Linux Format January 2022

Jonni Bidwell People mock the traditional “light up an LED” projects. But when you have a bunch of them in a line or a grid the possibilities are endless. You can learn electronics, classic visual effects or bitbanging serial buses. The only real danger is buying more and needing ever-larger power supplies. Les Pounder Making things move with Raspberry Pi is a great first project. We get the thrill of building, wiring and coding a robot. Start simple. Move the robot forwards, then back. Those two steps then lead to turning the robot (wheels moving in opposing directions) and your robot is alive! Michael Reed I’ve been attempting to get my backups organised of late. I need to get around to setting up a BorgBackup server set up on my Pi server. That way, I…

We’re sure this Christmas many people will be finding Santa has delivered packages of Pi-based happiness to young and old the globe over. Often the first question to pass people’s lips when they contemplate the Pi in their hands is, “What can I do with this thing?” Well, we’re here to help (for once)… While we’re sure our Les (and now Tom’s Hardware’s Les) would have a few suggestions on how to start out with a Pi involving LEDs and motors, we’re aiming for something a bit more entertaining. The modern Pi is a media miracle and combined with the amazing open source Kodi – in the form of LibreElec – you can be quickly bouncing all your media around your local network from 4K HDR video to enjoying multi-room audio…

Linus Gabriel Sebastian, known for his popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, recently posted a video (https://bit.ly/lxf284linustechtips) in which he attempts to move from Windows to Linux on his main PC. While the video highlights some of the issues that Windows users may encounter when using a Linux distro, there is a moment in the video where Linus tries and fails to install Steam. Steam is one of the easiest game launchers to install in Linux thanks to Valve, the company behind it, being a big supporter of gaming on Linux. When Linus encountered these issues, people began to examine what may be causing them. It seems that Linus’ choice of distro, Pop!_ OS, and its configuration were to blame, as the package dependencies can become convoluted, especially when installing third-party…

Last year, Apple launched a range of MacBooks and Macs that run on its own ARM-based M1 SoCs, in a break from relying on Intel hardware. It also recently launched two new MacBook Pros that come with either the M1 Pro or M1 Max chips, which are vastly more powerful versions of the M1. Coinciding nicely with this launch, Canonical has announced an update to its Multipass project (https://multipass.run). This will enable people to run Linux on Apple’s M1 hardware via an Ubuntu virtual machine, which can launch with a single command. According to Canonical in a blog post that can be read at https://bit.ly/lxf284ubuntum1, “developers on M1 can now get running on Linux in as little as 20 seconds.” Because the M1 Macs run on a new architecture, Linux support via…

A security reliability engineer at Google Cloud has revealed that malicious users have exploited a security flaw known as CVE-2021-22205 to launch a huge amount of denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The vulnerability was discovered by William Bowling and a fix was released in April 2021. It affected ExifTool, which was used to remove metadata from images uploaded onto servers, and Bowling reported (https://bit.ly/lxf284bug) that he found a way to exploit the way ExifTool handles.djvu and.djv file uploads and gain control over the entire GitLab web server. Italian security firm HN Security then found that attacks exploiting the CVE-2021-22205 in June, after randomly named users were being added to GitLab servers, which were likely created by malicious users to gain control over compromised servers. Damian Menscher from Google, then tweeted (https://bit.ly/lxf284tweet) that…

Matt Yonkovit Head of Open Source Strategy and silly hats, Percona “Accurately predicting trends can get you ahead of the competition. Next year I predict sadly we’ll see more of the same. I predict we’ll continue to see more security breaches due to poor database security. Developers want to get services up and running quickly, and in the rush they overlook basic security hygiene like properly configuring access control. Without a fundamental change in approach, the number of security breaches won’t go down. I predict no reduction in our hunger for data. In fact, we’ll create more data than ever. This means more database deployments and this means Kubernetes to help them scale and be implemented faster. Finally, I predict that the demand for database talent will continue. Companies need DBAs and data specialists…