Plus a few Linux commands that are guaranteed to destroy your install.

We debate the best distros of 2017, get into some community news, and a bcachefs and Gentoo challenge update & also learn a bit about Canonical’s new Multipass project.

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Show Notes:

Follow Up / Catch Up

So join us (ideally with from a warm glass of something non-offensive and sweet) as we take a tart look backwards through some key releases from the past 12 months. This list is not presented in any sort of order, and all of the entries were sourced from YOUR feedback to the survey we shared earlier in the week.

Lastly – bcachefs has its first corporate sponsor! A big thank you to _http://elements.tv/_and if you need a media storage appliance you should definitely check them out.

Multipass is a service that manages virtual machine instances running Ubuntu. It uses images from cloud-images44 and QEMU/KVM as the backend to provide easy access to a whole range of Ubuntu instances. The client command line is kept similar to LXD’s to keep your muscle memory happy.

Features

Fetch and cache images from cloud-images

Periodically refresh downloaded images ensuring you always have the freshest image installed

Launch instances of any supported Ubuntu version

Create instances with custom disk size / memory size / cpu count

Easily connect to a shell prompt inside the instance or execute commands as part of your workflow

Support cloud-init 5 user-data for instance customization

5 for instance customization Mount data from the host inside instances

But why call it 5.0 when there are no major changes in it? The reason is purely psychological or should I say purely numerical. Torvalds thinks that it is difficult to keep track when the numbers go in the 20s and 30s. It is easier to remember smaller numbers like 13 or 14.

This is the reason why there will be 5.0 instead of 4.20.

“[Bolt] provides a D-Bus API to list devices, enroll them (authorize and store them in the local database) and forget them again (remove previously enrolled devices). It also emits signals if new devices are connected (or removed). During enrollment devices can be set to be automatically authorized as soon as they are connected.”

TING

Firefox recently pushed an add-on to users called “Looking Glass 1.0.3,” carrying no description other than “MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS.” While it was a benign marketing campaign by the company, several users assumed they had downloaded malware.

Etcher Pro is a stand-alone hardware device that allows you to write to multiple cards or usb disks at once, at extreme speeds. Compared to a traditional Disk Duplicator, Etcher Pro is faster and less expensive, while at the same time easier to use and packed with features, so that you can do much more than just copy SD Cards.

Snap updates

Calling all Jedi! VLC 3.0.0-rc1 is in the snap store and ready for your testing on #TheLastJedi day! The @VideoLAN team need you and your Padawan to test it out before the final release. Click the link to get involved. https://t.co/weSBGf5s6F pic.twitter.com/ifeySET67x — Snapcraft (@snapcraftio) December 15, 2017

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JetBrains offers 21 different tools for developers and in the last couple of months have created snaps for around half of their portfolio.

DigitalOcean

Spider-Man’s credo is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” That’s also a wise attitude for Linux system administrators to adopt.

Linux Academy