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Before I introduce you to the new SUSE Manager for Retail 3.2 offering, let me walk you through the journey of how SUSE has evolved its offerings for the retail environment.

We have moved away from just an image management paradigm with the legacy SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service offering to a comprehensively managed end-point paradigm with SUSE Manager for Retail.

Legacy SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service

Traditionally the solution SUSE offered for the point of service (POS) environments was SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service, or SLEPOS as we call it.

SLEPOS was a 3-tiered solution, with 3 separate components;

We offered the SLEPOS Admin Server, which was ideally installed in a central location. This was a central point for basic management of the point of service infrastructure. It hosted an LDAP database to store configuration information for the point of service client devices and the branch server. Among other things it also provided the tools for creation and customization of system images, as well as storing of those system images for distribution to the branch servers and the point of service terminals. There was usually 1 Admin Server in the entire environment.

Then the next component was the SLEPOS Branch Server. An ideal environment included 1 Branch Server in the back office of every store, and provided the network boot and system management infrastructure for the point of service terminals.

Finally there were the SLEPOS Clients. These were the customized operating system images for the point of service terminals themselves.

A lot of our current customers, the big retailers, are still using this 3-tiered SLEPOS stack. However, retailers strongly expressed the need to have a unified solution for management of their data center and store infrastructure. Something that will help them optimize their operating costs.

This was a core driver for us to enhance our offering which was targeted to this market, which is why we introduced SUSE Manager into the mix.

SUSE Manager for Retail

What we offer our customers now, is a product which provides them the ability to manage their traditional data center infrastructure and at the same time is optimized to manage the store IT infrastructure (including the servers and point of service terminals).

This product is called SUSE Manager for Retail.

In a nutshell, what we have done is, we have taken the feature-set which SLEPOS Admin and Branch Server had to offer and added those functionalities in SUSE Manager. Effectively, SUSE Manager has been enhanced with a feature set that is relevant and tailored to retailers. Going forward, we will continue to add on top of SUSE Manager’s core features and optimize the product for use in retail environments.

SUSE Manager for Retail is simplified and has only 2 main components:

• A central SUSE Manager Server
• SUSE Manager for Retail Branch Server (which can be installed in the back offices of every store).

The transition

With SUSE Manager for Retail 3.1 we did not completely replace the SLEPOS Admin and Branch servers with SUSE Manager. That full integration has been achieved with SUSE Manager for Retail 3.2.

What we delivered with SUSE Manager for Retail 3.1 was a close integration between traditional SLEPOS and SUSE Manager. We enabled the customers to install the SLEPOS Branch Server and SUSE Manager Proxy on the same host in the store environment -Something which was not available earlier. We packaged them as one product: SUSE Manager for Retail 3.1. With this packaging customers were still required to install SUSE Manager and SLEPOS as separate products.

Today we are we pleased to announce our first fully integrated release, SUSE Manager for Retail 3.2.

SUSE Manager for Retail 3.2

This product delivers best-in-class open source infrastructure management, optimized and tailored specifically for the retail industry. It is designed to help retailers reduce costs, optimize operations and ensure compliance in their environment. It provides a reliable, flexible and open platform for managing point of service and point of sale terminals, kiosks, self-service systems and reverse-vending systems.

The following are the retail optimizations that have been built on top of the core functionalities of SUSE Manager 3.2, to deliver SUSE Manager for Retail 3.2:

• Simple and flexible image building – To help the retailers more quickly build customized images for their POS terminals, thereby saving them time and money. Through the SUSE Manager UI retailers can now setup an image build host and build customized images or leverage pre-build image templates to setup their POS systems.
• Formulas with Forms – To quickly and efficiently setup retail store servers. We are leveraging the forms-based framework of SUSE Manager to configure key services such as DHCP, DNS, PXE, TFTP and FTP, on the store server. The store server could then provide the network boot and systems management infrastructure for the point of service terminals in the store.

The store server can be configured in several different configurations:

• If the store server has a dedicated network interface card and terminals use an isolated internal branch network, then in this configuration, the store server manages the internal network and provides DHCP, DNS, PXE, FTP and TFTP services.
• If the store server shares a network with the terminals, and provides a connection to the central server, then in this configuration the store server is not required to manage a net-work (DHCP and DNS services). Instead it acts as a PXE boot server and provides FTP and TFTP services.

It is important to note that SUSE Manager for Retail 3.2 is built on the latest release of SUSE Manager.

Here is how SUSE Manager for Retail 3.2 will prove beneficial in a retailer’s environment:

• Reduce bandwidth costs, minimize resource needs and ease deployment with the SUSE Manager for Retail Branch Server – This allows the product to easily scale larger environments
• Improve operational efficiencies by providing easy automation of repetitive tasks without the need for advanced scripting skills via re-usable action chains.
• Ensure retailer can meet their business’ compliance requirements, by monitoring and patching devices and container-based workloads to the latest security and patch levels.
• Easily manage complexity with the extended capabilities in our easy to use forms-based UI. This allows administrators to define/model even more complex configurations, helping ensure more consistent and repeatable installations and deployments of those complex retail configurations.

Learn more about SUSE Manager and SUSE Manager for Retail at:

https://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager/

https://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager-retail/

 

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on Monday October 29, 2018 @01:22PM

from the growing-synergy dept.

At the end of August, Valve announced

a new version of Steam Play for Linux that included Proton

, a WINE fork that made many Windows games, including more recent ones ,such as Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3 and Dishonored, playable on Linux. Just two months later, ProtonDB says there are

over 2,600 Windows games that users can play on Linux

, and the number is rapidly growing daily. From a report:

When Valve Software launched Steam Play with Proton, it made it easier for gamers to play Windows games that hadn’t yet been ported to Linux with the click of a button. Not all games may run perfectly on Linux, but that’s also often the case with Windows 10, which can not play older games as well as previous versions of Windows did, even under Compatibility Mode. In only two months, the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600 — more than half of the 5,000 Linux-native games that can be obtained through the Steam store.

“You can’t make a program without broken egos.”

Working…

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News briefs for October 29, 2018.

The first ever Fedora
Appreciation Week will run November 5th to the 11th.
This week-long event takes place during the 15th anniversary of the Fedora
Project and was organized by the Fedora Community Operations team to “to
celebrate efforts of Fedora Project contributors and to say ‘thank you’
to each other.” Go here
to see how to participate.

The Qt Company announced the deprecation of Qbs. The last Qbs release will come out in April 2019, and the company intends to improve support for CMake significantly and eventually switch to CMake for building Qt itself.

The D language front end has finally merged with GCC 9. According to Phoronix,
“The code is merged for GDC including the libphobos library (D run-time
library) and D2 test suite. Adding the D support touches more than three
thousand files (most of which is test suite cases) and 859,714 lines of
code….Yes, the better part of a million new lines.”

A security bug was discovered in systemd last week that can crash a Linux
machine or execute malicious code. The
Register reports that the “maliciously crafted DHCPv6 packets can try to
exploit the programming cockup and arbitrarily change parts of memory in
vulnerable systems, leading to potential code execution. This code could
install malware, spyware, and other nasties, if successful”. The vulnerability
is in the DHCPv6 client of the systemd management suite.

And finally, you’ve likely already heard that IBM yesterday
announced its acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion. Interesting note: Bob
Young, founder of Red Hat, was Linux Journal‘s first editor in chief.

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Open source software isn’t just proliferating within technology infrastructures around the world, it is also creating profound opportunities for people with relevant skills. Organizations of all sizes have reported widening skills gaps in this area. Linux tops the list as the most in-demand open source skill, according to the 2018 Open Source Jobs Report. With this in mind, In this article series, we are taking a closer look at one of the best new ways to gain open source and Linux fluency: the Introduction to Open Source Software Development, Git and Linux training course from The Linux Foundation.

This story is the third in a four-part article series that highlights major aspects of the training course. The first article in the series covered the course’s general introduction to working with open source software, with a focus on such essentials as project collaboration, licensing, legal issues and getting help. The second article covered the course curriculum dedicated to working with Bash and Linux basics.

Working with commands and command-line tools are essential Linux skills, and the course delves into task- and labs-based instruction on these topics. The discussion of major command-line tools is comprehensive and includes lessons on:

• Tools for creating, removing and renaming files and directories

• Locating files with find and locate
• Finding character strings in files using grep
• Substituting strings in files using sed

There is a Labs module that asks you to set the prompt to a current directory and encourages follow up by changing the prompt to any other desired configuration. In addition to being self-paced, the course focuses on performing meaningful tasks rather than simply reading or watching.

Overall, the course contains 43 hands-on lab exercises that will allow you to practice your skills, along with a similar number of quizzes to check your knowledge. It also provides more than 20 videos showing you how to accomplish important tasks.

As you go through these lessons, keep in mind that the online course includes many summary slides, useful lists, graphics, and other resources that can be referenced later. It’s definitely worth setting up a desktop folder and regularly saving screenshots of especially useful topics to a folder for handy reference. For example, here is a slide that summarizes the handy utilities that any user should have in his or her toolbox:

With the groundwork laid for working with the command line and command line tools, the course then comprehensively covers working with Git, including hands-on learning modules. We will explore the course’s approach to this important topic in the next installment in this series.

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Today, Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds two new features to simplify development with AppStream 2.0. You can provision AppStream 2.0 resources using AWS CloudFormation and automate user pool management using new APIs.

With CloudFormation, you can automate creating fleets, deploying stacks, adding and managing user pool users, launching image builders, and creating directory configurations alongside your other AWS resources. To learn how to get started, read AWS CloudFormation support for Amazon AppStream 2.0 resources and API enhancements

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Ubuntu is, by default, one of the best choices for new and general Linux users because of its simplicity, powerful environment and a robust support and the community behind it. There are tons of things to do with Ubuntu. On every Linux distro, the terminal is a big player. It allows you to perform a ton of works and obviously, there are some tasks that you can’t complete with GUI. In the case of Ubuntu, there’s the classic Ubuntu terminal view we all know of and love.

Now, the feel of the terminal is changeable dramatically. The color scheme itself plays a big role. Let’s change the terminal experience of Ubuntu terminal!

Let’s have a closer look at the Ubuntu terminal.

It’s actually the GNOME Terminal. GNOME is a family of software that comes up with a powerful support and a large community. Ubuntu has finally shifted towards GNOME and the terminal is now from GNOME. As it’s a part of GNOME, it already contains a number of predefined color schemes.

Changing the terminal color scheme

Go to Edit >> Preferences.

Open the “Colors” tab.

At first, uncheck the “Use colors from system theme”.

Now, you can enjoy the built-in color schemes.

Here are all the available color schemes.

Black on light yellow

Black on white

Gray on black

Green on black

White on black

Tango light

Tango dark

Solarized light

Solarized dark

Note that you can also change the color of the characters from the “Palette” section. Enjoy the coloring!

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Tomcat is a web server that serves web applications written in Java. Tomcat is a project of Apache Foundation and it is completely open source. You can use Tomcat for free. There are many web servers for running Java web applications such as Glassfish, JBoss etc. Tomcat is one of the most popular Java web server among them.

Your Java web application hosted on Tomcat server uses HTTP protocol by default. The communication between the client and the web server is not encrypted when HTTP protocol is used. So, it’s not secure.

These days, almost all the browsers will warn you when you try to visit HTTP links. It will even show you a red lock in the URL bar. If you want that green lock to appear in the URL bar when someone visits your Java web application hosted on Tomcat web server, you have to enable HTTPS on Tomcat. HTTPS is just the secured version of the HTTP protocol. When HTTPS is enabled, the communication between the client and the web server is encrypted.

An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is used to verify the ownership of the web server the client is connecting to using the HTTPS protocol. You normally buy an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority or CA such as Verisign, DigiCert etc and install it on your web server (in this case the Tomcat web server). You can also generate an SSL certificate yourself and install it on your Tomcat web server. Such certificates are called Self-Signed certificates.

In this article, I will show you how to generate your own SSL certificate or Self-Signed certificate and how to install it on Tomcat web server. Let’s get started.

Before you can install a SSL certificate on your Tomcat web server, you have to generate a Java KeyStore file or JKS file. When you install Apache Tomcat web server, all the required tools to generate a JKS keystore file is also installed. You can use the keytool utility to generate a JKS file on Linux…

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Oct 29, 2018 — by Eric Brown

Ibase’s fanless, Linux-ready “IPPC1x05-RE” industrial panel PCs are available in 15-, 17-, and 19-inch sizes with 6th Gen Core EQ/E CPUs, IP65 front-side protection, dual SATA bays, 2x GbE, and 2x PCIe.

Ibase’s 15-inch (IPPC1505-RE), 17-inch (IPPC1705-RE), and 19-inch (IPPC1905-RE) industrial touch-panel PCs are designed for factory automation, machine automation and other harsh indoor applications. The IP65-protected IPPC1x05-RE systems, which follow earlier IPPC branded panel PCs with Bay Trail and older Core models, are higher-end siblings to the company’s recent OFP series. While the OFP models include 15- and 21-inchers based on an Apollo Lake Pentium N4200 and a 21-inch OFP-2101-PC with a dual-core 7th Gen, “Kaby Lake” Core-U, the new IPPC models offer a choice of Intel 6th Gen “Skylake” chips.

IPPC1505-RE, front and back
(click images to enlarge)

 

The IPPC1x05-RE panel PCs give you a choice of running Windows 7/10 or Linux Kernel 3+ on the quad-core, 2.0GHz/2.8GH Core i7-6822EQ, quad-core 1.9GHz/2.7GHz Core i5-6442EQ, or dual-core, 1.9GHz Core i3-6102E, all with 25W TDPs. The announcement says there’s an option for 7th Gen chips, but no details were supplied on the product pages.

The specs are identical among the three systems except for their screens, which all provide USB-based one-point resistive touch, with 79 percent light transmission and 50,000 hours backlight lifetime:

• IPPC1505-RE — 15-inch, 1024 x 768 pixels, 420 cd/m2, 600:1 ratio, 160/160 view angles
• IPPC1705-RE — 17-inch, 1280 x 1024 pixels, 350 cd/m2, 800:1 ratio, 160/140 view angles
• IPPC1905-RE — 19-inch, 1280 x 1024 pixels, 350 cd/m2, 1000:1 ratio, 170/160 view angles

The IPPC1x05-RE systems ship with 4GB to 32GB RAM (type undisclosed). For storage, you get dual 2.5-inch SATA bays, one of which is populated as a default with a 64GB SSD.

IPPC1905-RE, front and back
(click images to enlarge)

 

Dual GbE ports provide EtherCAT master support, and there’s optional “wireless,” presumably via one several expansion slots. The system provides dual full-size PCIe x8 slots, as well as a full-size mini-PCIe slot with mSATA support. There’s also a storage focused M.2 M-key socket.

The IPPC panel PCs provide 6x USB 3.0 ports, as well as a front-facing USB 2.0 port located at the front bezel. You also get external RS232/422/485 and RS232 ports, and optional 4-in/4-out DIO. To hook up additional displays, the panel PCs provide HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort, and DVI-D ports. Three audio jacks are also available.

The 442 x 377 x 132.8 IPPC systems provide a 12 to 24VDC input via a 3-pin terminal block. The front panel offers IPC65 protection against water and dust, and there’s a 0 to 50°C (SSD) or a 0 to 40°C (HDD) operating range. The systems are available with VESA 75 x75 or 100×100 mounting options and Ibase’s iSMART green technology with EuP/Erp power saving, auto power on/off scheduler, and power resume functions.

Further information

No pricing or availability information was provided for the IPPC panel PCs. More information may be found on Ibase’s IPPC1505-RE, IPPC1705-RE, and IPPC1905-RE product pages.

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By Jack M. Germain

Oct 29, 2018 11:54 AM PT

This story was originally published on Feb. 3, 2018, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

Open source led to a new software development and distribution model that offered an alternative to proprietary software. No single event takes the prize for starting the technology revolution. However, Feb. 3, 1998, is one of the more significant dates.

On that day, Christine Peterson, a futurist and lecturer in the field of nanotechnology, coined the “open source” term at a strategy session in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the release of the Netscape browser source code.

Later that month, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens formed the
Open Source Initiative, an educational and advocacy organization, to lobby for the open source label. Rapid adoption followed, with support from the Free Software Summit that April.

Numerous other events contributed to driving the movement. For instance, Red Hat launched as a start-up in 1993, with the goal of developing its own Linux distribution for enterprise use.

Other noteworthy dates in open source history:

• 1994 — work began on the development of the free database MySQL;
• 1996 — Apache HTTP server started its run to dominance as an open source entity on the Internet;
• 2004 — Canonical released its Debian-based Ubuntu operating system, which brought the Linux desktop to everyday users.

The Free and Open Source movement has achieved successes probably no one dared to dream of when the free software movement began to take shape in the 1980s, noted Max Mehl, program manager of
Free Software Foundation Europe.

“Today, Free Software and Open Source as a synonym are being used in almost every device — from remotes to washing machines, and mobile phones to aircraft and the International Space Station,” he told LinuxInsider.

Indisputable Impact

Large enterprises, even self-declared enemies of FOSS in the past, now recognize that the power of the community and the transparent processes benefit end users and encourage innovation, noted Mehl.

“The concept of Free Software licenses and copyleft, once a legal hack, is universally accepted and legally confirmed, he added.

The open source community has delivered tremendous results, observed Sheng Liang, CEO of
Rancher Labs.

It has impacted the development of mature technologies, such as Linux, Java, Python and PHP, as well as more recent technologies, including cloud, containerization, blockchain and artificial intelligence, he told LinuxInsider.

“Open source technologies form the foundation of the technology infrastructure stack. Open source development has greatly increased the speed of technology innovation,” Liang said.

Perhaps one of open source’s most significant accomplishments is the democratization of technology and the Internet, suggested
Cybric CTO Mike Kail.

The open source model allows global, direct contributions to advancements instead of siloed efforts within corporate boundaries, he told LinuxInsider.

“The LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack was what initially lit the rapidly burning fuse of Internet usage,” Kail recalled. “At least parts of that stack continues to power a high percentage of sites.”

Today, FOSS is almost everywhere. The GNU/Linux operating system (or a variant) powers all supercomputers, a large number of servers and network appliances, and the majority of smartphones, said Italo Vignoli, cofounder of
The Document Foundation, which oversees LibreOffice development.

“FOSS is more reliable, robust, stable and secure than proprietary software, and this represents a huge advantage for the IT infrastructure and for enterprise applications,” he told LinuxInsider.

End of Walled Gardens

Many people have forgotten or do not realize that 20 years ago the software industry was a world of walled gardens, remarked Owen Garrett, head of product at
Nginx. You picked your allegiance — Sun, IBM, SCO, HP, Windows. That choice defined the tools you used and even the types of applications you built.

“Twenty years ago, it was unthinkable that an enterprise organization would build business-critical services on anything other than a commercial, closed-source Unix vendor’s platform,” he told LinuxInsider. “Twenty years forward, the complete opposite is the case.”

Back then, open source started from a much different state than in today’s world. Much of OSS’ efforts went into duplicating and freeing vendor-specific tools and applications, Garrett explained.

“Projects were peppered with arguments about licensing. The default choice when creating a new product for commercial sale was to go closed source. The GNU project, among others, was a power for good in advancing the open source agenda,” he said.

Companies typically found it difficult to fit in with the new approach to software procurement. Switching from commercial to open source products usually meant cutting lose traditional sources of support.

“Corporate leaders grew up in an enterprise environment where someplace within was a procurement officer who established relationships with the sales force at a software company,” noted Tim Mackey, senior technical evangelist at Black Duck Software.
That relationship grew around the support structure for using that commercial software.

With open source, companies have to find new avenues for support, he told LinuxInsider. “If a company decides to replace the proprietary vendor with an open source product or company, the procurement may be 100 percent free, with no guarantees that patches are provided,” for example.

Strings Attached

Far too many people believe that open source technologies are absolutely free, according to Mackey.

They may be without cost, but they are not without obligation, he cautioned.

Perhaps the biggest risk for organizations results from taking a project that appears to meet their needs without checking out the ecosystem.

“The result is they get blindsided. Either the project no longer gets maintained, or the version they are using goes away,” Mackey said.

“OSS still suffers from the infamous ‘free as in beer’ analogy, where many assume that there is truly no cost to acquiring, installing, running and maintaining OSS. The communities still need to do a better job of communicating that,” said Cybric’s Kail.

Business Transformation

In the 20 years since that April 1998 Freeware Summit, the single most significant achievement of open source has been gaining ubiquity, observed Julian Dunn, director of product marketing at
Chef Software.

Today, everyone interacts with open source software. Open source software permeates technology — from the Internet to Web applications and apps on smartphones and computers.

“Nearly all of our Internet-connected gadgets, like smart door knobs or refrigerators, run on open source software at their core,” Dunn told LinuxInsider.

Open source has transformed businesses with an agile and responsive approach, noted Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source at Suse.

Technology trends driven by open source have changed the world, he told LinuxInsider.

“It doesn’t matter what industry you are in. For instance, 3D printing is impacting housing, manufacturing and even healthcare. Big data/analytics/machine learning is impacting retailers, military and media. Mobile is impacting banking, retail and most other industries,” Clark pointed out.

The open source community has grown exponentially. Today, there are hundreds of open source foundations and millions of projects on repositories such as Github. This is helpful for fostering innovation and collaboration, both of which are crucial to the growth of the community, he said.

Business-Critical Contributions

The “free” misnomer does not mean that there is no money to be made from open source software. However, not everyone succeeds with individual projects within the developing business model.

“Open source does not preclude a commercial model. Although many developers contribute in their own time, the world needed more than a collection of hobbyists to achieve greatness. The business community saw the opportunity and obliged,” Nginx’s Garrett said.

The vast majority of OSS contributions are made from employees of commercial organizations. Their companies are the very organizations whose business depends critically on the open source to which their employees contribute, he explained.

Those contributions may be direct, or indirect through sponsorship of foundations. Increasingly, commercial organizations have been releasing well-targeted, internally developed solutions to the community at large as a way of recognizing their employees and giving back to the wider community.

Open source has become the default for new software companies, said Howard Green, vice president of marketing at
Azul Systems.

The default value comes in terms of the technologies used to build and support new products, as well as in terms of the product offerings themselves, he told LinuxInsider.

“Open source technologies thrive when they are used and maintained. Great products flourish, sometimes at almost exponential rates, driven by community adoption and evolution,” Green said.

The way we create software today is different, thanks to the open source movement, noted Stormy Peters, senior manager of Red Hat’s community team.

The way software developers share their work and work together has become much more efficient and effective. Much of that credit goes to the frameworks, best practices and licenses, as well as the communities, she told LinuxInsider.

“For me personally, open source software has created a global community of colleagues and friends that we would never have thought possible,” Peters said. “At DevConf, I had dinner with a group of 15 people that came from countries around the world: Israel, Austria, France, U.S. and Brazil, to name a few. All of them were in Brno, Czech Republic, to collaborate on open source software projects that are making the world a better place.”

Best-of-Breed Tools

Open source has a bright future at the center of technology innovation. It will continue to expand its reach and influence, noted Suse’s Clark.

“As the speed of software development increases, the size of open source projects grow,” he said, “and the services developed scale to global proportions. Open source becomes the only viable method for businesses to contain development costs, outpace the competition, and flourish with business transformation.”

Open source set developer expectations that software should be open by default. Developers now expect to be able to fork and modify most things they work with as a matter of course, according to Jason Thane, cofounder of
General UI.

“They are surprised and even a little suspicious if they can’t. If a useful package is closed, you can bet there is an open alternative being developed to complement it or replace it,” he told LinuxInsider.

Many open source projects are the best-of-breed solutions in their space to a point where there are no non-open source tools that have any meaningful traction, said Kevin Fleming, a member of the CTO office at
Bloomberg.

Examples include TensorFlow, Apache Solr (for enterprise search), Kubernetes and OpenStack, he told LinuxInsider. “Essentially, these open source tools have more market share than any other options by orders of magnitude.”

Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open source technologies. He has written numerous reviews of Linux distros and other open source software.
Email Jack.

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October 29, 2018

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