LiFT Scholarship Recipients Advance Open Source Around the World

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November 20, 2017

Fifteen people from 13 different countries have received Linux Foundation Training Scholarships (LiFT) in the category of Linux Newbies. This year, 27 people received scholarships across all categories — the most ever awarded by the Foundation.

Now in its seventh year, the program awards training scholarships to current and aspiring IT professionals worldwide who may not otherwise have the means for specialized training. The Foundation has awarded 75 scholarships worth more than $168,000 since the program began.

This year, The Linux Foundation received a record 1,238 applications for 14 scholarships, which are typically given to two people in seven categories. However, the quality of the applications in the Linux Newbies category was so high that the Foundation chose to award an unprecedented 15 scholarships in that category alone.

To qualify, candidates must demonstrate they want to contribute to the advancement of Linux and open source software and help influence their future. Applicants can be located anywhere in the world and must show a passion for these technologies and a proven interest in becoming an open source professional.

Linux Newbies

The 15 recipients in the Linux Newbies category are new to Linux but have learned the basics by completing the Intro to Linux online course. These recipients have been awarded scholarships to take the next course in this career-focused series: Essentials of System Administration along with the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator exam.

They are:

Alexander Anderson, 28, United Kingdom

Alexander starting coding in PHP at 14 years old, and currently runs Debian as his primary operating system. He hopes this scholarship will help him establish a career in open source so he can better care for his wife, who is disabled.

Fatma Aymaz, 28, Turkey

Fatma was raised in a region where most people believed women should not receive an education. She fought for the ability to attend school and eventually received a university degree in international relations. She is interested in programming and Linux and hopes to take this opportunity to make a move and establish a career in open source computer science. Her dream is to study and change herself and the world.

Jules Bashizi Irenge, 36, United Kingdom

Jules is seeking asylum from Congo. He has earned a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool. He is a long-time Linux user, having completed his undergraduate project on CentOS 6. He hopes to go on to complete a Ph.D. program in computer science and use Linux for future research projects. Jules says he is passionate about Linux and in the future he wants to learn about kernel programming.

Cruzita Thalia Cabunoc, 21, Philippines

Cruzita is a student at the Technological Institute of the Philippines-Quezon City, where she is currently studying Computer Engineering. She found shell scripting intriguing while taking Intro to Linux and now has the goal of becoming a Linux systems administrator after she completes her studies. Cruzita has no experience developing open source software but is interested in taking additional Linux training courses and is open to new knowledge.

Dimitris Grendas, 27, Greece

Dimitris has studied informatics and cybersecurity at two different universities and hopes to eventually earn a Master’s degree in cybersecurity. He is preparing to start an internship where he will compile a custom Linux system based on systemd from source code instead of using pre-compiled binary packages. His interests in IT are cybersecurity and networking and looks forward to advancing his IT skills with more education and practice. “I can’t wait to move to my next education step!” he said.

Valentin Ilco, 25, Moldova

Valentin works at the Center of Space Technologies of Technical University of Moldova, where he has helped with development of the first Moldovan satellite, which utilized open source software. He hopes to use even more open source in his future projects. The most interesting about the Intro to Linux to him was learning how Linux can make complex operations and interactions with hardware easier. “The Intro to Linux course put everything in its own place and made a really good base for future development,” he said.

Andreea Ilie, 28, Romania

Andreea studied Japanese and East Asian culture during her university years, but had a strong interest in IT. She taught herself using free online resources in her free time, and eventually managed to secure an IT job despite her lack of formal training and experience. She has a few Python projects hosted on GitHub, and she hopes this scholarship provides her with a stronger knowledge of Linux, and the certification to demonstrate it.

Andreea said she liked that the Linux course “tried to introduce a wide set of topics geared towards a beginner background, explained in a concise way that was easy to understand and not daunting to someone not accustomed to Linux.” She found the background information about the history of Linux and the different distributions interesting “and a welcome addition, which made appreciating the origins and usefulness of this often-dreaded operating system much easier.”

Carlo Martini, 27, Italy

Carlo is pursuing a computer science degree at night school. He is active in the Venice Linux Users Group, volunteers to write documentation for the Mozilla Developer Network and is part of the Amara Translating Team for the GitHub. His day job is working for a government-sponsored program for Italian youth, but he hopes this course will help him become a full-time open source professional.

Emmanuel Ongogo, 24, Kenya

Emmanuel holds a computer science degree and is a fan of Ubuntu, using it as his primary operating system since 2013. He has seen an increase in the use of open source in Kenya, including using CentOS to run the recent elections and hopes to encourage it to spread further in the country. “Apart from advancing my career, I would wish to support others who might also have an interest in Linux,” he said.

Darius Palmer, 47, United States

Darius is a ward of the state of California, currently living in a halfway house with other formerly incarcerated men. He always had an interest in computers when he was younger, and after completing the free Intro to Linux course, he wants to learn more and eventually become active as a contributor to the Linux community.

Darius said the most interesting of the Intro to Linux course was “the growth and impact that Linux has had on society.” He noted that development of the operating system has provided millions of people with careers and a livelihood. “It’s been involved in the creation of multitudes of extremely profitable entrepreneurial endeavors, such as Google. The Linux kernel has been with this company from day one. But, despite all the influence that Linux has had on the world anyone can download, use and become involved with this software for free. I want to be a part of this phenomenon.”

Andi Rowley, 25, United States

Andi has a drive to learn more about open source as she wants to live in a world where individuals collaborate to improve technology. Since completing Intro to Linux, she has wanted to become a Linux systems administrator and hopes this scholarship will help her accomplish that goal. In her scholarship application, Andi said the most interesting section of the course was how the Linux kernel generates random numbers. “My experience using open source software has been awesome!” she said.

Sara Santos, 46, Portugal

Sara recently completed a specialized course in managing computer systems and networks but has been unable to secure a job. She is passionate about open source, and would like to work in systems administration, especially with web servers, so expects this scholarship will help her achieve that. “I like the concept of open source software and the community also. I intend to continue for many many years and forward my studies to become an expert,” she said.

Sokunrotanak Srey, 28, Cambodia

Sokunrotanak didn’t study computers but he decided after school to go into the field anyway. He works as an IT technician at non-profit Asian Hope, where he first encountered open source in the form of Ubuntu. He hopes this scholarship will help him improve his skills to better serve Asian Hope and the people it helps. “I love how the Linux community collaborates and helps each other out. I have received lots of help from the community to solve problems in my organization, and I’m looking forward to improving my skill so that I can contribute to the community,” he said.

George Udosen, 42, Nigeria

George originally studied biochemistry, but now has a passion for open source. He would like to learn more and become certified in Linux, so he can pursue a career teaching it and encouraging more people to join the open source community.

Glenda Walter, 28, Dominica

Glenda studied building and civil engineering in college, but now wants to become a Linux systems administrator. She has started running CentOS 7 but knows she needs more training before she can make a big career change into open source.

Learn more about the LiFT Scholarship program from The Linux Foundation.

Introducing container-diff, a Tool for Quickly Comparing Container Images

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Google Open Source Blog

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November 20, 2017

The Google Container Tools team originally built container-diff, a new project to help uncover differences between container images, to aid our own development with containers. We think it can be useful for anyone building containerized software, so we’re excited to release it as open source to the development community.

Containers and the Dockerfile format help make customization of an application’s runtime environment more approachable and easier to understand. While this is a great advantage of using containers in software development, a major drawback is that it can be hard to visualize what changes in a container image will result from a change in the respective Dockerfile. This can lead to bloated images and make tracking down issues difficult.

Imagine a scenario where a developer is working on an application, built on a runtime image maintained by a third-party. During development someone releases a new version of that base image with updated system packages. The developer rebuilds their application and picks up the latest version of the base image, and suddenly their application stops working; it depended on a previous version of one of the installed system packages, but which one? What version was it on before?

Sustainable Open Source Is About Evolution As a Group

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The Linux Foundation

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November 20, 2017

In the early days of open source, one of the primary goals of the open source community was educating people about the benefits of open source and why they should use it. Today, open source is ubiquitous. Almost everyone is using it. That has created a unique challenge around educating new users about the open source development model and ensuring that open source projects are sustainable.

Peter Guagenti, the Chief Marketing Officer at Mesosphere, Inc., has comprehensive experience with how open source works, having been involved with several leading open source projects. He has been a coder, but says that he considers himself a hustler. We talked with him about his role at Mesosphere, how to help companies become good open source citizens, and about the role of culture in open source. Here is an edited version of that interview.

ipcpipeline: Splitting a GStreamer Pipeline into Multiple Processes

By

Mark Filion

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November 20, 2017

By George Kiagiadakis, Senior Software Engineer at Collabora.

Earlier this year I worked on a certain GStreamer plugin that is called “ipcpipeline”. This plugin provides elements that make it possible to interconnect GStreamer pipelines that run in different processes. In this blog post I am going to explain how this plugin works and the reason why you might want to use it in your application.

Why ipcpipeline?

In GStreamer, pipelines are meant to be built and run inside a single process. Normally one wouldn’t even think about involving multiple processes for a single pipeline. You can (and should) involve multiple threads, of course, which is easily done using the queue element, in order to do parallel processing. But since you can involve multiple threads, why would you want to involve multiple processes as well?

Splitting part of a pipeline to a different process is useful when there is one or more elements that need to be isolated for security reasons. Imagine the case where you have an application that uses a hardware video decoder and therefore has device access privileges. Also imagine that in the same pipeline you have elements that download and parse video content directly from a network server, like most Video On Demand applications would do. Although I don’t mean to say that GStreamer is not secure, it can be a good idea to think ahead and make it as hard as possible for an attacker to take advantage of potential security flaws. In theory, maybe someone could exploit a bug in the container parser by sending it crafted data from a fake server and then take control of other things by exploiting those device access privileges, or cause a system crash. ipcpipeline could help to prevent that.

How does it work?

In the – oversimplified – diagram below we can see how the media pipeline in a video player would look like with GStreamer:

image.YNGV9Y.png

With ipcpipeline, this pipeline can be split into two processes, like this:

image.WCEG9Y.png

As you can see, the split mainly involves 2 elements: ipcpipelinesink, which serves as the sink for the first pipeline, and ipcpipelinesrc, which serves as the source for the second pipeline. These two elements internally talk to each other through a unix pipe or socket, transferring buffers, events, queries and messages over this socket, thus linking the two pipelines together.

This mechanism doesn’t look very special, though. You might be wondering at this point, what is the difference between using ipcpipeline and some other existing mechanism like a pair of fdsink/fdsrc or udpsink/udpsrc or RTP? What is special about these elements is that the two pipelines behave as if they were a single pipeline, with the elements of the second one being part of a GstBin in the first one:

image.9EBV9Y.png

Continue reading on Collabora’s blog.

Kube-Node: Let Your Kubernetes Cluster Auto-Manage Its Nodes

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The New Stack

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November 20, 2017

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

As Michelle Noorali put it in her keynote address at KubeCon Europe in March of this year: the Kubernetesopen source container orchestration engine is still hard for developers. In theory, developers are crazy about Kubernetes and container technologies, because they let them write their application once and then run it anywhere without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. In reality, however, they still rely on operations in many aspects, which (understandably) dampens their enthusiasm about the disruptive potential of these technologies.

One major downside for developers is that Kubernetes is not able to auto-manage and auto-scale its own machines. As a consequence, operations must get involved every time a worker node is deployed or deleted. Obviously, there are many node deployment solutions, including Terraform, Chef or Puppet, that make ops live much easier.

Take Linux and Run With It

By

LinuxInsider

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November 20, 2017

“How do you run an operating system?” may seem like a simple question, since most of us are accustomed to turning on our computers and seeing our system spin up. However, this common model is only one way of running an operating system. As one of Linux’s greatest strengths is versatility, Linux offers the most methods and environments for running it.

To unleash the full power of Linux, and maybe even find a use for it you hadn’t thought of, consider some less conventional ways of running it — specifically, ones that don’t even require installation on a computer’s hard drive.

We’ll Do It Live!

Live-booting is a surprisingly useful and popular way to get the full Linux experience on the fly. While hard drives are where OSes reside most of the time, they actually can be installed to most major storage media, including CDs, DVDs and USB flash drives.

What is a Socket?

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Red Hat

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November 20, 2017

Recently, while reviewing the FAQ, I came across the question “What’s a Socket?” For those who are not familiar, I shall explain.

In brief, a Unix Socket (technically, the correct name is Unix domain socket, UDS) allows communication between two different processes on either the same machine or different machines in client-server application frameworks. To be more precise, it’s a way of communicating among computers using a standard Unix descriptors file.

Every UNIX systems Input/Output action is executed by writing or reading the descriptor file. A Descriptor file is an open file, which is associated with an integer. It can be a network connection, text file, terminal or something else. It looks and behaves much like a low-level file descriptor. This happens because the commands like read () and write () works with the same way they do with the files and pipes.

The Missing Career Path for Software Developers

By

Dev.to

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November 19, 2017

The details of your story may vary but for the most, it follows a familiar path. You travel along a default career path until a decision point when you need to shift the trajectory. This typically means obtaining new skills like learning how to become a manager or business skills when to work for yourself. What you really want is to use and deepen your expertise. What you lack is a clear path to move forward along your desired trajectory. And without an objective mentor, you’re more likely to choose an undesirable path, or worse, choose none at all, allow inertia to carry you along.

The longing

You long for the time — and space to continue sharpening those technical talents you worked so hard to acquire. You envision a professional life where instead of atrophying due to lack of use, your mastery deepens. Rote tasks are replaced with constant learning. If you work for yourself, you have support with the business side of your work. Instead of dealing with people problems, you’re able to follow those technical obsessions. You long to feel the rush of solving challenging problems again. Your discoveries have an impact on the companies you work with and your fellow developers. The work day is full of creative challenges you relish. You long to feel valued for your talents and well-honed skills. The learning is continual and interesting. Instead of a plateau, your career has never been better.

This what you long for. But you haven’t found the direct route yet.

This Week in Open Source: Linux Demonstrates Superpowers With Supercomputer Domination & More

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The Linux Foundation

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November 17, 2017

This week in open source/Linux news, Linux not powers the vast majority of the world’s supercomputers, Hyperledger is set apart from hype, and more.

1) All 500 of the fastest computers on the planet are running Linux.

Linux Totally Dominates Supercomputers– ZDNet

2) Executive Director of Hyperledger explains how the blockchain project isn’t just tech world hype.

Blockchain Moves Beyond its ‘Moonshot’ Phase– American Banker

3) Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking and Orchestration for The Linux Foundation, tells MEF 17 attendees that ONAP has become “widely accepted.”

Linux Foundation’s Joshipura Says ONAP is Now the De Facto Open Networking Platform– FierceTelecom

4) “Open source software is being integrated into an increasing number of organizations, most recently, the Pentagon.”

The Value of Open Source Software– Information Age

5) Facebook announces Open/R’s open source move in the continuation of an open shift at the company.

Facebook Open Sources Open/R Distributed Networking Software– TechCrunch

How to Install and Use Docker on Linux

By

Jack Wallen

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November 17, 2017

Containers are all the rage in IT — with good reason. Containers are lightweight, standalone packages that contain everything needed to run an application (code, libraries, runtime, system settings, and dependencies). Each container is deployed with its own CPU, memory, block I/O, and network resources, all without having to depend upon an individual kernel and operating system. And that is the biggest difference between a container and a virtual machine; whereas a virtual machine is a full-blown operating system platform, running on a host OS, a container is not.

Containers allow you to expand your company offerings (either internal or external) in ways you could not otherwise. For example, you can quickly deploy multiple instances of NGINX (even with multiple stagings — such as development and production). Unlike doing this with Virtual Machines, containers will not put nearly the hit on your system resources.

Docker makes creating, deploying, and managing containers incredibly simple. What’s best is that installing and using Docker is second-nature to the Linux platform.

I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to install Docker on Linux, as well as walking you through the first steps of working with Docker. I’ll be demonstrating on the Ubuntu 16.04 Server platform, but the process is very similar on most all Linux distributions.

I will assume you already have Ubuntu Server 16.04 up and running and ready to go.

Installation

Since Ubuntu Server 16.04 is sans GUI, the installation and usage of Docker will be handled entirely through the command line. Before you run the installation command, make sure to update apt and then run any necessary upgrades. Do note, if your server’s kernel upgrades, you’ll need to reboot the system. Thus, you might want to plan to do this during a time when a server reboot is acceptable.

To update apt, issue the command:

sudo apt update

Once that completes, upgrade with the command:

sudo apt upgrade

If the kernel upgrades, you’ll want to reboot the server with the command:

sudo reboot

If the kernel doesn’t upgrade, you’re good to install Docker (without having to reboot). The Docker installation command is:

sudo apt install docker.io

If you’re using a different Linux distribution, and you attempt to install (using your distribution’s package manager of choice), only to find out docker.io isn’t available, the package you want to install is called docker. For instance, the installation on Fedora would be:

sudo dnf install docker

If your distribution of choice is CentOS 7, installing docker is best handled via an installation script. First update the platform with the command sudo yum check-update. Once that completes, issue the following command to download and run the necessary script:

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh

Out of the box, the docker command can only be run with admin privileges. Because of security issues, you won’t want to be working with Docker either from the root user or with the help of sudo. To get around this, you need to add your user to the docker group. This is done with the command:

sudo usermod -a -G docker $USER

Once you’ve taken care of that, log out and back in, and you should be good to go. That is, unless your platform is Fedora. When adding a user to the docker group to this distribution, you’ll find the group doesn’t exist. What do you do? You create it first. Here are the commands to take care of this:

sudo groupadd docker && sudo gpasswd -a ${USER} docker && sudo systemctl restart docker

newgrp docker

Log out and log back in. You should be ready to use Docker.

Starting, stopping, and enabling Docker

Once installed, you will want to enable the Docker daemon at boot. To do this, issue the following two commands:

sudo systemctl start docker

sudo systemctl enable docker

Should you need to stop or restart the Docker daemon, the commands are:

sudo systemctl stop docker

sudo systemctl restart docker

Docker is now ready to deploy containers.

Pulling images

For Docker, images serve as the building blocks of your containers. You can pull down a single image (say NGINX) and deploy as many containers as you need from that image. To use images, you must first pull them onto your system. Images are pulled from registries and your Docker installation includes usage of the default Docker Hub — a registry that contains a large amount of contributed images (from official images to user-contributed).

Let’s say you want to pull down an image for the Nginx web server. Before doing so, let’s check to see what images are already to be found on our system. Issue the command docker images and you should see that no images are to be found (Figure 1).

Let’s fix that. We’ll download the Nginx image from Docker Hub with the command:

docker pull nginx

The above command will pull down the latest (official) Nginx image from Docker Hub. If we run the command docker images, we now see the image listed (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The NGINX image has been pulled down.

Notice I said “official” Nginx image? You will find there are plenty of unofficial Nginx images to be found on Docker Hub. Many of these unofficial images have been created to serve specific purposes. You can see a list of all Nginx images, found on Docker Hub, with the command

docker search nginx

As you can see (Figure 3), there are Nginx images to be had for numerous purposes (reverse proxy, PHP-FPM-capable, LetsEncrypt, Bitnami, Nginx for Raspberry Pi and Drupal, and much more).

Figure 3: NGINX variant images found on Docker Hub.

Say, for example, you want to pull down the Nginx image with reverse proxy functionality built in. That unofficial image is called jwilder/nginx-proxy. To pull that image down, issue the command:

docker pull jwilder/nginx-proxy

Issue the command docker images to see the newly pulled images (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Two different NGINX images, ready to be used.

As a word of caution, I recommend only working with the official images, as you cannot be certain if an unofficial image will contain malicious code.

You now have images, ready to be used for the deploying of containers. When next we visit this topic, we’ll begin the process deploying those containers, based on the Nginx image.

Docker is an incredibly powerful system that can make your job easier and your company more flexible and agile. For more information on what Docker can do, issue the command man docker and read through the man page.

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