Linux Format June 2022

Jonni Bidwell I’ll be keeping my Jammy Jellyfish installed. It’s not yet stung me. But will it become my new daily driver? I’ll reserve judgement till the next Pop!_OS LTS comes out, I suppose. Plus there will surely be a plethora of other great Jellyfish-spawn distros with which to burden my bootloader. Nick Peers I’ll be installing Ubuntu 22.04 on all my machines, but not all at once. My desktop will be upgraded first, and I’ll hold off updating my server until some of the early bugs get ironed out. The thought of being unable to access my NickFlix media server sends shivers down my spine… Les Pounder I’ll upgrade my laptop to Kubuntu 22.04. When I first started with Linux I enjoyed KDE, then I spent some time with Gnome, Openbox and Regolith. However,…

It’s LTS time again! If you’re down with the Linux lingo then you’ll already know what this means, but to the rest of the world it’s a Long Term Support release and for Ubuntu this comes around every two years, with 20.04 being the last such release. Why is any of this important? An LTS freezes development and provides a stable and secure install that Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu – guarantees will receive five years of security and kernel updates, with potentially a further three years (and perhaps as long as five) of Extended Support Maintenance, although you need to register for this. It offers peace of mind for those wanting a quiet time of it or more likely admins who prefer stable, secure and predictable systems to deal with.…

Since last issue, more of the open source community has spoken out to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and show support for Ukrainians. This includes Scarf (https://about.scarf.sh), an open-source gateway that helps distributes software and offers analytics for companies. In a recent blog post (https://bit.ly/lxf289scarf), Scarf’s co-founder and CEO Avi Press announced that Scarf will block package downloads from the Russian Government. Avi had discovered that “Scarf has fulfilled ongoing software download requests from at least 17 distinct sources that have been confirmed to originate from the Russian Government,” and that the “notion of Russian government cyber attack operations leveraging software downloaded through Scarf’s platform is unacceptable.” Because of this, Scarf will block all “package and container downloads originating from Russian government sources.” Avi also urged other open-source projects, companies and…

For anyone who was upset when the BeagleV StarFive RISC-V SBC (single board computer) was cancelled a few years ago, there’s some good news. StarFive has essentially resurrected it, with a collaboration with Radxa repurposing the JH7100 dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processor for a brand new SBC: the VisionFive V1. It features similar specs as the previous SBC, although the VisionFive V1 increases the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, and also supports USB PD and Quick Charge with its USB-C power port. There’s some interesting specifications for this SBC, and a starter kit went on sale for $179 (around £140) from https://bit.ly/lxf289 visionfive, although at the time of writing the starter kit has sold out, and you can’t buy the board on its own either, because that’s also sold out, too. However, the…

Apple’s M1 processor is one of the most interesting products the company has made in recent times, and the Asahi Linux project (https://asahilinux.org) brings a customised remix of Arch Linux ARM with the Plasma desktop to M1-powered Macs and MacBooks. As the release notes reveal (https://bit.ly/lxf289asahi), Mac and MacBooks that use the M1 chip, or the more powerful M1 Pro and M1 Max chips are supported. However there’s no mention of the brand-new M1 Ultra chip (which is essentially two M1 Max chips connected via a low-latency connection), and the announcement says that the new Mac Studio, which is currently the only product to use the M1 Ultra, is not currently supported. The ability to run Linux on these new Mac devices is exciting because the ARM-based M1 chips offer excellent performance…

Gabriel Krisman Bertazix is a senior software engineer at Collabora. While filesystems developers do their best to avoid corruption, it’s impossible to completely protect a system from accidental issues. Whether they’re caused by random bit flips, disk crashes or software bugs, users don’t enjoy losing their data for no reason. This is why filesystem developers put a huge effort in not only testing their code, but also in developing recovery tools. In fact, all persistent filesystems deployed in production are accompanied by some support infrastructure. When an error happens, administrators and recovery daemons must be notified ASAP so they can begin emergency recovery procedures, like recover from backups, rebuild RAIDs, replace disks or run fsck. When one needs to watch over a large quantity of machines, like in a cloud provider with…