Indice dei contenuti per March 2025 in Linux Format

Italo Vignoli is one of the founders of LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. “Released in February 2025, LibreOffice 25.2 is the latest iteration of the Document Foundation’s flagship open source office suite. This release focuses on improving usability, compatibility and performance. Key enhancements include improved support for Microsoft Office formats, ensuring seamless file sharing and collaboration with users of other platforms. The interface has also been refined to provide a more modern, intuitive experience, with customisable layouts and improved compatibility for both desktop and mobile. Performance optimisations result in faster loading times and better stability in the core apps: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base and Math. Enhanced table handling in Writer, new chart types in Calc, plus smoother animations and updated templates in Impress make it easier for users to…

Q Brave password choice I have recently changed my user account password via the Users & Groups menu. However, I noticed that when I loaded the Brave browser (which was installed before the password change), it came up with the error message: I clicked Cancel (multiple times) and it continued to load as normal. Then I went to Passwords And Keys (Seahorse) and changed the password to my updated user account password and reloaded Brave, and the message didn’t reappear. Initially, I noticed that in the Seahorse menu under Login, it had two entries: Brave Safe Storage and Chrome Safe Storage Control. However, after a while, a blank entry has appeared. When I click on the blank entry, it lists ‘app_id’ under Details. What is this and why has it…

Engineer Aedan Cullen went public with his Hacking the RP2350 presentation (https://bit.ly/lxf325talk) at the recent 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3), and there is now a GitHub repo (https://github.com/aedancullen/hacking-the-rp2350/tree/master) to accompany the video. Cullen studied the RP2350 in detail before going for a voltage injection glitch attack on pin 53 of the chip, which turned on the ‘permanently disabled’ RISC-V cores and their debug access port, enabling him to read the secret. Raspberry Pi introduced the RP2350 via the Pi Pico 2 as a successor to the RP2040 – with added security features to appeal to commercial and industrial customers. These include Secure Boot, TrustZone, Redundancy Coprocessor (RCP), and Glitch Detectors. The setters of the challenge hid a secret on one of these ‘fully secured’ chips, which would be supplied to…

Bluetooth audio is has been around since the days of the Palm Tungsten T. Back then, compute power in mobile devices was a limited commodity. This meant the codecs used for audio transmission had to be optimised for the constraints of the semiconductor tech in use at the time. Better codecs please Bluetooth 5.2 introduced a new standard called Low Complexity Communications Codec, or LC3. It uses advances in codec development to offer higher audio quality at reduced amounts of transmission volume. Tests by the Bluetooth SIG standardisation body revealed that a 160kb/s LC3 stream provides superior quality to a 345kb/s one based on the legacy encoding format. Reducing transmission volume reduces the amount of energy consumed by the transceiver. It enables true stereo, where non-connected individual headphones can receive…

In the first part of this series, we introduced Basic and discovered how it’s ideal for learning programming by creating simple games like Mark Buckwell’s Cosmic Invaders. If you went through the code in the article and used the sample scripts available from https://github.com/azuregate/lxfcosmicinvaders/, you’ll now have a game with a colourful title screen that plays a brief tune, then invites players to press Space to start or Q to quit. This month, we’ll focus on loading the game variables, as well as the basic elements of the main screen, such as the scores, aliens and player base. We’re using the mighty b2 BBC Micro emulator. There’s a Snap version in the Ubuntu Software Center, making it easy to install. The code in this series works in other emulators; if…

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We are in the final stages of the Linux 6.13 development cycle, and with the recent Release Candidate (RC) 7, the final release should be any day now. This means that the merge window (the period of time during which disruptive changes are allowed) for Linux 6.14 will be opening, and we will have a summary next month. In his customary weekly kernel summary announcing RC7, Linus noted that things were on track, having picked up after being quiet due to the end of year holidays and new year. But he also noted that he likes to spend his holiday time doing a LEGO build or two, and this year he had expanded to “LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron” and had been building guitar pedals. Not that he…