This week was a busy one for open source enterprise wins! Read the latest installment of our weekly digest to stay on the cutting edge of OSS business beats.
1) The Linux Foundation’s Dronecode project receives accolades for the creator of its PX4 project; Lorenz Meier has been recognized by MIT Technology Review in its annual list of Innovators Under 35.
4) Microsoft announced purchase of a startup called Cycle Computing for an “undisclosed sum”. While it doesn’t have the name recognition of some of its peers, the startup has played a pivotal role in cloud computing today.
5) Open source content management system was initially released without frills or fanfare. After 2,600 commits, the 1.0 version is ready to tackle the blogging giants.
There are so many Linux distributions available—so many, in fact, that it can become a bit of a challenge to find the one right for you. After you’ve looked at them enough, it seems the variations tend to blur together, such that one flavor of Linux is only a slight shift away from another.
Perhaps your distribution of choice may have a sweet-looking desktop, but it might be the standard Ubuntu underneath. Or, maybe you’ve found that a distro is using the same GNOME as everyone else, with the slightest variation under the hood. That’s how it goes in the selection of Linux. The good news is that, even with that familiarity, there are some truly brilliant distributions available. Some of them advance the desktop interface well beyond the standard, while others go out of their way to be familiar.
Chakra Linux is a combination of the above descriptions. What initially started out as a variation on Arch Linux, with the name KDEmod, the distribution used a “lightified and modular” version of the KDE desktop, built exclusively for Arch Linux. This take on KDE offered a significant performance increase and improved customizations over the standard KDE installation, and it quickly gained a following.
After a while, however, it was determined that the LiveCD Project would be a much better fit and Chakra was born. Since then, the environment has slowly morphed into its own beast, a unique merging of ideologies and designs that deliver a solid and beautiful experience.
Chakra’s main vision is to provide a pure KDE/Qt desktop, with a nod to simplicity and transparency. Of course, simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Even though KDE makes for an incredibly user-friendly environment, a new-to-Linux user will find themselves a bit confused when it comes to certain tasks. Let’s dive in and see what Chakra’s all about.
At first blush
Chakra is a beautiful desktop—if you’re okay with flat themes (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Chakra desktop, showing off the flat theme.
Check out the Chakra menu, and you’ll find just about every piece of software you need. The one caveat to this is the choice of office suit. Instead of the more popular LibreOffice, Chakra installs the KDE-specific Calligra. As long as you don’t need to interact with MS Office, that’s not completely a bad thing. If, however, you have to open any MS Office document (later than Office 2007), you’re out of luck. As much as I respect what Calligra is doing, without the ability to interact with the likes of .docx, it simply will not do (especially in a business environment).
Of course, that’s not really too much of an issue, as you can open up the Octopi software installer and install LibreOffice. Unfortunately, the version available is a bit out of date. Currently, the latest release of LibreOffice is 5.4.0.3 and the version available to Chakra (after an initial update) is 5.3.5-1. Unfortunately, there is no latest version of the office suite to be downloaded for the platform, so users would have to wait until the developers make it available for update.
Speaking of which…
Another issue new users will find with Chakra is the update process. With most Linux distributions, you can head to the desktop menu and find an entry for updating software. Not so with Chakra. Any updating to be done, must be handled through the command line. So to upgrade your system, you must open up the terminal window and issue the command:
sudo pacman -Syu
After running the command, you must okay every single one of the updates, before the process will continue (do note, the first run will take considerable time).
Speaking of which…
A unique aspect of Chakra is that it is a half-rolling release distribution. This means that Chakra works with a stable core and rolling applications on top. With this idea, you will always have the latest desktop software, running on top of a not-so-latest release of the core. This forms a solid foundation for which to run software. For instance, after an initial update, Chakra was using KDE 5.10.4-1 (the latest release) and kernel is 4.8.6-1. The mainline kernel is currently at 4.13-rc4, so this is certainly a stable kernel.
Fortunately, you do not have to install applications from the command line (you certainly can, if you choose). If you prefer a GUI for installing software, Chakra includes the Octopi front end for that particular task (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Octopi GUI front end.
It is very important that you run the sudo pacman -Syucommand before first using Octopi—otherwise, you’ll have out of date packages available for installation.
Some nice choices
Looking beyond the Calligra over LibreOffice issue, some nice choices have been made for default software. Take, for instance, the selection of Clementine as the default music player. This happens to be my favorite of all the available players on the market. It offers an amazing array of features, with a great user interface. Good choice. Another solid choice is Qupzilla, a lightweight web browser that uses the Qt webengine. This browser is faster to open that Firefox, offers more features than Midori, and renders as well as Chrome.
Another nice touch is the addition of the Yakuake drop-down terminal. I like a good terminal that is quick to open and quick to get out of the way; Yakuake does this with ease.
Who should be using Chakra
Chakra is a unique distribution that offers an interface and stability that begs for new users to come play, but with just enough added complexity that might challenge them to learn a bit more (or make them slightly hesitant). On the other hand, Chakra does deliver serious performance and plenty of tools (such as Package Changelogs, Chakra Bug Tracking System, Qt Designer, Vim text editor, and more) that will make more hard-core users quite happy.
If you’re a new user, who doesn’t mind working at the command line now and then, Chakra will serve you well. If you’re already well versed in Linux, Chakra will give you just enough to keep you curious and happy, while remaining stable underneath.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
This is an inversion of the traditional open core model behind many commercial open source strategies for enterprise application layer products. In open core, the product’s core is open source, and in the enterprise edition, vendors provide and support proprietary enhancements. Using the API approach, the product’s core is often not visible in the cloud, and the only way in and out of the product is through the API.
Because of APIs, we are seeing the differentiation, enhancement, and value in enterprise editions migrating to the perimeter via tools, widgets, and components. These can be closed source and/or open source, but we should see more open source in the perimeter, because many vendors can make money by supporting their core and charging for API calls or transactions. The two best examples of this are Twilio and Stripe.
Still, finding the perfect Linux laptop has always been and remains something of a Goldilocks problem: this one is too big, this one is too underpowered, this one has too little RAM, this one lacks a big SSD, and so on. Generally speaking, if you want power and storage you’re going to end up with something too big to comfortably throw in a bag and carry all day. The Dell Precision 7520 and the System76 Oryx Pro are good examples of this.
Alternately, you could go for the more portable Dell XPS 13 or System76 Lemur, which both offer a more svelte, lightweight machine that’s easier on your shoulders but lacking in RAM and drive space.
What Linux users like myself have long wanted is a laptop with roughly the form factor and weight of a Macbook pro, but with the option to get 32GB of RAM or 3TB of storage. This is the mythical unicorn of pre-built Linux machines, a laptop that is both reasonably lightweight and powerful.
And that, my fellow Linux users, is refreshingly what System76 has managed to deliver with its new Galago Pro laptop.
Over the last year, GitHub has gradually evolved the infrastructure that runs the Ruby on Rails application responsible for github.com and api.github.com. We reached a big milestone recently: all web and API requests are served by containers running in Kubernetes clusters deployed on our metal cloud. Moving a critical application to Kubernetes was a fun challenge, and we’re excited to share some of what we’ve learned with you today.
Why change?
Before this move, our main Ruby on Rails application (we call it github/github) was configured a lot like it was eight years ago: Unicorn processes managed by a Ruby process manager called God running on Puppet-managed servers. Similarly, our chatops deployment worked a lot like it did when it was first introduced: Capistrano established SSH connections to each frontend server, then updated the code in place and restarted application processes. When peak request load exceeded available frontend CPU capacity, GitHub Site Reliability Engineers would provision additional capacity and add it to the pool of active frontend servers.
Using off-the-shelf servers, NASA and HPE are devising a way to allow a Mars-bound spacecraft to house an on-board supercomputer.
To test the concept, NASA has launched the SpaceX CRS-12 rocket containing HPE’s “Spaceborne Computer” as its payload. According the company, the servers that make up the system are of the same type that power Pleiades, NASA’s flagship 7-petaflop supercomputer housed at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Pleiades is currently the 15th most powerful system in the world, according to the latest TOP500 rankings
The Spaceborne Computer will be deposited at the International Space Station (ISS), where it be part of a year-long experiment to find out how regular commodity servers can operate in the harsh conditions of outer space.
Containers, DevOps, and microservices all fit together to help CIOs achieve that goal of agility. In short, containers corral applications in a neat package, isolated from the host system on which they run. Developers can easily move them around during experimentation, which is a fundamental part of DevOps. Containers also prove helpful as you move quickly from development to production environments. (For more, see this background guide on containers.) Of course, technology alone doesn’t solve the problem. CIOs must also manage the cultural challenges that arise when you start working in cross-functional DevOps groups and rethinking boundaries and process.
But CIOs can learn plenty from their peers’ work on both fronts of culture and technology. On the technology side, when working in the trenches with companies adopting containers, you see many of the same goals and hurdles. Let’s examine the four typical ways companies adopt containers – and what you should know about each pattern.
How companies tap into containers
First, understand that there’s not one perfect container adoption path for your company. You may begin using containers on one path, then hop across to another later. Also, different groups inside a company often use containers in different ways – so it’s common to see multiple usage patterns at once.
Over the past few years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been a key buzz in the computer networking/IT industry. Today, more and more companies are discussing SDN to leverage it for their business and future growth plans. Reason being, SDN reduces CAPEX (capital expenses of network equipment) and OPEX (operational and maintenance expenses) of a network, and that’s what every business in the networking industry wants at the end of the day.
That brings us to the question, what is so special about SDN that existing or legacy networking is not able to deliver?
Basically, traditional networks can’t cope up and meet current networking requirements like dynamic scalability, central control and management, on the fly changes or experiments, lesser error-prone manual configurations on each networking node, handling of network traffic (which has massively increased due to boom of mobile data), and server virtualization traffic in data centres.
What’s more, traditional networks are tightly coupled with highly expensive network elements that don’t offer any kind of openness or ability to customize internals. To deal with such issues, open source communities came together to define a networking approach for future. And that’s how the concept of SDN came to life.
