Mailserver
Write to us at Linux Format, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA or lxf.letters@futurenet.com.
Is this our youngest reader ever? We answer more questions in the wrong section, try to help with terminal issues and help out with Office meta data.
I have questions
Thank you for the magnificent magazine. I have some questions for you. I used to run Ubuntu and recently changed to Mint to give it a try. I’m actually restoring old machines to have a second life with Linux. Which one do you recommend for an 11-inch low-powered Chromebook? What alternatives do you recommend for Spark with its functions on open source? Is there any reliable service alternative to unroll.me? What’s the best value VPN service out there, securing anonymity and price? Federico Winer, Loughborough
Neil says…
So you want to replace Chromeos? It depends, really. You can use the Crouton system as part of Chromeos, and Ubuntu has a guide that will work with both x86 or ARM models: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/installubuntu-on-chromebook. However it’s not optimal, so if you have an x86 system try https://galliumos.org. This is designed to replace your existing Chromeos install.
Turning to Spark, do you mean Apache Spark I’m afraid we’re not too hot on big data analytical engines! As for unroll.me, we wouldn’t recommend that or anything similar – the issue of it selling your details could happen with any other system. As for VPN you should check out the Techradar guide and regularly updated list at www.techradar.com/uk/vpn/best-vpn.
Terminal error
I’m not a “pro” user of the Linux, but have used it for a couple of years. My main approach to do something in Linux is to use the graphical interface, but at same time I understand that Linux has power in the terminal, so its main audience are people related to servers or people with old-fashioned views.
I like Linux and want to make workstations more popular and on a level with Windows and Mac, but I feel that something is going wrong in development because the percentage of the audience hasn’t increased over the years.
If Linux’s terminal is so capable, why can’t I find much information on how to use it? And I don’t just mean simple commands like list directory or create/ move files. Where are the ready-to-use script files for basic setups that can be used by new users, together with a comprehensive set of instructions? It would be really helpful, at least for people close to programming, to understand one of the strong aspects of Linux. Vener Minyazev, via email
Neil says…
Just to start with your last point, which sounds like it’s actually two different things. To kick off there are entire books and libraries on Terminal scripting, and depending on what you’re referring to that could be Bash or more generic Unix scripting. Check out the Ubuntu resources at https://help.ubuntu.com/ community/beginners/bashscripting for starters.
As for your request for ready-to-use scripts for beginners, that flies in the face of your previous point of Linux being more widely accepted for beginners, but then I’m not sure why you would be using this for basic setups. As you say yourself, most desktop users use the graphical interface these days, because the Linux ecosystem has a healthy range of outstanding desktop environments to choose from.
But when you talk about the percentage of Linux use being static you’re (likely) only looking at desktop use via browser stats. I’d say that 99.9 per cent of systems
on sale only offer Windows or MACOS. So why would that change? If, however, you look at servers, supercomputers and virtual machines you’ll find that Linux distros have the majority share, which is good!
Clean my meta
I recently had emails rejected by Gmail with the message “its content presents a potential 552-5.7.0 security issue” and the following reference link: https://bit.ly/lxf264meta.
Apparently it didn’t like the metadata in a Word doc. I can use mat2 to show or remove metadata in a terminal, but how can I remove metadata from Thunderbird email attachments on the fly? David Baxter, via email
Jonni says…
It’s not possible to change attachments after you’ve included them in the message (until someone writes a plugin for Thunderbird), but it is possible to use mat2 to delete the metadata before doing the attaching. Thunderbird copies any attachments and embeds them in the message file, so changing the original file after it was attached has no effect. However, I don’t think that’s your issue. People send Word docs as attachments all the time, and the only ones Gmail doesn’t like, in our experience, are ones containing macros or weird embedded objects. Modern versions of Word have macros turned off by default – did you turn it back on by any chance?
There might be a security issue depending on what metadata is left in the doc and who you’re sending it to (old versions of Word used to store deleted text so if you were to delete something rude in a doc and then send it to your boss…), but those aren’t the kind of security issues that the error code is talking about. It’s mostly all about preventing harm to the recipient.