Innehållsförteckning för September 2024 från Linux Magazine

Log data, configuration files, medication plans – several forms of data require some kind of version control. If you’re building an application that manages version-sensitive information, you might be wondering if it is possible to simply integrate Git rather than painstakingly implementing a version management system yourself. Git is an obvious choice for many scenarios. For instance, developers use version management for their source code anyway and are already very familiar with Git. Git is totally reliable and meets professional requirements. This article outlines some of the options for integrating Git with your homegrown code. Build It In The most direct way to build Git into your application is to launch it directly. This method can be cumbersome in the long run, but it is easy to describe conceptually. Most…

When containers were first introduced just over a decade ago, they were seen primarily as a server application. However, in the past few years, containers have been increasingly finding their way onto the desktop where they function like applications such as chroot and Gnome Boxes. Containers can also be used to dual-boot distributions and releases, as well as for sandboxing. Their advantage is that they integrate seamlessly with the host distribution’s hardware and require less memory than their alternatives. Among the choices for managing containers in this way, Distrobox is by far the most popular [1]. Although only a few years old, Distrobox is rapidly spreading across distributions. Running from a user account, Distrobox integrates with the host, letting it share the HOME directory, external storage, external USB devices, audio,…

Whether users are browsing through my US blog [1] or finding out about the city hiking trails [2] I’ve put together in my adopted home of San Francisco, it gives me great pleasure to see how readers navigate the content by tracing the associated web server’s logs. In this issue, the terminal UI, Logdrill, grabs one or more access logfiles on the web host, finds which pages have been requested, and displays the latest hits in a continuously scrolling list box. The bottom line of the terminal UI even lists the country of origin of a requesting web client and some of the user’s geodata (Figure 1). A web request’s source IP can be used to determine where it came from. Before the web server delivers the requested page, it…

Available Starting September 6 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…

openSUSE Leap 15.6 64-bit openSUSE Leap 15.6, the latest update to the 15.x series, introduces features for containers, immutable systems, and embedded development. Leap 15.6 will receive bug and security updates until the end of 2025, after which it can be upgraded to Leap 16.0 or SUSE’s extended support version. Leap 15.6 contains numerous software upgrades including the Linux kernel 6.4, Plasma 5.27.11, and Gnome 45. However, version 15.6’s main emphasis is containers, introducing Podman 4.8 and upgrades to Distrobox and Docker, and container management tools such as Skopeo and containerd. Notably, too, Leap 15.6 introduces Cockpit, a container tool that improves usability and works with both high-end container administration tools and web-based interfaces. This release also provides updates to virtualization tools such as Xen 4.18, KVM 8.2.2, and virt-manager…

Code and version management used to be difficult and risky. Users were never quite sure whether they would keep or lose their last changes when switching to a different development branch. Attempts to merge the results of hours of work could sometimes lead to unexpected results. Before Git [1] became the de facto standard, CVS [2] was the most widely used version management system. In CVS, all changes must be uploaded to a central server and the user needs a functioning network connection. In addition, CVS only saves the individual changes and never a complete version of the code. When merging the work of two developers, branching can lead to conflict situations that can be very time consuming to resolve. Other systems such as Subversion (svn) [3] or Mercurial (hg)…

Remember Edubuntu? No surprise if you do not. This educational flavor of Ubuntu disappeared nine years ago. However, in late 2023, the Eickmeyer family of Seattle revived the project, and the three releases since then have begun the process of updating the distribution and spreading the word that it is back in business (see Figure 1). In talking with Linux Magazine, the family sent brief bios: • Amy Eickmeyer, Project Leader: In her day job, Amy works as an early education manager for a nonprofit in the Seattle area for refugee and immigrant families from East Africa. She is a graduate of the University of Washington with a BA in Early Education and Family Relations. • Erich Eickmeyer, Technical Lead: In his day job, Erich works as a media specialist…

Having foreign language text automatically translated in your web browser at the push of a button is an indispensable function that many users rely on every day. Virtually nobody seems to think about the fact that a service provider is translating the foreign language content into the desired target language. Although this does not incur any direct costs, this translation feature still comes at a price: The service providers analyze the translated data and then use the information for commercial purposes and profiling. Native Linux translation programs such as LibreTranslate [1] work in an offline mode, which means that they do not spy on your personal data. However, you have to install them and in some cases compile them from the source code. Starting with version 118 released in September…

Digital video plays a big part in the lives of many Linux users. A collection is only useful, however, when you can find what you need. You could catalog all your videos with a simple spreadsheet or a full-blown Linux-compatible media center platform, but these alternatives can be cumbersome and inflexible. A more future-proof solution that is valid for any kind of video format and is not tied to any particular application is to associate metadata with every video file. Most Linux users are accustomed to working with metadata for photo images, but metadata can be a bit more complicated with video files. This article describes the most important metadata you might want to manage for your personal archives of video files. I’ll also present some Linux-compatible tools for working…

Set Up and Configure Git You need to enter your username and email address up front. These are not the access credentials for a service such as GitHub. The --global option defines the setting for all (local) Git repositories, --local configures the settings for the current repository. Creating or Cloning a Repository A repository acts as a storage location for all the project files you want to manage, such as source code, configuration files and so on. A local repository consists of a directory, a remote repository is usually offered by a server or a service such as GitHub or GitLab. Staging Area: Selecting Files for Versioning Modified and newly created files initially end up in the staging area. The project changes gathered there form a new intermediate status (commit)…

Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) is the art of studying a potentially compromised system to understand the blast radius of an attack. In this article I will look at some of the DFIR steps a security analyst might take following an incident. I will also simulate a couple of attacks and then go through how an analyst might respond after a monitoring system raises an alarm about a potential attack. (See the box entitled “Resources and Tools” for more on the post-incident investigation environment.) A large part of this discussion was inspired by an excellent article by Craig Rowland [1]. For purposes of illustration, I will work with a live, running system, but keep in mind that a real forensic investigation would be more likely to make an exact…

While thinking about intelligence and its operation dates back at least to the Greek philosophers [1], discussion of creating an artificial brain only credibly emerged after Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s work on the Analytical Engine [2]. The idea that a mechanical device could be built possessing the ability to reason was further boosted by the appearance of digital computers in the 1940s and a highly symbolic language such as Lisp the 1960s [3], reducing indirection to just another set of parenthesis and thus enabling the efficient encoding and processing of large sets of interdependent rules. Then progress hit a wall due to the impossibility of encoding in declarative fashion all the rules (some of which were manifestly yet unknown) required to reason from a premise to a conclusion. Nevertheless,…

In part 1 of this series on PCB design [1], I covered schematic capture in KiCad [2]. The schematic embodies the logical part of the design, which components are used, and how they are interconnected. To complete the information required for PCB layout, the component symbols are annotated with data that describes the physical layout of the component pins, otherwise known as a footprint. Other symbols represent mechanical features required by the design, such as mounting holes and any markings on the silkscreen layer. These elements can be added directly to the PCB layout without having a reference in the schematic. You can also mark such things as logos, copyright warnings, and revision numbers to be excluded from the bill of materials (BOM) in the symbol’s properties. In this second,…

The KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) first appeared near the end of the first decade of the millennium. It was a time when the Linux desktops had caught up with their proprietary counterparts but had paid little attention to the user experience. In 2008, at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Mark Shuttleworth challenged developers to “shoot beyond the Mac,” and “to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean.” In response, over the next few years, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE experimented with rethinking the desktop, with varying degrees of success and mixed user response. Since then, distributions such as elementary OS, Deepin, Zorin, and Pop!_OS have conducted their own experiments, but KDE’s HIG have been little changed. However, in 2024, KDE developer Nate Graham has started a…