MidnightBSD Could Be Your Gateway to FreeBSD

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May 11, 2018

FreeBSD is an open source operating system that descended from the famous Berkeley Software Distribution. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 and is still going strong. Around 2007, Lucas Holt wanted to create a fork of FreeBSD that made use of the GnuStep implementation of the OpenStep (now Cocoa) Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools. To that end, he began development of the MidnightBSD desktop distribution.

MidnightBSD (named after Lucas’s cat, Midnight) is still in active (albeit slow) development. The latest stable release (0.8.6) has been available since August, 2017. Although the BSD distributions aren’t what you might call user-friendly, getting up to speed on their installation is a great way to familiarize yourself with how to deal with an ncurses installation and with finalizing an install via the command line.

In the end, you’ll wind up with desktop distribution of a very reliable fork of FreeBSD. It’ll take a bit of work, but if you’re a Linux user looking to stretch your skills… this is a good place to start.

I want to walk you through the process of installing MidnightBSD, how to add a graphical desktop environment, and then how to install applications.

Installation

As I mentioned, this is an ncurses installation process, so there is no point-and-click to be found. Instead, you’ll be using your keyboard Tab and arrow keys. Once you’ve downloaded the latest release, burn it to a CD/DVD or USB drive and boot your machine (or create a virtual machine in VirtualBox). The installer will open and give you three options (Figure 1). Select Install (using your keyboard arrow keys) and hit Enter.

Figure 1: Launching the MidnightBSD installer.

At this point, there are quite a lot of screens to go through. Many of those screens are self-explanatory:

Set non-default key mapping (yes/no)
Set hostname
Add optional system components (documentation, games, 32-bit compatibility, system source code)
Partitioning hard drive
Administrator password
Configure networking interface
Select region (for timezone)
Enable services (such as secure shell)
Add users (Figure 2)

After you’ve added the user(s) to the system, you will then be dropped to a window (Figure 3), where you can take care of anything you might have missed or you want to re-configure. If you don’t need to make any changes, select Exit, and your configurations will be applied.

In the next window, when prompted, select No, and the system will reboot. Once MidnightBSD reboots, you’re ready for the next phase of the installation.

Post install

When your newly installed MidnightBSD boots, you’ll find yourself at a command prompt. At this point, there is no graphical interface to be found. To install applications, MidnightBSD relies on the mport tool. Let’s say you want to install the Xfce desktop environment. To do this, log into MidnightBSD and issue the following commands:

sudo mport index

sudo mport install xorg

You now have the Xorg window server installed, which will allow you to install the desktop environment. Installing Xfce is handled with the command:

sudo mport install xfce

Xfce is now installed. However, we must enable it to run with the command startx. To do this, let’s first install the nano editor. Issue the command:

sudo mport install nano

With nano installed, issue the command:

nano ~/.xinitrc

That file need only contain a single line:

exec startxfce4

Save and close that file. If you now issue the command startx, the Xfce desktop environment will start. You should start to feel a bit more at home (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The Xfce desktop interface is ready to serve.

Since you don’t want to always have to issue the command startx, you’ll want to enable the login daemon. However, it’s not installed. To install this subsystem, issue the command:

sudo mport install mlogind

When the installation completes, enable mlogind at boot by adding an entry to the /etc/rc.conf file. At the bottom of the rc.conf file, add the following:

mlogind_enable=”YES”

Save and close that file. Now, when you boot (or reboot) the machine, you should be greeted by the graphical login screen. At the time of writing, after logging in, I wound up with a blank screen and the dreaded X cursor. Unfortunately, it seems there’s no fix for this at the moment. So, to gain access to your desktop environment, you must make use of the startx command.

Installing

Out of the box, you won’t find much in the way of applications. If you attempt to install applications (using mport), you’ll quickly find yourself frustrated, as very few applications can be found. To get around this, we need to check out the list of available mport software, using the svnlite command. Go back to the terminal window and issue the command:

svnlite co http://svn.midnightbsd.org/svn/mports/trunk mports

Once you do that, you should see a new directory named ~/mports. Change into that directory (with the command cd ~/.mports. Issue the ls command and you should see a number of categories (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The categories of applications now available for mport.

Say you want to install Firefox? If you look in the www directory, you’ll see a listing for linux-firefox. Issue the command:

sudo mport install linux-firefox

You should now see an entry for Firefox in the Xfce desktop menu. Go through all of the categories and install all of the software you need, using the mport command.

A sad caveat

One sad little caveat is that the only version of an office suite to be found for mport (via svnlite) is OpenOffice 3. That’s quite out of date. And although Abiword is found in the ~/mports/editors directory, it seems it’s not available for installation. Even after installing OpenOffice 3, it errors out with an Exec format error. In other words, you won’t be doing much in the way of office productivity with MidnightBSD. But, hey, if you have an old Palm Pilot lying around, you can always install pilot-link. In other words, the available software doesn’t make for an incredibly useful desktop distribution… at least not for the average user. However, if you want to develop on MidnightBSD, you’ll find plenty of available tools, ready to install (check out the ~/mports/devel directory). You could even install Drupal with the command:

sudo mport install drupal7

Of course, after that you’ll need to create a database (MySQL is already installed), install Apache (sudo mport install apache24) and configure the necessary Apache directives.

Clearly, what is installed and what can be installed is a bit of a hodgepodge of applications, systems, and servers. But with enough work, you could wind up with a distribution that could serve a specific purpose.

Enjoy the *BSD Goodness

And that is how you can get MidnightBSD up and running into a somewhat useful desktop distribution. It’s not as quick and easy as many other Linux distributions, but if you want a distribution that’ll make you think, this could be exactly what you’re looking for. Although much of the competition has quite a bit more available software titles ready for installation, MidnightBSD is certainly an interesting challenge that every Linux enthusiast or admin should try.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

What’s New in Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS

By

InfoWorld

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May 11, 2018

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS “Bionic Beaver” arrives with a default Gnome desktop and a new minimalist install option for desktop users.

Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution for Linux has earned a reputation for being user-friendly, with editions aimed at desktop, server, cloud, and IoT users. This changelog tracks updates to Ubuntu across its release cycle, including its LTS (long term support) releases.

Canonical produces new Ubuntu releases every six months and supports them with free security updates and bug fixes for at least nine months. New LTS releases arrive every two years and are supported for five years.

Toward the Jet Age of Machine Learning

By

O'Reilly

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May 11, 2018

Machine learning today resembles the dawn of aviation. In 1903, dramatic flights by the Wright brothers ushered in the Pioneer Age of aviation, and within a decade, there was widespread belief that powered flight would revolutionize transportation and society more generally. Machine learning (ML) today is also rapidly advancing. We have recently witnessed remarkable breakthroughs on important problems including image recognition, speech translation, and natural language processing, and major technology companies are investing billions of dollars to transform themselves into ML-centric organizations. There is a growing conviction that ML holds the key to some of society’s most pressing problems….

Simply put, we needed to invent aeronautical engineering before we could transform the aviation industry. Similarly, we need to invent a new kind of engineering to build ML applications. Data-driven software development is radically different from conventional software development, as it targets complex applications domains (e.g., vision, speech, language) and focuses on learned behaviors instead of rule-based operations (e.g., training deep neural networks on massive data sets versus hand-coded if-then-else statements). Currently, very few organizations have the expertise to do this kind of engineering, and we are just scratching the surface of the potential for ML-powered technology. We describe three key challenges of this new development paradigm below.

Setting up LVM Partition on a Linux Server

By

LinuxandUbuntu

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May 11, 2018

Think about this situation, you have a Ubuntu server and with your home videos or movies, books and other important files that are worth having a backup. You don’t have enough space on your laptop and also on your server the available space is almost gone. You go to a shop and buy a new HDD to make more space on your server but, when you connect it and you run lsbk you see two different discs on your system and you can’t have for examples home videos1 and home videos2 because you want to get them organized properly.

Today I will show you how to create an LVM partition and let you know some advantages and disadvantages of LVM over normal partitions.

LVM – Logical Volume Management

Logical volume management provides a higher-level view of the disk storage on a computer system than the traditional view of disks and partitions. This gives the system administrator much more flexibility in allocating storage to applications and users.

In other words, we can say that LVM allows multiple disks to show as one and help to maintain your information.

Maximizing Value from Open Source Testing Frameworks

By

The New Stack

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May 11, 2018

Open source-based testing acceleration is a new use case in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Software Test Automation, which is Gartner’s recognition that QA teams are increasingly using open source tools and frameworks. It has become evident that no industry is immune to market disruption, including the software development and testing space. In the past two decades, the software testing industry has been flooded with open source frameworks, including a few at the top such as Selenium and Appium that has popularized its adoption. In addition, organizations incorporating agile development and continuous delivery to enhance their DevOps practices are driving the acceleration of open source tools within large organizations.

There are clear differences between open source and commercial tools. Not every company, industry, and QA team is the same and how each defines, executes, and maintains tests vary. Aside from a tool’s functionality meeting your software needs, the question comes down to a few key business differentiators:

Free Sells: Demands for frequent release cycles, managing infinite combinations of devices, and creating standardization has put pressure on delivery times.

Cloud Foundry for Developers: Pushing Apps

By

Linux.com Editorial Staff

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May 10, 2018

After following the first four blogs in this series previewing the Cloud Foundry for Developers training course, you should have a Cloud Foundry instance to use, have the cf CLI installed, and know how to connect to your instance and run commands. Now it’s time to push an app to your Cloud Foundry instance. You can catch up on the previous articles here:

cf-sample-chapter.png The Linux Foundation

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Definitions

Part 3: Architecture

Part 4: The cf Command

For more details, you can download the sample chapter here.

Writing an app is beyond the scope of this series, but you can refer to the Developer Guide for detailed help. Apps must have unique names, so don’t name it my-app, demo-app, test-app, sample-app, or any other commonly used name for testing.

Pushing Apps

Use the cf push command to deploy your app to your Cloud Foundry instance. If your app requires other services, such as a database, log management, or messaging, the services must be already provisioned, and may need to be bound to your app. See the Deploy an Application to learn more.

A lot of things happen when you push your app:

Cloud Foundry uploads and stores your app files
Reads and stores app metadata
Creates a droplet, the CF unit of execution
Assigns the droplet to a Diego cell
Starts the app

Writing your app is the hard part. Pushing it is easy. Change to the directory it is in and run cf push. You will see a lot of output as it is deployed. When it is finished, you can run cf apps to list all the apps in your space.

$ cf apps
name               state   instances memory disk urls
mine-fine-ruby-app started 1/1       64M    512M mine-fine-ruby-app.cfapps.io

Run cf app [appname] to see some details of your running app.

$ cf app mine-fine-ruby-app
requested state: started
instances: 1/1
usage: 64M x 1 instances
urls: mine-fine-ruby-app.cfapps.io
last uploaded: Mon Apr 9 8:49:11 UTC 2018
stack: cflinuxfs2
buildpack: ruby_buildpack

     state     since        cpu    memory         disk
#0   running   2018-04-09   0.0%   25.7M of 64M   102.4M of 512M

What is your app doing? Tail its logfile, or dump the log instead of tailing. Ctrl+c stops tailing.

$ cf logs mine-fine-ruby-app
$ cf logs --recent mine-fine-ruby-app

Apps can be stopped, started, and restarted.

$ cf stop mine-fine-ruby-app
$ cf start mine-fine-ruby-app
$ cf restart mine-fine-ruby-app

You may delete your app, force delete it, or delete your app and its mapped routes.

$ cf delete mine-fine-ruby-app
$ cf delete mine-fine-ruby-app -f
$ cf delete mine-fine-ruby-app -r

Now you know the basics of using Cloud Foundry to deploy apps. See the Cloud Foundry Documentation for thorough help and tutorials.

The information in this series is based on the Cloud Foundry for Developers (LFD232) training course from Cloud Foundry and The Linux Foundation. You can download a sample chapter here.

Open Source AI For Everyone: Three Projects to Know

By

The Linux Foundation

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May 10, 2018

At the intersection of open source and artificial intelligence, innovation is flourishing, and companies ranging from Google to Facebook to IBM are open sourcing AI and machine learning tools.

According to research from IT Intelligence Markets, the global artificial intelligence software market is expected to reach 13.89 billion USD by the end of 2022. However, talk about AI has accelerated faster than actual deployments. According to a detailedMcKinsey report on the growing impact of AI, “only about 20 percent of AI-aware companies are currently using one or more of its technologies in a core business process or at scale.” Here, we look at three open source AI projects aimed at simplifying access to AI tools and insights….

Google has also released two new AIY kits that let individuals easily get hands-on with artificial intelligence. Focused on computer vision, and voice assistants, the two kits come as small self-assembly cardboard boxes with all the components needed for use. The kits are currently available at Target in the United States, and, notably, are both based on the open source Raspberry Pi platform—more evidence of how much is going on at the intersection of open source and AI.

Kubernetes and CNI: What’s Next — Making It Easier to Write Networking Plugins

By

The New Stack

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May 10, 2018

Linux containers have changed the way we think about application architecture and the speed at which we can deliver on business requirements. They provide consistency and portability across environments and allow developers to focus on application innovation rather than underlying execution details. One container by itself, however, is just a useful way to package an application; many containers, working together and running at scale, can transform an enterprise. That’s where Kubernetes comes in, providing the capabilities to deploy and orchestrate Linux containers at the volume needed to drive real business results and power innovation.

While containers provide the application packaging and Kubernetes delivers the ability weave large, complex applications from simpler containerized components, these two technologies by themselves lack a common way to communicate outside of their specific stack. But there is an answer to this challenge: the Container Networking Interface (CNI),…

Red Hat Introduces Kubernetes Operators Software Development Toolkit

By

ZDNet

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May 10, 2018

At Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, Red Hat introduced Kubernetes Operators to the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem. This provides an easy path for independent software vendors (ISVs) to deliver tested and validated Kubernetes applications on OpenShift.

Red Hat picked up Kubernetes Operators as part of its CoreOS acquisition. Kubernetes Operators are application-specific controllers that extend the Kubernetes application programming interface (API). It can create, configure, and manage instances of complex stateful applications.

Developed with the Operator Framework open-source toolkit, an Operator helps to remove the barriers to building complex, stateful applications for Kubernetes, resulting in services designed to “just work” across any cloud where Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes variant runs.

Blacklisting Modules on Linux

By

Network World

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May 10, 2018

The Linux kernel is modular — composed of modules that work together but are largely independent of each other. New functionality can be added when a kernel module is loaded, but there are times when you might need to block functionality because modules interfere with each other or leave a system vulnerable. When that is the case, you can restrict what modules the kernel is able to use by blacklisting the troublemakers. This blocks them from being loaded.

Listing Kernel modules

You can list kernel modules with the lsmod command. For a taste of what you’re likely to see, the lsmod command below shows us the top of the lsmod command output on a sample system.