Linux Blimp

Atom is an open source cross-platform code editor developed by GitHub. It has a built-in package manager, embedded Git control, smart autocompletion, syntax highlighting and multiple panes.

Under the hood Atom is a desktop application built on Electron using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Node.js.

The easiest and recommended way to install Atom on Ubuntu machines is to enable the Atom repository and install the Atom package through the command line.

Although this tutorial is written for Ubuntu 18.04 the same instructions apply for Ubuntu 16.04 and any Debian based distribution, including Debian, Linux Mint and Elementary OS.

Prerequisites

The user you are logging in as must have sudo privileges to be able to install packages.

Installing Atom on Ubuntu

Perform the following steps to install Atom on your Ubuntu system:

1. Start by updating the packages list and install the dependencies by typing:

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https wget

2. Next, import the Atom Editor GPG key using the following wget command:

   wget -q https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/gpgkey -O- | sudo apt-key add –

   And enable the Atom repository by typing:

   sudo add-apt-repository “deb [arch=amd64] https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/any/ any main”

3. Once the repository is enabled, install the latest version of Atom with:

Starting Atom

Now that Atom is installed on your Ubuntu system you can launch it either from the command line by typing code or by clicking on the Atom icon (Activities -> Atom).

When you start the Atom editor for the first time, a window like the following should appear:

You can now start installing themes and extensions and configuring Atom according to your preferences.

Upgrading Atom

To upgrade your Atom installation when new releases are published, you can use the apt package manager normal upgrade procedure:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Conclusion

You have successfully installed Atom on your Ubuntu 18.04 machine. To learn more about how to use Atom, from beginner basics to advanced techniques, visit their official documentation page.

If you have any question, please leave a comment below.

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Source: Naked Security/Sophos

The epidemic of Twitter-based Bitcoin scams took another twist this week as attackers tweeted scams directly from two verified high-profile accounts. Criminals sent posts from both Google’s G Suite account and Target’s official Twitter account. Cryptocurrency giveaway scams work by offering money to victims. There’s a catch, of course: They must first send a small amount of money to ‘verify their address’. The money in return never shows up and the attackers cash out.

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Haemimont Games along with Paradox Interactive have released the Surviving Mars: Space Race expansion today and it’s great.

Note: DLC key provided by TriplePoint PR.

The Surviving Mars: Space Race expansion expands the game in some rather interesting ways. One of the biggest obviously being the AI controlled colonies which are optional. Being able to trade with them, deal with distress calls and do covert ops against them has certainly added an interesting layer into the game. While I enjoyed the game anyway, this actually gives it a little bit more of a purpose outside of trying to stave off starvation and not get blown into tiny pieces by meteorites. It’s interesting though, that this could pave the way for a full multiplayer feature, since they have things you can actually do with/against other colonies now. Although, you can’t directly view AI colonies, only see them on the world map which is a bit of a shame.

There’s also the free Gagarin content update which has released at the same time, which includes some interesting goals from each Sponsor. They each have their own special list of goals for you to achieve, which will give you rewards for completing them. For example, with the International Mars Mission sponsor, one such goal is to have a colonist born on Mars which will give you a bunch of supply pods for free. They’re worth doing, but not essential.

Another fun free feature our planetary anomalies, which will require you to send a rocket stocked with Drones, Rovers or Colonists across Mars outside of your colony to investigate, they’re pretty good too since they offer some pretty big rewards at times. There’s also Supply Pods now which cost a bit more, but you don’t need to wait for them to get prepped and so they’re really good for an emergency situation and can end up saving your colony should the worst happen.

Bringing Surviving Mars closer to games like Stellaris, there’s also now special events that will happen. The game was a little, how do I put it, empty? Empty is perhaps too harsh, it’s hard to explain properly. I enjoyed the game in the initially released form, but it did feel lacking in places. Not so much now since there’s around 250 events that will come up at various points throughout the game. Some good, some bad, some completely terrible and so it just makes the game a lot more fresh. Considering this was added in free, it’s quite a surprise. It goes to show how much they care about the game I think.

I was actually having the game freeze up on me a few times in previous version, since I’ve put many hours into this latest update I haven’t seen a single one so that’s really welcome. The game has been running like an absolute dream on maximum settings, incredibly smooth and (as weird as it is to say this about Mars) it looks great too. On top of that, the Linux version got a fix for switching between fullscreen and windowed mode with the patch.

One thing to note, is that there’s a few new keybinds and so I do suggest resetting them or checking them over as I had one or two that were doubled up.

As a whole, the game has changed quite dramatically with this expansion and free update. I liked it a lot before, now I absolutely love it. Even going with just the free update, it’s so much more worthwhile playing! I’m very content with it and I plan to play a lot more in my own personal free time now.

This exciting expansion will be available from Humble Store, GOG and Steam. It’s also having a free weekend on Steam.

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BERLIN — In a keynote at the OpenStack Summit here, Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical Inc and Ubuntu, detailed the progress made by his Linux distribution in the cloud and announced new extended support.

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Long Term Support) debuted back on April 26, providing new server and cloud capabilities. An LTS release comes with five year of support, but during his keynote Shuttleworth announced that 18.04 would have support that is available for up to 10 years.

“I’m delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years,” Shuttleworth said. “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 .”

OpenStack

The long term, stable support for the OpenStack cloud is something that Shuttleworth has committed for some time. In April 2014, the OpenStack Icehouse release came out and it is still being supported by Canonical.

“The OpenStack community is an amazing community and it attracts amazing technology, but that won’t be meaningful if it doesn’t deliver for everyday businesses,” Shuttleworth said. “We actually manage more OpenStack clouds for more different industries, more different architectures than any other company.”

Shuttleworth said that when Icehouse was released, he committed to supporting it for five years, because long term support matters.

“What matters isn’t day two, what matters is day 1,500,” Shuttleworth said. “Living with OpenStack scaling it, upgrading it, growing it, that is important to master to really get the value for your business.”

IBM Red Hat

Shuttleworth also provided some color about his views on the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat by IBM, which was announced on Oct. 28.

“I wasn’t surprised to see Red Hat sell,” Shuttleworth said. “But I was surprised at the amount of debt that IBM took on to close the deal.”

He added that he would be worried for IBM, except for the fact that the public cloud is a huge opportunity.

“I guess it makes sense if you think of IBM being able to steer a large amount of on prem RHEL workloads to the cloud, then that deal might make sense,” he said.

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

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GNOME Shell Extensions is an open source and freely distributed project that provides users with a modest collection of extensions for the GNOME Shell user interface of the GNOME desktop environment. It contains a handful of extensions, carefully selected by technical members of the GNOME project. These extensions are designed to enhance users’ experience with the GNOME desktop environment.

Designed for GNOME

In general, GNOME Shell extensions can be used to customize the look and feel of the controversial desktop environment. In other words, to make your life a lot easier when working in GNOME. While the software is distributed as part of the GNOME project, installable from the default software channels of their Linux distributions, it is also available for download as a source archive, engineered to enable advanced users to configure, compile and install the software on any Linux OS.

Includes a wide variety of extensions for GNOME Shell

At the moment, the following GNOME-Shell extensions are included in this package: Alternate Tab, Apps Menu, Auto Move Windows, Drive Menu, Launch New Instance, Native Window Placement, Places Menu, systemMonitor, User Theme, Window List, windowsNavigator, and Workspace Indicator.

While some of them are self-explanatory, like systemMonitor, Window List, Workspace Indicator, Apps Menu or Alternate Tab, we should mention that the User Theme allows you to add a custom theme (skin) for the GNOME Shell, and Alternate Tab replaces the default ALT+TAB functionality with a sophisticated one.

In addition, the windowsNavigator extension allows you to select windows and workspaces in the GNOME Shell overlay mode using your keyboard, Native Window Placement will arrange windows in the overview mode in a more compact way, and Auto Move Windows will automatically move apps to a specific workspace when it is opened.

Bottom line

Overall, GNOME Shell Extensions is yet another important component of the GNOME desktop environment, especially when using the GNOME Shell user interface, making your life much easier and helping you achieve your goals faster. However, we believe that there are many other useful extensions out there that should be installed in this package.

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Etcher is a free tool for flashing microSD card with the operating system images for Raspberry Pi single board computers. The user interface of Etcher is simple and it is really easy to use. It is a must have tool if you’re working with a Raspberry Pi project. I highly recommend it. Etcher is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. So you get the same user experience no matter which operating system you’re using.

In this article, I will show you how to install and use Etcher on Linux. I will be using Debian 9 Stretch for the demonstration. But this article should work on any other Debian based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu without any modification. With slight modification, it should work on other Linux distributions as well. So, let’s get started.

You can download Etcher from the official website of Etcher. First, go to the official website of Etcher at https://www.balena.io/etcher/ and you should see the following page. You can click on the download link as marked in the screenshot below to download Etcher for Linux but it may not work all the time. It did not work for me.

If that is the case for you as well, scroll down a little bit and click on the link as marked in the screenshot below.

Your browser should prompt you to save the file. Just, click on Save File.

Your download should start as you can see in the screenshot below.

Installing Etcher on Linux:

Now that you have downloaded Etcher for Linux, you are ready to install Etcher on Linux. In order to run Etcher on Linux, you need to have zenity or Xdialog or kdialog package installed on your desired Linux distribution. On Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint and other Debian based Linux distributions, it is a lot easier to install zenity as zenity is available in the official package repository of these Linux distributions. As I am using Debian 9 Stretch for the demonstration, I will cover Debian based distributions here only.

First, update the package repository of your Ubuntu or Debian machine with the following command:

Now, install zenity with the following command:

$ sudo apt install zenity

Now, press y and then press <Enter> to continue.

zenity should be installed.

Now, navigate to the ~/Downloads directory where you downloaded Etcher with the following command:

As you can see, the Etcher zip archive file is here.

Now, unzip the file with the following command:

$ unzip etcher-electron-1.4.6-linux-x64.zip

The zip file should be extracted and a new AppImage file should be generated as you can see in the screenshot below.

Now, move the AppImage file to the /opt directory with the following command:

$ sudo mv etcher-electron-1.4.6-x86_64.AppImage /opt

Now, run Etcher with the following command:

$ /opt/etcher-electron-1.4.6-x86_64.AppImage

You should see the following dialog box. Just click on Yes.

Etcher should start as you can see in the screenshot below.

Now, you don’t have to start Etcher from the command line anymore. You can start Etcher from the Application Menu as you can see in the screenshot below.

Using Etcher on Linux:

You can now flash microSD cards using Etcher for your Raspberry Pi. First, open Etcher and click on Select image.

A file picker should be opened. Now, select the operating system image file that you want to flash your microSD card with and click on Open.

The image should be selected.

Now, insert the microSD card or USB storage device that you want to flash with Etcher. It may be selected by default. If you do have multiple USB storage devices or microSD card attached on your computer, and the right one is not selected by default, then you can click on Change as marked in the screenshot below to change it.

Now, select the one you want to flash using Etcher from the list and click on Continue.

NOTE: You can also flash multiple USB devices or microSD cards at the same time with Etcher. Just select the ones that you want to flash from the list and click on Continue.

It should be selected as you can see in the screenshot below.

You can also change Etcher settings to control how Etcher will flash the microSD cards or USB storage devices as well. To do that, click on the gear icon as marked in the screenshot below.

The Etcher settings panel is very clear and easy to use. All you have to do is either check or uncheck the things you want and click on the Back button. Normally you don’t have to do anything here. The default settings are good. But if you uncheck Validate write on success, it will save you a lot of time. Because this option will check if everything is written on the microSD cards or USB storage devices correctly. That puts a lot of stress on your microSD cards or USB devices and takes a lot of time to complete. Unless you have a faulty microSD card or USB storage device, unchecking this option would do you no harm. It’s up to you to decide what you want.

Finally, click on Flash!

Etcher should start flashing your microSD card or USB storage device.

Once the microSD card or the USB storage device is flashed, you should see the following window. You can now close Etcher and eject your microSD card or USB storage device and use it on your Raspberry Pi device.

So that’s how you install and use Etcher on Linux (Ubuntu/Debian specifically). Thanks for reading this article.

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Introduction

For those of us who work with technologies every day, it’s important to remember one key thing: every topic is new to someone somewhere every day.

With that in mind, we are starting a series of posts here that will start from basics to help you build your knowledge of modern application delivery. Think of it as Containers 101.

To understand what containers are and how they benefit application developers, devops, and operations teams, let’s look at an essential change in the architecture of applications: the use of microservices.

What are Microservices?

Microservices are an evolution of a software architecture concept that developed in the 1990s and became widespread in the 2000s – service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA defines an application as a collection of services. A service is an independent and self-contained function that is well-defined and stateless. Services act together as an application by taking input from each other (or, at one end of the application pipeline, from a user or other input source), performing some processing on the data, and passing it on to another service (or, at the other end of the pipeline, to some data store or to a user).

Services are reusable – that is, the same service can be connected to many different services, often from different applications with the same needs. Here’s a very simple example: whether it is a person, a command shell, or another program that needs to convert a domain name to an IP address, there can be a single Domain Name Service in the environment that resolves those requests.

Many of today’s developers were exposed to SOA in the form of web services, functions that could be exposed by web protocols such as HTTP, with their inputs and outputs composed into structured requests via REST APIs. These services communicate with each other over networks. Services can also use other communication mechanisms, for example, shared memory.

Microservices are a next step, where monolithic applications that traditionally run on a single server (or redundantly in a cluster) are decomposed – or new ones built – as a collection of small well-defined units of processing. Microservices may run on the same system or across nodes of a cluster.

The benefits of using microservice-based architecture include:

• functions can be shared with other applications
• functions can be updated without requiring rebuilding and updating entire applications (continuous delivery)
• functions can be scaled up and down independently, making it easy to deploy resources where they are needed

Using microservices has become much simpler with the development of a relatively new architectural construct: containers.

What are Containers?

The adoption of virtual machines became widespread in the 1990s and 2000s for IT on industry-standard system architectures because they made it possible to do two very important things: to isolate an application from the behavior of other applications on the same system or cluster, and to package up all of the resources an application or set of applications require into an easily deployable, easily portable format. But virtual machines can be a solution for these issues that is too resource-intensive for the needs of many applications, and especially, of microservices. Each virtual machine needs to not only carry with it the application or service and all of its dependencies, but also, an entire operating system environment, and the emulation of a software version of a standalone computer.

Containers are a “best of both worlds” architectural idea that attains many of the isolation and packaging benefits of virtualization, but by using lighter-weight mechanisms within a shared operating system, offers many benefits. Because containers don’t need to boot a new operating system environment, they can start and stop rapidly, often in less than a second – especially useful when scaling them up and down to accommodate changing demand. Because this makes them smaller than a virtual machine, more of them can be run on the same hardware simultaneously. For the same reason, they are especially well suited to microservices, of which a well decomposed application may have a large number. But containers still carry with them the libraries and commands that each application or service needs – making it possible for apps and services build on different OS releases to coexist on the same hardware.

What aren’t Containers?

Containers are not virtual machines. They do not offer the heavy-weight security and performance isolation that virtual machines can offer. (Though there are new container implementations in development that come close; we will discuss those in a future educational blog post.)

Containers are not installation packages – they take the place of software installation. Containers can be deployed on demand to specific servers and their deployment can replace the complex tasks of software installation.

Containers are not whole applications. Well, to be honest, some of them can be: there are certainly gains in flexibility of deployment and management that can be realized by just putting a monolithic application in a container, But the real gain comes from rearchitecting legacy applications into microservices, and designing new ones that way. Note that the journey to microservices and application modernization need not be all-or-nothing: many organizations start on their existing application by chipping away at them to break off reusable and scalable capabilities into microservices gradually.

Where Do I Go From Here?

If you’re new to containers and microservices, I hope this has given you a good introduction. The next post that builds on this knowledge will be available in about two weeks. If you want to read ahead, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server includes a containers module about which you can find information on our website and in the blog. And SUSE CaaS Platform includes containers and management capabilities for them in a purpose-built product. If you find the reading gets deep for you, though, stop back to the SUSE Blog for more of Containers 101 soon.

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A computer algebra system (CAS) is mathematical software that can manipulate mathematical formulae in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. This type of system supports a wide range of mathematics including linear algebra, calculus, and algebraic and ordinary differential equations.

A CAS offers a rigorous environment for defining and working with structures such as groups, rings, fields, modules, algebras, schemes, curves, graphs, designs, codes and many others.

They have been extensively used in higher education.

The main features of a CAS include:

• Numerical Computations: The software can determine numerical approximations of solutions, derivatives, integrals, differential equations, etc. Solve, manipulate, and plot functions without needing to generate numeric data. Often problems that cannot be solved explicitly can be solved numerically, and often only a numerical answer is sufficient.
• Data Analysis: Having data is not sufficient; we need to extract useful information from it. There are many algorithms designed for data analysis, most of which involve too much work to be done by manual computations. CAS’s put these algorithms in one place, and offer an environment where the algorithms are easy to implement.
• Data Visualization: CAS’s can graph 2D and 3D functions in a variety of ways. They are also designed to graph vector fields and solutions to differential equations.
• Symbolic Computations: Most of the CAS’s can perform symbolic manipulation of expressions: reducing, expanding, simplifying, derivatives, antiderivatives, etc. Unlike numerical computations, which can exhibit floating-point errors, symbolic computations are determined exactly. They can therefore provide the exact answer to an equation (as opposed to a decimal approximation), and they can express results in terms of a wide variety of previously defined functions.

A CAS automates tedious and sometimes difficult algebraic manipulation tasks. The principal difference between a CAS and a traditional calculator is the ability to deal with equations symbolically rather than numerically.

The chart below offers our rating for each software. Some of the software is very specialized, designed to fill a particular niche. This makes comparisons difficult.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 13 impressive algebra systems. There’s general purposes systems as well as specialist software solutions. All of them are open source software.

Let’s explore the 13 algebra systems at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources.

Computer Algebra Systems
Maxima	System for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions
PARI/GP	Widely used algebra system designed for fast computations in number theory
SymPy	Python library for symbolic mathematics
Scilab	Numerical computational package
SageMath	Open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab
Octave	Powerful programming language with built-in plotting and visualization tools
Axiom	General purpose Computer Algebra system
SINGULAR	Computer Algebra System for polynomial computations
GAP	System for computational discrete algebra
CoCoA	System for doing computations in commutative algebra
Cadabra	Symbolic computer algebra system for field theory problems
Macaulay2	Software system for research in algebraic geometry
FriCAS	Fork of Axiom

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Managing infrastructure is a complex problem with a massive amount of signals and many actions that can be taken in response; that’s the classic definition of a situation where machine learning can help.

IT and operations is a natural home for machine learning and data science. According to Vivek Bhalla, until recently a Gartner research director covering AIOps and now director of product management at Moogsoft, if there isn’t a data science team in your organization the IT team will often become the “center of excellence”.

By 2022, Gartner predicts, 40 percent of all large enterprises will use machine learning to support or even partly replace monitoring, service desk and automation processes. That’s just starting to happen in smaller numbers.

In a recent Gartner survey, the most popular use of AI in IT and operations is analyzing big data (18 percent) and chatbots for IT service management — 15 percent are already using chatbots and a further 30 percent plan to do so by the end of 2019.

Read more at The New Stack

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