Plasma Mobile Could Give Life to a Mobile Linux Experience

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February 23, 2018

In the past few years, it’s become clear that, outside of powering Android, Linux on mobile devices has been a resounding failure. Canonical came close, even releasing devices running Ubuntu Touch. Unfortunately, the idea of Scopes was doomed before it touched down on its first piece of hardware and subsequently died a silent death.

The next best hope for mobile Linux comes in the form of the Samsung DeX program. With DeX, users will be able to install an app (Linux On Galaxy—not available yet) on their Samsung devices, which would in turn allow them to run a full-blown Linux distribution. The caveat here is that you’ll be running both Android and Linux at the same time—which is not exactly an efficient use of resources. On top of that, most Linux distributions aren’t designed to run on such small form factors. The good news for DeX is that, when you run Linux on Galaxy and dock your Samsung device to DeX, that Linux OS will be running on your connected monitor—so form factor issues need not apply.

Outside of those two options, a pure Linux on mobile experience doesn’t exist. Or does it?

You may have heard of the Purism Librem 5. It’s a crowdfunded device that promises to finally bring a pure Linux experience to the mobile landscape. This device will be powered by a i.MX8 SoC chip, so it should run most any Linux operating system.

Out of the box, the device will run an encrypted version of PureOS. However, last year Purism and KDE joined together to create a mobile version of the KDE desktop that could run on the Librem 5. Recently ISOs were made available for a beta version of Plasma Mobile and, judging from first glance, they’re onto something that makes perfect sense for a mobile Linux platform. I’ve booted up a live instance of Plasma Mobile to kick the tires a bit.

What I saw seriously impressed me. Let’s take a look.

Testing platform

Before you download the ISO and attempt to fire it up as a VirtualBox VM, you should know that it won’t work well. Because Plasma Mobile uses Wayland (and VirtualBox has yet to play well with that particular X replacement), you’ll find VirtualBox VM a less-than-ideal platform for the beta release. Also know that the Calamares installer doesn’t function well either. In fact, I have yet to get the OS installed on a non-mobile device. And since I don’t own a supported mobile device, I’ve had to run it as a live session on either a laptop or an Antsle antlet VM every time.

What makes Plasma Mobile special?

This could be easily summed up by saying, Plasma Mobile got it all right. Instead of Canonical re-inventing a perfectly functioning wheel, the developers of KDE simply re-tooled the interface such that a full-functioning Linux distribution (complete with all the apps you’ve grown to love and depend upon) could work on a smaller platform. And they did a spectacular job. Even better, they’ve created an interface that any user of a mobile device could instantly feel familiar with.

What you have with the Plasma Mobile interface (Figure 1) are the elements common to most Android home screens:

Quick Launchers
Notification Shade
App Drawer
Overview button (so you can go back to a previously used app, still running in memory)
Home button

Figure 1: The KDE Mobile desktop interface.

Because KDE went this route with the UX, it means there’s zero learning curve. And because this is an actual Linux platform, it takes that user-friendly mobile interface and overlays it onto a system that allows for easy installation and usage of apps like:

GIMP
LibreOffice
Audacity
Clementine
Dropbox
And so much more

Unfortunately, without being able to install Plasma Mobile, you cannot really kick the tires too much, as the live user doesn’t have permission to install applications. However, once Plasma Mobile is fully installed, the Discover software center will allow you to install a host of applications (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Discover software center on KDE Mobile.

Swipe up (or scroll down—depending on what hardware you’re using) to reveal the app drawer, where you can launch all of your installed applications (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The KDE Mobile app drawer ready to launch applications.

Open up a terminal window and you can take care of standard Linux admin tasks, such as using SSH to log into a remote server. Using apt, you can install all of the developer tools you need to make Plasma Mobile a powerful development platform.

We’re talking serious mobile power—either from a phone or a tablet.

A ways to go

Clearly Plasma Mobile is still way too early in development for it to be of any use to the average user. And because most virtual machine technology doesn’t play well with Wayland, you’re likely to get too frustrated with the current ISO image to thoroughly try it out. However, even without being able to fully install the platform (or get full usage out of it), it’s obvious KDE and Purism are going to have the ideal platform that will put Linux into the hands of mobile users.

If you want to test the waters of Plasma Mobile on an actual mobile device, a handy list of supported hardware can be found here (for PostmarketOS) or here (for Halium). If you happen to be lucky enough to have a device that also includes Wi-Fi support, you’ll find you get more out of testing the environment.

If you do have a supported device, you’ll need to use either PostmarketOS (a touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux that can be installed on smartphones and other mobile devices) or Halium (an application that creates an minimal Android layer which allows a new interface to interact with the Android kernel). Using Halium further limits the number of supported devices, as it has only been built for select hardware. However, if you’re willing, you can build your own Halium images (documentation for this process is found here). If you want to give PostmarketOS a go, here are the necessary build instructions.

Suffice it to say, Plasma Mobile isn’t nearly ready for mass market. If you’re a Linux enthusiast and want to give it a go, let either PostmarketOS or Halium help you get the operating system up and running on your device. Otherwise, your best bet is to wait it out and hope Purism and KDE succeed in bringing this oustanding mobile take on Linux to the masses.

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

3 Warning Flags of DevOps Metrics

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OpenSource.com

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February 23, 2018

“Human beings adjust behavior based on the metrics they’re held against.” Choose your metrics carefully.

Metrics. Measurements. Data. Monitoring. Alerting. These are all big topics for DevOps and for cloud-native infrastructure and application development more broadly. In fact, acm Queue, a magazine published by the Association of Computing Machinery, recently devoted an entire issue to the topic.

I’ve argued before that we conflate a lot of things under the “metrics” term, from key performance indicators to critical failure alerts to data that may be vaguely useful someday for something or other. But that’s a topic for another day. What I want to discuss here is how metrics affect behavior.

It’s HTTPS or Bust: How to Secure Your Website

By

ZDNet

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February 23, 2018

Come July 2018, with the release of Chrome 68, any site not protected with Secure-Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) will be marked with the red-triangle of an insecure site. Unless you secure your site, you can kiss your web traffic goodbye.

To secure your website, you must install an X.509 Digital Certificate, generically called an SSL certificate, on your server. A trusted third party, called a Certificate Authority (CA), guarantees the Digital Certificate’s authenticity with a Digital Signature, so your visitors can be sure they are where they thought they were going.

There are many CAs. Some of the best commercial ones are Network Solutions, Entrust, and Symantec. Prices for certificates from a major provider range from $50 to $500. You can also get a free certificate — that’s every bit of good for most purposes — from the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG)‘s Let’s Encrypt.

Let’s Encrypt Hits 50 Million Active Certificates and Counting

By

Electronic Frontier Foundation

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February 23, 2018

In yet another milestone on the path to encrypting the web, Let’s Encrypt has now issued over 50 million active certificates. Depending on your definition of “website,” this suggests that Let’s Encrypt is protecting between about 23 million and 66 million websites with HTTPS (more on that below). Whatever the number, it’s growing every day as more and more webmasters and hosting providers use Let’s Encrypt to provide HTTPS on their websites by default.

Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority, or CA. CAs like Let’s Encrypt are crucial to secure, HTTPS-encrypted browsing. They issue and maintain digital certificates that help web users and their browsers know they’re actually talking to the site they intended to.

One of the things that sets Let’s Encrypt apart is that it issues these certificates for free.

Mentor Embedded Linux Gains Cloud-Based IoT Platform

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LinuxGizmos

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February 23, 2018

Mentor announced a “Mentor Embedded IoT Framework” platform that builds on top of Mentor Embedded Linux with cloud-based IoT cloud services ranging from device authentication and provisioning to monitoring and diagnostics.

Mentor’s Mentor Embedded IoT Framework (MEIF) extends its Yocto Project based Mentor Embedded Linux (MEL) and Nucleus RTOS development platforms to provide cloud services for IoT device management. The platform mediates between these platforms and cloud service backends, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Eclipse IoT, Microsoft Azure, and Siemens MindSphere.

Linux LAN Routing for Beginners: Part 1

By

Carla Schroder

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February 22, 2018

Once upon a time we learned about IPv6 routing. Now we’re going to dig into the basics of IPv4 routing with Linux. We’ll start with an overview of hardware and operating systems, and IPv4 addressing basics, and next week we’ll setup and test routing.

LAN Router Hardware

Linux is a real networking operating system, and always has been, with network functionality built-in from the beginning. Building a LAN router is simple compared to building a gateway router that connects your LAN to the Internet. You don’t have to hassle with security or firewall rules, which are still complicated by having to deal with NAT, network address translation, an affliction of IPv4. Why do we not drop IPv4 and migrate to IPv6? The life of the network administrator would be ever so much simpler.

But I digress. Ideally, your Linux router is a small machine with at least two network interfaces. Linux Gizmos has a great roundup of single-board computers here: Catalog of 98 open-spec, hacker friendly SBCs. You could use an old laptop or desktop PC. You could use a compact computer, like the ZaReason Zini or the System76 Meerkat, though these are a little pricey at nearly $600. But they are stout and reliable, and you’re not wasting money on a Windows license.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is great for lower-demand routing. It has a single 10/100 Ethernet port, onboard 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless, and four USB ports, so you can plug in more USB network interfaces. USB 2.0 and the slower onboard network interfaces make the Pi a bit of a network bottleneck, but you can’t beat the price ($35 without storage or power supply). It supports a couple dozen Linux flavors, so chances are you can have your favorite. The Debian-based Raspbian is my personal favorite.

Operating System

You might as well stuff the smallest version of your favorite Linux on your chosen hardware thingy, because the specialized router operating systems such as OpenWRT, Tomato, DD-WRT, Smoothwall, Pfsense, and so on all have their own non-standard interfaces. In my admirable opinion this is an unnecessary complication that gets in the way rather than helping. Use the standard Linux tools and learn them once.

The Debian net install image is about 300MB and supports multiple architectures, including ARM, i386, amd64, and armhf. Ubuntu’s server net installation image is under 50MB, giving you even more control over what packages you install. Fedora, Mageia, and openSUSE all offer compact net install images. If you need inspiration browse Distrowatch.

What Routers Do

Why do we even need network routers? A router connects different networks. Without routing every network space is isolated, all sad and alone with no one to talk to but the same boring old nodes. Suppose you have a 192.168.1.0/24 and a 192.168.2.0/24 network. Your two networks cannot talk to each other without a router connecting them. These are Class C private networks with 254 usable addresses each. Use ipcalc to get nice visual information about them:

$ ipcalc 192.168.1.0/24
Address:   192.168.1.0          11000000.10101000.00000001. 00000000
Netmask:   255.255.255.0 = 24   11111111.11111111.11111111. 00000000
Wildcard:  0.0.0.255            00000000.00000000.00000000. 11111111
=>
Network:   192.168.1.0/24       11000000.10101000.00000001. 00000000
HostMin:   192.168.1.1          11000000.10101000.00000001. 00000001
HostMax:   192.168.1.254        11000000.10101000.00000001. 11111110
Broadcast: 192.168.1.255        11000000.10101000.00000001. 11111111
Hosts/Net: 254                   Class C, Private Internet

I like that ipcalc’s binary output makes a visual representation of how the netmask works. The first three octets are the network address, and the fourth octet is the host address, so when you are assigning host addresses you “mask” out the network portion and use the leftover. Your two networks have different network addresses, and that is why they cannot communicate without a router in between them.

Each octet is 256 bytes, but that does not give you 256 host addresses because the first and last values, 0 and 255, are reserved. 0 is the network identifier, and 255 is the broadcast address, so that leaves 254 host addresses. ipcalc helpfully spells all of this out.

This does not mean that you never have a host address that ends in 0 or 255. Suppose you have a 16-bit prefix:

$ ipcalc 192.168.0.0/16
Address:   192.168.0.0          11000000.10101000. 00000000.00000000
Netmask:   255.255.0.0 = 16     11111111.11111111. 00000000.00000000
Wildcard:  0.0.255.255          00000000.00000000. 11111111.11111111
=>
Network:   192.168.0.0/16       11000000.10101000. 00000000.00000000
HostMin:   192.168.0.1          11000000.10101000. 00000000.00000001
HostMax:   192.168.255.254      11000000.10101000. 11111111.11111110
Broadcast: 192.168.255.255      11000000.10101000. 11111111.11111111
Hosts/Net: 65534                 Class C, Private Internet

ipcalc lists your first and last host addresses, 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.255.254. You may have host addresses that end in 0 and 255, for example 192.168.1.0 and 192.168.0.255, because those fall in between the HostMin and HostMax.

The same principles apply regardless of your address blocks, whether they are private or public, and don’t be shy about using ipcalc to help you understand.

CIDR

CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) was created to extend IPv4 by providing variable-length subnet masking. CIDR allows finer slicing-and-dicing of your network space. Let ipcalc demonstrate:

$ ipcalc 192.168.1.0/22
Address:   192.168.1.0          11000000.10101000.000000 01.00000000
Netmask:   255.255.252.0 = 22   11111111.11111111.111111 00.00000000
Wildcard:  0.0.3.255            00000000.00000000.000000 11.11111111
=>
Network:   192.168.0.0/22       11000000.10101000.000000 00.00000000
HostMin:   192.168.0.1          11000000.10101000.000000 00.00000001
HostMax:   192.168.3.254        11000000.10101000.000000 11.11111110
Broadcast: 192.168.3.255        11000000.10101000.000000 11.11111111
Hosts/Net: 1022                  Class C, Private Internet

The netmask is not limited to whole octets, but rather crosses the boundary between the third and fourth octets, and the subnet portion ranges from 0 to 3, and not from 0 to 255. The number of available hosts is not a multiple of 8 as it is when the netmask is defined by whole octets.

Your homework is to review CIDR and how the IPv4 address space is allocated between public, private, and reserved blocks, as this is essential to understanding routing. Setting up routes is not complicated as long as you have a good knowledge of addressing.

Start with Understanding IP Addressing and CIDR Charts, IPv4 Private Address Space and Filtering, and IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry. Then come back next week to learn how to create and manage routes.

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

ONS 2018: Networking Reimagined

By

The Linux Foundation

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February 22, 2018

For the past seven years, Open Networking Summit (ONS) has brought together the networking industry’s ecosystem of network operators, vendors, open source projects, leading researchers, and investors to discuss the latest SDN and NFV developments that will shape the future of the networking industry. With this year’s event, taking place March 26-29, 2018 in Los Angeles, ONS will evolve its approach as the premier open source networking event. We’re excited to share three new aspects of this year’s ONS that you won’t want to miss:

Present Less, Engage More

Sometimes it’s good to break the traditional mold. As ONS is an open source event, we hope to foster more collaboration with fewer formal presentations and more discussion within our keynotes. Attendees can expect more time to ask questions and explore demos while attending keynotes. This year’s sessions will cover forward-looking vision, disruption and strategy with an enterprise, cloud and server provider focus. Keynote presenters for this year include industry leaders from AT&T Labs, Arm, Ericsson, Google, Uber and many more. Learn more about ONS 2018 keynotes here.

Networking: Reimagined for Future Networks

Open source networking deployments are now expanding beyond the carrier world. Hear from industry visionaries and leaders on the future of networking beyond SDN/NFV, including 5G & IoT; cloud networking (Kubernetes); AI & ML applied to networks; and the use of networking technologies within other industry verticals such as FinTech and automotive. Whether you are new to these emerging technologies or want to deepen your technical understanding, our agenda will connect you with many organizations deploying open source networking solutions. Full agenda can be found here.

Welcome to Los Angeles!

We’re excited to feature ONS 2018 in a new location this year: Los Angeles! Unofficially known as the City of Dreams, we hope attendees will be inspired by the innovation and creativity of the area. The change of scenery brings us to the heart of Los Angeles, at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, and will provide opportunities for networking (in every sense of the word).

Sign up to get the latest updates on ONS NA 2018!

Registration for ONS 2018 is quickly filling up and we hope you’ll join us this March! Save 15% on your registration with the code ONSLCR15. To reserve your spot or learn more about the event, visit here.

This article originally appeared at The Linux Foundation.

Why UX Practitioners Should Learn About SRE

By

Medium Blog

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February 22, 2018

Understanding reliability is an equally complex problem to understanding user needs and we still need to consider the user — even more important than poor reliability is the perception of poor reliability. That why it’s essential that balanced teams start involving UX researchers in the reliability research of their product as ultimately this is a tool for product design.

That said understanding reliability requires a new vocabulary and a comfort level with automation and statistical analysis that may not be familiar to some. These are new skills for most researchers but they are teachable. Most researchers will find it most natural to start with the concepts of Operator Experience Design (OX) but the research toolkit is much richer than that.

How Kubernetes Became the Solution for Migrating Legacy Applications

By

OpenSource.com

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February 22, 2018

You don’t have to tear down your monolith to modernize it. You can evolve it into a beautiful microservice using cloud-native technologies.

Kubernetes and containers didn’t only change the ability to manage at scale, but also to take massive, monolithic applications and more easily slice them into more manageable microservices. Each service can be managed to scale up and down as needed. Microservices also allow for faster deployments and faster iteration in keeping with modern continuous integration practices. Kubernetes-based orchestration allows you to improve efficiency and resource utilization by dynamically managing and scheduling these microservices. It also adds an extraordinary level of resiliency. You don’t have to worry about container failure, and you can continue to operate as demand goes up and down.

The Next Generation of TinyFPGAs

By

Hackster

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February 22, 2018

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have come of age. Once viewed as exotic and scary there are a number of FPGA boards targeting the maker market and among them is a new range of open source TinyFPGA boards.

The latest TinyFPGA board is the TinyFPGA BX board, an updated version of their B2 board, and it’s arriving soon on Crowd Supply.

The new BX board is based around the same ICE40LP8K FPGA as the original B2; however, with stock of their original B-series board running low, the new piece of hardware is a big improvement.