SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Discover archetypes

IBM wants to help developers identify and classify archietypes in data with the release of a new code pattern.

Archetypes are formally defined as a pattern, or a model, of which all things of the same type are copied. According to the company, its Watson natural language understanding helps users discover archetypes in their text corpus.

“When we read through a set of these records, our mind naturally groups the records into some collection of archetypes. For example, we may sort a song collection into easy listening, classical, rock, etc. This manual process is practical for a small number of records (e.g., a few dozen). Large systems can have millions of records, so we need an automated way to process them,” IBM wrote in a blog post.

Orange Egypt Using Red Hat for Horizontal Cloud Rollout

Red Hat has been a recognizable name in the open-source community for decades. Now, Orange Egypt is utilizing the open-source provider as a basis for its horizontal cloud development. The telecommunications provider opted for the open-source solution based on reliability and cost-effectiveness. Red Hat states that Orange Egypt is the first Orange affiliate to offer management of all of its customer traffic using a software-based platform covering several sites within the geographic area. The company has invested in Red Hat technologies and already utilizes the Red Hat OpenStack Platform alongside Red Hat Ceph Storage.

Everything OK down there in the Oracle trench? Good. Big Red has a cloud-based data science platform for you

After securing a lofty position in enterprise applications and databases, Oracle has fixed its eyes on data science. And though analysts have expressed doubt about whether Big Red is producing technologies new to the field, its shiny Cloud Data Science Platform might appeal to those already heavily invested in Oracle's software.

Big Red's pitch is that it will bring cohesion to efforts in data science, allowing practitioners to "collaboratively build, train, manage and deploy machine learning models".

Via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science service, data scientists will, the vendor said, be able to automate algorithm selection and tuning, automate predictive feature selection, evaluate models and make machine-learning models explainable to the outside world.

Stuffed Ep 34 – How open-source is solving the world’s biggest problems

Open-source software has evolved to be integrated into every part of our lives. Even if we don’t necessarily know it. Proprietary software will likely become almost redundant as we move into cloud-accessible open-source options. Toby Shapshak speaks to Red Hat’s Lee Miles to delve into more accessible software.

“When development is distributed, the risk of failure goes down.” Red Hat provides open-source solutions and software options to businesses and individuals. It focuses on high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies — but the portfolio is growing as the software industry ‘opens’ up. The top areas where open-source software is being applied within the enterprise are security, cloud, database, and big data and analytics. Enterprises that use this software like to leverage open source for specific industry needs, like IT infrastructure modernisation, application development, and DevOps.

Use of proprietary software is 'plummeting', finds Red Hat report

Red Hat's annual research report The State of Enterprise Open Source has found a big rise in the use of enterprise open-source software, and, to a lesser extent, community-based open-source solutions...

Report: The benefits of open-source software go beyond cost

Open-source adoption is not slowing down within enterprises. A recent report found 95% of enterprises are taking open source seriously, with 75% of them reporting that open-source software is extremely important to their IT strategies. That number is up from 69% last year.

The 2020 State of Enterprise Open Source by Red Hat is based off of 950 interviews conducted with IT leaders worldwide.

“For our second annual report, we wanted to know more. With 95% of IT leaders agreeing that enterprise open source is important to their enterprise infrastructure software strategy, it’s safe to say we don’t need to ask ‘if’ anymore. We need to ask ‘why’ and ‘how,’” Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, wrote in the report.

OKD4 Update and Roadmap with Christian Glombek

In case you were wondering what’s going on with OKD, Red Hat’s Christian Glombek delivered an update on the project, its current state and its roadmap. Here’s the full talk in video form.

PipeWire 0.3 Released With Redesigned Scheduling Code To Offer JACK2-Like Performance

PipeWire is the Red Hat engineered project aiming to offer better audio/video stream handling on Linux that integrates well with Flatpak and can optimally handle use-cases currently covered by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK. This week marked the release of PipeWire 0.3 as another big step forward for the effort.

PipeWire 0.3 comes with redesigned scheduling mechanisms that should now offer its JACK compatibility layer performance that is comparable to JACK2.

Network Automation: Why organizations shouldn’t wait to get started

For many enterprises, we don’t need to sing the praises of IT automation - they already get it. They understand the value of automation, have invested in a platform and strategy, and have seen first-hand the benefits IT automation can deliver. However, unlike IT automation, according to a new report from Forrester Research 1, network automation is still new territory for many organizations.

The report, "Jump-Start Your Network Automation," found that 56% of global infrastructure technology decision makers have implemented/are implementing or are expanding/upgrading their implementation of automation software, while another 19% plan to implement it over the next 12 months. But those same organizations that are embracing IT automation haven’t necessarily been able to take that same initiative when it comes to automating their networks.

Even if they know it will be beneficial to them, the report found that organizations often struggle with even the most basic questions around automating their networks.

Using a story’s theme to inform the filmmaking: Farming for the Future

The future of farming belongs to us all. At least that’s the message I got from researching Red Hat’s most recent Open Source Stories documentary, Farming for the Future. As a self-proclaimed city boy, I was intrigued by my assignment as director of the short documentary, but also felt like the subject matter was worlds away. If it did, in fact, belong to all of us how would we convey this to a general audience? How could we use the film’s theme to inform how we might approach the filmmaking to enhance the storytelling?

Raptor Rolls Out New OpenBMC Firmware With Featureful Web GUI For System Management

While web-based GUIs for system management on server platforms with BMCs is far from anything new, Raptor Computing Systems with their libre POWER9 systems does now have a full-functioning web-based solution for their OpenBMC-powered systems and still being fully open-source.

As part of Raptor Computing Systems' POWER9 desktops and servers being fully open-source down to the firmware/microcode and board designs, Raptor has used OpenBMC for the baseboard management controllers but has lacked a full-featured web-based system management solution on the likes of the Talos II and Blackbird systems up until now.

Introduction to open data sets and the importance of metadata

More data is becoming freely available through initiatives such as institutions and research publications requiring that data sets be freely available along with the publications that refer to them. For example, Nature magazine instituted a policy for authors to declare how the data behind their published research can be accessed by interested readers.

To make it easier for tools to find out what’s in a data set, authors, researchers, and suppliers of data sets are being encouraged to add metadata to their data sets. There are various forms for metadata that data sets use. For example, the US Government data.gov site uses the standard DCAT-US Schema v1.1 whereas the Google Dataset Search tool relies mostly on schema.org tagging. However, many data sets have no metadata at all. That’s why you won’t find all open data sets through search, and you need to go to known portals and explore if portals exist in the region, city, or topic of your interest. If you are deeply curious about metadata, you can see the alignment between DCAT and schema.org in the DCAT specification dated February 2020. The data sets themselves come in various forms for download, such as CSV, JSON, GeoJSON, and .zip. Sometimes data sets can be accessed through APIs.

Another way that data sets are becoming available is through government initiatives to make data available. In the US, data.gov has more than 250,000 data sets available for developers to use. A similar initiative in India, data.gov.in, has more than 350,000 resources available.

Companies like IBM sometimes provide access to data, like weather data, or give tips on how to process freely available data. For example, an introduction to NOAA weather data for JFK Airport is used to train the open source Model Asset eXchange Weather Forecaster (you can see the model artifacts on GitHub).

When developing a prototype or training a model during a hackathon, it’s great to have access to relevant data to make your solution more convincing. There are many public data sets available to get you started. I’ll go over some of the ways to find them and provide access considerations. Note that some of the data sets might require some pre-processing before they can be used, for example, to handle missing data, but for a hackathon, they are often good enough.

Red Hat Helps Omnitracs Redefine Logistics And Transportation Software

Fleet management technology provider Omnitracs, LLC, has delivered its Omnitracs One platform on the foundation of Red Hat OpenShift.

Using the enterprise Kubernetes platform along with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Omnitracs One is a cloud-native offering and provides an enhanced user experience with a clear path towards future innovations. With Red Hat’s guidance, Omnitracs said it was able to embrace a shift from on-premises development technologies to cloud-native services, improving overall operations and creating a more collaborative development process culture.

Peter Hutterer: A tale of missing touches

libinput 1.15.1 had a new feature: it matched the expected touch count with the one actually seen as opposed to the one advertised by the kernel. That is good news for ALPS devices whose kernel driver lies about their capabilities because these days who doesn't. However, in some cases that feature had the side-effect of reducing the touch count to zero - meaning libinput would ignore any touch. This caused a slight UX degradation.

After a bit of debugging and/or cursing, the issue was identified as a libevdev issue, specifically - the way libevdev replays events after a SYN_DROPPED event. And after several days of fixing things, adding stuff to the CI and adding meson support for libevdev so the CI can actually run a few useful things, it's time for a blog post to brain-dump and possibly entertain the occasional reader such as you are. Congratulations, I guess.

The Linux kernel's evdev protocol is a serial protocol where all events have a type, a code and a value. Events are grouped by EV_SYN.SYN_REPORT events, so the event type is EV_SYN (0), the event code is SYN_REPORT (also 0). The value is usually (but not always), you guessed it, zero. A SYN_REPORT signals that the current event sequence (also called a "frame") is to be interpreted as one hardware event [0].

What is backporting, and how does it apply to RHEL and other Red Hat products?

Version numbers are important, but aren't always what they seem at first glance. Red Hat, for example, often backports updates to the software we ship in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to maintain the version that we shipped.

This is a post to follow to Jean-Sébastien Tougne’s post on finding the latest available kernel. Jean-Sébastien’s article was responding to a question on the Red Hat Learning Community, where the poster was seeking the latest version of the kernel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That prompted me to write an article that went deeper into the nuance and strategy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team employs for this to be magically delicious for administrators.

The edge is open: Why scale-out computing doesn’t exist without open hybrid cloud

The past year has seen the rise of applications that push enterprise IT to the (literal) edge, from using autonomous vehicles guided by artificial intelligence (AI) to vast sensor networks that rely on 5G for instant connectivity and emergency reaction times. Whether it's the Internet-of-Things (IoT), fog computing or edge computing, the intent is to bring computing resources like processing power and storage closer to the end user or data source to improve the ability to scale, responsiveness and the overall service experience.

We can look at the edge as the newest IT footprint, becoming an extension of the data center just like bare-metal, virtual environments, private cloud and public cloud. In a sense, edge computing is a summation of the other four footprints, blending pieces from each to create infrastructure aimed at tackling specific customer demands that traditional IT models cannot address.

Enterprise open source software is growing within innovative companies

Red Hat has been at the forefront of the global open source discussion, fighting for software freedom in the U.S Supreme Court, and offering free tech products for cloud infrastructure, automation, AI, and much more. After conducting research and interviewing IT leaders from around the world, Red Hat released a report examining the state of enterprise open source in 2020.

950 IT leaders, unaware that Red Hat was the research sponsor, were surveyed about their practices and opinions on enterprise open source software.

Multicluster Management and GitOps Workshop

There’s so much more to come. In the next few weeks, we’ll dive deeper into customer ideas and finish the design thinking process by producing designs, prototyping them, and finally testing their validity.

We also want you to join us. To help influence the future of OpenShift, sign up to be notified about research participation opportunities or provide feedback on your experience by filling out this brief survey. If you’d like to attend the next workshop, keep an eye on the OpenShift Commons calendar for upcoming events. Feel free to reach out by email if you have any questions.

GNU Linux Distributions – about Fedora -> CentOS -> RedHat

The focus of the Governing Board is to assist and guide in the progress and development of the various SIGs, as well as to lead and promote CentOS.

The CentOS Governing Board is the governing body responsible for the overall oversight of the CentOS Project and SIGs, the creation of new SIGs, and the election (and re-election) of new board members. The Board also has the responsibility to ensure the goals, brands, and marks of the CentOS Project and community are protected. The Board serves as the final authority within the CentOS Project.

Stories from the amazing world of release-monitoring.org #9

I woke up to the cold morning in my tower. The sun shone brightly on the sky, but the stone of the tower was cold as it takes some time to make it warm. Everything was already prepared for today’s journey. I sat at my table and started going through some reports from workers. I still had some time til the traveler arrived. So I started reading the reports …

Fedora 31 : The Fyne UI toolkit for Go programming language.

ABRT team: New releases

Just prior to branching of Fedora 32, we released new versions of abrt, gnome‑abrt, abrt‑java‑connector, libreport, satyr and retrace‑server.