and Del are common options. Mac users should hold down C. Select the optical drive or USB and then choose ‘Try Ubuntu without installing’. 3 Test and install Check as much…

We’ve focused on the desktop side of things, but this isn’t how Canonical makes its money and is far from the whole Ubuntu story. Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s diminutive distro that’s designed for constrained devices, particularly IoT things, and containers. Core uses the same kernel as desktop and server Ubuntu, and leverages Snap packages to provide smooth and secure installations, and upgrades. Canonical is hoping that Ubuntu Core will become popular for Edge (or Fog) computing. This is the boundary between the cloud and real world devices, where devices sit on the edge of low-powered (for example, sensor) networks and marshall their data to the cloud. Sometimes less is more, and this adage ne’er rang truer than for containers, embedded systems and IoT. To this end, Canonical now provides a…

To program yourself requires the standard called OpenQASM. This is the basis for all development kits. Many groups have developed toolkits using this standard. The best known ones are from IBM, D-Wave and Microsoft. IBM decided to use Python to create Qiskit, and you can download this kit from Github. It also has many sources and demonstration collections available. You can learn all about the current development state from there. In both Eclipse and Netbeans, all you need to do is import the code into a project and explore. Don’t forget to install Python 3.5 or higher before you try to compile. IBM’s QE has these examples in their Python toolkit. When you have the sources installed, you can only run simulations on your own computer. If you want to…

Serial is one of the most basic forms of communication, so it isn’t surprising that other devices also have serial ports. The BBC micro:bit has a serial interface, and to use the interface with Micropython on the micro:bit, all we need to do is print data to the Python shell, which will then output the data to serial – no need for any fancy commands: Then we just need to edit the port name and baud speed: While inside the loop we still need to set the serial port and baud speed, then the parity and other error-checking options. We then read the serial data to the variable “data”, then print the variable to the shell, confirming that our micro:bit is communicating over serial to the attached Pi. We’ll put…

Floppy disks are slow. Attach a virtual hard drive and loading times are quicker and you can switch between programs without having to swap out disks. Hatari supports three type of emulated hard drives: ACSI, IDE and GEMDOS. Of these, ACSI is the most compatible option and works with all versions of TOS from 1.02 up. ACSI emulated drives exist physically as an IMG file and can be fiddly to set up, plus they require drivers placed on the virtual hard disk to work correctly. Thankfully, Hatari provides you with an empty 80MB hard drive image, which you can download from https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/hd80mb.image.gz. Extract the hd80mb.image file to a suitable folder, then open Hatari’s configuration, select Hard disks and click Browse next to ACSI HD image to select the file. Reboot…

Here’s a quick introduction to some of the others moreutils packages that make working with the shell fun: ts Use this tool to add a timestamp to the beginning of each line of the stdout output. This can help you monitor how long it takes for a command to run, before passing control to the next command. You can even use the ts tool to timestamp the logs produced by a server. zrun Text editors are incapable of making sense of compressed files, but zrun can decompress archives given to it on the fly and currently works with various formats including gzip, bzaip2 and xz. By default, zrun deletes the decompressed temporary file once you’re done. This means that all the changes you made in the editor will be lost,…

OUR EXPERT Will Meister built his first website when Mosaic 0.9 was hot. He still thinks that HTML is the best thing since sliced bread John Lane’s groundbreaking article in LFX234 showed just how far embedded Linux has come over the past ten years. Thanks to the ready availability of high-spec systems-on-chips (SoCs), we’re surrounded by hardware that’s capable of running our favourite OS. Which begs the question: why aren’t more people hacking smart appliances? One reason may be that most of us haven’t realised how much is possible. John’s intro showed how LEDE/ OpenWrt could enable new, creative applications for a home router. This article picks up where he left off, with step-by-step instructions for repurposing a cheap travel router as a development server. In addition, we’ll apply some…

A Docker container includes both the application along with all its configuration and dependencies. So you can streamline a distro to host containers only. The community has latched on to this, which is why you have several stripped-down container-oriented distros such as Container Linux, RancherOS and Atomic Host. While you can run a container on top of a regular distro, these fine-tuned distros have become the norm for running containers in a production environment. Each of these distros comes with its own set of features that make them suitable for different kinds of deployments. Container Linux (formerly known as CoreOS), is a production-ready operating system that’s built from scratch for hosting containers. One of its advantages is that it automatically detects a new Docker container as soon as it comes…

OUR EXPERT Brian Mork has used Linux for 23 years, and has authored dozens of articles. Now he has far too much data. Cloud file storage is a popular option. Commercial solutions lack privacy, are insecure, sacrifice control of data, often require installation of invasive software, and involve a subscription purchase. Part one (see LXF236) described an architecture to set up a free cloud service backup, encrypted both in transit and when data’s at rest. This article covers installing and operating the free cloud service in three parts: setting up the encryption service; setting up synchronisation, and then operating the tools. Set up EncFS When EncFS encrypts files, it keeps the same directory structure, file time stamps and sizes. This could enable someone to guess at what the files are.…

For an extra measure of privacy, you can intermingle different sets of encrypted files into the encrypted directory. Just be sure to move the first .xml file out of the way (rename or move to a different directory) before creating and using the second encryption set. Only one xml file can be used at a time. Putting different encryption sets overlapping into the same directory structure makes the encrypted files look like one big collection, although the intermingled files are encrypted with different files and different passwords. Only the files that match the xml file and password being used will appear in the clear text directory. Each xml file you create and use enables decryption of a unique subset of all the encrypted files. For example, you could distribute one…

Version: 3.28 Web: www.gnome.org The Gnome team releases a new build every six months or so. This means you can expect each new 3.x version on a fairly regular basis. For this month’s Hotpicks we’ve decided to highlight the latest and greatest Gnome 3.28 version for two reasons. First, because there’s a lot to enjoy there, and second, due to the inescapable fact that Gnome has steadily become one of the most popular desktop environments lately. It’s certainly the default choice for Ubuntu and Fedora, which are, of course, the two main heavyweights in the Linux world. The list of new and changed features is pretty extensive. Some of these features will be noticed immediately, while for others it’s more likely that they’ll make their presence known over time. The…

The main advantage of a web site with static files is security because it’s much most difficult – if not impossible – to hack a static web site when you have a properly configured web server. So, no more worries about SQL injections or easy-to-guess passwords! The second advantage of static sites is speed, provided that the visitors don’t have to deal with an extremely busy web server. Additionally, static web sites have easy indexing and fast transferring tools in case you want to transfer your web site into another web server. Finally, static web sites have a lower cost of development because they can be developed much faster. However, static web sites also have their disadvantages. The biggest downside of a static web site which has been created using…

One key advantages of using Wordpress multisite is that we can create sub-sites and have them managed by someone else. So our mulitsite could be a series of smaller sites operated by individuals in a given location. One example where sites would be managed by local users could be an information site about a local activity, such as hiking. Every sub-site would be managed by a user from the given location that would make that sub-site informative for that location. To keep this simple, all we need to do is make admins for each one of our sites and let them manage the rest. Let’s clone a new site and call it ‘clone’, and make the URL http://localhost/wordpressmultisite/clone. Now, any one of the users for that single site can open…

GNU EMACS MANUAL I’ll now risk alienating half of our readership by stating that I use Emacs to edit text, then risk upsetting most of the remainder by saying I only use it to edit text. Emacs is an incredibly powerful platform based around a text editor that can do so much more than edit text. That’s why it has a 600+ page manual. If you’ve ever wondered what all the fuss is about, you can find out. From the arcane, but quite logical, keyboard commands to the use of macros and even reading email – it’s all in here. READING MATTER Advanced Bash Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners Get to grips with the basics of Bash scripting. Bourne Shell Scripting First steps in…

I for one am genuinely excited by the latest release of Ubuntu. Canonical is no stranger to controversial decisions, but it feels recent moves – switching back to Gnome, abandoning convergence devices – have enabled it to focus on the core job of making Ubuntu as good as possible. Despite its comical Bionic Beaver codename, Ubuntu 18.04 will stand as the foundational basis for a plethora of Linux distros with support reaching out for five years. An untold number of servers will rely on its stability and support, while this release delivers the smallest footprint yet from its minimal install. On page 30 Linux Format’s own Bionic Bidwell will guide you through a smooth upgrade from older versions, a smooth install from scratch and a smooth guide around the all-important…

Companies wanting to use Linux on an embedded device and sell it to consumers need to adhere to Linux’s GNU General Public License version 2 (http://bit.ly/gnu-public-license), which means agreeing to provide the source code for the device. It’s both a legal requirement and basic good manners. Sadly, many individuals and companies don’t adhere to this, and Symantec, the security company behind the Norton antivirus software, is one of them. Matthew Garrett, a Linux security programmer and Google engineer, noticed that Symantec’s Norton Core Router was running a Linux distro based on the QCA Software Development Kit project, which is an open-source platform based on OpenWRT (often used for router operating systems) and provided with the GPLv2 licence. The problem is that Symantec hasn’t provided the source code, and in the…

Valve is one of the most prominent names in PC gaming, and it has previously done a lot to support gaming on Linux, in the form of pre-built gaming PCs known as Steam Machines that run a customised Linux distro known as SteamOS, as well as encouraging ports of popular games to Linux. However, Valve’s decision to remove a link on its store’s front page to Steam Machines has led some people to worry that Valve is retreating from its support of Linux. Valve posted a defence of both Steam Machines and the future of gaming on Linux on its Steam Community forums (see http://bit.ly/steam-machines), insisting that the removal of any reference to Steam Machines was “a routine cleanup of the Steam Store navigation”, and that “while it’s true Steam…

FACEBOOK CONTAINER EXTENSION Facebook’s handling of its users’ data has been under scrutiny recently, and if you’re concerned about what sort of information Facebook has on you, and how it’s being shared, then you’ll want to install Mozilla’s new Facebook Container Extension. With it installed, next time you visit the social network a new blue-coloured “container” tab will open, keeping your Facebook activity separate from your general web activity, and vice-versa. You can find out more at http://bit.ly/facebook-container-ex. RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX 7.5 The latest version of the enterprise-level distro by Red Hat is now available, and according to the release announcement (http://bit.ly/red-hat-enterprise), it comes with boosted security and compliance controls (thanks to OpenSCAP integration), as well as tools to reduce storage costs, and better integration with Microsoft’s Windows and…

Presentable us We have an upcoming Linux Presentation Day Bristol 2018 event on Saturday 9 June, between 1pm and 6pm. It’s being held at the Ye Shakespeare Pub on Victoria Street. I was wondering if you could kindly give us a mention on the pages of Linux Format? Our Facebook presence for the event where most action is happening: http://facebook.com/LPDBristolUK. Our Twitter: http://twitter.com/LPDBristolUK. Linux Presentation Day UK: http://linux-presentation-day.org.uk. Bristol and Bath Linux User Group (the group we’re from): http://bristol.lug.org.uk. If you drop in to our free event in the backroom of the Ye Shakespeare Pub, Victoria Street Bristol BS1 6DR, 1pm to 6pm on Saturday 9 June 2018, then we can show you Linux distributions on laptops such as the popular Ubuntu and Fedora. You may even be able to…

Q Last features year of I was various looking Linux at the distributions and I heard somewhere (DistroWatch, Linux Format or maybe even YouTube) of a distribution that had the equivalent of Apple’s Mac OS Keychain built in, but unfortunately I can’t remember which one it was. Can you help? Charles Keane, via email A I don’t recall ever seeing such a distribution, or indeed why a distro would seek to emulate Apple’s tool on Linux. The Seahorse (also known as Passwords and Keys) utility for Gnome does an excellent job of managing keys (GPG and SSH), passwords and certificates. Maybe this is what you saw? KDE Plasma has its own Kwallet, which does a similar task, but this has a habit of being slightly buggy and also has a…

Apart from the official documentation and forum boards, the projects featured in this Roundup are so popular, you’ll easily find user-contributed tutorials and guides on a variety of topics. The older projects, like Drupal and Joomla, are also the subject of a book or two. CMS Made Simple impressed us the most with its documentation covering all the aspects of setting up the system for installation. The official documentation provides step-by-step instructions on installation and configuration and other essential topics such as upgrading, user management, navigating the layout and more. The forums are teeming with activity and apart from general and module specific discussions are also a good source for tips and tricks shared by the community members. The Exponent CMS documentation mentions the essential pre-installation steps, such as creating…

Quiet your busy mind for just a moment, dear reader, and tell us what you hear. The sound of swallows, swifts and wheatears returning to their northern breeding grounds? No, listen more closely. There’s a vaguely mechanical gnawing sound from the trees over yonder. That’s the sound of a bionic beaver, and possibly some gnomes too, and it can mean only one thing: the latest Ubuntu LTS release is here. As is tradition, our cover has been emblazoned orange, our disc editor has been kept up for days testing the daily builds, and Jonni won’t stop wittering on about Walpurgisnacht. But things have changed since the last LTS two years ago. Back then, there was excitement about Canonical’s bold desktop projects: Unity 8, Mir and convergence. Those have all been…

Thomas Sigdestad is CTO and co-founder of Enonic, a company that’s grown from humble beginnings in a garage in downtown Oslo to one of Norway’s most successful open source companies. It had the bold idea of providing people with something useful and usable during the dotcom boom, and that remains very much part of its strategy today. We caught up with him at the O’Reilly Software Architecture 2017 conference in London to talk about the future of cross platform applications: progressive web apps. You may not have heard of them, but the chances are, if you’ve gone anywhere near a major website recently, that you’ve already used one. New technologies enable web browsers to do all kinds of things – things that hitherto were strictly the preserve of native applications.…

One big question is whether encryption systems are at risk with quantum computers. The major concern is the RSA encryption scheme. The scheme is secure because it relies on the condition that factoring a large number into its primes is too time-consuming. When trying to find the prime numbers, there are many strategies, so the simplest one is to guess and try. A trial and error approach isn’t practical, though, since a 2,048 bit number will have millions of solutions. Some strategies can reduce the number of possible solutions, but even the most powerful methods will take years or millions of years. With the right algorithms, a quantum computer could reduce that time to a practical level. Efforts are underway to create other algorithms that aren’t breakable this way. While…

See what crops up in Raspberry Fields Join the Raspberry Pi Foundation and other makers for a celebration of making and learning. Running over the weekend of the 30 June, Raspberry Fields is a new annual event organised by the Raspberry Pi Foundation at Cambridge Junction. With tickets free to under 16 (you’ll still need to book, mind) and £5 to any humans older than this, it’s sure to be a hit with the community! It’s being described as a chance for people of all ages to have a go at getting creative with technology, and celebrate all that the UK’s makers have already achieved and learnt, through the many Code Clubs, CoderDojos, Raspberry Jams or just tinkering at home. There’ll be chances to learn about the many maker projects…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers sees his career come full circle with this article. He started his writing career as disk editor on ST Format magazine back in 1994. It would be like coming home, if only he could remember that far back. COMPATIBILITY 2/3 ONLY You’ll almost certainly remember the late 80s when the eight-bit computing revolution gradually gave way to the rise of 16-bit machines. Atari and Commodore stood at the forefront of this revolution, with the Amiga eventually winning out. But for a while during the late 80s and early 90s, the Atari ST ran it close. And thanks to the brilliant Hatari (http://hatari.tuxfamily.org), you can now resurrect the ST (and its successors) on your Raspberry Pi. First steps You’ll need a desktop environment to run Hatari –…

OUR EXPERT Bobby Moss develops middleware APIs for a global IT consultancy and its clients. In his spare time he works on free software projects, tinkers with old hardware and records quirky Linux podcasts. All projects start with an idea. But before any of us can put our ideas into action, they need to be fleshed out. What do we know? What do we need to research? What are the steps we need to take to make our idea happen? Let’s pause dramatically for a moment to ponder these questions… Don’t worry, you haven’t just stumbled across a TED talk we’ve transcribed onto these hallowed pages by mistake. In this tutorial we’ll be covering note-taking applications, and while they may not be the most exciting tools in the world, you’ll…

Command......................What it does docker info ....................Displays details about the Docker daemon docker ps.......................Lists all running containers docker inspect..............Displays the configuration of a container docker logs....................Displays the standard output from a container docker exec ...................Executes a command in a running container docker images ..............Displays local images docker run .....................Initiates a new container docker pull/push..........Downloads/uploads images from/to a remote registry docker start/stop ........Starts or stops a container docker rm ......................Removes a container docker rmi .....................Removes an image…

You might use a big USB drive to aggregate your encrypted files before syncing to off-site. A FAT32 filesystem would be the most compatible (Linux, Mac, Windows). That didn’t work for us because we also wanted to store an Rsnapshot repository in the same partition, which requires hard links, which FAT32 doesn’t offer. In addition, the 4GB individual file size limit of FAT32 may be an issue. In this case, an ext3 format may be what you want. If you use a Linux filesystem on a removable drive, remember that file permissions may be maintained. If the USB drive is later used on multiple systems that don’t have the same usernames, expect to use root to manually change the ownership and group information.…

OUR EXPERT Dr Sinitsyn is a lapsed KDE committer. He likes building Linux clouds and writing articles. Back at the start of January, a group of security researchers disclosed several side-channel attacks against the majority of x86 processors produced over the past decade. Shortly afterwards, those vulnerabilities were code-named Meltdown and Spectre. This is a relatively old story, of course, so why are we devoting page space to it here? Well, in March 2018, a small research company named CTS Labs, based in Israel, revealed multiple critical vulnerabilities in the latest AMD Zen processors. Following tradition, these vulnerabilities were codenamed Masterkey, Ryzenfall, Fallout and Chimera. The bugs come in a few varieties, and are able to put into motion a dozen attack vectors in total. AMD’s EPYC, Ryzen, Ryzen Pro…

Nftables are often seen as new-generation iptables, which is mostly true. However, things change fast in the IT world and sometimes become obsolete before they go mainstream. We don’t know if this would happen to nftables or not. But as these words are written, there’s an ongoing discussion in the Netfilter community regarding something called bpfilter. As of February 2018, the project is still in the early proof-of-concept (PoC) stage. Yet both Alexei Starovoitov, the main man behind eBPF, and David S. Miller, the Linux networking subsystem maintainer, are already on the author’s list, which suggests bpfilter isn’t a simple toy. Both nftables and eBPF implement a kernel-based virtual machine. A lot of efforts went into eBPF recently (see LXF232), which brought it features like Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation, code validation…

Here we’ll talk about the structure of a Hugo project to better understand what goes where. The archetypes directory holds files for preconfigured content types that will be used by the hugo new command. Using these files promotes consistency among your web pages. The content directory contains the content of your Hugo web site you create – this directory might have an internal structure in order to differentiate between the different types of content. The data directory is for storing configuration files. The layouts directory stores HTML files that will be used by Hugo for rendering your content into a static web site. In the static directory you can put any static files you like, including CSS, Javascript and image files. The public directory is where Hugo puts the files…

Before we begin, let’s download it from wordpress.org. Since Wordpress uses a database, we need to set up a mySQL database with a user and password. Then, we unzip the file and can rename it wordpress-multisite. We can upload it to web hosting or copy and paste it to our localhost at /var/www/html on our Linux machine. Next, open a web page in a browser that matches our folder. In this case, that would be localhost/wordpress-multisite. On a host it would be something like http://example.com/wordpress-multisite. Follow the instructions, such as adding our database name, username and password. The default prefix is wp_ but we can change it. On a home server we may need to edit wp-config-sample.php and add the database name, username and password and save it as wp-config.php…

The battle between Google and Oracle over whether Google used Oracle’s intellectual property when using Java to build the Android platform has added a new chapter to the sorry tale, with an appeals court recently siding with Oracle. If you’ve missed this back and forth over the past eight years, Oracle claims that Google’s Android operating system infringes on two patents that relate to its Java language, while Google maintains that it should have been able to use Java for free considering that the 11,500 lines of code that are claimed to have been copied are insignificant compared to the millions of lines of code that makes up Android. In 2012 a jury decided that Java isn’t protected under copyright law, but in 2014 an appeals court rejected that decision,…

“Launched by Haivision in 2017, and freely available on GitHub via the Mozilla Public License 2.0, SRT is an innovative UDPbased protocol enabling high-quality, low-latency video streaming across unpredictable networks. With secure, end-to-end AES encryption, optimised packet retransmission and controllable buffering, SRT leverages the best of IP standard attributes while maintaining compatibility to traditional UDP-based broadcast and streaming workflows. Its main purpose is to send live TV streams across the internet, for example, to upload to streaming services as a low latency RTMP replacement. While an SRT Alliance was also formed to support its implementation, the open source nature of SRT played a key role in driving its adoption in both the community and end users. Thanks to collaborative development, initial support for SRT has already made its way into…

While Valve is having trouble shifting its compact Linux-toting PCs (see above), Linux Mint has had more success with the Mintbox Mini, and it has now revealed the Minitbox Mini 2, available to buy in June. This new version ditches the AMD A4 Micro-6400T processor for an Intel Celeron J3455, which brings a four-fold increase in performance, and over twice the performance of the Mintbox Mini Pro. It also gets 802.11ac wireless support, Bluetooth and a new fanless design for £211, which is only $4 more than the original. There’s also a Mini Pro 2, which comes with 8GB RAM and a 120GB SSD, which will go on sale for £207. You can find out more about the device at http://bit.ly/mintbox-mini-2.…

“Last month, The Linux Foundation announced the launch of the LF Deep Learning Foundation, an umbrella organisation that will support and sustain open source projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. The community is working to make these critical new technologies available to users and data scientists everywhere, including through a marketplace for building, combining and sharing models. The initial project of LF Deep Learning is the Acumos AI Project, a comprehensive platform for AI model discovery, development and sharing. More projects around AI, ML and DL have been proposed and the community is working to evaluate them. LF Deep Learning Foundation is being supported by members including Amdocs, AT&T, B.Yond, Baidu, Huawei, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, Tencent, Univa and ZTE. With their support the community has access to…

FIND AND JOIN A LUG Alpinux, le LUG de Savoie Meets on the first and third Thursday of the month at the Maison des Associations de Chambéry, France. www.alpinux.org Build Brighton Thursday evenings is open night. www.buildbrighton.com Sandbox Sandbox Digital, 5 Brasenose Road, Liverpool L20 8HL. Open maker night is Tuesday 6-9. Kids clubs are Monday (six to eight years) and Wednesday (eight to 12 years). www.sandboxdigital.co.uk Leeds Hackspace Open night every Tuesday 7pm-late, open day second Saturday of the month, 11am-4pm. www.leedshackspace.org.uk Horsham Raspberry Jam Park side, Chart Way, Horsham. www.facebook.com/hackhorsham rLab Reading Hackspace Unit C1, Weldale Street, Reading. Open sessions held on Wednesdays from 7pm. http://rlab.org.uk Huddersfield Raspberry Jam Meet every month at Huddersfield Library, typically the fourth Saturday of each month. www.huddersfieldraspberryjam.co.uk Medway Makers 12 Dunlin Drive, St…

Q I have an embarrassing problem. When I use LibreOffice in KDE Plasma, spell checking doesn’t work. At first I thought this was just my impeccable spelling, but colleagues started laughing at my work. Obviously, incorrectly spelt words are not underlined, and when I invoke the check manually it just says “The spelling check is complete”, oblivious to my errors. If I dig around in the options, I can see some dictionaries installed, but in the actual Spelling dialog, the Text Language drop-down is blank. I’m using Arch, and have installed what I assume are all the required packages – hunspell, hunspell-en and hunspell-en_GB – but to no effect. I know I have my system locale set up correctly (via /etc/locale.conf), which is confirmed when I run localectl on a…

Unlike the other CMSs that enable you to log in to the administrator account like any other user, for CMS Made Simple and Exponent CMS, you must manually point the browser to http://127.0.0.1/sitename/admin or http://127.0.0.1/sitename/login.php respectively if you wish to log in to the site. With the exception of Drupal, all the CMSs volunteer to create sample content during installation, which option makes it easy to assess the different themes offered out of the box. In addition to nine different designs that are offered out of the box, with CMS Made Simple you can even download more user contributed themes, some of which are sold commercially. Do note however that these are untested and the project makes no guarantees about these third-party offerings. Each theme comprises many different elements, called…

There are also a great selection of Gnome extensions that provide new functionality. Only two small hurdles need to be overcome before you can avail yourself of them. Gnome extensions are installed via the https://extensions.gnome.org website. Before you can use this (as the website tells you) you’ll need two things: a ‘native host messaging application’ and a browser extension. The former is found in the chrome-gnome-shell package available from the software application and the latter can be found by following the ‘Click here to install browser extension’ link. Now a whole world of extensions awaits you. One of the most popular, you’ll note, is User Themes, which enables you to use themes from sites such as https://gnome-look.org, by extracting them to the ~/.themes directory. Once that’s done you can select…

LXF: So you started Enonic in the dotcom crash, right? But you had a good idea, unlike a lot of companies who were just putting the word “Internet” into wonkybusiness plans. TS: Yup, we started in summer 2000 and one month later the whole world fell down. We went straight into platforming, which isn’t the easiest thing to do. In a way we were lucky, because we were thinking, “Let’s make things dead simple to use”, so we wanted to make a CMS so simple that anyone can use it. We had to give users form-based input, and to present this requires quite extensive coding. It turns out that no small company wanted to invest in this level of coding, but the big companies wanted this, and since we were…

To help understand how quantum computers work, there are a large number of simulators. There’s no way that you can simulate one efficiently, but if you want to understand the underlying principles then many of these are excellent. The first one that’s worth exploring is a Bloch sphere simulator. Without having at least a rudimentary understanding of the Bloch sphere, you’ll have trouble understanding what the gates do. Learn more about it at : http://eecs.ceas.uc.edu/~cahaymm/blochsphere. There are many more simulators – most of them are the results of Ph.D. thesis work. For that reason, most of them are not active, only good starts. The few mentioned here are useful for self-education. The JQuantum simulator looks and behaves like a quantum score. Using it is a little cumbersome, but if you’re…

It’s a weird joy when someone says “Raspberry Pi? Never heard of it”. You get to show them what’s possible, what people are doing, all the projects, the joy. It’s rare to find someone who can’t suddenly see a way it can make a positive difference. From simple servers, old-skool arcade machines and media centres to providing education and science where it’s needed most, but hasn’t been delivered before because it was too hard or too expensive. But hey, not everyone learns the way you do, or may like the way you do things. That’s okay, because somewhere in the fluffy clouds of the Raspberry Pi community are 10 people doing things 10 different ways, just itching to tell people all about the things they can make and how to…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is a freelance maker who works with organisations such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote maker skills. You can find his blog at www.bigl.es. YOU NEED An Arduino Uno or compatible Any model of Raspberry Pi with the latest Raspbian OS A TMP36 sensor breadboard Three male-to-male jumper wires All of the code and a diagram can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/LXF 237-serial-project The Arduino and Raspberry Pi are fantastic machines, and here we’ll be using an Arduino to read a TMP36 temperature sensor. We’ll send the data via a USB serial connection to a Raspberry Pi running Python code that will read and interpret the data, then act upon it. This project will show that the two machines can co-exist, and…

It all sounds so simple, and if you’re lucky you’ll get to play a number of games before coming across one that doesn’t appear to work. Start by visiting http://bit.ly/hatari-compat for a non-exhaustive list of ST programs that are known to cause problems. Failing that, check the website you downloaded the disk from to see if there’s any specific configuration you should use. If you’re running an older game, try switching to ST mode with TOS 1.02 for compatibility purposes. Avoid allocating more than 2MB of RAM to your virtual ST, because timing issues can cause problems, too. 1MB should be ample for most games. Some games may require a NTSC (US English) TOS rather than the default PAL (UK English) TOS you’ve downloaded – simply swap them out and…

OUR EXPERT Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch Linux user. He’s always on the look-out for geeky memorabilia. One of the reasons for the soaring popularity of Unix back in the day was its rock-solid design philosophy, which comprises a set of rules that shaped how Unix and its myriad tools were developed. Among these principles is one that continues to inspire budding developers: do one thing and do it well. As stated, the idea was to create tools and utilities that provided a single useful functionality, but did it well. Many of the popular command-line tools used routinely by Linux users are all descendants of the original tools written for Unix based on this design principle. Taking a cue from the simplicity and…

lt took a lot of convincing for a lethargic Mayank Sharma to power down his virtual machines and learn to virtualise apps instead. OUR EXPERT Mayank Sharma is a technical author who spends much of his time playing Linux games like there’s no tomorrow. Even if you’re totally disconnected with the realm of mortal beings, you’d still surely have heard of Docker and how it can solve all your IT problems. If you have somehow managed to isolate yourself from experiencing the fruits of Docker’s goodness, here’s your chance to absolve yourself. Traditional virtualisation technologies provide full hardware virtualisation. This is to say that the virtual machine or hypervisor takes chunks of physical resources such as CPU, storage, RAM and then slices them into virtual versions like virtual CPUs and…

Command............................ What it does FROM ................................... Specify the base image RUN ...................................... Used to execute a command during the build process CMD...................................... Executes a command within the container WORKDIR ............................ Sets the path where the command, defined with CMD, is to be executed ADD ...................................... Copy a file from the host machine to the new docker image ENTRYPOINT...................... Default command that’ll be executed whenever a container is created with the image ENV....................................... Defines environment variables EXPOSE ............................... Exposes a specific port between the container and the outside world USER .................................... Sets the user or UID for the container created with the image VOLUME............................... Enable the container to access a directory on the host machine MAINTAINER....................... The name of the image maintainer…

With EncFS running, instead of having Syncthing do the aggregation, you can aggregate files onto the bridge computer clear text directory manually. Just be sure EncFS is running first to “catch” them. For example, you can push files to the bridge computer using an rsync bash script under Linux, on a Mac, or the Windows 10 bash shell: set -x ssh pi@10.0.0.113 test -f /home/pi/cleartextfiles/_encfs-is-mounted && rsync -rltv --delete-after ~/Documents/$1pi@10.0.0.113:cleartextfiles/Documents The set command is optional; it simply enables you to monitor in the terminal window any bash commands that execute. The second line uses the bash AND function (&&). The left side ssh command executes to test if a semaphore file (_encfs-is-mounted) is present in the desired folder (analagous to the syncthing .stfolder at the sync root level). This ensures…

Have you ever heard about the DevOps thing? I bet you did. Not because it’s something great or particularly bad. I’m seeing this word in every second mailing list I’m subscribed to. Does it mean that Administeria shouldn’t take on administering things anymore? That’s a good question. The world around us is changing, and the IT landscape is changing particularly fast. Many if not all jobs have become multifunction, so why should developers and system administrators be an exception? I agree that developing software and making it run smoothly in production implies a slightly different mindset. But I don’t see why you can’t combine these mindsets in a single person. Take a systems administrator and teach them some software development patterns. Take your backend developer and tell them what load…

Nftables may look sweet, but as an administrator, you probably have a lot of config scripts that use iptables. And as a good administrator, you’re unlikely to move to something new if it means you’ll have to rewrite everything from scratch. Those are valid concerns, and nftables comes with a migration path for those running xtables firewall. The latter is just a smart way to say “iptables, ip6tables and ebtables” in one word, so if you use any if these, congratulations – they’ve got you covered. Nftables approaches the migration from two angles. The one is rule translation, and you can apply it to the whole rulesets such as those generated with iptables-save, or single rules. The latter is a good way to learn nftables by example: you feed in…

Version: 1.0 Web: https://github.com/naraesk/krunner-translator You may be surprised to know that the number of standalone translation applications is limited. Even if we’re talking about a front-end to some well-known public services such as Google, Yandex or Baidu, there are only a few decent programs that we can recommend with any degree of confidence. One of them is KRunner-translator, a Plasma 5 extension that adds an extra feature to your KDE Plasma desktop. The KRunner aspect is a virtual Swiss Army knife, whose many powerful capabilities are hidden under a simple search bar (access this by pressing Alt+F2). KRunner can search files, places, browser history, switch user sessions, calculate numbers and more thanks to its straightforward plug-in nature. KRunnertranslator adds language translation capabilities, which work well in case you need to…

OUR EXPERT Mihalis Tsoukalos is a technical author, a UNIX administrator, a programmer and a mathematician. He is the author of Go Systems Programming and is writing Mastering Go. Go is a popular systems programming language that can be used for much more than simply working with systems software. One such example is Hugo. The official description of Hugo is that it’s a configurable static site generator. It can help you develop a web site that’s composed of static files without the need to have a database in place or other types of resources that are used when creating dynamic web pages. Go Go, Golang So, Hugo is a tool written in Go that enables you to create web sites which are composed of static files. Although Hugo is written…

OUR EXPERT Kent Elchuk is a full-time web developer and Linux enthusiast whose spare time includes programming and hydroponic food production. The purpose of this tutorial is to guide you through the process of using the Wordpress feature known as multisite. First, let’s make sure we know what that is. A Wordpress multisite is an aspect of Wordpress that enables you to run multiple Wordpress sites all on a single installation using a single database. Think of it as various sites located in subdomains or subfolders. We can log into a site at cat.example.com and dogs.example.com and manage them separately as if they were separate installations. Multisites have many possibilities for usage: imagine a website with various categories and locations. A multisite will enable the admin to make it unique…

The transition from Windows or MacOS to the initially mysterious yet eventually fulfilling world of Linux can be a difficult one, as can choosing the best distribution for it. Creating a distro for that situation is even more fraught with obstacles. Allow me to explain… I think we’re all agreed that there’s no point in a distro trying to pretend it’s something it isn’t. Linux and Windows are fundamentally different computing beasts and a new user has to come to terms with that. Equally, there’s no point in trying to make a distro behave like a Windows clone because that would be a dead end. The user still doesn’t know Linux, except to think that it’s like Windows, and would have just as much of a shock trying any other…