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Posts tagged Linux User & Developer
Linux User & Developer, Issue 110
07 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month’s Linux User magazine features my usual group test article – this time on CD ripping packages – along with the last part of my series on becoming a contributor to an open-source project and a review of penetration testing toolkit BackBox Linux 2.01.
The group test required a methodical approach, addressing the most common needs from an audio CD ripping package: the codecs supported; the ability to deal with scratched discs; downloading of CDDB information and cover art; and handling of discs encumbered with digital restrictions management (DRM) technology.
It also provided me with an excuse to listen to some of my favourite music, of course.
Interestingly, the group test result convinced me to switch from my usual CD ripping tool to an alternative thanks to its surprising performance. It’s not often that I’ll make a move from a tool I’m used to as the result of testing like this, but it’s always welcome when it does happen.
The final part of my three-part series looking at contributing to the LibreOffice project finishes off with an investigation of how a contributor can make the leap from mentoree to mentor – a key part of any open source community. It’s something which is all too often overlooked, but as soon as you start to take your first steps on the path you begin to know more than those who start after you. As a result, you have valuable knowledge to share with the community – even though you might consider yourself a mere neophyte.
Finally, there’s the review of BackBox Linux, a distribution aimed at security and penetration testing. As with BackTrack, it’s an Ubuntu derivative but it includes a surprisingly robust suite of utilities – including documentation tools and general-purpose packages like audio utilities and even a scanner driver – which makes it a serious contender despite the immaturity of the project.
Further details on this issue are available over on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Raspberry Pi Preview
013 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
While the magazine won’t be out for another couple of months, Imagine Publishing’s Linux User & Developer is running a teaser of my interview with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton on its website.
Despite being merely a small extract of two points raised in the interview, it’s proving popular: the article has shot to the top of the ‘most read’ list and looks to be staying there for the duration. Another teaser is planned in the coming weeks, while the full interview will be found in the pages of Linux User & Developer Magazine Issue 111.
The teaser can be found over on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 109
028 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month’s Linux User & Developer magazine features another cover piece of mine – that’s three in a row, if anyone except me is counting – on Google’s Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ release and what it means for developers.
It was a fun, if somewhat challenging, piece, involving getting comment and option from industry luminaries including Xamarin chief technical officer Miguel de Icaza, Black Duck Software’s Peter Vescuso, Logic PD’s Mark Benson, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman and others.
Taking up four pages at the heart of the magazine, the feature looks at what has changed in Android 4.0, the industry’s reaction to those changes, what the re-opening of the source code – closed for Android 3.x ‘Honeycomb’ – means, and how developers can look to capitalise on the software’s release to make some serious dough.
Issue 109 also sees the second part of my three-part series on becoming a bug-fixer for open source projects, focusing on the LibreOffice project (thanks largely to how wonderfully helpful its members have been.) Finally, it includes a group test covering popular email clients, a project that saw me asking friends on Twitter to email sample messages to a test account for flavour – and a chance to see themselves in print, too.
More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 108
049 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
Continuing my work for Imagine Publishing, this month’s Linux User & Developer magazine has as its cover story a feature I wrote on the top ten Linux distributions of 2011.
Echoing a similar feature created for Issue 100, this latest run-down was a pleasure to write: as before, its creation involved the downloading, installation and configuration of ten Linux distributions within a virtual machine environment (VirtualBox, if you’re curious) so that screenshots of each can be taken.
Rather than using stock screenshots, each image is specific to the feature and includes the same applications – a media player, a calculator and the application menu – for easy comparison between different distributions’ visual styles.
Doing that takes a fair amount of effort, of course, but the result is worth it.
The feature also collects comments and opinions from distributions’ developers and community members, along with a rapid-fire ‘quick facts’ boxout for each.
Also in this latest issue is the first of a three-part series looking into becoming a bug fixer for an open source software project, using the real-world example of the LibreOffice productivity suite and including input from community members Michael Meeks, André Schnabel and Markus Mohrhard.
More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 107
090 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month’s Linux User & Developer Magazine is a bumper issue for me: as well as another cover story on ten ways to fix common Linux problems, the issue includes my group test of password managers and an in-depth interview with Canonical’s Gerry Carr ahead of the launch of Ubuntu 11.10.
First, the “10 Ways to Fix Linux” piece: this was something of a departure from the norm, but proved a fun challenge. For each problem, the issue needed to be reproduced on a test-bed system – specifically, a VirtualBox environment – in order for screenshots to be taken and each fix tested for viability.
While the piece is unlikely to contain anything to surprise the hardcore among the magazine’s readership, relative newcomers should hopefully find it a useful cut-out-and-keep reference for the most likely issues they’ll come across while using Linux as a personal operating system.
The group test, as is usual, took four popular packages – Seahorse,
KeepassX, PasswordMaker and LastPass – and pitted them against each other to see which emerged the victor. As with most software-based group tests, the packages were installed in a clean Ubuntu environment within VirtualBox to ensure no conflicts were present.
Finally, the interview: conducted over the telephone with Canonical’s Gerry Carr, the piece covered the new features of Ubuntu 11.10, upcoming changes for 12.04, the backlash following the switch from GNOME to Unity on the desktop, and more.
Interviews are always a bit of a pain due to the amount of time taken up with transcription afterwards, but it’s rare they don’t make an interesting read; I’d like to think this one is no exception to that rule.
More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 106
0119 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month’s Linux User & Developer magazine includes two pieces of mine: a review of the latest version of the media streaming VortexBox distribution and a group test covering multi-language integrated development environments (IDEs.)
Aimed at the magazine’s developer readership rather than newcomers to Linux, the group test takes four of the most popular development environments – Komodo, Netbeans, Geany and Eclipse – and puts them head-to-head to see which emerges victorious.
While it’s easy to just look at a list of features, care was taken to ensure that the scoring metrics used were useful: how fast each is, the facilities on offer, the languages supported were all included, but perhaps the most important metric of all – and one not normally seen in a group test – was a look at the availability of commercial support.
The review looked at the latest release of VortexBox, a handy media streaming distribution which can turn unused hardware into a Universal Plug ‘n Play (UPnP) server. As with the majority of distribution tests – except where hardware support or 3D acceleration functionality is on trial – the software was installed into a virtual machine running under Oracle’s VirtualBox.
More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 105
0147 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month’s Linux User & Developer includes three of my pieces: a review of the Parted Magic Live CD, a group test of command-line compression packages and a step-by-step guide to installing and configuring CMS Made Simple.
The review was fairly standard fare, with one exception: during writing, Parted Magic was going through a rapid development cycle as the maintainer found and fixed bugs. As a result, the review needed to be revised at three separate points during its creation to accommodate changes made in each release. It’s a pain when that happens, but it’s better to start again than publish a review based on outdated code.
The tutorial was a departure from the norm, but a fun challenge nevertheless. Unlike my usual testing process, in which an Ubuntu-based virtual machine is used as the software host, I installed the CMS Made Simple software on an actual live webserver as a true test that the tutorial could be used in a production environment.
As a result of its live, production nature, the latter part of the tutorial looked at securing the CMS Made Simple installation from attack; something which, sad to say, many beginner-oriented tutorials miss to their readers’ peril.
The group test was a technical one this month: taking the command-line compression tools bzip2, lbzip2, gzip and 7Zip, I had to devise a way of testing them to see which is the best option for real-world use.
Taking place on a testbed virtual machine, the test methodology included running compression routines on both synthetic data – sparse data collected from /dev/zero and dense data collected from /dev/urandom – and real-world data.
Using compression times and compression ratios as the scoring mechanism from the benchmark testing, the packages were also rated based on their functionality for use in shell scripts or to be called from other programmes; something in which the readership of Linux User & Developer is likely to be interested.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 104
0175 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month sees just two pieces of mine in Linux User & Developer magazine: a review of the Efika MX Smarttop and a group test of popular filesystem-level encryption tools.
It’s always fun doing a hardware review for a change, and the Efika test was no exception. Based on an ARM architecture processor and shipping with a cut-down version of Ubuntu, any benchmarking tools need to be compiled from scratch in order to run.
The encryption group test was a departure from my usual fare: because the software on test has an actual, measurable performance impact on the host system, it’s possible to get an objective – rather than subjective – idea of which is ‘best.’
Building a custom benchmarking script, I created a small volume on a virtual host which was then encrypted using each of the filesystem encryption utilities. Files were then copied to and from the volume – with both sparse and dense files in small and large chunks chosen – with each transaction rated in terms of transfer speed and CPU load.
Between tests, the virtual machine was rolled back to an earlier snapshot – one of the major reasons I do this kind of testing within VirtualBox, rather than on a physical host – to ensure that file caching, fragmentation and the like couldn’t skew the results.
More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 103
0200 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month’s Linux User & Developer may come as a shock to some: the group test, a regular mainstay of the magazine, is nowhere to be found. Thankfully, it’s been replaced with something just as good – and highly visible there in the right-hand corner of the cover: a head-to-head shoot-out between GNOME3 (and the GNOME Shell) and Unity.
With the launch of GNOME3 and Canonical’s insistence on using its own Unity desktop for Ubuntu, passions are high in the Linux community. Taking both releases and running them head-to-head, I compared their features and functionality in order to ascertain exactly which comes out ahead.
To capitalise on the interest surrounding the topic, editor Russell Barnes made the decision to publish the piece on the website as well as in the magazine; a good choice, it turns out, with the article grabbing significant traffic and sitting at the top of the ‘most read’ stats for a considerable time.
As well as the head-to-head, this issue includes a two-page review of cloud-centric Linux distribution Peppermint Two, again installed and configured on my VirtualBox testbed virtual machine.
More information is available over on the Linux User & Developer website.
Linux User & Developer, Issue 102
0231 days
by Gareth
in Published Work
This month’s Linux User & Developer includes my regular group test feature, this time looking at photo management utilities, alongside a review of Accountz, a somewhat painfully-named enterprise-grade accountancy package for Windows, Mac and Linux.
While I’m no accountant, I was – in my not-so-humble opinion – able to put the package through its paces, following an installation in my usual virtualised test environment. If you want to know what I thought of it, though, you’ll just have to buy the magazine.
The group test was, as usual, a fun task: taking four of the most popular photo management applications for Linux and putting them head-to-head through a variety of tests, it gave me a chance to finally have a play with Darktable, the heavily Adobe LightRoom-inspired open source photo workflow management app.
More details are available over on the Linux User & Developer website.
