Dell’s Barton George has been on a crusade to change how Linux is perceived by both consumers and developers. Six years ago Dell granted George and his team a $40K innovation fund and some freedom to launch a Linux-powered laptop aimed at developers, that would be developed in the open with feedback from the community. This of course became Project Sputnik and began with the outstanding Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, a laptop designed to “just work” out of the box with Ubuntu. …
At organizations everywhere, managing the use of open source software well requires the participation of business executives, the legal team, software architecture, software development and maintenance staff and product managers. One of the most significant challenges is integrating all of these functions with their very different points of view into a coherent and efficient set of practices.
More than ever, it makes sense to investigate the many free and inexpensive resources for open source management that are available, and observe the practices of professional open source offices that have been launched within companies ranging from Microsoft to Oath to Red Hat.
Fundamentals
The Linux Foundation’s Fundamentals of Professional Open Source Management (LFC210) course is a good place to start. The course is explicitly designed to help individuals in disparate organizational roles understand the best practices for success.
The course is organized around the key phases of developing a professional open source management program:
Open Source Software and Open Source Management Basics
Open Source Management Strategy
Open Source Policy
Open Source Processes
Open Source Management Program Implementation
Best Practices
The Linux Foundation also offers a free ebook on open source management: Enterprise Open Source: A Practical Introduction. The 45-page ebook can teach you how to accelerate your company’s open source efforts, based on the experience of hundreds of companies spanning more than two decades of professional enterprise open source management. The ebook covers:
Why use open source
Various open source business models
How to develop your own open source strategy
Important open source workflow practices
Tools and integration
Official open source programs play an increasingly significant role in how DevOps and open source best practices are adopted by organizations, according to a survey conducted by The New Stack and The Linux Foundation(via the TODO Group). More than half of respondents to the survey (53 percent) across many industries said their organization has an open source software program or has plans to establish one.
“More than anything, open source programs are responsible for fostering open source culture,” the survey’s authors have reported. “By creating an open source culture, companies with open source programs see the benefits we’ve previously reported, including increased speed and agility in the development cycle, better license compliance and more awareness of which open source projects a company’s products depend on.”
Free Guides
How can your organization professionally create and manage a successful open source program, with proper policies and a strong organizational structure? The Linux Foundation offers a complete guide to the process, available herefor free. The guide covers an array of topics for open source offices including: roles and responsibilities, corporate structures, elements of an open source management program, how to choose and hire an open source program manager, and more.
The free guide also features contributions from open source leaders. “The open source program office is an essential part of any modern company with a reasonably ambitious plan to influence various sectors of software ecosystems,” notes John Mark Walker, Founder of the Open Source Entrepreneur Network (OSEN) in the guide. “If a company wants to increase its influence, clarify its open source messaging, maximize the clout of its projects, or increase the efficiency of its product development, a multifaceted approach to open source programs is essential.”
Interested in even more on professional open source management? Don’t miss The Linux Foundation’s other free guides, which delve into tools for open source management, how to measure the success of an open source program, and much more.
There are a lot of different ways to track email, and different techniques can lie anywhere on the spectrum from marginally acceptable to atrocious. Responsible tracking should aggregate a minimal amount of anonymous data, similar to page hits: enough to let the sender get a sense of how well their campaign is doing without invading users’ privacy. Email tracking should always be disclosed up-front, and users should have a clear and easy way to opt out if they choose to. Lastly, organizations that track should minimize and delete user data as soon as possible according to an easy-to-understand data retention and privacy policy.
Unfortunately, that’s often not how it happens. Many senders, including the U.S. government, do email tracking clumsily. Bad email tracking is ubiquitous, secretive, pervasive, and leaky. It can expose sensitive information to third parties and sometimes even others on your network. According to a comprehensive study from 2017, 70% of mailing list emails contain tracking resources. To make matters worse, around 30% of mailing list emails also leak your email address to third party trackers when you open them. And although it wasn’t mentioned in the paper, a quick survey we did of the same email dataset they used reveals that around 80% of these links were over insecure, unencrypted HTTP.
Here are some friendly suggestions to help make tracking less pervasive, less creepy, and less leaky.
The technology landscape has evolved into an always-on environment of mobile, social, and cloud applications where programs can be accessed and used across a multitude of devices.
These always-on and always-available expectations are handled by distributed systems, which manage the inevitable fluctuations and failures of complex computing behind the scenes.
“The increasing criticality of these systems means that it is necessary for these online systems to be built for redundancy, fault tolerance, and high availability,” writes Brendan Burns, distinguished engineer at Microsoft, in Designing Distributed Systems. “The confluence of these requirements has led to an order of magnitude increase in the number of distributed systems that need to be built.”
In Distributed Systems in One Lesson, developer relations leader and teacher Tim Berglund says a simple way to think about distributed systems is that they are a collection of independent computers that appears to its user as a single computer.
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is a memory-protection process for operating systems that guards against buffer-overflow attacks. It helps to ensure that the memory addresses associated with running processes on systems are not predictable, thus flaws or vulnerabilities associated with these processes will be more difficult to exploit.
ASLR is used today on Linux, Windows, and MacOS systems. It was first implemented on Linux in 2005. In 2007, the technique was deployed on Microsoft Windows and MacOS. While ASLR provides the same function on each of these operating systems, it is implemented differently on each one.
The effectiveness of ASLR is dependent on the entirety of the address space layout remaining unknown to the attacker.
I have to confess, this particular topic is a tough one to address. Why? First off, Linux is a productive operating system by design. Thanks to an incredibly reliable and stable platform, getting work done is easy. Second, to gauge effectiveness, you have to consider what type of work you need a productivity boost for. General office work? Development? School? Data mining? Human resources? You see how this question can get somewhat complicated.
That doesn’t mean, however, that some distributions aren’t able to do a better job of configuring and presenting that underlying operating system into an efficient platform for getting work done. Quite the contrary. Some distributions do a much better job of “getting out of the way,” so you don’t find yourself in a work-related hole, having to dig yourself out and catch up before the end of day. These distributions help strip away the complexity that can be found in Linux, thereby making your workflow painless.
Let’s take a look at the distros I consider to be your best bet for productivity. To help make sense of this, I’ve divided them into categories of productivity. That task itself was challenging, because everyone’s productivity varies. For the purposes of this list, however, I’ll look at:
General Productivity: For those who just need to work efficiently on multiple tasks.
Graphic Design: For those that work with the creation and manipulation of graphic images.
Development: For those who use their Linux desktops for programming.
Administration: For those who need a distribution to facilitate their system administration tasks.
Education: For those who need a desktop distribution to make them more productive in an educational environment.
Yes, there are more categories to be had, many of which can get very niche-y, but these five should fill most of your needs.
General Productivity
For general productivity, you won’t get much more efficient than Ubuntu. The primary reason for choosing Ubuntu for this category is the seamless integration of apps, services, and desktop. You might be wondering why I didn’t choose Linux Mint for this category? Because Ubuntu now defaults to the GNOME desktop, it gains the added advantage of GNOME Extensions (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The GNOME Clipboard Indicator extension in action.
These extensions go a very long way to aid in boosting productivity (so Ubuntu gets the nod over Mint). But Ubuntu didn’t just accept a vanilla GNOME desktop. Instead, they tweaked it to make it slightly more efficient and user-friendly, out of the box. And because Ubuntu contains just the right mixture of default, out-of-the-box, apps (that just work), it makes for a nearly perfect platform for productivity.
Whether you need to write a paper, work on a spreadsheet, code a new app, work on your company website, create marketing images, administer a server or network, or manage human resources from within your company HR tool, Ubuntu has you covered. The Ubuntu desktop distribution also doesn’t require the user to jump through many hoops to get things working … it simply works (and quite well). Finally, thanks to it’s Debian base, Ubuntu makes installing third-party apps incredibly easy.
Although Ubuntu tends to be the go-to for nearly every list of “top distributions for X,” it’s very hard to argue against this particular distribution topping the list of general productivity distributions.
Graphic Design
If you’re looking to up your graphic design productivity, you can’t go wrong with Fedora Design Suite. This Fedora respin was created by the team responsible for all Fedora-related art work. Although the default selection of apps isn’t a massive collection of tools, those it does include are geared specifically for the creation and manipulation of images.
With apps like GIMP, Inkscape, Darktable, Krita, Entangle, Blender, Pitivi, Scribus, and more (Figure 2), you’ll find everything you need to get your image editing jobs done and done well. But Fedora Design Suite doesn’t end there. This desktop platform also includes a bevy of tutorials that cover countless subjects for many of the installed applications. For anyone trying to be as productive as possible, this is some seriously handy information to have at the ready. I will say, however, the tutorial entry in the GNOME Favorites is nothing more than a link to this page.
Figure 2: The Fedora Design Suite Favorites menu includes plenty of tools for getting your graphic design on.
Those that work with a digital camera will certainly appreciate the inclusion of the Entangle app, which allows you to control your DSLR from the desktop.
Development
Nearly all Linux distributions are great platforms for programmers. However, one particular distributions stands out, above the rest, as one of the most productive tools you’ll find for the task. That OS comes from System76 and it’s called Pop!_OS. Pop!_OS is tailored specifically for creators, but not of the artistic type. Instead, Pop!_OS is geared toward creators who specialize in developing, programming, and making. If you need an environment that is not only perfected suited for your development work, but includes a desktop that’s sure to get out of your way, you won’t find a better option than Pop!_OS (Figure 3).
What might surprise you (given how “young” this operating system is), is that Pop!_OS is also one of the single most stable GNOME-based platforms you’ll ever use. This means Pop!_OS isn’t just for creators and makers, but anyone looking for a solid operating system. One thing that many users will greatly appreciate with Pop!_OS, is that you can download an ISO specifically for your video hardware. If you have Intel hardware, download the version for Intel/AMD. If your graphics card is NVIDIA, download that specific release. Either way, you are sure go get a solid platform for which to create your masterpiece.
Figure 3: The Pop!_OS take on GNOME Overview.
Interestingly enough, with Pop!_OS, you won’t find much in the way of pre-installed development tools. You won’t find an included IDE, or many other dev tools. You can, however, find all the development tools you need in the Pop Shop.
Administration
If you’re looking to find one of the most productive distributions for admin tasks, look no further than Debian. Why? Because Debian is not only incredibly reliable, it’s one of those distributions that gets out of your way better than most others. Debian is the perfect combination of ease of use and unlimited possibility. On top of which, because this is the distribution for which so many others are based, you can bet if there’s an admin tool you need for a task, it’s available for Debian. Of course, we’re talking about general admin tasks, which means most of the time you’ll be using a terminal window to SSH into your servers (Figure 4) or a browser to work with web-based GUI tools on your network. Why bother making use of a desktop that’s going to add layers of complexity (such as SELinux in Fedora, or YaST in openSUSE)? Instead, chose simplicity.
Figure 4: SSH’ing into a remote server on Debian.
And because you can select which desktop you want (from GNOME, Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE), you can be sure to have the interface that best matches your work habits.
Education
If you are a teacher or student, or otherwise involved in education, you need the right tools to be productive. Once upon a time, there existed the likes of Edubuntu. That distribution never failed to be listed in the top of education-related lists. However, that distro hasn’t been updated since it was based on Ubuntu 14.04. Fortunately, there’s a new education-based distribution ready to take that title, based on openSUSE. This spin is called openSUSE:Education-Li-f-e (Linux For Education – Figure 5), and is based on openSUSE Leap 42.1 (so it is slightly out of date).
openSUSE:Education-Li-f-e includes tools like:
Brain Workshop – A dual n-back brain exercise
GCompris – An educational software suite for young children
gElemental – A periodic table viewer
iGNUit – A general purpose flash card program
Little Wizard – Development environment for children based on Pascal
Stellarium – An astronomical sky simulator
TuxMath – An math tutor game
TuxPaint – A drawing program for young children
TuxType – An educational typing tutor for children
wxMaxima – A cross platform GUI for the computer algebra system
Inkscape – Vector graphics program
GIMP – Graphic image manipulation program
Pencil – GUI prototyping tool
Hugin – Panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program
Figure 5: The openSUSE:Education-Li-f-e distro has plenty of tools to help you be productive in or for school.
Also included with openSUSE:Education-Li-f-e is the KIWI-LTSP Server. The KIWI-LTSP Server is a flexible, cost effective solution aimed at empowering schools, businesses, and organizations all over the world to easily install and deploy desktop workstations. Although this might not directly aid the student to be more productive, it certainly enables educational institutions be more productive in deploying desktops for students to use. For more information on setting up KIWI-LTSP, check out the openSUSE KIWI-LTSP quick start guide.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
Kubernetes is one of the most popular technologies around today. So, it’s no surprise that there are an awful lot of open source libraries, tools, and other assorted goodies out there on GitHub.
We like to keep an eye on what’s fresh for developers, so today we’re taking a look at five different Kubernetes tools for developers. From serverless functions to local development, GitHub has thousands of open source tools to enjoy. Here are five interesting ones we want to take a closer look at!
Minikube
Improve your local cluster experience with Minikube! Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube is often suggested to beginners, since it allows users to run a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on their laptop. That way, they can try the Kubernetes experience without needing to get everything set up. Minikube is also great for developers who are just dabbling and want a day-to-day developing setup.
How bad is this trio of trouble? With any of these a local user can gain root privileges. Worse still, Qualys reports that “To the best of our knowledge, all systemd-based Linux distributions are vulnerable.”
Heading into 2019, digitalization will accelerate business model innovation and drive the adoption of these emerging technologies for sustainable competitive advantage. Here’s a closer look at five technology trends that will change the way enterprises approach digital operations management in 2019:
Multi-Cloud Adoption Goes Mainstream
In FY18 Q3, the three leading cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) accounted for 65 percent of the market share of public cloud infrastructure and platform services. Enterprises are increasingly relying on multiple cloud providers to avoid lock-in and harness innovative product offerings, global presence and flexible pricing strategies. When it comes to multi-cloud adoption in 2019:
Lift-and-Shift Will Give Way to Rebuilding. In the initial phase of enterprise cloud adoption, CIOs preferred “lift-and-shift” strategies for migrating complex, legacy applications to public cloud services. In 2019, enterprises will rebuild legacy portfolios to truly take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, security and utility pricing. Rebuilding is not only the right approach to modernize legacy systems, but also a viable solution for reducing technical debt and unleashing enterprise agility.
There are a ton of tasks you do every single day. Make it a little easier on yourself by downloading our cheat sheets.
9 Linux and open source cheat sheets
Python 3.7 Beginner’s Cheat Sheet
The Python programming language is known for its large community and diverse extension menu. Get acquainted with Python’s built-in pieces.
Advanced SSH Cheat Sheet
SSH is a tool for remote login, and it can be used in many other ways. Get common command-line options and their configuration file equivalents.
