Raspberry Pi Adds Second Laptop Monitor

If you have a cheap laptop and you realize you can’t connect a second monitor to it, what do you do? Well, if you are [Pierre Couy], you grab a Raspberry Pi and put together a virtual screen …

A Linux Distro For All Your Ham Needs

For anyone new to the world of ham radio, one of the things that takes a little getting used to is visiting the websites of authoritative experts in various fields and feeling like you’ve tra…

Linux Fu: Sharing Your Single WiFi

If you are trying to build a router or access point, you’ll need to dig into some of the details of networking that are normally hidden from you. But, for a normal WiFi connection, things mos…

What’s Old Is New Again: A Linux PC From A Set Top Box

There was a time around two decades ago, when the new hotness was taking control of home routers to use as small Linux computers. An echo of this era lives on in the name of the OpenWrt minimal Lin…

Linux Fu: The Shell Forth Programmers Will Love

One of the most powerful features of Unix and Linux is that using traditional command line tools, everything is a stream of bytes. Granted, modern software has blurred this a bit, but at the comman…

SteamDeck: Become Printer

Wonderful things happen when we read the documentation. For instance, we’ve all seen a Raspberry Pi work as an Ethernet adapter over USB, or a ESP32-S2 presenting as a storage device. Well, […

Linux Fu: UEFI Booting

Unless your computer is pretty old, it probably uses UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) to boot. The idea is that a bootloader picks up files from an EFI partition and uses them to start …

Linux Fu: Miller The Killer Makes CSV No Pest

Historically, one of the nice things about Unix and Linux is that everything is a file, and files are just sequences of characters. Of course, modern practice is that everything is not a file, and …

DietPi Releases 8.12 With Support For The Rockchip RK3588 SoC

This month DietPi released version 8.12 of this SBC-oriented Linux distribution. Most notable is the addition of support for the NanoPi R6S and the Radxa ROCK 5B SBCs. The ROCK 5B features the new …

CoreFreq Gives Peek At CPU Performance Info On Linux

The CPU is the part of the computer that makes everything else tick. While GPUs have increasingly become a key part of overall system performance, we still find ourselves wanting to know how our CP…

Chumby Gets New Kernel… Soon

If you missed the Chumby, we’re sorry.  They were relatively inexpensive Linux appliances that acted as a clock, Internet radio, and feed reader. The company went belly up, although there was…

Getting Root On A Chinese IP Camera

With so many cheap network-connected devices out there being Linux-powered, it’s very tempting to try and hack into them, usually via a serial interface. This was the goal of [Andrzej Szombie…

A Tiny RISC-V Emulator Runs Linux With No MMU. And Yes, It Runs DOOM!

It’s something of an article of faith, that to run Linux your computer must include a hardware memory management unit, or MMU. To an extent it’s true, in that for a Linux-based system t…

How Realtime Is Your Kernel? Scope A GPIO To Find Out

When debugging something as involved as kernel scheduler timings, you would typically use one of the software-based debugging mechanisms available. However, in cases when software is close to bare …

A Single Board Computer From A TV

It is an annoyance for some members of our community, that it has become almost impossible to buy a TV that’s not a so-called “smart” TV. These units contain a computer as well as…

If Only The Kids Knew About Pipes

Being a parent is hard work. You need to prepare your child to operate in the world. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to make good choices are just the beginning. They also ought to know regul…

Linux Fu: Atomic Power

People are well aware of the power of virtual machines. If you want to do something dangerous — say, hack on the kernel — you can create a virtual machine, snapshot it, screw it up a fe…

Linux Fu: Eavesdropping On Serial

In the old days, if you wanted to snoop on a piece of serial gear, you probably had a serial monitor or, perhaps, an attachment for your scope or logic analyzer. Today, you can get cheap logic anal…

Back Up Encrypted ZFS Data Without Decrypting It, Even If TrueNAS Doesn’t Approve

[Michael Lynch] recently replaced his Synology NAS with a self-built solution built on ZFS, a filesystem with a neat feature: the ability to back up encrypted data without having to decrypt it firs…

Linux Fu: The Chrome OS Flex Virtualization

You’ve probably heard about Google Chromebooks. Like Android, Chrome OS is based on some variant of Linux, but it is targeted at the “cloud first” strategy so Chromebooks typicall…