Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Vaishali Thakkar

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January 14, 2016

Vaishali crop The Linux Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program has awarded 34 scholarships totaling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals during the past five years. In this series, we are featuring recent scholarship recipients with the hope of inspiring others.

Vaishali Thakkar is a scholarship recipient in the Kernel Guru category. She lives in India and recently completed an Outreachy internship on project Coccinelle. The goal of her project was replacing out-of-date API uses and deprecated functions and macros in the Linux kernel with more modern equivalents. She began contributing to the Linux kernel almost a year ago, and her first contribution was running a Coccinelle semantic patch over staging directory files. She says the excitement of having that first patch accepted was amazing, and she hopes some day to have her dream job of “Linux Kernel Engineer.”

How did you become interested in Linux and open source?

I was introduced to Linux from one of my university courses on operating systems. But, I ended up playing with some basic commands and trying a few Linux distros in virtual machines only.

My real interest in Linux began when I met with an accident and my leg was fractured. After the operation, doctors told me that I could not walk for at least 2 to 3 months. I always wanted to know more about Linux and open source, but I couldn’t find time because of many reasons. So, that was the perfect opportunity for me to dive into the Linux kernel and open source related stuff. I installed a Linux distro on my machine, learned Python, and tried to fix my neighbor’s PC, which was having problem with wireless drivers. I guess a lot of the fun was figuring out how to do things by myself and tweaking those things in ways to make them do something else.

What Linux Foundation course do you plan to take with your scholarship?

I am planning to take the Developing Linux Device Drivers (LFD331) course in October.

How do you expect to use the knowledge you gain from the course?

I think the course will help me understand how a device driver can be written from a scratch and what are some important points to understand while developing different device drivers. I expect to use this knowledge to submit higher level patches to the Linux kernel. LF-small

What are your career goals? How do you see a Linux Foundation course helping you achieve those goals?

One of my career goals is to get a job as a Linux kernel engineer and eventually rise to the level of kernel subsystem maintainer. I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the kernel drivers through the Linux Foundation course, which will help me in submitting higher quality patches in the kernel and getting my dream job with the “Linux Kernel Engineer” title.

What other hobbies or projects are you involved in? Do you participate in any open source projects at this time?

I have contributed to the Linux kernel since last year. Currently, I am working on correcting some incorrect uses of resource managed (devm*) functions in the Linux kernel and making use of some newly introduced functions where possible. I am also helping newbies to start with Linux kernel development and sending patches in lkml.

Additionally, I also worked on removing/replacing some driver specific macros/functions with standard Linux API macros/functions. This helped me to understand various kernel API functions and their usage. I also worked on network drivers to correct endianness errors. These days, I am working on removing module init/exit boilerplate code with standard helper macros. I have introduced some new helper macros, too. My contributions to the Linux kernel can be found here.

[Update: Since this interview was done, Vaishali has joined Oracle as a Linux Kernel Engineer.]

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Eduardo Mayorga Téllez, Teens in Training

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Kyri’ay Vanderpoel, Whiz Kid

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Erich Noriega, SysAdmin Superstar

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Eva Tanaskoska, Women in Linux

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Enrique Sevillano, SysAdmin Superstar

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Anthony Hooper, Whiz Kid

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Yashdeep Saini, Developer Do-Gooder

Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Kiran Padwal, Kernel Guru

How to Encrypt your Data with EncFS on Debian 8 (Jessie)

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Falko Timme

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January 14, 2016

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs without any special permissions and uses the FUSE library and Linux kernel module to provide the filesystem interface. It is a pass-through filesystem, not an encrypted block device, which means it is created on top of an existing filesystem. This tutorial shows how you can use EncFS on Debian Jessie to encrypt your data.

de Raadt: Important SSH Patch Coming Soon

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LWN

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January 14, 2016

Theo de Raadt suggests that a significant OpenSSH security issue is about to be exposed; the message reads, in full: “Important SSH patch coming soon. For now, every on all operating systems, please do the following: Add undocumented ‘UseRoaming no’ to ssh_config or use ‘-oUseRoaming=no’ to prevent upcoming #openssh client bug CVE-2016-0777. More later.“

Update: that important patch appears to be OpenSSH 7.1p2, available now. “The OpenSSH client code between 5.4 and 7.1 contains experimential support for resuming SSH-connections (roaming). The matching server code has never been shipped, but the client code was enabled by default and could be tricked by a malicious server into leaking client memory to the server, including private client user keys.” There are a few other security fixes there as well.

Valve Releases Full Steam Link SDK and Reveals the Hardware Powering It

By

Softpedia

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January 14, 2016

valve-releases-full-steam-it Valve has just launched the complete Steam Link SDK, making way for developers and the community to build native apps for this piece of hardware.

The idea behind the Steam Link is a really good one. Users can connect their gaming machines to the TV, via the network. This means that you don’t need a new and shiny Steam Machine if you already have a powerful computer at home. Valve wants to dominate the living room, but it doesn’t care how it’s going to achieve that.

Manage your Linux Box with htop

By

CTSDownloads

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January 14, 2016

There is one application that I simply must have on every Linux system I install and that’s htop. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a virtual machine or installed on hardware. It doesn’t matter what distribution it is or whether the system is running a GUI Desktop Environment or not, I gotta have htop. It has become such an integral part of my Linux experience that I completely overlooked doing a video or writing about it until now. One of my EzeeLinux clients brought this fact to my attention. I have referred to htop many times in videos but never actually took the time to explain it. Let’s fix that right now. (a href=”/http://freedompenguin.com/articles/how-to/manage-your-linux-box-with-htop/“>Read the rest</a>)

Alternative Education Can Help Close IT Skills Gap

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The Linux Foundation

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January 14, 2016

thinkstockphotos-186993441 Bootcamps, MOOCs, nanodegrees and online education providers won’t take the place of a traditional degree anytime soon, but they can play an important role in helping close the IT skills gap.

There’s a huge need for affordable, accessible IT education and training options to help IT workers and job seekers keep up with ever-changing skills demands. While bootcamps, MOOCs, certificates and nanodegrees won’t take the place of a college education, they can play an important role for organizations looking to stem the widening IT skills gap.

Microsoft’s JavaScript Engine Code Released, Wants To Port It To Linux

By

Phoronix

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January 14, 2016

Last month Microsoft announced they would open-source their JavaScript engine and this week they’ve honored their word by releasing ChakraCore on GitHub.

Microsoft has made their ChakraCore JavaScript engine open-source under the MIT license.

Black Duck Intros Container Scanning

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LinuxInsider

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January 14, 2016

Black Duck Software on Tuesday announced it has added to its Hub software container-scanning capabilities that let users map open source security flaws for applications, Linux distros, and other software in Docker and other Linux containers.

Adding a containerized scanner to a Docker host enables automatic identification of known open source vulnerabilities in all layers of containers on that host, the company said.

Nvidia Releases New Beta Driver for Linux with Support for New GPUs

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Softpedia

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January 14, 2016

nvidia-driver-for-linuxs Nvidia has released a new update for the Linux drivers, but it’s a small upgrade that only brings support for a couple of new GPUs.

Keeping track of all the Nvidia branches for Linux drivers is becoming a hassle, especially if you are a gamer. Usually, game developers recommend that you use the latest driver, but that’s a piece of advice a little bit difficult to follow on the Linux platform. The recent Nvidia driver update is a good example of that.

U.S. Official Sees More Cyber Attacks on Industrial Control Systems

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The Linux Foundation

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January 14, 2016

A U.S. government cyber security official warned that authorities have seen an increase in attacks that penetrate industrial control system networks over the past year, and said they are vulnerable because they are exposed to the Internet.

Industrial control systems are computers that control operations of industrial processes, from energy plants and steel mills to cookie factories and breweries. “We see more and more that are gaining access to that control system layer,” said Marty Edwards, who runs the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT.