Innehållsförteckning för May 2023 från Linux Magazine

In the next few years, how you boot a computer could change drastically. A firmware alternative known as coreboot [1] is well on the way to becoming readily available, and it is likely to become more popular as development accelerates. For one thing, coreboot is a giant leap forward for open hardware. Just as importantly, on hardware where it can be implemented, coreboot boots three to four times faster than the familiar BIOS or UEFI, and, depending on how it is configured, sometimes even faster. Originally known as LinuxBIOS, coreboot was founded in 1999 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the research and development facility best known for its role in the development of the atomic bomb. Today, coreboot’s major contributors include manufacturers such as AMD and SiS, and motherboard vendors…

Monitoring network traffic is part of the admin’s daily grind. Most admins use the graphical Wireshark tool because of its wealth of functions as well as its availability in most distributions’ respositories. Because Wireshark is primarily aimed at professional users, you need in-depth network knowledge to use it. The new Sniffnet project targets less experienced users, providing meaningful results in a simple, intuitive, and clearcut interface. Installation Sniffnet is a cross-platform Rust application [1]. If you don’t have the Rust programming language on your system, first set it up with the command from line 2 of Listing 1. The installation routine requires some interactive input and prints some status messages at the prompt. You install Sniffnet itself in the terminal using the Rust package manager, Cargo (line 4). If you…

An object file is a black box that you can never really see inside. You can’t just open it and read it. We all have some understanding that it contains instructions for the computer, coded in a format that only a computer can understand, but we’re used to thinking of compiled program code as something of a mystery. If you take a closer look, however, the structure is not as opaque as you might imagine. Linux, like most other Unix-like operating systems, stores program code in the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF). ELF superseded the less-flexible a.out format and has been the standard in Linux since 1995 and in Free-BSD [1] since 1998. An ELF object file contains the processor-specific instructions that the CPU actually executes. It also contains other…

Whether you are training to become an IT specialist, managing networks, or preparing for the Linux Professional Institute second certification (LPIC-2) [1], you can’t avoid the topic of firewalls, especially rules for filtering packets on the network. After ipchains and Ipfw, the netfilter project’s [2] iptables is mostly commonly used for configuring firewall rules on Linux, while FreeBSD/ NetBSD and the two Solaris successors Illumos and OpenIndiana use IPFilter [3]. However, iptables is getting a little long in the tooth. In particular, the program code has become increasingly complex. Small changes in the project core have tended to affect all related tools. Iptables, ip6tables, ebtables, and arptables all come from the same codebase, but not in the form of modules. Instead they rely on code duplication, which has resulted in…

Data has the bad habit of hiding away in the depths of the filesystem precisely when you need it urgently. That’s why there are tools at different levels to help with searching, including FSearch v0.2.2. Similar to the Findutils for locate, FSearch first builds a database of the selected data, which can then be searched at lightning speed. The search begins as soon as you start entering the search term. Great Selection It is important to distinguish between desktop environment search tools and generic search tools. In terms of user interfaces, KDE Plasma offers the KRunner, KFind, and Baloo programs, the latter being the underpinnings for searching with the Dolphin file manager. Gnome comes with Tracker integrated into the Nautilus file manager by default. In addition, there are many search…

We’ve looked at several terminal-based web browsers over the years, and most can trace their origins back to when a terminal was a necessity rather than a choice, because desktops didn’t exist. This meant their focus was on getting access to a website and allowing you to navigate without too much difficulty, rather than emulating a nonexistent desktop web browser. Those apps are still brilliant if you need to download a graphics driver in an emergency or search the web for instructions on resetting a broken Wayland session. But for accessing the modern JavaScript-ridden interactive web, they’re less than ideal. Carbonyl, however, is a terminal web browser that takes the terminal experience to a whole new level. Its output is a mixture of desktop FFmpeg-to-ASCII conversion (our guess) with perfect…

Using the Markdown syntax for writing text documentation has become almost the default for many projects and writers. It’s easy to learn and understand, and it treads lightly on the readability of the raw document when you don’t have a Markdown preview. You don’t need to understand Markdown to know which parts are titles, lists, or links to other pages, and Markdown can be ingested by many services and turned into beautifully rendered web pages or structured documentation. It’s GitHub’s default for good reason. But there also are a couple of big problems with Markdown, and they’re related: There’s no agreed global Markdown standard and there are many tweaked derivatives of definitions that become standards in their own domain. Even GitHub supports two, kramdown and its own GitHub Flavored Markdown…

When you read that this game is a “bridge simulator,” your first thought might be that it’s a recreation of the tricky card game. It’s not, nor is it a game like Bridge Constructor, where you’re tasked with traversing some kind of chasm or river. This bridge simulator takes its inspiration from Star Trek, rather than structural engineering, and the bridge in question is the command center for a spaceship. Thorium Nova is a sequel to Thorium, which was the developers’ first attempt at a space-base bridge simulator. True to a real command bridge, there are different stations for controlling different aspects of the ship, including captain, navigation, tactical planning, engineering, and communications. Each role has its own interface, its own skill set, and its own set of challenges. Most…

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Fedora 37 Workstation 64-bit Fedora is a Red Hat-maintained community distro that is known for early adoption of new software components. The Fedora Workstation edition is focused on desktop operations in a professional setting. The Fedora 37 release includes the Gnome 43 desktop, which features a redesigned system status menu and a major upgrade for the Files file manager. The latest Fedora also comes with updates to the support for human languages, as well as key updates to computer language components, including Python, glibc, and LLVM. TUXEDO OS 2 64-bit TUXEDO OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux variant maintained by the European hardware vendor TUXEDO for use with their native Linux laptop systems. TUXEDO unveiled an ISO for general purpose Linux systems back in September, and they have also made their…

Word is starting to get out: Software often unnecessarily wastes a huge amount of energy. Several open source projects are developing tools for studying and measuring exactly how much. This article tours some of the most promising tools. Taking a Tour The Green Software Foundation (GSF) [1], which the Linux Foundation launched in 2022, has the stated mission to “Build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and best practices for creating and building green software.” For this purpose, the GSF, which includes companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Accenture, is organized into working groups. There are already several repositories with software, tools, and documents available on https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation. For example, the Open Source Working Group (opensource-wg) maintains a repository called Awesome Green Software [2] with links to a whole host…

Linux and hardware haven’t always been the best of friends. Just 20 years ago, you couldn’t just buy a mainstream computer and expect it to work when you installed Linux. If wanted to be sure that your new acquisition would play nicely with Linux, you often had weeks of very detailed research ahead of you. Which chipsets were supported? Which modems, printers, sound cards, and network adapters had the necessary drivers? If you didn’t check carefully, the worst case is that you would be left with hardware that was practically impossible to get to work with Linux. Just remember the notorious winmodems (Figure 1) or printers that did nothing without binary drivers that the vendor didn’t bother to provide for Linux systems. If you are looking for proof that not…

Alternative package systems such as Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage are becoming increasingly popular. They offer a number of advantages, for both developers and users. For example, experimental software versions can be tested without interfering with the distribution’s package management system. You can also run several versions of a software tool for comparison purposes without them interfering with each other. Distribution-agnostic Flatpaks can simplify a developer’s job because software only needs to be built in a single format. Flatpaks also present some disadvantages. In view of the low price of storage media, it is up to you whether Flatpak’s greatly increased space requirement poses a disadvantage. However, the update behavior of Flatpaks and AppImages does pose a clear disadvantage. Gnome Software, Plasma Discover, and Mint Update will let you automatically update…

KDE Plasma 5.27 is a significant milestone, not just because it contains so many new features and fixes, but because it’s the final release before the migration to Qt 6 and Plasma 6. As with several major open source projects, including Firefox, Krita, and Blender, a rapid cadence makes it difficult to track anything but major new features, and that’s certainly the case with Plasma 5.27. Nestled alongside the new Discover features and the Guided setup is “native window tiling.” This is something we’ve wanted to see for years, and we’ve covered an almost endless supply of scripts and add-ons that bring native-like tiling to Plasma. Some have been more successful than others, with the austere kwin-tiling being the tool to beat thanks to its powerful i3 keyboard shortcuts. The…

While we’re in the realm of text processing, there’s one tool above all others that writers turn to when they have to convert documentation in one format to documentation in another. That’s pandoc. Pandoc has been around since 2006 and has just celebrated the major milestone release of 3.0, formalizing more than five years of development work. Pandoc is the text equivalent to FFmpeg, capable not just of converting a huge number of input formats to a huge number of output formats, but also transforming the text on its way through its various processors. It can convert between Markdown formats, HTML, LaTeX and DOCX, and output to PDF while transforming tables, definition lists, footnotes, and even mathematical and R notation. We used it extensively when converting magazine articles in XML…

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of the best games ever made. It was originally released by Nintendo for its Super Nintendo/Super Famicon in 1991, and it’s still available for the latest Switch console. The game was one of the first to incorporate a wonderful story, challenging puzzles, and intuitive combat mechanics within an immersive 2D world that’s been often copied but never surpassed. It’s a game whose intellectual property is obviously closely guarded by Nintendo, but it’s also a game that contains the indelible DNA of success, and the nostalgic hopes and dreams of millennials everywhere. Which is why it’s so significant that the zelda3 project has reverse-engineered the entire game into 80 thousand lines of C code, without infringing on any of the…

Applications use the processor in different ways, and those differences are sometimes reflected in the power bill. The programming language you choose has a significant influence on energy consumption. But developers still need to go the extra mile to leverage the language’s capabilities. At first glance, Go comes with everything you need for energy efficiency. It has a lean syntax, and smart Goroutines distribute parallel tasks efficiently to the processor cores, thus avoiding a bloated runtime environment that needs to manage complex class hierarchies or juggle classic threads. And the compiler translates the source code into a native and therefore fast program, which means the processor can go back to sleep sooner and save energy. On top of that, Go statically links all external modules into the finished binary, eliminating…

As a writer, I rarely need to look up the definition of a word. If I don’t know a word, I’m not going to risk using it. However, I frequently check that a word has the exact nuance I want. If it does not, I turn to a thesaurus to search for a closer alternative. Unfortunately, a regular dictionary is next to useless for these purposes. That is why I was pleased to discover dict [1], which not only has the information needed for such purposes, but runs from the command line for added efficiency. A client for the DICT [2] dictionary network protocol, dict essentially searches several dozen databases and returns comprehensive results in seconds. It is available for major distributions, but note that each database is often in…

Text interfaces can be extremely useful for Windows or secure shell (SSH) clients that need to connect to your Linux or Raspberry Pi systems. One of the simplest options for creating text interfaces is Whiptail [1], which comes preinstalled on Raspbian and many Linux systems. The Raspberry Pi configuration tool, raspi-config (Figure 1), is a good illustration of how Whiptail can be used. In this article, I introduce Whiptail with three small projects. The first creates a menu interface for some common Linux diagnostic tools, the second controls Raspberry Pi output pins, and the final uses Python to display Pi sensor data. Getting Started If your system does not have Whiptail, you can install it on Raspbian/ Debian/ Ubuntu machines with the command: A simple Whiptail test shows the date/time…

Anyone who spends a lot of time on the web will repeatedly come across content that they want to save for further evaluation at a later stage. Traditionally, you would use your web browser’s bookmark function for this. For example, if you want to continue reading a web page you discover on your way home from work on your computer at home, and you use the browser’s bookmarks, this requires synchronization between the devices. All modern browsers offer synchronization services for this. As an example, think of Firefox Sync [1]. The drawback of these services is that data such as bookmarks, passwords, open tabs, and more are stored on the browser provider’s servers. Without wanting to imply anything about Mozilla, what better way can you imagine than this if you…

Linux has become so good at containers, virtual machines, and isolated package formats that you’re probably running more instances of Linux in containers than you are natively. But you often don’t need a full-blown container just to keep a few things separated from your day-today system. For those occasions, boxxy is the perfect solution. Boxxy is a clever, low-resource tool that corrals directories and files into a location you specify, and optionally, only under the circumstances you write into its configuration file. Thanks to a Linux kernel feature called namespaces, boxxy accomplishes all of this without using symbolic links (symlinks), which are typically used all the time for ad hoc links between locations. But symlinks can make it difficult to understand where your files are, whether something has truly been…

Despite the terminal being the place for copying, renaming, deleting, and organizing files, text-based file managers have always been popular. They can help remove some of the jeopardy in using commands to do important things to your data, especially when multiple files or directories are involved, and a file manager is obviously more visual. This can make it easier to navigate and explore filesystems you may not be familiar with. Miguel de Icaza famously started his career by writing Midnight Commander for Linux in 1994, before starting the Gnome project in 1997, and his venerable mc command is still the one many of us resort to when we want to visualize files and directories on the command line. But as entrenched in our collective history as Midnight Commander is, there’s…

MythTV is one of those few remarkable projects that have been around for so long they’ve become part of the open source canon (a little like KiCad!). It was first released over 20 years ago, and I personally used it as a daily television-recording solution, video player, and music center for five years, between 2004 and 2009, until my interest in live broadcasts waned and the Internet took over. Back then, I was using a video grabber to digitize the analog output from a satellite receiver in coordination with an LIRC infrared beamer to send channel signals. A successfully recorded program required a delicate balance between show timings carefully scraped from a website, the infrared beamer successfully sending a channel change code at the right time, the receiver interpreting that…

Linux users do have reasons to be grateful to the almighty search engine Google. After all, Google gave the world the (mostly) open source Android operating system [1]. Still, many phones and devices come preinstalled with Google’s app – a firm whose bottom line is largely based on serving you more and more targeted ads. This isn’t good for your privacy, and as recently as late December 2022, the search engine was fined around $57 million in France due to its handling of customers’ data [2]. As Linux users, we’re used to finding workarounds, so in theory it’s not much trouble to “de-Google” your life. In practice, this is very difficult given Google’s market dominance. DuckDuckGo was originally created by Gabriel Weinberg to address these kind of privacy worries. Out…