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Is there anything better than a warmly flickering Linux terminal?

Sure there is: two warmly flickering Linux terminals. In fact, the more, the better.

FreeBSD is a great operating system, but, by design, it does not come with a desktop environment. Without installing additional software from FreeBSD's ports and packages collection, FreeBSD is a command-line only experience. The screenshot below shows what logging into FreeBSD 12.1 looks like when every one of the "optional system components" is selected during installation.

Companies create Open Source Program Offices (OSPO) to manage their relationship with the open source ecosystems they depend on. By understanding the company's open source ecosystem, an OSPO is able to maximize the company's return on investment and reduce the risks of consuming, contributing to, and releasing open source software. Additionally, since the company depends on its open source ecosystem, ensuring its health and sustainability shall ensure the company's health, sustainable growth, and evolution.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

Kubernetes is the dominant technology for infrastructure today, and that means sysadmins need to be familiar with administering it. I have been managing Kubernetes clusters every day for years now, and I picked up a few tricks that I highly recommend for others looking to simplify their admin experience.

In the first two articles in this series, I explored the Linux systemd startup sequence. In the first article, I looked at systemd's functions and architecture and the controversy around its role as a replacement for the old SystemV init program and startup scripts. And in the second article, I examined two important systemd tools, systemctl and journalctl, and explained how to switch from one target to another and to change the default target.

We've mentioned it before in Ansible around the web, but there are big changes afoot with Ansible itself and the move to collections. To keep the developer community updated with the rate of progress, our own Greg DeKoenigsberg has started a newsletter, The Bullhorn. You should check it out!

Wunderlist is an app for lists, loved by many, but gone for good as of May 6, 2020. The website encourages existing users to download and use Microsoft To Do in its place. That's tempting because it makes it easy to import all of those lists you've made over the years. Then again, maybe it's a chance to Marie Kondo those lists and pare things down. Do you really need 30 lists? (Apparently, I've decided that I do, so I won't judge.)

Usually, my articles about Kubernetes administration are full of kubectl commands for administration for your clusters. Recently, however, someone pointed me to the k9s project for a fast way to review and resolve day-to-day issues in Kubernetes. It's been a huge improvement to my workflow and I'll show you how to get started in this tutorial. 

PHP Codeigniter is an open source framework providing business applications with the easy-to-use PHP programming language and powerful tools for coding. It also provides business intelligence, server monitoring, development, and application integration facilities. It's a relatively quiet project that you don't hear much about, but it's got a lot going for it that many developers new to it find surprising and refreshing.

PHP Codeignitor is an open source integrated development environment (IDE) providing business applications with the easy-to-use PHP programming language and powerful tools for coding. It also provides business intelligence, server monitoring, development, and application integration facilities. It's a relatively quiet project that you don't hear much about, but it's got a lot going for it that many developers new to it find surprising and refreshing.

If you are into open source development, you have probably worked with Git to manage source code. You might have come across projects with numerous dependencies and/or sub-projects. How do you manage them?

For an open source organization, it can be tricky to achieve single-source documentation and dependency management for the community and the product. The documentation and project often end up fragmented and redundant, which makes them difficult to maintain.

In 2010, the My Little Pony franchise was rebooted with the animated show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The combination of accessibility to children with the sophisticated themes the show tackled garnered a following that cut across ages. I was swept up in the wave and discovered there is a lot to learn about DevOps from the show.

Video games are a big business. That's great for the industry's longevity—not to mention for all the people working in programming and graphics. But it can take a lot of work, time, and money to keep up with all the latest gaming crazes. If you feel like playing a few quick rounds of a video game without investing in a new console or game franchise, then you'll be happy to know that there are plenty of open source combat games you can download, play, share, and even modify (if you're inclined to programming) for free.

Way back in 2012, Harvard Business Review published an article that proclaimed "data scientist" to be the sexiest job of the 21st century. Interest in data science has exploded since then. Many great open source projects, such as Python and the R language for statistical computing, have facilitated the rapid developments in how we analyze data.

In Learning to love systemd, the first article in this series, I looked at systemd's functions and architecture and the controversy around its role as a replacement for the old SystemV init program and startup scripts. In this second article, I'll start exploring the files and tools that manage the Linux startup sequence. I'll explain the systemd startup sequence, how to change the default startup target (runlevel in SystemV terms), and how to manually switch to a different target without going through a reboot.

Humans transfer information in many different ways. On the internet, the primary format is text, which is how you're reading this article. However, there is other data on the internet, such as images and sound files and so on. It might seem easy to post an image online or attach a document to an email, until you realize that HTTP/1.1 and SMTP are text-based protocols. Data transferred over such protocols must be represented as a subset of ASCII text (specifically, characters 33 to 126).

Apache Cassandra is a database. But it's not just any database; it's a replicating database designed and tuned for scalability, high availability, low-latency, and performance. Cassandra can help your data survive regional outages, hardware failure, and what many admins would consider excessive amounts of data.

Schools are closed in many countries around the world to slow the spread of COVID-19. This has suddenly thrown many parents and teachers into homeschooling. Fortunately, there are plenty of educational resources on the internet to use or adapt, although their licenses vary. You can try searching for Creative Commons Open Educational Resources, but if you want to create your own materials, there are many options for that to.

As tech conference organizers ramp up for the fall season, you may be seeing calls for papers (CFP) landing in your email box or social media feeds. We at All Things Open (ATO) have seen a lot of presentation proposals over the years, and we've learned a few things about what makes them successful.