Linux Magazine November 2024

Dear Reader, The free software community loves it when FOSS projects find a place in the IT cosmos. When people who have never used Linux start talking about tools like LibreOffice and MariaDB, we get a warm feeling of accomplishment. However, many open source projects are maintained by for-profit entities, and once in a while, they fall off the open source wagon. There is still a large army of old-school business people who don’t get open source. What? You’re giving away your source code? What’s the point of that? How do you “extract value” from it if everybody can use it? You would think we would be done with this question by now, but actually it as gotten worse in recent years, due to the recent epidemic of large companies…

Rocky Linux 9.4 64-bit Rocky Linux is a community-based alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). For users’ convenience, its release versions parallel those of RHEL, and it includes a migration tool, migrate2rocky, for those who wish to switch from RHEL. Rocky’s releases usually occur within a week or two of RHEL’s releases. Both are geared toward large deployments rather than single-user installations. Rocky Linux’s 9.4 release includes enhanced options for its image builder, including custom mount points and partitioning modes. It also features updates to a variety of security features, ranging from new deny rules for SELinux user space and the ability to install Keylime’s verifier and registrar as containers, to the ability to create a directory for provider-specific configuration files in the OpenSSL TLS toolkit and support for…

New KDE Slimbook Plasma Available for Preorder All about power, the latest KDE Slimbook features an AMD 8845HS with CPU 8 cores, 16 threads, and up to 5.1GHz and 24MB cache. You’ll also find an AMD 780M GPU, with 12 cores and RDNA 3 and NPU, ready for local AI. While the Slimbook does not ship with AI software preinstalled, it does mean the hardware is ready for AI. With this latest iteration, you can get up to 96GB of RAM (DDR5 5600MHz), so you can imagine how fast the Plasma desktop will perform. Other features include an 83 Wh battery, four speakers, a full aluminum chassis, a 16" Wide Quad XGA display (2560x1600, 16:10, sRGB 100%, 120Hz, 400 nits), 2 x PCIe 4.0, and the Plasma 6.1 desktop environment…

Supporting Older Tools One fascinating aspect of Linux involves balancing the need to support all users everywhere with the need to keep the source code as clean and maintainable as possible. For example, someone may have an extremely old computer with an old compiler and old versions of the other tools needed to build the kernel. While it’s possible for Linus Torvalds and the rest of the developers to continue supporting those old tools forever, should they do it? Linus believes they should not. As the build tools continue to improve over time, the kernel source tree no longer needs to compensate for the lack of this or that feature in those older tools. This allows the kernel developers to clean out code that is no longer needed because a…

Today’s home automation solutions fall into four groups. On one side are the ecosystems of vendors such as Apple, Google, and Samsung. On the other are commercial systems such as Homey that integrate devices from different manufacturers. The third group includes open source systems that offer many standardized features, such as Home Assistant. The fourth group targets technology enthusiasts who are looking for a flexible, lightweight tool that is easy to customize and extend. Domoticz [1] belongs to this last group. Domoticz is easy to install and easy to expand, supporting programming languages such as DzVents (Domoticz Easy Events, a Lua offshoot), Python, Ruby, and Blockly. This extensive support for programming means you can use Domoticz to code complete home automation systems (Figure 1), alarm systems, battery management systems, and…

OpenHAB [1], or the Open Home Automation Bus, is a vendor- and technology-independent open source facility-automation platform that can act as the brain of a smart home. OpenHAB follows the “Integrate Everything” principle, currently supporting more than 400 technologies and systems, including En-Ocean, KNX, LCN, Loxone, Modbus, MQTT, Philips Hue, Z-Wave, and Zigbee. In fact, openHAB can integrate, visualize, and automate more than 3,000 different devices. You’ll find a list of the supported technologies and systems at the project website [2]. See the box entitled “openHAB History” for some background on the openHAB project. One of openHAB’s aims is to simplify sequence control. The openHAB control engine offers various options for automation, from UI-based rules, to Blockly based visual scripts, to full-fledged programming languages, such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby, openHAB…