The Future of SUSE: A Home for Truly Open Open Source Solutions

While this might look like a big change for SUSE, the fact is that for myself and the rest of the leadership team here, it’s a fulfillment of a path we’ve been following for a long time.
In fact, there are no changes to the essence of our mission, vision and strategy. We will continue our focus on the success of our customers and our commitments to our partners and open source communities and projects.
Events and trends in IT make it clear that open source has become more important for enterprises than ever. We believe this makes our position as the largest independent open source company more important than ever. SUSE’s independence is aligned with a single-minded focus on delivering what is best for our customers and partners, coupled with full control over our own destiny.

SUSE Completes Move to Independence, Reaffirms Commitment to Customers, Partners and Open Source Communities as Industry’s Largest Independent Open Source Company

SUSE® today announced the creation of the largest independent open source company following the completion of SUSE’s acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus. With its ongoing momentum, portfolio expansion and successful execution in the marketplace, as a standalone business SUSE is now even better positioned to focus on the needs of customers and partners as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that enable customer workloads anywhere – on premise, hybrid and multi-cloud – with exceptional service, value and flexibility.
The newly independent SUSE has expanded its executive team, adding new leadership roles and experience to foster its continued momentum into this next stage of corporate development. Enrica Angelone has been named to the new post of chief financial officer, and Sander Huyts is SUSE’s new chief operations officer. Thomas Di Giacomo, formerly chief technology officer for SUSE, is now president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. All three report to SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann.

SUSE completes its management transition

Here's a SUSE press release hyping its transition to being "the largest independent open-source company".

SUSE Marks Its New Independence Under EQT Ownership

It was in July of last year that Swedish private equity firm EQT Partners acquired SUSE from Micro Focus. That deal is now closed and SUSE is marking its independence today while proclaiming to be the largest independent open-source company.

Quarking Drools: How we turned a 13-year-old Java project into a first-class serverless component

Rule-based artificial intelligence (AI) is often overlooked, possibly because people think it’s only useful in heavyweight enterprise software products. However, that’s not necessarily true. Simply put, a rule engine is just a piece of software that allows you to separate domain and business-specific constraint from the main application flow. We are part of the team developing and maintaining Drools—the world’s most popular open source rule engine and part of Red Hat—and, in this article, we will describe how we are changing Drools to make it part of the cloud and serverless revolution.

Why feedback, not metrics, is critical to DevOps

Most managers and agile coaches depend on metrics over feedback from their teams, users, and even customers. In fact, quite a few use feedback and metrics synonymously, where they present feedback from teams or customers as a bunch of numbers or a graphical representation of those numbers. This is not only unfortunate, but it can be misleading as it presents only part of the story and not the entire truth.

L2TP Tunnel Support Added To Systemd

The newest feature addition for systemd is supporting L2TP, the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, as part of its networking code. 

Systemd's networkd now has support merged for LT2TP tunnel support. L2TP can be used for extending a local area network (LAN) or also for VPN purposes when paired with the likes of IPsec for providing encryption. L2TP also has a variety of other use-cases with this bare protocol able to offer a layer two link over an L3 network.

libinput 1.12.901

The first RC for libinput 1.13 is now available.




Only two notable features in this release but patches are accumulating on
master, it's been 6 months since 1.12 and I've decided to postpone the two
major features (hi-res scrolling and totem support) to 1.14.




Touch arbitration has improved for tablets, especially on touch screens.
A timer set on pen proximity out means we don't get ghost touches anymore
when the hand lifts off slower than the pen itself. And location-based touch
arbitration means that parts of the screen can be interacted with even while
the pen is in proximity. libinput uses the tilt information where
available to disable touches in a rectangle around the pen where the hand is
likely to be but leaves the rest of the touchscreen available otherwise.
Where the UI supports it, this allows for bimanual interaction.




The test suite is installed on demand (meson -Dinstall-tests=true). Where
run from the installed location it will use the normal library lookups and
the quirks directory as defined by the prefix. This makes it useful for
distribution-level testing, i.e. run this on a test machine after updating
the package to make sure everything is as expected. Where available, you can
invoke it with the "libinput test-suite" command.




Other than that, a load of fixes, quirks added, cleanups, tidy-ups and so on
an so forth.




As usual, the git shortlog is below. Many thanks to all the contributors.

Libinput 1.13 Is Coming But High-Resolution Scrolling & Dell Totem Support Delayed

Libinput is fairly mature at this stage for offering a unified input handling library for use on both X.Org and Wayland Linux desktops. Libinput has largely reached a feature plateau with new releases no longer coming out so often and no glaring gaps in support. With it already being a half-year since the last major release, libinput 1.13 is now being buttoned up for release and available today is the first release candidate. 

Libinput 1.13 isn't that exciting of a release particularly since maintainer Peter Hutterer of Red Hat decided to delay the high resolution scrolling support. The Linux 5.0 kernel brought the much anticipated high resolution scrolling support for various Logitech/Microsoft mice to improve the scroll-wheel experience. Besides the kernel support, there is also the user-space support that needs updating. Peter decided to delay this functionality now until Libinput 1.14 to give it more time to bake.

New package in Fedora: python-xslxwriter

First Public Beta for SUSE Manager 4.0!

ClusterShell – A Nifty Tool To Run Commands On Cluster Nodes In Parallel

We had written two articles in the past to run commands on multiple remote server in parallel.

These are Parallel SSH (PSSH) or Distributed Shell (DSH).

Today also, we are going to discuss about the same kind of topic but it allows us to perform the same on cluster nodes as well.

You may think, i can write a small shell script to archive this instead of installing these third party packages.

Of course you are right and if you are going to run some commands in 10-15 remote systems then you don’t need to use this.

What's your favorite Linux terminal emulator?

Most terminal emulators are graphical programs that run on any Linux graphical desktop environment, like KDE, Cinnamon, LXDE, GNOME, and others, and can emulate several different types of hardware terminals.
There are many terminal emulators available for Linux. The first one, Xterm, was developed in 1984 by Thomas Dickey. Xterm is still maintained and packaged as part of many modern Linux distributions. Other popular terminal emulators include Konsole, Tilix, RXVT, GNOME terminal, Terminator, Xfce4-terminal, and LXTerminal; each has interesting features that appeal to specific groups of users. For example, some can open multiple tabs or terminals in a single window. Others have just the minimum set of features required and are typically used when small size and efficiency are called for.

I use three terminal emulators consistently, switching between them depending on the features I need—or sometimes just because they are there. Sometimes I just want a change.

14 Best Free Linux ERP Software

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) manages the information and functions of a business. It provides an integrated system by which the entire business can be managed. Not only does ERP improve the efficiency of an organisation it also serves to help the firm’s management make more informed decisions.

Businesses constantly face a moving target. With globalization, competition from emerging countries, and technological improvements, organisations need to change. Traditional communication tools such as the facsimile have long been replaced by email. The internet has meant that information needs to be available at all hours of the day, not merely the working day. A modern business system needs to adapt accordingly. ERP software helps firms to rise to this challenge.

ERP software is an integrated suite of applications which commonly cover areas such as distribution, accounting, inventory, invoicing, shipping, logistics and manufacturing. Such software is not only beneficial for large multinational organisations, as small and medium size enterprises can gain significant improvements in their efficiency by deploying ERP software.

All of the software featured in this article is released under a freely distributable license. Some of the software applications have proprietary versions too, which add custom features and additional functionality.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 14 high quality free Linux ERP software. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wishes to enhance their organisation’s efficiency.

Cockpit Project: Cockpit 189

Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 189.

There’s no such thing as a bad question…especially when choosing your partners for your SAP project

Growing up in the US education system, there was one thing drilled into me almost above all else: “There is no such thing as a bad question” and conversely, “the only bad question is the one not asked.” As with most things in life, asking questions and, specifically, asking the right questions can often be the difference in success or disappointment. Asking questions is such a fundamental step in every decision in our lives, whether it be related to our career or personal lives, that we almost take it for granted. Imagine trying to find a partner or a spouse without asking questions. In business, just in life, asking the right questions and, ultimately, finding the right partners can have long last lasting and not easily undone consequences both very, very good and well, not so good.

HOT Off the Presses, a RA for the Container Age!

As a technology marketer, I build and come across a lot of marketing collateral. Out of the full spectrum, the ones that get downloaded and shared the most are case studies and reference architectures. The reason is simple, before you sign on to a pretty big technology commitment, you want to feel some assurance that others have done this, and there is a guaranteed “win” at the end. So I was very excited when technologists on our Dell Alliance team published our 1st SUSE CaaS Platform Reference Implementation on Dell EMC infrastructure.

The Days After ServerlessDays ATX

I recently spent the day at Serverless Days in Austin, Texas, and it was interesting for a lot of reasons. The first was that it was in a movie theater. There was no running around to different conference halls — it was just sit in your big, comfy theater chair and enjoy the show. It was nice. There was no FOMO on the other talks — everything was very simple and singularly focused. Not to mention, this was not just any movie theater — this was none other than the Alamo Drafthouse Theater, which makes all other theaters relinquish their pride, as they could never compete with the comfort, the food, or the quirkiness that is the Alamo Drafthouse.

Making the LVFS and fwupd work in the enterprise

We’ve started working on some functionality in fwupd to install an optional “agent” that reports the versions of firmware installed to a central internal web service daily, so that the site admin can see what computers are not up-to-date with the latest firmware updates. I’d expect there the admin could also approve updates after in-house QA testing, and also rate-limit the flow of updates to hardware of the same type. The reference web app would visually look like some kind of dashboard, although I’d be happy to also plug this information into existing system management systems like Lenovo XClarity or even Red Hat Satellite. The deliverable here would be to provide the information and the mechanism that can be used to implement whatever policy the management console defines.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta cheat sheet for developers

Greater control of Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment with Ansible integration

The release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform director in version 14 brings some changes to how the overcloud nodes are configured during the deployment. The biggest feature is called "config-download" and it enables using Ansible to apply the overcloud software configuration.

This post is going to take a look at some of the OpenStack operator and deployer facing changes that can be expected with config-download, and show some tips and tricks on how to more easily interact and control the OpenStack deployment with director.

We’re Rolling Out The Green Carpet – Only 4 Weeks To Go!!

First Public SUSE Doc Day Ever – Join us at SUSECON!

Can’t wait to attend SUSECON ? Have you recently had a look at the Web site? Did you realize there is something new on the agenda ?

Yes, we are super excited ! Much in the spirit of the SUSECON theme “My Kind of Open”, we will host the very first public SUSE Doc Day as an in-person event on Friday April 5, from 9 am to 6 pm. It will take place in combination with SUSECON 2019 and the openSUSE Summit, to give interested attendees of both conferences the chance to join. And of course, the location for Doc Day is also the beautiful Renaissance Nashville Hotel .