Table of contents for April 2023 in Linux Format

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 letters@ linuxformat.com. The road ahead Linux is the way forward, is it? The future of alternative computing and all that? My experience of Unix machines only covers the terminals at uni and I wasn’t impressed, although I think they probably had outdated kernels and were badly configured – I never even got around to installing LinuxAPUS on my trusty PPC-powered Amiga (you shouldn’t laugh). So, is it worth installing LinuxAPUS and the basic Red Hat distribution that appeared on an AFCD and joining the Linux revolution? I remain to be convinced. Colin Buchanan, via email (from LXF001)…

IN BRIEF Another of the grandparent distros, SUSE is perhaps mentioned less than others as it’s Germanbased. Because it also focuses on enterprise, it was picked up by Cray for its supercomputers in the early 2000s. It rebranded to OpenSUSE in 2005 and SUSE Linux Enterprise in 2004. SPECS Released: Nov 1999 CPU: x86 (i386+) Mem: 32MB HDD: N/A Builds: x86, ARM, S390, PPC As an experienced distributor, German company SUSE has been around for many years and is very popular in European markets. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly due to the large amount of software found on its CDs. It has also recently converted its distribution to run on the Alpha processor, and it has put money into several of the key areas of Linux development.…

HOW WE TESTED… There are hundreds of active distros, but there are certain characteristics that are unique to key distros and help them stand out from the rest. For starters, one key feature is longevity, because a distro can’t survive for long if it isn’t special. It must also bring something new and revolutionary to the table, which is what helped it gain attention in the first place. Of course, a key distro must have broad appeal, to attract a large number of users. This could be because of its customisability, its support for a large range of hardware, its installation options, or something else. Also, it needs a vibrant community, which is the key ingredient that’s essential to the success of any FOSS project. Based on these parameters, we’ve…

There are many things that go into making a distro, and it all just gets dialled up a notch when it comes to the key distros. User experience is the culmination of these aspects, and while it begins with the installation process, it’s also heavily influenced by other factors, such as the default apps, the customisations and the tweaks the developers have made to the stock desktop environment and the apps, and how important these are in making the distro more usable. But there’s more to usability than just beautiful interfaces. While things such as administration and package management are important, we’re interested in gauging how well these distros serve their core users. Some of these distros excel in one aspect or even perhaps a couple, but in this section,…

There are multiple tools that distros use to manage packages, including both text-based and graphical tools. Debian uses the venerable APT package manager, with Aptitude as the CLI front-end and Synaptic as a graphical manager. Since Debian places great significance on stability, it doesn’t aim to release the latest versions of most software. Ubuntu’s package management system is derived from Debian. Besides APT and Aptitude, there’s the Ubuntu Software Center, a graphical utility for installing, purchasing and removing software. Ubuntu also has PPA (Personal Package Archive) repos and ships with support for Snap universal packages. Fedora uses the RPM Package Manager with several higherlevel tools built on top, most notably DNF and graphical package managers PackageKit and Gnome Package Manager. RPM Fusion is a popular community-maintained repo that provides packages…

Wireshark is a packet analyser with an easy-touse GUI. It enables you to capture and analyse the data that travels around your network. You can use it to track down insecure software that has the potential to cause problems, and you can also use it to find out a bit more about the protocols that make a network and even the internet work. Best of all, it’s easy to get started. Let’s start with a simple example. Load up Wireshark and select the network adaptor that you use for connection with the internet when prompted. If you open a web browser and browse to a website, you should see a flurry of packet data in the main Wireshark window. Presuming that test works and you can see some traffic, put…

It’s venerable, has a labyrinth of features, and is probably the most fully featured open source video editor we have on Linux. The Kdenlive developers are always adding new features, so it’s a good idea to track down the latest version. As for installation options, we generally go for PPA to get the latest version when we’re using Ubuntu, but the AppImage version is also worth considering as Kdenlive sits on a lot of frameworks and libraries, so it can be difficult to add them all to a distribution. Video editors, on the whole, are complicated programs, and the developers have to find methods of making the features accessible in a way that engenders a smooth workflow. Kdenlive makes a lot of use of panels, which are often multifunction and…

IN BRIEF An adaptor board that claims to provide Raspberry Pi Model B functionality to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It provides the basics: USB, Ethernet and full-size HDMI. In every category it falls short and provides a lacklustre end user experience. It could have been great if tolerances were observed – oh, and if the screws were included! T he Raspberry Pi Zero was released to much fanfare in 2015. The original $5 board distilled the Raspberry Pi platform into a board the size of a piece of chewing gum. Since the original board was released, we have seen a few point releases, chiefly the 1.3 that brought the official camera interface. It took six years for a full version update to take place. The Raspberry Pi Zero…

300 issues of Linux Format T he last decade may not have been kind to Firefox and its parent Mozilla, but there’s no denying it’s still a vitally important cog in the web browser marketplace. Google doesn’t simply dominate the market with its Chrome browser, it’s also got fingers in virtually every other browser out there. Whether you’re using Opera, Vivaldi or even Microsoft’s Edge browser, you’re actually using the same underlying browser engine – Google’s Blink – as used by Chrome and its open-source brother, Chromium. While Apple continues to plough its own furrow, powering Safari and all web browsers on the iPhone and iPad through its own WebKit engine, those of us who naturally detest large monopolies have just one holdout to turn to, and that’s Firefox. It…

Version: 1.36.0 Web: https://aria2.github.io No matter how you use a computer, you can’t do without a download manager. Although our web browsers come equipped with one, and they are quite handy sometimes, they aren’t as featureful as a dedicated downloader. And talking of features, few offer the same versatility as Aria2. From Curl to Wget, Linux has a host of tools to fetch files from the internet, which while useful in their own right, can’t match UDP tracker for completeness. Aria2 is a lightweight, multi-protocol, multi-server and multisource command-line download utility that can verify checksums and authentication certificates on the fly. Furthermore, it includes a fully featured BitTorrent client with support for DHT, PEX, encryption, magnet URIs, web seeding, selective downloads, local peer discovery and a UDP tracker. Best of…

Version: 2.14.12 Web: https://pidgin.im A long-time Linux mainstay, Pidgin is a wonderful app for exchanging instant messages across many network protocols. With Pidgin, you can sign in with multiple accounts in the single client and chat with loads of friends in different networks. You can use it to connect to AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC and more chat networks all at once. Pidgin is available in the official repos of most desktop distros. Users of DEB-based distros such as Ubuntu can grab it with sudo apt install pidgin , while those using RPM-based distros like Fedora can grab it with sudo dnf install pidgin . The default user interface of Pidgin is uncluttered and easy to navigate. It features a tab-based interface for hosting multiple conversations simultaneously. You…

Version: 2020.3.17 Web: www.flightgear.org FlightGear isn’t your average game. It’s a trueblue flight simulator that’s sophisticated and hyper-realistic. The ‘game’, which had its first release back in 1997, is often used in the aerospace industry for research and training purposes. In fact, its flight dynamics engine has even been used by NASA. Using FlightGear, you can get in the pilot’s seat of over 400 aircraft of all shapes and sizes, from classic and vintage aircraft to single-engine propeller aircraft, large four-engine passenger liners and even experimental aircraft and helicopters. You can take them for a spin from any of the thousands of visually accurate airports from around the world, any time of the day, and through all kinds of weather. FlightGear supports a plethora of flight control hardware, and works…

IN BRIEF A short-lived Debian-based distro from Corel aiming to compete with Windows 98/2000. The project ceased not long after Microsoft bought 24 million Corel shares around October 2000. Hmmm… SPECS Released: Nov 1999 CPU: Pentium class Mem: 24MB HDD: 500MB Builds: x86 These are classic distro reviews reprinted from LXF001, May 2000. When Corel announced that it would move into the Linux distribution market, the news was greeted with both hope and apprehension by the community. While it was clear the organisation could help to improve Linux’s position on the desktop, many thought it was in danger of dumbing down the operating system. The software company, responsible for WordPerfect and CorelDRAW, has based its package on the respected Debian distribution, and aimed it at new users who have switched…

IN BRIEF Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro that first appeared in 2004, backed by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African entrepreneur who created Canonical, which develops it. Its ease of use and support of the wider ecosystem helped propel Ubuntu and a huge number of spin-off distros to the fore. SPECS Released: April 2005 CPU: x86 Mem: 32MB HDD: 110MB Builds: IA-32, x86-64, PPC, Arm This review originally appeared in LXF068. The Ubuntu team only launched its first release (4.10, aka The Warty Warthog) in October 2004. Since then, Ubuntu has become one of the most downloaded distros available today. What’s its secret? The slogan says it all: Linux for human beings. This is a distro that you shouldn’t have to be a geek to use. Version 5.04 – The Hoary…

In terms of installation options, Slackware covers the basics, but doesn’t go as far as the others. The project, I which is fuelled by old-school community passion, rather than money, produces 32-bit and 64-bit install-only DVD images, as well as a live edition that’s only available for 64-bit machines. There’s also the Slackware ARM project that puts out 32-bit and 64-bit stable releases for ARM processors. Debian, which recommends the minimal netinst for 64-bit PCs, also puts out other images, such as offline installers, live systems, installers for other CPU architectures, such as 32-bit PCs, or cloud instances for popular platforms such as OpenStack, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. Fedora has several editions. There’s a workstation release for laptops and desktops, and another for server and IoT deployments. The project…

Despite its longevity, Slackware has limited appeal. The distro is ideal for purists who don’t need the conveniences offered by other modern Linux distros. It’ll suit those who can appreciate its approach of not anticipating use cases or precluding user decisions. However, if the CLI gives you cold feet, you’ll find Slackware has a dauntingly steep learning curve. The other distros are a lot more welcoming. Debian pitches itself to desktop users, developers and even for enterprise use cases because of its focus on stability. That said, Debian’s freesoftware-only approach limits its appeal for pragmatic desktop users looking for an install-and-use desktop. OpenSUSE is one of the options that fits that bill. It has fixed and rolling release editions, which will cater to a wide variety of users, from beginners…

Aderivative is a distro that is based on the work done in the upstream distro, but has its own identity, goals and audience. Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are popular options for creating derivatives. There’s a number of distros based on Debian, including several that have gone on to become popular in their own niche, such as the pentesting distro Kali Linux, and the privacy and anonymity distro Tails. The most popular derivative by far, though, is Ubuntu, which has become a key Linux distro in itself. The default desktop environment of Fedora is Gnome, but if you prefer an alternative desktop such as KDE or Xfce, you can download a spin for your preferred desktop environment. Then there’s Fedora Labs, which is a selection of curated bundles of purpose-driven software…

GIMP is the go-to tool for most Linux users when they’re working with bitmap graphics – and with good reason. It’s a highly capable tool in many different areas of image editing and creation. In the past, the user interface came in for criticism, but that judgment feels a little unfair, given what it has looked like for the past few years. It now defaults to a singlewindow interface, with various toolbars and panels around the sides of the main area. There is simply no way of offering such a huge range of features without a somewhat complex interface. GIMP is a destructive editor. In other words, you alter the bitmap as you work on it. However, it’s possible to add an element of non-destructive editing by using layers. For…

As it’s an office suite, LibreOffice is actually several pieces of software. Like most of the A LibreOffice modules, LibreOffice Writer has all of the core features that most business users need. This word processor is fully-featured and takes inspiration for its user interface from traditional GUI word processors, meaning that it will feel familiar to nearly every computer user as soon as they first encounter the program. Having said that, it does have a more modern, ribbon based interface that is disabled by default. To enable the ribbon, visit the pop-up user interface menu (View > User interface). So, how does the ribbon operate? There’s a tab along the top of the ribbon area that divides the user interface elements into several categories. For instance, the Home category gathers…

Dolphin is a fairly traditional file manager with a lot of its functionality disabled by default. On first launch, you’ll probably quickly get the gist of how to use it. The main area displays the files, and there is a second pane on the left-hand side that contains user bookmarks along with notable system locations, such as removable media, the waste bin and network locations. There’s a status bar at the bottom of the window, and this integrates the zoom slider. So far, so standard… Traditionally, KDE applications have tended towards the needs of power users, and in our opinion, it’s a shame that Dolphin’s default layout configuration is so tame. Removing clutter is one thing, but we usually end up having to enable a few options in order to…

O pen to submissions from 6th February until 26th April, the Coolest O Projects is an online showcase where young digital creators can show off their creations for the whole world to enjoy. It’s pretty simple to enter and anyone up to the age of 18 can take part. You can apply as a solo project or in a team of up to five members. The project can be of any level and is entered into one of six categories: Scratch, Games (non-Scratch), Web (HTML/CSS), Mobile App (phone/tablet-based), Hardware (typically SBC/microcontroller-based) and Advanced Programming. You don’t even have to submit a completed project; part of the fun is to encourage and bring together like-minded young digital creators. You can get inspiration from last year’s projects at https://online. coolestprojects.org/events/cp-2022/gallery and if…

Version: 3.0.0 Web: www.openshot.org These days, shooting video is easier than ever, and when it comes to bringing it all together, OpenShot is our go-to video editor. There’s a handful of video editors for Linux, but in our opinion, OpenShot offers the best combination of features and ease of use for the home user. You can use it to combine videos, audio tracks and still images, add captions, transitions and more, and then export the final product in a variety of different formats. OpenShot can also use Blender to create 3D animated titles. OpenShot is available in the repos of most distros, but it’s best to use the distro-agnostic AppImage. Just grab it from its website and change its permissions to make it an executable, and you’re good to go.…

Version: 4.1.1 Web: www.claws-mail.org Claws Mail is a lightweight, standardscompliant, highly-configurable email client. It started out in early 2001 as Sylpheed-Claws, the development version of the Sylpheed email client. It eventually evolved and was renamed Claws Mail, growing into a robust, user-friendly email client. Claws Mail requires far fewer resources than its peers, which makes it the perfect solution for low-spec or older machines with limited hardware resources. You can add multiple accounts to Claws Mail, which supports SSL over POP3, SMTP, IMAP4rev1 and NNTP protocols. It has a threaded display, and provides message filtering, spell-checking, templates, tags, support for GnuPG, RSS feed reading, HTML rendering, calendaring and more. Some of these features are available courtesy of Claws’s extensive plugins architecture. Some plugins such as Bogofilter for weeding out spam…

Version: 22.12.1 Web: https://apps.kde.org/konqueror Unless you are a KDE user, chances are you haven’t heard of the Konqueror web browser. It debuted over two decades ago and in addition to its web browsing duties, it doubles up as a file manager as well. Konqueror is notable for being the first browser to use KDE’s KHTML browser engine, which has been forked by the likes of Apple and Google over the years, and today powers some of the most popular browsers including Chrome, Safari, Vivaldi and more. By default, Konqueror now uses Qt WebEngine, which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core. Using this engine enables Konqueror to support virtually all of the recent web standards, such as WebRTC, ensuring that it’s compatible with literally every modern website. Konqueror looks…

Version: 7.2.0 Web: www.qemu.org Q EMU (Quick EMUlator) is one of the oldest virtualisation apps that’s been helping desktop users get a taste of virtualisation since the turn of the century. Although it works much like other popular virtualisation apps, QEMU does have several features that you won’t find in its competitors. QEMU is bundled in the official repos of pretty much every distro. Users of DEB-based distros like Ubuntu can grab it with sudo apt install qemu , while users of RPM-based distros like Fedora can use the sudo dnf install qemu command. QEMU supports many options for launching the guest system, including multiprocessor emulation on single-processor systems. The open source software can also emulate other processor architectures such as PowerPC, ARM, RISC and more. Besides its impressive hardware…

OFFICE SOFTWARE LibreOffice 7.5 released Turbo-charge your productivity with this upgraded office suite. T he Document Foundation has just released LibreOffice 7.5, a major upgrade of its popular open source office suite. This latest version includes a huge number of improved features. Lovers of dark modes will be pleased to hear that more than 40 bugs have been ironed out to make it much easier to activate and navigate. If you prefer a little colour in your life, you can also enjoy the more rounded application and file icons, based on the Sifr icon set. These aren’t the only features to be more vibrant: Writer bookmarks now come in all hues of the rainbow, making them much easier to see, while Impress and Draw now have a much wider and…

IN BRIEF One of the grandparents of Linux distros, first released in 1993 by the sadly deceased Ian Murdock. Its name is a portmanteau of Ian and Debra, and it uses Toy Story characters for release code names. SPECS Released: March 1999 CPU: i386 Mem: 12MB HDD: 64MB Builds: x86, Alpha, Sparc, 68k, ARM Unlike commercial distributions, Debian is produced by a non-profit organisation called Software in the Public Interest. Volunteers all over the world help to maintain the system, and the distribution has acquired considerable respect from experienced users in the community. The text-mode installer is available in mono or colour, so Debian can be installed on very old systems that don’t have colour displays. This is a good idea and a refreshing change from the new, jazzy installers…

IN BRIEF Mandrake was, for a time, a highly successful spin of Red Hat Linux combined with KDE, developed initially by Gaël Duval. It was succeeded by OpenMadriva and Mageia. SPECS CPU: 586 (Pentium) Mem: 32MB HDD: 300MB Builds: x86 The concept behind Linux- Mandrake was originally born out of Red Hat’s refusal to include KDE in its distribution. This was due to licensing concerns, so Mandrakesoft decided to create a variant of Red Hat with KDE included and ready to go. This meant new users wouldn’t have to find and download the desktop suite from the web. Since then, Mandrake has evolved into a solid distribution in its own right. The new graphical installer is a fantastic, easy-to-use tool, and we had absolutely no problems getting underway with it.…

When it comes to tweaking the installation, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu rely on tools from the Gnome desktop, primarily the Gnome Settings for configuring installation. Besides this, the distros offer a different set of tools. For instance, Debian ships with Extensions Manager and Gnome Tweaks Tool, while Fedora has the Connections remote desktop client. Ubuntu has tweaked the Software & Updates app to let you easily enable additional repos and manage proprietary drivers. The other two distros are diametrically opposite to each other. Slackware adheres to the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) design philosophy, adored by advanced users who bank on it to build their installation exactly as per their requirements. Everything in the distro, from its installer to the package management system, is a reflection of its ethos of…

While the distros have their own ways to hand-hold and guide users, all have loads of avenues to offer support and a large community that helps you resolve any issue. Slackware is the only project that has an email address where you can send general support questions. The project has mailing lists for announcing new releases and for sharing security issues, but nothing for support. Instead of hosting its own support forums, the project directs users to the very active Slackware sub-forum at LinuxQuestions. The project also maintains a list of companies all over the world that offer paid technical support services. In terms of documentation, Slackware has an online book that hasn’t been updated in quite a while, but most of it is still relevant thanks to the nature…

Before we get to the rankings, we’d like to say that all five of the distros on test here are key distros; a title they’ve earned for having made a positive impact to the Linux ecosystem at a profound level. Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distro, is a shining example. Those who know how can use it for anything. That said, the distro isn’t for just anyone. It comes with a steep learning curve, which severely impacts its usefulness on the desktop. Then there’s OpenSUSE, which isn’t much younger than Slackware. However, it is the distro’s recent tumultuous history that makes it lose out over its peers, like Fedora, more than anything else. Fedora trumps OpenSUSE simply for being the more mainstream of the two. We’ll not go into the…

Ardour provides a complete music studio in the form of a Linux app. You can use it for all three of the main areas of music recording: getting music into the computer, mixing and editing it, then mastering and exporting it to an audio file. You might have to jump through a few hoops to get Ardour on to your Linux box, as the developers request a payment (pay what you like) or a regular subscription. However, you can download and build the source code package from the site for free. We’re looking at what version 7.2 has to offer. After a long period of waiting, the 6.x series reimplemented much of the internal workings of the program, but a lot of us were left underwhelmed as visible improvements were…

The Visual Studio Code project was originally started by Microsoft, a company not particularly renowned for its support of Linux. Rest assured that it was soon released under the MIT licence and is, today, a fully open source project, and one of which we’re huge fans. You might notice that Visual Studio Code looks a bit different from other applications and lacks a native feel. That’s because it’s coded using a framework called Electron. This gives the developers complete control of the layout, even if it means that it doesn’t fit in with the overall style of the desktop it’s running on. Sometimes, apps programmed in this way can be sluggish, but we haven’t encountered any problems with it, and it’s surprisingly good on a resource-constrained device such as a…

Cockpit is a remote system administration service. It can be installed using the package manager on most distributions. What you end up with is a set of management pages that can be accessed by a web browser over a network. A system like this has its uses in the server room, but it’s very easy to use, and it’s also worth knowing about for the average user who wants to carry out some admin and system monitoring remotely. Cockpit comes into its own when managing a remote Linux box used as a server, and you can handle a lot of the administration features that you would otherwise have to access via the GUI admin tools of the distribution or via the command line. The first page is a system overview…

Version: 3.2.7 Web: https://rsync.samba.org Linux has a plethora of applications for backing up, transferring and synchronising data between folders, disks and computers. Look under the hood and chances are you’ll find they’re powered by Rsync. The command-line utility has been a mainstay of the open source ecosystem since before the turn of the century. What makes Rsync so unique is the Rsync algorithm, which compares the local and remote files one small block at a time using checksums, and only transfers the blocks that are different. If you’re copying over the network, Rsync compresses these tiny blocks on the fly before sending them over the wires, which further helps cut down the file transfer time. For such network transfers, Rsync is usually clubbed with SSH to encrypt the data transfer…

Version: 5.22.1 Web: https://apps.kde.org/akregator If you need to keep track of updates on a bunch of websites, for news, latest deals, latest scores or anything else, there’s no beating the convenience of a feed reader. A feed reader gathers and displays web feeds, usually in the RSS format, from various websites in one place. Akregator is one such RSS feed reader, and it has been around for a couple of decades. Although designed for the KDE desktop environment, you can use Akregator on top of any desktop. Akregator is available in the official repos of all major distros, but you can also install it using the official distro-agnostic Flatpak with the flatpak install flathub org.kde.akregator command. Remember, however, that the app pulls in quite a lot of dependencies when installed…

Version: 1.4 Web: https://supertuxkart.net As its name suggests SuperTuxKart (STK) is a kart racing game. What makes it superadorable is that its characters are mascots of various open source projects. Besides Tux, there’s Gnu, Puffy from OpenBSD, Suzanne from Blender, Wilbur from GIMP, Xue from Xfce, and several others. The game is available in the repos of virtually all desktop distros, and you can fetch it using the default graphical package manager. To ensure you have the latest version of the game, it’s best to grab the compressed tarball from its website. You can then uncompress it using the file manager or with the tar -xf command. Then switch to the extracted folder and run the run_game.sh script. STK started as a fork of TuxKart, which came out over two…

Version: 4.5.2 Web: https://thetumultu ousunicornofdarkness.github.io/CPU-X Linux has some of the best system profiling and monitoring utilities. Unfortunately, they involve heading to the command-line interface. On top of that, their output doesn’t always make sense to a new user. That’s where CPU-X comes into play. It’s a system profiling and monitoring app, which is similar to the popular CPU-Z app for Windows. With CPU-X, you can get detailed information about your processor, caches, motherboard, memory and graphics hardware. The app is available in the official repositories of most distros, but can also be installed via AppImage from its website. The first tab lists details of your system’s CPU with all its supported instructions, as well as live temperature, core speed and usage. This tab also lists some details about the caches,…