Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från Linux Magazine

Planning tools for the desktop have long since replaced the diary-style organizers that were often given away as promos in the past. These electronic organizers offer several advantages over their paper counterparts. They can’t be misplaced, illegible entries are a thing of the past, and thanks to reminder functions you’ll never miss an appointment or deadline. Users are spoiled for choice: There are numerous graphical appointment calendars, some of which are preinstalled on desktop environments. Their feature sets differ considerably, potentially consuming your storage media. This article examines some of the leading free graphical schedulers for individual workstations. Not considered in this roundup are cloud-based personal information managers (PIMs), groupware calendars, and schedulers integrated into email clients. Features The basic functions of an appointment scheduler include a daily, weekly, and…

When sizing up potential targets, attackers try to get as much information as possible without raising any alarms. The ability to passively research the details of online resources and their associated humans has never been easier. If you’re wondering what kind of information about you and your network is available online right now, the best way to find out is to look for it yourself. This article examines some online services that tabulate known information on users and websites. Some of these services use information that is freely available through online sources; others delve into the dark web to find data that has turned up in security breaches. For privacy, and in order to demonstrate richer examples, identifying information in the output of the tools described in this article will…

Temperature and humidity sensor comparison Remeasured The data sheets of common temperature and humidity sensors tend to brag about accuracies in the range of a tenth of a degree. A closer look at 21 cases with eight different sensors shows which claims are true and which are just hot air from marketing. It isn’t complicated to wire up a sensor and read the values cyclically. If you’ve ever done so, you’ve probably had the feeling at some point that the numbers didn’t add up. Deploying a second device only adds to the confusion, with deviations of up two units, which quickly gives rise to suspicions that your sensor lacks quality or was just too cheap, leaving you to wonder whether mysteriously high measured values are the result of a poor…

EndeavourOS 11 64-bit EndeavourOS is an ideal choice for users who want to experience Arch Linux but not the challenges of installing it. EndeavourOS replaces Arch’s traditional manual install with Calamares, a popular graphic installer used by many modern distributions, making it more accessible than even the latest Arch release. Code-named Galileo, EndeavourOS 11 is a housekeeping release, intended to make the distribution easier to both maintain and use. For the first time, community editions and multiple desktops are not available through the installer, and the default desktop is KDE Plasma instead of Xfce. Galileo also restructures package selection as well as the installer, offers stronger LUKS encryption, and improves dual booting with Windows, while also providing the usual application upgrades of most general releases. The overall result is an…

An intrusion detection system (IDS) works like a smoke detector. It detects a risk, issues a warning, but does not take any further steps to prevent the attack. A fullblown intrusion prevention system (IPS), on the other hand, can take additional steps to stop the attack. However, an IPS is much more elaborate (and often expensive), and it is often overkill for a small home network. For many users on small networks, the notification is the most important part, and an IDS can deliver that notification for far less trouble and a smaller learning curve. An IDS takes a deep look at the IP packets passing through. If the analyzed content appears suspicious, the system alerts the user. The IDS references a database populated with known attack patterns to decide…

Too long; didn’t read (TL; DR) is a flippant Internet acronym for a summary that first came into use about a decade ago. It seems to be falling out of fashion but survives in tldr, the newest command and format for computer documentation. It is far from the first documentation command, but it fills a niche as a cheat sheet for the most common options for commands. The most common documentation format, of course, is the man page, which dates back to 1971 (Figure 1). Man pages cover commands, libraries, and configuration files, usually aiming for an encyclopedia-like summary of their topics. One great advantage is that the pages are highly organized, arranged in nine sections ranging from user commands and system calls to system administration calls, kernel routines, and…

Why does LibreOffice Writer need a how-to? Aren’t millions familiar with it through daily use? Not exactly – many use LibreOffice inefficiently, ignoring the tools designed to make work easier, and do everything the hard way. It’s like dragging your feet instead of using the brakes. When using LibreOffice, or any word processor, most people type some text, pause to format the text before typing more, and then repeat the process, which is slow and likely to interrupt one’s train of thought. To change the format, a user must go through the document individually updating every instance of the old format. This method of working is known as direct or manual formatting. Word processors in general, and Libre-Office Writer in particular, are not primarily designed for direct formatting. They can…

Flight simulation on the Raspberry Pi Takeoff Flight simulators range from games to airline operations, and generally, you cannot (or you are not permitted to) modify the software. Often, the code is proprietary and not accessible, or the acquisition of data used in the simulator is very costly, and the developers of these simulators are understandably protective of their software. However, for a class of simulator known as an engineering flight simulator (EFS) – used by aircraft manufacturers, avionics companies, research organizations, and universities to develop and evaluate aircraft designs and aircraft systems – it is essential to have access to the source code to modify the simulator for a range of studies. Table 1: Module Functions Computer Function I/O system Data acquisition of analog and digital inputs from the…

No matter which shell you use in a terminal, the prompt probably looks very dull in the vast majority of cases and only provides basic information – typically just telling you the current working directory. Fortunately, the vast majority of shells offer users a function for customizing the prompt. Prompt engines such as Powerline or Oh My Zsh take advantage of this. As a rule, they use various themes that give the environment a more appealing look. These engines can also display useful information in the input line. The is then typically broken down into different segments, which gives you the opportunity to populate these segments with the kind of information you actually need. In the simplest case, you might display the date or time in one segment. More complex…

Available Starting February 9 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…

Few distributions have had the ups and downs of Peppermint OS [1] (Figure 1). Founded in 2010 during a pub discussion in North Carolina, Peppermint OS enjoyed initial success only to decline after the death of one of its founders. A few years ago, the project had shrunk to a single maintainer, but the last few years have seen a resurgence of effort with the development of a closely knit and active community. Throughout its history, though, Peppermint’s releases have shown several points of continuity. Its source has always been a Debian derivative – currently, Debian and Devuan. In addition, it has always had a minimal installation in which standard apps such as LibreOffice are not included by default. Instead, a variety of options are offered including six different web…

The Domain Name System (DNS), comparable to an address book, forms the backbone of today’s communication on the Internet. With IPv4, IT administrators could memorize their most important servers’ IPv4 addresses, but there is no alternative to DNS with IPv6. In this article, I will show you how attackers exploit old DNS records to hijack parts of your domain, as well as show you how to protect yourself against these attacks. DNS is divided into zones (a portion of the DNS namespace) managed by individual organizations or administrations. New entries are quickly created, and many projects sometimes result in very large zone files. Often, remnants of test setups or projects will remain in a zone even after they are no longer in use. Combine this with external services, such as…

When I started mining Bitcoin 13 years ago, the hardware standard was a bunch of Windows computers built up around the best possible video cards and power supplies. The end goal was to achieve the most hashes per second (H/ s, or sometimes expressed as kH/s or mH/s) [1]. To this day, it is easy to find articles explaining how to mine Bitcoin using this classic setup. But few of the mining tools are command-line based, which is a problem for Linux veterans who wish to avoid GUI clutter. But rest assured: A basic Debian system, with the fastest CPU you can get your hands on, is all you need to start mining cryptocurrencies. In the highly competitive universe of crypto mining, major currencies like Bitcoin are typically mined using…

The command line has a stark and austere beauty all its own, but many of us need a little more color and cheer. If you want the simplicity of the terminal without the taxing two-tone boredom, why not jazz it up a little with Oh My Posh? The Oh My Posh prompt theme engine lets you define a visual theme for your command-line environment, which perks up the view and also makes the details easier to read and understand. Also in this month’s Linux Voice, we dive down into System Monitoring Center and spell out some best practices for working with the SSH.…

Linux comes with more system control applications than any other operating system. But the individual tools typically only focus on specific components of a computer. For example, programs such as the Gnome disk utility or the KDE partition manager take care of the connected mass storage devices. The system monitor for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and the system monitoring tools for other desktop environments such as MATE or LXDE keep an eye on the CPU, RAM, and network throughput, but no more. Many of the tools integrated into the respective environments for monitoring individual components also look a little jaded. Compared to them, System Monitoring Center [1], which is available as a Flatpak and can therefore be used independently of your choice of distribution, offers a comprehensive overview of…