Índex per December 2022 a Linux Format

What do you do when the developer of the most widely used browser in the world decides it’s going to break a host of your privacy-protecting plugins? Hopefully, use Firefox is your response, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to get the world to do this very issue. The conceit is rather beautiful: if no one can track you any longer, why would you need privacy? It reminds me of a privacy expert pointing out that no one actually needs curtains, but people still like the option of having them to close at night, as you know, privacy is a nice thing to have even when it’s not being exploited. As always, it’s a complex situation, which you can read about in News (page 7) and we cover on a…

Welcome to Ubuntu Pro, free with a personal subscription and good for five systems. All the work put into Ubuntu over the last five years for enterprise customers is yours. As Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, put it: “We are excited to offer the benefits of all of that work, free of charge, to anyone in the world.” Thanks, Mark! Ubuntu Pro offers compliance packages, including FIPS (a set of data security standards if you ever want to handle federal data as a contractor), FedRamp (which you need in order to handle government data), HIPAA (required standards for protected health data) and PCI DSS (standards to cover the processing of card payments). Ubuntu Pro is currently in pubic Welcome beta and comes with a full set of security updates, with…

"October 2023 may seem like a long time away, but that’s when MySQL 5.7 will hit end-of-life (EOL) status. This normally means no more updates or security patches will be released. For companies running this database in their applications, it is time to start planning. MySQL is the most popular open source database in the world, based on DB-Engines’ ranking. It gained this position as part of the LAMP stack (Linux-Apache web server MySQL-PHP) and it remains popular being open source and relatively simple to set up. The current main versions are 5.7 and 8.0. For anyone running MySQL 5.7, the year-long countdown to EOL is now ticking. You have three options. The first? Do nothing. If your application is running – and you don’t expect to expose it to…

"Linux 6.1 marks the likely end of the road for the venerable Intel 486, the first machine that was my daily driver, running Linux back in the mid-’90s. Nobody is going to miss the 486 support on a daily basis, but some of us will feel a bit older seeing it go the way of the floppy disk, or the a.out binary format that has also finally been removed from the kernel. Many know me as an Arm fanboy, but I am aware of the rising popularity of RISC-V and the potential that it could become more prevalent. For this to happen, it’s vital to see more investment in architecture and platform standards. Today, if you choose any one RISC-V design, it’s hard to say how compatible it is with…

SPECS Cores: 28 Ray units: 28 Vector units: 448 Clock: 2,050MHz Mem: 8GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps, 256-bit PCIe: v4 x16 API: Vulkan v1.3, OpenGL 4.6, OpenCL 3.0, DirectX 12 Displays: eDP 1.4, DP 2.0 (UHBR 10), HDMI 2.1/2.0b Max res: 4,096x2,160 @ 60Hz HDMI, 7,680x4,320 @ 60Hz DP HW de/encode: h264, h265 HVEC, AV1, VP9 Power: 225W The Intel Arc A750 doesn’t feign to be top of the class when it comes to frame rates, but it’s not asking top dollar, either. At £289, this entry-level graphics card helps keep prices down at a time when you could run up a significant bill buying one. And, for that reason, the Arc A750 is perhaps even more important than its pricier A770 sibling. The Arc A750 comes with 28 Xe-cores, the…

Pi USER TAKING STOCK There hasn’t been much change to Raspberry Pi stock levels in 2022. With a global chip shortage, war in Ukraine and waves of pandemic, it seems that Raspberry Pi stock should be the least of our worries. But life goes on, and we carry on making. In a recent YouTube livestream, Raspberry Pi expert Jeff Geerling talked about Raspberry Pi stock levels. He had information from Eben Upton, co-founder of Raspberry Pi, that indicated 2022 was the year of status quo. Around 400,000 units are made each month, with many going to OEM/industrial customers who depend on the boards to power their products. A number of Pi are ring-fenced for consumer purchases and sent to authorised resellers in dribs and drabs. In a recent interview with…

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at bigl.es. YOU NEED Raspberry Pi Latest Pi OS Arduino Uno (or compatible) Breadboard 10K potentiometer LED 330-Ohm resistor (orangeorangebrown-gold) 5x M2M jumper wires Code: https://git hub.com/ lesp/LXFpyFirmata The Arduino and the Raspberry Pi both have their strengths and weaknesses, but what if we could harness both of them to produce projects? Firmata is a firmware that enables our Raspberry Pi (or another Linux computer) to talk to an Arduino and use it as an extension of the GPIO. In this tutorial, we shall learn how to configure an Arduino that reacts to commands sent via pyFirmata, a Python version of Firmata. This project would be ideal…

OUR EXPERT W hether it’s a cool desktop effect, cleverly designed application or a bizarre problem to be solved, we all have had to capture screenshots at one time or another. Most desktop distributions feature a default screenshot utility, and you have the choice of several more in your software repositories. More often than not, though, the default screenshot utility is limited to capturing either the entire desktop, the active window or a portion of the screen. But what if you could do all three and, more importantly, create a screencast recording of your screen – and all from the comfort of the CLI? Written in Rust and released under the GPLv3 licence, Menyoki bills itself as a screenshot, screencast utility that can also perform myriad image-related tasks, such as…

OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has worked in IT support for over a decade, and always tries to utilise Linux alongside other installed systems. C loud computing is a term that means a number of things. Software as a Service (SaaS) is one such example of what can be hosted in the cloud. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the next step down the cloud computing ladder and allows a developer to create their service on an operating system that is managed by the supplier, so they don’t need to worry about it. A third example is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which essentially provides the user with a rented hardware platform. The hardware is maintained by the supplier, while anything softwarerelated is maintained and managed by the user. Given the…

PYTHON Credit: https://github.com/mx0c/super-mario-python OUR EXPERT Andrew Smith is a software Developer for NHS Digital. He enjoys scripting in Python and playing video games. QUICK TIP When practising with new or unfamiliar code, always back up the file you are practising with, so if anything goes wrong, it is easy to recover. During the early to mid-’90s, platform games were incredibly popular on game consoles. The king of the platformer was Nintendo and iterations of Mario games were rolled out for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This means that, even today, people still love to play Super Mario Bros and its ilk in a staggering array of variations. For this instalment, we are looking at a Python project created by Marius Bauer (https://github.com/ mx0c) that aims to…

"When we take on a new client’s servers at Tiger Computing, we carry out a pre-contract check to make sure the servers are in a suitable state to support. Part of that check is to see whether there are any outstanding security updates to be installed. Here’s a surprising fact: in 20 years of supporting Linux servers, we have never taken on a server that didn’t have some outstanding security updates to install. The reasons vary, from no one being responsible for the servers to the need to run older versions of software for compatibility reasons to having a policy of only patching servers on a quarterly basis. But security compromises happen – and they don’t only happen to other people. When they occur, the only safe recovery action is…

A CPI support was added to Linux in 2002 and a dummy wake op was needed for AMD chipsets that weren’t idle when they were supposed to be. It was a quick ’n’ dirty workaround. Move forwards 20 years, and you guessed it, that workaround is still being applied, only now it’s not being particularly helpful, quietly causing performance issues with some workloads. Its original job has long been redundant on all but the oldest Athlon boxes. Once AMD engineers eventually spotted it, a patch was forthcoming and folded into the Linux 6.0 kernel. How many workarounds are there lurking in the bowels of the code waiting to be uncovered? How much cruft? Probably more than we like to think. Still, at least this wasn’t a remote code execution vulnerability,…

Q Kustomising wallpaper I recently installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my computer and for the most part I really like it (compared to my older computer running 12.04). I prefer KDE to Gnome, so I switched to that desktop, but there are a few annoying issues I have with this new version that don’t affect the older version. First, they somehow broke the desktop wallpaper. I have two monitors with four virtual desktops; on the old computer that means I have eight unique wallpapers to look at. But this current version reverts to Windows 10 functionality. Every virtual desktop shares the same wallpapers, which means all four desktops have the same two wallpapers. From what I’ve read, they prefer that everyone uses Activities and those allow for unique wallpapers. Is there…

Roundup Inkscape 1.2.1 Krita 5.1.1 Ipe 7.2.26 Xfig 3.2.8a LibreOffice Draw 7.3.6 HOW WE TESTED… We started by installing all five applications onto the latest OpenSUSE desktop. Given the nature of a drawing workflow, we decided to stick with stable versions of each application. The only application that threw up any problems was Ipe, which wasn’t in the distribution repository for SUSE. In the end, we used an RPM file from the website, but we had to force the installation due to dependency problems. Beyond that, we didn’t encounter any notable problems with obtaining the latest versions of the apps. By the same token, we didn’t come across any noticeable performance problems when we loaded some quite complicated drawings into each program. We put the software through its paces by…

Few people like being tracked online. Sure, there are some legitimate reasons for it: you may be a threat to national security – busily searching up combustible materials, bidding for the infamous and stylish Casio F-81W on eBay, or meeting up with your fellow government toppling anarchists on Facebook (although no one is better at overthrowing HMG than HMG). We’re sure there are warehouses full of counterterrorist officers sitting behind ancient CRT monitors, watching the humdrum daily activities of suspected terrorists as they scroll through 60-second TikToks, work on mind-numbing romance novels, and call their grandmas on WhatsApp to make sure they’ve remembered to take their meds and have enough milk. A James Bond lifestyle it ain’t. In reality most tracking takes place with little or no human interaction, and is…

OUR EXPERT Sean Conway is a former IT security specialist from a national telecommunication company who implements Pi-based projects to get his muchneeded technology fix after retiring. YOU NEED Raspberry Pi 3 B+ 16GB SD card Raspberry Pi OS Lite (used: 4 April 2022) GPIO Zero 1.6.2 IR sensors H ave you ever seen something and thought, “I can do that”? This writer’s inspiration came after using a commercial device to determine the speed of a model train. The speed limit posted for a real train entering a siding is 16kph. So let’s use a Raspberry Pi, with some external infrared (IR) sensors mounted to a block of wood of known dimensions, to establish the scale speed of a model train entering the siding on a model railway layout. Typical…

OUR EXPERT Nick Peers wonders if his fading brain might benefit from being hardwired into Cerebro. Or should it be Cerebro that’s hardwired into him? Productivity apps are nothing new – ask macOS users about Alfred. Their aim is simple: to provide you with a handy search bar that can be used as a toolkit to make things easier to find and access. A good productivity tool combines the best elements of other apps – context-sensitive search tools spanning files, folders and the web, a launcher app for quick-fire shortcuts, and maybe some extra tools and utilities, such as a calculator or unit converter. When it comes to replicating the likes of Alfred on a Linux desktop, there’s only one tool worth considering. According to its website, Cerebro (https://cerebroapp. com)…

OUR EXPERT Mike Bedford has been the victim of a disk crash, so is all too aware of the anguish of losing important data. I ncreasingly, one of the most valuable commodities is information. But this isn’t just for big business – most of us have data that is valuable in one way or another. So, preserving that data is important, because the consequences of failing to do so can range from inconvenience to financial hardship. And as we’re all well aware, there can also be severe consequences if our data falls into the wrong hands. Here we address the two inter-related themes of data recovery following accidental deletion or hard disk failure, and secure deletion so that, when you do delete data, nobody else can recover it. Mostly we’re…

Cozy >> Etherpad-Lite >> Macchina >> OCRmyPDF >> KOReader >> PDF Arranger >> Editly >> OpenTTD >> Picmi >> Albert >> Variety AUDIOBOOK PLAYER Cozy Version: 1.2.1 Web: https://cozy.sh A good story makes the world go around. If you’re not too fond or have lost the habit of reading, perhaps audio might ease you back into the world of wisdom, wonder and storytelling. Cozy is a nifty little audiobook player for Linux. If you already have a collection of audiobooks, you can import them into your Cozy library, which makes it easy to browse through the different files. It also lets you control playback speed, remember the playback position, so you can resume listening to books, and search for specific files through the library. More importantly, it supports a variety…

DJANGO Credit: www.djangoproject.com OUR EXPERT Matt Holder has been a fan of the open source methodology for over two decades and uses Linux and other tools where possible. QUICK TIP More featurepacked source code for this project can be downloaded from https://github.com/mattmole/LXF-Django-Project Part One! Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16! We’re going to start the process of creating an application that can be used to catalogue and search magazine articles, with the idea that once filled in, you won’t need to rifle through that massive pile of old issues to find a particular article. Consideration will be made to the fact that a publisher can have multiple magazines assigned, articles can appear in multiple magazines and that a magazine can have multiple issues. The technology we are…

A focus of this issue’s main feature is chrome is shifting from Manifest V2 extensions to V3; the process is expected to be complete in January 2023. According to the Chrome peeps, it will offer “increased safety and peace of mind”. Until then, Manifest V2 will gradually be turned off. In June 2023, Chrome may run “experiments” to turn off selected V2 extensions and halt any publication of V2 extensions. By January 2024, it’ll all be over – it’s V3 or nothing. Anything that isn’t V3 won’t earn Chrome’s Featured badge (its mark of a highstandard extension). Not everybody is happy. (When are they ever?–Ed) The WebRequest API, used by content blockers, has been replaced by a less flexible version. Apparently, it’s not too bad if you use one blocker,…

"Released in September, Weston 11.0 brought a number of highlights, including DRM back-end optimisations and experimental colour management support. So, what’s next for Wayland’s reference compositor? With colour management infrastructure code now in place, Weston 12 should see further updates on this front, such as using the libdisplayinfo library to replace the ad hoc EDID parsing. More behind-the-scenes work has gone into being able to support multiple GPUs and multiple backends at the same time, to be landed in a future release. For libweston users, simplifying and potentially unifying some of the setup code required when creating a compositor instance is also on the shopping list. On that same subject, we’ve been pulling out common functionality used in shells into helper functions that could be useful to other users of…

Wayland aims to be easier to develop, extend and maintain than X11. It’s been around since 2008, but has only recently been getting support from the bigger distros. Apparently, there is enough backing now for Blender to add native support. Here it will offer the “best user experience”, without being limited by X11’s compatibility layer. Blender did have Wayland support back in 2020 as a build option, but it wasn’t enabled by default because it lacked a few important features, such as tablet and 3D mouse support, cursor warping, Hi-DPI and window frames. Blender has worked through the list of issues and, all being well, Blender 3.4 should ship with native Wayland support, although there remain a few niggles to iron out yet.…

Linus Torvalds announced the first few Release Candidate snapshots of what will become Linux 6.1, noting, “This isn’t actually shaping up to be a particularly large release.” He drew attention to the “initial Rust scaffolding” but noted there was “no actual real Rust code in the kernel yet”. He also noted he had experienced some downtime because his main development machine (which was not using ECC memory, something people drew attention to) had “suddenly started showing memory problems”. Initially, he had assumed it was a kernel bug and spent time chasing after a bug that turned out not to be there. The most attention-grabbing feature of Linux 6.1 is undoubtably Rust language support, albeit less than some readers might have been expecting. While the fundamental “scaffolding” is there in 6.1,…

Seeing a 3D printer in action is slightly hypnotic; the process of seeing a physical object emerge, layer by layer, out of seemingly nothing is amazing. Even in the early days, the potential was obvious. An early rapid prototype appeared in the 2001 film Jurassic Park 3. The large-scale rapid prototyper, as used by Billy Brennan, was busy printing a raptor resonating chamber. It was incredible technology, but so was the dino cloning biotech on which Michael Crichton based his books. In 2001, the scan and print were just part of a raptor’s skull, but what about today, more than 20 years later – is it possible to 3D print living tissue? The 3D printer in Jurassic Park 3 was similar to the technology we use today in our printers…

OUR EXPERT Michael Reed, as a teenager in the 1990s, was raised on the three touchstones of alternative comedy, alternative rock and alternative operating systems. QUICK TIP Most virtualisers can still boot floppy images. In VirtualBox, go to the Storage tab within the settings for a virtual machine and add a new controller of type floppy. Then, add a floppy image in the same way that you do an ISO image. H aving a day when you’re running out of RAM and wish you had a faster processor? This issue, we’re looking at operating systems that can boot almost instantly, run from a floppy disk (a what? Ed) and require as little as 8MB of RAM to boot. You might think we’re delving into systems of the past, but these…

Credit: https://getpublii.com OUR EXPERT Nick Baird has been using Linux since kernel 2.2. He recently abandoned Kubuntu for Manjaro as his main desktop because life is too short for Firefox snap cold-start times. WordPress-style database-driven CMSes are huge overkill for a lot of websites, particularly if you are serving up the same content to all of your visitors, and only updating the site every day or two. But suppose there was an alternative that provided an easy way to create theme-able, attractive websites for uploading to a web server? Well, there is, using a static site generator. We covered these before in LXF282, but the options reviewed required the use of the command line and/or markdown language to create the website. Today we are taking a look at another option…

EBPF Credit: https://ebpf.io OUR EXPERT Mihalis Tsoukalos is the author of Go Systems Programming and Mastering Go, 3rd edition. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. QUICK TIP Seekwatcher is a tool that can generate graphs from blktrace data in order to help you reveal I/O patterns and visualise performance. You can find more information about Seekwatcher at https://github. com/tnm/ seekwatcher. We are going to learn how to use the capabilities of eBPF to monitor disk I/O operations in order to discover and solve performance issues related to input and output operations. We’ll kick off by discussing the ways of approaching issues related to disk I/O, because there’s a wide range of tools that can help you and choosing the right tool for the job is often the…

LXF297 will be on sale Tuesday 13 December 2022 Raw photography Open source has all the pro-level tools you need to handle the best-quality digital photos. We get you started! Protect those passwords We dive into Buttercup, the best password storage project. Get set up, protect your passwords and take them everywhere. Starting Pi Wars! A new series on building your very own autonomous fighting machine. From chassis to software, everything you need! Get into GIMP With version 3 of GIMP on the horizon, it’s time you got to grips with one of the longest-running FOSS art projects around.…