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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 GPLv3. We give you the most accurate, unbiased and up-to-date information on all things Linux.
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This issue we asked our experts: We’re building new Linux PCs – what would you like to build or see built into the kernel or your favourite distro? Jonni Bidwell It strikes me that we have a lot of software that almost-but-not-quite gives you superpowers: social media is sort of like reading other people’s thoughts, Git is sort of like time travel (three-way merges are paradoxes), and Tor sort of makes you invisible. If I could get some superpowers then I’d be able to make up a better answer!
Neil Bothwick I’d like a voice activated help system, one that not only responded to the content of what I say but the volume and pitch. Ideally, it would also recognise expletives and escalate the problem accordingly. Responses to threatened and actual physical violence against the computer would also be welcome.
Les Pounder Ever since I heard that you could install Linux on a dead badger, (http://bit.ly/ deadbadger), I’ve sought [Ed - help?] to unleash an army of cyber badgers all reanimated using the power of the Raspberry Pi. Yes it will be an unholy army of undead animals, but they will at least be running Linux.
Build it, and they will come PCs, PCs everywhere but not one running Linux. It’s the age-old problem – walk into any number of high-street computer stores and while you’ll be confronted with row upon row of desktops and laptops, not one will come with a Linux option. You know opening your mouth will just result in blank stares, utter confusion or a sad shrug of resignation; we can understand that Linux isn’t easy to support, even Dell has struggled with the supposedly stable Ubuntu. So there’s only one option: build it yourself. Welcome to the Build issue of Linux Format. The start of your shining new PC begins on page 32 and Neil Bothwick is your wizard-hat wearing, grey-bearded guide. No matter if you want to build a £200 budget system or a bulletproof home server, he’ll show you how. We have over the last year seen a slowly improving landscape for the Linux user. We’ve reviewed a constant stream of Chromebooks, like the bulletproof Dell Chromebook 11 on page 17 and this can only be a good thing, especially as you can make your own if you want with our tutorial on page 70. Les Pounder is providing us with our usual dose of Pi goodness on page 60 and Carrie Anne Philbin gets us up to speed with what’s happening at the Pi Foundation. You’ll discover how to build a smart weather station and emulate dice rolls. I also have to mention Debian 8. It’s out and we look at its new features on page 20, and explain everything you need to know about its new init, Systemd on page 46. It’s a vital distro so it’s also on the DVD, which rounds off another packed Linux Format. Don’t miss issue 200 next month!
Sean Conway Lose weight when in the Linux zone. Burn gobs of fat during the time my emotions are not just contained and channelled, but positive, energised and aligned so as to be fully immersed and focused in the service of performing activities and learning Linux, while drinking a beer. [Ed – answers on a postcard to the usual address.]
Alexander Tolstoy I think I’d like to see a feature, where Linux developers are able to chat in the comments that are made right inside kernel modules sources, instead of unleashing their thoughts on public forums and mail lists. If they did, the Linux Kernel Swear count would definitely draw pretty graphs with giant peaks.
Neil Mohr, Editor neil.mohr@futurenet.com
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July 2015 LXF199 3
Contents “If you build it, he will come.” – Field of Dreams
Reviews Dell Chromebook 11.......... 17 Attacking the education market, here comes possibly the perfect Chromebook for school, tough, capable and feature-packed!
The new 2015 Dell Chomebook 11 is one tough cookie and smart too!
Visual Studio Code............18 Hell has frozen over! A Redmond-spawned product in Linux Format, but this one is released for free on Linux.
WIN!
The BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition Phone p16
Build a PC! Control your hardware and your software – by building your own super system p32
Roundup: Instant messengers p24
1&1 Cloud Storage.............19 How does the latest SSD-powered, Linux running virtual cloud service from 1&1 perform? Pretty darn well.
Debian 8 “Jessie”............. 20 After years of waiting, the next release of Debian is here, the biggest update in 22 years, packing Systemd and loads more.
Debian 8 in all its glory with a new init fit for the 21st century.
Fritz! Repeater 1750W...... 22 Need to expand your wireless network? Fritz! thinks it has the ideal answer and it runs at screaming-fast 802.11ac, too.
Bioshock Infinite............... 22 Another AAA gaming title hits Linux and this one works! It’s just a shame it’s full of bigots, but then, quite helpfully, you do get given some very big guns.
Interview We had no idea if it was possible but we went ahead and did it anyway. Saving the world with robots and open source p40
4 LXF199 July 2015
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Raspberry Pi User
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In-depth...
Pi news.................................... 60
Discover Systemd................. 46
The Foundation targets hundreds of thousands of educators with Piacademy. Plus, the Pi dons a space suit and the B+ gets a price drop.
It’s the hugely controversial init that has swept all the major distros, so it’s time you learned to love Journald and embraced Systemd.
Review: Pipsta printer...........61 A micro printer for the Raspberry Pi but what can it do? Les Pounder investigates.
Make digital dice................... 62 Combine the GPIO, a bit of code and LEDs to create your own digital dice.
Build a weather station........ 64 Combine a Pi temperature sensor and plotting software to build your own weather tracker.
Systemd – the ‘d’ stands for dominant.
Coding Academy
Tutorials Chome OS Build a Chromebook........ 70
System coding: Time functions...................... 84
Neil Mohr gets the Google powered-OS installed on a laptop for fun and science!
Our resident Time Lord, Dr. Chris Brown, unravels the mysteries of time functions and the significance of the year 2038.
PulseAudio Audio streaming................72
Unity 5 on Linux.................... 88
Jonni Bidwell explains how to get your, er, banging tunes playing via a remote stream.
Start developing Unity 5 Linux games today! Discover how you can get the IDE up and running on Linux and start creating amazing 3D games without writing a line of code.
Regulars at a glance News.............................. 6 Subscriptions............30 Back issues................68 Ain’t nothing virtual about VENOM,
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15.04 celebration issue? Quick snap
news Linux sails into space (again)
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and Ubuntu gets a bit hairy (in a
Sysadmin....................50
good way).
Mr. Brown had a ‘little episode’ when
Next month................98.
Mailserver.................... 11
he heard the Microsoft news, but
We’re 200! Happy bicentenary issue
after managing to coax him out of his to us! We’ve got amazing features
Your thoughts shared and printed for
bunker he got straight back to work
all to read! LUGs, feature ideas and
uncovering the wonders of CoreOS.
Americans – there’s a lot going on.
User groups.................15 Les Pounder feels the FOSS heat rising in Manchester.
Roundup.....................24
and reminiscing planned.
Alexander Tolstoy might be Russian, but things aren’t getting worse for
GNU Nano, ZFSonLinux, GNU Hurd,
instant message you the results.
MegaGlest, Vera Desktop, DNSCrypt
Neil Bothwick turns you into a super user with control over everything – it’s madness!
Perf_events Analyse system events.... 76
Tcpdump Delve into TCP/IP............ 80
him, oh no. He’s got amazing open source treats to try: Tor Browser,
Plank, QMapShack, Guake, Minilens,
Terminal basics Sudo power........................ 74
Mihalis Tsoukalos diagnose system events with the standard Linux monitoring system for better performance.
HotPicks.....................54
Marco Fioretti can’t chat, so he’ll
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Sean Conway explains how you can use tcpdump to dive inside your packets.
July 2015 LXF199 5
This ISSUE: Linux in space
Meizu MX4 out
C.H.I.P. – super-cheap PC
Russian OS
Virtualisation
Think virtual systems are secure? Think again
Virtual systems aren’t quite as secure as we’d hoped.
M
any of us consider virtual machines (VMs) to be secure, mainly due to the fact that any nasties the virtual device picks up can be sandboxed and kept separate from the physical host computer. However, a new security vulnerability discovered by Jason Geffner, a CrowdStrike Senior Security Researcher, can escape from a VM and access the host system or other VMs running on the host. The vulnerability is known as VENOM, which stands for Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation and targets the virtual floppy drive code used by a number of virtualisation platforms. These include Xen, KVM, VirtualBox and the native Qemu client. However VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Bochs hypervisors aren’t impacted. After breaking out of the virtual machine, VENOM can more laterally infect other VMs, and then move on to accessing the network that the host machine is on, allowing malicious users to access credentials, personal information and other sensitive data outside of the exploited VM. VENOM resides on the hypervisor’s codebase, which means it doesn’t matter what OS the host machine is
6 LXF199 July 2015
running – all are susceptible, but it does mean the attackers needs admin or root privileges on the guest OS. Although no instances of the VENOM exploit has been seen in the wild, it’s a worrying development. In the past VM vulnerabilities were only found in non-default configurations and couldn’t be used in secured environments. They were also confined to a single virtualisation platform, which makes VENOM unique as it can be applied to a range of virtualisation platforms, works on default configurations and allows for direct arbitrary code execution.
first added to the Qemu codebase in 2004, which means the VENOM vulnerability has existed for 11 years. After discovering the vulnerability, Geffner informed the relevant security contact lists of its existence and after a patch was developed, CrowdStrike publicly disclosed VENOM. If you’re concerned that you’re running a system that has this vulnerability, then make sure you have the latest patches for your platform, especially if you’re running Xen, KVM or Qemu. If you need to patch the KVM or Xen hypervisors without rebooting then head over to www.venomfix.com for steps on how to do that. You can also find a list of what vendors have released patches at http://venom.crowdstrike.com, alongside a Q&A. You should also contact your vendors directly to ensure you have the latest security updates. Oracle was quick to patch its virtualisation software, and said in a patch advisory that “The vulnerable virtual Floppy Disk Controller (FDC) code is included in various virtualisation platforms and is used in some Oracle products … The attacker may be able to send malicious code to the FDC that is executed in the context of the hypervisor process on the host OS.” Trustwave threat intelligence manager, Karl Sigler spoke to The Register about how malicious users might exploit the vulnerability: “I would see this attack typically used to target Vulnerabilities hosting companies that use virtual are getting headline- grabbing environments, such as KVM. An names (and logos) attacker would purchase a KVM instance then use VENOM to breach that at least help the hosting machine.” spread the word.
“Targets the floppy drive code used by some virtualisation platforms.” If you think that because the exploit targets the relatively outdated virtual floppy drive that more recent VMs are safe, then we’ve got some bad news for you. Many virtualisation platforms still include a virtual floppy drive by default and in some instances even if the virtual floppy drive is disabled, a bug causes the vulnerable code to remain active. The virtual Floppy Disk Controller was
www.linuxformat.com
Newsdesk space technology
Linux in space! Another giant leap for Tux.
L
ightSail is a ‘citizen-funded’ project by the Planetary Society, the world’s largest nonprofit space advocacy group. The project involves sending two small spacecraft into the Earth’s orbit, which will be powered by large reflective sails that measure 32m2 in a test flight that’s planned to pave the way for a second solar sailing demonstration in 2016. If successful, the LightSail project will prove that using solar sails as a method of propulsion is viable for spacecraft. The large sails capture the momentum of photons (packets of light energy) by reflecting the light off the sail, with the momentum of the light getting transferred, pushing the sails. Solar sails are capable of thrusting continuously and reach higher speeds over time, as opposed to chemical rockets which only provide short bursts of thrust. The amount of acceleration using this method of propulsion will be low, but with time and testing, it’s believed the speed could
be increased and also be a viable method of interplanetary travel in the future. In yet another sign of the world’s greatest operating system’s flexibility, the LightSail will be powered by Linux, and broadcasting important information gathered by the small device (that apart from the sails is no bigger than a loaf of bread). You can keep up with the mission and the data it collects at http://sail.planetary.org.
Linux once again boldly goes into orbit.
Linux distribution
Ubuntu 15.10 finally gets a name
Newsbytes Mozilla has recently announced that it will be phasing out nonsecure HTTP, as it views HTTPS as the way forward for the web. It follows a number of organisations, including the IETF, IAB and the US Government calling for universal use of encryption by internet applications. Mozilla’s community is now working on a date when all new features will be available only to secure websites, then gradually phasing out access to features for non-secure websites. The second commercially available Ubuntu Phone, the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu edition, is now on sale in China, and will be making its way to the West very soon. It comes with a 5.36-inch display with a 1,920x1,152 resolution, an Octa-core MediaTek 6595 chipset, 20.7MP rear camera, 2GB of RAM, 4G LTE connectivity and much more. It’s aimed at mainstream customers, though at the moment it might be of more interest to developers. Think the Raspberry Pi is cheap? The Next Thing Co. has created a PC that makes the Pi’s price tag look positively steep with a device that runs Debian and costs just $9. C.H.I.P. comes with a 1GHz R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage, giving the Raspberry Pi B+ a run for its money in the power stakes. If you’re interested on finding out more about this super-cheap computer, check out their KickStarter page at http://kck.st/1H3QfZj.
Welcome the Wily Werewolf.
W
e’re sure you’ve been wondering what animal-based moniker Canonical is going to go for when Ubuntu 15.10 is released later this year – then ponder no longer! In a blog post Canonical founder, Mark
Ubuntu was dropping down the distro charts, but it’s all right noooooooooooow!
Shuttleworth announced that he was turning down suggestions, such as Watery Walrus, Witchy Whippet and Wacky Wabbit in favour of Wily Werewolf – that well-known creature indigenous to London, New York, New Orleans… and Flixton? So now that the name has been settled, what can we expect from Wily Werewolf? The base of Ubuntu 15.10 will be derived from the upstream Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 repos and use the Linux kernel 4.0, which was released in April. At the Ubuntu Online Summit event, other features were revealed, such as a switch to GCC 5.0 as the default compiler (which will also be in 16.04, the next long term support version). Shuttleworth himself confirmed that Ubuntu 15.10 will continue to focus on convergence, bringing Ubuntu – and its apps – to a wide range of devices, such as TVs, smartphones and tablets. The system architecture will also now be based on Snappy packages, and cloud services, such as Juju and OpenStack will be heavily involved. See Shuttleworth’s post at: http://bit.ly/LXFwily
www.tuxradar.com
The perfect PC for resting against bananas has been made. Russia isn’t happy about Apple and Google’s domination of the smartphone marketplace, and might be about to build its own OS in response. Russian Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov is said to be in talks with Finnish company Jolla about creating an ‘independent’ OS based on the company’s Sailfish OS. The Russian government claims it’s worried that Android isn’t open source enough, which is nice, but the Kremlin’s desire to create its own OS is likely to be motivated by something other than a love of open source. http://bit.ly/LXFrussiaOS
July 2015 LXF199 7
Newsdesk Comment
Developers doing good Michael Meeks This month I joined the joint Kolab / OpenSUSE conference at The Hague and caught up with a lot of smart developers doing good things. The major announcement from SUSE was about making its latest SUSE Linux Enterprise source-code available in the OpenSUSE build service. That makes it possible for people to build against and even submit improvements for its very latest Enterprise Product. That’s an encouragingly big shift in a good direction and should help to grow the SUSE ecosystem. Tumbleweed: the rolling OpenSUSE distribution (distro) seems to be going very nicely too, delivering a stable base with the very latest up-stream releases, making it easier for developers to enjoy and advance the state of the art. Tumbleweed’s stability is in turn driven by OpenQA – initially a SUSE project created for booting and automatically testing complete distro images inside VMs. It’s pleasing to see OpenQA picked up and used by RedHat, too.
Collaborating Kolab The progress Kolab is making with its free software product is great. (Kolab is building a unified communication and collaboration system.) It was also encouraging to see it collaborating with several other vendors at the event eg FastMail to improve Cyrus – a leading IMAP server. Kolab is taking the time to re-work its foundations around a newer, faster and cleaner RoundCube architecture – making a beautiful FOSS foundation for web groupware going forward. RoundCube’s licensing (AGPL with plugin exceptions) should encourage multiple vendors to collaborate on the core while allowing integration with proprietary systems in plugins. Kolab has a RoundCube Next crowd-funding project going at Indiegogo (http://roundcu.be/next) and would appreciate your support. Michael is a pseudo-engineer, semi-colon lover, SUSE LibreOffice hacker and amateur pundit.
8 LXF199 July 2015
Hitting the mirrors What’s behind the free software sofa? PC-BSD 10.1.2 The latest release from the PCBSD project, which is a desktoporientated operating system based on FreeBSD, has been unveiled. It comes with a Tor mode for forcing all network traffic through the Tor network, as well as features that enable users to maintain home directories on an external hard drive that’s been encrypted, as well
as offering encrypted guest accounts. You can find out more, particularly the changes to the desktop Lumina, at http://blog.pcbsd.org.
It’s got a snazzy logo, and the distro is also rather good as well.
Parsix GNU/Linux 7.5 Parsix, a Debian-based distro for desktop computers has hit version 7.5, and brings the Gnome Shell 3.14 as its default desktop environment, along with UEFI boot support and the 3.14 Linux kernel. The desktop performance has been improved thanks to the decision to include X.org 1.16.4 and a number of default programs have been updated as well. Head over to www.parsix.org to download the new live CD to give the distro a go.
You might not have heard of Parsix before, so give the live CD a whirl.
Netrunner 16 Netrunner codenamed Ozymandias, and based on the Kubuntu distro, has been upgraded to version 16. The choice behind this biblical moniker is, according to Clemen Toennies of the project, “I met a traveler from an antique land … And he told me that there once was a mighty king in the land
of ancient desktops, called KDE - The King of DEsktops!” So basically, KDE’s Plasma Desktop 5 is included. For more lunacy check out the full release notes at www.netrunner.com/ netrunner-16-ozymandias.
HandyLinux 2.0 Bonjour, mon ami! HandyLinux, the distro for French speakers, is here with an improved and simplified interface and is the first version to be based on Debian 8.0 “Jessie”. There’s an emphasis on accessibility with the Orca screen reader included for people who are visually impaired, so if you’re French, or would like to brush up on your French language skills, then head over to http://blog. handylinux.org for more details.
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Simplified server As a Dutch co-reader (alas sometimes delayed) I highly value the magazine. Although I professionally managed IBM mainframe systems, several capable of 1000MIPs, I somewhat struggle with my Linux laptop server. I run my own website on it, but next to that virtually nothing. Since I did a standard install of Ubuntu on it, a relative big bunch of software came with it. So, just idling, it runs about 230 processes. My question is how can I minimise the amount of software that I have installed, and attached to that question, minimise the number of running processes? Of course, I’m acquainted with the apt-get remove command, but the secret is in knowing what can be deleted
and what cannot? Could you possibly point me to a source or give any good advice on how to accomplish this? This time I couldn’t find anything with my friends at Google. Maybe it’s also an interesting thing to write a future article on? Hans Siemensma, The Netherlands Jonni says: It is true – a standard Ubuntu installation not only comes with a fair amount of software, but more pertinently starts a lot of services and background processes. Many of these are inextricably coupled to the Unity desktop environment, so you could try running a lighter desktop, such as Mate or Xfce. Of course, there is always
Debian 8 is out and on the DVD – an ideal time to get it installed.
the Ubuntu Server edition too, which comes with no desktop, but I presume you want to do desktop things on your laptop as well as run a website. Also just because there are a lot of processes (my Arch machine running Gnome lists about 150) it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily hogging resources, check your idle CPU load and memory usage with the top command. Likewise, just because it comes with lots of desktop software, most of it won’t tax your system (besides taking up disk space) until you actually use those programs. Ubuntu is designed to be a fully featured Desktop OS. It can be slimmed down to some extent, by uninstalling (for example) LibreOffice, Shotwell or any of the other large applications. But this won’t have much noticeable effect
Letter of the month
O
Made in Ipswich
ur makerspace is somewhere that like-minded people can get together and share their interest in science, electronics and all things technological. The aim is to share knowledge, show off our skills and inspire each other to new heights of inventiveness. We meet twice a month: once for personal projects and once for talks, show and tell, and group discussions. It’s a chance to learn something new like PCB-making or hear about the latest tech from someone who’s been handson with it. We have microcontroller collectors, quadcopter pilots, robot builders, several members who own 3D printers, and vast numbers of unfinished projects.
Flushed with the success of our Tractorbot team at Pi Wars in December, where we won the Under-£75 category (1st in Obstacle Course, 2nd in ThreePoint Turn, came within a gnat’s crotchet of winning Proximity Alert), we are launching a series of mini-courses to include PCB making, PIC programming, SQL, timelapse photography, soldering and more. We meet every 2nd and 4th Thursday at 7pm at Trinity Church Hall, Back Hamlet, Ipswich IP3 9AJ, Suffolk. Your first meeting is free! See our blog: http://ipswichmakerspace.com. Tim Elliot, via email Neil says: Thanks for letting us know about your makerspace. If any other readers want to promote their own LUG or maker space, send us an email!
www.tuxradar.com
There’s a lot going on at the Ipswich Makerspace.
July 2015 LXF199 11
Mailserver
on the number of running processes – if you start uninstalling the packages responsible for these you’ll very likely end up with a broken system. If you haven’t upgraded to the Systemd-powered 15.04 yet, you can use Boot-Up Manager ( apt-get install bum ) to disable some boot up services, but again, things may end up broken. This might help you see anything extra that has been added to the install that you no longer require. For example, maybe you’re running MySQL when you don’t need to be. If your website (or indeed your desktop) gets busy though, I would strongly advise against your current setup. The best solution is to isolate server and desktop roles – run your webserver on another machine (perhaps a virtual private server) with a more suitable OS (eg Debian 8.0 with no desktop) and enjoy the bells, whistles etc of Ubuntu on your desktop.
Swapped SSD What’s the consensus on using a small solid state drive for the swap partition and just letting it burn itself out over time? Small one’s are now cheap
enough so you could build a system with three drives: two SSDs and one big normal drive for data. Dave, via email Neil says: What you say is very true, in terms of price 120GB SSDs have plummeted to around £50 while the larger capacity around 480GB remain much higher, pushing upwards of £300. So in one way it sounds sensible to opt for a couple or even three smaller drives, but looking at prices going below 120GB isn’t really sensible. The savings on a 64GB SSD are around £15 for deciding to choose one with half the capacity. The other element that makes this even less sensible is that it turns out new SSDs have awesome reliability. It’s true when they first appeared there were wear issues and concerns, but any models made in the last year or two will easily stand up to years of heavy writing. Also, there’s no need to worry about having a swap partition on the same drive in terms of access. Unlike spinning hard drives, latency is minimal so a SSD can easily service the swap partition and any other at full access speeds. Also, also, quite simply the swap partition is hardly used these days – to the
point that some people don’t bother with one – though you should always have one – as newer 64-bit systems can access so much extra memory.
Plodcast I am a keen reader of LXF and the TuxRadar podcast. However, I have noticed there have been no podcasts since May 2014. What’s happening? Oscar Harris, via email. Neil says: When TuxRadar and its podcast were first created back in March 2009, Linux Format had four full-time editorial, plus extra assistance, a bigger budget and yet just 116 pages to fill each month. What did those guys do with their time?! That’s right they did the website and record a podcast twice a month. Unfortunately with reductions in staff and budgets we have to concentrate on what’s key and that’s the magazine and forum. We did try a few podcasts and as much fun as it is to sit around for half a day jabbering about Linux, GNU and the FOSS world, the day or so it takes out of magazine production is hard to justify, especially as people pay a lot of money for the magazine while nothing for the podcast.
You sir, Subscription
I’ve been an avid reader of LXF magazine for several years, and have always meant to take out a subscription. Here’s the quandary: If I ordered today, what issue would I get
shane_collinge@yahoo.com
SSD reliability is so good now you don’t need to worry about swap usage at all.
12 LXF199 July 2015
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New dead-tree subscribers will get the next published issue. Go on you know you want to.
sent? The old one – ie the one I just bought? The new one, the one coming out – or the one after that? Do I still buy the next edition I see in the supermarket, or might I end up with two of the same. Or do I not buy the next one and then end up missing an edition, thereby missing some vital piece of information? It’s March, but as far as I can see, the March edition came out in the middle of February. One magazine I subscribe to recently sent me the April 2015 edition. Can you make it easier for us and state ‘orders processed before (particular) date will be sent (issue number) magazine’ and then everything would be much simpler. Graeme Dobie, via email. Neil says: Good question and it’s
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