In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at an open source toolbox for mathematics, some reasons Linux is a growing trend in business, an introduction to the Linux command line, and more.

Open source news roundup for May 22-28, 2016

An open source toolbox for pure mathematics

The European Union is creating open source tools to develop and encourage an ecosystem of collaboration. Computers are used for many scientific purposes in the EU, and collaboration has been impeded by the lack of funding for common software tools and the lack of interoperability between existing ones.

The core component of the EU-funded OPENDREAMKIT project is the Virtual Research Environments (VRE). These online services enable collaboration between geographically dispersed groups researchers. More than 50 people across 15 EU sites are working on the OPENDREAMKIT toolkit, which is expected to improve upon and unify several existing tools.

5 reasons Linux is a growing business trend

Apparently Linux is no longer just for nerds. Although I think that is too bad in some ways, it is a good thing in many other ways. Linux has always been the rock on which much of the Internet has built its foundation, but it is expanding into many other aspects of computing as well.

Android devices rule the mobile world, and Android is a specialized version of Linux. Linux provides the platform for most cloud implementations as well as the host instantiation. Linux is everywhere in the IoT universe. The Linux geeks of the world are likely to benefit the most from this growth.

Everything you need to know about Linux commands

Most of us who get started in Linux, for whatever reason, eventually find our way to the CLI—the Linux Command Line. Often times this happens early in our relationship with Linux because the instructions for installing a piece of hardware or a bit of software that we absolutely need to have tell us to open a terminal to perform some obscure task.

This seven-page tutorial covers many of the basic commands we use consistently in the CLI. It discusses the Unix/Linux directory structure and the commands necessary to manage files and directories, including some basic information about file permissions. The article also covers package management using apt, basic disk management, using tar to perform backups, and networking. It also defines and compares command options and arguments, managing users and how to get help.

All in all, this is a very nice beginner’s tutorial for anyone who wants to penetrate the mystique of the Linux command line. I highly recommend it.

Cray supercomputer runs OpenStack and open source big data tools

Cray has always been obsessed with speed. The company has just announced the Cray Urika-GX system, which runs OpenStack and other open source bid data tools like Hadoop and Spark. The Urika-GX can be configured with 16, 32 or 48 2-socket Intel Xeon v4 (Broadwell) processor nodes for up to 1,728 processor cores. It also supports up to 22TB of DRAM, with options for as much as 35TB of SSD storage and 192TB of standard hard drive storage.

Cray has positioned itself as the software service provider for its customers as a form of Software as a Service. Cray will pre-install, configure, and manage the base software for the customers on the Urika-GX, including software upgrades every six months. The customer is still responsible for the applications they install on this platform.

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar, to see what’s happening next week in open source.