Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2022 in Linux Magazine

Do you have an old computer gathering dust? Thanks to Linux’s flexibility and the innovative spirit of programmers, even computers that are more than 10 years old can still be used as network storage in current IT infrastructures. Systems frequently used by power users in the past often offer plenty of space for mass storage. In addition, these systems usually have sufficient power supplies to run multiple hard disks as network-attached storage (NAS). EasyNAS, an openSUSE derivative, takes the pain out of configuring network storage with multiple storage media and integrating it into an existing LAN [1]. Requirements EasyNAS comes as a hybrid ISO image with a size of about 380MB. As the minimum system requirements, the developers recommend a processor with at least 500MHz clock speed – as you…

Every admin knows how to deal with IP addresses. Unfortunately, IPs never turn up alone. They belong to a network, and the network is almost always assigned to an autonomous system (AS), which uses the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routing information. There is a simple way to find out which AS a particular individual IP belongs to. By way of an example, the following is the IP address of Computec Media’s web server, www.computec.de. The associated IP address 62.146.104.133 can be discovered using dig or by simply pinging. I then feed this IP address to a tool named ASN [1]. The shell script aggregates the output of several other tools and presents the results in a clear-cut way. It has a number of dependencies that vary depending on…

I recently found myself in a difficult situation with my home NAS brought about by some sketchy construction work done at my apartment. Long story short, the workers didn’t mention that they would be using my work area as their work area and set about cutting bathroom tiles right next to my main workstation, my home NAS server, and a toy i3- based rig that I occasionally use for testing and special projects. Consequently, my NAS suffered failure after failure – with ghosts that I am still chasing more than three months later. My NAS is a home-built rig using a Supermicro X8STi with an X5680, 24GB of ECC DDR3, and six disks total, including the operating system (OS) drive itself. The OS is on an SSD, and the data…

Many tools can help when analyzing your system, but many of these have a focus on your CPU, mainboard, or storage. Not many look at your graphics hardware specifically, possibly because, until recently, many Linux users didn’t need a powerful graphics accelerator outside of machine learning and didn’t need to see whether their current one was performing adequately. Graphics capabilities were simply judged on the size and resolutions of the displays they could drive. But the popularity of Linux gaming is changing that; PC gamers are fastidious about their systems’ performance and capabilities. If you want to know everything about your system’s graphics hardware, there isn’t a single way to survey the multifaceted APIs most hardware now support - until GPU-Viewer. For anyone with a decent GPU, GPU-Viewer shows your…

This is a phenomenal project that tackles what most people would consider a minor issue: the audio quality from their headphones. But it does this in such a hugely impressive and well-documented way that even audio cynics would be impressed. At the core of the project is a command-line tool that can listen to and analyze the frequency response of your hardware. The frequency response of a set of headphones (or speakers) can be visualized as a graph that shows how accurately the sound output reflects the sound input. Can it accurately reproduce low bass frequencies, for example, or the mid frequencies typically occupied by the human voice, or the high frequencies generated by high hats in a drum kit, or the raspiness of Miles Davis’s trumpet? The truth is…

Despite its ubiquity, many of us forget how intimidating the command line can be to people who have never used it before. This is a tricky issue to overcome because this initial trepidation only dissipates with experience. But to gain that experience, no matter how much you’ve read beforehand, you need to do actual things with the command line. It’s a vicious cycle, but it’s also one that Bashcrawl attempts to break. Bashcrawl isn’t really anything other than a collection of files and directories, but it’s a collection that’s been put together in such a way that what you need to learn for the story to progress is entertaining and could provide that vital first step for people who want to use the command line but don’t know how. To…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to events@linux-magazine.com. NOTICE Be sure to check the event website before booking any travel, as many events are being canceled or converted to virtual events due to the effects of COVID-19. DeveloperWeek Date: February 2-9, 2021 Location: Oakland, California and Online Website: https://www.developerweek.com/ DeveloperWeek 2022 is the largest developer conference & event series including the DeveloperWeek 2022 Conference & Expo – 1,000+ attendee hackathon, 800+ attendee tech hiring expo, and…

Ubuntu 21.10 64-bit Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) is the latest release of one of the most popular distributions on the desktop. It will be supported until July 2022, when it will be replaced by release 22.04, the next Long-Term Support (LTS) release. Ubuntu reserves major new features for its LTS releases, so 21.10 does not introduce any radical changes. The few that it does have include support for the upcoming Intel Alder Lake-S and AMD Aldebaran chips, Microsoft Surface laptops and tablets, and the beginnings of support for the Apple M1 ARM-based system on a chip. The release also benefits by including the Linux 5.12 kernel, which was released in April 2021. However, most of the changes are upgrades. On the desktop, these upgrades include the Gnome 40 desktop environment,…

Real estate agents sometimes say that the key to success is location, location, location. This saying might almost summarize the history of the locate command [1] and its various successors, particularly mlocate [2] and plocate [3]. As a replacement for find, all three commands use a database solution to reduce search time. While all three share many of the same options, plocate is widely considered the most efficient choice. Slightly different versions of locate are available in the BSD and GNU findutils, but you can also find locate, mlocate, and plocate as separate commands. Because the number of choices can be confusing, a history seems in order. First released in 1982, locate uses a database that can be read by any user. If regular expressions are not used, it displays…

I had to make many decisions when setting up my personal network-attached storage box. I needed a machine capable of sharing files on my local network with Samba [1]. I also wanted to be able to use the system as a Plex streaming server [2] and to run virtual machines occasionally to test out new Linux distributions. I didn’t need the system to be mission critical or high performing. A big motivation for setting this server up was to learn more about Linux. With that in mind, it should not be too surprising that I built it using spare parts. The files I wanted to store on this server were mainly replaceable media files. A high-end file system such as ZFS sounded amazing, but it was more than I needed…

After more than 10 years of development, systemd has undeniably arrived. The systemd system and service manager still does not find undivided approval in the open source community, but the discussions centered on what was once a very controversial topic have calmed down. No matter what you think of systemd, it has improved a few things. One of the benefits of systemd is its ability to log information, warnings, and errors. In systemd, the component responsible for logging is known as the journal. Systemd-journald provides much more data than conventional log files /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog that have been used for decades. In some cases, the journal even includes metadata that you can use to refine your journal searches. Systemd’s journaling results in a high volume of data that would be…

Photographers often rely on tabletop photography to take product photos for advertising campaigns or illustrations for magazines. Even a digital camera or smartphone is up to this task, but you have good reasons to look into USB and web cameras, as well. Armed with a 4K USB camera, a focus distance of 3cm, an integrated zoom function, and a Raspberry Pi with USB 3.0 ports, tabletop photographers can embark on their mission. Raspberry Pi Cameras Currently, the Raspberry Pi Foundation officially supports the V2 camera module (also available in the NoIR variant) and the Pi High Quality (Pi HQ) camera. The V2 module was introduced as the successor to the V1 module in 2016. The predecessor was based on an OmniVision 5647 sensor with a resolution of 5 megapixels (Mpx).…

Linux has not been most people’s preferred gaming platform until now because many interesting and also graphically sophisticated games are only available for other operating systems. But with PlayOnLinux [1], a tool enters the scene that makes games developed for Microsoft systems usable under the free operating system with the help of the Windows runtime environment, Wine. PlayOnLinux is also aimed at users who want to use conventional Windows applications on Linux. It therefore also integrates numerous office applications and programs for productive use. With the release of Lutris [2], there is now another solution that uses Wine for Windows games and also integrates native Linux games. On top of this, Lutris supports games that are distributed and managed via the Steam platform, and the program can handle other digital…

Even the most cynical anticloud Linux users will admit that virtual machines (VMs) have changed how we use computers. In the cloud, VMs can provide unlimited scale and flexibility, at a cost, while locally they let us isolate environments, run more than one distribution, and build for different architectures. But they can still be tricky and less than intuitive. VirtualBox has a functional GUI, but it requires you to download an appropriate image, define its configuration, and run through the installation. The libvirt library has its own GUI, Virtual Machine Manager, with a similar set of configuration panels to navigate. Docker, Multipass, and LXC perhaps offer the best options, because they’re backed by their own images that install and prepare themselves transparently, but they still require you to navigate the…

Valve’s Steam Deck is bringing a lot of needed attention to the Linux desktop and its associated applications, even when there’s no direct gaming connection. Gaming sessions are run within something that Valve calls Gamescope, which sounds new but is actually a Wayland compositor that better allows for gaming integration within Linux. It’s using Wayland with XWayland, but it’s still a positive step towards more general Wayland acceptance and surely its eventual total replacement of Xorg. It’s decisions like these, and Valve’s decision to use Arch Linux as its SteamOS base, that are bringing Linux to wider attention. But we’ve seen other projects that are also trying to bring games’ console-like features to Linux. Nyrna is a brilliant little utility that must surely have been inspired by Valve’s Steam Deck,…

Every mobile device needs its own Android build because of numerous drivers that are not available in the source code. The need to maintain every version of Android for every mobile device means that many manufacturers eventually stop supporting updates. Often, smartphones or tablets that still work perfectly can no longer be used without worry because the manufacturer has simply ceased to offer bug fixes and security updates. The fact that many drivers for smartphone hardware are not available as source code makes it difficult to provide Android upgrades. The LineageOS project [1], the successor to the CyanogenMod project, which was discontinued in 2016, proves that it is not impossible to keep these devices up-to-date. Unpaid volunteers at LineageOS do the work that many manufacturers do not want to do:…

In the past few years, distributions based on Arch Linux have become more popular. Perhaps their popularity reflects the growing expertise of Linux users, but both Antergos and Manjaro have both been in the top five for page views on DistroWatch. In the past year, EndeavourOS [1], a distribution based in the Netherlands, has also appeared in this spot, holding steady in second or third on the list. EndeavourOS occupies a definite position among Arch derivatives. Where Manjaro offers an Ubuntu-like desktop experience, Endeavour’s focus is on getting users to a successful commandline install with less difficulty than Arch Linux and then assisting with all the resources needed for customization. Similarly, where Arch seems arcanely advanced, EndeavourOS emphasizes the pleasure of learning and doing things your way. As the project’s…

In the early years of this century, Gnome 2.0 and KDE 3.0 were Linux’s most popular desktops. Sometimes one won the popularity polls, sometimes the other. Eventually, both were replaced by radically new releases, but both refused to disappear. In the case of KDE 3.0, a fork was created called Trinity Desktop Environment [1] (TDE, or simply Trinity). More than 10 years later, Trinity continues to be kept alive by a small group of developers, mostly in once- or twice-yearly maintenance releases, with the latest R14.0.11 release in October 2021. The result is a functional desktop, still suitable for modern computing, but with some archaic features and limitations that users may want to update immediately after installation. Trinity is included in few distributions, so the project cannot depend on maintainers…

Special projects deserve special components, which is why a display with unusual dimensions acts as the basis for my living room music system. However, the path to the final version was fraught with challenges. A web radio based on a Pi Zero (Figure 1) came to life in 2018 as a lightweight tinkering project with a keyboard, mini-speakers, and a small LCD screen [1]. Now, however, it has found a permanent place on my audio/visual (AV) receiver (Figure 2). Today, it is no longer controlled by a keypad, but by an infrared remote control. This solution works well, but it has one obvious drawback: The display is simply too small for couch potatoes. Therefore, a new version of the project has been in the pipeline for quite some time but…

Backing up data is still one of the most unpopular tasks for many users, even though it is no longer necessary to laboriously install and configure special backup programs to do the job. In addition, you can save yourself the time-consuming task of backing up entire disks or partitions if only some data has been modified. Linux offers the right solution for all conceivable backup and synchronization scenarios. If you only want to keep small or medium-sized datasets synchronized on two data carriers, FreeFileSync [1] is a mature free tool. Installation FreeFileSync can be found in the software repositories of various popular distributions and can be conveniently installed on, for example, Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia, and PCLinuxOS using the integrated package managers. For other distributions, you will find a…

There can be little doubt that one of the best command-line utilities of all time is tmux. Like screen before it, tmux transforms your humble command line into a fully fledged productivity portal, allowing you to split the terminal, create new background sessions, install plugins, and easily detach and reattach to concurrently running sessions. If you spend a lot of time on the command line, tmux quickly becomes the equivalent of your desktop environment, and you typically find yourself wanting to context switch to your graphical environment less and less. This in turn leads you to wanting to perform more and more of those desktop tasks on the command line. There are lots of great tools that can be used as substitutes to those desktop tasks, but there’s one element…

Dropbox was revolutionary when it first appeared in 2007. The cloud storage it offered was something new, and the convenience of having a directory shared with cloud storage that would then synchronize itself with other machines was alluring. Combine this with the gamification of inviting new users to add to your personal storage capacity, and many of us Linux users were hooked. Even though the whole platform was closed and proprietary, the relatively open API and a choice of third-party Linux clients meant we could all pretend Dropbox would eventually support Linux as a Tier 1 system. But the lack of Linux progress and an alleged hack in 2012 (widely reported in 2016) that exposed 68 million user passwords dampened our enthusiasm, especially in what was now a competitive market.…

Software recreations of real pinball games shouldn’t work. Left and right mouse buttons can’t simulate the feel of the paddles, nor can the space bar replace the spring and thunk of the ball launcher. Pinball is a physical game that needs to exist within a real space, alongside other games in a real environment. The physicality of the mechanism, the momentum in the chrome ball, the flashing lights, and the crude sound all contribute to the heady playability cocktail that anyone who loves pinball will know. And yet, despite all this, software recreations of pinball games can and do work. This was proved early on in the 8-bit era and with the wonderful Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies on the Commodore Amiga, which all effectively made pinball a whole new…