Molly de Blanc: (Some) Highlights from GUADEC

I positively adore my coworkers. I’ll spare you how great they are, and instead focus on some of the talks they’ll be giving. GKT Core Developer Emmanuele Bassi will be giving two talks: Being a GNOME Maintainer: Best Practices and Known Traps and Archaeology of Accessibility. Being a GNOME Maintainer will discuss what it means to be a GNOME maintainer, and Archaeology of Accessibility will be a technical deep dive into the accessibility work Emmanuele and others have been doing around accessibility. (Note: “Accessibility” refers to the ability of technology to accommodate the needs of users who have disabilities, visual impairments, etc.) Melissa Wu, who is organizing the Community Engagement Challenge, will give two sessions as well. In her first, Remember What It’s Like to Be New to GNOME, she’ll talk about her experience coming to the GNOME community only a few months ago, getting to know people, and making things happen. Melissa will also join me for A Year of Strategic Initiatives at GNOME, during which we’ll talk about a range of things that have happened at GNOME over the past year (and some future plans), with a focus on organizational sustainability and the initiatives that make us excited to work here. Executive Director Neil McGovern will lead the Annual General Meeting, to provide everyone with an overview of what we’ve been doing and what we will do, and answer your questions.

IBM/Red Hat: systemd, chatbots, remote work and why Java and Quarkus are important for your business

• systemd-oomd Looks Like It Will Come Together For systemd 247

  Systemd-oomd is the out-of-memory daemon developed by Facebook and systemd developers. They are aiming for this to be better Linux handling of out-of-memory / low memory situations. Facebook originally wrote their OOMD code for their servers and since then has continued to be refined and adapted so it works out equally as well on desktops and more. Systemd-oomd polls systemd for OOMD-enabled cgroups to monitor them and kill based on memory pressure or swap usage. The systemd-oomd behavior is controlled via a new oomd.conf configuration file. Cgroups will need to employ EnableOomdKill if they want to be killed when under pressure.

• 8th grader creates Watson-powered chatbot to help students plan for college during COVID-19

  When eighth-grader Harita Suresh found herself stuck at home due to the coronavirus, she decided to use her extra time to learn something new. After perusing edX.org, she settled on a course from IBM called AI chatbots without programming, which claimed that she would be able to build a fully functional chatbot with no prior knowledge about AI. Two weeks later, she’d used her newfound knowledge to create and launch a fully functioning chatbot — Rita — for her dad’s business, Analyze-Ed.

• 3 best practices for working on a distributed team

  I have mixed feelings about instant messaging platforms. Pulling quick conversations out of email and into Slack often does improve resolution times for small issues, but a successful rollout requires some setting of expectations. Fundamentally, I do not believe it is reasonable to expect prompt responses to IM messages during the workday. Giving employees time for focused, uninterrupted work is vital. These tools provide functionalities to customize alerts, including muting all notifications (with a configurable option that lets others force alerts through as needed), muting individual channels, setting up various keyword notifications, and a wide range of other options not covered here. However, these controls are meaningless if there is an organizational expectation of prompt responses. Too frequently, I see folks asking a question like "Is anyone working on the database?" and, after less than five minutes, following up with "Okay, sounds like nobody is working on it, I am going to make my changes." Not only does this assume everyone has the same working hours, which immediately breaks down when you have remote team members in different time zones, it also ignores the reality of work both in and out of the office. Packages get delivered, coffee needs to be prepared, meetings are attended, and, sometimes, real work is being done! Take an empathetic look at your co-workers' needs and build expectations that allow for async work.

• Why Java and Quarkus are important for your business

  Java has been the workhorse of enterprise software application development for the past 25 years. During this time, we have also seen some drastic changes to application infrastructure technologies - ones that are not always compatible with the Java framework. We have seen it all: from monolithic application servers, to API-driven programmable infrastructure, to just-in-time intelligent serverless infrastructures. We have gone from extensive setup and dynamic configuration for peak workloads, to expressing the ideal operational model as code for our applications. Now with serverless computing, developers can focus on providing the application code and letting an intelligent application infrastructure run and scale up and down for use, without even thinking about infrastructure concerns. Increasingly, modern application infrastructure tends to be immutable, meaning that servers are not able to be modified after they have been deployed. Immutable infrastructure can help simplify operations and lead to simpler, more predictable, and consistent deployment processes. When changes are required, the old configuration can be replaced with a new configuration to keep the environments consistent and easily reproducible across development, test and production. However, the traditional Java framework was designed for changeable application infrastructure that is no longer required in modern cloud environments.

NanoPi and Raspberry Pi

• Compact, $20 NanoPi Neo3 SBC runs Linux on RK3328

  FriendlyElec has launched a 48 x 48mm, $20-and-up “NanoPi Neo3” SBC that runs Linux on a quad -A53 Rockchip RK3328 with 1GB or 2GB DDR4 and provides USB 3.0, GbE, and -20 to 70℃ support. When FriendlyElec announced its NanoPi Neo4 SBC last October, there was a lot to be excited about, starting with one of the most affordable prices ($45 and up) and smallest footprints (60 x 45mm) available with a hexa-core Rockchip RK3399. To our mind, it was not a proper Neo, however, as it lacked the ultra-compact 40 x 40mm footprint of earlier, Allwinner-based Neo boards such as the Allwinner H3-based NanoPi Neo Air and Allwinner H5-based NanoPi Neo2 or 52 x 40mm NanoPi Neo Plus2.

• Metronome or Music Pc? Music Geek Tries the Raspberry Pi/Linux-Primarily based 'Organelle'

Troubleshoot Linux kernel panic with kdump crash tool

Kernel panic is a critical issue that manifests as a system freeze. If you're not familiar with what a kernel does, it is the core of an OS. Linux itself is a kernel, which enables developers to create numerous distributions. A serious enough error at the kernel can cause an event known as kernel panic. This is similar to Window's blue screen of death, but instead of seeing a blue screen, you simply see a log output on a black screen. Kernel panic can occur due to bad memory, driver crashes, malware or software bugs. To identify the cause of kernel panic, you can use the kdump service to collect crash dumps, perform a root cause analysis and troubleshoot the system. To get started, you should have two VMs that run CentOS. This tutorial uses CentOS 8 as the Linux distribution for both the Network File System (NFS) server and client. If you configure the client to send the crash dumps to an NFS share, you can centrally gather and analyze a crash dump without using the system that is affected by kernel panic. Below are the IP addresses of the NFS server and client. Your addresses may differ depending on your subnet configuration, but both addresses are necessary.