The interactive fun continues! On Friday, June 30 at 10 a.m Pacific, The Linux Foundation will continue its #AskLF program: a series of monthly Twitter chats hosted by The Linux Foundation thought leaders and executives. The initiative allows the open source community to ask a designated host questions about the organization’s offerings and strategies. Previous topics have included open networking, Linux Foundation Training and Certification programs, and the basics of Cloud Foundry. The series’ fourth installment will focus on the new Diversity Empowerment Summit, hosted by Angela Brown, VP of Events at The Linux Foundation.
Angela Brown
#AskLF was started to showcase the organization’s many sources of expertise, strategy, and vision. The forum also provides a transparent way for the community to engage with open source front runners– and one another. Angela Brown has been a source of guidance and creativity at The Linux Foundation since 2007, when she was brought on as an event manager. Today, she serves as VP of Events and truly has her finger on the pulse of open source events the world over. Her #AskLF chat will take place in advance of many exciting events produced by The Linux Foundation, such as Xen Developer & Design Summit, Open Source Summit North America, and the new Diversity Empowerment Summit.
@linuxfoundation followers will have the unique opportunity to ask Angela questions about this exciting event and learn how to facilitate a diverse open source environment. Aside from the new summit, The Linux Foundation has released many new programs related to diversity and inclusion in tech such as the Inclusive Speaker Orientation, which provides participants with practical skills to promote inclusivity in their messaging.
Sample questions include:
Which topics will be covered at the Diversity Empowerment Summit?
How can I be an ally to underrepresented communities in tech at industry events?
How does The Linux Foundation practice inclusiveness at its events?
Here’s how you can participate in the #AskLF:
Follow @linuxfoundation on Twitter: Hosts will take over The Linux Foundation’s account during the session.
Save the date: June 30, 2017 at 10 a.m. PT.
Use the hashtag #AskLF: To ask Angela your questions while she hosts. Click here to spread the news of #AskLF with your Twitter community.
More dates and details for future #AskLF sessions to come! We’ll see you on Twitter, June 30 at 10 a.m. Pacific.
Learn more about creative approaches to diversity from Katharina Borchert (Chief Innovation Officer at Mozilla) in her presentation at Open Source Leadership Summit 2017.
This week in Linux and open source news, The Linux Foundation’s ever-popular “Intro to Linux” MOOC is selected as one of the top courses of 2017, Cloud Foundry gains new Gold Member in Microsoft, and more! Read on and stay in the open source know!
1) Linux Foundation Training’s “Intro to Linux” edX course picked as one of TechRadar’s top Linux training providers, 2017.
2) Cloud Foundry announces new Microsoft membership, giving the former as the opportunity to offer an executive candidate for one of two gold seats on the Cloud Foundry board of directors.
3) A new strain called Linux.MulDrop.14 is infecting Raspberry Pi devices, allowing attackers to take advantage of poor security to “generate money from nothing.”
4) “Munich’s Green Party says the recent WannaCry ransomware attacks on Windows machines worldwide highlight the danger of the city abandoning its Linux-based OS.”
One complaint some new users have is that the Linux filesystem hierarchy is confusing. After all, why are program executables stored in /usr/bin and what is home? For those who are accustomed to Linux, this all makes some strange form of sense. However, if you take a moment to step back and really look at it, you might think twice about that assessment. That is exactly why the developers of GoboLinux did what they did; they completely rethought the filesystem hierarchy.
Instead of the usual suspects like:
/usr
/sbin
/home
/etc
/boot
/dev/
/lib
/opt
/sys
/tmp
GoboLinux offers only six total directories in the root of the filesystem. Those directories are:
Data – contains information about packages and necessary data to enable the compilation of programs
Lost+found – a directory dedicated to housing unlinked files that still may be open by a process.
Mount – the mounting directory
Programs – houses all programs (each of which will have its own folder that contains settings, files, and data)
System – system files, binaries, and kernel
Users – the home folders for users
And that’s it for the folders found in the root partition.
For long-time Linux users, does this mean you have to learn a completely different filesystem in order to use GoboLinux? Not necessarily. The developers have created symlinks such that if you issue the command cd /etc, you will actually be taken to /Programs/Settings (although issuing pwd will indicate you are in /etc). Not all of the usual suspects have symlinks. For example, if you issue the command cd /home, you’ll be returned an error that no such path exists; so it’s not a one-for-one situation (however, cd ~/will take you to /Users/USERNAME. Where USERNAMEis the name of the logged in user).
Even with this variation on the directory structure theme, once you use GoboLinux for a bit, it all starts to make perfect sense.
With the major difference out of the way, let’s take a look at GoboLinux and see if it’s a distribution you might want to try.
Installation
GoboLinux is, in a lot of ways, a throwback to the early days of Linux. You get your first taste of that the second the live media boots up, where you wind up at a terminal window and are required to either type startxto start the GUI orInstall GoboLinuxto start up the text-based installation (Figure 1). I highly recommend going with the startx command to get GoboLinux installed.
Figure 1: Before you can install, you must go a bit old school.
Once the GUI is up and running, you’ll find GoboLinux to be yet another distribution that doesn’t include a partitioning tool in the installer. To that end, you must fire up the included GParted tool and create a root partition (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Creating the necessary partition for the GoboLinux installation.
Once the partition has been created, you can click the GoboLinux start button (upper left corner of the desktop) and then click System Tools > Install GoboLinux. At this point, the installation is as easy selecting your packages (Figure 3), answering a few quick questions, and letting the installation complete.
Figure 3: Selecting the packages you want to include in your GoboLinux installation.
Once the installation completes, reboot and you’re ready to get to know GoboLinux.
What you’ll find
With GoboLinux installed, you’ll find a fairly minimal installation, with the Awesome Window Manager serving up windows and menus. In fact, the user-facing application list includes:
A terminal application
GIMP
Firefox
Avahi VNC and SSH server browsers
Htop
GParted
CUPS printer manager
Vim
That’s it.
You won’t even find a package manager on the system, like apt, dnf, or zypper. Instead, you must take advantage of the Compile command, which will download the necessary recipes for installing a piece of software.
Say, for example, you want to install the Thunderbird email client. To do this, you would open up a terminal window and issue the Compile thunderbirdcommand. After you answer the resulting questions (answer CAfor Compile All), you’ll unfortunately discover the installation fails. In fact, I attempted to install several applications (found on the GoboLinux Recipe Store), only to have many of them fail because of dependency issues. Even installing Audacity failed, due to an inability to connect to surina.net to install the SoundTouch dependency (although the Compile command did valiantly try, until it finally gave up the ghost).
Next up, I attempted to install Claws-Mail. This particular recipe successfully installed and returned me with a perfectly working instance of the powerful email client (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Claws-Mail up and running.
Understand, each of these attempted installations can take considerably more time than installing with a standard package manager, so know what you’re getting into before you dive in.
Why use GoboLinux?
This is the question I continually asked myself as I was working with this interesting take on the Linux platform. Being one who prefers a far more modern desktop, Awesome Window Manager was a really hard sell. I even made an attempt at installing both the Enlightenment and GNOME desktops on GoboLinux. As you probably assume, these did not succeed. However, the simplicity of the filesystem did make for a very intriguing few days of usage.
What the developers did with the GoboLinux directory structure makes perfect sense. But even with logic on its side, I cannot imagine other Linux distributions following suit. Why? The work that would have to be done to make this happen would be tremendous. Because of that, I can see GoboLinux standing alone with this layout. If I’m being totally honest here, that’s a shame. Why? Because the GoboLinux filesystem structure makes perfect sense (and could possibly make the transition from other operating systems to Linux much easier for new users).
So, in the end, who would benefit from making use of GoboLinux? Anyone looking to kick it back a bit old-school and experiment with a flavor of Linux that is a serious departure from the norm. If that’s you, GoboLinux might well be your desktop distribution of choice.
GoboLinux is not a user-friendly distribution (nor was it created to serve as such), but it is certainly unique take on the platform and well worth a look.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
Being able to edit your $PATH is an important skill for any beginning Linux user.
When you type a command into the command prompt in Linux, or in other Linux-like operating systems, all you’re doing is telling it to run a program. Even simple commands, like ls, cd, mkdir, rm, and others are just small programs that usually live inside a directory on your computer called /usr/bin. There are other places on your system that commonly hold executable programs as well; some common ones include /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, and /usr/sbin. Which programs live where, and why, is beyond the scope of this article, but know that an executable program can live practically anywhere on your computer: it doesn’t have to be limited to one of these directories.
As anyone who’s ever watched a TV show with our heroes sneaking out sensitive data from a computer with a USB stick knows, Windows and Macs are easy to crack with USB-borne tools. In the real world, Linux-based USB distributions such live-boot Tails makes this easy. USBGuard can stop any such attack.
With proprietary software, it’s easy for a developer to know where he or she stands. Unless you or the company for which you’re working owns the copyright to the code, it’s off limits — end of story. There’s usually not even any temptation to use the code, because the source code is usually not available.
Moving into open source opens up a whole new world that can make things a lot easier. Suddenly, you’re not constantly having to reinvent the wheel by writing code for processes where there’s code already written and waiting at the ready. In some circumstances, you can even use open source code inside a proprietary project.
To understand more about the evolution of big data operations, I asked Justin Mullen about the challenges his company faced five years ago and why they were looking for modern integration platforms. He responded with, “We faced similar challenges to what our customers were facing. Before Big Data analytics, it was what I call
He responded with, “We faced similar challenges to what our customers were facing. Before Big Data analytics, it was what I call ‘Difficult Data analytics.’ There was a lot of manual aggregation and crunching of data from largely on-premise systems. And then the biggest challenge that we probably faced was centralizing and trusting the data before applying the different analytical algorithms available to analyze the raw data and visualize the results in meaningful ways for the business to understand.”
We’ve recently welcomed two new additions to our Advisory Board – with Nicole Forsgren and John Willis, joining Gene Kim and Gary Gruver as Electric Cloud’s strategic advisors.
As we set to work with each of the advisors, we also took the opportunity to pick their brains about where DevOps is heading, what are the key things we should know as we set out on this journey, and what are some of the emerging technologies and patterns they have their eye on. We’re excited to share the tips and insights from these DevOps luminaries in this short Q&A series – starting off with Dr. Nicole Forsgren!
In your experience, what is the biggest challenge for adopting and scaling DevOps in the enterprise?
Right now, I think the biggest challenge for organizations is focusing on prioritization and doing the right things to accelerate their technology transformations. So often, companies and organizations want to take the easy way out and just “buy” their DevOps solution – which usually means buying a technology or automation tool. At the same time, the DevOps crowd sings from the rooftops that DevOps is all about culture. And then the agile and lean practitioners chime in that process is important.
The Linux system boots so fast that most of the output scrolls by too quickly to read the text (showing services being started) sent to the console. Therefore observing boot issues/errors becomes a little of a challenge for us.
In this article, we will briefly explain the different stages in a Linux system boot process, then learn how to establish and get to the bottom of boot issues: in terms files to look into or commands to view system boot messages.
Summary Of Linux Boot Process
In summary, once we press the Power On button, the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) a program integrated in a motherboard performs a POST (Power on Self Test) – where hardware such as disks, RAM (Random Access Memory), keyboard, etc are scanned. In case of an error (missing/malfunctioning hardware), it is reported on the screen.
When DevOps began, so did a shorthand description for the model: It broke down the wall between dev and ops. The teams communicated better and operated with a shared set of objectives and concerns. At the extreme, there were no longer devs and ops people, but DevOps skill sets. But now, another view of DevOps has emerged: It’s about enabling ops to provide an environment for developers, then get out of the way as much as possible.
Is this model a good fit for your business needs – and do you understand what the dev and ops teams inside your organization would need to make it work? Let’s take a look.
Definition of DevOps evolves
DevOps widened Agile principles to encompass the entire application lifecycle including production operations. Thus operations (and security) skills needed to be added to the cross-functional teams that included designers, testers, and developers.
