Table of contents for Complete Guide to Linux in Complete Guide to Linux

Whether you're a Linux veteran or have only recently become acquainted with Tux, the Complete Guide to Linux brings you a wealth of fascinating features, expert guides and coding projects from the pages of Linux Format. Inside you'll learn about running Linux on your mobile and protecting your privacy online, discover how to write your own retro games, build a smart home and more, as we explore the wonderful world of open source and bring you tips, tricks and top Pi projects to help you get the most out of your passion. Enjoy!…

Let’s cut to the chase – you’re looking for apps to replace those you use in Windows. Which ones come recommended? You probably already know LibreOffice as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, while GIMP replaces Photoshop if you need more features than those offered by the basic built-in Photos app. If Videos refuses to play your media, try VLC Media Player instead. Many of your favourite Windows apps have also been ported to Linux, too – visit the program’s own website to confirm this, or try the https://alternativeto.net website to find alternatives. Finally, last but not least, open a terminal window and type the following commands, one line after the other: $ sudo apt install software-properties-common $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip.scott/pantheon-tweaks $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install pantheon-tweaks…

Without Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS), there would be no GNU, and without GNU, there would be no Linux distributions as we know them, and without Linux, there would be no Linux Format. So here we are, 300 issues on, celebrating the very thing that enables us to exist: the free software movement. RMS started the GNU’s Not Unix Project in 1983 to create a totally free operating system, and later he established the General Public License to guarantee its software freedom. By 1991, much of GNU was finished, but it lacked a kernel – which is where Linus Torvalds and his Linux kernel came in. Combining the collaborative nature of online open source development, the benefits of the GPL licence and the pulling-as-one community that builds around projects, GNU/Linux took…

We’re not saying our readership is old, but we’re pretty sure everyone reading this has at least one fond memory of computing in some past era. Maybe it was playing the classic platformer Crash Bandicoot on the original PlayStation, maybe it was discovering the SAY() and TRANSLATE$() functions in Amiga Basic. Perhaps it was even reverse engineering a printer driver for a PDP-11 microcomputer. Whatever your rose-tinted memories of bygone computing eras are, it’s often fun to indulge them. There are thousands of open source emulators and other tools that can help us on this journey into nostalgic reverie. Of course, retro gaming has been popular ever since the first games were able to be classed as retro. The first version of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) appeared in 1996,…

RetroPie is itself just a bundle comprising Pi builds of Emulation Station (ES – the GUI frontend), RetroArch (a frontend which some of the emulators plug into, the one with the funky green retro menu in-game) and the emulators themselves. The emulators that integrate with RetroArch (or rather its libretro library) are known as “libretro cores”. The glue that binds everything together, in a sense, is the RetroPie Setup Script. This is what handles all the package management, including adding custom emulators as you might have done for the BBC Micro above, and as you might do for the Amiga and Atari ST over the page. It can also be used to augment a standard Raspberry Pi OS installation with RetroPie. That’s what the first option (“Basic install”) is for.…

Historically, DCraw by Dave Coffin (www.dechifro.org/dcraw/) was the first free RAW converter under Linux. The program is available as a pure command line program and initiated a development that led to LibRaw (www.libraw.org). This library is used by modern RAW converters to read in and decode RAW files. UFraw was an early RAW converter developed mainly for GIMP, which is now replaced by Nufraw. It offers a simple GUI, but hardly any advanced features. Lightzone (https://archive.org/details/lightzone4.2.0) is a Java project that is free today. Although it only supports simple processing, its usability and tools are very sophisticated. Rawtherapee (www.rawtherapee.com) and variant ART (https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art/wiki/Home) are classic RAW converters with a whole range of important features. Performance and usability are very good, and the programs are used intensively in production. Darktable (http://darktable.org)…

To ship a phone running Android, the manufacturer must submit it (together with its drivers and Android customisations) to a certification process by Google. Certified devices receive regular security updates from Google, as well as updates from manufacturers, if they deign to provide them. Carrier-locked phones additionally require the phone company’s support to receive an Android upgrade, and that upgrade may also be blocked pending contributions from the manufacturers of the device’s components. Since manufacturers often don’t bother porting new versions of Android to their older hardware (and when they do, users don’t install them), there is considerable fragmentation in the Android ecosystem. Some very capable hardware is stuck running old software. Not only does this contribute to the Android landfill problem, but it’s a very real security concern. Android…

Several OSes, including non-legacy UBports images, are based on a remarkable bit of software called Halium. Halium provides a unified hardware abstraction layer (HAL, geddit?) on top of the vendor-provided Android kernel. Coupled with some Systemd gymnastics and Libhybris, which communicates directly with binary blob bits of Android, this allows developers to build new flavours of mobile Linux from a common base. Halium thus aims to reduce the oft-decried fragmentation in the mobile Linux ecosystem. It works its magic via an LXC container running a minimal version of Android. Libhybris then marshals communication with the Android libraries (built with Google’s Bionic) and Glibc libraries on the underlying Linux system. There has been great progress developing all the gubbins peculiar to a mobile OS. The oFono telephony stack originated as a…

The kids may all be headed back to school and the not-yet adults may be off to learn the ways of the world in tertiary education camps. But whatever your age, it’s never too late to learn to code… It’s a trite old phrase, and one that’s been jumped on by a million YouTube videos, expensive courseware and even our very own “Bookazine” department. Maybe you’ve already sat through classes where everything is introduced from first principles. If not, let us tell you with certainty that listening to someone explain functions, variables, loops, data structures, recursion, pointers and memory allocation for an extended period of time is in most cases frightfully dull. Or maybe you’ve had an apposite experience, where ‘Learn to code’ turned out to be code for ‘here’s…

You can convert any local directory into a Git repository with a simple git init, but to upload it to GitHub or GitLab you’ll need an account. We mentioned that GitLab is open source so if you have a VPS or a home server you may want to set up your own instance there, but it also has a free tier for individuals (and hopefully print media publications). Signing up for GitHub or GitLab is straightforward, but to get the remote repo to trust you will take some work. First, you’ll need to upload an SSH key to authenticate with the remote repo. You may have one of these generated already, it will be contained in the file ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. If not you can generate one with ssh-keygen and then copy…

Few people like being tracked online. Sure, there are some legitimate reasons for it: you may be a threat to national security – busily searching up combustible materials, bidding for the infamous and stylish Casio F-81W on eBay, or meeting up with your fellow government-toppling anarchists on Facebook (although no one is better at overthrowing HMG than HMG). We’re sure there are warehouses full of counter-terrorist officers sitting behind ancient CRT monitors, watching the humdrum daily activities of suspected terrorists as they scroll through 60-second TikToks, work on mind-numbing romance novels, and call their grandmas on WhatsApp to make sure they’ve remembered to take their meds and have enough milk. A James Bond lifestyle it ain’t. In reality most tracking takes place with little or no human interaction, and is…

If you’re a Chromium addict and can’t get enough of Google products (unlikely, we think), it will still be possible to block ads on Chrome once Manifest V2 is deprecated but it’ll be fiddly and limited. UBlock Origin Lite has been specifically developed with Manifest V3 in mind and is fully compliant with Google’s new rules. According to the devs, “UBOL does not require broad read/modify data permission at install time, hence its limited capabilities out of the box compared to uBlock Origin or other content blockers requiring broad read/modify data permissions at install time,” and you need to explicitly grant extended permissions on specific sites. UBlock Origin Lite is still a work in progress, and seems to be effective so far, but it’s a sticking-plaster measure at best.…

Like most things in the programming world, Django isn’t the only Python web framework. Other examples include flask, web2py, turbogears and Masonite, while fastAPI gets an honourable mention as a library that can be used to create APIs. Django makes testing our projects incredibly simple because it contains a built-in web server that can be used for this purpose. It should never be used in production, however. When moving to production, there are lots of security considerations that need to be made, which are outside the scope of this article. Moving from SQLite to MySQL, MariaDB or PostSQL would be a very wise move, and would give a much higher throughput and better concurrency, should the program be accessed by multiple users. Apache is a good choice of web server…

Currently, the application we have written behaves like a website written in the 1990s. This is because all the data needed by a single page is sent to the browser in one go and rendered accordingly. This works fine for a project of this size, but imagine we were working with hundreds of thousands of data items – rendering this client-side could cause real problems on slow internet connections or low-spec devices. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is a method developed to provide communication between the server and client and for pages to be updated when required. For example, the page could be loaded with 100 rows of data and then extra loaded when the page is either scrolled down or the Next Page button is selected. Django has full…

When creating the model for tags, as explained in article one of the series, the only field that is required to be unique is that of the id value. Interestingly, when defining the mode, the id field does not need to be defined, because this is automatically included by the database ORM. This means that multiple tags of the same name can be added to the database, which isn’t optimal. When creating the models, fields can have the unique=True option set. While this is a step closer to what we want, it would not stop two tags being registered with the same name, but different casing of the letters. This is where custom validations become useful. See the Quick Tip (above) for further information, but to ensure that only one…

Another game that would be an interesting project is one called Breakout. This game contains very similar concepts to Pong, because a paddle is used at the bottom of the screen, controlled horizontally this time, to make the ball bounce between the paddle and a series of blocks that are drawn towards the top of the screen. The level is completed when the ball has bounced off all the blocks, which causes the blocks to disappear. Levels are made more difficult by blocks having different capabilities. Some blocks disappear after being hit once and some require multiple hits. Other ways of increasing the difficulty include speeding up the ball and decreasing the paddle size. Breakout was first released as an arcade cabinet in 1976, then a software version was released…

There are many libraries available for Python that enable data analysis. Examples of these libraries include numpy, which allows for numerical analysis to be carried out with access to mathematical constants, nth dimensional arrays and many other features. Matplotlib is a powerful library that makes it possible to visualise data, with most sort of plots being able to be generated. These include scatter plots, pie charts, and box and whisker diagrams. Pandas is another library, built on top of Python, which provides access to many statistical tools. In this tutorial, we’ve discussed lists (can also be called arrays) as well as dictionaries. In Python, lists can contain objects of any type – they don’t have to contain only strings or numbers. When iterating through a list of objects, the usual.…

OUR EXPERT Mats Tage Axelsson is digging through the web to find what may surface. It may be new, but always with an angle to help you better navigate your digital life using Linux. On the current web there are a few, enormous companies that dominate your activities and collect your data. For many of us this is a worrying development that we need to do something about. One technical solution is to develop a new version of the web. How that will look is still a mystery. To get a grip on the efforts to reinvent the web, you should start by looking at distributed solutions. File systems such as IPFS can give you autonomy over your data. In most efforts, blockchain technology is also involved. In this article…

The problem with owning a Raspberry Pi is knowing what to do with the flipping thing. That’s if you’ve been able to get hold of one over the last year. But that is where the Pi Pico comes into its own, costing a fraction of the latest Pi 4 models and actually being available. No matter what Pi you have to hand or what your ability is, we’ve got projects to keep you busy and out of trouble. Well, mostly. We’ve selected self-contained capsule projects and have supplied the relevant code, while any kit you need shouldn’t be too outlandish, from basic NeoPixels to simple radio receivers. That’s half the fun of Raspberry Pi projects: one moment you’re flashing LEDs in different colours, the next you’re reliving retro gaming moments, and…

YOU NEED › Raspberry Pi 3, 4 or Zero 2W › 8GB or larger microSD card › Controller (USB or Bluetooth) In the ’80s, the only way to experience arcade-quality gaming was by going to an arcade. Over the passing decades, arcades have become mere memories and gaming is now a home pastime. For the more ‘mature’ gamer, the appeal of retro gaming is nostalgia, and the Raspberry Pi has been a capable retro gaming platform for most of its life. In this tutorial, we’re converting a Raspberry Pi into a retro gaming console using RetroPie. Before we get too far, a word on legality. Retro games are still under their respective owners’ copyright. In some countries this isn’t an issue, in others it is. Please consult your local regulations.…

YOU NEED › Pi Pico W › DS18B20 temp sensor › 4.7kOhm resistor › Dupont jumper cables › MicroUSB power adaptor › An instance of Home Assistant (see LXF287) ESPHome was originally written to allow the ESP8266 and ESP32 devices to easily interact with Home Assistant. Using YAML syntax, the required options and configuration can be written, then parsed and used to create source code, which is cross-compiled and uploaded to the devices. With the release of the 2022.11 version, developmental support has been added for Raspberry Pi Pico W boards. In this project we’re creating a program that enables us to read the temperature from a DS18B20 sensor, report it to Home Assistant and flash the internal LED on the board via a switch in Home Assistant’s web GUI.…

Another user-friendly point Valve has pushed about the Deck is that the company hasn’t done anything to prevent it being opened, repaired or upgraded. Now, that’s not to say you should go around opening, repairing or upgrading it yourself, but the lovely types at iFixIt.com rank the Deck with a 7/10 for repairability. Plus points are its modularity, single screw size use and its ease of opening, while the main negatives are that the battery and charge port are tricky to replace. However, this means that for someone capable of upgrading the built-in SSD – especially for the cheaper and smallest 64GB model – it can be done relatively easily and provide copious more high-speed internal storage. It would be tempting to buy the biggest and fastest SSD, but do…

Cropping and straightening an image is one of the first tasks you should learn to tackle when it comes to editing in GIMP. Why exactly? Because all images must have a sound base on which to proceed to the more advanced steps, yet many people tend to ignore the procedure altogether. The thing is, cropping and straightening are easy things to achieve, so you can quickly do them with great results. Although you might think your images look straight, chances are they’re ever so slightly on a slant, so a quick rotation can get them looking right again. As far as cropping is concerned, it’s a great way of focusing on a particular part of an image for effect, or it might just be necessary in order to remove certain…

Even though the introduction of the digital camera has enabled us to take better photos with instant feedback (and quickly discard any duff ones), most photos still need some post-production work. This is where GIMP’s Color Balance tool comes in. It enables you to modify the highlights, midtones and shadows in a photograph or layer. Any changes you make using simple Colour Level sliders can be subtle, and the Color Balance tool is generally used to correct predominant colours in images – deepening blues or dialling down powerful reds. You can also use the tool to create more extreme, love-it-or-hate-it visual effects, such as colourising a photo with a dominant green. Usefully, there is an option to save any settings you like as presets for later use; if you like…

Have you finally had enough of Windows? Perhaps your computer didn’t make the cut when Microsoft arbitrarily prevented certain PCs from working with Windows 11? Maybe you’re just looking to broaden your horizons and recapture that love of computing you’ve lost after years or decades trying to fit into Microsoft’s vision for how you should operate a PC instead? There are many good reasons to switch. First, Linux runs beautifully even on older hardware, so you can avoid the need for an expensive and unnecessary upgrade. Second, many Linux distributions – and in particular the Ubuntu LTS distro and its many derivatives (or flavours, as they’re better known) – enjoy established long periods of support with more predictable upgrades than Windows. LTS versions, which come out every two years, enjoy up…

To fix the display issue in VirtualBox, choose Devices > Insert Guest Additions CD Image from the main VirtualBox menus. Now switch to Elementary OS, click Applications in the top-left corner and open Terminal from the second page of results. Once done, type the following command: $ sudo mkdir/media/cdrom You’re prompted for your user password. Once entered, the /media/cdrom directory is created. The following command maps your virtual CD drive to the /media/cdrom directory: $ sudo mount/dev/sr0/media/cdrom Ignore the write-protected warning. Now just issue the following two commands: $ cd/media/cdrom $ sudo sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run You’ll see the Guest Additions installer run. When it completes, click the power button in the top-right and choose Shut Down then Restart. Once back in Elementary, click the System Settings icon in the Dock, navigate…

Prehistory – Linux Answers In late 1999, Future plc published a one-off magazine. This was borne off the back of the success of the now-closed PC Answers and PC Plus [the flashbacks! – ed]. All we’ll say is that this was successful enough to launch a monthly magazine… May 2000 – Linux Format #1 Renaming the title in line with Future’s most successful print magazines, Amiga Format and PC Format, Linux Format was released with editor Nick Veitch of Amiga Format fame and writing talent from PC Plus mag. It came with a CD and was an instant hit. April 2001 – LXF013 The beginning of a new century called for new media, so the DVD age finally hit Linux Format! On the first LXFDVD you could find SuSE Linux…

The mobile device world has become duopolised by two big tech outfits, one fruity and the other Borg-ish. Google’s Android runs on an array of mobile hardware, has a Linux kernel, and the core Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is freely licensed. Devices can generally be unlocked and custom apps can be sideloaded. Compare it with Apple’s walled-garden, locked-down hardware approach in iOS, and you can see why free software advocates might prefer to side with the Android camp. But this argument is specious, because much of Android proper is proprietary. The Google apps and most of the popular Android apps are all proprietary, and many rely on the fiendish Google Play Services library to do their work (or display ads). Those apps all collect data and tie it to your…

No one makes builds of LineageOS for x86 PCs; they’ll point you in the direction of the Android-x86 project – and rightly so. If you snoop around the LineageOS FAQ (https://wiki.lineageos.org/emulator), you’ll find detailed instructions on how to compile your own emulator that can run LineageOS rather slowly on a PC, but it’s aimed at developers and requires 32GB of memory and 300GB of space for the latest 18.1+ releases. The simplest way of trying out LineageOS – if you don’t have a suitable spare phone – is to crack out your Raspberry Pi. Now, there’s good news and bad news. So, the bad news is that if you want to try LineageOS 18.1 or newer, you need a Pi 4 with 2GB of memory – Google bumped the minimum…

If you’re now proudly running a Google-free phone OS, you’ll probably be wanting to get some free (as in Mel Gibson shouting “Freedom!”) apps. Even if you’re still running Android and using Play Store apps, the F-Droid store is well worth checking out. It’s easy to install – just visit https://f-droid.org on a PC and scan the QR code with a laptop. This downloads the APK (the Android package format), and when you try to install it, you’ll see a warning saying the browser is not authorised to install unknown apps. This is A Good Thing. Ordinarily, we’d never tell you to download and install APKs this way, but this an exception. You can check the PGP signatures if you are concerned. Once you’re happy, you can grant your browser…

The rudiments of programming include lots of things which in principle are simple. We’ve already seen loops (well, a loop) and functions. Then there are variables and data types (which we don’t really need to worry about in Python). And then there’s recursion. This is the where a function calls itself (often many, many times), and, by a careful flourish of programming, doesn’t result in an infinite descent into madness. Recursion is something computers are good at, and humans are not so good at. Rather than trying to explain it further we’ll present a recursive Turtle function for you to play with. Add it near the top of pyturtle.py and change the __main__ block of boilerplate to call it instead: def rec_turtle(r): if r >= 10: turtle.pendown() turtle.circle(r) turtle.penup() for…

Browser fingerprinting works because very few computers are set up to be identical. Sure, in Linux Format Towers, we sit in rows behind identical grey boxes running the exact same OS, software, language packs and IP address, but once we’re home, the situation is very different. The first giveaway is your IP address. Even if you live and work in a factory dorm, that IP address isn’t going to have more than a couple of hundred machines using it. You’re further identified by the fact that you (presumably) use Linux, making you part of the elite 1% globally. If you’re using one of the more esoteric distros or DEs, you’re even more identifiable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation developed Cover Your Tracks to help you to discover exactly how unique you…

True security and anonymity is impossible on the internet. Any encryption can be broken and any connection traced. All it takes is vast quantities of money and resources. Tor is about as safe as can be – even if a nation state actor is taking a particularly close interest in what you’re up to online. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect – the Tor devs are continually patching vulnerabilities, while law enforcement continues to try to exploit them. In the early 2010s, police had notable successes in tracking down and prosecuting Tor users who traffic in child abuse. Threat actors can also compromise Tor connections by taking control of huge numbers of Tor nodes, carrying out autonomous eavesdropping attacks and analysing timings to expose who is connected at one end…

Interacting directly with a database requires queries to be written in a language known as Structured Query Language (SQL). These incantations can become quite complex and can require specialist knowledge to write them correctly. Also, when interacting with a database, one needs to sanitise any queries so that untoward things are not carried out by a malicious user (https://xkcd.com/327/). ORMs (object-relational mapping) can have their own issues, such as making application code more complicated and causing bottlenecks when returning data from the database. These two items won’t be a concern with a project of this size. An ORM simplifies the way we return information to a program, especially when considering relationships between multiple tables. The listing below details how to extract the same information using first SQL statements and secondly…

The aim of these articles is to introduce the concepts required to create applications that can be interacted with from a web browser, are backed by a database and have some program logic to provide the necessary functionality. These aims are being met, but the display of the information looks like it was created when the web began. This is because we have not included any CSS to style the output. There are plenty of libraries that can be used, but a good one to get a headstart in styling output is bootstrap. This library was created by Twitter and has been released for free. There are plenty of tutorials across the web on how to get started, the official one being at https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/getting-started/ Some other examples of incredibly useful…

While not the most exciting thing in the world, testing is crucial to ensure that our programming projects work as they are intended. While the example we have been working on for the last few months is relatively simple, getting into the habit of testing is a really good thing. So, do as your author says and not as he does! This is where unit tests are really important. Unit tests are a way of creating automated tests to ensure that a given input to a function returns the correct result. A good example of this would be to ensure that it is not possible to create two tags with the same name. The first attempt to create the new tag should be successful and the second time should return…

The library being used in this project is called Pygame and it is used to add gaming functionality to the Python language. Pygame is well established, open source and now 20 years old. It is possible to use the library on Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Another option would be the incredibly popular Unity game engine, which is closed source and has a free tier available as well as various paid-for options. Games created using Unity can be sold royalty-free and can be packaged for 25 platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS and popular consoles as well. Games can be developed on Linux, Mac OS or Windows. Godot is another excellent option, which can be used for 2D or 3D games, and contains all of the features you would…

XML and similar structured text is used everywhere to represent what we need to see. RSS feeds that are used for either news aggregation or podcasts use XML to store information about the story or episode, and make it available to RSS readers or podcast tools. Another example is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which is used to write the front end of every website on the web. HTML was first released in 1993 and was an extension of the SGML (Standardised General Markup Language). While the specification has been built on over the years, the basic elements, such as <title>, <p> for paragraph, <br> for break line and <table> for tables are still used. Where things have changed is the delineation of responsibility. CSS is used now for styling…

As always with open source, you build everything upon other people’s efforts. OpenZeppelin has libraries for tokens, Governance and access. You are using the access part in this tutorial. Tokens is a means of creating a new type of coin. This is why there are so many coins available. It is easy to create new coins. You use Governance if you want to have a voting system – useful for decentralised autonomous organisations (DAO). You use the token contract (ERC721) libraries. You see that the contracts you use are abstract, which makes them useless on their own. Only when you use them in another contract can you compile it to a useful state. When you want to use these libraries, you need to read the documentation. It is possible, though,…

Let’s face it, we’re not using Linux because we want an easy life, but because we like to tinker, play and extend things. As SteamOS is basically Arch Linux running on an immutable filesystem, you can tinker to the degree that Flatpak and SteamOS enable it. One system you absolutely must try is Decky Loader. This is a widely supported plugin system for SteamOS that offers a host of cool and handy plugins – find it at https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader. Be aware that Decky Loader is incompatible with Crankshaft, so you have to remove that first. It’s another excellent plugin system that uses ports 1337 and 8080, so anything using these needs to be removed or changed, such as Syncthing. Before doing anything, let’s enable Developer Mode. Press the Steam button and…

OUR EXPERT Karsten Günther is not only a master of using layers and masks to edit photos, but he also finds them useful to keep warm and incognito. Besides selections, layers are one of the most important elements when creating complex images. GIMP is no different. Being familiar with layers also helps if there seems to be an error – often a different layer is active from the intended one. Normally, we can think of layers as transparencies, slides or printouts stacked on top of each other. The viewer looks at the stack from above and sees what is still visible after covering it. In fact, layers are much more complex objects, as will become apparent. The Layer Dock represents this stack of layers in a list. All layers present in…

Unconvinced by Elementary OS? The good news is that you have a mind-boggling array of choices when it comes to Linux, and the major difference between them is the desktop environment they supply. Elementary OS uses its own Pantheon desktop, which is based on perhaps the best-known Linux desktop of all, Gnome. The main Ubuntu distro uses Gnome, but there are other familiar-looking desktops available via other variants. The Cinnamon desktop is popular with Windows switchers because it offers a familiar-looking Start menu and task bar running along the bottom of the screen. This is the default desktop offered by Linux Mint (https://linuxmint.com), which we covered in depth back in LXF294. Another popular choice is Pop!_ OS (https://pop.system76.com), which offers its own Cosmic desktop, another variant of Gnome. The great…

Now you’ve familiarised yourself with the Elementary OS desktop, it’s time to start putting your new operating system to good use. This, of course, involves installing new applications. The obvious source for these is the AppCenter via its Dock shortcut. This opens an app store, with a search tool at the top, some featured apps beneath and – if you scroll down – a series of categories for you to explore. Whisper it quietly, but Elementary OS’s app store is rather short of well-known apps. That’s because it’s aimed at developers who release free and paid-for software that’s optimised for use with Elementary OS’s Pantheon desktop. Don’t worry, though, because open source programs usually exist in multiple different places. The first alternative source reveals itself when a search returns no…

1 Stay up to date The obvious place to go to keep your new OS and applications up to date is AppCenter (and Synaptic if you’ve installed it). Look out for AppCenter notifications informing you of available updates. Install these by clicking the orange update button followed by Update All. An alternative method – one more thorough – is to open the terminal and type two commands: sudo apt update followed by sudo apt upgrade. 2 Explore the terminal The command line is often the quickest way to get things done, and it won’t take you long to understand how it works. Take out a subscription to Linux Format and you also gain full access to the magazine’s archives in PDF format, where you can find a series of beginner’s guides that…

RMS: First, I want to tell you about free software because I want that to be the interview. Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing. Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can’t change it since they don’t have the source code. The owner of the program has unjust power over the users, and the program is simply an instrument of that power. This is an injustice, and the idea of…

Our favourite home computer was the Commodore Amiga. In particular the A500, which launched in 1987. The machine, being the successor to the immensely popular C64, had big shoes to fill. And fill them it did. Up until questionable management effectively killed it off. That being said, Hyperion Entertainment produced a version of AmigaOS (see www.amigaos.net) for PowerPC-based machines. A-EON technology, in collaboration with Hyperion, led to the AmigaOne X5000, the latest in a series of machines capable of running AmigaOS. These can emulate the Motorola 68000 at the heart of the first Amigas without batting an eyelid, though at €2,400, you might say the X5000 is eye-wateringly expensive. EMULATING AMIGA TECH“A-EON technology, in collaboration with Hyperion, produced the AmigaOne X5000, the latest in a series of machines capable of…

Getting started with RAW photography is not difficult at all. It’s not even necessary to take RAW photos exclusively; all modern cameras support a mixed mode where a RAW file is saved at the same time as the JPEG image that is normally produced. This gives beginners the opportunity to directly compare their image developed from the RAW file with the taken JPEG image. In principle, care should be taken in digital photography to avoid overexposure. It is much more difficult to fix burnt-out highlights than to remove noise from too dark shadows, if that is necessary at all. Some noise often doesn’t even bother in the shadows. RAW photos utilise the full brightness resolution of the camera sensor, typically 12 bits, which provides greater latitude for denoising. No thought…

Unlocking your bootloader, in theory, opens you up to lots of attacks that compromise the device at boot and so circumvent any higher-level protections. This shouldn’t be much of a concern as long as you’re not sideloading Russian downloaded APKs. But malware has been found in the Play Store before, so take care. LineageOS does provide signed builds (which include verified boot) and ought to play nice with locked bootloaders, but it’s all very experimental still. Samsung devices with Snapdragon processors mostly ship in the US with perma-locked bootloaders. And many carrier-locked devices don’t allow you to unlock the bootloader either. Unlocking the bootloader wipes your device, and you might notice a serious drop in picture quality with the standard LineageOS camera app. If you try to sideload the device’s…

Early Nokia smartphones (notably the classic N900 from 2009, see over there on the right) shipped with a Linux-based OS called Maemo. Maemo was largely based on open source projects, but included some proprietary code. The community was key to developing it, under Nokia’s stewardship, and it fuelled the vision that one day our phones could run free software without compromise. That may not have fructified yet, but there is hope. Today, long after Nokia largely abandoned Maemo (being forced by Microsoft to sell Windows Phones in 2011), there is still a community dedicated to Maemo. Namely Maemo Leste, which runs an upstream kernel and is based on Devuan (the distro that most has it in for Systemd). You may not be interested in running Linux on hardware quite as…

Some people (no matter how much we shout at the sky) want to run Google apps on LineageOS. These can’t be distributed by LineageOS and have to be sideloaded at install time. New versions of Lineage recommend the MindTheGapps package. You’ll find download links at https://wiki.lineageos.org/gapps. Grab the correct package for your architecture (probably arm64) and Lineage version. Sideload it from TWRP immediately after sideloading the main OS. A number of other G-Apps packages are available, some larger than others. Alternatively, use the Aurora Store (on F-Droid) to access Play Store apps without a Google Account. Aurora makes it clear which apps use Google Services Framework (GSF) and whether or not they include ads. If you want to access any paid-for apps, you can sign in and do so. This…

Having everything defined in functions and classes and what have you is undoubtedly ‘the right way’ to write code. But it does mean that the code that actually springs the game into life is right at the end. First we create a new Game object, which sets up the game area, fonts and theme music. Then we instigate the main_loop() method. Most applications have a main loop that typically runs for the whole lifetime of that application, polling for input or updates and acting on them accordingly. Our main loop in Pivaders is executed 20 times a second, so the code is working pretty hard while you blast aliens. The only way to escape our main loop (line 401) is for the Gamestate.end_game flag to be set, which happens when…

OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has been a fan of the open source methodology for over two decades and uses Linux and other tools where possible. We’re going to start the process of creating an application that can be used to catalogue and search magazine articles, with the idea that once filled in, you won’t need to rifle through that massive pile of old issues to find a particular article. Consideration will be made to the fact that a publisher can have multiple magazines assigned, articles can appear in multiple magazines and that a magazine can have multiple issues. The technology we are using to accomplish this is called Django. This is a library for the Python programming language, which allows web applications to be created. Similar to Python itself, Django…

OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has been a fan of the open source methodology for over two decades and uses Linux and other tools where possible. In the last feature we began a project to catalogue magazine articles, which makes it a lot easier to search for interesting topics, rather than hunting through a pile of magazines. During the tutorial, we introduced Django, which is a Python web framework, and designed our first models, which are how the data is stored in the database, including relationships between different database tables. Django uses an object-relational mapper (ORM) to interact with the underlying SQL database, allowing for data to be interacted with as Pythonic objects, and this was also introduced. We also introduced Model-View-Controller (MVC) concepts, which are used to provide clear separation…

OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has been a fan of the open source methodology for over two decades and uses Linux and other tools where possible. In his spare time, Matt enjoys listening to music and reading. In this series of articles, we’ve been working on a cataloguing application, where magazines, newspapers and corresponding articles can be added, stored and eventually searched. In parts one and two, we introduced Django, described some basic database theory, created our database models, explored the built-in shell, added some URLs and created some views and HTML pages to view output from the software. We also explored the admin interface, which allows data to be added and deleted. In this final article, we’re exploring the forms functionality, which allows for HTML forms to be added to…

OUR EXPERT Matt Holder was told he wasted far too much of his youth playing Pong – but it turns out it was all in the name of research. We can’t imagine there are many folk who need introducing to Pong. However, for those who do, it is a two-player game in which table tennis (or ping pong) is simulated. Pong was an early computer game, first released in 1972. Upright arcade cabinet machines existed that ran the game as well as home consoles that became available from 1975 onwards. Pong was first released by Atari and there have been many versions created over the years, both ones that use hardware and versions using various programming languages that run on top of your operating system. In this article, we are…

OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has worked in IT support for over a decade, and is keen to utilise Linux alongside other installed systems. Before we begin, a word of warning. Web scraping can be viewed as a negative endeavour – even a type of hacking – if what you’re trying to do is take somebody else’s intellectual property. When taking the ideas in the article further, ensure to take into consideration any legal implications. The web scraping that we’ll carry out in this article is using purely fictional data, so this won’t be a problem. That said, web scraping is a way to take information from a rendered web page, store it into variables, lists and other data types, and then use it for carrying out another purpose. Okay, let’s…

Some pretty advanced work can take place using XPath. XPath operates on nodesets, which can be considered to be similar to arrays in programming. It’s possible to construct sourcePaths that compare two nodesets. Using this approach, it would be possible to return data that either differs between two tables or that contain the same data. The second concept is that of axes. This provides a way to reference nodes at the same or different levels. For example, the sibling axis enables all nodes at the same level to be returned. Using the simple example above, as well as the <body> node, the <head> node would be returned. It’s also possible to return ancestors of a selected node. In this way, when selecting the <table> node the <body> and <html> node…

The blockchain is public. If you put anything out there, it stays there! This means you need to test carefully before you deploy to the public blockchain. There are several ways of doing this. You can publish to a testnet and you can create a local chain. Using a testnet requires you to use a faucet to receive any funds. This is a hassle to say the least. You must do this at some point, but you should have reached a high level of confidence in your code before you take this route. Before you publish to a testnet, it is much better to have a local chain. One solution for this is Hardhat, but it’s much more than that. It includes many tools and you can add your own…

It’s easy to overclock your Pi to gain a modest speed increase. If you’re serious, first attach a suitable Pi cooling fan, such as the Pimoroni Fan Shim. It’s worth a sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade-y then open config.txt for editing (in the/boot directory): $ sudo nano/boot/config.txt At the bottom of the file for a Pi 4, 400 or CM4, add these new lines – see the table (above-right) for other models: arm_freq=2200 gpu_freq=750 over_voltage=6 force_turbo=1 If you choose to use the same SD card in a different model of Raspberry Pi later, you should change or remove these lines. Save the file by pressing Ctrl+X, Y then Enter. Reboot the Raspberry Pi. If it fails to boot, power off the Raspberry Pi, remove the microSD card, edit…

YOU NEED › Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (2GB is ample) › 16GB or 32GB microSD card › Suitable PSU With the release of the Raspberry Pi 4, the networking stack was greatly improved thanks to changes to the hardware, which meant that USB bus was no longer used to make it available to the operating system. In this project, we are creating our own Wi-Fi router using Raspberry Pi OS and RaspAP. Once the initial setup has been completed, the wireless router can be configured via a web interface – much like the products available from popular router manufacturers. What’s the benefit of making this yourself? Well, the first reason is that cheaper routers aren’t kept updated for very long, possibly leaving security holes. Basing the router on Debian…

YOU NEED Raspberry Pi Pico W Code: https://github.com/lesp/LXF-Pi-Special/archive/refs/heads/main.zip In this project, we’re creating a simple app to get the latest exchange rates for the euro and US dollar against the UK pound. The Raspberry Pi Pico W comes with MicroPython, a version of Python 3 for microcontrollers. It is regularly updated and new versions can be found at https://bit. ly/lxf298upython. It’s a good idea to update MicroPython and ensure you get the version for the Pico W, as it has extra modules for Wi-Fi connectivity. Download and install Thonny for your OS and connect your Pico to the computer. Open Thonny, go to Tools > Options and click on the Interpreter tab. Set the interpreter to be MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico) and then set the serial/COM port to auto-detect the…

The year 2022 will go down as the year of the Linux Deck-top. A typo in Linux Format, you cheer, but for once, ’tis deliberate. Valve released its Linux-powered Steam Deck, driven by an abundance of cutting-edge open source technology that at least in part was backed and developed by Valve itself. Back at the start of 2022, we covered the pre-release build-up and launch of the Steam Deck – see our preview and review in LXF287 and LXF288, and our getting started guide in LXF289. While some reviewers had misgivings about a Linux-powered handheld gaming device, the world didn’t. A year on, the Steam Deck is a smash hit. Valve can’t make them fast enough and it’s the biggest grossing product on Steam – with new games costing £60, that’s…

OUR EXPERT Neil Mohr for his sins, grew up with Photoshop 2, but back then GIMP didn’t exist. Now it does and he uses it a lot. We don’t talk about GIMP much. That’s probably a mistake – it was used to create Tux and is one of the most powerful open source image manipulation tools around. But in recent years, while Photoshopped remains the bastardised transitive verb people use to talk about photo manipulation, Krita (that image has been Kritted?), with its user-first approach to fundraising, community-building and feature-prioritising, has taken the spotlight in FOSS circles. The great news is that GIMP is moving towards a version 3.0 release, and the developers seem to have realised that listening to users makes them more likely to give you money for development.…

Layer modes are essentially an offsetting or rendering rule of the RGB values of the pixels in two neighbouring visible layers. The layer mode of the upper layer determines how the pixel values are offset against the layer below. GIMP then displays the result of this calculation. The outcome often looks rather strange, but it can be extremely useful. For example, the positions of layers can be checked to make sure they are pixel perfect with the Grain Extract mode, where any deviations clearly stand out. The subject is covered in detail in the GIMP manual at https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en_GB/gimp-concepts-layer-modes.html, including the formulas used for offsetting. In practice, it is often helpful to place your mouse cursor over the Mode button and then use the mouse wheel to try out all the…

OUR EXPERT Karsten Günther has written entire books about using GIMP, so four pages is just a morning’s work to him. Both GIMP and the plugin G’MIC have a number of layer functions that – in contrast to those in the article from LXF298 – are neither simple nor obvious. We’ll examine them in more detail here. With G’MIC, it usually looks like this: a number of functions available with GIMP can be found with extended possibilities and usually there are a range of additional functions that offer something similar. Some of these functions are rather theoretical, but many are quite practical. The layer-specific functions are mainly found in the Layers, Sequences or Colour sections, and scattered in the Testing section. Separate colours GIMP supports the idea of separating colours in…