GNU/Linux has become predominantly a business system, flexible, reliable, secure, and above all a free system in most cases, or at least a cheaper one that allows companies to invest in other areas and do without licenses to be more competitive, in addition to the ability to change the source code to create more customized solutions according to their needs.
Linux has not achieved success on desktops, but it is undoubtedly very important for servers, supercomputers, and at the business level. So, here we are going to present the 6 best Linux distributions for businesses that are currently available. Also, BYOD has spread and is becoming increasingly popular among employees of large and small companies, including SMBs, if you need it.
Before Private Internet Access went to hell, I once spoke to their former tech support people about Windows 10 in their IRC chat room, and “Max-P” told me that writing VPN software for Windows was the worst part of the job. He said that preventing “leakage”, that is, where your kill switch doesn’t work and your traffic spills out onto the open internet, which is what you bought the VPN to avoid, is very difficult to ensure on Windows.
Furthermore, it’s hard to get any decent sort of throughput on a VPN in Windows, because Windows doesn’t have any sort of usable and secure VPN tech included in the OS. In fact, NordVPN says that if you try using IKEv2 in Windows 10, it will sabotage it by using weak cryptography. (“Note: the Windows system configuration downgrades the cipher to the weaker 3DES-CBC encryption.“)
Most Windows VPN software use “WinTun” to route traffic around and are essentially rate limited and use a ton of CPU time for overhead. That is, doing nothing important at all and tying up system resources. Creating more bottlenecks due to inherently bad design.
The VPN situation on Linux is….better. If it doesn’t make your networking stack great again, it’ll at least help make it tolerable. You can set up NetworkManager and bypass VPN software entirely, and use OpenVPN binaries from your Linux distribution, or you can use something like NordVPN’s client which makes things a little bit simpler, hopefully, with commands like “nordvpn c”, “nordvpn d”, “nordvpn set autoconnect on”, “nordvpn set killswitch on” and so on.
It takes but a few minutes to understand how to use NordVPN’s LInux software, and unlike the Windows version, there isn’t all sorts of nasty stuff going on behind the scenes. The killswitch is just firewall rules. There doesn’t need to be a lot of crazy stuff going on that can make your internet connection unusable if the connection drops out until you reboot the computer, which is what often happens on Windows 10. Also, their client for Linux doesn’t pop up notifications to go read their blog posts.
It’s convenient to create a copy of your application with a copy of its state for each team. For example, you might want a separate database copy to test some significant schema changes or develop other disruptive operations like bulk insert/delete/update...
The number of web-facing computers using nginx has increased once again, whilst both Apache and Microsoft lost both in absolute numbers and market share. This month nginx saw an increase of 40,800 raising its market share to 37.2%. Apache and Microsoft each lost 0.24 percentage points of market share to leave them with 30.8% and 11.9% shares. LiteSpeed gained 4,660 computers (+5.9%).
Welcome to the WordPress 101 series. So far in this series, we’ve learned how to install a new WordPress theme, plugins, configure the homepage, create navigation menus, and so on. With this information, we should be able to launch our website. It is now time to prepare our website for traffic analysis so that we can make better decisions and have a complete picture of what is going on with our website.
Search engines will begin delivering visitors to your website once it is operational and has high-quality content. As the amount of material on the website grows, so does the number of visitors and engagement. For understanding where your visitors came from, how much time spent on a particular page, the links they clicked, and a lot more deep information that can help create better user experience and deliver you better results.
If the website is an eCommerce store, then the analytics system is a extremely useful as it can help increase sales. You can track campaigns on social media and track each of the campaign through analytics system like Google Analytics.
A Quick overview of Windowxfx 11 Preview Free Edition
1:49 Linux Innards 40:47 Vibrations from the Ether 56:22 Check This Out 1:04:09 Announcements & Outro
In our Innards section, an introduction to the new folks that will carry the show with Tony and Joe
Sometimes things go wrong; this week, we admit we've got a problem.
Plus new details about the Steam Deck everyone has missed, and an old friend stops by the show with an update.
A world without Linux is hard to imagine. Every Google search we run is accomplished on Linux-based servers. Behind the Kindle we enjoy reading, to the social media sites we spend scrolling away every day sits the Linux kernel. Would you believe your ears if I tell you the world’s top 500 supercomputers run on Linux? No wonder Linux has permeated into every aspect of the digital age, not to mention its steadily growing enterprise user base.
It may be true that Linux makes up only 9% of total enterprise operating systems, but don’t let the numbers fool you; the most high-value systems, including web servers, routers, and contingency machines are often trusted with Linux. One could see why, considering the global consensus on Linux being the most secure OS.
While the Linux kernel is increasingly supporting the use of Zstd for various compression purposes, the current Zstd code within the kernel is out-of-date and efforts so far to re-base it against the closer to upstream Zstd state have been stalled. Fortunately, a new attempt at getting the Zstd code updated for the Linux kernel will be published soon.
There has been Linux kernel work to support Zstd compressed modules, Zstd compressed firmware, Zstd'ed kernel image, and work like Btrfs Zstd file-system compression. Zstandard is increasingly used throughout the open-source ecosystem for its speedy decompression capabilities and overall great design and performance.
Intel has published a patch (discovered by Phoronix) that enables support for its Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) mechanism in Linux. The technology is meant for upcoming Intel Xeon processors and is designed to activate additional silicon features after a processor has been deployed.
The patch does not mention any specific features it is meant to unlock or any specific Xeon Scalable processors it is meant to upgrade (we think Sapphire Rapids), yet it gives some general understanding how it is supposed to work. As it turns out, the whole process is purely software, so it does not require any manipulations with hardware. Therefore, it can be done relatively easily.
Intel's SDSi initiative seems to be a major one, yet Intel is not new to offering software upgrades to its CPUs. The most recent example of such software upgradeability is Intel's Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel VROC) technology that relies on the Intel Volume Management Device (VMD) hardware built into the CPU and has to be activated using a special hardware key. The company also once offered its Upgrade Service software upgrade capability for its entry-level client CPUs that would increase their clock speed, unlock a previously unused portion of cache, and activate Hyper-Threading technology.
Free open-source live streaming app, OBS Studio 27.1.1, was released. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Linux Mint 20, and derivatives.
OBS Studio 27.1.1 is a hot-fix release for version 27.1, which was released yesterday. It introduced YouTube integration, so users can connect YouTube account without using a stream key. And, it features a new “Manage Broadcast” button to create and manage YouTube streams, a chat dock for public and unlisted broadcasts, set settings on per stream base, and bandwidth testing support in the Auto-Configuration wizard.
Other features include a 18-scene multiview option, a “Mask Only” option to the stinger track matte, an option to draw safe areas in the preview, and a feature to browser sources to allow limited control over OBS.
Available edition package OBS Studio 27.1 for streaming, compositing and video recording. The code is written in C / C ++ and is distributed under the GPLv2 license. Assemblies are generated for Linux, Windows and macOS.
The development goal of OBS Studio was to create a portable version of the application Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Classic) that is not tied to the Windows platform, supports OpenGL, and is extensible through plugins. The difference is also the use of a modular architecture, which means the separation of the interface and the core of the program. Supports transcoding of original streams, video capture during games and streaming to Twitch, Facebook Gaming, YouTube, DailyMotion, Hitbox and other services. To ensure high performance, it is possible to use hardware acceleration mechanisms (for example, NVENC and VAAPI).
Provides support for compositing with scene building based on arbitrary video streams, data from web cameras, video capture cards, images, text, content of application windows, or the entire screen. During broadcasting, it is allowed to switch between several predefined scene options (for example, to switch views with an emphasis on the screen content and the image from a web camera). The program also provides tools for sound mixing, filtering with VST plugins, volume leveling and noise suppression.
The free open-source vector drawing app Inkscape 1.1 got its first maintenance update. Users are recommended to upgrade!
Thanks to the upstream GTK+3 fix, pressure sensitivity works again on Windows ink devices in Inkscape 1.1.1. And, the release includes many other general fixes, such as Stroke to Path works on text again; Saving no longer leaks memory; improve startup time on Windows; Canvas no longer blurred when moving window from HiDPI to a regular display; Click to select objects; Caps lock no longer stops some shortcut keys from working on Windows.
By clicking on a resizing separator (aka three-dots) of a docked dialog will now toggle dock visibility. The the “Font features” tab now load faster so it don’t freeze. And the transparency is now respected when applying the Fast Crop filter.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Inkscape 1.1.1 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 19.10, Ubuntu 18.04, Debian, and LinuxMint 20.1.
Inkscape is a free and open-source professional vector graphics editor software that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows desktop computers.
It is suitable for illustrators and web designers and it is an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It supports many SVG features (markers, alpha blending, clones, etc..) and is easy to use.
Package managers are really easy to use, but it is also true that many people prefer to do operations in a graphical environment. That’s why we present to you some graphical package managers in Linux. We will cover the basic operation of them focusing on the most popular ones.
What is a graphical package manager?
In the previous post, we have learned that it is a package manager that helps us to install, uninstall and do many operations with packages. Although these programs are relatively easy to use, they have to be invoked from the console. So, if you are a novice user coming from Windows or macOS, maybe the impact is bigger and some introduction is needed.
So, to save time and ease the transition to Linux for newbies, the community has developed programs that act as front-ends for these package managers. Of these programs, some are developed by the distribution itself but others are developed by third parties.
With these graphical package managers we can do the same operations as in the terminal, but of course all from a comfortable graphical interface. Even if you are a novice or an experienced user, you should know these tools because you will be able to save time on the system.
Sometimes we may need to replicate data from one MySQL DB server to one or more MySQL DB servers automatically. Basically, database administrators perform database-related tasks such as replication, clustering, and auto-failover. Managing MySQL database servers and performing replication tasks are the responsibilities of database experts. In this article, we will learn how to set up master-slave MySQL database replication in Ubuntu 20.04. In this article, we will use MySQL 8 for replication.
A colleague recently talked me into buying one of these nifty HDMI to USB video capture dongles that allows me to try out my ARM boards attached to my desktop without the need for a separate monitor. Your video output just ends up in a window on your desktop … this is quite a feature for just 11€
In Linux, executable files reside in many different directories. But you may have noticed that you do not provide a directory path while running your common commands. So you might wonder, how does the Linux system know where the relative executable is.
That's where the PATH variable comes in, the PATH variable stores all paths of the directories where the executables are. So when you issue a command, the Linux system traverses the given directories in the PATH variable until it finds the relevant script/executable.
The cache is often the most critical piece of software for a web-based business.
Varnish Cache is a popular – and powerful – open source HTTP engine/reverse HTTP proxy used by more than 3.4 million websites.
Varnish Cache is an open-source caching HTTP reverse proxy that can help improve a web server’s performance.
In this guide, we will show you how to install Varnish Cache and use it.
Touch command is commonly used to create an empty file in Linux. It can be also used to change file timestamps.
In this tutorial, we learn about touch command in Linux with useful examples.
In this tutorial, we’ll work through setting up a Raspberry Pi 4 to boot from a USB connected SSD or other USB storage media. There is quite a bit of information on this online already, but I’ve had a lot of questions recently about how to do this, so I thought I’d share my method.
I’m going to be doing this on my latest plywood Pi case build with an M.2 NVME drive, but the process is the same for any USB attached solid-state, flash or disk drive. It also doesn’t matter what type of SSD you’ve got, as long as you’ve got an adaptor to convert the SSD interface to a USB interface, then you should be able to get your Raspberry Pi 4 to boot off of it.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable brotli compression. For those of you who didn’t know, Brotli is a new compression format launched by Google which claims to save 20%-28% over their previous gzip or and mod_deflate compatible implementation, for similar speeds. Brotli has the advantage that for the same amount of CPU work a smaller compressed file is created. This magnifies the advantages of using compression to serve site content. Brotli compression is supported by all the major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step enabling Brotli Compression on Apache webserver. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Django on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Django is a free and open-source web development framework written in Python. It is used for developing complex and database-driven Python applications. It can be run on any operating system that can run Python including, Windows, macOS, Linux, and many more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Django framework on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In Linux, you need to run terminal commands simultaneously for installing and executing applications. If you’re a newbie in Linux, the chances are that you might be looking for methods to execute multiple commands at a time on your terminal shell. Especially, system administrators need to perform a bunch of commands like ifconfig and GRIP commands to handle loads. Linux allows users to get a newbie to professionals through commands. Knowing a handful of commands might make you different in the Linux community if you know how to use them and how to run multiple commands at once in the terminal on your Linux machine.
CSF is also known as "Config Server Firewall" is a free and advanced firewall for Linux systems. It comes with some advanced security features such as intrusion, flood, and login detections. It is designed to defend against many attacks, such as port scans, SYN floods, and login brute force attacks. It also provides integration for cPanel, DirectAdmin, and Webmin.
This tutorial will explain CSF installation, basic configuration, and essential commands for CSF on Debian 11.
Streamlit is the fastest way to build and share data apps.
It is an open-source python library designed to create custom web applications for machine learning and data science.
This guide will explain how to run a Streamlit on a CentOS 8.
I try to use Ansible often, even for tasks that I know how to do with a shell script because I know that Ansible is easy to scale. Even though I might develop an Ansible playbook just for my personal workstation, sometimes it ends up being a lot more useful than intended, and it's easy to apply that same playbook to all the computers on my network. And besides, sometimes the greatest enemy of getting really good at something is the impression that it's only meant for serious professionals, or big projects, or whatever you feel that you're not. I use Ansible because it's a great open source tool, but I benefit from it the most because it scales.
This guide explains step-by-step how to set up a new MySQL server running in Docker container in only a few minutes.
One of the great things about Docker is how you can quickly use it to try out applications without having to install it directly on your machine. You can use Docker to run a database in a container as if it were a remote server, and test how your application interacts with it.
Keeping your system up to date is an essential factor for anyone from simple desktop users, developers, sysadmins; well, let’s face it, anyone with a device primarily connected to the Internet. Ubuntu, by default, is not set up for automatic updates. However, with enabling and configuring unattended-upgrades packages, you can easily apply security, package, or even new feature upgrades in an easy, simple, efficient way if you do not always have the time to check or forget. IT is highly recommended to enable this just for security alone.
As the name implies, rescue mode is provided to rescue your system when the system unable to boot normally into Red Hat Enterprise Linux with runlevel 3 or 5.
I thought confusions like these were interesting but unimportant oddities until I audited some UTF-8 data files from Russia. Some of the scientific names in those files were made up of mixed Latin and Cyrillic letters. A real-world example was "AporreÃÂtodea caliginosa caliginosa (Savigny, 1826)", in which the "c" in Aporrectodea was Cyrillic, not Latin.
This had the potential to cause data-parsing errors, so I needed a way to find mixed Latin-Cyrillic words in the files I audit, which are all TSVs, UTF-8-encoded and mostly in Latin script.
It is easy to use your Linux distribution's package management tool to install the Java software packages. However, sometimes you need to do a manual installation of Java. This is of particular importance to administrators of Java-based application servers such as Tomcat or JBoss. Many open source and proprietary software products rely on these services.
If you're looking for yet another cloud storage provider, one that offers a Linux desktop app, Jack Wallen believes Megasync might be exactly what you need.
Here are the steps to install Slack on Debian 11 Bullseye or 10 Buster Linux using the command line terminal.
Slack is a popular Online instant messaging service application that stands for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”, yes, in short, “Slack”. It has been developed by the US-based company “Slack Technologies” mainly used to handle communication processes within workgroups and project teams.
Slack can also be seen as an alternative to other team messengers and project management tools such as Microsoft Teams, Stackfield, Circuit, or Rocket. Its business model corresponds to the well-known “freemium” model. That means it offers multiple plans including the free one that offers access to 10,000 of your team’s most recent messages; 1:1 voice and video calls between teammates and 10 integrations with other apps like Google Drive, Office 365, and many more.
Although currently while adding the GPG key on Debian 11 you will get a “Warning: apt-key is deprecated. Manage keyring files in trusted.gpg.d instead (see apt-key(8))“, still we can use this method. However, there is a solution for this. And here in this article, we will see that.
OpenPGP is an open standard for a cryptographic system (encryption; digital signatures; web of trust), especially for use with e-mails. GnuPG ( Gnu Privacy Guard ) is free and open-source software (available for many operating systems) that implements the OpenPGP standard.
GPU-Viewer is graphical tool to show the detailed information about OpenGL, Vulkan, and/or OpenCL graphics libraries.
Without struggling with glxinfo, vulkaninfo and clinfo command line tools, the GTK+3 tool provides a graphical front-end that shows all the important details.
Flatpaks are a universal package type that gives you cross-distribution access to popular Linux apps. In this video, I'll show you how to configure Ubuntu for Flatpak support, and we'll install a few apps. In addition, I'll show you command-line methods as well.
Released at the end of August 2021, Linux 5.14 is the most recent kernel branch available for GNU/Linux distributions, and, now that Linux kernel 5.13 reached end of life, you might want to upgrade your computers to this newer release that brings better hardware support and many other new features.
Why install Linux kernel 5.14? Because it comes with new and updated drivers, as well as support for new hardware, so if you’re experiencing issues with some of your hardware components when using a previous kernel version that’s available in your Ubuntu or Linux Mint system, why not give it a try.
Time for another look at what Google are doing with their cloud gaming service Stadia with more new releases and new Stadia Pro games coming to the optional subscription.
Firstly, a big one. Fifa 22 comes to Stadia on October 1, which includes the brand new next-gen HyperMotion, a feature that's supposed to make players more realistic with their animations. The interesting thing here is that the Windows version still won't have it but Stadia and consoles will.
Made using real photos and videos of various aspects of the great outdoors, Seedlings seems like an absolutely wonderful 2.5D puzzle platformer to keep an eye on and try the demo too.
Developed by Bardsley Creative with the open source Godot Engine, you assume the role of a sentient seed as you travel through various parts of New Zealand's native forests. It's certainly not the first to do something like this but that doesn't stop how interesting it is.
Being alone on a desert island after a plane crash? No thanks. Bringing along a friend? Yes please. Stranded Deep now has online multiplayer for two people. This is in addition to the existing couch co-op feature.
"Explore underwater and on land as you hunt for supplies to craft the tools, weapons, and shelter you’ll need to stay alive. Stay sharp: hunger, thirst, and exposure conspire against you as you brave treacherous elements and the dangerous creatures of the Pacific. Live long enough, Stay Alive!"
Additionally for Linux the recently introduced PipeWire desktop capture for Remote Play has been disabled by default, instead you can launch Steam with "-pipewire" if you wish to use it.
It’s been a few years since Valve released the Index virtual reality headset, which sells for $499 and up (with an emphasis on the “up” if you want wireless controllers and sensors required to get the most out of it).
Now a couple of reports suggest that Valve is working on new VR headsets, including a model that may be a standalone model that can be used without a PC, much like Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2. But there’s a difference between “working on” and planning to release.
Back in June we reported on a patent from Valve that indicated work progressing towards their next VR headset and it appears the codename is Deckard. Once again coming from VR reporter "SadlyItsBradley" (Brad Lynch) it a new YouTube video.
Keep in mind that it's all still speculation, and from what we know of Valve they do have quite a habit of prototyping a lot of different things at any one time and the majority never see the light of day for consumers. That said, a VR headset from Valve that can go standalone and be hooked up to a PC would be a logical step to enable more people to check it out (and hopefully bring the price down?).
Founded 13 years ago, GOG.com is celebrating with the release of more classic games along with a big sale.
A fan of classic games? Well you're in luck with Elvira: Mistress of the Dark and Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus now available on GOG with Linux packages ready to install (it uses DOSBox). The popular classic Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is also now on GOG but only has a Windows version so you will need to use Wine. Nice to see even more older games getting a new life, which is a big reason why I like GOG when they work with publishers to make it happen.
How do you feel about Netflix doing gaming? We've often seen service compared to a "Netflix of gaming" but now they're going all-in on it themselves. Games will be included as part of a normal membership so they're in a pretty good position. Just recently they expanded their offering from just Poland to also include Spain and Italy but it's Android only right now. It likely won't be too long before play is possible in your browser.
Published release SuperTuxKart 1.3 , free racing game with plenty of go-karts, tracks and features. The game code is distributed under the GPLv3 license. Binaries are available for Linux, Android, Windows, and macOS.
One of the most popular open-source games, SuperTuxKart, has finally received a significant update after a gap of almost a year. It is a free and cross-platform 3D kart-racing game available for Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android.
Just like Mario Kart, you can choose from a vast catalog of characters (based on mascots of open-source projects) racing in unique karts using special items to win races in various arenas. The game also features various racing modes, including a story Mode and an online Mode, to keep you engaged.
Let us see what’s new with the latest release.
As you can imagine, I didn't really continue with my test. Therefore, no data on battery life, resource usage, or any of the customizations that I often have to undertake to my systems usable and productive. What would be the point really? So many things went wrong. Some of these aren't Fedora's fault, but many others are.
Slow boot time (and boot menu oddities), Wayland scaling problems, crashes, lack of third-party application by default. Fedora 34 KDE just does not feel complete. It's a distro all right, but it sure doesn't get as much love and attention as the flagship release. Not that that guarantees quality in the distrospace really, anywhere. All in all, if you want Plasma bleeding edge, Manjaro or neon can do that just as well, while providing their own share of quirks and bugs (albeit smaller). There are some small redeeming points in Fedora 34 KDE, but they are nowhere near enough to compensate for the bad stuff. All in all, sadly, my past impression holds. Oh well.
Fedora team announced the release of Fedora 35 Beta. Here’s a quick wrap of the features and direction for you to download the copy and test.
After some delays (which is normal in Fedora releases), the team released the Fedora 35 BETA .iso images for Workstation, Servers, IoT and Desktop flavors. This release brings a very few changes, considering the usual Fedora release. Important changes include the latest GNOME 41, PipeWire and WirePlumber to manage audio, a new flavor Fedora Kinoite based on KDE Plasma and standard version update of packages.
I'll tell more about them soon). Because I'm beta testing Krita 5.0 beta 1 appimage on GNU/Linux, I could use the Stylise filter of Gmic. It was at first designed to apply the style of a painting (eg. Van Gogh) into a photo.
I have just renamed librsvg's master branch to main, as other modules already have.
In December 2021, CentOS 8 will reach end of life and be replaced by CentOS Stream. One of the major changes between previous iterations of CentOS and CentOS Stream is the lack of minor versions. Centos Stream has adopted a continuous release cycle. From the beginning of this year, developers in the Foreman community started to see the benefits of earlier bug detection and patching that CentOS Stream offers as a result of the continuous releases. We no longer have to wait for the next release to take advantage of the latest changes and bugfixes. A veteran Linux community enthusiast noted that this move also brings RHEL developers closer than ever to the FOSS community.
Fail-fast culture can be advantageous for modern systems design and development. But “fail fast” usually connotes learning and improvement. Without that piece, it becomes just “fail” – the speed doesn’t really matter.
This principle applies to DevSecOps, which like DevOps depends on a culture of continuous learning and improvement. You won’t always get it right and you will learn some lessons by taking missteps along the way.
To attract and retain top talent these days, organizations need to offer remote or hybrid work options. But flexible work models are not without their challenges.
A successful hybrid work model requires employees to navigate the blurred lines between work and personal time, to stay connected as a virtual team, and to be productive even while working across time zones.
For managers, it also requires a shared definition of what flexible work looks like for your team and an understanding of the right skills to help everyone thrive in this new environment.
As the modern IT environment continues to evolve, it continues to grow in complexity. An organization’s technology stack may not look the same as it did five years ago, let alone five months ago. In addition, organizations are expected to scale faster than ever to meet customer demands in a digital world. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is our key for the enterprise to demystify complex systems and innovate at pace with the industry by breaking down bottlenecks caused by repetitive, manual processes. With the introduction of Ansible Automation Platform 2 announced today, IT teams can now take advantage of self-contained automation capabilities to make it even easier to address automation at scale across a range of environments and systems.
Central to delivering and supporting portable IT automation is the Red Hat partner ecosystem. Three years ago, we launched the Red Hat Ansible Automation Certification Program to equip users with trusted and reliable automation content provided by Red Hat and our partners. Since then, Red Hat has introduced Ansible Content Collections to package certified Ansible content, such as modules, plugins, documentation and playbooks, making it even easier for users to manage, consume and deploy automation solutions.
Today, we are proud to announce that there are nearly 100 supported partner platforms enabled by Ansible Content Collections, nearly double since this time last year. Red Hat’s growing catalog of ready-to-use, certified Ansible content is a testament to the power of automation and the real results seen by users.
In the last year, organizations across the globe have operated under dynamically changing business requirements. 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, noted that respondents in its recent Voice of the Enterprise: DevOps, Organizational Dynamics survey indicated "flexibility to quickly respond to changes" (52%) as the top DevOps benefit. While only 36% of respondents described the level of IT automation in their organization as "mostly or all automated processes," respondents expect it to grow to 47% in 12 months.
Automation is about empowering people to do more, to focus on bigger picture problems and to use tools to perform the rote tasks that do not require or benefit from manual intervention. When IT automation was first introduced, it began as a task-driven, domain specific initiative; script-based tools were a reaction to address the pain points of a single job function. This original wave of automation was about enabling an individual to do more, faster, generally taking place in small pockets and usually orthogonal to other similar efforts taking place elsewhere in the same organization.
Technology professionals across various teams often dealt with similar issues, but tackled them separately and thus with less efficiency. As the scale and complexity of technology platforms grow more interdependent and application deployments more frequent, enterprises need to drive business agility and transformation while taking the friction out of the system.
While IT automation tasks have traditionally been human initiated, the sheer volume of platforms, application components, configurations, deployments and changes associated with digital transformation require a new approach. In order for organizations to meet these challenges, they must break down the siloes that so frequently exist among teams to integrate best practices, tools and processes. They need to adopt a new approach to operations through autonomous automation.
At AnsibleFest 2021, we introduced a re-architected Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to meet the changing needs of the open hybrid cloud, so teams can create, test and deploy automation with greater speed and scalability in cloud-native and containerized environments. What many customers will notice is that the feature terminology looks unfamiliar; this was done to reflect the cloud-native foundation of Ansible Automation Platform 2.
Time for a change, and a big one at that. As of September 20th, I am now a full time Employee of Ampere Computing. I am in the Software Development team, working on Open Source stuff. That means Linux Kernel and Open Stack, among other things.
I’ll post more on why in the future. Why I left Red Hat, and why I specifically chose Ampere. Both deserve a well formed explanation, as both are very important to me. My head is not there yet, it is in code and machines and processes.
This article introduces you to using Thoth's security recommender to scan for flaws in your Python applications. Security checks were recently added in Project Thoth, a cloud-based resolver for Python applications.
Debian is a preferred choice of millions of Linux users for some of the most popular and powerful operating systems, like Ubuntu and its derivatives are based on Debian.
Debian 11 has finally been released, finally, after a long development work of two years. Bullseye – that’s the name given to this latest Debian Linux distro. So what are the updates and upgrades? In this article, let’s check out what’s new in Debian 11.
Based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10.10 “Buster” operating system, Deepin Linux 20.2.4 is here one and a half months after version 20.2.3, which introduced an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature to the Screen Capture and Image Viewer utilities to help users extract text from pictures.
Now, Deepin Linux 20.2.4 is here with another cool feature, a global search functionality that helps users quickly find all the information they need from the convenience of the Dock. After you update your Deepin Linux installations to version 20.2.4, you’ll be able to see the global search icon in the Dock.
One change you probably know about: Ubuntu 21.10 uses the Yaru light theme by default. The ‘mixed’ version of the Yaru theme (dark headers but light control) has been jettisoned and is no longer available. Ubuntu’s Appearance settings pane is updated to reflect the change accordingly...
Notice anything else different about the screenshot above?
I won’t be surprised if you don’t as it’s a very subtle change. But, the selected row styling no longer has a little orange bar at the start of it. Here’s a comparison pic of Yaru GTK before and after today’s update...
Canonical on Sept. 21 announced the lifecycle extension of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) to help organizations implement their transition to new applications and technologies.
This lifecycle extension enables organizations to balance their infrastructure upgrade costs. The support extensions give them additional time to implement their upgrade plan. The lifecycle extensions provide support for a total of 10 years.
Canonical’s Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase of Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 LTS enables a secure and low-maintenance infrastructure with security updates and kernel live patches.
iWave’s “iW-RainboW-G34S” Pico-ITX SBC runs Linux on an i.MX8M Mini or Nano with up to 4GB LPDDR4 and 128GB eMMC plus up to 2x GbE and 3x USB, WiFi/BT, HDMI, MIPI-CSI, and an M.2 B-key slot.
Last year, iWave Systems announced a sandwich-style iW-RainboW-G34D Pico-ITX development kit for NXP’s i.MX8M Mini via its iW-RainboW-G34M-SM module. The company has now returned with a monolithic iW-RainboW-G34S SBC for both the i.MX8M Mini and Nano designed for mass production and backed up with a 10+ year longevity guarantee.
. By utilizing pre-loaded Ubuntu OS, Intel€® Distribution of OpenVINOâ⢠Toolkit, MRAA and UPM I/O and various sensor libraries, users can rapidly deploy and jump-start their development of edge computing project.
I was first introduced to Wirepas Massive mesh networking a few days ago when I covered Solidrun Solidsense N8 IoT Compact Wirepas Massive gateway comprised of an NXP i.MX 8M Nano processor running Linux and a module based on Nordic Semi nRF52832 wireless MCU handling Wirepsd Massive through its 2.4 GHz radio.
Arduino is going full steam ahead with its Arduino PRO family of boards for industrial applications. After the announcement of the Portenta H7 Lite board earlier this month, the company has now introduced the Arduino Nicla Sense ME designed in collaboration with Bosch Sensortec.
The Nicla Sense ME (Motion & Environment) board comes with a range of Bosch Sensortec sensors notably a 9DoF smart motion sensor and a 4DoF environmental sensor with AI capabilities, and targets industrial IoT applications either for research projects, rapid prototyping, or commercial products.
Everyone loves watching movies, that is, so long as you can hear what the characters on screen are saying. [GreatScott] found this second part difficult while watching through BladeRunner 2049, so he designed an automatic volume adjuster to assist.
At a high level, the solution is fairly straightforward; when there is loud music playing in a movie, turn the volume down. The challenge is how to actually achieve that. The first step was controlling the volume. To avoid having to modify or damage his sound system, [GreatScott] opted instead to mimic the volume up and down signals of his remote over IR. Using the very handy IRremote library for Arduino and its built-in decoding functionality, he was able to identify and replicate the signals with his own IR LED.
The second step in this process was measuring the volume of the movie. [GreatScott] achieved this with a microphone and amplifier circuit, that was then piped into one of the analog pins of the Arduino Pro Micro at the heart of the build. Since the audio being sampled could have a frequency as high as 20 kHz, the ADC Prescaler had to be adjusted from its standard value, which would have only permitted measurements at less than 5 kHz.
Generally speaking, we like our computing devices to remain on and active the whole time we’re using them. But there are situations, such as off-grid devices that run on small solar cells, where constant power is by no means a guarantee. That’s where the concept of intermittent computing comes into play, and now thanks to the BFree project, you can develop Python software that persists even when the hardware goes black.
Poker is a fun game to play with a group of friends or as part of a league, and manually having to keep track of turns by passing a dealer chip around can get tiresome… quickly. Redditor tatey13 had the idea to build a custom poker table with some extra features that makes playing easier and more fun.
The table started off as an old dining room table, which was promptly sanded and had a large oval cut from its center to make room for the lighting and a soft play surface. Additionally, eight spaces were created around the table at even intervals that each have a metal container and a light-up pushbutton for getting user inputs. A long LED strip was also glued to the inner edge of the table to provide information about the current turn and timing.
A current entry in Jolla’s blog deals with the sandboxing model that Jolla introduced in February with the release of Sailfish OS 4.0.1 “Koli” . The article goes into the current status and the plans for the future of this security technology at Sailfish OS.
As with other operating systems, sandboxing is designed to help improve user privacy by restricting what applications are allowed to do. This is done using the security technology of the namespaces in the kernel. This is a lightweight but effective mechanism that makes it relatively easy to define what resources each application can consume. Control over the authorizations is then passed to the user in a dialog when an app is started for the first time.
Mentoring and internship programs, besides being important to career growth, are also crucial to open source software development. For example, they serve to teach and engage newcomers, lower barriers to entry, and help improve the sustainability of open source projects.
“Part of starting, or growing, a successful open source community is designing the community to be sustainable,” says Karsten Wade at the Red Hat blog. “This means the project needs to be able to reliably, and repeatedly, bring in new people and help them become ongoing contributors.”
The 10-year old Germany-based open source encrypted email startup Tutanota announced this week that it’s offering free premium subscriptions to open source developers working on qualified open source projects that are at least 30 days old.
“Open source projects need to use a standard open source license and must be non-commercial,” the company said in its online announcement. “Your project should not have paid support or pay contributors.”
Merged this morning into the LibreOffice code-base is the initial Qt6 VCL plug-in.
LibreOffice supports multiple Visual Class Library (VCL) plug-ins for different toolkits from the Windows and macOS Quartz user-interface back-ends to the GTK and Qt5 back-ends and more for supporting different user-interface implementations depending upon the platform. Complementing the LibreOffice Qt5 VCL is now an early, work-in-progress Qt6 VCL.
Writer now has the start of list level support in Writer paragraph styles. This improves ODT and DOCX compatibility, and it’ll improve the style previews and the UI in the future.
For some years now, the web has been getting fatter and fatter. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks it’s doing much more for the user than it did 20 years ago (except maybe for native media codecs instead of Adobe Flash). Overall, it’s turned into less of a decentralized and open domain for the free exchange of ideas and code and people’s web logs, and more into a corporate shithole of Google, Facebook, and Cloudflare.
In Richard Stallman’s “The JavaScript Trap” essay, he wrote that “web apps” are a danger to computer users because they encourage the use of non-Free software when the user doesn’t consider the problem. That they are applications, that they are written in ways that obscure how they work, that they are copyrighted and proprietary, and…even worse, they run on someone else’s computer, and they can stop you from using them at all after you need them, and spy on you.
I’ve never, personally, seen anything dumber than an office suite you have to be online to use, and apparently enough people agreed with me even if they won’t just switch to LibreOffice, that Microsoft backpeddled from their previous position that there would be no more desktop program, and announced new versions of the desktop Microsoft Office.
In fact, Microsoft’s office programs today are a huge regression over even their own products 20 or 30 years ago, when there was no annoying product activator and this web app nonsense that requires you to be online to edit a document, and then be “encouraged” to save them all to your OneDrive account where the government has access to everything. Also, Microsoft is the second largest advertising network on the internet after Google, and now they can parse anything you’re stupid enough to save on their cloud. (Plus, if you want to use MS Office 95 forever because reasons, Wine runs it just fine.)
While we're busy working on both the upcoming Godot 4.0 and 3.4 releases (with a dev snapshot for 3.4 beta 5 available now), we still cherry-pick important bug fixes to the 3.3 branch regularly for maintenance releases (see our release policy).
Godot 3.3.3 was released a month ago, and a handful of important fixes have been queued in the 3.3 branch since then. Most notably, users of the GDScript LSP in Visual Studio Code have been experiencing crashes in 3.3.3, which are fixed in this new Godot 3.3.4 RC 1.
Note: Version numbers can be confusing with three branches worked on in parallel - this release is 3.3.4, i.e. a maintenance update to the 3.3 branch. This is not the upcoming 3.4 feature release.
As there is no new feature and only bug fixes, this RC 1 should be as stable as 3.3.3-stable and can be used in production if you need one of the fixes it includes.
As usual, you can try it live with the online version of the Godot editor updated for this release.
If you need centralized, comprehensive monitoring, putting Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana together can be a useful combination.
Announcing here Web::PageMeta which is lazy build-ed HTTP-GET and web-scrape-data module able to work both in classic code and also to behave non-blocking in async code. More info on my blog or on CPAN or on GitHub.
Around 18 months ago, I set about working on the largest set of architectural changes that Raku runtime MoarVM has seen since its inception. The work was most directly triggered by the realization that we had no good way to fix a certain semantic bug in dispatch without either causing huge performance impacts across the board or increasingly complexity even further in optimizations that were already riding their luck. However, the need for something like this had been apparent for a while: a persistent struggle to optimize certain Raku language features, the pain of a bunch of performance mechanisms that were all solving the same kind of problem but each for a specific situation, and a sense that, with everything learned since I founded MoarVM, it was possible to do better.
The result is the development of a new generalized dispatch mechanism. An overview can be found in my Raku Conference talk about it (slides, video); in short, it gives us a far more uniform architecture for all kinds of dispatch, allowing us to deliver better performance on a range of language features that have thus far been glacial, as well as opening up opportunities for new optimizations.
Today, this work has been merged, along with the matching changes in NQP (the Raku subset we use for bootstrapping and to implement the compiler) and Rakudo (the full Raku compiler and standard library implementation). This means that it will ship in the October 2021 releases.
If you are reading this page then you are like all of us a Linux fan, also you are using the command line every day and absolutely love Linux. But even in love and marriage there are things that make you just a little bit annoyed. Here in this article we are going to show you some of the most stupid Linux commands that a person can find.
Many people don’t think of the command line prompt as a useful element, or even pay it much attention. However, a useful prompt can change the way you use the command line, and by extension, your system. This article shows you a number of useful and interesting Bash prompts with examples. Note that we begin with the prompts themselves, then offer some further instructions on how to work with them.
Here we offer a few Bash prompts, and not all will be serious. For example, our first entry on the list could bring a little joy to you when using the command line!
This post is aimed at people who are developers but who do not know C or low-level details about things like sign extension. In other words, if you’re a seasoned pro and you eat memory safety vulnerabilities for lunch, then this will all be familiar territory for you; our goal here is to dive deep into how integer overflows can happen in real code, and to break the topic down in detail for people who aren’t as familiar with this aspect of security.
Rust is definitely in the news. I'm definitely on the bandwagon. (To me it feels like I've been wanting something like Rust for many years.) There're a huge number of intro tutorials, and of course there's the Rust Book.
A friend observed to me, though, that while there's a lot of "write your first simple Rust program" there's a dearth of material aimed at the programmer who already knows a dozen diverse languages, and is familiar with computer architecture, basic type theory, and so on. Or indeed, for the impatient and confident reader more generally. I thought I would have a go.
So, how did I get this pair of boxes, covered in woodgrain and connected by a wire?
The short answer is because they were invented, and they eventually found their way to people around the country, connecting to cable systems for the first time.
The longer answer is because there was a need for such boxes. And Phil Hamlin, Sr. was there—both for the formation of the original industry that led to their use, and the creation of the devices. There was a separation of a couple of decades along the way, and by the time he invented the device, he was already a legend in the cable industry, having literally put up some of the earliest wires.
Hamlin’s early work led to a role with an important formative company in the cable industry, Jerrold, which manufactured some of the earliest electronics used in the cable industry and was a brand name in the space for decades in the pre-digital era.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (iaito, libssh, radare2, and squashfs-tools), openSUSE (hivex, shibboleth-sp, and transfig), SUSE (python-urllib3 and shibboleth-sp), and Ubuntu (apache2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-snapdragon, and linux-hwe-5.11, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.11, linux-oracle-5.11).
As the security certificate on all connected objects expires, millions of smartphones, game consoles and PCs may be deprived of the Internet on September 30, 2021. This concerns all devices marketed before 2017 that have not been updated.
U.S. officials are set to tour Latin America this week to scout infrastructure projects as they prepare a counter to Chinese President Xi Jinping's multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.
A delegation of diplomatic and development officials led by President Joe Biden's Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh is in Colombia, where they plan to meet President Ivan Duque, before stops later in the week to Ecuador and Panama, U.S. officials said.
The group is tasked with turning Build Back Better World (B3W), the international infrastructure investment initiative announced by the Group of Seven richest democracies in June, into reality. It's the first of several planned "listening tours."
Civil society’s fight to restore Twitter access continued in Nigeria today, as the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS Court) held a hearing in the consolidated case of SERAP & Others v. Nigeria. While the Nigerian government attempted to delay the proceedings, the attorneys for the applicants successfully argued to go forward. As the government is still blocking Twitter, any delay in proceedings would have extended the online censorship.
“We’re proud to see the ECOWAS Court push through with the hearing on Nigeria’s Twitter ban,” said Felicia Anthonio, Campaigner and #KeepItOn Lead at Access Now. “These proceedings are justifying civil society’s outrage at online censorship, and hopefully act as a deterrent to other governments looking to pull the same oppressive move.”
When journalists are under threat, truth is under threat. With the growth and facility of digital tools the press in India are facing legal threats more than ever before. IFF in collaboration with the Foundation for Media Professionals (FMP) launched the Digital Patrakar Defence Clinic (DPDC) in September to provide pro bono legal assistance to journalists. DPDC will continue to provide pro bono legal assistance throughout the year. We have described the need for DPDC in our previous post here. In this post we highlight who can apply for the Clinic and how (quick tip: fill this form), and the pro bono legal services offered.
The European Parliament must block the suggestions to the Digital Services Act currently being negotiated among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) that jeopardize a human rights-centric model of platform governance. Through an open letter to MEPs, Access Now, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and European Digital Rights network are calling for fundamental rights safeguards that are crucial to a free and democratic society.
For much of the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals chased after tritons and mermaids. Vaughn Scribner follows the hunt, revealing how humanity’s supposed aquatic ancestors became wondrous screens on which to project theories of geographical, racial, and taxonomical difference.
A 19th-century catalogue dedicated to showcasing diatoms (a type of unicellular microalgae) in all their intricate glory.
