Docker is making Linux containers a lightweight alternative to hypervisors; network engineers must be prepared. Find out what you need to know about Docker networking.

Every year, the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is released. A list filled with machines containing tens of thousands of nodes and capable of cranking out enough petaflops per second to make your head spin.

And, of course, this list is absolutely dominated by machines powered by Linux.

This is awesome. But, really, we all know this. Let's dig a little deeper into these Goliath computers that will, someday, become sentient and rise up against their human creators.

One feature we are spending quite a bit of effort in around the Workstation is container technologies for the desktop. This has been on the wishlist for quite some time and luckily the pieces for it are now coming together. Thanks to strong collaboration between Red Hat and Docker we have a great baseline to start from. One of the core members of the desktop engineering team, Alex Larsson, has been leading the Docker integration effort inside Red Hat and we are now preparing to build onwards on that work, using the desktop container roadmap created by Lennary Poettering.

X.Org Server 1.16 has been delayed. However, it's not been delayed like in some of the more notorious past releases due to outstanding bugs, etc, but over letting in a late feature to this latest revision of the X11 server.

There was a lot of developer interest and pressure to let non-PCI device support get merged for the 1.16 stable release. This non-PCI support is needed for allowing the NVIDIA Tegra (open-source) graphics driver to work properly in an easy manner since it's not exposed as a PCI VGA device. Thierry Reding at NVIDIA along with support from other developers worked out adding this non-PCI graphics support on the X.Org Server side.

Firms that use Linux-based cloud servers are overspending on their cloud capacity by more than £1 billion annually for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas).

According to cloud provider ElasticHosts, the dominant payment model for IaaS is highly inefficient, and even at its best, companies are overpaying by as much as 50 per cent.

The recommendation is to update your installation to this version. The previous version 1.6.0 had great new features, first and foremost the parallel up- and download of files and a way more performant handling of the local sync journal. That required a lot of code changes. Unfortunately that also brought in some bugs which are now fixed with the 1.6.1 release.

If Ubuntu Linux is to prove truly competitive in the OpenStack cloud and Big Data worlds, it needs to run on more than x86 hardware. And that's what Canonical achieved this month, with the announcement of full support for IBM POWER8 machines on Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Server.

Right now the only operating system that supports this 36 core processors, are the ones based on Linux, though it is not certain which Linux based OS MIT researchers are using.

Facebook engineer Chris Mason is unequivocal about the primacy of Linux in Facebook’s storage infrastructure.

“If it runs on a computer, and it’s storing important data,” he said, “it’s running Linux.”

Mason, speaking at the Linux Enterprise End-User Summit on Monday in New York, joined Facebook just six months ago in order to spearhead the social network’s move to btrfs (usually pronounced “butter eff ess.”), the Linux-based file system that he created in 2008 while working at Oracle.

Also: Linux dominates supercomputers as never before

The cloud-dominated world of modern IT is the perfect breeding ground for the spread of Linux in particular and open-source software in general, according to the man responsible for guiding one of the most important open-source projects.

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat believes the wait should be over. In a phone conversation over a two-day period following Red Hat's earnings report last week, Whitehurst assured me his company has a stacked deck in that all-important new frontier known as OpenStack. With the sort of confidence you would expect for someone of Whitehurst's pedigree, he proclaimed "no one knows OpenStack better than us." Investors and analysts have no reason to doubt him.
Whitehurst believes his company has an added advantage -- not only from its long history of open source expertise, but he believes very few players actually understand what OpenStack is. He explained that some make the mistake of confusing OpenStack's relationship to the cloud and server virtualization. In other words, having a cluster of virtualized servers does not qualify as a legitimate cloud platform.
Whitehurst envisions OpenStack as the "default choice for next-generation architecture." He does not see a scenario where "Red Hat does not emerge as the leader." He described this as "his mission."

Atrust unveiled a “t66″ thin client that runs Linux on a quad-core Freescale i.MX6 SoC, and supports Citrix ICA/HDX, RDP, and VMWare Horizon View protocols.

As power consumption grows in priority, the thin client world is increasingly turning to ARM processors. Atrust Computer Corp. offers a number of ARM-based thin clients, and like its x86-based Intel Atom- and Via-based systems, they run a custom Atrust Linux OS. While the company’s previous ARM systems ran on single-core Cortex-A8-based Sitara system-on-chips from Texas Instruments, the Atrust t66 runs on a faster, quad-core, Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6. No clock rate was supplied for the t66, but the i.MX6 typically runs at 1.2GHz, and offers 2D, 3D, and video coprocessors.

While there are competing vendors, chip architectures, core counts and networking fabrics at play in the list of the worlds top 500 supercomputers, when it comes to the operating system of choice, there is no debate. Linux dominates the list with a 97 percent share, being installed on 485 systems on the top 500 list.

Providing a common gateway for web services, caching web requests or providing anonymity are some of the ways organizations use proxy servers. Commercial proxy products, especially cloud offerings, are plentiful, but we wondered if open source or free products could provide enterprise-grade proxy services.

Rackspace aims to shake up the cloud market with the launch of its new OnMetal OpenStack cloud service that enables users to directly provision physical hardware. The promise of the cloud is highly available, elastic computing power that is available on-demand. For the most part, that promise has been enabled through the use of virtualization and multi-tenancy, where many different users share the same physical hardware.

Canonical's Orange Box, the portable server cluster that the company intends to use to showcase OpenStack, MAAS, Juju and other aspects of the Ubuntu Linux-based cloud, is out. Here's what it's all about.

For starters, it's important to understand what the Orange Box is not: A revenue-generating hardware product from Canonical. The company has given no indication so far that it plans to sell these devices on a large scale—although if you truly want you can buy one, for the equivalent of around $12,900, from TranquilPC Limited, the company that has the contract for manufacturing them.

After having some interesting discussions last week around KVM and Xen performance improvements over the past years, I decided to do a little research on my own. The last complete set of benchmarks I could find were from the Phoronix Haswell tests in 2013. There were some other benchmarks from 2011 but those were hotly debated due to the Xen patches headed into kernel 3.0.

Inside the Orange Box, you'll find ten Intel micro-servers. Each is powered by Ivy Bridge i5-3427U CPUs. Every one of these mini-servers has four cores, Intel HD Graphics 4000, 16GBs of DDR3 RAM, a 128GB SSD root disk, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The first micro-server also includes a Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi Adapter, and 2TB Western Digital hard drive. These are all connected in a cluster with a D-Link Gigabit switch.

There I was, 4 years ago (this past January) at CampKDE in San Diego, giving a talk on data privacy, warning the audience about the risks to their privacy from cloud vendors – in particular, Dropbox. So, build it yourself they said. Sure, I’ve built things in the past, so sure, I’ll do it. And there is where I started my odyssey, first, to protect myself, my friends and my colleagues from the snooping of governments, and other bad guys, and later – as I saw the worldwide interest grow – to build a real and successful project.

I had to decide a few things before I got started of course, including what it is I wanted ownCloud to do, what development platform to use, how I wanted to structure ownCloud, and of course, to name it ownCloud.

OnMetal Cloud Servers are built with Open Compute Project-specified hardware and run OpenStack.