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Puzzles are coming! Firewalls are coming! Digital editions are coming! Even the kitchen sink is coming!
Don’t worry, I’m not writing for a USA edition, the UK version works just fine. I was wondering if you could cover my favourite Linux firewall, either in a firewall Roundup, or as part of an OpenSuse review? I find the SuSEfirewall2 to be very easy to use, using either Yast or editing the config file directly, and I can get much more granular with the rules than I can with most of the other firewalls out there. Chris Lucht, CTUSA Neil says: As you might have noticed we ran openSUSE Tumbleweed with LXF222 and we managed to squeeze the entire 4.7GB of the full openSUSE on to LXF220! So hopefully that will help slake people’s thirst for the green geko for a while at least.
I have to admit openSUSE doesn’t get anywhere near enough love from us, but I think that’s also a reflection of the wider situation – even though it’s a bulletproof distro with solid inroads into the enterprise business, and constantly in the top five distros.
Do digital
I have been a faithful reader of LinuxFormat for over ten years. Recently, I have had some difficulty in getting my copies by post, so I have been buying them from J Sainsbury. I have very recently tried to renew my subscription changing to the digital edition. Having paid for an annual digital subscription I find that it is only available for iPads, iPhones and Android devices. Fancy a publisher of one of the world’s leading Linux publications not offering a digital edition for Linux platforms! It is rather like the Houses of Parliament publishing online the text of Hansard only in Urdu and Farsi. There may be millions of Indians and Persians out there, but how many want to read British parliamentary proceedings? Please draw the attention of the senior executives of Future Publishing to the ridiculousness of the current situation. John Hunter, via email Neil says: Believe it or not the majority of our digital subscriptions are bought by Apple (boo, hiss) owning readers. Splitters, etc. As you’d hope, Android devices have caught up, but it’s still not quite on parity. None of that really deals directly with your point, but one man’s platform is another man’s walled garden. What is the Linux platform? Android, which runs Linux? Ubuntu? Many people wouldn’t want to create the required Ubuntu One account. The compromise we ended up with is that print subscribers can access the Linux Format online PDF archive – DRM-free PDF versions of every issue back to number 66 – but a couple of years back this was extended to digital-only subscribers too, who paid through our own My Favourite Magazines. co.uk service so we are able to validate the subscription database; something we’re unable to do through Google or Apple.
A great year
A big thanks to everyone for continuing to produce such an excellent magazine. My favourite articles of 2016? Well, the history lesson on the birth of Linux ( LXF215) made absolutely fascinating reading, as did Jonni Bidwell’s Security Suite ( LXF216), but that’s not to say nothing else is good; Nick Peers’ terminal tutorial is always useful, as is Jolyon Brown’s Administeria (what I can understand, anyway).
As a little aside, I recently queried with you the validity of the claim by Firefox v50.1.0 that your own website was considered insecure. Is Firefox just being overly cautious or is its database of acceptable certificate issuers not up to date, I wonder? Keep up the good work. David Bones, via email Neil says: Thanks for the kind words, we’re hoping to make 2017 an even better year for Linux Format with new writers wanting to contribute and new ideas from you the readers! In terms of the website report, we had a technical issue with the website at the start of 2017 due to a security protocol being deprecated by Google and Mozilla. We disabled HTTPS access as a temporary workaround – though this then caused its own warnings – but once Jonni got back from travelling we were able to build a new version of Apache and all is well once more.
Kitchen sink
Here’s a challenge or a suggestion for a future article… As an example I have a Dell Latitude E5520, Intel Core i3 with 8GB of memory. On it, I’ve installed:
Pluma (because it retains
recent files, unlike Leafpad, which does not)
Kate (because it does column selection and word counts as well as word wrap) LlibreOffice, Bleachbit, FSLint (for duplicate image cleanup) Catfish (search), feh (Image viewer), SpaceFM (FileManager), Wine, VirtualBox, NoMachine, GUFW (Firewall) Gimp (Colour to B/W conversions, G’Mic – brushes / Patterns – import Inkscape then Blender) Krita (Image fun / brushes / Patterns – Side trips to Gimp/ Pinta (or vice versa) Inkscape (lots of extensions – export to Openscad / Cookie Cutter / Blender Import / Export ), Inkscape (using Freestyle or F3Image Save and Bitmap Trace) ChaosPro, Pinta, OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, K3DSurf, Synth
Structure, POVRay, Netfabb Basic, Meshlab, Blender.
I give my PCs a workout, to say the least. And, they crash and burn (lock up and complain – pkill, xkill and HTop are my friends). So, that’s my (shortened) list of what’s most likely to find it’s way onto my PCs over the years of use.
Both laptops run Linux Mint 18.1 and Ubuntu LTS. I stick with Ubuntu because I’m more comfortable with how it gets things done than I am with other distros. But, I’ve looked at just about all of them and for various reasons, Linux Mint just gets me where I want to go with a minimum of fuss.
So, throw the kitchen sink at them, yours or mine, makes no difference, software, hardware, distros, PC, laptop, what tends to work best, what just falls short. I’ve tried just about everything, limited resource distros, custom distros, outside my comfort zone (Centos, Fedora, Mageia, etc). What shines? What doesn’t? What’s recommended? What’s not? Mike, Covington, WA Neil says: Just to be clear, we’re not going to print big old lists of installed programs every month, but in your case we made an exception because you ARE most certainly giving your systems a good workout. Though perhaps the story here is more what you’re doing with Blender et al that’s destroying your PCs on a regular basis?!