Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, So much of the big news these days is all about AI. AI advances, AI politics, AI corporate maneuvering, AI power usage … I was feeling a bit downcast about the prospect of writing yet another AI column when, in fact, there isn’t that much I can say in one page that isn’t either speculation or well-trodden platitudes. Then I noticed a news item that swung the other way, into the deep, retro past: Picture the oldest PC-style home computer you can remember, maybe the first computer your father brought home? The BBC website recently posted an article on contemporary uses for really ancient Windows computer systems [1], and I’m not just talking about people logging onto a home PC to write a letter. I mean actual production…

The development team behind Flatpak has unveiled the latest iteration of the universal package manager, which includes a number of enhancements. One of the biggest improvements comes by way of parental control enhancements. With the latest release, child accounts are now able to update existing applications, by default, when parental controls are enabled. Thanks to this addition, the installation of security and bug fix updates can be installed in a more timely manner. The release also includes a number of performance and system management improvements, such as the flatpak prune --dry-run command now runs much faster because it skips unnecessary calculations that are related to potential disk space recovery. Another improvement comes by way of the flatpak permission-reset command. Now, the command will only write entries that have actually changed,…

For some time, the KDE Plasma developers have offered Long Term Support releases for the venerable desktop environment. However, Nate Graham recently posted (https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-plasma-sprint/?ref=news.itsfoss.com) about the status of Plasma LTS, stating that, “It’s no secret that our Plasma LTS (“Long-Term Support”) product isn’t great. It really only means we backport bug-fixes for longer than usual – usually without even testing them, since no Plasma developers enjoy living on or testing old branches.” Graham adds, “And there’s no corresponding LTS product for Frameworks or Gear apps, leaving a lot of holes in the LTS umbrella.” Graham also goes on to mention that LTS means different things to different people. In the end, it’s problematic for the development team to continue with the LTS releases. And given how quickly Plasma development has…

Good news, OpenMandriva fans, version 6.0 is now available for download and installation, and there’s plenty to be excited about. For starters, this is the first time the developers have released a server edition into the mix. This new edition includes a minimal set of applications, a pre-configured user, support for cloud-init, and more. This version is available for the following architectures: x86_64 (64-bit), AArch64 (ARM64) with UEFI support, and AMD Zen (EPYC, Threadripper, Ryzen). As for the desktop releases, you’ll find kernel 6.14, Plasma 6.3, KDE Gear 25.04, and spins for Gnome 48.1, LXQt 2.2, Xfce 4.20, and COSMIC 1.0 alpha. On the Plasma side of things, you’ll find both X11 and Wayland available. If you plan on running OpenMandriva as a VirtualBox guest, the developers strongly suggest using…

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Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software The Battle for Open Source The US government contributes a lot to open source development. In 2024, the Tor Project received around half a million dollars, while Let’s Encrypt was given roughly $800,000. Traditionally, the funding is done through the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which in turn donates to the Open Technology Fund (OTF). Unfortunately, the OTF has been the latest casualty of the White House’s efficiency drive. In a statement by USAGM executive CEO Kari Lake, the OTF was declared a “huge rot and burden on the American taxpayer” and funding was cut, leading to an ongoing lawsuit. As I was reading through the comments on this story in the r/​linux subreddit, I…

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. OpenSouthCode 2025 Date: June 20-21, 2025 Location: Málaga, Spain Website: https://www.opensouthcode.org/ OpenSouthCode, Southern Europe’s leading free software, hardware, and open culture event returns. Join us in Málaga on June 20–21, featuring UbuCon and the KDE Community. Learn, share, and connect with a passionate community. Register now for free! GUADEC Date: July 24-29, 2025 Location: Brescia, Italy  Website: https://guadec.org GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference. Join us in Brescia,…

Available Starting July 11 Computers have a way of getting cluttered – with temporary files, download files, log files, cache files, orphaned process files, and lots more. Once in a while, it is a good idea to tidy up. Next month we show you some housekeeping tools and strategies. Also inside: • Storing Secrets with v02enc• Monitoring AMD GPUs• Inform: Interactive Fiction on Linux• Console Games with ChimeraOS• And much more! Please note: Articles could change before the next issue. BE THE FIRST TO SEE WHAT’S NEXT 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…

A new Linux server is now available from IBM, the LinuxONE Emperor 5, and it’s going to turn heads. The new server makes use of the Telum II CPU with built-in AI acceleration, as well as the IBM Spyre PCIe accelerator cards to help power the AI capabilities of the new server. According to the official IBM release statement (https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/blogs/tina-tarquinio1/2025/05/06/the-next-generation-of-ibm-linuxone), “Confidential computing, significant crypto bandwidth, NIST-standardized post quantum algorithms, and cutting-edge hardware security module make LinuxONE 5 a compelling solution for end-to-end protection of workloads and data. This advanced level of security can help clients prepare for existing and emerging threats such as harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks in the post-quantum age.” This new server has been engineered specifically to help address the cost, space, and energy challenges that surround AI, such…

Robin Candau (https://antiz.fr/) recently announced that Arch Linux is now available to use within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Until recently, the only distributions available to WSL included Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Remix, openSUSE, Kali Linux, and Pengwin, so Arch Linux will be a welcome addition to many who’ve been hoping to either try the rolling release distro or develop for it. Candau, the official maintainer of the Arch WSL image, is building and releasing new versions monthly via GitLab CI/CD. The goal is to provide a complete system that offers the usual Arch Linux experience. For those who are looking to run a full-blown desktop environment with Arch Linux, you’ll need WSL 2 installed (because the original WSL doesn’t support GUI apps). Candau also warns that as soon as Arch…

The latest version of TrueNAS has arrived, and it’ll no longer confuse you with CORE and SCALE versions. Instead, the company behind TrueNAS has merged these versions into one release, TrueNAS 25.04. This new release (Fangtooth) is built on the foundation of Electric Eel (True-NAS 24.10) and includes features such as the Linux kernel 6.12, fast deduplication, 5X acceleration of the RAID-Z expansion process, LXC containers (and Qemu/KVM virtualization) via Incus instances, configurable IP addresses for newly added apps, and more. There are also several new enterprise extensions, including improved security (GPOS STIC), RDMA extensions for improved latency on iSCSI and NFS, iSCSI block cloning, fast file copy, fiber channel support for enterprise SANs, and NFS access to snapshot directories. According to the TrueNAS official announcement, “If you are deploying…

The final USENIX ATC Recently, a long-time friend and fellow Bell Labs alum made a comment on my Facebook page about the 50th (and last) Annual Technical Conference (ATC) of the USENIX (usenix.org) organization. For those of you not familiar with the USENIX organization, they encourage research in advanced computing systems. While often this was oriented around Unix and Unix-like systems, they also encouraged research in other operating systems, concentrating on memory management, new filesystems, networking, and other elements. They encouraged peer-reviewed research papers and bringing these papers to conferences that were open to all. For a while, they charged to access these papers, but in 2008 they opened up the papers to all over the Internet. They also offered very focused conferences. Conferences on security and privacy. One of…

Ican think of two really important things web users worldwide can do right now to preserve their sanity and make the world a better place. One is self-hosting their online life with Nextcloud [1][2]. The other, which might be even more urgent for many people, is to start getting online news from reputable media outlets through healthy RSS aggregators instead of from toxic social media. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to access RSS news feeds using FreshRSS [3], a multi-user open source RSS aggregator. Why RSS Really Simple Syndication, or RSS [4], is the most efficient, most self-respectful way to keep up with the day’s news. Even if social media platforms weren’t deliberately engaged in profiling every user for profits, social media would not be an adequate source…

If you’ve not heard of it yet, End of 10 (https://endof10.org/) is a collective of developers and others who are trying to help Windows 10 transition to Linux. With the Windows 10 end-of-life (EOL) on the horizon, it was only matter of time before something like this arrived onto the scene. From the End of 10 site comes this gem: “If you bought your computer after 2010, there’s most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.” Recently, it was announced that openSUSE would be joining the initiative. In fact, openSUSE has decided to transition its Upgrade to Freedom campaign to the End of 10 movement (https://news.opensuse.org/2025/05/05/utf-campaign-shifts-to-eot/). Douglas DeMaio says, “A new initiative called…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Flipper Zero Mobile Hacking Tool • Holger Reibold The Flipper Zero mobile hacking tool can check a wide range of wireless connections for vulnerabilities. Rootless Podman Containers • Koen Vervloesem Running rootless containers is easy with Podman. With Podman Quadlet files, these containers are seamlessly integrated into systemd services. Kick-Start Your AI Projects • Martin Loschwitz Training language models and AI algorithms requires a powerful infrastructure that is difficult to create manually. Although Kubeflow promises a remedy, it is itself a complex monster … unless you are familiar with the right approach that lets you get it up and running fairly quickly. Reducing the Attack Surface in Windows • Matthias Wübbeling Windows has built-in rules that minimize the attack surface; they simply need to…

System76 has released the latest alpha version of its COSMIC desktop with plenty of bug fixes and features. First off, there’s the usual round of bug fixes that help bring even more stability and reliability to the desktop. But this isn’t just about squashing bugs, because Alpha 7 has a few new tricks up its sleeve. For example, there’s the newly minted ability to not only click and drag a workspace to reorder it, but you can also pin a workspace so it can’t be moved. Then there are the new accessibility features, including high contrast mode, color filters, color inversion, and mono sound. The desktop magnifier has also been improved such that both the overlay and Super + Scroll can be disabled, as well as various improvements. COSMIC also…

Kernel Efficiency Improvements Sometimes the Linux folks will struggle to eke out a few microseconds of speedup in some part of the kernel or other. These efficiency improvements may not seem to matter to the average user, but they do add up. They can mean the difference between hours and days to larger organizations constantly doing massive computations. At the same time, the question of where a given improvement should be made – in the kernel itself, in the C compiler, or elsewhere in the toolchain – may also mean the difference between a tight clean solution and a complex and easily breakable one. Recently, Mateusz Guzik noticed that “The kernel is chock full of inlined rep movsq and rep stosq, including in hot paths and these are known to…

You may have wondered what kind of magic it takes for, say, a WhatsApp or Slack chat open in your web browser to respond so quickly to new input from your chat partner, or to show that your partner is typing … even before the message has been sent (Figure 1)? To do that, the browser at least needs to partially reload the page you are viewing, but how does it know when to do so? In the simplest of cases, the browser could just periodically ask the server, but that would generate unnecessary network traffic – after all, nothing would have changed most of the time. This also would cause periodic flickering of what was a largely static page, which would look pretty unprofessional. For a better approach, you…

In this article, I’ll introduce you to NAPS2 (short for Not Another PDF Scanner) – a versatile open source application for document scanning that works across multiple platforms. First and foremost, NAPS2 was designed with ease of use in mind, and it supports various scanner interfaces, including WIA, TWAIN, SANE, and eSCL (more on SANE and eSCL shortly). Users can organize scanned pages as needed and export them in formats such as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, or PNG, and the software also includes OCR functionality for text recognition. Besides its straightforward graphical interface, NAPS2 can be operated via the command line, and it features a developer library for integration into other applications. Among those, Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) serves as an open source framework and API for managing image scanners…

#295/June 2025 GRUB GUIs Customizing the Linux boot process requires a dive into GRUB. If you’re the type who likes to go spelunking through documentation, you can get by with tweaking the config files, but a GRUB GUI tool is a safer and simpler route. On the DVD: Zorin OS 17.3 Core and elementary OS 8.0 Stable #294/May 2025 Secure Browsers The Internet is much nosier than it used to be, and many believe leading browsers like Chrome and Firefox are part of the problem. This month we highlight some secure browser alternatives that will help you surf without leaving a trail. On the DVD: Rocky Linux 9.5 and SystemRescue 11.03 #293/April 2025 Trojan Horse We’re all taught to fear Trojan horse programs, but what are they really? This month…