Linux Format May 2022

Jonni Bidwell Get people to move from Chrome to Firefox. Then dazzle them with wobbly windows and videos playing as ascii like it’s the early 2000s. From there it’s just a hop, skip and a JMP instruction and before you know it they’ve installed Gentoo and know more about Linux than you. Dang. Matthew Holder Helping people embrace the open source life can be a tricky thing, but I always try to get people thinking about a task they complete and then use open source to accomplish it. Also introducing the concepts of GPIO by using Scratch helps to make learning to code less daunting. Les Pounder Get a Raspberry Pi, any model, then pick up an Explorer HAT Pro from Pimoroni. This easy-to-use HAT has plenty of functions to introduce Python and electronics. Capacitive…

The first time I saw a Raspberry Pi was sat in a Welsh pub garden with my parents and one-month old daughter, during the summer of 2012. It was hard to know back then how all of these things were going to change my life dramatically in one way or another. Ten years on and my daughter continues to delight me, Wales has become my home, my parents still annoy me like nothing else can and the Raspberry Pi has become a world-wide technological phenomena. While they might not seem related, living in south Wales and the Raspberry Pi were pretty central to me ending up editing Linux Format and my daughter has just started to ask about doing Raspberry Pi projects. It’s exciting because it’s unprompted, but also comes from her…

Google Project Zero, a team of security researchers at the search giant, has released a new blog post (which can be read at https://bit.ly/lxf288gpz) detailing how fast various businesses have responded to security vulnerabilities between January 2019 and December 2021, and the results are particularly flattering for Linux developers. According to Google Project Zero’s data, 96 per cent of security issues were fixed by Linux developers before 90 days. This is the standard deadline that Google Project Zero gives companies once it’s passed on a bug report. This is the highest percentage out of the companies listed by Google Project Zero, narrowly beating Google itself, which fixed 95 per cent of security issues by day 90, and a lot higher than Apple (87 per cent), Mozilla (90 per cent) and Microsoft…

A new project called Tow-Boot aims to make booting Linux on ARM better and most consistent. As the Tux Phones website explains (https://bit.ly/lxf288tuxphones), unlike x86 PCs that use BIOS or UEFI for lots of boot tasks, with ARM it’s often handled by the operating system, which leads to inconsistencies with booting and troubleshooting if anything goes wrong. With an increasing number of ARM-based smartphones running Linux being released, addressing these inconsistencies is more important than ever, especially if Linux phones are going to be accepted by mainstream users. Currently, most ARM devices use U-Boot to boot Linux, but Tow-Boot, a fork of U-Boot, that uses the upstream U-Boot and provides builds for supported hardware to ensure consistency between devices. Boot selection for various distros is also included, along with graphical boot…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen global condemnation. Many tech companies are pulling their products from Russia in protest, while others have stopped using Russian-made components. OpenBLAS, an open-source implementation of the BLAS and LAPACK APIs, only recently added support for the Russian-made Elbrus E2000 processors, but now the team is considering revoking that support in light of Russia’s actions. The fact that OpenBLAS could be used for military functions is an added ethical conundrum for the team. As RFC (Request for Comments) on the product’s GitHub (https://bit.ly/lxf288openblas) explains, “The Elbrus processor is a so-called homegrown processor, with the primary use case of circumventing sanctions,” and is almost certainly used in Russian military equipment. While the RFC uses very emotive language, claiming that “continued support for the Elbrus processor within OpenBLAS…

Samuel Iglesias is an open-source graphics driver developer at Igalia “Many open-source projects start as a hobby project. Open-source graphics drivers are no exception. Most Mesa3D graphics drivers start with just a handful of developers adding basic support for the intended graphics API (OpenGL or Vulkan). These drivers grow and, eventually meet industry-grade quality standards making them suitable to be shipped in a variety of products. One key goal is getting official OpenGL or Vulkan conformance from the Khronos Group, which ensures the driver meets a set of quality requirements to be used by applications that depend on those APIs. At the end of 2021, two open-source drivers got Vulkan 1.1 conformance: the V3DV driver for Broadcom GPUs and the Turnip driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. This is a crucial step to get…