In this article, we'll be talking about some exciting news related to Red Hat certification. They're going remote and the expiration dates have been extended. Ubuntu has released the first point release for 20.04. This will be version 20.04.1. Before we dive into those topics, let's take a look at this month noteworthy news. Get your man pages ready, and let's jump right in.
First up this month, Jenkins graduates from the Continuous Delivery Foundation. The Continuous Delivery Foundation, one of the Linux foundation projects announced that Jenkins is one of the first projects to graduate. To explain what this means, I'll quote from the CD foundation
To move from the maturity level of incubation to graduation. A project needs to demonstrate growing adoption, open governance process, feature maturity, and a strong commitment to community sustainability and inclusivity.
Jenkins, which is an automation engine that allows for continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows and software development. I am a huge fan and it's great to hear that it's reached this milestone, congratulations.
LibreOffice 7 has been released. This release sees the introduction of a whole new look, thanks to the skia engine. Thank you, AMD. As well as GPU acceleration, utilizing Vulkans.
Microsoft has ported one of its popular sysinternals tools, Procmon over to Linux. This means that if you have to manage a mixed stable of operating systems or you're using Linux via the Windows subsystem for Linux. You can now lean on one tool as a resource. Microsoft has released Procmon and the MIT license and the source code, build and contribution instructions are listed on GitHub.
And in other Microsoft being open news. Microsoft has joined the Blender Development Fund. Currently, some of the projects that are going to be getting a boost are related to Blender, being used for 3D Artificial Intelligence and machine learning modeling. Since the Blender foundation is open source, these projects will find their way to a project near you.
Red Hat exams go remote and certification expiration has been extended. Red Hat has come up with a different approach to the remote exam process. They will provide the entire operating system to the candidate. This includes hardware and network checks that are necessary for exam delivery. Unlike other remote exam environments that take place in a browser. Red Hat states that when booted from a typical USB thumb drive or other external storage device, this operating system runs entirely in RAM. It leaves whatever's installed on the untouched and unchanged. Since the operating system that the exam is using curated by Red Hat. This means they can control access to search engines and instant messaging programs to ensure that there are no shenanigans taking place during the exam. This is a big change to the normal online proctoring and Red Hat says they're making this change to ensure that they're maintaining the highest levels of integrity and fairness when the exams are being taken remotely.
In addition to this new method of administering the exams, Red Hat has also changed some of the deadlines that it has with regards to exam expiration date. In a recent announcement about their COVID-19 response. Red Hat outlined the changes for current certification holders, as well as exam candidate. There are going to be more flexible about canceling exam. This is taking into consideration social distancing and tighter schedules at in-person testings. Along the same line, if you're needing to take an exam to maintain your certified status or to continue along a certification track, Red Hat has extended the exam window by three months. If you're a current holder of a Red Hat certification, they've also extended your expiration dates for your certification. They've indicated that effective persons have been notified. If your certification expires the end of this year, and you've not been notified of the extension, you might want to follow up on that and stay tuned for more information are there might be future updates.
Ubuntu releases the first point release for 20.04 Focal Fossa. Big improvements in stability and installation. This release will allow users of 18.04 to see and apply the update in their console. If you're thinking about installing the 20.04 LTS, make sure that you're using the latest installation images since they will have the updates baked in, and there will be less to do post installation. A lot of the work that's been done in this release is related to packages and stability. There have also been extensive updates done to the installer. So now it should be a smoother process. This release also sees tons of updates, the hardware compatibility, and kernel support. Other items that I think are awesome in this latest release or updates to the desktop, as well as server and cloud related fixes. I'm a huge fan of Ubuntu, and I've really been excited to get in on the new known goodness that's in 2004. And now with all the new updates and bug fixes, I'm looking forward to updating my system.
That's all for this month.
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