Linux Format November 2021

meet the team

Jonni Bidwell If Reddit is anything to go by then all it takes is a screen grab of an i3 desktop with some sort of sci-fi/manga background, a translucent terminal and Conky proudly showing the handful of running processes consuming but a smidgeon of the machine’s gargantuan memory. Les Pounder With Valve’s upcoming Steam Deck running Arch Linux, we are going to see a big push for Linux gaming, thanks to Steam and Proton. These advancements will filter down to Linux in general, so you will soon be able to frag newbs via your Tux-powered rig. David Rutland If macOS is a Tesla and Windows a Honda Civic, Linux puts an entire dealership at your disposal with distros catering from new drivers to mechanics tinkering under the hood. Or build your own with jacked-up wheels…

windows insider

So after saying it would never exist, Microsoft felt it necessary to launch Windows 11. Why do we care? Well we don’t, but it’s neat to note that the Linux kernel now comes baked into Windows as part of WSL 2.0. It means people can try out and use Linux and its FOSS ecosystem more easily than ever before. We know many see this as more Microsoft ‘embrace and extinguish’, but this is different. Microsoft can’t own the Linux kernel, can’t shut it down – all it can do is attempt to make access to Linux as easy as possible from within Windows. My view is this simply opens Linux to a wider audience, which has to be a good thing. Right? In this issue Jonni – the poor boy – has…

remembering the legacy of sir clive sinclair

Sir Clive Sinclair has died at the age of 81. After leaving school at 17, Sinclair worked for a while as a technical journalist before creating Sinclair Radionics in 1961. Its first product was the Sinclair Micro-amplifier, released in 1962. After almost a decade of creating audio equipment, the company began creating popular pocket calculators that were considerably smaller than the competition. However, Sinclair was best known for effectively inventing home computers with the ZX80. Released in 1980 costing £79.95 as a kit, or £99.95 pre-assembled, it was drastically cheaper (and smaller) than any other computer at the time, and it meant having a computer for the home was finally affordable for many people. Selling 100,000 units the ZX80 was moderately successful, its follow-up the ZX81 was far more of a…

linux games get faster

Back in LXF280 we reported on how Valve was preparing to launch its Steam Deck handheld console, which runs Linux in the guise of its Arch-based SteamOS 3.0 distro, and it appears that work is bringing benefits to other Linux gamers as well. As Tom’s Hardware reports (https://bit.ly/lxf282valveamd), Valve has been working with AMD to create a new CPU driver that will improve the performance and power efficiency of Zen-based AMD processors on the Linux platform – which includes the Steam Deck. As AMD developer Ray Huang explained at the recent X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021), Valve discovered issues with the current ACPI CPUFreq driver, which was impacting performance with games running on Proton. Proton is a fork of Wine that was co-created by Valve to enable Windows-only games to run on…

wsl malware discovered

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is one of the best recent additions to the Windows OS as it adds everyone’s favourite kernel to Windows. In this very issue we look at WSL 2.0, which is built into Windows and enables you to run Linux executables natively in Windows 10 and Windows 11, with WSL 2.0 including the Linux kernel. It’s handy for devs working on Linux projects but using a Windows PC, for example, and it’s certainly been one of the more popular aspects of Microsoft’s embrace of open source. However, security researcher Black Lotus Labs has discovered malware that uses WSL to avoid being detected by antivirus tools. In a blog post outlining their findings (read it at https://bit.ly/lxf282wsl), the researchers reveal they have “recently identified several malicious files that…

the most wanted

Matt Yonkovit is Percona’s Head of Open Source Strategy and a member of SHA (Silly Hats Anonymous). PostgreSQL is currently ranked the “most wanted” database according to Stack Overflow, and DB-Engines crowned it DBMS of the year 2020. By the time you read this, PostgreSQL 14, the latest version of the open source database and is a great example of the power of open source. The licence allows it to be shared, used, forked and built upon. Hundreds of different companies, commercial and open source, have created spin-off versions. In an effort to ensure long-term supportability and quality, maintainers have tightened control over what makes it officially into a release. While this may not sit well with all contributors, the great news is that PostgreSQL’s architecture was designed to allow new additions…