I'm sure everyone has already heard this from yesterday... but yes after believing there wouldn't be a new Raspberry Pi release for 2018 because nothing was announced at the end of Feb., the Raspberry Pi foundation pulled a fast one on Pi Day by announcing a new revision of the Raspberry Pi 3B.  They added a + to the end of it: Raspberry Pi 3B+.

What's new?  They improved power regulation and cooling of the CPU enabling a default clockrate 200MHz faster than the previous Pi (1.4GHz).  They totally refreshed the radio components (with a nice RPi logo stamped on the cover of it) bumping the wifi to dual-band 802.11ac and Blutooth 4.2.   They also improved ethernet performance making it "faster ethernet" but just under 1GBit along with 4 new pins for Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) capabilities with an add-on HAT.  Overall it is a cleaner design and the best Raspberry Pi to date.

While some had hoped for a doubling of the RAM (still only 1GB) that just wasn't in the cards as RAM prices have been significantly increasing over the last year and it is very important to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to keep the price point at $35.

Quite a few reviewers got a hold of the new model early and were able to post informative videos on YouTube including some benchmarks.  Retailers don't quite have them in stock yet but will RSN.  I already put in my order with Newark and it should be shipping in about 10 days.  I hope to get FedBerry going on mine for a desktop Fedora system.  I'll post about that when the time comes.  In the meantime, enjoy the following brief video mentioning what's new in the Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Update: My Rpi3B+ arrived on Monday, March 19th.  Wow, that was fast.  I couldn't find the case I had so I haven't had time to play with it yet.  For some reason, it seems smaller than previous models.

This interview is a couple of months old but still good.  Enjoy.

Update: On Jan. 1st, 2018 Linux Journal published an update on their website stating that they had a new investor that was bringing them back to life.  Long live Linux Journal.

I got an email from Linux Journal today.  It announced that they were ceasing publication because they were broke.

I've been a long-time subscriber.  How long?  Well, I started using Linux in January of 1995... and only found out about the existence of Linux Journal some months after that.  I don't recall the exact month I subscribed but it was probably sometime in late 1995 or early 1996.  Early on they were every-other-month but it didn't take them very long before they went monthly.  I continued renewing my subscription every year... although I think there might have been a few, fairly short, accidental late renewals where I might have missed an issue or two.  Whenever that happened I was sure to check the newstand (aka Barnes and Noble).

I remember early on (1996?) they were based in Seattle... and it just so happened that my family and I would periodically visit Seattle for days and sometimes weeks at a time because my first son was born with kidney problems and the Seattle Children's Hospital was his regional pediatric care facility.  Staying in Seattle for periods of time you look for stuff to do... and I decided to find their offices and pay them a visit.  In those days it wasn't too far from the University district.  On my first visit I was able to buy most all of the back issues that came out before I was a subscriber going back to issue #2.  They had long sold out of issue #1 (dated March 1994) as it obviously had the lowest print run anyway... so I never actually saw a physical issue #1... but I saw all of the rest of them.  I believe I visited their Seattle office at least 3 times.  They had tee-shirts and various other branded items one could buy.  I do remember getting one or two tee-shirts.

I also saw a Linux Journal booth at various Linux-related conferences I have attended over the years.  I was always sure to grab a few copies of the current issue they would giving away to share with my fellow LUG members.

A few years ago they went digital-only (August 2011).  I never missed an issue because they allowed access to all back issues they offered in PDF format... which goes back to issue #132 dated April 2005.  Their last issue was #283 dated November 2017.  I have the bulk of my print issues sitting on a shelf in front of my desk at work.

In the email from today they said that they were unfortunately not going to be able to give  subscribers a refund for any remaining undelivered issues.  That's fine.  I don't even know how many issues were left on my last subscription.  As a parting gift they were able to provide a link to 6 free issues of Linux Pro magazine... as well as a download link for the final Linux Journal Archive optical disc which contains every issue, now including the last one... in HTML format.  That is normally a $25 value.  I downloaded it.  They said the download was good until the end of the year... at that point I assume their website and everything else will be dismantled to stop any additional financial burden on them.

Linux Journal you will be missed! 1994-2017

This is  from a recent conference.  I'm sure you can figure out which one if you care to know.  Anyway, here's the video.

Another keynote from the Open Source Summit... about start-ups... the rich and the poor.  Notice... cuss words are used and realities exposed.  Enjoy!

I haven't watched this yet, but I bet it is interesting.  Enjoy!

I took the GUI Fedora 26 container I made in the previous video and decided to see if I could do screencasting within the container.  Seems to work just fine.  I think the microphone would have worked within the container if I hadn't been using it on the host to record the video on the host of recording a video within a container.  Inception all over again.  Enjoy!

Higher resolution / quality downloadable version:
lxc-screencasting-20170908.webm (4m:34s, 35.2MB)

LXC is a native form of containers available in the mainline Linux kernel for several years now.  Unlike Docker, LXC provides a full "system" container and can even be used for GUI desktop environments.

In this video I show how to install and setup LXC on a Fedora 26 host as well as how to create your first container (also Fedora 26) which is very minimal... and how to build it up via package manager to a complete GUI container including video and audio playback accessed via the x2go remoting protocol that runs over ssh.

I have also made GUI containers of other distributions including CentOS 7, Ubuntu 16.04, Debian 9, and OpenSUSE 42.3... using the pre-made OS Templates shown listed in the video... using their native packages managers, mostly the same packages, and all running systemd and accessible via x2go.

Screencast recorded under Fedora 26 with simplescreenrecorder from the rpmfusion repository.

I did make a few minor mistakes and typos along the way, but making mistakes is how we learn, right?

Higher resolution / quality downloadable version:
lxc-start-to-finish-20170908.webm (34m:19s, 196MB)

KVM has had the ability to do nested for a while. Here are some instructions for getting nested KVM working in Fedora. I decided to do nested, nested... and hey, it is slow but yeah, it actually works. Proof below.

kvm-nested-nested-20170716.webm (19:24, 44.7MB)

There was a GO / NO GO meeting earlier in the week and the Fedora 26 RC 1.5 build passed.  As a result Fedora 26 will be officially released on Tuesday, July 11th.  According to the original schedule, F26 was set to be released on June 6th.  It got bumped 5 times during the alpha and beta phases but that pretty much always happens to this distro that is constantly leading the pack with innovation. 

What are the new features?  Check out the release notes and/or the changeset.  There are quite a few changes to the installer. Just be aware there are a ton of normal updates beyond the changeset and I mean... how about that new desktop background?  LXQT users will also be happy to have their own Spin now.  Don't forget that Fedora appears to be supporting quite a few arches, some as primary and others as secondary.  Not as many as Debian and Gentoo but still.  Which arches?  aarch64, armhfp, i386, ppc64, ppc64le, and x86_64.  I'm only using the later myself.

I've been using Fedora 26 since before the alpha release.  How is that?  For many years now they have been producing nightly-builds if you knew where to look.  I just took one of the nightly builds and did an install... and then crawled along updating all the way through alpha and beta to final.  I mainly start early because I like to build my own remix with all of the desktop environments installed and the earlier I start the longer I have to work on perfecting it to my own tastes.  Here's some instructions if you have any desire to make your own spin or remix.  About the time the beta came out I started running F26 on my laptop and work machine exclusively.  It has been stable for me the entire time.

My main home server machine is always the last to move to a new release and I just upgraded to F26 from F25 today.  Since I have a lot of packages installed it did take a while.  Let it be known that rpmfusion has had packages for F26 since around the alpha release and as a result I was able to just upgrade everything and not have to worry about removing much because third-party packages were missing... because they weren't.  For a long time I have been a fan of clean installs but with the home server I have a particular application installed that has to pull down a ton of data post install if I were to do a clean install (plexmediaserver)... so I've been upgrading that machine with each release for quite a few releases now.  Upgrades for me have been completely painless for several releases now.  It helps when Linux / Fedora likes your hardware and you aren't using any proprietary drivers (no nVidia here).

Fantastic job Fedora Project!  I also wanted to give a shout out to the fine fellows that make up the Respin SIG.  They have been providing updated iso media for all of the Fedora Spins (including Workstation) for several releases now and generally make new ones every other kernel update, which in Fedora is quite often.  I'm not sure everyone knows about the periodic refreshed media that they provide because they are mainly only promoted on Fedora Planet and the Fedora IRC channel.  Keep up the good work!  There are a ton up post-release updates for Fedora 26 already so I'm sure they'll be getting to work on refreshed F26 media RSN.