Table of contents for April 2016 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell The US Navy’s new Zumwalt class destroyers features 16 blade servers and will run a proprietary, Linux-based OS called LynxOS. One day it will control railguns and lasers. And in other reassuring news the UK’s entire nuclear deterrent is still running on Windows XP. Neil Bothwick Linux is everywhere now so it’s hard to pick a single use case. But the porting of Linux to the Cyberdyne range of CPUs and it being embedded in the T-800 has to have been/will be a significant step. Although attempts to enforce the GPL are awaiting the court’s decision on judgement day. Nick Peers For me, it has to be Pi MusicBox. It’s so simple to set up and designed to be run headless and made it incredibly easy for me…

It looks highly likely Ubuntu 16.04 will come with support for the Vulkan graphics API, which is a low-overhead API that can allow even relatively underpowered devices run impressive-looking games. Vulkan is also multiplatform, so unlike other APIs, such as DirectX or Metal (which are locked to Microsoft and Apple platforms respectively), or Mantle (which only works with AMD hardware), Vulkan can be used no matter what OS or hardware. But perhaps best of all it’s royalty-free and open source. With the release of the Vulkan 1.0 specification by Khronos, the company behind the API, we’ve seen examples of what the technology can achieve – and the results are already impressive. Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve, is already singing Vulkan’s praises: “We are extremely pleased at the…

“This month was FOSDEM, a whirl of a conference – that takes place in Brussels every year – packed with the right kind of people to get things done in free software. The LibreOfficeteam had a hack-fest beforehand to get into the mood – I spent a little while re-learning the (obvious) necessity of profiling before optimising, spending a chunk of effort trying to save memory for our Online version without winning much, before profiling and quickly halving our memory use with just a few lines. It was great too to announce another Collabora Online partnership with the popular Kolab groupware suite. That will bring rich, online document editing into Kolab on Linux alongside its mail, calendar, address book, file storage and other pluggable richness. It was good to catch…

Some time ago, you published an article on how to make karaoke files that were CDG and OGG or MP3. I’ve been playing around with a Raspberry Pi and found that there were people out there explaining how to turn it into a streaming center using SFTP. This got me thinking about how to mount the remote drive from the Raspberry Pi, which has an extensive collection of karaoke that I have made myself. Using just a Raspberry Pi with my drive set up as a NAS drive, I’ve installed PyKaraoke and SSHFS on my client (Mint Debian though this should work on any distro) I’ve created a solution that works. Mounting the drive into my home folder using the following commands from the terminal in my home folder: Then…

LinuxCon Europe Berlin, Germany plays host to LinuxCon Europe between October 4-6 2016. If you’re a sysadmin, architect or a passionate Linux developer then this event will be right up your street. Over three days you’ll see panel discussions, workshops and deep dives (in-depth technical discussions) on all aspects of the Linux ecosystem. Ticket prices start at around $225 for students and reach the dizzy height of $950, but this can easily serve as part of a yearly training budget for those in the industry. LinuxCon Europe is a great event to rub shoulders with like-minded people and learn new skills. http://bit.ly/LinuxConEurope Liverpool Makefest 2016 Last year’s event had a diverse range of maker activities from robots, drones to knitting – there was even a guest appearance of a Dalek…

While the primary purpose of each of these distros is to help you recover from disasters, they also bundle utilities to secure your system and prevent privacy leaks. In Finnix, you’ll find the command-line wipe utility for secure file deletion and GNU Privacy Guard (GPGV) for verifying GPG signatures. Rescatux also ships with GPGV and includes shred for permanently deleting files. SysRescCd bundles several tools to ensure that files are permanently erased from the hard disk. There’s also chkrootkit which searches for rootkits. Finally, there’s the md5deep utility which is used in the computer security, system admin and computer forensics communities to run large numbers of files through any of several different cryptographic digests. As previously mentioned, TRK has several virus scanning engines, including ClamAV, F-Prot, BitDefender, Vexira and Avast.…

No doubt there will be a few of you thinking that Rancherhas the potential to solve all your container related woes and earn you much kudos to boot. But you’ve already had the conversation with your pointy haired boss in your head, you know, the one that goes: “What about support contracts?” and “When will this be a 1.0 release?” I got in contact with Rancher to find out their plans on this front and the company was kind enough to send me the following details: “Rancher Labs are planning to release v1.0 of the Rancherplatform in Q1. This will be accompanied by a commercially licensed and supported version of the product, with support offered on a Standard or Platinum basis. Response times for SLAs and hours of access to…

ON GETTING THE WORD OUT“We actually showed Scratch running on a recent Newsnight piece.” The device is called the Raspberry Pi. Device? Computer, really. ‘Device’ suggests singular function and intent, and this is anything but. The obvious headline is that it can run Quake III Arena, “but I think it’s fair to say it’s quite a way beyond that in terms of what it can do” David Braben points out. “It will be able to do things that you’d consider a lot more contemporary, but these are the things available freely that we can show running easily” Besides, that’s not the real crux of what Pi is all about. Yes, it runs on a Linux core and presently boots to the familiar LXDE, to be exact, which fits snugly into…

Pi Model B February 2012 The Pi Foundation planned to release two models and pre-orders opened at the end of February 2012 on the more popular Model B. This higher cost version included an Ethernet and additional USB port. Unfortunately, an incorrectly sourced type of Ethernet port – the initial 10,000 units had to have the Ethernet port replaced – and accelerated compliance testing delayed its initial shipment into April 2012. May 2012 20,000 units shipped Pi Model B Rev 2 September 2012 Production moved to the United Kingdom and in conjunction with that change the Raspberry Pi B had a PCB revision 2 and was about to receive a memory upgrade to 512MB (in October 2012). The Rev 2 board cleaned up issues with the original design with components…

Our expert Les Pounder works with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to deliver training for teachers across the UK. Les blogs at http://bigl.es about robots, hacking and all things makery. We take them for granted, but lists are incredibly powerful tools that we use everyday for anything from remembering our shopping, taking registers to just generally remembering the things we need to do. In programming they are used to collect data into a sequence (usually separated by commas). In this tutorial, we’ll use a list in two applications, first we create a simple quiz in Scratch that will use two lists to handle the questions and answers. We will then select the questions at random and use a method to ensure that the correct answer is selected in the answer list.…

It doesn’t matter how fleet of hand your typing skills are, the command line can still be a time-consuming, frustrating experience. Thankfully the terminal comes equipped with lots of handy time-saving shortcuts. This issue let’s take a look at how you can easily access previously used commands and view suggestions: Up/down arrows Browse your command history. history Use this to view your command history Ctrl+r Search command history. Type letters to narrow down search, with the most recent match displayed, and keep pressing Ctrl+r to view other matches. Tab View suggestions or auto-complete a word or path if only one suggestion exists. Press ~+Tab to autofill your username, @+Tab to autofill your host name and $+Tab to autofill a variable.…

What’s the current state of play for hardware support for Bay Trail tablets? It varies from device to device, of course, but there are differences. Here’s what you should be looking for when testing your tablet: ACPI This deals with power management. This is practically non-existent out of the box, but later kernels do tend to produce support for displaying battery status – the Linx appears to be the exception to the rule here. Suspend and hibernation should be avoided. Wi-Fi Later kernels again improve support, but many devices use SDIO wireless adaptors, which aren’t supported without patches or custom-built drivers like those found at https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs. Bluetooth This often needs patching with later kernels, although our Linx tablet retained Bluetooth connectivity throughout, even when the internal Wi-Fi adaptor stopped working.…

Our expert Neil Bothwick has a great deal of experience with booting up, as he has a computer in every room, but not as much with rebooting since he made the switch to Linux. Gentoo Port Add and create your own overlays to portage and find software In issue LXF208 we looked at getting more out of Portage, Gentoo’s package manager. We covered some of the basics and now we’ll look at a more features to help you make the most of Gentoo’s flexibility. The portage tree contains a lot of software, at the time of writing there are 39,394 ebuilds for 19,120 packages (most packages have more than one version in the tree). That’s a lot, but it’s not everything. Occasionally, you’ll want to install something that’s not in…

Our expert Afnan Rehman loves tinkering, fiddling and being a general nuisance when it comes to Linux and other systems. He now gets to write about his efforts. Octave Learn how to install it and start making 2D and 3D plots and graphs There comes a time in a man’s life where he must ask: to calculate or not to calculate? If you’re anything like the author, with an engineering final project due in the next few hours and three cups of coffee sitting on your desk, the answer is yes. That’s when you turn to Octave, a beautiful piece of software that will turn a mass of messily scrawled paper-napkin equations into a visual feast. Octave is an open-source program developed out of the need to be able to…

Our expert Nick Peers has spent the last 18 months fine-tuning his Pi 2-powered media server setup for easy access to his ever-growing DVD collection. It’s starting to get messy and fixated on Doris Day. Raspberry OxxxELEC Pi Build a Pi-powered media centre for your music and film collection Why fork out for an expensive set-top box when you can build your own for significantly less? Thanks to the powerful open-source Kodi media centre software (https://kodi.tv), you can access both locally stored personal media on demand, plus watch a wide range of internet streaming services, including catch-up TV. The success of Kodi – formerly known as XBMC – has led to the development of Kodi-flavoured distributions (distros). If you’re looking for a full-blown Ubuntu-based distro with Kodi sitting on top…

As you’ve seen in this tutorial, Swift for Linux is currently lacking some basic features that are taken for granted on iOS and OS X. We’ve worked around them here, but Apple is working hard to fill these holes as quickly as possible. But don’t get too comfortable: even as those holes are filled, Apple is already planning to introduce a series of API breakages to help make its many thousands of APIs more ‘Swifty. Hopefully this won’t affect the code we’ve written here, but we’ll have to wait until June 2016 to know for sure.…

Although the Bottle framework was developed with dynamic sites in mind, it can also be used for creating static sites as well. The following Python code (static.py) demonstrates this: The code above defines the handlers for two specific URLs (‘/hello’ and ‘/hello/’) which are the only URLs that are supported by static.py. The actual HTML code is embedded inside the PY file so you don’t have to look into too many files when you want to make changes to your site. Additionally, static.py shows that you can support multiple routes with one function, as static.py does with ‘/hello’ and ‘/hello/’ which is very handy. If you try to access a URL that’s not supported by static.py, you’ll get the usual 404 error. Should you wish to print your own error…

Shell redirection is useful when you want to capture the output of a single command, and you can capture the error channel as well with a little fiddling. But what if you want to save the output of several commands, or the commands you run are interactive so you still need to be able to see what they ask to give the correct responses? The solution is a program called script. Run this from a terminal, with no arguments. Nothing will appear to happen apart from a message that scripthas started. Now run some other commands and everything appears to be just the same as normal. But what has happened is that script has opened a subshell and is both displaying and capturing everything from whatever you type, and that’s…

The other day I was visiting someone’s house and his son was watching cartoon videos on a media player box. When he finished and went back to the home screen, I saw it was Kodi running on OpenELEC (by coincidence, this was just a couple of days after I’d put OpenELEC on this month’s DVD). Now there’s nothing remarkable about that, except this person’s computer literacy barely extends to a calculator. For years, Linux has been the province of those with a certain amount of technical expertise or curiosity. Yet here we have someone with over-the-counter hardware running Linux. Yes, Linux has technically been in the hands of millions for some years in the form of Android devices, but this was GNU/Linux, what we normally think of when we say…

Quad-copters! Let’s distract management with the shiny thing, so us grown-ups can sit down and talk about embedded Linux. In this issue there’s not only an entire cover feature on the subject, but also a host of tutorials on the idea of running Linux in embedded systems for speed, fun and entertainment. From tiny Linux systems that can boot in under a second to running Linux on streamlined tablet hardware, Linux is a versatile beast of a penguin. This opens up whole new areas for us to play with and have fun with. Once again we’ve unleashed Jonni Bidwell, our tamed in-house hacker, to turn Linux to a host of interesting tasks: from creating optimised builds of Debian 8, so he can build custom routers, to piloting quad-copters from a…

The Linux Foundation (LF) does admirable work in promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software, and until recently it was possible for individual members to elect two board members to represent the community. However, the LF by-laws have been changed so this no longer happens. The effect of this change has caused many people to worry that the community’s influence on the LF is waning. Some community figures have gone even further, such as Matthew Garrett, a security developer and member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors, who in a blog (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39546.html) links Karen Sandler’s – the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) – announcement that she planned to stand for election to the Linux Foundation board, with the timing of the by-law change.…

TINY CORE LINUX 7.0 By the time you read this Tiny Core Linux 7.0 will be ready to download. In this release, the Linux kernel has been updated to 4.2.9, along with the latest stable patch and updates to glibc, GCC (to 5.2.0). Xorg-7.7 and ALSA. The minimalist Linux distro – which runs entirely in memory and gives its users modular access to only run the tools and services they need – has been given a short but concise release note to match, which you can read on http://tinyIoreSinux.net. REACTOS 0.4.0 After nearly ten years since the release of ReactOS 0.3.0, we’ve now got a new major update of the operating system that’s based on the design of Windows NT. Good things are said to come to those who wait, and…

It’s good to share Community – the best that FLOSS can get. Look up ‘Community’ in the dictionary and you’ll find that it’s defined as “the condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common ” These words explain what community is, but rather coldly. Community is the greatest achievement in FLOSS, where communities across the globe work to further their particular interests. Linux User Groups (LUGs) serve as great ambassadors for FLOSS. At a LUG you can learn new skills and share skills with others. Do you remember your first time at a LUG meeting? I bet that you were a little apprehensive? Be the smiling face that welcomes newcomers and listens to their problems. Yes, we know that you can probably fix that issue in a…

There aren’t many other distros designed for repair and rescue applications besides the ones that we covered in the Roundup. The Italian PoliArch distro does look like a nice addition to our list. However, it’s homepage and most of its documentation is in Italian which heavily limits its user base. The other option is to use live CDs built around one particular tool. Some of the popular rescue and repair tools make themselves available in finely tuned, minimalist live CDs. If you only need to use that one tool, you can always use the live CD version instead of an elaborate general-purpose rescue distro. An example of this is the Boot-Repairtool, which has a live CD that’s excellent for repairing and fixing all sorts of bootloaderrelated issues. In addition to…

PrBoomis one of a few source ports of Doom(whose source code was released back in 1997) that’s available for Windows, Linux and many other platforms. It’s much more capable and customisable than the original, while still retaining compatibility with the original WAD files (so that levels and graphics from the original can be used). With Linux now running in so many unorthodox places, it has become something of a trope to get PrBoomonto these devices too. One of our favourite examples of this was Michael Jordon getting it running via the LCD screen on a Canon Pixma printer. A security flaw in the firmware update mechanism enabled the glorious hack to take place (http://bit.ly/PixmaDoomed). Beyond that, various flavours of Doomrun on RockBox (although it looks rather odd in monochrome), graphical…

For this project you will need to connect your micro:bit to a Linux machine or Raspberry Pi. You’ll also need an LED, 220 Ohm Resistor (RED-RED-BROWN-GOLD) and three Crocodile clips. In physical computing, the equivalent to programming’s “Hello World” is controlling an Light Emitting Diode (LED). This helps to test that the board and components are working correctly before we progress to something more challenging. First, We start by downloading the Python software known as Mu, http://bit.ly/LXF209-Microbit-Software. Ensure that you have the latest version of the software for your OS. You will need to make the downloaded file executable, in most Linux distros you can right click on the file and select Properties and from there make the file executable. If you prefer the terminal then you can do the…

AMD says “it’s time to open up the GPU” AMD announces plans to remove hurdles to innovation with the launch of GPUOpen. Citing the difficulties developers face when using ‘Black Box’ APIs, AMD released a variety of tools, code and documentation under an MIT licence at its new GPUOpen website (http://gpuopen.com). This is an initiative, AMD says is to “enable developers to create ground-breaking PC games, computer-generated imagery and GPU computing applications for great performance and lifelike experiences using no cost and open development tools and software”. In an introductory blog on the site, AMD’s Nick Thibieroz talked about the disparities between console and PC gaming where proprietary libraries and tool chains prevent developers from accessing code for maintenance, porting and optimisation. However, the initiative is also focused on professional…

There are a few other cool features hidden under Rancher’s hood. Everything is visible via the built-in API, which is easily interfaced from any scripting language worth its salt. This is great for hooking into all kinds of other tools (eg monitoring – we’ll cover more on that next month) and might eventually be the main way in which Rancheris communicated with. Ranchercan also handle custom registries for local Dockerimages and it’s quite likely that most companies won’t want their in-house applications loaded up to Docker Hub or some other service, preferring them to be safe and sound on the internal network. Its a great idea to have an automated build process that throws Dockerimages up into a registry for use by Rancher. When defining services, it’s possible to mark…

The Raspberry Pi was initially designed to improve ‘hard core’ computing skills that largely disappeared when the IBM PC caused the demise of home computing (as it was known back then). Being a low-cost hardware platform coupled with Linux, the Pi addressed this initial goal. However, our decision to include a 26-way GPIO connector galvanised a community of makers. They designed and built add-on hardware and support software for their own needs, and they freely publish and maintain their exploits for others to use and adapt. Today, supported by a refined and extended PiHat/GPIO connector, there are hundreds of boards with supporting code modules providing a wealth of building blocks for maker and commercial projects. With Raspberry Pi you can go from bit twiddling on an I/O port to artificial…

Pre-Pi Cretaceous period (2006) Eben Upton had the idea of an easily built home PC kit. Behold the Atmel ATmega644 system, which sat on a Veroboard with a block SRAM. Running at 22.1MHz it had to drive the display too, leaving blanking periods for processing. Upton decided a SoC capable of running a general OS would be more useful, good lad! http://bit.ly/RaspPi2006Ed Proto-Pi – May 2011 Early in 2011 David “Elite” Braden was showing off a prototype USB device he was calling the Raspberry Pi (http://bit.ly/EarlyPIOnBBC). More like a USB stick than the Pi we have today, this concept was dropped for one that enabled the device to have more connections and the crucial GPIO pins. Alpha Pi – August 2011 An alpha board went into production and was ready…

Linux Format: How difficult has it been to adapt to the success of the Raspberry Pi? Eben Upton: I think a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of the logistics and the scale has obviously been taken on by RS and Element 14 (the two manufacturers of the Raspberry Pi). LXF: Had you always planned to use them those two manufacturers? EU: That was the idea, originally, because even before we launched we realised we’d probably have success beyond the scale we’d ever be able to cope with, and we had enough money to build the 10,000 – we had a quarter of a million dollars … I think it was the point when we released the first SD card image for the device and we had 50,000 downloads,…

We mentioned sets last month, in the context of @system and @world, but there are others. If you install a new kernel, any third party modules (such as Nvidia and some wireless drivers) also need to be rebuilt. Any such drivers are added to a set when they are first installed, so you can rebuild them all with Similarly, @x11-module-rebuild does the same for any X drivers after updating XOrg. You can also define your own sets, which is useful if you want to install the same applications on several machines. Create a file in /etc/portage/sets containing a list of the packages. We have a set called base that includes the various programs that we always want on a new system, like eixand conf-update. We copy this file to a…

We’ve talked a lot about Octave’s compatibility with Matlab, but what specifically is compatible and what is different? Exactly how much can you do before you find yourself hitting the wall that differentiates these two applications? First, let’s talk about compatibility. Octave was built to work well with Matlab, and hence shares many features with it. Both use matrices as a fundamental data type; have built-in support for complex numbers; and both have powerful built-in math functions and libraries. A vast majority of the syntax is interchangeable, and often opening a script file in one program will yield the same result as opening it in the other. There are some purposeful yet minor syntax additions on the Octave side that could potentially cause issues. One of those being that in…

Our expert Paul Hudson is an award-winning developer and author who’s on a mission to make the world switch to Z shell. Give it up, all you Bash users! Swift is a Marmite programming language. For the benefit of non-Brits that means you either love it or hate it, but very few people read about Swift then say ‘meh. There are good reasons for such a divisive response: it’s from Apple (boo!) but it’s open source (yay!); it’s type-safe (yay!) but its optionals and closures confuse people (boo!); its syntax changes often (boo!) but it’s fast to compile (yay!); and so it goes on. If you’re reading this, it means you’re keen to give the new language a try, and we hope you followed the tutorial from Mihalis Tsoukalos last…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos is a database and Unix admin, mathematician and programmer. Surprisingly, he confesses to enjoying learning new things. This tutorial will use the MongoDBknowledge you already have and combine it with Bottle, a Python framework, in order to create a blog site that stores its data on a MongoDBdatabase. The Bottle framework will be mainly responsible for the user interface of the website as well as its logic. We’re assuming that you’ll have both MongoDBand PyMongo already installed on your Linux distro. If you don’t feel comfortable with MongoDBand PyMongo – the Python MongoDBdriver – we’d recommended revisiting the past two issues [Coding Academy, p84, LXF207 and Coding Academy, p88, LXF208] to learn more about using the driver and MongoDB administration, respectively). At the end of this…

Pine A64 Q I recently purchased a pine A64+ on Kickstarter. I’m new to single-board computers and I’m looking for advice on software to use. What do you reckon is the best software to use that runs like Windows 10 and do you know what photo managers would be compatible with the Pine A64? I came across photo managers in LXF206 and I like your first option, Digikam. Would that be able to run on the Pine A64? Paul Tyrrell A While the Pine boards look like an interesting alternative to the Raspberry Pi they are very new. At the time of writing, they weren’t on general sale yet and only available from Kickstarter. As such, they are still in something of a DIY phase and there’s currently no desktop…

The makers of Kodi, the popular open-source home theatre software, has hit out at piracy box sellers who it says are deliberately modifying and selling versions of Kodi that are purposefully broken, allowing users to run dodgy add-ons from untrustworthy repos. While these add-ons allow Kodi users to access pirated material, they also frequently break Kodi, as well as open it up to serious security exploits. In a passionate blog post titled The Piracy Box Sellers and YouTube Promoters Are Killing Kodi (http://bit.ly/KodiPiracyBoxSellers), it’s revealed that the situation has gotten so bad that core Kodi developers have threatened to quit. So what are they doing to help prevent this? Kodi now own the trademark, and are threatening legal action against people selling Kodi boxes made for piracy. Wikipedia has received…

A long time ago... A long time ago, I brought the very first issue of Linux Format and after a lot of struggling and frustration managed to get the system to work, but it was so much trouble I finally gave up and went back to Windows. From time to time I have tried again with the same outcome and today I brought LXF205 as the cover said that Ubuntu was easy to install… But not if you want to put it on an existing partition of your hard drive. I was able to identify the partition only by the amount of used and unused space. I pressed ‘Install’ and was told I needed a filesystem as the one I had chosen was not correct, so I picked another. I…

Blackpool Makerspace Blackpool Makerspace, 64 Tyldesley Road, 10am every Saturday. https://blackpoolmakerspace.wordpress.com Bristol and Bath LUG On the fourth Saturday of each month at the Knights Templar at 12.30pm. www.bristol.lug.org.uk Coding Evening Help teachers learn computing and have a beer. Locations across the UK. www.codingevening.org Egham Raspberry Jam Meet at Gartner UK HQ every quarter. http://winkleink.blogspot.co.uk Lincoln LUG Meet on the third Wednesday of the month at 7.00pm, Lincoln Bowl, Washingborough Road, Lincoln, LN4 1EF. www.lincoln.lug.org.uk Liverpool LUG Meet on the first Wednesday of the month from 7pm onwards at DoES Liverpool, Gostins Building, Hanover Street, Liverpool. http://liv.lug.org.uk/wiki Manchester Hackspace Open night every Wednesday at 42 Edge St, in the Northern Quarter. http://hacman.org.uk Surrey & Hampshire Hackspace Meet weekly each Thursday from 6.30pm at Games Galaxy in Farnborough. www.sh-hackspace.org.uk Tyneside LUG…

Finnix hosts documentation on some aspects of the distro such as: the various boot parameters; sparse guides on how to restore bootloaders; and how to use the distro for computer forensics. Most of the information is written to guide experienced users and the website lacks a beginner’s guide. Similarly, the tutorial section on the Ultimate Boot CDs website isn’t well organised. It points to a list of user-contributed tutorials curated from the forum boards, and the documentation on the project’s wiki isn’t of much help either. Most of it is incomplete and isn’t intended for new users. The documentation on the websites of the other three distros doesn’t disappoint, however. Rescatux hosts lots of guides and instructional videos. There’s also some documentation to help inexperienced users get started with the…

“If you look closely enough, you will find Linux embedded in all kinds of places.” Desktop Linux machines are in the minority, it’s hard to get an exact figure, but most surveys estimate usage to be less than 3%. Linux usage on Steam tends to hover around 1%. And that’s OK as there isn’t really a compelling need for Linux to be at the top of those tables, it’s continued existence isn’t threatened just because people – inexplicably – still need to run Microsoft Office so that their TPS reports can be filled out correctly. Indeed, many users enjoy being in the minority, some even deign to look down on the desktop masses. But desktop Linux was only ever a side-effect of Linux’s unparalleled growth in other areas. For servers…

In October 2014, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation, and in conjunction with industry leaders 3D Robotics and Yuneeq, the non-profit Dronecode project was inaugurated. This is a collaborative effort with industry partners to create a shared open-source platform to benefit Linux-based UAV software. Aspring airborne software makers can be rewarded for contributing to the platform in a meritocratic manner. Currently there are over 1,200 developers working on Dronecodeaffiliated projects. Dronecode aims to standardise protocols (such as MAVLink), flight code (such as APM and PX4) and ground control software (QgroundControl, APM Planner, etc.) with the goal of advancing and improving access to the Linux-based drone ecosystem. As the hardware on board the vehicle becomes more capable, Dronecode aims to steer development of advanced features, such as video streaming (the…

ON 30 YEARS OF BUFFER OVERFLOWS“The jury is in, the experiment has been run, humans can’t write that code…” Jim Blandy (aka jimb) cut his teeth working on Emacs, The GNU Project Debugger (gdb) and various other bits of the GNU Project. He’s a founder of Red Bean, a company set up to never to make any money, but also to never go away. These days he’s a software developer at Mozilla, and an ardent Rust proponent. We caught up with him at OSCON to learn all about the new language, as well as the idiosyncrasies of the old ones. Plus the various challenges of teaching a new generation of rustaceans. Linux Format: So Rust 1.0 (this interview took place in July 2015) has just been released. I have a…

You might have noticed that AI (artificial intelligence) has gradually becoming one of the more visible undercurrents in the news over the last couple of years. We’ve got self-driving cars working through regulatory processes before they become mainstream; political elites discussing the disruption AI and robots will bring to the world economy (while being schmoozed by the technorati at Davos) and Stephen Hawking warning of the dangers AI might bring to our world (I recommend Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom as an excellent book on this topic). Of course, enlightened Linux Format readers know that the media term AI is usually a system employing machine learning (or ‘deep learning’ which is the new phrase du jour) for a specific problem space. Actual intelligence and self awareness seem to be some way…

“One valuable feature in MyPaint is the ‘endless’ canvas.” Digital artists tend to group into communities and discuss each other’s work at web communities like DeviantArt and Behance. There you can notice which specific software they use and try it yourself. It’s a good idea to start your own amateur sketches using best practices from gifted people you admire. In the Windows world most artists use Corel Painter and Artage, while Linux lovers are rocking with Krita. So, how does this affect MyPaint? Well, this small program starts to matter if you’d like to make drawings and sketches in Linux and want a fast GTK-based application. MyPaintdoesn’t offer as many sophisticated features as Krita, but it’s certainly very capable for those who just want to get creative and don’t demand…

“The Pi retains its bestselling status and remains firmly Linux-oriented.” From the back of a napkin to international hardware-stardom, the Raspberry Pi has become a phenomenon. Having now glided through the 8 million sales mark it’s not only the fastest selling PC in history, it also claims the crown of the biggest selling UK PC in history, which trumps the Amstrad PCW. But how did the Raspberry Pi come into existence? How did it become such a success? (Hint: a small black penguin helped.) Who were the people that got it, to where it is now? It has been something of a whirlwind experience and with the Raspberry Pi hitting four-years old, we’re looking back over the extensive Linux Format coverage to bring you a brief history of Pi, told…

ON LEARNING“You’ve got to have great insight into how code works to understand why it doesn’t.” Linux Format: How did you get involved? Pete Lomas: I’d built a large FPGA [Field Programable Gate Array] for Imperial College and went to an open day to see it running and I sat next to a chap called Alan Mycroft who is the Professor for Computer Science at Cambridge. He said there’s a guy at Cambridge called Eben Upton with an idea for a small board to teach programming. I thought that’s such an inspired idea and went to have a chat. Within half an hour I said I’ll design the board; send me the bits; show me what we want to do and I’ll make them on my production facility. Me and…

Our expert Nick Peers finds the terminal a safe, soothing dark cave to hide in after decades of working as a tech journalist. Terminal Pick an emulator, learn the syntax and the help commands The terminal is an incredibly important part of your Linux desktop. It doesn’t matter how wedded you are to point and click over the command line, at some point you’re going to have to dip your toe in the terminal’s dark expanse and use it. Don’t worry, though, because the terminal isn’t as scary as it might appear, and if you take the time to learn the basics you’ll discover it can be a far quicker and more effective way of getting certain tasks done. As you’d expect, a terminal effectively gives you access to your…

Our expert Nick Peers recently bought himself a Linx 1010 tablet specifically for the purposes of getting Linux working on it. That’s either a sign of great dedication or stupidity for you. Hardware Get Ubuntu working on a Windows x86 hybrid 2-in-1 device Are you jealous of the sudden proliferation of cheap Windows 2-in-1 tablets? Wish you could run Linux on it instead? Spanish smartphone manufacturer, BQ, may be teaming up with Canonical to sell the Aquarius M10 tablet with Ubuntu pre-installed, but with the price tag expected to be north of £200, why pay more when it turns out you can – with a fair amount of tweaking – get Linux to install on one of those cheap Windows devices? These devices all use a low-end Intel Atom quad-core…

1 Download install script When Ubuntu has finished installing to your tablet, make sure the dialogue asking if you’d like to continue retesting or restart your PC is kept on-screen. Now open the Firefox browser and navigate to http://bit.ly/grub32bit, which will redirect to a Google Drive download page. Click ‘Download’ to save the linuxium-32bit-patch.sh to your Downloads folder. 2 Install script The linuxium-32bitpatch.sh file is a script that automates the process of installing the 32-bit version of the Grub 2 bootloader. Now you’ll need to press Ctrl+Alt+T and type the following commands: 3 Reboot PC You’ll see a series of packages are downloaded and installed automatically, which will basically allow your tablet’s 32-bit UEFI to recognise the Grubbootloader, and allow Ubuntu to load automatically at startup. Click the ‘Restart Now’…

Gentoo effectively has two portage trees in one: the stable and testing trees. If you use the stable tree, by setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=amd64 in make.conf, you will get the tried and tested ebuild rather than the very latest. Using ~amd64 gives the testing ebuild. However, it’s possible to mix the two to a certain extent. Let’s say that you run a stable system but need the latest version of our old friend foo. Just add the package atom to /etc/portage/ package.accept_keywords. As with package.use – and all similar files – this can either be a single file or a directory full of them. Running a mixture of testing and stable can cause issues, so use this sparingly.…

Whether it is life or Linux, the success of one is built using the strength of many. Beyond the scope of this article there are many resources that can help you in advancing your knowledge of the Octave software. The full documentation is available at https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter. This guide, published by the creator of the software, John Eaton, will cover almost everything you need to know to push the software to its fullest potential. The only drawback to the manual is that while it’s comprehensive, it is also very dense at times. For a more beginner-friendly set of tutorials, check out the Wikibooks tutorial at http://bit.ly/WikibooksOctave. Another helpful guide is by TutorialsPoint at http://bit.ly/MatlabOctaveTuturial. Although this guide seems specific to Matlab, almost all of the syntax carries over to Octave and…

Kodi works best with your locally stored digital media, but for it to recognise your TV shows from your music collection you need to name your media correctly and organise them into the right folders too. Kodi supports the same naming convention as its rival services Emby [see Features, p32, LXF204] and Plex – use the following table to help you: Need to rename files in a hurry? Then Filebot (www.filebot.net) is your new best friend [see LXF204’s lead feature, p32 for a detailed guide on how to use the renamer].…

You’ve seen strings and integers in this tutorial, but in Swift you can also store functions inside variables. You can even pass functions as parameters and send them back as return values, just as if they were a string or an integer. On your LXFDVD you’ll find I’ve taken this project a step further by making the present() method accept an optional function: if the function is provided, it’s used to filter the filteredCommits array so that it shows only some values. Otherwise, the full array is shown. The syntax for this is a bit overwhelming at first: That means ‘the filter parameter will either be nil, or it will be a function that accepts a Commit instance and returns true or false.’ When this is put through Swift’s filter()…

CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete, which are the basic operations that can be performed on any database. In order to be able to follow this MongoDBtutorial, it would be very helpful to bear the basic CRUD commands in mind so that you can check what the Python scripts do or don’t do. You can get one random document from a collection using findOne() : In the code below, the first command returns all documents from a collection whereas the second command returns all documents that have the n key set to the 324 value: The main difference that you’ll discover between find() and findOne() is that the former function can return multiple documents with the help of a cursor, whereas the latter will randomly return a single…

Linux Format is proud to produce the biggest and best magazine that we can. A rough word count of LXF193 showed it had 55,242 words. That’s a few thousand more than Animal Farm and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis combined, but with way more Linux, coding and free software (but hopefully less bugs). That’s as much as the competition, and as for the best, well… that’s a subjective claim, but we do sell way more copies than any other Linux mag in the UK. As we like giving things to our readers, each issue the Star Question will win a copy of one of our amazing Guru Guides or Made Simple books – discover the full range at: http://bit.ly/LXFspecials. For a chance to win, email a question to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, or post it…

I’m new to Linux, where do I go to find software for it? Linux works very differently to Windows in many ways, but none more so that software management. Linux distros provide a centralised software manager. How does that work and where do I find it? It uses a system of repositories containing all the software and a management program to install, update and remove programs, Most distros have something called a “Software Centre” or something similar in their menus, this is where you do everything? So the distros keep their own copies of everything, isn’t that rather inefficient? Each distro repackages the software to make sure it works with the rest of their packages, avoiding software conflicts. They also digitally sign every package, so even if one is tampered…