Table of contents for November 2022 in Linux Format

After 17 alpha builds in 2022 alone, the open-source Godot game engine (https://bit.ly/lxf295godot) is now one step closer to the full release of version 4.0, with the recent release of the first beta. According to the release announcement, this beta version is essentially feature complete, so it should give us a good idea of what the final release will look like. The main purpose of this beta is to help identify and fix bugs, as well as optimise performance. It includes a culmination of improvements made on the engine core since work on Godot 4.0 began in 2019. The idea is that the core engine will be a solid and robust base to build the application around, and as the release announcement says, “We’re thinking forward, and preparing the ground…

Framework has caught our eye in the past with its open, modular, laptops that put the user’s right to repair at the forefront of its designs, so we were excited to see it launch a Chromebook. The specs are impressive, with the design aping the Framework Laptop, with a 2256x1504 resolution, 12th generation Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB DDR4 RAM (which can be upgraded to 64GB and a 256GB SSD, which can be upgraded to 1TB. As you’d expect, ChromeOS comes preinstalled. These specs are high for a Chromebook – and so is the price, with the website announcing the launch (https://bit.ly/lxf295framework chromebook) announcing a $999 starting price. That’s a big investment for a Chromebook.…

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email lxf.letters@ futurenet.com. Z is for storage I’ve just put on Mint 21 with ZFS as root ending with a bpool and an rpool on a 1TB disk. Now what? I’m struggling with concepts of filesystems and partitions, how to back up everything, whether I can or should have home on a separate partition/special area, and so on. Any chance of articles in this area? Phil Neil says… As soon as you start abstracting things away from the actual hardware it can suddenly become difficult to work out just what’s going on, especially when terms like ‘pools and volumes…

IN BRIEF Openmamba is competent enough, stable and even comes with Raspberry Pi-optimised versions. However, it claims to be neither derivative nor dependent on other distros doesn’t quite feel right. The distro is maintained by one person, so perhaps it’s a little unfair to expect a complete ground-upwards effort with this level of polish. SPECS CPU: Intel Pentium III or AMD K6/ Duron/ Athlon, Arm 64-bit Memory: 2GB (512MB server) HDD: 20GB (10GB server) Build: i586, x86_64, aarch64. Most Linux distros reviewed on these pages have a rich and storied lineage, with one of a few common heritages – claiming, in one form or another, descent from Debian, Arch, Slackware or Red Hat. Openmamba is a Linux-based operating system, and claims not to be based on any other distributions. First…

SPECS Recommended OS: Ubuntu 20.04 64-bit, Steam OS CPU: Intel Core i5 6600, AMD Ryzen 1600X Memory: 8GB HDD: 6GB GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 3GB Vram, AMD RX 580 4GB Vram Of all the gags Two Point Campus fires off over the university PA system, “University gives you a bright future… and clouds it with debt” has stuck the most, capturing the experience of playing this management game as well as enrolling in further education. We had high hopes for the students, but by the end we only cared about how much cash we could bleed from them to keep the university running. Indeed, maintaining a campus is expensive. The buildings and staff chip away at the bank balance regularly, and whenever there’s a nice fat stack sitting in the…

The Lubuntu installation routine is the most conventional. As with most Ubuntu derivatives, the user boots into a live desktop environment. From there on, Lubuntu follows the familiar path, launching an easy-to-use partitioning tool followed by a few choices about language and location. The 4QOS installer looks similar to a standard Ubuntu one, but what we really liked was that there’s a Software section that enables the user to choose between four profiles that range from a bare desktop to one with a fully featured application selection. The partitioner also added an ‘install alongside’ option along with the more typical Ubuntu-style options. There’s also a version of the installer that can run from within Windows. Linux Lite offers live mode and direct install routines. Linux Lite and 4QOS both feature…

We’ve chosen Lubuntu as the best of the current crop of lightweight Linux distributions. In some ways, it doesn’t feel like an exciting choice because Lubuntu seems to be all about delivering the standard Ubuntu experience with a faster, less resource-intensive desktop. However, there’s no arguing with what it provides. The desktop is clear and more or less fully featured, with a layout that nearly every computer user will be able to grasp at first sight. It’s fast in operation and reasonably light on memory usage. To be frank, machines that aren’t powerful enough to handle Lubuntu are going to struggle to handle mainstream applications like a web browser anyway. Beneath the understated (but attractive) desktop, Libuntu has a fairly standard Ubuntu setup running the show. That means most of…

There’s been a resurgence in retro gaming lately. The C64 and NES (originally launched in 1982 and 1983, respectively) both saw mini editions launched back in 2018 and both enjoyed plentiful sales. A SNES edition appeared last year too, priced rather steeply at £239 (more than the original’s RRP, not considering inflation). This was followed by the Amiga A500 Mini at the start of 2022 (RRP £120). All of the above are just open source emulators running on commodity hardware in a designer shell, so you might think the prices are a little overboard. What you’re paying for though, mostly, is the licence to run these retro ROMs and disk images legally. Nintendo in particular will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger if it catches you…

Not many people can boast of having their own code run in space on the International Space Station, but that’s exactly the reward the Astro Pi Mission Zero offers to every entry that passes the eligibility criteria and correctly follows the Mission Zero guidelines. Participation is free and open to anyone up to the age of 19 who lives in an ESA Member State (yes, that’s still the UK!). The contest runs until 17 March, 2023, and everything can be completed in a web browser. This gives you plenty of time to submit an entry! Astro Pi is introducing a host of new features to this year’s competition. The most obvious addition is an all-new Python-based online code editor. It also takes full advantage of the new features of the…

IN BRIEF Waveshare’s PoE HAT for the Raspberry Pi Zero is compatible with all but the earliest models of Zero, and it works without any software or hardware modifications. The ‘double decker’ design looks a little cumbersome, but it does grow on you. We get Power over Ethernet, three USB 2.0 ports and 100 Base-T Ethernet speeds, all in the Zero form factor. When the Raspberry Pi 3B+ introduced Power over Ethernet (PoE), it was seen as a useful addition, even though its existence was rather surprising. PoE is when power is supplied over a network connection. Power can be supplied by a router/switch with PoE support, or it can be “injected” using a specialist device. Waveshare has introduced a PoE HAT for the Raspberry Pi Zero range of boards,…

Over the years Microsoft’s feelings towards the open source community have changed significantly. Contrast it to the Steve Ballmer days, when he described it as a cancer, to more recently when Azure runs a majority of Linux distros, submits code to the Linux kernel and is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation. Microsoft also releases some key parts of its technology stack as open source. .NET Core is a version of its .NET programming stack that runs and compiles on multiple platforms. PowerShell also has a native Linux version and the replacement for the terminal emulator, cmd.exe, is developed on GitHub. Historical integrations between Windows and other operating systems have included Windows Services for Unix and support for mapping NFS shares. To explore deeper into this we’ll be discussing…

Whether you’re working on your next novel that you’re looking to self-publish or a concise report for a club that you run, Sigil can help you turn your text into well-crafted documents. Most desktop distros including Ubuntu and Fedora only carry an outdated version for the utility in their official repos. If you want the latest version then you’ll have to spend some time building Sigil from source. And unfortunately it’ll take some doing. Before you can even get to compiling the program you must first fetch all of its many dependencies, including several qt5 libraries and python3 packages. There’s also a whole battery of additional packages which you’ll have to install if you wish to take advantage of the third-party plugins that have been contributed by Sigil users to…

Videomass is a graphical front-end for ffmpeg, but boasts of additional useful features, such as the ability to download videos from YouTube, Facebook and other sources. Popular desktop distros don’t yet carry Videomass in their software repos. Even more disappointingly, the project doesn’t publish any pre-compiled binaries. While you could install the utility with Python’s package manager Pip, you’ll still have to ensure all its dependencies are installed beforehand. pip3 install videomass will install the latest available version of the project and most of its dependencies. On our Ubuntu test machine, we had to install the python3-wxgtk4.0 package before we could get Videomass to work. Thankfully, this package is available in the software repos of most desktop distros. If you also want to use Videomass to download videos from different…

No matter the number of cores and RAM on your machine, there comes a time when you begin to question the vitality of your system. However, a quick look at the system monitor will usually allay most of your fears. Desktop distros typically ship with a graphical system monitoring utility, and there are many others on offer through software repos. Written in Python and released under the LGPL licence, Glances outshines most of its peers with the sheer amount of data it can display. For instance, Glances will display information on combined CPU usage, for machines with a number of cores, but can also show stats for each CPU. The Glances interface features a sidebar on the left that can show TCP connections, disk I/O, filesystem stats and so on,…

Ubuntu users who have been losing patience with the official app store of the distro will be interested to learn that it looks like Canonical, the company behind the popular Debian-based distribution, is looking to replace the Gnome-based store with the community-made Flutter store. A user on Reddit (https://bit.ly/lxf295flutter) found that the new store is starting to appear in the preview/edge channel – and you can test it out by running sudo snap remove snap-store && sudo snap install snap-store --channel=preview/ edge in the Terminal. Early impressions have been very positive, with people who have used an early version saying that even in this early stage, it’s less buggy, faster and easier to use than the current store (that’s not hard!–Ed). The new look has also won a lot of people over. You…

SPECS Build: 320x350x 330mm Material: PLA, PETG, TPU, ABS Type: Direct drive Nozzle: 0.4mm Maximum temp: 275°C Speed: 200 to 40mm/s Layers: 0.12 to 24mm Base: PC coasted flex sheet, heated Levelling: automatic Laser: 1.6w CNC: ER11 collet Comms: USB, Wi-Fi Size: 508x483x 534mm Weight: 52kg Snapmaker 2.0 is a 3-in-1 modular machine with swappable parts to make it a 3D printer, laser and CNC machine. It’s an impressive feat of engineering, with a price to match. Unboxing the Snapmaker 2.0 A350T is an experience in its own right. You get a tool box full of tools to build and maintain the printer. You also get a 1kg spool of Snapmaker filament, standard safety glasses for woodworking and laser safety glasses for etching. There’s an impressive design, completely made from…

IN BRIEF There are people who hate Systemd, others who love it, and most Linux users, who don’t care either way. MX-21.2.1 miraculously manages to cater to all three groups, and can be installed directly on your hardware or run as a live USB with persistence. The KDE edition is as pretty as you’d expect, let down by Plasma – which keeps falling over. SPECS CPU: i686 or AMD processor Memory: 1GB HDD: 10GB Build: x64, 386 PAE. MX Linux is a constantly evolving distro, based on Debian 11 Bullseye, with both 32- and 64-bit versions, along with a special Advanced Hardware Support (AHS) that enables it to be deployed on recent hardware. Unlike many other distros, MX has no plans to drop 32-bit versions. The most recent version, MX-21.2.1,…

Absolute Linux ships with applications that can handle practically every type of computing task. There’s no loyalty to a particular toolkit or desktop environment, and the selections are mostly lightweight choices. There are tools that can edit audio, video and graphics alongside programming tools and mainstream applications such as LibreOffice and GIMP. Although not quite as extensive as Absolute Linux from the get-go, EasyOS packs in an incredible amount of functionality into a small installation footprint. Like Absolute Linux, the main applications are present such as LibreOffice and GIMP along with smaller applications in areas as diverse as CD burning, audio editing, multimedia playback along with a couple of text editors. However, there’s some overlap in functionality and many of the choices are smaller, less well-known applications. The other three…

Fans of the Raspberry Pi should check out the official Tom’s Hardware’s Raspberry Pi-themed show, The Pi Cast. The show airs every Tuesday at 7pm BST and features Raspberry Pi news, projects, tutorials and guests, including Linux Format’s very own Les Pounder. There are plenty of episodes to explore and in September the show hit a milestone with its 100th show, which features André Costa, the creator of the rpilocator website (https://rpilocator.com) that tracks down stock of Raspberry Pi Launched in the summer of 2020, The Pi Cast has amassed a great catalogue of content to inspire makers both amateur and professional alike. It features plenty of cool Pi projects, while makers come on the show to reveal how they pulled off their incredible creations. You can find previous episodes…

SPECS SoC: Amlogic A311D2 CPU: 2.2GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A73, 2GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 GPU: Arm Mali-G52 MP8 800MHz, 8K 24fps decoder, 4K h.264/5 encoder, 4Kx2k@60fps HDR10+ Memory: 8GB LPDDR4 2GHz SSD: 32GB eMMC Storage: MicroSD, M.2 NVMe Ports: 1x USB 2, 1x USB 3, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x USB Type-C Comms: Gigabit Ethernet, AP6275S WiFi 6 (802.11ax 2T2R MIMO + RSDB), Bluetooth 5.1 I/O: 40-pin GPIO, I2C, I2S, SPDIF, UART, PWM, ADC, SWCLK, SWDIO PSU: USB-C 9-20V Size: 823x58x11.5mm The VIM4 may be similar in size to the Raspberry Pi 4, but its form factor is very different. Eschewing ports covering two sides of the board, the VIM4 instead has all of its ports along one long edge. Under the HDMI port is a sneakily hidden microSD port. On the opposite…

There are many different tools that you can use to create a bootable USB drive, and many distros such as Ubuntu and Fedora bundle one in their default installation. Using a specialised one such as Ventoy offers several advantages. For starters, in addition to USBs you can also use Ventoy with a SD card or even SSDs. You can also configure persistent mode on your Ventoy device, to make changes made inside a Live session to persist even after a reboot. Ventoy can also run unattended installations for several distros, such as Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu Server. Ventoy isn’t offered in the software repos of many popular desktop distros, but you can get it working in almost no time at all. Download the latest tarball and extract the files. The…

Castero follows the old Unix philosophy of doing one thing well. You can use the tool to add podcasts that offer RSS feeds, fetch episodes and metadata, and even download episodes for offline listening, but little else. You only need Python, sqlite3 and a media player such as VLC or mpv before you get started with installing Castero. You can find them all in your distro’s software repos. With the dependencies in place, run pip3 install castero to install it. To launch it, run castero from the terminal. To add a new podcast feed to Castero, press ‘a’. The bottom of the interface will then change to enable you to type or paste the URL of the RSS feed for the podcast that you wish to listen to. Once you’ve…

Since its first release nearly 40 years ago, Tetris has gone on to become the most ported game that’s available on over 60 different platforms. It’s no surprise then that while there are several graphical variants for Tetris available for Linux, you could also partake in the block-laying shenanigans from the comfort of your terminal. Released under the MIT licence, AWKTC – a recursive acronym for AWKTC is Workable Klutzy Time-wasting Command – is a nifty little implementation written in Awk. You won’t find AWKTC in the software repos of Linux distros, but don’t let that bother you since the game actually doesn’t require installation, as long as you have gawk installed on your machine, along with the GNU CoreUtils package. Clone the Git repository with git clone https:// github.com/mikkun/AWKTC.git…

Rymdport is a cross-platform tool that can be used to share files, directories or even plain text between different devices. It requires users to enter a secret code between the two machines and the intended file, directory or text message is shared only when the correct code is entered. You’ll obviously have to install Rymdport on all the target machines. Unfortunately, the project isn’t available in the software repos of many distros and there are no official binary packages. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of chasing after dependencies, you can take advantage of the official Flatpak package. Many desktop distros, including Fedora, Linux Mint, elementary OS, support Flatpak out of the box. On such installations, flatpak install flathub io.github.jacalz. rymdport will install the tool, and flatpak…

Many readers will be keen to know what’s eating into their computer’s disk space. And the culprit more often than not are duplicate files. Written in Rust, dupeGuru is a nifty little tool that can help you weed out duplicate files. It features three modes – Standard, Music and Images – and offers different scan types for each of them. For instance, you can search for files using filenames, folders, define files to ignore, use regular expressions, and such. For images, you have the option to search using EXIF timestamp, while you can search for duplicate music files using tags such as track, artist, album and more. Although the project is well documented covering every aspect of its usage, there’s not much written about installation. In addition to installing from…

Krita, the open-source painting program (https://krita.org) has announced that Intel is the first Patron Member of the Foundation’s Development Fund. According to a blog post announcing the partnership (https:// bit.ly/lxf295kritablog), Intel’s funding will help the project “build a more stable developer foundation, allowing to hire and retain the best developers in the industry.” It looks like Krita could also have features that work particularly well with Intel hardware, especially the BIG.little designs of its 12th generation (and upcoming 13th generation) processors, and its new Arc GPUs. The benefits of the funding has already made an impact on new features, according to the blog.…

SPIRAL LINUX 11.220925 This new distro from the developers behind GeckoLinux is a Debian-based respin designed to offer a host of stable desktop choices. It was created in response to changes from OpenSUSE. SpiralLinux offers individual live installable ISO images for the Cinnamon, XFCE, Gnome, Plasma, Mate, Budgie, and LXQt desktop environments. Find out more at https://spirallinux. github.io. GECKOLINUX GeckoLinux has received major updates to all editions of its Static branch, which is built from openSUSE Leap 15.4. New hardware is better supported thanks to the more recent Linux kernel included with the distro, and various packages and desktop environments have been upgraded since 15.3. The rolling branch of GeckoLinux has also been updated. You can find out more at https://bit.ly/lxf295geckolinux. Also detailed here are known bugs, including one that…

IN BRIEF RebornOS is a phoenix from the ashes, and it’s staggeringly easy to use, without sacrificing much in the way of configuration options. It works straight from the box with no messing around, and you can make major changes without ever having to use the keyboard for more than tapping in a password. Give it to your gran, your mum, or your auntie. They’ll love it. SPECS CPU: 1.2GHz dual-core 64-bit Memory: 2GB HDD: 20GB Build: x86_64 People who keep track of such things (that’s us, right team? – Ed) will remember Antergos as a nifty Arch derivative that achieved a moderate degree of popularity between its inception in 2012, and its eventual abandonment in 2019 as a result of developer time commitments. But Antergos didn’t die completely. It…

IN BRIEF Salix isn’t lying when it calls itself, “Linux for lazy Slackers.” The installation process comes with zero drama, and once it’s installed you can start using it straight away without additional configuration. It’s obvious where everything is, what everything does, and the software defaults are both sensible and useful. While it would be nice to have the choice of multiple desktop environments, Salix’s use of Xfce is practically perfect. SPECS Build: x86_64, i586/i686 Salix – also known as The Bonsai OS and Linux for the Lazy Slacker – is a Slackware-based distribution, with a focus on lightness, ease of use and simple good looks. Salix 15.0 is only available with the Xfce desktop environment, making it a perfect choice for older machines, and means you have one less…

Gslapt is the GUI repository front end for Absolute Linux. It was difficult to install packages from the command line because not all Slackware-based distros work in the same way, but we got there in the end. Our go-to text mode text editor, Nano, wasn’t available in the repositories. Lubuntu’s software shop application is called Discover, and once it’s launched you’ll find a wide selection of major applications drawn from the Snap and Ubuntu repositories. Reviews and ratings are included, and switchable software channels and versions are the icing on the cake. On the component level, Muon is the front end, and it looks good and works well. Q4OS features its own Software Centre with a list of 57 applications. Each one has a rating, but there are no reviews.…

Even working with computers kitted out with around 2GB of RAM and a 2GHz multi-core CPU, there’s no reason why a lightweight Linux desktop environment can’t offer a fairly full feature set. It’s never going to greatly affect memory and CPU usage to offer conveniences such as a pleasant-looking theme and a searchable application launcher. As for the layout, it’s sometimes interesting to see a modern approach, but quite often – if you’re outfitting an older model computer – you might be getting it ready for someone who isn’t expert enough to figure out something that strays from conventions. For that reason, we’re not going to mark distributions down if they resort to the tried-and-tested application bar along the bottom of the screen with an application launcher and status panel…

Absolute Linux’s Control Panel application ties together the GUI configuration tools, which are fairly basic and include a couple of system information tools. Trinity-based 4QOS inherits many of its facilities from KDE 3.x. The system configuration tools are navigated through a Konqueror interface, and this works perfectly well. The configuration applets are attractive and easy to use. EasyOS collects configuration tools into a utility called PupControl that it inherited from Puppy Linux. This organises a large number of tools in a logical manner. Some of these tools may give a greater amount of fine, technical control, but a lot of them aren’t particularly friendly and there’s little consistency. It might be worth bearing in mind that, if you hit upon an unusual problem, you might struggle to find the same…

Retro gaming has long been a popular activity on the Pi. Soon after its 2012 release coders worked hard to get the popular MAME running there, and other emulators soon followed suit. The Fuse emulator for the ZX Spectrum series was another early arrival, and Fuse development is alive and well today. Anyone who went to school in the UK in the 1980s will remember the BBC Micro. Anyone willing to recreate the BBC experience need look no further than BeebEm (http://beebem-unix.bbcmicro.com). It’s one of the oldest emulators we’ll feature here, having been around since 1994. It will have you reliving your galactic trading days in Elite in no time. You can even run it from a web browser at https://beeb.webassembly.link. C64 on a Pi One of the greatest selling…

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

YOU NEED > Raspberry Pi > The latest Raspberry Pi OS 3 x LEDs > 3 x 220 Ohm Resistors (Red-Red- Black-Gold) > 6 x Female to male jumper wires > Breadboard > The code: https://github.com/lesp/LXFGo-Raspberry-Pi-GPIO/archive/refs/heads/main.zip Think Pi coding, think GPIO, think Python, right? Python isn’t the only way to access the GPIO. In this tutorial we’ll use Go, a flexible and easyto-use alternative to Python. We’ll learn how projects are built, how to import modules of code and write projects that interact with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO. Before we install Go, it’s best practice to ensure that our system is up-to-date. Open a terminal and run the following commands to update the list of repositories and then install the latest software. Note: this can take a while. Visit https://go.dev/dl…

The internet of the 90s was largely run by powerful servers nurtured by small teams, each holding arcane knowledge about their machines’ configuration and quirks. Typically, a server would only have one role, so that if it glitched out the failure would have much less of an impact on other services. Updates might take days, and if they went awry then there would be yet more downtime while things were slowly restored from backup tapes. The mid-2000s saw widespread adoption of virtual machines, which (if deployed properly) made much better use of server capacity. Services could be isolated from one another on the same machine. In the event of hardware failure, virtual machines could easily be restored from backup on new hardware, without the need for reconfiguration. In the event…

Released under the MIT licence, gopass is a rewrite of the popular pass password manager utility in Go. But while most password managers are content providing a safe repository for your credentials, gopass offers a lot more. To begin, you can use the tool to audit your passwords, and check if they suffer from common errors such as being too short, or based on dictionary words. The project also boasts of the ability to generate one-time passwords and perform offline checks against known leaked passwords. The utility is written in Go and so the easiest way to install the latest version is with the go install github. com/gopasspw/gopass/<version> command. This, however, requires Go v1.11 installed on your system. Alternatively, you can download the RPM or D eb packages binaries for…

One of the reasons why people shun performing backups is the space requirements. After all, you need enough storage room for safekeeping all your precious data. Most backup strategies result in a lot of wasted space, before being abandoned entirely, as you invariably end up making copies of the same data over and over again. BorgBackup, or Borg, is a command-line backup utility written in Python, which uses the data deduplication technique to minimise space wastage. Borg works by comparing chunks of data to identify unique bits, and thereby only saving changes to a file since the last backup. With the exception of Fedora, Arch and Void Linux, most popular distros carry a slightly older version of Borg in their repos. You can use Python’s Pip package manager to install…

Many comparisons have been made between the world-building adventures of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. If you were ever curious of a world where characters from both universes mix it up, fighting off villains, pillaging villages and hungering for gold, then Battle for Wesnoth is just the game for you. The turn-based strategy game features a mix of races such as orcs, elves, dwarves, trolls, humans and the bi-pedal Drakes, which can trace their roots to dragons. It also builds on stereotypes associated with the different races. For instance, elves are strongest in forests, which has traditionally been seen as their domain in fantasy writings. You have the choice of weapons and even attack plans, melee…