Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, Several years ago, the Linux crowd was spending a lot of time waiting for Linux to arrive and explode onto the general PC consumer market. Every year was supposed to be “the year of the Linux desktop.” Ubuntu, in particular, had grand ambitions to be the operating system of the future and cultivated a flashy in-crowd image much like Apple did. But this ascendancy never really worked out like we thought (or hoped) it would. One reason was that, despite the settlement of the Microsoft antitrust case, Microsoft and Apple still had their own sneaky little ways of staying in control. Another reason was that, admittedly, Linux’s persistent aversion to standardization made it difficult for the public to understand and for the industry to deal with. Eventually everyone…

After more than a year of work, Wayland 1.24 is now available for download, complete with new features, fixes, and improvements. This latest release is all about maturity and stability, as well as optimizing resource management. Wayland 1.24 adds improvements for keyboard and event handling, but the majority of the changes are found in associated protocols and compositors. Highlights include a new wl_keyboard repeated state that gives control to the compositors for key repeats, an important improvement for any situation where precise keyboard management is required; the introduction of wl_display_dispatch_queue_timeout() and wl_dis play_dispatch_timeout(), both of which are used to allow more control for dispatching events; and wl_shm_buffer_ref() and wl_shm_buffer_unref(), which allow access to the wl_shm_buffer storage, even after a protocol object is discarded. Although Wayland 1.24 has been made available…

Linux Magazine www.linux-magazine.com ADMIN Online http://www.admin-magazine.com/ Data Protection Techniques • Daniel Richey Data anonymization and pseudonymization are two key techniques that ensure privacy while enabling the use of data for analysis and decision making; the two methods offer different approaches that vary as a function of use case. Logger in HPC System Administration • Jeff Layton Store user-specified messages in syslog with logger. Using the Purdue Model • Gerd Pflüger The Purdue Model maps the challenges of networking industrial systems to five levels, helping to target and mitigate risk and address vulnerabilities. Windows Hardware Diagnostic Tools • Thomas Bär and Frank-Michael Schlede We look at one Windows onboard tool, five free tools, and a commercial tool to discover hardware installed on a Windows computer and determine whether it is still…

TUXEDO Computers has been hard at work to create a new notebook that is ready for just about any need. The InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 300 with up to 12 cores and 24 threads and an AMD Radeon 800M GPU. Besides the powerhouse CPU/GPU combo, the InfinityBook Pro also offers a 14-inch Omnia IPS display with a 16:10 ratio, matte/non-glare screen, a viewing angle of 89/89/89/89 degrees, a refresh rate of 120Hz, a resolution of 2880x1800, an sRGB color gamut of 100 percent, a brightness of 500 nits, and a contrast ratio of 1500:1. You also get DDR5-5600 dual-channel RAM up to 128GB and 2x M.2 2280 for NVMe (PCI-Express 4.0 x4) storage. The InfinityBook Pro isn’t just about power, it’s also about…

Nearly all major Linux distributions are vulnerable to a couple of sudo bugs. The two vulnerabilities are CVE-2025-32462 (https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-32462) and CVE-2025-32463 (https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-32463). Although the first bug has a low Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 2.8, the second has a score of 9.3, which is critical. Both vulnerabilities were discovered by the Stratascale’s Cybersecurity Research Unit (https://www.stratascale.com/) and the full report can be read here: https://www.stratascale.com/vulnerability-alert-CVE-2025-32462-sudo-host. One very interesting point in the report states that “CVE-2025-32462 has remained unnoticed for over 12 years, despite being present in the code all along.” The report then mentions CVE-2025-32462, when it says, it “… is an issue that has been hidden in plain sight since the host option was implemented 12 years ago. Because it’s a built-in option, no exploit is needed…

It should come as no surprise that nearly every office suite has introduced AI in some form or another, including ones that run on the open source Linux OS. ONLYOFFICE v9 follows the trend with AI-powered virtual assistants. The AI enhancements in ONLYOFFICE v9 include automatic text extraction for PDF files, smart automation for macros, smart formulas for complex data analysis in spreadsheets, macro creation based on prompts, and conversion of VBA macros to ONLYOFFICE macros. AI isn’t the only addition to ONLYOFFICE 9.0, as you’ll find a pair of brand new themes, Modern Light and Modern Dark, that give the user interface some serious polish (note: The classic themes are still available to use). There’s also a redesigned Start page, a new Diagram Viewer, support for new file formats…

This original story has been updated because the quoted source, Politiken, was misinformed about the situation. The Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs is only testing the possibility of migrating from Office 365 to LibreOffice and is not looking to ditch Windows for Linux. The original Politiken article now includes the following passage: “Clarification: In an earlier version of this article, it was stated that the Ministry of Digital Affairs would replace the Windows operating system with Linux and be free of Microsoft by the fall. This is not correct. That statement has therefore been removed. The ministry will only replace Office 365 with LibreOffice.” As first reported by Politiken (https://politiken.dk/edition/news/art10442448/Minister-is-phasing-out-Microsoft-in-the-Ministry-of-Digitalization), Denmark is poised to make a major change with regard to the software it uses. The move is happening…

Securonis Linux [1], a Debianbased distribution running on the MATE desktop environment (Figure 1), is distinguished by its wide array of security and privacy tools. While its Security Tools menu contains tools native to MATE as well as a few miscellaneous tools, the Securonis menu contains 11 tools unique to Securonis, each of which offers choices for various actions that run in a command line, such as Password Manager (Figure 2) and System Knight (Figure 3), a collection of administrative security tools. Other custom features in the Securonis menu are described below in an interview with root0emir (aka Emir), Securonis’s creator. Linux Magazine (LM): What is your background in free and open source software? root0emir (Emir): My journey in the open source world began with a strong interest in cybersecurity.…

Order online: https://bit.ly/Linux-Magazine-Library #297/August 2025 Cleaning Up Linux comes with lots of files, and more are added every time you download software, install packages, or navigate a system update. Plus logs get longer, and who knows what’s really in that/tmp directory. Once in a while, it makes sense to clean it all up. On the DVD: Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon and nobara 42 #296/July Pen Testing Intruders have a way of sneaking past the defenses. All your firewall rules are never enough. If you are wondering how an attacker could get in, you need to learn to think like an attacker. The Internet offers many resources for those who want to get started with penetration testing. On the DVD: Fedora Workstation 42 Live and Ubuntu Budgie 25.04 #295/June 2025 GRUB…

Linux Magazine is looking for authors to write articles on Linux and the tools of the Linux environment. We like articles on useful solutions that solve practical problems. The topic could be a desktop tool, a commandline utility, a network monitoring application, a homegrown script, or anything else with the potential to save a Linux user trouble and time. Our goal is to tell our readers stories they haven’t already heard, so we’re especially interested in original fixes and hacks, new tools, and useful applications that our readers might not know about. We also love articles on advanced uses for tools our readers do know about – stories that take a traditional application and put it to work in a novel or creative way. We are currently seeking articles on…

CachyOS is a bit niche and not nearly as well known as the likes of Ubuntu or Fedora, but sometimes those niche distributions do things that might inspire the others to follow suit. In an announcement for the July 2025 CachyOS release, the developers announced that the user’s shell can be chosen during installation. Before you get too excited, the choices are limited to fish, Zsh, and Bash. During installation, if you don’t choose between fish or Zsh, Bash will be chosen for you (even though the default configuration will remain fish). There are other changes coming to the next iteration of CachyOS, such as KDE Plasma installations defaulting to Wayland. At the same time, the NVIDIA legacy drivers and plasma-x11-session will also be installed to avoid problems. Plus, CachyOS…

Back in June, the Fedora team proposed ditching support for 32-bit architecture starting with Fedora 44. That wasn’t just a strike against 32-bit hardware but also a strike against any 32-bit applications remaining in the wild. In a discussion thread on the Fedora Project website (https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f44-change-proposal-drop-i686-support-system-wide/156324?ref=news.itsfoss.com), it was made clear that the change would break the FEX rootfs that has been in production since Fedora 42, which could have a direct impact on Linux gaming. There was also concern for Podman/Docker/Toolbox containers that use 32-bit (or 64-bit multilib) operating systems to run older native apps. Needless to say, the Fedora community didn’t respond well to the announcement, so the Fedora team decided to back off on its decision. In the withdrawal of the proposal (https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f44-change-proposal-drop-i686-support-system-wide/156324/400?ref=news.itsfoss.com), Fabio Valentini (a member of…

It’s time for another round of vulnerabilities discovered in the wild. This time, it’s two local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities that affect SSH and libblockdev – both of which are found in most major Linux distributions. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2025-6018 (which allows a hacker to impersonate a user via SSH) and CVE-2025-6019 (which is exploitable via the udisks service and allows a user to escalate access to root privileges). Pumpkin Chang, a security researcher at DEVCORE who focuses on Linux kernel security, discusses these issues in depth in his blog (https://u1f383.github.io/linux/2025/05/25/dbus-and-polkit-introduction.html). Chang explains D-Bus and Polkit and how these mechanisms are leveraged to perform certain operations by impersonating actual users. Additionally, a report (https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2025/06/17/qualys-tru-uncovers-chained-lpe-suse-15-pam-to-full-root-via-lib-blockdev-udisks) from Qualys’ senior manager, Saeed Abbasi, discusses both LPE flaws. Abbassi says, “These modern…

If your photo collection is not well organized, it can be quicker to find the snapshot you are looking for on a map than in a timeline. The cellphone’s photo app displays photo clusters on the map (Figure 1) and shows you a list of all photos taken in the vicinity at the tap of a finger. In other words, if you know where a photo was taken, you can often quickly find what you are looking for. I decided to build a Go program that performs similar geosearches. But where should I start? Given that I have thousands of photos in a deep directory hierarchy, it makes little sense to go through them each time the application is called up and extract the Exif data for each individual photo…

Student support in Brazil Around the year 1996, I started traveling to Brazil and from there the rest of Latin America. I have often written about the conferences I attended, the people I talked with, and particularly the students. Twelve years ago a student approached me and asked “maddog, how can I make money with free software?” Of course, there are many ways to make money with free software, but before I started down this long discourse I realized that what he was really asking was “How can I make money with free software?” About the same time I started a project at the University of São Paulo with the goal of being able to design, create a supply chain for, manufacture, and distribute a computer along the lines of…

The Linux Way These days, I receive so many press releases I usually just “file them away” as soon as they arrive. Still, I made an exception for one from the End of 10 campaign. The name derives from the fact that, as of October 14, 2025, Windows 10 will no longer be supported, supposedly forcing Microsoft users to choose between using an obsolete operating system or upgrading to newer hardware. This is pretty serious, given that over 240 million PCs could end up as e-waste. Hopefully, readers will have already realized there’s a third way: Just install Linux on the machines. This is the core message of the End of 10 campaign: to persuade Windows 10 users to switch to an up-to-date OS by using Linux. The main website,…

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. SNIA Developer Conference (SDC) Date: September 15-17 Location: Santa Clara, California Website: https://www.snia.org/sniadeveloper SDC is a premier educational conference dedicated to providing vendor-neutral information on advancements in data technology. Whether you're a software engineer, product manager, or CTO, SDC caters to professionals across all disciplines. Join us in Santa Clara to embrace the evolving landscape of technology and expand your expertise. Texas Linux Festival 2025 Date: October 3-4,…