• Mesa 19.0 RADV Vulkan Driver Gets New Fixes To Help DXVK Gaming

  Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed some fresh patches in Mesa 19.0 (and also marked for back-porting to the stable branch) to help out the DXVK gaming experience for Windows games using Direct3D 11 that are re-mapped to run on top of the Vulkan graphics API.

• Mesa 18.2.7 Released With Several RADV Driver Fixes, Variety Of Other Updates

  For those not yet prepared to move over to the Mesa 18.3 series, Mesa 18.2.7 is out today with the latest batch of fixes.

Today we’re releasing Krita 4.1.7, another bug fix release in the Krita 4.1 series.

The most important fix is a weird one: it might help your wifi connection. The problem is that we started building a widget that would show you the news feed from krita.org. The widget isn’t active, and doesn’t make any kind of network connection… But Qt’s network manager class still checks your wifi settings all the time. See these bugs: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-46015 and https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40332.

Apart from that, we’ve worked around a bug in Qt 5.12 that would cause an instant crash when using a tablet. Our own builds do not use that version of Qt, so the Windows builds, macOS build and the Linux appimage are fine, but users of rolling Linux releases like Arch would suffer from this issue.

• New Galaxy S10 Plus Camera Details Hiding Inside Android

• Mainstream media still doesn’t understand Android

• OnePlus 5 and 5T get official Android Pie-based beta

• Blu Vivo Go budget phone launches with Android 9 Pie (Go edition)

• 3 tips for choosing Chrome or Android devices for work

• Snapdragon 855 Will Power Android Phones in 2019 With Blazing 5G And AI

• The Galaxy S10’s biggest Android rival in 2019 won’t look nearly as cool

• Google Maps for Android and iPhone gets Lime integration

• Gboard gets new Light and Dark gradient themes on Android devices

Welcome to another day of the Linux command-line toys advent calendar. If this is your first visit to the series, you might be asking yourself what a command-line toy even is. We’re figuring that out as we go, but generally, it could be a game, or any simple diversion that helps you have fun at the terminal.

Some of you will have seen various selections from our calendar before, but we hope there’s at least one new thing for everyone.

• Fuchsia SDK and 'device' now included in Android Open Source Project

• How To Wirelessly Connect Your Android Phone To Ubuntu

• OnePlus 5, 5T now receiving Android 9.0 Pie based OxygenOS Open Beta update

• Blu announces its $80 Android 9 Pie Go phone for the US

• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite’s Android Pie beta is now rolling out in China

• Hotfix update fixes issues with the latest Galaxy S9 Android Pie beta

• Cinemo to Showcase Next Generation Android Automotive Based Infotainment Systems at CES® 2019 in Las Vegas

• Google updates Family Link for Chromebooks w/ time limits, Android app restrictions

• Google Beefs Up Android Key Security for Mobile Apps

• Chrome for Android is getting a shortcut to close all tabs

• Get notifications for your patches

  We are trialing out a new feature that can send you a notification when the patches you send to the LKML are applied to linux-next or to the mainline git trees.

• A simple blank makes the difference

  OFX is the Open Financial eXchange protocol used by various financial institutions in a few countries. KMyMoney provides an OFX client implementation using the open source LibOFX library allowing users to import transactions directly from the bank’s server without using the detour through a web-browser and a downloaded file into the ledger of the application.

• Fractal December'18 Hackfest (part 1)

  The Tuesday 11th started the second Fractal Hackfest. I've organized this hackfest in Seville, the city where I studied computer science and here I've a lot of friends in the University so is a good place to do it here.

  The weather was important too for the hackfest selection, in December Seville is a good choice because the weather is not too cold, we're having sunny days.

  The first day was a good day, thinking about some relevant issues and planning what we want to do. We talked about the work needed for the interface split, about the E2EE support, new features and the need for a new release.

  We're having some problems with the internet connection, because the University has a restricted network policy and we ask for the guess internet connection the Monday, but we're still waiting.

• Unexpected fallout from /usr merge in Debian

  Back in 2011, Harald Hoyer and Kay Sievers came up with a proposal for Fedora to merge much of the operating system into /usr; former top-level directories, /bin, /lib, and /sbin, would then become symbolic links pointing into the corresponding subdirectories of /usr. Left out of the merge would be things like configuration files in /etc, data in /var, and user home directories. This change was aimed at features like atomic upgrades and easy snapshots. The switch to a merged /usr was successful for Fedora 17; many other distributions (Arch, OpenSUSE, Mageia, just to name a few) have followed suit. More recently, Debian has been working toward a merged /usr, but it ran into some surprising problems that are unique to the distribution.

  Debian and its derivatives are definitely late to the /usr merge party. Systems running Debian testing that were initially installed before June 2018 still have /bin, /sbin, and /lib as normal directories, not as symbolic links. The same applies to Ubuntu 18.10. But both Debian and Ubuntu want to make the switch to a merged /usr. Debian tried, but it hit something completely unexpected.

  The Debian /usr merge history started in 2016, when Marco d'Itri got the usrmerge package into Debian unstable. This package contains a Perl script that converts an existing system into the state with a merged /usr. Also, a change was made to the debootstrap program (which installs a Debian system into a chroot), so that it could create the needed symbolic links by itself before installing any packages. The end result is the same in both cases.

  [...]

  The Debian package sed also has /bin/sed, not /usr/bin/sed. In the bug report, the problem is treated like a one-off issue, to be solved by a rebuild. However, on the debian-devel mailing list, Ian Jackson quickly pointed out that the problem is, in fact, due to /usr merge on the build daemons. He suggested that the change should be reverted. Dirk Eddelbuettel seconded that suggestion, and noted that he expects "much more breakage to follow". Indeed, similar problems were triggered in sympow, pari, and monitoring-plugins. Other bugs of this nature can be found by searching the Debian bug tracking system for a special tag (but this search also finds other kinds of issues).

  [...]

  The discussion is still in progress, though; no consensus has been reached. A bug was filed against debootstrap by Jackson to revert the change to merge by default for the next release of Debian. Due to the disagreement of the debootstrap maintainer to the proposed change, Jackson reassigned the bug to the Debian Technical Committee, which is the ultimate authority for resolving otherwise unresolvable technical disputes within Debian. There is also a request from the Debian backports FTP master that the default should be the same in Debian stable backports and in Debian testing. Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, a member of the release team, also spoke in favor of reverting to non-merged /usr in new installations.

  It is impossible to predict now how the Technical Committee will rule. In the worst case for /usr-merge proponents, proper introduction of a merged /usr into Debian may be delayed by a few more years. But, if it votes for keeping the status quo, new end-user systems in the next stable release of Debian will have merged /usr, old but upgraded ones won't, and the build daemons will reliably build packages suitable for both cases, just like what's planned for Ubuntu 19.04. No flag day is needed in this scenario, so it would follow the best Debian traditions of not forcing transitions onto users.

• Compiz: Ubuntu Desktop's little known best friend

  The best part is that it takes no time at all to get up and running! I’ll show you how to transform Ubuntu into a desktop that is functionally similar to Mac.
   

• How to use TOAD The Open Source Android Deodexer

  Deodexing Android can be a time-consuming process which involves pulling /system files from your Android device, deodexing them using PC tools, and installing them back on your phone. Not to mention that whenever Google releases a new Android version, the process for deodexing ROMs alters – which means tools for deodexing need to play catchup. Many deodexing tools have become defunct due to lack of update from the developers.

  A new tool called TOAD (The Open Source Android Deodexer) has been released, which aims to not only be incredibly easy, its open-source nature allows the development community to keep it updated with the latest deodexing methods. TOAD utilizes batch files for processing odexed files, so new batch files can easily be added or modified by the development community.

• Linux group plans show and tell

  The Linux Users’ Group of Davis presents Open Source Computing “Show and Tell” event, an informal open night to talk about and demonstrate programs, computer projects or tricks and tips.

  Feel free to bring something to show or tell for 10 minutes, from a Raspberry Pi project to tools or utilities that you find handy. Everyone is welcome to join in the fun, whether you’re a hobbyist, coder, enthusiast or sysadmin.

• Windows 10 tip: Run Ubuntu Linux in an enhanced Hyper-V session [Ed: When Microsoft's Ad Bot (Ad Bought?) covers Ubuntu it's about putting it as a slave of Vista 10, complete with back doors]

• ​MS-Linux? Lindows? Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux? [Ed: It’s like CBS wants to just hire pro-Microsoft slants; propaganda and clickbait.]

• How Facebook Made a Universal Open Source Language for the Web

  THE CODE THAT runs the web is a melting pot of programming languages and technologies. JavaScript, the most popular language on the web, is the standard for writing code that runs in your browser. But the server side is much more diverse. Java (no relationship to JavaScript) remains popular, as do PHP, Python, and Ruby. Mobile app developers, meanwhile, have their own preferred languages, like Kotlin for writing Android apps or Apple's Swift for iOS.

• C Programming Tutorial Part 2 - Preprocessors

  In the first part of our ongoing C programming tutorial series, we briefly touched on the preprocessing stage. In this tutorial, we will discuss it in a little more detail so that you have a basic idea about it before learning other C programming aspects.

• Microsoft patches 'dangerous' zero-day already being exploited by [cracking] groups

  This vulnerability in kernel image ntoskrnl.exe was reported to Microsoft on 29 October by security vendor Kasperky Lab. Listed as CVE-2018-8611 and classified as 'important', it is a local privilege escalation bug. Kaspersky Lab researchers say it has already been exploited by [cracking] groups FruityArmor and SandCat.

• Security updates for Thursday

• Epic Games’ New Cross-Platform Services Will Be Given to Developers for Free

  Fortnite, one of the biggest battle royale games of this year, is known for its extended cross-platform capabilities. Developer Epic Games, who recently launched their own digital game store called Epic Games Store, has announced that they are working on cross-platform services that will launch for free in 2019.

• Game Engine Black Book: DOOM

  I had the pleasure of proof-reading an earlier version of the Doom book and it's a real treasure. It goes into great depth as to the designs, features and limitations of PC hardware of the era, from the 386 that Wolfenstein 3D targetted to the 486 for Doom, as well as the peripherals available such as sound cards. It covers NeXT computers in similar depth. These were very important because Id Software made the decision to move all their development onto NeXT machines instead of developing directly on PC. This decision had some profound implications on the design of Doom as well as the speed at which they were able to produce it. I knew very little about the NeXTs and I really enjoyed the story of their development.

  Detailed descriptions of those two types of personal computer set the scene at the start of the book, before Doom itself is described. The point of this book is to focus on the engine and it is explored sub-system by sub-system. It's fair to say that this is the most detailed description of Doom's engine that exists anywhere outside of its own source code. Despite being very familiar with Doom's engine, having worked on quite a few bits of it, I still learned plenty of new things. Fabien made special modifications to a private copy of Chocolate Doom in order to expose how various phases of the renderer worked. The whole book is full of full colour screenshots and illustrations.

• Some thoughts on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s Danger Zone, the new Battle Royale mode

  Now that the dust has settled and I’ve been able to put plenty of time into the new Danger Zone mode for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, I have some more thoughts.

  For those not clued up what the fuss is, it's a little like Fortnite, PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) and a few others like that. You (or you and some friends) and everyone else drop into the map from the air, then it's a mad race to be the last person standing. Unlike Fortnite there's no building involved, the game itself is quite streamlined overall so it's closer to PUBG than anything else.

• 15 Best Linux Games on Steam

  Before Valve ported their popular Steam gaming platform to Linux, gaming on the operating system seemed like a hopeless pursuit. Most Linux gaming came in the form of a handful of open source games or messy Wine configurations to get Windows games to work, albeit at a huge performance hit. Now, the picture is much different, thanks in large part to Steam.

  These games mark the best the platform currently has to offer natively for Linux. Keep an eye out, though, because that's all changing again with Steam's new Steam Play feature that allows you to play Windows games on Linux the same as you would a native game, changing the picture drastically again.

• Grapple Force Rena Hits Linux and Windows PCs

  GalaxyTrail's pedigree has seen them craft a modern-day classic side-scrolling platformer in Freedom Planet, and now they're back with Grapple Force Rena. This blend of traditional platformer and Bionic Commando takes the usual "young hero saves the world" plot and mixes things up a bit. Rena's a little delusional and as such, tries to recruit all of her friends to help her save the world. She doesn't believe that she can do it all by herself, and is dismayed to find that they don't have powers as she does.

• Flash Point: Fire Rescue, the tough strategy game about saving people has new levels and a tutorial

  The Training Update for Flash Point: Fire Rescue just released, with an aim to help people learn the ropes while also add in more levels to play.

• Hand of Fate 2 - A Cold Hearth DLC now available with a new companion

  Hand of Fate 2, the excellent mix of action-RPG combat with a board game has another DLC available named A Cold Hearth.

• Humble Store are doing a little sale with some Linux titles plus LEGO The Hobbit is free

  Humble Store have a WB Games Sale live right now which has a few nice Linux games going cheap, plus you can grab LEGO The Hobbit which works with Steam Play (ProtonDB has a bunch of "Platinum" rating entries for it) free for 48 hours. I gave it a brief run myself and sure enough, it works well.

• The GOG winter sale is officially here, with plenty of Linux games and a giveaway

  GOG have officially unwrapped a present in the form of a winter sale which comes with a free copy of Full Throttle Remastered for a limited time.

• The WWI FPS game 'Verdun' just got a big free expansion, new UI in testing

  News coming in from the Western Front, Blackmill Games and M2H have released a big free expansion to their First World War shooter Verdun. It's quite a big one too, they haven't been focused solely on their other FPS game Tannenberg which is nice to see!

• Putting information into a table from the table's filename

• Tricks for keeping a tidy Git commit history

• Podman and user namespaces: A marriage made in heaven

• How To Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack On RHEL 8

• How to View Hidden Files and Folders in Ubuntu File Manager

• How to Roll Your Own VPN with AWS CloudFormation – Part Two

• How to test a zabbix item key using zabbix_agentd in linux ?

• Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) Decisions Still Uncontroversial Unless One Asks the Patent Maximalists
• Latest Talk From IBM’s Manny Schecter Shows That IBM Hasn’t Changed and After the Red Hat Takeover It’ll Continue to Promote Software Patents
• The European Patent Troll Wants as Much Litigation as Possible
• António Campinos Turns His ‘Boss’ Into His Lapdog, Just Like Battistelli and Kongstad
• EPO Trust, Leadership and Commitment
• Links 12/12/2018: Mesa 18.3.1 Released, CNCF Takes Control of etcd
• Links 11/12/2018: Tails 3.11, New Firefox, FreeBSD 12.0

• MIUI 10 based on Android Pie gets ported to the OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T

• Android Pie adds Keystore features to make phone safer, more secure

• Blu made a budget smartphone that runs Android Pie Go Edition

• Pocophone F1 gets Android 9 Pie stable update ahead of official launch in the country

• We Broke Into A Bunch Of Android Phones With A 3D-Printed Head

• Cinemo to Showcase Next Generation Android Automotive Based Infotainment Systems at CES® 2019 in Las Vegas

• 5 best remote desktop apps for Android!

• Dodgy Android app steals £1,000 from user’s PayPal account in SECONDS

• Panasonic Toughbook FZ-T1, Toughbook FZ-L1 Rugged Android Devices Launched in India

• Get These Android-Powered TV Box Models At A Hefty Discount: Includes Xiaomi Mi Box S, Beelink GT1 And More

• I'm a diehard iPhone user who switched to Android for a week — here's what I loved and hated about the Google Pixel 3 XL

Following the GeForce RTX 2080 Linux gaming benchmarks last week with now having that non-Ti variant, I carried out some fresh GPU compute benchmarks of the higher-end NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards. Here's a look at the OpenCL performance between the competing vendors plus some fresh CUDA benchmarks as well as NVIDIA GPU Cloud TensorFlow Docker benchmarks.

This article provides a fresh look at the Linux GPU compute performance for NVIDIA and AMD. On the AMD side was the Linux 4.19 kernel paired with the ROCm 1.9.1 binary packages for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. ROCm continues happily running well on the mainline kernel with the latest releases, compared to previously relying upon the out-of-tree/DKMS kernel modules for compute support on the discrete Radeon GPUS. ROCm 2.0 is still supposed to be released before year's end so there will be some fresh benchmarks coming up with that OpenCL 2.0+ implementation when the time comes. The Radeon CPUs tested were the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 as well as tossing in the R9 Fury for some historical context.

It's that time of the year again. Everyone is in a festive mood and excited about all the new things they're going to get. It's only natural, since it's the season of the last KDE Applications release for this year!

With more than 140 issues resolved and dozens of feature improvements, KDE Applications 18.12 are now on its way to your operating system of choice. We've highlighted some changes you can look forward to.

Also: KDE Applications 18.12 Released With File Manager Improvements, Konsole Emoji

Nvidia announced a lower-cost 4GB version of its Linux-driven Jetson TX2 module with half the RAM and eMMC and has begun shipping its next-gen Jetson AGX Xavier.

Nvidia will soon have three variants of its hexa-core Arm Jetson TX2 module: the original Jetson TX2, the more embedded, industrial temperature Jetson TX2i , and now a new Jetson TX2 4GB model. The chip designer also announced availability of its next-gen, robotics focused Jetson AGX Xavier module (see farther below).

• Linux 4.19.9

• Linux 4.14.88

• Linux 4.9.145

• Linux 4.4.167

• Linux 3.18.129

• Vivaldi 2.2 adds tweakable toolbars and Netflix for Linux

  UPSTART WEB BROWSER Vivaldi has released version 2.2, with a number of new features which continue its aim to differentiate itself from other Chromium browsers.

  The privacy passionate progeny of Opera co-founder Jon Von Tetzchner boasts improved tab management, support for pop-out video windows, configurable toolbars and updates to acccessibility.

  [...]

  "Customizing a browser as per your needs is not only a thing for pros and geeks. The key is to create something that works for you," says Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner. "Features are what draw people to Vivaldi and details are what keep them there. That's why we are always striving to fit every use case and giving our users different ways to browse."

• QEMU 3.1 Released For Advancing The Linux Open-Source Virtualization Stack

  The QEMU emulator that is widely used by the open-source Linux virtualization stack is out with its version 3.1 feature release. This is the QEMU update that is adding multi-threaded Tiny Code Generator support, display improvements, adds the Cortex-A72 model and other ARM improvements, and various other enhancements.

• What are Linux man pages?

  Have you ever sought help on a technical issue, only to be told RTFM? What is that acronym? In a safe-for-work translation, it means Read The Freaking Manual. That's all fine and good when you working with something that has a downloadable PDF file containing all the necessary information you need. But what about a Linux command? There are no manuals to be had. Or are there?

• JFrog Empowers Millions of Open Source Go Developers, Announces Community's First Public Go Repository

  JFrog, the Universal DevOps technology leader known for enabling liquid software via continuous software update flows, is announcing the coming availability of JFrog GoCenter, the first-ever central repository for software modules developed in the popular Go programming language. GoCenter is a free, open source and public service that will be provided for the broad Go community in early 2019, and is being showcased at KubeCon Seattle.

• Open Sesame

  Although it’s free for users, people invest time in making the technology better or creating it in the first place.

  [...]

  When a project is open-source, it means that the software, hardware or data are open for users to use, access, change or distribute for free. An open-source project can also make it easier to bring a team together to develop a project, Davis says.

• Fuchsia SDK and ‘device’ now included in Android Open Source Project

  Fuchsia, Google’s future OS project, is getting more connected to Android. The search giant has added two Fuchsia items to its Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code.

  A new commit posted to the AOSP Gerrit — an online code collaboration and management tool — added two Fuchsia ‘repos’ to the primary ‘manifest’ of AOSP.

  In other words, developers added two Fuchsia files to the instructions that tell Google’s download tool ‘Repo’ what to include when a user downloads AOSP. Further, for those unfamiliar with AOSP, it’s a compilation of Android made available for anyone to use.

• Fuchsia SDK & Test Device Appear In Android Open Source Project

  Google has taken substantial new steps toward the release of its long-awaited new operating system Fuchsia, based on recently noticed changes to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) codebase. Although AOSP is most often connected to Android OS and development on that platform, Fuchsia OS has now appeared as both an SDK and test device in the repository. According to comments on the commits, the OS's repositories being included in the Android master manifest equates to an added 760MB. The Gerrit UI also shows changes to approximately 977 files in total with the addition of the Fuchsia software development kit (SDK) and a related test device. Interestingly, the test device SDK seems to be based on or at least tested with the configuration for 'Walleye' -- Google's codename for one of the Pixel 2 handsets.

• ‘This is not a big boys club’: FINOS seeks to open up open source

  Attend an event about open source development and collaboration in financial technology, and you will see developers and executives from Capital One, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and perhaps a handful of other financial institutions, along with open-source-focused vendors like Red Hat (now part of IBM).

• The Autoware Foundation - An Open Alliance for Autonomous Driving Technology

• What is Open Source & Why Should You Care?

  The term ‘open source’ is used with excitement throughout multiple industries, yet folks are still asking a lot of questions, chief among them: What is open source & why should I care? Well, for industrial and process manufacturing, open source is rapidly becoming a fundamental for the digitalization of these industries. Industrial automation users, system integrators, machine builders, and automation suppliers that understand how to embrace and leverage open source are dramatically improving their odds of being effective competitors in their respective industries.

• QLC Chain to open source WinQ server router, focuses on multi-sig smart contracts
  

  QLC Chain has released its bi-weekly report, which highlights development progress of the public blockchain and VPN routers, adjustment of QLC Chain’s development plan, and updates to WinQ 2.0. Recently, an incentive program was announced for VPN operators and active community members to test the platform.

• Instaclustr Releases Three Open Source Projects That Facilitate Cassandra-Kubernetes Integration and LDAP/Kerberos Authentication

• Instaclustr Announces Three Open Source Projects That Facilitate Cassandra-Kubernetes Integration and LDAP/Kerberos Authentication

  Instaclustr, the leading provider of completely managed solutions for scalable open source technologies, today announced the availability of three open source projects purpose-built to expand developers’ capabilities using Apache Cassandra and address pain points. These projects include an open source Cassandra operator for more seamlessly running and operating Cassandra within Kubernetes, and open source LDAP and Kerberos authenticator plug-ins for Cassandra.

• Instaclustr expands Apache Cassandra with new open-source software

  Instaclustr Pty Ltd., which sells hosted and managed versions of popular open-source software Apache Cassandra, Spark and Kafka, is giving back to the community with three projects of its own.

  The company says it’s open-sourcing three “purpose-built” projects aimed at addressing pain points and expanding the capabilities of the Apache Cassandra database. Apache Cassandra is a distributed database that’s used to manage large amounts of structured data while providing continuous availability with no single point of failure.

• Kubernetes open-source project matures as commercialization accelerates

  This week, the annual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 event taking place in Seattle will give the cloud computing industry a chance to take stock of how far Kubernetes has come.

  On the flip side, the show also will work through the issues that may be preventing this open-source container orchestration platform from achieving its full potential.

  Kubernetes has been a banner story in high tech throughout 2018, and the technology looks like it will continue its momentum toward ubiquitous adoption in coming years. The Kubernetes ecosystem has become amazingly vibrant, though that’s a double-edged sword.

• Kubernetes caretaker auditions for Hoarders; takes in another open source project

  At the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 meetup on Tuesday, the CNCF revealed it will adopt, shelter and nourish an itinerant jumble of letters known on the street as "etcd."

  Pronounced "et-cee-dee" among those who dare speak its name, etcd is a distributed key-value store. It hails from the Linux /etc/ directory, which lives in the root folder and stores configuration files and related subdirectories.

• Kubernetes and serverless are getting chummy in open source

  But the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — home to Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration platform — wants everyone to know it’s not partial to either containers or serverless, and there’s room for both, and others, in next-generation enterprise technology.

  “We love serverless in CNCF,” said Chris Aniszczyk (pictured), chief technology officer and chief operating officer of CNCF. “We just view it as another kind of programmatic model that eventually runs on some type of containerized stack.”

• Atomist Announces Delivery to Kubernetes With Its Open Source SDM, adds GitLab Support

  Atomist, the software delivery automation company, today announced the ability for developers to now deliver to Kubernetes using the open source Software Delivery Machine (SDM) in local mode. SDM local is completely open source and now supports delivery to Kubernetes, whether a single-node cluster on a laptop using minikube or a fully-managed Kubernetes service.

• Why Kubernetes Is Successful and Boring

  Google has had a common message throughout 2018 about Kubernetes, and the message is simple: Kubernetes is boring.

  At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2018 event here, Google engineer and conference co-chair Janet Kuo echoed comments made by her peer Aparna Sinha, group product manager at Google, at the Kubecon and CloudNativecon Europe 2018 keynotes in May, which is simply that Kubernetes is boring, and boring is good.

  Kuo said in the early days of Kubernetes the focus was on building fast and adding new features. By 2015, a focus was added to make it easier for users and administrators to build, deploy and use Kubernetes. At this point in the maturity cycle of Kubernetes, Kuo commented that adoption has moved from the early stage of adopters to more mainstream deployments.

  "Kubernetes is now getting so solid and so mature and so great, that it is very, very boring," Kuo said during her keynote. "Boring is good; it means that lots of companies are already using it, and it just works."

  Kuo added that being boring means organizations can just focus on delivering business value, rather than spending time on making Kubernetes usable.

• Kubernetes Federation Evolution

  Deploying applications to a kubernetes cluster is well defined and can in some cases be as simple as kubectl create -f app.yaml. The user’s story to deploy apps across multiple clusters has not been that simple. How should an app workload be distributed? Should the app resources be replicated into all clusters, or replicated into selected clusters or partitioned into clusters? How is the access to clusters managed? What happens if some of the resources, which user wants to distribute pre-exist in all or fewer clusters in some form.

  In SIG multicluster, our journey has revealed that there are multiple possible models to solve these problems and there probably is no single best fit all scenario solution. Federation however is the single biggest kubernetes open source sub project which has seen maximum interest and contribution from the community in this problem space. The project initially reused the k8s API to do away with any added usage complexity for an existing k8s user. This became non-viable because of problems best discussed in this community update.

• [Red Hat] Men: Step out of your bubble to champion gender diversity

  According to Catalyst Canada, men represent more than 95 per cent of the CEO positions in Canada’s 100 largest publicly traded companies. With such a big divide, those who are leaders must help define the role those with power and privilege play. Many men want to get more involved, but we must go about it the right way. We want to respect the successful work that has already been done, find the right fit for our skills and learn from our female leaders who have the deep knowledge of this issue. As Tanya van Biesen, executive director of Catalyst Canada, has said: “The path to gender equity is a journey. There is no silver bullet – only commitment and action.”

  As leaders, our self-worth is often measured by meeting hard targets and achieving financial goals. Stepping forward to become an advocate for gender diversity is uncharted territory for many of us. Yet, it is a business imperative with a body of evidence demonstrating a positive effect on the bottom line.

• IBM's $34 billion Red Hat acquisition came after deal talks with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, sources say

  When IBM announced its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat on October 28, the tech word was struck by the huge price tag, as well as its potential to revive IBM's struggling cloud business. But as it turns out, things could have gone a lot differently.

  Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all engaged in deal discussions with Red Hat and looked closely into an acquisition in the months and weeks before Red Hat struck a deal with IBM, according to sources familiar with the deal.

  As an open-source software company, Red Hat is strategic because of its popularity with developers. It's also is the largest commercial maker of the Linux operating system. IBM wanted the technology to enhance its hybrid-cloud project and to give its portfolio an edge.

  Red Hat indicated in a public filing on November 30 that three unnamed companies considered making bids in addition to IBM. CNBC reported in October that Google had looked into buying Red Hat. But Microsoft and Amazon's deal talks with Red Hat have not been previously reported.

• IBM goes hard in open source so enterprises can take it easy

  IBM’s investment in open source goes back years. Big Blue went all-in on Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration platform about two years ago, according to Chris Rosen (pictured), program director, offering management, IBM Container Service and IBM Container Registry. The company contributes to the open-source Cloud Native Computing Foundation upstream and then simplifies the technology for end users.

• Arista EOS containers integrated with Red Hat, Tigera products

  Arista has integrated the containerized version of its network operating system with Red Hat and Tigera software to support containers running on public, private and hybrid clouds.

  Arista released this week a technology preview of the integration of containerized Arista EOS with Tigera Calico, the open source control plane the company developed to distribute security policy rules across containers and virtual machines running on cloud environments. Arista plans to make the integration generally available in 2019 within the Tigera Secure Enterprise Edition product.

• Contrail, Red Hat treat multicloud-network headache with Kubernetes

  A number of computing customers lately are asking for a smarter network. This might mean programmability, transparency, multiple lanes for prioritized web traffic, etc. The question is, will software developers and administrators need to get smarter in order to use such networks? Don’t they have their hands full already refactoring applications and managing distributed cloud environments?

  Developers these days simply want to consume the network in the same way they consume compute and storage. They don’t want the job of configuring it — at least not if that entails plunging deep below the application layer.

  “The app is the thing that’s going to consume these things, and the app developer doesn’t necessarily want to worry about IP address and port numbers and firewall rules and things like that,” said Scott Sneddon (pictured, left), senior director and chief evangelist of cloud at Juniper Networks Inc.

• Top 10 Open Source Licenses in 2018: Trends and Predictions [Ed: WhiteSource with connections to Microsoft continues to smear the GPL and copyleft; why does this always turn out to be Microsoft-funded/connected? They continue trying to tell people what to do based on what's perceived to be happening, even when they intentionally lie about what's happening (in an effort to alter the outcome, a self-fulfilling prophecy strategy).]

• Microsoft is telling awesome open source stories [Ed: Mac Asay is still looking for a job at Microsoft and he endlessly helps the company spread its lies]

• Pimcore Closes $3.5 Million in Series A to Expand Open-Source Data and Experience Management Platform Into the U.S.

• Pimcore expands Open-Source Data and Experience Management Platform Operations in India

• Pimcore closes 1st round of funding to expand open-source data and experience management platform operations in India

• NPR Releases Open Source Podcast Analytics Tech [Ed: openwashing of surveillance methods (for advertisers)]

• How NPR Aims to Bring Transparency to Podcast Metrics

• Bing releases Clarity, an open-source UX analytics tool [Ed: openwashing by Microsoft of surveillance tools]

• Verizon joins O-RAN Alliance board

  After announcing earlier this year that the xRAN Forum and C-RAN Alliance were merging, the O-RAN Alliance announced new board members—including Verizon—and a collaboration with the Linux Foundation on open source software.

  Verizon’s participation in the O-RAN Alliance isn’t a surprise given its work on Open RAN initiatives and its earlier involvement in the xRAN Forum—it was a contributor to the xRAN fronthaul specification that was released in April. That specification defines open interfaces between the remote radio unit/head (RRU/RRH) and the baseband unit (BBU) to simplify interoperability between suppliers.

  [...]

  O-RAN also said it has started collaboration arrangements with The Linux Foundation to establish an open source software community for the creation of open source RAN software. Collaboration with The Linux Foundation will enable the creation of open source software supporting the O-RAN architecture and interfaces.

• O-RAN Alliance and Linux to create an open source software community

  The O-RAN Alliance announced that Reliance Jio, TIM, and Verizon have joined the O-RAN board.

  AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch says, “It’s encouraging to see the O-RAN Alliance off to such a strong start and gaining momentum as we welcome three new board members.

  “It’s important that the wireless industry continues to come together to drive forward O-RAN’s goals for open networking, software, and virtualisation in global wireless networks especially as 5G is closer than ever.”

• Hyperledger Onboards 12 New Members Including Alibaba Cloud, Deutsche Telekom and Citi

  Hyperledger has onboarded 12 new members, including such major firms as Alibaba Cloud, Citi, and Deutsche Telekom, according to an announcement published on Dec. 11.
  Launched in 2016, Hyperledger is an open source project created by the Linux Foundation and created to support the development of blockchain-based distributed ledgers.
  The new members were announced at the Hyperledger Global Forum in Basel, Switzerland. The latest general members that joined the initiative include Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of the e-commerce giant; financial services firm Citigroup, Deutsche Telekom, one of the largest telecoms providers in Europe; and European blockchain trading platform we.trade, among others.

• Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise

  Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise, 2nd edition, by Ibrahim Haddad outlines best practices for organizations to adopt and use open source code in products and services, as well as participate in open source communities in a legal and responsible way.

• Linux Foundation Brings the Year to a Close with 21 New Members Making the Commitment to Open Source

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the addition of 18 Silver members and 3 Associate members. Linux Foundation members help support development of shared technology resources, while accelerating their own innovation through open source leadership and participation in some of the world’s most successful open source projects including Hyperledger, Kubernetes, Linux, Node.js and ONAP. Linux Foundation member contributions help provide the infrastructure and resources that enable the world’s largest open collaboration communities.

  Since the start of 2018, on average a new organization has joined The Linux Foundation every day.

• Linux.org Redirected to NSFW Page Spewing Racial Epithets [Ed: Trying hard to make it seem like a "Linux" issue when in fact it is purely a DNS issue]

• Campaign Drops Coinminer on Linux Boxes Using Old Elasticsearch Vulnerabilities [Ed: Not about GNU/Linux. Just as holes in iTunes aren't being blamed on "Microsoft" or "Windows".]

  A malware campaign scanning the Internet for exploitable Elasticsearch instances running on Linux machines has been recently observed by Trend Micro and by ISC, in both cases dropping a variant of the XMRig cryptocurrency miner.

  "The attack was deployed by taking advantage of known vulnerabilities CVE-2015-1427, a vulnerability in its Groovy scripting engine that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands through a crafted script, and CVE-2014-3120, a vulnerability in the default configuration of Elasticsearch," said Trend Micro.

• Cybersecurity books recommended by top security researchers

• Intel Announces Faster Processor Patched for Meltdown and Spectre [Ed: But the company refuses to patch (remove) the back doors]

• Automatically finding new cybersecurity threats with Open Source Intelligence