Linux Blimp

News briefs for November 12, 2018.

The Fedora team
announces that the latest version of the Nest simulator is now available in Fedora as
part of the NeuroFedora initiative. Nest allows computational neuroscientists to “make large scale
computer models of the brain that are needed to investigate among other things, how the brain
processes information”. Nest provides an easy to use Python interface and it can be run on both
laptops and supercomputing clusters.

Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service comes to Android and iOS. According to The
Verge, “The mobile app uses features like VPN support to push your mobile traffic towards the
1.1.1.1 DNS servers and improve speeds. It will also prevent your carrier from tracking your browsing
history and potentially selling it. Cloudflare is promising not to track 1.1.1.1 users or sell ads,
and the company has retained KPMG to perform an annual audit and publish a public report.” You can download it
for Android here.

The Ceph storage project receives a dedicated open-source foundation, hosted by The Linux
Foundation. TechCrunch
quotes Sage Weil, Ceph’s co-creator, project leader, and chief architect at Red Hat for Ceph:
“Today’s launch of the Ceph Foundation is a testament to the strength of a diverse open source
community coming together to address the explosive growth in data storage and services.”

Valve appears to be making its own VR headset. GamingOnLinux
reports that a leaked imgur album shows several photos
of the new hardware with a Valve logo. Valve also is apparently working on new Half-Life
title for VR.

Sparky Linux 4.9 has been released, which celebrates 100 years of Poland’s independence. Sparky 4.9 offers
the LXDE desktop environment and minimal images of MinimalGUI (Openbox) and MinimalCLI (text mode), so
you can “install the base system with a desktop of your choice with a minimal set of applications, via
the Sparky Advanced Installer”. In addition to added packages and updates, this new version has the code name “100”,
commemorating the 100 anniversary of Poland’s
independence, and it provides information about Polish
history and also includes new Poland nature wallpapers.

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Learn how to align your goals for managing and creating open source software with your organization’s business objectives using the tips and proven practices from the TODO Group.

The majority of companies using open source understand its business value, but they may lack the tools to strategically implement an open source program and reap the full rewards. According to a recent survey from The New Stack, “the top three benefits of open source programs are 1) increased awareness of open source, 2) more speed and agility in the development cycle, and 3) better license compliance.”

Running an open source program office involves creating a strategy to help you define and implement your approach as well as measure your progress. The Open Source Guides to the Enterprise, developed by The Linux Foundation in partnership with the TODO Group, offer open source expertise based on years of experience and practice.

The most recent guide, Setting an Open Source Strategy, details the essential steps in creating a strategy and setting you on the path to success. According to the guide, “your open source strategy connects the plans for managing, participating in, and creating open source software with the business objectives that the plans serve. This can open up many opportunities and catalyze innovation.” The guide covers the following topics:

1. Why create a strategy?
2. Your strategy document
3. Approaches to strategy
4. Key considerations
5. Other components
6. Determine ROI
7. Where to invest

The critical first step here is creating and documenting your open source strategy, which will “help you maximize the benefits your organization gets from open source.” At the same time, your detailed strategy can help you avoid difficulties that may arise from mistakes such as choosing the wrong license or improperly maintaining code. According to the guide, this document can also:

• Get leaders excited and involved
• Help obtain buy-in within the company
• Facilitate decision-making in diffuse, multi-departmental organizations
• Help build a healthy community
• Explain your company’s approach to open source and support of its use
• Clarify where your company invests in community-driven, external R&D and where your company will focus on its value added differentiation

“At Salesforce, we have internal documents that we circulate to our engineering team, providing strategic guidance and encouragement around open source. These encourage the creation and use of open source, letting them know in no uncertain terms that the strategic leaders at the company are fully behind it. Additionally, if there are certain kinds of licenses we don’t want engineers using, or other open source guidelines for them, our internal documents need to be explicit,” said Ian Varley, Software Architect at Salesforce and contributor to the guide.

Open source programs help promote an enterprise culture that can make companies more productive, and, according to the guide, a strong strategy document can “help your team understand the business objectives behind your open source program, ensure better decision-making, and minimize risks.”

Learn how to align your goals for managing and creating open source software with your organization’s business objectives using the tips and proven practices in the new guide to Setting an Open Source Strategy. And, check out all 12 Open Source Guides for the Enterprise for more information on achieving success with open source.

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If you’re using Ubuntu, you’re already familiar with the software repository. It’s a HUGE collection of all the necessary tools Ubuntu needs to run. The repository is always kept up-to-date with the latest versions of the software. However, you’re already aware that all the software aren’t present in the repository. There are a number of essential tools that you need to get from other sources. Even after grabbing those apps, you have to make sure that they are up-to-date. For solving this issue, Ubuntu features a great method – PPA.

A PPA (Personal Package Archive) is a special software repository that allows the APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) to automatically grab a specific software from that repository. PPA offers an easier method of getting the latest software without any delay. All you have to do is command “apt” to upgrade your system. Most of the world’s PPAs are hosted on Launchpad. However, there are a number of private PPAs hosted on different sites.

How to add a PPA

At first, find out what PPA you need to add. For adding a PPA, it’s the easiest to use the terminal command. The command uses the following structure –

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:abc/xyz

Let’s have a quick breakdown of each part of the command.

• sudo – Running the command with “root” privilege.
• add-apt-repository – The tool for adding the PPA.
• ppa:abc/xyz – The repository code.

For this example, we’ll be using the uGet official PPA.

Run the following command –

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:plushuang-tw/uget-stable

Installing the software

Now, your system is ready to get your target software. However, make sure that your “apt” repository database is up-to-date with the latest addition of the above PPA.

Install uGet –

Voila! uGet is installed!

Removing the PPA

If you don’t need a PPA anymore, it’s best to remove it from your system.

• Method 1

The best way of removing a PPA is through the command.

Run the following command –

sudo add-apt-repository –remove ppa:plushuang-tw/uget-stable

Don’t forget to update your “apt” database cache –

• Method 2

You can also remove the PPA using the GUI method.

From the menu, search for “software”.

Open Software & Updates.

Open the “Other Software” tab.

Here, you’ll find out all the PPAs you added in your system over the lifetime.

Select the unwanted PPA(s) and hit “Remove”.

When closing, make sure that you reload the software repository database of “apt”.

Voila! PPA is removed!

Enjoy!

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Once described by Microsoft as “a cancer,” the Linux world has become a key focus for Microsoft these days, especially as part of the company’s transformation started shortly after Satya Nadella took over the CEO role from Steve Ballmer.

With Nadella at the helm of the company, the software giant has made it very clear that “Microsoft loves Linux,” and this message has been reiterated pretty much with every single occasion.

At some level, this makes perfect sense, as Microsoft has become more interested in developers, and in their turn, developers are often deeply committed to the Linux ecosystem.

But for a company that stood so firmly against Linux, this is quite a change of mind. And not only that Microsoft likes Linux, but even Steve Ballmer, the former company leader who used the cancer phrase, thinks the open-source world is worth the love.

These days, instead of fighting against Linux, Microsoft wants to make this platform its own ally in a struggle to transform Windows 10 in the operating system for virtually everything and everyone.

Linux now runs on top of Windows 10 thanks to a feature called Windows Subsystem for Linux, and several super-popular distributions are available in the Microsoft Store, including Ubuntu. Microsoft joined forces with quite a lot of Linux companies, and a substantial share of Linux developers are now using Windows 10 thanks to the improvements mentioned above.

However, Windows 10 is far from becoming the operating system for everyone, as Microsoft itself hopes. And the most recent blunders that the software giant produced on its own show once again that an alternative to Windows 10 does exist, and that alternative is Linux.

Sure, many people think switching to Apple is the right way to go given the somewhat more user-friendly approach, but the overall costs of this transition is what pushes more people to Linux. Apple continues to build devices that are way too expensive for a significant share of computer users, so it’s either Windows or Linux for many out there.

Ubuntu is now available for Windows 10 users from the Microsoft Store

One of those blunders that made some users look beyond Windows is the October 2018 Update fiasco. Launched on October 2 with much fanfare, Windows 10 October 2018 Update, also referred to as version 1809, was pulled only a few days later after Microsoft discovered a critical bug which might have caused the removal of user files stored in libraries.

The next few weeks were all about further bugs discovered in Windows 10 version 1809, and this update eventually turned out to be one of the buggiest releases in a long time.

As a result, I’ve seen quite a lot of people praising the world of Linux, and some of our readers told me this is something you don’t see happening on distributions like Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Of course, there’s no flawless operating system out there, but for many users, the Windows 10 version 1809 fiasco was just too much to continue using Microsoft products.

Statistics, however, don’t seem to indicate that an en-masse migration to Linux is happening right now, though there’s actually a chance that more users are actually exploring such a switch in the coming months. Linux isn’t exactly the right operating system for everyone, as it’s the case of gamers, for instance, but on the other hand, it serves quite a wide array of purposes with advanced functionality you don’t find on Windows.

Getting in touch with users is always the best way to receive feedback on a certain product, service, or trend, and because Microsoft has such a hard time getting Windows right, you are definitely the ones that should help guide the company towards its final goal of making Windows the best OS for everyone.

Why did you give up on Windows and switched to Linux? What does Microsoft need to do to win you back? Is there any Linux feature you’d want to see on Windows?

Let us and Microsoft know what you think in the box below.

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Robolinux LXDE is an open source, freely distributed, low on resources and extremely fast computer operating system derived from the award-winning Debian GNU/Linux distribution and built around the lightweight LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) graphical desktop environment. The LXDE edition of Robolinux promises ultra fast boot times and requires only 66 MB of RAM to boot (on the 32-bit flavor).

Distributed as 64-bit and 32-bit Live DVDs

The LXDE edition of Robolinux is available for download as two Live DVD ISO images, one for each of the supported hardware platforms, 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (i386). Users can write the ISO images to either USB flash drives or DVD discs, as they have approximately 1.5 GB in size each.

From the boot menu of the Live DVD ISO images, the user can start the live system with normal configuration or install the distribution on their computers, replacing or alongside an existing operating system.

LXDE loads really fast, looks traditional

As mentioned, this Robolinux flavor is built around the LXDE desktop environment, which loads really fast and looks traditional, comprised of a single taskbar (panel) located on the bottom edge of the screen, from where users can access the main menu and browser installed apps, launch frequently used programs, interact with running applications, as well as to cycle between virtual workspaces and access essential system functions or apps that reside in the system tray area.

Comes pre-loaded with a great software selection

With Robolinux LXDE, users will be able to download torrent files using Deluge, browse the Internet with Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, chat with friends and family using Pidgin or Skype, send/receive emails or stay informed with the latest news articles using Mozilla Thunderbird, edit office documents with LibreOffice, view and organize photos with Shotwell, edit images with GIMP, listen to music using Audacious or Banshee, or view movies with VLC Media Player.

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As an IT manager at an enterprise company, you’ve done the research and become convinced that software-defined storage (SDS) is the only storage approach that can handle today’s data explosion. And now you’re faced with helping decide which SDS solution is right for your company.

It’s a good time to stop and ask, “What is the value of making the switch to this particular vendor, rather than its competitor X?” The only right answer is that the vendor has more experience and offers more services and capabilities than the others—to alleviate the IT burden and help you accomplish more without hiring more staff.

Suppose you’ve decided to go with open source. You could get the free version of Ceph, today’s most popular open source distributed storage solution. Free is hard to beat in up-front value, but then the real challenge is finding out whether your team can manage and maintain the solution without any structured support or built-in integration to your existing infrastructure. That no-cost solution can quickly become extremely expensive in the time and effort you spend to run it.

On the other hand, there’s SUSE Enterprise Storage. Based on the same popular Ceph technology, it comes with all the powerful capabilities of the free open source solution but also includes a wealth of built-in enterprise support and features that simplify and streamline operation and management for your IT team.

Robust features save you time and money

SUSE Enterprise Storage delivers a highly scalable and resilient storage environment with a single unified SDS cluster that provides applications with object, block and file system storage capabilities. With its distributed storage cluster, it offers unlimited scalability to accommodate hundreds of terabytes to petabytes and beyond.

Its self-healing and self-managing features can keep applications available and performing after hardware failures by automatically rearranging resources as needed to optimize system performance. Consider this: a good rule of thumb for conventional block storage is that it requires around one storage admin per 500 TB of data. Because a Ceph cluster manages itself, a Ceph storage admin can easily administer as much as 3-4 PB of data. Productivity improves and your team is freed up for projects that help build the business.

Another interesting money-saving feature of SUSE Enterprise Storage is its per-node pricing model, versus the typical per-gigabyte pricing. Now you don’t have to request more budget for adding more data or using larger nodes or drives.

The storage solution that evolves with your organization

Thanks to our early adoption of SDS and leadership in the industry, SUSE continues to improve SUSE Enterprise Storage to meet evolving storage requirements. We are committed to making it faster, easier and even more manageable with every release. Today, SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.5 incorporates numerous performance and stability enhancements including Ceph BlueStore, a new native backend that increases performance by a factor of two or more. Enhancements to ease of use and management, further reducing costs, and increasing operational efficiencies through OpenStack integration and openATTIC enhancements (Note: openATTIC concepts and technology provide the basis for a new default management and monitoring dashboard for Ceph Mimic). Also included is production support for CIFS/Samba and industry first support for heterogeneous Ceph deployments – Non SUSE RBD and CephFS Clients. Security has been enhanced with embedded support of AppArmor. AppArmor or “Application Armor” is a Linux kernel security module that will allow the storage administrator to granularly select the actions that can be made within the Ceph Cluster. There is extensive support for localization and translation of documentation. And technology previews include System Event notifications through email and text, and Enhanced data protection and disaster recovery capabilities with the support for asynchronous iSCSI replication.

See how your peers are managing their data with SUSE

One of the most convincing arguments for any vendor or solution is to see how your peers and competitors are using it to their advantage. One New York-based police department used SUSE Enterprise Storage to significantly increase public safety because the super-scalable solution could accommodate huge data streams from new body cameras. Credit-services guru Experian kept control of its rapid spike in data volumes with SUSE Enterprise Storage and saw a dramatic increase in system performance. Also, an IT services provider and an arts-oriented school in the Netherlands both used our SDS solution to manage their growing data stores while lowering their total cost of ownership.

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The majority of companies using open source understand its business value, but they may lack the tools to strategically implement an open source program and reap the full rewards. According to a recent survey from The New Stack, “the top three benefits of open source programs are 1) increased awareness of open source, 2) more speed and agility in the development cycle, and 3) better license compliance.”

Running an open source program office involves creating a strategy to help you define and implement your approach as well as measure your progress. The Open Source Guides to the Enterprise, developed by The Linux Foundation in partnership with the TODO Group, offer open source expertise based on years of experience and practice.

The most recent guide, Setting an Open Source Strategy, details the essential steps in creating a strategy and setting you on the path to success. According to the guide, “your open source strategy connects the plans for managing, participating in, and creating open source software with the business objectives that the plans serve. This can open up many opportunities and catalyze innovation.” The guide covers the following topics:

1. Why create a strategy?
2. Your strategy document
3. Approaches to strategy
4. Key considerations
5. Other components
6. Determine ROI
7. Where to invest

The critical first step here is creating and documenting your open source strategy, which will “help you maximize the benefits your organization gets from open source.” At the same time, your detailed strategy can help you avoid difficulties that may arise from mistakes such as choosing the wrong license or improperly maintaining code. According to the guide, this document can also:

• Get leaders excited and involved
• Help obtain buy-in within the company
• Facilitate decision-making in diffuse, multi-departmental organizations
• Help build a healthy community
• Explain your company’s approach to open source and support of its use
• Clarify where your company invests in community-driven, external R&D and where your company will focus on its value added differentiation

“At Salesforce, we have internal documents that we circulate to our engineering team, providing strategic guidance and encouragement around open source. These encourage the creation and use of open source, letting them know in no uncertain terms that the strategic leaders at the company are fully behind it. Additionally, if there are certain kinds of licenses we don’t want engineers using, or other open source guidelines for them, our internal documents need to be explicit,” said Ian Varley, Software Architect at Salesforce and contributor to the guide.

Open source programs help promote an enterprise culture that can make companies more productive, and, according to the guide, a strong strategy document can “help your team understand the business objectives behind your open source program, ensure better decision-making, and minimize risks.”

Learn how to align your goals for managing and creating open source software with your organization’s business objectives using the tips and proven practices in the new guide to Setting an Open Source Strategy. And, check out all 12 Open Source Guides for the Enterprise for more information on achieving success with open source.

This article originally appeared on The Linux Foundation

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Posted On: Nov 8, 2018

Amazon Inspector now offers agentless network assessments with the ‘Network Reachability’ rules package that identifies ports and services on your Amazon EC2 instances that are accessible from outside your VPC. With just a few clicks in the Inspector console, you can analyze the network configuration of your AWS account to identify the resources accessible from the internet or private networks like VPN, Direct Connect, or a peered VPC.

An Amazon Inspector assessment using the network reachability rules package helps you validate that your AWS network configurations are working as you expect. Assessments generate detailed findings that show you accessible ports on your EC2 instances along with the network configurations that allow access to these ports, to help you easily restrict access as originally intended. The network reachability rules package uses the latest technology from AWS’s Provable Security initiative, which is a suite of AWS technologies that uses automated reasoning. The agentless assessment analyzes your AWS network configurations including Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), security groups, network access control lists (ACLs), and route tables, to find accessible ports.

You can install the Inspector Agent on your EC2 instances to get additional information when using the network reachability rules package. Findings are enhanced with information that identifies the processes listening on accessible ports. By using an Inspector host assessment rules package, like Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), you will also get information about vulnerabilities on the Amazon EC2 instances. This creates a more complete view of potential security risks by showing possible access paths to the EC2 instances that host your applications as well as vulnerabilities and insecure configurations in those instances.

Amazon Inspector is available in the following eleven regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and AWS GovCloud (US). The network reachability rules package for Inspector assessments is available in all of these regions except AWS GovCloud (US).

To learn more about Amazon Inspector or to start your free trial, please visit Amazon Inspector.

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Different types of commands are needed to run from the terminal in Linux. Sometimes we need to run multiple commands at a time where the commands can depend on each other or not. Running multiple commands at once is called command chaining. Many types of operators can be used for command chaining for different purposes. How you can run two or more commands by using most commonly used operators is shown in this tutorial.

pipe(|) operator is used to run two or more related commands at a time. The input of the next command will be the output of the previous command. So, the success of each command depends on the success of earlier command without first command. In the following command, the first command, ls will find out the list of files and folders of the current location and send the output as input for the second command, wc. It will print the total number of lines, words, and characters based on the input data.

Semicolon (;) Operator

Semicolon(;) operator is used to running two or more unrelated commands at a time. This means that the output of each command is not dependent on other commands. In the following example, three types of commands are combined together and the failure of each command will not create an effect on the output of other commands. The first command will print the content of a file, the second command will make a directory and the third command will change the current directory.

$ cat myfile.txt ; mkdir newdir ; cd Desktop

Logical AND (&&) operator

The commands which run by Logical AND (&&) are related with each other like pipe (|) command. So, if the previous command will not execute successfully then the next commands will not work. In the following example, two commands, mkdir, and rmdir combined by && operators. So, it mkdir command is failed to execute successfully then rmdir command will not execute. According to the output of ls command, myDir directory already exists in the current location. So the first command will not execute and for this second command will not execute also.

$ ls
$ mkdir myDir && rmdir temp
$ ls

Logical OR (||) operator

Logical OR (||) operator is the opposite of the Logical AND (&&) operator. The next command will execute if the previous command fails to execute. Three cat commands are combined with OR (||) operator in the following example. When you will run the command, first of all, it will try to display the content of cat.txt file. If no such file exists in the current location then it will try to execute the next command. According to the output, bird.txt file exists in the current location and the content of this file is displayed.

$ cat cat.txt || cat dog.txt || cat bird.txt

Multiple commands with multiple operators

You can use multiple operators to run multiple commands at a time. In the following example, three commands are combined with OR (||) and AND (&&) operators. After running the command, first of all, it will change the current directory to newdir if the directory exists. If this command fails then it will create the directory by executing the second command and print the message, “directory is created.” According to the output, newdir directory not exist in the current location. So, the error message is displayed and the directory is created later.

$ cd newdir || mkdir newdir && echo “directory is created”

Combination operator {}

Two or more commands can be combined using this operator and if the execution of the first command fails then the second command will not execute. In the following example, OR, AND and combination operators are used together. First commands will check the temp directory is exist in the current location or not. If the first command fails then it will create a temp directory and print a message. The last command will show the current directory list.

$ [ -d temp ] || { mkdir temp; echo temp directory is created now.; } && ls

Precedence operator ()

You can use this operator for grouping the commands at the time of execution. Here, each group will work as a single task. In the following example, two command groups are defined and if the first group fails to execute then the second group will execute.

$ (cd temp && ls -a) || (mkdir temp && ls)

Conclusion

This tutorial explained the mostly used operators for running multiple commands in Linux. But there are many others operators exist in bash which are used to run two or more commands together. These are ampersand (&), redirection (<,>,>>), Logical NOT (!), Combination ({}) etc.

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