The subject of this week’s Linux Picks and Pans is a representative of a less well-known computing platform that coexists with Linux as an open source operating system. If you thought that the Linux kernel was the only open source engine for a free OS, think again. BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) shares many of the same features that make Linux ...

The problem is that some seem to put too much trust in the capabilities of Linux by default. As a result, they often don’t pay enough attention to the manual aspect of their security. Linux can help you automate your workflow to a large extent, but it still requires a manual touch to keep things going well. This is even ...

Linux users will soon have a new way to access and sync OneDrive on Linux.  Insync, makers of a popular third-party Google Drivesyncing client for Linux (and Windows and macOS), have decided to add another string to their bow: Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service. Microsoft offer a OneDrive basic plan for free. It comes with 5GB of free cloud storage for files, photos and other ...

Google rethinks its planned changes to Chrome’s extension API that would have broken many ad-blocking extensions. Ars Technica reports that Google has made this revision to “ensure that the current variety of content-blocking extensions is preserved”. In addition, “Google maintains that ‘It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to prevent or break content blocking’ [emphasis Google’s] and says that it ...

Linux is just plumbing. The real OS—the real value—is with Kubernetes The operating system no longer really matters. And for developers and the cloud, that means that Linux no longer really matters. You can see proof of that in what has not happened. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has not gotten a $34 billion buyout offer from IBM, even though company founder Mark Shutteworth ...

Usually, you want to mitigate all possible vulnerabilities unless we are talking about Meltdown and Spectre which are a class or family of dozens of vulnerabilities. But what sysadmins hate more than these vulnerabilities are mitigations offered to these vulnerabilities. Some of these mitigations have a massive impact on performance, while not offering any significant protection. Gauging the pros and cons, sysadmins ...

Manylinux is an easy way to make your Python libraries compatible with most versions of Linux. There are many operating systems built on the GNU/Linux code base; these are known as “distributions.” Users fondly (or sometimes not so fondly) talk about “distro wars”: loud arguments, usually on the internet, about which distribution is best. Each distro’s community makes its own ...

Working with the Linux operating system offers a never-ending series of alternatives. One of the greatest benefits of using the Linux desktop is that you are never at risk of vendor lock-in or of being stranded if your chosen distro flavor suddenly sours. Take Redcore Linux, for example. Redcore is not a household name among typical Linux users. Neither was its ...

The release candidate 6 for the highly anticipated 5.0 Linux kernel was just released. You can view the changeset for 5.0-rc6 here. Canonical issued an update (USN-3878-3) and a formal apology for a recent kernel update regression that prevented systems with certain graphics chipsets from booting. A stable version of Chrome OS 72 was just released on Friday which introduces better access to external storage, ...

Grid, a new project from the Linux Foundation, will offer developers tools to create supply chain-specific applications running atop distributed ledger technology. The Linux Foundation’s blockchain initiative – Hyperledger Project – has created a set of developer tools to allow the creation of supply chain-specific applications running atop the distributed ledger technology (DLT). The Hyperledger Grid project, as it’s called, will ...