Debian is also called the universal operating system as it is used as a base for hundreds of Linux distributions. So, this claim also underlines that Debian should run on mobile devices too–right? Well, Debian developers are continuously working to add support for new devices and adapt it as per hardware and GUI capabilities of different devices.
Along the similar lines, during the recent DebConf17, which was held in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 developers met to discuss this issue, as reported by Softpedia.
Debian Project’s W. Martin Borgert wrote that a number of mobile devices running Debian GNU/Linux were shown at DebConf17. These devices were:
PocketCHIP — A small handheld computer with keyboard, USB, WiFi, running Debian 8 or 9.
Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G — A Android phone with physical keyboard. It can already run portions of Debian userspace on Android kernel.
ZeroPhone — An open source, Raspberry Pi Zero-based smartphone with small screen and classic keypad. It ran Debian-based Raspbian OS.
Pyra — A handheld computer with touchscreen. It’ll come with Debian preinstalled.
The Security Team weekly reports are intended to be very short summaries of the Security Team’s weekly activities.
If you would like to reach the Security Team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-hardened channel on FreeNode. Alternatively, you can mail the Ubuntu Hardened mailing list at: ubuntu-hardened@lists.ubuntu.com
During the last week, the Ubuntu Security team:
Triaged 537 public security vulnerability reports, retaining the 134 that applied to Ubuntu.
Published 16 Ubuntu Security Notices which fixed 36 security issues (CVEs) across 17 supported packages.
By 1997, there had long been graphical Unix and Linux graphical user interface (GUI) desktops, but none of them had gathered much support. KDE, which was destined to become a major desktop, had started in 1996, but it was still facing opposition for its use of the Qt license. The GNOME Project, founded by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero on August 15, 1997, was created to build a GUI without the use of any non-General Public License (GPL) software. Thus, a struggle began between the two Linux desktops, which continues to this day.
Since the initial release of GNOME 1.0 in 1999, there have been 33 stable releases. That first release would set the framework for all future versions. It was based on the GIMP ToolKit (GTK+). Then, and now, GNOME offered a friendly platform for developers and supported many programming languages. Its libraries are available for any application under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). GNOME’s applications are available under the GPL.
GNOME is more than just a desktop. It’s a complete family of desktop applications. These include the Evolution, email client; AbiWord, a word-processor; and Epiphany, a web browser.
For many years, KDE and GNOME would struggle over Linux desktop domination. While there were other significant early Linux GUIs — GNUStep (aka OpenStep), Xfce, and Enlightment — GNOME and KDE would dominate Linux for many years.
On August 2, Luke Marsden (Weaveworks) and Marco Ceppi (Canonical) presented a webinar on how to Speed up your software development lifecycle with Kubernetes. In the session they described how you can use conjure-up and Weave Cloud to set up, manage and monitor an app in Kubernetes. In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to set up Kubernetes on any cloud, the conjure-up way. Once the cluster is spun up, you’ll use Weave Cloud to deploy an application, explore the microservices and monitor the app as it runs in the cluster.
Why Canonical & Weaveworks?
Canonical’s conjure-up makes it easy to deploy and operate Kubernetes in production, using a neat, easy-to-use CLI installer. Weave Cloud fills in the gaps missing with a Kubernetes install and provides the tools necessary for a full development lifecycle:
Deploy – plug output of CI system into cluster so that you can ship features faster
Explore – visualize and understand what’s happening so that you can fix problems faster
Monitor – understand behavior of running system so that you can fix problems faster using Prometheus
Weave Cloud Development Lifecycle
Installing Kubernetes with conjure-up
Use conjure-up to install Kubernetes on your cloud infrastructure (LXD provider is not currently supported by Weave Cloud)
You may wish to make this permanent by adding the export command to your ~/.bash_profile or equivalent shell startup script. Once you have the environment variable in place, you can run kubectl commands against the cluster. Try it out with
kubectl get nodes
Connecting your conjured up cluster to Weave Cloud
Next you will visualize the Kubernetes cluster in Weave Cloud. Sign up for Weave Cloud. Select Setup→ Kubernetes→ Generic Kubernetes and then cut and paste the Kubernetes command from the Weave Cloud UI into your terminal:
Now you should be able to see the Sock Shop in Weave Cloud Explore (click Controllers and select the sock-shop namespace filter from the bottom left):
And you should be able to access the shop in your browser, using the IP address of one of your Kubernetes nodes at port :30001.
Once the app is loaded, try out the Monitoring tool in Weave Cloud to observe the latencies between services in the cluster. Click Monitor and then run the following query:
You should see all the different requests latencies for all the services in the sock shop. This is possible because the sock shop is instrumented with the Prometheus client libraries.
Conclusion
In this post, we showed you how to get from nothing to a Kubernetes cluster using Canonical’s conjure-up. We then showed you how to install the Weave Cloud agents and just scratched the surface of what you can do with Weave Cloud: monitoring the request latencies on a Prometheus-instrumented app, the sock shop.
This newsletter is to provide a status update from the Ubuntu Foundations Team. There will also be highlights provided for any interesting subjects the team may be working on. If you would like to reach the Foundations team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-devel channel on freenode.
Highlights
Updated cloud images have been released with fix for CVE-2017-7533
After no small amount of effort, the perl 5.26 and gcc-7 transitions migrated to artful on the 10th, unblocking many of the packages that had been stuck in -proposed.
Ubuntu Budgie is one of the few Linux distros to offer integration of a Budgie desktop-only edition, other than Solus OS, whose developers created it.
Ubuntu Budgie is classy and user-friendly. It does not sacrifice performance for reliance on a simple design. It is maintained by a United Kingdom-based developer community. Previously called “Budgie-Remix,” it is an Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the Budgie desktop.
Although based on the Ubuntu Linux family, Ubuntu Budgie is not from Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company. The Solus community originally developed Budgie from scratch and tightly integrated the desktop user interface with the GNOME stack.
Designed with the modern user in mind, Budgie is known for its simplicity and elegance. It has a plain and clean style and is easy to use.
The Budgie desktop is not a fork of any other desktop project. Its designers planned for an easy integration into other distros, and it is an open source project in its own right.
The integration of an improved Budgie desktop environment with a solid Ubuntu core makes Ubuntu Budgie an interesting and stable Linux distro.
The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list.
Spotlight: cloud-init at DebConf17
Josh on the cloud-init team presented at DebConf17 last week. His talk included an introduction to how cloud-init works and then an overview of recent developments made by the team. Replay is available on the DebConf17 website.
Below is a summary of uploads to the development and supported releases. Current status of the Debian to Ubuntu merges is tracked on the Merge-o-Matic page. For a full list of recent merges with change logs please see the Ubuntu Server report.
After bringing Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) to Windows 10 operating system and making the installation more hassle-free by adding them to Windows Store, Microsoft is all set to bring the goodness of Linux to Windows Server.
In an announcement on its blog, Microsoft wrote that WSL can be installed on Windows Insider Builds of Windows Server. After this, developers and sysadmins can use Linux tools alongside PowerShell and CMD.
Just in case you’re wondering why Microsoft decided to add Windows Subsystem For Linux to Windows Server, doing so makes more sense as compared to regular Windows 10. Windows Server is used by sysadmins, developers, people building/managing services, etc. Occasionally, they need tools available on Linux.
Compared to running Linux in a virtual machine, WSL runs unmodified Linux binaries natively on Windows. With its help, one can run/install almost any Linux tool integrated into Windows.
Please note that while you can run daemons and jobs like PostgreSQL, MYSQL, sshd, etc., via an interactive shell, you can’t use WSL to run persistent Linux servers, jobs, etc.
Christian Brauner (@brauner) and Stéphane Graber (@stgraber) were attending Debconf17 in Montreal. We had the opportunity to catch up with colleagues, friends and users.
Stéphane gave a talk about LXD and system containers on Debian, a recording is available:
Senthil Kumaran S of Linaro was also presenting LXC on Debian:
Extended CFP for containers micro-conference
As we still have a number of slots available for the containers micro-conference at Linux Plumbers 2017, we’ve decided to extend the CFP. All current proposals have been approved.
The list below is feature or refactoring work which will span several weeks/months and can’t be tied directly to a single Github issue or pull request.
This section is used to track the work done in downstream Linux distributions to ship the latest LXC, LXD and LXCFS as well as work to get various software to work properly inside containers.
Ubuntu
LXD 2.16 was backported to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 17.04 (in the backports pocket)
LXC 2.0.8, LXCFS 2.0.7 and LXD 2.0.10 have also been backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Snap
Removed CRIU support from the snap as current CRIU doesn’t work with snap confinement.
Fixed a number of issues with /run inside the snap environment missing files needed for DNS resolution to properly function.
Fixed support for nesting, allowing the LXD snap to be installed inside an unprivileged LXD container.
Added libacl as required by the recently introduced ACL shifting code.
Changed the LXD daemon directory to be 0755 rather than 0711, having it now be the same as the .deb package.
We’re preparing to make the changes described above in the coming weeks, that means that the GNOME Shell Ubuntu session is going to transition to this design in the next few days. Didier will be posting a series of blog posts next week on how this all works as they are landing. The vanilla upstream GNOME session will also emerge from this work. And we’ll link to the posts in next week’s newsletter, but keep an eye on social media for up-to-date information.
We’ve resurrected the “power off” option when the power button is pressed. This will appear in GNOME Control Center 3.25.90.
Video, Audio, Bluetooth, Networking
You might have seen this screenshot earlier in the week:
We’re testing some patches to Chromium 60 in Artful to enable video acceleration and we’re seeing roughly a 50% saving in CPU overhead when using VA API. In the screenshot above playing the video without acceleration is on the left and playing with acceleration is on the right. The CPU is Haswell. There are still more bugs to fix, but we’re making progress.
In Pulse Audio we’ve dropped some more patches for Android support (from Ubuntu Touch) bringing us more inline with upstream. This will make maintenance easier and should reduce the chance of bugs cropping up from our patches.
Our patches to add enabling and disabling of the Network Connectivity Checker are in review upstream. This will eventually add a toggle switch in the privacy settings of Control Center to allow you to turn on/off the connectivity checker. We should be able to distro-patch these into Ubuntu soon before they appear upstream, and then drop the patches once they are available upstream.
We’re including the Rhythmbox “Alternate Toolbar” by default in 17.10, this brings a tidier user interface
Updates
Updated Chromium stable to 60.0.3112.78, pending validation. The next Chromium stable update is 60.0.3112.90, already lined up in a PPA. Updated Chromium beta to 61.0.3163.31, Chromium dev to 62.0.3175.4.
Updating LibreOffice Snap to 5.4.0.
Merged upstream Ghostscript version 9.21 from Debian into Ubuntu.
Synced newest versions from Debian for hplip, cups-bjnp, ippusbxd. System-config-printer updated to a new snapshot from upstream GIT.
GNOME got a stack of updates to 3.25.90 (evolution, games, font viewer, online accounts, tweak tool, map, log, disk, calculator, cheese, todo)
In The News
We’re planning a Fit And Finish hackfest in London at the end of August to find and fix all the niggly little bugs and theming issues. If you’ve got skills to offer and would like to get involved please see Popey’s blog post.
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