Innehållsförteckning för June 2024 från Linux Magazine

AI is a buzzword on the world’s lips, and technology enthusiasts are eager to try out the new tools. Eventually, however, your wallet or the available hardware could reach a limit. Linux AI tools tend to be easy on the wallet, but they sometimes demand a high level of technical understanding, especially if the installation involves a visit to the command line. Linux users can quickly reach their limits due to the mess of Python tools and unfulfilled dependencies (Figure 1). The AI browser Pinokio [1] was created to help the user manage that complexity. (We were unable to verify whether the name is an ironic reference to the fact that AI sometimes fails to tell the truth.) In this case, the term AI browser does not mean that Pinokio…

The number of text formats in modern computing has steadily increased, resulting in complexity when it comes to porting to and from the different formats. Added to this complexity is the desire to single-source documents, which allows you to create different documents from a single file. With this in mind, I return to a tool I covered a few years ago, pandoc [1]. Universal Document Converter Pandoc supports 22 input formats (Figure 1) and 25 output formats (Figure 2) – and half as many again if you count various versions of the same basic format. With so many formats to support, you might expect support conversion between formats to be spotty, especially if you are familiar with such efforts as Collabora’s ongoing struggle to improve just LibreOffice’s support of Microsoft…

A real-time operating system for microcontrollers My desktop computer uses an operating system (OS) – Linux, of course – but “operating system” is a very loose term, often describing everything that makes a computer work, from launching programs, communicating over a network, managing filesystems, and presenting the user with a sophisticated graphical user interface. Much of this functionality lies outside of the kernel of the OS, and many computers are used in such a way that they don’t need some of these facilities: specifically, servers that generally run headless with administrative and user access performed over some form of network. In the world of embedded computers, a real-time operating system (RTOS) is much more focused on being a kernel. The simplest microcontroller might require no OS at all, which is…

Netcat can quickly set up a connection between two systems. It supports both shell access and file transfers. Unlike its predecessor, the Go-based Netcat alternative, ezcat, can manage multiple connections to different systems. You will need to build the software yourself from the sources. When called, the ezcat shell starts up, allowing you to manage the connections. Ezcat uses the HTTP protocol and listens on port 6001. You can use the HTTP_ADDR environment variable to specify an interface and a port. The help command lists all the commands available in the ezcat shell. The gen command followed by the interface name tells ezcat to generate a shell payload. You then execute this command sequence on the console of a remote computer to establish a connection to the ezcat system. The…

The Simple Script Compiler (ssc) converts scripts to a binary format. You will need to build the tool yourself from the source code. To convert a script to a binary, pass the name of the script to ssc, along with the name of the future binary file, and ssc converts the code into an ELF file. Among others, ssc supports Bash, Perl, Python, Node.js, PHP, Lua, and Ruby. By default, the binary programs use libraries for execution. For an autonomous binary, use --static to build a static version, although this will bloat the size of the resulting file. The -e option tells ssc to integrate a predefined interpreter into the program file. To prevent third parties from analyzing the script, you can add debugging protection to the binary with -u.…

Do you have lots of digital family videos, full of priceless memories lost among many other scenes that aren’t worth preserving because someone forgot to turn off the camera? Do you have old recordings of TV shows that would be much more enjoyable without commercials? Would you like to remove all that chaff, to get videos that people would like to watch? If these scenarios sound familiar, you might find LosslessCut [1] quite useful! LosslessCut is a multiplatform, open source software program that aims to be the “Swiss Army knife of lossless video/ audio editing.” Think of it as a digital Moviola, whose purpose is not to create fancy special effects, but to let you cut and paste multimedia clips as simply and quickly as possible without degrading their quality.…

Nobara 39 64-bit Founded by former Red Hat Software Maintenance Engineer Thomas Crider (aka GloriousEggroll), Nobara is a young distribution that is quickly gaining popularity. A fork of Fedora, Nobara adds to its installation what many users install on their own: not only the proprietary drivers needed to take full advantage of their hardware, but also dozens of patches to ease the experience of novices, with a major emphasis on online games. Replacing Fedora’s Anaconda installer with Calamares, Nobara sets up a core system and then offers users the chance to create WebApps, set up gaming sites, and choose a bootloader. Only then does it turn to desktop appearance and choices such as themes and icon. This setup makes for a longer install than most modern distributions, but it probably…

You can imagine a chatbot as a kind of robot that talks to you. Underpinning the chatbot experience is software that can analyze language in text form and find an appropriate response. The technical term for this process is Natural Language Processing (NLP). In the past, NLP systems were completely rule-based. To be more precise, state machines were used to conduct the conversations. However, rule-based chatbots were extremely limited. They were only suitable for processing simple standard tasks. A chatbot could provide information about a specific item in an online store or the opening hours of a museum. However, recent AI techniques allow for a much greater range of expression. Modern AI-based chatbots are very capable of conducting complex conversations. Modern chatbots start by analyzing the request and trying to…

The Fedora Project describes its workstation edition as “a polished, easy-to-use operating system for laptop and desktop computers, with a complete set of tools for developers and makers of all kinds” [1]. Certainly, over the years, Fedora has been among the major distributions that have steadily improved the user experience. However, for Thomas Crider (aka GloriousEggroll), a former Software Maintenance Engineer at Red Hat, more remains to be done. Since 2022, Crider has been making a concrete critique in a new distribution called Nobara [2]. Presumably named for Nobara Kugisaki, an anime character known for her fierce independence, Nobara runs on Wayland and is available in Gnome and KDE versions. Nobara began as Crider’s personal project, but quickly attracted the interest of others. As of late March 2024, Nobara has…

If you are looking for a console-based system monitor that provides information about the installed hardware, the utilization, and the distribution running on the machine, inxi might be just right for you. Many Linux derivatives already contain older versions of the software, but you can pick up the current release from Codeberg. As a Perl tool, inxi runs immediately after unpacking. When called without parameters, it discovers the installed CPU, including the clock speed and number of cores, the RAM utilization level, the available mass storage space, the uptime, and the Linux kernel and shell. The data is output in a compact block. The -G switch delivers information on the built-in graphics card, and you can query details on the sound system using -A. You can use additional parameters to…

The C-based cupidfetch, which you will need to compile yourself from the source code, lets you query system information at the command line. You simply call cupidfetch without any parameters; the configuration resides in the $HOME/.config/cupidfetch/cupidfetch.ini file. When called, the tool determines data such as the hostname, the logged-in user, the distribution, the kernel version, the number of installed packages, and the uptime. It also shows the CPU model, the shell you are using, the system’s IPv4 address, and the memory utilization. A list of all active mount points, including space consumption, completes the output. As a C program, cupidfetch impresses with its processing speed. The current version discovered most of the system information as advertised but failed to determine the distribution we used in our lab. The still young…

If you are a fan of TV series such as NCIS, you will be familiar with the following scene: The team’s IT specialist receives a heavily pixelated image with a completely unrecognizable license plate and, in just a few seconds, conjures up a perfectly sharp image on a PC to help convict the perpetrator. Many users would love to have this technology for their home environment. Perhaps you have experienced the problem of finding a suitable and freely usable image for a blog entry, and then discovering the resolution is far too poor. Or maybe you dug out a great photo that your parents took of you back in the day, but it is too low-res to actually use for anything? To solve these problem, various websites offer upscalers (Figure…

If you tracked the development of PostgreSQL in the ’90s, you may remember it as a slow, resource hungry open source database later surpassed in popularity by the faster and easier to use MySQL. If that’s the case, you might be surprised by PostgreSQL 16. While the name is the same, along with the similar syntax of familiar tools such as psql or pg_dump, the internal architecture has been vastly reworked. At the end of the day, it is basically a completely different database. PostgreSQL is a mature, polished product that has been in development for almost 40 years. At the same time, it has developed at a rapid pace and offers many new, interesting features. In fact, it is practically impossible to describe all of these features in a…

Improved performance on old Pis The OpenWrt project offers an open source networking-centric operating system that supports almost 1,000 different devices [1], mostly networking equipment (e.g., D-Link and Netgear routers), although other hardware such as Raspberry Pis, BeagleBone modules, and even old X86 computers can be used. OpenWrt has an extremely small footprint, and it is designed to operate with as little as 8MB of flash RAM and 64MB of RAM. Because of these minimal hardware requirements, OpenWrt can be ideal for older Raspberry Pi hardware with speed and memory usage issues. I was a little apprehensive when I saw that the OpenWrt Raspberry Pi image was only 185MB (compared with 520MB for the Raspberry Pi OS Lite image), but after everything loaded, I was happily surprised with its great…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software A console-based HTTP client such as CuTE provides genuine benefits to anybody who needs to maintain web applications or wants to test their web server’s response. CuTE offers a convenient interface for sending HTTP requests from the terminal. You can use the CuTE interface to formulate the request. In addition, CuTE lets you store previous requests and even API keys. According to the project documentation, “This is a tool for when your requests are not complex enough for something like Postman, but more complicated than you would want to use with curl CLI, or if you just don’t want to remember all those commands. You can make a few requests to your back ends for testing,…

A clipboard lets users exchange data between programs on one computer. If you need to exchange data across two systems, a web-based tool such as Hasty Paste is a big help. You can install Hasty Paste from the source code or launch it in a Docker container. The tool comes up with a simple clipboard on port 8000. There is no TLS-based transport encryption, which is why you should only use Hasty Paste on the local network. You can use the New Paste button to create a new entry in the clipboard, which you can label and assign an expiration date. If the entry is source code, you can also enable syntax highlighting. After creating the entry, you will find a link in Download that gives you remote access to…

The EPUB format has established itself as the standard for ebooks, but the format is really only designed for reading with an EPUB reader. If you want to work directly with the text, you’ll need a way to extract it. The C-based ebread is a simple tool that converts the XHTML contents of an EPUB file into formatted text. You’ll need to clone the source code of the tool from the Codeberg repository and build the program yourself. The call parameters define the configuration. To extract the text quickly, pass the name of the EPUB file you want to process to the tool. Ebread creates a folder based on the filename in which it stores the text files. You can use -d to specify a target directory. If you want…