Linux Format

I made a pointless device that alerts the household to the internet breaking by glowing an ominous red. It’s pointless because we already have devices that alert us to a loss of connectivity. They are called humans and they make, with very little lat

This isn’t quite the Linux Format any of us was expecting, but I guess we should feel lucky there’s a Linux Format at all, right now. I don’t want to dwell, as I expect you’re hoping for a happy FOSS-based distraction from world events, but if the ma

“Recently, we’ve been working on some exciting new projects at Collabora. We partnered with Microsoft to build OpenCL and OpenGL mapping layers, to bring OpenCL 1.2 and OpenGL 3.3 support to all Windows and DirectX 12 enabled devices. One might wonde

“The topic on everyone’s minds at the moment is the global pandemic. Around the world daily life has been upended for billions of people. Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the US we’re now under a “stay-at-home” advisory similar to those in other

We’ve been reporting on the UBports project since August 2018, picking up where the official Ubuntu Touch left off. After 18 months of development UBports has a real phone you can buy (well, pre-order) and use UBports on. In conjunction with PinePhon

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 5.7-rc1 (release candidate 1) and with it the closure of the “merge window” (period of time during which disruptive changes are allowed) for what will hopefully be Linux 5.7 in time for the summer. Many new features wer

Zong Li posted a patch series that adds kernel address space layout randomisation (KASLR) support for RISC-V. ASLR (without the K) is a popular technique that randomises the layout of memory used by applications, to make certain types of security exp

The shell is a powerful way of working, but you may often find yourself typing the same commands over and over. Shell aliases provide a shortcut to typing full commands with lots of options. If you run alias in a terminal, it will list any aliases al

We’d love to try and answer any questions you send to lxf.answers@futurenet.com, no matter what the level. We’ve all been stuck before, so don’t be shy. However, we’re only human (although many suspect Jonni is an alien visitor), so it’s important th

In the developers’ own words, the FuryBSD project pays homage to popular but discontinued desktop BSD projects such as PC-BSD and TrueOS. It delivers a much more usable FreeBSD, using a combination of a familiar graphical desktop environment and some

All distributions were tested on the same dual-core machine with 4GB RAM, and we’ve selected the latest stable releases for all the distros. The recommended RAM for these is much less, and they claim to be able to run on even much older hardware, so

With the exception of Feren OS and Void Linux, all the distributions also have fairly active forum boards. Forum boards are excellent resources because there’s a good chance any queries you may have already been answered. You’ll find detailed tutoria

Feren OS features a couple of home-grown utilities. The Transfer Tool can be used to back up data from crucial directories such as Home, Pictures, Documents, Downloads, etc. You can similarly restore data using the tool with a single click. The other

While the number of projects that have dropped support for 32-bit hardware is increasing every day, there are a few distros that continue to spend resources to produce images that can boot on 32-bit machines. There’s the popular Debian-based distro M

The year 2000 problem didn’t end the world, but in the years since, developers have become increasingly concerned that an aclockalypse in 2038 might. Unix time is an arbitrary standard used by Linux and other systems that measures time as the number

We’ve hopefully given you some options to keep your old hardware alive. And while we wouldn’t ever discourage meddling with Linux in any way, shape or form, it’s only right to point out a few problems with old hardware. Firstly it’s slow, slower than

Those trusty 32-bit CPUs are vulnerable to the speculative execution attacks that have kept on coming since January 2018. These were mitigated (albeit some months later than their 64-bit counterparts) in the kernel, but the associated fixes led to so

The axe-like shadows first hung over 32-bit Ubuntu back in 2017, when desktop ISOs stopped being produced. You could still upgrade, but users were given fair warning that the end was coming (and remember it’s not for another three years for the mainl

While we might have talked about using “portable” versions of Tor in terms of releases you can take with you on a USB drive that will run on any PC, what about mobile devices? The double good news is that, over recent years, the Tor Project has come

The success of the Raspberry Pi has been how it disrupted the status quo. Back in 2012, if you wanted to buy a small Linux computer with added GPIO then at a consumer level you were stuck with a cheap Atom CPU device and an Arduino. At a professional

As the Covid-19 virus spreads around the globe we’re seeing nation states, industries, businesses and individuals take sensible steps to protect themselves. This includes the Raspberry Pi Foundation,which has announced a number of different steps it’

What happens if you’re out and about and want to access the Tor network, but on someone else’s PC? This could be at an internet cafe or perhaps using a work system where you can’t install software. Say hello to Tails, an open-source OS project that i

An aluminium case with great cooling, using both passive heatsinks and active fan cooling. What makes this different is the inclusion of software to control fan speed based on temperatures, and a power button linked to software to easily power and re

Why are webhooks so important? In this project we used a webhook to trigger IFTTT to send a message to Telegram. We didn’t need to install a library for IFTTT, we just told the web interface who we were (API key) what our trigger was (trigger) and we

In this month’s tutorial we will be creating a project that will alert us to any movement via a passive infrared (PIR) sensor. This will trigger a message to be sent to a service called IFTTT, which is used to receive inputs from various other servic

In our Python code the webhook URL has a section of JSON used to communicate the image URL as value1. In Python “value1” has a lowercase v, but in IFTTT “Value1” is used with an upppercase V. They are both the same. ■

Arduino uses curly braces {} to signify many different syntax structures. Functions, loops and conditional statements are all contained within these braces, ensuring that our code is tidy. Python uses indentation (whitespace) for a similar effect.

The short answer is we can. We can connect the rotary encoder to the GPIO and write a function to read the direction of rotation. This can then control the speed of the motor using the same L298N connected to the GPIO. For the fine control we would n

The Arduino is a powerful board. It may not have the same processing power as a Raspberry Pi – in fact it cannot even match the original Raspberry Pi – but it has power in its simplicity and connectivity. It has protocols such as I2C, SPI, UART and s

If you are new to the Arduino community then the first decision to make is which board to buy. Everyone’s first Arduino should be the Uno. It is the most widely supported Arduino board, with plenty of tutorials and accessories available to help as yo

Any mention of running a command beginning with a : implies that it needs to be run from within Vim, and not from your terminal. You can simply launch Vim, and execute the :PlugClean and the :PlugStatus and the other commands as mentioned in this tut

Back in LXF258 we introduced you to Vim, a fiercely popular and featureful text editor, and discussed how you can enhance your Vim experience by enabling some advanced options such as auto-completion, smart search, and even polish your writings by us

If you’ve been paying attention to the different blocks of code, you’ll notice that we’ve mentioned several different plugins already. But how do you decide which plugin is best for you, or even if one already exists for a functionality you want in V

Project management is a tricky skill. What can start out as a relatively simple task can spiral out of hand when you get underway and discover new angles, fresh requirements and who knows what else. It’s hard enough managing a project on your own, bu

Look out for My Personal Kanban’s Cloud menu – this enables you to keep your boards synced between computers using Google Drive as an intermediary. Choose Cloud>Setup to get started by creating the encryption keys that keep your boards private and se

Kanban is a bulletin board that reveals how your project is progressing and what needs to be done. Each board contains a series of columns known as ‘lists’ that represent different stages of your project. Each component of your project is then repres

You can’t have too many backups, and that at least one of those backups should ideally be stored offsite – which typically means in the cloud. But can you trust the cloud with your sensitive data? Can you be sure your cloud provider is telling the tr

If you’re satisfied with the security offered by your cloud provider, but would like the option of encrypting sensitive files – particularly for sharing with others – then AES Crypt is perfect for occasional use.Download it from www.aescrypt.com/down

To determine your current upload speed, check your router’s configuration or run a speed test at the likes of SpeedTest (www. speedtest.net).This will give you a figure in Mbps. Divide this figure by eight to get your Megabytes per second figure. Pr

Just how many photos and video clips have you accumulated over the years? Whether you’ve got dedicated equipment or just love snapping and videoing on your phone, now is the time to do something creative with them. OpenShot is a brilliant video-editi

Duplicati can also be run from the command line or incorporated into Bash scripts. It’s a straightforward structure: Commands are largely self-explanatory: backup, find, restore, delete, compact, test, compare, purge, vacuum, repair, affected, list

Consider taking away the boundary checks so your player character can fall through the floor, just as Mario can in places, resulting in death and a restart of the current level. Create a lava level by designing a new red platform. Add red to the RG

Side-scrolling video games are usually action based, with a side-view perspective on a player character traversing a two-dimensional world. As the character moves left or right, the game world moves with them. Timeless classics include Sonic The Hedg

The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms by Alfred Aho, Jeffrey Ullman, and John Hopcroft is a classic book that contains information about graphs. You can also check the https:// en.wikipedia. org/wiki/ Graph_drawing Wikipedia page about graph

There are many algorithms for doing useful tasks with graphs. Two well-known ones are the Depth First Search (DFS) and the Dijkstra’s Shortest Path First algorithms. The former is used for searching graphs whereas the latter is used for finding the s

A graph G(V,E) is a finite, non-empty set of vertices V (or nodes) and a set of edges E. If the edges E that have the form of (a,b) are an ordered pairs of vertices, then we have a directed graph. In contrast, if the edges E are unordered pairs of ve

Editor Neil “trapped in Wales” Mohr Floating editor Jonni Bidwell Art editor Efrain Hernandez-Mendoza Production editors James Price, Cliff “IS BACK” Hope Group editor in chief Graham Barlow Senior art editor Jo Gulliver Editorial contributors Neil B

This month, we’re going delve into solving maze and dungeon puzzles with the help of graph theory (well, we are all in isolation–Ed). The purpose of such puzzles is to determine whether there’s a path that connects two places and find that path, keep

Sketch out story boards to plan what shots and scenes you’ll need for your video. Even basic shoots require one. The classic blue screen or green screen, usually called chromakey, lets you replace a single colour with an alternative video source –