Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i Linux Magazine

The developers of Debian have been hard at work patching several security vulnerabilities and fixing bugs for the latest point release of their venerable Linux distribution. This new release fixes numerous security issues surrounding Apache’s Log4j (such as CVE-2021-4104, CVE-2022-23302, CVE-2022-23305, and CVE-2022-23307) and includes other security patches for the likes of ClamAV, FLAC, GLibc, Golong, XTerm, atftp, eguardian, glewlwyd, gnupg2, and htmldoc. Although this release doesn’t bring to light any new features, it’s still a very important release, and all Debian 11 users should not hesitate to upgrade (especially those who use Debian with the Apache webserver). The 11.3 release ships with kernel 5-10.0-13, which is patched against the Dirty Pipe vulnerability. As far as user-facing software, it’s important to remember that Debian focuses primarily on stability, so many…

At 25 years of age, the Xfce desktop is a veritable dinosaur among Linux work environments. While this lean and fast desktop is still great when it comes to saving resources, visually, the Xfce interface is starting to show it age despite a couple of overhauls. In addition, Xfce has fallen behind KDE Plasma and Gnome in terms of configuration options. Twister UI [1] changes all that. Specially designed for Xfce, Twister UI visually enhances the Xfce desktop while showcasing the potential of this old-timer interface. Installation Twister UI is available for download from the Pi Labs project page [2]. The developers offer three binary packages: one for 32-bit hardware (Xubuntu/​Linux Mint), and two for 64-bit environments (Xubuntu/​Linux Mint and Manjaro Linux). After downloading a package, you first need make…

Most businesses in the manufacturing sector adopt some form of centralized software that records and retrieves data from various departments within the organization for purposes of metrics and financial reporting. This software is collectively called “Enterprise Resource Planning” (ERP). ERP software is ubiquitous throughout modern manufacturing industries and constitutes a total enterprise solution that governs most, if not all, aspects of daily business activity – from inventory control to financial accounting. Today’s ERPs have a much larger scope of application compared to their predecessors (see the box entitled “A Brief History of ERP”). Beyond accounting and materials management, current ERPs offer solutions for other departmental operations within an organization, such as sales and marketing, supply chain management, human resources management (HRM), customer relations management (CRM), asset management, and many other…

Tiling desktops are graphical environments in which windows open in a grid. They appeared early in Linux’s history and have always had a few followers, especially among developers. For much of the past two decades, though, tiling desktops were ignored in the efforts to mimic Windows and macOS and to improve usability. However, in recent years, tiling desktops have become more popular, most likely because modern computing power means that more users are working with more windows open. Today, users can choose from a variety of tiling desktops. Some have been around for years, and others are more recent. The idea behind tiling desktops is to reduce clutter on the desktop and make windows easier to find. By contrast, the standard or stacking desktop becomes less orderly with each open…

This is a bit of an odd one for FOSSPicks because it’s not purely a standalone utility, application, or server. Rich is primarily a thirdparty library for Python programmers that helps them create beautiful text-based output. If you’re any kind of Python programmer, you’ll know there are probably dozens of such libraries, so what makes this one special? It’s wonderfully engineered and documented and can easily be used by any script programmer who might have more ambitious plans for their output. All you need to do is create a console object within your code and use this to print whatever output you require. The formatting comes from using Rich’s “renderables,” which is a library of objects that can be used to easily format tables, progress bars, tree views, columns, Markdown,…

Back in the days before the World Wide Web, back when BBSs were common and, if you were lucky, the Internet was accessible via dial-up, downloading large files was difficult. There were several reasons for this, but the most important one was that it was hard to maintain a slow connection for a long period of time. Combine this with the popularity of sharing files on Usenet, and it became common to split large files into smaller files that could later be recombined or stored across several floppy disks. The brilliantly named horcrux is a modern version of the same functionality, only this time designed specifically to help keep your files secure with encryption. Horcrux is a command-line tool that’s been designed to offer a form of secure encryption without…

One of the most unique things about Ambermoon (above) was that, when it was originally released in 1993 on the Amiga, it was able to create a 3D texture-mapped view for the player as they walked around dungeons and cities. Unlike on the PC, this was a difficult trick for the Amiga to pull off, and Amiga fans at the time were desperate to see games similar to Wolfenstein-3D, which had come out the year before on the PC. But even then, 3D first-person views had been around for almost forever, despite the relatively complex mathematics required to calculate the view. Even the humble Sinclair ZX81, with its meager 16KB of RAM, ran a game called 3D Monster Maze, and most home computers of the ‘80s had their equivalents. This…

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Zorin OS 16.1 Core 64-bit Based in Ireland, Zorin OS is a commercial Ubuntu derivative founded by two brothers, Artyom and Kyrill Zorin. In its 13 years of existence, Zorin OS has gained admirers for its minimalist aesthetics. It compares favorably to distros such as Deepin and elementary OS. In particular, Zorin OS is noted for the Zorin Appearance app, a collection of skins that imitate the appearance of other operating systems and distributions. This month’s DVD incudes Zorin OS 16.1 Core, a free download version of the distribution. Its version of Zorin Appearance includes skins for Windows, Windows List, the mobile-device-like Touch, and Gnome Shell, as well as the default modified Xfce desktop. Zorin Appearance aims to ease the transition to Linux by providing a familiar-looking desktop. This intent…

In the third year of the coronavirus pandemic, it has now long been clear that many companies are likely to remember the virus as beneficial to their own business. VPN solution vendors definitely fall into this category: When home office and teleworking mutated from the exception to the rule in many companies, existing VPN solutions became substantially more in-demand. Hardly anyone expected the load on the VPN gateways to explode overnight. The large network manufacturers were happy to help out their customers as many admins purchased more powerful systems for OpenVPN (Figure 1). But do VPNs really solve the problem of network security? Many experts are not so sure. Implicitly, all parties involved with VPNs start from the following premise: There is a difference between the internal and the external…

Data analytics is a major force in the current zeitgeist. Analytics are the eyes and ears on a very wide variety of domains (society, climate, health, etc.) to perform an even wider variety of tasks (such as understanding commercial trends, the spread of COVID-19, and finding exoplanets). In this article, I will discuss some fundamentals of data analytics and show how to get started with analytics in Python. Finally, I will show the whole process at work on a simple data analytics problem. A Primer on Data Analytics Data analytics uses tools from statistics and computer science (CS), such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to extract information from collected data. The collected data is usually very complex and voluminous, and it cannot be interpreted easily (or at…

Snort [1] is one of the oldest and most reliable network intrusion detection systems. Founded in 1998 by Martin Roesch, then the CTO of Sourcefire, Snort quickly became so popular that in 2009 InfoWorld declared it one of the top 36 pieces of free software [2]. Like the definitions in a virus detector, Snort relies on a series of rules to detect all known means of compromising a system. It is not difficult to install, but it requires preparation, and, the more customization, the more timeconsuming your installation will be. What follows are instructions for a minimal installation for Debian-like distributions, which should be good enough for many users, especially on standalone machines. To get the very latest protection, install Snort from source [3], using the usual. /configure, make, and…

Assembler programs run directly on the computer’s hardware, which means they can reach nearly the maximum achievable speed of execution. Because assembler program code is very low level, writing the code is more complicated, but it is still the best choice for some tasks, especially on a computer such as the Raspberry Pi with its limited resources. Before you can start creating programs, however, you need to plumb the depths of the CPU and peripheral architecture. Machine Code To begin, it makes sense to clarify some terms. The CPU only understands machine code – zeros and ones or, more precisely, voltage levels that represent zeros and ones. Each command in machine code has a human-readable abbreviation that is easy to remember. These abbreviations are known as mnemonics and act as…

This wouldn’t be FOS-SPicks without some form of system-monitoring tool. And while we usually look at new and shiny monitoring tools as they appear, Conky has been around for a while. It was featured in this very magazine back in 2009, and it has since continued to develop and add new features and many new users. This means it’s more mature than the typical monitor, benefiting from the stability and efficiency that comes from an established project, as well as from an active community sharing tips and configuration files. This community is important because Conky’s best feature is its incredible flexibility – Conky can be whatever monitoring tool you want it to be. There is a default layout, but no one uses it. Instead, most of us use Conky to…

As much as we’d like to write that this is a recreation of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, famously used by the band A-ha on their pop hit “Take On Me” in 1985, we can’t, because it isn’t. This aha is instead almost the inverse of Rich (above) because it takes colorized terminal output as an input and converts it into HTML for publishing online. ANSI color and layout is included in the output, alongside any text styles and formatting, making the resultant HTML a surprisingly effective visualization of command output, and the source of a decent local hosting service. This might sound like a simple process, but aha does this in such a useful way that after using it for a few things, you quickly start to think of many…

Back in the days when the Internet was a lot slower for most of us, and a lot less consistent, download managers used to be a thing. These were separate applications you could launch to offload your download duties, such as grabbing the latest distribution ISO, or a suite of links off a web page. There were many to choose from, all with features such as bandwidth limiting, or server load balancing, suspend and resume, and destination folder determination based on download type. The combination of broadband Internet and modern browsers have mostly replaced these requirements with browser functions. Because we typically always run a browser, it’s now acceptable to leave the browser running while things download in the background. But there are still many reasons for running a download…

The years 2008-2012 marked an era of innovation for the Linux desktop: Gnome and KDE introduced radically new desktops, and Ubuntu developed Unity. However, the innovations were too much for many users. By the time development of Unity stopped altogether in October 2017, desktop developers had long since become more cautious. The age of bold experimentation seemed to be over. However, Ubuntu’s switch from Unity back to Gnome immediately inspired the creation of Pop!_OS by System76, a company best-known for its Linux laptops and workstations [1]. Now, five years later, Pop!_OS has gained a reputation for innovation, particularly for the small enhancements in its installer, the modifications of Gnome and Ubuntu, and, most importantly, an option for the easiest tiling desktop yet. Jeremy Soller, Pop!_OS’s principal engineer, remembers: “When Ubuntu…

The Python environment consists of several important elements, including the Python interpreter, the package manager, the shell, and the virtual environment manager. The interpreter is the virtual machine that reads and executes the code. A Python interpreter is usually present in most Linux distributions by default. Although most users rely on the vanilla interpreter (CPython), there are several alternative, specialized interpreters, such as Jython (integrated with the Java VM), PyPy (more performant than vanilla Python), or MicroPython (geared towards microcontrollers). Due to compatibility with libraries, vanilla Python is recommended for most of the tasks. The package manager downloads and installs libraries that can be used to extend the basic functionality of Python. The default package manager is called pip, and it has an online repository of more than 300,000 libraries…

You’ve probably come across strange posts on various social media platforms recently where users have shared images of what at first glance appears to be a very simple word game. Typically, you’ll see a grid of five by six boxes colored either gray, yellow, or green populated by fiveletter words that don’t seem to have anything in common. If you’ve steered clear of the hype so far, this phenomenon goes by the name of Wordle [1]. Launched in October 2021, the free and currently ad-free Wordle was quickly acquired by The New York Times Company from US software developer Josh Wardle for a “low seven-figure sum” – rumors on the web claim the actual sum was $6 million [2]. To solve Wordle puzzles, you need an extensive vocabulary. If you…

An application opening a connection to the Internet is a normal procedure and typically completely legitimate, but there are programs – even open source applications – that like to phone home or track the user. On Linux, there is usually an opt-in step – you have to actively agree to the data collection. Often, the collected data relates to telemetry functions and gives the developers information about a user’s interaction with their program. However, open source does not always protect you against being investigated. In Firefox, you have to actively opt out of sending telemetry stats if you do not want this to happen. An application firewall can reveal what’s going on behind the user’s back. While conventional firewalls examine the data flow packets to and from the CPU, an…

If you use your Raspberry Pi to control sensors or displays, you will frequently have to deal with wiring problems or resort to using a soldering iron. Plug-and-play systems such as Adafruit STEMMA-QT [1], Seeed Grove [2], SparkFun Qwiic [3], and DFRobot Gravity [4] provide connection systems for electronic components. A system recently introduced by Tinkerforge [5] can also be plugged together, but it plays in a different league, because it comes with an additional microcontroller for management tasks on each module. The systems I will discuss in this article offer special cable connections on the devices (Figure 1). Common to all systems are reverse-polarity-proof connectors and symmetrical cables. In other words, the cable has connectors that look identical on both sides, but they are not the same internally and…

Duplicate file removing tools are a niche but long-lived software category, especially on Windows where there’s a small cottage industry selling utilities to do exactly this. Similar tools exist on Linux, such as rdfind, fslint, and dupeguru, but they’re seldom updated and can feel slow and cumbersome on modern systems. This leaves many of us to either create our own commandline incantations or simply kick the problem into the future with more storage. Czkawka, however, is a modern duplicate file remover that will feel familiar, while also being modern, fast, and efficient. This modernness and efficiency, like many recent projects, comes from being built with Rust. Even if you keep tight control of your filesystem, Czkawka still finds duplicates and provides the perfect options for managing them. There’s both a…

QR codes, despite a slow start, have become ubiquitous. They’re now used for everything almost everywhere, from restaurant opening times to NFT ownership. And very much like NFTs, they don’t actually store anything more useful than a URL; username; or a long, difficult-tocopy hash code, with a typical data limit of around 3KB. They’re successful because scanning a QR code is more convenient than copying a long unique URL manually or relying on OCR to automatically extract the data from text. If only they weren’t so boring to look at! And this is where Amazing-QR can help. Amazing-QR is a small Python utility that can encode any data you provide into a self-generated QR code that it saves by default as a PNG file. The X and Y pixel size…

Released a year after the Amiga 1200 in 1993, Ambermoon was an amazing role-playing game that could take full advantage of the Amiga’s capabilities and maturity. It featured beautifully handdrawn graphics, and both a topdown mode for adventure views and a 3D first-person mode for dungeons and cities. The sound was also wonderfully evocative of the era, full of 8-bit wholesomeness. But of course, that era has never particularly left us, and it could be argued that the gameplay, sound, and aesthetics of that time are now more broadly popular than they ever were in the 1980s and 1990s. Which leads us to this brilliant recreation of the original Ambermoon for our modern Linux systems, imaginatively called “Ambermoon.net” because it’s been rewritten in the language of. NET (C#). The download…