Indice dei contenuti per August 2025 in Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, The impending end of life for Windows 10 has launched a new round of calls for Windows users to adopt Linux. KDE recently made a pitch [1]. The End of 10 initiative [2] is supported by a number of open source organizations who make the case that this is a good time for Windows users to switch. The argument is that the new Windows 11 won’t run on some of the old Windows 10 hardware, and it seems like a waste to throw out a working computer just because Microsoft won’t support the OS. A topic such as this works better with facts, so here are some details. First of all, 32-bit systems won’t work at all with Windows 11, so if you’re using a 32-bit Windows 10…

It’s that time again, Linux Mint fans. You have to upgrade. Why? Because Linux Mint 20 has reached its EOL. Version 20 of the popular Linux distribution was released in June of 2020 as a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, which (in Linux Mint terms) is five years of support. Fortunately, there’s a new LTS version available that has already enjoyed its first point release. Linux Mint 22.1 (aka "Xia") comes loaded with improvements and goodies, such as a new and improved Cinnamon desktop, improved Flatpak support, better window management with multi-monitor configurations, a better default font, a switch to the PipeWire sound server, and better VirtualBox support. With version 22.2 on the horizon, you'll see Fingwit integration for fingerprint authentication and Libadwaita support for theming. Version 22 will be supported…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Attack Service Management Tools Wilhelm Greiner The tools used in attack surface management help identify attack surfaces more precisely and respond to changes in risk situations. The Resurrection of bWatch Jeff Layton Bringing back a tool from the early days of Beowulf. Web Applications with Julia Lee Phillips The technical programming language Julia is fast becoming a favorite with scientists and engineers of all stripes, but it is also well suited to form the backbone of interactive websites that explain these science and engineering concepts. A GUI for Warewulf 4 Jeff Layton Warewulf 4 beginners can use a new GUI that does everything veteran users can do from the command line.…

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 6.15 on May 25, 2025. This latest release includes some pretty important Rust integration, by way of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver, named NOVA. Written in Rust, NOVA gives the kernel significant gains on exFAT performance and a new fanotify API for enabling real-time monitoring of filesystem mount and unmount events (to make it possible for applications to instantly respond to changes). It was created for the NVIDIA RTX 2000 "Turing" series and other new GPUs. Btrfs benefits from the new kernel with real-time zstd compression levels (-15 to -1) to improve speed while maintaining compression ratios and add smarter fall-back for direct I/O with checksums (to reduce errors in virtual environments). There’s also a new zero-copy receive (zcrx) via io_uring…

Learning Developer Practices Sometimes a patch can be good, but it may still face hurdles getting into the kernel. This time, Aditya Garg posted a patch by Paul Pawlowski to add driver support for the T2 Security Chip. The T2 is an embedded system that runs alongside the primary computer with all its own hardware resources such as RAM. It responds to requests over USB from the primary system, but it also stays active even when that primary system is asleep. The T2 makes sure that upgrades to the primary system have all been properly signed. It’s a gatekeeper intended for Apple hardware, but it has various other abilities, such as controlling microphones, cameras, speech recognition, and whatnot. The T2 also has a variety of security holes, some of which are…

Since our tender youth, my buddies and I have been huge fans of local co-op games. We still are, however – even though independent game options have greatly improved – the problem of how to get all the hardware to work on a regular laptop running Linux remains. And as customers have seen ever-expanding options for games and consoles, a need has arisen for a common starting ground. ChimeraOS is an atomic Linux distribution built on Arch and released under the MIT license. The goal of ChimeraOS is to provide an open and extendable foundation for launching and playing games. ChimeraOS also implements a gamepad input system that allows you to remap gamepad input to mouse and keyboard inputs. Visually speaking, ChimeraOS is similar to SteamOS. Both systems use the…

#296/July 2025 Pen Testing Intruders have a way of sneaking past the defenses. All your firewall rules are never enough. If you are wondering how an attacker could get in, you need to learn to think like an attacker. The Internet offers many resources for those who want to get started with penetration testing. On the DVD: Fedora Workstation 42 Live and Ubuntu Budgie 25.04 #295/June 2025 GRUB GUIs Customizing the Linux boot process requires a dive into GRUB. If you’re the type who likes to go spelunking through documentation, you can get by with tweaking the config files, but a GRUB GUI tool is a safer and simpler route. On the DVD: Zorin OS 17.3 Core and elementary OS 8.0 Stable #294/May 2025 Secure Browsers The Internet is much…

Available Starting August 8 Sure you can game on Linux, but what about creating games? Next week, we show you how to build a complete game development studio using all free tools. Also inside: • Warp AI Terminal• Protect your Systems with Wazuh• Coding with PictoBlox• The Rise of Universal Packages• And much more! Please note: Articles could change before the next issue. BE THE FIRST TO SEE WHAT’S NEXT The Linux Magazine Preview is a monthly email newsletter that gives you a sneak peek at the next issue, including links to articles posted online. Sign up at: https://bit.ly/Linux-Update…

TuxCare has announced that its KernelCare service has been extended to AlmaLinux 9.2 (with version 9.6 to be added soon), thereby making it the only FIPS 140-3 validated distribution (which adds years of rebootless patching). Although some distributions are capable of patching the Linux kernel without reboots, those reboots aren't avoided but, rather, delayed. TuxCare KernelCare removes the necessity for reboots altogether. In addition, TuxCare KernelCare offers up 100-percent vulnerability coverage (which dwarfs the 5-10 percent offered by other live patching solutions). According to Michael Canavan, Chief Revenue Officer at TuxCare, "This new KernelCare service for AlmaLinux is TuxCare’s latest step in ensuring that enterprisegrade reliability and security are continually available for the growing number of AlmaLinux users.” Canavan added, “We’re pleased to bring a rock-solid path for compliance and…

In the latest issue of This Week in Plasma (https://blogs.kde.org/2025/05/31/this-week-in-plasma-plasma-6.4-stabilizes/), the KDE team talks mostly about the fact that Plasma 6.4 has become stable with the second beta version. A ton of polishing has gone into version 6.4 in preparation for the general release scheduled for later in June. The KDE team also brings up Plasma 6.5, mentioning that it will include a new keyboard shortcut to advance to the next wallpaper slideshow. Also, the KWin Magnifier and Zoom effects now share the same initial zoom level and zoom factor settings. The Digital Clock widget’s calendar add-ons page has been overhauled, and Plasma now warns you that keeping the "Raise maximum volume" setting active for too long could damage speakers. Perhaps the most notable news is that Plasma 6.5…

Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. Read that again, and again. Announced at the Build 2025 developer conference, this marks the closing of a request that was submitted nearly nine years ago. One thing to remember is that this is not the Microsoft of old, so releasing something as open source shouldn't be that big of a deal, but WSL is a bit different because it directly involves Linux. The code for WSL is now available on GitHub (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/2.5.7) (downloaded as either a. zip or. tar.gz file). Before you get too excited (you knew this was coming), Microsoft didn't open source the entire WSL code. What you will find is the WSL command-line tools (such as wsl.exe and wslconfig.exe), as well as the WSL service, which is…

Linux is stable, fast, and versatile. But let’s be honest: After a while, things get messy with temporary files, old packages, piled-up old kernels, and unused applications. Worse than the unused applications are the applications you install just to try and then remove without knowing what they’ll leave behind. Recently, I started noticing that my sleek Ubuntu system was feeling heavy, which made me realize it was time to liberate some disk space. As a long-time Linux user, I’ve faced these issues many times. The good news is that cleaning up your Linux system isn’t hard. In this article, I’ll show you some ways to declutter your system and reclaim disk space while keeping Linux running smoothly. Remove Unnecessary Packages Over time, as you install and remove software, your system…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software Clash of the Licenses If you’ve spent any time in the retro gaming space, you’ll have come across libogc – a community-developed C library that underpins a lot of GameCube and Wii emulators. For years there have been troubling rumors that at least some of libogc’s code was based on leaked information from Nintendo. The controversy’s taken a new turn recently, as it seems that significant portions of libogc have also been copied from other open source projects: most notably the Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) and the Linux kernel, without proper attribution. RTEMS is released under a permissive 2-clause BSD license, meaning its code can be reused provided the original authors are credited. RTEMS…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to info@linux-magazine.com. GUADEC Date: July 24-29, 2025 Location: Brescia, Italy Website: https://guadec.org GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference. Join us in Brescia, Italy as we bring together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops. Register today! Akademy 2025 Date: September 6-11, 2025 Location: Berlin, Germany Website: https://akademy.kde.org/2025/ Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software…

The Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs has decided to cut ties with Microsoft Windows and Office and adopt Linux and LibreOffice. As first reported by Politiken (https://politiken.dk/viden/tech/art10437680/Caroline-Stage-udfaser-Microsoft-i-Digitaliseringsministeriet), Denmark is poised to make a major change with regard to the software it uses. The migration from Windows/Office to Linux/LibreOffice will take place between June and August for half of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and the rest of the staff will follow suit during the months of September and November. The move is happening because Denmark’s Minister for Digital Affairs, Caroline Stage Olsen, indicates that Denmark wants to have control over its data and systems. According to Jan Damsgaard (https://www.thelocal.dk/20250610/why-denmark-wants-to-cut-use-of-microsoft-products-at-key-ministry), head of the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School, “Denmark, as the most digitised country in the world, is…

Darktrace (https://www.darktrace.com/blog/pumabot-novel-botnet-targeting-iot-surveillance-devices) has discovered a new Go-based botnet named PumaBot that is targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices and avoiding scanning by using a C2 server to acquire targets and then use brute-force attacks to grab SSH credentials. PumaBot retrieves a list of targets from a command-and-control server and then establishes persistence, using system service files. After harvesting a list of IP addresses for IoT devices with open SSH ports, Puma-Bot identifies a valid SSH credential pair, logs in, self-deploys, and begins the replication process. PumaBot uses a trySSHLogin() function to perform environment fingerprint checks to avoid getting trapped in honeypots or execution environments (such as restricted shells) that are suitable for its needs. If the environment passes the checks, the malware runs the uname -a command to discover the…

KaOS Linux 2025.05 is now available. This independent distribution (meaning that it’s not based on another distribution) features KDE’s Plasma desktop and Arch Linux’s pacman package manager. In the official release statement, the team announces that KaOS 2025.05 is officially Qt5 free. Qt5 saw its end of life years ago, but the move to Qt6 has been slow going. However, the announcement does mention that Qt5 has not yet been removed from the repositories, so it’s still possible to install Qt5 applications (after the installation). It should be noted that Qt5 removal is planned for the near future. The Plasma desktop is version 6.3.5 and includes KDE Gear 25.04.1 and Frameworks 6.14.0, all of which are built on Qt6.9.0. There are many other updates, including glibc 2.4.1, binutils 2.44 and…

The general availability (GA) of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.0 was announced May 20, 2025, just in time for the Red Hat Summit, which was held May 19-22 in Boston. As far as what’s new in version 10, you'll find that it’s been updated for postquantum cryptography with system-wide cryptographic policis, OpenSSL, and OpenSSH support; Sequoia PGP tools for managing OpenPGP encryption and signatures; SELinux improvements including CIL output for audit2allow and Wayland support for the SELinux sandbox; enhanced compliance and system roles; an optimized kernel for better scalability, memory management, and performance under heavy workloads; modern hardware support; and more. The development toolchain includes Python 3.12, Ruby 3.3, Node.js 22 (http://node.js/), Perl 5.40, PHP 8.3, Git 2.45, Subversion 1.14, GCC 14.2, glibc 2.39, Annobin 12.55, binutils 2.41, Apache…

A natural progression There’s been a lot of discussion recently in social media about high-performance computing (HPC) and the viability of Linux (instead of other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD) for HPC. I thought I would use this month’s column to explain why all 500 of the fastest computers in the world run GNU/Linux. Around 1995, the supercomputer market was having some issues. Specially designed supercomputers were very expensive, mostly because companies (e.g., Cray, HP Enterprise El Capitan, CDC 6600) would each spend millions of dollars on specialized hardware design, their own proprietary OS, and perhaps their own compilers (etc., etc.) to make their own supercomputers – and then sell a relatively small number of them. These companies were going out of business. Then two people at…

Interactive fiction (IF) is one of the most venerable super genres of digital creativity, an art form that has existed for almost as long as computers have been able to send and receive text. With its deepest roots in mainframe-and-teletype entertainments from the 1960s and 1970s such as Hunt the Wumpus and ELIZA, IF today encompasses hypertext games, visual novels, and a swirling variety of commercial and experimental work that focuses on text as its core interactive element. Ages of Interactive Text For much of the 1980s, IF often defined the cutting edge of computer games. A typical IF game of that era often adapted the most prominent UI of that era, one that’s quite familiar to readers of this magazine: the command-line prompt. Titles such as Zork and Wishbringer…

Linux Magazine is looking for authors to write articles on Linux and the tools of the Linux environment. We like articles on useful solutions that solve practical problems. The topic could be a desktop tool, a commandline utility, a network monitoring application, a homegrown script, or anything else with the potential to save a Linux user trouble and time. Our goal is to tell our readers stories they haven’t already heard, so we’re especially interested in original fixes and hacks, new tools, and useful applications that our readers might not know about. We also love articles on advanced uses for tools our readers do know about – stories that take a traditional application and put it to work in a novel or creative way. We are currently seeking articles on…