Hello everyone. I'm Ross Brunson, a training architect here at A Cloud Guru,
and I'm a long-time Linux professional. This month,
we'll be racing around looking at all the updates and other interesting things
that have happened in this past month,
in the wonderful and often wacky world of Linux and open source,
including a bunch of enterprise Linux updates.
But just before we jump into the highlights,
why don't you let us know what you think in our quick YouTube survey.
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This month, we've got lots of software updates and new releases.
The developers have been really busy and there's so much to test out and
discover. First up is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 has been released,
and the focus is now on the edge.
Red hat released RHEL 8.4 with a heavy focus on the edge of computing,
a very important space for a Linux vendor who wants to empower its enterprise
users to help them capture, manage and secure those IOT,
or internet of things,
devices that are busy producing upwards of a billion terabytes of useful and
critical data already.
RHEL 8.4's improvements also include an upgrade to Podman,
which is the container management engine that is already eating away at Docker
market share and shows no sign of slowing down,
but also includes expanded Docker support.
So all you have to do is use Docker containers in Podman until you're ready to
switch over. Opensuse is now binary compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise.
The competitive world of enterprise Linux distributions just got a little more
interesting with the news that SUSE has now offered it's prebuilt binaries from
the SUSE Linux enterprise distribution in addition to the sources for that code
to the open SUSE Leap platform.
The intention is to supercharge the development process by making many hundreds
of rigorously tested binary packages available directly to the developers of the
Leap distribution.
These actions will have the effect of bringing up the levels of compatibility
and making the code streams more closely related and easier to work with.
And finally, Fedora 32 reaches end of life, long lived Fedora 34.
Released just about a year ago,
Fedora 32 brought a lot of interesting enhancements and features to the world of
curious distribution testers.
But now it's 13 months later and it's time to say so long.
There will be no more support for that version of Fedora.
Those who need to upgrade can easily do so to the in-service Fedora 33
or the just released Fedora 34, which will be supported until May of 2022.
So long Fedora 32, and thanks for all the uptime.
Now it's time to hit our top stories.
And for those of you who have been having a hard time keeping all those many
passwords and multiple authentication methods straight,
we'll make your lives better with our first item.
1Password finally runs on Linux natively.
The wait for a full featured desktop application version of 1Password is finally
over. While it's long been possible to run password in a browser instance,
and do most of the tasks you'd want from the service,
the presence of the new desktop application simultaneously shows the
developer's commitment to the Linux platform,
but also how important secure password management is to enterprises.
The new desktop application is just the most visible feature of the new release.
The 1Password development team really did themselves proud by expanding the
integration into just about every area of Linux you can think of.
Including full support for not just KDE and GNOME,
but your choice of Window manager.
They have full support for the GNOME key ring and KDE wallet,
kernel key ring and both Dbus and command line API support.
If your two factor authentication works with Linux now,
they state 1Password for Linux will support it too.
And if all that weren't enough,
there is also an incredibly useful command line tool support to help you with
password management in your scripts, your programs and your other console uses.
Bravo to the 1Password team for an incredible amount of development effort,
and for making Linux even more compatible with regular enterprise password
management scenarios.
We told you it was super busy in the enterprise Linux market.
SUSE has pushed out its Service Pack 3 of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15,
and it's got a lot of great features.
Some especially designed to help CentOS refugees feel more at home with a move
to SUSE. First on the list is Podman and container support,
bringing it up to the same market as RHEL version 8.
Also newly added is migration support for those running the free version of
OpenSUSE to jump to SUSE Linux Enterprise.
It's now super easy to make the move. Additionally,
the previously separate software development kit is now integrated and more
support is available through the development tools module. Finally,
the long time satellite server competitor SMT,
or subscription management tool, is now replaced by the RMT,
or the repository mirroring tool,
making it that much easier to manage your software, your updates,
your licensing, and much more.
Ever thought of switching to Linux?
There's 17 examples of people who did and how it worked. Let's face it,
we have all heard those anecdotal stories of the company, the city government,
or even the country that threw out Windows and went completely Linux with
varying results and a couple of horror stories from early adopters.
The good folks over at
opensource.com recently asked their contributors for solid and confirmed
examples of switching and of their own journey with Linux.
So be sure you click on the link to this article in the episode,
resources below to take a read of many of these and get inspired.
Many of them will be usable examples for your own convincing of colleagues,
company management,
and even family members to take a chance on Linux and open source. Well,
imagine my delight to see that one of the first testimonials is by a former
Linux boot camp student and very good friend, Don Watkins,
who relates "Curiosity sparked my earliest explorations with Linux.
I came to realize very early that Linux can be used in so many ways that support
the education of students and teachers, whom I worked with every day.
Linux and open-source software leveled the playing field for many of my students
and library patrons.
Linux extended the life of hardware platforms that became obsolete by the design
of proprietary operating systems.
It is a gift that keeps on giving every day." Thanks Don. A personal note:
My own journey with Linux began when I was a Unix systems administrator for a
major training company where we couldn't get budget for more servers because of
Sun's high licensing cost. Undaunted,
we installed early slackware and the now mostly forgotten Ydryggsil
distributions,
and saved our company tens of thousands of dollars a year using Intel class
servers instead of expensive proprietary Unix vendor hardware.
I was sold. So was company management. We went on to replace all,
but a couple of the sun boxes with Linux and the rest, well, is history.
That's it for this month's Linux This Month.
Do you have any interesting stories about switching to Linux? If so,
add it to the comments and if you like this show,
be sure to give this episode a big thumbs up.
Here's hoping all your users remember their passwords and may you never get
stuck in VIM. See you next time.
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