NEWS

Ubuntu 16.10 Released

Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, has released the latest version of their open source operating system, Ubuntu 16.10.

According to Canonical, Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" comes with "hybrid cloud operations, bare-metal cloud performance, and the ability to lift-and-shift 80% of Linux VMs to machine containers." Also included in the latest release are "Kubernetes for process-container coordination, full container support in OpenStack, and telco-grade networking latency enhancements."

Ubuntu 16.10 includes Juju 2.0 for managing hybrid cloud operations and features MaaS (Metal as a Service) 2.0, which allows a physical data center to "feel like a cloud," with on-demand availability of machines with custom images.

On the consumer front, Ubuntu 16.10 gives a preview of Unity 8 that is geared toward mobile devices and offers device convergence. Canonical said in a press release that the Unity 8 developer preview includes apps that scale from phone to desktop and from mouse to touchscreen, setting a precedent for the next wave of Linux devices.

Ubuntu 16.10 is available for free download: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/.

Red Hat Releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, the latest version of their flagship operating system. The new release features improvements across the board, from performance to security.

Much of the focus is on the data center networking experience, with new support for lightweight tunnels that enable more secure, scalable, and efficient guest instances. Additionally, enhancements to the bulk packet memory allocator improve performance for both 40GB and 100GB networking interfaces.

High-transaction applications like databases, event-processing systems, and virtual machines need a high input/output (IO) rate and low latency. RHEL 7.3 improves performance by adding support for high speed, low latency non-volatile memory devices. In addition, version 7.3 makes performance-sensitive Parallel NFS (pNFS) clusters easier to manage with support for the Block SCSI and Flex Files layout format.

RHEL 7.3 also introduces new capabilities around Linux containers and the Internet of Things (IoT). Two key features aimed at IoT include support for communication with Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) and kernel support for the Controller Area Network bus (CANbus) protocol used in automobiles and high-end industrial controllers.

RHEL 7.3 offers better support for Linux containers through enhanced management tools and an updated container runtime (docker engine). RHEL 7.3 also comes with new container signing capability as a Technology Preview.

Ubuntu Core 16 Released

Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, has released Ubuntu Core 16. Ubuntu Core is Canonical's minimal edition for embedded devices, Internet of Things, and cloud deployments. The latest version comes with Update Control, which allows software publishers and manufacturers to validate updates across the ecosystem before they are applied. The greatest feature of Ubuntu Core is that its updates are transactional, which means that failures are automatically rolled back so there are no bricked or compromised devices.

Canonical claims the new Ubuntu Core delivers security, management, operations, and upgradability in a compact, developer-friendly platform, thanks to its use of Snap packages. Snaps are securely confined, digitally signed, read-only, tamper-proof application images.

In the month of October, millions of IoT devices were used to launch a massive wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the managed DNS service Dyn. The attack brought down a big chunk of the Internet in the United States. Services for Amazon, Twitter, and other major sites were down for many users.

Experts believe that the attack could have been avoided if these IoT devices were running operating systems that focus on security of IoT devices through regular and secure updates without user intervention.

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