mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types.

The post 7 Best Free and Open Source Front-Ends for mpv appeared first on LinuxLinks.

OpenInfra Live is a new, weekly hour-long interactive show streaming to the OpenInfra YouTube channel every Thursday at 14:00 UTC (9:00 AM CT). Episodes feature more OpenInfra release updates, user stories, community meetings, and more open infrastructure stories.

The Kata Containers community hosted community members from AMD, Ant Group, Apple, IBM, and Huawei to share how they’re running Kata. Kata Containers Architecture Committee members and upstream contributors also provided an update on community development and the project roadmap.

Enjoyed this week’s episode and want to hear more about OpenInfra Live? Let us know what other topics or conversations you want to hear from the OpenInfra community this year, and help us to program OpenInfra Live! If you are running Kata Containers or helping your customers overcome the challenges discussed in this episode, join the OpenInfra Foundation to help guide Kata Containers software development and to support the global community.

In this week’s episode, Samuel Ortiz, software engineer at Apple and member of the Kata Containers Architecture Committee, kicked the episode off by talking about what’s new with the development of Kata Containers, an open source container runtime project supported by the OpenInfra Foundation. 

Kata Containers Project Update

First, a quick refresher on 2.1.0 which was released on May 15. Notable features from this minor release included:

• The Kata agent that runs inside the Kata Containers guest is now asynchronous, which gives improved performance and better resource utilization
• Kata-deploy will be the main way of deploying and distributing Kata Containers 
• The community went from open tracing to open telemetry
• Better direct device assignment was added 
• Added support for IPv6 and virtio-mem
• Kata 1.x was officially deprecated, the first official series of the Kata Containers project

Kata 2.2.0 is the next minor release and is scheduled for August 6, but Ortiz anticipates a delay as discussed in the public Kata engineering calls. If you’re interested in learning more, he encourages you to join the community meetings. 

Notable features from the Kata 2.20 release include: 

• CI stabilization, which will help accelerate development and pull request merges
• Tracing improvements and stabilization 
• Watchable volumes and mount points
• Moving to QEMU’s q35 

The community is also simplifying release management by creating a fixed cadence, having one release candidate for the next major or minor release every three weeks. Then, there will be one minor release every 12 weeks. The contributors will use one stable branch to track the previous minor or major release progress. 

Kata Container Use Cases 

Within the community, there are focused discussions around Kata users’ specific issues and features. Use cases include: 

• Performance isolation: best practices for keeping Kata’s resources overhead and noisiness constrained. See meeting details
• Confidential containers: running confidential computing workloads with Kata. See meeting details  

Ortiz then introduced several organizations who are deploying Kata Containers to share their use cases. 

Large Scale Kata Containers in Production at Ant Group

Ant Group, the leading peer-to-peer payments processor in China, does automatic online payment transactions on the world’s biggest digital payment platform all the time, so Kata Containers’ features such as isolation of network with dedicated kernels and performance jitter are critical for their use case.

“With Kata Containers, we are still sharing the same host kernel. We have a hypervisor layer and we run different pods in different guest operating systems (OS),” said Peng Tao, staff engineer at Ant Group and member of the Kata Containers Architecture Committee. “When one guest panics, it will not affect the other pods on the same host.” 

With this guest OS level isolation, Ant Group no longer shares a lot of host kernel threads, allowing their service performance to be much more stable with Kata.

AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) 

Brent Hollingsworth, senior manager for the EPYC Software Ecosystem team at AMD and Hubertus Franke, distinguished research staff member at IBM talked about confidential computing and the role Kata Containers plays. 

With confidential computing, Franke says the customer has to have absolute trust that data is not being exposed. In regulated environments, where governments are putting stricter rules like heath data in place, it has to be ascertained that the hypervisors can get access to the data, but it sees no value in it. Encryption plays a key role so the confidential or container based workloads can be coupled with the technologies that are coming out like AMD SEV. 

“With the 2018 [Kata Containers] prototype that AMD has had in place with the SEV technology, it’s been possible for us to offer confidentiality, meaning that we can turn it on and the containers would run in an encrypted mode,” Hollingsworth said. “We are currently in the process of investing in Kata Containers, we are working with the community and folks like IBM.”

Hollingsworth continued that it’s critical that in a couple of years, we have the ability to build an infrastructure that can do all of this as well as flow this to the end user so that everyone can run in a secure mode.

Kata Containers on Huawei Cloud

Shaobao Feng, cloud containers architect at Huawei, introduced two environments where Huawei is running Kata Containers in production: Cloud Container Instance (CCI), the first serverless Kubernetes on public cloud, and Cloud Container Engine (CCE) turbo, a complete Kubernetes service provided by the Huawei cloud.

Live Q&A Session

• What about the percent of resource utilization of the lightweight VM?
• What kind of emulation do you run?
• Are you looking at if storage direct block device is upstream able in both Kubernetes and Kata?
• Are the mentioned extensions fed back in the upstream?

Next Episode on #OpenInfraLive

The Kubernetes steering committee and OpenStack technical committee meet regularly to talk about cross-community learnings and collaboration opportunities. Join members of both governance bodies to ask questions about integration, cross-project support and how you can stay updated on the latest developments.

Tune in on Thursday, July 29 at 1400 UTC (9:00 AM CT) to watch this #OpenInfraLive episode: Kubernetes and OpenStack Working Together.

You can watch this episode live on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook. The recording of OpenInfra Live will be posted on OpenStack WeChat after each live stream!

Like the show? Join the community! 

Catch up on the previous OpenInfra Live episodes on the OpenInfra Foundation YouTube channel, and subscribe for the Foundation email communication to hear more OpenInfra updates!

The post Kata Containers Use Cases | OpenInfra Live Recap appeared first on Superuser.

Did you get our summer reading list?

Last week brought a significant new addition: the schedule view. It, and all of the other features explored in last week’s post, have been added over the course of this week and are now part of the master branch of Kalendar!

1. !8: Improved event info drawer, event collection editing, attachments
2. !9: Add undo/redo functionality
3. !10: Add a schedule view to Kalendar

This week brings a number of smaller visual tweaks and a significant new feature that has involved a lot of wrangling inside Kalendar’s guts. Let’s go through ’em!

Making the incidence editor prettier

!11: Improve appearance of incidence editor

The incidence editor’s has been modified to make it nicer to look at and easier to differentiate between its different sections. The description textarea has been moved to the top, and separators have been added between each of the model-driven sections (attendees, attachments, reminders, and recurrence exceptions).

Additionally, these model-driven sections have been changed to use much more visually attractive Kirigami components.

Tweaks to the calendar views

!10: Add a schedule view to Kalendar (and tweak the month view)

Kalendar’s views have seen some small changes. First, the schedule view: on desktop, the padding on the cards has been reduced in order to present more incidences at once, since on desktop the cursor allows you to click on smaller cards just as precisely.

Additionally, both the schedule and the month view now let you double-click on a date in order to instantly open the event addition window set to the date you double-clicked on. Right-clicking opens a context menu that lets you specify what kind of incidence you’d like to add.

New incidence types

!12: Add support for more incidence types

That’s right! A lot of work has gone into Kalendar this week in order to let you view, edit, and add different types of incidences. Now, you can add todos in addition to events to your calendars. This has meant significant changes under the hood, which should make work to add support for additional types of incidences much more straightforward.

Including new types of incidences has also meant some changes to the UIs of different parts of the application. Event addition buttons are now replaced with menus that let you select the type of incidence you want to add, for example. Both the month and schedule views now show what type of incidence something is alongside its name. The layout and contents of the incidence editor also change depending on what sort of incidence you are adding or modifying. In the case of todos, you can also mark them as complete or incomplete from the incidence information drawer.

This merge request is big, so it is still under review (sorry!) but it should land over the next few days.

Coming up next

Up next will be to finish tailoring the different aspects of Kalendar to accommodate new incidence types. This will include changes to the incidence editor to include support for additional and specific features of todos. Journals will also be added in the next few days.

Also coming up is the addition of a view focused on todos — but more on that when it’s ready.

Is there anything you’d like to see added to Kalendar? Get in touch! I’m @clau-cambra:kde.org on Matrix.

Linux laptops are the perfect alternatives to macOS and Windows-powered laptops.

Technically, you can turn any laptop of your choice into a Linux machine by choosing to install any Linux distribution available.

But, here, our focus will be on the laptops that offer Linux out-of-the-box, ensuring the best compatibility and support no matter what kind of budget you have.

read more

Persepolis and Download Navi are two download manager apps for Ubuntu and Android, respectively. They can help the users accelerate download speed and keep track of what files had been saved. This tutorial will explain how to use them to download files from the internet after installing them to desktop and phone. I hope this tutorial helps Ubuntu users who have computer and phone altogether.

Subscribe to UbuntuBuzz Telegram Channel to get article updates.

About The Applications

Persepolis Download Manager (PDM) is a free libre open source, cross platform, IDM-like program available officially on Ubuntu since version 20.04 Focal Fossa.

Download Navi is an Android phone app, available freely at F-Droid app store (read our quick guide). It is a very fast download accelerator and manager for mobile users. 

Features of both apps:

• Accelerate download speed up to 16x splits
  
• Automatic naming of files (Navi)
  
• Pause and resume
• Dark theme 
• Browser integration (Persepolis)

Installing Download Managers

On Ubuntu:

• Open Terminal.
• Press Enter after typing the command line below. 
• Persepolis installed.

$ sudo apt-get install persepolis

On Android:

• Open F-Droid. 
• Search for Download Navi.
• Click INSTALL and accept everything else. 
• Download Navi installed.

Basic Downloading

Now we learn how to download a file over the internet regardless it is a document, a program, a video or audio, or anything else. The basic is you just need to get the link (URL) on web browser and insert that link into the download manager. Let's practice with this exercise website https://file-examples.com.

To download a video: 

• go to Video Files Page, 
• select a video, 
• right-click a Sample Video File,
• Copy Link,
• paste link in the download manager program, finally
  
• start the download;
• for the other files repeat steps above.
  

I think it is clear and easy to do. Now, let's jump to the next practice.

Download YouTube Videos

INVIDIOUS (website) is a convenient way to download YouTube videos. For example, let us see this one hour Beautiful Nature Scenery video.

On Ubuntu:

• Right-click the playing video. 
• Copy Video Link.
• Open Persepolis and add new download. 
• Paste the link.
• Start download. 
• It downloads. 
• Once completed, the video is saved in Downloads.

On Android: 

• Open browser to the video above.
• Click Download.
• It plays on new tab in dark background.
• Copy the URL from the address bar.
• Open Download Navi, add new download.
  
• Paste the URL.
• Start download.
  

The Progress and The Result

Here's how both downloads happening and finishing. Once again, for the other types of file, the ways to download are just the same.

Progressing with about 7MB/s speed:

Resulting in saved videos:

That's all. I hope this will be useful for all dear readers.

GitHub Actions is a service provided to quickly setup continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflows . These workflows run on hosts called runners. GitHub provides hosted runners with a limited set of operating system choice (Windows Server, Ubuntu, MacOS).

Another option is to use self-hosted runners which gives the repository administrator more control on the runners. Self-hosted runners are dedicated to a repository or organization. The following article goes through the steps of configuring self-hosted runners using Fedora CoreOS.

Getting Started

Fedora CoreOS is a minimalist operating system designed to be easy to deploy and maintain at scale. The operating system will automaticaly update and provide, by default, the tools needed to run containers. For all of these reasons, Fedora CoreOS is a great choice to consider for running CI/CD workflows.

The first step to configure and provision a Fedora CoreOS machine is to generate an Ignition file. Butane allows you to generate Ignition’s file using a friendlier format (YAML).

Configure a Fedora CoreOS runner

To execute GitHub actions on Fedora CoreOS, the host needs the binaries and scripts used to register and run the runner. Download the binaries and scripts from the actions runner project and deploy under /usr/local/sbin/actions-runner.

version: "1.3.0"
variant: fcos
storage:
  directories:
    - path: /usr/local/sbin/actions-runner
      mode: 0755
      user:
        name: core
      group:
        name: core
  files:
    - path: /usr/local/sbin/actions-runner/actions-runner-linux.tar.gz
      overwrite: true
      contents:
        source: https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.278.0/actions-runner-linux-x64-2.278.0.tar.gz
      mode: 0755
      user:
        name: core
      group:
        name: core

Registration and Removal token

Configuring runners for a project requires a “token”. This prevents registering or removing self-hosted runners from projects without the correct permissions. Tokens provided by Github have a one hour expiration time. If the runner restarts after this time it will require a new registration token.

The token can be problematic, in particular with Fedora CoreOS automatic updates. The update process expects that the host will restart at least once every couple weeks after receiving new data.

Luckily, it is possible to use GitHub REST API to obtain these tokens and automatically configure the runner every time the host restarts. The following manage-runner.sh script uses the APIs to retrieve a token, remove any runner already configured and register the runner with a new token.

#!/bin/bash
# Handles the Github Action runner configuration.
# Remove and Registration token expires after 1 hour, if we want our runner
# to work after a reboot (auto update) we need to refresh the tokens.

# First remove the runner with a fresh remove token
REMOVE_TOKEN=$(curl -u ${GITHUB_USER}:${GITHUB_TOKEN} -X POST -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" https://api.github.com/repos/${GITHUB_USER}/${GITHUB_REPO}/actions/runners/remove-token | jq -r '.token')
/usr/local/sbin/actions-runner/config.sh remove --token ${REMOVE_TOKEN}


# Then register the runner with a fresh registration token
REGISTRATION_TOKEN=$(curl -u ${GITHUB_USER}:${GITHUB_TOKEN} -X POST -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" https://api.github.com/repos/${GITHUB_USER}/${GITHUB_REPO}/actions/runners/registration-token | jq -r '.token')
/usr/local/sbin/actions-runner/config.sh --url https://github.com/cverna/fcos-actions-runner --token ${REGISTRATION_TOKEN} --labels fcos --unattended

The script above uses a few environment variables that contain a GitHub username and a Personal Access Token used to authenticate the REST API requests. The Personal Access Token requires the repo permissions in order to successfully retrieve the runner registration and removal tokens. The token is security sensitive so it is better to store it in a different file with stricter permissions. In this example that file is actions-runner.

GITHUB_USER=<user>
GITHUB_REPO=<repo>
GITHUB_TOKEN=<personal_access_token> 

Following is the Butane snippet that creates these two files – manage-runner.sh and actions-runner.

    - path: /usr/local/sbin/actions-runner/manage-runner.sh
      contents:
        local: manage-runner.sh
      mode: 0755
      user:
        name: core
      group:
        name: core
    - path: /etc/actions-runner
      contents:
        local: actions-runner
      mode: 0700
      user:
        name: core
      group:
        name: core

Running Actions on Fedora CoreOS

Finally, create the systemd services that will configure and start the runner. Define the services in the Butane configuration file.

systemd:
  units:
    - name: github-runner-configure.service
      enabled: true
      contents: |
        [Unit]
        Description=Configure the github action runner for a repository
        After=network-online.target boot-complete.target
        Requires=boot-complete.target
        [Service]
        EnvironmentFile=/etc/actions-runner
        Type=oneshot
        RemainAfterExit=yes
        User=core
        WorkingDirectory=/usr/local/sbin/actions-runner
        ExecStartPre=tar xvf actions-runner-linux.tar.gz --no-same-owner
        ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/actions-runner/manage-runner.sh
        [Install]
        WantedBy=multi-user.target
    - name: github-runner.service
      enabled: true
      contents: |
        [Unit]
        Description=Run the github action runner
        After=github-runner-configure.service
        [Service]
        WorkingDirectory=/usr/local/sbin/actions-runner
        User=core
        ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/actions-runner/run.sh
        [Install]
        WantedBy=multi-user.target

This creates two services, github-runner-configure.service (running once when the host has finished booting) and github-runner.service (running the Actions runner binaries and waiting for new CI/CD jobs).

Now that the Butane configuration is complete, generate an Ignition file out of it and provision a Fedora CoreOS Actions runner.

$ podman run -i --rm -v $PWD:/code:z --workdir /code quay.io/coreos/butane:release --pretty --strict --files-dir /code config.yaml -o config.ignition

Once the Ignition file is generated, it can be used to provision a runner on the platforms where Fedora CoreOS is available.

Configure an Action to use a self-hosted runner

The following test Action workflow will test the FCOS self-hosted worker. Create the following file in your git repository .github/workflows/main.yml

# This is a basic workflow to help you get started with Actions

name: CI

# Controls when the action will run. 
on:
  # Triggers the workflow on push or pull request events but only for the main branch
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]

  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

# A workflow run is made up of one or more jobs that can run sequentially or in parallel
jobs:
  # This workflow contains a single job called "build"
  build:
    # The type of runner that the job will run on
    runs-on: fcos

    # Steps represent a sequence of tasks that will be executed as part of the job
    steps:
      # Runs a single command using the runners shell
      - name: Run a one-line script
        run: podman run --rm fedora-minimal:34 echo Hello World !

Note that the runs-on configuration is set up to use a runner with the label fcos.

The code presented in this article is available here.

Rclone, a free and open source command line cloud storage sync tool, was updated to version 1.56.0, which includes some important new features. There's a new backend, new commands including Docker serve, a reworked configuration system, and there's also a new librclone C library.

Rclone is a command line cloud storage manager. You can use it to manage multiple cloud storage providers from the command line, which allows using the cloud equivalents of Unix commands like rsync, cp, mv, mount, ls, ncdu, tree, and so on.

You can use it to sync files and directories from and to cloud storage services (including directly between cloud storages) with optional encryption, mount a remote storage locally using its FUSE support, serve local or remote files over HTTP, WebDav, FTP, SFTP or DLNA, and more.

As for supported cloud storage providers, Rclone supports over 40 services, including Google Drive, Amazon Drive and S3, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Yandex Disk, NextCloud, Box, pCloud, and more. It runs on Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, *BSD and Solaris.

While this is a command line tool, it does come with an experimental web GUI. There's also a third-party Rclone Browser GUI.

The latest Rclone 1.56.0 comes with some new commands, including a serve docker command that implements the Docker volume plugin API allowing Docker to use Rclone as a data storage mechanism for various cloud providers, and a checksum command for checking files in the source against a SUM file (MD5, SHA1, etc).

Performance metric tracking with Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) and Grafana can be useful in almost any RHEL environment. However, the process to get it set up across a large number of hosts might seem daunting at first. This is why Red Hat introduced a Metrics System Role,  which automates the configuration of performance metrics. I’ll show you how in this post.

• Git integration
• Debugging projects in vim
• Language server features, completion, go to …