Now in 2018, Cumulus' model of enabling white box networking with a Linux based distribution has increasingly become the norm and along with that shift, Cumulus has become increasingly successful. Cumulus has raised a total of $129 million in funding, including a $43 million Series D round that was announced on Jan. 23.

In a video interview with EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet at the 2018 OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Rivers outlines how the company has evolved in recent years and where it is going next.

"We have help to change the world around with the concept of buying switching hardware and software separately," Rivers said.

Also: Open source networking startup Lumina Networks raises $10 million Series A round from Verizon Ventures

• QNAP Launches 16-Bay AMD Ryzen-Based TS-1677X NAS with 10 GbE

  QNAP will offer four models of the TS-1677X NAS with various CPUs and different amount of memory. The manufacturer did not disclose prices, but since we are talking about enterprise-grade NAS, they are not going to be low.

• Latest ReSpeaker mic array offers improved barge-in and full duplex operation

  Seeed has launched an upgraded, $69 “ReSpeaker Mic Array v2.0” for far-field voice control that works with any Linux, Mac, or Windows computer. It enables simultaneous playback and recording and offers improved barge-in voice recognition.

  [...]

  Seeed launched the ReSpeaker microphone array on Kickstarter in 2016, and followed up a year later with the $25 ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array for Raspberry Pi add-on board. Seeed’s new v.2.0 is an upgrade to the original ReSpeaker, but like the Raspberry Pi version, it’s not an SBC boardset, but is instead controlled via a separate attached computer.

• Microchip – New SOM simplifies industrial-grade Linux designs (SAMA5D27)

  The Microchip SAMA5D27 SOM removes the complexity of managing signal integrity, EMI and ESD for high-speed interfaces and power management in MPU-based industrial Linux designs.

One of the ongoing system administration controversies in Linux is that there is an ongoing effort to obsolete the old, cross-Unix standard network administration and diagnosis commands of ifconfig, netstat and the like and replace them with fresh new Linux specific things like ss and the ip suite. Old sysadmins are generally grumpy about this; they consider it yet another sign of Linux's 'not invented here' attitude that sees Linux breaking from well-established Unix norms to go its own way. Although I'm an old sysadmin myself, I don't have this reaction. Instead, I think that it might be both sensible and honest for Linux to go off in this direction. There are two reasons for this, one ostensible and one subtle.

The ostensible surface issue is that the current code for netstat, ifconfig, and so on operates in an inefficient way. Per various people, netstat et al operate by reading various files in /proc, and doing this is not the most efficient thing in the world (either on the kernel side or on netstat's side). You won't notice this on a small system, but apparently there are real impacts on large ones. Modern commands like ss and ip use Linux's netlink sockets, which are much more efficient. In theory netstat, ifconfig, and company could be rewritten to use netlink too; in practice this doesn't seem to have happened and there may be political issues involving different groups of developers with different opinions on which way to go.

• openSUSE Donates 10 More Raspberry Pis to GNU Health

  The openSUSE Project once again donated 10 Raspberry Pis to GNU Health Project, which were handed over to the project’s founder Luis Falcon at the openSUSE Conference today.

  Last year, the openSUSE Project donated 10 Raspberry Pis to the non-profit, non-government organizations (NGO) that delivers free open-source software for health practitioners, health institutions and governments worldwide.

• Uyuni: Forking Spacewalk with Salt and Containers

  Members of a new open source community project called Uyuni announced today at openSUSE Conference that a fork of the open-source systems management solution Spacewalk is on its way.

• OpenSUSE Leap 15 released (Linux with enterprise features)

  The latest version of OpenSUSE is out today, bringing a new installer, improvements for cloud usage, and support for the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

  OpenSUSE Leap 15 is also more closely aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), making it easy for users to migrate from the community-based operating system to the professional version that offers better stability and long-term support, among other things.

• How to Use Steam Link on Android

• Pioneer's new NEX in-dash receivers take CarPlay or Android Auto fully wireless

• How to install Android P beta on the Sony Xperia XZ2

• Android Go: Is Android's light version for cheap phones any good?

• Fuchsia Friday: How ad targeting might be a hidden cost of Fuchsia's structure

The latest openSUSE release Leap 15 is here with updated software, Wayland support and an easier upgrade procedure to the famed SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition.

• Moto Z and Moto Z Play finally receives Android Oreo in US

• Steam Link arrives on Android as expected but is barred from iOS by Apple

• Find My Device v2.2 adds IMEI numbers to simplify reporting of lost or stolen phones [APK Download]

• Android Developer

• Google's Android P to Enhance Enterprise Use of Mobile Devices

• Chrome Canary's horizontal tab switcher now works just like Android P's app switcher

• Google search data shows weight loss searches have increased over time while those on obesity have decreased

• Android Circuit: New Galaxy Note 9 Features Confirmed, OnePlus 6 Review, Radical Pixel 3 Design Leak

The donation was made by an anonymous person, though the money will be received by the GNOME Foundation over the next couple of years. Honored by this gesture, the team pledges to use the money to hire more developers and streamline their operations to improve the GNOME desktop environment.

"We are honored by the trust given to us and will work hard to justify that trust. This particular donation will enable us to support the GNOME project more widely, and tackle key challenges that the free software community faces," said Neil McGovern, Executive Director of GNOME Foundation.

Aaeon has launched an “UP AI Edge” family of products that builds on a new Apollo Lake based “UP Core Plus” SBC with stacking AI companion boards based on the Movidius Myriad 2 or Intel Cyclone 10GX plus add-ons including a quad-GbE board and a camera.

Aaeon Europe quickly met its modest $11K Kickstarter goal for the new UP AI Edge ecosystem, which builds on its UP board products and community. The centerpiece is a new UP Core Plus SBC, although the official, Ubuntu-equipped UP AI Edge development package uses the larger, more feature-rich UP Squared SBC.

Roughly fourteen full phases of the moon ago, I wrote an article on MX Tools, a unique and useful bunch of dedicated utilities packaged with the MX Linux distribution. This toolbox offered the ordinary (or new) MX Linux user a chance to perform some common configuration tasks with easy and elegance.

In general, MX-16 was a great player, and the recent MX-17 is even better - and at a first glance, so is the new version of MX Tools bundled with the system. Good stuff. So I set about testing, to see what has changed, and in what way this set of utilities has improved, if at all. But I'm positive. Let us commence.

[...]

MX Tools turned out to be a predictable gem, just as I'd expected. Well, I'm cheating, because I wrote this article after some rather thorough testing. But then, if you look across the wider spectrum of Linux home distributions, there aren't that many unique players with distinctive features. Quite often, it's the rehash of old and familiar with some extra color, polish and rebranding. MX Linux goes the extra mile (or kilometer, if you will) in making the newbie experience meaningfully different.

Future improvements could potentially include an interactive walkthrough - so users will be actively prompted and helped along in their tasks. Then of course, there's the matter of visual appearance, in the UI itself. But in general, MX Tools TNG is better than we had before. More elegant, more streamlined, better looking, and most importantly, more practical. This is a good and useful toolbox, and it makes a solid distro even more appealing. Well worth testing. So do it. And take care.

I have recently made a tabular summary of (probably) all Council members and Trustees in the history of Gentoo. I think that this table provides a very succinct way of expressing the changes within management of Gentoo. While it can’t express the complete history of Gentoo, it can serve as a useful tool of reference.

What questions can it answer? For example, it provides an easy way to see how many terms individuals have served, or how long Trustee terms were. You can clearly see who served both on the Council and on the Board and when those two bodies had common members. Most notably, it collects a fair amount of hard-to-find data in a single table.

We've had great success with the United States Senate voting in support of net neutrality! Congratulations and thank you to everyone in the US for contacting your congresspeople, and all of you who helped spread the word.

However, it's not over yet. Here are more actions you can take if you're in the United States.

Now that the (CRA) has passed the Senate, it moves to the House of Representatives. Just as we asked you to call your senators, now it's time to call your House representatives. Find their contact info here and use the script below to ask them to support the reinstatement of net neutrality protections.

The timing hasn't been set for future votes and hearings yet, but that's no reason to wait: make sure your representatives know how you feel.

Also: GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 18 new GNU releases!

• 10 Reasons Why Desktop Linux Isn’t Mainstream – For The Record

  10 Reasons Why Desktop Linux Isn’t Mainstream. Yeah, the title is totally link-bait. However, it’s worth noting that I actually deliver what the title describes and then some. Linux is awesome, but sadly, most people haven’t heard of it. Here’s why.

• Linux Works For You

  Linux allows YOUR computer to work for you, not against you. Wearing this shirt/hoodie demonstrates to all who see it that you are not a slave to your PC. You are in control and Linux is the reason for this.

• Robin "Roblimo" Miller

  The Linux Journal mourns the passing of Robin Miller, a longtime presence in our community.

 

• Pidgin / Libpurple SkypeWeb Plugin Sees New Stable Release

  SkypeWeb is a plugin that allows using Skype in Pidgin / libpurple chat clients. The plugin can be used to send instant messages and participate in group chats, but it does not yet support voice / video calling.

• Feral's GameMode May Soon Have Soft Real-Time Capabilities

  Feral Interactive's Linux system tuning daemon, GameMode since being introduced earlier this year has primarily offered the ability to easily change the CPU scaling governor when gaming but not much more. Though a new feature is now in the works for GameMode.

• Mini DebConf Hamburg

  Last week I attended the MiniDebConfHamburg. I worked on new releases of dracut and rinse. Dracut is an initramfs-tools replacement which now supports early microcode loading. Rinse is a tool similar to debootstrap for rpm distributions, which now can create Fedora 28 environments aka chroots.

• Android and Automotive Grade Linux battle, as car becomes a data center

  Volvo’s decision to pick Intel’s Atom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) to run in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) for its new XC40 SUV highlights the intensifying competition among chipmakers in this fast growing sphere. The decision to base the system on Android also illuminates the evolving operating system scene for cars, with Linux the primary alternative in its AGL (Automotive Grade Linux) variant. However, given the complementary strengths of Android and Linux, it looks more likely that both will be deployed by many automobile makers in hybrid packages, so that they can take advantage of Android’s huge app ecosystem, encouraging plenty of third party enhancements, as well as harnessing the independence and enterprise scale of Linux. As cars become mini-data centers or edge compute…

• Vending machine boardset works with UP or UP Squared boards

  Aaeon’s “AIOT-MSSP01” is a vending machine boardset powered by a PIC32 MCU that’s optimized to work with the UP or UP Squared SBCs. It offers vending-friendly I/O like MDB, EXE, and DEX, as well as motor controllers and 6x USB ports.

  The AIOT-MSSP01 is an industrial-grade vending machine controller (VMC) solution designed to run 24/7 “without a glitch,” says Aaeon. The boardset is optimized for use with the UP or UP Squared SBCs, but works with standard PCs and “most computer boards on the market.” There’s no mention of OS support for the connected computer, but the UP SBCs support Linux, Android, and Windows.

• Boxes + Flatpak

  It might seem at first sight that Boxes is a simple application, and that is partially true if you ignore the deep stack under the hood responsible for making virtualization simple™. The various modules (some of them gigantic such as qemu, libvirt, freerdp…) need to be setup in perfect harmony for us to boot a whole operating system with its essential functionalities.

• OpenSUSE 15 Leap Released, Facebook and Google Already Face GDPR Complaints, GNOME 3.29.2 and More

• Promo Sprint Report: What We Did and How You Can Help Us

  February was a big month for the Promo team - we held a long-awaited sprint in Barcelona, Spain from the 16th to 18th. The aim of the sprint was to look at information we had collected over the prior years, interpret what it meant, and use it to discuss and plan for the future. The activities we came up with should help us accomplish our ultimate goal: increasing KDE's visibility and user base.

  Nine members of the team made it to Barcelona: Aleix Pol, Ivana Isadora Devčić, Jure Repinc, Kenny, Łukasz Sawicki, Lydia Pintscher, Neofytos Kolokotronis, Paul Brown, and Rubén Gómez. We met at Espai 30, an old factory converted into a social center for the neighborhood. Coincidentally, that is one of the places where the Guifi.net project started -- rather fitting for a meeting that comprised Free Software and communication.

  [...]

  That last thing is important because the Promo team must discover what technologies people use, how they use them, and what they like and dislike about them to be able to market KDE products. We decided to take a step back and work on a market research project that will provide us with solid information on which to base our actions.

• LXQt 0.13 Arrives with Minor Improvements

  LXQt 0.13 is available to download. It's the latest version of the LXQt desktop, which aims to provide an elegant, resource friendly 'next-gen' LXDE.

• [Slackware] May update for Plasma5

  On with the show.

  After recompiling LibreOffice and VLC to compensate for the recent poppler update in Slackware-current, my next target was – naturally – my Plasma5 package set. The KDE-5_18.05 release of ‘ktown‘ for Slackware-current offers the latest KDE Frameworks (5.46.0), Plasma (5.12.5) and Applications (18.04.1) on top of Qt5 5.9.5 (I decided to wait with an update to Qt5 5.11.0).
  You can and should check out the README file for more details and for installation/upgrade instructions.

• Best Free Linux e-book Tools – Updated (2018)

  An electronic book (commonly abbreviated e-book) is a text and image-based publication which can be read on a computer or other digital devices such as an e-book reader.

  The rise of multimedia digital downloads in recent years has been truly extraordinary. The impact has been so great in respect of digital music downloads. Digital music accounted for half of the all the revenue generated by the music industry in 2016 and amounted to a total of 7.8 billion U.S. dollars that year. Over the years, many music labels stopped releasing singles on a physical format. We do not foresee that major book publishing companies will abandon paperbacks. However, the expansion of digital downloads equally applies to books. The biggest booksellers have reported that they sell more digital books than paperbacks.

• Zammad – An Open Source Help Desk and Support Ticket System

  Zammad is a free open source, fully featured web based ticketing system for helpdesk or customer support. It ships in with a multitude of features for handling customer communication through various channels such as social networks (Facebook and Twitter), live chat, e-mails as well as telephone. It has an API for integrating your telephone system into in and outgoing calls.

• BTFS – A Bittorrent Filesystem Based On FUSE

  The torrents have been around for a long time to share and download data from the Internet. There are plethora of GUI and CLI torrent clients available on the market. Sometimes, you just can not sit and wait for your download to complete. You might want to watch the content immediately. This is where BTFS, the bittorent filesystem, comes in handy. Using BTFS, you can mount the torrent file or magnet link as a directory and then use it as any read-only directory in your file tree. The contents of the files will be downloaded on-demand as they are read by applications. Since BTFS runs on top of FUSE, it does not require intervention into the Linux Kernel.

• Living in a Docker world

  Once upon a time, I worked at a startup that was looking to “Dockerize” its backend infrastructure. This developed into a running joke where the programmers on the team would ask me if I knew what Docker was, and I would say:

  “Yes, it’s like a boat.”

  This would frustrate the programmers, which was my intention. They would howl about how wrong I was, and they could never quite calm down enough to clarify how Docker wasn’t like a boat.

• Systemd Introduces "Portable Services" Functionality, Similar To Containers

  The past several months Lennart Poettering has been working on a "portable services" concept and that big ticket new feature has now landed in Systemd. Portable services are akin to containers but different.

  Portable Services is a big addition to systemd at around six thousand new lines of code for this init system and also brings the new portablectl utility.

• Red Hat powers Tata Communications’ IZO private cloud platform

• What Does The Red Hat And IBM Cloud Private And Deep Learning Combination Bring To Enterprise IT?

• PHP version 7.1.18 and 7.2.6

• Getting started with the Python debugger

• Fedora 28 : Video about development and fix packages.

• Speak at Open Source Summit Europe – Submit by July 1

  Open Source Summit Europe is the leading technical conference for professional open source. Join developers, sysadmins, DevOps professionals, architects and community members, to collaborate and learn about the latest open source technologies, and to gain a competitive advantage by using innovative open solutions.

• MariaDB launches Oracle compatible enterprise open source database

  Enterprise computing has often been reliant on proprietary database architecture, but this can be both complex and costly, putting up a barrier to innovation.

  Now open source database specialist MariaDB is launching its latest enterprise offering with Oracle compatibility. This allows existing Oracle Database users to reuse existing code and established skill sets when migrating applications or deploying new ones.

  MariaDB TX 3.0 introduces built-in, system-versioned tables, enabling developers to easily build temporal features into applications. This eliminates the need to manually create columns, tables and triggers in order to maintain row history, freeing DBAs to simply create new tables with system versioning or alter existing tables to add it, streamlining the process significantly. Developers can query a table with standard SQL to see what data looked like at a previous point in time, such as looking at a customer's profile history to see how preferences have changed over time.

• MariaDB TX 3.0 Delivers First Enterprise Open Source Database to Beat Oracle, Microsoft and IBM

  MariaDB® Corporation today announced the release of MariaDB TX 3.0, the first enterprise open source database solution to deliver advanced features that, until now, required expensive, proprietary and complex databases.

• 5 Open-Source SQL IDEs for You to Learn and Explore

  If you’ve done a lot with SQL, you’ve probably used some form of SQL IDE to help you complete that work. Yes, it’s possible to do everything in SQL from the command line; but creating or even maintaining databases and tables that way is an exercise in masochism. There are some nice commercial IDEs such as dbArtisan and SQL Server’s Management Studio, but IDEs is one area where open-source can do just as well (or in some cases, even better).

• LibreOffice 6.1 Branches & Now Under Feature Freeze, LibreOffice 6.2 On Master

  LibreOffice has reached its hard feature freeze and branching period with the first beta release being imminent.

  As of yesterday is now the libreoffice-6-1 branch for continued with on this next open-source office suite while the Git master code is tracking what will later become LibreOffice 6.2.

• Securing Third-Party and Open Source Code Components: A Primer [Ed: Citing, as usual, firms that try to sell their proprietary software by badmouthing FOSS]

  The increasing popularity of open source code continues to be a boon for developers across the industry, allowing them to increase efficiency and streamline delivery. But there are security risks to be considered when leveraging open source and commercial code components, as each carries with it a significant risk of becoming the enemy within, creating a vulnerability in the program it helps build.

• FOSSID Awarded Grant for Artificial Intelligence in Open Source Auditing by Sweden's Government Agency for Innovation

• Intel AI Lab open-sources library for deep learning-driven NLP

  The Intel AI Lab has open-sourced a library for natural language processing to help researchers and developers give conversational agents like chatbots and virtual assistants the smarts necessary to function, such as name entity recognition, intent extraction, and semantic parsing to identify the action a person wants to take from their words.

  Just a few months old, the Intel AI Lab plans to open-source more libraries to help developers train and deploy artificial intelligence, publish research, and reproduce the latest innovative techniques from members of the AI research community in order to “push AI and deep learning into domains it’s not a part of yet.”

• 'monitor mode for iwm(4)'

• FSFE Newsletter - May 2018

  Following a more than a decade long tradition, the FSFE once again led its annual Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW) in Barcelona, Spain, as a meeting point for world-leading legal exper...

• 24 best free security tools

• Firefox 63 to Get Improved Tracking Protection That Blocks In-Browser Miners

  Mozilla developers are working on an improved Tracking Protection system for the Firefox browser that will land in version 63, scheduled for release in mid-October.

  Tracking Protection is a feature that blocks Firefox from loading scripts from abusive trackers. It was first launched with Firefox's Private Browsing mode a few years back, but since Firefox 57, released in November 2017, users can enable it for normal browsing sessions at any time.

• Firefox 63 To Block Cryptojackers With Advanced Tracking Protection

  It has been reported by Bleeping Computer, a security blog, that Firefox 63 will be launched with an improved tracking protection system to ward off the threats and security concerns posed by in-browser miners.

  With the surge in incidents involving mining malware trying to use your CPU power to perform some CPU-intensive calculations for their own benefit, many browsers have raised their guards by providing additional security features. (You can read more about blocking cryptocurrency mining in your browser in our earlier published article.)

• What’s the 411 on 404 messages: Internet error messages explained

  Nothing’s worse than a broken website. Well, maybe an asteroid strike. Or a plague. So maybe a broken website isn’t the end of the world, but it’s still annoying. And it’s even more annoying not knowing what those weird error messages mean. That’s why we’ve decoded the most common HTTP error messages.

• Canonical founder calls out OpenStack suppliers for ‘lack of focus’ on datacentre cost savings

  The OpenStack supplier community’s reluctance to prioritise the delivery of datacentre cost savings to their users could prove “fatal”, says Canonical co-founder Mark Shuttleworth.

• OpenStack in transition

  OpenStack is one of the most important and complex open-source projects you’ve never heard of. It’s a set of tools that allows large enterprises ranging from Comcast and PayPal to stock exchanges and telecom providers to run their own AWS-like cloud services inside their data centers. Only a few years ago, there was a lot of hype around OpenStack as the project went through the usual hype cycle. Now, we’re talking about a stable project that many of the most valuable companies on earth rely on. But this also means the ecosystem around it — and the foundation that shepherds it — is now trying to transition to this next phase.

• Free OpenStack Training Resources

• How the OpenStack Foundation Is Evolving Beyond Its Roots

  The OpenStack Foundation is in a period of transition as it seeks to enable a broader set of open infrastructure efforts than just the OpenStack cloud project itself.

  In a video interview at the OpenStack Summit here, OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce and Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier discussed how the open-source organization is still thriving, even as corporate sponsorship changes and attendance at events declines.

  At the event, Collier said there were approximately 2,600 registered attendees, which is nearly half the number that came to the OpenStack Boston 2017 event. OpenStack's corporate sponsorship has also changed, with both IBM and Canonical dropping from the Platinum tier of membership.

• VNC Desktop with Automation Broker

• How to clean up your data in the command line

• Simplify Local Variable Type Definition Using the Java 10 var Keyword

• How to Install and Configure MRTG on Ubuntu 18.04

• kill the first docker container in docker ps

• Mail Command : Send mail from terminal on Linux machines

• Kubernetes and the Challenge of Adding Persistent Storage

• Comprehensive Beginner’s Guide to Jupyter Notebooks for Data Science & Machine Learning

• 4 Easy Ways to Get Out of a Ubuntu Crash

• How To Install Nginx, MariaDB, PHP (LEMP stack) on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Linux

• The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) with Apache, PHP, MySQL, PureFTPD, BIND, Postfix, Dovecot and ISPConfig 3.1