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I've been on a journey from Mac to Linux since joining the staff at Opensource.com almost two years ago. In a huge step for me, I finally made the call to have my personal laptop also run Linux. Due to the coverage of System76 in our community, I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'm coming from a MacBook Pro as my go-to device, so I went with a near-standard build of the Lemur Pro for a comparable system. A reasonably priced upgrade to more RAM and a speedy NVMe hard drive later, my order was on its way.

It's been a long time since I properly learned a new language—computer or human. Maybe 25 years. That language was Java, and although I've had to write little bits of C (very, very little) and JavaScript in the meantime, the only two languages I've written much actual code in have been Perl and Java.

Cloud-init is a standard—it would not be a stretch to say it is the standard—that cloud providers use to provide initialization and configuration data to cloud instances. It is used most often on the first boot of a new instance to automate network setup, account creation, and SSH (secure shell) key installation—anything required to bring a new system online so that it is accessible by the user.

The Free Software Foundation's (FSF) annual conference LibrePlanet went fully virtual in 2020 due to ongoing issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In our last week of preparations before the live event, increasingly disturbing news related to the virus made us realize we could not responsibly hold our usual conference on software freedom in person while protecting the safety of our participants and their communities.

In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we share accessibility updates from Facebook and IBM, Microsoft's admission that it was wrong about open source, and more headlines you need to know.

A shared filesystem is a great way to add versatility and functionality to a homelab. Having a centralized filesystem shared to the clients in the lab makes organizing data, doing backups, and sharing data considerably easier. This is especially useful for web applications load-balanced across multiple servers and for persistent volumes used by Kubernetes, as it allows pods to be spun up with persistent data on any number of nodes.

As a backend developer at the Railwaymen, a software house in Kraków, Poland, some of my tasks rely on models that manipulate and customize data retrieved from a database. When I wanted to improve my skills in frontend frameworks, I chose Vue, and I thought it would be good to have a similar way to model data in a store.

There are plenty of great books to help you learn Python, but who actually reads these A to Z? (Spoiler: not me).

Many people find instructional books useful, but I do not typically learn by reading a book front to back. I learn by doing a project, struggling, figuring some things out, and then reading another book. So, throw away your book (for now), and let's learn some Python.

Curl is commonly considered a non-interactive web browser. That means it's able to pull information from the internet and display it in your terminal or save it to a file. This is literally what web browsers, such as Firefox or Chromium, do except they render the information by default, while curl downloads and displays raw information. In reality, the curl command does much more and has the ability to transfer data to or from a server using one of many supported protocols, including HTTP, FTP, SFTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SMB, SMTP, and many more.

A few months ago, we got a requirement to provide a stable and reliable Domain Name System (DNS) server for a new project. The project dealt with auto-deployment using containers and where each new environment would generate a unique, random URL. After a lot of research on possible solutions, we decided to give PowerDNS (PDNS) a try.

I see this question popping up quite often in different conversations. Recently, we had a good discussion about it within my team. The main question was about how to communicate openly with the community, as well as have the space to build a team and work as a team. This can be challenging; for example, when a company or a sponsor pays a part of the contributors to work full time on a project.

In this article, I will explain why agile works with the open source development model.

Python has earned a reputation as a wonderful beginner programming language. But where does one begin?

One of my favorite ways to get people interested in programming is by writing games.

PursuedPyBear (ppb) is a game programming library optimized for teaching, and I recently used it to teach my children more about my favorite programming language.

Recently, I wrote an article explaining how we can implement Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) using the Quagga routing suite. There are multiple software suites that can be used instead of Quagga to implement different routing protocols. One such option is free range routing (FRR).

One of the cheering things about the pandemic crisis in which we find ourselves is the vast upswell of volunteering that we are seeing across the world. We are seeing this equally across the IT sector, and one of the areas where work is being done is in apps to help track COVID-19. Specifically, there is an interest in COVID-19 contact-tracing or -tracking apps for our mobile0 phones.

One of the great strengths of the Linux desktop is the choice it affords its users. If you don't like your application menu in the lower left of your screen, you can move it. If you don't like the way your file manager organizes your documents, you can use a different one. Admittedly, however, that can be confusing for new users who aren't used to having a say in how they use their computers. If you're looking at installing Linux, one of the choices you're going to have to make is which desktop you want to use, and the best way to do that is to try a few different ones until you find the on

In my previous article, I introduced Skipper, an open source HTTP router and reverse proxy for service composition. This article focuses on how Skipper increases network visibility and describes its advantages for both developers of scalable applications and operators of the infrastructure they run on.

We all know that modern business has become a rapid-response environment. Never before have we had the number of IT resources at the tips of our fingers as we have today, and most of them are enabled by the cloud. When we refer to "the cloud", we may be talking about several computing concepts, but typically the cloud consists of a set of remotely-hosted resources and services, from web pages to mobile apps or even traditional desktop applications.

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are usually associated with DevOps, DevSecOps, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), GitOps, and more. It's not enough to just say you're doing CI and CD; there are certain best practices that, if used well and consistently, will make your CI/CD pipelines more successful.

WebAssembly (also known as Wasm) is taking the world by storm. It started off as technology for browsers, "doing JavaScript right," but has developed into so much more than that. It provides a platform-independent runtime with binaries that can be compiled from many different languages and run (without any further changes or recompilation) on any platform with runtime support.

Once you have WordPress installed, you may be eager to see how you can use it in your school or classroom. As more schools switch to online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, WordPress is a go-to content management system.