I told you I love new projects, right? Well, today I have a brand-new distro that I’d like to introduce you to, called Super Container OS, and targeted at developers who want to run containerized apps.

The Super Container OS developer Harshad Joshi pinged me earlier on Twitter earlier to check out his new distro, which he says it’s a live and installable Linux OS that comes pre-loaded with a container engine powered by Docker and systemd-nspawn.

Based on the Bufferstack.IO computing platform, Super Container OS wants to be the ideal tool for those who want to create, deploy and distribute apps that can run on IIoT Gateways, servers, or even virtual machines.

Now that Container Linux from CoreOS is no more, I guess we need more alternatives. Super Container OS is based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series and aims to make deploying, running and managing containerized applications easier by using OS level virtualization.

Also: Sylvain Beucler: Debian LTS and ELTS - July 2020

• Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities July 2020

  This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

• Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in July 2020

  This was my 17th month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/

  Well, this month I didn’t do a lot of Debian stuff, like I usually do, however, I did a lot of things related to Debian (indirectly via GSoC)!

• DebConf3

  This tshirt is 17 years old and from DebConf3. I should probably wash it at 60 celcius for once...

  DebConf3 was my first DebConf and took place in Oslo, Norway, in 2003. I was very happy to be invited, like any Debian contributor at that time, and that Debian would provide food and accomodation for everyone. Accomodation was sleeping on the floor in some classrooms of an empty school and I remember having tasted grasshoppers provided by a friendly Gunnar Wolf there, standing in line on the first day with the SSH maintainer (OMG!1 (and it wasn't Colin back then!)) and meeting the one Debian person I had actually worked with before: Thomas Lange or MrFAI. In Oslo I also was exposed to Skolelinux / Debian Edu for the first time, saw a certain presentation from the FTP masters and also noticed some people recording the talks, though as I learned later these videos were never released to the public. And there was this fiveteen year old called Toresbe, who powered on the PDP's which were double his age. And then actually made use of them. And and and.

• Sparky news 2020/07

  The 7th monthly report of 2020 of the Sparky project:

  • Linux kernel updated up to version 5.7.11 & 5.8-rc7
  • added new desktop: NsCDE
  • added to repo: Shutter-Encoder, Lite Editor, Sparky APTus AppCenter
  • Sparky 5.12 Nibiru of the stable line released
  • riot-desktop package changed its name to element-desktop

• Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, July 2020

  I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked 5 hours this month and returned the remainder to the pool.

  Now that Debian 9 'stretch' has entered LTS, the stretch-backports suite will be closed and no longer updated. However, some stretch users rely on the newer kernel version provided there. I prepared to add Linux 4.19 to the stretch-security suite, alongside the standard package of Linux 4.9. I also prepared to update the firmware-nonfree package so that firmware needed by drivers in Linux 4.19 will also be available in stretch's non-free section. Both these updates will be based on the packages in stretch-backports, but needed some changes to avoid conflicts or regressions for users that continue using Linux 4.9 or older non-Debian kernel versions. I will upload these after the Debian 10 'buster' point release.

       

• Chris Lamb: Free software activities in July 2020

  As part of being on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative and Software in the Public Interest I attended their respective monthly meetings and participated in various licensing and other discussions occurring on the internet, as well as the usual internal discussions regarding logistics and policy etc. This month, it was SPI's Annual General Meeting and the OSI has been running a number of remote strategy sessions for the board.

       

• Jonathan Carter: Free Software Activities for 2020-07

  Here are my uploads for the month of July, which is just a part of my free software activities, I’ll try to catch up on the rest in upcoming posts. I haven’t indulged in online conferences much over the last few months, but this month I attended the virtual editions of Guadec 2020 and HOPE 2020. HOPE isn’t something I knew about before and I enjoyed it a lot, you can find their videos on archive.org.

       

• Chris Lamb: Pop culture matters

  Many people labour under the assumption that pop culture is trivial and useless while only 'high' art can grant us genuine and eternal knowledge about the world. Given that we have a finite time on this planet, we are all permitted to enjoy pop culture up to a certain point, but we should always minimise our interaction with it, and consume more moral and intellectual instruction wherever possible.

  Or so the theory goes. What these people do not realise is that pop culture can often provide more information about the world, humanity in general and — what is even more important — ourselves.

  This is not quite the debate around whether high art is artistically better, simply that pop culture can be equally informative. Jeremy Bentham argued in the 1820s that "prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry", that it didn't matter where our pleasures come from. (John Stuart Mill, Bentham's intellectual rival, disagreed.) This fundamental question of philosophical utilitarianism will not be resolved here.

  [...]

  In summary, we can simultaneously say that pop culture is not worthy of our time relative to other pursuits while consuming however much of it we want, but deliberately dismissing pop culture doesn't mean that a lot of other people are not interacting with it and is therefore undeserving of any inquiry. And if that doesn't convince you, just like the once-unavoidable millennial pink, simply sticking our collective heads in the sand will not mean that wider societal-level ugliness is going to disappear anytime soon.

• Jonathan Carter: Free Software Activities for 2020-06

  Hmm, this is the latest I’ve posted my monthly updates yet (nearly by a month!). June was both crazy on the incoming side, and at the same time I just wasn’t that productive (at least since then I caught up a lot). In theory, lockdown means that I spend less time in traffic, in shops or with friends and have more time to do stuff, in practice I go to bed later and later and waste more time watching tv shows and playing mobile games. A cycle that I have at least broken free from since June.

• Steve Kemp: I'm a bit of a git (hacker?)

  Sometimes I enjoy reading the source code to projects I like, use, or am about to install for the first time. This was something I used to do on a very regular basis, looking for security issues to report. Nowadays I don't have so much free time, but I still like to inspect the source code to new applications I install, and every now and again I'll find the time to look at the source to random projects.

  Reading code is good. Reading code is educational.

  One application I've looked at multiple times is redis, which is a great example of clean and well-written code. That said when reading the redis codebase I couldn't help noticing that there were a reasonably large number of typos/spelling mistakes in the comments...