Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, I feel like we entered a new era earlier this year when Google scientist Blake Lemoine declared that he thought Google’s LaMDA artificial intelligence is “sentient,” and that the company should probably be asking LaMDA’s permission before studying it. The news this month is that Google fired Lemoine. The stated reason was that he violated a confidentiality agreement, but few observers could separate the termination from Lemoine’s announcement and the controversy that followed. Let me explain, I don’t think this story is important because the computer was sentient – in fact, I’m quite sure it wasn’t. I just find it strange that we’re even talking about it, and the way we’re talking about it is even stranger. Several leading computer scientists, and Google as a company, have gone…

After a lengthy shipping delay caused by COVID-19 limitations in China, the ARM-based 14" Pinebook Prolaptop is available again from Pine64. The device ships with a 64-bit Dual-Core ARM 1.8GHz Cortex A72 and Quad-Core ARM 1.4GHz Cortex A53, with a Quad-Core MALI T-860 GPU, 4GB LPDDR4 dual-channel system DRAM, and 64GB eMMC 5.0 internal storage. The Pinebook Pro 14" audience mostly focuses on those who want to experiment with Linux on ARM devices. In fact, Pine64 goes so far as to say, “Please do not order the Pinebook Pro if you’re seeking a substitute for your X86 laptop, or are just curious and you’re ordering it with an intent to file a return/refund return request. These pre-orders are meant for enthusiasts familiar with the ARM architecture and interested in the…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN HPC http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/ Sharing a Linux Terminal Over the Web • Jeff Layton The ability to share a terminal over the web could multiply the effectiveness of admins and users. The tty-share tool might be the answer. Sharing Linux Terminals • Jeff Layton Sometimes sharing a screen between two users is enormously helpful. We look at two terminal sharing tools: screen and tmux. ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Load testing with Locust • Matthias Wübbeling The Locust load test tool assesses the resiliency of your infrastructure to help you determine whether it can withstand a flood of requests. Remote maintenance and automation with RPort • Thorsten Kramm Firewalls and network address translation often stand in the way of access to remote systems, but the free RPort software works around…

Chasing the Dream Liam Howlett, speaking for himself and Matthew Wilcox, recently announced the Maple Tree, which he wished to have included in Linux. Andrew Morton asked for a nice explanation of what the Maple Tree was. So, despite whatever lovely pastoral scene you might have envisioned would come next, Liam actually said, “the maple tree is an RCU-safe range based B-tree designed to use modern processor cache efficiently.” A B-tree is a data structure designed to let the user find and retrieve big pieces of data extremely efficiently. The “tree” in the name refers to a branching search path, where you ditch the wrong paths and narrow down the remaining search quickly. This is similar to the fun guessing game, where one person picks a secret number between 1…

At first sight, KOReader [1] looks disappointingly bare bones. But behind its unassuming interface hides a powerful application with an impressive array of features, from extensive gesture support to a built-in SSH server. Combined with a handful of hacks and a bit of creative thinking, you can use KOReader to unlock the full potential of your ebook reading device. Installing KOReader Although KOReader is available as an Android app and a Linux desktop application, its natural habitat is e-ink devices. How you install KOReader depends entirely on the ebook reader you have. Fortunately, the project’s wiki [2] provides detailed installation instructions for all supported devices. Normally, installing KOReader requires copying files in the appropriate directories in the ebook reader’s filesystem, so the process requires neither deep technical knowledge nor effort.…

We are always looking for good articles on Linux and the tools of the Linux environment. Although we will consider any topic, the following themes are of special interest: • System administration• Useful tips and tools• Security, both news and techniques• Product reviews, especially from real-world experience• Community news and projects If you have an idea, send a proposal with an outline, an estimate of the length, a description of your background, and contact information to edit@linux-magazine.com. The technical level of the article should be consistent with what you normally read in Linux Magazine. Remember that Linux Magazine is read in many countries, and your article may be translated into one of our sister publications. Therefore, it is best to avoid using slang and idioms that might not be understood…

Once upon a time, I hung out with the Mandrake Linux team at a Linux convention. That was back in the late 1990s, and things have changed quite a bit since then. Mandrake Linux ceased being developed in 2011. Arising from the its ashes, OpenMandriva, a fusion of the Brazilian Connectiva Linux and Mandrake, has since flourished. Recently, the OpenMandriva developers have announced the latest technical preview release of their Lx ROME distribution, which is a rolling release take on the open source operating system. One thing of note is that the developers have switched off the auto-updater tool for ROME because they’ve been making some major changes to the tool-chain/system packages in the Cooker branch. These changes have resulted in updates being unsafe (which is why the tool was…

With the release of Firefox 103, a few new additions are aimed at greatly improving the experience of some users. One of the biggest additions to the open source web browser is two-finger horizontal swipe gesture support for navigating back and forward with a trackpad. This feature has been in the works for some time and is now seeing the light of day. However, there is a caveat to the new addition. The developers’ goal was to have the feature fully supported with version 103; however, upon release, the only way to use the two-finger swipe gesture is to first press and hold the Alt key on your keyboard. Hopefully, somewhere in the next few updates, that requirement will be removed and the feature will work exactly as expected. Other…

The ImageMagick image processing tool is one of the gems of the open source toolkit. You can use ImageMagick to tweak images from the command line. If you have a collection of digital photos and they all need the same tweak, why slow down for a GUI when you can fix them all using ImageMagick. But ImageMagick can do more than just edit images. This month we bring you a tutorial on drawing images from scratch using ImageMagick and simple scripts. Also this month, we delve into the KOReader ebook reader, and we introduce you to the classic Linux strategy game 0 A.D. ELVIE…

Order online: https://bit.ly/Linux-Newsstand #262/September 2022 Beyond 5G Behind the scenes, the cellular phone network has always been the preserve of highly specialized and proprietary equipment, but some recent innovations could be changing that. This month we explore the Open RAN specification, which could one day allow more of the mobile phone network to operate on off-the-shelf hardware. On the DVD: openSUSE Leap 15.4 and MX Linux 21.1 #261/August 2022 USB Boot Live boot was such an exciting idea 15 years ago – just carry a CD with you and boot from anywhere. But old-style boot CDs had some limitations. Today’s USB boot tools solve those problems plus offer a feature that no one even thought about back then: access to several boot images on a single stick. On the DVD: Linux…

Kali Linux has been one of the most widely-used penetration testing Linux distributions on the market. With a vast number of preinstalled tools available, security experts and pen testers can use the platform to uncover just about any vulnerability or weakness on your network. The 2022.3 release, has a few new tricks up its sleeve, including a new VirtualBox image format, weekly images, and build scripts (so you can roll your own); new Net-Hunter updates; and five new tools, which are BruteShark (a network analysis tool), DefectDojo (an open source application vulnerability correlation and security orchestration tool), phpsploit (a post-exploitation framework), shellfire (a tool for exploiting LFI/RFI and command injection vulnerabilities), and SprayingToolkit (a tool for testing password spraying attacks). Another addition to Kali Linux is their new Discord server…

Linux Mint 21 has arrived and it includes some interesting updates and features that will please both new and previous users alike. One big addition is the new upgrade tool that makes it even easier to upgrade to a major version with just a few clicks of a graphical tool. The new updater displays packages that have been upgraded, as well as those that won’t, and reports if any PPAs will no longer be supported in the new version. Linux Mint 21 also ships with a new Bluetooth application, Blueman, and the BlueZ back end. This was done for two reasons. First, Blueman is a superior application. The second reason is explained by Clement Lefebvre (Linux Mint lead developer) when he said in a blog post back in March (https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4285):…

Linux hardware vendor System76 has announced an update to their Oryx Pro laptop computer. The Oryx Pro, which is a popular option for gaming as well as artificial intelligence/machine learning, comes with a new 12th Gen Intel CPU boasting 14 cores and 20 threads running between 1.7 to 4.7GHz. System76 has also made it so you can configure the Oryx Pro with either NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti or 3080 Ti graphics (along with the RTX 3070 and 3080 that were previously available). The Oryx Pro includes a 15.6" or 17.3" FHD (1920x1080) matte finish display, up to 64GB dual-channel DDR4, and up to 4TB M.2 PCIe Gen4x4 internal storage. As for ports/expansion, the Oryx Pro includes 1 Thunderbolt 4, 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1, 1 USB 3.2 Gen 2, and…

Jon “maddog” Hall is an author, educator, computer scientist, and free software pioneer who has been a passionate advocate for Linux since 1994 when he first met Linus Torvalds and facilitated the port of Linux to a 64-bit system. He serves as president of Linux International®. Sorting and Searching When I started programming in 1969, even mainframe computers from IBM might have had only 1MB of main memory and two or three disk drives that were measured in hundreds of megabytes, with multitrack tape drives that would supplement that storage. Any type of parallelism in programming typically stressed the goal of keeping the data that you needed coming into main memory, while you were also trying to get the processed data out to “stable storage,” either to a disk or…

Free Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of and Open Source Software Ear bender Cecilia 5 We’ve looked at esoteric audio manipulation software in the past, but there has been nothing to compare with Cecilia. It’s like a concrete bunker for sound exploration with a user interface designed for a nuclear power station. It’s probably capable of emulating the sound of a nuclear meltdown, too. In fact, one of its best uses is to generate sound effects, although it’s equally capable of producing musical or soothing sounds. Cecilia is a desktop application designed for audio manipulation and, at a basic level, it loads a sound and allows you to process that sound with various modules. There are dozens of modules, and they vary hugely in what they do.…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to info@linux-magazine.com. NOTICE Be sure to check the event website before booking any travel, as many events are being canceled or converted to virtual events due to the effects of COVID-19. Akademy Date: October 1-7, 2022 Location: Barcelona, Spain and Virtual Website: https://akademy.kde.org/2022 Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the…

Preview Newsletter The Linux Magazine Preview is a monthly email newsletter that gives you a sneak peek at the next issue, including links to articles posted online. Sign up at: https://bit.ly/Linux-Update Approximate UK / Europe Oct 08 USA / Canada Nov 04 Australia Dec 05 On Sale Date Please note: On sale dates are approximate and may be delayed because of logistical issues.…