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The Haiku open-source operating system project building off the success of BeOS continues steadily improving its hardware support and making other improvements...

BeOS-Inspired Haiku Makes Progress On Driver Porting, Plans For Usable RISC-V Images  Phoronix

A Linux Distribution For DOOM  Hackaday

Good news for GNOME fans as Adaptive Sync displays come to Mutter  The Register

Firefox 101.0.1 fixes issues in Mac, Windows and Linux versions  Ghacks

Symbiote: A New, Nearly-Impossible-to-Detect Linux Threat  BlackBerry

Edit PDFs on Linux with these open source tools Michael Korotaev Thu, 06/09/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

Open source reading and editing tools for PDFs are often more secure and reliable alternatives to the applications residing in the first pages of "PDF editor" search results. There, you're likely to see proprietary applications with hidden limitations and tariffs, lacking sufficient information about data protection policies and hosting. You can have better.

Here are five applications that can be installed on your Linux system (and others) or hosted on a server. Each is free and open source, with all the necessary features for creating, editing, and annotating PDF files.

LibreOffice

With the LibreOffice suite, your choice of application depends on the initial task. While LibreOffice Writer, a word processor, lets you create PDF files with export from text formats like ODF and others, Draw is better for working with existing PDF files.

Draw is meant for creating and editing graphic documents, such as brochures, magazines, and posters. The toolset is therefore mainly focused on visual objects and layouts. For PDF editing, however, LibreOffice Draw offers tools for modifying and adding content in PDFs when the file has editing attributes. You can still add new text fields on the existing content layers and annotate or finish the documents if it doesn't.

Draw and Writer are both bundled in a LibreOffice desktop suite available for installation on Linux systems, macOS, and Windows.

ONLYOFFICE Docs

ONLYOFFICE has been improving work with PDFs for a while and introduced a brand new reader for PDFs and eBooks in version 7.1 of ONLYOFFICE Docs.

The document editor allows creating PDF files from scratch using DOCX as a base for files that can then be converted to PDF or PDF/A. With built-in form-creation functionality, ONLYOFFICE Docs also makes it possible to build fillable document templates and export them as editable PDFs with fillable fields for different types of content: text, images, dates, and more.

In addition to recognizing text within PDFs to copy and extract it, ONLYOFFICE Docs can convert PDFs to DOCX, which allows you to continue using the documents in fully editable text formats. ONLYOFFICE also lets you secure the files with passwords, add watermarks, and use digital signatures available in the desktop version.

ONLYOFFICE Docs can be used as a web suite (on-premises or in the cloud) integrated into a document management system (DMS) or as a standalone desktop application. You can install the latter as a DEB or RPM file, AppImage, Flatpack, and several other formats for Linux.

More Linux resources Linux commands cheat sheet Advanced Linux commands cheat sheet Free online course: RHEL technical overview Linux networking cheat sheet SELinux cheat sheet Linux common commands cheat sheet What are Linux containers? Our latest Linux articles PDF Arranger

PDF Arranger is a front-end application for the PikePDF library. It doesn't edit the content of a PDF the way LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE do, but it's great for re-ordering pages, splitting a PDF into smaller documents, merging several PDFs into one, rotating or cropping pages, and so on. Its interface is intuitive and easy to use.

PDF Arranger is available for Linux and Windows.

Okular

Okular is a free open source viewer for documents developed by the KDE community. The app features very mature functionality and allows viewing PDFs, eBooks, images, and comics.

Okular has full or partial support for most popular PDF features and use cases, such as adding annotations and inline notes or inserting text boxes, shapes, and stamps. You can also add a digitally encrypted signature to your document so your readers can be sure of the document's source.

In addition to adding texts and images in PDFs, it's also possible to retrieve them from the document to copy and paste somewhere else. The Area Selection tool in Okular can identify the components within a selected area so you can extract them from the PDF independently of one another.

You can install Okular using your distribution's package manager or as a Flatpak.

Xournal++

Xournal++ is a handwriting journal software with annotation tools for PDF files.

Created to be notetaking software with enhanced handwriting features, it may not be the best option for working with text-based content and professional layouts. However, its ability to render graphics and support for stylus input in writing and drawing make it stand out as a niche productivity tool.

PDF annotation and sketching are made comfortable with layer management tools, customizable pen point settings, and support for stylus mappings. Xournal++ also has a text tool for adding text boxes and the ability to insert images.

Xournal++ has installation options for Linux systems (Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, SUSE), macOS, and Windows (10 and above).

Summary

If you're looking for a free and safe alternative to proprietary PDF viewing and editing software, it is not hard to find an open source option, whether for desktop or online use. Just keep in mind that the currently available solutions have their own advantages for different use cases, and there's no single tool that is equally great at all possible tasks.

These five solutions stand out for their functionality or usefulness for niche PDF tasks. For enterprise use and collaboration, I suggest ONLYOFFICE or LibreOffice Draw. PDF Arranger is a simple, lightweight tool for working with pages when you don't need to alter text. Okular offers great viewer features for multiple file types, and Xournal++ is the best choice if you want to sketch and take notes in your PDFs.

Open source alternatives to Adobe Acrobat have all the necessary features for creating, editing, and annotating PDFs.

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Opensource.com

Linux Alternatives What to read next Open source alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for PDFs This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

A guide to container orchestration with Kubernetes Seth Kenlon Thu, 06/09/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

The term orchestration is relatively new to the IT industry, and it still has nuance that eludes or confuses people who don't spend all day orchestrating. When I describe orchestration to someone, it usually sounds like I'm just describing automation. That's not quite right. In fact, I wrote a whole article differentiating automation and orchestration.

An easy way to think about it is that orchestration is just a form of automation. To understand how you can benefit from orchestration, it helps to understand what specifically it automates.

More on Kubernetes What is Kubernetes? Free online course: Containers, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift technical over… eBook: Storage Patterns for Kubernetes Test drive OpenShift hands-on An introduction to enterprise Kubernetes How to explain Kubernetes in plain terms eBook: Running Kubernetes on your Raspberry Pi homelab Kubernetes cheat sheet eBook: A guide to Kubernetes for SREs and sysadmins Latest Kubernetes articles Understanding containers

A container is an image of a file system containing only what's required to run a specific task. Most people don't build containers from scratch, although reading about how it's done can be elucidating. Instead, it's more common to pull an existing image from a public container hub.

A container engine is an application that runs a container. When a container is run, it's launched with a kernel mechanism called a cgroup, which keeps processes within the container separate from processes running outside the container.

Run a container

You can run a container on your own Linux computer easily with Podman, Docker, or LXC. They all use similar commands. I recommend Podman, as it's daemonless, meaning a process doesn't have to be running all the time for a container to launch. With Podman, your container engine runs only when necessary. Assuming you have a container engine installed, you can run a container just by referring to a container image you know to exist on a public container hub.

For instance, to run an Nginx web server:

$ podman run -p 8080:80 nginx
10-listen-on-ipv6-by-default.sh: info: Getting the checksum of /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
10-listen-on-ipv6-by-default.sh: info: Enabled listen on IPv6 in /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
[...]

Open a separate terminal to test it using curl:

$ curl --no-progress-meter localhost:8080 | html2text
# Welcome to nginx!

If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and
working. Further configuration is required.

For online documentation and support please refer to
[nginx.org](http://nginx.org/).  
Commercial support is available at [nginx.com](http://nginx.com/).

_Thank you for using nginx._

As web server installs go, that's pretty easy.

Now imagine that the website you've just deployed gets an unexpected spike in traffic. You hadn't planned for that, and even though Nginx is a very resilient web server, everything has its limits. With enough simultaneous traffic, even Nginx can crash. Now what?

Sustaining containers

Containers are cheap. In other words, as you've just experienced, they're trivial to launch.

You can use systemd to make a container resilient, too, so that a container automatically relaunches even in the event of a crash. This is where using Podman comes in handy. Podman has a command to generate a systemd service file based on an existing container:

$ podman create --name mynginx -p 8080:80 nginx
$ podman generate systemd mynginx \
--restart-policy=always -t 5 -f -n

You can launch your container service as a regular user:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user
$ mv ./container-mynginx.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
$ systemctl enable --now --user container-mynginx.service
$ curl --head localhost:8080 | head -n1
HTTP/1.1 200 OKRun pods of containers

Because containers are cheap, you can readily launch more than one container to meet the demand for your service. With two (or more) containers offering the same service, you increase the likelihood that better distribution of labor will successfully manage incoming requests.

You can group containers together in pods, which Podman (as its name suggests) can create:

$ systemctl stop --user container-myngnix
$ podman run -dt --pod new:mypod -p 8080:80 nginx
$ podman pod ps
POD ID     NAME   STATUS  CREATED  INFRA ID  # OF CONTAINERS
26424cc... mypod  Running 22m ago  e25b3...   2

This can also be automated using systemd:

$ podman generate systemd mypod \
--restart-policy=always -t 5 -f -nClusters of pods and containers

It's probably clear that containers offer diverse options for how you deploy networked applications and services, especially when you use the right tools to manage them. Both Podman and systemd integrate with containers very effectively, and they can help ensure that your containers are available when they're needed.

But you don't really want to sit in front of your servers all day and all night just so you can manually add containers to pods any time the whole internet decides to pay you a visit. Even if you could do that, containers are only as robust as the computer they run on. Eventually, containers running on a single server do exhaust that server's bandwidth and memory.

The solution is a Kubernetes cluster: lots of servers, with one acting as a "control plane" where all configuration is entered and many, many others acting as compute nodes to ensure your containers have all the resources they need. Kubernetes is a big project, and there are many other projects, like Terraform, Helm, and Ansible, that interface with Kubernetes to make common tasks scriptable and easy. It's an important topic for all levels of systems administrators, architects, and developers.

To learn all about container orchestration with Kubernetes, download our free eBook: A guide to orchestration with Kubernetes. The guide teaches you how to set up a local virtual cluster, deploy an application, set up a graphical interface, understand the YAML files used to configure Kubernetes, and more.

To learn all about container orchestration with Kubernetes, download our new eBook.

Image by:

William Kenlon. CC BY-SA 4.0

Containers Kubernetes What to read next Experiment with containers and pods on your own computer This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

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