The Companies That Support Linux and Open Source: VMware

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March 6, 2017

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility and has been active in open source development for many years.

The company has steadily increased its open source involvement through Linux Foundation projects such as ONAP, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Cloud Foundry, Open vSwitch and others. And it has just increased its commitment to open source and The Linux Foundation by becoming a Gold member.

Dirk Hohndel is Chief Open Source Officer at VMware.

Open source software helps VMware accelerate its development processes and deliver even better solutions to its customers, said Dirk Hohndel, Chief Open Source Officer at VMware, in the Q&A below.

“We see open source components as vital ingredients to our products and are actively engaged in many upstream projects,” Hohndel said. “We also continue to create new and interesting open source projects of our own.”

Hohndel leads VMware’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open source communities. Before joining VMware, he spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist and he’s been an active developer and contributor in Linux and open source since the early 1990s.

Here, Hohndel tells us more about VMware; how Linux and open source have become integral to their business; and how they participate in the open source community.

Linux.com: What does VMware do?

Dirk Hohndel: VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology. We help our customers to build and evolve scalable production IT environments delivered as an on-prem or hybrid cloud solution that meets their needs. Additionally, we provide customers with modern end-user computing solutions that enable users to access their critical applications, desktops and services using any device or platform.

Linux.com: How and why do you use Linux and open source?

Hohndel: VMware uses many open source components as part of the solutions we deliver to our customers. Linux is a key guest (and host) OS that we support and the basis of many customer solutions that run on top of our infrastructure.

We see open source components as vital ingredients to our products and are actively engaged in many upstream projects. We also continue to create new and interesting open source projects of our own such as the Project Clarity design system or the Project Harbor container image registry.

Linux.com: Why did you increase your commitment to The Linux Foundation?

Hohndel: We see The Linux Foundation as one of the key consortia in the broader open source ecosystem. In parallel, we steadily increased our engagements with the various projects and foundations such as ONAP, CNCF, Cloud Foundry, and others under the LF in the past few years. It only made sense to increase our engagement in and support for The Linux Foundation, given the role its projects play in our business.

Linux.com: What interesting or innovative trends in technology are you witnessing and what role do Linux and open source play in them? How is VMware participating in that innovation?

Hohndel: The IT infrastructure industry is constantly evolving. More and more of the relevant solutions stacks are built around open source components, and many companies are collaborating on accelerating the transformation of entire industry verticals. The recently launched ONAP Project is an excellent example of this trend and VMware was one of the founding Platinum sponsors of this project.

Linux.com: How has participating in the Linux and open source communities changed your company?

Hohndel: At its roots, VMware is an engineering driven company. Our engagement with the Linux and open source communities has helped us accelerate our development processes and allowed us to collaborate with other partners and customers in this space to deliver even better solutions.

Linux.com: Is there anything else important or upcoming that you’d like to share?

Hohndel: For VMware, the upgrade to a Gold sponsorship of the Linux Foundation is an integral part of our open source strategy and a key step on our journey to a more open and collaborative future. We look forward to working across many LF projects in order to create solutions that delight our customers.

Learn more about Linux Foundation corporate membership and see a full list of members at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/members/join.

Why Open Source Is Like a Team Sport

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OpenStack

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March 6, 2017

As director for Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) — a role she alternatively describes as coach, nerd matchmaker and diplomat — Heather Kirksey oversees and provides guidance for all aspects of the project, from technology to community and marketing. At the recent Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit, she headed up a session titled “Open Source as a Team Sport” with and OPNFV’s Chris Price and OpenStack’s Jonathan Bryce. …

Superuser sat down with Kirksey to ask her more about the parallels between hockey and open source. She tells us why the brutality of hockey is a good metaphor for open source, about leveling the open source playing field for women and how you can get involved with OPNFV.

Of all the team sports, hockey is one of the most violent, right?

Why do you think I like hockey? I like my sports with a side of brutality…In most sports there are tensions that flare up and sometimes it can get raw and there are fisticuffs. At the end of the day, you need to come together because you’re trying to accomplish a goal.

What If Mesos Metrics Collection Was a Snap?

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The Linux Foundation

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March 6, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbBC5zkwLd4?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6pLSHrXSg7IYgzSlkOh132K

This talk covers the basics of Mesos metrics collection, introduces Snap — a powerful, open source telemetry framework for modern infrastructures — as well as an open source plugin for Snap developed specifically to collect Mesos cluster metrics.

What If Mesos Metrics Collection Was a Snap?

By

Carla Schroder

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March 6, 2017

Roger Ignazio, tech lead at Mesosphere, introduces the Snap plugin for Apache Mesos at MesosCon Asia 2016. Snap is an open telemetry framework that simplifies the collection, processing, and publishing of system data through a single API. It collects hundreds of metrics from Mesos masters and agents and helps you can make sense of this mass of data so that you can monitor your cluster operations.

Ignazio presents Snap in the context of day two operations. “Day two operations is everything that comes after day one,” says Ignazio. “So, what does that mean? Everything that happens after you provision a Mesos or a DC/OS cluster falls into day two operations. That’s logging, that’s debugging, that’s metrics collection. Really, anything that you need to do to operate and ensure the health of a cluster.”

There are many Mesos metrics APIs that you can potentially use, and Ignazio describes some fo them. “The first one is the redirect endpoint. In a Mesos cluster you commonly have three or five or seven masters, for a production highly available deployment. The redirect endpoint returns a HTTP 307 redirect to the leading master, and this is important because you never want to query the non-leading master for its metrics.”

“The next is this metrics snapshot endpoint, and that’s a summary of the masters metrics. Kind of a high level and operations view. It’s things like how long it’s taking to query the Mesos internal registry, and how many messages are being sent back and forth between the frameworks.” Other metrics APIs include state and state summary endpoints, which provide either a high level or a detailed view of cluster states, and metrics about running containers, container IDs, CPU, memory, and disk usage.

Snap separates the collection of all of this data from publishing it. “You can filter, you can add context, you can type metrics, you can aggregate them, and then ultimately publish them onto your message queue or to a time-series database, and you can visualize them with your tools of choice.” The Grafana dashboard is a popular choice for creating a visual representation of your Snap data.

Watch the full presentation (below) to learn more about Snap’s architecture and to see some examples of how to use it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbBC5zkwLd4?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6pLSHrXSg7IYgzSlkOh132K

Interested in speaking at MesosCon Asia on June 21 – 22? Submit your proposal by March 25, 2017. Submit now>>

Not interested in speaking but want to attend? Linux.com readers can register now with the discount code, LINUXRD5, for 5% off the attendee registration price. Register now to save over $125!

Litebook Launches $249 Linux Laptop

By

ZDNet

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March 6, 2017

A company called Litebook has released a new Linux laptop that is priced to compete with Chromebooks — if not as cheap as the $89 Pinebook. That’s because the Pinebook is bare-boned when it comes to specs, using an ARM CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of built-in storage. The Litebook, on the other hand, uses an Intel Celeron processor (the N3150), twice as much memory, and a 512GB hard drive. (An extra $20 gets you a 32GB SSD in addition to the hard drive to help speed up boot-ups.)

The Litebook ships with the Elementary OS flavor of Linux, though you can install an alternate that uses the Linux kernel 4.8.

802.Eleventy What? A Deep Dive into Why Wi-Fi Kind of Sucks

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Linux.com Editorial Staff

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March 6, 2017

Just as everybody got used to the idea that 802.11b sucked, 802.11g came along. Promising 54 screaming Mbps, 802.11g was still only half the speed of Fast Ethernet, but five times faster than original Ethernet! Right? Well, no. Just like 802.11b, the advertised speed was really the maximum physical layer data rate, not anything you could ever expect to see on a progress bar. And also like 802.11b, your best case scenario tended to be about a tenth of that—5 Mbps or so—and you’d be splitting that 5 Mbps or so among all the computers on the network, not getting it for each one of them like you would with a switched network.

802.11n was introduced to the consumer public around 2010, promising six hundred Mbps. Wow! Okay, so it’s not as fast as the gigabit wired Ethernet that just started getting affordable around the same time, but six times faster than wired Fast Ethernet, right? Once again, a reasonable real-life expectation was around a tenth of that. Maybe. On a good day. To a single device.

Top 4 JavaScript Code Editors

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OpenSource.com

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March 6, 2017

JavaScript is everywhere, and its ubiquitous presence on the web is undeniable. Every app uses it in one form or another. And any developer who is serious about the web should learn JavaScript. If you already know it, be sure to continue learning new frameworks, libraries, and tools, because JavaScript is a living, evolving language.

The JavaScript community has a great open source environment, and that has led to some excellent open source JavaScript IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). The open source movement is strong, and there are many IDEs that you can use to code your JavaScript program.

Google’s Microservices Protocol Joins Kubernetes in Cloud Foundation

By

InfoWorld

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March 6, 2017

Google’s gRPC protocol was originally developed to speed up data transfer between microservices, proving faster and more efficient than passing around data encoded in JSON.

Yesterday the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which oversees the development of Kubernetes, announced it would also become the home for gRPC’s development.

IBM Adds New API to Quantum Computing Cloud Service

By

TechCrunch

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March 6, 2017

IBM announced today that it was updating its Quantum Experience cloud with a new API that it hopes will increase the abilities of researchers and other interested parties to build more sophisticated applications with its experimental quantum computing system.

Last May, IBM opened up its 5 qubit computer in its NY state labs to the public in the form of a cloud service. The hope was that by providing interested parties with a working quantum computing model, it would help advance the technology, which remains very much in the preliminary stage of development.

How to Upgrade Kernel to Latest Version in Ubuntu

By

Tecmint

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March 6, 2017

Periodically new devices and technology coming out and it’s important to keep our Linux system kernel up-to-date if we want to get the most of out it. Moreover, updating system kernel will ease us to take advantage of new kernel fuctions and also it helps us to protect ourselves from vulnerabilities that have been found in earlier versions.

Ready to update your kernel on Ubuntu 16.04 or one of their derivatives such as Debian and Linux Mint? If so, keep reading!

Step 1: Check Installed Kernel Version
To find the current version of installed kernel on our system we can do: