Linux Format May 2021

Jonni Bidwell My RetroPie set up is losing me lots of hours. But I’ve also been mesmerised by magnetic marble tracks from a local maker in Bath. They’re laser-cut from wood with stylish living hinges for the curvaceous bits. A modern take on a childhood classic. Check them out at https://deepmake.io. Nick Peers My favourite Pi project was one I documented way back in LXF239 and 240: creating a multi-room audio system with Logitech Media Server and a Pi Zero running PiCorePlayer. It’s three years since I installed it, and I’m still listening to music through it every single day. Les Pounder For me the Raspberry Pi Pico has been a runaway success, more so now that I have the Maker Pi Pico board from Cytron. For $10 I have a Pico and lots of…

I remember people used to talk about market disrupters and truly the Raspberry Pi was just that. In a world that looked like it was falling into a corporate-owned walled garden of locked-down “smart” devices, like the Apple iPad and Google Nexus phones, came 10 thousand bare-naked Raspberry Pis that happened to run Linux. Who’d be mad enough to want to buy one of those? Forty million Pi sales later and here we are… It’s not like the Raspberry Pi was unique as a device. Beagle and Arduino had similar single-board computers, but at much higher prices and without necessarily the software backing it up. At the time I read a lot of Pi criticism pointing out the better specs of competing devices, while completely ignoring the software and price point. It’s…

For years the Wayland display server protocol has looked like it would become a mainstream alternative to the X Window System. Yet a prime-time release always seemed one year away… Recent moves by some big industry names means that Wayland’s time could finally be upon us. The team behind the Ubuntu distro has announced that they’ll once again be attempting to use Wayland as the default session. While this has previously been attempted with Ubuntu 17.10, the team now feels confident that “now is the right time to try again,” with an aim of using Wayland as default in an LTS (Long Term Support) version. With the GNOME version of Ubuntu not being upgraded in this cycle, the team believes this will make things easier. However, in a forum post (which you…

Linux is no longer just the most widely-used operating system on Earth – it’s now made its way to Mars. NASA recently landed the Perseverance rover on our celestial neighbour, along with a small helicopter, known as Ingenuity. This was used to attempt the first powered flight on a planet other than Earth, and it was powered by Linux. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior engineer Tim Canham said, in an interview with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (see http://bit.ly/LXF275IEEE),the “software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.” The framework Canham referred to is F Prime (http://bit.ly/LXF275FPrime), which is an “open-source framework for small-scale flight software systems.” As he explains, because it’s…

AMD and Microsoft have both announced the launch of its Secured-core Server initiative which, according to AMD’s announcement (http://bit.ly/LXF275AMDSec), will help you “boot securely, protect your device from firmware vulnerabilities, shield the operating system from attacks and prevent unauthorised access to devices and data with advanced access controls and authentication systems.” Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own announcement (http://bit.ly/LXFMicrosoftSec) reveals that Secured-core Sever “is built on three key pillars: simplified security, advanced protection, and preventative defence.” With a device running Secured-core Server, it can boot securely and avoid any firmware vulnerabilities, while protecting the OS from attacks or unauthorised access. As the AMD blog post explains, “The firmware and bootloader can load freely with the assumption that these are unprotected code and knowing that shortly after launch the system will transition into a trusted…

“KernelCI has been driving continuous integration for the Linux kernel with hundreds of commits every day since its creation in 2012 and as a Linux Foundation project since 2019. The platform can help you find and fix several problems, including regressions, build failures and merge conflicts from your patches with others. Today, KernelCI is the most complete automated testing and continuous integration tool for the Linux kernel. It can test your code on many platforms performing automatic builds in kernel trees. Builds, tests information and more can be found in its dashboard. Over the past year, the KernelCI dashboard has changed in many points, transitioning from checking basic boot reports to starting to check more advanced test reports. This has opened the way to an increased focus on testing, more specifically functional…