GeckoLinux Brings Flexibility and Choice to openSUSE

By

-

December 8, 2017

I’ve been a fan of SUSE and openSUSE for a long time. I’ve always wanted to call myself an openSUSE user, but things seemed to get in the way—mostly Elementary OS. But every time an openSUSE spin is released, I take notice. Most recently, I was made aware of GeckoLinux—a unique take (offering both Static and Rolling releases) that offers a few options that openSUSE does not. Consider this list of features:

Live DVD / USB image
Editions for the following desktops: Cinnamon, XFCE, GNOME, Plasma, Mate, Budgie, LXQt, Barebones
Plenty of pre-installed open source desktop programs and proprietary media codecs
Beautiful font rendering configured out of the box
Advanced Power Management (TLP) pre-installed
Large amount of software available in the preconfigured repositories (preferring packages from the Packman repo—when available)
Based on openSUSE (with no repackaging or modification of packages)
Desktop programs can be uninstalled, along with all of their dependencies (whereas openSUSE’s patterns often cause uninstalled packages to be re-installed automatically)
Does not force the installation of additional recommended packages, after initial installation (whereas openSUSE pre-installs patterns that automatically installs recommended package dependencies the first time the package manager is used)

The choice of desktops alone makes for an intriguing proposition. Keeping a cleaner, lighter system is also something that would appeal to many users—especially in light of laptops running smaller, more efficient solid state drives.

Let’s dig into GeckoLinux and see if it might be your next Linux distribution.

Installation

I don’t want to say too much about the installation—as installing Linux has become such a no-brainer these days. I will say that GeckoLinux has streamlined the process to an impressive level. The installation of GeckoLinux took about three minutes total (granted I am running it as a virtual machine on a beast of a host—so resources were not an issue). The difference between installing GeckoLinux and openSUSE Tumbleweed was significant. Whereas GeckoLinux installed in single digits, openSUSE took more 10 minutes to install. Relatively speaking, that’s still not long. But we’re picking at nits here, so that amount of time should be noted.

The only hiccup to the installation was the live distro asking for a password for the live user. The live username is linux and the password is, as you probably already guessed, linux. That same password is also the same used for admin tasks (such as running the installer).

You will also note, there are two icons on the desktop—one to install the OS and another to install language packs. Run the OS installer. Once the installation is complete—and you’ve booted into your desktop—you can then run the Language installer (if you need the Language packs—Figure 1).

Figure 1: Clearly, I chose the GNOME desktop for testing purposes.

After the Language installer finished, you can then remove the installer icon from the desktop by right-clicking it and selecting Move to Trash.

Those fonts

The developer claims beautiful font rendering out of the box. In fact, the developer makes this very statement:

GeckoLinux comes preconfigured with what many would consider to be good font rendering, whereas many users find openSUSE’s default font configuration to be less than desirable.

Take a glance at Figure 2. Here you see a side by side comparison of openSUSE (on the left) and GeckLinux (on the right). The difference is very subtle, but GeckoLinux does, in fact, best openSUSE out of the box. It’s cleaner and easier to read. The developer claims are dead on. Although openSUSE does a very good job of rendering fonts out of the box, GeckoLinux improves on that enough to make a difference. In fact, I’d say it’s some of the cleanest (out of the box) looking fonts I’ve seen on a Linux distribution.

Figure 2: openSUSE on the left, GeckoLinux on the right.

I’ve worked with distributions that don’t render fonts well. After hours of writing, those fonts tend to put a strain on my eyes. For anyone that spends a good amount of time staring at words, well-rendered fonts can make the difference between having eye strain or not. The openSUSE font rendering is just slightly blurrier than that of GeckoLinux. That matters.

Installed applications

GeckoLinux does exactly what it claims—installs just what you need. After a complete installation (no post-install upgrading), GeckoLinux comes in at 1.5GB installed. On the other hand, openSUSE’s post-install footprint is 4.3GB. In defense of openSUSE, it does install things like GNOME Games, Evolution, GIMP, and more—so much of that space is taken up with added software and dependencies. But if you’re looking for a lighter weight take on openSUSE, GeckoLinux is your OS.

GeckoLinux does come pre-installed with a couple of nice additions—namely the Clementine Audio player (a favorite of mine), Thunderbird (instead of Evolution), PulseAudio Volume Control (a must for audio power users), Qt Configuration, GParted, Pidgen, and VLC.

If you’re a developer, you won’t find much in the way of development tools on GeckoLinux. But that’s no different than openSUSE (even the make command is missing on both). Naturally, all the developer tools you need (to work on Linux) are available to install (either from the command line or from with YaST2).

Performance

Between openSUSE and GeckoLinux, there is very little noticeable difference in performance. Opening Firefox on both resulted in maybe a second or two variation (in favor of GeckoLinux). It should be noted, however, that the installed Firefox on both was quite out of date (52 on GeckoLinux and 53 on openSUSE). Even after a full upgrade on both platforms, Firefox was still listed at release 52 on GeckoLinux, whereas openSUSE did pick up Firefox 57. After downloading the Firefox Quantum package on GeckoLinux, the application opened immediately—completely blowing away both out of the box experiences on openSUSE and GeckLinux. So the first thing you will want to do is get Firefox upgraded to 57.

If you’re hoping for a significant performance increase over openSUSE, look elsewhere. If you’re accustomed to the performance of openSUSE (it not being the sprightliest of platforms), you’ll feel right at home with GeckoLinux.

The conclusion

If you’re looking for an excuse to venture back into the realm of openSUSE, GeckoLinux might be a good reason. It’s slightly better looking, lighter weight, and with similar performance. It’s not perfect and, chances are, it won’t steal you away from your distribution of choice, but GeckoLinux is a solid entry in the realm of Linux desktops.

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

Practical Ways to Improve Your Open Source Development Impact

By

The Linux Foundation

-

December 8, 2017

Open source programs are sparking innovation at organizations of all types, and if your program is up and running, you may have arrived at the point where maximizing the impact of your development is essential to continued success. Many open source program managers are now required to demonstrate the ROI of their technology development, and example open source report cards fromFacebook and Google track development milestones.

This is where the new, free Improving Your Open Source Development Impact guide can help. The aim of the guide is to help you increase your development team’s efficacy through and with open source contributions. By implementing some of the best practices laid out in the guide, you can:

Reduce the amount of work needed from product teams
Minimize the cost to maintain source code and internal software branches
Improve code quality

Deletion and Garbage Collection of Kubernetes Objects

By

The New Stack

-

December 8, 2017

This contributed article is part of a series, from members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), about CNCF’s Kubecon/CloudNativeCon, taking place this week in Austin, Dec. 6–8.

With the Kubernetes container orchestration engine, concepts and objects build on top of each other. An example we described previously is how deployments build on top of replica sets to ensure availability, and replica sets build on top of Pods to get scheduling for free.

What exactly happens when we delete a deployment? We would not only expect the deployment itself to be deleted, but also the replica sets and pods that are managed by the deployment.

Raspberry Pi, Linux on ARM Users: Now You Get a New Browser Option with Vivaldi

By

ZDNet

-

December 8, 2017

Raspberry Pi users now have one more browser to choose from besides Chromium, Firefox, and Midori, with the newly-announced availability of an experimental version of power-user-focused Vivaldi.

The Blink-based browser from former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner is expanding beyond Windows, macOS, and Linux PCs to a range of ARM-based developer boards, including the Raspberry Pi, CubieBoard, Asus Tinker Board, and more.

8 Holiday Projects with Raspberry Pi and Arduino

By

Carla Schroder

-

December 8, 2017

The best way to celebrate the coldest, darkest time of year is to build fun Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. These projects will light up the gloomiest gloom, fill your days with fun and your heart with joy, and all without draining your pocketbook. You can control lights and music, build a retro gaming console, build a cool weather station, build a photo frame, or just learn the basics and fiddle around randomly.

MicroPython on Arduino Smart Holiday Lights

When you want a versatile lighting project that you can tailor in all kinds of way, such as size, shape, animations, and colors, try MicroPython Smart Holiday Lights. It’s an advanced project that is great for learning a whole lot of cool stuff, like MicroPython, LED strip lights, and ESP8266 devices. ESP8266 is a 32-bit microcontroller with an embedded TCP stack, and ESP8266 boards are usually very small. This makes them a bit challenging to work with, which is a perfect reason to treat yourself to a good-quality lighted magnifier LED lamp. The small size also makes them quite versatile for easy embedding in all manner of objects.

Some examples of ESP8266 boards are the SparkFun ESP8266 Thing and Adafruit Feather HUZZAH.

Arduino Blinky Lights for Beginners

If you need something more basic to get started, try An Arduino Project: How To Make Flashy Christmas Lights Ornaments. This uses an Arduino Uno (Figure 1), a breadboard, and a pile of LEDs and resistors. The article links to a UK vendor for the parts, but any Arduino supplier has what you need. Breadboards are the bee’s knees for fast testing and learning, no soldering necessary.

Adafruit.com is cram-full of great beginning tutorials; you might like Breadboards for Beginners.

Easy Controllable Light Strings for Arduino

5 Minute Christmas Neopixel Led Strip has minimal soldering, and gets right into the programming. (Remember, any soldered connections can also be made on a breadboard.) The xtmas_neopixel sketch is complete with 33 animations, which you can study and modify.

The parts links in are all for overseas vendors, but you can easily find them at any Arduino supplier.

Arduino Lights and Music

Christmas Lights to Music Using Arduino is a first-rate tutorial with loads of pictures and product links. Use it to control larger light projects, such as a great gob of lawn decorations. It is based on the Arduino Duemilanove, which has been superseded and improved by the Uno R3. The Uno R3 is a super-nice board with a reset button, USB interface chip, and a fuse.

This project uses a component you don’t often see in these projects, a solid-state relay board. SSRs are for projects that require a lot of high-speed switching, and they comes in many sizes, so you tailor it to your project.

It also uses an FM transmitter and landscape cables. When you successfully put all the pieces together you’ll have a flexible controller you can adapt for all kinds of scenarios.

Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi

Holiday projects aren’t limited to lights and music. How about some classic gaming? Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi builds a classic arcade game machine. It’s a fairly complicated project, but as always the Adafruit instructions are clear and complete, with extensive guidance on which hardware to use, such as game controllers, joysticks, and arcade buttons. Before you spend any money, you can download various emulators and test them first on your PC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tm6n126Mp5E?rel=0

Raspberry Weather

What’s the weather doing? You could look outside. Or you could build a Raspberry Weather station. This collects weather data over time and displays it in graphs on your web site. It’s a medium-complex project, but the tutorial is thorough and details all the steps, including how to set up a web site on WordPress.org to display your weather data.

Raspberry Pi Photo Frame

The Raspberry Pi Photo Frame is a good project for beginners. Your photos are stored on an SD card, and the screen is the Raspberry Pi 7″ touch screen. You could use a smaller screen and hang it on your Christmas tree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUh52ZlC45g?rel=0

How to Make a Raspberry Pi Media Panel is a more complex project that powers a full-sized screen and adds a music server.

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

How IoT Is Steadily Transforming the Mobile App Development Sphere

By

Melissa Crooks Crooks

-

December 8, 2017

In recent times, the mobile app development sphere has been flooded with different sort of innovations and groundbreaking discoveries. As the current trend of the mobile market, everyone (both individuals and businesses) have been relying on mobile apps for various purposes such as communication, ordering food, booking flights, streamlining businesses, shopping and lots more. Right now, the market is largely dominated by apps and there is no sign of stopping even in the near future.

In a bid to create smarter devices that could boost virtually all aspects of an individual’s life, most top app development companies are focused on developing highly efficient mobile apps that can function more like a bridge specially designed to get people connected regardless of where they may be. It’s important to know that this new and creative achievement is responsible for the rise of the internet of things (IOT).

No doubt, the spread of devices enhanced by the creation and proliferation of the Internet of Things (IOT) is tremendously revolutionizing mobile app development. Many top app development companies today are making good use of the IoT to develop the best products and services of the 21st century. This is helping many businesses and developers to find lots of new customers day by day. The industry’s growth is enduring as there are no signs of slowing down.

Top app development companies are using the IOT to make their jobs easier by exploiting the ubiquity of its innovative technology. Most mobile apps are used basically to interact with other people, play games, locate businesses, and stream music. In simplest terms, they are used as endpoints. However, IoT has proven that there is more to just using mobile apps as endpoints. In fact, they can serve as gateways that would essentially require an endpoint through which data can be sent.

Consider a live-streaming sci-fi plot, Internet of Things has virtually penetrated into the mobile app development sphere helping people to effectively interact with every facet of their lives. In a bid to provide a greater degree of safety, comfort, and control, people are now making use of ingenious apps to get their smartphones linked with advanced, interconnected devices which tends to offer an alternate way of living.

The future of mobile app development is currently being influenced by the dramatic opportunities the IOT boom offers today. In the tech world, IoT and mobile development are becoming more or less inseparable. As this new era of technology commences, here is what you need to know about the incredible transformation that is already taking its course.

Select and Efficient Home Device

In the initial phase of the app development process, it is very needful to carefully select a home device that is connectable to the rest of the devices available. This is a very crucial task that shouldn’t be taken for granted. It is concerned with the interconnectivity of several devices via IoT. Consider using a personal computer as the home device if your technology needs to be backed up by extensive processing power. But a smartphone can be more efficient as it can be effectively managed as a home device due to its compactness. So, if you’re concentrating more of your technology on the portability, this would make a great option.

Combine Your Connectivity Options

First of all, you must understand that a steady connection is required for efficient interconnectivity of various devices to work over the IoT system. Many mobile app development companies are enabling users to seamlessly integrate their devices in various ways by employing modern technology. As a user, you can essentially get your devices connected to a single system by making use of mobile data, NFC, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. While developing their mobile apps, mobile developers often make enough space available for multiple connections. Once an app or device can effectively accommodate two or more connections without experiencing any hitches it is highly suitable for IOT.

Expand Accessibility Alternatives

One of the major reasons, mobile app development has become so popular is due to the flexibility of mobile apps. Top app development companies are helping users gain easy access to their apps regardless of where they may be at any time. Most of these devices do not require the use of a mouse and keyboard to function since they can be easily accessed and operated through their touchscreen feature. These days, developers are integrating gesture control module with mobile app development to enhance user access. At times, users may be required to employ more accessibility alternatives depending on the device they plan to link via the network.

Ensure Convenient Usability

These days, users are only interested in using apps that are extremely convenient to them. That’s why most top app development companies focus primarily on usability when designing their apps. For the most part, mobile apps are designed to offer convenient usability to the next level. Developers try to reflect proper recognition and trust to their users via the professionalism revealed in the application. Sometimes, they may be required to explore the merged functionality of multiple devices while working on the development of IOT for their apps. This is done to ensure that the app delivers the desired outcome irrespective of the device it is operated on. As a matter of fact, a complete mobile app development can only be executed once an accurate evaluation of several traits of various devices has been performed.

Build a Safe and Secure Channel

In a bid to uncover any glitches that users’ may experience, most top app development companies would need to perform a rigorous testing process for the app on multiple IOT devices. This is commonly referred to as the “trial phase.” When it comes to ensuring user security in an app, there is always no room for compromise particularly when it is frequently communicating with users’ personal data. In other to ensure better sales and service, user security should not be taken for granted. The app must help to keep sensitive information confidential and prevent security hitches. Thus, the need for proper testing.

DevOps: Is It More Than Just A Name?

By

Linux Career

-

December 8, 2017

The title of DevOps Engineer has consistently been gaining momentum for over five years. From the outside, it appeared it might be a corporate preference to call an individual a DevOps engineer as opposed to a System Administrator. It was thought they were virtually one and the same. As time has progressed, the nuances that differentiate the two have become apparent.

DevOps’s existence is primarily the result of the cloud. Being able to automate a lot of the tasks done by a traditional System Administrator, the evolution of the DevOps role took shape. The previously known System Administrator was now being asked to collaborate with software development and product management to ensure efficiency in the process of releasing software…

What we know is the numbers are showing strong growth in the DevOps title and a decline in the System Administrator one. In the last 18 months, we have seen an increase of over 50% in the number of advertisements that include a title of DevOps Engineer.

KubeCon: CoreOS Tectonic, Open Source Kubernetes Tools from Oracle, Kasten, and More

By

SD Times

-

December 7, 2017

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation kicked off their KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference, dedicated to Kubernetes and cloud native technologies, in Austin, Texas today with the announcement of 31 new members, including AppsCode, CA, Datadog, Grafana Labs, InfluxData, HPE and Kasten.

“KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the polestar for practitioners of Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies. We are bringing together the core developers, end users, vendors and other contributors who are building the infrastructure for the next decade of computing,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

A number of companies made announcements surrounding Kubernetes and cloud-native technology. Here’s a rundown of the biggest news:

Oracle announces new open source Kubernetes Tools

Oracle is open sourcing the Fn project Kubernetes Installer and Global Multi-Cluster Management solution. …

Linux Then, and Why You Should Learn It Now

By

Network World

-

December 7, 2017

The booming popularity of Linux happened around the same time as the rise of the web. The server world, once proprietary, eventually fell in love with Linux just the same way networking did. But for years after it began growing in popularity, it remained in the background. It powered some of the largest servers, but couldn’t find success on personal devices. That all changed with Google’s release of Android in 2008, and just like that, Linux found its way not only onto phones but onto other consumer devices.

The same shift from proprietary to open is happening in networking. Specialized hardware that came from one of the “big 3” networking vendors isn’t so necessary anymore. What used to require this specialized hardware can now be done (with horsepower to spare) using off-the-shelf hardware, with Intel CPUs, and with the Linux operating system. Linux unifies the stack, and knowing it is useful for both the network and the rest of the rack. With Linux, networking is far more affordable, more scalable, easier to learn, and more adaptable to the needs of the business.

How Kubernetes Deployments Work

By

The New Stack

-

December 7, 2017

This contributed article is part of a series, from members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), about CNCF’s Kubecon/CloudNativeCon, taking place this week in Austin, Dec. 6 – 8.

We’ve written quite a few blog posts about the Kubernetes container orchestration engine and how to deploy to Kubernetes already, but none cover how Kubernetes Deployments work in detail.

With Kubernetes Deployments, you “describe a desired state in a Deployment object, and the Deployment controller changes the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate,” the Kubernetes Deployment documentation states. In this blog, we’ll explain both how Deployments work from a high-level perspective, and then get our hands dirty by creating a Deployment and seeing how it relates to ReplicaSet and Pod objects.