Linux Format

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. It may be a film cliché but often there’s more truth told in jest than many might want to admit. If you read certain parts of the internet, you’d think that’s what happened

In late March 2024, Microsoft software engineer Andres Freund was flying home to San Francisco from his native Germany. He’d been doing some micro benchmarking and saw that his system’s sshd processes were using an unusual amount of CPU resources. Th

On 20th March, Red Hat display driver software engineer Danilo Krummrich announced the creation of the Nova project, a Rust-based driver for Nvidia GPUs. This is no doubt welcome news to users of the open source graphics driver Nouveau, given that l

DigitalPlat, FlyOS developer, proudly announces on its main page: “Imagine coding on your phone, connecting a keyboard and mouse, and effortlessly accessing your favourite tools like LibreOffice, VSCode, GIMP, Jupyter and more. It’s a complete Linux

Since 2001, Distrowatch has helped Linux users make informed decisions by posting news and reviews of various versions of the OS. In late March, the National Cyber ​Incident Response Center (USOM) in Turkey decided to block access to the site for loc

On 20th March 2024, Redis announced that as of version 7.4, the software will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available Licence (RSALv2) and Server Side Public Licence (SSPLv1). The Open Source Initiative characterises the Server Side Publi

I was originally using the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint 21.3. I heard good things about MATE, so I did a new installation to try out MATE. After several months, I decided that I would like to go back to Cinnamon. I am not sure how to switch back wi

Do you have a burning Linux-related issue that you want to discuss? Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA or email letters@ linuxformat.com. I’ve just installed Linux Mint. It was very easy and it’s gre

SoM: LM4A (T-Head TH1520 12nm, Quad C910) RISC-V 1.5GHz GPU: Imagination BXM-4-64 GPU Mem: 16GB LPDDR4X Storage: 128GB eMMC + external NGFF SSD, microSD Display: 7-inch touch 1,280x 800 LCD, 1x mini HDMI Input: 72-key keyboard, RedPoint Camera: 2MP

There are two likely reasons we’ve not heard much about Regata OS. One: it’s from Brazil. Two: it’s based on OpenSUSE. In a world that seems to revolve around Debian/Ubuntu-based distros in the English language, stepping away from either is bound to

CachyOS is a powerful and secure alternative to Arch, sporting its own secure kernel and custom apps. Use the intuitive installer to choose from a huge range of desktop environments and window managers. CPU: 1GHz Mem: 3GB (4GB best) HDD: 30GB (50GB b

Ubuntu 24.04 includes up to 12 years of support. This, combined with a dedicated firmware updater and security hardening, means it’ll likely outlive any hardware on which it’s installed. CPU: 2GHz dual-core Mem: 4GB HDD: 25GB Builds: x86_64, ARM64, A

We began by installing the latest stable release of the AMD64 edition of each distribution into a VirtualBox virtual machine. VMs are good for this sort of work as you can make sure that each distro is working within an identical environment. Apart f

Kali has a huge variety of install options, and these include images for ARM-based computers and pre-made virtual K machine images for most of the popular virtualisers. It’s even possible to install a version of Kali on to an Android-powered device.

Debian-based Parrot Security boots straight into the live desktop, where the installer is invoked from an icon. It’s nice to see a distro that embraces Btrfs as the main partition format. Other than that, it’s a fairly standard Linux GUI installation

L et’s get something out of the way from the beginning – some of these desktops adopt a ‘hacker’ aesthetic. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of normal functionality. There’s even something to be said for

K ali works differently from the others as it has the security tools in the root of the app launcher. If you know what you’re looking for, the whole thing is searchable from the launcher. The ‘normal’ apps are located in the Usual Applications folder

Kali has it all if you want a pre-made networkhacking distribution. It has an impressive number K of editions to cover most installation scenarios, plus a slick-looking lightweight desktop and a huge set of built-in, well-categorised hacking tools. I

These distros are focused on a technical area of computer use, penetration testing, but that doesn’t mean they’re T not suitable for beginners in this discipline. It’s not much of a surprise that a Gentoo-based distro like Pentoo is more complicated

You can download the Ubuntu 24.04 ISO image from the link above. It’s over 5GB, so won’t fit on a regular DVD. Unless you’ve got a thing for dual-layer optical media, you’ll want to write that image to a USB drive. This is more complex than just copy

Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) releases are one of the few things we get excited about nowadays. So colour us excited. We’re champing at the bit to tell you all about Ubuntu 24.04’s great new features. And to explain the creature behind its code name

It’s that most special time of the year when Canonical releases a new Ubuntu LTS. This I time, the creature it has loosed unto the world is Noble Numbat. And what a fine specimen it is. OK, full disclosure before we get stuck in: we’re basing our eva

Hopefully, by now you’ve managed to create and boot H an Ubuntu installation medium. If not, turn back and follow the instructions in the box forthwith. The first thing you see is a brutalist menu from which you should select the first option (Try Or

Besides the lack of Start menu, one of the most stark differences between Ubuntu and Windows is the way software (be it applications, drivers or games) is installed. While this is changing on Windows, many users are still used to downloading software

You should reboot to a boot menu (which is quite hard to read on a HiDPI display). Choose Y Ubuntu (it’s the default option, with Windows Boot Manager below it if you installed alongside Windows) and in a few seconds, you are greeted with a login scr

We’ve covered the basics, so now it’s time to perform the final steps needed to get Ubuntu W ready for action. You may want to integrate online accounts – for example, you might want to have Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive files available in the f

Without Ubuntu, the current Linux landscape would be unrecognisable. Back in October 2004, the first 4.10 (2004.10) release of Ubuntu, with its intriguing Warty Warthog code name, leapt from obscurity to being one of the most downloaded Linux distrib

The key improvement to the latest Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 release is a T bump to support the most recent Linux kernel 6.6 LTS. The Debian 12-based operating system has had plenty of tweaks and comes with Chrome 122 and Firefox 123. Interestingly, it also

Diet Pi, the low-resource Swiss army knife of distros, runs on anything, so it’s fitting that there D is a new alpha version for the Raspberry Pi 5. After downloading the 170MB disk image – yeah, Diet Pi v9.1 is that small – we used Raspberry Pi Imag

The wait for a bigger 3D printer from Prusa Research has ended, and it certainly overdelivered. Instead of simply upsizing its classic i3 design, Prusa chose to create a completely new Core XY tool changer with a 360x360 mm build plate. The machine c

As opposed to music players, which can be used to enjoy your own music collection, radio A exposes you to new and, sometimes, old wonders that you otherwise might not come across. While some graphical music players let you stream internet music, CLI

Oscilloscopes are expensive and largely reserved for makers or electronics engineers O who need to understand what a circuit is doing. We can’t make our own, simple oscilloscope and logic analyser with a £4 Raspberry Pi Pico, right? It turns out that

In recent months, interest in Linux has exploded. Increasing numbers of users are finally turning their backs on the likes of Microsoft and Apple to dip their toes into the wonderful world of open source, privacy-first computing. But even if Linux be

Think email client and the obvious example is Mozilla’s Thunderbird. But whether you’re a T long-time Thunderbird user or looking for a new email client, you may find that Betterbird is – if you’ll excuse the pun – a better fit. That’s particularly t

Neil Mohr has been playing with analogue and then digital photography all his life. Can you believe Linux Format has never run a Krita tutorial, despite many reviews over the C years? Krita has finally turned v5 and we’re taking a flying tour of its

Old data should be backed up, and it’s becoming easier to read files created and saved on other platforms. Thanks to emulation and advances in how data is read on old formats, you can back up cartridges, cassettes and even disks, from 8-bit and 16-bi

Michael Reed is a sound man in every sense of the term. XLR microphone cables are balanced – negative and positive versions of the signal are sent through the wires. Any differences must have come from the outside of the cable and are removed electri

Kseniya Fedoruk is a document specialist at OnlyOffice and spends her days dreaming up documents and nights fighting AI-powered bots. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a buzzword that you hear everywhere. AI-powered technology is becoming part of daily

On 2nd November 2000, a man calling himself John Titor began posting on Art Bell’s BSS forums, claiming to be from the O future year of 2036. Titor painted a grim version of the 21st century, a cross between Pat Frank’s 1959 post-apocalyptic epic Ala

Version: 4.6.1 Web: www.darktable.org If you’re a shutterbug, chances are you’ve got a camera that can save RAW images. I And with Darktable, you can create a professional digital darkroom to convert and process your digital negatives. The app is ava

Previously in Linux Format… We covered how to write P 6502 (LXF312) first on a website and then using an assembler, and then how to develop for the Commodore 64 (LXF313). In this article, we’re continuing with the C64 but moving way from 6502 assembl

The #1 open source mag Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA Email contact@linuxformat.com EDITORIAL Editor-in-chief Neil Mohr Art editor Fraser McDermott Production editor Katharine Davies Group editor-in-chief Graham Bar

LXF316 will be on sale Tuesday 28th May 2024 Word processors that can help craft that novel you’ve always been talking about and organise large projects. Revive the old roleplaying system for a digital age as we recreate our own play-by-mail gaming