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This issue we asked our experts: We’re scaring our readers senseless in this issue, so what’s your biggest Linux fear?
Jonni Bidwell Oddly enough I realised the other day my PC wouldn’t wake from sleep. Turn off. Turn on. Root filesystem corrupted. Repair attempted. Turns out when the btrfs devs say don’t use btrfsck --repair, they mean it. My Arch install was hosed. So I spent a very enjoyable five hours re-installing...
Nate Drake I fear a reversal in Linux adoption. The French Parliament switched to Ubuntu in 2007 but in 2012 MPs were given the choice to go back to Windows. The city of Munich also seems to be seriously considering going from LiMux back to Windows 10 too.
Nick Peers Ubuntu’s decision to end development of Unity highlights one fear: that Linux becomes less diverse and more homogenised. You might not like Unity, but at least it was an alternative to Gnome. Let’s hope other niche desktops like Elementary’s Pantheon don’t go the same way.
Les Pounder My biggest fear for Linux? That the skills and knowledge that we have aren’t being passed on to the next generation of sys admin, hackers and makers. Sure, there are people around the world doing this, but will there be enough for the next generation of Linux users?
Shashank Sharma My fears are multitude and some of them, like accidentally dd’ing the wrong partition have even come true. These days I’m troubled with existential questions such as ‘what if distros didn’t ship with man pages'? Or I couldn’t remember how to work Bash’s history expansion feature. Gulp!
Shields up! Companies that market products like to talk about the “threatscape”. Long gone are the days when someone might be coding a virus for fun, as an experiment or to see if they could get it to propagate widely enough to gain some notoriety and online kudos in equal measure. Yet for the majority of Linux users there’s not even a threat of traditional malware, be it spamming toolbars into your browser or trying to monitor what you do. Today, the threatscape is more directed at online systems, which can be attacked directly using any known weakness and then typically hit with ransomware. This, alongside social engineering attacks – in terms of phishing emails – are the biggest threats that most standard users face today. That’s the guiding light for the 2017 edition of the Linux Format Learn to Hack guide. By looking at the methods and techniques hackers use to attack systems, we can learn how to plug holes and protect those systems. It feels like it’s been at least a little while since the last major security hole appeared after the torrent filled 2016. Though having just written that, both Sod and Murphy’s law will now apply… Still, on the security front we also look at locking down a collection of insecure IoT devices on a corporate network and building a website on the Darknet. But it can’t be all fear and loathing in Linux, so in this month’s Roundup we have a look at the animation tools that are fit for the big screen, getting Linux up and running on a Mac system, and we at least relax for a bit by running the full-fat version of Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi. With a look at the affordable AMD Ryzen 5 processor, LucasArts’ classic Full Throttle Remastered, fresh training courses to try, coding Android app and Swift 3, there’s a plethora of projects no matter what your interest. Enjoy!
Neil Mohr Editor neil.mohr@futurenet.com
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On digital and print, see p28 www.techradar.com/pro
July 2017 LXF225 3