Linux Blimp

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Next week, the SUSE team will be at the Intercontinental London Hotel at the O2 for the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference. This will be a great opportunity to hear from many well-respected names within the IT community – analysts, experts and even the quite legendary Frank Abagnale, of “Catch Me If You Can” fame. While one of the most memorable scenes in the film version of Frank Abagnale’s adventures depicts him pretending to be a Pan Am pilot, strolling through an airport arm-in-arm with a bevy of beautiful female cabin crew, the SUSE team will be leaving their flight crew uniforms, which were last seen in action at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, at home. However, my Movember moustache will still be very much in evidence for all to admire as it continues its European tour to celebrate my 13th year of supporting the Movember Foundation in their aim to stop men dying too young (having been to Berlin last week, and then heading to Madrid for the HPE Discover conference next week once the Gartner conference is finished).

The death of the data centre?

We’re looking forward to helping lots of people understand how data centres have evolved, and how software-defined infrastructure is the future and should be part of every business’s cloud strategy. Whether you already have a fully-fledged cloud strategy, are using public cloud for test and development, or are just starting to think about how to best leverage cloud resources, the conference will give you plenty to think about. Giuseppe Paterno and I will be talking on Tuesday 27th November at 12:45pm about the death of the data centre, so please do come along to hear if the data centre is indeed dead, or if it’s just having a little lie down to catch its breath. In addition to discussing the merits of public cloud, private cloud, OpenStack and containers, we’ll also be talking about how our customer ApiOmat used SUSE CaaS Platform and SUSE Cloud Application Platform to enable them to better serve their enterprise customers.

Chameleons, chameleons everywhere – catch them if you can

Of course, the SUSE team will be giving away some of our ever-popular Geeko stuffed chameleons in the exhibitors hall, so come along to talk to us, hear about how software-defined infrastructure should be a part of your cloud strategy, and pick up a cuddly chameleon to keep you company on your journey home!

 

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At the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Leon Anavi compared the Alexa and Google Assistant voice platforms and looked into open source newcomer Mycroft Mark II.

U.S. consumers are expected to drop a bundle this Black Friday on smart speakers and home hubs. A Nov. 15 Canalys report estimates that shipments of voice-assisted speakers grew 137 percent in Q3 2018 year-to-year and are on the way to 75 million-unit sales in 2018. At the recent Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, embedded Linux developer and Raspberry Pi HAT creator Leon Anavi of the Konsulko Group reported on the latest smart speaker trends.

At ELCE, Leon Anavi explains inner workings of Google Assistant SDK
(click image to enlarge)

 

As Anavi noted in his “Comparison of Voice Assistant SDKs for Embedded Linux Devices” talk, conversing with computers became a staple of science fiction over half a century ago. Voice technology is interesting “because it combines AI, big data, IoT, and application development,” said Anavi.

In Q3 2017, Amazon and Google owned the industry with 74.7 percent and 24.6 percent, respectively, said Canalys. A year later, the percentages were down to 31.9 and 29.8. China-based Alibaba and Xiaomi almost equally split another 21.8 percent share, followed by 17.4 percent for “others,” which mostly use Amazon Alexis, and increasingly, Google Assistant.

Despite the success of the mostly Linux-driven smart speaker market, Linux application developers have not jumped into voice app development in the numbers one might expect. In part, this is due to reservations about Google and Amazon privacy safeguards, as well as the proprietary nature of the hardware and cloud software.

“Privacy is a concern with smart speakers,” said Anavi. “You can’t fully trust a corporation if the product is not open source.”

Anavi summarized the Google and Amazon SDKs but spent more time on the fully open source Mycroft Mark. Although Anavi clearly prefers Mycroft, he encouraged developers to investigate all the platforms. “There is a huge demand in the market for these devices and a lot of opportunity for IoT integration, from writing new skills to integrating voice assistants in consumer electronics devices,” said Anavi.

Alexa/Echo

Amazon’s Alexa debuted in the Echo smart speaker four years ago. Amazon has since expanded to the Echo branded Dot, Spot, Tap, and Plus speakers, as well as the Echo Show and new Echo Show 2 display hubs.

Amazon Echo Show 2
(click image to enlarge)

 

The market leading Echo devices run on Amazon’s Linux- and Android-based Fire OS. The original Echo and Dot ran on the Cortex-A8-based TI DM3725 SoC while more recent devices have moved to an Armv8 MediaTek MT8163V SoC with 256MB RAM and 4GB flash.

Thanks to Amazon’s wise decision to release an Apache 2.0 licensed Alexa Voice Services (AVS) SDK, Alexa also runs on most third-party hubs. The SDK includes an Alexa Skills Kit for creating custom Skills. The cloud platform required to make Alexa devices work is not open source, however, and commercial vendors must sign an agreement and undergo a certification process.

Alexa runs on a variety of hardware including the Raspberry Pi, as well as smart devices ranging from the Ecobee4 Smart Thermostat to the LG Hub Robot. Microsoft recently began selling Echo devices, and earlier this year partnered with Amazon to integrate Alexa with its own Cortana voice agent in devices. This week, Microsoft announced that users can voice-activate Skype calls via Alexa on Echo devices.

On Nov. 20, Amazon announced it had publicly released its Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit to help developers bring Alexa to Bluetooth headphones, headsets, and wearables. The developers kit lets Bluetooth devices communicate with a phone’s Alexa app without requiring the device makers to build a custom app or Alexa skill.

Google Assistant/Home

The Google Assistant voice agent debuted on the Google Home smart speaker in 2016. It has since expanded to the Echo Dot-like Home Mini, which like the Home runs on a 1.2GHz dual-core Cortrex-A7 Marvell Armada 1500 Mini Plus with 512MB RAM and 4GB flash. This year’s Home Max offered improved speakers and advanced to a 1.5GHz, quad-core Cortex-A53 processor. More recently, Google launched the touchscreen enabled Google Home Hub.

The Google Home devices run on a version of the Linux-based Google Cast OS. Like Alexa, the Python driven Google Assistant SDK lets you add the voice agent to third-party devices. However, it’s still in preview stage and lacks an open source license. Developers can create applications with Google Actions.

Last year, Google launched a version of its Google Assistant SDK for the Raspberry Pi 3 and began selling an AIY Voice Kit that runs on the Pi. There’s also a kit that runs on the Orange Pi, said Anavi.

This year, Google has aggressively courted hardware partners to produce home hub devices that combine Assistant with Google’s proprietary Android Things. The devices run on a variety of Arm-based SoCs led by the Qualcomm SD212 Home Hub Platform.

Google Home Hub (left) and LG XBOOM AI ThinQ WK9
(click images to enlarge)

 

The SDK expansion has resulted in a variety of third-party devices running Assistant, including the Lenovo Smart Display and the just released

LG XBOOM AI ThinQ WK9

touchscreen hubs. Sales of Google Home devices outpaced Echo earlier this year, although Amazon regained the lead in Q3, says Canalys.

Like Alexa, but unlike Mycroft, Google Assistant offers multilingual support. The latest version supports follow-up questions without having to repeat the activation word, and there’s a voice match feature that can recognize up to six users. A new Google Duplex feature accomplishes real-world tasks through natural phone conversations.

Mycroft/Mark

Anavi’s favorite smart speaker is the Linux-driven, open source (Apache 2.0 and CERN) Mycroft. The Raspberry Pi based Mycroft Mark 1 speaker was certified by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHA).

The Mycroft Mark II launched on Kickstarter in January and has received $450,000 in funding. This Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC driven home hub integrates Aaware’s far-field Sound Capture technology. A Nov. 15 update post revealed that the Mark II will miss its December ship date.

Mycroft Mark II weather and timer skills

Kansas City-based Mycroft has raised $2.5 million from institutional investors and is now seeking funding on

StartEngine

. Mycroft sees itself as a software company and is encouraging other companies to build the Mycroft Core platform and Mycroft AI voice agent into products. The company offers an enterprise server license to corporate customers for $1,500 a month, and there’s a free, Raspbian based

Picroft

application for the Raspberry Pi. A Picroft hardware kit is under consideration.

Mycroft promises that user data will never be saved without an opt-in (to improve machine learning algorithms), and that it will never be used for marketing purposes. Like Alexa and Assistant, however, it’s not available offline without a cloud service, a feature that would better ensure privacy. Anavi says the company is working on an offline option.

The Mycroft AI agent is enabled via a Python based Mycroft Pulse SDK, and a Mycroft Skills Manager is available for Skills development. Like Alexa and Assistant, Mycroft supports custom wake words. The new version uses its homegrown Precise wake-word listener technology in place of the earlier PocketSphinx. There’s also an optional device and account management stack called Mycroft Home.

For text-to-speech (TTS), Mycroft defaults to the open source Mimic, which is co-developed with VocaliD. It also supports eSpeak, MaryTTS, Google TTS, and FATTS.

Mycroft lacks its own speech to-text (STT) engine, which Anavi calls “the biggest challenge for an open source voice assistant.” Instead, it defaults to Google STT and supports IBM Watson STT and wit.ai.

Mycroft is collaborating with Mozilla on its open source
DeepSpeech STT, an open source TensorFlow implementation of Baidu’s DeepSpeech platform. Baidu trails Alibaba and Xiaomi in the Chinese voice assistant market but is one of the fastest growing voice AI companies. Just as Alibaba uses its homegrown, Alexa-like AliGenie agent on its Tmall Genie speaker, Baidu loads its speakers such as its ceiling-mounted PopIn Alladin with its DeepSpeech-driven DuerOS voice platform. Xiaomi has used Alexa and Cortana.

Mycroft is the most mature of several alternative voice AI projects that promise improved privacy safeguards. A recent VentureBeat article reported on emerging privacy-oriented technologies including Snips and SoundHound.

Anavi concluded with some demo videos showing off his soothing, Bulgarian AI whisperer vocal style. “I try to be polite with these things,” said Anavi. “Someday they may rule the world and I want to survive.”

Anavi’s ELCE video presentation can be below.

Leon Anavi’s “Comparison of Voice Assistant SDKs for Embedded Linux Devices”

This article is copyright © 2018 Linux.com and was originally published here. It has been reproduced by this site with the permission of its owner. Please visit Linux.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.

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Today’s Linux platform accommodates a number of really good financial applications that are more than capable of handling both personal and small-business accounting operations. That was not always the case, however.

Not quite 10 years ago, I scoured Linux repositories in a quest for replacement applications for popular Microsoft Windows tools. Back then, the pickings were mighty slim. Often, the only recourse was to use Microsoft Windows-based applications that ran under WINE.

Classics and Fresh Faces

The best of the Linux lot were
GnuCash,
HomeBank,
KMyMoney and
Skrooge. In fact, depending on the Linux distro you fancied, those four packages often comprised the entire financial software lot.

In terms of features and performance, they were as good as or better than the well-known Microsoft Windows equivalents — MSMoney and Quicken. Those Linux staples are still top of the class today. Their feature sets have expanded. Their performance has matured. However, Linux users now have a few more very noteworthy choices to chart their personal and small business financial activities.

In a change of pace from the usual Linux distro reviews, Linux Picks and Pans presents a roundup of the best financial apps that make the Linux OS a treasure trove for your financial needs. These Linux apps are tools to handle your budget, track your investments, and better organize your record-keeping. At a bare minimum, they will help you become more aware of where your money goes.

One development with the growing catalog of money management software for Linux users is the cost factor. Just because an application runs on Linux does not mean it is free to use. The lines have been blurring between open source products and Linux packages with free trial periods or reduced features unless you pay to upgrade. This software roundup includes only free, open source products.

If you are looking for an app only to track your checking and savings accounts, you will probably find the applications in this roundup a bit too advanced. For maintaining your bank account registers, you can find a variety of spreadsheet template files for LibreOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel on the Internet. Yes, you can get Microsoft Office apps for Linux now! They are cloud-based, and you need a Microsoft log-in such as a free Outlook.com mail account.

Cash In with GNUCash

GnuCash is an advanced financial program and one of the few money apps that an accountant using Linux would relish. It is a powerhouse personal and small business finance manager. It comes with a steep learning curve, though.

It is a double-entry accounting system. GnuCash tracks budgets and maintains various accounts in numerous category types. It has a full suite of standard and customizable reports.

GnuCash has the look and feel of a checkbook register. Its GUI (graphical user interface) is designed for easy entry and tracking of bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. The easiness ends there, however, if double-entry accounting is not your comfort zone.

If you do not have an appreciation for formal accounting principles, be sure you spend considerable time studying the ample documentation. Learning to use GnuCash is not overly difficult. It is designed to be simple and easy to use. Its core functions, though, are based on formal accounting principles.

For business finances, GnuCash offers key features. For instance, it handles reports and graphs as well as scheduled transactions and financial calculations. If you run a small business, this app will track your customers, vendors, jobs, invoices and more. From that perspective, GnuCash is a full-service package.

There is not much that GNUCash cannot do. It handles Check Printing, Mortgage and Loan Repayment, Online Stock and Mutual Fund Quotes and Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios. Create recurring transactions with adjustable amounts and timelines. Set an automatic reminder when a transaction is due. Or postpone a scheduled payment without canceling or entering it before the due date.

The latest stable release of GnuCash is version 3.3. Most Linux distributions come bundled with a version of GnuCash. Often, it is not the most current version.

Feel at Home with HomeBank

Compared to GnuCash, HomeBank is a much easier personal accounting system to use. It is designed for analyzing your personal finance and budget in detail using powerful filtering tools and charts, and for those purposes it is an ideal tool.

It includes the ability to import data easily from Intuit Quicken, Microsoft Money or other software. It also makes importing bank account statements in OFX/QFX, QIF, CSV formats a snap.

Also, it flags duplicate transactions during the import process and handles multiple currencies. It offers online updates for various account types such as Bank, Cash, Asset, Credit card and Liability. It also makes it simple to schedule recurring transactions.

HomeBank is more than a simple ledger program. It uses categories and tags to organize transactions.

For example, this app handles multiple checking and savings accounts. Plus, it automates check numbering and category/payee assignment.

HomeBank can schedule transactions with a post-in-advance option and makes creating entries easy with transaction templates, split-category entries and internal transfer functions. It also offers simple month or annual budget tracking options, and has dynamic reports with charts.

The current version is 2.2, released Oct. 10, 2018.

Welcome Uncle Skrooge

Skrooge resembles Quicken with its dashboard-style graphical user interface, or GUI. It looks less like a banking ledger. The design is much more user-friendly. Skrooge goes where the other financial apps don’t.

The tab structure gives Skrooge a more appealing look and feel. Each task — such as filtered reports, ledger entry and dashboard — remains open as a tab line along the top of the viewing windows under the menu and toolbar rows. This keeps viewing open tabs one click away to see the Dashboard, Income vs. Expenditure report, various pie categories, etc.

Skrooge is no slouch when it comes to features. One of its strong points is the ability to grab data from other money applications so you do not have to set it up from scratch.

It imports QIF, QFX/OFX and CSV formats. It can handle exports from KMyMoney, Microsoft Money, GNUCash, Grisbi, HomeBank and Money Manager EX.

Other features include advanced graphical reports, tabs to help organize your work, infinite undo/redo even after a file is closed, and infinite categories levels. You also get instant filtering on operations and reports, mass update of operations, scheduled operations, and the ability to track refund of your expenses.

Skrooge also automatically processes operations based on search conditions and handles a variety of currencies. It lets you work with budget formats and a dashboard.

The latest stable version is version 2.16.2 released on Nov. 4, 2018.

Easy KMyMoney Doubles Down

KMyMoney makes using double-entry accounting principles. It could very well be the Linux version of Quicken that actually is easier to use.

The user interface has a look and feel that is familiar and intuitive. This money manager is one of the original made for Linux.

The KDE community developed and maintains this money manager app. Although it is a part of the KDE desktop, KMyMoney runs fine in most other Linux desktop environments.

It supports different account types, categorization of expenses and incomes, reconciliation of bank accounts, and import/export to the “QIF” file format. You can use the OFX and HBCI formats for imports and exports through plugins.

What gives KMyMoney an edge, at least where usability is concerned, is its friendly user interface. It is a comprehensive finance-tracking application that does not require an accounting degree to use effectively.

Even if you have no prior experience with money management software, KMyMoney is a win-win solution. The interfaces used in most other Linux finance and banking tools are much more cumbersome. KMyMoney has a much lower learning curve.

KMyMoney is a capable and useful tool for tracking bank accounts and investment results. Not much effort is needed to set it up and learn to use it efficiently.

Oddly, it is as if the Linux version is a separate product. You cannot get it from the main website. The Linux version is available on Sourceforge.net.

The latest release is version 4.6.4.
Get KMyMoney here.

Grisbi Masters Simple Entry Accounting

Grisbi Finance Manager is functional and uncomplicated. It is an ideal personal financial management program.

Much of the credit for that assessment is due to the accounting entry method that relies on debiting one account and crediting one account. It is populated with an impressive set of home finance features, including support for multiple currencies.

The feature set focuses on best practices for handling Accounting, Budgeting and Reporting. You can create multiple unlimited accounts, categories and reports.

One of the essential features that work is Grisbi’s clear and consistent user interface. Another design feature that makes Grisbi work so well is its customization. You can tailor transactions lists, trees, tabs, and a lot more to your use.

Grisbi uses a tab-based interface for its menu system. This makes the controls easy to operate. It is built around using multiple accounts, categories and transactions. You can back up and archive your records effortlessly, and use the built-in scheduler and file encryption tools.

Importing and exporting data has an Achilles’ heel: You cannot export to non-QIF and non-CSV formats. Real-time updating is a drawback as well. You can’t. There is no local help file, and an account is unrecoverable if the user forgets the password.

My only real complaint about using Grisbi is the unnecessary challenge to learning how to get the most out of it. Do not bother downloading the 259-page Grisbi manual unless you are fluent in French. For speakers of other languages, that makes for a steep learning curve. You are totally on your own.

The current stable edition of Grisbi is version 1.1.93, released in December 2017.

Buddi Does It Simply

If you crave simplicity but demand budgeting awareness from your money management software,
Buddi could be the hands-down banking tool for you. It is a personal finance and budgeting program.

Buddi ignores the complications of other features that make more in-depth money applications harder to use. It is aimed at users with little or no financial background.

Buddi’s user interface is based on a three-tab concept built around your accounts, your budget and your reports.

Buddi runs on any Linux computer with a Java virtual machine installed. The only drawback with this software is its legacy nature. The latest version, Buddi 3.4.1.14, was released on Jan. 14, 2016.

Use Money Manager EX for Lightweight Reliability

Money Manager Ex is easy-to-use personal finance software. Use it to organize your non-business finances and keep track of where, when and how your money goes.

Money Manager includes all the basic features you need to get an overview of your personal net worth. It helps you to keep tabs on your checking, credit card, savings, stock investment and assets accounts.

You can set reminders for recurring bills and deposits. Use it for budgeting and cash flow forecasting. Create graphs and pie charts of your spending and savings with one click.

Two factors make this application an unbeatable personal finance tool. You do not have to install Money Manager EX. Instead, run it from a USB drive. It uses the nonproprietary SQLite Database with AES Encryption.

Several features make Money Manager EX intuitive and simple. It has a wizard to simply create accounts and start to use the program. You can use multiple currencies for each account to have more flexibility.

Categories tell you the reason for an expenditure or income received. Clear displays show all expenses and income. You can divide and highlight them with different status indicators. You can search, filter and sort by every field to have a clear understanding of bank accounts at any time.

Special transactions can be set up in order to have the transaction entered into the database at some future date. They generally occur at regular intervals based on a schedule.

Budgeting and Asset tracking are easy to do with Money Manager Ex. You can undervalue or increase every asset value by a specific rate per year, or leave them unchanged. It is a snap to set up a budget for any time interval.

One of the best features in this lightweight money management application is the ability to store all related documents to every element type (transaction, account, asset) so you always have quick access to invoices, receipts and contracts.

The latest stable release of Money Manager EX Desktop is 1.3.3.

Bottom Line

These seven money manager applications for Linux offer a wide range of features and user interfaces. Some are good starting products for users with little or no experience with this category of software. Other titles give you all of the tools to manage your household and your small business.

I deliberately avoided ranking these Linux products. I also suspended the usual star rating for each one in this roundup. All of them share two things in common. They are all free open source applications. They are all stable and very workable, depending on your money-tracking and management needs.

Some of them are easy to set up and use. Others are more involved and can be frustrating if you are not familiar with accounting procedures.

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LibreELEC is an open-source embedded operating system based on the Linux kernel and built around the free, open-source and cross-platform Kodi media center. It is designed to be deployed on various popular singe-board computers (SBCs), including Raspberry Pi, Odroid C2, WeTek, Cubox, and others.

Your media at your fingertips, thanks to Kodi

The main design goal of LibreELEC is to help users transform their embedded device into a powerful HTPC (home theater PC) or media center computer for managing their huge collections of movies, TV shows, images, music, etc. LibreELEC follows the development of Kodi so you’ll always have the latest and greatest media center infrastructure at your fingertips.

An evolution of OpenELEC

LibreELEC is to be considered an evolution of the OpenELEC project because the latter cannot be installed on all the single-board computers that the former supports. However, if you’re moving from OpenELEC to LibreELEC, you’ll notice many familiarities, but LibreELEC has its own development cycle offering users a stable and bleeding-edge distribution.

Supported platforms

Being a 100% free project, LibreELEC appears to supports a wide range of platforms, starting from generic 64-bit, AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPU HTPC systems and Amlogic HTPCs, and continuing with numerous ARM boards, including but not limited to Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi Zero W, WeTek Core, WeTek Hub, WeTek Play, WeTek Play 2, WeTek OpenELEC, Five Ninja’s Slice, Odroid C2, CuBox i2, CuBox i4, and HummingBoard.

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Another outstanding OpenStack Summit is done and dusted. As expected, Berlin was a magnificent venue and it was truly a delight to reconnect with old friends and spend valuable time with colleagues and customers across the community.

After such a dynamic event, here are my top 5 takeaways:

1. OpenStack is a great community doing amazing things

Ever since I attended my first OpenStack Summit (Atlanta 2014), it’s been a privilege to be part of this vibrant, innovative community where open collaboration is the hallmark of everything we do. The core values and guiding principles of open source, open community, open development and open design remain as valid today as when the project first started.

2. Open infrastructure begins with OpenStack

In his keynote address, Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, highlighted how the connected, smart world we now live in is creating entirely different infrastructure challenges. Open source technology options are increasingly vital for building the software-defined infrastructures needed to meet these challenges. Flexibility, interoperability and integration are all critical factors.

How do we focus on getting all of this done? We’re going to start by rebranding the OpenStack Summit as the “Open Infrastructure Summit”.

The first of these summits will be in Denver, April 29th – May 1st, 2019, where users, operators and open source developers will get the chance to collaborate on everything from OpenStack; CI/CD; containers; IoT and edge computing; private, public and hybrid cloud; telecoms and NFV; artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML); and much more.

3. OpenStack adoption continues to expand and users are happy

With 70,000 commits over the past year, OpenStack is in the top 3 most active open source projects on the planet, right up there with Linux and Chromium. In addition, OpenStack is being used by organizations of all sizes and from all over the globe. Not only that, but users are increasingly happy with OpenStack, with its Net Promoter Score (NPS) soaring in the latest user survey results.

What’s driving the growth? Increasing operational efficiency and accelerating the ability to innovate are top of the list of reasons for choosing OpenStack.

4. OpenStack is a great platform for running containers

This fact probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone. Containers are the top emerging technology for OpenStack users and Kubernetes is the most popular Platform as a Service (PaaS) or container framework for managing applications on OpenStack.

We’ve been seeing our customers do this for a while. They are using SUSE OpenStack Cloud for hosting bare metal, virtualized and containerized workloads. We integrated both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry solutions to provide a flexible choice of application delivery solutions for our customers. And with the new Airship project (see below) that SUSE has been engaged with, you may see folks starting to use Kubernetes to deploy OpenStack, so you can deploy more Kubernetes clusters…that could make your head spin a bit 🙂

5. Watch out for new features, use cases and products

With the OpenStack Foundation evolving to embrace the wider open infrastructure community, four new pilot projects were the talk of the town in Berlin:

• Airship. Kubernetes based container deployment and management tools particularly useful for 5G and edge computing.
• Kata Containers. Secure container runtime providing the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs.
• StarlingX. Cloud infrastructure stack for telecom and industrial IoT use cases.
• Zuul. CI/CD platform that has been proven at scale supporting the OpenStack project.

Having been at most of the OpenStack Summits since 2014, it seems strange and a little sad to think that Berlin was the last. But as Alexander Graham Bell famously said, “when one door closes, another opens.” This time, that situation is happening by design and for good reason.

We’re moving on to greater things.

See you all in Denver next April for the first Open Infrastructure Summit.

 

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It’s one thing to give travel advice; it’s another to follow it.

In past articles, I’ve written about how to prepare for a vacation or other
travel when you’re on call. And, I just got back from a vacation where I
put some of those ideas into practice, so I thought I’d write a follow-up
and give some specifics on what I recommended, what I actually did
and how it all worked.

Planning for the Vacation

The first thing to point out is that this was one of the first vacations
in a long time where I was not on call, directly or indirectly. In my
long career as a sysadmin responsible for production infrastructure, I’ve
almost always been on call (usually indirectly) when on vacation. Even if
someone else was officially taking over on-call duties while I was away,
there always was the risk that a problem would crop up where they would
need to escalate up to me. Often on my vacations something did blow
up to the point that I needed to get involved. I’ve now transitioned
into more of a management position, so the kinds of emergencies I face
are much different.

I bring up the fact that I wasn’t on an on-call rotation not
because it factored into how I prepared for the trip, but because,
generally speaking, it didn’t factor in except that I didn’t have to go
to as extreme lengths to make sure everyone knew how to contact me in
an emergency. Even though I wasn’t on call, there still was a chance,
however remote, that some emergency could pop up where I needed to
help. And, an emergency might require that I access company resources, which
meant I needed to have company credentials with me at a minimum. I
imagine for most people in senior-enough positions that this
would also be true. I could have handled this in a few ways:

1. Hope that I could access all the work resources I might need from my
   phone.
2. Carry a copy of my password manager database with me.
3. Put a few select work VMs on my travel laptop.

I chose option number 3, just to be safe. Although I’m not superstitious,
I still figured that if I were prepared for an emergency, there was a
better chance one wouldn’t show up (and I was right). At the very least,
if I were well prepared for a work emergency, if even a minor problem
arose, I could respond to it without a major inconvenience instead
of scrambling to build some kind of MacGyver-style work environment
out of duct tape and hotel computers.

Selecting the Travel Computer

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I recommend buying a cheap,
used computer for travel. That way, if you lose it or it gets damaged,
confiscated or stolen, you’re not out much money. I personally bought a
used Acer Parrot C710 for use as a travel computer, because it’s small,
cheap and runs QubesOS pretty well once you give it enough RAM.

I originally planned on taking this same small travel computer with
me on my vacation. I even prepped the OS and was about to transfer
files over when I changed my mind at the last minute. I changed my mind
because at my job we are working on integrating a tamper-evident BIOS called
Heads into our laptops that, in combination with our USB security token
called the Librem Key, makes it easy to detect tampering. You plug in the
key at boot, and if it blinks green you are fine; if it blinks red, it
detected tampering. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend taking a work laptop on
vacation, but in this case, I wanted to beta-test this BIOS protection, so at
the last minute I decided to take my work laptop and try everything out.

Preparing the Travel Computer

Another important part of travel preparation is to make backups of your
personal or work laptops. This is important whether you are traveling
with your personal laptop, a work laptop or a travel laptop, because in
any of those cases, you will want to transfer some files to the laptop you
have with you, and you also want to be safe in case you lose that machine.

In my case, the backup process has an additional significance because
I use QubesOS. QubesOS allows you to separate different workflows,
files and applications into individual VMs that all run in a unified
desktop. You also can back up and restore those VMs independently. For
travel, this means I can perform a full backup of personal and work
machines before the trip and then restore just the VMs I need onto my
travel laptop. If the laptop is lost, broken or stolen, or if I want to wipe
the laptop, I don’t have to worry about losing data.

Since I was traveling with my work laptop, this meant that I performed my
normal backups of personal and work Qubes VMs, but then I just restored
the personal VMs I thought I might need on the trip onto my work
laptop. Otherwise, I would have restored both personal and work VMs onto
my separate travel laptop. Normally I also recommend that you spend a
full day working from your travel laptop after you have set it up,
so you can make sure you have all of the access and files you need. Since
I was traveling with the work laptop, I could skip this step, of course.

The Results

So what were the results of all this travel preparation? I barely had to
open my laptop at all! I had one or two personal obligations that required
the laptop at the beginning, but I didn’t have to fire up any work VMs. Since
I mostly kept my laptop in a bag, I did end up leaving it unattended
quite a bit, so it was a good test for that tamper-detection (as you might
expect, the laptop wasn’t tampered with during the trip). Knowing that
I could fire up work VMs if I had to did give me extra peace of mind
during the trip, even though I never actually had to try it.

When I returned home, there was some clean up to do. Normally
with my travel laptop, this means a complete wipe and re-install of the OS
so it’s ready for next time. In this case, since I was using my regular
work laptop, I just deleted all of the personal VMs I had added.

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Node is often described as “JavaScript on the server”, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. In fact, any description of Node.js I can offer will be unfairly reductionist, so let me start with the one provided by the Node team:

“Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine.” (Source)

That’s a fine description, but it kinda needs a picture, doesn’t it? If you look on the Node.js website, you’ll notice there are no high-level diagrams of the Node.js architecture. Yet, if you search for “Node.js architecture diagram” there are approximately 178 billion different diagrams that attempt to paint an overall picture of Node (I’ll refer to Node.js as Node from now on). After looking at a few of them, I just didn’t see one that fit with the way I’ve structured the material in this course, so I came up with this:

Figure 1. The Node.js architecture stack

Read more at IBM Developers

Source

Earlier this month marked the release of the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler 1.3 (AOCC 1.3) with a re-base to the LLVM 7.0 code-base, enhanced loop optimizations, better vectorization, code generation, integration of the optimized AMD Math Library, and other enhancements. Here are some fresh benchmarks against AMD AOCC 1.3 against LLVM Clang 7.0 upstream as well as GCC 8.2.0.

 

 

Using the Dell PowerEdge R7425 that we received a few weeks ago and have been using for a lot of our Zen/EPYC benchmarks given its dual EPYC 7601 processors, the server was running Ubuntu 18.10 in its current configuration for the latest compiler toolchain. AMD AOCC 1.3 was tested using its default binaries and compared to GCC 8.2.0 and LLVM Clang 7.0. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS for testing were maintained at “-O3 -march=native” throughout.

A variety of C/C++ benchmarks were compiled and run in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite.
Source

Plata is a new Gtk+ theme based on the latest Material Design refresh. The theme comes in 3 variants, regular (mixed), Lumiere (light) and Noir (dark), each with regular and compact versions.
The theme, which mixes black, indigo and grey with bits of red and purple, supports Gtk+ 3.20.x, 3.22.x and 3.24.x, as well as Gtk+ 2, and a multitude of desktop environments like Gnome Shell (and Flashback), Cinnamon, Xfce, Mate, LXDE, and Budgie Desktop.

Patheon (elementary OS), Unity 7 and ”

Gnome Shell customized by Canonical

” (the Ubuntu session) are not officially supported by Plata theme. I’ve used Plata in Ubuntu 18.10 with Gnome Shell and I didn’t notice any issues other than the theme GDM theme not being used, but this is only after about an hour of usage.

Related: Canta Is An Amazing Material Design GTK Theme
More Plata theme screenshots:

Plata compact in Cinnamon

Gnome Shell

Plata theme (regular)

Plata Lumiere compact

Plata Noir compact

When built from source, Plata theme lets users disable support for particular desktop environments, enable Gtk+ 4.0 support, or change the 4 key-colors.

The Plata theme designer (who also created Adapta theme) also offers support for theming Firefox (through FirefoxColor test pilot), Gedit, Plank dock, or Telegram and TweetDeck.

I’ve used Paper icons in the screenshots from this article.

Install Plata theme

Plata theme can be installed in Ubuntu or Linux Mint (and Ubuntu/Linux Mint flavors) using the official theme PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tista/plata-theme
sudo apt update
sudo apt install plata-theme

Since the theme needs Gtk+ 3.20 or newer, it’s available for Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10 and 19.04, as well as Linux Mint 19.

Other Linux distributions users will need to compile the theme from source, as explain on its GitLab project page.

Related: How To Change The GTK, Icon Or GNOME Shell Theme In GNOME

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Usually, when I get review hardware in, it’s not a big deal. It’s like working in a candy shop. At first, it seems great (“All the candy I can eat!”). Then, you quickly get sick of dealing with the extra equipment.

But, every now and again, I get a really fine machine, like Dell’s latest XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. And I get excited again.

• See it now: Dell XPS 13 from Dell

There’s this persistent fake news story that you can’t buy a computer with Linux pre-installed on it. It’s nonsense. Dell has been selling Ubuntu-Linux powered computers since 2007. What’s also true is that, Dell, like Linux-specific desktop companies such as System76, sells high-end systems like its Precision mobile workstations. At the top end of Dell’s Ubuntu Linux line, you’ll find the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptops.

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What makes them a “Developer Edition” besides the top-of-the-line hardware is its software configuration. Canonical, Ubuntu‘s parent company, and Dell worked together to certify Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the XPS 13 9370. This worked flawlessly on my review system.

Now, Ubuntu runs without a hitch on almost any PC, but the XPS 13 was the first one I’d seen that comes with the option to automatically install the Canonical Livepatch Service. This Ubuntu Advantage Support package automatically installs critical kernel patches in such a way you won’t need to reboot your system. With new Spectre and Meltdown bugs still appearing, you can count on more critical updates coming down the road.

The XPS 13’s hardware is, in a word, impressive. My best of breed laptop came with an 8th-generation Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8550U processor. This eight-core CPU runs at 4Ghz.

The system comes with 16GB of RAM. This isn’t plain-Jane RAM. It’s fast 2133MHz LPDDR3 RAM. It’s backed by a 512GB PCIe solid state drive (SSD).

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To see how all this hardware would really work for a developer, I ran the Phoronix Test Suite. This is a system benchmark, which focuses primarily on Linux. And, this system averaged 461.5 seconds to compile the 4.18 Linux kernel. For a laptop, those are darn good numbers.

When it comes to graphics, the XPS 13 uses an Intel UHD Graphics 620 chipset. This powers up a 13.3-inch 4K Ultra HD 3840 x 2160 InfinityEdge touch display. This is a lovely screen, but it has two annoyances.

First, when you boot-up, the font is tiny. This quickly changes, but it’s still can lead to a few seconds of screen squinting. The terminal font can also be on the small side. My solution to this was upscaling the display by using Settings > Devices > Displays menu and moving the Scale field from its default 200 percent to a more reasonable — for me — 220 percent. Your eyesight may vary.

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The other problem is, while the thin bezels make the screen attractive, putting the video-cam at the bottom of the screen can lead to some rather unattractive, up-nose video-conferencing moments until you get use to this atypical cam positioning.

The keyboard with its large, responsive keys is a pleasure to use. When you’re a programmer, that’s always important. The trackpad is wide and responsive.

Thinking of battery life, when you’re not working on the XPS 13, it’s very aggressive about shutting things down. Even when you are giving it a workout, I saw a real-world battery life of about nine hours.

One neat feature the XPS 13 includes, which I wish all laptops had, is a battery power indicator on the console’s left edge. You press a tiny button with your fingernail and up to five lights let you know how much juice you have left.

For ports, the XPS 13 has a trio of USB-C ports. If you, like me, have a host of older USB sticks and other devices, Dell kindly provides a USB-A to USB-C adaptor. It also has an audio jack and a MicroSD card reader. Two of the USB-C ports support Thunderbolt, while the other one supports PowerShare. The latter enables you to charge devices from your laptops. In my case, I could charge up my Google Pixel 2 phone

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All this comes in a package that weighs in at a smidge over two-and-a-half pounds. This is a full-powered laptop that comparable in size to a small Chromebook.

While my all-time favorite laptop remains my maxed-out Linux-enabled Pixelbook, the new Dell XPS-13 comes a close second. If you want a Great Linux laptop, this one demands your attention.

But it does have one problem: It’s pricey. The model I tried out lists for $1,779.99. If that’s too rich for your blood, the Dell XPS 13 line starts at $889.99. And even that model is pretty sweet.

Besides, don’t you owe yourself a holiday present for next year’s development work? Sure you do!

Related stories:

• Dell XPS 13 now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 Linux
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS: The Linux for AI, clouds, and containers
• Dell refreshes Precision laptops with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed
• System76 readies release of American-made powerhouse Linux PC

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