Innehållsförteckning för November 2022 från Linux Magazine

Language is the medium through which people communicate and express their thoughts. It is an ancient dream of mankind to be able to communicate with a machine (for example, just watch 2001: A Space Odyssey). Meanwhile, science has come a bit closer to this vision. The box entitled “Sample Dialogue with LaMDA” contains a conversation with the Language Model for Dialogue Applications [1] (LaMDA) dialogue model. It was assigned the identity of a Weddell Seal in the first line. As you can see, LaMDA can give grammatically and contextually correct answers and even play with the meanings of words. But how does a computer system manage to achieve language fluency? To understand language, the system needs to know the meaning of words. For this purpose, each word is represented by…

Backing up data from a Linux installation doesn’t pose a problem for most users thanks to open source solutions for almost every scenario, from a single machine to a cluster, as well as command line and GUI options. However, backing up Android devices such as smartphones or tablets can be a little trickier. Up until Android 4, backing up such devices was only possible if the bootloader was unlocked, and unlocking was no easy task because most manufacturers tried to prevent it. And if you did unlock the boot-loader, you could void your warranty, and, even worse, risk bricking your device. An advance backup would have made sense, but it was only possible after rooting. Starting with Android 4, adb backup [1] (which Google has since deprecated for security reasons)…

Network administrators rely on Secure Shell (SSH) every day to establish secure connections over unsecured networks. The only requirement is that the computer you wish to control must be running an SSH server service. The most popular SSH service on Linux is OpenSSH. The SSH protocol also supports port forwarding, which allows you to tunnel connections for other applications, and SSH lets web admins upload files to a web server using secure SFTP and SCP connections. SSH typically requires a terminal window. However, as you increase the number of servers and services managed through SSH connections, you also increase the risk. In such cases, it is better not to use the same usernames and passwords for all remote systems. For convenient access, you can instead use a graphical SSH front…

If you didn’t like to tinker, you wouldn’t be using Linux, right? Well … mostly. Linux has gotten more mainstream over the years, so you don’t have to be a hacker to enjoy it, but that do-it-yourself spirit lives on. Proprietary hardware vendors don’t always mix well with do-it-yourselfers, but a little ingenuity can always open doors. This month we show you how to access and share iTunes metadata using XML and a little bit of Python. Also in this issue, sync your files with Seafile and explore the Ryzom multiplayer role-playing game.…

Recently, Mozilla’s Thunderbird email application has been trying to reboot its popularity with a promising modern redesign and a partnership-plus-rebranding of the open source Android client, K-9 Mail. This is great news for Thunderbird and new potential users, but it also helps to remind us that desktop email clients are still a thing, and that they can be a great alternative to web-based clients. Scribe is another great alternative. Although it’s not as full-featured or as capable as Thunderbird, it is less than 10MB to download and can be run from its unarchived directory. It’s also fast to load, easy to navigate, and convenient even on low-powered devices with very little storage. There are also versions for macOS and Windows, which means you could theoretically run executables for each off…

The Internet is full of videos containing just music with some simple visualization to help provide some feedback while you’re listening. They’re easy to create and useful if you want to share your music or create an easily accessible playlist, but it’s notoriously difficult to create a meaningful visualization. The biggest problem is generating something useful that can be synchronized to the sound. One approach is to render the output from a music player visualizer, such as projectM, which we’ve previously looked at here. Another approach is to use corrscope, which takes one or more audio files and generates an animated oscilloscope view of those inputs. These show the changing frequencies in the audio, and they can be notoriously difficult to sync to the actual sound. Corrscope solves the sync…

Doom notwithstanding, Ultima VII was one of the most brilliant and influential games of the early 1990s. It was a role-playing game with a top-down isometric graphic style that is still being copied today and whose graphics engine is part of the legacy behind Ultima Online, 25 years after its launch. But most importantly, the game itself was one of the first open world adventures where you could go anywhere and do anything. As you took your time to travel from one town to the next, Britannia’s denizens would go about their days and seasons as they might in 15th-century England, tending to fields and cattle before going down to the local tavern for a beer and a meal. Meanwhile, your character – the avatar – starts on a quest…

Debian 11.5 64-bit Debian releases only every couple of years, making each release a major event. The release of Debian 11 (Bullseye) in August 2021 was no exception. Not only was Bullseye’s Homeworld theme unusually sophisticated for Debian, but the release also featured driverless printer and exFAT filesystem support, as well as reliable Bluetooth integration. A year later, the 11.5 release is the latest enhancement to this firm foundation. Like all Debian releases, Debian 11.5 consists of bug fixes and security updates that have been issued since the last point release. In addition, the release includes bug fixes for dozens of packages, including dpkg, NVIDIA drivers, and the Debian installer. Like all Debian releases, Debian 11.5 lacks the newest software, but it compensates by providing stability and security that is…

In any classification project, it is certainly possible to get someone to review a certain number of images and build a classification list. However, when entering a new domain, it can be difficult to identify domain knowledge experts or to develop a ground truth for classification upon which all experts can agree. This is true regardless of whether you are looking at the backside of a silicon wafer for the first time, or if you are trying to identify the presence of volcanoes in radar images from the surface of Venus [1]. Alternatively, you can bypass all these problems and kickstart a classification project with unsupervised machine learning. Unsupervised machine learning is particularly applicable to environments where the typical images are largely identical, much like the pieces of hay in…

The development of Unix began over 50 years ago. In contrast to commercial software, most of Unix’s basic commands are still in use today. However, in the past couple decades, alternatives have been developed for a variety of reasons. For instance, restrictions such as lack of memory or color monitors or limits on file name lengths have long since disappeared, opening the way for more to be done with a command. Also, now that desktop environments are the norm, users demand more even at the command line. Sometimes, too, commands or some of their options have become obsolete or too numerous and too complex for their most common uses, resulting in the desire for simplification. At other times, developers want to try their hand at developing an improved version. Here…

Because the Raspberry Pi comes with both WiFi and Bluetooth, most programs choose to rely on WiFi, with Bluetooth being more of a wallflower. However, the Pi Pico mixes things up and makes Bluetooth a desirable option. Bluetooth should be a familiar technology by way of your smartphone, and this topic has been investigated for the Raspberry Pi in a previous article [1], so I will be sticking to the bare minimum in terms of the basic technology in this article. The focus here is on various scenarios in which the Raspberry Pi, Pi Pico, and smartphones use Bluetooth to communicate. The Pico stands in for almost any microcontroller, as long as it supports serial communication. Basic Technology The two basic prerequisites for Bluetooth communication between partners is pairing and…

One of the best things about the KDE Plasma desktop is that, while it’s a great experience in its own right, it’s also a brilliant desktop construction set. This means you can customize and augment the default experience in almost limitless ways, using either the in-built settings provided by KDE or by creating your own scripts to add more programmatic functionality. This is best seen in the variety of scripts that change the window’s arrangement behavior. We’ve covered a couple before, including KWin Tiling (to turn the desktop into a tiling window manager with its own rules) and Kröhnkite (which performs a similar role with dynamic layouts). Exquisite is another one, developed to mimic the good bits of Windows 11 window management. It’s a great option for users who may…

Abastion host is a server that lives just outside your network, either in a DMZ or beyond the safety of your firewall, from where it can bridge or forward certain services from your network to a remote host. Its location makes it prone to attack, but bastion servers are typically hardened and audited to ensure nothing can breach their simplified services. Warpgate is a simple bastion service provided as a single binary executable you should build yourself and run on your own hardened server. It can authenticate and forward specifically permitted SSH, HTTPS, and MySQL connections, which can also be fully logged and recorded for future playback or auditing. This is an essential part of making sure a service hasn’t been compromised, and it’s what differentiates Warpgate from setting up…

Overgrowth is one of those rare pieces of software that has already lived an independent life as a commercial and proprietary product before getting a new lease on life as an open source project. It’s a game that has been available on Steam and GOG for the best part of a decade (and still is) and one with a keen user base who love its rabbit-themed wild martial arts physics brawling. Wolfire Games, its developer, really needs to be commended for this approach, as well as always providing a native Linux version. It even has a history of doing the same thing: Its earlier rabbit-themed title, Lugaru, is also open source. Although both titles feature rabbits, neither focus on the traditionally cute side of their in-game anthropomorphic avatars. Instead, they’re…

Issue 265/December 2022 Quantum Computing Fact or science fiction? Real or just a fascinating mental exercise? The story of quantum computing is just beginning to unfold. Tune in next month for a closer look. Approximate UK / Europe Nov 05 USA / Canada Dec 02 Australia Jan02 On Sale Date Please note: On sale dates are approximate and may be delayed because of logistical issues. 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…

In May 2022, a friendly person from Linux Magazine wrote to me and asked if I could write a short article on machine learning. After a few quick queries, I agreed, as you can see here. I’m going to try to be more creative in fulfilling this request than just restating the Wikipedia entry on machine learning techniques. Now that we have known each other for a few lines, let me ask you a personal question: Did you have a friendly person from Linux Magazine in your mind’s eye while you were reading the opening lines? Second question: No matter who it was – can you imagine why? Most of us piece images together in our heads from the experience we gain while reading. Because you didn’t have any information,…

Red Hat Linux bought CentOS in 2014, but largely ignored it for years. Essentially, CentOS was the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), both deriving from Fedora. Then, in December 2020, Red Hat announced that CentOS would be discontinued, and it would be replaced by CentOS Stream. Within days, Rocky Linux (Figure 1), named for CentOS cofounder Rocky McGaugh, was announced [1]. Four months later, Rocky Linux released its first version. Like CentOS, it offers a community-based alternative to Red Hat. Recently, I sent questions about Rocky’s current state to Brian Clemens, the project manager at the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), who got the development team to collaborate on answers. Here’s what the RESF development team has to say about Rocky Linux. Linux Magazine (LM): What were…

Hurray! This issue marks the 25th anniversary of my “Programming Snapshot” column, which first appeared in the German edition of Linux Magazine back in October 1997 (originally under the “Perl Snapshot” banner). Times have changed: Now the featured programs in this column mainly use Go, but you might also see Ruby, Python, or even TeX, as was the case recently. For this dinosaur birthday party, I thought I might rewrite a tool I put together in Perl back in the dot-com era, but looking at it from today’s perspective in Go. The photo tagger from 2003 (it was called Image Database [1] or idb for short) is something I’ve been wanting to use again for a long time. The idb tool assigns one or more tags to a set of…

Clean code is a set of rules and procedures that make it easier to read and understand source code regardless of the programming language used. Many clean code strategies fit all languages, but some more far-reaching strategies only prove useful in the object-oriented world. The clean code concept is not new or revolutionary. Back in 2008, Robert C. Martin described the procedures in his book, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship [1]. With today’s highly complex IT applications, ensuring that source code has a clean structure has becoming increasingly important. The clean code concept has evolved in recent years, and the procedures described in Martin’s book have been expanded. To get you started writing cleaner code, I’ll describe some of the core ideas and rules of clean code.…

Ryzom is a free massively multiplayer online role-playing game (or MMORPG – an online role-playing game in which a large number of players interact simultaneously over the Internet in a virtual world) with a complex story and many episodes. In the game, your adventure starts centuries in the future on the planet Atys. The planet is home to various peoples. The Kami are nature-loving shape shifters and skilled mages. The Karavan, on the other hand, are a highly technical people with powerful weapons. Both the Kami and Karavan help the homins, whose role the player assumes. The homins are divided into four nations. The Fyros are a warlike nation with their homes in the desert, and the craft-oriented Matis live in the forest. The Tryker, explorers and discoverers, live by…

Node-RED is a brilliant project and one that’s had significant coverage in these pages, most recently when version 2.2.0 appeared. Version 3.0 is another major upgrade and consolidates its brilliance at being the glue for your various data sources while remaining easy to use and supremely powerful. In this release, for example, the addition of a right-click context menu lets you access all the most common features from where your cursor is, which is exactly where you need this kind of menu. This is important because it wasn’t always clear what you could do and where in previous versions, and you would often need to switch between editing and adding nodes in the flow and then go back to the inspector on the right to configure the elements you wished…

One surprising thing the Steam Deck has done for mobile Linux is make battery life a first class issue again. As brilliant as the device is, its 15W graphics hardware can easily drain its humble 40Wh battery in less than two hours. While the Steam Deck does include some excellent performance tweaking and analysis overlays, these aren’t available in desktop mode. This is where battop can help, and also help any other Linux running on a battery, because it tells you everything you need to know about your batteries. It runs from your terminal, connects directly to the battery management subsystem, and renders everything it can divine from your hardware to a brilliantly functional terminal-based user interface. The main display is split into six sections spread across two columns on…

We often mention the triumvirate of open source RAW photo editors: digiKam, RawTherapee, and darktable. However, it’s the last one we find ourselves using the most. Darktable always used to chase Adobe Lightroom for features and capabilities, but since we last looked at darktable properly a few years ago, we think it has finally surpassed its inspiration and become a powerful photo manipulation and management platform for serious photographers in its own right. We used darktable for our photography in Linux Voice, and it saved us from a complete lack of skill and ability on many occasions, especially when it came to under- or over-exposed photos where darktable can magically turn a black smudge into something we could print. This is all thanks to the various RAW image formats darktable…

The Extensible Markup Language (XML)[1] is a widely used markup language and text file format for storing and exchanging arbitrary data. A wide variety of applications, including the Apple iTunes application, use the XML format for exchanging or storing library data. In this article, I will show you how to use Python to read and manipulate data from an iTunes [2] XML library file. iTunes Library File iTunes divides its content into two separate categories: media and metadata. Media (music and video) are saved in separate files from metadata. Throughout the rest of this article, I will focus on music information – artist, song title, album title, track number, genre, release year – and refer to it as metadata. The iTunes metadata files have either a. itl or. xml extension…