Innehållsförteckning för June 2023 från Linux Magazine

You have a pet, but you need to be away from home for a day. Is it really worth paying for a kennel when all you want is to keep an eye on your pet while you’re away? Of course, you could use a video doorbell service (like Ring or Arlo) and simply locate the camera device inside your home, but it seems like overkill to pay for a monthly service for something that you only need occasionally. Also, for privacy reasons, some people might not want to invite a streaming video service into their home when they don’t have control over how the video is processed and stored. On the other hand, if you have a Raspberry Pi, an Internet connection, and a Pi-compatible camera, it is actually pretty…

Since 2019, MX Linux has had the most page views on DistroWatch. The reason is not hard to find. A collaboration between developers of the defunct MEPIS Linux and the minimalist antiX, MX Linux is an example of a vertically integrated distribution, meaning a one-stop solution for an installation, including hardware, support, and cloud services. In fact, it appears to be the first vertically integrated community distro, most of the other examples being corporate retailers of original software such as Purism, Slimbook, System76, and TUXEDO Computers. Moreover, MX Linux appears to be an effort to recapture the user-friendliness of MEPIS in the first 13 years of the millennium. From either perspective, MX Linux largely succeeds, although not without raising a question or two. Veteran users may recall MEPIS as one…

Almost half of all websites are created with WordPress [1] according to current estimates. While WordPress is a mature, proven, and easy-to-use content management system (CMS), it is still often too complex, especially for beginners and smaller websites, and unnecessarily consumes server resources. Beginners in particular don’t need all the functions provided by a database CMS such as WordPress. Ironically, beginners often turn to WordPress, even though a flat-file CMS would be a far better choice. A flat-file CMS, such as the well-known open source Grav [2], offers most of the features of a conventional database CMS, but it does not require its own database: The content is in the form of files that reside directly on the web server. A flat-file CMS simplifies the software installation and makes it…

The Qt project has a long history of experimenting with different code licenses and business models. This has sometimes brought it into conflict with the Linux community, with its early proprietary license fueling the foundations of Gnome, for instance. It has since remained open source, but various new developments and components have drifted into and out of inclusion as the Qt project experimented with new funding models. Even recently, the current custodians of Qt, the Qt Company, announced it would only release LTS versions of Qt 6 and not intermediate patches, forcing the KDE project to maintain its own. All this leaves Qt’s sub-projects, such as the brilliant platform-agnostic Qt Creator, stuck in the middle of a storm they have no control over, and no way for users to know…

It is unusual for a project such as LMS to survive quite so long. It started out as a boutique hardware/​software music player solution at the dawn of digital music in 2001. It was then acquired by Logitech, who assimilated the neatly designed hardware players and their Perl-based server into its product range, the latter of which was released as open source. This being Logitech, the hardware was eventually dropped, but by then, open source software clients had replaced the hardware and were running on Linux desktops, NAS devices, and Raspberry Pis everywhere. What’s most astonishing is that over 10 years later, in the era of multiroom subscription streaming, nothing can still beat that combination of Logitech Media Server and open source client, and both are still being developed and…

Many games have taken their inspiration from the classic board game Risk. It’s the original boundary-dispute and resource-management game, where players take turns to roll dice to capture neighboring territories, with the dice used to determine how many armies each side loses until one side dominates the other. Many video games have used variations of this gameplay to capture resources and expand territory, and it’s particularly common in real-time strategy games. But relatively few have kept as closely to the original recipe as Qonquest 2, a game strongly based on the original Risk rules. While Qonquest 2 is a game fundamentally based on Risk, it also does things slightly differently and takes particular advantage of a computer being able to make the game more complex and unfamiliar. Unlike version 1…

New technologies and new providers are constantly expanding the range of potential smart home applications. Solutions from various manufacturers are often mutually incompatible, which means customers cannot leverage the full potential of home automation services. But there is another approach. Zigbee is a protocol for low-power wireless communication based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The Zigbee protocol is often used for home automation devices. Dresden elektronik [1] has been working on light control systems based on the Zigbee protocol for some 10 years and now offers numerous vendor-agnostic systems for the smart home. The company also distributes the Rasp-Bee module for home automation with a Raspberry Pi. A RaspBee device with the accompanying software can help you reap the benefits of the smart home without expensive gateways and cloud connections.…

Understanding energy consumption is more important now than ever, and the tools of the smart home provide some interesting possibilities for energy monitoring. This article shows how to use an energy consumption meter to answer practical questions about the power usage of home appliances. A consumption meter is a device that sits between the appliance and the socket outlet. Some versions include a graphic display to show the current power consumption and the total consumption. Other models support some form of networking to transmit data to a hub or computer system for viewing and further processing. I’ll look at two consumption meters that transmit wireless data output. The Voltcraft SEM6000 uses the low-energy Bluetooth variant known as Bluetooth LE to transmit the data, and the Delock 11827 supports WiFi (Figure…

While I was working on hike-find, a command-line program that chooses a trail from a collection of GPX files with track points, for a recent issue [1], I got the idea of drawing the trail contours the program found in a terminal window. Unfortunately, a GPX file generated by an app such as Komoot or a Garmin tracker only contains geocoordinates as floating-point numbers. They refer to the points of the globe through which the trail passes (Figure 1). These geopoints on a spherical surface now need to be converted to a two-dimensional coordinate system so that they look as natural as possible on a flat map. This problem was solved centuries ago. Any map, whether paper or digital, is based on the genius idea of projecting geopoints on the…

After you have edited a collection of vacation pics or snapshots from a party, you may want to scale them for emailing. This doesn’t seem like a big deal at first, but if you have to edit each image individually for an entire series of photos, this monotonous task can consume a huge amount of time. The remedy is basically ImageMagick [1], which batch-processes files, but can only be controlled using shell commands. If you feel more comfortable with a graphical user interface, it is worth taking a look at Converseen [2], which is based on ImageMagick. For the install [3], you have a choice between an AppImage and Flatpak or Snap packages across various distributions. Some distributions also let you pick up Converseen via the package manager, and the…

It’s remarkable that most home networks provide very little analysis of the network traffic they’re carrying, or further details on what they’re sending to and receiving from the Internet. The best that most home routers can manage is a network usage graph, perhaps with a pie chart split into broad packet categories for video, file transfers, and music. One of the reasons we don’t have access to deeper analytics is likely because the vast majority of users can’t even log into their routers, let alone worry about the seven layers of the OSI model or the difference between UDP and TCP. But there should be a middle option for those of us who do want it, and ntopng might be that option. As its name suggests, ntopng is the “next…

There can’t be many Linux users who don’t have FFmpeg installed, even if they’re not aware of it. FFmpeg has become the backbone of media manipulation and can seemingly handle everything. It’s used to transcode optical discs, stream videos, remove advertising, extract audio, encode audio and video, and to silently bridge the ever increasing gap between the formats provided by streaming services and those we find convenient on our computers. And as anyone who has typed ffmpeg on the command line can attest, all this incredible flexibility does result in complexity. FFmpeg has more build options and command-line arguments than the Linux kernel, but this is what enables FFmpeg to work with so many media codecs, and to solve so many problems with convoluted media containers, their codecs, and file…

Linux simply wouldn’t be Linux without Linux distributions and Linux distribution builders. From Linux’s earliest days, it has been the people building distributions that have put down the roads the rest of us have followed. From choices about configuration files and package repositories, to desktops, and even systemd, none of this would make sense without Yggdrasil’s Live CD or Softlanding Linux System becoming Slackware. It’s a tradition that has crossed the three decades since, with many people and companies still creating their own distros, sharing ideas, integrating features, and iterating updates with each release, helping all modern distros to reach their full potential. We now have distributions for beginners, for experts, for musicians, for security experts, for developers, and everyone in between. Experimenting with your own distribution is still a…

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Arch Linux has evolved in recent years from a wallflower underestimated by many to a much sought after shooting star. As a result, increasing numbers of Arch Linux derivatives with a strong focus on specific use cases have started to appear. One such derivative, Snal Linux [1], a lean system for 64-bit hardware with a great collection of tools, promises help with system repairs. Snal Linux primarily targets administrators who frequently have to patch hardware or software issues on desktop computers and servers. Consequently, Snal Linux skips a large preinstalled software inventory and only comes with the most necessary system maintenance tools. Snal Linux’s only standard programs are the Firefox web browser, which you use to access the online documentation, support services, and cloud accounts, and the i3 tiling window…

Linux systems can be compromised by the installation of hidden processes visible only from the kernel. Unhide is a generic name for a series of related commands designed to detect such processes through a toolkit of over 30 tests, most of which involve examining and comparing various elements of the system. Of all the versions, the one for Linux is by far the most developed. Originally, the Linux version was called unhide-linux, but in Linux repositories, it is generally named simply unhide [1]. The unhide command works by scanning for inconsistencies within the parts of a Linux operating system that allow users to view what the kernel and related processes are doing. Many system elements compare/proc, the pseudo filesystem that displays information about the running system, and/bin/ps, which contains all…

Most people today think of a newsfeed as something that happens on social media, but the protocol known as RSS has been serving up headlines and news links for more than 20 years. And the best part is, RSS doesn’t depend on AI voodoo to figure out what kind of news you want. You can customize your news yourself by selecting the sources that interest you. This month, we explore RSS and show you how to build your own homegrown RSS news aggregator. Also inside this month’s Linux Voice, we look at how to edit images with Converseen, and we round up some popular desktop tools for compressing and archiving files.…

Compressed archives make it easier to email and share large volumes of data. While Linux offers a variety of command-line tools that support different formats and functions, graphical front ends and easy-to-use, standalone packing programs can save you the trouble of having to learn the syntax. This article explores some popular options. Ark Ark [1] is KDE Plasma’s graphical front end for managing archives. When you install a distribution with KDE Plasma desktop, Ark is typically installed automatically. Ark uses Linux command-line programs as a back end. You have the choice of using archive tools such as Gzip, bzip2, 7-Zip, RAR, and Tar. With Ark, you can create and extract archives, as well as view and modify them. If you call the program from the KDE Plasma desktop menu, you…

The idea of the quantified self, where you track and learn from biometric data generated by your activity, first appeared a couple of decades ago. It took time for our technology to catch up, but self-monitoring and analysis is now common and extends far beyond the number of steps you take or the flights of stairs you climb. Google’s Fitbit, Apple’s Watch, Garmin’s trackers, and devices from many other manufacturers can now monitor heart rhythm, blood oxygen levels, cardio fitness, respiration rates, stress, sleep, hydration, activity, temperature, and many other statistics. The downside, of course, is that this data is difficult to access outside of each manufacturer’s walled garden, and this is where PostRunner can help – at least for users of some common Garmin devices. PostRunner is a command-line…

Using the strace command can be like using ntop (see earlier) in that it empowers ordinary users to see extraordinary things and usually jump to the wrong conclusions. By default, strace is run against the name of a command for which it will list whatever system calls it executes and the libraries those calls come from. It’s a lot like debugging your own code within an IDE, except you have very little context for those system calls, and even small executables can make hundreds of calls as they pass through every library they link to. However, we’re not looking at strace specifically, but instead a similar tool called lurk. The lurk command hopes to be a better-looking and more focussed alternative to strace. It only offers a subset of functions,…

Games within games have been around for a long time. In the 1980s, sporting games in particular would aggregate several minigames together into an “Olympics” or sports triathlon, both in the arcade and on home computers. Nintendo used the same trick with Wii Sports, and Starship Olympics does the same for open source gaming in the 21st century. It’s a beautifully drawn and rendered, top-down arena that can host 20+ individual games for 1-4 players. You can play it alone, against computer opponents, or in cooperative modes, and the whole game has been developed with Godot. It’s set in some distant future after everyone replaced fighting with intergalactic sports games. Each player takes on the role of the champion for some alien race in their attempts to win the games.…

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) [1] of website headlines is the most underrated tech on the Internet. This tutorial offers a flash introduction to RSS and shows how easy it is to build your own RSS aggregator to collect and process online news. Understanding RSS Technically speaking, RSS is an open standard that any website can use to provide small, plaintext files that contain titles, links, and excerpts. Programs called RSS aggregators download these files from many independent sources and display the headlines in one coherent interface. These days too many people don’t even know that RSS exists, and one reason might be the false but widespread belief that RSS died in 2013 when Google killed off Google Reader. I have lost count of how many times I have read this…