Servers: Kubernetes, Oracle's Cloudwashing and Embrace of ARM

• Bloomberg Eschews Vendors For Direct Kubernetes Involvement

  Rather than use a managed Kubernetes service or employ an outsourced provider, Bloomberg has chosen to invest in deep Kubernetes expertise and keep the skills in-house. Like many enterprise organizations, Bloomberg originally went looking for an off-the-shelf approach before settling on the decision to get involved more deeply with the open source project directly. "We started looking at Kubernetes a little over two years ago," said Steven Bower, Data and Infrastructure Lead at Bloomberg. ... "It's a great execution environment for data science," says Bower. "The real Aha! moment for us was when we realized that not only does it have all these great base primitives like pods and replica sets, but you can also define your own primitives and custom controllers that use them."

• Oracle is changing how it reports cloud revenues, what's it hiding? [iophk: "probably Microsoft doing this too" (cloudwashing)]

   

  In short: Oracle no longer reports specific revenue for cloud PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, instead bundling them all into one reporting line which it calls 'cloud services and licence support'. This line pulled in 60% of total revenue for the quarter at $6.8 billion, up 8% year-on-year, for what it's worth.

• Announcing the general availability of Oracle Linux 7 for ARM

  Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 7 for the ARM architecture.

• Oracle Linux 7 Now Ready For ARM Servers

  While Red Hat officially launched RHEL7 for ARM servers last November, on Friday Oracle finally announced the general availability of their RHEL7-derived Oracle Linux 7 for ARM. Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 is available for ARM 64-bit (ARMv8 / AArch64), including with their new Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 based on Linux 4.14.

Graphics: XWayland, Ozone-GBM, Freedreno, X.Org, RadeonSI

• The Latest Batch Of XWayland / EGLStream Improvements Merged

  While the initial EGLStreams-based support for using the NVIDIA proprietary driver with XWayland was merged for the recent X.Org Server 1.20 release, the next xorg-server release will feature more improvements.

• Making Use Of Chrome's Ozone-GBM Intel Graphics Support On The Linux Desktop

  Intel open-source developer Joone Hur has provided a guide about using the Chrome OS graphics stack on Intel-based Linux desktop systems. In particular, using the Chrome OS graphics stack on the Linux desktop is primarily about using the Ozone-GBM back-end to Ozone that allows for direct interaction with Intel DRM/KMS support and evdev for input.

• Freedreno Reaches OpenGL ES 3.1 Support, Not Far From OpenGL 3.3

  The Freedreno Gallium3D driver now supports all extensions required by OpenGL ES 3.1 and is also quite close to supporting desktop OpenGL 3.3.

• X.Org Is Looking For A North American Host For XDC2019

  If software development isn't your forte but are looking to help out a leading open-source project while logistics and hospitality are where you excel, the X.Org Foundation is soliciting bids for the XDC2019 conference. The X.Org Foundation is looking for proposals where in North America that the annual X.Org Developers' Conference should be hosted in 2019. This year it's being hosted in Spain and with the usual rotation it means that in 2019 they will jump back over the pond.

• RadeonSI Compatibility Profile Is Close To OpenGL 4.4 Support

  It was just a few days ago that the OpenGL compatibility profile support in Mesa reached OpenGL 3.3 compliance for RadeonSI while now thanks to the latest batch of patches from one of the Valve Linux developers, it's soon going to hit OpenGL 4.4. Legendary open-source graphics driver contributor Timothy Arceri at Valve has posted 11 more patches for advancing RadeonSI's OpenGL compatibility profile support, the alternative context to the OpenGL core profile that allows mixing in deprecated OpenGL functionality. The GL compatibility profile mode is generally used by long-standing workstation software and also a small subset of Linux games.

Software, KDE and GNOME Leftovers

• Drawing Feynman Diagrams for Fun and Profit with JaxoDraw

  When first developed, theoretical physics was mostly done either with pen and paper or on a chalkboard. Not much thought was given as to how you could render these drawings within a document being written on a computer. JaxoDraw is meant to help fill in that gap in document layout and provide the ability to render these drawings correctly and give output you can use in your own documents. JaxoDraw is written in Java, so it should run under almost any operating system. Unfortunately, it isn't likely to be in the package repository for most distributions, so you'll need to download it from the project's website. But, because it's packaged as a jar file, it's relatively easy to run.

• Kodi v18 Leia - Alpha 2

  We have been relatively quiet for a while and several months have past since the first pre-release Alpha build. Today we present you the second official Alpha build in this pre-release trilogy. It is a continuation of the first one which was released beginning of March and contains our continous battle against the dark side that consist of bugs and usability problems.

• Kodi 18 Alpha 2 Released With Stability & Usability Improvements + New Wayland Code

  It's been a few months since the Kodi 18 Alpha while available today is the second alpha release of this major update to the open-source, cross-platform HTPC software. Kodi developers have been spending the past few months working on a range of stability and usability enhancements to this software formerly known as XBMC. Kodi 18's latest additions include live TV viewing improvements, Windows support improvements, continued Android integration enhancements, re-introducing Wayland protocol support, video player enhancements, and more.

• LibreOffice color selector as GTK widgets

  Here's what the native GTK widget mode for the color picker looks like at the moment under Wayland. A GtkMenuButton displaying a color preview of the currently selected color and a GtkPopover containing the color selection widgetry.

• TenFourFox FPR8 available

  TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 8 final is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). There are no changes from the beta except for outstanding security patches. As usual, it will go live Monday night, assuming no changes.

• Latte Dock, Beta 1 for v0.8 (v0.7.95)

  Hello everyone Latte Dock v0.7.95 which is the first beta of v0.8 is here. Latte v0.8 is a huge release and one of its main goals is to make the user feel with it very natural and comfortable. [...] Important for contributors: Beta1 will last 10 days, during these days translators will be able to report string improvements at bugs.kde.org. English isnt my native language, (proof reading / simpler expanations) might be necessary. When Beta2 is released around 3 to 5 July the string freeze will take place. Beta2 period will last 10 more days. So v0.8 is scheduled for 13 to 15 Jully. During all these days improvements and fixes can be landed through review process at kde phabricator.

• Musing About Communities Size And Activity

  If you remember my previous installment I raised a couple more questions which I pointed out as tougher to address and I'd keep on the side for a while. Well, I decided to look at something simpler in the meantime... which unexpectedly took more time than expected. First I thought I'd try to reproduce the cohesion graph from Paul's Akademy 2014 talk... but it looks like we have a reproducibility issue on that one. However hard I try I don't manage to reproduce it. What I get is very different, so either there's a bug in my tentative script or there was a bug in Paul's script or somehow the input data is different. So one more mysteries to explore, I'm at a loss about what's going on with that one so far.

• Second Post and First Weekly

  Because of the last one, I have been refactoring related code in the last month. The refactoring is generally completed, with KisDlgInternalColorSelector being the last dependency that haven’t been moved to enable KisPaletteView to be used everywhere needed.

• Ubuntu Developers Working On Improvements To GNOME Software Store

  Canonical/Ubuntu developers are working on improvements to the GNOME Software "app store" and recently held an in-person design sprint along with one upstream GNOME developer for coming up with improvements. The Ubuntu developers working on improvements to GNOME Software were joined by prolific GNOME contributor Richard Hughes for brainstorming improvements to better GNOME Software over the months to come.

• App Launching From GNOME Shell Now More Robust Under Memory Pressure & Faster

  Right now on systems with low amounts of available system memory, GNOME Shell can sometimes fail to launch applications due to an error over not being able to allocate memory in the fork process. With the latest rounds of Glib optimizations, this should no longer be the case.

• GNOME Web Browser is Adding a Reader Mode

  An experimental reader mode will ship in the next version of GNOME Web, aka Epiphany. The feature is already available to try in the latest development builds of the GTK Webkit-based web browser, released this week as part of the GNOME 3.29.3 milestone.

today's howtos

• Use LVM to Upgrade Fedora

• Breaking out of the Slack walled garden

• Linux control sequence tricks

• How to Easily Install Windows Games on Linux with Winepak

• Getting Started with Awk Command

• [Older]  Play Hearthstone On Linux With Lutris

• Weekend Reading: FOSS Projects

• Behind the GESSourceClip rate

• How to Monitor MySQL/MariaDB Databases using Netdata on CentOS 7

• How To Create a Sudo User on Debian

• 20 Recommended Free Ebook Download Sites for Ubuntu Users

• Nageru deployments

• Using the Connfa open source conference management software set: the CMS

• How to Check Disk Space on Linux from the Command Line