CentOS Dojo is over, hello FOSDEM! :: Pensées de Michel — Personal thoughts and musings

The first CentOS Dojo of the year is, as usual, held as a FOSDEM Fringe event. It’s virtual - again - which is a blessing and a curse. It would be fun to travel and meet people in person again once the situation permits, then again, given my family situation that would have meant I would have to skip for the next year or two anyway.

That being said, it was held on Hopin, which has a decent hallway track experience. Nothing much is changing on the platform front - linux.conf.au was on Venueless again, and FOSDEM is again using a bleeding edge Element web client at chat.fosdem.org. I like the Hopin and Element experience, though I admit to a bias - Element because I like decentralized platforms, and Hopin because I know more people among the attendees of events held there. And Hopin is still unpredictably buggy on Firefox!

As Kubernetes Matures, The Edge Needs Containment [Ed: Paid-for IBM puff piece; many self-described "journalists" are just lousy, reckless marketing people]

In a relatively few short years, Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform for managing software containers, besting a lineup that included such contenders as Docker Swarm and Mesosphere. Since spinning out of Google eight years ago, Kubernetes has developed at a rapid pace, with new releases coming out as often as four times a year.

Kubernetes also has spawned a range of platforms from the likes of Red Hat (with OpenShift, a key driver of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2019, VMware (Tanzu), and SUSE (Rancher) and its now being offered as a service via top public cloud companies Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as others.

That said, there are continuing signs of maturation and stabilization in Kubernetes, which is under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). For one, the torrid pace of the release cycle is beginning to ease, from four releases a year to about three. And now, there is talk among those within the Kubernetes project about possibly rolling out longer-term support releases, according to Brian Gracely, senior director of product strategy for OpenShift at Red Hat.

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2022

This month I accepted 342 and rejected 57 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 366.

Lately I was asked: Is it ftpmaster’s opinion and policy that there is no difference in NEW queue review process between bin and src?

StarlingX R6.0 is here!

One of the core components of the platform is the Linux kernel. In light of the earlier CentOS announcements, the community decided to move over to Debian in an incremental process. In the 6.0 release, this means to upgrade to the 5.10 version of the kernel.

Introduction & Testimonial From rlcopple

Though I currently live in the Denver metro area, I'm originally from Texas. The longest that I've ever lived in a city was Marble Falls, TX for 18 years. (Growing up, we moved a lot!) At any rate, my "computer history" starts in the mid to late 70s, my Mom had an old Kaypro computer, with an old "distro" called "CP/M". Anyone remember that one? I immediately became interested in it.

My Mom must have noticed, because in the early 80s, she gave me a TI-994a console. It had cartridges that you could insert to play various games, mostly. If I'm recalling correctly, it boasted a 4KHz processor, along with a hefty 16K of memory. I used my TV as the monitor. I learned "Basic" programming on that computer. One of the first programs I ever wrote on it was a game: Yahtzee. I had a general idea of how to do it, and the crazy thing is, it actually worked! Though it did stress out the processor to go through the 5-nested loop to verify that it actually was a long straight, before awarding the points. Usually it took around 5 minutes -- time enough to get a cup of coffee and go to the bathroom.

From there I had my first IT experience at a gas measurement company, working on a Digital RS11 (if I remember that correctly) that had about 6-7 VT100 terminals connected to it. Though, as in most jobs I've had, that wasn't my only duty, often, not even my primary one. (I was a bookkeeper from 1996 - 2011, mostly.) That's despite the fact that all that I know comes from experience, not classes or any degree (my college degree was in Religion).

Obviously, since I was a bookkeeper during those years, I was locked away into the Windows systems, since everyone I worked for used QuickBooks and that program could only run on Windows (as well as Macs, but I never used those much). That said, I did fiddle with Linux during those days. In 2001 or 2, I "attempted" an install of Debian from a stack of CDs I had ordered (that was back in the modem days, it would have taken a couple of days back then, tying up the phone lines, to even think of downloading 1 Gig, much less the 2-3+ of most ISOs now days). I failed to get it up and running, however, mainly because I was looking for starting up the X server, which I did. However, no graphical menu popped up! (Shows you how much I knew about Linux). Indeed, I did get it to boot up into the X environment, but I couldn't do anything in it. Then, around 2006, I successfully installed Ubuntu onto my old laptop, played around with it for a while, but it was only a passing interest at that time. Around 2011, when my last client who used QuickBooks ended their professional relationship with me, I was free to think more about actually moving to Linux. I discovered dual-boot, so I did, installing Lubuntu alongside Windows. It took me around 2-3 months to figure out how to configure it to my liking, from shortcut keys to replacement programs. The hardest was a replacement for inventory as in Quickbooks. I never did find one, so I created a spreadsheet for it, which I'm in the middle of updating. That was also the time I first met Peter Patterson Mint Spider who I know resides on this forum. {waves} Hi Peter!

At any rate, I've used several different distros since then, and reviewed several on my YouTube channel which I started in August of 2018. Then I came across BDLL, and the community there, and they have gratefully sucked me into their collective. Obviously, that is where I met Alie, or Aris. I mixed those two up as I didn't realize they weren't the same person until just yesterday. Hi! But if my memory serves me well (and frequently, it doesn't) I believe it is Alie. Well, my introduction to PCLinuxOS was on that channel, where we recently, like 3 or 4 weeks ago, reviewed PCLinuxOS. Which has led me here, to this community.

I currently have 8 computers (two of them my sons, and one of them the original computer I first installed Lubuntu on.) My "daily driver" computer is a fairly new Framework computer. I've installed PCLinuxOS BigDaddyTrinity on my son's Lenovo Legion Gaming Desktop, out in our living room. More about that in Testimonials.

So, I hope to be able to contribute here some, as well as learn some more about this distro. Thanks for inviting me to come here and post my questions, Peter.

[PCLinuxOS] Screenshot Showcase

iXsystems Outperforms in 2021 with 70% Year-over-Year Growth of TrueNAS Open Storage Deployments

New tools to simplify wrapping your head around Kubernetes • The Register

Engineer Nelson Elhage offers several reasons Kubernetes is so complex but this does at least mean that multiple companies offer tools to try to help you master it.

The Google-backed container-management system is famously difficult, even to spell or pronounce. (It's often called "k8s" for short: since "kubernetes" is 10 letters long, "k8s" signifies "k" + eight letters + "s", and is pronounced "kates".) The Mountain View mammoth even commissioned a comic to explain what it is. (It's long, but quite good.)

K8s is a set of tools for managing clusters – but not everyone has a spare cluster lying around that they can play with.

Repo Review: Xtreme Download Manager

Xtreme Download Manager is an advanced and feature-full download manager that's designed to accelerate your download speeds by using a dynamic file segmentation system. It provides integration for most popular web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, etc) through the installation of an addon. Xtreme Download Manager also supports downloading videos from YouTube and other streaming sites.

Xtreme Download Manager's interface has a very modern look, and is fairly easy and straightforward to use. On the left side are several categories to help you sort your downloads into their different file types. From the top-right corner, you can set the filters to show only complete, incomplete, or all downloads. From down in the lower-right corner, you can use a switch to enable and disable the web browser integration.