Linux Blimp

Before we talk about new features and project news I’d like to send a huge thank you to all the people who support our project. Many thanks to our donors, our sponsors, our patrons and all the people who are helping us. I’d also like to say we’ve had a lot of fun working on developing Linux Mint lately and we’re excited to share the news with you.

Release schedule

We will be working to get Linux Mint 19.1 out for Christmas this year, with all three editions released at the same time and the upgrade paths open before the holiday season.

Patreon

Following the many requests we received to look into an alternative to Paypal, we’re happy to announce Linux Mint is now on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint.

Our project received 33 pledges so far and we decided to use this service to help support Timeshift, a project which is very important to us and adds significant value to Linux Mint.

Mint-Y

Joseph Mccullar continued to improve the Mint-Y theme. Through a series of subtle changes he managed to dramatically increase the theme’s contrast.

The screenshot below shows the Xed text editor using the Mint-Y theme as it was in Mint 19 (on the left), and using the Mint-Y theme with Joseph’s changes (on the right):

The difference is immediately noticeable when the theme is applied on the entire desktop. Labels look sharp and stand out on top of their backgrounds. So do the icons which now look darker than before.

The changes also make it easier to visually identify the focused window:

In the above screenshot, the terminal is focused and its titlebar label is darker than in the other windows. This contrast is much more noticeable with Joseph’s changes (below the red line) than before (above the red line).

Status icons

Linux Mint 19 featured monochrome status icons. Although these icons looked nice on dark panels they didn’t work well in white context menus or in cases where the panel background color was changed by the user.

To tackle this issue, Linux Mint 19.1 will ship with support for symbolic icons in Redshift, mate-volume-control-applet, onboard and network-manager-applet.

Xapp

Stephen Collins added an icon chooser to the XApp library.

The icon chooser provides a dialog and a button and will make it easier for our applications to select themed icons and/or icon paths.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon 4.0 will look more modern thanks to a new panel layout. Whether you enjoy the new look or prefer the old one, we want everyone to feel at home in their operating system, so you’ll have the option to embrace the change or to click a button to make Cinnamon look just like it did before.

The idea of a larger and darker panel had been in the roadmap for a while.

Within our team, Jason Hicks and Lars Mueller (Cobinja) maintained two of the most successful 3rd party Cinnamon applets, respectively “Icing Task Manager” and “CobiWindowList”, two attempts at implementing a window list with app grouping and window previews, a feature which had become the norm in other major desktop operating systems, whether it was in the form of a dock (in Mac OS), a panel (in Windows) or a sidebar (in Ubuntu).

And recently German Franco had caught our attention on the need to use strict icon sizes to guarantee icons looked crisp rather than blurry.

We talked about all of this and Niko Krause, Joseph, Jason and I started working on a new panel layout for Cinnamon. We forked “Icing Task Manager” and integrated it into Cinnamon itself. That new applet received a lot of attention, many changes and eventually replaced the traditional window list and the panel launchers in the default Cinnamon panel.

Users were given the ability to define a different icon size for each of the three panel zones (left, center and right for horizontal panels, or top, center and bottom for vertical ones). Each panel zone can now have a crisp icon size such as 16, 22, 24, 32, 48 or 64px or it can be made to scale either exactly (to fit the panel size) or optimally (to scale down to the largest crisp icon size which fits in the panel).

Mint-Y-Dark was adapted slightly to look even more awesome and is now the default Cinnamon theme in Linux Mint.

By default, Cinnamon will feature a dark large 40px panel, where icons look crisp everywhere, and where they scale in the left and center zones but are restricted to 24px on the right (where we place the system tray and status icons).

This new look, along with the new workflow defined by the grouped window list, make Cinnamon feel much more modern than before.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new layout, we’re really thrilled with it, and if you don’t that’s OK too. We made sure everyone would be happy.

As you go through the “First Steps” section of the Linux Mint 19.1 welcome screen, you’ll be asked to choose your favorite desktop layout:

With a click of a button you’ll be able to switch back and forth between old and new and choose whichever default look pleases you the most.

Update Manager

Support for mainline kernels was added to the Update Manager. Thanks to “gm10” for implementing this.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Donations in September:

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Source

MySQL Replication allows you to synchronize slave copies of a MySQL server. You can then use the slave to perform backups and a recovery option if the master should go offline for any reason. MySQL needs to be installed on both servers.

Install MySQL on both servers:

yum install -y mysql-server mysql-client mysql-devel

Edit /etc/my.cnf on both servers and set a unique numerical server id(any number is fine as long as they are not the same):

server-id = 1

Configure MySQL Replication On The Master

On the master ensure a bin log is set in /etc/my.cnf

log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log

Restart mysql

service mysqld restart

Connect o mysql on the master

mysql -u root -p

Grant privileges to the slave

GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO ‘slave’@’%’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Load the new privileges

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Lock the MySQL master so no new updates can be written while you are creating the slave

FLUSH TABLE WITH READ LOCK;

Get the current master status

SHOW MASTER STATUS;

This will return a similar result to this:

mysql> SHOW MASTER STATUS;
+——————+———-+————–+——————+
| File | Position | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB |
+——————+———-+————–+——————+
| mysql-bin.000001 | 107 | | |
+——————+———-+————–+——————+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

This is the position the slave will be on, save this information for later. You will need to keep the mysql client open on the master. If you close it the read lock will stop and will cause replication issues when trying to sync it.

Open a new ssh client and dump the databases

mysqldump -u root -p –all-databases > all.sql

If it is particularly large mysql server, you can rsync all of /var/lib/mysql

Once the copy has completed go ahead and type the following on the MySQL master:

UNLOCK TABLES;

Go ahead and quit on the master

Configure MySQL Replication On The Slave

Import the databases on the slave

mysql < all.sql

You should also enabled the server-id in /etc/my.cnf and restart it

Once it has been restarted and the databases have been imported. You can setup the replication with the following with the following command in the mysql client:

CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST=’IP ADDRESS OF MASTER’,MASTER_USER=’slave’, MASTER_PASSWORD=’password’, MASTER_LOG_FILE=’mysql-bin.000001′, MASTER_LOG_POS= 107;

Change MASTER_LOG_FILE and MASTER_LOG_POS to the values you got earlier from the master. Once you have entered the above command go ahead and start the slave:

START SLAVE;

To check current slave status to

SHOW SLAVE STATUS;

This is a basic Master-Slave Mysql replication configuration.

Apr 29, 2017LinuxAdmin.io

Source

You can now use the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Command Line Interface (Amazon ECS-CLI) to create AWS secrets for your private registry credentials.

Previously, in order to use the ECS-CLI to run tasks that used images from a private registry, you had to first create AWS Secrets for your registry credentials.

Now you can provide the ECS-CLI with an input file that includes the the registry names and associated credentials, and the ECS-CLI will create the AWS Secrets as well as an IAM role for you that can be used by ECS to access the secrets.

To learn more about how ECS-CLI supports creating AWS secrets for private registry credentials, read our documentation.To see where ECS is available, visit our region table.

Source

Apache Kafka is a data streaming platform responsible for streaming data from a number of sources to a lot of targets

. The sources are also called producers. The data produced is needed by a completely different group called consumers for various purposes. Kafka is the layer that sits between the producers and consumers and aggregates the data into a usable pipeline. Also Kafka itself is a distributed platform, so the Kafka layer is composed of various servers running a kafka, these servers or nodes are hence known as Kafka

Brokers.

That overview is a bit in the abstract so let’s ground it in a real-world scenario, imagine you need to monitor several web servers. Each running its own website, and new logs are constantly being generated in each one of them every second of the day. On top of that there are a number of email servers that you need to monitor as well.

You may need to store that data for record keeping and billing purposes, which is a batch job that doesn’t require immediate attention. You might want to run analytics on the data to make decisions in real-time which requires accurate and immediate input of data. Suddenly you find yourself in the need for streamlining the data in a sensible way for all the various needs. Kafka acts as that layer of abstraction to which multiple sources can publish different streams of data and a given consumer can subscribe to the streams it finds relevant. Kafka will make sure that the data is well-ordered. It is the internals of Kafka that we need to understand before we get to the topic of Partitioning and Keys.

Kafka Topics are like tables of a database. Each topic consists of data from a particular source of a particular type. For example, your cluster’s health can be a topic consisting of CPU and memory utilization information. Similarly, incoming traffic to across the cluster can be another topic.

Kafka is designed to be horizontally scalable. That is to say, a single instance of Kafka consists of multiple Kafka brokers running across multiple nodes, each can handle streams of data parallel to the other. Even if a few of the nodes fail your data pipeline can continue to function. A particular topic can then be split into a number of partitions. This partitioning is one of the crucial factors behind the horizontal scalability of Kafka.

Multiple producers, data sources for a given topic, can write to that topic simultaneously because each writes to a different partition, at any given point. Now, usually data is assigned to a partition randomly, unless we provide it with a key.

Partitioning and Ordering

Just to recap, producers are writing data to a given topic. That topic is actually split into multiple partitions. And each partition lives independently of the others, even for a given topic. This can lead to a lot of confusion when the ordering to data matters. Maybe you need your data in a chronological order but having multiple partitions for your datastream doesn’t guarantee perfect ordering.

You can use only a single partition per topic, but that defeats the whole purpose of Kafka’s distributed architecture. So we need some other solution.

Keys for Partitions

Data from a producer are sent to partitions randomly, as we mentioned before. Messages being the actual chunks of data. What producers can do besides just sending messages is to add a key that goes along with it.

All the messages that come with the specific key will go to the same partition. So, for example, a user’s activity can be tracked chronologically if that user’s data is tagged with a key and so it always end up in one partition. Let’s call this partition p0 and the user u0.

Partition p0 will always pick up the u0 related messages because that key tie them together. But that doesn’t mean that p0 is only tied up with that. It can also take up messages from u1 and u2 if it has the capacity to do so. Similarly, other partitions can consume data from other users.

The point that a given user’s data isn’t spread across different partition ensuring chronological ordering for that user. However, the overall topic of user data, can still leverage the distributed architecture of Apache Kafka.

Conclusion

While distributed systems like Kafka solve some older problems like lack of scalability or having single a point of failure. They come with a set of problems that are unique to their own design. Anticipating these problems is an essential job of any system architect. Not only that, sometimes you really have to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the new problems are a worthy trade-off for getting rid of the older ones. Ordering and synchronization are just the tip of the iceberg.

Hopefully, articles like these and the official documentation can help you along the way.

Source

Google Chrome is the most widely used web browser in the world. It is fast, easy to use and secure browser built for the modern web.

Chrome is not an open source browser and it is not included in the CentOS repositories. It is based on Chromium, an open-source browser which is available in the EPEL repositories.

This tutorial teaches how to install Google Chrome web browser on CentOS 7. The same instructions apply for any RHEL based distribution, including Fedora and Scientific Linux.

Prerequisites

Before continuing with this tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges.

Installing Google Chrome on CentOS

Follow the steps listed below to install Google Chrome on your CentOS system:

1. Start by opening your terminal and download the latest Google Chrome .rpm package with following wget command:

   wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

2. Once the file is downloaded, install Google Chrome on your CentOS 7 system by typing:

   sudo yum localinstall google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

   The command above will prompt you to enter your user password and then it will install Chrome and all other required packages.

Starting Google Chrome

Now that you have Google Chrome installed on your CentOS system you can start it either from the command line by typing google-chrome & or by clicking on the Google Chrome icon (Applications -> Internet -> Google Chrome):

When you start Google Chrome for the first time, a window like the following will appear asking if you want to make Google Chrome your default browser and to send usage statistic and crash reports to Google:

Select according to your preference, and click OK to proceed.

Google Chrome will open and you’ll see the default Chrome welcome page.

At this point, you have Chrome installed on your CentOS machine. You can sign-in to Chrome with your Google Account to sync your bookmarks, history, passwords and other settings on all your devices.

Updating Google Chrome

During the installation process the official Google repository will be added to your system. You can use the cat command to verify the file contents:

cat /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo[google-chrome]
name=google-chrome
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

This ensures that your Google Chrome installation will be updated automatically when a new version is released through your desktop standard Software Update tool.

Conclusion

In this tutorial we’ve shown you how to install Google Chrome on your CentOS 7 desktop machine. If you’ve previously used a different browser, like Firefox or Opera, you can import your bookmarks and settings into Chrome.

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Lanner’s “NCA-1515” secure network appliance is equipped with an Atom C3000 SoC, 2x mini-PCIe, M.2 with Nano-SIM, and up to 8x GbE ports with one-pair bypass and optional SFP.

Lanner has launched a security-oriented NCA-1515 network appliance with a variety of networking and storage options. The 231 x 200 x 44mm desktop appliance features an Intel Atom C3000 “Denverton” SoC and is designed for vCPE/uCPE and edge security applications.

Other desktop network appliances based on the Atom C3000 include Nexcom’s vDNA 1160, Advantech’s FWA-1012VC, Axiomtek’s NA362, and Aaeon’s FWS-7360 and FWS-2360.

NCA-1515, front and back
(click images to enlarge)

 

Unlike most of these competitors, the NCA-1515 lacks support for the higher-end 12- and 16-core Atom C3000 models, limiting you to the octa-core C3708, the quad-core C3508, and the dual-core C3308, with clock rates ranging between 1.5GHz and 2.0GHz. No OS support is listed, but Linux is almost certainly supported.

Like most of its rivals, the NCA-1515 supports Intel AES-NI and Intel QuickAssist Technology (Intel QAT), featuring accelerated symmetric encryption and authentication, asymmetric encryption, digital signatures, RSA, DH, ECC, and lossless data compression. Paired with the Atom C3000, QuickAssist “greatly boosts network responsiveness and security by distributing processing power to more critical applications and by offloading computationally intensive compression and encryption/decryption tasks,” says Lanner. The system also provides a secure boot mechanism, support for TPM 2.0, and a Kensington lock for physical device security.

Unlike the vDNA 1160, NA362, and FWS-7360, there are no 10GbE ports. All four models have a bank of 4x MAC- and copper-based Gigabit Ethernet ports. Two of these models feature one-pair bypass. One adds two more copper GbE and two more optical SFP GbE ports (with dedicated LEDs) via an Intel i350 server adapter PCIe board. The other adds only the pair of SFP ports.

The three configurations are:

• 6x GbE RJ45 with 1 pair Gen3 bypass; 2x GbE SFP
• 4x GbE RJ45 with 1 pair Gen3 bypass; 2x GbE SFP
• 4x GbE RJ45 without bypass

You can load up to 32GB of 2400/2133MHz DDR4 RAM with ECC, and there’s a standard allotment of 8GB eMMC. There’s also an option for adding a 2.5-inch SATA bay.

Simplified (left) and full detail views of the NCA-1515
(click images to enlarge)

 

There are plenty of options for wireless. You get dual mini-PCIe slots (PCIe/USB2.0), as well as an M.2 B-key 2242 slot that is linked to dual Nano-SIM slots for adding cellular capability.

The NCA-1515 is further equipped with 2x USB 2.0 ports, an RJ45 console port, and an LOM (Lights Out Management) remote access port with an OPMA (Open Platform Management Architecture) slot. A watchdog, RTC, and LEDs are also onboard.

The system has a 12V DC input jack with power and reset buttons and, depending on the SKU, a 36W or 60W adapter. There’s a passive heatsink and system cooling fan that together support a 0 to 40°C range.

Further information

No pricing or availability information was provided for the NCA-1515. More information may be found on Lanner’s NCA-1515 product page.

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October 30, 2018

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December is coming, which means one of my favorite holidays, Christmas, is fairly imminent. While I enjoy spending time with family to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, I’d be lying if I said I don’t like getting presents. Heck, I really enjoy giving gifts too.

Not all Christmas gifts need to be physical — sometimes a Linux distribution can be equally rewarding! Case in point, today, we learn Linux Mint 19.1 — which is named “Tessa” — will be released around Christmastime. In addition, the Mint developers have launched an official Patreon account as a new way to get funding from users. More importantly, there are some significant upcoming improvements to the Cinnamon desktop environment.

“Following the many requests we received to look into an alternative to Paypal, we’re happy to announce Linux Mint is now on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/linux_mint. Our project received 33 pledges so far and we decided to use this service to help support Timeshift, a project which is very important to us and adds significant value to Linux Mint,” says Clement Lefebvre.

ALSO READ: IBM gobbles up open source and Linux darling Red Hat in $34 billion deal

Lefebvre further says, “Cinnamon 4.0 will look more modern thanks to a new panel layout. Whether you enjoy the new look or prefer the old one, we want everyone to feel at home in their operating system, so you’ll have the option to embrace the change or to click a button to make Cinnamon look just like it did before. The idea of a larger and darker panel had been in the roadmap for a while.”

To learn more about upcoming Linux Mint changes, you can read the official blog post here. Are you excited for a holiday season full of Linux Mint goodness? Please tell me your thoughts in the comments below

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Last updated October 18, 2018

A couple days ago, Lucas Holt announced the release of MidnightBSD 1.0. Let’s take a quick look at what is included in this new release.

What is MidnightBSD?

MidnightBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. Lucas created MightnightBSD to be an option for desktop users and for BSD newbies. He wanted to create something that would allow people to quickly get a desktop experience on BSD. He believed that other options had too much of a focus on the server market.

What is in MidnightBSD 1.0?

According to the release notes, most of the work in 1.0 went towards updating the base system, improving the package manager and updating tools. The new release is compatible with FreeBSD 10-Stable.

Mports (MidnightBSD’s package management system) has been upgraded to support installing multiple packages with one command. The mport upgrade command has been fixed. Mports now tracks deprecated and expired packages. A new package format was also introduced.

Other changes include:

• ZFS is now supported as a boot file system. Previously, ZFS could only be used for additional storage.
• Support for NVME SSDs
• AMD Ryzen and Radeon support have been improved.
• Intel, Broadcom, and other drivers updated.
• bhyve support has been ported from FreeBSD
• The sensors framework was removed because it was causing locking issues.
• Sudo was removed and replaced with doas from OpenBSD.
• Added support for Microsoft hyper-v

Before you upgrade…

If you are a current MidnightBSD user or are thinking of trying out the new release, it would be a good idea to wait. Lucas is currently rebuilding packages to support the new package format and tooling. He also plans to upgrade packages and ports for the desktop environment over the next couple of months. He is currently working on porting Firefox 52 ESR because it is the last release that does not require Rust. He also hopes to get a newer version of Chromium ported to MidnightBSD. I would recommend keeping an eye on the MidnightBSD Twitter feed.

What happened to 0.9?

You might notice that the previous release of MidnightBSD was 0.8.6. Now, you might be wondering “Why the jump to 1.0”? According to Lucas, he ran into several issues while developing 0.9. In fact, he restarted it several times. He ending up taking CURRENT in a different direction than the 0.9 branch and it became 1.0. Some packages also had an issue with the 0.* numbering system.

Help Needed

Currently, the MidnightBSD project is the work of pretty much one guy, Lucas Holt. This is the main reason why development has been slow. If you are interested in helping out, you can contact him on Twitter.

In the release announcement video. Lucas said that he had encountered problems with upstream projects accepting patches. They seem to think that MidnightBSD is too small. This often means that he has to port an application from scratch.

Thoughts

I have a thing for the underdog. Of all the BSDs that I have interacted with, that monicker fits MidnightBSD the most. One guy trying to create an easy desktop experience. Currently, there is only one other BSD trying to do something similar: Project Trident. I think that this is a real barrier to BSDs success. Linux succeeds because people can quickly and easily install it. Hopefully, MidnightBSD does that for BSD, but right now it has a long way to go.

Have you ever used MidnightBSD? If not, what is your favorite BSD? What other BSD topics should we cover? Let us know in the comments below.

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FreeBSD is an open source and server oriented operating system derived from BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.

Distributed as installable or Live CDs for five architectures

The project is distributed as installable only CD ISO image that support the 32-bit/x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), 64-bit/amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), IA-64 (ia64), PPC (PowerPC), and SPARC instruction set architectures.

It is also essential to mention that this operating system is not a Linux distribution, and it features several stable branches. While the 10.x branch delivers all the latest BSD technologies and it is considered the latest stable release, the 9.x and 8.x branches have been classified as legacy releases.

Boot options

The operating system provides users with a text-mode, minimal boot menu from where they can boot into the multi user or single user environments, drop to a shell prompt for system rescuing tasks, choose a stable or old kernel, as well as to reboot the machine.

Additionally, you can configure various boot options, such as support for ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), safe mode, single user and verbose. After the system boots, you will be asked if want to install the distribution of use the live environment.

Bottom line

Summing up, FreeBSD is without no doubt an advanced operating system that powers some of the most modern desktop, server and embedded systems around the world. Thanks to its state-of-the-art security and advanced features, FreeBSD is used by a plethora of powerful companies to deliver modern services, as well as to respond to changing needs and demands.

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