Linux Magazine September 2023

Dear Reader, Things have been pretty quiet in Free Software for a few years now. When I started this job, Linux and the little mystery ship we call Open Source were fighting for survival. Microsoft, SCO, and other large companies were bringing all their powers to break up that delicate balance of code freedom established by the GNU Public License (GPL). Much of the battle was fought through PR stunts and misinformation, but some of it was fought in courtrooms – and the GPL always won. But things could be heating up again. Red Hat recently announced that only paying customers will have access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, and apparently, if the customer tries to exercise the rights to that code as defined in the GPL,…

Side A (32-bit Boot) Explore the world of small distros! This disc boots as a Live system to Tiny Core 14.0. Or, mount it as a filesystem to discover the following ISOs in the top directory. Copy an ISO to your hard drive to boot it from VirtualBox, or burn it to a boot medium to boot directly. • CorePlus-14.0.iso (248MB), http://tinycorelinux.net/• S15Pup32-22.12-230708.iso (382MB), http://downloads.sourceforge.net/spup/• S15Pup64-22.12+4-T.iso (420MB), http://downloads.sourceforge.net/spup/• TinyCore-14.0.iso (23MB), http://tinycorelinux.net/• TinyCorePure64-14.0.iso (31MB), http://tinycorelinux.net/• alpine-extended-3.18.2-x86.iso (762MB), https://www.alpinelinux.org/• alpine-standard-3.18.2-x86_64.iso (189MB), https://www.alpinelinux.org/• antiX-22_x64-full.iso (1.4GB), https://antixlinux.com/• dsl-4.4.10.iso (50MB), http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/• fossapup64-9.5.iso (409MB), https://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/puppy-fossa/ Side B (64-bit) The backside of this month’s DVD boots to SystemRescue 10.1. Or, if you mount it as a filesystem, you’ll find the following virtual appliances in the top directory. Copy these files to your hard drive to import a…

SUSE Goes for the Fork After Red Hat’s RHEL Announcement SUSE, the company behind Rancher and SUSE Enterprise Linux, has announced it will invest $10 million to fork publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and develop a RHEL-compatible distribution. Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, says, “For decades, collaboration and shared success have been the building blocks of our open source community. We have a responsibility to defend these values.” He then speaks to the investment SUSE has committed to this effort by saying, “This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today.” This all started when Red Hat declared that CentOS Stream would…

The Hot Mess of Closed Source In the course of trying to track down a regression, Akihiro Suda traced the problem to a couple of patches that had been accepted into a recent kernel release. A regression is when something stops working and the developers have to look back at the patch history to see which one caused the breakage. Identifying regressions is what the Git bisect command is for. It starts from a known good version and a known bad version, tests the middle version, and then just keeps going to the next middle version until it finds the bad patch that started it all. Git makes regressions fun. However, this particular regression had to do with running virtualized systems and related to both Advanced Configuration and Power Interface…

Quick, name three Linux distributions: You probably thought of some of the big players, such as Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, or Red Hat. What they have in common is that they target current desktop and server hardware, and they provide huge (yet similar) selections of current Linux applications, covering all categories, including office, multimedia, development, and gaming. Typically you download a large DVD ISO image and write it to a USB stick – or burn a DVD if you still have a DVD drive – then boot it and launch the installer. All of these modern general-purpose distributions let you reassign disk space and create a boot menu from which to select the new OS from a menu of systems installed on the hard disk. If you think of Linux as…

For a special job, you need a special tool. Occupying a special place beside the grand old generalists are a number of Linux distributions that have a very narrow focus, such as audio, gaming, or security. Specialized Linux distributions come in all sizes, but even the huge ones often fall into the “lightweight” category, because, even though they might need a lot of space for their specialist tools, they don’t have to make room for all the other general-purpose software you’re used to seeing in a Linux system. Hundreds of specialty distros exist in the wild. This article highlights a few popular alternatives (Table 1). I’ll introduce you to Daphile, an audio server; Linux From Scratch, an educational roll-your-own Linux; Recalbox, which lets you run classic games on EmulationStation; System-Rescue,…