Table of contents for Linux Format Annual (2025) in Linux Format Annual (2025)

Once Jellyfin is set up, you’re taken to your home screen, which offers a variety of ways to view your media library: at the top are shortcuts to individual libraries, followed by the Next Up section, which helps you track your progress through TV shows by helpfully displaying partially played episodes as well as queuing up the next available episode for viewing. Beneath this you’ll see the latest additions to your libraries. You’ll find plenty of on-screen aids to help you navigate even the largest libraries. At the top are a range of library views, from Suggestions to Genres. Look out, too, for Favorites – which lists any media you’ve marked by clicking the heart icon next to it – and Collections, which enables you to group movies by your…

If you’re not ready for Wi-Fi 7, that’s understandable. Most of us haven’t caught up with Wi-Fi 6E yet, which only hit the mainstream around 2020 while we were distracted by other issues. Strictly speaking, though, Wi-Fi 6E wasn’t a new standard. While it introduced support for wireless networking in the 6GHz frequency range, it’s otherwise based on the same 802.11ax spec as Wi-Fi 6. It could have been called Wi-Fi 6.1. So it’s getting on for four years since the last major Wi-Fi update – which is about par for the course. From the original 802.11b release in 1999 onwards, each generation has reigned for between four and six years, before being replaced by something smarter and faster. Wi-Fi 6 was adopted in 2019, and Wi-Fi 7 is due…

The good news is that you don’t need to commit to a full-blown install of Linux to determine if it’s right for you. Many Linux distros – including Elementary OS – come with a live version of the operating system that can be run directly from DVD or USB flash drive. This enables you to get started with Linux in minutes without committing any hard drive space. Reboot your PC with the drive inserted, then look for an option to bring up the boot menu just after your PC switches on (typically F11 or F12). Press this, then select your boot media from the menu – if there’s a choice, try UEFI first. If you’ve installed Ventoy, you’ll see a list of ISO files stored on the drive – choose…

Microsoft and its flagship Windows OS have a troubled history with Linux and open source. When Bill Gates penned his ‘Open Letter to Hobbyists’ in 1976, he complained about the rampant software piracy taking place in early hobbyist communities – particularly that of the Altair Basic interpreter, which he’d co-created. At a time before open source initiatives like the GNU and Linux projects, his opinion was clear: “Are people who copy software any different than those who copy records and books?” Twenty-two years later, one of the leaked Microsoft Halloween Documents (see box) focused on how the tech giant viewed its rival OS, even showing grudging respect: “Linux represents a best-of-breed Unix, that is trusted in mission critical applications, and – due to its open source code – has a…

Despite its easy integration with WSL, in October 2021 Visual Studio Code became the site of a battleground between Microsoft and the open source community. The controversy centred around the release of.NET 6. The tech giant had originally hinted it would include a feature to allow developers to modify source code while an app is running and immediately see the results. Microsoft provoked a backlash due to its lastminute decision to include this feature in Visual Studio only – a paid product primarily designed to run on Windows. Ultimately, Microsoft bowed to pressure from both the open source community and its own employees to grant a pull request to enable this feature with VS Code, but events like these beg the question: can a commercial company like Microsoft ever fully…

Before we start looking at specifics, let’s examine some terminology. According to John McCarthy of the computer science department at Stanford University, artificial intelligence (AI) is “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs”. This definition is incredibly broad, which goes to show what a massive field AI is. Intelligence can mean many things, of course, but the sometimes unreliable Wikipedia states: “Artificial intelligence is intelligence – perceiving, synthesising and inferring information – demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or by other animals. Intelligence encompasses the ability to learn and to reason, to generalise and to infer meaning.” Ghost in the machine The Cambridge Dictionary defines machine learning (ML) as “the process of computers changing the way they carry out tasks by…

For our AI session, we are going to take a look at how to leverage one of the available ChatGPT API integrations. The functionalitynamed ChatGPT-shell-CLI provides access to the ChatGPT chat engine from a shell. When invoked, the shell script can use ChatGPT to return information. It is also able to invoke commands directly. Installation is simple and only requires a couple of supporting packages. For an Ubuntu install, open a terminal and run the following commands: To quickly explain what we have installed, jq is used to interact with the JSON data, which is returned from the ChatGPT API and curl is used to download the shell script, which will be used in the next step. Finally, the glow package is installed, which enables the tool to render markdown…

Containerised packages are a very important part of this jigsaw puzzle and allow apps to be installed with their dependencies, without the need to add to or alter the files on the root partition. For example, should an application need a particular Python library, it can be bundled with the app itself. A second reason why containerised packages are so powerful is that the same version can run on many operating systems, due to the ability to use runtimes and dependency embedding. Thirdly, as these apps are containerised, their ability to edit the entire OS’s files can be reduced. For example, an app can be allowed access to a user’s home directory only and given access to the USB ports. Conversely, some apps are denied USB access. Examples of containerised…

Long gone are the halcyon days when the Raspberry Pi platform consisted of just one or two models. We are using the Raspberry Pi 4 due to the availability of the Neon ISA, but that is just one of the necessary considerations. Image processing is one of the lowest hanging fruit known to AI developers, so obviously a camera module is required – the problem with that is the availability of multiple different candidates waiting to fill the gap. We are using the Camera 2 module we purchased some time ago – while it lacks autofocus and might not be the most cutting-edge offering, the image quality (in well-lit areas) is more than enough for our needs. Keep in mind that AI algorithms can usually cope very well with bad…

Making and keeping your own backups is more secure and reliable than banking on a third party and an internet connection. While any PC can be configured as a backup machine, a more compact solution like the Raspberry Pi keeps such a set up low-powered and almost infinitely flexible. Different backup types are available, with a full backup, specific file/device backups, and incremental (those that simply make a copy of any files that have changed) all possible. Using a Raspberry Pi as a cloudaccessible NAS is straightforward, but choosing the right software for the task is less obvious. What is a NAS? Network-attached storage is a file server that can be accessed across a network over Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Unlike a Samba server, which relies only on file browser access,…

Anyone who can name two Linux desktop environments off the top of their heads (admittedly a small sample of the general population) will very likely say “Gnome and KDE”. This duality was even brought up in Mr Robot. But, at least for the last decade or so, it seems as though KDE Plasma (to give it its correct title) has always played second fiddle to Gnome. This is perhaps unfair. Lots of other desktop environments exist, and most of these are based on GTK (the toolkit that underlies Gnome). Over the last decade, GTK has become inextricably linked [that is not a good pun – ed] to certain Gnome libraries. So, by journalistic oversimplification, we might get away with saying that lots of these other desktops (MATE, Budgie, Xfce, Cinnamon…

Gnome, KDE Plasma or any other desktop you’d care to name all rely on low-level frameworks to work their magic. The rudiments of any desktop application (buttons, scroll bars, menus, dialogs, tooltips…) are known as widgets and these are a big part of what those underlying frameworks provide. You’ll sometimes see GTK (the thing that underlies Gnome) and Qt (that which underlies KDE Plasma) described as widget toolkits, but this isn’t strictly correct as they provide other things, too. You can read more about GTK and Qt in the box (below). Another key component of any desktop environment is the window manager (such as Gnome’s Mutter or Plasma’s Kwin). As you’d guess, this manages windows, where they’re drawn and how they’re decorated. Unless you’ve been living under a desktop-Linuxproof rock…

The ’80s and ’90s were the heyday of the point-and-click adventure game. The setting of titles varies but the basic premise remains – that of moving your character around a screen using your mouse, interacting with people and objects, and usually adding items to your inventory. These aspects of point-and-click games were one of the most maddening for those who grew up in an era when you couldn’t simply DuckDuckGo a solution, because these games were deliberately designed to make the player take counterintuitive actions. Who would have thought, for instance, that in order to defeat the undead villain in The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), the protagonist needs to spray him with a bottle of root beer? In the cyberpunk adventure Beneath a Steel Sky (1994), the game actually…

We mentioned earlier that Debian is the only major-league distribution still supporting 32-bit x86 hardware. This is an oversimplification, because we are simple journalists, after all. You are no doubt gasping to point out that several 32-bit versions of Ubuntu can have their support window extended well into the future (see box, page 38). Be that as it may, Debian 12 will be supported until 2028 and, thanks to its configurability, it is a fine distro for your dusty old hardware. There’s also a number of lightweight distros based on it, including AntiX, MX Linux and Crunchbangplusplus (aka #!++), a continuation of the popular CrunchBang project. Obviously, there are non-Debian-based distros that still support 32-bit machinery – more on those later. For this section, we want to concentrate on what,…

Kali Linux is a Debian-based distro that we can guarantee appears in pretty much any ‘how to hack’ tutorial you might find. It’s possible to use it straight from live media; indeed, in the early days, this was the only way to run it. Kali Linux used to run everything as root. This made it a terrible choice for doing anything other than pen-testing work. But now you can install and use it just as you would any other distro, with an unprivileged user account. Certain tools require root to work, but we’re already getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s get on with the installation. First, download an ISO from www.kali.org/get-kali. The default Installer image is 3.9GB and has everything you need to get started. There is also a cutting-edge weekly…

Total online anonymity is impossible, but if used correctly, the Tor network, or dark net, comes pretty close. This is the thinking behind Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), a Debian-based security-focused Linux distro. Since 2009, the good people of the Tails Project have hitched their star to Tor’s wagon by making sure that whenever you use the OS, all internet connections are routed through the dark net. If you’re new to the dark net and want to familiarise yourself with how Tor is configured to conceal your identity, it’s now time to stop. Head on over to www.torproject.org and return here when you’re done. If, on the other hand, you’re happy the dark net can provide the online safety you need, you can do far worse than use Tails.…

While it’s possible to create libraries in Jellyfin to stream your personal photos and home videos to the big screen, the question remains of how easy it is to transfer said content from your phone to your server. Taking its cue from your cloud provider, Immich is designed to provide you with your own self-hosted alternative – one that doesn’t come with expensive subscription fees, and which not only simplifies the task of transferring your photos and videos to your server, but also gives you the means of organising files by album, people, location and more. Immich installation Immich is supplied as a container, so you need Docker or similar to deploy it. Browse to https://documentation.immich.app/docs/install/requirements for the scripts and instructions you need – Docker Compose is the recommended route…

Booting into Elementary OS – using Live Distro, a virtual machine (see page 36) or full install – you should find yourself at the login screen, where you’re prompted to enter the password you just created to log into your new OS for the first time. When the desktop appears, you’ll see a verdant mountain landscape as your wallpaper, highlighting how Elementary is designed very much in the mould of Mac OS. At the bottom is the Dock – it’s a more elegant form of Windows’ taskbar, while there’s a Panel at the top. On the left of this, click Applications to open Elementary’s launcher, its equivalent of the Start menu. You’ll see a series of shortcut icons spread over two pages (roll the mouse wheel up and down to…

While it’s a potentially easy way into Linux, you may decide that Elementary OS isn’t for you – perhaps you don’t like its desktop and cut-down app store or find it’s more trouble getting set up than it’s worth. But this doesn’t have to mean bringing your adventures into the world of Linux to a premature end. The great thing about Linux – unlike Mac OS or Windows – is that you have an unbelievably diverse choice of alternative distros to choose from. Most distros are based on another distro, tweaked to provide a specific user experience, or fill a perceived gap in the market. Most – including Elementary OS – are based on Ubuntu, one of Linux’s most popular distros (itself based on another distro – Debian). Ubuntu is…

The origins of WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) lies in Microsoft’s Project Astoria, a tool originally designed to port Android apps to Windows 10 Mobile. The project was killed in 2016 but the code formed the basis of WSL, which was released in beta later in the same year. Unlike third-party apps like Cygwin, WSL’s initial aim was native Linux compatibility through serving Unix programs as custom isolated ‘pico processes’. In May 2019, Microsoft announced the release of WSL2, a huge improvement over its predecessor, given it uses virtualisation to run Linux kernels inside a lightweight virtual machine. This not only improves performance but adds full system call compatibility. Both WSL2 and compatible Linux distros can easily be installed via the command line or Microsoft Store. WSL’s ‘so what?’ moment…

Last issue we reviewed Murena’s Fairphone 4 (its latest and greatest offering loaded with the privacy-respecting /e/OS). We noted a few rough edges, but on the whole were very impressed. So much so that we decided to dedicate four pages to /e/OS. DeGoogled Android is nothing new, but until now no one’s come up with a satisfactory solution to replace those ever-so-convenient Google services and Play Store apps. With /e/OS, you get full Play Store access (if you want it), your own privacy-respecting cloud services, and a beautiful and unique user interface. Thanks to MicroG, the dreaded machination that is Google Play Services has been expelled. And thanks to the Murena cloud, you don’t have to miss out on centralised storage, contact management and notes. Your data is stored on…

We are going to kick off using Google’s Bard to generate some code for us. We will then copy this code into VS Code and attempt to run it. Any code you write should be tested thoroughly and this is no different. Bard, ChatGPT and other similar systems are trained on huge data sets, but the sources are not necessarily correct. These systems are also able to use chunks of information (code in this context) from multiple sources. Because of this, some parts of the code sample generated could be correct while others are incorrect. So, let’s get started. First of all, open your web browser and perform a search for Google Bard. Log in using your Google account and spend some time getting acquainted. Start by asking some simple…

We’ve established that Podman is a superb and useful tool, and demonstrated an example deployment. But hunting around on GitHub for self-hosted web apps is a chore, and a rabbit hole in which you can lose yourself for days on end. Do they have container images ready to download and deploy or don’t they? It can be a pain finding out. There are thousands of apps, services, games and more that have been lovingly packaged and stuffed into containers, ready to ship, and Podman has a tool that can help you search them all. You will recall that on the previous page you had to specify that Podman was to download the PiGallery2 image from docker.io. It’s a minor inconvenience that exists only because Podman doesn’t come readyconfigured to search…

It’s that most special time of the year when Canonical releases a new Ubuntu LTS. This time, the creature it has loosed unto the world is Noble Numbat. And what a fine specimen it is. OK, full disclosure before we get stuck in: we’re basing our evaluation on the latest daily images. So, we’re ignoring some rough edges as we’re sure they’ll be smoothed by the time you read this. This does mean we may miss any final flourishes the team is holding back until the final release, but we’re sure you’ll forgive us. Before you rush to https://ubuntu.com/desktop to download the installation material, we’d like to offer a few pointers. If this is your first foray into the world of Ubuntu, or Linux in general, good news: we’re making…

We’ve covered the basics, so now it’s time to perform the final steps needed to get Ubuntu ready for action. You may want to integrate online accounts – for example, you might want to have Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive files available in the file manager. Or receive desktop notifications for Gmail, Microsoft or other email accounts. You can even integrate with MS Exchange or Kerberos resources if you want to connect to corporate environments. All these (and more) are available in the Online Accounts section of the Settings app. Earlier we mentioned installing new applications and introduced the idea of repositories, but we didn’t give you the whole story. The traditional repo system meant that apps were packaged by distribution packaging teams, rather than the app developers themselves. This…

Let’s look at some of the changes that have become prevalent in recent years. The first is the development of init systems, which are integral to a running Linux system as they control the running of all processes. Early in the boot process, the kernel starts the init process and it continues to run as a daemon. Various options exist, all the way from the venerable SysVinit, developed for Unix decades ago. Canonical spearheaded the use of Upstart, before Systemd became the popular choice for most distros. In the late ’90s/early 2000s, the most commonly used filesystem was extended2 (ext2), soon succeeded by ext3 and ext4, which are journalling filesystems, which greatly increases the reliability when things like power cuts occur. The ZFS filesystem arrived in 2001 and is renowned…

We’re going to be mixing some old-fashioned electronics with Python programming to convert a common toy robot arm into a computercontrolled device. While you may not be able to get the exact arm to convert, the aim here is that the article will give you the knowledge to determine whether a device is suitable for converting and let you know what to change. Part of the magic of the Raspberry Pi is its ability to easily control external electronics through a bank of pins. These pins are known as GPIO, which stands for generalpurpose input/output. The pins are digital, can be used as input or output, support different protocols and standards, and use 3.3V logic. The voltage level is important and is discussed later. The fact that the GPIO is…

Kavita does for your digital books and comics what Audiobookshelf does for your digital audiobooks – it provides easy access to all your ebooks via a web browser or app, at home and further afield. Although geared towards comic book users and manga fanatics, there’s enough in Kavita to suit those who simply want a user-friendly home to manage, read and share their digital publications. Put up a bookshelf If you want to install Kavita natively on your system, head to https://wiki.kavitareader.com/en/install/linux-install for instructions. It involves saving the correct build of the latest release at https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita/releases to your hard drive, then extracting the.tar.gz archive to a writable directory of your choice, making it executable (chmod +x./Kavita), and running the app directly (./Kavita). You’ll also find instructions for installing Kavita as…

Fedora has long been a bastion of the Gnome desktop, and it’s been used in Ubuntu since 2017. Pop!_OS’s COSMIC is packaged as a Gnome shell extension (although the next version will be a totally separate affair). And SolusOS’s Budgie desktop is based on Gnome and retains its look and feel. By comparison, no mainstream distro offers KDE Plasma by default. Sure, desktop-agnostic affairs such as Debian and OpenSUSE all let you select it from the installer. But in terms of distros that ship it (apart from Kubuntu, the Fedora KDE respin and Manjaro KDE) by default, you’ve got, er, Mageia and KaOS. All fine, don’t get us wrong, but not really ones that grab headlines. Of course, (with determination) you can install KDE on any distribution you like. But…

Oscilloscopes are expensive and largely reserved for makers or electronics engineers who need to understand what a circuit is doing. We can’t make our own, simple oscilloscope and logic analyser with a £4 Raspberry Pi Pico, right? It turns out that with a Raspberry Pi Pico, some software called Scoppy and an old Android phone, we can do just that. For the low, low price, we can’t expect the earth. This won’t rival an expensive setup, but for most of us, it is enough to understand and get to grips with the equipment before we open up our wallet. In this tutorial, we learn how to configure a Raspberry Pi Pico as an oscilloscope and use the Scoppy Android app to read live data from a circuit. Note that due…

Many people turn to Linux to breathe new life into their old systems. Consigning ageing machines to the scrap heap (or preferably an ewaste service) may be cathartic, but if it works, it seems a shame not to use it. A machine that is not capable of running Windows 10 (see box), or running it in a usable manner, can in all likelihood run some form of Linux. We’ll be clear about this, though: there are some limits, some which depend on how much effort you’re willing to invest. Modern Linux can’t run on your dusty old 386, for example. Such support was removed in kernel 3.8 over a decade ago. If you really want to build your own Linux distro based on an older kernel, you could, but it’s…

Having got LMDE installed on our woefully underpowered EeePC, it became apparent that the machine wasn’t going to be very useful. Except for pandering to our sense of nostalgia. According to Systemd-analyze, it took a minute to boot (as far as the login screen), a far cry from the sub-20s boot times we’ve come to expect. Initial memory usage (as gauged by the free -h command) was 500MB or so. Following the welcome screen’s recommendations, we let it chug through a handful of updates. The simple act of starting Firefox brought the machine to its knees (kneees? – ed), and even our beloved linuxformat.com took ages to render. And then began the swapping. Our install set up a 1GB swap partition (which is used as memory when actual memory runs…

You might assume that cybercriminals would focus their attentions on the biggest organisations – after all, those are the ones best able to afford huge ransoms. In fact, smaller targets can and do get attacked all the time. “Regardless of the size of the business,” says Matt Cooke, strategist at cybersecurity specialist Proofpoint, “if they have a bank account, or sensitive information to steal, they are very much at risk.” Proofpoint has found that 72% of organisations with fewer than 500 employees have dealt with a material loss of sensitive information within the past 12 months (see http://proofpoint.com for more information). Indeed, small and medium-sized businesses are prime targets for malicious actors. Recent research from cybersecurity specialist Trellix (http://trellix.com) reveals that companies with 51-200 employees are the most common victims…

We are now turning our attention to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which Microsoft describes as “Your AI pair programmer”. The idea of Copilot is that can detect the context of the code you are writing, including imported libraries, language used and recently written code. Using all of this information, Copilot can suggest code samples that can be used to write the program you are working on. GitHub has an enormous repository of code and Copilot is trained on a huge sample from this source. Before writing some code, we need to sign up for a free trial and configure VS Code accordingly. To sign up for a free account, open your favourite browser and navigate to https://github.com/features/copilot. Use the Start My Free Trial button and follow the steps on the website…

Take Python – it’s one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and has been used for millions of individual coding projects. The current version is 3.11, and while it comes with various upgrades for speed and security, it deprecates several features, functions and modules. If a Python app you wrote a few years ago uses binhex, distutils or gettext functions, it won’t run on the most up-to-date installs. While readers of Linux Format probably wouldn’t have too much of a problem specifying which Python version to use, it makes the experience more difficult than it needs to be. If you’re a developer, it means you either need to regularly go back and update your code so the app works with a broader variety of software setups, or…

It’s easy to think that you’ll mostly use Podman to pull ready-made containerised apps from the registries, but the problems we outlined in the intro are real. There will come a time when you need a specific app working in a specific environment with particular libraries and dependencies that, because you’re now on Ubuntu 45 (Dangerous Duck), you simply can’t install on your local system. In these cases, you can use Podman to create a container that will hold everything you need to get your precious software running. One of our favourite things to do to pass time when we’re trying to avoid doing any work is play solitaire in the terminal. It’s a classic game, but the version we use relies on Google’s Go language. There’s no guarantee the…

Hopefully, by now you’ve managed to create and boot an Ubuntu installation medium. If not, turn back and follow the instructions in the box forthwith. The first thing you see is a brutalist menu from which you should select the first option (Try Or Install Ubuntu). If things go wrong, try again with one of the other options (use Safe Graphics mode if you see graphical corruption or a blank screen). Once it’s loaded, you hear a welcoming chime and are asked to select localisation settings, connect to your Wi-Fi (or LAN), and set up any accessibility options (such as the zoom tool, screen reader and sticky keys). You might then be offered an update to the installer, which you should accept. Next you’re asked whether to Try Ubuntu or…

On 2nd November 2000, a man calling himself John Titor began posting on Art Bell’s BSS forums, claiming to be from the future year of 2036. Titor painted a grim version of the 21st century, a cross between Pat Frank’s 1959 post-apocalyptic epic Alas Babylon and the film Civil War that’s currently hitting cinemas. He predicted domestic uprisings in the US from 2005, culminating in World War 3 in 2015. In his future, government employees were being trained to use time travel to help mankind. In 2000, Titor’s wild predictions were unfalsifiable so provoked strong online debate. His story was lent a veneer of plausibility when he stated the original purpose of his mission: to travel to 1975 and retrieve an IBM 5100, one of the first portable computers. At…

When reading about next-generation distros, the terms immutable or immutability are spoken about a lot. Immutable means something that is unchanging over time. In the Linux world, it generally refers to the fact that the base operating system is set up in a read-only fashion, and that only updates from the distribution’s makers can update the operating system itself. Combining this technique with the use of sandboxed packages and containers leads to an OS that is as lean as possible and means that as few bugs as possible can affect processes running as root. Multiple techniques are available to ensure immutability, including clever partitioning systems, which separate the basic operating system from its configuration, and Unionfs or similar systems being used to layer filesystem images on top of each other.…

Artificial intelligence payloads are commonly associated with high-power systems that cost a fortune. This, however, is a misleading impression – a (relatively) cheap Raspberry Pi and a few simple peripheral devices are all you need to take your first steps into the fascinating realm of artificial intelligence. The following pages demonstrate a wide variety of possibilities – while some tasks, such as the recognition of faces, are common, you can also look forward to some more advanced tasks that you would usually expect to require larger workstations. Finally, we will also move our llama.cpp implementation to a 4GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4. Creating custom and home-built AI systems using Python is not only lots of fun, but it also gives you some basic experience of workflow, which can…

Remember the good ol’ days of the internet when the best you could do with your pics and videos was share them with friends and family? Close ones at that. This is in stark contrast to the modern-day practice of turning everything into a reel or insert-latest-jargon-here, and releasing it online. Editly is a CLI utility that relies on FFmpeg to help you create slideshows, GIFs or movie masterpieces, complete with music score, text overlays, zooms and other effects. Best of all, you don’t have to muck about with the terminal pushing dozens of different settings, because Editly works with a JSON file instead to save you time and effort. Whether for private use or for internet fame, Editly can help turn your images and videos into memorable pieces with…

If you (successfully) installed Neon, after rebooting you’ll see a monochrome boot menu listing Neon, any other OSes, as well as some memory test options (which you should never need). Choose Neon, and after a few moments you’re presented with a login screen. Keen-eyed users will spot the session-choice box in the lowerleft and note that it defaults to Plasma Wayland. More on this later. For now, log in with the credentials you gave at installation, and you’re greeted with the welcome screen. There’s a bit of repetition from the install slideshow here, but if you forgive that, you’ll find helpful links to System Settings, KDE’s powerful tooling selection and the Discover software centre. All of which we’ll cover in a moment. The next screen, though, gives you a quite…

USB audio adaptors are external boxes with audio inputs and outputs that can be used in place of a soundcard or the built-in sound facilities of a PC. They usually offer a considerable increase in quality over the stock audio hardware. To add to this, some audio adaptors offer a greater number of inputs and outputs, specialist connectors for good quality audio sources such as microphones, and a higher recording resolution. Best of all, basic models aren’t very expensive. All laptop and desktop PCs have sound hardware of some sort. A desktop computer usually comes with line level inputs and outputs, and possibly headphone and speaker outputs. The quality of built-in audio is often passable, but the inputs tend to be subpar because few people use them and they’re designed…

Think of retro games and you’ll probably think of the pixellated look of titles released on consoles such as the NES. Games such as Bomberman and Kid Icarus worked within the limitations of ’80s technology, yet offered hours of fun and iconic looks. The style faded into obscurity with the development of more powerful game consoles and 3D graphics, but has seen a recent renaissance in indie games such as Pepper Grinder (www.peppergrindergame.com). The art is still drawn pixel by pixel using a limited palette, but is much smoother thanks to careful shading and muted hues not available to ’80s game developers. One of the most popular uses of pixel art is in roleplaying games based on an isometric grid. We’re going to create an example character (or sprite) for…

Whatever machine you’re trying to resurrect or rejuvenate, it’s always worth getting as much RAM into it as possible. Retailers won’t stock this any more, but you’ll find plenty of DDR1 or SDRAM sticks on auction sites for cheap. Just make sure to check your motherboard’s manual to find which speeds and stick combinations are required and whether you need ECC memory (unlikely). The model number for the motherboard should be visible in the BIOS somewhere, so type that into DuckDuckGo and you’ll find a manual in no time. Later old hardware is much less fussy than old-old hardware about mixing and matching memory capacities. So, if your machine is old-old, aim to put identical sticks in all the slots. Or in a pair of the slots (usually the two…

People and passwords were never a good mix. Users continue to reuse passwords (or use easily guessed variations of them). Site admins (or the software that runs their sites) are generally good at no longer storing passwords in plain text. Instead, hashed passwords (where an easy-toapply but hard-to-reverse function is applied to the password) are stored so that nosy sysadmins can’t see your password. We should also note most sites have stringent (sometimes pointlessly so) requirements on length, capitalisation and special characters. Besides hashing, it’s de rigueur to store a random ‘salt’ value alongside the password and use both as inputs of the hash function. These hashed and salted passwords ensure that even if two users have the same password, the stored image of it is different. So, anyone trying…

Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey, said the Beatles back in the day. However, the correct phrase for the modern world would be, “Everybody’s got something to hide, especially me and my monkey.” If you’re still keeping all your passwords and other important information in a draft email, SafeCloset is for you. One of the first mistakes people make is using the same username and password combination across different online services because of their inability and unwillingness, understandably, to remember multiple login credentials. With SafeCloset, you can store all your different login credentials and other important information in secure, password-protected files. While there are many password managers on offer, some of them built into modern desktop browsers, the advantage of having all your secrets at your…

This guide assumes your primary installation disk is already encrypted. If this is not the case, you will have to re-install the OS and when the installer gets to the Disk Setup page, select Advanced Features and choose the Encrypt With LVM option. It asks you for a passphrase and offers to set a backup key on the disk being encrypted, to be moved somewhere else later (if you forget the passphrase). Picking a good passphrase is critical. If you want to get nerdy, the EFF has a take on creating a secure passphrase with dice: https://bit.ly/3y2wHGI It can’t be stressed strongly enough how critical it is to have a backup of this and a good passphrase. Losing it means reinstallation and no chance of data recovery. Assuming the OS…