Innehållsförteckning för Getting Started with Linux 2020 från Linux Magazine Special Editions

If you haven’t done so yet, use this magazine to start your journey towards freedom: Freedom from proprietary software (like Windows and Microsoft Office). The Linux operating system and the hundreds of complex applications (including LibreOffice) that you find on our DVD are completely free; they replace your old operating system and apps. What does “free” mean? The first, and maybe most obvious, meaning is that there is no cost. If you’ve bought this magazine, you have paid for the costs of writing, editing, proofreading and laying out the articles, as well as printing the magazine and manufacturing the DVD; but the software on it comes free of charge, and you can install and use it on as many machines as you like. If you want to, burn copies of…

Most modern Linux distributions follow old wisdom from the world of Unix, an operating system that was designed in the 1960s and developed for high security and stability scenarios. Whereas proprietary software tends to concentrate on making things easy to use, Linux/Unix tend toward greater security. Although this emphasis can be annoying at times, in most cases, it makes sense. For example, when you install modern Linux distributions, they will all be in the safest possible state considered usable by their developers. That usually includes a running firewall, with no services reachable from any network. The only connections your system should undertake are network services (DHCP) for the Internet and a time server (NTP) for accurate timekeeping.…

For security reasons, it is better not to give an everyday user account access to the whole OS. Most systems limit the end user’s privileges and rely on an administrator account with expanded privileges for performing system-level tasks, such as starting or stopping services, creating user accounts, and accessing system directories. Traditionally, many Linux distros had a completely separate account for the superuser (also known as root), and the system administrator only accessed the superuser account for important system administration tasks. To access this superuser account, the sys admin could do either of the following: • Log in as root.• Use the su command to switch user to superuser (root). Another approach has gained popularity in recent years. The sudo command lets a user run a command under the privileges…

Modern Linux operating systems have a fully formed graphic user interface, like Windows or macOS. When you boot into the system, you will see icons, menus, and a mouse cursor, as you would with any other operating system. Linux actually supports several different desktop interfaces. If you installed the open-SUSE Linux system on the DVD attached to this issue, the default desktop is KDE Plasma. This article will show you around the Plasma desktop and will help you get started with configuring and exploring KDE. If you’re using a Linux version with a different desktop, check your distro’s documentation sources for a similar article on getting started. KDE PLASMA OpenSUSE installs KDE’s Plasma desktop by default (Figure 1). Plasma is an advanced (some would say very advanced) desktop, which comes…

As you’ve seen, Windows partitions will not be mounted automatically when your system starts; instead you need to manually mount them, which requires entering the root password. You can automate the process and that lets you also select a better mount point (the directory from which you can access the partition). Under Windows, check which drive letters (C:, D:, and so on) exist for Windows partitions, and then create folders named/win/c/, /win/d/, et cetera. Then under Linux mount those partitions, right click their entries, and open the Properties dialog. In the last lines you will find two fields: • Mounted on displays the mount point, for example /run/media/esser/Win-NTFS,• Mounted from displays the device file that identifies a partition, for example /dev/sdb1. These devices will (in most cases) have names like…

Given that Wine has been in development since 1993, you might wonder why it still has issues running some Windows programs. After all, that must be enough time to recreate the Windows API, right? Especially when the project has benefited from commercial backing? Well, there are two main reasons why compatibility is still not perfect. First, a lot of the Windows internals are not documented – at least, not publicly. Details for many API calls are thin on the ground, and Microsoft hasn’t been particularly forthcoming with them. Yes, there have been some source code leaks of Windows versions, but Wine developers don’t want to go anywhere near them for legal reasons. If they reimplement something in Wine after seeing original Windows code, Microsoft’s lawyers could spring into action. So…

If you want to try the very latest version of digiKam, you either need to install it from a third-party repository or compile the application from source. There is also a third option: Use the digiKam AppImage Package. It is a single file that contains all the required files and libraries. This means that you don’t need to install anything: Grab the latest AppImage Package from the project’s website [1], and make the downloaded file executable using: Then double-click on the file to launch digiKam. This convenient option does have a couple of drawbacks, though. It’s slower to launch and offers no system integration. Also, it’s not possible to modify the application’s files, so you can’t replace the default splash screen and add custom presets.…

Firefox for Android has lots of nifty features, but you might find one tool particularly useful. Similar to its desktop sibling, Firefox for Android supports syncing. The clever part is that this feature integrates with Android’s sharing functionality, which lets you push the currently opened website to another linked machine or device. You can put this feature to many practical uses. For example, you can use it as a read-it-when-you’re-back-home tool. When you’re on the move, you can push interesting links to your production machine at home. In a similar manner, you can use the desktop version of Firefox to send links and tabs to other devices linked to your Firefox Sync account (Figure 6). To do this, right-click on the tab or link you want to send, and then…

The tribes in ARK and the parties and alliances in 0 A.D. emphasize a shared experience. Therefore both games were built from the beginning as client-server systems. This is very different in Cities: Skylines, in which the original concept was to create a single-player game by design. The chief developer Mariina Hallikainen explained in a 2015 interview with PC Gamer [8] that no multiplayer mode was in the works. Hundreds of servers host ARK worlds, most of which are found in the Nitrado [9] network, a gaming platform on which official servers are centrally maintained by Studio Wildcard. As a result, this platform always has the most recent version of a game, which you need to install on the client side. The official servers use The Island and The Center…

When you start up Windows or macOS, you boot into a system with a single look and feel and a standard collection of tools specified by the operating system (OS) vendor. Because Linux is a free software system, it has no standard “look.” Individual distribution developers have much more freedom to shape the user experience and define which tools are present by default. In particular, Linux supports several GUI desktop environments, such as Gnome, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, and Xfce. The desktop can have a huge influence on the system’s appearance. The great variety of tools and GUIs in the Linux environment means that standard configuration tasks might be different depending on which distribution you are using. This special edition is based on the openSUSE Linux distribution with the KDE’s Plasma…

The chown utility is primarily for the root user, but a “normal” user may use the tool in some situations. For example, chown phil:audio file_name changes the group membership of the file. The user phil is allowed to use this command if the user is a member of the group audio and owns the named file. In this case, the user may change access to their own files for members of the groups editors, adm, dialout, cdrom, sudo, audio, and so on. The chgrp command first expects information about the new group and then the name of the file or directory. To assign a file to the audio group, just type: On a Linux system, the system administrator is allowed to assign new owners and new groups to files and…

When you drop something on the desktop or into another folder (the desktop acts just like a regular folder), Plasma will ask you whether you want to move, copy, or link to the item. If you move the item, you erase it from its original location and create a new copy in the new location. So if you move an image from your Pictures folder to the desktop, it will disappear from Pictures and will reappear on the desktop (in the Desktop folder). This is good for files when you don’t want duplicates scattered all over your hard disk. It is not such a good idea if you are dealing with folders and apps. If you move an app, it may stop working, because the system looks for apps in…

First steps with a new operating system can be challenging, but once you’ve started feeling comfortable you’ll want to get back to using the computer for your everyday tasks. Often that will mean surfing the web, reading and writing emails, creating office documents and launching the occasional game. For some of those tasks you’ll need access to the files you’ve created with Windows programs, for other tasks you won’t. We’ll show you what to do about those Windows disks – and we’ll also discuss macOS-formatted media. Working with a file that you’ve created on a Windows or macOS machine will often be as easy as simply clicking on it in the file manager window (Dolphin). If you’ve mastered the transition from double-click to single-click (the behavior that KDE defaults to),…

If classic MS-DOS games float your boat, it’s worth checking out DOSBox [7], a full-fledged emulator that includes a virtual x86 processor and basic DOS implementation and is capable of running a huge number of old DOS games. Install it from your distro’s package manager, and then start it by simply providing a directory as follows: dosbox <mydir> This starts a new DOS session, with the C: directory mapped to mydir (or whatever you specified). Now you can enter the good old dir command to view files inside the directory or run a program. If you’re running a game and DOSBox grabs control of your mouse pointer, hit Ctrl+F10 to get it back. DOSBox is highly configurable: You can change how fast the emulated CPU runs, customize the virtual video…

In KDE Plasma, contacts, calendars, email, and other personal information are all managed by the same database. Because of this arrangement, you can easily pass information back and forth between these personal information management (PIM) tools once they are set up. You can use the tools individually, or you can use Kontact (Figure 1) to move back and forth easily between them. Once you are set up, you can even use the other tools from within the email browser. You pick which solution suits you best. The first time you use a PIM tool, the Account Assistant opens (Figure 2). When you enter your email address and password, the Account Assistant does its best to offer the options used by your Internet provider. You may have to supply the incoming…

For most of us, daily computing is unthinkable without a browser. We use it to communicate, share, research, write, watch movies, and stream radio. In short, the browser stays in the foreground most of the time. Although plenty of good browsers are available on Linux, Mozilla Firefox still remains a popular choice on most mainstream distros, including openSUSE. Even the most inexperienced users can learn Firefox’s basics in a matter of minutes. After all, browsing mostly means typing URLs into the address bar and using the Back and Forward buttons. However, Firefox offers plenty of useful features that can vastly improve your browsing experience and make your daily computing more efficient. PREFERENCES AND INTERFACE Although Firefox comes with sensible default settings, you might want to adjust the browser’s options to…

Modern 3D games under Linux used to be challenging even before the first round of play, with tricky settings in Wine. Crude hacks in the settings files required that gamers have a high level of experience with Linux. Numerous strange bugs kept appearing in the games, but the game providers didn’t care, because they occurred only on Linux, a strange niche operating system, instead of the officially supported Windows platform. The year 2010 saw changes in this unpleasant state of affairs when some game developers started turning to Java as an operating-system-agnostic development language. Mojang’s Minecraft enjoyed outstanding success as an independent title, running under Windows and Linux almost equally well – some even said it ran better under Linux. Around the same time, the game provider Valve decided to…

An image is a collection of files that have been assembled by an image creator. From a VirtualBox-y point of view, an image would be the hard disk image of a freshly installed VM that has been shut down, so there is no current state (such as memory contents). You cannot run or modify an image. (However, image creators can write a “Dockerfile” which uses an existing image as a starting point and describes changes that shall be made to the image in order to create a new image.) The Docker Hub [3] is a huge repository of images that every user can download. A container is created from an image when you use the docker run command. So, even though the argument for docker run is an image name,…

An old saying states that “security is the good feeling an admin has when going home at night,” and that’s not far from wrong. No matter what marketing tells you, nothing to do with IT systems is 100 percent secure. Security is not a binary quality (secure/insecure); in fact, it ranges along a scale from “secure enough” to “not secure enough.” Costs rise exponentially the closer you get to secure enough; thus, everybody – enterprise, home user, IT pro, or hacker – has to decide the level of security they are willing to pay for, apply, and follow. Which attacks do you want to protect yourself from? How much damage can be done? Even before Snowden’s revelations, we knew it was difficult or impossible to protect standard IT systems against…

The name for the Linux operating system comes from the kernel name. The Linux kernel is a single component down in the heart of the system that performs tasks such as running processes and controlling the hardware. A full-blown OS also contains hundreds of other components, including services, applications, configuration utilities, and programming interfaces. Many of the components within Linux were created by the GNU project, which is why some experts refer to the system as GNU/Linux. Other components have found their way into Linux through the years – some contributed by independent developers and some by the companies that work with Linux. The GNU Public License (GPLv2) used with Linux systems ensures that improvements made to the Linux environment will be available to the whole community.…

Modern Linux distros transmit software in the form of packages. A package contains the application you want to install, plus additional information about other packages (called dependencies) necessary to use the application. Packages are stored on servers called package repositories located on the Internet or on a local network. To install a new application, enter the name of the application in the local package manager. The package manager connects to the server, downloads the package, and installs the package on your system. The YaST management interface lets you install packages in an easy GUI environment. (See the article on YaST elsewhere in this issue.) However, many users prefer to install and update software from the command line. OpenSUSE provides the zypper command-line tool as an alternative to YaST. Installing software…

OpenSUSE’s default desktop is called Plasma. Plasma is developed by KDE [1], a worldwide community of volunteer developers. The KDE community also creates many of the apps that come with Plasma and has a weakness for the letter K (in fact, KDE’s logo is the letter K embedded in a gear). They also tend to use K somewhere in the name of their apps: Krita (an advanced painting program for designers), Kate (a text editor), and Kontact (a suite of communication and productivity apps).…

While those of us dedicated to free and open source software (FOSS) love to shout from the rooftops about the awesomeness of GNU, Linux, and open standards, we also have to deal with the awkward reality that Windows is still very common on the desktop and has an enormous software base. Sure, FOSS equivalents for proprietary Windows apps exist (and new ones are popping up every week), but certain tools simply don’t exist elsewhere, and people or companies that want to migrate away from Windows toward Linux might still need to run the occasional Windows program or game. Of course, dual-booting (having Linux and Windows on the same PC) is one way to solve this problem, but it still means you need a Windows license and a chunk of your…

A few simple tricks can help you get the most out of your openSUSE system, providing fixes for common problems and helping you adjust the system to fit your specific needs. The following are tips to help you add useful software, adjust network configurations, and better understand other helpful tools and features. UPGRADING FIREFOX TO THE LATEST VERSION If you opt for openSUSE Leap instead of Tumbleweed, you’ll soon notice that the former comes with a slightly older version of the Firefox browser. Upgrading to the latest version is not particularly difficult, and it’s a good opportunity to learn how to configure openSUSE to use additional repositories. While the latest version of Firefox is not available in the default openSUSE software repositories, it is available through a dedicated Mozilla repository…

In a way, digiKam is an underappreciated application. Many Linux users may have heard that it’s a decent tool for managing photo collections. However, they might not be aware of digiKam’s more advanced features or the fact that this application offers functionality that covers the entire photographic workflow. This article introduces some of digiKam’s key features and shows how they can be used to set up a complete workflow, including importing, organizing, and editing photos and RAW files. For information on installing digiKam, see the “digiKam AppImage Package” box. IMPORTING PHOTOS AND RAW FILES DigiKam features a rather capable import module that makes it possible to transfer photos and RAW files from your camera into the application, as well as process and organize them on the fly. In fact, the…

Selecting text in web pages using the mouse can be rather tricky sometimes. For easier and more precise text selection, you can press F7, which toggles the so-called Caret Browsing mode. With this mode enabled, you can make a text selection by placing the movable cursor anywhere on the page and then using keyboard keys to make a text selection. To close a browser tab, you normally click the Close Tab (x) button. Alternatively, you can close any tab by middle-clicking anywhere on it, which is slightly easier than trying to hit the tiny x icon.…

Today more people than ever can take great digital photographs inexpensively, and that means more people than ever have a need for high-quality image processing software. The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP or Gimp) [1] is a great free tool you can use to process your digital photos. Gimp can easily handle even the most demanding photo retouching tasks. FIRST LOOK On openSUSE you need to install the gimp package (System | Install/remove software). Current releases of Gimp default to singlewindow mode. If you’re used to the multiwindow experience from older versions, you can get that back by disabling Windows | Single-Window Mode in the menu, but we do not recommend this: If you are new to Gimp, single-window mode will make your first steps easier. The main Gimp window…

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology is a mechanism that could more aptly be called Digital Restrictions Management. This technology assumes control over a user’s access to files on their own computer and over various hardware interfaces, particularly those involved in transferring data to audio and video cards and the accompanying output devices. Proprietary kernel modules for Nvidia and AMD graphics chips support parts of this technology, and applications like Steam rely on it. This situation has led to increasingly strident criticism being leveled by the Linux world against the Steam developer Valve. It is only fair to add that Valve advised game providers early on to stay away from DRM. Connecting DRM files to a system’s hardware is done as a means of directly controlling loading and processing of the…

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…