Linux This Month - BottleRocket is GA, GNOME 3.38 is out, and go for a drive with Super Tux Kart

Linux This Month - BottleRocket is GA, GNOME 3.38 is out, and go for a drive with Super Tux Kart
6 min read
01 October 2020

Google's android 11 has released on September 8th, 2020, and now offers additional benefits to enterprise clients. The introduction of asset management and personal use policies means that IT teams will be able to ensure devices are in compliance with corporate policy while still being able to maintain employees privacy. September's 2020 security patches are out. Google has published the September 2020 security bulletin. It contains details on security vulnerabilities that have been discovered on the Android open-source framework, the Linux kernel, and chips from vendors. Now as a Linux and security enthusiast, I want to emphasize the importance of staying up-to-date with your device's security patches. So if you're a Google Pixel owner, go check out the September's release. And select Samsung devices have also been offered updates. Others will come based on vendor schedule.

Looking to have a little fun this month. We'll Tux, our beloved Linux penguin is getting his debut in a free and open-source game Super Tux Kart. Linux This Month - BottleRocket is GA, GNOME 3.38 is out, and go for a drive with Super Tux KartSuper Tux Kart is a 3D cart racing game. It's based on the 2000's Tux cart game and includes a variety of characters, tracks, and different modes of play, it even has team chat. It's available free on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and mobile OS. With game creation of racing servers available on iOS devices.

Zorin OS 15.3 is here.Linux This Month - BottleRocket is GA, GNOME 3.38 is out, and go for a drive with Super Tux Kart Zorin OS 15.3 has been released and is based on a Ubuntus 18.04.5 LTS release. Allthough Zorin was first released in July 2019. It's already reported over 1.7 million downloads with a majority of these downloads from Windows and Mac users. The release comes with a new Linux kernel and it should give users better system performance, greater security and improved hardware compatibility. Like compatibility with Intel's recently announced 11th generation CPUs and upcoming AMD processors.

GNOME 3.38 is here. Linux This Month - BottleRocket is GA, GNOME 3.38 is out, and go for a drive with Super Tux KartThe latest release of GNOME 3, 3.38 has been code named Orbis, and it was released on September 16th. The release includes six months of updates, which may not seem like a lot until you realize it incorporates 27,896 changes made by approximately 901 contributors. Several core utilities have been updated giving the overall look of the desktop environment, an elegant appearance. Some notable updates are improved screen recording, better multi-monitor support and my favorite virtualization software, Boxes now allows editing a virtual machines libvirt XML. This enables you to change advanced settings and to be able to configure an environment as you want.

Red Hat and IBM have announced a hybrid cloud software marketplace. Red hat has partnered with parent company IBM to announce the general availability release of their new hybrid software marketplace. As we continue to see the growth of applications being built on the cloud, there are more and more choices leading to more and more layers of complexity. Developers are currently expected to build within a CI/CD DevOps environment, and they have to have software that has been pre-approved for purchase. These purchases also have to have hardware and software that have been approved for security and compliance. And really they have to ensure that applications are enterprise grade, they're scalable, and they're cloud native. Red Had and IBM are looking to help tackle this while still giving companies and developers  the flexibility in application choice and the choice to which cloud provider we will deploy. Marketplace will make it easier for developers and companies to have a one stop shop, to buy and deploy container based software. Software offerings, such as Sysdig and MongoDB are all provided by independent vendors, and they're certified OpenShift offerings, which are built on Kubernetes Operating Framework, allowing them to run just like if they were cloud services. Enabling the ability to be able to do automated upgrades, backups, fail over and recovery. Marketplace also offers a personalized marketplace experience through Red Hat Marketplace Select, at an additional cost. This allows companies to have greater control to pre-approve software that meets their current policies and governance.

In March, Amazon announced the developer preview release of BottleRocket OS, its very own open-source Linux distribution. Built specifically to run containers on virtual machines or bare metal. Basically it's a minimalistic Linux distribution and it contains only the software needed to run containers and it uses the open-source standard components. That was March, and now it's September so BottleRocket has been made generally available making it the default operating system for Amazon EKS and ECS. With BottleRocket as the default OS for EKS and ECS, it will be covered under the AWS support plan and be able to take advantages of certified BottleRocket partners all through the APN partner network.  I understand that there are other container OS' available. However, bottle rocket updates are their main differentiator with updates being received through one single step updates instead of the traditional Linux package by package updates. BottleRocket also offers the ability to configure changes manually through an API call. This allows easy automation using container orchestration. It makes it easy to automate through Amazon Elastic Container Services or Amazon Elastic Service. There are heaps of other benefits, but I can't go through them all. I highly recommend that you give BottleRocket a try. It's now GA so no cost on the Amazon machine images within EC2, or you can force BottleRockets project on GitHub and give it a whirl within your own environment.

That's it for this month.

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Alex 9.8K
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