I’m not a software developer, but find myself writing and managing more and more code in the recent years – mostly infrastructure as code, but also Python scripts for my mini-projects.
I’ve been a user of Tower for the past 2 years and must say it’s a pleasure to use. I tried other GUI solutions for working with git, but on MacOS this Tower thing is so good there’s no competition.
Improvements in Tower 4.0
The biggest thing is the massively improved undo function – Cmd+Z now helps with undoing quite a bunch of accidental changes in your git environment.
For my (fairly basic) knowledge of git, here are the common mistakes that Cmd+Z will help with:
Pretty cool! I almost missed that Debian 10.3 got released last week. This is a corrective release, meaning it’s about improving stability and security rather than about introducing major innovations.
Upgrade Debian 10.2 to 10.3
I only have one dedicated server running Debian 10, and will possibly reinstall even that – turns out I’m much more used to CentOS servers than anything else.
BUT this server is still there, so why not upgrade it?
Step 1: Update Debian repositories
First, we run apt-get update. I never noticed it before, but apparently this command is clever enough to recognize that InRelease changes version from 10.2 to 10.3 (see the last line of the output):
apt-get dist-upgrade brings all the packages to the current release of your Debian/Ubuntu distro. In my case,
root@srv:~ # apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Calculating upgrade… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
linux-headers-4.19.0-8-amd64 linux-headers-4.19.0-8-common linux-image-4.19.0-8-amd64
The following packages will be upgraded:
base-files e2fsprogs git-man libboost-iostreams1.67.0 libboost-system1.67.0 libcom-err2 libcups2 libcupsimage2 libext2fs2 libgnutls30 libidn2-0
libnss-systemd libopenjp2-7 libpam-systemd libpython3.7 libpython3.7-dev libpython3.7-minimal libpython3.7-stdlib libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules
libsasl2-modules-db libss2 libsystemd0 libtiff5 libtimedate-perl libudev1 linux-compiler-gcc-8-x86 linux-headers-amd64 linux-image-amd64 linux-kbuild-4.19
linux-libc-dev openssh-client openssh-server openssh-sftp-server python-apt python-apt-common python3-apt python3.7 python3.7-dev python3.7-minimal sudo
systemd systemd-sysv udev
44 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 129 MB of archives.
After this operation, 325 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
...
Step 3: Reboot (when convenient)
You don’t have to reboot immediately. The biggest reason to do it is to start using new version of Linux kernel, but there’s hardly a specific update in minor kernel upgrade that justifies immediate downtime.
Here’s the kernel version before reboot:
root@srv:~ # uname -a Linux srv.ts.fm 4.19.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.67-2+deb10u2 (2019-11-11) x86_64 GNU/Linux
This time I’m definitely installing it on my Raspberry Pi 4!
Kali Linux just released the very first release of the year 2020 with the following much welcome improvements:
Single installer image – I find it refreshing that there’s only one image to download which then allows you to choose the desktop environment of your preference (Gnome, KDE, Mate or LXDE)
kali user is the new default, used to be root
Python 2 is officially End Of Life
Theme refinements (kali-undercover looks even more like Windows now)
Just to remind you: Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distro made by security professionals for security assessments, penetration testing and digital forensics.
NVMe drive temperature driver – also very convenient. I’m getting this info on Macbook out of the box, so will be interesting to try NVMe functionality on a Linux desktop.
Has it been a year since VirtualBox 6.0 release already? Time flew! This week brought us the first major release of the VirtualBox 6.x family, with lots of improvements – traditionally focus is on performance and stability.
Implemented support for importing a VM from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – VirtualBox 6.0 previously introduced exporting VMs into the same cloud – this is now a complete workflow
New style 3D support (VBoxSVGA and VMSVGA) – old style using VBoxVGA is gone
Support YUV2 and related texture formats with hosts using OpenGL (macOS and Linux), which accelerates video playback when 3D is enabled by delegating the color space conversion to the host GPU
Virtualization core: recompiler is gone, meaning full CPU hardware virtualization is required now
vboximg-mount: Experimental support for direct read-only access to NTFS, FAT and ext2/3/4 filesystems inside a disk image without the need for support on the host – sounds like you can use Windows to run a VM that would access Linux filesystems on attached storage – pretty cool!
I’m quite happy with Parallels Desktop on my macOS systems, but install VirtualBox among the first 5 apps on any Linux laptop or desktop. Have upgraded to 6.1 on my Dell XPS already, will post more screenshots soon!
Default desktop environment is Xfce (with new theme)
Linux Kernel is updated to 5.3.9
PowerShell is now included as standard
Kali Documentation is now apparently git-managed (would really like to contribute someday)
But the most talked about feature is “Kali Undercover” mode which is essentially a desktop theme that makes Kali look very similar to Windows 10 desktop – background, icons, task manager, main menu and even file manager are all updated to look like Windows 10.
new virtiofs filesystem – a FUSE based implementation for sharing physical host filesystems with virtual machine guests.
exFAT and sdFAT implementations – although my issues on Linux laptop are more to do with card reader than the exFAT filesystem on the microSD Cards
booting from CIFS (Wndows share) – don’t quite know how it works, but sounds too cool not to try!
lockdown module – a feature aimed to minimise access to Linux kernel even for root user – meaning no direct access to memory and device ports, limited calls and fully controlled debugfs amd kprobes.
Lots of new graphics cards are added into both AMD and Intel drivers, will be interesting to see if anything is improved for my Ubuntu 19.10 laptop.
Just as I published last Unix Tutorial Digest on November 5th, RHEL 8.1 release got shipped – think this is a great incremental release bringing a number of key improvements to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
RHEL 8 Release Cadence
Red Hat announced that going forward Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS will be receiving regular updates every 6 months. Since RHEL 8 release was in May 2019, this current RHEL 8.1 update is right on time, 6 months after.
RHEL 8.1 Improvements I Want To Try
There’s a number of great improvements in this release:
Live Kernel Patching with kpatch
SELinux profiles for containers and tbolt for Thunderbolt devices – will be cool to try on my RHEL 8 PC
Perhaps try RHEL 7.6 in-place upgrade to RHEL 8.1
Review rhel-system-roles and specifically the new storage role added in RHEL 8.1
I also want to try Red Hat Universal Base Image for RHEL 8 – it’s been around since initial release in May, I just never got the chance to have a look.
I’m hardly getting any chance to work on Sun/Oracle hardware and Solaris anymore, but still like tracking the releases. OpenIndiana is a free Solaris implementation based on the Illumos project, and OpenIndiana 2019.10 just got released.
Improvements in OpenIndiana 2019.10
Latest improvements from the Illumos project (namely illumos-gate)
