Jon Corbet is at it again... giving an informative presentation at a Linux oriented conference... this particular one being Linaro Connect Budapest 2017 from last week. Enjoy!
I have a very minimal LiveCD of CentOS 7.x that has XFCE from EPEL as default. How minimal? It is about 580MB and is installable if desired. Here's a video showing it start in a KVM virtual machine.
Just in case you missed the announcement yesterday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the immediate release of the Raspberry Pi Zero W for $10. Here's the intro video:
Anyone who has been using Linux for a while is familiar with package managers and package management. Being a Fedora user, I have noticed a few projects that Fedora has in the works to augment package management. For example, Fedora Atomic does not the traditional package manager (dnf) but uses rpm-ostree instead. Why would Fedora be working on additional packaging systems? What is wrong with existing package managers? I have been asking myself those questions for some time now.
Kristoffer Grönlund provides answers to those questions in a talk entitled, "Package Manages all the way down". Enjoy.
It is that time of year again... linux.conf.au. They have been doing a great job getting the videos up fast and they are still uploading more. Here's Jon Corbet's talk, The Kernel Report. Enjoy!
I've been running FedBerry 24 on my Rasperry Pi 3 for some time now. It has been hooked up to the HDTV in the back bedroom. While I don't use it on a daily basis, I do try to login to it once a week or so and keep it updated... and reboot whenever there is a kernel update. Given the rate of Fedora updates and frequent FedBerry kernel updates, the project is fairly active.
What is FedBerry? FedBerry is a Fedora-remix made by three guys who have built glue packages for Fedora's ARM release and produced a few different images for the RPi 2 and Pi 3. Download the .tar.xz, decompress and write it to a microSD card, insert card into Raspberry Pi... and snap... you have Fedora. They started with Fedora 23, are on Fedora 24 now, and fairly recently released packages for Fedora 25... although no images for Fedora 25 yet.
As I write this, I'm in the middle of upgrading my F24 system to F25. The number of packages the FedBerry folks have to produce is pretty small. They are mostly related to the kernel and various branding packages. It really isn't that far away from Fedora's ARM build. Fedora has said that they are working on getting a release to run on the Raspberry Pi but historically there have been a few roadblocks that over time have been dissolving. The main ones were with kernel support that wasn't in mainline and/or proprietary and the use of the FAT filesystem for the boot partition... or something like that. I read a few blog posts on it a couple of months ago but don't remember the exact details.
Anyhoo, I run XFCE and a host of other common desktop software on the RPi3 and it works great. While it is no speed demon, all of the hardware works including the wifi. I can ssh into it and even connect to it via x2go for a remote XFCE session. Overall, I'm very impressed with FedBerry.
I will update this post with info on how the upgrade went. The FedBerry devs didn't announce their F25 packages, or at least not that I saw, but I noticed a 25 directory on their repo site and thought I'd stick my neck out. If it fails on me, it would really be my fault for being a earlier-than-early adopter... but so far it seems to be working.
Update: The upgrade went fine. Rebooted and had a 4.9.2 Linux kernel. FB24 had 4.4.41. All the hardware continues to work fine. Thanks FedBerry!
The method I used was: dnf system-upgrade download --nogpgcheck --releasever=25 followed by dnf system-upgrade reboot
Red Hat's Vincent Batts gives a presentation at systemd.conf 2016 conference entitled, "What's next for containers?". It is a good overview of where the various container projects are (with no mention of OpenVZ however) and what work needs to be done. I enjoyed his assessment that the first thing that is next is, "Get Past the Hype," and to, "Make Containers Boring." Vincent goes over several of the userland tools as well as covers the areas where Linux native containers still need work. Enjoy.
There have been a ton of conferences in the last couple of months... and luckily a lot of the presentations were recorded and have been posted. Here is Lennart Poettering's presentation from the systemd.conf 2016 conference on, "State of the Union / Portable Services". Enjoy.
Everyone has been sweating the DirtyCOW bug that has been in the Linux kernel for over 9 years. I recently discovered the Open Source Security Podcast and their most recent episode covers DirtyCOW some in a way I found interesting so I thought I'd share. Enjoy!
Notice that is in Opus format which should play in Firefox and Google Chrome just fine... and supposedly Microsoft's Edge. Apple's Safari? Not so much
Andrea Limbago is interviewed by the CUBE at the Grace Hoper Celebration 2016 conference. She covers a number of interesting topics and I thought it was worth sharing. Enjoy!