Mozilla will fund open source COVID-19-related technology projects

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April 3, 2020

Have you come up with hardware or software that can help solve a problem that arose from COVID-19 and its worldwide spread? Mozilla is offering up to $50,000 to open source technology projects that are responding to the pandemic in some way.

“As part of the COVID-19 Solutions Fund, we will accept applications that are hardware (e.g., an open source ventilator), software (e.g., a platform that connects hospitals with people who have 3D printers who can print parts for that open source ventilator), as well as software that solves for secondary effects of COVID-19 (e.g., a browser plugin that combats COVID related misinformation),” the organization explained.

[Source: Mozilla]

Chrome, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, VSCode Now Unofficially Available For Clear Linux

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 3, 2020

One of the common criticisms for those trying to use Clear Linux on the desktop is that it lacks easy access to proprietary packages like Google Chrome and Steam. There has been plumbing within its swupd package/bundle management system to support third-party repositories to expand the ecosystem and now we’re finally seeing that happen.

Last month it was noted Clear Linux has the changes in place to support third-party repositories with Clear Linux’s swupd albeit the documentation was admittedly lacking and no prominent third-party repositories at the time.

[Source: Phoronix]

Scheduling tasks on Linux using the at command

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 3, 2020

When you want commands or scripts to run at some particular time, you don’t have to sit with your fingers hovering over the keyboard waiting to press the enter key or even be at your desk at the right time. Instead, you can set your task to be run through the at command. In this post, we’ll look at how tasks are scheduled using at, how you can precisely select the time you want your process to run and how to view what’s been scheduled to run using at.

at vs cron: For those who’ve been scheduling tasks on Linux systems using cron, the at command is something like cron in that you can schedule tasks to run at a selected time, but cron is used for jobs that are run periodically – even if that means only once a year. Most cron jobs are set up to be run daily, weekly or monthly, though you control how often and when.

[Source: Network World]

Google Opens Code Search For Angular, Dart, TensorFlow And More

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 3, 2020

Google has announced the launch of Code Search for its popular open source projects — Angular, Bazel, Dart, ExoPlayer, Firebase SDK, Flutter, Go, gVisor, Kythe, Nomulus, Outline, and Tensorflow.

As Kris Hildrum of Google’s Code Search Team puts it, “Code Search is one of Google’s most popular internal tools, and now we have a version (same binary, different flags) targeted to open source communities.” Googlers get a rich code browsing experience. For example, the blame button shows which user last changed each line and you can display history on the same page as the file contents. It supports a powerful search language and, for some repositories, cross-references.

[Source: TFiR]

HPE announces new open source programme to simplify 5G rollout

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 3, 2020

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management initiative, a new open source programme that will simplify the management of large-scale geographically distributed physical infrastructure deployments. In addition, HPE will introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator that is aligned with the initiative.

Open Distributed Infrastructure Management helps resolve the complexity that telcos face in rolling out 5G networks across thousands of sites equipped with IT infrastructure from multiple vendors and different generations of technology. This new initiative underlines HPE’s continued leadership in open 5G technologies and commitment to accelerating industry alignment through open source innovation.

[Source: Express Computer]

Canonical Wants to Manage Away Open Source Complexity

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 2, 2020

Canonical launched a managed applications platform that allows enterprises to have the vendor control their open source applications regardless of what type of infrastructure those applications are running on.

The Canonical Managed Apps platform is launching with the ability to manage 10 cloud-native database and logging, monitoring, and alerting (LMA) applications on multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure or on virtual machines (VMs) running on bare metal, public, or private clouds. The initial applications include databases MySQL, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and ElasticSearch; the Open Source MANO NFV management and orchestration application; the Kafka event streaming platform; the Graylog logging platform; the Prometheus monitoring system; and the Grafana observability platform.

[Source: SDxCentral]

Importance of monitoring in the cloud-native world: Payal Chakravarty @Sysdig

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 2, 2020

In this interview with TFiR, Payal Chakravarty, VP, Product Management at Sysdig talks about the importance of monitoring in the Cloud Native landscape.

“One thing that’s happening in the Cloud Native Landscape is applications are shipping really fast and as applications ship fast, monitoring needs to be embedded into the DevOps workflow. And the other thing that’s coming with this is these applications are running on the containerized infrastructure. Containers are FMRI dynamic and that leads to a high explosion of operational data. So how do you analyze that data? How do you scale, ingest, gather that data? And how do you derive insights from that data? It becomes very relevant,” Chakravarty explains. So it becomes all the more important for monitoring tools in the Cloud Native world to adapt to handle that high volume of high cardinality data, metrics and being able to ingest, scale and analyze that data.

[Source: TFiR]

It’s surprisingly easy to switch a gaming PC to Linux today

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 2, 2020

Talking to PC gamers about Linux is always entertaining, because everyone who knows even a little bit about Linux has a different impression. For some it’s that other operating system they’ve vaguely heard of, and they have about as much interest in it as I have in cars (read: not much). For others it’s a critical part of their work or infrastructure, or it’s the thing their techy friend somehow always manages to bring up in unrelated conversations (ugh, you know how to do everything on the command line, we get it).

Last year I decided to become one of the latter and go all-in on desktop Linux. It opened my eyes to how much Linux has changed over the years, and how outdated the idea of Linux as an OS exclusively for tech nerds really is. Not only was the switch relatively painless, but I’m not missing out on much, either—not even gaming. Here’s what it’s like switching from Windows to Linux today, from hardware to software to gaming.

[Source: PC Gamer]

Huawei joins major US-based open-source patent protection consortium OIN

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 2, 2020

When you think of Chinese 5G smartphone superpower Huawei and intellectual property (IP), your first thoughts are of the US Department of Justice charging Huawei with racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets. Or, if you follow intellectual property (IP) issues closely, you’d recall that Huawei has made $6 billion in patent royalties since 2001 with nearly 80% of that coming from US companies.

And now, Huawei is joining the Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community. Many will find this shocking news.

[Source: ZDNet]

5 best Linux desktop distributions

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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April 1, 2020

A Linux distribution on the desktop is an amalgam of the tortoise and the little train that could. Ever so slowly, it continues to move onward and upward, ticking away the market share percentages by a tenth of a point at a time. No matter how slow that journey is, the developers of each distribution will keep going until their version of Linux has finally become accepted by the masses—at which point, one Linux distro will rule them all.

Until then, the Linux community will continue to enjoy numerous distributions, ready to take over your desktop. But of those hundreds (nay, thousands) of desktops available, which are the best Linux desktop distributions?

[Source: TechRepublic]