WELCOME

Valve announces the Linuxpowered Steam Deck

Upcoming handheld PC will use SteamOS, which is now based on Arch, and it could have big benefits for Linux gaming

Audacity drama continues

Anger over Audacity’s use of telemetry reaches boiling point as 4chan gets involved

Linux Foundation in game engine push

The foundation teams up with the likes of Adobe and Red Hat to design a 3D game and simulation engine

UPSTREAM FIRST

Gustavo Padovan Kernel team lead at Collabora, helping

FIRST STEPS

Keith Edmunds is MD of Tiger Computing Ltd,

SOFTWARE

GIMP seeks funding

Checkmate, GPL abusers!

Chess engine Stockfish files lawsuit against ChessBase over GPL 3 violations

Linux Foundation Training Scholarship winners announced

500 scholarships announced for this year – the highest yet

Distro watch

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

IMPROVING INCLUSIVITY

Matt Yonkovit is Percona’s Head of Open Source

ACORNS TO OAKS

Jon Masters has been involved with Linux for

KERNEL WATCH

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

Answers

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

MAILSERVER

WRITE TO US Do you have a burning Linuxrelated

On the disc

Discover the highlights from this month’s packed DVD!

Historic distros

ARTEFACTS AND RELICS MIN SPECS: A REALLY OLD

CUSTOMISE MINT 20CUSTOMISE MINT 20

Explore desktop options with the latest release of Mint 20.2 and get the best of all worlds

LINUX FORMAT

Future Publishing Limited, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath,

Linux Kernel 5.14

Mayank Sharma celebrates 30 years of Linux by examining its beating heart

Slackware 15

Mayank Sharma has a childhood flashback to seeing his dad in the same predicament as he finds himself after all these decades

Debian GNU/Linux 11

Mayank Sharma can’t help but marvel at one of the oldest Linux distros, which continues to be as riveting as it was almost three decades ago

Fedora 35 Rawhide

Mayank Sharma is pleasantly surprised to discover that this distro, which can trace its roots back to the early days of Linux, hides another one in plain sight

OpenSUSE

Mayank Sharma is glad that being able to correctly capitalise its name isn’t a requirement for running the distro that’s almost as old as Linux itself

Mageia 9

Mayank Sharma remembers Linux-Mandrake 5.1 for sowing the seeds of his complex relationship with KDE. How relevant is its successor in 2021?

Arch Linux

Mayank Sharma finds himself at that juncture in his life where he has the time to appreciate Arch, but not the patience to use it as his daily driver

Terminal browsers

Web browsers are heavy on resources and hard to tweak. Mats Tage Axelsson identifies five that you can customise to your heart’s content

Installation considerations

Some of these programs need to be compiled from source

Use and capabilities

Since you’re in a terminal, are the limitations too much to stomach?

Usability straight out of the box

How painless is first-time use?

Graphics capability

Graphics aren’t vital but remain of interest when using a terminal browser

Modern sites, JavaScript and more

Without JavaScript, many web sites look awful or simply don’t work

Functions and features

These browsers are designed to be agile – you add your own features

Working with other programs

When you choose one of these browsers, you end up wondering how to handle edge cases

The Verdict

Terminal browsers

CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF LINUX!

How a 21-year-old’s bedroom coding project took over the world and a few other things along the way

WHAT MAKES THE KERNEL TICK?

Linux is just a kernel, but as Jonni Bidwell discovers there’s an awful lot going on in there…

Pi Foundation boosts computer education

Research project aims to further enhance the stellar educational outcomes from the Pi Foundation

PiStorm Amiga

Kit back from the dead

Real USB booting

Firmware update required

GENEROUS COMMUNITY

Dave James is an engineer in the Canonical

Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT

Les Pounder thought the PoE+ HAT was new headwear inspired by the dashing Star Wars hero Poe Dameron. Unfortunately, it is not

Set up Sense HAT inputs in Scratch 3

Les Pounder shows how to obtain data and control sprites using the Sense HAT add-on board with Scratch 3

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a cloud server

NEXTCLOUD

Manage files and more

Midnight Commander can do more than just copy, move or delete files. Some would argue that it’s as versatile as Shashank Sharma.

Sharpen your desktop publishing skills

Aspiring media mogul Nick Peers reveals how to design newsletters, flyers and more with Scribus, the powerful open-source DTP tool.

How to run classic distros with QEMU

QEMU

Build a custom digital signage system

Discover how to create a digital signage display for an open source conference using Xibo digital signage and the help of Matt Holder.

Read RSS feeds direct from the terminal

Focus on what’s important in the world and cut out all those cat meme distractions with Neil Mohr and a terminal-based text-only news reader

Maximise the power of VirtualBox networking

Stuart Burns builds upon the powerful components of advanced VirtualBox networking with this second instalment of stress-saving tips

Welcome

The original issue 1 HotPicks, still going strong 21 years later!

VLC

Version: 3.0.16 Web: www.videolan.org/vlc W e think there’s

Ksnip

Version: 1.9.0 Web: https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip No other software is

Waterfox

Version: G3.2.3 Web: www.waterfox.net Imagine Firefox with a

Far2l

Version: v2021-06-30_alpha Web: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l The quest for the

G’MIC

Version: 2.9.8 Web: http://gmic.eu Get creative in image

OpenSnitch

Version: 1.3.6 Web: https://github.com/ evilsocket/opensnitch No outgoing network

WinXP

Version: GIT Web: https://winxp.vercel.app S ome may wonder

OpenTTD

Version: 1.11.2 Web: www.openttd.org The ideal sea port

0 A.D.

Version: 0.24 Web: https://play0ad.com Our Romans are peacefully

Lutris

Version: 0.5.8 Web: https://lutris.net Collect all your games

KDE Connect

Version: 21.04 Web: https:// kdeconnect.kde.org Control your Android

Build a software analysis Gitlab pipeline

In the second part of our web application security series, Tim Armstrong takes us through the essentials of software composition analysis

Sliding puzzles with Pygame and Python

PYTHON