Compact Whiskey Lake embedded PC supports Linux

Portwell’s fanless, Linux-friendly “WEBS-21G0” embedded PC has a 15W TDP 8th Gen Core CPU and offers dual GbE, dual displays, triple USB, dual M.2, and ruggedization features. American Portwell has announced a rugged, 8th Gen Whiskey Lake based embedded computer based on its NANO-6051 Nano-ITX board. The WEBS-21G0 system supports Ubuntu, Yocto, Wind River, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise running on Core i5 or i3 chips. Based on the NANO-6051 support list, this would suggest Intel’s quad-core Core i5-8365UE (1.6GHz/4.1GHz) and dual-core, 2.2GHz/3.9GHz Core i3-8145UE, both with 15W TDP.

Linux GUI Apps Comes to Windows 10 via WSL [Announcement]

Microsoft announced and provided information about running Linux GUI Apps in Windows 10 via WSL. Here are the details.

today's leftovers

• HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC – Multimedia – Week 3

  This is a weekly blog looking at the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC running Linux. For this week’s blog, we’ve tested video and audio on the HP machine using the Manjaro rolling distro. This machine was made available by Bargain Hardware. Bargain Hardware retails refurbished servers, workstations, PCs, and laptops to consumers and businesses worldwide. All systems are completely customisable on their website along with a vast offering of clean-pulled, tested components and enterprise replacement parts. They supply machines with a choice of Linux distros: Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.

• At 140 Million Miles Away From Home Open Source Proved Itself

  NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet and it runs Linux. At 3:34 am on April 19, the NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter took off from the surface of Mars, rose to an altitude of 10 feet for 30 seconds and then safely landed back down. The event marked the first time in the mankind’s history that an aircraft achieved a “powered, controlled flight” on another planet. NASA confirmed at 3:46 am the flight succeeded after receiving data from the helicopter via the Perseverance Mars rover. This engineering feat was done with Linux, open-source software, and a NASA-built program based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) open-source F prime framework.

• Dgraph GraphQL database users detail graph use cases

  Users of Dgraph Labs' graph database technology as varied as a nonprofit Christian missionary platform and a financial data services firm are employing graph systems in a variety of applications they say are not achievable with traditional databases. Dgraph Labs is one of a number of vendors that offer a graph database, including Neo4j, TigerGraph and Amazon with its Neptune platform. The Dgraph graph database has its base in an open source project. The vendor, based in Palo Alto, Calif., also provides the Dgraph Cloud service, a managed database as a service (DBaaS).

• Facebook's massive data leak starts to have important knock-on effects – and potentially serious ones for Ireland

  Instead, it seems to think that by constantly repeating the word “privacy” like a mantra, people will believe that it is doing enough to protect sensitive personal data. For example, last week, it issued a press release entitled “ How We Combat Scraping“. It ended with a section “What You Can Do to Help Keep Your Data Safe”, which used the word “privacy” six times, and basically implied that the data breach was somehow users’ fault, and that they really ought to be more careful in future.

IBM and Red Hat

• Languages and DevOps: Mainframe

  In true DevOps fashion, I nearly forgot to cover the mainframe after saying it warranted its own blog! There is a lot going on right now in the mainframe space, so the question of mainframe language choices has several different answers. We’ve got Linux running on the mainframe, we’ve got cross-compiled open source capable of running on the mainframe natively, we’ve got mainframe-based containers and we even have traditional mainframe tools being ported to other platforms (hello, COBOL on Linux!) so that development can happen on smaller platforms but target the mainframe. Taken in the order they came available, we have traditional mainframe development, in languages like COBOL and RPG, right on the mainframe in standard LPARs. This has gotten easier over the years, but is still basically the same development environment that was used in the 1980s, with prettier UIs.

• Paving the path to organizational goals: Consider the bridge not built

  Thomas Sowell opines in Basic Economics that “[…] the real cost of anything is still its value in alternative uses. The real cost of building a bridge is whatever else could have been built with that same labor and material. The cost of watching a television sitcom or soap opera is the value of the other things that could have been done with that same time.” Organizations make this determination every time they choose to work on one ticket, project, or objective and key result (OKR) over another. Making this value judgment explicit is critical to a well-functioning organization. To do this effectively, organizations must understand and communicate priorities, and individuals must be incentivized to work towards those priorities.

• Optimize your RHEL infrastructure: 5 performance areas to focus on

  Would you rather wait for something to become a problem, or do some performance tweaking and optimization to avoid downtime or performance headaches altogether? The answer to that is easy, but deciding what to optimize or troubleshoot isn't always obvious. In this post we'll cover some common areas where you can use Red Hat Insights and its Advisor service to solve problems before they start.