News

Fedora Project Announces Fedora 30

The Fedora project has announced (https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-30/) the release of Fedora Linux 30. Fedora is a free, Red-Hat-sponsored community Linux that serves as a test bed for technologies that will eventually appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The latest release arrives with a realignment of some of the various Fedora versions. The former Cloud and Server editions are combined into the new Fedora Server. Fedora's Atomic Host container-focused variant is replaced by Fedora CoreOS. (Red Hat acquired CoreOS back in 2018.)

Fedora 30 comes with Gnome 3.32, GCC 9, Bash 5.0, and PHP 7.3. The server edition adds a new feature called Linux System Roles, which the project describes as "… a collection of roles and modules executed by Ansible to assist Linux admins in the configuration of common GNU/Linux subsystems."

The Fedora project also sponsors a number of alternative desktop editions known as Spins, and the project maintains versions for the ARM AArch 64, Power, and S390x architectures, as well as the standard versions for Intel-equivalent systems.

The Apache Software Foundation Completes Migration To GitHub

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), home to some of the biggest open source projects, has migrated its Git service to GitHub.

According to the foundation, Apache projects initially had two version control services available via ASF Infrastructure: Apache Subversion and Git. Through the years, an increasing number of projects and their communities wanted to see their source code available on GitHub. As these were read-only mirrors, the ability to use GitHub's tools around those repositories was limited.

ASF has over 200M+ lines of code which are managed by a large community comprising 730 individual ASF Members and 7,000 Apache code committers. Over its 20 year history, 1,058,321,099 lines of code have been committed across 3,022,836 code commits.

"In 2016, the Foundation started integrating GitHub's repository and tooling, with our own services. This enabled selected projects to use GitHub's excellent tools," said Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator.

Commenting on this migration, Nat Friedman, Chief Executive Officer of GitHub said, "Whether we're working with individual Open Source maintainers and contributors or some of the world's largest Open Source foundations like Apache, GitHub's mission is to be the home for all developers by supporting Open Source communities, addressing their unique needs, and helping Open Source projects thrive."

Canonical Combines its Services in a Single Package

At the Open Infrastructure Summit, Canonical announced its plans to consolidate its services for enterprise users.

Under a new offering called Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, Canonical is "aggregating Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, KVM, Ceph, and SWIFT security update and support offerings into a single package which enables businesses to evolve from traditional infrastructure to private cloud and container operations without introducing any new cost," said Stephan Fabel, Director of Product at Canonical.

For those users who do not need technical support, the Essential level of UA for Infrastructure provides a stream of kernel live patches and security fixes for system services and libraries, including OpenStack and Kubernetes, Ceph and SWIFT, together with FIPS and a range of infrastructure management and operations capabilities such as Prometheus, Grafana, Telegraf, Graylog, Filebeat, Elastic Search, MAAS and Canonical's Landscape systems management offering.

UA Infrastructure Essential covers regulatory compliance for Linux and infrastructure components, including base Docker images, without adding the cost of support.

"A surge of customers adding Ubuntu to their list of officially supported operating systems has given us the volume to simplify our infrastructure security and support offering, and lower the average cost per machine even further," said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical.