Table of contents for No. 180 in Linux User & Developer

This issue » Celebrating 20 years of GNOME, p18 » All the features of Nextcloud 12, p56 » Find out who sank your battleship, p74 Welcome to the UK and North America’s favourite Linux and FOSS magazine. We’ve had a bewildering time of late with a poll-defying general election and two terror attacks on mainland Britain. Regardless of your political allegiance, anyone who deals with security will be taking solace in Prime Minister May’s weakened parliamentary majority that will likely prevent her from pushing through ill-thought out legislation that will force tech companies to create backdoors in their products. As we all know, once a backdoor is created, no one can control who uses it. Thank GNU then for GNOME, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. What an astonishing…

Coding among kids has been gradually gaining traction in recent years, and the latest announcement from the Raspberry Pi Foundation is set to take it to the next level. The Pi Foundation is joining forces with CoderDojo, a global network of coding clubs aimed at kids aged between 7 and 17. Since its initial launch back in 2011, the ‘dojo’ has spread to 69 countries, with over 35,000 young coders coming to learn about the world of coding. In a blog post by Raspberry Pi Foundation CEO Phillip Colligan, it was made clear that the merger would benefit both parties. “The two organisations will work together to advance our shared goals, using our respective assets and capabilities to get many more adults and young people involved in the CoderDojo movement,”…

Top 10 This month Downloads across the board are generally down. However, with expected updates to elementary OS and Manjaro arriving soon, expect imminent changes. Highlights elementary OS The recent first point release of the ‘Loki’ series has helped elementary OS gain downloads this month. At its core is the new AppCenter, which is the software manager and upgrade centre as well as a market for third-party apps (see page 12 for our interview). Antergos Arch Linux isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but Antergos certainly shows off all its best elements. From its modern and elegant desktop to its superb choice of apps, Antergos continues to impress. ReactOS Sneaking into the bottom of our top 10 this month is ReactOS. Being binary compatible with Windows has helped the distro…

If you’re a relative newcomer to Linux, then you might perhaps be forgiven for not being aware of GNOME (even though it may well underpin much of the functionality you are using on your Linux computer). GNOME is a desktop environment, founded in 1997, that is composed of free and open source software that runs on Linux and most BSD derivatives. The project was started in part because the K Desktop Environment (aka KDE, which powers Kubuntu among other distributions), relied upon the Qt toolkit for software development, which used a proprietary licence rather than LGPL, limiting its use. GNOME uses GTK+ and the project is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries and GPL for its applications. GNOME version 1 was released in March 1999, with the two years…

GNOME is now 20 years old, with development first announced in 1997. But what has the journey been like? After the initial announcement, it took a year and a half for the first major release to take place, with version 1.0 dropping in March 1999. Announcing it at the Linux World Conference, Miguel de Icaza waxed lyrical about what GNOME would mean for the future of Linux computing. He wasn’t wrong. Version 1.2 "Bongo" arrived in May 2000 and had the confidence to describe itself as a “dramatic step forward in the usability, attractiveness, and stability of the GNOME desktop.” End users would apparently be able to “impress their grandparents and younger siblings.” The last 1.x release, 1.4 "Tranquility" landed in April 2001, promising to "take free software to a…

You are about to call it day, smiling to yourself that you still have time to make it to your anniversary dinner. But just before you log off, the boss asks you to provision five computers on the second and third floors for the interns joining tomorrow morning. As you drag yourself up the stairs, you nervously twiddle the phone anticipating the unpleasant conversation during the call you are about to make. The life of a system administrator isn’t easy. Managing a network full of computers can sap the energy out of any admin, irrespective of the size of your realm. That’s where the FOG project comes in and helps take the pain out of time-consuming repetitive tasks such as imaging and cloning computers. FOG also makes light of regular…

A couple of years ago, your expert joined a team who were dropped in to help a struggling project meet some ambitious deadlines. After some gentle persuasion, the client accepted that Bash scripts alone couldn’t deliver the kind of complex infrastructure required and that configuration management was the way forward. The project was a success. Fast-forward to several months later. Development of the next iteration of the platform using containers was underway and we suddenly found that our config management tools no longer had an obvious role to play. Our target infrastructure was immutable – it would be destroyed and replaced with a new version of itself every time we needed it to be. In this article, we’re going to demonstrate how configuration management still has a role to play…

 Robbie Frazelle is director of marketing for an interactive lighting company. Prior to that, he worked as a designer for Optiv Security (formerly FishNet Security), a cybersecurity company. “As I started building, the idea continued to evolve” Like it? As mentioned in the interview, this is just one of many projects that Frazelle has undertaken using the Pi, including one that turns an ornate mirror into a smart device using the magicmirror2 platform (https:// magicmirror. builders), which includes facial recognition, traffic and weather information. Further  reading We had to reduce the list of components as there are so many, but Frazelle details the whole build process at http://bit.ly/ SteamPunkLaptop. Many of his other projects are frankly breathtaking and the Legend of Zelda bartop arcade cabinet is a particular labour of love: http://bit.ly/ ZeldaArcade Cabinet.…

https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/common/auth "Every modern vehicle has an OBD port" “Many people have developed projects where Raspberry Pis are used as the core of house-monitoring systems. There is no reason that you can’t go mobile with this concept and create a monitoring system for your car. This month, we’ll look at how you can build such a monitor and keep track of what your car and its engine is doing. The reason this is possible is because of the onboard diagnostics (OBD-II) protocol. Essentially, every modern vehicle has an OBD port so you can connect a device and interact with the control computers within the engine. In most cases, you’ll need a dongle to act as an interface between the vehicle and some type of computer. The dongles can usually be connected…

Lean & Mean Drag and Drop (lmdd) is a neat little script for “dragging, dropping, sorting and reordering html structures.” The structures would typically be boxes in a container, and could represent choices sorted by preference; colours put together to compare and contrast choices for decorating; or anything else you feel needs this sort of interaction on your website or web app. In a world of bloated JavaScript and CSS frameworks, lmdd is a relatively sprightly 442KB in gzipped format. With no external dependencies, installation and integration is simpler than with many JavaScript projects. The homepage gives an example of integrating with Vue, but points out that the process is similar with Angular or React. The docs also give ideas for advanced use, such as cloning blocks between containers, as…

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The best distros and FOSS Essential software for your Linux PC Professional video tutorials The Linux Foundation shares its skills Tutorial project files All the assets you’ll need to follow our tutorials Plus, all of this is yours too… • Download the latest version of Nextcloud 12 as well as the ISOs for elementary OS Loki and Fedora 25. • Get the program code for Erlang and all the code, sound files and assets required for the first part of our Battleships game for the Sense HAT. Log in to www.filesilo.co.uk/linuxuser Register to get instant access to this pack of must-have Linux distros and software, how-to videos and tutorial assets The home of great downloads – exclusive to your favourite magazines from Future Publishing Secure and safe online access, from…

1 Knoppix Knoppix is one of the stalwarts of the low-resource scene, and to this day remains one of the best choices for underpowered computers. Its primary use is for rescuing data from corrupt systems, but it also contains all the basic functionality of a standard Linux distro. 2 Lubuntu One of the reasons Lubuntu is so highly regarded is its unrivalled memory efficiency. However, the distribution also boasts all the benefits of Ubuntu, offering an attractive package for new users. 3 Remix OS Android fans will find a lot to love in Remix OS, as it’s the closest thing to a smartphone experience on desktop, despite being a low-resource distro. 4 Puppy Linux Despite increased competition, Puppy Linux has continued to develop and adapt to match its rivals. Being…

Microservices are fast becoming the architectural style of choice for developers looking to break down traditionally larger applications, which are then communicated over APIs. To help improve this further, Google, IBM and Lyft have partnered up to launch Istio, a new open source platform aimed at helping developers secure and manage their microservice-based applications. While similar tools already exist, Istio is one of the few that can be used without requiring any changes to the applications it’s being used in conjunction with. Primarily, this is down to the application sitting at the network level, using a proxy to intercept all sorts of network communications to your microservices. Traditionally, breaking down larger applications is a laborious task, but with Istio, developers have all the tools to completely streamline the process, while…

How old is elementary OS? We had our first release in 2011 and that was elementary OS Jupiter. That’s how old the OS is as far as releases go. Daniel Foré, the founder of elementary, actually started work on [it] back in 2007, almost ten years ago. Of course, he started work on the icon set and the GTK style sheet and that point it was really small – his pet project to help him make his Linux install look better – and from there it grew into the applications that were designed to work with the style sheet and icons. In about 2010, we realised the best way to deliver these applications, style sheet and icons to people was by putting it all together in one OS. If you…

01 BIOS settings – AHCI vs RAID Installing Linux alongside Windows is usually fairly painless – for many installs, you don’t need to disable Secure Boot now as most distros are signed. However, sometimes, the installer runs but you can’t see your hard disk. This can be resolved by switching the hard disk mode from RAID to AHCI – provided you aren’t specifically using RAID features, this should cause no ill effects. You will need to give Windows a heads-up or you’ll get a blue screen! 02 Prepare Windows for AHCI From a Windows admin privilege command prompt, type bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal. Reboot to BIOS and change the mode. Save and reboot to Windows and the operating system will automatically start in Safe Mode. Now, again from a…

In this tutorial, we continue with last month’s ethical hacking theme, but this time we look at the ‘evil twin’ attack, in which a rogue wireless access point (AP) is set up that looks identical to another in the area. Clients connected to the latter AP can then be deauthenticated and, so long as our Wi-Fi signal is stronger, then tricked into connecting to our rogue AP. This complements other attacks, such as sslstrip (see boxout below), since it allows an attacker to be on the same network as potential targets. Linux tools are available that allow us to boost the signal strength on wireless devices. But, as anyone who’s ever tried doing anything involving Wi-Fi on Linux won’t be surprised to hear, their efficacy depends very much on the…

PalmSource once stated that a big frog in a small pond lives better than a small fish in the ocean. This sentence is true in mobile: while both BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone might not be success stories, some developers did really well and some even managed to employ their users’ migration stream as a stepping stone into Android and iOS. Qt is ideally suited to hedging against mobile market risks. A little-known detail of history involves Nokia purchasing it not because the firm wanted a professional consultancy, but rather because it saw it as a way to unify its then-chaotic mobile operating system landscape. Amusingly, the switch to Windows Phone would have gone smoother if Qt support had come earlier. The most interesting mobile port of Qt is for…

01 Fire up a web server Nextcloud needs a web server that supports PHP scripts. Apache is the preferred option, with instructions for Nginx also provided. Lighttpd is not on the recommended list, although your author has a test setup running on it and the basics seem to work fine. However, if you have any problems with such a setup, you are largely on your own. If in doubt, stick with Apache as it is the best-supported option. 02 Pick your database Nextcloud also needs a database. For the smallest personal sites, SQLite will do, but anything larger benefits from a ‘proper’ SQL database. There is a little more setting up to do, but it is worth going with the recommended choice of MySQL/ MariaDB from the start. You need…

What you’ll need • Minecraft https://www.mojang.com/games • Python https://www.python.org • McPiFoMo http://rogerthat.co.uk/McPiFoMo.rar • Minecraft Turtle http://bit.ly/MinecraftTurtle • Block IDs http://bit.ly/minecraft_id_links Hooking directly into Minecraft with Python gives us many advantages, but rather than building by hand, we can use programming techniques such as loops to simplify much of the building process. In this issue’s tutorial, we will manipulate the player character’s position and the blocks around them. We use simple lines of code to replicate blocks in rows and columns, to build entire rooms out of thin air. We also teleport Steve or Alex around your world at the drop of a hat. Combining these two functions enables us to have a little fun with TNT to create our own bomber-man. As a prerequisite, we assume you’ve installed McPiFoMo, from…

“Once it’s up and running, Android-x86 looks and behaves like regular Android” RAM 1GB Storage 1.2GB HD space Specs 32-bit platform Available from: www.android-x86.org Before you dismiss the idea of running an OS designed for mobile devices on a regular PC, spare a thought for those unused netbooks stashed in the attic. The Android-x86 project is ideal for making those underpowered machines usable again. The project started off as a series of patches to the vanilla open source Android code to get it working on netbooks such as the ASUS Eee PC, but has grown into a fully fledged distro that now supports a wide range of 32-bit PCs. Also, Android-x86 isn’t the only game in town that’s trying to fuse Android together with a PC. The Anbox project, currently…

Dyne.org  is an interesting collection of coders and artists, producing useful tools for creative people working with technology. Denis ‘Jaromil’ Roio – Dyne’s co-founder and CTO, originator of projects as diverse as HasciiCam, Freecoin and the dyne:bolic distro – has produced a static site and image gallery generator, running on Zsh. This is the only dependency to get up and running, although some of the optional features need other libraries. For image galleries, one of WebNomad’s most useful features is an extra – needing jhead installed, the Exif JPEG header manipulation tool – which will remove or modify Exif and other headers added by your camera and software to JPEG images. These leak out metadata onto the web, such as the location and time at which the photograph was taken,…

At the recent CoreOS festival in California, Microsoft took to the stage to announce its latest open source project. Named Draft, the new tool aims to streamline the development of apps running on the Kubernetes cluster. Due to the increased usage of Kubernetes, Draft’s unveiling will be good news for a lot of people, and best of all, accessibility has been the top priority. In just two simple commands, developers can begin hacking container-based applications. Even better, users without any prior knowledge of Kubernetes will find everything they need already available through the Draft tool. Although still in a relatively early stage of development, Microsoft is aiming to expand on Draft’s coding features. Code can still be edited locally through the tool, but it has been suggested that Draft will…

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 4.12-rc5, the fifth release candidate (RC) kernel for what will become 4.12. Linus noted his disappointment at how many late breaking fixes had gone into this RC. At this point in any development cycle, changes are supposed to be calming down, since there are typically only seven weekly RCs prior to the final release of a kernel in any two-month(ish) development cycle. Linux 4.12 will include many new features, some of which we described last month when we covered the active ‘merge window’. With that window well and truly closed and the kernel nearing final release, it’s worth noting now that the new kernel may well stand out more for what changes are under the hood than big-ticket user-visible features. That is, with one big exception.…

Although GNOME itself has had an at-times troubled and somewhat controversial history, it has grown and matured to such a point now that a number of distributions offer it as their default environment – an approach that is certain to become more popular going forward, too. The beauty of Linux is that you can drop GNOME on top of virtually any distribution you choose, as you’re certain to find it in the appropriate repositories. What you won’t always get, however, is a fully integrated experience – some distros go the extra mile to ensure that the distribution is fully integrated with the desktop environment, and the extra level of care shows. When choosing a distro that uses GNOME, it’s also worth checking exactly which version is included. Some distros are…

The success of open source software and the impact it has had on everyday life is indisputable. From powering desktops of home users and providing cost-effective technology solutions to small and medium-sized businesses, open source has spread into powering large servers, running entire corporations and even analysing big data. But what is open source? How is it different from free software? Why are there so many software licences and how do you decide which is best for what situation? These questions have plagued users and developers for decades and despite the large amount of detailed documentation, several scholarly articles and a book or two, the doubts persist. Part of the reason for this is the FUD campaign (fear, uncertainty, doubt) of the 1980s and 1990s perpetrated by large proprietary software…

There are two well-known types of binary analysis: static and dynamic. Static analysis involves reverse-engineering the binary without executing it. Dynamic analysis, on the other hand, executes the binary and feeds it with a limited (although large) range of inputs, expecting it to crash or misbehave at some point.Angr is a Python framework that introduces us to a next-generation analysis: symbolic (concolic) analysis. Sometimes it is referred to as ‘dynamic symbolic analysis’ because the binary is executed and symbolically analysed along the way. This analysis solves the next question: how do I trigger path X or condition Y? Angr will solve the constraints on the inputs needed to reach certain paths of a program. Then, it will give form to these symbolic values. A symbolic value could be, say, x.…

Welcome to the latest tutorial in our Erlang series. This time the subject is Mnesia, a database server implemented in Erlang. Databases offer persistent data storage, which is extremely important when you have lots of data and you do not want to lose it! In addition, they allow you to query and update your data using a more or less standard language such as SQL or JavaScript. Mnesia follows the same principles but uses Erlang as its programming language of choice. This tutorial will introduce you to Mnesia in a gentle way using easy-to-understand examples. After learning some things about the history of Mnesia, its features and its design principles, you will discover how to create Mnesia tables, insert data to a table, delete records from a table and query…

What you’ll need • Raspberry Pi • Sense HAT The classic game of Battleships engages you to find and locate your opponent’s ships by launching torpedoes to try to sink their convoy. In part one of this two-part tutorial, you will create a version of the classic game for the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT. When completed, your program creates a random layout of enemy boats, some ammo and mostly water. Use the Sense HAT joystick to select one of 64 locations on the sea (LED matrix). Then press Enter to fire a torpedo. The program makes use of two lists: one to store the location of the enemy ships, ammo and water, and the second to track the location of your ship. When you fire a torpedo, your current position…

The digital audio workstation model – based on a paradigm of editing tape – is not the only way of making music with computers, and the history of generative coding goes back to the 1950s. More recently, languages such as Pure Data and Processing and platforms like Sonic Pi, have spread interest in live coding and laptop orchestras. TidalCycles is a language for live-coding patterns, enabling easy composing of patterns and transformations to make complex interactions between the parts. You’ll need Haskell, along with a suitable editor and something to actually make the sounds. Tidal is designed to use the SuperDirt synth, which runs in the SuperCollider IDE. Atom is the default editor in the example setup. Commands are passed to channels – the d1 and so on that you…

IPython is the Python back-end (or kernel) of the Jupyter notebook – Jupyter being the Mathematica- or Maple-style notebook that began as a core part of IPython, but as it also ran Julia, R, and other languages, grew to need a separate identity. We are not reviewing IPython in isolation from Jupyter here as, although it contains a useful interactive shell – started with ipython – it’s really intended to drive the notebook and take advantage of Python’s libraries for displaying data. Installation, provided you have a recent Python, is a simple pip install notebook, with pip3 the norm on Debian-based distros until Python 2.x finally fades away (give it another decade). Start a notebook session from the command line and it will open up in your browser, showing you…