Continuous delivery (CD) is becoming the cornerstone of modern software development, enabling organizations to ship — in small increments — new features and functionality to customers faster to meet market demands. CD is achieved by applying DevOps practices and principles (continuous integration and continuous deployment) from development to operations. There is no continuous delivery without implementing DevOps practices and principles. By that, I mean strong communication and collaboration across teams, and automation across testing, build, and deployment pipelines. But often achieving continuous delivery to meet market demands presents numerous challenges for security.
While DevOps principles and practices acknowledge the need for security, many organizations struggle to find the right fit and speed for integrating security into DevOps.
How do you install an application on Linux? As with many operating systems, there isn’t just one answer to that question. Applications can come from so many sources—it’s nearly impossible to count—and each development team may deliver their software whatever way they feel is best. Knowing how to install what you’re given is part of being a true power user of your OS.
Repositories
For well over a decade, Linux has used software repositories to distribute software. A “repository” in this context is a public server hosting installable software packages. A Linux distribution provides a command, and usually a graphical interface to that command, that pulls the software from the server and installs it onto your computer.
This week in open source news, the Consumer Electronics Show has us looking forward to connected cars and smart cities. Read on to learn how AGL is helping steer the course.
1) Automotive Grade Linux (AGL,) a Linux Foundation Project, makes a splash at CES 2018.
2) “The smart city sector is one of the hot topics at CES 2018, with nearly every major technology provider looking to jump into the connected ecosystem,” writes Natalie Gagliordi. We ask, how can open source help take this from “hot topic” to universal reality?
Computer programmers, website developers, and people learning the basics as production managers of Linux and Unix systems will be able to acquire new information from this handbook. After reading this book, I wanted to share some of the key points with advanced engineers, as well as people starting out like myself.
One year ago I started attending DevOps meetings called Meetups in the Boulder area. I was able to expand my comfort zone past front-end development, and find out more on how system operations worked. The Meetups continue to be an excellent way for people to acquire new skills in networking and operations.
The first few chapters contained information and vocabulary that was over my head at times, but I found out that after reading and reviewing new terms, it expanded my ability to learn new information. I suggest you read the latest edition to stay up to date on Linux and Unix systems, as well as refresh yourself with the latest cloud computing trends.
Compliance is a valid tool for enabling or facilitating secure operation of any type of IT organization, which is what ISO 27001 [1], BSI Base Protection [2], and various other certification bodies claim for their customers. However, corporations often need to implement compliance rules for certification that are contrary to existing business practices. To keep the promises made to the certification authority, regular systems checks are needed. Thus, a corporation needs to verify whether the rules laid down in its statutes are in fact implemented on all relevant systems, as the instructions require. The question is, how can you implement this kind of check?
One way would be to employ admins who do nothing but handle this task, but that would be inefficient; moreover, it would cause a worrying situation in which regular administrators feel they are being watched. Infinitely preferable is automated compliance tests: InSpec to the rescue.
On this new episode of The New Stack Makers from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2017, we’ll learn more from Kohn and William Denniss, a product manager at Google, about how the program can help ensure interoperability and why that’s so important.
Denniss noted that avoiding vendor lock-in is a key reason people want to use Kubernetes, with a focus on abstracting away from the infrastructure they are using.
The simple premise of DevSecOps is that everyone in the software development life cycle is responsible for security, in essence bringing operations and development together with security functions. DevSecOps aims to embed security in every part of the development process. It is about trying to automate core security tasks by embedding security controls and processes early in the DevOps workflow (rather than being bolted on at the end). For example, this could be the case when migrating to microservices, building out a CI/CD pipeline, compliance automation or simply testing cloud infrastructure.
The ability to deploy applications in the cloud has improved both scale and speed, the move to agile and DevOps methodologies (and with that, continuous delivery) making “big bang” application launches a thing of the past. In particular, DevOps — the principle of integrating development and IT operations under a “single automated umbrella” — has helped with everything from more frequent feature releases to increased application stability.
Earlier we have discussed some basics about VI/VIM editor but VI & VIM are both very powerful editors and there are many other functionalities that can be used with these editors. In this tutorial, we are going to learn some advanced uses of VI/VIM editor.
To open multiple files, command would be same as is for a single file; we just add the file name for second file as well.
Barcelona city administration has prepared the roadmap to migrate its existing system from Microsoft and proprietary software to Linux and Open Source software.
A Spanish newspaper, El País, has reported that the City of Barcelona is in the process of migrating its computer system to Open Source technologies.
According to the news report, the city plans to first replace all its user applications with alternative open source applications. This will go on until the only remaining proprietary software will be Windows where it will finally be replaced with a Linux distribution.
When last we met, we learned that the Linux console supports multimedia. Yes, really! You can enjoy music, movies, photos, and even read PDF files without being in an X session with MPlayer, fbi, and fbgs. And, as a bonus, you can enjoy a Matrix-style screensaver for the console, CMatrix.
You will probably have make some tweaks to your system to make this work. The examples used here are for Ubuntu Linux 16.04.
MPlayer
You’re probably familiar with the amazing and versatile MPlayer, which supports almost every video and audio format, and runs on nearly everything, including Linux, Android, Windows, Mac, Kindle, OS/2, and AmigaOS. Using MPLayer in your console will probably require some tweaking, depending on your Linux distribution. To start, try playing a video:
$ mplayer
If it works, then hurrah, and you can invest your time in learning useful MPlayer options, such as controlling the size of the video screen. However, some Linux distributions are managing the framebuffer differently than in the olden days, and you may have to adjust some settings to make it work. This is how to make it work on recent Ubuntu releases.
First, add yourself to the video group.
Second, verify that /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf has this line: #blacklist vesafb. It should already be commented out, and if it isn’t then comment it. All the other module lines should be un-commented, which prevents them from loading. Side note: if you want to dig more deeply into managing your framebuffer, the module for your video card may give better performance.
Add these two modules to the end of /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, vesafb and fbcon, then rebuild the initramfs image:
$ sudo nano /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
# List of modules that you want to include in your initramfs.
# They will be loaded at boot time in the order below.
fbcon
vesafb
$ sudo update-initramfs -u
fbcon is the Linux framebuffer console. It runs on top of the framebuffer and adds graphical features. It requires a framebuffer device, which is supplied by the vesafb module.
Now you must edit your GRUB2 configuration. In /etc/default/grub you should see a line like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
It may have some other options, but it should be there. Add vga=789:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vga=789"
Reboot and enter your console (Ctrl+Alt+F1), and try playing a video. This command selects the fbdev2 video device; I haven’t learned yet how to know which one to use, but I had to use it to play the video. The default screen size is 320×240, so I scaled it to 960:
And behold Figure 1. It’s grainy because I have a low-fi copy of this video, not because MPlayer is making it grainy.
Figure 1: Playing a video.
MPLayer plays CDs, DVDs, network streams, and has a giant batch of playback options, which I shall leave as your homework to explore.
fbi Image Viewer
fbi, the framebuffer image viewer, comes in the fbida package on most Linuxes. It has native support for the common image file formats, and uses convert (from Image Magick), if it is installed, for other formats. Its simplest use is to view a single image file:
$ fbi filename
Use the arrow keys to scroll a large image, + and – to zoom, and r and l to rotate 90 degress right and left. Press the Escape key to close the image. You can play a slideshow by giving fbi a list of files:
$ fbi --list file-list.txt
fbi supports autozoom. With -afbi controls the zoom factor. --autoup and --autodown tell fbi to only zoom up or down. Control the blend time between images with --blend [time], in milliseconds. Press the k and j keys to jump behind and ahead in your file list.
fbi has commands for creating file lists from images you have viewed, and for exporting your commands to a file, and a host of other cool options. Check out man fbi for complete options.
CMatrix Console Screensaver
The Matrix screensaver is still my favorite (Figure 2), second only to the bouncing cow. CMatrix runs on the console. Simply type cmatrix to start it, and Ctrl+C stops it. Run cmatrix -s to launch it in screensaver mode, which exits on any keypress. -C changes the color. Your choices are green, red, blue, yellow, white, magenta, cyan, and black.
Figure 2: Matrix screensaver.
CMatrix supports asynchronous key presses, which means you can change options while it’s running.
-B is all bold text, and -B is partially bold.
fbgs PDF Viewer
It seems that the addiction to PDF documents is pandemic and incurable, though PDFs are better than they used to be, with live hyperlinks, copy-paste, and good text search. The fbgs console PDF viewer is part of the fbida package. Options include page size, resolution, page selections, and most fbi options, with the exceptions listed in man fbgs. The main option I use is page size; you get -l, xl, and xxl to choose from:
$ fbgs -xl annoyingpdf.pdf
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
