CloudLinux announces the expansion of its affordable Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) services for Linux distributions, by providing its own updates and security patches for several years after expiration of the products’ end-of-life date. For example, support for CentOS 6 from Red Hat expired November 30 last year. CloudLinux offers ELS for CentOS 6, available since November, 2020 and extends to June 2024. Oracle Linux 6 (ends March 2021) Extended Lifecycle Support service will be available starting in February 2021 and will extend to February 2025. Extended Lifecycle Support service for Ubuntu 16.04 (ends April 2021) and Debian 9 (ends June 2022) is under development.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is widely deployed on-premise to run a variety of applications, but more conservative customers may need guidance in taking their first steps toward the cloud. One of the features in RHEL 8.3 is Image Builder’s Push to Cloud capability, which can help simplify and accelerate the transformation of workloads to the cloud. Building custom images is just one way to deploy RHEL for your enterprise. [...] RHEL provides a stable, manageable platform for applications for architects, operations, developers. Though some organizations may be hesitant to deploy an open source OS, RHEL is a supported solution, and there are ways to give it a try.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.6 helps enterprises expand their existing data protection capabilities to include Kubernetes applications, without requiring additional technology or infrastructure upgrades. Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.6 delivers snapshot functionality orchestrated by the Container Storage Interface (CSI) for customizable, point-in-time snapshots and clones of persistent data volumes. This makes it easier for IT administrators and application developers to more quickly return to a prior state.

The Elastic Deep Learning capabilities of IBM Watson® Machine Learning Accelerator are designed for large-scale distributed deep learning workloads. It transforms static monolithic training into a dynamic process that is resilient to failures and automatically scales GPU allocation while training. Data scientists, deep learning developers, and administrators can use Elastic Deep Learning capabilities to simplify production deployment, improve run time efficiency, and deliver on service level agreements (SLAs).

Keeping an eye on your system’s performance is one of the essential tasks that any Linux user should undertake from time to time. This helps in diagnosing any bottlenecks that are likely to impact performance. Webmin is a free and open-source front-end monitoring and administration tool that helps Linux users have a glance at various system metrics and perform administration tasks without the need of running commands on the terminal.

The web team here at Canonical run two-week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.

We’re now well into 2021, and as we plan ahead for our roadmap and activities around Kubernetes for the year, it helps to look back and reflect on everything that took place for Canonical in the K8s space within the year that passed. Kubernetes has always been a crucial part of Canonical’s vision and contribution to the IT world. All leading cloud providers, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco and IBM run cloud Kubernetes services on Ubuntu, because we focus on the latest container capabilities in modern kernels. This focus is why Ubuntu is also the top choice for on-premises enterprise Kubernetes, with MicroK8s, kubeadm and Charmed Kubernetes all supported by Canonical.

On Linux, no additional driver is needed. When attached to a USB port the Magewell device shows up under /dev/video* on Linux. There’s a few software options available to capture the stream including VLC and OBS, but I prefer to use a little script. I call it make_screencast and it lives in my /home/alan/bin folder, on the machine capturing the video. The script is below.

The very first release of EasyOS Dunfell-series for the Raspberry Pi4 was version 2.6, released on January 19. See announcement: https://bkhome.org/news/202101/easyos-dunfell-26-released-for-the-raspberry-pi4.html Since then, some package version bumps: SeaMonkey is now version 2.53.6 and includes the IRC chat module, ffmpeg is 4.3.1. LibreOffice is still a somewhat old version, 7.0.1.2, but I recompiled it with PDF-import support, which seemed like a good thing to have. Version 2.6.1 also has Samba, which had been left out of 2.6. Also added package 'smbnetfs'. Oh yes, also added package 'tigervnc', that Forum member rufwoof reported as very fast. Added package 'libvdpau-va-gl' though don't really know why. There were some performance issues with 2.6, that have mostly been fixed. SeaMonkey was often temporarily freezing, which seems to have been fixed by changing to 'kyber' IO scheduling. Plugging in a USB-stick, the kernel now consistently recognizes it first go -- due to version bump of the kernel from 5.10.4 to 5.10.9 and update of the device-tree.

This past holiday season, I decided to add some extra joy to our house by setting up a DIY light display. I used a Raspberry Pi, a programmable light string, and Python. [...] Each light can be individually programmed using an RGB set of integers or hex equivalents. These lights can be packaged together into matrices, strings, and other form factors, and they can be programmatically accessed using a data structure that makes sense for the form factor. The light strings I use are addressed using a standard Python list. Adafruit has a great tutorial on wiring and controlling your lights. [...] The neopixel_controller Flask application, in the neopix_controller directory of the github repository (see below), offers a front-end browser graphical user interface (GUI) to control the lights. My raspberry pi connects to my wifi, and is accessible at raspberrypi.local. To access the GUI in a browser, go to http://raspberrypi.local:5000. Alternatively, you can use ping to find the IP address of raspberrypi.local, and use it as the hostname, which is useful if you have multiple raspberry pi devices connected to your wifi.

OnLogic mini PCs can be configured to meet the specific requirements, and run a range of Windows or Linux operating systems. The company also offers custom branding, software imaging, custom fulfilment services, and lifecycle management support.

OnLogic is adding to its line of Helix and rugged, higher-end Karbon embedded PCs with four new Helix 300 and Karbon 400 models that run Linux or Windows on Intel’s Elkhart Lake. OnLogic has announced four fanless embedded systems built around Intel’s 10nm-fabricated, MCU-equipped Elkhart Lake Atom, Celeron, and Pentium processors. The smaller Helix 310 (HX310) and Helix 330 (HX330) and more expandable and rugged Karbon 410 (K410) and Karbon 430 (K430) all run Linux or Windows and will ship in the second quarter.

It’s been a while since the last release of the Arduino Create Agent. We tried to give some love to this awesome tool, in order to enhance the experience with the Create ecosystem.

What better way to announce the availability of the Portenta Vision Shield LoRa than at The Things Conference 2021 – a global showcase for all the top-notch LoRaWAN products and services. The LoRa® module option of the Portenta Vision Shield is specifically designed for edge ML applications, enabling low-power, long distance communication over LoRa® wireless protocol and LoRaWAN networks. It’s the perfect addition to the powerful Arduino Portenta H7 which makes possible machine learning on-device, thereby greatly reducing the communication bandwidth requirement in an IoT application.

Last week saw dramatic and rapid developments around Elastic and their open-source product Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch is a great product that became widely adopted in the last few years - I’ve seen and used it since probably 2013 or 2014. I’m not qualified as a customer or user of Elastic and AWS to make a statement on these developments - just don’t have enough open-source exposure on a regular basis yet. But I want to capture these announcements because it feels like a major changefor all parties involved. If you’re an Elastic customer or Elasticsearch user - please take the time to read through the full posts listed below.

Just last week Apache Superset was promoted to being a top-level project by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache Superset is around big data visualizations and business intelligence solutions through data exploration while now Apache ECharts has joined it as the latest top-level project. Apache ECharts was promoted on Tuesday to being a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation umbrella. ECharts is a charting and data visualization solution that started out in 2013 at Baidu. It's been considered an Apache incubator project for the past three years while now this charting and visualization library is considered a top-level project and seeing usage by the likes of GitLab, Intel, Amazon, Tencent, and many other organizations.

The FSFE will celebrate its birthday as we turn 20 in 2021. 20 years of defending user's rights and spreading software freedom. We want to use that momentum to speak, show and reflect on our activities in the past 20 years. And we want to give momentum to our community because it is on their shoulders that we have built our movement and our networks, which form a well-known pan-European Free Software expert interest representation called Free Software Foundation Europe. More information on this in the next newsletter. As we turn 20, we will continue to have to deal with the current global situation, for instance by running our events online this year. Our running campaigns will be updated and we will launch a brand-new campaign "Upcycling Android" towards the second half of the year – stay tuned.

This year’s EC Open Source Policy Summit will be virtual and will start with two keynotes: the European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton and the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat Chris Wright. Speakers include EU policy-makers and representatives of the industry, as well as actors coming from other layers of the ICT community, such as consumer associations and academia, who will address current issues in digital policy. Prof. Dr. Knut Blind will present for the first time the policy recommendations concluding the European Commission’s study on the impact of Open Source.

While the Community Council continues its solicitation of candidates for a Local Communities Research Committee it seems best to try to write up some reflections as a former member of the Local Communities Council. I know the Community Council wants the committee to find its way getting started in its research. I have some nagging concerns that have been unresolved for a while. [...] As of last census estimate Ohio is the seventh most populous of the fifty states. That led to interesting times as the point of contact and leader for Ohio’s local community group. During my tenure we had people involved. We were far-flung across the thirty-fourth largest state by area. Although we tried to gather together at least once a year at the Ohio Linux Fest event (a separate matter that we did not organize) such gatherings were a logistical nightmare to arrange. I remember handling the organization of an UbuCon event and how flexibility was key. With the mass gathering ban from the Ohio Department of Health still in full force and effect we won’t be gathering together in-person as a community any time soon. The group’s e-mail list last had a message in 2018 and the IRC channel has activity infrequently. Technology and paradigms for “being alone together” that originated during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic simply weren’t viable during my tenure trying to be leader.

Tor Browser 10.5a8 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory.

Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.