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81 Articles

LINUX FORMAT 2024 ANNUAL

Welcome to the Linux Format Annual 2024. We hope you’re ready to shake things up a bit, because this latest compilation from the makers of Linux Format magazine is going to equip you with the tools you need to free yourself from the likes of Windows, bulk up your defences and maximise your Linux experience. From discovering the best (well, we think so) open source software available and meeting the freedom fighters who started the movement to liberate programs for the masses, to taking back control of your passwords and levelling up your Linux career, let us help you to better protect your privacy, dig into the latest projects and get ahead in the world of Linux.…

LINUX FORMAT 2024 ANNUAL

HACK YOUR GRAPHICS

Graphics on Linux is complicated. On Windows, you have one driver model and one graphics API (DirectX… okay there are multiple versions, and subsets such as Direct2D). On Linux we’ve lost count. And it’s always been tricky, as anyone who’s tried to run X11 in 2000 will testify. Efforts have been made to simplify things, and in a way they are. AMD and Intel cards, thanks to open source drivers, will generally work out of the box on most desktop distributions. Even hardware requiring Nvidia’s proprietary drivers will work automagically in Ubuntu and Fedora. In future this driver will be free, too. Until then the open source Nouveau driver continues to improve, and (thanks to Nvidia finally releasing signed firmware) should provide much-improved performance for newer cards. However, there’s more…

HACK YOUR GRAPHICS

In the beginning…

Porting the X Windows System from (various flavours of) Unix to Linux was in some ways key to its success. A GUI, no matter how primitive, enables richer applications to be developed and richer content to be produced. In the mid-90s the only displays users needed to worry about were CRT monitors. Y’know, those heavy, retina-burning monsters whose depth was at least that of their screen’s diagonal. These work by sweeping a beam (okay, three beams if you want colour) of electrons back and forth with a given frequency, and then up and down with a slightly lesser frequency. These are the horizontal and vertical scan rates Even in this lawless era (which tolerated such atrocities as Chris Evans on The Big Breakfast) there were standards, one such being the…

In the beginning…

Into a third dimension

The first consumer 3D graphics cards appeared under 3DFX’s “Voodoo” branding in late 1996. These were add-in cards that still required a regular video card (or chip) to display 2D scenes. But they enabled games like Tomb Raider, Descent, Grand Theft Auto and Unreal to use 3DFX’s proprietary Glide API and render things (well, some things) much faster than software rendering. A number of other proprietary 3D graphics APIs appeared around this time, including the S3 3D Engine (used in Virge cards), the Nvidia Multimedia Library, the Creative 3D Library (used in Blaster 3D devices) and the even more imaginatively titled ATI 3D C Interface (for 3D Rage hardware). Silicon Graphics, makers of expensive workstations, also had a proprietary API, in the form of IRIS GL. This could do 3D…

Into a third dimension

Querying your 3D stack

For a long time, users of middle-aged Intel hardware were stuck using the venerable i965 Mesa driver. This caters to a range of hardware, from Broadwater (2006) to the HD and Iris graphics found in some Skylake chips (2015). For older hardware there’s the i915 Mesa driver, not that such hardware had much in the way of 3D capability. Newer, so-called Gen8 graphics and above (from Broadwell through to the latest Xe graphics) is supported by the Iris Gallium3D driver. The i965 (and i915) driver dates back to before the Gallium framework was developed, and throughout last year there were calls to retire it. However, Mesa aren’t in the habit of mass-scale hardware abandonment, so until a replacement was finalised, i965, and other ‘classic’ Mesa drivers were granted a reprieve.…

Querying your 3D stack

Hack your graphics

There are some great tools for probing, tweaking and otherwise tinkering with GPU on Linux. Most of these are vendor-specific. Intel provide a number of utilities via the intel-gputools package. Once installed you can run $ sudo intel_gpu_top to see how busy your GPU is, how much power it’s using, whether hardware video codecs are in use and more. It’s also handy if you get confused about which ‘Gen’ your graphics are. If only we’d known about it two pages back… AMD’s Catalyst Control Centre on Windows enables you to overclock your GPU and its memory, as well as tweak fan profiles. Corectrl on Linux makes it possible to do exactly the same thing, but probably with much less bloat. Corectrl is available on Fedora, Arch Linux’s AUR or you…

Hack your graphics

Of GPUs and APIs…

We’re lucky to live in a time when the Linux Kernel gets, on the whole, first-class hardware support, but it hasn’t always been this way. This is especially so when it came to 3D graphics support–or frankly graphic support of any kind. After Jonni’s in-depth look into the Kernel’s graphics stack and how you can tinker with it, we thought it would be useful to outline how graphics hardware has evolved alongside all those mentioned APIs–and their growing feature sets–used to access all the fancy hardware features. As you’ve already read, OpenGL sprang out of Silicon Graphics’ proprietary IRIS GL, developed over the 1980s for its own hardware and eventually running on flavours of Unix. This gave OpenGL rich hardware rendering alongside processor-based software rendering options. Microsoft created DirectX (initially…

Of GPUs and APIs…

Have you finally had enough of Windows? Perhaps your computer didn’t make the cut when Microsoft arbitrarily prevented certain PCs from working with Windows 11? Maybe you’re just looking to broaden your horizons and recapture that love of computing you’ve lost after years or decades trying to fit into Microsoft’s vision for how you should operate a PC instead? There are many good reasons to switch. First, Linux runs beautifully even on older hardware, so you can avoid the need for an expensive and unnecessary upgrade. Second, many Linux distributions–and in particular the Ubuntu LTS distro and its many derivatives (or flavours, as they’re better known)–enjoy established long periods of support with more predictable upgrades than Windows. LTS versions, which come out every two years, enjoy up to 10 years of…

It’s virtually Linux

Why commit to one Linux installation when you can try as many (or as few) as you like without touching your main Windows installation? Linux distributions are packaged as downloadable ISO files, which are designed to create bootable media. Unlike Windows installation media, many can function as “live media”, enabling you to run the OS in a temporary environment to get a feel for how it works. If this approach appeals, you need to convert the downloaded ISO file to a bootable DVD or USB flash media. To create a DVD, select the ISO file in File Explorer, then click the … button on the task bar and choose Burn To Disc. The simplest way to create bootable USB media is by using a tool such as Ventoy (https://ventoy.net). This…

It’s virtually Linux

Install Elementary OS alongside Windows

You’ve road-tested several flavours of Linux and settled on the one you want to switch to. You might feel ready to ditch Windows completely, but in most cases, you’ll probably want (or need) to keep it running for a specific app or game. The key is not to rush anything. Start by disabling hibernation, which can interfere with dual-booting: right-click the Start button and choose Command Prompt (Admin) or Terminal (Admin)–whichever appears. Now type powercfg-h off and hit Enter. Next, take a fail-safe backup of your Windows system drive as it currently stands. This requires a drive-imaging tool, and our favourite Windows tool by far is Macrium Reflect Free (www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx). Once downloaded and installed, open Macrium Reflect and click Create An Image Of The Partition(s) Required To Backup And Restore…

Install Elementary OS alongside Windows

Take the desktop tour

Once you’ve installed Elementary OS, you’re whisked through a setup wizard. It repeats the questions about language and keyboard layout, then asks you to set up your user account. Enter your name, and a suggested username is given, which can be changed as you see fit. You also need to provide a password to protect your account–Elementary OS guides you towards one it deems suitably strong. The Device Name–your virtual machine’s name as it would appear on your home network–can also be changed at this point. Once done, click Finish Setup. You’re now prompted to log into Elementary–if you’re running it in VirtualBox, you’ll have seen the compatibility warning during installation, so click the power button in the top-right corner and choose Shut Down. Once done, click Settings, select Display…

Take the desktop tour

Installing new apps

Now you’ve familiarised yourself with the Elementary OS desktop, it’s time to start putting your new operating system to good use. This, of course, involves installing new applications. The obvious source for these is the AppCenter via its Dock shortcut. This opens an app store, with a search tool at the top, some featured apps beneath and–if you scroll down–a series of categories for you to explore. Whisper it quietly, but Elementary OS’s app store is rather short of well-known apps. That’s because it’s aimed at developers who release free and paid-for software that’s optimised for use with Elementary OS’s Pantheon desktop. Don’t worry, though, because open source programs usually exist in multiple different places. The first alternative source reveals itself when a search returns no results, because AppCenter then…

Installing new apps

Take a deeper dive

You’ve added Elementary OS alongside Windows, you’ve installed the apps you need for everyday life, what next? The walkthrough (below) touches on some of the fundamental aspects of Linux you need to tackle at some point: keeping your system updated, file and folder permissions, and the terminal. But before that, what else needs to be done to get you set up? Let’s start with accessing your Windows drive. It’s likely you have personal files and folders stashed in your personal user folder, and the good news is that Elementary OS can read and write data to and from NTFS-formatted drives out of the box. Open Files and you should see your Windows drive under Storage. Double-click this and navigate to the Users folder to find your user folders all nested…

Take a deeper dive

Kinetic Kudu emerges from the bush

Ubuntu 22.10 is here. Kinetic Kudu–named after the African antelope with magnificent horns that’s nicknamed the “grey ghost” for its ability to materialise silently then vanish like smoke–is anything but grey. A worthy successor to Jammy Jellyfish, it’s packed with new features and under-the-hood improvements that will tempt even the most loyal members of the LTS crowd to break their cardinal rule of one upgrade every two years. Highlights include improvements to Gnome that make the desktop more attractive and easier to navigate, switches to new hardware standards to improve audio, and a new quick-settings panel to bring you key functionality within a couple of mouse clicks. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before we take you on the grand tour, we’ll first reveal the steps you need to…

Kinetic Kudu emerges from the bush

The Best OPEN SOURCE Software Ever!

For 300 issues, Linux Format has celebrated and promoted free and open source software. So, what better way to celebrate that software in our 300th issue than trying to distil the most useful of it all into a tawdry listicle? In the words of a CBeebies polar bear, let’s do this! Recently, open source has become the form of development du jour. It wasn’t always like that, with many arguing that a proprietary approach was superior. But as software project complexity spiralled, maintaining large enough groups of developers became ever more costly–for example, Cray was spending more on software development than on the supercomputers themselves before switching to SUSE Linux. While there are certainly difficulties and challenges with the open source approach–financing, leadership conflict, interface polish, quality documentation–the benefits generally outweigh…

The Best OPEN SOURCE Software Ever!

Top of the FOSS!

Linux Kernel Where would we be without Tux? Running some form of BSD or Open Indiana, we guess. BSD Format, anyone? We couldn’t have a top open source list without Linux in there somewhere, and where better than at the start? We’re not going to pontificate–you know Linux, we know Linux, even Microsoft loves Linux. For more details, see our feature in LXF280 on 30 years of Linux and how it’s gone from being a bedroom i386 project to running much of the modern world, from IoT devices and Android to the top 500 supercomputers and your PC. DETAILS WEB: www.kernel.org AGE: 17th Sept 1991; 31 years ago VERSION: 6.10 LICENCE: GPL 2 GNU Compiler Collection A free software movement wouldn’t get far if it couldn’t compile its own source…

Top of the FOSS!

GIMP is the go-to tool for most Linux users when they’re working with bitmap graphics–and with good reason. It’s a highly capable tool in many different areas of image editing and creation. In the past, the user interface came in for criticism, but that judgment feels a little unfair, given what it has looked like for the past few years. It now defaults to a single-window interface, with various toolbars and panels around the sides of the main area. There is simply no way of offering such a huge range of features without a somewhat complex interface. GIMP is a destructive editor. In other words, you alter the bitmap as you work on it. However, it’s possible to add an element of non-destructive editing by using layers. For a simple…

Ardour provides a complete music studio in the form of a Linux app. You can use it for all three of the main areas of music recording: getting music into the computer, mixing and editing it, then mastering and exporting it to an audio file. You might have to jump through a few hoops to get Ardour on to your Linux box, as the developers request a payment (pay what you like) or a regular subscription. However, you can download and build the source code package from the site for free. We’re looking at what version 7.2 has to offer. After a long period of waiting, the 6.x series reimplemented much of the internal workings of the program, but a lot of us were left underwhelmed as visible improvements were…

Wireshark 4.0.2

Wireshark is a packet analyser with an easy-to-use GUI. It enables you to capture and analyse the data that travels around your network. You can use it to track down insecure software that has the potential to cause problems, and you can also use it to find out a bit more about the protocols that make a network and even the internet work. Best of all, it’s easy to get started. Let’s start with a simple example. Load up Wireshark and select the network adaptor that you use for connection with the internet when prompted. If you open a web browser and browse to a website, you should see a flurry of packet data in the main Wireshark window. Presuming that test works and you can see some traffic, put…

Wireshark 4.0.2

LibreOffice 7.5

As it’s an office suite, LibreOffice is actually several pieces of software. Like most of the LibreOffice modules, LibreOffice Writer has all of the core features that most business users need. This word processor is fully-featured and takes inspiration for its user interface from traditional GUI word processors, meaning that it will feel familiar to nearly every computer user as soon as they first encounter the program. Having said that, it does have a more modern, ribbon based interface that is disabled by default. To enable the ribbon, visit the pop-up user interface menu (View > User interface). So, how does the ribbon operate? There’s a tab along the top of the ribbon area that divides the user interface elements into several categories. For instance, the Home category gathers together…

LibreOffice 7.5

Visual Studio Code 1.74

The Visual Studio Code project was originally started by Microsoft, a company not particularly renowned for its support of Linux. Rest assured that it was soon released under the MIT licence and is, today, a fully open source project, and one of which we’re huge fans. You might notice that Visual Studio Code looks a bit different from other applications and lacks a native feel. That’s because it’s coded using a framework called Electron. This gives the developers complete control of the layout, even if it means that it doesn’t fit in with the overall style of the desktop it’s running on. Sometimes, apps programmed in this way can be sluggish, but we haven’t encountered any problems with it, and it’s surprisingly good on a resource-constrained device such as a…

Visual Studio Code 1.74

Kdenlive 22.12.1

It’s venerable, has a labyrinth of features, and is probably the most fully featured open source video editor we have on Linux. The Kdenlive developers are always adding new features, so it’s a good idea to track down the latest version. As for installation options, we generally go for PPA to get the latest version when we’re using Ubuntu, but the AppImage version is also worth considering as Kdenlive sits on a lot of frameworks and libraries, so it can be difficult to add them all to a distribution. Video editors, on the whole, are complicated programs, and the developers have to find methods of making the features accessible in a way that engenders a smooth workflow. Kdenlive makes a lot of use of panels, which are often multifunction and…

Kdenlive 22.12.1

Dolphin is a fairly traditional file manager with a lot of its functionality disabled by default. On first launch, you’ll probably quickly get the gist of how to use it. The main area displays the files, and there is a second pane on the left-hand side that contains user bookmarks along with notable system locations, such as removable media, the waste bin and network locations. There’s a status bar at the bottom of the window, and this integrates the zoom slider. So far, so standard… Traditionally, KDE applications have tended towards the needs of power users, and in our opinion, it’s a shame that Dolphin’s default layout configuration is so tame. Removing clutter is one thing, but we usually end up having to enable a few options in order to get…

Cockpit is a remote system administration service. It can be installed using the package manager on most distributions. What you end up with is a set of management pages that can be accessed by a web browser over a network. A system like this has its uses in the server room, but it’s very easy to use, and it’s also worth knowing about for the average user who wants to carry out some admin and system monitoring remotely. Cockpit comes into its own when managing a remote Linux box used as a server, and you can handle a lot of the administration features that you would otherwise have to access via the GUI admin tools of the distribution or via the command line. The first page is a system overview…

BASH Strap in for a thrill ride! Bash, short for the Bourne-Again Shell, is the GNU Project’s Unix shell and command language that was originally released in 1989 by Chet Ramey. It was the free software replacement for the Version 7 Unix Borne shell (sh) released in 1977. This suspended the Mashey shell used with Version 4 Unix in 1973, which itself was a replacement of the Thompson shell (sh) that was written by Ken Thompson himself for the original 1971 Unix. In most distros, if you run echo $0 in the terminal, you’ll likely get the output of Bash, as that’s the base command language in Debian and thus Ubuntu and beyond. There are alternatives, such as Fish, which offers advanced tab completion, search as you type auto-suggestion, syntax…

Free our SOFTWARE!

Without Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS), there would be no GNU, and without GNU, there would be no Linux distributions as we know them, and without Linux, there would be no Linux Format. So here we are, 300 issues on, celebrating the very thing that enables us to exist: the free software movement. RMS started the GNU’s Not Unix Project in 1983 to create a totally free operating system, and later he established the General Public License to guarantee its software freedom. By 1991, much of GNU was finished, but it lacked a kernel–which is where Linus Torvalds and his Linux kernel came in. Combining the collaborative nature of online open source development, the benefits of the GPL licence and the pulling-as-one community that builds around projects, GNU/Linux took off beyond…

Free our SOFTWARE!

MULTI-BOOT MINT 21!

When Windows 10 was released Microsoft stated that it would be the last version. For a time we believed the company… Yet Windows 11 is here and if you’ve just bought yourself a new, TPM 2.0-bearing PC you’d be forgiven for thinking, “How the heck do I get rid of this?” Well, we don’t condone killing OSes (even proprietary ones), so we’ll show you the next best thing: how to dual-boot Windows 11 (or 10) with Linux. If you’ve never heard of Linux before, don’t worry–we’re basing the tutorial on Linux Mint, one of our long-term favourite distributions that’s ideal for beginners (also, bravo you for picking up a Linux magazine!). Mint is based on Ubuntu, so has a solid foundation and that enjoys five years of support from Canonical.…

MULTI-BOOT MINT 21!

Taking precautions

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-fingered salute away from Linux, where you can do everything else. But what happens when it goes wrong? Well a quick DuckDuckGo search gives one an idea: “Windows updated and broke Grub”, “Windows corrupted my exotic Linux partitions”, “Windows boot manager upsets my chihuahua”. Okay, one of those may not be real, but dual-booting has undoubtedly caused problems in the past. We endeavour to make the experience problem-free in the present. Before you get to installing Linux, you need to ensure that Windows is in a state which hopefully will…

Taking precautions

Installing stereo operating systems

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 on such a device (by addition of various Registry keys), or perhaps you have Windows 10 on an MBR drive already. In this setup Windows will occupy three primary partitions. It’s possible to add one or more logical partitions, but these must exist within an ‘extended’ partition, which is itself counts as a primary partition. So in an MBR setup, provided you or whoever put together your PC haven’t added extra primary partitions, there’s just enough room to fit Linux Mint (or whatever distro you like) on there. Of…

Installing stereo operating systems

Tweaking the Mint

The “Installation type” dialog that pops up when you click “Something else” is a little intimidating at first glance. You should see a map of your Windows drive and a colour-coded list of its partitions, as well as any free space in between them. If you’ve got another drive it’ll likely appear at the bottom of the list, so scroll down to it. If it’s unformatted you’ll need to click New Partition Table and accept the warning that all current partitions will be removed. Don’t use this option on your Windows drive unless you don’t want to use it ever again! (Is that a bad thing?–Ed) You’ll now be able to select the free space in the new drive and create partitions for KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE“The simplest setup is to…

Tweaking the Mint

Logical Volume Manager

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 general the penguins play nicer together compared to Windows. Thanks to flexible modern filesystems, you can even resize partitions while they’re mounted, although unless the need is urgent it’s always going to be safer to unmount first. Thanks to GPT partitioning there’s no need to worry about fitting in another distro (unless you’ve gone a bit wobbly and installed about 126 already). And thanks to UEFI booting you’ll never lose the ability to boot either distro. In fact, most distros will enable you to boot any sibling OSes from their boot…

Logical Volume Manager

Lately, there have been many news stories on how the web is evolving into something new. A lot of this news cycle is about Meta, but that’s just one vision of how we can interact with each other online. The paradigm shift that’s coming is irrelevant to the display, which is great for advertising but is no more than a glitzy distraction. Instead, the most powerful change is decentralisation. This is the idea that your data can be spread on everybody’s computers instead of hoarded inside corporate headquarters (don’t look at us!–Ed). In the mind of the pioneers, users will have full control and everything will be equal. You can think of the third web as a mash-up of regular web pages, peer-to-peer networks and blockchain technologies. To grasp the…

GET INTO CODING!

The kids may all be headed back to school and the not-yet adults may be off to learn the ways of the world in tertiary education camps. But whatever your age, it’s never too late to learn to code… It’s a trite old phrase, and one that’s been jumped on by a million YouTube videos, expensive courseware and even our very own “Bookazine” department. Maybe you’ve already sat through classes where everything is introduced from first principles. If not, let us tell you with certainty that listening to someone explain functions, variables, loops, data structures, recursion, pointers and memory allocation for an extended period of time is in most cases frightfully dull. Or maybe you’ve had an apposite experience, where ‘Learn to code’ turned out to be code for ‘here’s…

GET INTO CODING!

Initial conditions

We’re going to cover a couple of techniques in this adventure, hopefully making it possible for everyone to get at least some sort of a grasp on some of the rudiments of programming. Of course, many weighty tomes on this subject have already been written and cover much more than we can hope to do in a handful of pages. So we won’t be recreating Donald Knuth’s seminal The Art of Computer Programming (TaoCP) or Randal L Schwartz’s era-defining Programming Perl here. But hopefully we’ll inspire some who haven’t heard of those texts to check them (and other coding lore) out. It’s always rather daunting choosing a ‘first’ programming language. There’s plenty of contradictory articles online imploring you to learn Python, Ruby, JavaScript or PHP. And there’s as many telling…

Initial conditions

The body syntonic

Today’s top developers learned to code through a number of very different pathways. We mentioned BBC BASIC earlier, but we didn’t mention FORTRAN, COBOL or any of the Algol family, which were de rigeuer for scientists, mainframe operators and academics respectively back in the day. FORTRAN (originally FORmula TRANslator) was developed by IBM in the 1950s and quickly became the gold standard for scientific computation and engineering. It’s still in use today, particularly on supercomputers working on numerically difficult problems such as weather prediction, fluid simulations and crystallography. BASIC was largely based on FORTRAN II. And Fortran (the dated portmanteau and shouty capitals have since been left behind) continues to be updated to accommodate modern coding practices, such as objects, parallelism and concurrency. C was developed by Dennis Richie in…

The body syntonic

The great and the git

Working with your files locally is all well and good, but as soon as you start collaborating with other contributors doing the same it becomes difficult. In the early days of the Linux Kernel, patches were sent over Usenet and email, reviewed by Linus Torvalds, merged with the current kernel and all uploaded to an FTP site. Maintaining a consistent codebase this way is cumbersome, especially as contributions went meteoric in the mid-90s. The solution was to use a proprietary version control system (VCS) called BitKeeper. Code was now stored centrally and enabled developers to fork and branch the code with impunity, queue up their patchsets and generally not have to worry about singing from different source hymnsheets. For a time that worked well, but all good things must come…

The great and the git

Invaders, possibly from space

Once upon a time, there was a magazine called Linux User & Developer (LUD). It was a reasonable title, but not in the same high-calibre league as Linux Format. Noting it could never be LXF, LUD did the honourable thing and ordered its parent company to pledge fealty and hand over all assets to Future Towers. So for a while LUD was part of the Future family, and then a spreadsheet in London cried out in panic and suddenly LUD was no more. (I’m pretty sure none of that really happened–Ed). Anyway in issue 136 of LUD, a young Russell Barnes introduced a great project called Pivaders, a Space Invaders clone written in about 300 lines of code. Then in the next issue he added some bells and whistles, in…

Invaders, possibly from space

Bootstrap your LINUX career

Linux administrators are in demand. Those who are certified get more offers at higher rates of pay. To offer a personal experience of this, several years ago this writer applied for a job with a large well-known company and sailed through the interview. It came down to him and one other candidate, who had a similar level of experience. The writer had only the RHCSA (Red Hat Certified Sys Admin) certificate, while the other candidate had RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) certification and got the job. In a post-interview conversation, it became clear that the interviewer saw the RHCE certification as a big differentiator and a proven case of how certificates can and do make a difference. Depending on how you approach Linux accreditation, it can be costly. Some certifications…

Bootstrap your LINUX career

FREE YOUR PHONE!

The mobile device world has become duopolised by two big tech outfits, one fruity and the other Borg-ish. Google’s Android runs on an array of mobile hardware, has a Linux kernel, and the core Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is freely licensed. Devices can generally be unlocked and custom apps can be sideloaded. Compare it with Apple’s walled-garden, locked-down hardware approach in iOS, and you can see why free software advocates might prefer to side with the Android camp. But this argument is specious, because much of Android proper is proprietary. The Google apps and most of the popular Android apps are all proprietary, and many rely on the fiendish Google Play Services library to do their work (or display ads). Those apps all collect data and tie it to your…

FREE YOUR PHONE!

The issue with Android

Our perennial Escape Google features are always fun, but escaping the Borg on mobile deserves a treatment all of its own. From the moment you put your Google Account credentials into the setup screen, your phone/tablet/TV stick starts feeding data to Google’s silos. Search history, GPS location history, call logs, contacts and much more are by default shared with the company. Its PR outlets boldly claim that it doesn’t sell this data, but it does use it to sell highly targeted ads. As you’ll have noticed. Pause for a second to consider the resolution of the profile that all this data provides. Then pause for another second to consider the second-level data obtained by cross-referencing it with billions of other users. By now you might be feeling ill at ease.…

The issue with Android

Jump to LineageOS

The Android Open Source Project is where manufacturers start when they want to port Android to a new device. Manufacturers add in the drivers (and other hardware-specific code), as well as perhaps custom UI overlays. If this all passes Google’s muster (see box on previous page), the device can be shipped with Android pre-installed. Those wanting to compile custom ROMs for that device may find that the manufacturer has open sourced the code they added in (namely device trees, hardware libraries and things that end up in the vendor partitions), but this is rarely the case. Even if they provide something, drivers for the GPU, cameras, GPS and the baseband modem itself will more than likely only exist as proprietary blobs. Those are no use for compiling AOSP, so custom…

Jump to LineageOS

Get to know LineageOS

Without doubt, LineageOS is the premier way to experience open source Android on the widest range of consumer hardware. There’s a huge community of super-talented developers (most active on https://forum.xda-developers.com) constantly updating and building LineageOS releases new and old for specific models of devices. So, even if there’s not an official release for your device, a quick DuckDuckGo will likely return someone on XDA proffering a build–with varying degrees of device support; do you really need the camera?–for your obscure Chinese-made mobile device. Let’s take some time to look through the latest release details of LineageOS 20, but also some of the other features and advantages the project offers. As we mentioned, LineageOS rose from the regrettable disintegration of the Cyanogenmod project in late 2016. This also explains the odd…

Get to know LineageOS

Install GNU/Linux

Early Nokia smartphones (notably the classic N900 from 2009, see over there on the right) shipped with a Linux-based OS called Maemo. Maemo was largely based on open source projects, but included some proprietary code. The community was key to developing it, under Nokia’s stewardship, and it fuelled the vision that one day our phones could run free software without compromise. That may not have fructified yet, but there is hope. Today, long after Nokia largely abandoned Maemo (being forced by Microsoft to sell Windows Phones in 2011), there is still a community dedicated to Maemo. Namely Maemo Leste, which runs an upstream kernel and is based on Devuan (the distro that most has it in for Systemd). You may not be interested in running Linux on hardware quite as…

Install GNU/Linux

Open source apps

If you’re now proudly running a Google-free phone OS, you’ll probably be wanting to get some free (as in Mel Gibson shouting “Freedom!”) apps. Even if you’re still running Android and using Play Store apps, the F-Droid store is well worth checking out. It’s easy to install–just visit https://f-droid.org on a PC and scan the QR code with a laptop. This downloads the APK (the Android package format), and when you try to install it, you’ll see a warning saying the browser is not authorised to install unknown apps. This is A Good Thing. Ordinarily, we’d never tell you to download and install APKs this way, but this an exception. You can check the PGP signatures if you are concerned. Once you’re happy, you can grant your browser (called Browser…

Open source apps

PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY

Few people like being tracked online. Sure, there are some legitimate reasons for it: you may be a threat to national security–busily searching up combustible materials, bidding for the infamous and stylish Casio F-81W on eBay, or meeting up with your fellow government-toppling anarchists on Facebook (although no one is better at overthrowing HMG than HMG). We’re sure there are warehouses full of counter-terrorist officers sitting behind ancient CRT monitors, watching the humdrum daily activities of suspected terrorists as they scroll through 60-second TikToks, work on mind-numbing romance novels, and call their grandmas on WhatsApp to make sure they’ve remembered to take their meds and have enough milk. A James Bond lifestyle it ain’t. In reality most tracking takes place with little or no human interaction, and is for commercial…

PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY

The end of ad-blockers

Ad-blockers have been around for decades. They create a much better reading experience (shhh, TechRadar is listening!–Ed) as you’re not constantly bombarded by visual junk, autoplaying videos and mysterious sounds emanating from one of your 72 open tabs. Although it may appear otherwise, adverts are not actually on the site you visit in your browser. The website provides a basic HTML document that contains instructions for formatting, locations from which to retrieve images, and how to fetch and display other resources. Adverts are one such resource and are pulled from a remote location on the server of an advertising company. The URLs of these ad servers are generally well known and have been compiled into dozens of lists that can be downloaded by you or your PC. When an ad-blocking…

The end of ad-blockers

Firefox extensions

The world isn’t going to end when Google pulls the plug on Manifest V2 for Chrome, so let’s investigate the very best anti-tracking and ad-blocking extensions for Firefox. With Chrome and the long-term viability of extensions on other Chromium-based browsers in doubt, it’s increasingly clear that Firefox is the way forward. We’d love to recommend Linux-specific browsers such as Falkon, but the built-in adblock extension does not have a stellar reputation for being user-friendly, and Falkon’s overall performance is not quite up there with the best Mozilla has to offer. Perhaps the inevitable exodus from the Googlesphere will prompt increased investment in competent independent browser development, but then again, maybe not. Firefox has another major advantage in the upcoming browser wars: it’s truly multi-platform, with builds available for Windows, Mac…

Firefox extensions

Peeling open Tor 12

Users who want to keep their private business private when online often turn to VPN (virtual private network) providers. It’s a sensible precaution, and when you search for terms related to online privacy, it’s SEO-optimised, VPN-promoting articles that occupy the first few pages of results, because VPN companies pay out up to 60% for sales through affiliate links. Want your online tech publication to flourish? VPNs are where the cash is. VPNs can hide your location and your activities, but you need to pay for the privilege and create an account–and you can never be truly certain that the company that takes your money isn’t straight up selling your details to data brokers, handing it over to the police or, worse, to Disney copyright lawyers. Everybody loves getting paid twice,…

Peeling open Tor 12

Take full control of your passwords

Everyone needs a strong password manager, but you’re usually forced into one of two camps: a local-only password manager that keeps your passwords off the internet, but causes friction when you want to access them on different devices; or a cloud-based password manager that works seamlessly across all of your mobile and desktop devices, but requires you to store your passwords online. Given the rise in websites being hacked–parts of LastPass were compromised as recently as August 2022, although the company stressed no vaults were at risk, due to its zero-knowledge policy around master passwords–you’d be forgiven for being wary about trusting your vault to a third party. One workaround is to use our favourite password manager, the open source Bitwarden, in a self-hosted environment. It involves a fair bit…

Take full control of your passwords

Master hacking with Kali

Hacking is cool. Not the kind of hacking you usually get up to on your Linux machine–tweaking open source code to wring the last ounce of performance from an ancient program or adding new functionality to suit your needs. No, we’re talking about the other kind of hacking. Think black hoodies and world maps. Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller fleeing the Feds in the dead of night after some illicit intrusion or other. Hackers are the modern equivalent of cat burglars, breaking into high security areas to make off, unseen, with a priceless portrait or the contents of your secret vault. They blend into the background while drinking cocktails with their targets, and live the high life thanks to the proceeds of their victimless crimes. Of course, the analogy doesn’t…

Master hacking with Kali

Ice cold with Kali

Yes, Kali comes as a distro, but it’s also quite simple to download and install its essential tools on a standard Debian or Ubuntu system. But functionality and the ability to hurl malware like a cyber-shuriken is only part of what Kali Linux is about. Mostly, Kali Linux is about style. You’ll see it in the ever-present dragons scattered around the system. You’ll see it in the customised terminal, which, even if you only use it for some innocuous text editing, makes you look like a hacker. With Kali, you can sit in a cafe wearing a fedora, and even if you’re just checking the news on your laptop, you’ll exude an ineffable sense of menace to fellow-patrons as you down your triple espresso. One of Kali’s cool features is…

Ice cold with Kali

Get to grips with Kali

We’re not going to suggest that you use Kali Linux as your daily driver. We could, as it’s a perfectly serviceable as a distro, but there are some caveats. Kali is a specialist project and is heavily geared towards spoiling someone’s day, week, month or even their year. It’s designed with security in mind and developers deliberately keep the number of upstream repositories to a minimum. You may have a sudden urge to play some Steam games or add additional repositories to your sources.list, and while this is totally do-able in theory, you run a very real risk of nerfing your Kali Linux installation entirely. Unless penetration testing is your God-given vocation, and you can dedicate a machine on which to execute your exploits without giving in to the temptations…

Get to grips with Kali

Metasploitation

It’s a rare piece of code that never requires patching to fix some flaw or other that allows users to do what they were never meant to do. Exploits can be as simple as checking out plain text password files in an unprotected directory, or inputting something akin to the Konami code. It can be spamming a password field until it breaks, or writing more data to a memory buffer than it can hold. Hackers have been hacking since before the first computers were networked together with bits of string and sticky tape. Generally, this involves poking things until they break, and then poking them again. Occasionally, it involves the careful inspection of code to see whether there are any obvious flaws that developers have missed. This is one of…

Metasploitation

Chase the purple dragon

Kali Linux has always sat comfortably and firmly in the red team encampment, providing tools to test network security and generally giving blue teams a hard time. It’s an adversarial approach and one that sees red and blue teams constantly at odds, with defensive security being tested to its limits by the red team. With Kali Purple, Offensive Security has taken a new approach in attempting to make red and blue teams work together. Red and blue combined is purple. Get it? With Kali Purple, you get a mixture of tools, so you’re no longer manning a machine gun from the trenches or sending waves of bots to get snagged on digital barbed wire. You can take a more nuanced approach. Stay defensive with Purple Unlike the main version of…

Chase the purple dragon

Build your own hardware firewall

You might not think you need another firewall. The one built into Linux is working all the time in the background to protect individual computers, and many routers have their own firewalls to protect the whole network. But running your own custom firewall has several benefits: it gives you more flexibility and better oversight of what’s going on in the background and logs, lots of logs! And it’s easier than you might think. You don’t need specialist hardware, and you don’t even need to pay for enterprise-level firewall software. The open-source pfSense firewall is free for personal use, with a graphical interface for administration and all the same features as the enterprise version (the difference is that you don’t get commercial support). You can run it in a virtual machine…

Build your own hardware firewall

FREE ALL YOUR FILES

Thanks to LibreOffice’s superb document compatibility, Linux users no longer have to worry about dealing with Microsoft Office files. And Windows and Mac OS users need no longer be forced into paying extortionate MS Office prices or be duped into Office 365 subscriptions. So, the Document Foundation deserves serious recognition for obviating what for a long time was an obstacle to Linux adoption. The corporate world still revolves around DOCX and XLSX files, so it’s a blessing to be able to open and save them qualm-free. Speaking of the corporate world, it’s also very keen on Google’s Workspace (previously known as G-Suite), happy to fork out huge sums so Evil Corp doesn’t have to worry about email and document storage. But we FOSS fans know better, and that’s why for…

FREE ALL YOUR FILES

Introduction to COOL

If you’re reading this magazine, you’re probably already familiar with LibreOffice, the free, open source office suite. What you may not be aware of is that there’s an Enterprise edition (which many tight-fisted businesses avoid paying for). In fact, there are a few enterprise editions and support options from different players, each one a good reason for businesses to front some dollar. Most relevant for this feature is Collabora Office, brought to you by the similarly named Linux consultancy powerhouse. We featured Collabora Office in our interview in LXF302 (and indeed in our Finding Equi-Libre-um feature back in LXF288), but let’s start with a quick recap. Firstly, Collabora Office does not have any features that aren’t present in the regular edition. This is an important point. Collabora Office exists so…

Introduction to COOL

Installing Nextcloud

There’s a number of ways to install Nextcloud, including the use of à la mode container systems such as Docker or Snap. These are easy to set up, but integrating them with CODE (and otherwise tweaking their internals) is more involved, so we’ll roughly follow the official guidance at https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/example_ubuntu.html. Use SSH to log in to your Ubuntu server (it should also work on Debian) and update, upgrade and install the packages with: You can copy and paste the package list (and subsequent code screeds) from the documentation linked above to avoid tedium. Now we’ll set up our database server, using the freshly installed MariaDB. This is technically optional, because Nextcloud can use the flat-file database SQLite. This isn’t very performant, though, even with a single user, as the Nextcloud…

Installing Nextcloud

Installing CODE

For our next trick, we’re going to install the CODE package. Collabora does provide a PPA from which you can install native DEB packages (see www.collaboraoffice.com/code/linux-packages), but it’s a whole lot easier to use its Docker image here. There is a docker.io package in the Ubuntu repositories, but it’s recommended to use the official package. Add the Docker repo with the following (you can copy and paste this incantation from the Apt repository section of https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu): Then install Docker with: This should start the Docker daemon–check with systemctl status docker. If all is well, fetch the CODE image with: This is about 500MB, so once it had downloaded, our clean Ubuntu Server install had grown to 12GB. Space is thus another resource to keep in mind when running on a…

Installing CODE

Bleedin’ COOL

If you’re familiar with LibreOffice, you should have no problem navigating Collabora Online’s interfaces. From the Files app (the folder icon in the top-left of Nextcloud’s interface), use the big + button to create a new document, spreadsheet, presentation or even diagram. If you want to be able to save the latter as SVG files (rather than PDFs), an extra package is required: By default, CODE apps start with the new-fangled NotebookBar interface, which is a bit like Microsoft Office’s Ribbon interface, but less awful. If you prefer the classical buttons and menus arrangement, you can add the following to the extra_params parameter in the Docker incantation (remember to stop and remove the previous container, to preserve memory and disk space): Staying up to date One advantage of using CODE…

Hot Pi projects

The problem with owning a Raspberry Pi is knowing what to do with the flipping thing. That’s if you’ve been able to get hold of one over the last year. But that is where the Pi Pico comes into its own, costing a fraction of the latest Pi 4 models and actually being available. No matter what Pi you have to hand or what your ability is, we’ve got projects to keep you busy and out of trouble. Well, mostly. We’ve selected self-contained capsule projects and have supplied the relevant code, while any kit you need shouldn’t be too outlandish, from basic NeoPixels to simple radio receivers. That’s half the fun of Raspberry Pi projects: one moment you’re flashing LEDs in different colours, the next you’re reliving retro gaming moments, and…

Hot Pi projects

I like to make it, make it

To become a maker, you need the right kit, and without a microSD card, the main Raspberry Pi models won’t even boot. So, to kick things off as quickly as possible, we’ve had our friends at Tom’s Hardware do a bit of testing and come up with the fastest microSD cards to power your Pi. Now is an amazing time to buy a fresh microSD card as prices have tumbled and speeds have increased dramatically. Previously, we would have recommended 32GB cards, but it’s getting hard to find a 64GB card that costs much more than £7, while 128GB cards are regularly under £15. Much of this is powered by even larger capacity cards entering the market. Theoretical speeds can top 140MB/s, with many advertising a healthy 100MB/s, as the…

I like to make it, make it

Play retro games

In the ’80s, the only way to experience arcade-quality gaming was by going to an arcade. Over the passing decades, arcades have become mere memories and gaming is now a home pastime. For the more ‘mature’ gamer, the appeal of retro gaming is nostalgia, and the Raspberry Pi has been a capable retro gaming platform for most of its life. In this tutorial, we’re converting a Raspberry Pi into a retro gaming console using RetroPie. Before we get too far, a word on legality. Retro games are still under their respective owners’ copyright. In some countries this isn’t an issue, in others it is. Please consult your local regulations. RetroPie is a great way to play classic retro games via a Pi. We should know, as we have a Picade…

Play retro games

Make a media centre

When the Raspberry Pi first arrived in 2012, one of the first projects we saw was a media centre. Even the humble Raspberry Pi 1, with just a single 700MHz CPU and 512MB RAM, was capable of decent 1080p video playback. Fast-forward to today and the Raspberry Pi 4 is many times more powerful and able to perform much better with our growing library of media. In this tutorial, we explain how to install a media centre OS to your Raspberry Pi, and then show you how to play media from USB and live streams, all from the comfort of your sofa. OSMC is a great introduction to turning your Raspberry Pi into a media player. This lightweight Linux OS is designed just for serving media, be it local or…

Make a media centre

Build a Wi-Fi router

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 4, the networking stack was greatly improved thanks to changes to the hardware, which meant that USB bus was no longer used to make it available to the operating system. In this project, we are creating our own Wi-Fi router using Raspberry Pi OS and RaspAP. Once the initial setup has been completed, the wireless router can be configured via a web interface–much like the products available from popular router manufacturers. What’s the benefit of making this yourself? Well, the first reason is that cheaper routers aren’t kept updated for very long, possibly leaving security holes. Basing the router on Debian means that the base operating system is incredibly well tested and security updates are released on a regular basis. The web GUI…

Build a Wi-Fi router

Track and scan planes

Over the last few years, there has been much talk of software-defined radio (SDR–see LXF273). This is a way for a generic piece of receiver hardware to be repurposed to scan different frequencies or be used for a whole variety of purposes. One example of this is the Realtek RTL2832U+R820T2-based USB stick (around £35), which was originally intended to be used as a TV receiver. For this project, we will briefly introduce how this receiver can be used to receive ADS-B signals from passing aircraft and how this information can be fed into a web service that aggregates signals from many users, from across the globe. The second thing we will discuss is how to use the same receiver to scan for any local devices that send data at 433MHz or…

Track and scan planes

Master the Pi Pico GPIO

The Pi Pico comes pre-installed with MicroPython, a version of Python 3 for microcontrollers. It is regularly updated and new versions can be found at https://bit.ly/lxf298upython. It is prudent to update MicroPython before trying this tutorial. Our circuit for this project is a simple LED toggle switch–a detailed circuit diagram is included in the download link. A push button is used to turn the LED on and off. The Pico reads the GPIO pins and reacts to the change. Download and install Thonny for your OS and connect your Pico to the computer. Open Thonny, go to Tools > Options and click on the Interpreter tab. Set the interpreter to be MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico), then set the serial/COM port to auto-detect the Pico. Thonny should now detect the Pico…

Master the Pi Pico GPIO

Convert currency

In this project, we’re creating a simple app to get the latest exchange rates for the euro and US dollar against the UK pound. The Raspberry Pi Pico W comes with MicroPython, a version of Python 3 for microcontrollers. It is regularly updated and new versions can be found at https://bit.ly/lxf298upython. It’s a good idea to update MicroPython and ensure you get the version for the Pico W, as it has extra modules for Wi-Fi connectivity. Download and install Thonny for your OS and connect your Pico to the computer. Open Thonny, go to Tools > Options and click on the Interpreter tab. Set the interpreter to be MicroPython (Raspberry Pi Pico) and then set the serial/COM port to auto-detect the Pico W. Thonny should now detect the Pico W…

Convert currency

Build a smart home

ESPHome was originally written to allow the ESP8266 and ESP32 devices to easily interact with Home Assistant. Using YAML syntax, the required options and configuration can be written, then parsed and used to create source code, which is cross-compiled and uploaded to the devices. With the release of the 2022.11 version, developmental support has been added for Raspberry Pi Pico W boards. In this project we’re creating a program that enables us to read the temperature from a DS18B20 sensor, report it to Home Assistant and flash the internal LED on the board via a switch in Home Assistant’s web GUI. To begin, we need to set up Home Assistant and enable the ESPHome add-on. The easiest way to run the software is to install it on a microSD card,…

Build a smart home

Control NeoPixel LEDs

We’re using MicroPython here to control a small set of LEDs. Known as NeoPixels, they are a string of LEDs that are generally multi-coloured and can be addressed individually. NeoPixel is the name given to this style of LED by Adafruit, but the same driver is used for a large number of them (WS2811/WS2812), no matter who the manufacturer or supplier. These models are available with separate RGB channels, so that any colour can be made by mixing the values (think of HTML colours). First, download and install MicroPython from https://bit.ly/lxfupdate. Then hold down the Bootsel button on the Pico board and connect to your PC or laptop. Copy the downloaded file to the newly mounted disk, then the Pico W reboots and loads MicroPython. Download and install the Thonny…

Control NeoPixel LEDs

We’re on the case!

Although you can run a Raspberry Pi effectively without one (Raspberry Pi co-founder Pete Lomas designed it that way), many people want a case that can protect the single-board computer while offering an attractive design, built-in cooling or even special features. Originally, the Raspberry Pi was not supposed to be contained in anything, but over the years the number of cases available has become almost as numerous as decimal places in the number pi, so choosing the right one for your model and project can be a challenge. There’s no single best Raspberry Pi case for all uses, because what you would want for a media centre is different from what you need for maker projects or extreme overclocking. Some cases can turn the humble SBC into a desktop computer,…

We’re on the case!

Enhance your photos quickly and easily

Who needs another image editor? You’ve got Shotwell for image cataloguing (and the odd bit of editing) at one end of the scale, and at the other there’s GIMP to rival the likes of Photoshop with its powerful array of tools, filters and plugins. But what about those everyday tasks that you’d like to be able to perform without getting bogged down in GIMP’s multi-windowed (and occasionally confusing) user interface? One image editor offering to sit in the gap between the two is Photoflare (https://photoflare.io). Based on a popular Windows image editor called Photofiltre, Photoflare combines user-friendliness and simplicity with a relatively powerful set of features that should cover most everyday needs. If it falls short in certain areas then you can, of course, switch back to GIMP, but otherwise…

Enhance your photos quickly and easily

Set up your smart phone as a webcam

Need a mobile internet protocol (IP) camera, but don’t have the funds to purchase one? Want to make better use of your mobile devices–even the old ones that are gathering dust at the top of the cupboard in the spare room? Then DroidCam is the answer. This tool enables you to link your mobile to your PC so you can access its video camera as a webcam on your desktop. Whether using it to chat with others or even as an additional camera for video creatives (see the box, facing page), DroidCam has you covered. Installation DroidCam exists in two parts: the mobile app that you download from Google Play or Apple’s App Store, and the client software on your PC. This installs a set of drivers–Video4Linux and ALSA loopback–and…

Set up your smart phone as a webcam

Eye spy with my little Pi API…

Artificial intelligence models tend to show surprisingly large amounts of robustness against suboptimal image quality; many images that a human photographer would delete during chimping pass muster when studied from an AI model’s point of view. Due to this, we can get away with using relatively dated hardware–the main computer is a Raspberry Pi 4, while the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2 provides vision features. For reference, the OS used was 2022-09-22-raspios bullseye-armhf-full.img. Each camera module is shipped with a ribbon cable for connection. Be careful not to damage the connectors, as resoldering them requires expensive equipment and is not error-proof. When done, the system should look like the photo (above). There’s a reason why software development theorists compare large software systems to cubes of ballistic gel: the larger a…

Eye spy with my little Pi API…

Organise your fonts and create new ones

Fonts play a crucial role in everyday life, whether you’re designing a newsletter, writing a letter or simply pootling around your desktop. However, with so many installed on your PC (and still you can’t find the right one), how do you go a out maximising your use of them? Let’s start with a quick primer. Fonts exist in a three-level hierarchy. At the bottom are the individual characters, also known as glyphs. Whether letters, numbers or symbols, glyphs share a consistent design and are grouped together into individual fonts or typefaces. Different styles of glyph–such as bold, italics or underline–exist within their own font, and these related typefaces are then grouped together into font families. Typefaces are primarily one of two types: sans serif and serif. Serif fonts include traditional…

Organise your fonts and create new ones

Getting creative with algorithmic art

It has been suggested that creating artwork and computer programming are diametrically opposite. After all, art involves exercising creativity, while coding involves providing a fixed set of instructions that will be followed verbatim. More generally, the divide between the arts and the sciences is often considered unbridgeable. We’d beg to differ as, no doubt, Leonardo da Vinci would have done. As one of history’s best-known polyglots, his achievements included the painting of The Last Super, a mural that can be seen in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, his writings on a wide range of scientific disciplines including anatomy, botany, astronomy, mathematics and geology, plus his many inventions, perhaps most notably flying machines. With such an esteemed artist-cum-scientist as our inspiration, we feel more than justified in…

Getting creative with algorithmic art

Capture and restore old photos and slides

Traditional photos, by which we mean the prints, negatives or slides produced by the chemical processes that predated digital photography by well over 100 years, can be remarkably resilient. In fact, it’s been suggested that, while we might have inherited photos taken by our grandparents or great grandparents, it’s much less likely that today’s digital photos will be available to future generations. Our reference to resilience requires some clarification, because it’s by no means guaranteed. For a start, while black-and-white photos are based on a chemical reaction involving silver halides, which are moderately fade-resistant, the dyes used in colour photography were not nearly as forgiving. And second, even in the realm of black-and-white photography, the resilience assumes that the prints or negatives have been well looked after. In reality, this…

Capture and restore old photos and slides

Track down files and folders instantly

The ability to search your hard drive for files and folders is a critical part of any OS. Ubuntu’s file search exists within the Files tool itself, but it’s very basic. You type all or part of a keyword and the currently selected folder or drive is searched, with any matching results displayed–after a short pause. Eliminating that pause and widening the search to cover more of your storage requires choosing a different search tool–one that’s able to build an index of your files and folders that updates as changes are made, and which provides the search tool with the ability to return results instantaneously. But that’s not all a good search tool should offer. What happens if you only remember part of a name, or aren’t sure what certain…

Track down files and folders instantly

Create better QR codes

QR codes, those two-dimensional barcodes that whisk you off to a web page when you scan them with your phone, have had a chequered history. Invented in the ’90s and used extensively in Japan, their belated introduction to the rest of the world was short-lived before heading for apparent extinction. You’ll probably have noticed, though, that they’re now enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Fuelled by their use during the Covid pandemic–remember having to scan QR codes to enter restaurants and pubs?–we’re now seeing them everywhere as everyone has been trained up to use them. If you own a business, putting a code on your business card or brochure makes it far easier for potential clients to access your website. If you edit a newsletter for your sports team, code club…

Create better QR codes

Recreate classic retro platform games

During the early to mid-’90s, platform games were incredibly popular on game consoles. The king of the platformer was Nintendo and iterations of Mario games were rolled out for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This means that, even today, people still love to play Super Mario Bros and its ilk in a staggering array of variations. For this instalment, we are looking at a Python project created by Marius Bauer (https://github.com/mx0c) that aims to ape the original Super Mario World video game. We’ve modified and adapted the code for the benefit of this tutorial and are using replacement original sprites and game titles to appease the legal eagles. The original (unmodified) source code and resources can be found at the following Git: https://github.com/mx0c/super-mario-python. The aspects of…

Recreate classic retro platform games

Host your own music streaming server

The likes of Spotify may give you access to an almost unlimited library of music, but if you don’t want to pay a subscription, listen to ads or risk losing access to favourite songs, there’s no substitute for owning your own music collection, ensuring you’ll always have access to your favourite “bangers” (as the Radio 1 DJs like to term them). But how do you combine the benefits of streaming music services–easy access to your music from anywhere without having to sync files or flip through CDs–with your own music? The answer lies in building your own streaming music server. Not only does it allow you to store your music in one location and gain easy access to any track, album or artist from a wide range of devices and…

Host your own music streaming server

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