Android Open Source Project now includes the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia ‘device’

 

In a new commit posted today to Android’s Gerrit source code management, two Fuchsia-related repos have been added to the primary “manifest” for the Android Open Source Project. For the unfamiliar, this manifest is used to inform Google’s download tool “Repo” of what should be included when you download AOSP.

Google Fuchsia: Why This New Operating System Solves a Huge Coding Problem

 

The mobile layout has been code-named “Armadillo” and the other view has been dubbed “Capybara,” reported 9to5Google. Both sides of Fuchsia will work together using a tab system that will make up a majority of the user experience.

Lessons in Vendor Lock-in: Shaving

The power of open standards extends beyond today into the future. When my son gets old enough to shave, I can pass down one of my all-metal, decades-old antique razors to him, and it will still work. While everyone else in a decade will have to shave with some $20-per-blade disposable razor with three aloe strips, seven blades, and some weird vibrating and rotating motor, he will be able to pick any razor from my collection and find affordable replacement blades. This is the power of open standards and the freedom to avoid vendor lock-in.

Help us to make document compatibility even better

The Document Liberation Project (DLP) is a sister project to LibreOffice, and provides many software libraries for reading and writing a large range of file formats – such as files created by other productivity tools. Thanks to the DLP, LibreOffice (and other programs) can open many legacy, proprietary documents, but there’s always room for improvement! Check out this short video to learn more:

GNU Guix: Back from SeaGL 2018

SeaGL 2018 has concluded. Thank you to everyone in the local Seattle community who came to participate! As previously announced, Chris Marusich gave a talk introducing GNU Guix to people of all experience levels. Some very Guixy swag was handed out, including printed copies of this handy Guix reference card. The room was packed, the audience asked great questions, and overall it was tons of fun! If you weren't able to come to SeaGL this year, that's OK! You can watch a video of the talk below.

​Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime released

If you want to use a safe third-party container, smart people know they should turn to Bitnami. This company packages, deploys, and maintains applications in virtually any format for any platform. Now, at KubeCon in Seattle, Bitnami announced its Kubernetes release: Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR) 1.0, a production-ready open source project. So, with everyone and their cloud provider offering Kubernetes, why should you care? Well, first, BKPR provides built-in monitoring, alerting, and metrics automatically, thereby enabling developers to avoid reinventing the wheel when they rollout a Kubernetes application.

Why the Cloud-Native Market Is Expanding at KubeCon

The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event is a beacon for news, with vendors showcasing their wares and making multiple announcements. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon runs here from Dec. 11-13 and has brought 8,000 attendees and more than 187 vendors into the exhibit hall. Kubernetes itself is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is also the home now to 31 open-source cloud projects. In this eWEEK Data Points article, we look at the major areas of innovation and new services announced at the conference.

Add It Up: Enterprise Adoption of Kubernetes Is Growing

A recently updated user survey from monitoring software provider Datadog confirms an increase in Kubernetes adoption. We believe this is the result of three factors: 1) more organizations using containers in production; 2) Kubernetes has emerged as the leading orchestration platform; 3) organizations are choosing to adopt Kubernetes earlier in cloud native voyage. There is also some evidence that Kubernetes adoption is more likely among organizations with more containers being deployed. This article highlights findings from several studies released in conjunction with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, a Kubernetes user conference being held this week in Seattle. Cloud Foundry’s most recent survey of IT decision makers shows container production usage jumping from 22 percent in early 2016 to 38 percent in late 2018, with these deployments increasingly being described as “broad.” The Cloud Foundry report also found an increase in the number of containers being deployed — in 2016, only 37 percent of cont

Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel

Oracle caused quite a stir in 2010 when it announced its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux. We’ve checked in with Sergio Leunissen, Vice President, Linux and VM Development at Oracle, for an update on the ABCs of this important introduction as well as the company’s latest take on Linux.

Get the Skills You Need to Monitor Systems and Services with Prometheus

Open source software isn’t just transforming technology infrastructure around the world, it is also creating profound opportunities for people with relevant skills. From Linux to OpenStack to Kubernetes, employers have called out significant skills gaps that make it hard for them to find people fluent with cutting-edge tools and platforms. The Linux Foundation not only offers self-paced training options for widely known tools and platforms, such as Linux and Git, but also offers options specifically targeting the rapidly growing cloud computing ecosystem. The latest offering in this area is Monitoring Systems and Services with Prometheus (LFS241). Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database that is especially well suited for monitoring dynamic cloud environments. It contains a powerful query language and data model in addition to integrated alerting and service discovery support. The new course is specifically designed for software engineers and systems administrators wanting to learn how to use Prometheus to gain better insights into their systems and services.

Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.7 now available

CodeReady Workspaces for OpenShift (Beta) – It works on their machines too

“It works on my machine.” If you write code with, for, or near anybody else, you’ve said those words at least once. Months ago I set up a library or package or environment variable or something on my machine and I haven’t thought about it since. So the code works for me, but it may take a long time to figure out what’s missing on your machine.

OpenShift & Kubernetes: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going Part 2

The growth and innovation in the Kubernetes project, since it first launched just over four years ago, has been tremendous to see. In part 1 of my blog, I talked about how Red Hat has been a key contributor to Kubernetes since the launch of the project, detailed where we invested our resources and what drove those decisions. Today, that innovation continues and we are just as excited for what comes next. In this blog, I’d like to talk about where we are going and what we’re focused on, as we continue driving innovation in Kubernetes and the broader cloud native ecosystem and building the next generation of OpenShift.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform and making it easier to manage bare metal

Bare metal is making a comeback. At Red Hat we have been observing an increase of the use of bare metal in general. And we aren’t the only ones. In 2017’s OpenStack User Survey there had been a growth of bare metal in production environments from 9% to 20% of the production deployments. The 2018 survey says that adoption of Ironic is being driven by Kubernetes, with 37% of respondents who use Kubernetes on OpenStack using the bare metal provisioner. And there are many reasons for this growth. A great blog post about Kubernetes on metal with OpenShift by Joe Fernandes described this growth in the context of containers on bare metal with Kubernetes as a driver for this growth. But, it doesn’t stop there - High-Performance Compute (HPC), access to hardware devices or scientific workloads such as AI/ML or data lake management are also contributing to this increase.

etcd finds new home at CNCF

CoreOS has moved to secure the independence of etcd by donating the distributed key-value store to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The project was started by Core OS – now part of Red Hat – in 2013 to handle coordination between container instances so that a system reboot was possible without affecting the uptime of applications running on top. Its name can be seen as an hint to the management of configuration files, which over the years have grown to be stored in /etc directory in Unix systems.

Kubernetes etcd data project joins CNCF

How do you store data across a Kubernetes container cluster? With etcd. This essential part of Kubernetes has been managed by CoreOS/Red Hat. No longer. Now, the open-source etcd project has been moved from Red Hat to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). What is etcd? No, it's not what happens when a cat tries to type a three-letter acronyms. Etcd (pronounced et-see-dee) was created by the CoreOS team in 2013. It's an open-source, distributed, consistent key-value database for shared configuration, service discovery, and scheduler coordination. It's built on the Raft consensus algorithm for replicated logs.

Welcome etcd to CNCF

Etcd has been written for distributed systems like Kubernetes as a fault-tolerant and reliable data base. Clients can easily watch certain keys and get notified when their values change which allows scaling to a large number of clients that can reconfigure themselves when a value changes.

etcd: Current status and future roadmap

etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to manage the coordination state of distributed systems. etcd was first announced in June 2013 by CoreOS (part of Red Hat as of 2018). Since its adoption in Kubernetes in 2014, etcd has become a fundamental part of the Kubernetes cluster management software design, and the etcd community has grown exponentially. etcd is now being used in production environments of multiple companies, including large cloud provider environments such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and other on-premises Kubernetes implementations. CNCF currently has 32 conformant Kubernetes platforms and distributions, all of which use etcd as the datastore. In this blog post, we’ll review some of the milestones achieved in latest etcd releases, and go over the future roadmap for etcd. Share your thoughts and feedback on features you consider important on the mailing list: etcd-dev@googlegroups.com.

Red Hat contributes etcd, the cornerstone of Kubernetes, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Today Red Hat is thrilled to announce our contribution of etcd, an open source project that is a key component of Kubernetes, and its acceptance into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a vendor-neutral foundation housed under The Linux Foundation to drive the adoption of cloud native systems. The etcd project’s focus is safely storing critical data of a distributed system and it demonstrated its quality early on. It is most notably the primary datastore of Kubernetes, the de facto standard system for container orchestration. Today we're excited to transfer stewardship of etcd to the same body that cares for the growth and maintenance of Kubernetes. Given that etcd powers every Kubernetes cluster, this move brings etcd to the community that relies on it most at the CNCF.

Banks take next steps to digital refinement

The financial services industry (FSI) has gotten the message: customer expectations have changed radically. They want to experience banking services through multiple digital channels, and they want those services to go well beyond the generic products that traditional banks typically offer. Customers are looking for personalization, are comfortable with service automation, and are eager to get what they need quickly and easily. As the value chain for financial institutions’ services expands along with the need to deliver new and relevant customer offerings, their dexterity is being put to the test, according to an article by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). To enable the flexibility and agility they need to support a dynamic environment, they’ve begun to create a culture of continuous delivery (CD). This allows for continuous cross-channel development, may allow deployment of features in hours rather than months, and lends support for performing system upgrades with zero downtime and without disturbing the customer experience.

CentOS 7-1810 "Gnome" overview | The community enterprise operating system

How to prepare for digital transformation with Red Hat Virtualization and Veeam

Red Hat has a history of helping organizations reduce the cost of IT, from infrastructure to applications, while also helping to lay the foundation for open source digital transformation. More recently, Red Hat has sought to help organizations reduce the cost of virtualization, aiming to make it easier to accelerate their digital transformation journey through innovative technologies such as Red Hat Ansible Automation or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat’s comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes Platform.

Red Hat schedules stockholder meeting to vote on $34B IBM deal

INVESTIGATION NOTICE: Kaskela Law LLC Announces Shareholder Investigation of Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat sets date for stockholders to vote on the merger with IBM

Arista Works With Red Hat and Tigera on Container Environments for Enterprises

Arista Networks is working with Red Hat and Tigera to help enterprises adopt containers in both private and public clouds. The three companies are demonstrating a preview of their upcoming offering this week at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 in Seattle. The integrated product will include Arista’s containerized Extensible Operating System (cEOS) and CloudVision software along with Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform and Tigera’s Secure Enterprise Edition.

Knative Meshes Kubernetes with Serverless Workloads

Google Cloud’s Knative initiative launched in July is expanding to include an updated version of Google’s first commercial Knative offering along with a batch of new distributions based on serverless computing framework. Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform for building and managing serverless workloads in which cloud infrastructure acts as a server for managing the allocation of computing and storage resources. It is being offered as an add-on to Kubernetes Engine used to orchestrate application containers.

Red Hat Steps Up with HPC Software Solutions at SC18

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Yan Fisher and Dan McGuan from Red Hat describe the company’s powerful software solutions for HPC and Ai workloads.

RedHat contributes etcd, a distributed key-value store project, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon

IRS Not Yet Ready to Move to Linux Due to Its Own Errors [Ed: Bogdan Popa, "Microsoft News Editor" (euphemism for Microsoft PR/propagandist), continues to shamelessly attack GNU/Linux. Remember this when Microsoft says it "loves Linux".]

OpenSSH, now a part of the Windows Server 2019

Windows Server 2019 to support OpenSSH natively [Ed: Platform with NSA back doors and remote controls to hold private SSH keys]

Microsoft Now Supports OpenSSH in Windows Server 2019 [Ed: This weakens OpenSSH as a whole, across platforms]

Microsoft Goes Open Source with Web Browsers [Ed: Swapnil Bhartiya got the story wrong, became akin to a propaganda tool for Microsoft. No, the browser remains proprietary, they just 'leverage' Google's code and they didn't do this out of choice; they had lost the market they abused.]

Phippy + Cloud Native Friends Make CNCF Their Home [Ed: Microsoft entryism]

For now, the experimental Linux (and Mac) port of ARMA 3 will not see any more updates

Sad news for those who purchased ARMA 3 due to the experimental Linux (and Mac) version, as Bohemia Interactive have announced a halt to the updates for it.

There's a brand new Steam Play Beta version out with FAudio, also a Steam Play whitelist update

The day I'm sure many have waited for has arrived, a new Steam Play beta has been officially released today which includes the important FAudio project. On top of that, even more titles have entered the Steam Play whitelist. Don't know what the heck Steam Play is? The "too long; didn't read" is that it enables you to play a lot of Windows games on Linux.

Valve Rolls Out New Steam Play Proton 3.16 Beta, 29 More Games Supported

A new beta relase of Proton 3.16 is now available, the Wine-based software that powers Valve's Steam Play for running many Windows games on Linux.

Volcanoids, a steampunk base-building survival game may come to Linux, developer testing

I know what you're going to say, something about yet another survival game! However, Volcanoids really does look like something you want to pay attention to. I forget who, but someone mentioned this game to me a while ago. The developer seemed interested, but I didn't see them say much about it—until now thanks to another tip. On Steam, a user posted in their forum asking about Linux support and the developer replied showing a screenshot of their progress on a Linux build. The skybox is missing, plus a few other issues but it's promising.

Desert Child is a thrilling racing adventure now available with Linux support

Developed by Oscar Brittain, Desert Child is a fantastic pixel art racing adventure that just released with Linux support.

Koruldia Heritage, the awesome looking pixel-painted adventure RPG is fully funded and heading to Linux

Fully funded on Kickstarter and heading to Linux, the pixel-painted adventure RPG Koruldia Heritage is looking awesome. Against their initial goal of £10K they've smoothly sailed over £15K and so with 6 days left they've done pretty well. It's still not a large amount of money for a team to make such an ambitious game, but it has been in development for a few years already. The funding here, is for some additional help towards the finishing line.

The super sweet survival and base-builder 'MewnBase' is now on Steam

For those who prefer their survival games to be single-player and a little sweeter, MewnBase is now on Steam. Currently, the developer says it's mostly a spare-time gig and so updates aren't always that frequent. It's in Early Access and so it's not finished, with an end-date projected to be by the end of 2019. Hopefully with the Steam release, it will give the developer some additional sales and exposure to progress forwards.

The absolutely excellent platformer Slime-san now has a level editor

Easily one of the best and trickiest platformers around, Slime-san is a seriously underappreciated gem. Another big update recently released, adding in a level editor. Honestly, I don't understand why it has so few reviews and followers. Slime-san is practically one of the best platformers around if you're looking for a true challenge that won't be over quickly.

The Universim continues advancing with a crime system, firefighters and more

Just recently, they put out a whopper of an update which makes the game perform a lot better thanks to a number of optimisations. It performs consistently well above 100FPS and feels noticeably smooth now. They even fixed the issue I noted with the saving system causing massive stuttering, so that's great. Still not sold on needing a building to save, it's a gimmick that doesn't appeal to me but it's a minor gripe. As for the bigger parts of the update, they've introduced a full crime system with police stations where your people can become officers, prisons with guards and so on. You will need to catch criminals quickly, as things can soon escalate from minor crimes to setting everything on fire—ouch! There's two ways to deal with your "nuggets" (your people), you can either fry them up using brutal methods like the electric chair or my preferred method with a Rehabilitation Centre for some therapy to help them deal with their issues.

The fun indie FPS 'Ballistic Overkill' adds a new amusing game mode called Juggernaut

While not as popular as it once was, Ballistic Overkill is still a reasonably good online shooter that I've spent a lot of time in. The latest update sounds quite amusing. If the normal team modes aren't for you, the Juggernaut mode just might be. In this mode, there's a special golden Chainsaw on each map waiting to be grabbed. Once picked up, that player turns into the Juggernaut, a special class with a lot of health. You gain points for the length of time you stay in this mode, however, every other player will know where you are and will try to take you down.

ReignMaker 2 combines Match-3 gameplay with Tower Defense and more genres spliced together

Frogdice, developer of ReignMaker, Stash, Dungeon of Elements and more is back with a new Kickstarter campaign for their genre bending game ReignMaker 2. With a low goal of £799, they've already crossed the finishing line and then some with over £3K pledged so it looks like it's good to go. They're planning Linux support like with their past games, so we should see it sometime around April next year.