IBM dons winter gear, gives Emperors and Rockhoppers a refresh

IBM has quietly announced its first-ever cloudy mainframes will go live on June 30.

Big Blue in February disclosed its plans to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines running the z/OS that powers its mainframes. These would be first offered in a closed "experimental" beta under the IBM Wazi as-a-service brand. That announcement promised "on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test" with general availability expected "in 2H 2022."

The IT giant has now slipped out an advisory that reveals a “planned availability date” of June 30.

Good news for especially determined fans of Ubuntu's formerly in-house desktop: there's a new version.

Unity 7.6 just appeared, although there is a more complete list of changes in the earlier announcement that it was in testing.

Less than a week after IBM was ordered in an age discrimination lawsuit to produce internal emails in which its former CEO and former SVP of human resources discuss reducing the number of older workers, the IT giant chose to settle the case for an undisclosed sum rather than proceed to trial next month.

The order, issued on June 9, in Schenfeld v. IBM, describes Exhibit 10, which "contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to increase the number of 'millennial' employees."

Plaintiff Eugene Schenfeld, who worked as an IBM research scientist when current CEO Arvind Krishna ran IBM's research group, sued IBM for age discrimination in November, 2018. His claim is one of many that followed a March 2018 report by ProPublica and Mother Jones about a concerted effort to de-age IBM and a 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that IBM executives had directed managers to get rid of older workers to make room for younger ones.

Canonical's Linux distro for edge devices and the Internet of Things, Ubuntu Core 22, is out.

This is the fourth release of Ubuntu Core, and as you might guess from the version number, it's based on the current Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, version 22.04.

Ubuntu Core is quite a different product from normal Ubuntu, even the text-only Ubuntu Server. Core has no conventional package manager, just Snap, and the OS itself is built from Snap packages. Snap installations and updates are transactional: this means that either they succeed completely, or the OS automatically rolls them back, leaving no trace except an entry in a log file.

The UBPorts community is in the final stages of preparing its next release and it's calling for testers.

OTA-23 is getting close – the project's Github kanban looks quite good to us – and if you're lucky enough to have one of the project's supported devices lying around, then you can help.

Many of them are a few years old now, so there's a good chance that you've already replaced them and they sit unloved and neglected in a drawer. The starred entries in the list of devices are the best supported and should have no show-stopping problems. In order of seniority, that means: the LG-made Google Nexus 5 (2013); the original Oneplus One (2014); two models of Sony Xperia X, the F5121 and F5122 (2016); and Google's Pixel 3a and 3a XL (2019).

At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, Linus Torvalds said he expects support for Rust code in the Linux kernel to be merged soon, possibly with the next release, 5.20.

At least since last December, when a patch added support for Rust as a second language for kernel code, the Linux community has been anticipating this transition, in the hope it leads to greater stability and security.

In a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at Cardano, Torvalds said the patches to integrate Rust have not yet been merged because there's far more caution among Linux kernel maintainers than there was 30 years ago.

Updated In one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against IBM, Big Blue has been ordered to produce internal emails in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former SVP of Human Resources Diane Gherson discuss efforts to get rid of older employees.

IBM as recently as February denied any "systemic age discrimination" ever occurred at the mainframe giant, despite the August 31, 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that "top-down messaging from IBM’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires."

The court's description of these emails between executives further contradicts IBM's assertions and supports claims of age discrimination raised by a 2018 report from ProPublica and Mother Jones, by other sources prior to that, and by numerous lawsuits.

Microsoft is flagging up a security hole in its Service Fabric technology when using containerized Linux workloads, and urged customers to upgrade their clusters to the most recent release.

The flaw is tracked as CVE-2022-30137, an elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in Microsoft's Service Fabric. An attacker would need read/write access to the cluster as well as the ability to execute code within a Linux container granted access to the Service Fabric runtime in order to wreak havoc.

Through a compromised container, for instance, a miscreant could gain control of the resource's host Service Fabric node and potentially the entire cluster.

Microsoft has made it official. Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 distributions are now supported on Windows Server 2022.

The technology emerged in preview form last month and represented somewhat of an about-face from the Windows giant, whose employees had previously complained that while the tech was handy for desktop users, sticking it on a server might mean it gets used for things for which it wasn't intended.

(And Windows Server absolutely had to have the bloated user interface of its desktop stablemate as well, right?)

EndeavourOS is a rolling-release Linux distro based on Arch Linux. Although the project is relatively new, having started in 2019, it's the successor to an earlier Arch-based distro called Antergos, so it's not quite as immature as its youth might imply. It's a little more vanilla than Antergos was – for instance, it uses the Calamares cross-distro installer.

EndeavourOS hews more closely to its parent distro than, for example, Manjaro, which we looked at very recently. Unlike Manjaro, it doesn't have its own staging repositories or releases. It installs packages directly from the upstream Arch repositories, using the standard Arch package manager pacman. It also bundles yay to easily fetch packages from the Arch User Repository, AUR. The yay command takes the same switches as pacman does, so if you wanted to install, say, Google Chrome, it's as simple as yay -s google-chrome and a few seconds later, it's done.