Kubernetes Dominates in IT Job Searches

By

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January 8, 2019

Kubernetes was the dominant technology skill requested by IT firms in 2018, according to a new report from jobs board Dice.

The report, which scoured the site’s job postings, found that “Kubernetes” was far and away the skill most requested by IT recruiters and hiring managers. Nate Swanner, editor of Dice Insights, noted that Kubernetes – and to a lesser extent Terraform – led the demand of skill requests toward “containerization of apps and services, as well as the cloud.” Terraform is an infrastructure as code software by HashiCorp.

The Dice news followed similar findings released late last year from jobs board Indeed.

Indeed’s work found that Kubernetes had the fastest year-over-year surge in job searches among IT professionals. It also found that related job postings increased 230 percent between September 2017 and September 2018.

Stay current with Kubernetes courses from The Linux Foundation. Learn more about the various training and certification options.

Linux Commands for Measuring Disk Activity

By

Network World

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January 8, 2019

Linux systems provide a handy suite of commands for helping you see how busy your disks are, not just how full. In this post, we examine five very useful commands for looking into disk activity. Two of the commands (iostat and ioping) may have to be added to your system, and these same two commands require you to use sudo privileges, but all five commands provide useful ways to view disk activity.

Probably one of the easiest and most obvious of these commands is dstat.

dtstat

In spite of the fact that the dstat command begins with the letter “d”, it provides stats on a lot more than just disk activity. If you want to view just disk activity, you can use the -d option. As shown below, you’ll get a continuous list of disk read/write measurements until you stop the display with a ^c. Note that after the first report, each subsequent row in the display will report disk activity in the following time interval, and the default is only one second.

Entroware Launches Ubuntu Linux All-In-One PC With 6-Core Intel CPU

By

Linux Editorial Staff

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January 8, 2019

Entroware, a UK-based PC manufacturer specializing in custom Linux systems, just rolled out their new Ares PC. It’s a stylish-looking AIO that ships with Ubuntu or Ubuntu MATE and should be a great fit for classrooms, home office and business use. I have a review system on the way, but until it arrives let’s see what’s under the hood and breakdown the various loadouts…

Aliases: To Protect and Serve

By

Paul Brown

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January 7, 2019

Happy 2019! Here in the new year, we’re continuing our series on aliases. By now, you’ve probably read our first article on aliases, and it should be quite clear how they are the easiest way to save yourself a lot of trouble. You already saw, for example, that they helped with muscle-memory, but let’s see several other cases in which aliases come in handy.

Aliases as Shortcuts

One of the most beautiful things about Linux’s shells is how you can use zillions of options and chain commands together to carry out really sophisticated operations in one fell swoop. All right, maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but let’s agree that this feature *is* practical.

The downside is that you often come up with recipes that are often hard to remember or cumbersome to type. Say space on your hard disk is at a premium and you want to do some New Year’s cleaning. Your first step may be to look for stuff to get rid off in you home directory. One criteria you could apply is to look for stuff you don’t use anymore. ls can help with that:

ls -lct

The instruction above shows the details of each file and directory (-l) and also shows when each item was last accessed (-c). It then orders the list from most recently accessed to least recently accessed (-t).

Is this hard to remember? You probably don’t use the -c and -t options every day, so perhaps. In any case, defining an alias like

alias lt='ls -lct'

will make it easier.

Then again, you may want to have the list show the oldest files first:

alias lo='lt -F | tac'

Figure 1: The lt and lo aliases in action.

There are a few interesting things going here. First, we are using an alias (lt) to create another alias — which is perfectly okay. Second, we are passing a new parameter to lt (which, in turn gets passed to ls through the definition of the lt alias).

The -F option appends special symbols to the names of items to better differentiate regular files (that get no symbol) from executable files (that get an *), files from directories (end in /), and all of the above from links, symbolic and otherwise (that end in an @ symbol). The -F option is throwback to the days when terminals where monochrome and there was no other way to easily see the difference between items. You use it here because, when you pipe the output from lt through to tac you lose the colors from ls.

The third thing to pay attention to is the use of piping. Piping happens when you pass the output from an instruction to another instruction. The second instruction can then use that output as its own input. In many shells (including Bash), you pipe something using the pipe symbol (|).

In this case, you are piping the output from lt -F into tac. tac‘s name is a bit of a joke. You may have heard of cat, the instruction that was nominally created to concatenate files together, but that in practice is used to print out the contents of a file to the terminal. tac does the same, but prints out the contents it receives in reverse order. Get it? cat and tac. Developers, you so funny!

The thing is both cat and tac can also print out stuff piped over from another instruction, in this case, a list of files ordered chronologically.

So… after that digression, what comes out of the other end is the list of files and directories of the current directory in inverse order of freshness.

The final thing you have to bear in mind is that, while lt will work the current directory and any other directory…

# This will work:
lt
# And so will this:
lt /some/other/directory

… lo will only work with the current directory:

# This will work:
lo
# But this won't:
lo /some/other/directory

This is because Bash expands aliases into their components. When you type this:

lt /some/other/directory

Bash REALLY runs this:

ls -lct /some/other/directory

which is a valid Bash command.

However, if you type this:

lo /some/other/directory

Bash tries to run this:

ls -lct -F | tac /some/other/directory

which is not a valid instruction, because tac mainly because /some/other/directory is a directory, and cat and tac don’t do directories.

More Alias Shortcuts

alias lll='ls -R' prints out the contents of a directory and then drills down and prints out the contents of its subdirectories and the subdirectories of the subdirectories, and so on and so forth. It is a way of seeing everything you have under a directory.
mkdir='mkdir -pv' let’s you make directories within directories all in one go. With the base form of mkdir, to make a new directory containing a subdirectory you have to do this:
```
mkdir newdir
mkdir newdir/subdir
```
Or this:
```
mkdir -p newdir/subdir
```
while with the alias you would only have to do this:
```
mkdir newdir/subdir
```
Your new mkdir will also tell you what it is doing while is creating new directories.

Aliases as Safeguards

The other thing aliases are good for is as safeguards against erasing or overwriting your files accidentally. At this stage you have probably heard the legendary story about the new Linux user who ran:

rm -rf /

as root, and nuked the whole system. Then there’s the user who decided that:

rm -rf /some/directory/ *

was a good idea and erased the complete contents of their home directory. Notice how easy it is to overlook that space separating the directory path and the *.

Both things can be avoided with the alias rm='rm -i' alias. The -i option makes rm ask the user whether that is what they really want to do and gives you a second chance before wreaking havoc in your file system.

The same goes for cp, which can overwrite a file without telling you anything. Create an alias like alias cp='cp -i' and stay safe!

Next Time

We are moving more and more into scripting territory. Next time, we’ll take the next logical step and see how combining instructions on the command line gives you really interesting and sophisticated solutions to everyday admin problems.

The Many New Features & Improvements of the Linux 5.0 Kernel

By

Phoronix

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January 7, 2019

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.0-rc1, what was formerly known as Linux 4.21 over the past two weeks. While the bumping was rather arbitrary as opposed to a major change necessitating the big version bump, this next version of the Linux kernel does come with some exciting changes and new features (of course, our Twitter followers already have known Linux was thinking of the 5.0 re-brand from 4.21). Here is our original feature overview of the new material to find in this kernel.

The merge window is now closed so we have a firm look at what’s new for this next kernel version. As is standard practice, there will be seven to eight weekly release candidates before Linux 5.0 is officially ready for release around the end of February or early Match. Of the new features for Linux 5.0 below are the highlights from our close monitoring of the Linux kernel mailing list and Git repositories over the holidays.

Kubernetes Federation Evolution

By

Kubernetes Blog

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January 7, 2019

Deploying applications to a kubernetes cluster is well defined and can in some cases be as simple as kubectl create -f app.yaml. The user’s story to deploy apps across multiple clusters has not been that simple. How should an app workload be distributed? Should the app resources be replicated into all clusters, or replicated into selected clusters or partitioned into clusters? How is the access to clusters managed? What happens if some of the resources, which user wants to distribute pre-exist in all or fewer clusters in some form.

In SIG multicluster, our journey has revealed that there are multiple possible models to solve these problems and there probably is no single best fit all scenario solution. Federation however is the single biggest kubernetes open source sub project which has seen maximum interest and contribution from the community in this problem space. The project initially reused the k8s API to do away with any added usage complexity for an existing k8s user. This became non-viable because of problems best discussed in this community update.

What has evolved further is a federation specific API architecture and a community effort which now continues as Federation V2.

Conceptual Overview

Because federation attempts to address a complex set of problems, it pays to break the different parts of those problems down. Let’s take a look at the different high-level areas involved:

Kubernetes Federation V2 Concepts

7 CI/CD Tools for Sysadmins

By

OpenSource.com

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January 7, 2019

Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD) have all existed in the developer community for many years. Some organizations have involved their operations counterparts, but many haven’t. For most organizations, it’s imperative for their operations teams to become just as familiar with CI/CD tools and practices as their development compatriots are.

CI/CD practices can equally apply to infrastructure and third-party applications and internally developed applications. Also, there are many different tools but all use similar models. And possibly most importantly, leading your company into this new practice will put you in a strong position within your company, and you’ll be a beacon for others to follow.

Let’s dig into the tools a bit more. We’ll briefly cover each one and share links to more information.

LF Networking Moving Forward to Consolidate Open Source Networking Efforts

By

Enterprise Networking Planet

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January 7, 2019

In January 2018, the Linux Foundation announced a major reorganization of its networking efforts under the umbrella organization known as LF Networking. A year later, it’s an effort that continues to advance.

In a video interview, Arpit Joshipura, General Manager for Networking at the Linux Foundation, said there has been positive momentum in the LF Networking effort.

“Members do appreciate the concept, not just of collaborating across projects, but also the cost savings they get for not paying into individual projects,” Joshipura said.

The initial six projects that joined LF Networking are OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, FD.IO, pnda and SNAS.io. Other projects that have since joined LF Networking include Tungsten Fabric, which was originally known as Open Contrail. The umbrella effort also benefits from improved testing, certification and infrastructure components that help all of the participating projects. While LF Networking has a broad mandate, it also actively partnering with other industry associations, including the Open Compute Project (OCP), in support of the hardware layer for networking.

Read more and watch the video at Enterprise Networking Planet

It’s a Linux-Powered Car World

By

ZDNet

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January 6, 2019

Linux is everywhere including your car. While some companies, like Tesla, run their own homebrew Linux distros, most rely on Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). AGL is a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for connected cars with over 140 members.

This Linux Foundation-based organization is a who’s who of Linux-friendly car manufacturers. Its membership includes Audi, Ford, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Mercedes, Suzuki, and the world’s biggest automobile company: Toyota.

Why? “Automakers are becoming software companies, and just like in the tech industry, they are realizing that open source is the way forward,” said Dan Cauchy, AGL’s executive director…

7 Things Desktop Linux Needs in 2019

By

Jack Wallen

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January 4, 2019

The new year is upon us, which means yet another year has gone by in which Linux has not found itself dominating the desktop. Linux does many things very well, and in the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at the some of the very best distributions to suit your various needs, but for now, let’s take a step back and revisit this old issue.

For some, the idea of Linux dominance on the desktop has fallen to the wayside; instead, users simply want what works. The Linux operating system, however, does “just work.” And when you stop to realize that the typical user spends the vast majority of their time working (or playing) within a browser, it stands to reason that Linux (with its heightened security and reliability) is primed to become the dominant platform on the desktop market.

And yet it hasn’t. Why?

That’s the question that has confounded so many people for so many years. And, the possible answer five years ago would have been completely different from the answer today. To that end, I’ve come up with seven things that could help Linux gain traction on the desktop space. My suggestions are not necessarily easy or popular. No. What you’ll find here are seven ideas that could seriously help Linux stake its claim as a dominant player on the desktop market.

One Distro to Rule them All

I’ve been saying this for some time, but it’s not quite what you think it is. The distribution fragmentation within the Linux community is doing more harm than good. Consider this: Company X has a piece of software that already runs on Windows and Mac OS, and it’s incredibly popular. When asked to make their software available for Linux, the company says, “We’d love to do that, but it’s just too complicated.” When pressed further, it becomes clear that Company X refuses because there are so many permutations of Linux to consider. Which distribution? Which package manager? Which desktop? Which toolkit? The list goes on.

Because of this, I believe Linux needs to come up with a single “official” distribution — one that all Company X’s can focus their efforts on. Say that official distribution is Debian with the GNOME desktop. All Company X needs to then do is make their software run on that combination. If you, as a user, want to run the software from Company X on Linux, you know you’d have to do so on the official distribution. That doesn’t mean all other distributions go away. Nay, nay. It just means there’s an official distribution that companies can focus their efforts on.

I realize this is not a popular idea, but it’s one that should seriously be considered. Otherwise, Linux will continue to miss out on the likes of Photoshop, Adobe Premier, MS Office, etc.

A Viable X.org Replacement

X.org has served its purpose, but the replacement is long overdue. Canonical tried — and failed — with Mir. Wayland has been under development for quite some time, but it’s not ready for prime time yet. Because X.org has been around for so long, it carries with it a lot of baggage, some of which could be considered a security risk. Think about this: Linux is growing and evolving quite rapidly. How fast can the desktop evolve if it relies on antiquated technology? Instead of continuing to stand on that aging GUI foundation, Linux needs something that can bring much more agility to desktop improvement. Is that solution Wayland, or is there another option available? Who knows. But, Linux software continues to evolve (from the kernel to the user-space apps) at a rapid pace, and the X Window system can no longer keep up. The feasibility of something new coming to fruition and being ready for deployment this year is a pipe dream, but we need to see some solid progress in 2019.

Culling the App Herd

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve opened up a Linux app store and searched for a tool, only to find apps that are no longer being developed, haven’t been updated in a very long time, or have broken or deprecated dependencies. This will not do. Those responsible for the curation of apps in the various app stores need to get rid of the cruft. The last thing Linux needs is out of date, non-functioning, insecure apps for users to install. I realize that one reason many of these apps remain is to keep the numbers high. But saying there are tens of thousands of titles, when a good percentage shouldn’t be there is misleading. Those outdated, deprecated, abandoned apps need to go.

Real-Time Antivirus and Anti-Malware

This is where I might lose some people … but stay with me. I cannot tell you how many times I get asked, “Does Linux need antivirus or antimalware software?” My answer is always, “No, at least not yet.” Why the “not yet”? Because when Linux starts pulling in the numbers that Windows and Mac OS currently enjoy, you can bet the Linux desktop will become a target. But beyond that, what about users who receive email with malicious payloads, who then (unwittingly) send those payloads on to others? Or what about web browser phishing attacks? Linux has tools like ClamAV (and ClamTK), but they don’t do real-time scanning. The Linux community needs to start planning for the future, which means developing a real-time, open source antivirus/anti-malware solution.

Prosumer-Grade Apps

Linux has plenty of apps for the average user. It also has plenty of apps for IT pros. What it doesn’t have is apps for prosumers. For those that don’t know, a prosumer is an amateur who purchases tools that are of professional-grade quality. That’s where the likes of Adobe Premier, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Avid Pro Tools, and others come in. Linux doesn’t have the equivalent of any of these. Sure, Linux has an abundance of consumer-grade software (such as Audacity and OpenShot), but those tools are nowhere near prosumer-level. You’re simply not going to be editing a full-length film with OpenShot, or mastering an album with Audacity. Until Linux lands a few serious prosumer-grade tools, it’ll be ignored on that level of usage.

Better Font Rendering

Linux font rendering has come a long way, but it’s still light years behind that of Mac OS. If you use a MacBook Pro or iMac for a while and then come back to Linux, you’ll see the difference. A big part of this has to do with the fact that Linux is still relying upon X.org (see above). And, although this may seem like an afterthought to many, the beauty of a desktop is one of the first things that grabs a user’s attention. If a user looks at a desktop and sees an inferior result, that love affair won’t last long. And, to add injury to that insult, when you stare at a Linux desktop all day, as I do, you may find that poor font rendering can overwork your eyes. Linux needs some serious effort to provide superior font rendering.

More Companies Shipping Quality Products

After visiting System76 (to see the new Thelio factory), I have become convinced the future of the Linux desktop depends on companies like that. System76 is creating a holistic approach to Linux, such that the hardware they ship works seamlessly and beautifully. That’s exactly the experience we need for Linux. Someone who wants to use Linux should be able to purchase a laptop or desktop, connect it to their peripherals, and everything work out of the box… with zero effort. That’s what System76 delivers. Linux needs more companies doing that same thing, with the same level of proficiency. Period.

A Place to Start

Linux doesn’t have to have all seven of these ideas fall into place at once. But if we want to dominate the desktop, this list would be a good place to start. Are there more areas in which Linux can improve? Of course. But let’s begin with the obvious and go from there.