today's howtos

• How to Install Zimbra Collaboration Suite 8.8 on Ubuntu

• How to install and configure Varnish cache on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS

• How to set up PySpark for your Jupyter notebook

• Kiwi TCMS: Kiwi TCMS 6.2.1

• How to install and configure Varnish cache on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS

• Test sendmail

• Generate a sequence of numbers.

• A Trash-Bin for the Ubuntu Command Line

Latest Games for GNU/Linux

• Little Misfortune is a sweet looking adventure, should hopefully get Linux support

  From the same developer who made Fran Bow (which supports Linux), Little Misfortune is what they're calling an interactive story. With a focus on exploration and the characters, including sweet and dark elements with choices that have consequences. With that in mind, when I spoke to the developer in regards to a Linux build they said "We will try to have it, yes! :)". Not solid, but a very positive response especially since they've supported Linux before.

• Luna and the Moonling is a sweet puzzle game that's now available on Linux

  Luna and the Moonling from Greyborn Studios is a colourful puzzle game with an aim to put a new spin on block-pushing puzzle gameplay. Note: Key provided by the developer. For those who aren't aware, some of the people from Greyborn Studios previously worked on some pretty major titles like System Shock 2, Thief, Skylanders, Red Faction and quite a few more. "From the moment we released in early access last year we’ve had requests from Linux gamers to support the platform," said Michael Ryan, CTO & Technical Director of Greyborn Studios. "We’re big fans of the platform ourselves and were happy to oblige. We really hope Linux users enjoy the game, and welcome them to the Greyborn community," Ryan said.

• Odd Realm is a sandbox settlement builder inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld with Linux support

• Valve gave out more details about Artifact, including some public APIs and pre-order is up

  Artifact, the multi-lane card game from Valve is closing in on release and so Valve have given out a bunch of new details on what to expect. Firstly, it's now up for pre-order on Steam for £15.99/$20 and for that price you will get 10 card packs, 5 event tickets, and two complete starter decks. Considering how much such packs cost for real-life card games, that price is actually quite reasonable I think. Additional packs of cards will be $1.99, each pack has 12 random cards. You will also be able to buy and sell cards on the Steam Market.

• Zeon 25, a retro-inspired hardcore shoot 'em up is now in Early Access

  The Doom-inspired UI bar along the bottom looked quite amusing, haven't really seen many games do something like that in recent years. Looks like it could be worth a shot, the action looks intense enough to keep me interested for sure. While it's in Early Access, they're hoping to add a co-op mode along with new maps, new enemies, new levels and so on. The full release is currently scheduled for Q1 2019 although that may change depending on how much feedback they get during development.

• Neuroslicers is a narrative driven, online competitive cyberpunk RTS that will have Linux support

  Neuroslicers from developer Dream Harvest seems like a very interesting title. A narrative driven, online competitive cyberpunk RTS and it will be coming to Linux.

• Feral Interactive have put out the system requirements for Total War: WARHAMMER II, due on Linux this month

  Ready your swords and your axe as Total War: WARHAMMER II is heading to Linux this month and Feral Interactive have now put up the system requirements.

• Here's What You Need to Play Total War: WARHAMMER II on Linux and macOS

  UK based video games publisher Feral Interactive revealed today the official system requirements of the Total War: WARHAMMER II video game for Linux and Mac systems. In mid-June, Feral Interactive teased Linux and Mac gamers with the upcoming release of the Total War: WARHAMMER II port for their beloved platforms, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Total War: WARHAMMER video game released more than two years ago. The company said that the Linux and macOS port is coming in November. Well, November is here, and now Feral Interactive has revealed the official system requirements for playing the Total War: WARHAMMER II video game on Linux and macOS-powered computers, saying that the port will be available on these two platforms later this month.

• Warhammer: Vermintide 2 ‘Back to Ubersreik’ DLC Remasters Three Maps From The First Game

  Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Fatshark’s first person rat-murdering action game, will be getting another DLC next month. The Back to Ubersreik DLC takes players to the setting of the first Vermintide game, and will feature remasters of three maps seen in the original Vermintide.

• Dungeon crawler Ebony Spire: Heresy has a rather nice Anniversary Update that's worth a look

  After managing to sell a few thousand copies, the dungeon crawler Ebony Spire: Heresy has a great update now available. For those who missed the story, the developer Bearded Giant Games initially failed to really get anywhere with the game. They wrote a post on Gamasutra about it, where they said it had been a "a soul crushing experience". A pretty sobering reading, as game development has become so much harder in the past few years with stores being flooded with new games. Anyway, many months later they managed to hit over 6,000 sales and so this update is a thank you for keeping the developer going.

IBM/Red Hat: Moving, Supercomputing and How IBM and Red Hat Will Impact Your Cloud Strategy

• Moving house and moving applications are not the same. Or are they?

  As a Solution Architect I see my job as many things, from supporting customers in adopting Red Hat technology, educating organisations about using open source technologies and the benefits it brings, to thinking of ways to solve business challenges using technology and culture change. However, these are all generally in the space of “green field” app development. But what about all the systems keeping the business going today? The challenges businesses face in dealing with these “legacy” systems are complex, multi-faceted, involve many teams, and often businesses face knowledge gaps in how everything works together. In the public sector, where I work, this problem of legacy systems is arguably larger and more challenging, with the need for organisations to share information, outlined by things like Digital Service Standard. But, it’s worked that way for years, so why change it?

• Red Hat at Supercomputing 2018: Bringing open source innovation from high performance computing to the enterprise

  All supercomputers on the coveted Top500 list run on Linux, a scalable operating system that has matured over the years to run some of the most critical workloads and in many cases has displaced proprietary operating systems in the process. For the past two decades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has served as the foundation for building software stacks for many supercomputers. We are looking to continue this trend with the next generation of systems that seek to break the exascale threshold. SC18, a leading supercomputing conference, begins today. Red Hat hopes to hold conversations and share our insights on new supercomputers, including Summit and Sierra, nascent architectures, like Arm, and building more open computing environments that can further negate the need for proprietary and monolithic implementations. The updated Top500 list is an excellent example of how open technologies continue to proliferate in high performance computing (HPC) and highlights how the ongoing software optimization work performed on these systems can benefit their performance.

• New TOP500 List Lead by DOE Supercomputers

  The latest TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore. With the number one and number two systems on the planet, the “Rebel Alliance” vendors of IBM, Mellanox, and NVIDIA stand far and tall above the others.

• How IBM and Red Hat Will Impact Your Cloud Strategy

  Barring a heavy-handed approach to the recent acquisition, IBM and Red Hat can do some amazing things in the market. IBM is a long way from making physical machines. That part of the business went with Lenovo several years ago. So, what has been their focus ever since? Software and services. And, among those software pieces and services has been the cloud. Until today, you may have heard little about IBM’s cloud presence. Although I can assure you it’s there, it was really struggling to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure, and even GCP. Now, with predictions like those from Gartner stating that by 2020, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities and that the market in general could be worth $240 billion or more – this was as good a time as any to really take a dive into the cloud management and delivery ecosystem.

• Improved support information for RHEL on Azure: sosreport plugin updated [Ed: The author a "Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio" (Red Hat hiring them)]

AsciiDoc – text document format for writing

AsciiDoc is a lightweight markup language for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. It’s a plain text human readable/writable document format that dates back to 2002. AsciiDoc comes with a “converter program” that converts AsciiDoc documents to XHTML, DocBook or HTML. DocBook, in turn, can be converted to other formats such as PDF, TeX, Unix manpages and many more using the tool A2X which comes with AsciiDoc. Most of the Git documentation is written in AsciiDoc. AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.