The ways you can run Linux on the MacBook Air (2022)

Apple’s newest MacBook Air made its debut at WWDC 2022 ahead of July 2022 availability. But even before it gets into anyone’s hands, there is a lot that we already know about it. For one, the spec sheet is pretty complete, and the headline act is the Apple M2 chip powering the show.

Apple’s move to its own ARM-based silicon is heading into its second generation. Paired with macOS Ventura, also revealed at WWDC, there are a number of great features for consumers, professionals, and developers alike. It should be pointed out, though, that the MacBook Air (2022) will ship with macOS Monterey.

For the latter, one key consideration may well be whether or not the new MacBook Air can successfully run Linux. For many developers being able to successfully boot into Linux is a key part of their workflow. On that front, there is good and bad news to consider.

openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/24

Week 24 contained again some public holidays for my place, but as in the past, this has never stopped Tumbleweed from rolling. After all, it’s all our contributor’s work making it go as smoothly as it is. And their great work has paid off once again, as we could finally, after months and months of preparation, testing, fixing, and redo, make the switch of the default python interpreter to version 3.10. This resulted in a rather large rebuild of the distro, as all python3- symbols needed to move to the correct python subpackage again. As a positive side effect, the recently introduced SOURCE_FORTIFY=3 is now enabled on all binaries. With the rebuild taking a bit longer, we have still managed to publish 5 snapshots this week (0609, 0611, 0612, 0613, and 0614)

This RGB wedding dress mimics Princess Aurora’s from Sleeping Beauty | Arduino Blog

Inspired by his Christmas tree’s RGB lights, Brett Haddoak had the idea to turn his now-wife Rachelle’s wedding dress into something out of the classic children’s movie Sleeping Beauty by embedding a series of RGB LED strips that would elegantly illuminate it just like Princess Aurora’s.

At first, Haddoak chose to simply take the Christmas lights off of his tree and attach them to the dress, but this proved to be non-ideal since the area covered wasn’t enough. Additionally, the app that controls the string of lights was unreliable, thus making a DIY solution necessary. His initial test involved taking a couple WS2812B strips, wrapping them around a chair, and testing out a blue to pink transition animation that is performed by an Arduino Nano and the FastLED library. That concept turned out quite well, so Haddoak moved onto the next step of integrating the lights into fabric and toying with the brightness.

Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (kernel, liblouis, ntfs-3g, php, shim, shim-unsigned-aarch64, shim-unsigned-x64, thunderbird, and vim), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable and golang), Red Hat (grub2, mokutil, and shim and grub2, mokutil, shim, and shim-unsigned-x64), SUSE (389-ds, apache2, kernel, mariadb, openssl, openssl-1_0_0, rubygem-actionpack-5_1, rubygem-activesupport-5_1, and vim), and Ubuntu (exempi, kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-aws-5.13, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-5.13, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.13, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-intel-5.13, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.13, linux-oracle-5.4, and spip).

Reproducible Development with Devcontainers

Cisco Unfurls Observability Cloud for Kubernetes Environments

At its Cisco Live! event this week, Cisco added an AppDynamics Cloud observability service that is optimized for microservices-based applications constructed using containers.

Gregg Ostrowski, executive CTO for Cisco AppDynamics, says AppDynamics Cloud is designed to ingest logs, metrics, events and traces generated by both applications and the cloud infrastructure they run on to provide IT teams with a more holistic view of their environment. It initially supports managed Kubernetes environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with future support for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other cloud providers planned.

The private cloud future: Data centres as a service [Ed: There's no such thing as "private clouds"; you just mean servers. Stop calling everything "clown".]

Even after the public cloud hype, private clouds remain to be a very essential part of many enterprises’ cloud strategy. Private clouds are simply giving CIOs more control over their budgets, enabling better security and allowing the flexibility to build best of breed IT solutions. So let’s stop here and take a step backwards, why are organisations even investing in their IT?

The death of Internet Explorer: Good riddance to bad rubbish

Microsoft took the threat seriously. Netscape CEO James Barksdale would later testify that in a June 1995 meeting, Microsoft proposed that the two companies split the browser market, with Internet Explorer being the only Windows browser. If Netscape didn’t comply, Microsoft would crush it.

“I had never been in a meeting in my 33-year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we should either stop competing with it or the competitor would kill us,” Barksdale said during the Department of Justice’s 2001 antitrust trial against Microsoft.

Despite that warning, Netscape continued to lead the technology revolution. Netscape Communicator was where the real innovation happened. JavaScript, for example, is arguably the most popular programming language globally, and JavaScript was a Netscape creation. But, Microsoft, in all fairness, had its moments too. For example, IE 3.0 was the first browser to adopt Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in 1996.

But the real reason we’re saying goodbye to IE only today, long after Netscape became history, is that Microsoft exploited its illegal PC/Windows monopoly to block Netscape from computers. Microsoft strong-armed PC vendors into putting the new operating system and its browser on all their PCs. The goal was not so much to kill off other PC operating system vendors; there wasn’t any real OS competition in the mid-‘90s. The goal was to destroy Netscape.

The courts agreed. The DoJ won in its lawsuit against Microsoft because the company’s PC monopoly made it impossible for Netscape to compete with IE. Unfortunately, the government gave Microsoft a slap on the wrist rather than breaking it up into separate companies or open-sourcing its code. And Netscape died, just as Microsoft had threatened back in 1995.

So it was that many of you grew up with IE as the browser you knew and loved. You didn’t know any better.