Linux Format -julkaisun Summer 2022 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 has been released. Not only is it an updated version of AMD’s upscaling technology that can help improve game performance even on older graphics cards, but the company has also published the source code on GitHub as open source (https://bit.ly/lxf292amdfsr2). While we’re always pleased to see companies share their source code, this is a canny move by AMD. It puts a dividing line between FidelityFX Super Resolution and the rival DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) from Nvidia, with AMD getting kudos from the open source community and gamers alike, who may be annoyed at Nvidia’s proprietary technology. The latter also promises to improve game performance by upscaling a lower resolution image to make it appear to run at higher resolutions, without the high hardware demands.…

M ozilla has announced a new version of its open source desktop email client, Thunderbird (see https://bit.ly/ lxf292thunderbird). As the release announcement from Jason Evangelho states, “Thunderbird 102 is loaded with highly-requested features, and we think you’ll be delighted by them.” The user interface has had a big refresh with new icons, colour folders and improved headers, along with a totally new Address Book. According to Evangelho, this is the first step to modernising the entirety of Thunderbird’s UI, with a clean design and compatibility with vCards, which is the industry standard for contacts. This should make importing contacts from other programs and services a lot easier.…

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. Low profile latency I recently noticed that, when upgrading my Ubuntu machine with the latest Linux kernel, you no longer have the low-latency option. I believe kernel 5.16.11 is the last kernel where you got to choose between the generic and low-latency kernel (see https://kernel. ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.16.11). I can’t find anything about this – do you know why this option disappeared? Koen Rousseau Neil says… Oddly, back when you emailed, this blog on industrial use for low-latency kernel does suggest Jammy 22.04 support: https://ubuntu.com/blog/industrialembedded-systems-iii. Then at the start of June this blog appeared saying the RT kernel…

SPECS Socket: Socket V LGA1700 Process: Intel 7 10nm Cores (P+E): 4+0 Threads: Eight P-cache: 5MB L2, 12MB L3 P-core: 3.3GHz (4.4GHz boost) Unlocked: No GPU: UHD Graphics 730, 24 EU, 300MHz, OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.1 Mem max: 128GB, No ECC, two-channel Mem speed: DDR5 4800MT/s, DDR4 3200MT/s PCIe: v5 16-lanes, v4 four-lanes Peak Base Power: 60W Max. Turbo Power: 89W I ntel’s four-core eight-thread Core i3-12100 comes with a highly competitive £129 price tag that easily helps us brand this as the best budget CPU of 2022 so far. Not to mention that the chip also comes in the option of a £99 F-series with deactivated graphics. Ever since AMD’s Ryzen 3300X arrived in 2020 the sub-£200 processor market has been left lacklustre at best. AMD’s cheapest Zen-3 CPU…

IN BRIEF EasyOS is heavily influenced by PuppyOS, another lightweight distribution with which it shares much technology. It’s intended to provide full desktop computer facilities on limited hardware. It’s certainly an eccentric distribution in terms of how it works. And yet, if you can get past these eccentricities, it’s a highly viable option for reviving older systems or as an emergency portable setup on a flash drive. SPECS CPU: 64-bit processor of around 1GHz Memory: 1GB of RAM E asyOS is a lightweight distribution that can provide a useful Linux desktop on PCs with limited resources. As well as being useful in that regard, its inner workings are, in many areas, different to the majority of Linux distributions. This bucking of convention begins with the install procedure, in that there…

T he main input tool of all these packages is the pen. Drawing freehand lines is the foundation of artistic freedom and expression of thought. The actual shape of the line comes second. Using black, solid lines is enough when all you want to do is to write or mark sections. Simple graphs – including charts – don’t need anything else, either. With that being said, lines that look more like charcoal marks or the ability to create circles and squares are welcome features, but when you present ideas, they need to be simple and clear. OpenBoard provides a range of tools that you can use for visualising your ideas. You can even create your own if you have some JavaScript experience. The application also sports a web browser and…

T he programs in this Roundup have one thing in common: they all support freehand drawing. How advanced they are depends mostly on maturity, but also on the goals of the project. OpenBoard’s developers clearly aim to support the teaching community, because its features include a host of educational tools. Other programs are small and nimble – useful for taking notes and getting started on projects. Other features you might be looking for include the LaTeX editor that’s built into Xournal++. For the more artistic, you can start with the simpler options and then export your work in your favourite format to continue in a more advanced drawing program. Make sure the whiteboard program’s export options meet your expectations if you choose to go down this route. If you’re teaching…

W hen giving a presentation, LibreOffice Impress would likely be your first choice. However, the fact that pre-prepared slides are necessary makes it unsuitable for certain settings. You’ll have difficulties if you want to change slides during a presentation. In contrast, these whiteboard programs enable you to draw objects as you go through your presentation. You can also use them to lead the discussion or add ideas on the fly. None of these solutions have multi-user capability, though. With all that in mind, you should know that for education, OpenBoard outshines them all. This comes as no surprise when you realise that the project’s origin is from educational institutions in France. With the earlier mentioned “interactives”, you can show all the objects you need in OpenBoard. If you want to…

P orting the X Windows System from (various flavours of) Unix to Linux was in some ways key to its success. A GUI, no matter how primitive, enables richer applications to be developed and richer content to be produced. In the mid-90s the only displays users needed to worry about were CRT monitors. Y’know, those heavy, retina-burning monsters whose depth was at least that of their screen’s diagonal. These work by sweeping a beam (okay, three beams if you want colour) of electrons back and forth with a given frequency, and then up and down with a slightly lesser frequency. These are the horizontal and vertical scan rates Even in this lawless era (which tolerated such atrocities as Chris Evans on The Big Breakfast) there were standards, one such being…

F or a long time, users of middle-aged Intel hardware were stuck using the venerable i965 Mesa driver. This caters to a range of hardware, from Broadwater (2006) to the HD and Iris graphics found in some Skylake chips (2015). For older hardware there’s the i915 Mesa driver, not that such hardware had much in the way of 3D capability. Newer, so-called Gen8 graphics and above (from Broadwell through to the latest Xe graphics) is supported by the Iris Gallium3D driver. The i965 (and i915) driver dates back to before the Gallium framework was developed, and throughout last year there were calls to retire it. However, Mesa aren’t in the habit of mass-scale hardware abandonment, so until a replacement was finalised, i965, and other ‘classic’ Mesa drivers were granted a…

Credit: https://kno.wled.ge T his month we’ll be looking at the WLED firmware and what it’s used for. We’ll be building a project that features LEDs being controlled via a web interface and home automation software. We’ll also discover ways to make the lights react to music. This type of LED are commonly known as NeoPixels. They’re strung together and are usually multicoloured and can be addressed individually. Versions of the LEDs are available that take different input voltages and they can all be controlled in the same way. NeoPixel is the name given to this style of LEDs by Adafruit (that offers a wide- -range of models), but the same driver is used for a large number of them (WS2811/WS2812), whoever the manufacturer or supplier happens to be. Models are…

Version: 6.1.0 Web:https:// mhogomchungu.github.io/zuluCrypt/ The only reliable mechanism to keep your personal data to yourself is to encrypt it. Sure, working with encrypted data is an involved process, but zuluCrypt will simplify the process to a large extent, and help you reinforce the security of your data. While you can find zuluCrypt in the repositories of some Linux distros, such as Fedora, and Ubuntu, the project suggests that you skip these and instead use pre-compiled binaries from its downloads page. zuluCrypt has both a graphical and a command-line instance. The graphical instance has an intuitive, easyto-follow interface. Using the application you can also create an encrypted disk within a file, a partition and even USB disks. It can also encrypt individual files with the command line tool GnuPG. zuluCrypt can…

Version: 0.9.9.5 Web: https:// converseen.fasterland.net Those readers who’ve worked with images, whether professionally or just sorting through holiday photos, will know that a lot of imageprocessing work is monotonous. It involves repeatedly converting, resizing and rotating images to make them suitable for print or for passing around. Although you can use virtually any image viewing or editing tool, from GIMP to digiKam for this task, you’ll save yourself a lot of hassle by employing a dedicated batch conversion tool such as Converseen. Converseen is a straightforward front-end to the various command-line conversion utilities that are bundled as part of the ImageMagick suite. You can use the tool to convert images to and from over 100 formats, rotate and flip them, change their dimensions, and rename them in a fraction of…

Version: 2.1.0 Web: https://github.com/jubalh/nudoku Nudoku is a ncurses-based Sudoku game, which challenges you to place numbers one to nine within grids of various sizes. You’ll find it in the official repos of most distros and most users can install it with either sudo apt install nudoku on Ubuntu or sudo dnf install nudoku on Fedora. Once installed you fire it up with the nudoku command. You can use the arrow keys to move between cells and use the numeric keys to enter a number in a blank cell. Besides these, the game also has a number of shortcut keys. For instance, you can press the C key after entering a number to validate your answer. In the same vein, pressing H prints a hint by putting a number in one…

Version: 1.8.0 Web: https://github.com/ tchx84/flatseal Flatseal is a GUI utility that enables you to review and tweak the permissions given to all Flatpak programs that you use. Flatpak programs use two different permissions models. Static permissions are those that are set by the developers while building the program, while Dynamic permissions are granted by the users when they run the application. Both of these permissions can be modified by the users. However, you’ll have to get down to the terminal to tweak them. With Flatseal you’re able to tweak the permissions, but from the comforts of a graphical tool. Unsurprisingly, Flatseal is available as a Flatpak. You can install it with: $ flatpak install flathub com.github.tchx84.Flatseal  $ flatpak run com.github.tchx84.Flatseal Flatseal has an intuitive interface that displays all the Flatpaks…

T he Gnome project has just received a helping hand thanks to funding from what some people may consider a rather surprising source – Microsoft. The company’s Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund), which on its GitHub page (https://bit.ly/lxf292msfossfund) says “provides a direct way for Microsoft engineers to participate in the nomination and selection process to help communities and projects they are passionate about.” A prize of $10,000 in sponsorship is awarded to projects that are selected by Microsoft, and the 20th fund, for May 2022, has been given to Gnome. Microsoft states that “rom low-level libs over the window manager to end user applications the GNOME project is an essential part of many graphical Linux devices. It also powers Ubuntu which is the first Linux work environment supported…

Amiberry corrections As the author of Amiberry, I noticed a few inaccuracies in your LXF290 review, that I’d love to help you address, if you’re interested. For example, Amiberry doesn’t require the FKMS driver – it works just fine with the default KMS one as well. For the Raspberry Pi platform specifically, Amiberry comes in separate versions: pure SDL2 (using whatever back-end is available, like X11 or KMSDRM) or Dispmanx (which is considered obsolete, requires FKMS, lacks some features but still offers decent speed). It’s only if you want to use the Dispmanx version, that you’ll need the FKMS driver enabled – and that’s a limitation of Dispmanx itself, not Amiberry (it applies to all applications using that framework). Another detail you may not know about, is that the A500…

IN BRIEF GeckoLinux sits on top of openSUSE Linux. This gives it a strong underpinning in terms of administrative tools and reliability along with extensive documentation. The variety of editions is a boon. It’s preconfigured and set up to be easy to install and use. Maybe it can tempt some of the Ubuntu crowd over to the world of SUSE? SPECS CPU: 64-bit Memory: 2GB Builds: 64-bit only Static: yearly cycle (six desktops) Rolling: rolling release (nine desktops) G eckoLinux is based on openSUSE Linux, and it offers a good selection of editions. There are six ‘Static’ editions with different desktop environments based on the current ‘Leap’ edition of openSUSE, which has a roughly yearly update cycle. There are also nine different editions that are tied to the Tumbleweed openSUSE…

SPECS Minimum OS: Ubuntu 18.04 CPU: Intel Core i5 760, AMD Athlon II X4 645 Memory: 4GB HDD: 3GB GPU: GeForceGTX 550 Ti, 1GB Vram, Radeon HD 6850 1GB Vram Recommended CPU: Intel Core i5 3470, AMD FX 4350 Memory: 8GB GPU: GeForce GTX 1050 2GB Vram, Radeon RX 460 4GB Vram I nscryption turns board game night into a nightmare, trapping you in a spooky cabin where you’re forced to play a deckbuilder. Its villain is a shadowy figure who patiently waits at the table for the game to start. Though you have to play, under pain of death, you can also get up and stretch your legs. There are shelves of trinkets on the walls, a skull, a safe, a cuckoo clock. They’re puzzles to solve as part…

T he manner in how your software integrates with your system depends on your package manager. Yet in the case of applications such as your whiteboard software you may want it packaged differently. Most of the programs in this Roundup are cross-platform, which gives you the opportunity to run your favourite on all platforms. For this reason, you may appreciate Appimage, Flatpak or even a binary based on something else. You have options for all of this, though it shouldn’t be the main reason for choosing a particular application. In an ordinary installation of Linux, there’s support for the three main packaging systems. Choosing any of these packages will be enough to install. Only Lorien doesn’t come with any of the known packages. Instead they’ve created a binary containing the…

Y our own scribbles are a good way to start organising your thoughts, but they’re not always helpful when trying to teach others. In many subjects, using tools to show what happens in reality works best. You may want to show how a scale works, and so an animation that shows a scale working would be useful when it comes to visualising objects. OpenBoard excels at such tasks because it comes with a large pre-installed selection of modules with its regular install. You can also add pictures, video and, if you have the skills, your own “interactives”. To make your own there’s a JavaScript library you can use to create both graphical tools and quizzes. An entire test can be made using these elements, and there are many included examples…

W hen starting using whiteboard software, you’ll probably begin by using it for taking notes. This means you’ll find even the simplest choice here adequate. Once you want to start annotating documents, you run into limitations using the simplest of tools. Not all support importing PDFs, which you’ll need when going through reports. Mind you, with Rnote, you already have that and it’s still in early development. Rainbow and Lorien lack this support, so will only be of interest to people who also want to contribute and have their own way. Because of its many features and strength at teaching, we have a clear winner: OpenBoard. Developed by a university for the teaching staff, it has many contributors who teach and learn. They also use it in their own teaching,…

T he first consumer 3D graphics cards appeared under 3DFX’s “Voodoo” branding in late 1996. These were add-in cards that still required a regular video card (or chip) to display 2D scenes. But they enabled games like Tomb Raider, Descent, Grand Theft Auto and Unreal to use 3DFX’s proprietary Glide API and render things (well, some things) much faster than software rendering. A number of other proprietary 3D graphics APIs appeared around this time, including the S3 3D Engine (used in Virge cards), the Nvidia Multimedia Library, the Creative 3D Library (used in Blaster 3D devices) and the even more imaginatively titled ATI 3D C Interface (for 3D Rage hardware). Silicon Graphics, makers of expensive workstations, also had a proprietary API, in the form of IRIS GL. This could do…

T here are some great tools for probing, tweaking and otherwise tinkering with GPU on Linux. Most of these are vendor-specific. Intel provide a number of utilities via the intel-gputools package. Once installed you can run $ sudo intel_gpu_top to see how busy your GPU is, how much power it’s using, whether hardware video codecs are in use and more. It’s also handy if you get confused about which ‘Gen’ your graphics are. If only we’d known about it two pages back… INTEL MIXES THINGS UP “The release of the more powerful Alchemist cards might end two decades of the AMD/Nvidia duopoly.” AMD’s Catalyst Control Centre on Windows enables you to overclock your GPU and its memory, as well as tweak fan profiles. Corectrl on Linux makes it possible to…

W ith a surprise June 2022 release, we see a new Raspberry Pi Pico W – correcting one of the original’s omissions – this $6 microcontroller looks much like its predecessor, but under a tiny silver case lies a Wi-Fi chip that takes the Pico into the world of IoT. It may not be the first RP2040 board to offer Wi-Fi – but we’re sure that the Raspberry Pi Pico W is going to go straight on to our list of best RP2040 boards. There isn’t really much difference between the original Pi Pico and the new Pico W. There’s the same GPIO, microUSB port, dimensions and SoC. The only difference is the inclusion of Infineon’s CYW43439 2.4GHz Wi-Fi chip. Looking at Infineon’s datasheet for this chip, we spotted that…

Ahuge number of readers, we reckon, will fondly look back on the Commodore Amiga 500. Sure, some may remember further back, to the C64s, Spectrum or even the BBC Micro. But the A500, especially when viewed through the roseate lens of nostalgia, was truly a marvel. Around £300 in 1992 would get you one of these state-of-theart machines, and you’d be able to enjoy great games from The Bitmap Brothers, Gremlin Interactive, Team17 and other great British software houses. Thirty years hence, and no machine (the Deli’s free coffee machine?–ED) has ever made us at LXF Towers so happy. But that’s no matter, because while our younger colleagues discuss memes and web3 on social media platforms that make no sense to us, we can content ourselves with using our new-fangled…

Version: 1.0.68 Web: https://github. com/aristocratos/bpytop Think of bpytop as a super-charged version of the top utility for monitoring the resources on your computer. The CLI utility helps gauge and identify processes that are hogging the resources on your computer. bpytop is written in Python, and in addition to working on Linux, is also available for macOS. You’ll need Python 3, version 3.6 or later, and the psutil module installed on your system for bpytop to work without problems. There are various ways of installing the utility. For instance, you can install it using pip3, the package installer for Python, with: $ sudo pip3 install bpytop The tool is also offered as a Snap package. Ubuntu from version 16.04 LTS already ships with Snap support. If you use another distro such…

Version: 4.1.1 Web: https://fukuchi.org/ works/qrencode Most of us use QR codes on a daily basis (do I?–Ed), and more often than not for making payments. However, these nifty codes can do a lot more. You can, for instance, use QR codes to take users to a website, share your visiting cards and more. Qrencode is a Linux utility that helps you generate custom QR codes without much effort. It’s available in the official repos of most distros so you can just grab it with either sudo apt install qrencode on Ubuntu or sudo dnf install qrencode on Fedora. Qrencode is a CLI utility that takes a few arguments and spits out the appropriate QR code. Take, for instance, this command: $ qrencode -s 9 -l H -o “lxf.png” “https://www. linuxformat.com”…

Version: 96.2 Web: https://powdertoy.co.uk The Powder Toy is a free physics sandbox game, whose description will never be able to do justice to its awesomeness. You can use The Powder Toy to simulate interaction between gravity, air, pressure, heat and various substances. Installing the program is fairly simple. Just grab and extract its compressed binary, and you’re good to go: $ wget -c https://powdertoy.co.uk/Download/ powder-lin64.zip $ unzip powder-lin64.zip -d powder $ cd powder # ./powder The Powder Toy’s interface looks rather busy for a game. On the right side, you have a toolbar that enables you to select various substance types. There are solids, liquids, gases, explosives, elements and more. The actual list of materials for the select substance type, appears at the bottom. For instance, under liquid you’ll get…

Newsdesk THIS ISSUE: Unix commits archived AMD takes upscaling tech open source Linux on HP laptops Microsoft supports Gnome U nix is the operating system standard that Linux is based on, and it’s been around for a long time. If you want a glimpse of computing history, or you’re feeling nostalgic (and want to feel old) then a project on GitHub has collected every Unix commit since 1970 until today – and you can view it at https://bit.ly/lxf292unixhistory. As you can imagine, it’s a fascinating look at how the operating system evolved, “from its inception in 1970 as a 2.5 thousand-line kernel and 26 commands, to 2018 as a widely used, 30-million line system,” as the project’s GitHub page explains. The repository weighs in at 1.5GB, and contains half a…

After being abandoned by Canonical, Ubuntu UbuntuTouchwastakenonby UBports, and the latest version, Ubuntu Touch OTA-23, has been released. Supported handsets, such as the Google Pixel 3a and OnePlus 6, will be able to install the mobile OS, which offers privacy and freedom to its users. Ubuntu Touch, like the previous version, is based on Ubuntu 16.04, but there’s some big updates. FM radios in supported handsets is now included, though it’s in its early stages; the Messaging App is now improved; and support for wireless displays has also been fixed. See https://bit.ly/lxf292ubuntutouch.…

IN BRIEF A well-polished product in Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) space. We appreciate that the first 10GB of storage is free, and that the storage costs undercut many competitors. The good documentation is a plus; however, we have concerns that there’s no direct phone support, and the hours are limited for a online chat interaction. B ackblaze, which started in a small Palo Alto apartment, has seven co-founders that have worked together since 2007, first founding their cloud backup offering, and then in 2015 its B2 Cloud Storage offering. Because it’s an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), this latter product targets software integration for the business market. Backblaze B2 has a simple pricing model. While there’s no free trial period, the offer of 10GB of free storage without a…

IN BRIEF MakuluLinux has a bold and brassy appearance. It has a fastchange theme selection tool that can greatly alter the layout, all the way from a modern icon bar dock to something more conventional. Gamers will appreciate the built-in media and gaming support. Underneath it all, it’s based on Ubuntu and Debian, giving it a good foundation. SPECS CPU: 64 bit only Memory: 2GB RAM (minimum) Builds: Shift – the standard build Shift Pro – apremium (paid for) version Droid – with Android app compatibility M akuluLinux Shift edition uses parts of Ubuntu and Debian Testing as its base, and it’s a rolling release. Expect a bit of extra visual glamour at every stage of its use, and this includes booting into the live ISO, where you’re greeted with…

T he primary purpose for the majority of the applications in this month’s Roundup is to take notes, either for teaching purposes or to help develop new projects. As such, it’s crucial that you can move your work files over to other applications where necessary. For example, if you have the basic idea for a logo after working up the basic shapes in the whiteboard software, you could then refine it in Inkscape. The best file format for this is, of course, SVG while PDF is a better format for sending documents for review and comment. If you want to add your results to other graphical projects in GIMP or Krita, then PNG and JPG export options are useful. Exporting to PNG is universally supported; however, SVG is lacking in…

O ne thing we advise you do when choosing your whiteboard software is consider the level of development that’s taken place and how much is going on right now. In this group, some applications are early in development, while others are old and forks of forks, which is all part of the beauty of free and open source software. Usually, you can still use the software that’s no longer actively maintained, but you may run into problems and have no one to turn to for help. That’s why it’s much better to check your package before you get used to it. To keep up to date with dev activity, you can go to their repository. In this case, they’re all on GitHub. The Insights pages are a good indicator of…

Graphics on Linux is complicated. On Windows, you have one driver model and one graphics API (DirectX… okay there are multiple versions, and subsets such as Direct2D). On Linux we’ve lost count. And it’s always been tricky, as anyone who’s tried to run X11 in 2000 will testify. Efforts have been made to simplify things, and in a way they are. AMD and Intel cards, thanks to open source drivers, will generally work out of the box on most desktop distributions. Even hardware requiring Nvidia’s proprietary drivers will work automagically in Ubuntu and Fedora. In future this driver will be free, too. Until then the open source Nouveau driver continues to improve, and (thanks to Nvidia finally releasing signed firmware) should provide much-improved performance for newer cards. However, there’s more…

OpenGL remains the biggest API supported by Mesa today, but it’s far from the only one. There’s its embedded equivalent, OpenGL ES, OpenVG (for 2D vector graphics), EGL (used by Wayland to get its buffers on to a screen) as well as GLX (which isn’t needed on Wayland). You may be surprised to hear that Mesa has supported Direct3D 9 since 2015. Strange but true – it’s what provided Wine’s original DirectX 9 support, before Vulkan came along. Vulkan, also under the auspices of Khronos, is a new ‘closer to the metal’ graphics API designed to provide programmers with ultimate flexibility. DirectX 12 also followed similar, low-level design ideas, and as such it’s much easier to translate between the two. Unlike the situation with OpenGL and DirectX-es 10 and 11.…

W e’re lucky to live in a time when the Linux Kernel gets, on the whole, first-class hardware support, but it hasn’t always been this way. This is especially so when it came to 3D graphics support – or frankly graphic support of any kind. After Jonni’s in-depth look into the Kernel’s graphics stack and how you can tinker with it, we thought it would be useful to outline how graphics hardware has evolved alongside all those mentioned APIs – and their growing feature sets – used to access all the fancy hardware features. As you’ve already read, OpenGL sprang out of Silicon Graphics’ proprietary IRIS GL, developed over the 1980s for its own hardware and eventually running on flavours of Unix. This gave OpenGL rich hardware rendering alongside processor-based…

Linux is the result of the work of thousands of developers worldwide. It’s only right that it has support for the languages all those volunteers speak, to say nothing of its users. The multilingual question is how does open source software support not just translations for all the different languages of the world, but its different and varied alphabets alongside notations. How you represent decimal places or thousandth separators, for instance? Translation work is a vital aspect of enabling the take-up of open source software and Linux-based distros around the world. While English comprehension is often a perceived requirement for dev work, the truth is much of the world doesn’t speak English, let alone read it. So knowing how FOSS handles translations, more often called localisation, is key to growing…

Version: 1.6.0 Web: https://speek.network Speek is a privacy-focussed chat program that ferries messages via the Tor network. For added privacy, all messages sent through the application are end-to-end encrypted. The program is available as an AppImage, so grab the latest version from its website, make it an executable with chmod +x Speek*.AppImage , and then double-click the file to launch it from the file manager or use ./Speek*.AppImage from the terminal to launch the messenger. On launch, Speek will offer you the option to either bring up the client with the default settings, or tweak them with the Advanced Network Configuration option. Choosing the first option will take you directly to the messenger’s chat window, while the latter will drop you on the network settings page, where you can configure…

Version: 3.3.16 Web: https://github. com/smxi/inxi The CLI-based system information tool inxi can display all sorts of details about the hardware and software on your computer. The output of the application can be easily influenced, which makes it ideal for everyone from everyday desktop users who would be happy with broad details, to support and QA engineers who are looking for detailed information. The utility is already in your distro’s official repos, so Ubuntu users can grab it with sudo apt install inxi , while sudo dnf install inxi will install it in Fedora. Invoking the tool without any switches will display basic hardware and software details about the installation. Use the -C option to extract detailed information about the processor, such as inxi -C . For even more details, use…

Version: 2.1.5-beta Web: https://espanso.org Expanso is a powerful text expansion tool that can help you type faster by replacing your typed text with its longer equivalent. It works by analysing your typed text and compares to substitutions in its configuration file, and then make appropriate replacements when there’s a match. To get started on a Debian-based distro like Ubuntu, first download the precompiled binary: $ wget https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso/ releases/download/v2.1.5-beta/espanso-debian-x11- amd64.deb And then install it with: $ sudo apt install ./espanso-debian-x11-amd64.deb On all other distros, the project recommends using the official AppImage: $ wget -O Espanso.AppImage ‘https://github.com/ federico-terzi/espanso/releases/download/v2.1.5- beta/Espanso-X11.AppImage’ Now make it executable with chmod +x Espanso. AppImage , before registering it with sudo ./Espanso. AppImage env-path register . Before you can use it, first register Espanso with Systemd: $ espanso service…

Version: 0.5.0 Web: https://cerebroapp.com Cerebro is a comprehensive search program for Linux that enables users to search files, launch programs, look up places on maps, perform translations and a lot more. You can install the tool using its AppImage: $ wget -O cerebro.appimage ‘https://github.com/ cerebroapp/cerebro/releases/download/v0.5.0/  Cerebro-0.5.0.AppImage’ $ chmod +x cerebro.appimage On first launch, Cerebro will ask if you’d like to integrate it with your system. Doing so will integrate the program in your applications menu. Your other option is to use the appimage to bring it up. Once Cerebro is up and running, you can use the Ctrl+Space keyboard shortcut to bring up the Cerebro Search option. To get started, type settings in Cerebro Search to bring up the Cerebro Settings window. From here you can change the keyboard shortcut…