Indice dei contenuti per October 2025 in Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, I guess we all know the world is getting scary: ideological news bubbles, Internet trackers, social media’s “emotional manipulation for dollars” business model. One of the things that scares me the most is the rise of deepfake videos. Digital images reach deep inside our brains. We are hard-wired to believe that if we can see it, it is real. The problem is that digital images are also embedded deeply into our culture: our news media, our Internet activities, and scariest of all, our legal systems. A picture or a video recording was once considered a source of truth – you could present a photo or a surveillance video at a trial and the jury would have confidence believing in its authenticity. Early manipulations were so hokey they were…

Huzzah! Debian 13 (“trixie”) is now available to download and install. As with most Debian releases, it took time (two years) for this release, and (as always) the wait was worth it. Starring Linux kernel 6.12 LTS, Gnome 48, GCC 1.42, OpenJDK Java 21, Python 3.13, support for HTTP booting (via UEFI and U-Boot), an improved installer, RISC-V 64 support, APT 3.0, and a new default theme, Debian 13 might not look like a major step forward, but the performance will prove that wrong. Speaking of performance, another change involves the/tmp directory. This new release uses tmpfs for the/tmp directory by default. This means temporary files are stored in RAM instead of on local storage. Now, files in the/tmp directory will be automatically deleted after 10 days of inactivity, and/var/tmp…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Compressed Archives for User Projects • Jeff Layton The archivemount tool lets you mount, code, test, and unmount compressed archives by project. Better Monitoring for Websites and Certificates • Marcel Arentz Checkmk offers a new open source monitoring implementation for network services. Chat Servers • Andreas Stolzenberger Chat servers likely send confidential data to the cloud, so if you don’t want to see your business talks on Google or Amazon, you can keep your information safely in your own data center with self-hosted options – and without compromising on convenience. Serverless Applications with OpenFaaS • Marcin Gastol Use advanced techniques for automation, optimization, and security to deploy serverless applications with the OpenFaaS framework in a Linux environment.…

If a FreeBSD user wants to add Gnome, KDE Plasma, Xfce, or any other desktop environment, currently they have to manually install it once the OS is up and running. That’s about to change. According to the FreeBSD Foundation’s June 2025 update on GitHub (https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/monthly-updates/2025-06.md), FreeBSD is about to get a full KDE desktop installer option. The FreeBSD Foundation states, “For FreeBSD 15.0, our goal is to extend the FreeBSD installer to offer a minimal KDE-based desktop as an install option. The initial concept is a lowinteraction installation process that, upon completion, brings the user directly to a KDE graphical login screen.” The developers are evaluating the required package dependencies that will automatically select the proper graphics drivers to make this as easy as possible for users. As far as…

bcachefs Development Process In the ongoing saga of Kent Overstreet and Linus Torvalds’ differing approaches to kernel development, the story has taken a surprisingly straight path. The issue has been that Kent insists on submitting new feature patches at moments in the development cycle that are reserved for bug fixes and stabilization. He justifies this by saying that his patches are very important and that the rules should be flexible enough to accommodate him, while Linus and various others justify the current development cycle by saying that the stabilization period makes for better testing and debugging overall. In general, Linus has tended to accept Kent’s patches, though the conversation in response to those patches has been heated. The last time I wrote about this, Linus had asked for Kent’s patches…

As the name suggests, PictoBlox is a block-based development environment. What’s unusual about it is the option to upload programs directly to an MCU. I will be looking at an example to discover how to implement projects with PictoBlox. You can download the development environment free of charge from the manufacturer’s homepage [1]; different versions are available for all common operating systems. As the current 7.1.0 version refused to compile programs for the ESP32 on Ubuntu, I went for the slightly older 6.2.0 version in my lab. After downloading the right installation package, install it on your computer with the following command: You can use the pictoblox command to launch the IDE. To get started, first select the programming language (Figure 1) for your project – block coding in this…

Fifty years of USENIX ATC A few months ago, I read a Facebook post from an old (in every sense of the word) friend of mine that almost casually told me that the USENIX Association was having their 50th and last Annual Technical Conference (ATC) in July of 2025. USENIX, known for its high-quality conferences with peer-reviewed research papers, started in 1975, two years after I graduated with my undergraduate degree from Drexel University in Commerce and Engineering with a minor in Data Processing. It was in 1980 when I went to work for Bell Laboratories as a Unix systems administrator, that I heard about USENIX and their ATC conference. I convinced my management to send me. USENIX had a small staff of people located in Berkeley, California. As a…

Music is a wonderful, universal heritage of humanity. These days, however, it’s never really “ours,” thanks to streaming services that exploit it as yet another way to profile people for profit. Besides, no matter how big a streaming service may be, even if it did have all the music you’d like, it could never guarantee (even if it wanted to, which never happens) that it will keep music online as long as you want it. This article presents one of the easiest solutions to this issue: a personal open source audio server that you can install on your Linux computer to have your copies of all the music and podcasts you want always available with full privacy. Koel [1] is an audio streaming server that’s available in two versions, Community…

MXLinux 25 is on the horizon, and the developers have several tricks up their sleeves. The first of those tricks is defaulting to Wayland for KDE’s Plasma desktop. Given the stability of the Wayland/Plasma combo, this should come as no surprise. MXLinux will still include X11 sessions (to be used as a fallback), and the Xfce version has the experimental Wayland session disabled. As far as Fluxbox, it does not (and probably never will) support Wayland. There is one big surprise, however. Previously, MXLinux shipped with both systemd and SysVinit on the same ISO (allowing the user to select which init system they want during installation). With MXLinux 25, the developers will be releasing two separate ISO images: one for systemd and one for SysVinit. What you get will depend…

It’s a rare occasion that a Linux kernel is released without any blockbuster features, but 6.16 certainly has broken that mold. The most impressive thing about this latest kernel is its size, at over 38 million lines of code that span over 78,000 files. That doesn’t mean the latest kernel is without new additions. First off, the kernel has even more Rust integration, such as bindings for the driver core and PCI subsystem. Rust is also now integrated into the Direct Rendering Management (DRM) system for ioctl, file/GEM memory management, and infrastructure for device drivers of major GPU vendors. There are also improvements to the XFS filesystem, adding support for large atomic writes to help prevent data write errors. Even the ext4 filesystem gets some love in 6.16 with faster…

While 5 percent might not seem like much to the average person, for those of us who’ve been using and following Linux for decades, breaking the 5-percent barrier is important. As someone who had the “Linux World Domination” poster back in the early 2000s, I was expecting this to happen long, long ago, but I am thrilled that it’s finally a reality. According to this MSNBC post (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/linux-breaks-a-new-record-for-us-market-share-as-people-presumably-flee-windowsfor-its-open-source-rival/ar-AA1IT15h), one of the reasons for this jump is that Windows 10 users are testing the waters of Linux in favor of not having to purchase a new machine that supports Windows 11. There is one particular bit of information that has to be included in this news: The 5-percent market share is only in the US. As for the global market share,…

Network communication is a fundamental aspect of modern applications, enabling real-time data exchange between distributed systems. In this article, I will explore the development of a simple yet functional chat application using Python, focusing on socket programming and multithreading. Python is an excellent choice for this task due to its simplicity, extensive standard library, and built-in support for networking and concurrency. The socket module provides a straightforward way to establish TCP/IP connections, while the threading module allows you to manage multiple clients concurrently without blocking execution. This project introduces key concepts in socket programming by implementing a server that listens for incoming client connections, manages them using threads, and facilitates message exchange. Each client connects to the server, sends messages, and receives real-time updates from other participants, including the server…

Emails can be difficult to read due to full quotes or long signatures. If you use a text-based mail client and want to process messages in a more efficient way, you are in luck: This article looks at the t-prot tool [1], which helps you focus on the essentials in emails. T-prot stands for “TOFU Protection.” TOFU [2] refers to the citation style used in emails where the newly written text appears at the beginning of an email, and the rest of the email, including all the signatures, is sent as a quote: text at the top, full quote at the bottom. This type of message structure often results in excessively long and difficultto-understand emails. T-prot’s goal is to automatically filter this kind of content and improve the readability of…

Order online: https://bit.ly/Linux-Magazine-Library #298/September 2025 Indie Game Studio Proprietary software is expensive and it can slow you down. You can’t even get started on your task until you spend a lot of money. Luckily, you don’t need proprietary software to get started with game development. This month we explore some free tools you can use for rolling your own indie games. On the DVD: CachyOS Desktop Edition and NixOS 25.05 #297/August 2025 Cleaning Up Linux comes with lots of files, and more are added every time you download software, install packages, or navigate a system update. Plus logs get longer, and who knows what’s really in that/tmp directory. Once in a while, it makes sense to clean it all up. On the DVD: Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon and nobara 42…

The more you know, the more secure your systems will be. Linux is safer than Windows, but maybe not as safe as you think. Next month we show you a proof of concept for creating a virus in Linux. Also inside: • Watch your logs with Rsyslog • Photo editing with Affinity Suite • Advanced Grub techniques • Web radio on a Rasp Pi • 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…

Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” has reached beta status and can now be tested by the general public. This latest iteration of the popular distribution includes several changes that come together to make a rather intriguing release. First, there’s the new Cinnamon desktop theme, which is more modern than what we’ve seen on Mint to date (a welcome change in my opinion). One very nice touch is the blurred background in the login screen. On top of that, the login prompt now includes avatar support. As far as the new default theme, it adds a touch of blue and gray to give it a more polished look. Zara also has better GTK4/libadwaita support, thanks to a patched stylesheet. Linux Mint now also offers fingerprint support. If you use a laptop with…

If you’re into AI and wish there was an AI-powered assistant for Linux, your wish has been granted with Newelle v1.0. This new assistant can work with various LLMs, such as Ollama, Groq, Google Gemini, OpenAI, gpt4free, Anthropic’s Claude, Mistral, OpenRouter, and DeepSeek. Newelle also supports extensions (for things like image generation), local document parsing, command virtualization, the ability to work with an external terminal app, and more. You’ll also find voice support, long-term memory, web search, website reading, a built-in file manager, rich formatting, and chat editing. As a caveat, I had trouble with the command execution when sudo was required and wouldn’t exactly be comfortable giving the assistant access to heightened privileges. Other than that, Newelle is an outstanding native Linux app for interacting with either local or…

The world depends on open source software. However, the maintenance of open source software tends to be underfunded, especially when you compare it to funding for infrastructure, such as roads and bridges. Recently, GitHub’s developer policy team commissioned a report, “Funding Europe’s Open Digital Infrastructure,” (https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/) from organizations such as OpenForum Europe, Fraunhofer ISI, and the European University Institute. The report considers how to scale up the German Sovereign Tech Agency (one of the most successful open source government programs in the world) to meet the European Union’s open source funding needs. One of the partners in the study is Mercedes-Benz. In the report’s foreword, written by Magnus Östberg (Chief Software Officer, Mercedes-Benz AG) and Markus Rettstat (Vice President Software Defined Car, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation GmbH), the authors state, “At…

Plasma Bigscreen was a great idea when it was in active development, and it’s still a great idea. This project aims to create a Plasma shell suitable for large-screen devices (TVs) that is navigated via remote (instead of keyboard and mouse). Bigscreen included a TV-friendly launcher for apps and even included mini apps, known as Mycroft Skills. The project showed considerable potential, but for whatever reason, activity and interest fizzled. Recently, Canadian developer Espi (https://espi.dev/) decided it was time to pick up the project’s mantle and give it new life. In short shrift, Espi went to work, making some necessary changes to the user interface, home screen, the Settings app, and more. In a recent blog post, Espi said, “I started with some housekeeping work with the repository. I added…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software The FOSS Rises This year has seen a unprecedented seismic shift of European governments dropping Microsoft products in favor of open source alternatives. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein was one of the first to lead the charge with a mid-June announcement that it would switch from Windows to Linux and open source products over the next three months. This decision will affect nearly 30,000 employees, with remaining municipal and educational staff slated for later migration. The governments in Denmark’s two largest cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus have also opted to phase out Microsoft Office usage. The Danish Ministry of Digitization recently announced it would fully adopt LibreOffice too. One of France’s largest cities, Lyon, has announced…

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. DrupalCon Vienna 2025 Date: October 14-17 Location: Vienna, Austria Website: https://events.drupal.org/vienna2025 DrupalCon Vienna is one of the largest gatherings of open-source enthusiasts, bringing together developers, designers, content creators, business leaders, and decision-makers to network, collaborate, and shape the future of open-source innovation. Whether you're looking to level-up your skills or explore new career opportunities, DrupalCon Vienna is your gateway to impact, growth, and community. SeaGL Date: November 7-8…