Innehållsförteckning för May 2024 från Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, Sometimes the data points in the news come in pairs, or at least they converge into pairs when you stop to think about them. I noticed a story this month on the many layoffs in the tech industry. According to the report, 50,000 tech employees have lost their jobs so far in 2024. 2023 saw 260,000 lose their jobs, the biggest total since the bust in the wake of the dot-com era [1]. The other story that caught my eye was about a bill in the US Senate to mandate a 32-hour work week instead of the customary 40-hour week [2]. I’m not exactly sure why I think these stories belong together, other than the fact that the rise of AI is often cited as a reason for…

Since the early days of the Internet and its division into different organizational areas, users have needed a way to obtain information about domains, the IP addresses they use, their owners, and a way of mapping them to each other. The WHOIS protocol was devised for this purpose in 1982 and introduced in RFC 812 [1]. The service can be accessed using a command-line tool of the same name, whois. The age and importance of the protocol are evident from, among other things, its very low number – 43 – in the list of standardized ports for network services [2], which can be found in the file /etc/services [3]. Thus far, this plain-text protocol has proven its value thanks to its simplicity, even if only request and response have been…

Barcodes and QR codes abound in modern life. You can find them on products at the supermarket, train and plane tickets, concert and movie tickets, and letters and parcels. With a barcode or QR code, you can easily pass on short text, contact data, URLs, or WiFi access credentials, which can then be quickly scanned and processed with the right choice of app on a smartphone or tablet. Zint Barcode Generator [1] lets you easily make your own barcodes or QR codes. Installation To get started, you’ll want to grab the current version, Zint v2.13, from December 18, 2023. You can build the software yourself from the source code [2], which you’ll find along with some instructions on SourceForge. Alternatively, you can use the prebuilt Snap package [3]. You may…

Programs you run on your Linux desktop often have to communicate with each other. For example, when you open a text file by clicking on it in your file manager, your file manager launches your preferred text editor. However, if you already have open an instance of your text editor, the text editor program as launched by your file manager most likely will request the open instance to open the file in a new tab; then the instance invoked by the file manager will exit. As another example, many laptop computer keyboards have a set of extra keys on or next to the main keyboard for controlling multimedia playback. When pressed, these keys activate a daemon that is part of your desktop environment, and this daemon in turn passes the…

Zorin OS 17.1 Released, Includes Improved Windows App Support Zorin OS is widely respected as an outstanding Linux distribution for new users and, well, just about anyone who wants a beautiful, user-friendly operating system. But the latest release makes a case for those users who want all the benefits of Linux, while also being able to more easily run Windows apps. Version 17.1 of Zorin OS has been released and not only upgrades Wine to 9.0 but also includes the Bottles utility. According to the official Zorin OS blog (https://blog.zorin.com/2024/03/07/zorin-os-17.1-is-released/), the team states, “We’ve expanded our built-in database to detect installer files for popular Windows apps and games. It now supports over 100 apps, providing even more tailored recommendations for alternatives to sideloading their Windows executables.” For those who’ve never…

Learn the Julia programming language on a Raspberry Pi Cooking Pi Julia [1] is a relatively new general-purpose programming language that has an emphasis on data science and artificial intelligence (AI). In the past few years, Julia has been gaining momentum. Like Python and R, Julia can be used in Jupyter notebooks. A Raspberry Pi is a great platform for an introduction to Julia programming, and Python users will be happy to hear that Python code can be integrated directly into Julia scripts. In this article, I look at creating a Julia graphical user interface (GUI), micro-web server, and charting apps that communicate with Raspberry Pi hardware. I’ll also introduce mixing Python code within Julia script to communicate with an LCD display. Getting Started Julia is supported on Windows, macOS,…

Teaching Recently, I participated in a Facebook conversation with computer science educators (mostly grade school) about how many courses they were teaching and how many of them require preparation time before they walk into the classroom. In case you have never taught, good teachers prepare their lesson before going into the classroom, present the lesson, and then develop and grade the tests. If the material is new to the teacher, and a difficult subject, the teacher might take four, six, or eight hours for one hour of presentation. If the classes for the course are three one-hour presentations a week and the teacher needs four hours of preparation for each hour of class, that is 15 hours of work for each course. Add another hour per week for answering questions…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software Polyphonic sound generation Firefly Synth This wouldn’t be FOSSPicks without a new open source software synthesizer, and this time it’s Firefly Synth’s turn – which isn’t a synth designed to recreate the sound of flying insects. Instead, it’s capable of producing a huge range of powerfully complex sounds, from beautifully warm analog strings and brass-like melodies to percussion and eardrum-piercing leads. It does all this from a user interface totally unlike any other software synth, replacing skeuomorphism with practical and instant access to dozens of its features. The only downside is that there are so many features, it’s difficult to cram them all into the user interface, making it all look more complicated than it really…

Order online: https://bit.ly/Linux-Magazine-catalog #281/April 2024 Virtual Memory The classic vision of random access memory is just the beginning of the story. Modern hardware – and modern operating systems – manage memory in ways that old-school programmers could only have imagined. This month we take a look at virtual memory in Linux. On the DVD: elementary OS 7.1 and Mageia 9 #280/March KDE’s classic Plasma desktop can be as simple as you need it to be or as complicated as you want to make it. This month we explore the powerful Plasma 6 release that is making its way to your Linux distribution. On the DVD: Linux Mint 21.3 MATE and Zorin OS 17 Core #279/February 2024 Intrusion Detection You don’t need a fancy appliance to watch for intruders – just Suricata…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at https://www.linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to info@linux-magazine.com. ISC 2024 Date: May 12-16, 2024 Location: Hamburg, Germany  Website: https://www.isc-hpc.com/ The ISC High Performance 2024 conference and exhibition is an annual global gathering for HPC technology providers and users. Join us for 5 days focusing on HPC, machine learning, data analytics, and quantum computing where more than 3,000 international attendees will exchange ideas and knowledge on Reinventing HPC. PyCon US 2024 Date: May 15-23, 2024 Location: Pittsburgh,…

Linux Magazine is looking for authors to write articles on Linux and the tools of the Linux environment. We like articles on useful solutions that solve practical problems. The topic could be a desktop tool, a commandline utility, a network monitoring application, a homegrown script, or anything else with the potential to save a Linux user trouble and time. Our goal is to tell our readers stories they haven’t already heard, so we’re especially interested in original fixes and hacks, new tools, and useful applications that our readers might not know about. We also love articles on advanced uses for tools our readers do know about – stories that take a traditional application and put it to work in a novel or creative way. We are currently seeking articles on…