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If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings—with their propensity to collapse—will you have to zig-zag around to get there? read more

VIDEO: Is open-source past its prime? Does it need to be replaced? Some companies say yes, while others say nonsense!

Every year, we like to ask readers "What desktop distro do you prefer in 2019?" This year, the total votes tallied in at 5,641, and the winner was Fedora with 1,151 votes. Ubuntu was a very close second with 1,133 votes. From Sparky to Puppy to Gentoo ("how was that not on the list?"), readers weighed in. And, lots of folks mentioned their love of Pop! OS. read more

Software developers writing applications in languages such as Java, Ruby, and Python have sophisticated libraries to help them maintain their software's integrity over time. They create tests that run applications through a series of executions in structured environments to ensure all of their software's aspects work as expected. read more

Vincross has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a modular “MIND Kit” robotics kit ranging from $89 for the Linux-driven, quad -A53 compute unit to $799 for a complete kit with servo controller, motors, battery, bases, sensors, lidar, and a mic array. Vincross, which was founded in 2014 by Tsinghua University AI scientist Tianqi Sun, went […]

Kubernetes is the de facto leader in container orchestration on the market, and it is an amazingly configurable and powerful orchestration tool. As with many powerful tools, it can be somewhat confusing at first. read more

Some people say Linux distributions no longer matter with containers. Alternative approaches, like distroless and scratch containers, seem to be all the rage. It appears we are considering and making technology decisions based more on fashion sense and immediate emotional gratification than thinking through the secondary effects of our choices. We should be asking questions like: How will these choices affect maintenance six months down the road? What are the engineering tradeoffs? How does this paradigm shift affect our build systems at scale? read more

News briefs for February 20, 2019.

by Mitch Frazier   I have a computer in my bedroom. I also have cats. Unfortunately, cats and screen lockers don't mix well, particularly at night. To be accurate, it's more a problem with the display power management than the actual screen locking. Here's the way it works: I run a script to "shut the lights off at night" (that is, lock the screen and force the display to power down), and that works great, until one of the cats jumps on the desk and causes the mouse to move and turn the display back on. And the cats don't even have to touch the mouse; the slight movement of the desk is enough to cause the mouse to react. Recently, I'd had enough of it and figured there had to be a way to disable the mouse and "refactor" the script.

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In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up Kerberos authentication between two Ubuntu 18.04 servers. We will install and configure the Kerberos server on the Ubuntu server and then install the Kerberos client on the other. Finally, we will test the authentication of the SSH service with the Kerberos server.

Infrastructure monitoring is an integral part of infrastructure management. It is an IT manager's first line of defense against surprise downtime. Severe issues can inject considerable downtime to live infrastructure, sometimes causing heavy loss of money and material. Monitoring collects time-series data from your infrastructure so it can be analyzed to predict upcoming issues with the infrastructure and its underlying components. This gives the IT manager or support staff time to prepare and apply a resolution before a problem occurs. A good monitoring system provides: read more

Every day there seems to be a security breach reported in the news where our data is at risk. Despite the fact that SSH is a secure way to connect remotely to a system, you can still make it even more secure. This article will show you how. That’s where two-factor authentication (2FA) comes in. […]

Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb code can't handle much, but hey, it now runs in a browser In preparation for next month's 30th anniversary of the proposal that gave us the world wide web, boffins at the behest of CERN have recreated the world's first web browser, and made it accessible as a modern web page.…

Cachet is a beautiful and powerful open source status page system written in PHP that allows you to better communicate downtime and system failures to your customers, teams, and shareholders.

When you think of the word wiki, chances are the first thing that comes to mind is Wikipedia. That's not a surprise, considering that Wikipedia did help put the concept of the wiki into the popular consciousness. Wikis, which are websites you can edit, are great tools for collaborating and organizing. But wikis usually require a lot of digital plumbing and a bit of care to use and maintain. All of that's overkill for personal use. read more

If you've ever wondered how your Linux computer stacks up against other Linux, Windows, and MacOS machines or searched for reviews of Linux-compatible hardware, you're probably familiar with Phoronix. read more

In the previous two tutorials, we discussed the basics of variables including how they occupy memory. But we mainly focused on integers and floats. In this tutorial, we will discuss about characters (or char type variables).

News briefs for February 19, 2019.

There are a lot of great open source tools out there for storing secrets in Git. It can be hard to determine the right one for you and your organization—it depends on your use cases and requirements. To help you compare and choose, we'll look at four of the most popular open source tools for secrets management and see how they stack up against each other: read more

Who do you think you are? Paris-based code botherer CAST Software said today it would buddy up with Software Heritage to tackle the sometimes tricky task of identifying the provenance of open-source code in modern projects.…