Whether you’re moving around the file system, looking for files or trying to move into important directories, Linux can provide a lot of help. In this post, we’ll look at a number of tricks to make moving around the file system and both finding and using commands that you need a little easier.
One of the easiest and most useful ways to ensure that you don’t have to invest a lot of time into finding commands on a Linux system is to add the proper directories to your $PATH variable. The order of directories that you add to your $PATH variable is, however, very important. They determine the order in which the system will look through the directories to find the command to run — stopping when it finds the first match.
SUSE, one of the major open source software companies, is extending a helping hand to organizations that are producing medical devices to fight COVID-19.
“The current global pandemic requires more from us than simply trying to survive as companies and individuals,” said SUSE CEO Melissa Di Donato. “We have cutting-edge open source technology and know-how that can help others in the fight to save lives, and we will share it immediately and without charge.”
SUSE is offering free services such as support and maintenance for its operating system and container technologies to be embedded in and run those medical devices. These SUSE solutions are available immediately to help speed time to market for device manufacturers.
One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000 each. Now, a rapidly assembled volunteer team of engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT, is working to implement a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency use, which could be built quickly around the world.
The team, called MIT E-Vent (for emergency ventilator), was formed on March 12 in response to the rapid spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its members were brought together by the exhortations of doctors, friends, and a sudden flood of mail referencing a project done a decade ago in the MIT class 2.75 (Medical Device Design).
LibrePlanet 2020 ended on a high note with its second conference on 15 March 2020. There were a lot of things that were discussed in the online conference. However, one topic of discussion at the conference was centered on gaming on GNU/Linux systems. Developer Dennis Payne tried to look back and pointed out that Modern GNU/Linux no longer runs “older” free software games. There are workarounds to play old Linux games on the Modern GNU/Linux system, like installing the older version of the library. However, this process usually consumes a lot of time, and sometimes, it doesn’t even work.
Now, we all know that despite improving a little bit, Linux lags behind Windows in terms of gaming. Although various Linux distribution or platforms such as Pop!_OS, Manjaro Linux, Steam OS, GOG, Wine focuses more on strengthening gaming on Linux.
“Enterprises have moved on from the debate around Cloud Foundry Application Runtime or PaaS experience versus Kubernetes-based experience, and have opted to adopt both. The PaaS experience that Cloud Foundry offers is about optimizing developer time by allowing them to focus on business problems. Let them focus on the app they’re trying to build, not on the plumbing underneath it,” says Chip Childers, CTO at Cloud Foundry Foundation.
“There are plenty of use cases that don’t fit into a PaaS-style architecture. If you look at the breadth of architectures that a typical enterprise deals with, there are tons of applications that you need to just wrap the thing in a container and operate it that way,” he says.
Integrating Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes
To incorporate Kubernetes into the Cloud Foundry architecture so Cloud Foundry users can use Kubernetes as an alternative to Diego/Garden to orchestrate application container instances, Cloud Foundry Foundation kickstarted an initiative called Project Eirini.
Similarly, Project Quarks is another incubating effort within the Cloud Foundry Foundation that is focused on packaging the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime as a set of containers instead of virtual machines, enabling easier deployment to Kubernetes.
“Project Quarks took some code from SUSE called Fizzle. It would take the type of release artifact that our project teams were generally releasing for their component of the system, and work it into a usable Docker image. Then they would use Helm and some scripts to deploy that into Kubernetes,” said Childers.
There was, however, one crucial piece of the jigsaw missing.
“There was this code that SUSE had been working on. It was the basis of the SUSE product called SCF (SUSE Cloud Foundry). SCF became KubeCF. It creates a Kubernetes native distribution of Cloud Foundry,” reveals Childers.
KubeCF recently hit its 1.0 release. So, where does KubeCF go from here?
“Presenty, we can look at it as the easiest path to a Kubernetes-native Cloud Foundry for pure open search users. There are some other efforts that are happening in parallel that are taking a look at each component of the Cloud Foundry architecture. Project architects are working towards allowing people to take KubeCF, deploy the whole system to Kubernetes, and take advantage of the simplicity that gets enabled as code gets modified,” says Childers.
Developers First: Ensuring Seamless UX
One of the strengths of the Cloud Foundry community is that it has always offered a distribution. There is still a distribution called CF deployment, which is based on a VM-centric architecture that uses the Cloud Foundry BOSH platform to orchestrate infrastructures and service environments (or virtualized environments like V-sphere) to deploy VMs and then run the system on top of it.
However, distribution also entails members of the ecosystem packaging it or dictating with their own offerings. In such a scenario, how can developers expect consistency across the distros?
“The commonality between both upstream releases — the CF deployment and KubeCF — lies in the components that they sew together to create the Cloud Foundry platform. The Cloud Foundry Platform certification continues to be based on the idea that a certified distribution uses those components in an unmodified way, and integrates them to create that developer experience,” Childers explains.
“So, regardless of whether you’re deploying to Kubernetes or you’re deploying to virtual machines, regardless of the certified vendor that you use, or if you use upstream distributions, you should have that same developer experience. That’s what Platform Certification ensures,” he says.
Operational consistency is less a concern for the ecosystem and the community because many of these providers are offering it as a service. “Those that do it as subscription-based software delivery have a lot of tooling around operations that’s specific to them plus all of the other values that they bring together,” Childers avers.
Evolution Unabated
The KubeCF distribution has finally put the debate of ‘Do I use Kubernetes or do I use Cloud Foundry?’ to rest.
“The answer should’ve always been ‘You use both.’ The architecture fits one on top of the other very nicely, and overcomes the concerns of dual stacks,” says Childers.
With the ‘either-or’ debate over, Chip intends to further evolve this architecture, thereby offering an enormous amount of value to enterprises trying to deal with container-centric infrastructure management and developer productivity.
“We’ve completely re-converged as an ecosystem around embracing the Kubernetes-based infrastructure as being the most popular and rising approach. We’ve been evolving this architecture as a community for years now,” he says.
“There are huge engineering and commercial teams supporting Kubernetes. VMware has an enormous investment in Kubernetes, and it continues to increase that investment. With the acquisition of Pivotal, VMware also has a huge amount of investment in Cloud Foundry. It’s working aggressively on the mission of bringing the two together. We see the same traction with SAP, IBM, and SUSE, which presents a lot of opportunities for everybody,” adds Childers.
China’s plans to replace Windows and move to a homegrown operating system aren’t new, but this year, the whole thing could finally happen. This is what Chinese-based Union Tech promises, as its Linux-based Unified Operating System, or UOS, has made a huge progress in the last couple of months.
More specifically, the Chinese firm has worked together with other local companies to run the Linux operating system on chips developed domestically. And according to a recent report, an important achievement was reached in January when UOS managed to boot in 30 seconds on this hardware.
UOS is an operating system based on Deepin, a Linux distribution that’s already rather popular in China.
MIT researchers hope to publish open-source designs for a low-cost respirator that could potentially help Covid-19 patients struggling with critical respiratory problems.
The motorized device automatically compresses widely available bag valve masks, the sort of manual resuscitator used by ambulance crews to assist patients with breathing problems. The designs could arrive as a growing number of engineers, medical students, and hobbyists attempt to build or share specifications for makeshift respirators—of unknown quality and safety—amid rising fears of widespread shortages as the coronavirus epidemic escalates.
System76 has been manufacturing Linux-based PCs for over a decade, and the company continues to pump out new systems for those who prefer the “alternative” operating system to Windows hegemony. With its new Lemur Pro laptop, the company adds to its already formidable lineup of notebooks, desktops, and servers.
At just 2.2 pounds (and a mere 0.61 inches thick), the Lemur Pro is System76’s lightest laptop to date. Between the slim form factor and the latest Intel processors — not to mention the 73 Whr battery — the Lemur Pro promises great battery life, though the company is only providing claims in a cheeky fashion (10 hours to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy, 16 hours for reading Wikipedia, 21 hours for coding with VIM).
Mister Rogers famously told children that in times of fear and uncertainty, they should “look for the helpers”. As children, we clung to that nugget of wisdom as a way to soothe our fears about the state of the world. But as adults, now it’s time for us to be the helpers. Computer scientists and software engineers are in a unique position where not only can they typically work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they can help lend a hand.
How are programmers helping (besides responsibly social distancing with a well-stocked fridge of energy drinks)?
Martin Woodward from GitHub blogged about some of the open source projects they’ve seen that are helping track the pandemic, provide helpful datasets, and more.
Artificial intelligence company Megvii has open-sourced its self-developed deep learning framework MegEngine, allowing developers around the world to use and improve on the platform. The framework was initially developed in 2014 as part of Megvii’s Brain++ architecture, which the company uses to train computer vision algorithms—software that allows computers to interpret what they see.
MegEngine is especially effective when using large volumes of image or video data and can be used for complex tasks including image classification, object detection, and video analytics, according to Megvii.
Open-source deep-learning frameworks allow anyone with a bit of coding knowledge to train machine-learning models for a variety of purposes without having to build them from the ground up.
