Linux Format

Why didn’t you pick up that flashy MacFormat or shiny T3 magazine? Perhaps you don’t own a Mac, or don’t care about iPhones or Samsung Folds – Ihear they’re very slick. Do you hate technology? Oddly, you can’t actually buy a Future-published Windows magazine any more – people lost interest years ago… Perhaps that’s it – you’re interested in how things work, you’re interested in what goes on underneath and what makes a system tick. While Apple, Microsoft and much of the tech world are desperate to hide all the complexity away, there are still people who enjoy getting their hands dirty and learning what makes something run. So when Eben Upton first revealed the Raspberry Pi’s naked PCB back in 2012, much of the tech world moved on for…

DISTRO OpenSUSE to drop early 64-bit CPUs Tumbleweed moves to x86-64-v2 – do you even know which version you have? Tumbleweed is SUSE’s rolling release distro and is constantly updated with the latest stable software; development is handled by OpenSUSE Factory. Tumbleweed’s Dominique Leuenberger has sent an email to the Factory mailing list saying the Factory is “repurposed to move forward with x86-64-v2”. This leaves the first generation of 64-bit chips dead when implemented. A new repository will be created for legacy systems but will require volunteers to keep it running as, after setting it up, Leuenberger says he won’t touch it. SUSE Linux Enterprise is already due to move to x86-64-v2 (it had considered moving to v3, but this was dropped as a step too far). Given that Leap…

After waiting in the Linux-next integration tree for about 18 months, the basic Rust infrastructure finally landed in the mainline Linux kernel with the release of v6.1. While this did not include any real device drivers and only a few toy sample modules, further subsystem-specific bindings with real drivers should be added in the future. During the 2022 Linux Maintainers Summit in Dublin, Linus Torvalds asked CI systems to start testing the new Rust infrastructure. So, with that in mind, Rust testing has now been added to KernelCI! Of course, the future of Rust in the Linux kernel in general and what community adoption Rust will have within the project remains uncertain. The codebase is still in its early stages of experimentation and some topics are controversial. However, we do plan…

Linux isn’t like Windows or Mac OS. You know that, of course, but it could be news to some of your users. What they see is a computer. Desktop, laptop, tablet; Dell, Apple, Lenovo; Android, Windows, Mac OS. It’s a computer, and you fix computers, right? Yes, you can probably make an attempt at fixing systems that you don’t normally work on. There are enough similarities that you can probably help at least with the more straightforward things.  But are you an IT generalist or specialist? The generalist can be likened to your GP – they have a wide range of medical knowledge, but for most areas, they don’t possess the required in-depth knowledge. The person to be in the IT world is the specialist, not the generalist. You want…

The start of a year always brings a raft of predictions about what will be different in the next 12 months. I prefer new year’s resolutions, as these are actions you can take yourself.  My first resolution is to look at platform engineering. This takes the self-service, automated approach that is common in the cloud and applies it to self-managed software, like open source projects. It brings what people like about the cloud – ease of getting started, ability to work more efficiently – and keeps the level of freedom and control in your hands that open source provides. Adopting some of these approaches should help you get more done. Secondly, look at data ownership. Are you able to manage where your data is processed and stored? In the US,…

NOMADBSD 131R This is a distro designed to be run from a USB flash drive and is based around FreeBSD, this time version 13.1. New features include two images, one using ZFS and one using UFS for the filesystem, with the latter having soft updates journaling. The automated graphics driver has been updated, including support for VIA, and there’s a new display manager: SLiM. To keep the image size down, LibreOffice and some multimedia applications have been removed. LINUX MINT 21.1 BETA Linux Mint has been designed to give the classic desktop experience with custom tools to make for a convenient out-of-the-box web-based installation, ideal for beginners. There are custom menus and desktop, and many unique configuration tools. It’s based on Ubuntu and is also compatible with Ubuntu repositories. This…