Category: Linux, FreeBSD, and Unix types

Kali Linux is a specialized distribution targeted at security professionals that also shows up on popular TV show, Mr. Robot. Kali Linux is now compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4. Currently, the distro is only available as a 32-bit OS, but the project is planning on releasing a 64-bit version soon. In the meantime, security aficionados who have a spare Raspberry Pi 4 lying around can head over to the Kali Linux site and download the distro image. (Source: NoteBookCheck)

Michael Larabel of Phoronix reports that GNOME developers are planning to disable the Snap plug-in for GNOME Software. Canonical has begun writing their own Snap Store. They don’t plan to use GNOME Software in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and thus have taken their developers away from working on the upstream support. Due to the likelihood that the GNOME Software Snap plug-in will quickly suffer from bit-rot and pose a maintenance burden to GNOME developers with little to no return, it’s certainly reasonable that they would at least disable this plug-in. [Source: Phoronix]

Cloudera has announced changes to its licensing policy that will make its entire product portfolio available under open-source terms, effectively adopting Hortonworks’ business model. The move has important implications for the industry’s ongoing debate about how business models can be built upon a foundation of free software. Although Cloudera is a major contributor to open-source projects, its decade-old business has always been based on selling licensed software.

Microsoft has open-sourced its Quantum Development Kit (QDK) on GitHub. The QDK, which launched in preview last year, gives developers access to the Q# programming language, quantum simulators, and the libraries needed to start experimenting with quantum computing before it goes mainstream. “By open-sourcing the Quantum Development Kit in GitHub, we enable developers to contribute alongside an emerging community of quantum computing programmers. We initiated this work last year when we open-sourced several features of the Quantum Development Kit, including the libraries and samples,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

Wind River Systems is introducing enhancements to the Wind River Linux software to ease the adoption of containers in embedded computing systems. Enhancements provide resources such as pre-built containers, tools, and documentation, and support for frameworks such as Docker and Kubernetes. With this real-time software release, Wind River Linux removes the difficulties and lowers the barrier of entry for container usage in embedded software projects for applications like industrial control systems, autonomous vehicles, medical devices and equipment, Internet of Things (IoT) gateways, Radio Access Network (RAN) products, and network appliances. [Source: Military & Aerospace Electronics]

Linode has launched new GPU-optimized cloud computing instances tailored specifically for developers and businesses requiring massive parallel computational power. These new GPU instances give scientists, artists, and engineers working on artificial intelligence, graphic visualization, and complex modeling a cost-competitive alternative to hyperscale cloud providers. The new instances are built on NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPU cards with all three major types of processing cores (CUDA, Tensor, and Real-Time Ray Tracing) available to users. These new GPU instances give scientists, artists, and engineers working on artificial intelligence, graphic visualization, and complex modeling a cost-competitive alternative to hyperscale cloud providers. 

LF Networking (LFN) has announced the availability of ONAP Dublin, the latest release of the open-source platform for real-time, policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions. Dublin brings an uptick in commercial activity, including new deployment plans from major operators (including Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Swisscom, Telecom Italia, and Telstra) and ONAP-based products and solutions from more than a dozen leading vendors. The foundation also announced the addition of six new members including, Aarna Networks, Loodse, the LIONS Center at Pennsylvania State University, Matrixx Software, VoerEir AB, and XCloud Networks.

Microsoft recently applied to join a private Linux kernel mailing list that’s meant for reporting and discussing security issues privately before they are made public. After a week-long discussion, it’s all but certain that Microsoft will be subscribed to the list.  Alexander Peslyak, the maintainer of the list wrote in a discussion thread on Openwall, “Per our current policy and precedents, I see no valid reasons not to subscribe Microsoft (or part(s) of it, see below) to ‘linux-distros’. So I intend to figure out some detail and proceed with the subscription.”  Once accepted, Microsoft will join companies like Oracle and Amazon who are already on the list.

The Debian community has announced the release of Debian 10 “Buster.” Buster will be supported for the next five years. Buster ships with several desktop environments including, Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12. Buster supports a total of ten architectures, including 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit little-endian Motorola/IBM PowerPC (ppc64el), 64-bit IBM S/390 (s390x), ARMel, and more. Buster can be downloaded from the official Debian page.