today's leftovers

• Episode 43 | This Week in Linux

  On this episode of This Week in Linux we cover a big batch of releases from distros, apps, hardware and more. System76 launches the option to order their new Open Source Certified Desktop, Thelio. We got a big update from the Solus team about the future of the project. openSUSE announces the launch of their Legal Review System, Cavil. Fedora 29 has been released along with other releases like KDE Connect, Sailfish, i3 Window Manager, GIMP, VirtualBox and the Game Manager, Lutris. We’ll also take a look at some upcoming projects like Ubuntu 19.04, Cinnamon 4.0 and the Samsung DeX running Ubuntu. All that and much more!

• Hegemon – A Modular System Monitoring Tool for Linux

  There are all kinds of Linux system monitoring tools such as top, htop, atop and many more that provide different output of system data such as resource utilization, running processes, CPU temperature and others. In this article, we are going to review a modular monitoring tool called Hegemon. It’s an open source project written in Rust, which works are still in progress.

• Free Chess Club – A Modern Desktop App for Playing Chess Online

  It has been a while since we reviewed any games on FossMint. And even though I don’t know how many of our readers play chess, it is never too late for anyone to learn how to – especially since awesome services like the FICS exist. What, you’ve never heard about it? Read on. [...] Open Source: You can deploy the app to Heroku from GitHub.

• The alias And unalias Commands Explained With Examples

• Adding an optional install duration to LVFS firmware

• Automate Sysadmin Tasks with Python's os.walk Function

  I'm a web guy; I put together my first site in early 1993. And so, when I started to do Python training, I assumed that most of my students also were going to be web developers or aspiring web developers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although some of my students certainly are interested in web applications, the majority of them are software engineers, testers, data scientists and system administrators. This last group, the system administrators, usually comes into my course with the same story. The company they work for has been writing Bash scripts for several years, but they want to move to a higher-level language with greater expressiveness and a large number of third-party add-ons. (No offense to Bash users is intended; you can do amazing things with Bash, but I hope you'll agree that the scripts can become unwieldy and hard to maintain.) It turns out that with a few simple tools and ideas, these system administrators can use Python to do more with less code, as well as create reports and maintain servers. So in this article, I describe one particularly useful tool that's often overlooked: os.walk, a function that lets you walk through a tree of files and directories.

• Our achievements in 2018

  On October 12, we started our yearly donation campaign. Today, we summarize what we achieved with your help in 2018 and renew our call for donations.

Openwashing With GitHub

• Twistlock Improves Cloud-Native Security With Discovery Tool

  There is a simple truism in much of IT, and that is that organizations can't manage what they're not aware of. As organizations increasingly make use of distributed teams that use cloud-native services, there is a nontrivial risk of application sprawl. On Nov. 13, container security vendor Twistlock announced its new open-source cloud-native discovery tool, in an effort to help identify and locate applications running on different public cloud services. The Cloud Discovery tool's initial release supports scanning on the three major public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. "Most customers tend to have a multicloud cloud strategy and then you combine that with the fact that everybody has got multiple accounts for different projects or business units, and so forth," John Morello, chief technology officer at Twistlock, told eWEEK. "You get this big equation where organizations try to figure out all the possible things that could be out there deployed and running.

• Twistlock Releases Cloud Discovery Open Source Tool for Cloud Native Services

• Microsoft's New Open-Source Project Is "Shader Conductor" For Cross-Compiling HLSL [Ed: Why does Phoronix help Microsoft's openwashing of proprietary lock-in, DX?]

GNU/Linux Skills, Raspberry Pi and FUD

• Raspberry Pi's potential is wider than you think

  What do you get for the techie who has everything? How about giving them a Raspberry Pi and letting them make pretty much anything. Or better yet, do it for yourself with the Ultimate Raspberry Pi eBook Bundle.

• Systems Engineer Salary Rises Even Higher with Linux Experience

  Some companies treat “systems engineer” and “systems administrator” almost interchangeably, but there are significant differences between the two positions. In broadest terms, systems engineers must design and implement a company’s system (comprising the network, servers, devices, etc.), whereas systems administrators are largely charged with keeping everything running. To frame it another way, system administration is a very reactive role, with sysadmins constantly monitoring networks for issues. Systems engineers, on the other hand, can build a system that anticipates users’ needs (and potential problems). In certain cases, they must integrate existing technology stacks (e.g., following the merger of two companies), and prototype different aspects of the network before it goes “live.”

• New Linux-Targeting Crypto-Mining Malware Combines Hiding and Upgrading Capabilities [Ed: When your system gets cracked anything can happen afterwards; does not matter whether there's an upgrade or not? No.]

  Japanese multinational cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has detected a new strain of crypto-mining malware that targets PCs running Linux, according to a report published Nov. 8. The new strain is reportedly able to hide the malicious process of unauthorized cryptocurrency-mining through users’ CPU by implementing a rootkit component. The malware itself, detected by Trend Micro as Coinminer.Linux.KORKERDS.AB, is also reportedly capable of updating itself.

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