Home Blog Page 916

How To: Install/Upgrade to Linux Kernel 4.4 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint Systems

The Linux Kernel 4.4 is now available for the users, announced Linus Torvalds. This Linux Kernel version comes with plenty of fixes and improvements. This article will guide you to install or upgrade to Linux Kernel 4.4 in your Ubuntu or Linux Mint system.

Installation

For 32-Bit Systems

Download the .deb packages.

$ wget kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-wily/linux-headers-4.4.0-040400_4.4.0-040400.201601101930_all.deb
$ wget kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-wily/linux-headers-4.4.0-040400-generic_4.4.0-040400.201601101930_i386.deb
$ wget kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.4-wily/linux-image-4.4.0-040400-generic_4.4.0-040400.201601101930_i386.deb

Read more at YourOwnLinux

Apache Spark 1.6: Strong Typing, Faster Throughput

The release of Spark 1.6 continues the evolution of the data analysis platform toward greater performance and usability, according to Reynold Xin, co-founder of Spark sponsoring company Databricks. He noted that the number of project contributors has topped 1,000, a 50 percent increase in the past year.

He points to automatic memory management among the ways the new release makes life simpler for users.

Read more at The New Stack

Linux Foundation Moves Dronecode Project Forward

290 Drones2016CESIn just a year after the open-source Dronecode effort launched, its membership has taken off, and code and product are available. 

As interest in drone technology continues to grow, also expanding is the open-source Dronecode effort, which is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Dronecode launchedin October 2014 and has grown significantly since then, from only a handful of members to 51.Dronecode isn’t just vaporware code, but rather, now serves as the basis for multiple commercially available drone technologies, including the recently announced Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight.

Read more at eWeek

Intel to Supercharge NUC Mini-PC with Skull Canyon Edition

The chip giant is preparing a gamer-friendly version of its pint-sized desktop with a quad-core Skylake Core i7 processor and Thunderbolt 3 port to connect to external graphics solutions.

Intel has made strides in helping to reinvent the PC with its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) systems, which are one of a number of tiny Windows computers that are shaped like the Mac Mini. The small size obviously limits the ultimate performance of these mini-PCs, as there’s only so much room (and ability to dissipate heat) for components.

Read more at ZDNet News

Development Release: Tails 2.0 RC1

The developers behind Tails, a Debian-based live DVD designed for anonymous web browsing using the pre-configured Tor Browser, have announced the availability of the first release candidate for the upcoming version 2.0: The first release candidate for the upcoming version 2.0 is out.  We are very excited and cannot wait to hear what you think about it. What’s new since Tails 2.0 beta 1? New features: fix the passphrase strength indicator of GNOME Disks…

Read more at DistroWatch

The Best Linux Distros of 2016

distro-opensuse

2015 was a very important year for Linux, both in the enterprise as well as in the consumer space. As a Linux user since 2005, I can see that the operating system has come a long way in the past 10 years. And, 2016 is going to be even more exciting. In this article, I have picked some of the best distros that will shine in 2016. You can also see our list of best distros for 2017.

Best Comeback Distro: openSUSE

SUSE, the company behind openSUSE, is the oldest Linux company; it was formed just a year after Linus Torvalds announced Linux. The company actually predates Linux king Red Hat. SUSE is also the sponsor of the community-based distro openSUSE.

In 2015, openSUSE teams decided to come closer to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) so that users could have a distribution that shares its DNA with the enterprise server — similar to CentOS and Ubuntu. Thus, openSUSE became openSUSE Leap, a distribution that’s directly based on SLE SP (service pack) 1.

The two distros will share the code base to benefit each other — SUSE will take what’s good in openSUSE and vice versa. With this move, openSUSE is also ditching the regular release cycle, and a new version will be released in sync with SLE. That means each version will have a much longer life cycle.

As a result of this move, openSUSE has become a very important distribution because potential SLE users can now use openSUSE Leap. That’s not all, however; openSUSE also announced the release of Tumbleweed, a pure rolling-release version. So, now, users can use either the super-stable openSUSE Leap or the always up-to-date openSUSE Tumbleweed.

No other distro has made such an impressive comeback in my memory.

Advertisement for Linux certification

Most Customizable Distro: Arch Linux

Arch Linux is the best rolling-release distribution out there. Period. Ok, I could be biased because I am an Arch Linux user. However, the reason behind my claim is that Arch excels in many other areas, too, and that’s why I use it as my main operating system.

  • Arch Linux is a great distro for those who want to learn everything about Linux. Because you have to install everything manually, you learn all the bits and pieces of a Linux-based operating system.

  • Arch is the most customizable distribution. There is no “Arch” flavor of any DE. All you get is a foundation and you can build whatever distro want, on top of it. For good or for worse, unlike openSUSE or Ubuntu there is no extra patching or integration. You get what upstream developers created. Period.

  • Arch Linux is also one of the best rolling releases. It’s always updated. Users always run the latest packages, and they can also run pre-released software through unstable repositories.

  • Arch is also known for having excellent documentation. Arch Wiki is my to-go resource for everything Linux related.

  • What I like the most about Arch is that is offers almost every package and software that’s available for “any” Linux distribution, thanks to the Arch User Repository, aka AUR.

Best-Looking Distro: elementary OS

Different Linux distributions have different focus areas — in most cases, these are technical differences. In many Linux distributions. the look and feel is an afterthought — a side project at the mercy of the specific desktop environment.

elementary OS is trying to change all that. Here, design is at the forefront, and the reason is quite obvious. The distro is being developed by designers who have made their name in the Linux world by creating beautiful icons.

elementary OS is quite strict about the holistic look and feel. The developers have created their own components, including the desktop environment. Additionally, they choose only those applications that fit into the design paradigm. One can find heavy influence of Mac OS X on elementary OS.

Best Newcomer: Solus

Solus operating system has garnered quite a lot of attention lately. It’s a decent-looking operating system that has been created from scratch. It’s not a derivative of Debian or Ubuntu. It comes with the Budgie desktop environment, which was built from scratch but aims to integrate with Gnome. Solus has the same minimalistic approach as Google’s Chrome OS.

distro-solusI have not played with Solus much, but it does look promising. Solus is actually not a “new” OS. It has been around for a while in different forms and names. But the entire project was revived back in 2015 under this new name.

Best Cloud OS: Chrome OS

Chrome OS may not be your typical Linux-based distribution because it’s a browser-based operating system for online activities. However, because it’s based on Linux and its source code is available for anyone to compile, it’s an attractive OS. I use Chrome OS on a daily basis. It’s an excellent, maintenance-free, always updated OS for anyone using a computer purely for web-related activities. Chrome OS, along with Android, deserves all the credit for making Linux popular in the PC and mobile space.

Best Laptop OS: Ubuntu MATE

Most laptops don’t have very high-end hardware, and if you are running a really resource-intensive desktop environment then you won’t have much system resources or battery life at your disposal — they will be used by the OS itself. That’s where I found Ubuntu MATE to be an excellent operating system. It’s lightweight, yet has all the bells and whistles needed for a pleasant experience. Thanks to its lightweight design, the majority of system resources are free for applications so you can still do some heavy work on it. I also found it to be a great distro on really low-end systems.

Advertisement for Intro to Linux

Best Distro for Old Hardware: Lubuntu

If you have an old laptop or PC sitting around, breathe new life into it with Lubuntu. Lubuntu uses LXDE, but the project has merged with Razor Qt to create LXQt. Although the latest release 15.04 is still using LXDE, the future versions will be using LXQt. Lubuntu is a decent operating system for old hardware.

Best Distro for IoT: Snappy Ubuntu Core

Snappy Ubuntu Core is the best Linux-based operating system out there for Internet of Things (IoT) and other such devices. The operating system holds great potential to turn almost everything around us into smart devices — such as routers, coffeemakers, drones, etc. What makes it even more interesting is the way the software manages updates and offers containerization for added security.

Best Distro for Desktops: Linux Mint Cinnamon

Linux Mint Cinnamon is the best operating system for desktops and powerful laptops. I will go as far as calling it the Mac OS X of the Linux world. Honestly, I had not been a huge fan of Linux Mint for a long time because of unstable Cinnamon. But, as soon as the developers chose to use LTS as the base, the distro has become incredibly stable. Because the developers don’t have to spend much time worrying about keeping up with Ubuntu, they are now investing all of their time in making Cinnamon better.

Best Distro for Games: Steam OS

Gaming has been a weakness of desktop Linux. Many users dual-boot with Windows just to be able to play games. Valve Software is trying to change that. Valve is a game distributor that offers a client to run games on different platforms. And, Valve has now created their open operating system — Steam OS — to create a Linux-based gaming platform. By the end of 2015, partners started shipping Steam machines to the market.

Best Distro for Privacy: Tails

In this age of mass surveillance and tracking by marketers (anonymous tracking for targeted content is acceptable), privacy has become a major issue. If you are someone who needs to keep the government and marketing agencies out of your business, you need an operating system that’s created — from the ground up — with privacy in mind.

And, nothing beats Tails for this purpose. It’s a Debian-based distribution that offers privacy and anonymity by design. Tails is so good that, according to reports, the NSA considers it a major threat to their mission.

Advertisement for newsletter

Best Distro for Multimedia Production: Ubuntu Studio

Multimedia production is one of the major weaknesses of Linux-based operating systems. All the professional-grade applications are available for either Windows or Mac OS X. There is no dearth of decent audio/video production software for Linux, but a multimedia production system needs more than just decent applications. It should use a lightweight desktop environment so that precious system resources — such as CPU and RAM — are used sparingly by the system itself, leaving them for the multimedia applications. And, the best Linux distribution for multimedia production is Ubuntu Studio. It uses Xfce and comes with a broad range of audio, video, and image editing applications.distro-ubuntu-studio

Best Enterprise Distro: SLE/RHEL

Enterprise customers don’t look for articles like these to choose a distribution to run on their servers. They already know where to go: It’s either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise. These two names have become synonymous with enterprise servers. These companies are also pushing boundaries by innovating in this changing landscape where everything is containerized and becoming software defined.

Best Server OS: Debian/CentOS

If you are looking at running a server, but you can’t afford or don’t want to pay a subscription fee for RHEL or SLE, then there is nothing better than Debian or CentOS. These distributions are the gold standard when it comes to community-based servers. And, they are supported for a very long time, so you won’t have to worry about upgrading your system so often.

Best Mobile OS: Plasma Mobile

Although the Linux-based distribution Android is ruling the roost, many in the open source community, including me, still desire a distribution that offers traditional Linux desktop apps on mobile devices. At the same time, it’s better if the distro is run by a community instead of a company so that a user remains in the focus and not the company’s financial goals. And that’s where KDE’s Plasma Mobile brings some hope.

This Kubuntu-based distribution was launched in 2015. Because the KDE community is known for their adherence to standards and developing stuff in public, I am quite excited about the future of Plasma Mobile.

Best Distro for ARM Devices: Arch Linux ARM

With the success of Android, we are now surrounded by ARM-powered devices — from Raspberry Pi to Chromebook and Nvidia Shield. The traditional distros written for Intel/AMD processors won’t run on these systems. Some distributions are aimed at ARM, but they are mostly for specific hardware only, such as Raspbian for Raspberry Pi. That’s where Arch Linux ARM (ALARM) shines. It’s a purely community-based distribution that’s based on Arch Linux. You can run it on Raspberry Pi, Chromebooks, Android devices, Nvidia Shield, and what not. What makes this distribution even more interesting is that, thanks to the Arch User Repository (AUR), you can install many applications than you may not get on other distributions.

Conclusion

I was astonished and amazed when I worked on this story. It’s very exciting to see that there is something for everyone in the Linux world. It doesn’t matter if the year of the desktop Linux never arrives. We are happy with our Linux moments!

 

Read more:

The Best Linux Distros for 2017

 

Advertisement for LFCS

This Old Tech: The Beloved Speak & Spell Was a Pioneer of Popular Computing

speak and spell-largeBuilt by Texas Instruments, the Speak & Spell electronic educational toy was the first mass-produced product to use digital signal processing.

First released in 1978, the Speak & Spell pioneered digital signal processing techniques as the first mass-produced consumer product to include speech-synthesis capabilities. Ostensibly an educational tool, the Speak & Spell also served as a fun distraction thanks to its multiple built-in game modes and appealing robotic voice…

Read more at PCWorld

How to Install OpenCart 2 with Nginx and SSL on Ubuntu 15.10

This tutorial covers the OpenCart installation with Nginx, PHP-fpm and MariaDB on Ubuntu 15.10. OpenCart is free open source e-commerce software based on PHP and MySQL. OpenCart allows you to setup and run your own online store at a minimal cost. The software is suitable for a small and medium online businesses, it is easy to install and there are many add-ons and extensions available. OpenCart comes with translations for numerous languages and supports multiple currencies.

Read more at HowtoForge

Snapper: SUSE’s Ultimate Btrfs Snapshot Manager

Snapper, the excellent Btrfs management tool, is yet another of SUSE Linux’s best-kept secrets.

I call SUSE the secret Linux, because it’s the most advanced Linux distribution, but hardly anyone seems to know about it. SUSE has officially supported Btrfs, the next-generation Linux filesystem, since SLES 11 SP2, and supplies the excellent Snapper tool to manage Btrfs. Grab yourself a free openSUSE download, or a free 60-day SUSE Enterprise Linux evaluation and follow along as we learn how to create and manage snapshots with Snapper.

The standard openSUSE installation should include the following packages:

  • snapper

  • yast2-snapper

  • snapper-zypp-plugin

  • grub2-snapper-plugin

snapper is the core Snapper package. yast2-snapper automatically creates snapshots when you use YaST to add, remove, or update software packages. snapper-zypp-plugin automatically creates snapshots when you use Zypper to add, remove, or update software packages. grub2-snapper-plugin automatically creates bootloader entries, so you can roll your system back to an older snapshot by simply rebooting.

On a new openSUSE installation, the installer creates a Snapper configuration for the root filesystem. The default partitioning scheme formats the home directory with XFS, so if you want to make snapshots of /home (which I think is a good thing to do) then make sure it is formatted with Btrfs.

Viewing Configurations and Status

Snapper includes both a complete set of console commands and a nice graphical interface. The default root configuration automatically makes snapshots of the root filesystem whenever it is changed by Zypper or YaST. Run snapper list-configs to see your existing configurations. This is what the default looks like:

> sudo snapper list-configs
root's password:
Config | Subvolume
-------+----------
root   | /

fig-1The configuration file is /etc/snapper/configs/root. Figure 1 is what a new installation looks like after YaST and Zypper run a few times.

Select any snapshot labeled Pre & Post, and click the Show Changes button to see exactly what changed (Figure 2). You can see all changed files and diffs of their contents.

fig-2The Pre snapshots are taken before YaST or Zypper runs, and the Post snapshots are taken afterwards. single is a standalone snapshot; this is the kind of snapshot you make manually, or automatically with cron. Every snapshot has an ID number and timestamps. By default, the most recent 100 snapshots are retained. When you have more than 100, then the oldest snapshots are deleted.

snapper list shows the same information on the command line. You need root privileges (the Date column is abbreviated to make it fit):

> sudo snapper list
Type   | #  | Pre # | Date             | User | Cleanup | Description       | Userdata    
-------+----+-------+------------------+------+---------+-------------------+-------------
single | 0  |       |                  | root |         | current           |             
pre    | 1  |       | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  | yast snapper      |             
pre    | 2  |       | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  | zypp(zypper)      | important=no
post   | 3  | 2     | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  |                   | important=no
pre    | 4  |       | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  | zypp(packagekitd) | important=no
post   | 5  | 4     | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  |                   | important=no
post   | 6  | 1     | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  |                   |             
pre    | 7  |       | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  | yast snapper      |             
pre    | 8  |       | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  | zypp(zypper)      | important=no
post   | 9  | 8     | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  |                   | important=no
post   | 10 | 7     | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  |                   |             
pre    | 11 |       | Fri 01 Jan 2016  | root | number  | yast snapper      |

The Cleanup column indicates which type of cleanup algorithm is used, either number or timeline. number is a simple count (default 100); timeline deletes old snapshots after they reach a certain age. When you manually create snapshots, be sure to include a Cleanup value so they will automatically age out and be deleted when their time comes.

Userdata contains arbitrary comments in a key=value pair format, and you can leave this field blank or enter some text to help you remember what the snapshot contains. You may create multiple key=value pairs separated by commas.

Snapshotting /home

You can’t make snapshots of any directories until you create a configuration. New configuration files are created from /etc/snapper/config-templates/default. All of Snapper’s configuration files are nice plain text that you can edit. Create your new configuration with the snapper command:

> sudo snapper -c home create-config /home

Verify that it was created correctly with snapper list:

> sudo snapper -c home list
Type   | # | Pre # | Date | User | Cleanup | Description | Userdata
-------+---+-------+------+------+---------+-------------+---------
single | 0 |       |      | root |         | current     |

Use the Current Configuration drop-down at the top of the Snapper GUI to select which configuration status you want to see. There isn’t much to see until you create a snapshot. You can do this from the GUI, as in Figure 3. Click the Create button and fill in the fields.

fig-3Now rerun your list command:

> sudo snapper -c home list
Type   | # | Pre # | Date             | User | Cleanup | Description  | Userdata    
-------+---+-------+------------------+------+---------+--------------+-------------
single | 0 |       |                  | root |         | current      |                         
single | 1 |       | Sun 03 Jan 2016  | root | number  | weekend snap | day=Sunday

You may also use the snapper command to create snapshots:

> sudo snapper -c home create -d "weekend snap" -c number -u day=Sunday

Rollbacks and Undos

What if you make a mess and want to reverse your changes? That’s what filesystem snapshots are for. In the Snapper GUI select the configuration you want to use — so far, we have root and home — then select which snapshot you want to restore, and click the Show Changes button. You may select some files and directories or all of them; then just click Restore Selected (Figure 4). You’ll see a dialog listing your changes; when it looks correct, click Yes.

fig-4A rollback is booting your system to an earlier snapshot. Your boot menu contains a “Start bootloader from a read-only snapshot” option. Select this, and then you’ll have a list of snapshots to choose from.

Resources

Using Snapper is pretty easy, but you might be surprised at how much it can do. See System Recovery and Snapshot Management with Snapper for detailed documentation.

See How to Create and Manage Btrfs Snapshots and Rollbacks on Linux to learn about using Btrfs commands.

Red Hat’s Ansible 2.0 Brings New Power to DevOps

The latest version of the popular IT automation framework adds functionality and power while honoring backward compatibility.

Ansible, the Python-powered IT automation and configuration framework that recently became a Red Hat property, officially released its 2.0 version today. Its new features satisfy two needs that are sometimes deeply contradictory: Make the product more powerful and useful, but don’t break compatibility with the already large and growing culture of Ansible scripts and modules.

Read more at InfoWorld