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Fresh start

As we dive into 2024 and a whole

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THIS ISSUE: Valve console Steams ahead Foundations laid for HPSF Canonical cloud creation

Canonical launches MicroCloud

The Ubuntu publisher releases new cloud software.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Italo Vignoli is one of the founders of

CLOSING THE DOOR

Joe Brockmeier is head of community, Percona. Another

Blender 4.0 released

Latest stable version has overhauled UI and improved support for OneAPI.

Foundation gets €1 million from Germany

Gnome recognised as public interest infrastructure.

Itanium heading for scrapheap

The end of an era: Will the Linux kernel drop support for ia64 architecture?

Distro watch

What’s behind the free software sofa?

DRIVER’S TEST

Faith Ekstrand is an engineering fellow at Collabora.

GETTING TOGETHER

Jon Masters is a kernel hacker who’s been

Kernel Watch

Jon Masters keeps up with all the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to.

ONGOING DE VELOPMENT

There continue to be significant developments on the

Answers

Got a burning question about open source or the kernel? Whatever your level, email it to answers@linuxformat.com

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WRITE TO US Do you have a burning

HotPicks

THE BEST NEW OPEN SOURCE SOFT WARE ON THE PL ANET

Intel Core i9 14900K

Fast, powerful and a bit boring is not how to describe Jacob Ridley…

OSGeoLive 16.0

Uncharted no more – Nate Drake maps out the array of geospatial tools on offer in the specialist distro OSGeoLive.

GhostBSD 23.10.1

Roll over Slimer. Nate Drake explores the latest GhostBSD and finds that, like Casper, it’s extremely friendly and easy to manage.

Kubuntu 23.10

Nate Drake explores the lavish new Plasma desktop in the latest Kubuntu. Is this the greatest KDE-based distro to date?

Counter-Strike 2

It’s CS:GO Jim, but not as we know it, says Rich Stanton, as he takes the long-standing esport stalwart’s successor for a spin.

Live distributions

Michael Reed checks out five distros that you could carry around on your keychain to give you Linux goodness at a moment’s notice.

LEARN LINUX!

Finally had enough of your Windows PC? Nick Peers reveals how to fully road-test – then switch to – a user-friendly Linux distro.

Arm buys a slice of Pi

The deal effectively cements the Raspberry Pi to the Arm ISA for an undisclosed sum.

Pi OS Bookworm

Les Pounder has a Raspberry Pi 5 and isn’t afraid to use it, now that he has the latest Raspberry Pi OS.

Creality K1 Max

A big fan of fancy, Denise Bertacchi has taken to the K1’s bigger brother.

Take your Pi 5 to the next level!

Les Pounder has got his hands on a Raspberry Pi 5 and wants to show you how to get the best from it.

Tall Tails

Nate Drake explores how to configure the latest version of Tails for maximum security and convenience.

Safeguard your secrets

Shashank Sharma gets a taste for 007’s life by reading fiction and occasionally sending encrypted messages to his unsuspecting brother.

Dump your paper docs with perfect OCR

Nick Peers reveals how to extract editable text from images and printed materials with the help of optical character recognition software.

WordPress security, events and users

Michael Reed concludes his overview of setting up and maintaining a WordPress site with some finishing touches and a look at plugins.

Relive your BBC Basic days!

Turn your home system into a BBC Micro by following David Bolton’s advice to download BBC Basic and write programs just like it’s 1982.

Make your own pointand-click adventure

Nate Drake invites you to relive the glory days of Scumm-style point-and-click adventure games by creating your very own.

Massively improve your SSH login security

Passwords are so last century proclaims Stuart Burns! Using public keys and a couple of tweaks makes for a far more secure login.

Learning the way of the Docker

Docker is designed for an easy sysadmin life. Here are some top tips for using it.

Oxylabs

Mayank Sharma finds this proxy service to be a breath of fresh air.

Private Internet Access

A high-value VPN with a pile of interesting features that’s keeping the nefarious Mike Williams out of trouble.

No Ethernet, I expect you to die!

More stubborn than an anachronistic spy stereotype and just as reliable, Darien GrahamSmith uncrosses the network twisted pair.

Write a Linux shell from scratch

Never one to shy away from the difficult, Ferenc Deak takes us by the hand and helps us code a shell – from scratch.

Build a smart-home data application

Matt Holder investigates how to take data from an API and display it in a GUI for fun and possibly profit!