SUSE Condemns US Government and Promotes SUSE Enterprise Storage 7

• A time of reflection and standing together

  Like many of you, I have found the events occurring across the United States in response to the unconscionable killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, amongst many others, to be profoundly tragic and painful. Personally, they have shaken me to my core and have left me in deep reflection. While I will never understand the struggle of millions of people around the world that have been subject to systemic oppression, I stand united against hate and discrimination. As these events continue to unfold across the United States, they have rightly grabbed the world’s attention, and as leader of a global company, SUSE cannot remain silent – we will not remain silent. We will not accept racism, discrimination, or harassment in any form at any time. We stand against the innocent lives lost.

• Staying Out of Trouble with SUSE Enterprise Storage 7

  Do you ever wake up in the morning and think, “I wish there was somewhere that stored common troubleshooting problems for SUSE Enterprise Storage 7?”

Debian: SReview, Nageru, Clang build and More

• Wouter Verhelst: SReview 0.6

  I had planned to release a new version of SReview, my online video review and transcoding system that I wrote originally for FOSDEM but is being used for DebConf, too, after it was set up and running properly for FOSDEM 2020. However, things got a bit busy (both in my personal life and in the world at large), so it fell a bit by the wayside. I've now also been working on things a bit more, in preparation for an improved administrator's interface, and have started implementing a REST API to deal with talks etc through HTTP calls. This seems to be coming along nicely, thanks to OpenAPI and the Mojolicious plugin for parsing that. I can now design the API nicely, and autogenerate client side libraries to call them. While at it, because libmojolicious-plugin-openapi-perl isn't available in Debian 10 "buster", I moved the docker containers over from stable to testing. This revealed that both bs1770gain and inkscape changed their command line incompatibly, resulting in me having to work around those incompatibilities. The good news is that I managed to do so in a way that keeps running SReview on Debian 10 viable, provided one installs Mojolicious::Plugin::OpenAPI from CPAN rather than from a Debian package. Or installs a backport of that package, of course. Or, heck, uses the Docker containers in a kubernetes environment or some such -- I'd love to see someone use that in production.

• Nageru 2.0.0 released

  I've released version 2.0.0 of Nageru, my live video mixer. Obviously, version 2 of anything is a major milestone; in this case, it wasn't so much this specific release being so big, but the combined work that has gone on through the 1.x versions. (Also, if you go from 1.9.0 to 1.10.0, you can be pretty sure 2.0 is never coming!) There were several major features where I could probably have justified a 2.0 bump alone (e.g., the multichannel audio processing support, HTML5 graphics, slow motion through Futatabi, or the large reworking of the themes in 1.9.0), and now, it was time. Interestingly enough, despite growing by 40,000 lines or so since the 1.0.0 release four and a half years ago, the basic design has proved fairly robust; there are always things I would like to do different, but I'm fairly happy about how flexible and reliable things have turned out to be, even though my own use cases have shifted from simple conference video to complex sports productions.

• Debian rebuild with clang 10 + some patches

  Instead of patching clang itself, I used a different approach this time: patching Debian tools or implementing some workaround to mitigate an issue.

• Olivier Berger: Mixing NRELab’s Antidote and Eclipse Che on the same k8s cluster

  You may have heard of my search for Cloud solutions to run labs in an academic context, with a focus on free an open source solutions . You may read previous installments of this blog, or for a shorter, check the presentation I’ve recorded last week. I’ve become quite interested, in the latest month, in 2 projects: NRELab’s Antidote and Eclipse Che. Antidote is the software that powers NRELabs, a labs platform for learning network automation, which runs on top of Kubernetes (k8s). The interesting thing is that for each learner, there can be a dedicated k8s namespace with multiple virtual nodes running on a separate network. This can be used in the context of virtual classes/labs where our students will perform network labs in parallel on the same cluster.

• Olivier Berger: Experimenting on distant labs and labs on the Cloud

  I mention tools like Guacamole, MeshCentral, NRELab’s Antidote, Eclipse Che and Labtainers, as well as k8s and Docker, as interesting tools that may allow us to continue teaching in labs while allowing more flexibility, distant learning, and hopefully improved quality.

• Sylvain Beucler: Debian LTS and ELTS - May 2020

  Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor. In May, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 17.25h for LTS (out of 30 max; all done) and 9.25h for ELTS (out of 20 max; all done).

Let’s Discover Xubuntu 20.04 With Xfce 4.14; A Review

One of the most gorgeous flavors of Ubuntu is Xubuntu, which is shipped by default with the Xfce desktop. Xfce is a very practical desktop environment that not only “just works”, but is also beautiful in its own characteristic way. Xubuntu 20.04 is the first LTS release to ship with Xfce 4.14, making it also the first LTS to fully experience the power of GTK 3 after it was imported from GTK 2 taking around 4 years of continuous work. The amounts of updates between Xubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 is huge. We’ll take you today in a tour in Xubuntu 20.04, what are its features and what bugs or issues you may face if you consider switching to it.

IBM/Red Hat: Security Enhanced Linux, Open Data Hub and More

• SELinux Sees Nice Optimizations With Linux 5.8

  Security Enhanced Linux is seeing some nice optimizations with the in-development Linux 5.8 kernel. One of the optimizations in Linux 5.8 for SELinux is changing around some of their internal data structures for improving performance. One notable area is using a hash table for SELinux role transitions. For storing role transitions within a hash table, on Fedora where there are around 428 role transitions, the run-time was cut by about 50% when testing with Stress-NG benchmarks.

• [Red Hat] Edge investments, data navigators, and more industry trends

  As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

• Open Data Hub 0.6.1: Bug fix release to smooth out redesign regressions

  It is just a few short weeks since we released Open Data Hub (ODH) 0.6.0, bringing many changes to the underlying architecture and some new features. We found a few issues in this new version with the Kubeflow Operator and a few regressions that came in with the new JupyterHub updates. To make sure your experience with ODH 0.6 does not suffer because we wanted to release early, we offer a new (mostly) bugfix release: Open Data Hub 0.6.1.

• Open Sourcing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

  Recently, at Red Hat Summit Virtual Event, we announced Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, a new management solution designed to help organizations further extend and scale Red Hat OpenShift, the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. This new product is based on technology that originated with IBM, and that technology was not fully open source. In accordance with Red Hat policy, we are in the process of opening the source code for this new product. This same open source technology will then also be used by IBM for its CloudPak for Multicloud Management. At Red Hat, we believe using an open development model helps create more secure, stable and innovative technologies. And the commitment to that open source model is what we have based our business model on. Even after joining forces with IBM, this commitment remains unchanged. We have worked more than 25 years to invest in open projects and technologies.

• Role of APIs in an increasingly digital world

  COVID-19 has had a major impact on the world. It has affected the way we do business, where we work, how we provide services and how we communicate. We must find new ways to accomplish these pursuits, and application programming interfaces (APIs) can help. In a digital-driven world, applications have become fundamental to our economy and even our society – and these applications commonly need to communicate and integrate with a range of other applications and systems in order to perform their essential functions. APIs are one way to unlock the change.

• RHEL 7.8 and the final update to container tools

  Before we get started with the updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8, we recommend taking a serious look at moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. RHEL 7 is now in Maintenance Support and will no longer receive newer versions of container tools. Users who need access to the latest versions of Podman, Buildah and Skopeo, should move to RHEL 8 where the container-tools module is updated once a quarter. For those of you required to use containers on RHEL 7, this post will provide you a strategic and technical update. Red Hat understands that many customers cannot upgrade immediately. So, similar to our update of container tools in RHEL 7.7, we have released one final update to the container tools provided in RHEL 7.8.

• Advancing open source in telecom demands interoperability: How do we get there?

  More and more, open source technologies are gaining traction in the telecommunications industry as service providers reinvent their networks and push the boundaries with cloud-native networking functions and principles. But challenges remain, in particular around integration and interoperability of the many components that make up their infrastructures. This was a central theme at the Open Networking Summit Europe in Antwerp, Belgium, an event focused on the future of open source networking and aimed at enabling collaborative development and innovation across enterprises, service providers, and cloud providers. As digital service providers begin realizing value from open source platforms like OpenStack – including faster time to market, reduced costs, and improved reliability, scalability, and agility – they are in a better position to deliver the services their customers want: mobile 5G streaming video, audio, and more.

• Exploring and modeling COVID data

  “If your prediction proves to be very good, then it’s probably too good to be true,” says IBM developer advocate and data scientist Damiaan Zwietering. Damiaan loves his profession, which he has been practicing for almost 25 years, and by now he has come across most of the pitfalls. He likes to share his knowledge and experience with others, from developers to people in the business, and therefore, has a prominent role during the June 12, 2020, Code @ Think digital event. To register for this event, click here. In two sessions, he’ll introduce anyone who wants to know more about data science into the world of COVID-19 data and where the opportunities and pitfalls lie.