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Have you been trying to learn Kubernetes for a while now but still miss some concepts?. Learning Kubernetes can be tough especially for users new to Containers and its orchestration. This ebook is one of the best books to getting started with Kubernetes. It has all the pieces you need to become a Kubernetes master.

For introduction purposes, let’s define what’s Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open source tool initially designed by Google to aid in automation and management of containers and applications running on them.

If you’ve been playing with container engine tools like Docker, you must have experienced how difficult it is to manage more than one docker container across a number of hosts. This is where Kubernetes comes in. It makes it easy to deploy more than one container across a fleet of nodes and ensure they are highly available and redundant.

What’s in “Kubernetes Essentials” eBook?

Everything in this “Kubernetes Essentials” ebook is perfectly arranged, starting from Kubernetes basics to advanced topics for experienced system administrators and Developers. Below is a cover of chapter available in this book.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Kubernetes

In this chapter, you’re introduced to the world of containers. You get to differentiate between Virtualization and Containerization. What’s the difference between Docker and VM, Docker vs Kubernetes, Why you need Kubernetes, Kubernetes use cases all over the world e.t.c?

Chapter 2: Key definitions and components

On chapter two of this ebook, you get to learn all the pieces that makeup Kubernetes. You’re introduced to the concepts of Pods, Clusters, Levels, Services, Replication and all the components of Kubernetes are covered in detail, with a clear definition of its functionalities. This is where you get to understand Kubernetes well and how all its components fit together.

Chapter 3: Kubernetes Concepts

In this chapter, you get to learn Kubernets Networking and Storage subsystem layer in detail. How Pods in Kubernetes manage multiple containers – lifecycle, pods creation, replication, and the multi-node networking like VXLAN. How rescheduling and rolling updates take place in Kubernetes is also covered in this section.

Chapter 4: Deploying Kubernetes Manually

Chapter 4 of this book concentrates on the manual deployment of Kubernetes on CentOS, Ubuntu, and other operating systems. The environment can be Virtual e.g VirtualBox, AWS cloud, Azure or with the help of Vagrant for test environments. You’ll build Kubernetes clusters from scratch, starting from preparation of base OS, the basics of managing a cluster with Vagrant and working with the kubeadm tool, to troubleshooting deployment issues, working with etcd, Kubernetes add-ons, Kubernetes dashboard, Flannel networking, CoreDNS e.t.c.

Chapter 5: Orchestrating Containers with Kubernetes

Now that everything before this chapter introduced you to the basics of Kubernetes and its deployment. It’s time to do the dirty work. Here you start to deploy real applications on containers orchestrated through Kubernetes. By the end of this chapter, you should be confident in the deployment of applications of Kubernetes and expose them to the public via Services. Troubleshooting of Docker containers inside Kubernetes umbrella is covered in detail.

Chapter 6: Deploying Kubernetes with Ansible

You don’t want to deploy Kubernetes manually? don’t worry your medication is here. With ansible, you can automate the deployment of Kubernetes by having everything in a playbook that’s executable. You’ll spend some time writing YAML files which will save you a lot of hours later. With this, it becomes easy to scale out your Kubernetes infrastructure and tear it down when done.

Chapter 7: Provisioning Storage in Kubernetes

Storage is one of the crucial parts of Kubernetes. If poorly designed and deployed, it can cost you money to bring things up to service in case of a failure. This chapter will teach you on best storage guidelines to follow for Kubernetes. You’re introduced to various storage plugins available and advice on which one to pick. The main goal of this chapter is to help you deploy persistent storage that’s easy to scale, and how to use this storage inside containers. NFS and ISCSI are the core storage protocols covered.

Chapter 8: Troubleshooting Kubernetes and Systemd Services

Troubleshooting is a key in all systems management tasks. You’ll learn to inspect and debug issues in Kubernetes. It covers troubleshooting of pods, cluster controllers, worker nodes, Docker containers, storage, networking and all other Kubernetes components. If you have been in Linux world for some time, you must have witnessed the stress of managing services with upstart. There cane Systemd with its challenges and benefits. On this chapter, you’ll learn all the bells and whistles of systemd on Kubernetes. How to fix issues when they arise by utilizing systemd as a tool for troubleshooting

Chapter 9: Kubernetes Maintenance

This chapter includes Kubernetes monitoring with influxdb as a data store, Grafana as a visualization tool and Prometheus monitoring system/ time series database. Using Kubernetes Dashboard to visualize container infrastructure is also covered here and how to do logging for containers. Finally, regular checks and cleaning are essential.

Wrapping Up

Learning Kubernetes is inevitable, especially for System Engineers, Administrators, and DevOps roles. Kubernetes is a recent technology but has revolutionized how containerized applications are deployed in the cloud. Being an open source technology backed by huge community and support of big companies like Red Hat, SUSE and others, its future is definitely great. This ebook will help you get started earlier and grow your career in this interesting and growing containers space. The content of this book is concrete and covers everything you need to become a Kubernetes guru!

Download Ebook

Read Also:

• How to Create and Use Kubernetes Secrets
• Eksctl – A CLI Tool to Create Kubernetes Cluster on Amazon EKS
• How to Monitor Kubernetes Cluster with Prometheus and Grafana
• How to Create Kubernetes Cluster with Kops

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It has been three and half years since Red Hat last issued a major new version number of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. A lot has happened since RHEL 7 was launched in June 2014, and Red Hat is now previewing its next-generation RHEL 8 platform in beta.

Among the biggest changes in the last four years across the compute landscape has been the emergence of containers and microservices as being a primary paradigm for application deployment. In RHEL 8, Red Hat is including multiple container tools that it has been developing and proving out in the open-source community, including Buildah (container building), Podman (running containers) and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers).

Systems management is also getting a boost in RHEL 8 with the Composer features that enable organizations to build and deploy custom RHEL images. Management of RHEL is further enhanced via the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console, which enables administrators to manage bare metal, virtual, local and remote Linux servers.

Although RHEL 8 will be the first major version number update since RHEL 7 in 2014, Red Hat has not been sitting idle the past four years. The company has updated RHEL up to twice a year with new milestone versions. The most recent version is RHEL 7.6, which became generally available on Oct. 30 with new security capabilities.

The RHEL 7.6 release came the day after Red Hat announced it was being acquired by IBM in a $34 billion deal that is set to close in 2019.

Security

New security capabilities will also be a core element of RHEL 8, most notably the inclusion of support for the TLS 1.3 cryptographic standard. TLS 1.3 was announced as a formal standard by the IETF back on March 26, providing an updated version to the core protocol used to secure data in motion across the internet.

Additionally, Red Hat is making it easier for system administrators to manage cryptographic policies in RHEL 8 with a new feature.

“System-wide cryptographic policies, which configures the core cryptographic subsystems, covering the TLS, IPSec, SSH, DNSSec, and Kerberos protocols, are applied by default,” the RHEL 8 release notes state. “With the new update-crypto-policies command, the administrator can easily switch between modes: default, legacy, future, and fips.”

 

Application Streams

In the past, RHEL users were largely stuck with certain version branches of core application libraries in an effort to help maintain compatibility and stability.

Red Hat’s community-led Fedora Linux distribution introduced the concept of modularity earlier this year, with the release of Fedora 28. RHEL 8 is now following the Fedora Modularity lead with the concept of Application Streams.

“Userspace components can now update more quickly than core operating system packages and without having to wait for the next major version of the operating system,” Stefanie Chiras, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat, wrote in a blog. “Multiple versions of the same package, for example, an interpreted language or a database, can also be made available for installation via an application stream.”

Memory

Perhaps the biggest single change coming to RHEL 8 is in terms of system performance, specifically due to a new upper limit on physical memory capacity.

RHEL 7 had a physical upper limit of 64TB of system memory per server. Thanks to new performance capabilities in next-generation Intel and AMD CPUs, RHEL 8 will have an upper limit of 4PB of physical memory capacity.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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Disks (formerly GNOME Disk Utility) is an open source software that lists mounted storage devices and virtual disk images, allowing users to manipulate them in any way possible.

The application looks exactly like the Disk Utility software of the Mac OS X operating system. It lets users to view detailed information about a certain storage device, such as model, size, partitioning, serial number, assessment, and device path.

In addition, for each drive, the software can display detailed volume information in both graphical and text modes, such as partition type, size, absolute path, filesystem type, and mounted point.

Features at a glance

There are various options for each partition and drive, allowing users to deactivate, mount, unmount, format, delete or benchmark them. You can also do all these action in batch mode, using multiple selected drives at once.

Another interesting feature is the ability to view SMART attributes and run self-tests on a specific disk drive, which will tell you if the device is OK or not and if it contains errors. Also, you can apply advanced power management and write cache settings for each listed disk.

Besides the standard storage devices like SSD (Solid Disk Drive), HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and USB flash drive, the program can also mount and list ISO and IMG disk images, which can be deployed (restored) to one of the aforementioned disk drives that are mounted on your machine. It can also list optical devices, such as CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs or Blu-Ray drives.

Designed for GNOME

It is distributed as part of the GNOME desktop environment, but it can also be installed on other open source window managers as a standalone application, through the default software repositories of your Linux distribution.

Bottom line

Overall, Disks is an essential application for the GNOME desktop environment, as well as for any Linux-based operating system. It allows you to format and partition disk drives, as well as to write ISO images to USB sticks.

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Helping Your Clients Embrace the Cloud Can Reap Big Dividends

Digital transformation is affecting every industry, from manufacturing to hospitality and government to finance. As a service provider, you’ve probably seen how this period of rapid change is disrupting your customers—causing both stress and growth. Luckily, your customers’ digital transformation can be an opportunity for your organization too.

Digital transformation is driving increased cloud adoption. According to a new research report from 451 Research, multicloud scenarios are the norm, and that means organizations increasingly need Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs). This is where service providers can step in. One compelling option for CMPs is open source software, including the industry-leading OpenStack cloud.

Open source platforms such as OpenStack can help you to better support the digital transformation initiatives of your customers. By enabling customization, customer choice and support for a broader array of technologies and platforms, open source software such as OpenStack provides benefits proprietary offerings don’t. One of those benefits is the constant innovation and improvement that open source technologies experience due to the contributions of a large community of developers.

OpenStack isn’t a cure-all. It makes great sense for some scenarios and less so for others. The report details where service providers are likely to see the maximum potential opportunity:

Large Enterprises

The largest companies have been early adopters of open source technologies, and with their developer teams and in-house resources, they often have a better understanding of their CMP needs. 451 also expects that enterprise data center growth will occur mostly in hosted environments—private, public and dedicated—as enterprises move increasingly to the cloud.

Private Cloud Requirements

While not exclusively a private cloud opportunity, the majority of the open source CMP opportunity is with private cloud. OpenStack can’t compare or compete with hyperscale public cloud providers in terms of features and functionality, but it can provide the desired control in a private cloud scenario.

Regulated Industries

If you’re a service provider working with customers in a regulated industry such as finance or health care, you likely know the challenges better than anyone. There are often strict requirements that some applications and data run in-house or in a private cloud. This may rule out certain proprietary cloud offerings while creating the opportunity for open source cloud software.

Regional Requirements

Outside of the North American market, people are still wary of trusting the processing and storing of data to a U.S.-based vendor. In addition, legislation—such as the General Data Protection Requirements (GDPR) in Europe—is increasingly adding location and data-transit rules to customers’ burdens.

In these sectors and more, OpenStack presents service providers like you with a compelling opportunity. How to best take advantage of it is the next question. In the paper, you’ll learn:

• Which of the open source alternatives and go-to-market variations is best for you
• What you stand to gain from your investment
• How to best avoid the challenges involved

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Get to know networking basics with this tutorial from our archives.

Linux grew up with a networking stack as part of its core, and networking is one of its strongest features. Let’s take a practical look at some of the TCP/IP fundamentals we use every day.

It’s IP Address

I have a peeve. OK, more than one. But for this article just one, and that is using “IP” as a shortcut for “IP address”. They are not the same. IP = Internet Protocol. You’re not managing Internet Protocols, you’re managing Internet Protocol addresses. If you’re creating, managing, and deleting Internet Protocols, then you are an uber guru doing something entirely different.

Yes, OSI Model is Relevant

TCP is short for Transmission Control Protocol. TCP/IP is shorthand for describing the Internet Protocol Suite, which contains multiple networking protocols. You’re familiar with the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, which categorizes networking into seven layers:

• 7. Application layer
• 6. Presentation layer
• 5. Session layer
• 4. Transport layer
• 3. Network layer
• 2. Data link layer
• 1. Physical layer

The application layer includes the network protocols you use every day: SSH, TLS/SSL, HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, DNS, DHCP, streaming media protocols, and tons more.

TCP operates in the transport layer, along with its friend UDP, the User Datagram Protocol. TCP is more complex; it performs error-checking, and it tries very hard to deliver your packets. There is a lot of back-and-forth communication with TCP as it transmits and verifies transmission, and when packets get lost it resends them. UDP is simpler and has less overhead. It sends out datagrams once, and UDP neither knows nor cares if they reach their destination.

TCP is for ensuring that data is transferred completely and in order. If a file transfers with even one byte missing it’s no good. UDP is good for lightweight stateless transfers such NTP and DNS queries, and is efficient for streaming media. If your music or video has a blip or two it doesn’t render the whole stream unusable.

The physical layer refers to your networking hardware: Ethernet and wi-fi interfaces, cabling, switches, whatever gadgets it takes to move your bits and the electricity to operate them.

Ports and Sockets

Linux admins and users have to know about ports and sockets. A network socket is the combination of an IP address and port number. Remember back in the early days of Ubuntu, when the default installation did not include a firewall? No ports were open in the default installation, so there were no entry points for an attacker. “Opening a port” means starting a service, such as an HTTP, IMAP, or SSH server. Then the service opens a listening port to wait for incoming connections. “Opening a port” isn’t quite accurate because it’s really referring to a socket. You can see these with the netstat command. This example displays only listening sockets and the names of their services:

$ sudo netstat -plnt
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1583/mysqld
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:5901 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 13951/qemu-system-x
tcp 0 0 192.168.122.1:53 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2101/dnsmasq
tcp 0 0 192.168.122.1:80 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2001/apache2
tcp 0 0 192.168.122.1:443 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 2013/apache2
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1200/sshd
tcp6 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN 2057/apache2
tcp6 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN 1200/sshd
tcp6 0 0 :::443 :::* LISTEN 2057/apache2

This shows that MariaDB (whose executable is mysqld) is listening only on localhost at port 3306, so it does not accept outside connections. Dnsmasq is listening on 192.168.122.1 at port 53, so it is accepting external requests. SSH is wide open for connections on any network interface. As you can see, you have control over exactly what network interfaces, ports, and addresses your services accept connections on.

Apache is listening on two IPv4 and two IPv6 ports, 80 and 443. Port 80 is the standard unencrypted HTTP port, and 443 is for encrypted TLS/SSL sessions. The foreign IPv6 address of :::* is the same as 0.0.0.0:* for IPv4. Those are wildcards accepting all requests from all ports and IP addresses. If there are certain addresses or address ranges you do not want to accept connections from, you can block them with firewall rules.

A network socket is a TCP/IP endpoint, and a TCP/IP connection needs two endpoints. A socket represents a single endpoint, and as our netstat example shows a single service can manage multiple endpoints at one time. A single IP address or network interface can manage multiple connections.

The example also shows the difference between a service and a process. apache2 is the service name, and it is running four processes. sshd is one service with one process listening on two different sockets.

Unix Sockets

Networking is so deeply embedded in Linux that its Unix domain sockets (also called inter-process communications, or IPC) behave like TCP/IP networking. Unix domain sockets are endpoints between processes in your Linux operating system, and they operate only inside the Linux kernel. You can see these with netstat:

$ netstat -lx
Active UNIX domain sockets (only servers)
Proto RefCnt Flags Type State I-Node Path
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 988 /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 29730 /run/user/1000/systemd/private
unix 2 [ ACC ] SEQPACKET LISTENING 357 /run/udev/control
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 27233 /run/user/1000/keyring/control

It’s rather fascinating how they operate. The SOCK_STREAM socket type behaves like TCP with reliable delivery, and SOCK_DGRAM is similar to UDP, unordered and unreliable, but fast and low-overhead. You’ve heard how everything in Unix is a file? Instead of networking protocols and IP addresses and ports, Unix domain sockets use special files, which you can see in the above example. They have inodes, metadata, and permissions just like the regular files we use every day.

If you want to dig more deeply there are a lot of excellent books. Or, you might start with man tcp and man 2 socket. Next week, we’ll look at network configurations, and whatever happened to IPv6?

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

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One of the pieces of software you use daily is a file manager. A good file manager is essential to your work. If you are a Linux user and want to try out file managers other than the default one that comes with your system, below is a list of the best Linux file managers you will find.

What Is a File Manager?

Let’s start with a definition first to make sure we are on the same page. A file manager is a computer application that you can access and manage the files and documents stored on your hard disk. In Windows this application is called Windows Explorer, and in macOS, Finder. In Linux there is no one standardized file manager application for all distributions. These are some of the best Linux File managers.

1. Nautilus

Nautilus, now renamed to GNOME Files, is the standard file manager of the GNOME desktop environment. Since GNOME is a very popular desktop environment, this automatically means Nautilus is also among the most used file managers. One of the key features of Nautilus is that it’s clean and simple to use, while still offering all the basic functionality of a file manager, as well as the ability to browse remote files. This is a file manager suitable for novices and everybody who values minimalism and simplicity. If the default functionality is too limiting for you, you can extend it with the help of plugins.

2. Dolphin

Dolphin File Manager is the KDE counterpart of Nautilus. Similarly to Nautilus, it is intended to be simple to use while also leaving room for customization. Split view and multitabs, as well as dockable panels, are among its core features. You can use Dolphin to browse both local and remote files across the network. For some operations Dolphin offers undo/redo functionality, which is pretty handy for those of us who have (too) quick fingers. If the default functionality of Dolphin is not enough, plugins come to the rescue.

3. Thunar

Thunar might not be as popular as Nautilus or Dolphin, but I personally like it more. It’s the file manager I use on a daily basis. Thunar is the default file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment, but you can use it with other environments as well. Similarly to Nautilus and Dolphin, Thunar is lightweight, fast, and easy to use. For an old computer, Thunar is probably the best file manager. It is a relatively simple file manager without tons of fancy (and useless) features, but again, it has plugins to extend the default functionality, if this is needed.

4. Nemo

Nemo is a fork of Nautilus, and it’s the default file manager for the Cinnamon desktop environment. One of the special features of Nemo is that it has all the features of Nautilus 3.4 that have been removed in Nautilus 3.6, such as all desktop icons, compact view, etc., and tons of configuration options. Nemo also has useful features, such as open as root, open in terminal, show operation progress when copying/moving files, bookmark management, etc.

5. PCManFM

The last file manager for Linux on this list – PCManFM – has the very ambitious goal to replace Nautilus, Konqueror and Thunar. PCManFM is the standard file manager in LXDE (a distro developed by the same team of developers), and it’s meant to be lightweight, yet fully functional. I don’t have much personal experience with this file manager, but from what I know, I can’t say it’s groundbreaking, breathtaking, etc. It does have the standard features a file manager offers, such as thumbnails, access to remote file systems, multitabs, drag and drop, etc., but I don’t think it has really outstanding features. Still, if you are curious, you can give it a try and see for yourself.

There are many more file managers for Linux I didn’t include because I don’t think they are as good as the ones listed. Some of these managers are Gentoo file manager, Konqueror, Krusader, GNOME Commander, Midnight Commander, etc. If the 5 file managers I reviewed are not what you like, you can give the rest a try, but don’t expect too much from them.

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GUPnP AV i an open source and completely free library software designed as part of the GUPnP framework, providing users with a collection of helpers for building audio and video applications using GUPnP.

What is GUPnP?

GUPnP is an object-oriented and open source framework designed especially for creating UPnP devices and control points, written in C using libsoup and GObject. The GUPnP API is intended to be easy to use, flexible and efficient.

The GUPnP framework was initially created because of developer’s frustrations with the libupnp library and its mess of threads. Therefore, GUPnP is entirely single-threaded, it integrates with the GLib main loop, it’s asynchronous, and offers the same set of features as libupnp.

Getting started with GUPnP AV

Installing the GUPnP AV project on a GNU/Linux computer is the easiest of tasks, as you will have to first download the latest version of the software from Softpedia or via its official website (see the homepage link at the end of the article), and save it on your PC, preferably somewhere on your Home folder.

Use an archive manager utility to extract the contents of the source package, open a terminal emulator application and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/gupnp-av-0.12.7), where you will run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure/optimize and compile the project.

Please note that you should first install the GUPnP program before attempting to install this tool. After a successful compilation, you can install GUPnP AV system wide and make it available to all users on your machine by running the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user or the ‘make install’ command as root.

Under the hood

Taking a look under the hood of the GUPnP AV program, we can notice that it has been written in the Vala and C programming languages. It is currently supported on 32-bit and 64-bit computer platforms.

Object-oriented framework UPnP devices GUPnP framework Object-oriented Framework A/V UPnP

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According to The Information, Instagram has suffered a serious security leak of its own that could’ve exposed user’s passwords. While Facebook recently had a much more serious problem linked to its “View As” tool that was being actively exploited by… someone, the Instagram issue is linked to its tool that allows users to download a copy of their data. Facebook notified affected Instagram users that when they utilized the feature, it sent their password in plaintext in the URL. For some reason, these passwords were also stored on Facebook’s servers, however the notification said that data has been deleted and the tool was updated so it won’t happen now.

Read this full article at Engadget

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We never meant to make that widely public which is why we made a public FAQ for it

Microsoft was, and maybe still is, considering injecting targeted adverts into the Windows 10 Mail app.

The ads would appear at the top of inboxes of folks using the client without a paid-for Office 365 subscription, and the advertising would be tailored to their interests. Revenues from the banners were hoped to help keep Microsoft afloat, which banked just $16bn in profit in its latest financial year.

According to Aggiornamenti Lumia on Friday, folks using Windows Insider fast-track builds of Mail and Calendar, specifically version 11605.11029.20059.0, may have seen the ads in among their messages, depending on their location. Users in Brazil, Canada, Australia, and India were chosen as guinea pigs for this experiment.

Bad news: Mail for #Windows10 is getting ads for non-office 365 subscribers! https://t.co/xDELzAClJq pic.twitter.com/gXkQXab5Wr

— Aggiornamenti Lumia (@ALumia_Italia) November 16, 2018

A now-deleted FAQ on the Office.com website about the “feature” explained the advertising space would be sold off to help Microsoft “provide, support, and improve some of our products,” just like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail display ads.

Also, the advertising is targeted, by monitoring what you get up to with apps and web browsing, and using demographic information you disclose:

You can also close an ad banner by clicking on its trash can icon, or get rid of them completely by coughing up cash:

Here’s where reality is thrown into a spin, literally. Microsoft PR supremo Frank Shaw said a few hours ago, after the ads were spotted:

This was an experimental feature that was never intended to be tested broadly and it is being turned off.

Never intended to be tested broadly, and was shut down immediately, yet until it was clocked, had an official FAQ for it on Office.com, which was also hastily nuked from orbit, and was rolled out in highly populated nations. Talk about hand caught in the cookie jar.

And there’s no denying they will ever come back; just that they’re going away for now at least from Mail and Calendar. It may be that the ads appeared outside the intended sandbox of Brazil, India, etc, or even outside the Windows Insider program, forcing Microsoft to pull the plug.

Still, it sounds to us as though it was intended to be tested relatively broadly.

In any case, Redmond is or was mulling extracting revenue from people one way or another, either via Office subs or advertising, which is to be expected. It should be no surprise, just like knowing Facebook puts its own interests and profits ahead of its addicts should be no great shock. Redmond has been squeezing little adverts into its operating system for a few years now.

Injecting adverts into a desktop email client may be a little too much for Microsoft’s traditional users and loyalists to swallow, though. ®

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Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for ten years. Long Term Support releases of Ubuntu usually enjoy just five years of support, so this doubling is highly significant.

Shuttleworth — the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu — made the announcement at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, and the change is a tactical maneuver that will help Ubuntu better compete against the likes of Red Hat/IBM. It is also an acknowledgement that many industries are working on projects that will not see the light of day for many years, and they need the reassurance of ongoing support from their Linux distro. Ubuntu can now offer this.

See also:

• deepin 15.8 Linux distribution available for download — replace Windows 10 now!
• Linux on DeX Beta can turn your Samsung Galaxy smartphone or tablet into an Ubuntu desktop
• Microsoft is porting Sysinternals utilities to Linux, starting with ProcDump

Ubuntu 18.04 was released in April of this year, and the new announcement means that it will be supported until 2028. It is a significant and important change for developers working in various fields including hardware, IoT and the cloud, but it is not known whether a similar support cycle will be adopted for future LTS releases.

As reported by ZDNet, Mark Shuttleworth said:

I’m delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years. In part because of the very long time horizons in some of industries like financial services and telecommunications but also from IoT where manufacturing lines for example are being deployed that will be in production for at least a decade.

While the support cycle for future releases is not yet known, Shuttleworth said that support for Ubuntu 16.04 — which was due to come to an end in April of 2021 — will also be extended.

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