Linux & Open Source AnnualLinux & Open Source Annual (2024)的目錄

Each of these distribution is highly configurable. Apart from offering users the option to make cosmetic changes such as background image, power settings and setting a custom icon theme, these distros provide the option to make changes to just about everything else, too. Be it kernel modules to install and load to installing only your hand-picked packages, and more. Unlike desktop distributions that are built to cater to a large number of user and use cases out of the box, these distros are versatile enough to be customised for just about every use case. Each of the distro featured in this Roundup will require considerable user involvement before they’re ready for everyday use. The process, although involved, will leave you with a much better understanding of how a Linux distro…

Thanks to the rigorous testing the packages are put through before a new release is published, Slackware and Debian both offer incredibly secure Linux distributions. This is what makes them suitable to run servers. While Debian provides enough convenience to be also suitable as a desktop distribution, Slackware in turn is highly configurable and fast. Unlike most other distros, Slackware also stands out because it doesn’t provide graphical tools to help you configure the system, which must be done by manually editing the myriad configuration files. If you have a lot of different machines with different architectures and wish to run the same distribution on all, Debian is the only sensible choice because it supports close to a dozen different architectures such as i386, amd64 and sparc. You’ll also be…

If you’re reading this, then you have at least a passing interest in free software. Maybe it’s limited to Linux, but the FOSS community is bigger than that. There’s plenty of software projects that run on other operating systems, and also a variety of open source Un*x clones. The BSD family of operating system is an important example, representing some of the first systems truly free from legacy Unix code, and can be seen as at least an uncle to Linux as we know it today. What started as one system, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) went through a variety of versions (a book in itself), with different projects and vendors. Today’s family of BSD systems include NetBSD, OpenBSD, and TrueOS. Of these, FreeBSD is considered the most ‘general purpose’…

All of the installation sequences stuck close to the Ubuntu standard. They all offered encryption, but the option was slightly hidden in the case of Bodhi and Zorin OS. Some would prefer to be dumped into the desktop on a first run, but we’ve given points for distros that add some setup hand-holding at this point, particularly if it’s skippable for those who don’t need it. We liked the way that the Pop!_OS installer gave some layout and theme configuration options while installation was in progress along with some tips on the UI. Annoyingly though, the (non-skippable) first-time run greeter repeated some of these questions and information. The Mint Welcome application was a normal-looking application (which we liked) and offered some configuration options. It also popped a reminder about checking…

Overall, we were impressed with what we saw. All of the distributions we’ve considered succeed in offering the feel of a customised OS experience rather than a generic Linux build with a standard desktop slapped on top. They all made the standard Ubuntu desktop look a bit stale in comparison while benefiting from the rock-solid underpinning that Ubuntu offers. We’ve decided to make Pop!_OS the overall winner against strong competition. We got on well with the COSMIC desktop environment. It’s bound to be a subjective experience, but the default aesthetic appealed to us, and we felt that the desktop workflow, which can largely be carried out from the keyboard, was fast and efficient. The software selection is slim without being bare-boned, but between the Ubuntu repositories and Flatpak, it should…

One of the ways some desktops help you conserve resources is to offer matching lightweight apps for common desktop tasks such as file management, text editing, image viewing and so on. Others leave it to the user to pair the lightweight desktop or window manager with third-party lightweight apps. EDE belong to the latter category. The goal of the desktop is to provide a desktop environment only, and you will have to add even the most common apps like a file manager. Openbox similarly concentrates on being a lightweight window manager that you can complement with third-party light apps. It’s the same story with Moksha. Since it was designed to ship with Bodhi Linux, the desktop borrows the few essential apps that are bundled with the distribution. The other two…

Taking app launch times as an indication, all the options in this Roundup are equally lightweight and responsive, and don’t give us much to choose between in terms of performance. So instead we’ll concentrate on their other aspects and determine our winner using the tried-and-tested mechanism of elimination. Lumina loses out for the simple reason that it wasn’t designed for Linux. It also isn’t available in the repos of many distributions, which makes installation a tall order for most users. We are really pained to deny Equinox a podium finish, especially since it performs extremely well and doesn’t score too badly in terms of usability. However, the project isn’t as actively developed as its peers, and you can’t always find it in your favourite disto. Moksha gets on the podium…

SystemRescueCd doesn’t offer much in terms of a customised interface. The distro has a simple boot option that takes you to its Xfce desktop, which doesn’t offer any conveniences or customised interfaces to help orientate new and inexperienced users. The MorpheusArch project does produce an ncurses-based script called LinDiag to assist with common system admin and recovery tasks. You can use it to check services, diagnose the network, manage packages and recover data from drives. However, the script oddly isn’t included in the distro by default, and you’ll have to clone it from GitHub. ALT Linux Rescue also doesn’t offer much in terms of customisation. One of the few aids it does have is the forensic-mode boot option that brings up the distro without activating the swap or mounting any…

The first step to rescuing a damaged computer is to have access to the right utility, which is why we looked favourably at distros with a large collection of tools. But just having the largest collection of tools isn’t of much use in the hands of inexperienced users. Taking that into consideration, the winner of this Roundup has to be a distro which can be used by a large number of people, irrespective of skill and experience. This is why ALT Linux Rescue loses out. While the distro is equipped to handle all sorts of repair and rescue jobs, it won’t be of much use in the hands of new users – it’s firmly designed for experienced technicians. MorpheusArch Linux loses out for similar but different reasons. Unlike ALT, the…

Mainstream Linux distros provide a huge amount of security features out of the box. Some have been around for a long time (address space layout randomisation, having services drop root privileges when they don’t need them, mounting removable drives with the noexec option so they can’t launch binaries) and some are quite new (Spectre and microdata sampling protections). A few desktop Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Mint, Solus, Pop!_OS) offer full disk or home directory encryption out of the box too, which we’d highly recommend you do on your laptop, and if you’re handling sensitive data it’s worth considering on your desktop too. Fedora (and its commercial cousin RHEL) enforces SELinux accounting, which takes permissions and access control lists (ACLs) to a new level, sandboxing apps with fine-grained configurations. AppArmor on Ubuntu…

When you want to use Linux to provide services to a business, those services will need to be secure, resilient and scalable. Nice words, but what do we mean by them? ‘Secure’ means that users can access to the data they require, be that read-only access or write access. At the same time, no data is exposed to any party that’s not authorised to see it. Security is deceptive: you can think you have everything protected only to find out later that there are holes. Designing in security from the start of a project is far easier than trying to retrofit it later. ‘Resilient’ means your services tolerate failures within the infrastructure. A failure might be a server disk controller that can no longer access any disks, rendering the data…

Credit: https://github.com/sa2c/sombrero You’ve probably seen benchmark statistics reported about all manner of popular devices, but what exactly is a benchmark, and how can you run one on your own systems? A benchmark originally referred to a testing process for rifles, where the gun was mounted to a bench, rather than being held by a human marksperson: the bench was acting as the mark, hence benchmark. With several test firings, the spread of shots could be measured – the smaller the spread, the better the gun. Nowadays however it refers to any process that allows different methods, devices or processes to be compared with each other directly, based upon a standard reference. In computing, this is done by taking a set of reference tasks which reliably take exactly the same amount…

Single board computers (SBCs), typically credit-card sized or smaller, are now a familiar part of the computing scene, thanks in no small part to the Raspberry Pi family of products. The Pi has spawned lookalikes from several companies, which have also attracted their supporters, but perhaps less well-known are those SBCs intended exclusively for embedded applications. Our aim here is to introduce this category of SBCs, and to illustrate how you could put them to work using a starter kit that you can pick up for just a few pounds. To start, though, just in case this is a new concept to you let’s describe what we mean by an embedded application. This is one that works in the background in such a way that the user might not even…

There’s room for debate on the matter, but we consider the core office applications to be: word processing, spreadsheet, presentations and database. LibreOffice and Calligra have all of these, and the applications themselves are fully featured in each case. The same is true for FreeOffice, OnlyOffice and WPS Office, except they don’t come with a database. As for the modules themselves, they all offer the basic facilities. In the case of word processing, you’re more likely to make your decision due to personal preference about the user interface rather than because of a lack of essential functions. In addition to the basic facilities that most users need, each of the word processors have features for more advanced, graphical layouts. In the case of FreeOffice, only the paid-for version offers mail…

To test the word processor modules, we moved the text of this article between the word processor modules of the suites in. docx format, and we encountered no major problems. LibreOffice, OnlyOffice and WPS Office imported some example Excel spreadsheets perfectly. Calligra and FreeOffice imported them, but both showed errors on some of the formulas. When it came to testing the presentation module with some PowerPoint files, none of the suites performed perfectly, but WPS Office gave the most accurate renderings overall. LibreOffice did a reasonable job, but some multi-coloured text was mono-coloured. OnlyOffice did a relatively poor job and didn’t load the images at all in one case. Calligra can only load actual presentation files and couldn’t load template files at all, and in addition, the rendering typically looked…

Linux machines fitted with either 8 or 16GB of RAM are unlikely to be affected by the memory footprint of the always-open email applications. However, for low-spec or older machines that have limited hardware resources, Claws Mail is the perfect solution. Not only does it require far fewer resources than its peers, it’s also feature rich, supporting both POP and IMAP accounts. In addition to extensive filtering capabilities, it also enables you to create coloured labels when sorting messages. Setting up new accounts is also straightforward in all the clients tested here. Apart from emails, you can also use Evolution to schedule appointments and track your tasks list. Together with KMail, both programs are especially conscious of users’ privacy and provide easy means to sign, encrypt and decrypt messages. The…

Along with the web browser, the email applications are one of the most recognisable components of the desktop. What started as a means to easily communicate with your contacts have now expanded to behemoth projects with a vast feature set. Not all users would want their email client to set up reminders and double up as a calendar. But if these are things that you use daily, it’s probably best to use just the one tool, rather than several. Evolution, Gnome’s official Personal Information Manager (PIM), provides a calendar, address book and a task manager. You can get the same features with KMail, provided you run it on top of the KDE desktop, where it can connect with other well-known KDE components such as Kontact and Korganizer. If you frequently…

When running the installations and tests for the various web servers, both Ubuntu and Raspbian were used since both tools are of great use to a typical web developer. In some circumstances, Ubuntu would be a simple install while the latest 2018 version of Raspbian had no packages. Luckily, we used our time to find five packages that did install rather quickly on our machines. In addition to installation issues from simple install commands, installing from source was erroneous in some cases, too. So, with that said, let’s take a closer look at what we found in terms of device support when we made our installations. With Apache, Nginx, lighttpd and Apache Tomcat, all products could be easily installed on Ubuntu and Raspbian with the usual apt-get …. command. For…

Out of the box, they all work. However, since we have different and changing needs, we can look at what they come with and how that will work for us. For testing HTML and browser-interpreted code such as CSS and JavaScript they all display static content, by default. But, as soon as we need to add a server-side language like PHP, we not only need that to be installed, but, need the server to communicate and use it effectively. Well, only a couple small tweaks are really required for all packages to make this possible. Once a minute or two is taken to configure PHP, so we can run database applications such as Wordpress, the rest of the details that must be considered are speed optimisation and security. So, let’s…

With the exception of Debian, none of the distros feature a graphical installer. Slackware and Arch go a step further and don’t even provide a live-installable media. Slackware’s Ncurses-driven installer isn’t complicated and provides on-screen instruction, which are terse but still helpful and contain all the information you need to successfully move forward with each step. You’re asked to partition the disk before starting the installer and the distro provides the choice of fdisk and cfdisk, yet more command-line tools, to help you carve space for Slackware. Run the setup to launch the installation wizard which will run you through the different installation steps, such as selecting the target partition, package selection, etc. Similarly, Void Linux doesn’t offer a graphical installer. It provides live-images favouring different desktop environments such as…

Our selection of distros presents a rare opportunity as each one uses a unique package management system. In addition to stability, a chief reason of Debian’s continued success is the underlying package management system. The distributions boasts of one of the largest software repositories on offer. Packages which meet its strict Debian Free Software Guidelines are included in the main repository, while others are relegated to the non-free repository. Packages which although compatible with the DFSG but need dependencies from the non-free repo are relegated to the contrib repository. Void Linux relies on the X Binary Package System (xbps) which it’s developed in-house. It comprises the xbps-install and xbps-remove utilities, which can be used to install or remove packages respectively. You can similarly use the xbps-query tool to look up…

Each of the distributions has its own take on exactly how the desktop works, but they’ve all stuck to a fairly conventional layout. In other words, you should be able to make a guess as to roughly how they all work at first glance. Even though they all have scope to be customised, we’re going to focus on the default setup that each distribution offers, noting how easy it is to make minor changes. When we’re considering the scoring, we want the basic functionality to be fast, smooth and intuitive. Beyond that, we’re looking for added customisations that the developers have made, which improve the user experience and introduce extra features. In each case, if you couldn’t get on with the desktop environment, you could install a different one –…

Although there are many ways to add software to a Linux system, we’re only interested here in the GUI methods that are provided by default by each distribution. Pop!_OS features a custom shop application that uses standard repositories or Flathub as its sources. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include the all-important reviews and ratings of Ubuntu Centre. We like to see distribution developers coming up with original applications, but we’re not sure what extra features the Pop!_Shop adds over the standard Ubuntu software shop. Zorin OS also draws its potential software pool from the standard repositories, Snap and Flathub. This time, the shop application looks like it might be a customised version of the standard Ubuntu shop, but it also lacks the reviews and ratings. Neither Zorin nor Pop!_OS includes a front-end…

Lightweight or not, a desktop environment is one of the most crucial elements of a distribution. Regardless of the features or application set with which a distribution ships, oftentimes it’s the look and feel, behaviour and responsiveness of the desktop environment which help you decide on a distribution. Perhaps this explains why most mainstream distributions spend a considerable amount of time polishing the desktop environment and ensuring a rich and rewarding user experience. But all of those careful design strategies go out the window when you swap the default environment with a lightweight alternative. That said, while the primary objective of these desktops is to save resources, it doesn’t mean they totally ignore the usability aspect. After all, no one wants to use a desktop that takes a negligible amount…

Just because these desktops are lightweight doesn’t mean they can’t provide the bells and whistles you get with mainstream desktops. As these elements inevitably increase the memory footprint of the desktop, some of the desktops bundle them inside a separate package, while others avoid them altogether. EDE doesn’t believe in offering any additional plug-ins and so you’re stuck with the default functionality. On the other hand, while Openbox can be extended by plugging in various components such as a file manager, the window manager itself cannot take on new features via plug-ins, extensions or additional modules of any sort. Lumina began life as a set of extensions to Fluxbox, a stacking window manager for the X Window System, and bills itself as having a plug-in-based interface design. This enables you…

When it comes to distros that package specialised tools, it takes a lot more than the sum of its parts to win us over. Stuffing distros will loads of tools will help experienced users, but won’t be of much help in the hands of the average desktop user looking to rescue an unbootable machine. It’s because of this that usability becomes such a critical factor for specialised distros such as the ones in this Roundup. Also, remember that there’s more to usability than just beautiful interfaces; having relevant information on using the tools at hand is just as essential as picking the right tool for the job. Finally, just because a distro is usable irrespective of a user’s level of experience doesn’t mean it has less powerful tools than a…

All these distros will help you wiggle out a tricky situation, irrespective of the ailments that plague your installation. Many of them can also image and clone disks, identify and list damaged sectors, and extract recoverable data from physically damaged disks. However, some of them are more useful than others. For instance, data recovery is the sole advertised purpose of MorpheusArch, and you can use the distro for little else. AIO System Rescue Toolkit has a handful of rescue tools to fix boot errors and rescue accidentally deleted files. The majority of its tools, though, are for fixing Windows installations, and can be used to fix all kinds of issues with the proprietary OS. The tools bundled with ALT Linux Rescue can do a wide variety of repair jobs. In…

There have been a few notable efforts to humanise Linux. Today we’d say – and feel free to disagree – that Linux Mint and elementary OS are the most friendly-to-use and all-purpose distros out there. These are of course indebted to Ubuntu for providing a solid foundation and superlative package selection – which in turn owes something to Debian. But it’s also arguable that much of this popularity is, or at least was, a result of dissatisfaction with Ubuntu’s desktop. People who didn’t like Unity loved Cinnamon, and the people who did like Unity didn’t like GNOME 3 (which Ubuntu has used since 17.10). Pantheon, the macOS-like desktop of elementary OS, is attractive not just to fans of fruit-based fashion companies, but to anyone frustrated with over complicated configuration, inconsistently…

Human beings aren’t really username and password people. Anyone who claims that email is dead would do well to recall that it’s often the only way to reset passwords for all those web services we only sign into once in a blue moon. Naturally, we should all be using password managers and that situation should never arise, but to err is human and all that. Still, there are alternatives and augmentations to passwords that provide convenience and security. Major desktops on Linux don’t yet provide the face/retina unlock features of Windows 10, but that will change. In the meantime we can use a variety of other means to log into our glorious desktops and online services. If your laptop and mobile phone have NFC (near-field communication) capability, then there’s currently…

Unfortunately, if you fall victim to a ransomware attack and don’t have any backups, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. The usual asking price to unlock is around $500, though many variants will threaten to increase this amount after a couple of days, and may even threaten to make decryption impossible after longer. These threats just provoke anxiety in the victim, who’s then more likely to pay up before considering the merits of doing so. What is important to remember is that while there’s a possibility that whoever’s in control of this malware is reasonable enough to provide a decryption key, there’s also the possibility that they won’t. Their business model, after all, is to collect payments, so why should they bother with the extra admin of…

Virtualisation has been around since the 1960s. Of course, computing then was all done on mainframes and OSes were a lot different, so it’s harder for youngsters to get their trendy heads around how this worked. The idea then is essentially the same as it is now: compute resources were to be shared (fairly) amongst users in such a way that concurrently running jobs would not interfere with one another. Operating system kernels used to be called ‘supervisors’, and each separate job was more or less its own entity (today we expect our OSes to multitask programs as a matter of course, but this wasn’t the case back then). So the underlying OS which governed these jobs was referred to as a hypervisor, a term still used today. Modern hypervisors…

Big audio suites are great, but they can be intimidating to say the least – sometimes you just want something that works without having to think too much about it. Enter Audacity, from: www.audacityteam.org. Audacity has become popular on all desktop platforms, and has started popping up on YouTube tutorials quite a bit. Known for its ease of use and intuitive interface, Audacity is perhaps the audio equivalent of Microsoft Paint (erm…–Ed) – it can’t do deeply complicated tasks, but then it was never intended to do so. It’s designed around simple controls that most people can guess their way around… though that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve some great results! Although technically Audacity can record multi-channel digital audio, the interface really isn’t designed for it – it’s meant for…

The app called Linux Multi Media System (LMMS) has become the daddy of loop-based music making and easy MIDI editing. The important bit of LMMS is the sidebar on the left, which has samples, file management and instrument plug-ins – and instrument plug-ins are what really power LMMS. Included are a bunch of weird instruments and different synthesisers, but we’ll be focusing on the component called Sf2 Player, which runs MIDI soundfonts, enabling you to compose MIDI-based music without external hardware. If you drag Sf2 Player onto the Song-Editor window it will create a new track. Click the track’s Sf2 Player button and a new plug-in window appears, with a piano and sound controls. If you click the piano now, no sound will come out of it – first you…

Linux has made great strides in the area of software compatibility. Or, more accurately, software is available more consistently across the various distributions and their native package formats. Yet this still requires the hard work of packagers. They need to take an application and tweak it to fit the specific needs of different distros, and even different releases of the same one. However, a few new universal package formats have emerged, bringing the promise of “package once, run anywhere” (on Linux, anyway). Flatpak (https://flatpak.org) is among the contenders Mayank Sharma reviewed in LXF234, and it’s got a lot going for it. In this article we’ll examine Flatpak, explore how to use it, and take a look at two important developments. Mode of operation Flatpak is both a package format, and…

All of the office suites that we’ve looked at here are available free of cost when it comes to the core suite itself. LibreOffice, Calligra and OnlyOffice are free in every sense because there’s no cost to download the fully working suite and the source code is also available for download. All of the suites are available for Windows and Mac, too. This is an important consideration if you want to pass them on to people who don’t run Linux, although, Calligra appears to have only basic support on those environments. WPS Office and FreeOffice are examples of the commonplace ‘freemium’ model, in that the core product is free, but there are costs associated with extra features such as mobile applications and services like cloud hosting. That said, the developer…

This Roundup has shown that all of the suites on test are extremely usable, but we’re naming that old workhorse LibreOffice as the best of the bunch. It’s highly competent in most areas, even if the user interface looks a bit old-fashioned in places. Not enough people know that you can select the ribbon interface if you want it, and frankly, plenty of people prefer the old toolbar-based approach anyway. However, overall, it’s clean and clear looking and also highly responsive, even on slower hardware. Unfortunately, it’s rather lacking in collaboration features and cloud integration, this is understandable in terms of its desire for people and companies to utilise third-part cloud-offerings such as Collabera Online www.collaboraoffice.com to power cloud-based options. LibreOffice and Calligra both worked well on our old laptop,…

G Mail now offers users’ 15GB mailboxes. Yahoo similarly offers 1TB of storage space for your messages and attachments. While this is much appreciated, the downside to the vast storage space is that people no longer delete emails. Most email services now enable you to archive mails, or perform a similar function such that the Inbox is reserved only for important messages. This inevitably leads to massive mailboxes that hold tens of thousands of messages over the years. As you subscribe to more mailing lists and add more contacts, your mail client should make it possible for you to perform filtering operations to automatically sort the different messages into dedicated folders, or apply labels for easy identification. Just as important is the search capabilities, because looking for one particular email…

Mailspring is the youngest tool featured in this Roundup. All the others have received extensive coverage over the past several years, and we’ve certainly discussed them at length over the past few pages. In a break from tradition with our Roundups, where we normally spend some time going over the pros and cons of the winners, this time around we’ll spend more time talking about the last place finisher than all the other tools. This is because we’ve rarely come across an application that has so thoroughly impressed us. At the same time, a few poor choices and the lack of interest in providing key features also makes it one of the most disappointing tools ever featured in a Roundup. Judging solely by the score on the different tests, you…

From a basic installation, only Lighttpd and Apache had man page entries. Meanwhile, all five products tested had man pages online with the exception of Openlitespeed. Although man pages are a great of source of information, there is much better documentation online. After spending quite some time on each vendor’s website during the first-time setup and running, Apache, Tomcat and Nginx seemed to have organised, easy-to-follow information that allowed for an easy installation, modifications and configurations. Openlitespeed had multiple options and it took an amount of trial and error on both Ubuntu and Raspbian until it worked. Online it does look like a groomed commercial product with a slick GUI that integrated well with WordPress and other software, however it lacks the effort needed for a home web server and…

When we start our web server and test local pages, we are the only ones accessing our website with port 80. However, as soon as deploy a site online, we need to take security more seriously since our router will forward port 80, so outside users can access the site. Let’s do a quick run-through of our web servers and see what changes we need to make. With a default Apache installation, we should make several changes; like installing the mod_security module and making several changes to the /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/security. conf and /etc/apache2/apache2.conf files. With the /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/security.conf file, we should uncomment ServerSignature Off and ServerTokens Prod. We can also edit the apache2.conf file to turn off directory browsing and limit large requests to protect from denial-of-service attacks. With Nginx, we can…

Linux distributions have come a long way since the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros (actually in the beginning there was no Linux, and no space-time, then there was a big bang… – Ed). You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realise you’d got your Makefile wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was great fun. More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science department). Then in 1992 came SLS, which inspired Slackware and later frustrated Ian Murdock into creating…

Fancy using a range of applications such as VLC and LibreOffice? Then you’ll have to install each on the different distros yourself. Even though it’s often touted as a non-newbie distribution, Debian is perhaps the most user-friendly out of all the distros featured here. This is because you can get it installed and configured with all your favourite applications quickly. The other distros will require far more time and patience. Depending on your chosen install media, Debian will offer you a media player, web browser and an assortment of useful everyday applications. You can then populate the distro with all the tools you may need using the rather populous software repositories. While Void Linux will provide a desktop environment depending on the flavour you choose, our Mate installation was threadbare…

If all you’ve ever worked with our regular desktop distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint, Mandriva and the ilk, just installing the distributions featured in this Roundup would be an eye-opening experience. But you can’t judge power user distros with the same exacting measures as you would desktop distributions such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint, because the intended user either already has the expertise to not let the limitations hinder the work experience, or is determined enough to get past the shortcomings. Because of its increasing push to appeal to new users, it would be unfair to continue to label Debian as a power user distro. Not only is it the quickest in delivering a ready-to-use system post-installation, it’s easier still to tweak and configure. You can think of it as…

Pop!_OS comes with a slim selection of essential applications for general use such as Firefox as the web browser and Geany as the email client. There are some office applications such as LibreOffice, a USB image writer and a scanner tool. Overall, there’s a GNOME flavour with choices such as Totem video player and Evince document viewer, although this distribution seems to have picked up the odd GNOME habit of giving applications generic names such as Files, Videos and Document Viewer. The Bodhi Linux application selection is stripped down to the essentials with more system-configuration tools than actual applications. Perhaps it could have included a few more extras? The choices are appropriate for a distro that bills itself as lightweight such as Leafpad text editor, Ephoto photo manager and Thunar…

For each distro on test we’re basing our comparison on its main edition, but each one feature has at least one variant. You might only need a single release, but we mark more highly for releases that can cover a number of use cases. You might want to keep the same core distro in different roles, for example. Linux Mint has an upgrade cycle and versioning system that’s detached from the main Ubuntu one, but the releases themselves are based on Ubuntu LTS versions. Linux Mint refers to its variants as ‘editions’, and the main edition is based around the Cinnamon desktop, a feature-packed, modern desktop inspired by the classic GNOME desktop. There’s also an edition based on the MATE desktop, a direct continuation of the GNOME 2.x era desktop.…

With the exception of a couple, all the desktops in this Roundup are available in the repositories of mainstream desktop distributions. Arch, however, leads the pack, in that it gives you access to all the options via its official and community-supported repositories. You’ll also get good mileage with Fedora, thanks to its Copr build system which complements its repositories. Similarly, Ubuntu with its PPAs enables you to get your hands on a wide number of DEs. One word of advice though: the quality of packages in the community-maintained repositories varies widely and ranges from anywhere between rock-solid to barely usable. You might not get the best experience using packages from a community-supported repository as compared to the official ones. LXQt and Openbox are the two options that are universally available…

Since you’ve taken the steps to add a new desktop, it’s only natural you’ll want it to do your bidding by customising the way it works. All configuration options in EDE are housed inside the configuration window. It provides six tools to customise different but very basic aspects of the desktop including wallpaper, screensaver, calendar, volume and preferred apps. Advanced users can also set various other aspects of the desktop by manually editing configuration files. Openbox users can customise the window manager using the Openbox Configuration Manager (obconf) app. This helps you customise little else besides various aspects of the window manager. For instance, you can use it to change the default appearance and apply themes, and change the behaviour of the mouse and the position of the taskbar. You…

Should you be looking for a wide range of repair tools and utilities, you’ll be disappointed with MorpheusArch. The distro has a very focused approach and only really includes TestDisk, along with its companion PhotoRec utility, for recovering files. The tools support all popular file systems and can identify files in over 400 formats. In addition to files, you can also use them to find lost partitions, rebuild the boot sector, fix FAT tables, locate the backup superblock and more. Experienced users can use its Arch base to fetch other rescue tools. Another Arch-based rescue distro, SystemRescueCd is a slightly better option. Unlike MorepheusArch, this one ships with several repair and rescue tools and utilities, and supports all the important filesystems. There are multiple recovery tools, filesystem-specific repair tools, and…

Despite their fairly large collection of apps, these distros don’t include all the repair and rescue tools available. This is partly because some popular rescue tools have licence restrictions which prevent developers from including them in their distros. In any case, instead of lugging around multiple distros to accomplish different tasks, advanced users and technicians will prefer to flesh out their favourite distro to include all the tools they need. If you’re looking to decompile and assemble your own rescue distro, you won’t get far with ALT Linux Rescue, MorpheusArch or AIO System Rescue Toolkit. None of them offers the option to customise the distro, although you can use their respective package managers to pull in additional utilities and flesh out the live environment as need. In addition, AIO System…

We covered firewalls last issue, so check that out if you want to learn the ins and outs of packet-filtering on Linux. Now we’re going to cover them again, but this time we’re going for a more practical approach with IPFire, a dedicated distro for firewalls or other network appliances. You don’t need any particularly special hardware to run a firewall, an old machine or a Raspberry Pi is fine (we’ve included ISOs for 32-bit x86 machines as well as USB/SD Card images for 64-bit PCs and ARMv5 and later devices), but note that at least two network adapters are required. Be that as it may, you can also run IPFire in a virtual machine (which you can add as many virtual Ethernet adapters to as you like). On reasonable…

While we did a cover feature on malware not all that long ago (LXF251), our state of the art analytical engine (that’s me – Ed) tells us that you want to hear more detail about one particular type of malware – ransomware – and one particular means of delivery, social engineering. Holding things to ransom is an ancient idea, and one that has been shown to work very well. Kings, nobles and precious works of art have been ransomed since antiquity. Likewise using smooth talking to hoodwink people into doing things they probably shouldn’t – grifting, if you will. But in the digital age these practices take on a whole new, sinister dimension. On the face of it having files held to ransom is in an entirely different league to…

There are all kinds of devious ways that unscrupulous scammers will use to get hold of unsuspecting marks’ data – whether it’s tricking them to install ransomware or some other kind of malware such as a keylogger, or having them visit a booby-trapped website and enter valuable credentials. Most people nowadays know better than to reply to an email purporting to come from a Nigerian prince who needs some help organising a wire transfer for his considerable inheritance. Indeed, most scammers no longer bother with these kinds of ruses; their game has been considerably upped. They may play on local events, especially natural disasters. They may also send targeted email based on public information harvested from the target’s social media accounts. For this reason you should be awfully careful about…

At one stage utterances of the form “Linux doesn’t get viruses” were commonplace. They still are, by fans of the operating system and even by distro makers (see right https://manjaro.org). Unfortunately such talk was never quite true and it’s more fallacious now than it ever was. Worms, rootkits and all kinds of other nasties existed on UNIX systems while Linux was still just a twinkle in Linus’s eye. Many of the techniques they used were adapted to the Linux platform when it fructified. As far as desktop Linux is concerned, things are reasonably clear cut: there are far fewer attacks reported, and the list of known malware strains is far shorter than on Windows machines. Given desktop Linux’s market share (somewhere around two per cent), this makes sense – attackers will…

Many of the popular Windows antivirus programs have a Linux equivalent (Sophos, ESET NOD32, Comodo, F-PROT). But more often than not these do little more than scan for signatures of Windows viruses. This doesn’t mean they should be disregarded outright; if you use Wine to run Windows programs then you could inadvertantly use it to run Windows malware. Also, if you run an email server then it’s absolutely in your interests to scan incoming messages for Windows threats. Even if you don’t, maybe you’d rather know if that file you can’t remember downloading contains a Windows nasty, and maybe you’d feel safer scanning it from Linux. We’re going to look at what appears to be the only open source antivirus software, ClamAV. We actually looked at this way, way back…

Linux sound editing has grown from a quirky alternative to a genuinely viable platform with respect and commercial support. Each year, more commercial audio products are released on Linux, as more companies start taking it seriously. But fear not. There is no need to buy – or even pirate – expensive commercial editing suites when all you need to create music is just waiting to be downloaded. As the proprietary commercial scene grows, the free software audio scene is growing even faster. With each year that passes, Linux music-making is becoming stronger and richer, with more quality applications than we can possibly cover. Entire distributions and variants such as Ubuntu Studio, KX Studio and AV Linux exist to create dedicated music-making machines, with low latency kernels to optimise recording performance,…

Three of the suites (WPS Office, OnlyOffice and FreeOffice) use a modern ribbon toolbar in the various modules, aping the UI approach of Microsoft Office. The other suites (Calligra and LibreOffice) default to a traditional toolbar approach. Which one you prefer may come down to personal choice and your existing familiarity with office applications. Take note that some of the suites can switch between a traditional and a ribbon interface, even though you might have to hunt a bit to find that option. The use of individual tabs for each document, rather than individual windows, is another feature that distinguishes the different packages. And, as is the case with ribbon versus toolbar, personal preference might be the deciding factor here. Responsiveness of the interface is another criterion that we’ve taken…

Beyond the core office tools, what further applications does each suite offer? There isn’t anything to say about WPS Office or FreeOffice in this section because they don’t offer any modules beyond the three main editors. All of the modules in the Calligra suite have the feel of separate applications. So, it’s worth considering that many KDE applications such as KMail and KOrganiser could be used alongside Calligra while offering some integration and consistency. Of the official components, Karbon is a vector drawing application, covering similar ground to an application such as Inkscape. The blandly named Plan is a project planning application. The website also makes reference to former components such as mind-mapper Braindump, flow chart creator Flow and eBook publishing that are no longer maintained, making them a bit…

While online services such as Yahoo and GMail continue to tweak their interfaces every few years, desktop mail clients are far more lax with their appearances, with seemingly no change having taken place since the introduction of the modern email clients decades ago. How do you then explain the popularity and continued existence of desktop clients? One of the reason for this is their tight integration into the desktop, which means pop-up notifications for incoming messages. Add to that features such as queueing messages, their anti-spam measures and support for encrypting your messages, and it’s easy to see why these applications can boast of such vast user communities. The first and only task that a mail client should do well is connect easily with the different accounts and send and…

All the applications featured in this Roundup provide different tools and solutions to safeguard your privacy of your communications and the safety of your machines. In addition to the default settings, most also offer additional mechanisms to protect you with the aid of plug-ins. You have the choice of using Bogofilter or SpamAssassin to detect and eliminate spam messages when working with Evolution, KMail and Claws. With Claws, the core package includes several useful plug-ins including Bogofilter, but if you’ve installed it using your distribution’s software management utility, you must additionally install the claws-mail-plugins package. KMail’s anti-spam and anti-virus wizards help you to configure the respective tools. You must already have the tools installed to handle these operations, such as Bogofilter or ClamAV. If no tools are found, the wizard…

Web servers will be installed via the command line. Some installations are very simple one-liners that use apt-get install while others need to be installed from source using a few extra commands. Once installed, the servers can be used to quickly display a default web page. Since we will test our servers with the server-side language PHP and mySQL, we will see how easily they can be used with each server. Looking into details, we will see which software works easiest with basic commands or with the aid of very basic text editing to config files. On top of that, we will look at configuring each server so that it runs more efficiently and helps us get the results we need: a fast-loading website that won’t leave potential viewers so…