Linux Magazineの April 2023 の目次

The diaspora* federated social network allows users to independently run pods (diaspora* servers) to interact with each other and the world in a “privacy first” way. Technically speaking, diaspora* is a macroblogging platform. You could say it’s a Fediverse equivalent to Facebook. You can still create a space that serves as your online presence, post pictures, links, and personal reflections. But this time, you stay in control of your data. Anyone can set up or join their own diaspora* server (called a pod) using free and open source software. Although pods are managed separately from each other, they can be federated, so someone who uses their account on the US-based diasp.org can still interact with another user who’s registered with the German-based despora.de. Diaspora* (Figure 1) fills the strong need for…

Sometimes, it’s painful to watch people make the same mistake again and again. When Flickr’s bright star started to fade, anyone remotely interested in photography moved to Instagram. With Instagram losing its luster faster than a mountain hare loses its winter coat, there is a rush to VERO, Glass, and other photo sharing services that promise to be different but are essentially the same. The features offered by the current batch of Instagram challengers may vary, but the overall premise is unchanged: a service run by a commercial entity that dictates the rules and to whose fortunes and whims you’re beholden. So you’ll be forgiven for sagely shaking your head and murmuring to yourself, “Will they ever learn?” Fortunately, shutterbugs and serious photographers who are not willing to go down…

An open source, decentralized version of Twitter, Mastodon has been in development since 2016. With Elon Musk’s erratic decisions since purchasing Twitter in late 2022, many users predicting Twitter’s doom have been searching desperately for alternatives. The result has been a new surge in interest in Mastodon – even if many newcomers remain puzzled by its open source organization. The interest is so great that Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko reports that he has received offers of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from five investors – offers he refused so as not to endanger Mastodon’s nonprofit status [1]. As I write, the exodus from Twitter appears to have slowed, but along with the renewed interest in Mastodon has come a renewed interest among Linux users in toot [2], an open source…

In recent years, multifactor authentication (MFA) has been a hot topic in information security, with many organizations and software services now making it a requirement. To achieve MFA, two or more authentication factors must be provided by a user to pass authentication. These factors include something you have, something you know, something you are, somewhere you are, or something you do. Many organizations have turned to the Google Authenticator tool to implement MFA using a time-based one-time password (TOTP). Using TOTP with Google Authenticator satisfies the “something you have” authentication factor because TOTP requires a device in the user’s possession (e.g., the user’s Android smartphone or iPhone.) Adding a regular user password to satisfy the “something you know” authentication factor provides the second factor to achieve MFA. Many software as…

On the desktop, the clipboard is entirely taken for granted. Many of us now use Ctrl+C in one application and Ctrl+V in another to copy text from one place to the next without even thinking about it. Those commands, along with Ctrl+X to cut, have been consigned to muscle memory. But it’s not quite so simple on the command line. Historically, the command line didn’t need this kind of copy and paste functionality because it was already purpose built for manipulating streams of data. Real hackers were supposed to pipe and filter output between commands rather than crudely copy and paste without automation. Ever since desktops arrived, and terminals moved from teletypes to windows, the two have coexisted with very little option for interaction, a situation made even worse when…

Considering how much data we process on the command line, it’s surprising how few tools there are to help with data visualization. Being composed almost entirely of ASCII characters, the command line has its own limitations when it comes to output, and that can be a challenge. But we can surely do better than throwing a few asterisks across the display. And with YouPlot, you can. YouPlot is a simple command-line tool that’s easily installed with Ruby’s RubyGems package manager and just as easy to use. First, despite installing a project called “YouPlot,” the executable is uplot, presumably to lessen the typing burden while making a pin. The command can take its input from either the standard input or from a file. While the input format is based on tab-separated…

FreedroidRPG is an isometric role-playing game that has been around for a long time. The original “classic” version was first released in 2002 when there were very few games for Linux other than Tux Racer and BZFlag, and the classic version attained a 1.0 version number in 2003. Just before this, the project forked into a version known as the “modern” version, which included an increasing number of modifications. This modern version has been under development ever since and has just celebrated its own 1.0 version release, 20 years after the classic version did the same. To celebrate, the game is now available from Steam with a single-click installation, as well as the AppImage you’ve been able to download directly from the project’s web page. Despite its age, FreedroidRPG is…

EndeavourOS Cassini 22.12 64-bit EndeavourOS is to Arch Linux what Ubuntu is to Debian: a desktop-centered derivative that has gained its own following. Unlike Arch, EndeavourOS features an easyto-use installer, as well as seven desktop environments and five tiling window managers. Like Arch, it is a rolling release rather than a general release distro. EndeavourOS Cassini 22.12 introduces a number of new features. Among them is a choice of bootloaders, the option to create a new EFI partition, automatic detection of Windows when multibooting, and a redesigned installer, especially for the minimal netinstall. In addition, several desktops have new icon sets, including Plasma, Cinnamon, and Budgie. EndeavourOS also officially supports the Pinebook Pro laptop with hardware and driver support. If your priority is cutting-edge software in a usable format, EndeavourOS…

At FOSDEM 2023 [1] in Brussels, FOMO (the fear of missing out) was the buzz word, not only for people who did not make it to the event, but also for the conference attendees. Although the event in the Belgian capital attracted a slightly smaller audience than in years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, visitors repeatedly turned to live-streams because the conference rooms hosting popular topics quickly filled up. The First Instance A particularly large number of comments and FOMO statements appeared on Mastodon, where the #Fosdem topic was very popular for some time. Thanks to Elon Musk, Mastodon is currently experiencing a flurry of activity. GitHub developer Kris Nóva, who was unexpectedly dragged into the Mastodon universe last year, vividly described how lively things were. Her plan to build…

Recent affairs at Twitter have led to resounding and sudden success for the free, open, and federated Mastodon [1] social media platform. But despite the apparent benefit of Twitter’s mismanagement, Mastodon’s success was bound to happen sometime. As Cory Doctorow explains in one of his many eyeopening essays [2], proprietary, centralized, and for-profit social media platforms always kill themselves. Mastodon and other open platforms will fill in the vacuum they leave in their wake. Mastodon Is Not Twitter Thinking of Mastodon as a stand-in for Twitter will leave newcomers confused. Sure, on the surface, Mastodon is a microblogging social media platform, and you could use it a such. But, as Max Leibman points out, assuming that Mastodon is just like Twitter is the first of the two fundamental errors people…

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), EuroLinux [1] is a Polish-based commercial distribution that sells support from engineers and offers specialist editions, including a free community edition and editions for Raspberry Pi, containers, the cloud, and desktops. In keeping with the company’s philosophy, my questions were answered by leading developers. Linux Magazine (LM): Tell readers about the founding of EuroLinux. EuroLinux (EL): EuroLinux was founded in 2013 by a group of individuals who had been selling and supporting commercial open source software since 2000. Our company’s name originates from the name of its first product, which was the EuroLinux operating system. Author Bruce Byfield is a computer journalist and a freelance writer and editor specializing in free and open source software. In addition to his writing projects, he also…

Hair salons, medical offices, and other small businesses require customers to book an appointment. Traditionally, small businesses manage these appointments by offering a phone number. Customers call in, and an employee (or the business owner!) sets a date and time, usually writing everything down in an appointment book. Table 1: Easy!Appointments 1.4.3 Prerequisites While this approach works, it suffers from a number of shortcomings. Customers can only phone in when the office is open. In addition, internal management becomes cumbersome if more than one person needs to know the next day’s schedule: The receptionist then has to spend time telling each professional the weekly schedule instead of working on more important tasks. To minimize (potentially significantly) these issues, you can leverage the power of technology and let computers do the…

University students in engineering often have assignments in which they must show their work step-by-step with sample calculations. Although Excel and Python are useful for advanced calculations, they can’t present complex equations formally in a report. MathCAD [1] is a good package for writing engineering reports. The tool offers a workbook interface that allows you to enter complex equations in a readable format, along with a rich function library, programming interface, graphics, and plots. Unfortunately, MathCAD isn’t supported in Linux, and it is generally out of the budget for students or casual users. As an alternative, SMath is a great free option that works in Linux, macOS, and Windows. In this article I introduce SMath and show you some of the useful features that I expect to use in my…

The KDE Plasma desktop has become fertile territory for people wanting to experiment with tiling window managers. This is because while KDE is a fully fledged modern desktop that will feel familiar to anyone, it’s also supremely configurable. Its KWin window manager can be scripted to do almost anything, and there are several high-profile and easy-toinstall scripts that will change the default standard desktop window behavior. We’ve looked at a couple in the past, with the best being the austerely named “Tiling Extension.” With this script enabled, your application windows would automatically snap and expand to one of several layouts, filling your entire screen and even removing window borders. It used the same shortcuts and layouts as the native tiling window manager i3 and was a brilliant solution for those…

Command runners are curious things because there are so many ways to automate the running of commands. Shell scripts are the simplest and probably the most widely used. If you can type commands into a shell, you can type them into a file and run this separately. But they’re also prone to errors, and not particularly resilient to changing environments, location, or systems. At the other end of the scale is a makefile, which has a heavy syntax of its own for running and controlling the commands it runs. The strangely named just is just another example, and it bridges the best of both worlds. It makes command automation as easy as writing a script, but also as potentially programmable as a makefile. The commands themselves are grouped together into…

For more than 30 years, a group of about 30 people has been developing the ImageMagick [1] graphics toolbox and offering it for free under the Apache 2 license. It is not a single program, but a set of compact tools for the command line. In addition to a Linux version, there are variants for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and other operating systems. ImageMagick supports over 200 file formats and reliably processes images with resolutions in the gigapixel and terapixel range. You can install the program collection using your choice of distribution’s package manager. At the time of going to press, only Arch Linux had the latest 7.1 version on board. Debian 11 (including Testing and Unstable) and Fedora 37 still offered version 6.9. On Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu…

As this magazine goes to press, Twitter has just announced that it is closing its API – a radical move that will limit access from outside applications. Some form of API access might be possible, if you pay for it, but as of now, the terms are unclear, and anyway, the move is likely to cause still more restlessness from the Linux community, who have never had much patience for closed APIs and are likely to abandon the platform in even greater numbers. Where will they go? Social networking and the new generation of users who live on it have changed the Internet. Your thoughts, your experiences, your pictures, your politics – it all goes on the Internet now through your platform of choice: Life events on Facebook; links and…

The Fediverse community is building a parallel Internet based on ActivityPub, a W3C-recommended standard for social media, and PeerTube [1] is the Fediverse’s video service for individuals, communities, and other organizations. As with Mastodon, it would be understandable to think of PeerTube as a Fediverse drop-in for the popular closed, proprietary alternatives such as YouTube. And, sure, you can use Peer-Tube that way, but you would be ignoring its merits and how it can deliver video streaming that takes control from powerful corporations and puts it into the hands of users. Running a service that delivers video on the scale of YouTube requires an immense amount of bandwidth and storage, unless you decentralize the whole thing. To be clear, PeerTube does not offer an amount of media on the scale…

Which of the city walking routes recorded on the Komoot route planning service should I do again today? This is a question I ask myself surprisingly often. Depending on how I feel, I want the day’s tour to be short or long, hilly or flat, and – accordingly – challenging or relaxing. Depending on time constraints, I might not want to venture too far from home. My tours are recorded on the Komoot service, but it offers only very rudimentary filter options (Figure 1). In my case, using its smallest possible search radius of three miles, Komoot searches the entire San Francisco metropolitan area for saved tours rather than letting me narrow my search to individual neighborhoods. To enable more granular search criteria, what I have in mind for today’s…

Creating and maintaining the documentation associated with running a business isn’t normally something you can get too geeky about. It usually involves the sober writing of invoices, customer contact details, quotes, and calculations, which is probably why so many commercial products take advantage of this monotony with their proprietary solutions. Kraft lets you accomplish all of this while letting you explore your geeky curiosity and support for open source. Kraft 1.0 is a Qt application that integrates perfectly with KDE Plasma, but it looks just as good from other desktops, too. Its 1.0 tag is also something of a misnomer. Despite only being released at the end of 2022, Kraft has been in development since 2004, with lots of public 0.1 releases along the way. This means it arrives fully…

The name of this command line application seems reminiscent of Devo’s definitive 1980s song, “Whip It.” This isn’t perhaps surprising considering we’re dealing with a distinctly 1980s piece of high technology, the audio compact disc. But it’s more likely, and less interesting, that the name comes from the act of ripping – copying the data from an audio CD to your computer. Your first thought might be why are CD rippers still relevant in the third decade of the 21st century, and there are two answers to this. The first is that despite a plethora of streaming services, very few serve digital audio at CD quality. Most offer streaming only via lossy compression, and CD audio delivers a gloriously uncompressed 16-bit value, 44,100 times a second. The second is that…

Valve’s Steam Deck has undoubtedly been a success, with well over one million units reportedly sold. But it’s also been an interesting experiment in just what happens when the gaming public comes into contact with Linux (Arch Linux, no less!). The results have been remarkable. Perhaps it’s because many gamers are used to tinkering with their Windows system to get every drop of extra performance from their hardware and installing hundreds of mods, or perhaps it’s because they’re realizing the potential in a completely open system for the first time. But either way, there’s now a flourishing ecosystem of third-party plugins, skins, intro animations, and other add-ons that augment the factory Steam Deck functionality. The only problem is that, just like the mod scene itself, all those dozens of projects…