Linux Format 210 (Sampler)

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REVIEWED: SAILFISH OS – FAIRPHONE 2

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Pages of tutorials and features Start using Pi 3 Bluetooth Secure PCs with Fedora Discover the BBC micro:bit Coding Academy: Learn to shine with Rust and Swift

Get into Linux today!

HACK YOUR Desktop! Make and design a perfect Linux workspace for you Build it on Gnome 3 or KDE 5 Choose a windows manager Accelerate the interface ‌and make it beautiful!

Raspberry Pi heroes People have travelled from around the world to meet the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Celebrating 4 years of the Pi community Roundup

GnuPlot

Work better together with the best multi-user editors

Turn your big data into artwork fit for the Tate!

Collaborative editors

Data is beautiful

R2-D2 Pi Zero Make your own smart toys with Linux and Pi



Welcome Get into Linux today!

What we do

We support the open source community by providing a resource of information, and a forum for debate. We help all readers get more from Linux with our tutorials section – we’ve something for everyone! We license all the source code we print in our tutorials section under the GNU GPL v3. We give you the most accurate, unbiased and up-to-date information on all things Linux.

Who we are

This issue we asked our experts: We’re talking about building your own Linux desktop, what’s the greatest thing you’ve ever built?

Jonni Bidwell The greatest thing I’ve ever built was my first home – called Red House – with my wife in Kent. I think producing a series of English-language translations of Icelandic Sagas is a close second or possibly my decorative arts firm. Of course, this was in my past life as William Morris.

Neil Bothwick Apart from building a 13 desktop distro, including a fair bit of initrd jiggery-pokery to get it all working together? I built my own house, from initial design right through all the various stages of construction. I did almost everything myself… What do you mean, ‘Minecraft doesn’t count’?

Matthew Hanson The greatest thing I’ve ever built is probably the gaming PC I’m using right now, which is packed with obscene amounts of power including two top-end GTX 980 Tis and a frankly ludicrous 32GB of DDR4 RAM. Overkill? Certainly, but it’s never been better to game on Linux.

Les Pounder I remember my first Arduino project, a string of LEDs bought from the Pound Shop that I hacked to light up when I pressed a button. From then onwards I was hooked on electronics and it introduced me to maker culture and then the Raspberry Pi.

Mayank Sharma I love everything I’ve ever built. From London Bridge to the Dover Castle. Would you believe it took me more time to build the Enterprise aircraft carrier than the spaceship? What’s that? Minecraft doesn’t count? Erm, in that case, I’ll have to get back to you [And stop copying, Neil – Ed].

Desktop revolution In this issue – cue music – Linux users are doing it for themselves. We’re not happy with how our desktops are being built, so we’re going to make one ourselves. It seems a long-standing open source tradition that if you don’t like what you’re given, you can just fork it and do the job yourself. While we’re not going to develop a desktop environment from scratch, we are going to take out our digital digger and look at building our ideal desktop ourselves. No matter if you love Gnome or KDE, we take a look at how you can use these as the basis of your ideal Linux desktop. But perhaps that’s not going far enough for you? For those real minimalists we’re also going to go one step further and look at how you can create your own custom desktop environment by choosing your own windows manager and building things from there to make the most beautiful desktop that you’ve ever clapped your eyes on. The DIY approach doesn’t end there. We’re looking at building the ultimate Linux NAS PC, too. Our friends over at Maximum PC US have designed an awesome ‘rig’ as they like to call it (and we’re heading to the North Sea to see if we can hit oil with it this weekend). You can turn your hand to DIY security with more on the Fedora Security Suite and take on Big Data tasks with our guide to gnuplot. We’ve got a full report on the new Raspberry Pi 3: looking at its new wireless and Bluetooth abilities; just how much faster it is; a live report from the official Raspberry Pi Party and to top it off we make a smart R2D2 from a Pi Zero. From self-built desktops to Star Wars (Industrial Light and Magic also use GNU/Linux), don’t let anyone tell you that open source or Linux is boring!

Neil Mohr Editor neil.mohr@futurenet.com

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On digital and print, see p30 www.techradar.com/pro

May 2016 LXF210    3


Contents

Discover the BBC micro:bit on p46

“To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.” – Otto Lilienthal

Reviews Fairphone 2......................... 17 Phones are boring, so at least here comes one that can bore you about being ethical, modular and open source. It does support Sailfish OS, which is a bit more interesting.

No sign of upgrades yet, but even replacing modules is cool.

FlexiHub 2.2........................18

Hack your Desktop! Build your own desktop, it’s the only way to be sure. Get started on p32!

Roundup: Collaborative editors p24

A commercial solution to controlling and sharing USB devices over TCP/IP networks. Does it work and is it worth the money? Nick Peers unleashes the USB missile launcher.

Chakra.................................19 Wearied by winter and recent budget cuts, Jonni Bidwell hopes some mindful Chakra re-alignment will cure all his worldly agues, so he’s off to meet… Ian?

Tiny Core 7.0..................... 20 Ever intrigued by the little things, Jonni Bidwell dons his eyeglass and zooms in on the latest version of Tiny Core Linux, let us go and see what he discovers…

Tiny Core—for those seeking a minified distro experience.

React OS 0.4.......................21 An open source version of Windows. Why would anyone want that? Jonni Bidwell doesn’t know but he’s going to look anyway.

SuperHot............................ 22 How hot is this game? They say SuperHot we’re a little bit cooler on it.

4     LXF210 May 2016

Interview The Pi community… is so much more than just a bunch of people that tinker. We celebrate four years of Pi community p40 www.linuxformat.com


On your FREE DVD Ubuntu + 13 desktops, ArchBang 2016.03, Window Maker 0.95.7

64-bit

32-bit

32-bit

Only the best distros every month PLUS: Hotpicks, Roundup & more!

p96

Raspberry Pi User

Subscribe & save! p30

In-depth... The BBC Micro:bit................ 46

Raspberry Pi 3........................61

It’s time to get started with your BBC micro:bit, we review it, we try it, we love it! Discover the latest in-school gadget for all.

Of course, Les Pounder loves the new Pi— he loves all the Pis! But really, it’s very good.

Ubuntu Mate.......................... 62 With its new ARM v7 instruction set, how does the optimised Ubuntu run on the Pi 3?

Using Pi 3 Bluetooth............ 63 Les Pounder shows you how to hack in working Bluetooth on your shiny new Pi 3 board.

Pi Zero R2-D2........................ 64 Mash together an R2-D2 toy and a Pi Zero and boom! Instant smart-toy hacking fun.

It’s time to do more with your micro:bit.

Coding Academy

Tutorials Terminal basics Hello computer.................. 68

Rust......................................... 84 Mihalis Tsoukalos has had enough of your dodgy crashing code, it’s time to discover a better way, code everything in Rust.

Nick Peers explains how you can manage all your files from the comforting blackness of the all-powerful terminal.

Swift To-Do............................. 88

Build it The ultimate NAS.............. 70

What a to-do! Paul Hudson thinks you all need to get your lives in order and the way to do that is with Swift! Also, To Do lists.

Maximum PC explains how to build a poorman’s NAS from spare parts mere mortals might find lying around their homes.

Regulars at a glance News.............................. 6 Subscriptions............30 Back issues................66 Ubuntu goes mad with a new OS,

It’s the only way to save! Enjoy 13

Make Linux fly by embedding it in

a new phone and a new tablet!

issues, a free DVD and get copies

your hardware with LXF209.

Microsoft goes mad for Linux and we

sent early, direct to your home.

go mad for EnterpriseLibre an opensource enterprise cloud service.

Sysadmin....................50 Mr. Brown looks at next-gen

Next month................98. Ubuntu 16.04 is here and the Convergence has begun. Witness the

Mailserver.................... 11

sysadmin monitoring, not for our

end of times as Ubuntu takes over

We’re still trying to get colour

high blood pressure at cutting

everything, well, the cover at least.

corrected and stop slacking on

deadlines tight but for servers.

Slackware—it will happen people.

User groups.................15

Syria, he’s far too busy pulling amazing FLOSS out of the digital

Graph it Gnuplot graphing............ 80

bag like: LibreOffice, Retroshare,

Roundup.....................24

htop, FromScratch, Notes-up,

Mayank Sharma thinks we’re better

MComix, Logwatch, Raincat, Pop,

together, making us do the writing.

Pop, Win!, Wammu, Cellwriter.

Neil Bothwick explains how you can enjoy Linux with friends with benefits.

Afnan Rehman explains how you can security audit your networked systems.

Alexander Tolstoy isn’t pulling out of

Les Pounder is a busy bee, he hardly

Linux basics Multiple users.................... 74 Security! Fedora Security Lab......... 76

HotPicks.....................54

talks to us anymore.

You too could build a beautiful NAS.

Our subscription team is waiting for your call.

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Rafeeq Rehman explains how you can make all your data look beautiful even if it’s stored out there in the cloud.

May 2016 LXF210    5


This ISSUE: Ubuntu 16.04

Microsoft FOSS

EnterpriseLibre

MAME

Distribution news

Canonical gears up to launch Ubuntu 16.04

It’s also been busy with phones and tablets as well.

C

anonical has been working hard on the latest long term support (LTS) version of its Linux distro, Ubuntu “Xenial Xerus” 16.04, and the wealth of headline new features in this release prove that all of that hard work is paying off, as 16.04 looks set to be one of the most interesting, and feature-packed releases in years. This makes a change from usual LTS releases, which tend to value stability and security over innovation. Some of the features of Ubuntu 16.04 deal with making the interface more configurable and easier to use. You can now move the Unity launcher to the bottom of the screen if you’re after a Mac-like dock system, and the Software Center has been dropped in favour of Gnome Software. 16.04 will also integrate full support for Vulkan 1.0 – a low level graphics API, which we talked about last issue, and could have some very exciting implications for gaming on Linux. Ubuntu Snappy packages will also be made available for regular versions of Ubuntu running Unity 7, while a brand-new USB Startup Creator will be included. Ubuntu 16.04 will also support the impressive ZFS filesystem baked into the operating system and features snapshots, automatic repair and highly efficient data compression technologies. As Ubuntu 16.04 is an LTS release, this means we’ll be getting security patches and updates for the next five years.

6 LXF210 May 2016

As Dustin Kirkland, Ubuntu Product and Strategy at Canonical wrote in a blog post (http://bit.ly/ ZFSInUbuntu16_04): “ZFS is one of the most beloved features of Solaris, universally coveted by every Linux sysadmin with a Solaris background. To our delight, we’re happy to make OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system.” Kirkland also stated that the features of ZFS make it the perfect filesystem for containers, which could be hinting at ZFS’ role in Ubuntu 16.04. We’ll be taking a closer look at all the goodies in 16.04 in LXF211. Along with all the excitement surrounding Ubuntu 16.04, we’re also seeing a number of new devices being released with support for Canonical’s distro. At this year’s Mobile World

The Meizu Pro 5 has an attractive design and is a powerful smartphone that could bring mobile Ubuntu to the mainstream.

offer an experience closer to the desktop version of Ubuntu when it detects that it’s been hooked up to a mouse, keyboard and monitor. Being able to run the desktop version of Ubuntu on mobile devices has long been an aim of Canonical’s – and the Aquaris M10 looks like it could be one of the first devices to make use of this feature. Meizu, a Chinese manufacturer that’s also no stranger to creating Ubuntu devices, has just revealed its latest Ubuntu-toting smartphone, the Meizu Pro 5. It comes with quite a huge 5.7-inch display, which is Full HD and uses AMOLED technology for incredibly vibrant image quality. It’s backed up by an octa-core Samsung Exynos 7420 processor (the same chip in the Galaxy S6), the choice of 3GB or 4GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB of internal space, 21.16MP rear camera, 5MP front snapper and a fingerprint scanner. The Meizu Pro 5 comes with a sleek look and high-end hardware in a bid to woo consumers away from Apple and Samsung’s offerings. It’s devices like this which could make Ubuntu a mainstream hit for mobile devices.

“16.04 will support the impressive ZFS filesystem baked into the OS.” Congress event in Barcelona, the Spanish manufacturer BQ (which has already released an Ubuntu-powered BQ Aquaris E45), revealed a new tablet PC running Ubuntu, the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition. It comes with a 1.5GHz quad-core Media-Tek processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, along with a microSD slot and 8MP camera. The 10.1-inch display crammed into the Aquaris M10’s 8.2mm thick body tips the scales at 470g, which isn’t much heavier than the iPad Air 2. One of the key selling points of the M10 is that it can not only be used as a regular tablet with touchscreen controls, but it can

www.linuxformat.com


Newsdesk newsdesk bandWAGONING NEWS

Microsoft’s love affair with open source continues But will the romance last?

M

PaaS, we’re excited to now extend that icrosoft hasn’t been much of a friend to collaboration to SQL Server”, while Canonical open source in the past (many of us will founder, Mark Shuttleworth said “We are delighted find it hard to forget former CEO Steve to be working with Microsoft as it brings SQL Ballmer describing Linux as “a cancer that Server to Linux.” attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to On top of that, Microsoft showed off its everything it touches.”), but recently the Redmond Software for Open Networking in the Cloud company has been seen to embrace open source (SONiC) initiative at the Open Compute Project projects. Just last month Microsoft attended the EclipseCon event and joined the Eclipse Foundation (OCP) Summit in San Jose. SONiC brings together a collection of software networking components as a Solutions Member, allowing a greater sharing that enable cloud operators to build cloud network of tools (such as the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse and switches, with the freedom to choose hardware Java SDK for Azure). Perhaps most remarkably, and software that best suits their needs. Microsoft Microsoft is open-sourcing the Team Explorer has open-sourced SONiC in the hope that the Everywhere Plugin for Eclipse on GitHub networking community will embrace it. (http://bit.ly/TeamExplorerEverywhere), with As with almost everything Microsoft does, the express hope that the Eclipse community will there’s a degree of scepticism about its motives. help them develop it. The switch from Ballmer to Satya Nadella as CEO Microsoft also announced that SQL Server will has helped, but it also looks like it sees the open soon be able to run on Linux, with a target date of mid-2017. While Microsoft’s end goal here is plainly source community as something that can help far from altruistic – it wants its product available to them develop its technology. The world is moving towards Linux and open source, and it seems as many potential customers as possible – the Microsoft doesn’t want to be left – too far – behind. move has been met with enthusiasm from some big names in the open source world. Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat remarked that “We believe our customers will welcome this news and are happy to see Microsoft further increasing its investment in Linux. As we build upon our deep hybrid cloud partnership, Microsoft is courting the open source spanning not only Linux, but also middleware, and community, but what’s in it for the company?

Enterprise news

Virtual organisation

Why limit yourself to just one virtual desktop?

E

nterpriseLibre packages open-source software into a powerful virtual organisation. The virtual package comes with 28 of the leading open-source applications pre-installed, and it can be launched from almost any internetconnected computer, regardless of its host operating system. Through the online interface you can easily add other users who can then log on to their very own virtual desktop. Impressively, a user’s email account will already be configured to the email application, and they will only need one password to securely access all of the services in EnterpriseLibre, so users won’t need to remember a huge list of different passwords. All apps come

ready installed and configured, so configuration – and technical support – is kept to a minimum. By hosting your entire enterprise on the cloud it also means you and your staff aren’t beholden to hardware – all you need is a decent internet connection – it won’t matter how old your computer is. Of course, hosting an entire enterprise business in the cloud comes with security considerations, so the EnterpriseLibre team use end-to-end encryption, physical protection and secure network technology. To find out more you can read the in-depth description at http://bit.ly/ EnterpriseLibre or watch an informative YouTube video put together by the team (https://youtu. be/rv9IIx1vkPQ).

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Newsbytes Qualcomm, the company behind a lot of the world’s mobile and ARM processors, has announced its collaboration with Red Hat to port its Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview onto Qualcomm’s server platforms, paving the way for ARM servers. This means that the two companies can now work on quickly developing new applications for enterprise servers running on ARM system-on-chips. Arcade fans rejoice—the popular MAME emulation software has now become free and open source, with over 90% of the core files of the project now available under the 3-Clause BSD licence, with the project as a whole now distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. The emulation software (also known as Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is popular with arcade machine fans who build their own arcade cabinets. Throughout the years it has had a large number of people submit code to the project, and MAME is encouraging any contributor who has not been contacted about the shift to open source to get in touch via the contact page at http://mamedev. org/contact2.php?=team.

Relive your misspent youth and build your own arcade cabinet. Some of the most secure Linux distros aren’t the most userfriendly, so it often means those of us who are less technically minded miss out on some of the more advanced security measures. Spurred on by the various security and privacy concerns that surrounded the launch of Windows 10 – which saw large numbers of people decide to migrate to Linux – Subgraph OS, a Debianbased security-focussed, distro has been announced. Focussing on being as user-friendly as possible, especially for people new to Linux, Subgraph OS is a lightweight distro that can run on older lowpowered hardware, and has all of the advanced privacy and security options auto-enabled. The distro offers online anonymity through Tor, full disk encryption and application sandboxing. To find out more details head to the official website: https://subgraph.com/sgos.

May 2016 LXF210 7


newsdesk Comment

Solving hard problems

Michael Meeks

It’s Google Summer of Code time again, which brings wonderful opportunities for students to apply for real-world experience in large and interesting free software code-bases. Curiously, the most valuable thing I’ve taught the many students – and employees – I’ve mentored at Collabora – particularly the most capable students – is nothing about software but an understanding of their own limits. The reality of all giantic code-bases from LibreOffice to Chrome or the Linux Kernel, is that you cannot hold much of the complexity associated with your problem in your head. That is a huge challenge to those students who have previously designed, written and fully understood only small, new programs. Inevitably they come up against a brick wall with a mental loop trying to code-read and model more things than will fit into their heads; and it’s not long before they start complaining.

Mentor cruelty

At this point in my mentoring role, I completely refuse to help solve their problem—after all, I don’t know the answer either. Instead I take them aside and show how to use two wonderful tools. The most critical is the ability to journal and swap out your mental state: assumptions, interesting bits of code, stack traces—the raw stuff of understanding into a text file. That lets you extend your time of focus on a single problem from a few hours, to a few days, as you swap-in your previous mental state and challenge your previous assumptions. As a side-effect it also helps you to sleep peacefully at night. The second tool is reductionism—the rather over-hyped turning of a big problem into a series of smaller ones, so that you can see some progress. Usually students disappear, only to reappear after a week having not only solved their problem, but learned how to solve problems larger than any they tackled before. Why not enlarge your mind – into a text buffer – this summer, and contribute to a free software project? Michael is a pseudo-engineer, semi-colon lover, SUSE LibreOffice hacker and amateur pundit.

8 LXF210 May 2016

Distro watch

What’s behind the free software sofa?

KaOS 2016.03 The latest version of the Plasma desktop-toting distro is now available to download. The desktop includes Frameworks 5.20.0, Plasma 5.5.5 and KDE Applications 15.12.2, along with a number of improvements to make the Plasma desktop more

enjoyable to use. A working GUI for user management is now here – and long overdue – and a rewritten partitioning feature, based on KPMcore, is included that makes partitioning even easier. For the full release notes head to https://kaosx.us/kaos-2016-03.

ClearOS 7.2.0 ClearOS 7.2.0 has just been released, and the latest stable version of the CentOS-based distro which is designed for servers. This second release in the ClearOS 7 series is mainly maintenance one and fixes a number of bugs. However, it also brings

support for LVM caching and improved virtual machine support. ClearOS 7.2.0 comes in three editions: Community, Home, and Business, and handily you can install any edition of the distro from the same ISO. Head to the official site http://bit.ly/ ClearOS7_2_0 to download it.

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Colour corrected Like Mats Werf [Mailserver, p11, LXF206], I originally had problems printing colour with an HP printer (mine is a Deskjet 5940), which consistently gave dark, muddy results compared to the onscreen version. Like Mats, I also explored the world of colour calibration, but with little practical success, not least because I have a monitor with limited adjustment. I did, however, find that direct prints from a digital camera via PictBridge to the same printer were showing the correct colours, so it wasn’t a basic problem with the printer itself. After some trial and error, I discovered that if I opened the printer properties dialogue and changed the ‘Colour’ drop-down on the Device settings tab from the default setting of ‘From

driver’ to ‘Colour’, the printed colours matched the screen version very closely. I thought Mats Werf might find this information useful. Peter Nancarrow, via email Neil says: The fact that the camera can print more correct colours does show that the default colour correction selected by CUPS isn’t doing its job and you’ve hopefully found the setting to correct this.

Linux works! I’m a fairly new subscriber to your excellent magazine having been set free by Ubuntu. I guess some may say there’s another Windows exile who settled for the most popular distro but I have tried a few distros with little success until I settled for my top choice. I found that OpenSUSE was just too

We’ve had a few readers write in struggling with colour printing. It’s these niggles that make people think Windows is easier to use.

confusing for me, I’m afraid with all the different desktop areas coming, as I do, from Windows I’m used to just one desktop. Fedora refused to install on my laptop which was frustrating. PCLinux promised the look of Windows and the Windows XP theme on its website looked good. Moving on from XP ruined my relationship with Microsoft so I was interested in PCLinux

but it was too bright for me and I couldn’t face life using the distro every day. I did get Linux Mint on and I liked it save for two gripes: Drag and drop rarely worked and the battery gauge was just too unreliable, and I found my laptop switching off in the middle of work. So I tried a live DVD of Ubuntu and didn’t like the menus being at the top of the

Letter of the month

Slacking on Slack

W

ith reference to Nathan Hawthorne’s letter [Mailserver, p11, LXF207] about lack of Slackware info in the magazine. I suppose part of the problem is Slackware’s seeming ‘don’t release until it’s finished’ policy. The last release you included was Slackware 14.0. Since then they have gone to 14.1, but this is two years old now. However, the slackware-current at slackware.org.uk is ‘alive and kicking’. I’ve just downloaded the latest offerings which seem to be dated up to 17 Jan 2016. Malcolm Lang, via email There was a bit of discussion on the validity of using Distrowatch.com to represent usage on Slackware’s wikipedia

talk page. Unfortunately, Distrowatch best represents how popular distros are for newer users. Many seasoned users never visit that site. However, to point out that Slackware is still very popular on LinuxQuestions.org (which is still probably biased). In the 2014 LinuxQuestions.org Member’s Choice Awards, Slackware tied for first place in the desktop distribution category with 22.20% of the votes (tied with Ubuntu and Mint) and it came in second place in the server distribution category with 29.03% of the votes (CentOS came in first with 30.74%). Maybe this just means that Slackware users seek out those polls vs other distros, I don’t know... Nathan Hawthorne, via email Neil says: That’s it, I’m writing it in the huge

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planning spreadsheet of doom, we’ll get something done on Slackware in a future issue. Jonni’s keen, I’m keen, it doesn’t matter if something is popular or not, as long as it’s interesting and good.

It’s about time we revisited the elder distro—so we will do just that.

May 2016 LXF210    11


Mailserver

screen and on the opposite side too from what I’m used to. But other than that I really liked the look of the distro and after fiddling with the settings to hide the launch bar I soon forgot to care that it was upside down and back to front. In the end I ran out of time and had to stop playing around. The crazy thing is I found myself feeling sad! I wanted to get back on Ubuntu and I realised that for the first time in ages I actually really enjoyed using my laptop again, so I installed with dualboot and gave it half of my 1TB hard drive. It went on like a dream. The drag and drops work every time and the battery gauge is more informative and reliable than Windows 8.1. Now I really enjoy computing again, but, sadly, I still need Windows for my iPod and Access databases but with those two things taken care of it’s a

quick reboot back into Ubuntu— and it just works. It’s fast and reliable. The times, from new, I’ve got ‘Not Responding’ on every application in Windows; the amount of times after supposedly booting I had to wait until I could do something… anything; and the times updates closed down and restarted that took forever. But anyone who has escaped from the dark side will understand. There’s none of that with Ubuntu. Well, some restarts but they take no time at all. I can switch on and work. This is big. The world needs to know that Linux is so userfriendly and reliable, and secure. I tell everyone I know to give it a try, and having a cover disc with every issue makes it easy to get them to give it a try. I’m not going to leave Linux ever! Craig Price, via email Neil says: While Windows, Mac OS X, and the likes of Android are

Go with the defaults or choose your own—that’s the beauty of Linux.

trying to mask the complexities of computing away, GNU/Linux remains able to offer a classic experience and that’s no bad thing. The popularity of the Raspberry Pi shows that people – including many children – are hungry to learn, experience and hack away at the software and hardware for fun. So while Microsoft and Apple feel they have to hand-feed their customers an ever dumbed down operating system with ever higher walled gardens, we simply see more people looking at Linux as a genuine alternative.

./myconfig In your October issue in the letters there was the question of using a common home for separate distros. Here is my solution which might give the person something to think about. I run two main distros (Mint Mate and Cinnamon) on two 1TB drives. For Mate I have separate RAID 1 arrays for swap and /, and the same for

shane_collinge@yahoo.com

Put the fun back into computing with a bit of Tux.

12     LXF210 May 2016

www.linuxformat.com

Cinnamon. I then have a RAID 1 array for my data. On the data array I have a common website (Nginx), database (MySQL), data (music, videos etc) and a Truecrypt file for sensitive stuff. This gets mounted at boot time (fstab) on both distros. So no matter which one I run I have all my data available. I hope this helps. What about a tutorial on setting up RAID arrays? John Terrase, via email Neil says: Thanks for the tips! We did run a short tutorial on RAID and mdadm [see p76 LXF206], and Jonni also covered it in his NAS feature [see p46, LXF192]. Either of those will outline the basics for building a RAID. However, these days file systems such as Btrfs and ZFS support pooling for automatic data pools using grouped drives.

More interviews I would love a great cover and article on a rising star for the Linux community, Keila Banks, a 14-year-old technology guru



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