Ubuntu: Snapcraft, Intel, AMD Patches, and Telemetry

• SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Snapcraft

  Canonical, the company behind operating system and Linux distribution Ubuntu, is looking to help developers package, distribute and update apps for Linux and IoT with its open-source project Snapcraft. According to Evan Dandrea, engineering manager at Canonical, Snapcraft “is a platform for publishing applications to an audience of millions of Linux users.” The project was initially created in 2014, but recently underwent rebranding efforts.

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Now Certified on Select Intel NUC Mini PCs and Boards for IoT Development, LibreOffice 6.0.5 Now Available, Git 2.8 Released and More

  Canonical yesterday announced that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is certified on select Intel NUC Mini PCs and boards for IoT development. According to the Ubuntu blog post, this pairing "provides benefits to device manufacturers at every stage of their development journey and accelerates time to market." You can download the certified image from here. In other Canonical news, yesterday the company released a microcode firmware update for Ubuntu users with AMD processors to address the Spectre vulnerability, Softpedia reports. The updated amd64-microcode packages for AMD CPUs are available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), "all AMD users are urged to update their systems."

• Canonical issues Spectre v2 fix for all Ubuntu systems with AMD chips

  JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU'D HEARD THE END of Spectre, Canonical has released a microcode update for all Ubuntu users that have AMD processors in a bid to rid of the vulnerability. The Spectre microprocessor side-channel vulnerabilities were made public at the beginning of this year, affecting literally billions of devices that had been made in the past two decades.

• A first look at desktop metrics

  We first announced our intention to ask users to provide basic, not-personally-identifiable system data back in February. Since then we have built the Ubuntu Report tool and integrated it in to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS initial setup tool. You can see an example of the data being collected on the Ubuntu Report Github page.

Most secure Linux distros in 2018

Think of a Linux distribution as a bundle of software delivered together, based on the Linux kernel - a kernel being the core of a system that connects software to hardware and vice versa – with a GNU operating system and a desktop environment, giving the user a visual way to operate the system via a graphical user interface. Linux has a reputation as being more secure than Windows and Mac OS due to a combination of factors – not all of them about the software. Firstly, although desktop Linux users are on the up, Linux environments are far less common in the grand scheme of things than Windows devices on personal computers. The Linux community also tends to be more technical. There are technical reasons too, including fundamental differences in the way the distribution architecture tends to be structured. Nevertheless over the last decade security-focused distributions started to appear, which will appeal to the privacy-conscious user who wants to avoid the worldwide state-sanctioned internet spying that the west has pioneered and where it continues to innovate. Of course, none of these will guarantee your privacy, but they're a good start. Here we list some of them. It is worth noting that security best practices are often about process rather than the technology, avoiding careless mistakes like missing patches and updates, and using your common sense about which websites you visit, what you download, and what you plug into your computer.

Red Hat and Fedora News

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform fast forward upgrades: A step-by-step overview

  New in Red Hat®️ OpenStack®️ Platform 13, the fast forward upgrade feature lets you easily move between long-life releases, without the need to upgrade to each in-between release. Fast forward upgrades fully containerize Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment to simplify and speed the upgrade process while reducing interruptions and eliminating the need for additional hardware. Today, we’ll take a look at what the fast forward upgrade process from Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 looks like in practice.

• DesOps – The Next Wave in Design

  Today, design as a discipline is getting more and more recognition across the entrepreneur world and many industry efforts, such as IBM‘s Enterprise Design Thinking framework, RedHat‘s Open Studio and similar ones, are at a large scale, trying to create a synergy between the Agile approach to the software development lifecycle and the Design Thinking.  It is an interesting crossroad where the next big thing in product delivery is to bring scalability as well as automation to the creative process.

• Red Hat Unveils Cloud-Native BPM Platform

  Red Hat this week extended its business process management (BPM) suite to run natively on a Red Hat OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. Phil Simpson, product marketing manager for JBoss at Red Hat, says Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7 will make it simpler for members of a line of business (LOB) organization to collaboratively build applications using low-code application development tools in collaboration with professional developers relying on the same core OpenShift platform. The latest version of the Red Hat BPM platform is now more portable because of the cloud-native capabilities enabled by a Red Hat OpenShift platform that is tightly integrated with open source Kubernetes container orchestration software, says Simpson.

• Supermicro, Red Hat and Solarflare Set Record on Financial Applications Benchmark

  Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions and green computing technology, along with Red Hat and Solarflare today announced a new world record for lowest latency on the well-known STAC-N1 benchmark from STAC (the Securities Technology Analysis Center) for the world’s leading financial institutions.

• PHP version 7.1.19 and 7.2.7

• Fedora Atomic Host to Become Fedora CoreOS After Red Hat's Acquisition of CoreOS

  The Fedora Project's leader Matthew Miller and Red Hat's Atomic OpenShift Engineer Dusty Mabe announced Fedora CoreOS, an upcoming operating system designed to replace Fedora Atomic Host. In January 2018, Red Hat Inc., which is currently world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced that it acquired the CoreOS Inc. company for US $250 million. Some of you many know CoreOS as the CoreOS Linux operating system that later changed its name to Container Linux by CoreOS.

• Is Red Hat Stock a Falling Machete That’s Actually Worth Catching?

• Red Hat is getting slammed after giving disappointing guidance

• BTIG Downgrades Red Hat (RHT) to Neutral

• Red Hat stock plummets after analysts discuss disappointing forecast

• Splunk, Salesforce among cloud software stocks trading lower after Red Hat earnings

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) CEO James Whitehurst on Q1 2019 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

• Tech Today: Red Hat Plunges, Cheers for Micron, Apple Loves to Fight Patents

• Software Stocks Down; Red Hat, Electronic Arts, And BofI In Focus

• Red Hat (RHT) PT Lowered to $165 at Cowen

• Analysts: What Red Hat's stock drop means

• Mid-Afternoon Market Update: Red Hat Falls On Weak Forecast; Tandem Diabetes Care Shares Climb

• Why Red Hat, Inc. Shares Crashed Today

• Red Hat Stock Triggers Sell Signal As Outlook Raises Business Concerns

• Exxon Mobil and CarMax jump; Red Hat and Tesla tumble

• Red Hat CEO on earnings-led stock drop: 'I would encourage investors to look long term'

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