Top Linux Server Vendors

This article offers a 2019 update on several of the world’s top Linux server vendors, a very important but often mysterious section of the IT world that many people know little or nothing about. This is because Linux and its various flavors, called “distros” (for distributions), are underlying operating systems that run applications on servers and PCs and aren’t adjusted or changed by users as a matter of routine. For public internet servers, Linux is dominant, powering about twice the number of hosts as Windows Server, which is trailed by many smaller players, including traditional mainframe OSes. The supercomputer field is completely dominated by Linux, with 100% of the TOP500 now running on various versions. Internet-based servers' market share can be measured with statistical surveys of publicly accessible servers, such as web servers, mail servers or DNS servers on the Internet: the operating systems powering such servers are found by inspecting raw response messages. This method gives insight only into market share of operating systems that are publicly accessible on the Internet. The Linux OS started out as being exclusive to regular x86 desktop PCs, but it has since found its way into everything from Android phones to Google Chromebooks to those powerful super-servers mentioned above. IT decision-makers in the market for Linux servers should know that the very best Linux distros are tailored to specific types of users. Ubuntu, for instance, is very easy to use, because it’s designed for newbies. On the other hand, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, openSUSE, CentOS and others designed for the data center require a lot more expertise. Also: Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst on the IBM Merger, SUSE and Ubuntu

Games: Deadly Days, Gaming Performance, Creating Evscaperoom

• Deadly Days, the strategic zombie group-survival rogue-lite keeps on improving

  I'm really starting to like what Deadly Days is turning into. It's an Early Access game about directing a group of survivors through a Zombie apocalypse and it's really taking shape now. I've tested this one on and off since sometime around March last year, back then it was nothing but a shell. An interesting idea but it didn't really go anywhere. Pixelsplit now seem to have firmly found their feet, with each update making parts of the game make more sense, become bigger and more interesting. It's now actually more of a survival game and not just a town exploration game with zombies.

• Gaming Performance Only Faintly Touched By MDS / Zombie Load Mitigations

  Yesterday I published some initial MDS/Zombieload mitigation impact benchmarks while coming out still later today is much more data looking at the CPU/system performance impact... But is the gaming performance impaired by this latest set of CPU side-channel vulnerabilities? With the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, the gaming performance fortunately wasn't impaired by those mitigations. In fact, it was pretty much dead flat. With my testing thus far of the MDS/Zombieload mitigations on Linux, there does appear to be a slight difference in the rather CPU-bound scenarios compared to Spectre/Meltdown, but still it should be negligible for gamers. Well, that is at least with the higher-end hardware tested thus far, over the weekend I'll be running some gaming tests on some low-end processors/GPUs.

• Creating Evscaperoom, part 1

  Over the last month (April-May 2019) I have taken part in the Mud Coder's Guild Game Jam "Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon". This year the theme for the jam was One Room. The result was Evscaperoom, an text-based multi-player "escape-room" written in Python using the Evennia MU* creation system. You can play it from that link in your browser or MU*-client of choice. If you are so inclined, you can also vote for it here in the jam (don't forget to check out the other entries while you're at it). This little series of (likely two) dev-blog entries will try to recount the planning and technical aspects of the Evscaperoom. This is also for myself - I'd better write stuff down now while it's still fresh in my mind!

Programming Leftovers (Mostly Python)

• Scott Shawcroft: History of CircuitPython

  Scott Shawcroft is a freelance software engineer working full time for Adafruit, an open source hardware company that manufactures electronics that are easy to assemble and program. Shawcroft leads development of CircuitPython, a Python interpreter for small devices. The presentation began with a demo of Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express, a two-inch-wide circular board with a microcontroller, ten RGB lights, a USB port, and other components. Shawcroft connected the board to his laptop with a USB cable and it appeared as a regular USB drive with a source file called code.py. He edited the source file on his laptop to dim the brightness of the board’s lights. When he saved the file, the board automatically reloaded the code and the lights dimmed. “So that's super quick,” said Shawcroft. “I just did the demo in three minutes.”

• The 2019 Python Language Summit

  The Python Language Summit is a small gathering of Python language implementers, both the core developers of CPython and alternative Pythons, held on the first day of PyCon. The summit features short presentations from Python developers and community members, followed by longer discussions. The 2019 summit is the first held since Guido van Rossum stepped down as Benevolent Dictator for Life, replaced by a five-member Steering Council.

• Polymorphism and Implicit Sharing

  Recently I have been researching into possibilities to make members of KoShape copy-on-write. At first glance, it seems enough to declare d-pointers as some subclass of QSharedDataPointer (see Qt’s implicit sharing) and then replace pointers with instances. However, there remain a number of problems to be solved, one of them being polymorphism.

• The magic of BASH string expansion

  Unfortunately AWK (GNU AWK 4.1.4) is confused by Unicode character codes in replacement commands, and so is sed (GNU sed 4.4):

• Amber Brown: Batteries Included, But They're Leaking

• The 2019 Python Language Summit

  The Python Language Summit is a small gathering of Python language implementers, both the core developers of CPython and alternative Pythons, held on the first day of PyCon. The summit features short presentations from Python developers and community members, followed by longer discussions. The 2019 summit is the first held since Guido van Rossum stepped down as Benevolent Dictator for Life, replaced by a five-member Steering Council.

• Python Program To Print Numbers From 1 to 10 Using While Loop