Linux Format

I sorta wish the Nvidia open sourcing happened because it was cowing to hacker demands (it really didn’t). But open source (plus firmware blobs) or no, the EGLsteams/GBM binary will ensure that people still have something to argue about, graphics-wis

It seems that Tux can safely visit Hell, because last issue it froze over when Nvidia announced it’s starting on the long journey to producing a fully open source driver stack. It’s clear this is going to be a drawn-out affair. Just look at what happ

We always like to hear success stories of how governments and public bodies have switched to open-source alternatives that bring both accessibility and financial rewards, and Turkey is home to one of the most impressive recent examples. As the Fosspo

Matt Yonkovit is the head of open source strategy at Percona “When you have two options to decide between, your choice should be easier. For us in the world of open source, the decision between closed and open software has been an easy one for years.

Keith Edmunds is MD of Tiger Computing Ltd, which provides support for businesses using Linux. “Wikipedia lists 14 purely Open Source version control systems, but there’s one that stands head and shoulders above the rest: Git. Developed initially by

Mesa 22.1, the latest version of the opensource OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver, is now available to download and it comes with some exciting improvements. The headline feature is improved ray tracing support for AMD GPUs, which brings realistic lighti

Thunderbird, the open-source email client from Mozilla, saw its revenues rise in 2021 to a healthy $2.79m, compared to $2.3m in 2020. With the revenue almost entirely driven by donations, it means they rose by $500,000 to a new all-time high. Conside

This simple-to-use Ubuntu-based distro has a new version available, and it’s looking to encourage Windows users to make the switch by offering accessibility options that rival Microsoft’s admittedly very good offerings. New features include a screen

Jon Masters is a kernel hacker who’s been involved with Linux for more than 22 years, and works on energy-efficient Arm servers. “Linux 5.19 will mark the passing of 12 years since the Arm “multiplatform” effort began with the merging of the final fe

Xavier Claessens is a senior software engineer at Collabora “When developing an application or a library, it’s common to want to run it without installing it, or to install it into a custom prefix rather than on the system. Meson has always helped wi

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.18, noting that there had been no “unexpected surprises” at the tail end of the development cycle. The new kernel includes support for Intel’s Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT), improved scheduling perform

A potential security hole was discovered in which someone with local console access (including a remote console available over the network) “could trigger the debugger”. The kernel debugger can be used to read/write to arbitrary memory, which isn’t u

You’ll often see the phrase “put it in a shell script” when instructions contain a series of terminal commands, but what is a shell script? At its simplest, it’s a collection of commands that are executed in sequence that you put in a file, like this

gives your Tux a total tune up to keep it ticking along. Q Small screen VM I’ve been running Ubuntu and Linux Mint happily in VirtualBox for years. A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a PowerSpec G902 gaming PC. I haven’t been able to run Ubuntu 20.04

We’d love to try and answer any questions you send to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, no matter what the level. We’ve all been stuck before, so don’t be shy. However, we’re only human (although many suspect Jonni is a robot), so it’s important that you in

* For full terms and conditions see: www.futureplc.com/terms-conditions shane_collinge@yahoo.com ■

Raspberry Pi OS was the lightest of the five distributions on test in this month’s Roundup. It took 29 seconds to boot into the desktop. At this point, we opened a terminal and typed code free-h, which showed that 266MB was in use. We then launched C

Most of the official Pi documentation assumes that you’re using Raspberry Pi OS, which gives the distro a head start in that department. Documentation for the OS has its own section of the website, forming a fairly traditional manual. Note that a lot

VirtIO is part of the magic that enables faster communication between the virtual machine and the hardware. Using a technique called paravirtualisation the VM talks through the thinnest of driver layers with the actual hardware. By default, Boxes use

We’ve barely touched on what Vagrant can do. And given nary a mention to other capable orchestration tools such as Chef, Puppet and Ansible, which can all work harmoniously with it. Vagrant is quite good at taking the pain out of virtual networking (

Kevin McAleer loves bringing robots to life. Find him on Instagram and Twitter (search for @kevsmac). I’m Kevin McAleer and I make videos about robots (https://youtube.com/kevinmcaleer28). Each week I invite the audience to learn with me via my blog

Credit: https://github.com/pimoroni/displayotron LCDs are great for quick and simple information feeds, and one particular model, Display-OTron from Pimoroni is especially fun. An easy-to-use Python library enables us to create menus, stream text and

There’s no shortage of LCD displays for the Raspberry Pi, Arduino and other maker boards. We’ll start at the top end of the spectrum, with IPS displays. These are still LCDs, but they have rich and colourful panels that look great for media projects.

Systemd categorises units according to the type of resource they describe. Look to the type suffix appended to the end of the resource name to determine the type of unit here are a few key examples you’ll likely encounter: ›.automount unit file descr

Systemd running as PID 1 (Process IDentifier) is the system and service manager for Linux operating systems. Since 2015, most Linux distributions have adopted Systemd, having replaced other init systems. Here’s a breakdown of Systemd’s key features:

As Ethereum continues to evolve and usage increases, limitations cause bottlenecks and higher costs for users. Designers devised Solana (https://solana.com) to counter this problem. Solana is its own blockchain with smart contract capabilities. Perfo

Data is stored on a blockchain using hash numbers. To find and remember these isn’t humanly possible. Just as DNS helps you find web pages by a recognisable name, so the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) helps you find web pages for Web 3.0 pages. To get s

Current browsers aren’t yet ready for Web 3.0. Most browsers need, at least, a wallet extension to handle the initial Web 3.0 infrastructure system. Opera includes a built-in wallet, as does Brave, but Opera is more active in this space with a separa

For those stepping into the world of Ubuntu 22.04 for the first time, a potentially nasty surprise awaits: Wayland, the new desktop protocol that replaces X11. For the most part it’s a good switch – Wayland is faster and more secure, but it’s that ad

When you first started to read about programming, you’ll have learned various rules that apply to most languages. For example, while you’ll have used the × and ÷ symbols in your early lessons in arithmetic, you’ll have been told that in coding * and/

You might have concluded that APL is an environment for sophisticated mathematical manipulation but definitely not a programming language. Certainly, many people use it as the former, but it’s a language and applications genuinely are written in APL.

July 2022 Product code: LXFDB0290 In the magazine Expand your skill-set by exploring the formidable hacking tools within Parrot Security OS. Get the best fully-featured CMS for to host your web content on. We also explore sensors for the Pi, control

Credit: https://sonic-pi.net To say that digital technology has revolutionised the world of music is a massive understatement. Starting with the introduction of the audio CD in 1982, and continuing through to today’s streaming services, for the vast

Recorded music sounds exactly the same each time we listen to it, while a live performance will never sound exactly the same twice, even though the changes will be subtle. The idea of music that’s not set in concrete was taken forward by Brian Eno –

Throughout this VPS tutorial series, (which is regretfully but inevitably drawing towards a close, unless there’s a huge outcry…), we’ve endeavoured to deploy software that’s hardware agnostic. Yes, we’re writing about deploying software on a 64-bit

This is where our favourite Bitwarden feature comes in. Unlike many other self-hosted password managers, if you own your own domain (as you obviously do if you’re using it to deploy Bitwarden), then the browser extension can create email aliases on t

Over many years, different packaging formats have been developed for Linux distributions, and two formats lead the field. Debian-based operating systems (Debian, Ubuntu and Mint to name a few) use the .deb format. These packages are installed using t

Version: 5.0.0 Web:https://github.com/prateekmedia/appimagepool Universal file formats such as Flatpaks, AppImages, and Snaps have significantly reduced the amount of effort that’s required to install new applications in Linux. By decoupling it from

After slaving… er… scribbling for Linux Format for over a decade, Mayank Sharma likes to think of himself as the magazine’s Man Friday. Version: 2.0.1 Web: https://github.com/seadve/kooha Gnome’s built-in screen-recorder is one of the few that can re

Version: 0.6.0 Web: https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/blanket While some of us prefer to work (or relax) in a silent environment, for many particular sounds can help improve focus, and can also help calm their nerves (see page 65 for more). Blanket i

Version: 2.1.3 Web: https://slgobinath.github.io/SafeEyes You know what makes meeting deadlines and time targets worthwhile? To do so without injury (Linux Format… life on the edge – Ed). Safe Eyes is a simple tool that’s designed to ensure that long

Version: 0.10.0 Web: https://github.com/ElTh0r0/stackandconquer StackAndConquer is a challenging tower conquest game that’s inspired by the board game Mixtou (https://spielstein.com/games/mixtour).Your objective is to build a stack of stones with at

The subject of this tutorial is signal handling and working with processes in Rust. We’ll begin by showing how to spawn a new process in Rust – the relevant source file is named spawnNew.rs – without doing anything useful with it, just to show you th

UNIX Signals are software interrupts that offer a method of handling asynchronous events on a UNIX system. Every application, apart from the trivial ones, must be able to deal with signals. Each signal can be identified either by its name or a numeri

A process is an execution environment that contains instructions, user data and system data parts, and other types of resources that are obtained during runtime. On the other hand, a program is a binary file that contains instructions and data that a