Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Docker

Jonni’s been arguing with me this issue –

Is online privacy the hot topic for 2021?

PRIVACY

Linus vs Intel

Linus Torvalds blasts Intel for not supporting ECC memory

Affordable RISC-V PC arrives

BeagleV is a RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

SPRING CLEANING

Keith Edmunds is MD of Tiger Computing Ltd,

Apple M1 Macs get Linux support

Apple’s OS 11.2 now supports booting custom kernels

FOSS watch

PineTime takes on the Apple Watch and other wearables

Faster Firefox

Firefox 84 brings HW acceleration to Linux

Distro watch

What’s down the side of the free software sofa?

IT’S GOOD TO SHARE

Alyssa Rosenzweig is a software engineer based at

TIME’S UP FOR OLD KIT

Jon Masters has been involved with Linux for

Kernel Watch

Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel, so you don’t have to

Mailserver

Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA or lxf.letters@futurenet.com.

Helpdex

shane_collinge@yahoo.com WRITE TO US Do you have a

Answers

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

SUBSCRIBE!

EiskaltDC++

FILE-SHARING APPLICATION

TabFS

FILE SYSTEM

TuxPaint

DRAWING APPLICATION

Chipmunk

LOG VIEWER

Darktable

PHOTO EDITOR

EasyLogic Studio

CSS AND SVG EDITOR

Zenith

SYSTEM MONITOR

Tux Vs Yeti

PLATFORMER GAME

Invasion

ARCADE GAME

Qsnapstore

SNAP STORE VIEWER

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X

As Alan Dexter discovers, this chip may be the runt of the Zen 3 family, but it delivers where it counts most: gaming

Slackel 7.4

Before he couldn’t work with Arch, he couldn’t work with Slackware, which is why Mayank Sharma jumps at everything that mentions the venerable distro

RebornOS 2020.12.28

The constant deluge of Arch-based distros can put anyone to sleep, but this one makes Mayank Sharma wake up from his slumber

Rescuezilla 2.1

With perennial fat fingers, Mayank Sharma has been messing with hard disks long enough to know that good rescue tools are worth their weight in gold

Garuda Linux 210101

Mayank Sharma has enjoyed one Arch-based distribution this month, but will lightning strike twice or has he been taken in by the distro’s tall claims?

Wasteland 3

Management simply hates weirdos and snow, so this is a bad time of year for them and they’re taking it out on Jody Macgregor

Game engines

There’s never been a better time to get into game development on Linux. Michael Reed puts five capable engines under the microscope

How free is it?

There are different kinds of free…

Community and support

A game engine is useless without a way of learning how to use it

Programming environment and GUI

A difficult environment can lead to eventual loss of interest

2D workflow and features

Top down, overhead, side on or something else?

3D workflow and features

How easy is it to create a world to move around in?

Extras

Anything that makes it stand out from the rest?

Ease of use

This is relative because some engines are more capable in terms of what they can do

Game engines

The Verdict

BETTER VIRTUAL MACHINES

Forget about the draconian confines of reality and immerse yourself (well, your computing) in a virtual world. Jonni Bidwell’s here with a machines-inside-machines extravaganza

A virtual history

Datacentres are full of VMs, but why and how did they get that way?

QEMU, KVM and the other ones

Learn about virtualising the Linux way, with libvir t and Virtual Machine Manager, and jokes about Inception

Orchestrating with Xen

Set up a machine dedicated to hosting VMs with yet another high-powered hypervisor, XCP-ng

INSTALL XCP-NG

1 Launch the installer Fetch the latest ISO

Contain yourself

Containerisation is even more of an ugly word than virtualisation, but it’s a big deal too. A Docker whale-sized big deal, as we’ll discover…

THE LINUX GAMBIT

Jonni Bidwell once again sets a graphics card on fire, this time calculating chess positions…

PASSING ON THE KNOWLEDGE

Thierry Chantier is a French coder and maker.

Pi Foundation boosts support for teachers

Over 300 free curriculum-mapped video lessons now available via the Oak National Academy

Cool HAT dude!

This Pi Smart Fan HAT is stackable and GPIO friendly, too

Raspberry Pi Pico

In a break from the norm Les Pounder tests the latest Pi: a $4 microcontroller featuring the first ‘Pi Silicon’ created by Raspberry Pi

Turn a Pi HAT into a Magic 8-ball project

SENSEHAT

Build a Pi-powered helicopter diorama

Sean Conway uses a helicopter model to demonstrate how lighting, sound and motion can be accomplished using a Raspberry Pi

Connect, configure and use gamepads

GAMING

A terminal multiple window manager

You can’t use the mouse or run multiple windows in a text environment… unless you’re Shashank Sharma and know just the right tool for the job

Construct your own mind-maps

Nick Peers reveals how you can easily manage all of your thoughts – from simple ideas to fully formed projects – with this powerful free tool

Next-gen filesystem management

ZFS is a lot more than a filesystem. Neil Bothwick tells all about this advanced volume manager and Swiss Army Knife of filesystems

Run a classic BBC Micro under Ubuntu

Les Pounder reminisces about that one time when he caused a core meltdown in a nuclear reactor, then flew away in a spaceship

Decode signals from weather satellites

Weather satellites transmit signals that you can receive and decode to generate images of the Earth. Mike Bedford shows you how

Dify

IMAGE COMPARISON TOOL

Using Active Directory with Debian & Samba

Stuart Burns rolls up his sleeves and

Coding Arm 64-bit assembly language

Continue writing 64-bit assembly code for the Pi with John Schwartzman, who calls on Linux kernel services and the C run-time library

Write a maze runner game in Python

One way in, and only one way out… video game aficionado Calvin Robinson reveals how to create a vintage maze runner-style game

On the disc

Discover the highlights from this month’s packed DVD!

GeckoLinux 152

SUPER GECKO MUSCLES