As you may know, so far the YaST Partitioner offered an “Encrypt Device” checkbox when creating or editing a block device. If such box is marked, the Partitioner asks for an encryption password and creates a LUKS virtual device on top of the device being encrypted.

LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is the standard for Linux hard disk encryption. By providing a standard on-disk-format, it facilitates compatibility among distributions. LUKS stores all necessary setup information in the partition header, enabling to transport or migrate data seamlessly. So far, there are two format specifications for such header: LUKS1 and LUKS2. YaST uses LUKS1 because is established, solid and well-known, being fully compatible with the (open)SUSE installation process and perfectly supported by all the system tools and by most bootloaders, like Grub2.

You should not fix what is not broken. Thus, in most cases, the screen for encrypting a device has not changed at all and it still works exactly in the same way under the hood.

• Decentralizing the Data Center: Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud and more

  But how did we get to cloud computing in the first place? While these are not the only reasons, cost, availability and disaster recovery were a large part of what motivated companies to transition from on-prem [-only] deployments to cloud or hybrid approaches. Now, let us fast forward to the present and we are seeing something entirely new: a complete decentralization of the data center.

  But what does that mean? Once upon a time, companies transitioning or starting their operations in the cloud shopped around and found a public cloud service that best suited their needs. The final decision typically boiled down to cost and services. I would know. I used to work in a division of one of these large cloud providers and we were always going neck-to-neck with the other major players for mainly these key topics.

• Quarks – New Building Blocks for Deploying on Kubernetes

  At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU in the Netherlands, Mario Manno of SUSE and Enrique Encalada of IBM gave a presentation about two popular platforms for deploying your cloud-native applications – Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Kubernetes is the great for its flexibility, control over your application and is a great container orchestrator. Cloud Foundry is the go-to platform where you don’t want to worry about your infrastructure, networking, scaling, and routing. It also has the best developer experience in the industry. With Quarks, deployment is simplified using BOSH features, but keeping the flexibility of Kubernetes. Believing that Quarks is the next buzzword for Cloud Foundry conferences, they described and demonstrated the new framework and its building blocks for deploying cloud-native applications which has the best features of the two worlds.

• SLE 12 SP5 Release Candidate 2 is out!

  This Service Pack 5 is a consolidation Service Pack release.

• Red Hat Streamlines Operating System Update Cycle

  CentOS is a distribution of Linux based on a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The team that oversees CentOS operates independently of Red Hat. That team in collaboration with Red Hat is making available an additional distribution dubbed CentOS Stream, through which a continuous stream of content will be updated several times daily.
  Mike McGrath, senior director for Linux engineering at Red Hat, said those innovations eventually will find their way into RHEL, but until then developers who want to build applications using those features as they become available can use CentOS Stream.
  This latest distribution of Linux from Red Hat is intended to act as a bridge between Fedora, a distribution of Linux through which Red Hat makes available experimental technologies, and RHEL, he said.

• Happy Halloween (Packages Not In EPEL-8 yet)

  It is October, and in the US it means that all the decorations for Halloween are going up. This is a time of year I love because you get to dress up in a costume and give gifts to people. In the spirit of Halloween, I am going to make various packages available in a COPR to add onto the EPEL-8 repositories.

  There are a lot of packages which are in EPEL-6 or EPEL-7 but are not in EPEL-8 yet. Some of these may not be possible due to missing -devel, others may just need someone interested in maintaining a branch for EPEL-8, etc etc. In order to try and get a push on this I wanted to see what packages could be built and made ready at some point. I also wanted to make it possible that if you really needed this package, that they could be available. 

• CentOS 8 Stream Install Guide – CentOS 8 Installation Screenshots

• Paving the Road to Eirini

  At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU in the Netherlands, Lucas Bickel of Adfinis SyGroup and Peter Andersson of SUSE presented insight about their Cloud Foundry deployment using SUSE Cloud Application Platform for a large Swiss government office. They explained the challenges faced, the lessons learned and why SUSE Cloud Application Platform is the perfect fit to solve the customer requirements in a highly complex and demanding environment. Warning: this talk contains buzzwords such as DevOps, Cloud Native, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipeline, and other fancy stuff.

• Stratos Project Update: The Future of the Stratos Management UI

  At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU in the Netherlands, Neil MacDougall and Richard Cox of SUSE presented a talk that reviewed the development of the Stratos Web-based Management UI for Cloud Foundry. They also summarized and demonstrated the new features and improvements that have been added recently. Next, they looked forward to the year ahead and discussed where we we are heading with new work on Extensions and the new features that are planned.

• Lightning Talk: The Latest on How SUSE is Bringing Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes Together

  At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU in the Netherlands, Ignacio Gomez of SUSE presented a brief lightning talk explaining how SUSE continues to combine the best of the two leading open source application platforms in the industry — Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. Through projects like Quarks, Eirini, and Stratos, SUSE is fusing the mature development model of Cloud Foundry with the advanced container scheduling capabilities of Kubernetes.

Following discussions about the “openSUSE Project logo & name change” that started in June on the openSUSE Project mailing list [1], the Election Committee received a request from the Board to conduct a vote whereby openSUSE members can indicate whether they are for or against the project name change.

The voting will start on Oct. 10 and end on Oct. 31, which will provide three weeks for members to vote. The result will be announced on Nov. 1.

The voting exercise is limited to openSUSE members only.