Open-source News

Quick Tips: Listening to Your Linux-based Splunk Installation Ports  Security Boulevard

Valve this evening published SteamOS 3.2 as the newest version of their Arch Linux based operating system for the Steam Deck and currently running unofficially by passionate Linux gamers on other hardware too...

SteamOS 3.2 Released With More Improvements For The Steam Deck  Phoronix

This article originally appeared on the Open Mainframe Project’s blog. The author, Maemalynn Meanor, is a senior public relations and marketing manager at The Linux Foundation. 

In honor of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) Heritage Month, I wanted to share something my mother passed on to me.

I’ve worked in communications and public relations for the technology industry for almost 20 years. I’ve had to learn new industries, competitors, the intricacies of different technologies and how to interpret engineering language.

In all of these roles – no matter where I was – one thing remained the same. I was often the only Asian woman in the room. Without a roadmap or someone to look up to as an example of what to do I often leaned on my mom because standing in a room full of men who made me doubt myself was scary and intimidating. Always.

Whether it was in person or via webex or phone, nothing is worse than that moment when you say something and all the men in the room pause. Sometimes, they’ve agreed with my recommendations. Sometimes, they shot it down. One time, someone mansplained my idea back to me and then everyone in the room agreed that “that” idea was better than mine.

My mom always had the same advice. Trust yourself. Let your heart work with your mind – the strength of it encompasses not just things I learned in school but things my parents taught me about my family and my Thai heritage and culture.

She said this often. But there were times when I ignored her advice. I didn’t trust myself.

I remember one particular time more than a decade ago that I decided to distance myself from my heritage. I didn’t want to be the Asian woman in the room. I even tried to not be the woman in the room. I tried to be part of the “boy’s club.” I laughed at the inappropriate jokes. I was quiet when they complained about women leaders and used derogatory language.

This made me feel terrible about myself, my work and my life in general. I was going through the motions and no longer enjoyed my work and nor did I like my surroundings. But I kept going. It was my job after all.

A few months later, I was asked to go back to my college and meet with the Asian Students in Alliance (ASIA) club, which I was the former Vice President of, about my career in public relations and communications.

I struggled with this – am I really going to walk into a room full of bright Asian students and tell them that their culture doesn’t belong in the workplace? Am I okay with telling them to not highlight their differences and to not be proud of their culture? Am I really going to tell a room full of beautiful people from different Asian backgrounds – to just try to “blend in?”

No. My mom raised me better than that.

So I took her words and repeated them over and over again. Trust yourself. Believe in you. Let your heart and mind lead you where you need to be because they have the support of all your ancestors, your heritage and your traditions.

That night, I told my mom she’s right. I believe her response was “I know. I’m right about everything. Always. Don’t forget that.”

I am still sometimes the only Asian woman in the room but I’m happy to say that it’s not as often as it used to be. Now, there are more diverse backgrounds, more women, more voices – more of everything. It’s becoming easier to be who you are and love what you represent inside the workplace. This sense of belonging is something I don’t take for granted and will always be thankful for.

The post Lesson Learned: Always Listen to Mom appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Linux Signal Generation and Handling Explained  MUO - MakeUseOf

CentOS Linux lives on in the new AlmaLinux 9  ZDNet

I confess I am a lifelong learner – addicted to learning about new things and gaining new skills. So, when I started at The Linux Foundation, I was excited to see the depth and breadth of the training we offer (and employees have access to the catalog, so you should work here). It is truly impressive. And it makes sense. After all, the LF mission is to create the greatest shared technology investment in history by enabling open source collaboration across companies, developers, and users. Training is a necessary part of that. 

For starters, we practice what we preach. Every employee – and I mean every employee, from admin to engineering – is required to take 9 different LF training courses to get an in-depth overview of open source methodologies:

• Open Source 101
• Open Source Introduction
• A Beginner’s Guide to Open Source
• Open Source Licensing Basics for Software Developers
• Open Source Business Strategy
• Effective Open Source Program Management
• Open Source Development Practices
• Open Source Compliance Programs
• Collaborating Effectively with Open Source Projects

Each of these courses is also offered to the public through the LF Training and Certification portal. 

LF Training and Certification Portal

Speaking of the portal, this is your one-stop-shop for all of our training and certification resources. It hosts our training programs created by well-respected developers that cover the most important open source projects and includes opportunities for certification exams. It is all vendor-neutral, providing foundational knowledge and skills in the technologies running the modern world. 

You can access 30+ e-learning courses, 20+ instructor-led classes, 12+ certification exams, and 40+ free massive open online courses (MOOCs) in partnership with edX. (I just signed up for a blockchain one with 96,000 of my closest friends).

If there is a specific field of study you want to focus on, there are learning paths for: 

• Application Development
• Blockchain
• Cloud and Containers
• Cybersecurity
• DevOps and Site Reliability
• Embedded Development
• Linux Kernel Development
• Networking
• System Administration
• Systems Engineering and Architecture

In short there is something for you, and you can join the 2 million+ students who have enrolled and 50,000+ professionals who already earned certifications.

Developing Secure Software Course

I do want to highlight a course that came up during the Open Source Software Security Summit II a couple of weeks ago. The importance of teaching secure software development principles was one of the recommendations to improve the resiliency of open source software. Good news – the LF offers the “Developing Secure Software” (LFD121) course. It focuses on the fundamentals of developing secure software. Both the course and certificate of completion are free. It is entirely online, takes about 14-18 hours to complete, and you can go at your own pace. Those who complete the course and pass the final exam will earn a certificate of completion valid for two years. 

It is geared towards software developers, DevOps professionals, software engineers, web application developers, and others interested in learning how to develop secure software. It focuses on practical steps that can be taken, even with limited resources, to improve information security. 

Why is it needed? Many software developers have never been told how to effectively counter the ever-increasing barrage of cyberattacks. This course explains the fundamentals of developing secure software. A basic security principle – build it more secure in the beginning and you will spend less time fending off attacks later. From the course description: 

This course starts by discussing the basics of cybersecurity, such as what risk management really means. It discusses how to consider security as part of the requirements of a system, and what potential security requirements you might consider. This first part of the course then focuses on how to design software to be secure, including various secure design principles that will help you avoid bad designs and embrace good ones. It also considers how to secure your software supply chain, that is, how to more securely select and acquire reused software (including open source software) to enhance security. The second part of this course focuses on key implementation issues: input validation (such as why allowlists should be used and not denylists), processing data securely, calling out to other programs, sending output, and error handling. It focuses on practical steps that you (as a developer) can take to counter the most common kinds of attacks. The third part of the course discusses how to verify software for security. In particular, it discusses the various static and dynamic analysis approaches, as well as how to apply them (e.g., in a continuous integration pipeline). It also discusses more specialized topics, such as the basics of how to develop a threat model and how to apply various cryptographic capabilities.

You can learn more about the course and enroll for free here. 

Future Announcements 

We are always working to improve and expand what we offer. There are a lot of exciting announcements coming up next month during the Open Source Summit North America, including insights from our 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report, the winners of the 500 LiFT Scholarships for 2022, some new training courses, and more. Even if you aren’t able to attend, keep an eye out for our announcements. Some exciting stuff, but I have said too much already. Sign up for the newsletter so you are the first to know when new courses are offered, and – arguably more importantly – get access to promotions. I mean – new skills and saving money, how can you say no. 

I hope you have an opportunity to take some of our courses and become certified. You will be a better person for it.

The post Your Path to More Knowledge and Opportunities appeared first on Linux Foundation.

1. How to Access Files on Windows Subsystem for Linux  Virtualization Review
2. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 splashes down on Win Server 2022  The Register
3. Windows Server 2022 now supports WSL2 Linux distributions  XDA Developers
4. Microsoft adds support for WSL2 distros on Windows Server 2022  BleepingComputer
5. View Full Coverage on Google News

How to Access Files on Windows Subsystem for Linux  Virtualization Review

Earlier this week AWS announced general availability on their new Arm Neoverse-V1 based processors, Graviton3. Right after that I posted some initial Graviton3 benchmarks against prior-generation Graviton2 for showing the very sizable generational improvement with Amazon's new in-house Arm server processors. Since then I have been carrying out a more robust set of around 100 benchmarks across the original Graviton instance, Graviton2, Graviton3, and then up again Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC competing instances. Here is that much larger collection of Graviton3 performance benchmarks carried out on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

LINUX Systems Administrator at Datafin Recruitment  IT-Online

The Renesas (originally Hitachi Semiconductor) H8/300 "h8300" CPU architecture support is set to be removed again once more from the Linux kernel. It was previously retired years ago before being restored only to once again fail to be maintained...

How to Let Linux Scripts Detect They’re Running in Virtual Machines  How-To Geek

Zowe LTS V2 increases product stability, security and interoperability and ensures longevity compatibility with the Conformance and Conformant Support Provider Programs

SAN FRANCISCO, May 26, 2022 – The Open Mainframe Project announced today that Zowe, an open source software framework for the mainframe that strengthens integration with modern enterprise applications, marks a major technical milestone with the Long Term Support (LTS) V2 release. The second version, which comes 2 years after the first LTS release, will offer vendors and customers product stability, security, interoperability as well as easy installation and upgraded features.

“As organizations expand their hybrid cloud workloads, the Zowe framework evolves to address critical architectural requirements,” said Rose Sakach, Chair of the Zowe Technical Advisory Committee and Product Manager at Broadcom. “Since its launch in 2018, Zowe has become a foundational enabler to businesses’ hybrid IT strategy. The LTS V2 Release will continue to strengthen this value with developer-friendly features and benefits.”

Benefits of the LTS V2 include:

• Stability: Organizations can confidently adopt the technology for enterprise use and upgrade when appropriate for their environment, minimizing the risk of disruption.
• Interoperability: Zowe consumers can be assured LTS-conformant extensions have adapted to and support LTS features.
• Longevity: Zowe is designed for years of use and plans are in place for continued updates and support.

Open Mainframe Project launched Zowe, the first-ever open source project based on z/OS, in 2018 to serve as an integration platform for the next generation of administration, management and development tools on z/OS mainframes.  The Zowe framework uses the latest web technologies among products and solutions from multiple vendors. Zowe enables developers to use familiar, industry-standard, open source tools to access mainframe resources and services.

Feedback and interest in Zowe have been noteworthy. Since January 2022, Zowe has more than:

• 130,000 downloads
• 87,000 page views and 16,000 visitors of zowe.org
• 520 contributors

Key features of Zowe LTS V2 include:

• More security features built in to ensure data and user credentials are always encrypted and safe.
• A new daemon mode delivering performance improvements for the command line interface.
• The time to value to configure Zowe is faster and easier.
• There is more engagement and collaboration between team members using Zowe for modern DevOps at scale.
• New APIs created by the community

For more features, click here.

“Zowe continues to innovate as a direct result of the contributions, leadership and passion of the global open source community,” said John Mertic, Director of Program Management for the Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project. “Zowe shows no sign of slowing momentum and the LTS V2 release demonstrates our commitment to interoperability, stability and security.”

Other Zowe Updates

• Zowe Chat, a new incubator project that extends z/OS use by focusing on working with mainframes from chat clients such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Mattermost (with extensibility for other solutions). A set of commonly used scenarios will be provided, and the framework will be extensible so sites can add new scenarios. Similar to other Zowe core packages, the chat framework will be extensible by vendor tools, bringing an integrated user experience for more elaborate cross-vendor scenarios. Read more about it here.

• Zowe IntelliJ Plugin , a new incubator project that provides access to the mainframe from IDEs like IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm and more. Launched by IBA Group, the IntelliJ IDEA plug-in leverages z/OSMF to interact with mainframe data sets and USS files, which enables those familiar with these IDEs to comfortably work with the mainframe just like other projects. This integration will improve the efficiency and overall happiness of IntelliJ enthusiasts now working on the mainframe. Learn more in this blog.

• Zowe was recognized as the Best DevOps for Mainframe Award in this year’s DevOps Dozen competition. It was selected over a number of commercial vendor offerings, reflecting a widespread appreciation for the value of an open source solution for the mainframe. Learn more.

The Zowe Conformance Program is Updated with LTS V2 Guidelines

Aimed to build a vendor-neutral ecosystem around Zowe, Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe Conformance Program launched in 2020.  The program has helped Open Mainframe Project members such as ASG Technologies, BMC, Broadcom, IBM, Micro Focus, Phoenix Software International, and Rocket Software incorporate Zowe with new and existing products that enable integration of mainframe applications and data across the enterprise.

To date, 75 products have implemented extensions based on the Zowe framework and earned these members conformance badges

Additional Resources:

• Zowe GitHub Repository
• Zowe Convenience Build Download
• Getting Started documentation site 
• Open Mainframe Project’s I am a Mainframer Podcast

About the Open Mainframe Project

The Open Mainframe Project is intended to serve as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment. With a vision of Open Source on the Mainframe as the standard for enterprise class systems and applications, the project’s mission is to Build community and adoption of Open Source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating value of the mainframe on technical and business levels, and strengthening collaboration points and resources for the community to thrive. Learn more about the project at https://www.openmainframeproject.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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The post Open Mainframe Project Announces Major Technical Milestone with Zowe’s Longer Term Support V2 Release appeared first on Linux Foundation.

AlmaLinux 9 Officially Released, Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9  9to5Linux

Last year Ampere Computing announced they were designing their own in-house AArch64 server/cloud processor cores to succeed their current Ampere Altra / Ampere Altra Max processors leveraging Arm Neoverse N1 cores. The company announced today that their first in-house cloud native processor core designs will be marketed under the AmpereOne branding...

AlmaLinux has been one of the distributions born out of CentOS Linux (non-Stream) going end-of-life and has made a name for itself already in the industry with companies like AMD backing it for those looking at a no-cost/community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Just one week after RHEL 9.0 went GA, AlmaLinux 9.0 is being officially released today...

Developers tell users not to launch this top Linux distro over security fears  TechRadar

Developers tell users not to launch this top Linux distro over security fears  TechRadar

It was just last month that AMD announced plans to acquire Pensando and today that $1.9 billion deal has been completed...