CableLabs hinted in October that it was planning to launch an open source group. At that time, we speculated that the open source project would be related to its SNAPS initiative. SNAPS stands for “SDN/NFV Application development Platform and Stack.” CableLabs had previously done some software development it called SNAPS-OO. It gave that code to the OPNFV project a couple of months ago.
No matter what you do, chances are you enjoy a bit of music playing in the background. Whether you’re a coder, system administrator, or typical desktop user, enjoying good music might be at the top of your list of things you do on the desktop. And, with the holidays upon us, you might wind up with some gift cards that allow you to purchase some new music. If your music format of choice is of a digital nature (mine happens to be vinyl) and your platform is Linux, you’re going to want a good GUI player to enjoy that music.
Fortunately, Linux has no lack of digital music players. In fact, there are quite a few, most of which are open source and available for free. Let’s take a look at a few such players, to see which one might suit your needs.
Clementine
I wanted to start out with the player that has served as my default for years. Clementine offers probably the single best ratio of ease-of-use to flexibility you’ll find in any player. Clementine is a fork of the new defunct Amarok music player, but isn’t limited to Linux-only; Clementine is also available for Mac OS and Windows platforms. The feature set is seriously impressive and includes the likes of:
Built-in equalizer
Customizable interface (display current album cover as background — Figure 1)
Play local music or from Spotify, Last.fm, and more
Sidebar for easy library navigation
Built-in audio transcoding (into MP3, OGG, Flac, and more)
Figure 1: The Clementine interface might be a bit old-school, but it’s incredibly user-friendly and flexible.
Of all the music players I have used, Clementine is by far the most feature-rich and easy to use. It also includes one of the finest equalizers you’ll find on a Linux music player (with 10 bands to adjust). Although it may not enjoy a very modern interface, it is absolutely unmatched for its ability to create and manipulate playlists. If your music collection is large, and you want total control over it, this is the player you want.
Clementine can be found in the standard repositories and installed from either your distribution’s software center or the command line.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is the default player for the GNOME desktop, but it does function well on other desktops. The Rhythmbox interface is slightly more modern than Clementine and takes a minimal approach to design. That doesn’t mean the app is bereft of features. Quite the opposite. Rhythmbox offers gapless playback, Soundcloud support, album cover display, audio scrobbling from Last.fm and Libre.fm, Jamendo support, podcast subscription (from Apple iTunes), web remote control, and more.
One very nice feature found in Rhythmbox is plugin support, which allows you to enable features like DAAP Music Sharing, FM Radio, Cover art search, notifications, ReplayGain, Song Lyrics, and more.
The Rhythmbox playlist feature isn’t quite as powerful as that found in Clementine, but it still makes it fairly easy to organize your music into quick playlists for any mood. Although Rhythmbox does offer a slightly more modern interface than Clementine (Figure 2), it’s not quite as flexible.
Figure 2: The Rhythmbox interface is simple and straightforward.
VLC Media Player
For some, VLC cannot be beat for playing videos. However, VLC isn’t limited to the playback of video. In fact, VLC does a great job of playing audio files. For KDE Neon users, VLC serves as your default for both music and video playback. Although VLC is one of the finest video players on the Linux market (it’s my default), it does suffer from some minor limitations with audio—namely the lack of playlists and the inability to connect to remote directories on your network. But if you’re looking for an incredibly simple and reliable means to play local files or network mms/rtsp streams VLC is a quality tool.
VLC does include an equalizer (Figure 3), a compressor, and a spatializer as well as the ability to record from a capture device.
Figure 3: The VLC equalizer in action.
Audacious
If you’re looking for a lightweight music player, Audacious perfectly fits that bill. This particular music player is fairly single minded, but it does include an equalizer and a small selection of effects that will please many an audiophile (e.g., Echo, Silence removal, Speed and Pitch, Voice Removal, and more—Figure 4).
Figure 4: The Audacious EQ and plugins.
Audacious also includes a really handy alarm feature, that allows you to set an alarm that will start playing your currently selected track at a user-specified time and duration.
Spotify
I must confess, I use spotify daily. I’m a subscriber and use it to find new music to purchase—which means I am constantly searching and discovering. Fortunately, there is a desktop client for Spotify (Figure 5) that can be easily installed using the official Spotify Linux installation instructions. Outside of listening to vinyl, I probably make use of Spotify more than any other music player. It also helps that I can seamlessly jump between the desktop client and the Android app, so I never miss out on the music I enjoy.
Figure 5: The official Spotify client on Linux.
The Spotify interface is very easy to use and, in fact, it beats the web player by leaps and bounds. Do not settle for the Spotify Web Player on Linux, as the desktop client makes it much easier to create and manage your playlists. If you’re a Spotify power user, don’t even bother with the built-in support for the streaming client in the other desktop apps—once you’ve used the Spotify Desktop Client, the other apps pale in comparison.
The choice is yours
Other options are available (check your desktop software center), but these five clients (in my opinion) are the best of the best. For me, the one-two punch of Clementine and Spotify gives me the best of all possible worlds. Try them out and see which one best meets your needs.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
Since the beginning of the Git era (that is, the 2.6.11 release in 2005), a total of 15,637 developers have contributed to the Linux kernel, according to the recent Linux Kernel Development Report, written by Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman.
One of the top 30 developers is Thomas Gleixner, CTO at Linutronix GmbH, who serves in various kernel maintainer roles. In this article, Gleixner answers a few questions about his contributions to the Linux kernel.
This week in open source news, Bell is the first company to launch an open source version of ONAP, the European Commission has announced a bug bounty program, & more
1) Telecom company Bell announced it has become the first to launch an open source version of ONAP.
What does open source mean? That’s an increasingly tough question to answer because the term is now being applied everywhere and to everything — which is not good. To understand why open source is losing its meaning, you have to start by tracing the origins of the phrase.
Then, in 1998, a group of people who advocated the free sharing of software source code coined the termopen source software. They did so primarily because they sought an alternative to free software, the term that was initially used to describe software whose source code was freely available.
For political reasons not worth discussing here, some people today continue to prefer the term free software. By and large, however, open source software has become the de facto way to describe software with freely redistributable source code.
The Kubernetes developer community is capping off a successful year with the release of Kubernetes 1.9, adding important new features that should help to further encourage enterprise adoption.
Kubernetesis the most popular container orchestrator management software. It’s used to simplify the deployment and management of software containers, which are a popular tool among developers that allows them to run their applications across multiple computing environments without making any changes to the underlying code.
Recently, Sean Paul from Google’s ChromeOS team, submitted a patch series to enable HDCP support for the Intel display driver. HDCP – or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection to its parents – is used to encrypt content over HDMI and DisplayPort links, which can only be decoded by trusted devices.
HDCP is typically used to protect high-quality content. A source device will try to negotiate a HDCP link with its downstream receiver such as your TV or a frame-capture device. If a HDCP link can be negotiated, the pixel content will be encrypted over the wire and decrypted by the trusted downstream device. If a HDCP link cannot be successfully negotiated and pixel data remains unencrypted, the typical behaviour is to fall back to a lower resolution, or quality that is in some way less desirable to capture.
This is a form of copy protection usually lumped in with Digital Rights Management, something the open source community is often jumpy about. Most of the sound and fury typically comes from people mixing up the acronym with the kernel’s display management framework called the Direct Rendering Manager; this is thus the first known upstream submission of DRM for DRM.
Regardless, there is no reason for the open-source community to worry at all.
HDCP support is implemented almost entirely in the hardware. Rather than adding a mandatory encryption layer for content, the HDCP kernel support is dormant unless userspace explicitly requests an encrypted link. It then attempts to enable encryption in the hardware and informs userspace of the result. So there’s the first out: if you don’t want to use HDCP, then don’t enable it! The kernel doesn’t force anything on an unwilling userspace. Sinks (such as TVs) cannot demand an upstream link provide HDCP, either.
HDCP support is also only over the wire, not on your device. A common misconception is that DRM means that the pixel frames coming from your video decoder are encrypted. Not so: all content is completely unencrypted locally, with encryption only occurring at the very last step before the stream of pixels becomes a stream of physical electrons on a wire.
In Testing IPv6 Networking in KVM: Part 1, we learned about unique local addresses (ULAs). In this article, we will learn how to set up automatic IP address configuration for ULAs.
When to Use Unique Local Addresses
Unique local addresses use the fd00::/8 address block, and are similar to our old friends the IPv4 private address classes: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16. But they are not intended as a direct replacement. IPv4 private address classes and network address translation (NAT) were created to alleviate the shortage of IPv4 addresses, a clever hack that prolonged the life of IPv4 for years after it should have been replaced. IPv6 supports NAT, but I can’t think of a good reason to use it. IPv6 isn’t just bigger IPv4; it is different and needs different thinking.
So what’s the point of ULAs, especially when we have link-local addresses (fe80::/10) and don’t even need to configure them? There are two important differences. One, link-local addresses are not routable, so you can’t cross subnets. Two, you control ULAs; choose your own addresses, make subnets, and they are routable.
Another benefit of ULAs is you don’t need an allocation of global unicast IPv6 addresses just for mucking around on your LAN. If you have an allocation from a service provider then you don’t need ULAs. You can mix global unicast addresses and ULAs on the same network, but I can’t think of a good reason to have both, and for darned sure you don’t want to use network address translation (NAT) to make ULAs publicly accessible. That, in my peerless opinion, is daft.
ULAs are for private networks only and should be blocked from leaving your network, and not allowed to roam the Internet. Which should be simple, just block the whole fd00::/8 range on your border devices.
Address Auto-Configuration
ULAs are not automatic like link-local addresses, but setting up auto-configuration is easy as pie with radvd, the router advertisement daemon. Before you change anything, run ifconfig or ip addr show to see your existing IP addresses.
You should install radvd on a dedicated router for production use, but for testing you can install it on any Linux PC on your network. In my little KVM test lab, I installed it on Ubuntu, apt-get install radvd. It should not start after installation, because there is no configuration file:
$ sudo systemctl status radvd
● radvd.service - LSB: Router Advertising Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/radvd; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (exited) since Mon 2017-12-11 20:08:25 PST; 4min 59s ago
Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
Dec 11 20:08:25 ubunut1 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Router Advertising Daemon...
Dec 11 20:08:25 ubunut1 radvd[3541]: Starting radvd:
Dec 11 20:08:25 ubunut1 radvd[3541]: * /etc/radvd.conf does not exist or is empty.
Dec 11 20:08:25 ubunut1 radvd[3541]: * See /usr/share/doc/radvd/README.Debian
Dec 11 20:08:25 ubunut1 radvd[3541]: * radvd will *not* be started.
Dec 11 20:08:25 ubunut1 systemd[1]: Started LSB: Router Advertising Daemon.
It’s a little confusing with all the start and not started messages, but radvd is not running, which you can verify with good old ps|grep radvd. So we need to create /etc/radvd.conf. Copy this example, replacing the network interface name on the first line with your interface name:
The prefix defines your network address, which is the first 64 bits of the address. The first two characters must be fd, then you define the remainder of the prefix, and leave the last 64 bits empty as radvd will assign the last 64 bits. The next 16 bits after the prefix define the subnet, and the remaining bits define the host address. Your subnet size must always be /64. RFC 4193 requires that addresses be randomly generated; see Testing IPv6 Networking in KVM: Part 1 for more information on creating and managing ULAs.
IPv6 Forwarding
IPv6 forwarding must be enabled. This command enables it until restart:
$ sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
Uncomment or add this line to /etc/sysctl.conf to make it permanent:
This example reflects a quirk I ran into on my Ubuntu test system; I always have to stop radvd, no matter what state it is in, and then start it to apply any changes.
You won’t see any output on a successful start, and often not on a failure either, so run sudo systemctl radvd status. If there are errors, systemctl will tell you. The most common errors are syntax errors in /etc/radvd.conf.
A cool thing I learned after complaining on Twitter: when you run journalctl -xe --no-pager to debug systemctl errors, your output lines will wrap, and then you can actually read your error messages.
Now check your hosts to see their new auto-assigned addresses:
The latest version of the open source container orchestration framework Kubernetes, Kubernetes 1.9, brings to the container-orchestration framework both full-blown and beta-test versions of significant new features:
The general availability of the Workloads API.
Beta support for Windows Server.
An alpha version of a new container storage API
What’s new in Kubernetes 1.9
Kubernetes 1.9 was released in December 2017.
Production version of the Workloads API
Promoted to beta in Kubernetes 1.8 and now in production release in Kubernetes 1.9, the Apps Workloads API provides ways to define workloads based on their behaviors, such as long-running apps that need persistent state.
A common problem in component frameworks, class libraries, foundation services, and other infrastructure code is that many are designed to be general purpose without reference to concrete applications. This leads to a dizzying array of options and possibilities that are often unused or misused — or just not useful.
Generally, developers work on specific systems; specifically, the quest for unbounded generality rarely serves them well (if at all). The best route to generality is through understanding known, specific examples, focusing on their essence to find an essential common solution. Simplicity through experience rather than generality through guesswork.
Favouring simplicity before generality acts as a tiebreaker between otherwise equally viable design alternatives. When there are two possible solutions, favour the one that is simpler and based on concrete need rather than the more intricate one that boasts of generality.
