Linux Blimp

Dmitry Safonov wanted to implement a namespace for time information. The twisted and bizarre thing about virtual machines is that they get more virtual all the time. There’s always some new element of the host system that can be given its own namespace and enter the realm of the virtual machine. But as that process rolls forward, virtual systems have to share aspects of themselves with other virtual systems and the host system itself—for example, the date and time.

Dmitry’s idea is that users should be able to set the day and time on their virtual systems, without worrying about other systems being given the same day and time. This is actually useful, beyond the desire to live in the past or future. Being able to set the time in a container is apparently one of the crucial elements of being able to migrate containers from one physical host to another, as Dmitry pointed out in his post.

Read more at Linux Journal

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November 14, 2018

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Nov 12, 2018

This guide will present a step-by-step guide of how to install and configure Vundle (Vim Bundle) from GitHub, and what issues you may face when installing Vundle. As many of you may know, vim is a console-based text editor that has numerous advanced features. One such feature is that its functionality can be extended and customized using plugins written by other people. Managing these plugins, however, can be rather tedious. Vundle attempts to assist users in managing these plugins for you by providing an interface.

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Personalizing Vim(May 26, 2010)
• Vim 201: An Intermediate Guide to Vim(Nov 27, 2009)
• Vim 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Vim(Nov 21, 2009)
• VIM cheat sheet(Sep 13, 2011)
• Vim / Vi Tutorial(Dec 05, 2008)

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One I completely forgot to post about here, NVIDIA recently released the 415.13 beta driver for Linux.

Released on the 8th of November, it includes a number of interesting fixes, including an issue fixed with WINE where it might crash on recent distribution releases. Nice to see WINE get some focus, since things like this can affect Valve’s Steam Play.

They also fixed an OpenGL issue where conditional rendering was incorrectly affecting mipmap generation. Another OpenGL bug was fixed which caused the upper bounds of floating-point viewports, specified through the ARB_viewport_array extension, to be clipped incorrectly.

There’s also a new X configuration option “HardDPMS” which they disabled by default. This will enable you to put your display to sleep with modesets rather than VESA DPMS (VESA Display Power Management Signaling), possibly fixing some displays that won’t sleep when DPMS is active. NVIDIA say they will eventually enable it by default.

On top of that plus more fixes, they added the current synchronization state for PRIME Displays to nvidia-settings. This latest beta driver also ups the minimum Linux Kernel version to 2.6.9 to 2.6.32, along with a required X.Org xserver version bump to 1.5.

See the full changelog here.

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LF Deep Learning Foundation today announced the first publicly available release of Acumos AI, an open source framework and platform for the training and deployment of AI models.

Created in March, the LF Deep Learning Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation project and supports open source projects for machine learning, deep learning, and AI.

Founding members include Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, ZTE, AT&T, and Nokia.

Acumos AI, whose release version is codenamed Athena, also began in March and includes the participation of about 75 developers, a foundation spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. An updated version is due out in mid-2019, according to a statement provided to VentureBeat.

The first Acumos AI public release can deliver one-click deployment of AI models with Docker or Kubernetes containers, data translation tools, and a graphical user interface for linking multiple AI models together.

Acumos works with AI models created with tools like TensorFlow and scikit-learn, as well as H20.ai.

Other active LF Deep Learning Foundation projects include machine learning platform Angel and Elastic Deep Learning, a project to help cloud service providers make cloud cluster services with frameworks like TensorFlow and PaddlePaddle.

The two projects were added in August by Tencent and Baidu, respectively, a foundation spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

The Acumos AI community will also be able to utilize the AI Marketplace for sharing and downloading models. To seed the marketplace, a $100,000 competition was held earlier this year, with top winners making models that do things like predict the price of a home or determine whether a strain of breast cancer is benign or malignant.

Acumos is the latest tool for quick AI deployment to make its debut in recent weeks. There’s also Horizon, a reinforcement learning platform created by Facebook engineers and researchers, as well as Kubeflow Pipelines from Google Cloud Platform, which also relies on containers for deploying AI.

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4MLinux is an open source and independent distribution of Linux built from scratch and designed to be used as a system rescue Live CD, for watching videos and listening to music, for deploying servers using the inetd daemon, as well as for playing Linux games.

It has been designed from the ground up to be used directly from a CD disc or USB flash drive. However, users can install the distribution to a local disk drive using the built-in installer from the live session.

Distributed as a dual-arch Live CD

This is the main and first edition of the 4MLinux (four M – Maintenance, Multimedia, Miniserver and Mystery). It’s distributed as a single Live CD ISO image of approximately 50MB in size. Supported architectures includes 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (amd64).

Boot options

Two boot modes are available, with default display settings or using the VESA framebuffer. We recommend using only the first one, but if your graphics card is not supported, then you really need to use the second option.

Unfortunately, the Live CD does not boot directly into the graphical environment, as it will first ask users to set up a password for the root (system administrator) account, which will be used to log into the live session.

From the shell prompt, you will need to type the “startx” command in order to enter the graphical desktop, which is comprised of a taskbar located on the bottom edge of the screen, a dock (application launcher) on the upper side of the screen, and a system monitoring widget on the desktop.

Default applications

Default applications include the QupZilla web browser, PathFinder file browser, SMPlayer and MPlayer video players, SMTube YouTube browser, XPaint digital painting software, Clam AntiVirus virus scanner, GParted disk partitioning tool, as well as a handful of board games.

Another interesting feature is the ability to install the LibreOffice office suite, Oracle Virtualbox virtualization software, and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

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This howto will show you how to store your users in LDAP and authenticate some of the services against it. I will not show how to install particular packages, as it is distribution/system dependent. I will focus on “pure” configuration of all components needed to have LDAP authentication/storage of users. The howto assumes somehow, that you are migrating from a regular passwd/shadow authentication, but it is also suitable for people who do it from scratch.

The thing we want to achieve is to have our users stored in LDAP, authenticated against LDAP ( direct or pam ) and have some tool to manage this in a human understandable way. This way we can use all software, which has LDAP support or fallback to PAM LDAP module, which will act as a PAM->LDAP gateway.

Configuring OpenLDAP

OpenLDAP consists of slapd and slurpd daemon. This howto covers one LDAP server without a replication, so we will focus only on slapd. I also assume you installed and initialized your OpenLDAP installation (depends on system/distribution). If so, let’s go to the configuration part.

Read more at HowToForge

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With GCC 9 embarking upon its third stage of development where the focus ships to working on bug/regression fixes in preparation for releasing the GCC 9.1 stable compiler likely around the end of Q1’2019, here is a fresh look at the GCC 9 performance with its latest development code as of this week compared to GCC 8.2.0 stable while using an Intel Core i9 7980XE test system running Ubuntu Linux. For good measure are also fresh results from LLVM Clang 7.0 stable as well as LLVM Clang 8.0 SVN for the latest development state of that competing C/C++ open-source compiler.

As GCC 9 feature development is ending (aside from any new ports that may still be permitted during GCC Stage 3 development), it’s a good time to check in on how this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection is looking on the performance front. Both GCC 8.2 and GCC 9.0.0 20181112 were configured and built in the same manner from the Intel SKylake-X test system running Ubuntu 18.10 x86_64 with the Linux 4.18 kernel.

Clang 7.0 and Clang 8.0 SVN were also tested for reference on how that more liberally licensed compiler stack is performing. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were set to “-O3 -march=native” and maintained the same flags throughout the building and benchmarking of all four compiler stacks.

These compiler benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite. As the GCC 9.1 stable release nears (along with Clang 8.0), there will be more compiler benchmarks on a diverse range of hardware for seeing how the performance pans out while this is just a preliminary look given the shift to the next stage of GCC development.

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Container Linux by CoreOS is an open source software project that provides system administrators and experienced users with a modern and minimal operating system designed for massive server deployments. It is not based on any existing distribution of Linux and features the latest Linux kernel and Docker technologies for enabling warehouse-scale computing with minimum effort as possible.

Great availability, amazing technologies

The product is distributed as a standard ISO image, which can be burned onto a CD disc or written on a USB flash drive in order to boot it from the BIOS of a PC and install the operating system (detailed installation instructions are provided on the project’s homepage).

In addition to the ISO image, which is supported on both 64-bit and 32-bit instruction set architectures, the project can also be booted over network and installed on a local disk via the PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) and iPXE implementations and boot loaders.

Furthermore, it is supported by various cloud providers, including Amazon EC2, GCE, Brightbox and Rackspace, or deployable as a virtual machine on the QEMU, VMware, OpenStack, Eucalyptus and Vagrant virtualization technologies.

Because of its modern internal design, CoreOS uses with up to 50% less RAM (system memory) than any other existing server operating system. In addition, it makes use of the award winning Docker software project to run applications as containers.

Another interesting feature is the active/passive dual-partition scheme, which will make system updates painless and fast, while providing a rollback functionality. Also, it is designed from the ground up to be clustered, even if it runs on a single machine.

Bottom line

Summing up, CoreOS is a great Linux-based operating system for massive server deployments, which can be used by top-notch Internet companies like Twitter, Facebook or Google to run their services at scale with high flexibility.

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