Table of contents for Linux Made Simple 2015 in Linux Made Simple

Every time I come to write an introduction to one of these guides, I seem to relate a story of how I’ve ruined something by being unprepared. This guide is no different. My first experience with Linux was one of desperation: I really had to try it, being an unabashed computer nerd, and when I finally got my hands on an early copy of Mandrake Linux – in a box, on a real CD-ROM! – I set to installing it without thinking. I didn’t need that software or those documents, it seems. I also didn’t need a working computer, clearly, as Linux wasn’t particularly friendly when it came to compatibility at the time. Things have changed. Modern Linux distributions tend to work first time with whatever hardware you have. Every…

An operating system can be defined as the software needed to enable the applications to run on the hardware – as such, it consists of several interleaved layers. At the heart we have the kernel, which interacts directly with the hardware through its drivers and allows other software to use that hardware. On top of that, we have various layers that handle things such as input devices, networking, sound and video. Normally, you don’t need to know anything about this. It can be helpful to know some of it when things go wrong, but even then it is not essential, especially if you can find someone to fix the computer for you. But if you are reading this book, there is a good chance that you are interested in what…

The GNU (Gnu’s not Unix) project predates Linux by several years. It had created most of the basic tools needed by a computer of the early 1980s – compilers, text editors, file and directory manipulation commands and much more – but did not have a usable kernel (some would say their kernel, GNU Hurd, is still not that usable). When Linus Torvalds started tinkering with his small project in 1991, he had a kernel without the tools to run on it. The two were put together and GNU/Linux was born – an operating system using the Linux kernel and the GNU toolset. It is not only the programs in /bin and /usr/bin that come from GNU; glibc is the core C library used in Linux and it also comes from…

Storing data on a hard disk can involve several layers in itself. All physical storage (as opposed to network storage) in Linux revolves around block devices, so called because disks store data in blocks. A block device like /dev/sda1 does indeed refer to blocks, physical areas on the disk, and a collection of them as a disk partition. On top of that we have a filesystem, which is how the data is stored in a sensible structure of directories and files, containing both data and metadata. What’s the difference? Let’s say you save a file containing some text. The data in that file is the text, but the file has other attributes: there is the owner of the file, the time they created it, the time they last modified it,…

The Linux installation process is involved but it isn’t actually that cumbersome. The exact installation steps are slightly different for every distribution, but in general the distro’s graphical installer will guide you through the necessary steps pretty easily. In essence, installing Linux is very similar to installing a piece of software, albeit with a few caveats: » Disk partitioning Unlike a piece of software, installing Linux requires you to create a dedicated partition on your hard disk. This isn’t an issue if Linux will be the only OS on this computer. However, if you’re installing Linux alongside another OS, such as Windows, you’ll have to take steps to preserve the existing data. Many Linux distros will offer to partition the disk for you automatically, though you can create partitions yourself…

The simplest way to back up your system is to use the built-in Windows Backup tool in Windows 7 or later – select ‘System Image Backup’ and follow the prompts. It’s not very exciting and it’s a little scary, but it is essential. For a pure Linux back-up solution, use SystemRescueCD, which is on the cover disc. Here’s how… Reboot your PC with the disc in your drive, access the boot menu if necessary (usually [F11]) and choose your DVD drive, then ‘SystemRescueCD’. Problems booting could be caused by your PC’s UEFI (see over the page to fix them). Otherwise, pick the default boot options entry. Type uk when prompted for the keyboard layout, and type startx at the final command prompt to access the graphical environment. Once this loads,…

Many modern PCs now give you the option of booting either in UEFI or legacy BIOS mode, with the latter mode enabling you to install older operating systems. Ubuntu works fine with both UEFI and Legacy modes, but other environments – including SystemRescueCD – require booting from a legacy option. Some PCs even support mixed-mode booting, presenting both legacy and UEFI choices direct from the boot menu, so you don’t need to wade into the UEFI shell to switch between them. If you’ve wondered why some boot options are displayed twice in the boot menu, this is why: look more closely and you’ll see one option is prefixed by UEFI. This gives you the option of choosing which mode to boot that drive in, which is a good way of…

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships with a few apps preinstalled – notably LibreOffice and the Firefox web browser. For a complete list of installed apps, open the Ubuntu Software Center and select the ‘Installed’ button. Expand a category to see what apps are there, such as Rhythmbox. Use the Search box to locate them, then either open them directly from here or drag a shortcut on to the App Launcher. There are many more apps you can add to your Ubuntu installation, and the vast majority are free. There’s a number of ways to do this: as you’ve seen with Ubuntu Tweak (see ‘Accessing your documents’, aboveright), you can download apps from the web or install them from our cover disc. If they’re packaged as Deb files, you can double-click them…

Now that Ubuntu is safely installed on your PC, it’s time to consider taking a fresh backup of your hard drive. You can, of course, use SystemRescueCD for this purpose (see page 17). If this sounds like too much hassle, you could try Redo Backup and Recovery instead. Download the ISO file from SourceForge (http://bit.ly/Redobackup) and burn it to disc – in Ubuntu, insert a blank disc and click ‘Cancel’ when the ‘Choose application to launch’ window appears. Locate the ISO file (typically in your Downloads folder), right-click it and choose ‘Write to Disc’, then click ‘Burn’. When the disc has been created, reboot your PC and choose to boot from the disc – you may need to tweak your UEFI settings before it will work; enabling CSM for storage…

As we’ve mentioned, we’ve based this guide on what’s available on the accompanying cover disc, but there’s no reason you can’t substitute these options with your own choices. In some circumstances, this could be for compatibility. A 32-bit lightweight option (such as www.puppylinux.com at 161MB or www.bodhilinux.com at 613MB) may well be the only real choices for the more ancient XP systems out there. When XP was launched in late 2001, 32-bit was all the rage and remained so, especially on mobile systems, until the mid-2000s. There are also various releases of both Ubuntu and Linux Mint in 32-bit offerings, and you can grab yourself a download from www.linuxmint.com or www.ubuntu.com. For repartitioning, we’re going with the allpowerful SystemRescueCD distro, which is on the cover disc. It might be overkill…

There is a document that has been floating around the internet for at least fifteen years, called ‘What if operating systems were airlines’. The entry for Linux Airlines states: “When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO. html”. It’s an old joke but as Linux users we are still more accustomed to sometimes having to do things for ourselves than users of other operating systems. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as it means we understand our computers better. Still, at least when you want a new PC you can just go out (or online) and buy one. So why do people build their own? Over the next few pages we will try to answer this…

You will encounter plenty of abbreviations and jargon when looking at hardware, here are some of the common terms used: » DDR 2/3/4 Double Data Rate, a technology using in memory chips. » DIMM Dual Inline Memory Module, this is plug-in memory module. » WAF Wife Acceptance Factor, seen on maledominated forums and considered important for hardware that will be in the home. » Northbridge/Southbridge Chips on the motherboard that handle core logic and communication between the CPU and other components. » SATA Serial ATA, the current standard for connecting storage devices to computers. » ATX A motherboard configuration specification, meaning most boards are interchangeable in physical format and standard connectors.…

Building a PC isn’t difficult, but some care is needed when working with electronic components. Prepare a large working area, clear of any clutter and with a non-conductive surface. Static electricity can kill electronic components, and it can build up on your body without you noticing, until you pick up a component and zap it. You can avoid this by earthing yourself to discharge and static build up. The simplest way to do this is to touch a grounded object, such as a central heating radiator or the kitchen sink before touching a component. You can also buy anti-static wrist straps that connect to a grounded point by flexible cable to keep you static free during your build. The computer you build will not have a warranty, but the individual…

Five best open source games Strife: Veteran Edition This is an awesome first person shooter built on the open-source Chocolate Doom engine. Grab the game from http://bit.ly/StrifeVE. Stunt Rally - version 2.5 Race and performing stunts in fantastic environments. This game features 167 tracks, 19 cars and a track editor. Download the game at http://bit.ly/StuntRally. Annex: Conquer the World 4.0 If you enjoy real time strategy games, then this open source game is for you. Download the game from http://annexconquer.com. BYOND: Space Station 13 Remake This remake of a criminally overlooked classic is completely open source. Download the code from http://bit.ly/SS13Remake. Galaxy Forces: Moon Lander Action! Hark back to a simpler time for games with this retrofuelled moon lander shootem-up. Download from http://bit.ly/GalForcesV2. Five best AAA games The Witcher 2:…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation are rather excited about the new Raspberry Pi 2, We spoke to the engineering team and Gordon Hollingsworth about development: “The Raspberry Pi 2 is 100% awesome. It’s as close to a typical PC as we wanted when we first started the project.” And the amount of effort that’s gone into development is impressive: “The team have put the equivalent of 20 years of work into the new Raspberry Pi and it’s processor, and that runs at a cost of between ￡2-3 million.” But there’s still a lot of enthusiasm for the older Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton explains: “There are a lot of industrial customers who won’t want to switch, and, of course, we still have the Model A+. To give you an idea of the…

Ubuntu is, in many respects, the first distro to make a serious effort to bring in new users. The distro brought Linux into the mainstream, played a significant part in changing the notion and misconceptions about Linux and was able to successfully pitch itself as a viable OS alternative to Windows and Mac OS. Ubuntu was started by Mark Shuttleworth. He formed Canonical after selling his security-firm, Thawte, to VeriSign. Shuttleworth was a huge fan of the Debian project. However, there were many things about Debian that didn’t fit in with Shuttleworth’s vision of an ideal OS. He therefore invited a dozen or so Debian developers he knew and respected to his flat in London in April 2004 and hashed out the groundwork for the Ubuntu project. The group decided…

The CentOS distro has been the premier community-supported enterprise distro based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The distro is built using the open source SRPMS from the RHEL distro. CentOS is one of the most popular server distros, suitable for all kinds of use cases, from web servers to enterprise desktops, and has been able to pitch itself as an ideal choice for anyone who wants to put together their own server but can’t afford the RHEL subscription fees. CentOS ships with RHEL’s Anaconda installer and can run unattended installations across multiple machines thanks to Kickstarter. The installer provides various installation targets such as a web server, database server etc. In January 2014, Red Hat announced that it would start to sponsor a bunch of core CentOS developers to…

Until the release of Mandrake, Linux was generally thought of as a geek’s OS. Mandrake was the first distribution that focused on the convenience of the user. The goal was to provide a distro that could be operated by regular computer users. It had features such as the ability to auto-mount CDs without messing around with configuration files, which brought greater convenience to the Linux desktop. The Mandrake project has perhaps the most convoluted existence for a free software project. Over the years, the project has undergone various name changes, mergers and forks. However, it has spawned many distros and there are several major ones that are still active and can trace their lineage to Mandrake. The distro has developed a bunch of custom tools – collectively known as drakxtools…

OpenSUSE is one of the best RPMbased distros. It comes in several editions for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and also has ports for ARM v6, ARM v7, and the 64-bit ARM v8. Once known for its KDE desktop, OpenSUSE now looks good across all the major desktops. Besides KDE and Gnome, the distro also features Mate, Xfce, Enlightenment, and LXDE. You can download the distro either as a smaller live installable image or a install-only DVD image. One of OpenSUSE’s hallmarks is the distros YaST, which is a setup and configuration utility that enables you to tweak many different aspects of the system. Another popular tool is Snapper, which enables you to revert to a previously created system snapshot. The distro serves as the base for the SUSE Linux Enterprise…

Are these distros a ‘take it or leave it’ deal? It depends on what you’d like to change. If all you want is alternative window managers, no problem. Absolute is declared ‘package compatible’ with Slackware releases with the same number, while Crunchbang and Manjaro have access to the Arch repositories; you should find enough packaged, easily installable alternatives to make you happy. Ditto for Elive, which may reuse stuff from Debian and also has an Experimental Mobile mode for touchscreen phones, tablets and similar devices. Manjaro has three official variants, all with Tulliana and KFaenza icons: two for Xfce (full or stripped-down) and one with KDE 4.12 (with KDE Connect http://community.kde.org/KDE Connect), deliberately configured to “give all Windows users a new home”. Want more? Try the Manjaro community editions for…

Made Simple books are designed to get you up and running quickly with a new piece of hardware or software. We won’t bombard you with jargon or gloss over basic principles, but we will… ✓ Explain everything in plain-English so you can tackle your new device or software with confidence and really get to know how to use it ✓ Break instructions down into easy-to-follow steps so you won’t be left scratching your head over what to do next ✓ Help you discover exciting new things to do and try – exploring new technology should be fun and our guides are designed to make the learning journey as enjoyable as possible for you ✓ Teach you new skills you can take with you through your life and apply at home…

Linux uses libraries to share code between applications. If a program, foo, uses functions that could be useful elsewhere, it places them in libfoo. Then when another program, such as the imaginatively named bar, wants to use the same function, it has only to link to libfoo rather than reinventing the wheel. This means that there is only one copy of the code on your computer; if either project discovers a bug in the code, it will be fixed for both. It also introduces the concept of dependencies; both foo and bar depend on libfoo and are useless without it. This led to the phenomenon of ‘dependency hell’, where trying to install a program errored out with a list of unsatisfied dependencies, and trying to install those gave more dependencies.…

If you ever disable the splash screen most distros use to cover the boot messages, you will see a screen full of information about services being started. What are these services, and are they all necessary? The services are the programs that run in the background, making the computer as useful as it is. Some deal with networking, others handle hardware detection and configuration, while more are the traditional software services, or daemons, that provide functions to other programs when needed. The answer to the second part of that question is most likely to be “no”. While some of these services are used by almost all systems, such as the syslog daemon that handles writing information to system log files, others may not be needed. There is no need to…

Everything we have covered relates to Linux running on desktops, laptops and servers – traditional computer hardware if you like, but there are other environments where Linux is used. Many embedded devices, from routers to PVRs and set-top boxes, run Linux, and in many ways it’s similar to the Linux we know and love. If your router allows SSH access, you will often feel at home as soon as you log in. There is another class of device that has seen a huge uptake in recent years and runs a rather different Linux. No prizes for guessing we are referring to the smartphone and its tablet siblings, running Android. Android is Linux, it uses a Linux kernel, but it is not GNU/Linux. The kernel may be based on the same…

1 Shrink Windows Before you can partition your disk you’ll need to squeeze your Windows partition to free up some disk space for the new partition. Head to the Disk Management tool, and right-click your main partition that is typically assigned the drive letter C. Then select the Shrink Volume option from the pop-up menu. 2 Create new partition The Shrink dialog box shows you the total size of the drive and the maximum amount of shrink space available. You cannot squeeze more space out of a drive than the size shown here. To create a new partition, specify the size of the partition in the space provided in MB and click Shrink to start the process. 3 Use the partition After the process is complete, a new partition showing…

You can also install multiple desktops on top of your distribution, such as the popular Cinnamon desktop. It’s available in the official repositories of Fedora and Mageia and you can install it via their respective graphical package managers. On Ubuntu, it’s available via the ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamonstable PPA. Add this PPA to your system [as explained in the main text] and then install the desktop environment from the Software Center. Once you’ve installed multiple desktop environments you can easily switch to another one. To do this you just log out of the current desktop environment, and use the login manager and enter your login credentials. Before logging into the desktop, explore the buttons on the login manager. One of the buttons will reveal a drop-down list of all the installed desktops. Select…

All popular Google software, such as Chrome, Earth, the audio and video plugin for Hangouts and others can be installed on Linux. But you won’t find them in the official repos of major distros because of their licensing. However, you now have all the know-how to install them with ease if we point you in the right direction. The downloads page of each supported Google app contains links to both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the software in both RPM and Deb formats. Download the package for your particular distro and double-click on the file to install it with the distro’s package manager. All official packages for Google apps will also install the appropriate external Google repository in your distribution to keep the software updated. Another popular proprietary software that…

1 Select backup Boot into SystemRescueCD as before. Follow the steps in the main text (above) up to identifying your partitions. Next, mount the back-up partition in the /mnt/backup directory. Once done, open PartImage. Leave ‘sda1’ selected, type the back-up path and name from before into the ‘Image file’ box. 2 Restore boot partition Press [Tab] twice to highlight the asterisk by ‘Save partition’, then press the down arrow then [Space] to select ‘Restore partition from an image file’. Press [F5]. Note the description and press [Enter] . Press [F5] to restore the partition, working through the warnings until the files are copied back. 3 Restore main partition PartImage will close once the partition has been restored, so launch it again but this time select your main Windows partition (typically…

1 Launch Ubuntu Live If your Windows install isn’t detected, click ‘Back’ until you return to the Welcome screen. Click ‘Try Ubuntu’ to load the live CD. When it’s loaded, press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[T] to open a terminal window. Type the following command and hit [Enter]: sudo gdisk dev/sda 2 Verify and fix If gdisk says it’s found both an MBR and a GPT, then the presence of GPT is the problem – removing it will enable Ubuntu to see your Windows partition. First, select the GPT entry by typing 2 and hitting [Enter]. When prompted, type x and hit [Enter] to access Expert command mode. 3 Apply and reboot Type z and hit [Enter]. When prompted to wipe the GPT on /dev/sda, type y and hit [Enter]. When asked if you’d…

1 Identify mount point Click ‘Search’ in the App Launcher, type disks and click the ‘Disks’ shortcut under ‘Applications’. Assuming you’ve moved your data to a new drive, select this drive in the lefthand pane. Now highlight the partition that your data is stored on under ‘Volumes’ and make a note of where it’s mounted. 2 Install Ubuntu Tweak Open the Firefox web browser and browse to http://ubuntu-tweak.com‚ ignore the Launchpad prompt, then click the latest Deb Package link (0.8.7 at time of writing). Click ‘OK’ to launch it with Ubuntu Software Center, then review the package description before clicking the ‘Install’ button. 3 Move user folders Click the ‘Search’ button, type Ubuntu and select ‘Ubuntu Tweak’ under ‘Applications’. Select ‘Admins > User Folder’. Each folder will be listed –…

When you install Ubuntu alongside Windows, it adds a special boot loader to your system that provides a boot menu for choosing between Ubuntu and Windows on startup. That boot loader is called Grub 2, and as you’ll have seen, it’s designed to wait a short period of time before automatically loading Ubuntu. You can configure how Grub behaves – choose a shorter or longer time before it starts loading the default choice, and even change that choice, by editing its configuration file and updating Grub via the terminal. Before doing so, make sure you’ve backed up the system. Once done, open the terminal, then type sudo apt-get install gksu followed by gksu edit/etc/default/grub &. This opens the Grub configuration file in a Gedit window. From here, you need to…

Moore’s Law predicts a doubling of computer capacity every two years. Unless you plan to build a new computer every year, you should allow for your needs increasing during its lifetime. Always allow for spare capacity, if you want 16GB of RAM, buy a motherboard that takes 32GB and half-fill it. Your storage use will tend to increase too. 4K video is on the way, so build a system with more drive bays and SATA connectors than you need now. Storage and memory are easy to increase, provided you have left yourself the option. Hopefully your processor and motherboard will last you several years.…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released many new updates to the existing Raspbian install and keeping your Raspberry Pi up to date is a really good practice. There are a few handy Terminal commands to help you, such as sudo apt-get update which will update the list of installable software. Using the following sudo apt-get upgrade will check for the latest software, while sudo apt-get dist-upgrade is similar to upgrade, but a more intelligent updater that removes old kernels. If you would like to install the new desktop, and who wouldn’t as it is a really great piece of work by Simon Long, type the following three lines into a terminal: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods Once completed, reboot your Raspberry Pi for the changes…

The Debian project has played a significant role in the evolution of Linux and, in many ways, is the first real distribution created for the regular computer user. It was announced in August 1993 and had its first public release later that year, although its first stable release wasn’t available until 1996. The project was even sponsored by the Free Software Foundation from November 1994 to November 1995. A key motivating factor that led Ian Murdock to create a new distro was the perceived poor maintenance and prevalence of bugs in the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) distro. Besides the software itself, Murdock’s release included the Debian Linux Manifesto, which outlined his view for the new project, which prophesied that “distributions are essential to the future of Linux”. In the Manifesto,…

Trisquel GNU/Linux goes to great lengths to do justice to its free software tag. Not only does the distro not include any proprietary software, it also strips out all non-free code from the components it inherits from Ubuntu, such as the kernel. Instead of the stock Ubuntu kernel, Trisquel uses the Linux-libre kernel that doesn’t include any binary blobs. Thanks to its efforts, the distro has been endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. There are several variants of the distro, the most common ones are the standard Trisquel release, which is available as a 700MB image with the Gnome desktop, and Trisquel mini, which is designed for older hardware and low-power systems, and uses LXDE, the lightweight desktop. While the distro doesn’t ship with any proprietary codecs, you can watch…

Fedora has been around, in one form or another, since the early 1990s. The distro had its first release in 1995 and the early releases were named Red Hat Commercial Linux. During these early years, the distro was developed exclusively by Red Hat and the community was limited to contributing bug reports and contributing packages included in the distro. This changed in 2003 when the company shuttered Red Hat Linux in support of the Fedora Project and opened it up to contributions from the community. The aim of Fedora is to provide the latest packages while maintaining a completely free software system. The distro was initially called Fedora Core and was named after one of the two main software repositories – Core and Extras. The Fedora Core repo contained all…

Mageia is one of the best-assembled community distros and does a wonderful job of carrying forward the Mandrake legacy. It has an expansive support infrastructure and very good documentation. The distro follows a nine-month release cycle and each is supported for 18 months. Mageia has installable live media as well as installonly DVD images. Mageia boasts intuitive custom tools for managing various aspects of the distro. One of the best tools is the Mageia Control Center, which has modules for managing software, hardware peripherals and system services. Advanced users can employ it to share internet, set up a VPN and configure network shares. The distro uses the URPMI package management system and ships with three official repos. The Core repo contains open source packages, the Non-free hosts proprietary apps and…

Slackware has the honour of being the oldest distro that’s still actively maintained. It was created by Patrick Volkerding and had its first beta release in 1993. The project aims to create the most Unix-like Linux distribution. Slackware was originally derived from Softlanding Linux System (SLS), which was the first distro to provide TCP/IP and X Windows System in addition to the Linux kernel and basic utilities. SLS, however, was very buggy and the growing frustration of SLS users prompted Volkerding to release an SLS-like distro in July 1993. Back then, in addition to being hosted on an anonymous FTP server at the Minnesota State University Moorhead, the distro was offered as 24 3.5-inch floppy disks. By the time version 2.1 was released in October 1994, the distro had swelled…

Rather than being a distribution itself, Linux From Scratch – popularly called LFS – is a freely available set of instructions to create your own custom distro from the ground up, entirely from source. The project was started in 1999 when its author, Gerard Beekmans, wanted to learn how a Linux distro works behind the scenes. While building his system from scratch, Beekmans wrote down the steps and released it as a HOWTO (pictured, right) thinking that there would probably be other people who would be interested. LFS has grown quite a bit from its humble start, transforming from a single HOWTO to a multi-volume book. It has also spawned various sub-projects over time, such as BLFS or Beyond LFS which fleshes out the basic LFS system, and ALFS or…

We did not consider Lubuntu and other ‘light’ Ubuntu spin-offs, simply because they are the ones that most Linux novices who need a low-resource distro are more likely to know already. After a lot of investigation, we chose one distro with a truly unique architecture (Puppy) and four that are lightweight derivatives of more popular systems, namely Slackware, Arch Linux and Debian. We then ran them live on a low-end laptop and/or installed them in virtual machines with different RAM sizes, but never more than 2GB. In all cases, we tested the systems with ordinary dayto-day desktop activities, from browsing and using office suites to displaying photographs. We also tried some of the usual system administration tasks, from installing software to adding users and changing the general system configuration.…

The interface of any computing device, from smartphone to traditional desktop, is a balance of conflicting requirements: minimal consumption of RAM and CPU cycles, which in our case is a must, usability by nonexperts, room for customisation, and finally good looks (whatever ‘good’ might mean for each user). After testing, we were pretty happy with our choice of distros. The reason is that each of them gives a different but equally valid answer to the requirements above. Some people will prefer the easy but infinite visual configuration possibilities of Elive, others the rich but relatively rigid structure of Absolute or Slacko. Others still will love the no-frills approach of Manjaro and Crunchbang. But there should be something for everybody. Absolute Absolute uses the IceWm window manager to give you a…

This roundup isn’t just for those who need to keep old hardware up and running. Even if you’re satisfied with the performance of your current Linux desktop, why not try alternatives that may be even faster? You should try Puppy Linux at least once, to get a taste of what Linux desktop development may have been. However, while Puppy is in a world of its own, the other distros here have one thing in common: most of their speed gains over the vanilla versions of both their ancestors (Slackware, Arch Linux and Debian) and other common distros come from not using any form of Gnome or KDE. So the lesson to take home is this: if your computer is slower than you can tolerate, don’t change distro. Install and tweak…

LibreOffice Forked from OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice has become one of the most popular office productivity suites. It includes programs for word processing, and can create spreadsheets, slide shows, diagrams and drawings, maintain databases, and compose mathematical formulae. It also offers good compatibility with documents in proprietary formats and has recently had a face lift. www.libreoffice.org Wine Despite the increasing number of cross-platform apps that work on Linux, there are some that still only support Windows. This includes big third-party proprietary apps, such as Adobe Photoshop or just small niche home-grown tools that you can’t do without. For such situations, you can use Wine, which generally run these Windowsonly apps and games with ease. The project supports over 20,000 apps. Some work flawlessly out-of-the-box while others require minor configuration tweaks. www.winehq.org Remmina…

0 A.D. This is a real-time civilisation-building strategy game that features impressive graphics and intense battle gameplay. It’s yet to have a final release but has already won accolades in its current state. http://play0ad.com FreeCiv Another strategy game that challenges players to lead their tribe 4,000B.C to the space age. www.freeciv.org Alien Arena A popular first person shooter with a scifi theme and the tournament style deathmatch of Quake and Unreal Tournament. The game has several game modes and over 60 maps, and is quite configurable. http://red.planetarena.org OpenMW OpenMW is a new game engine that recreates the popular Morrowind RPG. The aim of the project isn’t to improve game assets or add additional features but to provide gamers a more moddable edition of the game. https://openmw.org FlightGear For fans of…

The word ‘Linux’ is one of the most used in this book, but what does it mean? It means different things to different people, from the purist who considers it to be the kernel, to the GNU advocate who sees it as a part of GNU/Linux and the new user who thinks it is another name for Ubuntu. In truth, Linux is all of these, depending on your point of view. Strictly speaking, the term Linux used alone refers to the kernel of the operating system, while GNU/Linux is the whole operating system, comprising the Linux kernel and GNU tools – either would be useless without the other (or one of its alternatives). If you then add a collection of application software, along with some tools to manage the whole…

The great flexibility of Linux distributions means that most elements can be changed. Default applications, desktops, even kernels can be swapped around, so it’s best to think of a Linux distribution such as Fedora or Ubuntu as merely a starting point for any customisation that you want to do. The one thing that can’t be changed so easily is the package manager, so the only way to try a different package manager is to try a different distro. Try comparing SUSE’s Yast with Debian’s Synaptic, for example, and you’ll be amazed at the difference that such a fundamental tool can make to your experience of using Linux.…

Networking is core to Linux. Even on a standalone machine with no connection to a local network, let alone the internet, networking is still used. Many services run on a client/server model, where the server runs in the background waiting for instructions from other programs. Even something as basic as the system logger runs as a networked service, allowing other programs to write to log files. The X graphics system is also networked, with the X server running the desktop and programs, telling it what they want displayed. This is why it is so simple to run X programs on a remote desktop – as far as the system is concerned, there is no major difference between that and opening a window locally. Running ifconfig will always show at least…

If you consider the kernel to be the lowest level of the system, the highest level is the user interface. Everything else, from the kernel through the drivers and hardware interfaces, is of no use until you can use the computer. This generally means a graphical desktop, and here we come across more layers. X (or maybe Wayland in the future) simply provides a blank canvas. You then need something to provide the niceties of a windowed interface, and that something is the window manager. In the past, window managers were standalone systems, and there are still plenty of these available, such as OpenBox or Enlightenment, but nowadays they are often part of a larger desktop environment. Strictly speaking, a window manager is responsible for the handling of windows on…

If, having bought a new PC that has Windows pre-installed, you’ve come to the conclusion that Microsoft has finally lost the plot, now is the perfect time to switch to a better OS. Macs are shiny and expensive, so why buy one when you can keep your existing PC and move to Linux? Gone are the days when Linux meant immersing yourself in command-line chicanery – we’ll show you how you can install a userfriendly flavour of Linux alongside your existing Windows installation without losing any data, so you can dip your toes into the free and open waters of Linux. To make the transition as smooth as possible, we’ve chosen Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (on the cover disc) as our Linux distro of choice. Ubuntu is one of the most…

Modern PCs, particularly those with Windows 8 preinstalled, have replaced the traditional BIOS with a new system called UEFI. Both perform the same job, detecting and initialising your hardware before handing it over to your OS, but UEFI represents a quantum leap forward from the somewhat primitive capabilities of the traditional BIOS. The UEFI offers a much wider range of features than that found in the BIOS, all wrapped up in a much more user-friendly, graphically pleasing interface. There are, however, potential issues to circumvent. First, because UEFI is a newer standard, it’s not compatible with legacy hardware. This problem is circumvented by a special Compatibility Support Module (CSM), which enables you to emulate the BIOS to run older hardware and OSes. More controversially, UEFIs also ship with a Secure…

You’ve installed Ubuntu, removed the cover disc and rebooted your PC. The first change you’ll see is the presence of a new boot menu on startup, called GNU Grub (see ‘All about Grub’, p19). This enables you to choose which OS to boot into, plus gives you access to a memory testing utility. The default choice is Ubuntu, but before booting into it for the first time, we recommend selecting the Windows entry. This lets Windows boot for the first time since the Ubuntu installer resized your partitions – you’ll note it immediately runs the disk checking tool to verify and update its own partition records. Let it do this, then once complete, it’ll restart your PC. Select ‘Windows’ again from the Grub boot menu to check all is well.…

Now you’ve familiarised yourself a little with the Unity desktop, it’s time to plunge deeper into the Linux ocean and arm yourself with more of the important knowledge you’ll need to use it going forward. Before diving in, however, it’s a good idea to take a system backup – as you start to learn Ubuntu, you may make mistakes that could lock you out of your system. (See ‘Take another backup’, below.) First, let’s take a look at the Linux filesystem and how it’s organised into folders. First, Linux uses a different filesystem to Windows (NTFS or FAT32) called ext4. This makes your Linux folders invisible to Windows, which can’t natively read ext-based drives. That’s fine – we’ve moved your data on to a shared partition that both OSes can…

Do you know one of the 12% of desktop PC users out there (www.netmarketshare.com) who still uses Windows XP? Yes? Then do them a favour – tell them to stop and hand them this article. As of 8 April 2014, Microsoft ended all support for its ageing closed-source operating system. This means every new exploit and security flaw will go unpatched and unfixed, and will remain as a gaping hole in people’s digital lives. It really is a bad situation, because it’s going to lead to identity theft, an increase in spam and more botnet activity. Of course, it also means that vulnerable people will potentially be exploited. One of the problems is that Windows XP works well for a large number of users, and because of this, they’re unwilling…

Hardware support in Linux is very good nowadays. Most devices are supported directly in the kernel. There is no need to go trawling manufacturers’ websites for drivers. When you are buying components for your own computer, you need to know whether there’s support for the hardware before you buy a component. The first step is to determine the exact component in use, which is not as easy as it sounds. The motherboard maker’s website may state it has a Gigabit Ethernet port, but not tell you which chipset, so you will have to do some research. Typing the full product code and the word Linux into your favourite search engine will normally give plenty of hits. It’s worth restricting your search to recent posts, there is no point reading complaints…

Once you have built your computer, you will need to install an operating system. We will not look at that here, the distro installers are well enough documented, but there are a couple of points to consider. New motherboards will use UEFI rather than the older BIOS. They may also have Secure Boot enabled. You will almost certainly need to turn this off in the firmware. Press the relevant key at boot to configure the firmware, the motherboard’s manual will tell you which it is (one of the joys of building your own computer is that you get a manual for your motherboard). You should be able to use UEFI to boot the computer, most distros now work with it, and it’s nicer to work with than the old MBR…

Using Crouton means putting your Chromebook into Developer Mode, in which you get root access and even a Bash shell. This isn’t a hack, but a fully supported, if hidden, official option. A warning first: enabling Developer Mode wipes your storage. It doesn’t affect your cloud storage but any files stored locally should be uploaded to Google Drive before you proceed. The method of enabling Developer Mode is devicespecific – you can find instructions at the Chromium website here: http://bit.ly/1gDHPGd. On the Acer C720 we used for testing, as with most Samsung devices, you turn the device off and then hold down the [Escape] and [Refresh] keys before pressing the power button. This gets you to the recovery screen, then press [Ctrl]+[D] to enable Developer Mode. Other devices have a…

Comparing a £200 Chromebook to a full laptop may seem unfair – it is more in the netbook price range, and aimed at a similar market – but we’ll do that anyway. Running Ubuntu or Debian on a Chromebook is just like running it on a proper laptop. The only differences are down to the use of a chroot. This means you have to boot into Chrome OS first and then open a shell to start the chrooted session, but Chromebooks are designed to be suspended rather than shut down, so this isn’t necessarily often. Because it uses the hardware through Chrome OS, you need to do things such as set up your network connection in there, but as you can switch between the operating systems at will, this is…

So you've built an amazing, yet compact, Steam Machine and loaded up SteamOS. Now what? You'll want to get some great gaming peripherals for comfy gaming from your sofa. Valve itself has been working on a dedicated Steam controller with the lofty ambition that it will combine the convenience of a game controller with the precision of a keyboard and mouse setup. It's certainly a tall order and one that Valve appears to have struggled with as the controller has been delayed until late 2015. While we wait for Valve's official controller, which will cost $50, a number of other companies offer some great alternatives for controlling SteamOS games. Roccat has built a Sova lapboard especially for SteamOS which offers a small mechanical keyboard and large mouse pad that can…

The biggest surprise brought about by the new Raspberry Pi 2 is compatibility with Ubuntu for ARM 7 CPU. Before the original Raspberry Pi was released in early 2012, Ubuntu was often mentioned as a candidate for the Pi, but as Canonical didn’t support the ARM 6 architecture, which the ARM 11 CPU used in the original Pi, another distro was needed. Early on we saw Pidora, a fork of Fedora for the Pi, being used to demonstrate the power of the Pi. But Pidora brought a full desktop experience to hardware that required a lighter distribution. After further investigations Debian, in the form of Raspbian, was seen as a suitable candidate and this remains the official distro and is used for all official tutorials and supporting documentation. But compatibility…

The Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is meant for users who wish to experience the best of Debian (directly rather than via Ubuntu) in an easy to use package. It’s based on Debian Testing and is a semi-rolling release, which means it receives periodic updates via Update Packs. These are tested snapshots of Debian Testing to ensure stability and LMDE is binary compatible with Debian, which means you can switch to Debian Testing or Unstable for more frequent and bleeding-edge updates. However, LMDE isn’t compatible with Linux Mint, so you can’t use Ubuntu PPAs. LMDE is designed to offer the same look and functionality of Linux Mint and is available as 32-bit and 64-bit Live DVD images with either the Mate or Cinnamon desktops. The distro ships with Firefox, Thunderbird,…

Another distribution that has played a crucial role in shaping Linux’s DNA is Red Hat Linux, which was created in 1994 by Marc Ewing. Bob Young and his ACC Corporation bought Ewing’s business and created Red Hat Software. The company went public in 1999 and achieved the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. It rode on the success of Red Hat Linux to became the first open source billion dollar company. Over the years, some of the biggest and brightest Linux developers have worked with Red Hat. Soon after it went public, it acquired Michael Tiemann’s Cygnus Solutions which had authored the GNU C++ Compiler and worked on the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger. One of Red Hat’s most influential pieces of technology is its…

The Korora distribution started out as a way to ease the installation process of the Gentoo distro, but switched to using the Fedora distro as the base in 2010. The main aim of the distro is to make sure it works right out-of-the box for users. Korora ships a live DVD, which includes a huge selection of apps that make it suitable for a large number of users and the distro offers five desktop choices – Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce and Mate. While Fedora only ships with open source software, Korora also includes some proprietary software, such as Adobe Flash, which are essential for catering to a wide user base. Korora also allow other software to be easily installed, such as Google Chrome and the proprietary graphics driver for Nvidia…

In 1992 Roland Dyroff, Burchard Steinbild, Hubert Mantel and Thomas Fehr founded Software und System Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development). The company started as a service provider but the founders decided to have a distro of their own to cater to the enterprise user. The distro was named SUSE, based on the acronym of their company. The distro was a stock Slackware release translated in German and developed in close collaboration with Slackware’s Patrick Volkerding. For building its very own distribution of Linux, SUSE used the now defunct Jurix distribution. Jurix was created by Florian La Roche, who subsequently joined the SUSE team and began to develop YaST, which is the distro’s unique installer and configuration tool. The first SUSE distro that included YaST was released in May 1996 (Yast…

Salix OS is one of the best Slackwarebased distros: it’s light, nimble and backwards compatible with Slackware. One of its salient features is that it minimises bloat by having only one application per task. The distro supports both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and is available in five variants for the KDE, Mate, Xfce, Openbox, and Ratpoison desktops. Salix offers three modes of installation – Full, Basic and Core. The Full option installs everything on the installation image; Basic provides a barebones system with just the graphical desktop and a few essential apps and the Slapt package manager; the Core option will only install a console-based system and is designed for users to custom-build their install. The Full distro includes all the apps you’d expect on a desktop distro, and is…

If you need Linux just to run a few apps on an older computer, the mere number of available pages of documentation may matter much less than two other things. First, check if those apps, rather than the distro, have good documentation. Second, look for distros that hold your hand well in the first two to three hours of usage, when you really need to get familiar with them and their community. Crunchbang’s default wallpaper is what all distros for newcomers should have: a cheatsheet with all the main keyboard bindings. Most Debian material will apply to Elive, too, so if anything, there may actually be too much documentation. Manjaro and Absolute are the best here. At first login, Manjaro welcomes you with a window full of links to documentation,…

No matter how good it might look, a distro is worthless if there is no way to install new programs, or update existing ones, without being a real programmer and/or fighting dependency hell. Elive is the easiest to deal with – it basically uses the same mechanisms, online repositories and graphical frontends available in Debian and its derivatives. Crunchbang has menu entries such as ‘Install LibreOffice’. Clicking this opens a terminal in which a script asks you to confirm, then proceeds to download and compile the sources, and install the result. In Absolute, crude dialogs ask, for example, if you want to download the ‘Multimedia’ packages, that is codecs and similar libraries not included by default. Another tool will list the installed packages and offer to remove them, or install…

With 70 Raspberry Pi top apps! We all have our favourite open source apps that work for us better than any available alternative. But take a moment and step back from the Emacs vs vim type battles raging on in the Linux-verse and marvel at the sheer number of apps at our disposal. Your distros’ software repositories give you access to thousands of apps, and you can install everything from fully featured app suites to nifty commandline utilities literally with the touch of a button. There are open source apps and tools for all kinds of applications today. There’s hardly any use case that isn’t catered for by a community contributed app. Many of these apps have proved their mettle and offer features and performance benefits that surpass their proprietary…

Firefox One of the most widely recognised pieces of open source software, Mozilla’s Firefox web browser is the default browser on virtually every Linux distro. It’s pretty responsive and known for its privacy features. You can customise it to the hilt and also extend it with an impressive number of extensions. www.firefox.com gFTP The gFTP client is a feature-rich client that’ll get the job done, if you need to download files via FTP occasionally. It has a simple two-pane interface that shows the content of the local and remote filesystem. Using gFTP you can also transfer files between two remote servers. http://gftp.seul.org Tox Privacy conscious users should try the new decentralised IM and VoIP client called Tox. This relies on a distributed network, which uses P2P connections, the same technology…

Calligra Unless you feel you need LibreOffice’s superior compatibility with proprietary formats, you may want to consider Calligra. It’s a continuation of KOffice and unlike LibreOffice, Calligra has a modern-looking, modular design, and also uses Open Document as its native file format. It ships with a large clutch of apps. In addition to the Words word processor, Tables for spreadsheets, Stage for preparing presentations, and Kexi for managing databases, it also benefits from Krita for digital painting. www.calligra.org GnuCash Gnome users have GnuCash which is similar to KMyMoney in terms of features, but also handles and categorises entries differently. GnuCash is a personal and small business accounting app that’s based on double-entry for professional reporting and besides dealing with monetary transactions, it can track things such as stocks, bonds and…