Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

2021 has been an exciting year for Kubernetes, and these articles prove it. From fun interfaces to homelabs to development environments, check out my favorite articles from 2021, K8s style.

This was an amazing year for the Enable Sysadmin community. In 2021, our site traffic grew to more than 600,000 page views per month, 100,000 per month over 2020. We generated more than 7.2 million page views and 4.2 million unique visitors in 2021.

When using Linux, there are times when you may need to manage hard drives, removable media such as USB drives and SD cards, and more. This is especially true if you plan on dual-booting Ubuntu with Windows or a second Linux installation.

Linux Mint’s final point release in the 20 series, nicknamed “Una,” is now in beta. It builds on version 20.2 “Uma” with some new features and refinements. Are those changes more substantial than the name change? Let’s find out.

Phoronix spotted a new Intel open-source project for Linux version 5.17 that allows the operating system to update system firmware, like a motherboard's UEFI or BIOS, without requiring a system restart. This new "PFRUT," or the Platform Firmware Runtime and Telemetry drivers, feature comes as a part of the widely-used ACPI spec, meaning we could see the same approach come to Windows and desktop PCs in the future.

Open source has a learning solution for you no matter where you are on the education continuum. This year our writers provided readers with a wide variety of articles that spanned that spectrum from PreK-12 to higher education. Here are 12 you won't want to miss.

Distrobox is a tool that allows you to create and manage container-based development environments without root privileges. Distrobox can use either podman or docker to create containers using the Linux distribution of your choice. The created container will be tightly integrated with the host, allowing sharing of the HOME directory of the user, external storage, external USB devices, graphical apps (X11/Wayland), and audio.

This year, Opensource.com ran several great articles focusing on open source in business. These articles show the power of open source in business as tools, platforms, or integration points. Let's review some of the top open source business stories from 2021.

With the continuously growing set of features and functionality provided by systemd, this year saw the project hitting record growth in terms of commit activity that easily surpassed prior years. Surprisingly, Lennart Poettering dropped from his spot as the one responsible for the most commits each year.

If you start using computers with Windows, you are likely to use the term folder. But when you switch to Linux, you’ll find that folders are often termed as directory. This may confuse some new Linux users. Should you call it folder or directory? Is there even a difference? Here’s the thing. You can call it folder if you want or directory if you like. It won’t make a difference. But if you wonder why a folder is called directory in Linux, here is some explanation.

This year we learned a lot about our community as we embraced our new work-from-home lives. We also met some amazing folks who are leveraging Linux and open source software in their organizations.

AMD's official Vulkan driver team is ending out the year by pushing out AMDVLK 2021.Q4.3 as their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver implementation for Linux systems. This alternative to the Mesa RADV driver finally has fixed up its very poor performance for Vulkan under Wayland.

Career opportunities are plentiful for sysadmins, even as we continue to cope with and recover from the pandemic. The "Great Resignation" and local skills shortages (especially as some borders remain closed) are affecting companies. We sysadmins need to make the most of the mounting career growth opportunities as IT organizations work around their needs for skills while the world slowly opens up.

One great thing about Linux and the open source community is that as soon as a vulnerability is detected, developers are hard at work releasing tools to mitigate the problem. Such is the case with the Log4j vulnerability.

Mold, a modern drop-in replacement for current Unix linkers, has reached version 1.0. Written by the original creator of the LLVM lld linker, mold aims to be several times faster than its predecessor. According to its author, Rui Ueyama, mold would allow developers to increase their productivity by significantly speeding up the debug-edit-rebuild cycles.

Linux 5.16 just dropped a few days ago, and with it arrives some performance gains for laptops equipped with AMD's Ryzen CPUs with Radeon integrated graphics, according to Phoronix. In most of the benchmarks Phoronix tested, Linux 5.16 provides anywhere between 5%-14% more performance compared to previous Linux kernels, including 5.15 and 5.11.

Open source software isn't just about creating alternatives to proprietary software. On the business side, open source has become a "force multiplier" to transform how organizations do business. At the same time, more companies have started to adopt more open source methodologies, even in managing teams and processes.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not (our family does, as it happens), this time of year is one where presents are often given and received. I thought it might be nice to think about what presents we could give in the spirit of open source.

There are many great synthesizers for Linux, and like synthesizers in real life, most of them can be controlled using the MIDI protocol.

Merry Christmas everyone! In this holiday season, are you looking forward to trying out new distributions on your Linux system? Fret not, we have you covered. Here, I shall be listing some of the latest Linux distribution releases.