APCの May 2019 の目次

AMD’s Radeon VII GPU has received support in the macOS Mojave 10.14.5 Beta 1 and has been tested to work in high-powered external GPU enclosures, although malfunctioned when inserted into a Mac Pro tower. Since the support is coming in the form of a beta update, it’s not surprising there are flaws here, but it’s still promising news for Mac users seeking more power.…

An app called Family Locator was found to be leaking the real-time location of some quarter-million users recently. While the app was intended to keep tabs on where your family members were at, security researchers found its exposed database contained unencrypted info on the users’ name, email, photo, password and current location, even revealing the name of such location, for instance: ‘home’.…

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the governing not-for-profit body that oversees USB has released the USB 3.2 specification. On the bright side, we’ll get a 20 Gb/s specification. More bandwidth for data hungry devices is always welcome. Devices such as docking stations, external SSDs and displays can all benefit from the increased bandwidth. “A typical end user needs clarity and simplicity when it comes to using their everyday tech devices. Exactly what your phone, tablet, PC or laptop supports has become harder to decipher. ” Naming the 20 Gb/s connection USB 3.2 would be logical. Unfortunately logic is not a part of the USB-IF’s naming schemes. If we had USB 3.0 for the 5 Gb/s connection, USB 3.1 for 10 Gb/s and now USB 3.2 for 20 Gb/s, well, that…

Gigabyte was ambitious this year, adding a top-of-the-line Core i9 RTX 2080 configuration to its Aero 15 offerings, but the gamble on this model didn’t exactly pay off since it suffered from thermal throttling and a major price hike. We’ve looked at the Gigabyte Aero 15X here which has a loadout of an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 2070 (Max-Q) GPU and 16GB of RAM. While this is a pretty standard configuration, Gigabyte does offer the largest battery of the bunch at 94.2Wh. Despite being 17.8% bigger than MSI’s GS75 Stealth 8SG, the Aero 15X’s lithium-ion battery actually ran dry 14.1% earlier when running with a more intensive 15.6-inch 4K screen. We’d recommend opting to save yourself the $800 it’ll cost to bump the screen to 4K…

FROM $15 PER MONTH | QUICKBOOKS.INUIT.COM/AU For a small business without a dedicated accounting department, or even a sole accountant, QuickBooks offers an attractive solution to managing the finances. The fundamental bookkeeping ingredients are all here, covering invoices, payroll, estimates, employee time tracking, sales tax, inventory tracking, and is able to sync bank transactions. QuickBooks offers a choice of three online plans or a downloadable version (that is somewhat inferior) to suit a variety of needs. At $15 per month for a single user subscription, this full-featured app costs more than its competitors. The $30 Essentials Plan adds bill management, timesheets and will accommodate up to three users, while the $40 Plus tier provides project profitability tracking, inventory management and provides logins for five concurrent users. Services such as payroll…

US$1.99 | LINEA-APP.COM | NEEDS IOS 11.4 OR LATER Linea Go is made for quick doodles, visual notes and perusing Linea Sketch for iPad creations on the move. When drawing, you can add a background texture and grid, and work with up to five layers. The layers have opacity controls, image import capabilities for tracing, and can also be reordered. The toolset is limited: two pencils, two pens and an eraser. You also get a colour picker and a copy/paste/transform tool. Still, Linea Go does a lot with a little. Drawing is responsive and, thanks to a recent update, makes great use of 3D Touch. The Zip Line feature aids geometric work to straighten and connect lines. Unfortunately, there’s no tool for circles. There’s a good range of predefined colour sets;…

FREE | PLAYSTATION.COM The PS4 Remote Play app feels more like a way of future-proofing Sony’s flagship console, and to test streaming technologies, than something anyone is actually likely to want or need right now. By logging into your PlayStation account, you can stream your console to your phone, letting you, theoretically, game on the go. It’s a cool thing to be able to do, but don’t throw out your Switch just yet. To stream from a console, you’re going to need a very strong Wi-Fi connection for it to really work properly, and here in Australia there’s a good chance you won’t have access to the best connection when you’re away from your home console. I was able to stream in my own home but found that the picture…

The October 2018 Update to Windows 10 introduced some great new features, but it’s easy to remain trapped in a rut, sticking with what you know, even when there are better and often more efficient ways of doing things in Windows. We’ve covered a wide range of topics and features in this tips extravaganza, but there’s plenty more to be found. Take the time to explore the many tweaks on offer – you’re bound to find at least one extra useful setting. We’ve hopefully revealed dozens of tips you’ll find incredibly useful. Simply researching and writing them has uncovered new and better ways of doing things for us, too, and that’s ultimately the best barometer of all. If you find something that improves your own way of doing things, then…

The Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is meant for users who wish to experience the best of Debian (directly rather than via Ubuntu) in an easy to use package. It’s based on Debian Testing and is a semi-rolling release, which means it receives periodic updates via Update Packs. These are tested snapshots of Debian Testing to ensure stability and LMDE is binary compatible with Debian, which means you can switch to Debian Testing or Unstable for more frequent and bleeding-edge updates. However, LMDE isn’t compatible with Linux Mint, so you can’t use Ubuntu PPAs. LMDE is designed to offer the same look and functionality of Linux Mint and is available as 32-bit and 64-bit Live DVD images with either the Mate or Cinnamon desktops. The distro ships with Firefox, Thunderbird,…

Another distribution that has played a crucial role in shaping Linux’s DNA is Red Hat Linux, which was created in 1994 by Marc Ewing. Bob Young and his ACC Corporation bought Ewing’s business and created Red Hat Software. The company went public in 1999 and achieved the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. It rode on the success of Red Hat Linux to became the first open source billion dollar company. Over the years, some of the biggest and brightest Linux developers have worked with Red Hat. Soon after it went public, it acquired Michael Tiemann’s Cygnus Solutions which had authored the GNU C++ Compiler and worked on the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger. One of Red Hat’s most influential pieces of technology is its…

The Korora distribution started out as a way to ease the installation process of the Gentoo distro, but switched to using the Fedora distro as the base in 2010. The main aim of the distro is to make sure it works right out-of-the box for users. Korora ships a live DVD, which includes a huge selection of apps that make it suitable for a large number of users and the distro offers five desktop choices – Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce and Mate. While Fedora only ships with open source software, Korora also includes some proprietary software, such as Adobe Flash, which are essential for catering to a wide user base. Korora also allow other software to be easily installed, such as Google Chrome and the proprietary graphics driver for Nvidia…

In 1992, Roland Dyroff, Burchard Steinbild, Hubert Mantel and Thomas Fehr founded Software und System Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development). The company started out as a service provider but the founders later decided to have a distro of their own that would cater to the enterprise user. The distro was named SUSE, after the acronym of their company, and it was a stock Slackware release that was translated into German and developed in close collaboration with Slackware’s Patrick Volkerding. For building its very own distribution of Linux, SUSE used the now defunct Jurix distribution. Jurix was created by Florian La Roche, who subsequently joined the SUSE team and began to develop YaST, which is the distro’s unique installer and configuration tool. The first SUSE distro that included YaST was released…

Salix OS is one of the best Slackware-based distros: it’s light, nimble and backwards compatible with Slackware. One of its salient features is that it minimises bloat by having only one application per task. The distro supports both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and is available in five variants for the KDE, Mate, Xfce, Openbox, and Ratpoison desktops. Salix offers three modes of installation — Full, Basic and Core. The Full option installs everything on the installation image; Basic provides a barebones system with just the graphical desktop, a few essential apps and the Slapt package manager; the Core option will only install a console-based system and is designed for users to custom-build their install. The Full distro includes all the apps you’d expect on a desktop distro, and is often…

Mwave IEM Champion 2.0 Gaming PC $2,299 – TINYURL.COM/APC467-IEM This is a fun little PC. It’s bright, colourful and powerful enough to stop anyone laughing at how small it is. Packing a 650W power supply, this diminutive system utilises Intel’s latest six-core processor and water cools it. Being unlocked, it’ll provide some overclocking headroom to explore finding those extra GHz games just love from Intel processors. Some quick RAM will keep the CPU well fed while it supports the RTX 2070 in dishing out a topnotch 1440p experience, with all the shiny stuff enabled. The single 1TB SSD is nice, but being a SATA drive it’s a missed opportunity when faster NVMe-based options only cost $100 more. The in-built Qi wireless charger on top of the case is a handy…

Another month, another request from some department or another within APC’s parent company. Our publishing house is a big business, and a lot of us work across multiple platforms and multiple brands, either helping each other out just because we can (we flattened two Xbox hard drives today for the IT team, for example), or on a freelance basis. This time, however, the request came from the video production guys. These folk do some really good work in the more “commercialised” area of the business, filming ads and pitching creative ideas to a whole plethora of big-dollar names across the world. They’ve requested help from us in the past, and lo and behold, here we are again, with another system build for them. “Build a system featuring an Nvidia RTX…

1 ADD UNGRADED CLIP Drag an ungraded clip to the timeline. We shot our example clip on a GoPro using the Protune setting to create a flat contrast. Tap the Clip Tools (toolbox) icon, then tap the Edit button. In the Edit panel, tap the Color & Effects tab. 2 APPLY A PRESET Tap a preset such as Contrast. This gives you sliders to tweak. Drag the Contrast slider right to boost it further. The Levels slider’s five handles enable you to adjust shadow, midtone and highlight brightness and contrast. 3 SELECTIVE COLOUR BOOST Drag Vibrance right to increase the saturation of weaker colours without ruining stronger ones. To claw back more highlight detail in bright skies, drag Highlight Amount left. Lighten shadows by dragging Shadow Amount right. 4 CREATE…

First, let’s make this clear. Only work with high voltages if you know exactly what you are doing as you can be seriously injured or killed! In this tutorial we worked with higher voltages, in that we used a 9V circuit to power the fan but controlled the circuit using the 3.3V Raspberry Pi GPIO. But how did we know what to use as our switch? Well, we consulted a datasheet. Datasheets are documentation provided by a company that manufacture components. To find a datasheet for the 2n2222 NPN transistor, we used a search engine and located an appropriate document. Then, with a coffee, we sat down and read about the voltages and currents that our transistor could tolerate. We learnt that the emitter could be used with up to…

ISSUE 467, MAY 2019 Please note that these exclusive APC magazine downloads will only be available for a limited time, from 22/04/2019 to 09/06/2019 NEVER LOSE YOUR DATA AGAIN GAIN PEACE OF MIND WITH ASHAMPOO BACKUP 2018. FULL VERSION WORTH $30 If you ever sat in front of a black screen because your Windows refused to start, you know the value of backups. Thankfully it’s easy to make your data safe. Ashampoo Backup can perform entire disk partitions in just a few clicks and restore your files even in the event of a total system failure. This application was specifically designed to do the heavy lifting for you, that means safety without the need for constant user interaction or system slowdown. It’s simple, it’s fast and it’s safe! DOWNLOAD LINK:…

“Email scheduling will allow you to select a time and date for your message to be sent. “ On April 1, 2004, Google introduced its now-ubiquitous email service to the world — albeit on an invite-only basis — and with it came the promise of secure and fast messaging backed up with an impressive amount of storage. Gmail is now 15 years old and, for its birthday, Google announced a few updates for the service via its blog, including one that users have been eager to use for quite some time. “We want to make it easier to respect everyone’s digital well-being,” Google’s blog post reads, “so we’re adding a new feature to Gmail that allows you to choose when an email should be sent.” Email scheduling will allow you…

A survey of 2,000 US adults has found that, on average they spend US$400 each year on online purchases when intoxicated – extrapolate this, and you get US$48 billion spent by all adults of legal drinking age in the States. An overwhelming majority of these purchases are from Amazon (it being four times as popular as eBay), and most of the purchased goods are clothing items.…

BEST BUDGET MOTHERBOARD OF 2018 FINALISTS: Asrock B360M-Pro4, Asus ROG Strix B450-F Gaming, Gigabyte B360 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi, Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro, MSI B360 Gaming Pro Carbon WINNER: ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING BEST PREMIUM MOTHERBOARD OF 2018 FINALISTS: Asrock X470 Taichi, Asus Prime X299 Deluxe II, Asus ROG Maximus XI Formula, Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master, MSI MEG X399 Creation, MSI MEG Z390 Ace WINNER: ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XI FORMULA BEST MOTHERBOARD COMPANY OF 2018 FINALISTS: Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte Aorus, MSI WINNER: ASUS BEST BUDGET GRAPHICS CARD OF 2018 FINALISTS: Asus Expedition Radeon RX570 eSports, Asus GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Cerberus OC 4GB, Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 OC 3G, Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 Windforce OC D5X, MSI Radeon RX 580 Armour MK2 8G OC WINNER: GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX 1060…

Nvidia’s new RTX cards have finally made their way to the gaming laptop space, and there’s no better way to welcome the new generation than with a gladiatorial battle where they’re all pitted against one another. We have three units from each of the RTX 2060, 2070 and 2080 categories this year, giving us a good indication of the various graphical capabilities. Nvidia’s big selling point for its 20-series graphics cards is the addition of a new game rendering technique called ray tracing and, while there are only a handful of tests you can run for ray tracing performance, we pegged a couple of the important ones here. There’s very little CPU diversity in the 2019 RTX offerings and every unit bar three came with a 15.6-inch 144Hz IPS display…

MSI massively upped its game last year with the GS65 Stealth Thin, receiving full marks from a range of independent outlets, but the GS75 Stealth 8SG we have here may be an even bigger success. At just 1.895mm thick it’s almost as thin as its smaller sibling, despite packing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (Max Q) GPU and a whopping 32GB of RAM. The GS75 Stealth 8SG has the only 17.3-inch display of the roundup, yet its tiny bezels and better screen-to body-ratio make it difficult to tell that the GS75 Stealth 8SG is actually a bigger unit. The 144Hz screen is powered by a generous 80Wh battery that gets 3 hours and 18 minutes in PCMark 8’s Home battery benchmark — 30% more than the average laptop here. This…

$34.99 | NEVERCENTER.COM | NEEDS OS X 10.9 OR LATER Pixelmash works with a canvas that exists at a higher resolution than you’re aiming for. When you import a drawing or photo, rather than converting it to low-res immediately, you can leave it intact while previewing your pixel version. A button toggles between viewing what’s stored and the pixellated version. You can even drag a slider to change the pixel resolution live. This leads on to the app’s other special features: effects and animation. Layers are supported, and you can apply shading and outlines to each, or to a master layer. You can also add frames, with ‘onion skinning’ to see ghosts of other frames while editing, and move, scale and rotate layers frame by frame, enabling animation. You can also…

FREE | EXPERIMENTS.WITHGOOGLE.COM/ BIGBANG-AR Big Bang AR, created by Google Arts & Culture Lab in collaboration with CERN, is one of the best AR apps we’ve seen yet. It’s more or less what it sounds like – an AR recreation of the birth of the universe, one that speeds through a greatest-hits package of how everything came to be. It starts by examining the opening seconds of existence, as the first particles come together and matter forms, before accelerating, eventually showing millions of years passing in seconds as it explains how stars formed and the universe came together. It’s quite lovely, and narrated by the silver-tongued Tilda Swinton. It’s about on par with what some museums are doing with AR now, but it’s easily accessible from your home – lying…

Your favourite Linux distribution isn’t an individual unit in itself. On the inside, it is made up of various apps, libraries, modules and toolkits. On the outside, it’s part of a much larger and very vibrant ecosystem that sustains several other distros. Also part of this larger Linux ecosystem are very active user communities and various support infrastructures that help nourish the distros and other projects. Over the course of their lifetime, the different elements of the Linux ecosystem interact with each other as well as with their environment. They collaborate, exchange ideas and features, and sometimes swap resources for their mutual benefit as well as for the enhancement of the ecosystem. The Linux ecosystem fosters the development of innovative projects and products. However, since the environment can only sustain…

Ubuntu is, in many respects, the first distro to make a serious effort to bring in new users. The distro brought Linux into the mainstream, played a significant part in changing the notion and misconceptions about Linux and was able to successfully pitch itself as a viable OS alternative to Windows and macOS. Ubuntu was started by Mark Shuttleworth. He formed Canonical after selling his security firm, Thawte, to VeriSign. Shuttleworth was a huge fan of the Debian project. However, there were many things about Debian that didn’t fit in with Shuttleworth’s vision of an ideal OS. He therefore invited a dozen or so Debian developers he knew and respected to his flat in London in April 2004 and hashed out the groundwork for the Ubuntu project. The group decided…

The CentOS distro has been the premier community-supported enterprise distro based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The distro is built using the open source SRPMS from the RHEL distro. CentOS is one of the most popular server distros, suitable for all kinds of use cases, from web servers to enterprise desktops, and has been able to pitch itself as an ideal choice for anyone who wants to put together their own server but can’t afford the RHEL subscription fees. CentOS ships with RHEL’s Anaconda installer and can run unattended installations across multiple machines thanks to Kickstarter. The installer provides various installation targets such as a web server, database server, and so on. In January 2014, Red Hat announced that it would start to sponsor a bunch of core CentOS…

Until the release of Mandrake, Linux was generally thought of as a geek’s OS. Mandrake was the first distribution that focused on the convenience of the user. The goal was to provide a distro that could be operated by regular computer users. It had features such as the ability to auto-mount CDs without messing around with configuration files, which brought greater convenience to the Linux desktop. The Mandrake project has perhaps the most convoluted existence for a free software project. Over the years, the project has undergone various name changes, mergers and forks. However, it has spawned many distros and there are several major ones that are still active and can trace their lineage to Mandrake. The distro has developed a bunch of custom tools, collectively known as drakxtools, to…

OpenSUSE is one of the best RPM-based distros. It comes in several editions for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and also has ports for ARM v6, ARM v7, and the 64-bit ARM v8. Once known for its KDE desktop, OpenSUSE now looks good across all the major desktops. Besides KDE and Gnome, the distro also features Mate, Xfce, Enlightenment, and LXDE. You can download the distro either as a smaller live installable image or a install-only DVD image. One of OpenSUSE’s hallmarks is the distro’s YaST, which is a setup and configuration utility that enables you to tweak many different aspects of the system. Another popular tool is Snapper, which enables you to revert to a previously created system snapshot. The distro serves as the base for the SUSE Linux Enterprise…

There are various reasons why a filmmaker might want to alter the colour and tones of footage. Clips may be incorrectly exposed or suffer from colour casts, for example. These problems can occur when shooting on Auto or in situations with contrasting lighting conditions. An editor may also want to creatively adjust (or ‘grade’) their footage to create a particular look, such as making their material look colourful and warm, or washed out and cold, to evoke a particular mood. Amateur filmmakers might use in-camera settings to create high contrasting and vibrantly coloured clips. These clips are harder to adjust in post-production apps because tonal details may be missing from the footage. “LumaFusion excels at grading thanks to its Color and Effects editor. This enables you to adjust colours and…

1 BASIC OPTIONS Choose a destination and filename for your scan, then select the source (typically flatbed, document feeder or transparency unit) and colour. 2 SET RESOLUTION It’s possible to set different horizontal and scan resolutions (in dpi) using XSane, but for most people you’ll want to keep these identical. 3 GAMMA CONTROLS You can manually set gamma, brightness and contrast here, or take advantage of the automatic settings (including an option for scanning negatives). 4 HISTOGRAM The Histogram works in a similar way to an image editor’s Levels control – adjust the white, grey and black points using the sliders beneath the top graph. 5 STANDARD OPTIONS Provides basic brightness, contrast, bit-depth and gamma options – choose Window > Show Advanced Options if you’re feeling brave. 6 PREVIEW WINDOW…

1 OBTAIN AND EXTRACT INSTALLER Locate the driver for your Linux distro.Save the gar.tz file to Downloads, then right-click it and choose Extract Here. Open the extracted folder and find a file called install.sh. Right-click inside that folder and choose Open In Terminal. 2 START INSTALLATION A Terminal window opens. Type the following command and press Enter, entering your root password when prompted: $ sudo sh install.sh . After a short pause either an installer wizard pops up or a script will run to install the driver. 3 FOLLOW INSTALLER WIZARD If a GUI wizard pops up, run through it. If you get a prompt about SANE being missing, click Install Anyway, then Next. If prompted, make sure you allow access to your device through the USB port. Disable LPT…

FREE | ZAPHOS.ITCH.IO/ HOW-TO-BE-A-TREE | PC, MAC I’ve come to the conclusion that being a tree is kind of wonderful. For one thing, you’re such a lovely tree that a monument is quickly built in your honour. You go on to become an icon of worship for a futuristic society, before the game ends, and without you lifting a finger. You’ll be pleased to discover that’s just one ending of many, branching out from the innocuous beginning, where you’re given ownership of a seemingly immobile totem of twigs. The other endings stem from your realisation that this tree can actually move, tumbling left and right, and jumping up onto floating platforms with all the elegance of the guy from QWOP after a litre of gin. Nominally this is a platform…

APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over 35 years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer – it’s in our name, after all – the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and apps to peripherals, accessories, online services and beyond. We have two main goals: to track down the best of modern tech and also to help our readers make the most of it. We’re also an open church in terms of platforms. We know most people aren’t wed to…

It’s no secret that NBN Co would like consumers to sign up to the higher speed tiers on offer, having designed multiple initiatives to encourage the uptake of NBN50 or higher, but its next move will instead actively discourage people from choosing the lowest tier. As reported by IT News, NBN Co is looking to discontinue a ‘discount’ it had in place with Retail Service Providers (RSPs) which effectively made NBN12 (12Mbps) speeds affordable to consumers. This means that, we could start seeing congestion on the lowest NBN speed tier network in coming months, as well as costs of the NBN12 plans rise once again, after they had been brought down to a reasonable amount with the initial discount introduced in mid-2016. The discount worked by reducing the charge for…

Following the failure of its social media platform, and a spate of security breaches, Google commenced deleting all data from Google+, but there were those who intended to preserve its somewhat underwhelming legacy. The Internet Archive is cataloguing any public posts – text, comments, images and more – for the sake of posterity, so if you’ve got anything you didn’t want to be made eternal, it might be too late now.…

In the very early days of adaptive refresh tech, it was difficult not to give the nod to Nvidia’s G-Sync. There were decent implementations of FreeSync monitors from day one, but if you had to pick G-Sync and FreeSync monitors at random, you could rely on the G-Sync option delivering a good experience. FreeSync? Not so much. That’s no longer the case. Even before FreeSync 2 arrived, most FreeSync monitors were delivering the goods in terms of a smooth, slick gaming experience without any obvious image quality problems. With FreeSync 2’s required LFC feature, plus some low latency goodies, the gap has closed to nothing from a gameplay perspective. That, no doubt, is at least part of the reason why Nvidia has unlocked FreeSync support for its GPUs. The move…

US$130 | WWW.MAGIX.COM Based on its current purchase price Magix’s Windows-only Movie Edit Pro Premium is a video editing solution aimed at the hobbyist end of the market. As such you probably shouldn’t be expecting too much beyond what any bundled app or free software would offer. But Movie Edit Pro Premium is actually remarkably full-featured, has a sleek interface and even grows with you as you improve your editing skills. It’s not without its annoyances and odd design decisions like say not being able to organise your clips prior to using them in a project. Many competing video editing apps allow you to import footage into your project, organise them in bins (aka folders), label them, or do whatever you need to do to have all the clips you…

FREE/$4.49 PER MONTH FOR PREMIUM | WWW.HYPERSPEKTIV.COM/ Hyperspektiv recently enjoyed a significant 2.0 update, which has essentially rebooted the app for modern phones with superior cameras and screens. It’s yet another photo manipulation and editing app, and these things are a dime a dozen, but it’s easy to appreciate how simple and intuitive this one makes the whole process. You can apply multiple filters (several of them are paywalled behind a monthly fee, as is the option for HD videos and photos, but the free selection is strong too), and each one allows you to edit the various effects that are working underneath it. It’s a fun way to mess around with your photos and apply weird effects that make them look like something out of a haunted ‘90s VHS,…

The Debian project has played a significant role in the evolution of Linux and, in many ways, is the first real distribution created for the regular computer user. It was announced in August 1993 and had its first public release later that year, although its first stable release wasn’t available until 1996. The project was even sponsored by the Free Software Foundation from November 1994 to November 1995. A key motivating factor that led Ian Murdock to create a new distro was the perceived poor maintenance and prevalence of bugs in the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) distro. Besides the software itself, Murdock’s release included the Debian Linux Manifesto, which outlined his view for the new project, which prophesied that “distributions are essential to the future of Linux”. In the Manifesto,…

Trisquel GNU/Linux goes to great lengths to do justice to its free software tag. Not only does the distro not include any proprietary software, it also strips out all non-free code from the components it inherits from Ubuntu, such as the kernel. Instead of the stock Ubuntu kernel, Trisquel uses the Linux-libre kernel that doesn’t include any binary blobs. Thanks to its efforts, the distro has been endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. There are several variants of the distro, the most common ones are the standard Trisquel release, which is available as a 700MB image with the Gnome desktop, and Trisquel mini, which is designed for older hardware and low-power systems, and uses LXDE, the lightweight desktop. While the distro doesn’t ship with any proprietary codecs, you can watch…

Fedora has been around, in one form or another, since the early 1990s. The distro had its first release in 1995 and the early releases were named Red Hat Commercial Linux. During these early years, the distro was developed exclusively by Red Hat and the community was limited to contributing bug reports and contributing packages included in the distro. This changed in 2003 when the company shuttered Red Hat Linux in support of the Fedora Project and opened it up to contributions from the community. The aim of Fedora is to provide the latest packages while maintaining a completely free software system. The distro was initially called Fedora Core and was named after one of the two main software repositories — Core and Extras. The Fedora Core repo contained all…

Mageia is one of the best-assembled community distros and does a wonderful job of carrying forward the Mandrake legacy. It has an expansive support infrastructure and very good documentation. The distro follows a nine-month release cycle and each is supported for 18 months. Mageia has installable live media as well as install-only DVD images. Mageia boasts intuitive custom tools for managing various aspects of the distro. One of the best tools is the Mageia Control Center, which has modules for managing software, hardware peripherals and system services. Advanced users can employ it to share internet, set up a VPN and configure network shares. The distro uses the URPMI package management system and ships with three official repos. The Core repo contains open source packages, the Non-free hosts proprietary apps and…

Slackware has the honour of being the oldest distro that’s still actively maintained. It was created by Patrick Volkerding and had its first beta release in 1993. The project aims to create the most Unix-like Linux distribution. Slackware was originally derived from Softlanding Linux System (SLS), which was the first distro to provide TCP/IP and X Windows System in addition to the Linux kernel and basic utilities. SLS, however, was very buggy and the growing frustration of SLS users prompted Volkerding to release an SLS-like distro in July 1993. Back then, in addition to being hosted on an anonymous FTP server at Minnesota State University Moorhead, the distro was offered as 24 3.5-inch floppy disks. By the time version 2.1 was released in October 1994, the distro had swelled to…

Rather than being a distribution itself, Linux From Scratch – popularly called LFS – is a freely available set of instructions to create your own custom distro from the ground up, entirely from source. The project was started in 1999 when its author, Gerard Beekmans, wanted to learn how a Linux distro works behind the scenes. While building his system from scratch, Beekmans wrote down the steps and released it as a HOWTO (pictured, left) thinking that there would probably be other people who would be interested. LFS has grown quite a bit from its humble start, transforming from a single HOWTO to a multi-volume book. It has also spawned various sub-projects over time, such as BLFS or Beyond LFS which fleshes out the basic LFS system, and ALFS or…

How popular is AMD’s Radeon VII with your customers? Are stocks low due to supply or demand? What percentage of total discrete GPUs you sell are AMD? John, TI Computers: “Yes, we did have some interested in the Radeon VII being a multipurpose card. However, that demand did not last too long. Primarily the performance gap between the Radeon VII and its next GPU down, the RX590 is just too big. Not to mention the complete Nvidia GPU line-ups leaving only limited room for AMD. To date, the majority of our discrete graphics sale is still with Nvidia.” Jaimie, Leader Computers: “At Leader we saw a heap of hype on the Radeon VII but stock has been almost non-existent, with whatever we can source getting grabbed almost immediately. Unfortunately, AMD…

$1,099, WWW.ASUS.COM/AU It’s a busy time for graphics cards – new GPUs are coming thick and fast, and the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is here, too. Trying to pick a winner isn’t easy, especially when the case for the RTX family in general has yet to be convincingly made. Even so, when it comes to our Turbo build, there’s only one card that really makes sense for the money: the GeForce RTX 2080. While there is more performance to be had from factory overclocked models, it’s the stock-clocked cards that make most sense in terms of value for money. So, this Asus card may not fill your case with cool looks, but it delivers where it counts the most – performance.…

1 ICLOUD TABS In Safari, you have quick access to web pages that are currently open on your other devices, but only by going to View > Show Tab Overview and scrolling down. Add the iCloud Tabs icon and you get them as a handier pop-up. 2 WEBSITE PREFERENCES Add the Website Preferences button near Safari’s search/address bar to remind yourself that you can alter default settings and permissions per site. Hover over each item to get a pop-up menu allowing you to change it. 3 FULL-SCREEN TOOLBAR In any app, in full-screen mode, you can choose whether the toolbar hides itself or shows itself (the latter ensures website security status remains visible in Safari). This even applies to Photos, whose toolbar isn’t otherwise alterable. 4 REDIRECT MAIL The Redirect…

Sadly, since Ubuntu 16.04 was released, updates to SANE appear to have partially broken scanning capabilities in Ubuntu. Many scanners that worked fine in earlier versions of Ubuntu no longer work in later versions, and both our test scanners (Dell B1265dnf and Epson Perfection V370) fell into this category. The first thing to do is visit tinyurl.com/apc467-scan where you’ll see this problem documented in detail. Enter the following into the empty file: Save the file, then reboot. Similar fixes have been posted for Brother and Xerox scanners. As you can see, it appears to be an issue with both permissions and changes to file locations that necessitate the use of symlinks to get things working again. Other afflicted scanners may be fixable using these basic principles.…

FREE | SPACEBACKYARD.ITCH. IO | PC, MAC Bird of Passage gives you the opportunity to don the white sheet and clanking chains of a g-g-ghost, but without having to die for the privilege. You’re a spectre that’s been haunting the streets of Tokyo since 1923, when the Great Kanto earthquake ripped Tokyo asunder, and sent you to an early grave. Rather than take up residence in a creepy old mansion, you instead take to the roads, hopping endlessly from one taxi to another, sharing your story – or the bits you can remember of it, at least – over and over again. As loops go, it’s one of the most mesmerising I’ve seen, thanks to the expertly framed scenes, the graceful animation of the ghost protagonist, and the overall smoothness…