• GTK+ 4.0 Likely Being Released In Spring Of 2019

  While the GTK+ 4.0 tool-kit was previously talked about for release by the end of 2018, that's now looking more like spring of 2019 when this next major version will be released.

  Happening the past week was the GUADEC 2018 GNOME developer conference and now the GTK+ team has put out their notes from the planning and discussions that happened pertaining to the next major version of the tool-kit.

  In case you missed the recent GTK news, a GTK+ 3.24 minor feature update release is being planned for this fall alongside GNOME 3.30. GTK+ 3.24 will serve as an interim release until GTK+ 4.0 is available and adopted.

• A report from the Guadec GTK+ BoF

  The GTK+ team had a full day planning session during the BoF days at Guadec, and we had a full room, including representatives from several downstreams, not just GNOME.

• Writing docs in a container

  In February, Matthias Clasen started a series of blog posts about Fedora Atomic Workstation (now Team Silverblue) and Flatpak. I gave it a try to see how the container would work with the documentation tools.

  The screenshot below shows the setup I used to submit this merge request. The buildah container is in the shell window on the right where git and Emacs operate in the /srv directory. At the same time on the Silverblue desktop, gitg and Yelp see the same files in the /var/srv directory.

• Welcome Window Integration in Pitivi – Part 3

  In my last post (link), I talked about Pitivi finally getting a Welcome window. In this window, the layout of the recent projects list was pretty basic – we were only showing the name of the projects.

• Virtual Kernel Mode-Setting Driver Being Added To Linux 4.19

  Linux 4.19 is shaping up to be a pretty exciting kernel release for what is expected to be the last version before Linux 5.0.

  Adding to the list of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) improvements in Linux 4.19, VKMS has been added to Linux 4.19. The VKMS driver is the virtual kernel mode-setting effort, most recently worked on as part of this year's Google Summer of Code.

  The virtual KMS driver is a basic KMS driver exposing a CRTC/encoder/connector/plane that can be used for headless machines to run an X.Org Server or even Wayland and serves for virtual display purposes without necessa

• Networking CAKE Is Ready For Tasting With Linux 4.19

  For those maintaining their own home-built Linux router, Linux 4.19 is going to be pretty exciting: CAKE Qdisc has been merged into net-next, making it a feature for this next kernel cycle.

• Latest Xen Hypervisor Arrives Late, but Greatly Improved

• AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Now Supports Direct Display Mode For VR HMDs

  The AMDVLK open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver has seen its latest weekly code drop that brings with it some of the extensions needed for supporting the Steam VR experience.

  The AMDVLK driver now supports VK_EXT_direct_mode_display and VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display extensions. These extensions are needed so a Vulkan application/compositor can take exclusive control of display(s), such as the use-case for virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs) with being controlled by the SteamVR compositor. The VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display extension is needed for acquiring control of a display that is associated with an X11 screen from the X.Org Server.

Teleconsole is a free open source and powerful command line tool for sharing your Linux terminal session with people you trust. Your friends or team members can connect to your Linux terminal session via a command-line over SSH or via a browser over HTTPS protocol.

The application was updated to version 3.4.0 a few days ago, receiving some important enhancements, like support for Yandex Music, and a settings page for each plugin. Only the YouTube plugin currently has its own service-dependent settings right now, which allow you to set the app to automatically mute and skip ads.

Google Play Music was also enhanced with favorites and seeking support, and the Spotify integration was fixed.

• Chromebook Users Getting App Shortcuts for Android Apps on Chrome OS

• The Honor 7S is a really cheap but utterly awful Android phone

• Loose lips at Huawei may have brought Android P out of its shell

• Fitbit admits smartphone data and battery drain issue for Android users

• CARROT Weather is finally available for Android

• The new Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Panorama UI is now available on Linux

  After waiting for a bit of extra time, Linux gamers can now enjoy the brand new Panorama UI update in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

  To activate it, you need to add "-panorama" as a launch option on Steam. Simply right right on the game in your Steam library, hit properties and then hit the set launch options button and paste it in there.

• Action racing game 'Road Redemption' updated with improved physics

  Annoyingly, they messed up the executable naming for the Linux & Mac versions. You can launch it directly from the installed folder, but not from Steam directly until they fix this. Sadly, that means the Steam Controller doesn't work as a gamepad, even when using SC Controller the buttons were all messed up so it's keyboard only until they fix it up.

• Fallout inspired ATOM RPG has another sizeable update

  ATOM RPG, the rough but very promising Fallout inspired game has another sizeable update that's live on Steam.

• Kalypso Media buy the rights to the Commandos IP, a new game is coming plus updates to older titles

  Kalypso Media now officially own the rights to the Commandos IP which could mean good things for Linux gamers.

  Kalypso Media have been pretty good to Linux gamers in recent years, with them publishing Linux titles like Sudden Strike 4, Railway Empire, Dungeons 3, Tropico 6 (coming soon) and plenty more.

• Valve have revamped the Upcoming Releases section on Steam

  Valve are continuing their Steam store updated, with the latest section to get a makeover being the Upcoming games section.

  Originally, it was a very basic list of all games to be released on Steam for whatever platform you had selected to view. Instead, it's now a "Popular Upcoming" list that takes into account pre-release interest in a game using wishlists and other data.

• Twin-stick shooter 'NeuroVoider' is now on GOG

  Flying Oak Games first title NeuroVoider is an action packed twin-stick shooter RPG and it's now available DRM free on GOG.

Since the KDE Advisory Board was created in 2016, we have been encouraging more and more organizations to join it, either as patrons or as non-profit partner organizations. With Ubuntu (via Canonical) and openSUSE (via SUSE) we already had two popular Linux distributions represented in the Advisory board. They are now joined by one of the biggest and oldest purely community-driven distributions: Debian.

KDE has a long-standing and friendly relationship with Debian, and we are happy to formalize it now. Having Debian on our Advisory Board will allow us to learn from them, share our experience with them, and deepen our collaboration even further.

• Shutting down the BGP Hijack Factory

  It started with a lengthy email to the NANOG mailing list on 25 June 2018: independent security researcher Ronald Guilmette detailed the suspicious routing activities of a company called Bitcanal, whom he referred to as a “Hijack Factory.” In his post, Ronald detailed some of the Portuguese company’s most recent BGP hijacks and asked the question: why Bitcanal’s transit providers continue to carry its BGP hijacked routes on to the global [I]nternet?

  This email kicked off a discussion that led to a concerted effort to kick this bad actor, who has hijacked with impunity for many years, off the [I]nternet.

• Malformed Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Leads to Discovery of Vulnerability in IDN Libraries

  The Punycode decoder is an implementation of the algorithm described in section 6.2 of RFC 3492. As it walks the input string, the Punycode decoder fills the output array with decoded code point values. The output array itself is typed to hold unsigned 32-bit integers while the Unicode code point space fits within 21 bits. This leaves a remainder of 11 unused bits that can result in the production of invalid Unicode code points if accidentally set. The vulnerability is enabled by the lack of a sanity check to ensure decoded code points are less than the Unicode code point maximum of 0x10FFFF. As such, for offending input, unchecked decoded values are copied directly to the output array and returned to the caller.

• GandCrab ransomware adds NSA tools for faster spreading

  "It no longer needs a C2 server (it can operate in airgapped environments, for example) and it now spreads via an SMB exploit -- including on XP and Windows Server 2003 (along with modern operating systems)," Beaumont wrote in a blog post. "As far as I'm aware, this is the first ransomware true worm which spreads to XP and 2003 -- you may remember much press coverage and speculation about WannaCry and XP, but the reality was the NSA SMB exploit (EternalBlue.exe) never worked against XP targets out of the box."

• Intel Discloses New Spectre Flaws, Pays Researchers $100K

  Intel disclosed a series of vulnerabilities on July 10, including new variants of the Spectre vulnerability the company has been dealing with since January.

  Two new Spectre variants were discovered by security researchers Vladimir Kiriansky and Carl Waldspurger, who detailed their findings in a publicly released research paper tilted, "Speculative Buffer Overflows: Attacks and Defenses."

  "We introduce Spectre1.1, a new Spectre-v1 variant that leverages speculative stores to create speculative buffer over-flows," the researchers wrote. "We also present Spectre 1.2 on CPUs that do not enforce read/write protections, speculative stores can overwrite read-only data and code pointers to breach sandboxes."

• FreeBSD find CPU (processor) temperature command

• LF - Feature Rich Terminal Manager for Linux

  In this guide, we will cover the installation and usage of LF file manager on Linux. LF which is an abbreviation of (List files) is console file manager written in Go.

  LF provides minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy on terminal. It gives you a quick way to switch directories and browse the file system.

• Scout_Realtime – Monitor Server and Process Metrics in Linux

• An introduction to Go arrays and slices

• Control your browser like a pro! Plasma browser integration

• A sysadmin's guide to SELinux: 42 answers to the big questions

  Security. Hardening. Compliance. Policy. The Four Horsemen of the SysAdmin Apocalypse. In addition to our daily tasks—monitoring, backup, implementation, tuning, updating, and so forth—we are also in charge of securing our systems. Even those systems where the third-party provider tells us to disable the enhanced security. It seems like a job for Mission Impossible's Ethan Hunt.

  Faced with this dilemma, some sysadmins decide to take the blue pill because they think they will never know the answer to the big question of life, the universe, and everything else. And, as we all know, that answer is 42.

• Top Indian carriers taking "open telco" approach to build future networks for new services: Red Hat

  Top Indian telecom service providers are taking “Open Telco” approach in building next-generation networks using networks functions virtualisation technology to bring flexibility to offer new services, and to prepare for 5G in coming years, according to the US-based open source solutions provider, Red Hat.

  Ben Panic, Director of Sales, Asia Pacific Region (Telecommunications) at Red Hat told ET that Indian telcos have already deployed open source technology-based solutions in the core functions of their mobile networks. “The target goal of NFV is to open, be multi-vendor, be flexible and agile,” he said.

• Celebrating Red Hat’s 25th anniversary: How partners play an important role [Ed: reposted from Red Hat's site]

  As Red Hat celebrates 25 years, I would be remiss not to mention the role Red Hat partners have played in our company’s story. Partners have been an important multiplier for Red Hat and building our customer success. They are important to our future.

  Early endeavours in the channel

  In 2006, I joined Red Hat to expand the partner ecosystem. I’d been working in the channel since Moses was around, or at least since 1981. Although we were mainly selling direct, there was growing confidence that we could make the transformation to support a robust partner ecosystem.

• Analysts Set Red Hat Inc (RHT) Target Price at $157.79

• Buy Red Hat, An Attractive Cloud Computing Play

• Fitbit Bug: Android app drinking down mobile data and battery life

• Google's Gboard keyboard now lets you communicate through Morse code on both Android and iOS

• Instantly lose all remaining self-respect with this $1000 Android blockchain phone

• Android P name accidentally revealed and it's nuts

• Google Maps on Android Auto now has a satellite view

• Snapchat not working for many Android users: Report

• Enable Site Isolation in Chrome for Android

There have always been integration challenges with open source software, whether in pulling together Linux distributions or in mating program subsystems developed by geographically distributed communities. However, today we're seeing those challenges writ large with the rise of large ecosystems of projects in areas such as networking and cloud-native computing.

Integration was one topic of my conversation with Heather Kirksey, the VP of Community and Ecosystem Development at the Linux Foundation, recorded for the Cloudy Chat podcast. We also talked about modularity and how developers can get involved with open source networking. For the past three years, Kirksey has directed the Linux Foundation's Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV), which is now part of the LF Networking Fund that's working to improve collaboration and efficiency across open source networking projects.

If you think Linux is only for servers and people who don't like watching YouTube videos or playing games, you're wrong! Linux is one of the most versatile operating systems in the world and is quickly developing into a beautiful environment where cool games can run natively.

For instance, Steam is now native to Linux! Not to mention, there are plenty of Linux-compatible games to try and most of them feature commercial quality. Sadly, MMORPGs are still a bit behind when it comes to Linux, but not for long! Still, there is a way around this as there are several cool games to try even when all you have is the dear old Linux. Below we'll list five of the most fun and entertaining MMORPGs that run natively on Linux.

• The Anti-35 U.S.C. § 101 Lobby Pushes Old News Into the Headlines in an Effort to Resurrect/Protect Software Patents
• Thomas Massie and Marcy Kaptur Are Promoting the Interests of Patent Trolls and Patent Lawyers While Calling That “Innovation”
• Links 12/7/2018: Mesa 18.1.4 RC, Curl 7.61.0

• Top 10 Reasons Why Desktop Linux Failed

  1) Linux isn't pre-installed - No matter how much we may debate it, having Windows pre-installed on PCs means that's what people are likely to end up using. In order for someone to move over to Linux on the desktop, there must be a clear reason to do so. There is the problem. The only time I've personally seen users make the switch over to Linux from Windows comes down to frustration with Windows or a desire to advance their skills into an IT field.

  My own Linux story, for example, was a mixture of the two examples above. First off, I was just done with Windows. I had already been dabbling with Linux at the time I completely switched, but I become disenfranchised with the Microsoft way of doing things. So for me, the switch to Linux was based out of frustration.

  Had I not experienced any frustrations with Windows, I might not have ever thought to jump ship over to an alternative. Even when I built my own PCs myself, the OS offered at computer stores was Windows only. This is a huge hurdle for Linux adoption on the desktop.

  2) Linux freedom vs convenience - It's been my experience that people expect a user experience that's consistent and convenience. How one defines this depends on the individual user. For some, it's a matter of familiarity or perceived dependability. For more advanced PC users, a consistent convenience may mean a preferred workflow or specific applications.

  The greater takeaway is that when people are aware of other operating systems, they will usually stick with that they've used the longest. This presents a problem when getting people to try Linux. When using a desktop platform for a long time, you develop habits and expectations that don't lend themselves well to change.

• How to be efficient and cost effective (or not)

  It's the mid-1990s, and this big corporation is working on a major development project to replace most of its critical systems, says a Unix admin pilot fish working there.

• [Podcast] PodCTL #41 – Dissecting Kubernetes Surveys

  In a world of open source projects, privately funded companies, one-off cloud services and a mix of public companies, it can often be difficult to determine hype from trends from real usage.

• PodCTL Podcast #38 – A Beginner’s Guide to Kubernetes

• Optimizing a Python application with C++ code

  I’ve been working lately in a command line application called Bard which is a music manager for your local music collection. Bard does an acoustic fingerprinting of your songs (using acoustid) and stores all song metadata in a sqlite database. With this, you can do queries and find song duplicates easily even if the songs are not correctly tagged. I’ll talk in another post more about Bard and its features, but here I wanted to talk about the algorithm to find song duplicates and how I optimized it to run around 8000 times faster.

  [...]

  An obvious improvement I didn’t do yet was replacing the map with a vector so I don’t have to convert it before each for_each call. Also, vectors allow to reserve space in advance, and since I know the final size the vector will have at the end of the whole algorithm, I changed to code to use reserve wisely.

  This commit gave the last increase of speed, to 7998x, 36680 songs/second and would fully process a music collection of 1000 songs in just 13 seconds..

• How A KDE Developer Used C++17 & Boost.Python For About A 8,000x Speed-Up

  Open-source developer Antonio Larrosa who contributes to KDE and openSUSE has been developing a command-line music manager called Bard. He's written an interesting post about how he sped up some of his operations by around eight-thousand times faster.

  In particular, Antonio was focused on speeding up the process of finding song/music duplicates in the user's local music collection. What started out as Python code was morphed into optimized C++ code. Little surprise, the C++ code once tuned was immensely faster than Python -- but the blog post is interesting for those curious about the impact of the various steps he took for tuning this implementation.

• GLib 2.58 Is Looking Good With Portability Improvements, Efficient Process Launching

  The GLib low-level GNOME library while being quite mature is seeing a significant update with its version 2.58 release due out this September for GNOME 3.30.

  Two of the biggest GLib 2.58 changes we have covered up to now on Phoronix has been the new generic reference counting API and more efficient app launching. The reference counting API has been in the works for 6+ years to help GLib's bindings/integration with languages utilizing automatic memory management / garbage collection. The more efficient process launching via the use of posix_nspawn() is also exciting for better performance, particularly on systems suffering from memory pressure.

• Taiwan Travel Blog - Day 2 & 3

  My Taiwan Travel blog continues! I was expecting the weather to go bad on July 10th, but the typhoon arrived late and the rain only started around 20:00. I'm pretty happy because that means I got to enjoy another beautiful day of hiking in Taroko National Park.

  I couldn't find time on the 10th to sit down and blog about my trip, so this blog will also include what I did on the 11th.

• Canonical Releases Minimal Ubuntu, Optimised for Multicloud

  Canonical, the company behind popular Linux system Ubuntu, has released Minimal Ubuntu, a pared-back, significantly faster iteration of its server operating system (OS).

• Nokia signs billion-euro network tech deal with China Mobile

   

  Nokia said over the one-year framework agreement it will deliver mobile radio access, fixed access, IP routing and optical transport systems as well as other services to the Chinese mobile operator.  

 

• wego – ASCII weather app for the terminal

  I spend an inordinate amount of time at the command line. I almost live on the command line because of its convenience. It’s probably because I love terminal apps.

  wego is another gem of a terminal application. It’s open source weather software written in the Go programming language and designed for the terminal. It displays the weather in a variety of visually attractive ways. It’s a lightweight way to keep an eye on the weather without requiring a web browser. The information is SSL-encrypted for transmission to the local computer.

  You may have been using the software without knowing it. wttr.in is a web frontend for wego that you can access using curl to provide weather information from a terminal. If you’ve already got curl on your system, there’s nothing to install. It’s got lots of options; you can find out about them from curl wttr.in/:help

• Cockpit 172

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 172.

• Samba 4.9 Is Working On Many Improvements, New Features

  Developers behind Samba, the open-source SMB/CIFS implementation for providing integration with the Windows Server Domain and Windows clients, is preparing for their next 4.9 release.

  In stepping towards their first preview release of Samba 4.9, their news file has been getting filled in over the past couple days to reflect all of the changes that have been staged in Samba Git since the Samba 4.9 branching at the beginning of the year.

• Using podman for containers

  Podman is one of the newer tool in the container world, it can help you to run OCI containers in pods. It uses Buildah to build containers, and runc or any other OCI compliant runtime. Podman is being actively developed.

  I have moved the two major bots we use for dgplug summer training (named batul and tenida) under podman and they are running well for the last few days.

• The Humble Store 'Square Enix Publisher Week' has some great Linux games on offer

  For those after some of the bigger Linux games, you should take a look at Humble Store's Square Enix Publisher Week.

• The updated release of 'Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive' that has Linux support is now on GOG

  As a reminder, the updated release from THQ Nordic doesn't just add Linux support. It also adds language support for French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and English to the main game. It also adds in the lost demo level, with more limited language support.

• The final step for huge-page swapping

  For many years, Linux system administrators have gone out of their way to avoid swapping. The advent of nonvolatile memory is changing the equation, though, and swapping is starting to look interesting again — if it can perform well enough. That is not the case in current kernels, but a longstanding project to allow the swapping of transparent huge pages promises to improve that situation considerably. That work is reaching its final stage and might just enter the mainline soon.

  The use of huge pages can improve the performance of the system significantly, so the kernel works hard to make them available. The transparent huge pages mechanism collects application data into huge pages behind the scenes, and the memory-management subsystem as a whole works hard to ensure that appropriately sized pages are available. When it comes time to swap out a process's pages, though, all of that work is discarded, and a huge page is split back into hundreds of normal pages to be written out. When swapping was slow and generally avoided, that didn't matter much, but it is a bigger problem if one wants to swap to a fast device and maintain performance.

• Revisiting the MAP_SHARED_VALIDATE hack

  One of the the most commonly repeated mistakes in system-call design is a failure to check for unknown flags wherever flags are accepted. If there is ever a point where callers can get away with setting unknown flags, then adding new flags becomes a hazardous act. In the case of mmap(), though, developers found a clever way around this problem. A recent discussion has briefly called that approach into question, though, and raised the issue of what constitutes a kernel regression. No changes are forthcoming as a result, but the discussion does provide an opportunity to look at both the specific hack and how the kernel community decides whether a change is a regression or not.

  Back in 2017, several developers were trying to figure out a way to safely allow direct user-space access to files stored on nonvolatile memory devices. The hardware allows this memory to be addressed directly by the processor, but any changes could go astray if the filesystem were to move blocks around at the same time. The solution that arose was a new mmap() flag called MAP_SYNC. When a file is mapped with this flag set (and the file is stored on a nonvolatile memory device), the kernel will take extra care to ensure that access to the mapping and filesystem-level changes will not conflict with each other. As far as applications are concerned, using this flag solves the problem.

• Take Our Survey on Open Source Programs

  Please take eight minutes to complete this survey. The results will be shared publicly on The New Stack, and The Linux Foundation’s GitHub page.

• Mesa 18.1.4 release candidate

  Mesa 18.1.4 is planned for release this Friday, July 13th, at or around 10 AM PDT.

• Mesa 18.1.4 Being Prepared With Intel Fixes & A Couple For Radeon

  Another routine Mesa 18.1. point release is being prepared while waiting for the August debut of the Mesa 18.2 feature update.

  Dylan Baker, the Mesa 18.1 release manager and his first stab at the task, has announced the Mesa 18.1.4 release candidate today. In its current form, Mesa 18.1.4 is comprised of just over two dozen patches.

• Pre-AMDGPU xf86-video-ati X.Org Driver Sees A Round Of Improvements

  It's rare in recent years to have anything to report on xf86-video-ati, the X.Org driver for the display/2D experience for pre-GCN Radeon graphics cards. But this week has been a large batch of fixes and improvements for those using this DDX driver with pre-HD7000 series hardware.

  Longtime Radeon Linux driver developer Michel Dänzer has landed a number of commits already this week of various fixes/cleanups, some of which were inspired by the xf86-video-amdgpu DDX driver that is used for current-generation hardware with the AMDGPU kernel driver (unless using xf86-video-modesetting...).

• Howto Configure PFSense Site-to-Site IPSec VPN Tunnel For Remote Access

• Find Out HP Network Printer Serial Number with Bash Shell On Linux/Unix

• Cooking with Linux (without a Net): Remote Linux System Administration Using Webmin and Virtualmin

• Linux: Log Suspicious Martian Packets / Un-routable Source Addresses

• Linux Use smartctl To Check Disk Behind Adaptec RAID Controllers

• Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)

• The confusing Bash configuration files

• Streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using VLC and RTSP

• How to Manage Your User Password from the Terminal in Linux

• How to create a custom Ubuntu ISO with Cubic

• How to install Pydio Cells on Ubuntu 18.04

• Red Hat OpenStack platform adopted by Fujitsu

  Red Hat recently announced that Fujitsu has adopted Red Hat OpenStack Platform as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) component of Fujitsu Cloud Service for OSS, its global hybrid cloud service offering.

  As a backbone for an open hybrid cloud, Fujitsu Cloud Service for OSS is designed to help enterprises more quickly develop cloud-native and traditional applications and services in an environment built from innovative, more reliable, and more secure open technologies.

  This announcement shows the continued, long-standing collaboration between Red Hat and Fujitsu to offer hybrid cloud solutions based on open source.

• Fujitsu Adopts Red Hat OpenStack Platform for Fujitsu Cloud Service for OSS

• Entando Announces OEM Agreement with Red Hat on Modern Applications

  Entando, a leader in open source Digital Experience Platforms, today announced that Red Hat has agreed to include access to a set of Entando’s open source low-code tools as part of Red Hat’s newly launched Red Hat Process Automation Manager. Entando has optimized the tools to run effectively on Red Hat Process Automation Manager. Together, these technologies offer customers expanded next-generation business process automation capabilities native to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and a user experience (UX) designed to help them create cloud-native applications faster.

• STT Connect builds webscale private cloud infrastructure on Red Hat

  To build its cloud on a flexible, supported open source platform, STT Connect partnered with Red Hat to deploy Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ansible Tower, and other enterprise Red Hat software.

  These solutions helped the company create an agile and efficient — yet secure — webscale cloud infrastructure. STT Connect became the first cloud company in Singapore to achieve the highest level Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) certification with an OpenStack private cloud.

• The Final Build of Scientific Linux 6.10 Legacy Branch Released

  Scientific Linux has announced that the 6.10 release will be the final build of their legacy branch based on Red Hat 6.10. It will only receive security updates and major bug fixes and will be supported until November 2020.

  Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) co-develop Scientific Linux with the aim of creating a stable operating system that is supplied with packages and applications that support scientific research. They also list using “the free exchange of ideas, designs, and implementations to prepare a computing platform for the next generation of scientific computing” as one of their goals.

• ISVs in APAC Showcase Increased Red Hat OpenShift Adoption Across Verticals

• Should You Buy Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) or Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. (MMC)?

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) P/E ratio is noted at 62.01

• Is this stock Risky for You?: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Analyst Buzz: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

• Red Hat: Ready For Multiple Expansion

• Fedora 29 Dropping GCC From Their Default Build Root Has Been Causing A Heated Debate

  One of the surprisingly controversial changes being implemented for Fedora 29 is dropping GCC and GCC-C++ from the default BuildRoot for assembling Fedora packages with Koji and Mock.

  Up to now it's always just been implied that GCC (including the GCC C++ compiler) is there by default with every build-root. But these days with more packages being written in languages like Go, Rust, Python, Node.js, and other modern languages, the proportion of C/C++ applications is decreasing. As such, the GCC C/C++ support is no longer being implied with the default build environments in Koji/Mock, which in turn should help package build times for non-C/C++ packages as they will no longer need to pull in the gcc/gcc-c++ packages and in turn a cleaner buildroot environment too.

• Open Source GraphQL Engine Launched

  An open source GraphQL Engine has been launched that can be used with applications based on Postgres without the need for backend GraphQL processing code.

  The new GraphQL as a service can be used by front-end developers to build scaleable GraphQL apps on Postgres.

  Hasura’s GraphQL Engine automates the implementation and linking of databases to the graph. The APIs can be used to choose tables from new or existing database for use with GraphQL and link those existing tables into a graph. The engine has built-in authorization and authentication with granular authentication and a dynamic access control system that integrates with existing authentication systems such as Auth0 or custom implementations. The engine is also lightweight, consuming only 50MB of RAM even while serving more than a thousand requests per second.

• Hasura Launches Open Source GraphQL Engine That Provides Instant GraphQL-as-a-Service on Any Existing Postgres Application

• R3 has commercially launched its open-source blockchain platform

  Blockchain consortium R3 has commercially rolled out its open-source blockchain platform, dubbed Corda Enterprise, which aims to enable more businesses to leverage blockchain technologies. This comes after R3 launched version 1.0 of the platform in October 2017.

• Algo Development 2.0 Looks to Open Source, Cloud & Big Data

  While the financial services industry was an early adopter of open source software going back to the Linux operating system in 1991 and the FIX Protocol in the late 1990s, financial firms may have restrictions on contributing code back to the wider open source community.

  “When it comes to trading algorithms there is a secret sauce embedded there that I don’t think people ever want to open source,” said Bill Harts, senior advisor to the Modern Markets Initiative, who moderated the panel. Harts, who has been an early adopter of algorithmic trading at Citi, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, said: “That’s how they make money. Where do you draw the line?” asked Harts.

• 5 open source principles that help DevOps teams excel

  While open source has more than a decade head start on DevOps, the two have steadily converged over time. As a CIO, you can support the use of some key open source cultural values to empower your organization’s DevOps team and ensure maximum success.  

• Open source hasn't made tech more open

  Democratic ideals have given way to governments and corporate giants.

• Event management with Indico

  There are many things to love about the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), but the event's web site has not often been considered one of them. This year, your editor took on the task of finding a new system to handle proposal submission, review, and scheduling, despite his own poor track record when it comes to creating attractive web sites. The search finally settled on a system called Indico; read on for some impressions of this interesting free event-management system.

  There are a number of free systems out there for handling the needs of conferences. Among the others that were considered are Symposion, which is used by linux.conf.au, and OSEM, the openSUSE event-management system. Both are capable systems, but neither seems to have been developed with the idea that others might want to pick it up and run it. In particular, every Symposion installation seems to require a fair amount of low-level customization. The installation documentation for both is, to put it charitably, a bit scant. Indico, instead, comes with a nice installation manual that makes the task something that is, if not actually easy, at least achievable without having to actually learn the entire code base first. 

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   Events in Indico have most of the features needed to track their life cycle. Each event has a home page with a reasonable degree of customization; pages of information can be attached to the home page. There is an elaborate mechanism for proposal submission and review. Events can be split into tracks and sessions, with a different coordinator for each session; the schedule for the whole thing can be managed in a reasonably straightforward way. For those who need it, Indico also offers a registration system, though LPC is not using it.