Linux Format

This issue we’re seeing how many operating systems Jonni can run on one PC. We asked our writers what’s the most OSes they’ve had on a system, and why. Well, the poor PC that was forced to accommodate seven distros for the cover feature could probab

Things used to be simple: you’d have a master boot record that pointed to a bootloader and away your operating system went. But, of course, people wanted more features and something called security, so LILO appeared and then Grub, and Windows had BCD

Usually when a distro announces that it’s ditching Google for another default search engine, privacy campaigners – and anyone concerned about how their online activity is tracked and shared – would be pleased. However, Debian has managed to provoke m

We’ve often talked about PINE64’s projects, including the PinePhone and PineBook. The company caught our eye by producing devices with an admirable commitment to both open source software and hardware, and with the PinePhone brought us a Linux-powere

We always love seeing iconic PC game Doom running on surprising hardware, and the talented hacker known as Sick Codes (https://bit.ly/lxf294sickcodes) recently did just that at the recent Def Con event (https:// defcon.org). However, it wasn’t just f

"According to StackOverflow’s survey for this year, cloud platforms take up the top three slots in the ‘Most Wanted’ category. Building cloud native applications means thinking about how to use distinct microservices for each function and connect the

"We took on some new (to us) Linux servers onto support recently. Both the client and we knew that there was a lot of work needed to make them secure and reliable. It can be daunting when the work required looks like a mountain, and you’re standing a

Canonical announced in 2021 RISC-V compatibility for Ubuntu, enabling its popular Linux distro to run on the open-source processor architecture. It’s now increased support by announcing an Ubuntu release for the StarFive’s VisionFive board. This sing

Flathub (https://flathub.org), the base for Flatpak, is one of the most popular methods of distributing programs for Linux, no matter what distro you’re running, and it aims to make donating to developers quick and easy. This enables users to show th

LibreOffice 7.4 Community is now available to download from https://bit. ly/lxf294libreoffice, with some useful new features. The latest version now supports WebP (but Effy still doesn’t–Ed) images and EMZ/ WMZ files, adds a search field for the Exte

"Over the past few years, different video codecs have been developed to meet the needs of various applications. The quality of the reconstructed video using these codecs is excellent at medium-to-low bitrates, but it degrades when operating at very l

This second refresh of MX Linux 21 has been released, and while it’s still based on Debian 11 and comes with the Linux kernel 5.18, it also features several important bug fixes and updates. The base is Debian 11.4 “Bullseye” and with this release mx-

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.0- rc4 (Release Candidate 4) following the earlier closure of the “merge window” for what will become the Linux 6.0 kernel in a few more weeks. Last issue we speculated that Linus was likely to go with the “6.0” namin

"I moved house earlier this year. Like many others, the pandemic changed life for me and my wife, and in some ways for the better. I had traditionally thought of myself as a “city cat”, and for the better part of several decades I lived right in the

Do you have a burning Linuxrelated issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email lxf.letters@futurenet.com. I’ve been installing Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 36. (I’m using t

Q Bloated Debian This Debian 11 is my first attempt to explore Debian and I truly loved it for its stability and user-friendliness. I’m dual-booting Debian with Windows 10. I was wrong to set the Debian partition of 40GB only (2.6GB/41.8GB available

Socket: AM4 Process: TSMC 7nm FinFET Cores: Six Threads: 12 Cache: 384KB L1, 3MB L2, 16MB L3 Clock: 3.6GHz (4.2GHz boost) Mem: DDR4 3,200MHz, two-channel, no ECC, 128GB max PCIe: v3.0 20 lanes  TDP: 65W GPU: n/a Cooler: Wraith Stealth A MD released t

BSD-based distros are completely different to Linux-based distros and at the same time, achingly familiar. DragonflyBSD is definitely not for beginners, and the documentation while being comprehensive is not always helpful. Undocumented errors will s

KDE Neon isn’t an official Ubuntu Flavour. Rather, it’s a KDE project with an Ubuntu core, with an emphasis on good looks and ease of use. Almost everything is extremely intuitive, and for the parts that may not be, there’s excellent and accessible o

NuTyx is a simple easy-touse distro with an unusual package manager, which stays out of your way as much as possible – almost to the point of anonymity. Coming with a range of desktop environments (or none at all), NuTyX has a flavour to suit you wha

Emmabuntüs is a Debianderived desktop distro from France, with features aimed at newcomers to Linux (who are also from France). Developers have made some interesting, although not necessarily wise, choices with installed packages and defaults. Emmabu

Minimum OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i3-3225, AMD Phenom II X6 Mem: 8GB HDD: 30GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050, AMD Radeon RX560, 2GB Vram Recommended OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K, AMD Ryzen 5 1600 GPU: Nvidia G

All five products are simple to install, but only three can be installed through a repo or platform that guarantees automatic updates. These include Manuskript, which can be installed through snap and flatpak, and novelWriter, which offers both stabl

Leading the pack in minimalism is Quoll Writer – understandable given that its toolset is less extensive than its peers. It opens with a simple two-paned interface – navigation on the left, and a multi-tabbed pane giving you easy access to multiple a

All of the tests we perform help us rate key aspects of these creative-writing tools, but you need to spend quality time with each to gauge just how intuitive it is, whether it suits the way you work and – ultimately – if it possesses the tools you n

Organisational tools are the prime reason for choosing a creative-writing tool over your word processor. All five provide dedicated sections to record key characters, locations and items, from relatively simple freeform boxes (novelWriter and Quoll W

Writing long-form pieces is rarely as simple as starting at the beginning and writing all the way through. What a good creative-writing tool will do is provide you with tools to help you write out of sequence. The weakest tool in this regard is Quoll

Once you’ve organised all the elements of your story, you’ll want to get on with writing it. While all five tools offer a built-in editor, none hold a candle to a word processor. Are there things they can do to improve your experience? First, do they

When it comes to providing you with extra help when you need it, our creative tools shared some similar traits, but diverged widely in others. Only Manuskript provides any form of templates for new projects, while novelWriter includes a demo project

Once you’ve started using a creative-writing tool to help plan and plot your story, you won’t revert to relying on a single LibreOffice Writer document for your stories ever again. All five tools in this Roundup will help you organise your existing n

Dual-booting is great. You can have a Windows install for proprietary applications (be it overpriced office suites or convoluted CAD packages) and those AAA games that don’t quite work with Proton. And when you’re done with those, you’re just a three

First, if you’re on old hardware, or hardware that’s otherwise still using the old MBR (Master Boot Record, also known as MS-DOS) style partition tables, then you’re strictly limited to four primary partitions. It turns out you can install Windows 11

Besides dual-booting Windows, you might be interested in dual-booting another Linux distribution, or even multibooting several distros. It’s fine to have multiple Linux distros sharing the same drive. There are a few things to watch out for, but in g

Sad news reached the UK Linux and Raspberry Pi community that Oliver Clark, Olly to his friends, sadly passed away. Olly was a titan of the community. He was there at the grass roots, helping everyone around him. In the early days of the Raspberry Pi

Chassis: 2x front wheel drive Ball castor 2x 110:1 DC motors Grippy wheels 1x HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor 2x FR-4 PCB Headers: 40-pin Pi GPIO 2x Qw/St 1x servo 5x garden sockets 1x I2C 1x Pi Camera Power: via Pi GPIO Size: 150x106x 53.4mm Trilobot is a

A low-profile, no-nonsense cooler that eschews the RGB aesthetic for straight-up great cooling. The 40mm fan and unusual heatsink arrangement work in our favour and the Raspberry Pi 4 is kept cool, even when overclocked. GPIO access is a stretch, but

Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at bigl.es. > Raspberry Pi Pico W > DHT11 temperature sensor > 3 x MtoM jumper wires > Half breadboard > Internet connecti

Michael Reed has been spending so much time with Kodi of late that his mum thought he’d finally got a girlfriend. Kodi is a cross-platform application that can turn a device such as a Raspberry Pi into a fully fledged media centre. It presents the us

Shashank Sharma is in love with Go and Python, but Rust has been on his mind quite a bit lately. The modern Linux kernel supports many different modules, which provide additional features and functionality. This could be support for USB devices, netw

Nick Peers has been playing around with computers for over 30 years, and has been dabbling with Linux for the best part of a decade. Need a mobile internet protocol (IP) camera, but don’t have the funds to purchase one? Want to make better use of you

Michael Reed sometimes feels like he’s OpenIndiana Jones when exploring an unfamiliar operating system. OpenIndiana’s website offers USB and DVD ISO installation images. The images are also offered as a textmode installer version and a minimal instal

Alastair Jennings has been obsessed with 3D printing for well over a decade. And it all started with a large, heavy, noisy and frankly terrible 3D printer. Just purchased your new feature-packed 3D printer, but failing to reproduce the high-quality p

Karsten Günther is a long-time LaTeX, Linux and GIMP user, and has written a number of books on these topics. The isolated parts of an image contained on a separate layer can usually be used either in the same image, or another image as additional el

Mike Bedford used invisible ink as a kid. Many years later he learned it was called steganography and discovered it’s gone digital. Most steganography is network steganography. However, the term has a specific meaning of embedding information in netw

is at the stage in his life where he doesn’t mind admitting that he gets a chuckle every time he mistypes HotPicks as HotPics. ■

Version: 1.20.4 Web: https://syncthing.net Taking a backup is often suggested as the best means to guard against accidental data loss. While that’s a prudent strategy, another could be to use a file-sync tool such as Syncthing, which can easily dupli

Version: 0.6.1 Web: https://github.com/meowtec While reducing image size isn’t all that difficult, to do so without compromising on image quality can be challenging. Thankfully, this is an area where Imagine excels. You won’t find Imagine in software

Version: 5.5.6 Web: http://homebank.free.fr/en Ever notice how many sci-fi movies often find a way to remind us that maths is constant across the universe? Closer to home, worrying about income and expenses is just as much a constant, with most peopl

Version: 2.10 Web: https://desktop.jitsi.org  The Jitsi project isn’t a single program, but rather a set of applications. The project’s namesake application is a VoIP and instant messaging tool that has an impressive set of audio and video conferenci

Version: 1.6.0 Web: https://beets.io Back before the world switched to online streaming services (speak for yourself youngster!–ED) for their multimedia needs, music was collected and stored on disk drives. If this is a familiar scenario you might en

Version: 1.59.0 Web: https://rclone.org There’s no such thing as being too cautious when it comes to protecting sensitive data. It’s not just malicious attacks and external threats, either – something as innocuous as a misdirected dd command can wipe

Version: 0.12 Web: https://vifm.info Your desktop environment already has a graphical file manager, but there also exists a variety of text-based file managers. Vifm is one such file manager, and its claim to fame is its adherence to a Vi-style key b

Version: 0.53 Beta Web: https://unvanquished.net On the face of it, Unvanquished appears like any other first-person shooter set in a futuristic, sci-fi setting. But the game has a rich history and was one of the first cool-looking open source shoote

Version: 022 Web: https://bitfighter.org Bitfighter is a team-based multiplayer game that involves navigating your space ship across the vastness of space, as you collect flags, shoot enemy ships and evade incoming gun fire. This 2D arcade game requi

Version: 3.11 Web: www.aescrypt.com We don’t have to convince you about the need to encrypt your files. Keeping files behind usernames and passwords no longer cuts it. But while there’s no dearth of encryption tools, most of the good ones come with a

Version: 22.7.0 Web: https://smplayer.info Across-platform graphical frontend to the venerable mplayer command-line media player, SMPlayer can play virtually all known formats in circulation. The application is pretty similar to VLC in terms of form

Andrew Smith is a software developer for NHS Digital, and likes video gaming and scripting in Python Call your variables something meaningful so that you can easily identify what part they play in the program. This issue we’re going to look at a gam

Credit: https://ebpf.io Don’t miss next issue! Subscribe on page 16 Mihalis Tsoukalos is a systems engineer and a technical writer. You can reach him at www. mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. Get the code for this tutorial from the Linux Format archive: