LINUX FORMAT

The #1 open source mag Future Publishing Limited,

MEET THE TEAM

We’re looking at all manner of hacks this issue, from using Kali Linux to Hackfest and robot builds. What was your favourite hack?

Hacking away

It was a great experience to attend the

Newsdesk

THIS ISSUE: Ubuntu ties knot with RISC-V »

RISC-V on Ubuntu

Developers at Canonical and the RISC-V Foundation have been pulling out all the stops to marry everyone’s favourite distro with RISC-V.

Deutsche Telekom picks Collabora Online

An open source online office suite is now available to Telekom customers in Germany and Austria.

Storm in a Docker container?

Announcement causes confusion among customers.

LINUX FOCUSED

Keith Edmunds is MD of Tiger Computing, which

BACK TO BASICS

Joe Brockmeier is head of community, Percona. "There

Happy birthday to Curl!

As Curl turns 25, version 8.0.0 is released.

Multi-core improvements

Intel engineers have tweaked optimisations for the Linux kernel.

Google boosts VM performance

Google engineers release patches to improve KVMbased virtual machines.

Distro watch

What’s behind the free software sofa?

NEW DRIVER

Boris Brezillon is a senior software engineer at

CONFLICTS

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.

Answers

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

Mails rver

MAILSERVER WRITE TO US Do you have a

HotPicks

System Monitoring Center Universal Media Server Element Carbonyl Nushell Tonfotos Conjure Space Station 14 Crispy Doom Singlebox Rymdport

LDO V0-S1 Voron 0.1

Denise Bertacchi thinks you can take DIY too far…

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

It’s AMD’s fastest graphics card, powered by chiplets, cries Jacob Ridley.

Trisquel 11.0 Aramo

Nate Drake goes from being a Boy and his Blob to Trisquel, a truly free open source and blobless operating system.

Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster

Nate Drake finds this Lobster Linux to be a snappy dresser, with the stunning latest version of Gnome and improved settings.

Dome Keeper

The Management likes to think the monsters in the LXF dungeon are incentivisation multipliers. Jon Bailes is too busy mining a way out to argue.

Firewall distros

WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!

Installation and setup

How simple are these firewalls to fire up?

Configuration and management

How easy do these firewalls make life for network admins?

Updates and upgrades

Which firewalls are easiest to keep in the loop?

Security features

How seriously do these firewalls take your safety?

Help and support

When all else fails, can you read the manual?

Cloud support

Which firewalls take to the cloud best of all?

Stability

Will your chosen firewall still be here 10 years from now?

The Verdict

Firewall distros

Master hacking with Kali

Daring David Rutland dons his black hoodie and joins the red team to try out Kali Linux from Offensive Security.

Ice cold with Kali

Kali is essentially a collection of tools gathered over the decades, and packaged in an easy-to-use, logical way.

Get to grips with Kali

Kali Linux enables amateurs and pros alike to take security into their own hands and carry out attacks on their own networks and equipment.

Metasploitation

No computer program is perfect and it’s not possible to predict every output for every input as neither humans nor computers are omniscient.

Chase the purple dragon

There are people who want to break into networks and machines, and people who try to stop them, known as red teams and blue teams.

Ada Computer Science platform launched

An English curriculum-mapped resource for GCSE and A-level grade students. Fill your boots!

Pico gets video-out with Adafruit

The latest microcontroller RP2040 comes with advanced visual goodies.

SPRING IS BEARING FRUIT

Les Pounder works with groups such as the

Argon ONE NVMe

Feeling the need, the need for 1980s film references, Les Pounder tries out a speedy Pi solution.

Pico Bricks

Learn all about electronics and programming with a simple, Pico-based kit and Les Pounder!

Boot your Pi faster from USB storage

Les Pounder feels the need, the need for speeding up his Raspberry Pi 4 using USB 3…

Robot object detection, side motion and video

To put the electronic cherry on Les Pounder’s finished robot, we add sonar sound, streaming video and sideways motion.

Vanilla OS

Matt Holder discovers that Vanilla OS is anything but vanilla.

It’s Collabora time!

At Clare College, Cambridge, Neil Mohr catches up with the Collabora Online team to discover what’s state of the art in the online office world.

Check your disk usage

There are many vanilla tools that tell you the amount of free disk space but Shashank Sharma prefers one that values style as well as substance.

Speed up text-based tasks with Espanso

Nick Peers reveals how to boost your productivity with a free text replacement tool that has a multitude of different uses.

ALGOL: the father of mainstream languages

Time traveller Mike Bedford steps back 65 years to the birth of high-level languages and looks at ALGOL, the language that started a revolution.

Scale, repair and enhance your photos

G’MIC is a treasure chest with virtually inexhaustible content. But how do you use it? Karsten Günther helps open the box and explore the contents.

Rescuing data from legacy floppy disks

Matt Holder discovers that rescuing data from 20-yearold floppy disks is a lot more difficult than expected.

Relive the history of tracker music

Michael Reed looks at the history of so-called tracker music and explores some of the Linux tools that can work with that format.

Art beyond the canvas

Tam Hanna takes a look at running the Stable Diffusion image generator on your local Linux systems.

Add controllers and menus with OpenGL

Never a man to miss deadlines, Andrew Smith stays in control adding mouse menus to our OpenGL-powered 3D chess game.