This Week in Open Source News: Sprint Joins LF Networking Fund, Blockchain Consolidation Predictions & More

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May 18, 2018

This week in open source and Linux news, Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf predicts blockchain consolidation, Sprint joins LFN and ORAN Alliance, AGL is furthering the connected car movement in new and comprehensive ways, and more!

1) Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf “predicts the industry will begin to consolidate among a core set of technology stacks.”

Blockchain Consolidation Phase Is Imminent, Hyperledger Chief Says– Wall Street Journal

2) Sprint is becoming a member of the ORAN Alliance, formerly known as the xRAN Forum, and it is also joining the LF Networking Fund (LFN).

Sprint Joins ORAN Alliance and Linux Foundation Networking Fund– SDxCentral

3) An overview of Automotive Grade Linux’s role in improving the connected car.

Open Source Drives Development in Motor Industry– ITWeb

4) A flaw related to a NetworkManager integration script is trivially easy for attackers to leverage.

Linux Admins: Dire Vulnerability Gives Attackers Root Access in RHEL, CentOS, Fedora– TechRepublic

5) For Timone Sloane, VP of Marketing & Ecosystem at ONF, open source is “the only way forward.”

The Edge Defines Experience, But Can’t Be Done Without Open Source – ONF– telecoms.com

What Is a Blockchain?

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O'Reilly

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May 18, 2018

So, what is a blockchain? It’s a complicated question because the inventor of Bitcoin, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, didn’t use the term in the original Bitcoin paper. For many, “the blockchain” is nothing more than a shorthand for “how Bitcoin works.” But more usefully, the blockchain is a distributed ledger, shared by untrusted participants, with strong guarantees about accuracy and consistency. What does that mean? Let’s unpack it term by term:

A ledger: If you go into antiquarian bookstores, you may have seen piles of books from the 19th century in which accountants entered transactions by hand. Those are ledgers. Ledgers are lists of transactions: items sold, and for how much; items purchased, and for how much. Those transactions are dated (timestamped) and ordered. Ledgers are strictly append-only: transactions can be added, but you can’t go back and edit or delete them. A blockchain can have ledger entries that are significantly more complex than credits and debits, but the concept is the same: a set of ordered entries to which new entries can be added, but old entries can be neither deleted or modified.

Making Kubernetes Easier with Cloud Foundry Platform

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The New Stack

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May 18, 2018

Cloud-native technologies and architectures are the means by which more traditional businesses — like insurance, financial services or even heavy machinery — can transition from simply consuming cloud resources into operating like the cloud providers themselves. This is shifting the way they run their businesses, making them more agile, distributed and ready to tackle via software, whatever their businesses demand. As with most new technologies, however, it’s important to look at Kubernetes with some perspective.

For large enterprises especially, Kubernetes and its growing ecosystem are just the latest developments in a continuum that spans decades. It might be the tool of choice for teams that want a great way to manage fleets of containers, but it still comprises only a fraction of enterprise workloads. And despite the massive migration to cloud platforms such as AWS and Google Cloud, enterprises will, for the foreseeable future, require a level of control and flexibility that managed cloud services and developer-centric technologies simply cannot provide.

6 Key Data Strategy Considerations for Your Cloud-Native Transformation

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InfoWorld

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May 18, 2018

Many organizations are making the move to cloud-native platforms as their strategy for digital transformation. cloud-native allows companies to deliver fast-responding, user-friendly applications with greater agility. However, the architecture of the data in support of cloud-native transformation is often ignored in the hope that it will take care of itself. With data becoming the information currency of every organization, how do you avoid the data mistakes commonly made during this cloud transformation journey? What data questions should you ask when building cloud-native applications? How can you gain valuable insight from your data?

The ensuing presentation includes six key considerations companies must have when they make this transition to cloud-native. …

While there are many legacy applications that are still SOA-based, the architectural mindset has changed and microservices have gained much popularity. Rather than architecting monolithic applications, developers can achieve many benefits by creating many independent services that work together in concert. A microservice architecture delivers greater agility in application development and simpler codebases; updates and scaling the services can be achieved in isolation and services can be written in different languages and connected to different data tiers and platforms of choice.

Addressing the Complexity of Big Data with Open Source

By

D Zone

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May 18, 2018

Just like a zoo with hundreds of different species and exhibits, the big data stack is created from more than 20 different projects developed by committers and contributors of the Apache Software Foundation. Each project has its own complex dependencies structure, which, in turn, build on one another very much like the Russian stacking doll (matryoshka). Further, all of these projects have their own release trains where different forks might include different features or use different versions of the same library. When combined, there are a lot of incompatibilities, and many of the components rely on each other to work properly, such as the case of a software stack. For example, Apache HBase and Apache Hive depend on Apache Hadoop’s HDFS. In this environment, is it even possible to consistently produce software that would work when deployed to a hundred computers in a data center?…

All of these moving parts effectively serve one purpose: to create the packages from known building blocks and transfer them a different environment (dev, QA, staging, and production) so that no matter where they are deployed, they will work the same way. The deployment mechanism needs to control the state of the target system. Relying on a state machine like Puppet or Chef has many benefits. You can forget about messy shell or Python scripts to copyfiles, create symlinks, and set permissions. Instead, you define “the state” that you want the target system to be, and the state machine will execute the recipe and guarantee that the end state will be as you specified. The state machine controls the environment instead of assuming one. These properties are great for operations at scale, DevOps, developers, testers, and users, as they know what to expect.

6 Industrial Touch-Panel Computers Based on the Raspberry Pi

By

Eric Brown

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May 17, 2018

In the smart home, voice agents are increasingly replacing the smartphone touchscreen interface as the primary human-machine interface (HMI). Yet, in noisier industrial and retail IoT environments, touchscreens are usually the only choice. The industrial touch-panel computer market has been in full swing for over a decade. Touch-panel systems based on Linux, and to a lesser extent, Android, are gaining share from those that use the still widely used Windows Embedded, and over the past year, several Raspberry Pi based systems have reached market. Here we look at six RPi-based contenders.

The first three models here use the stripped-down Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3) while the last three use the full Raspberry Pi 3 Model B SBC. The CM3 gives you the same quad-core, Cortex-A53 Broadcom BCM2387 SoC as the Raspberry Pi 3, but without the real-world ports and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. (It’s unlikely that we’ll see an RPi Compute Module based on the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, which boosts the clock rate to 1.4GHz and offers faster WiFi and Ethernet, as well as Power-over-Ethernet.)

In addition to the all-in-one devices listed here, many more touchscreens are available for the Raspberry Pi 3 that could be turned toward HMI purposes. These range from the official, 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touchscreen, which competes with a variety of third-party 7-inchers, as well as 10.1-inch models like the Waveshare Raspberry Pi 10.1 inch. There are also numerous smaller screen options that are generally more suitable for home automation than industrial or retail applications.

Any RPi touchscreen add-on can be combined with a Raspberry Pi and applied to HMI use. (Here’s an Instructibles how-to on flush mounting the official RPi touchscreen on a wall.)

Purpose-built industrial touch-panel system add additional features such as wall-mounting kits and in some cases, VESA or DIN-rail mounting. Some offer extended temperature support, and one of the systems covered here includes IP65 ingress protection. Most of these systems provide industrial-friendly wide-range power supplies, and some offer opto-isolated interfaces, surge and EMC protection, and UPS.

Interfaces

Most Raspberry Pi touch-panel systems feature capacitive touch, which is generally preferred as being more precise than resistive technology. Several of the screens offer backlighting, extra-wide viewing angles, and higher contrast ratios. Many supply higher brightness (luminance) measured in candela per square meter (cd/m²), a unit which is often referred to as a nit.

The more industrially oriented systems often extend the RPi’s GPIO with various interfaces including serial, CAN, digital input and output (DIO). Other features include a watchdog timer, an IR interface, and a Real Time Clock (RTC). The new Acme CM3-Panel compensates for the CM3’s lack of onboard wireless by offering WiFi and RF radio options.

One alternative in between all-in-one touch-panel computers and a DIY system based on touchscreen add-ons is an industrial touchscreen sold without an onboard computer. For example, Industrial Shields offers a 10.1-inch resistive Industrial Aluminum EMC Panel PC that supports a bring-your-own Raspberry Pi, as well as Banana Pi and Hummingboard SBCs.

The touch panel computers

Here are some recent Raspberry Pi based touch-panel computers, with information links embedded in the titles. Most of the vendors are European (typically German), but many also have North American distributors:

Acme CM3-Panel — This RPi CM3-based touch-panel touched down earlier this month in four wireless and I/O configurations ranging from 95 Euros ($113) to 119 Euros ($142). Standard features include a 7-inch, 800×480 touchscreen with a 90-degree viewing angle, as well a MIPI-CSI camera connector, 24x GPIO, and a wide-range 12-24V DC input. The $113 model has a USB 2.0 port while the $118 version instead provides 2.4GHz WiFi. The two higher end models offer either USB or WiFi combined with wireless modules that support Acme’s open source 868MHz Yarm RF radio module spec. The Yarm module supports Acme’s ISM 868MHz Energy Harvesting radio nodes, and there are special Yarm GPIOs in addition to the 24x GPIO array. The CM3-Panel, which is only 22mm thick, supports -20 to 70°C temperatures and ships with schematics.
Comfile ComfilePi — Comfile’s 7-inch ComfilePi CPi-A070WR and 10.2-inch ComfilePi CPi-A102WR combine an RPi CM3 with 800 x 480, resistive touchscreens. They offer IP65 protection against ingress and support 0 to 70°C temperatures. The ComfilePi is further equipped with a 10/100 Ethernet port, 3x USB 2.0 ports, a microSD slot, and an audio jack. Serial and I2C interfaces are expressed via terminal pin connectors, and there is a 12-24V input and 5V output. Saelig sells Korea-based Comfile’s systems in North America for $226 (7-inch) and $340 (10.2-inch).
Distec POS-Line IoT — Aimed at Point-of-Sale (PoS), HMI, and signage, Distec’s POS-Line IoT stands out with an LVDS-driven, 10.1-inch capacitive multitouch screen with 1920 x 1200 resolution. The backlit screen offers 170-degree viewing angles and 500-nit luminance. The system is a pre-assembled version of a starter kit offered for Distec’s Artista-IoT board, which incorporates a Raspberry Pi CM3 module. The Artista-IoT provides a scaler chip that enables display functions such as DICOM pre-set, gamma correction, and color calibration. The board and touch-panel both furnish RPi 3-like ports except that there are only three USB ports. Internal features include 10x GPIO, 3x UART, 2x I2C, and an I2C and USB touch sensor interface. You also get IR and OSD keypad interfaces, plus an RTC and an 8-36V or 12V power supply. U.S. customers can buy the system from Apollo Displays.
Janz Tec emVIEW-7/RPI3 — This 7-inch, 800 x 480 capacitive multitouch touch-panel is based on Janz Tec’s emPC-A/RPI3 industrial controller, which is built around a Raspberry Pi 3 SBC. Targeted at industrial HMI applications, the emVIEW-7/RPI3 has a backlit, 350-nit screen. In addition to the exposed ports of the RPi 3, you get 8-bit DIO, a serial debug port, and an interface that supports serial and CAN. Sold in North America by Saelig for $665, the DIN-rail mountable system offers a 9-32V input and a 0 to 45°C range.</li>

MASS RPI-07 — Like the emVIEW-7/RPI3, the RPI-07 is a 7-inch, 800 x 480 system built around a Raspberry Pi 3 SBC. The screen offers 10-finger multitouch, 250 nits, and 500:1 contrast. Most of the RPi 3’s ports are exposed, and the HDMI port is available internally and can be accessed via knockouts. There’s a GPIO connector that supports an RTC or options including DIO cards with optocouplers or analog inputs and outputs. The RPI-07 provides 12V and 24V inputs and supports flush-mounted panel PC configurations or VESA 75 arm or foot mounting. No pricing was listed.
Sfera Labs Strato Pi Touch Display — Available directly from Italy-based Sfera Labs, the Strato Pi Touch Display comes pre-assembled with a Raspberry Pi 3 with exposed ports plus the official 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touchscreen with 800 x 680 resolution and 10-finger touch. You can pair your Pi with one of three Strato boards. The 425-Euro ($523) option gives you a Strato Pi Mini, which adds a surge-protected 9-28V terminal block input with an RTC, battery, and buzzer. The 459-Euro ($543) Base model adds to the Mini features with opto-isolated RS-232 and RS-485 interfaces, LEDs, and a watchdog. The 494-Euro ($586) UPS model adds a UPS unit based on an external lead-acid 12V battery, plus special GPIO pins and an LED dedicated to UPS. The device is protected per EN61000-6-2 (EMC) and EN60664-1 (electrical safety).

A Guide to Git Branching

By

OpenSource.com

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May 17, 2018

In this third article on getting started with Git, learn how to add and delete Git branches.

In my two previous articles in this series, we started using Git and learned how to clone, modify, add, and delete Git files. In this third installment, we’ll explore Git branching and why and how it is used.

Picture this tree as a Git repository. It has a lot of branches, long and short, stemming from the trunk and stemming from other branches. Let’s say the tree’s trunk represents a master branch of our repo. I will use master in this article as an alias for “master branch”—i.e., the central or first branch of a repo. To simplify things, let’s assume that the master is a tree trunk and the other branches start from it.

How to Speak Linux

By

Network World

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May 17, 2018

I didn’t even stop to imagine that people pronounced Linux commands differently until many years ago when I heard a co-worker use the word “vie” (as in “The teams will vie for the title”) for what I’d always pronounced “vee I.” It was a moment I’ll never forget.

… Unix commands evolved with a number of different pronunciation rules. The names of some commands (like “cat”) were derived from words (like “concatenate”) and were pronounced as if they were words, too (some actually are). Others derived from phrases like “cpio,” which pull together the idea of copying (cp) and I/O. Others are simply abbreviations, such as “cd” for “change directory.”

Some commands are basically pronounced as if we are spelling them out loud — like “el es” for ls and “pee double-u dee” for pwd, while others are read like “chown” (rhyming with “clown”) as if they are words. And since many Linux users might first be exposed to the Linx command line on some old PC that they decided to put to better use, they may never hear other people saying Linux commands out loud. So, in today’s post, I’m going to explain how I pronounce Linux commands and how I’ve heard some others going in different directions.

Containers and Microservices and Serverless, Oh My!

By

HPE Blog

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May 17, 2018

A new round of buzzword-heavy technologies are becoming relevant to—or at least discussed among—developers, operations professionals, and the tech staff who lead them. Need to come up to speed on the changing cloud and container trends and technologies? If you feel out of the loop, this tech-transfer explainer should provide enlightenment.

Once upon a time, virtual machines changed how we thought about servers. Then, the cloud changed how we thought about IT. Now, containers have started a new transformation. The latest entry is “serverless”—though I should point out immediately that the term serverless is a misnomer. Future cloud-native applications will consist of both microservices and functions, often wrapped as Linux containers.

VMs and the cloud enabled DevOps, the practice of developers and IT operations staff collaborating to optimize technology processes. Cloud technologies’ dynamic compute and storage resources made it easier to provision resources. The idea behind DevOps is that developers no longer need to worry about infrastructure because that’s taken care of in the background by programs such as Ansible, Chef, and Puppet.

Purism Partners with Nitrokey to Reinforce the Security of Their Linux Laptops

By

Softpedia

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May 17, 2018

Purism, the maker of Linux-powered laptops, announced today that it partners with Nitrokey, a maker of Free Software and Open Hardware USB GPG SmartCards and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), to create a GPG-based SmartCard called Purekey.

Purism has always tried to offer its customers some of the most secure and privacy-aware laptops with the Librem 13 and 15 lineups, and it is now working to deliver the privacy-focused Librem 5 smartphone powered by PureOS,