Red Hat and SUSE: Drools, Systemd, Libinput, Fedora and Beta for SUSE Manager 4.0

Quarking Drools: How we turned a 13-year-old Java project into a first-class serverless component

Rule-based artificial intelligence (AI) is often overlooked, possibly because people think it’s only useful in heavyweight enterprise software products. However, that’s not necessarily true. Simply put, a rule engine is just a piece of software that allows you to separate domain and business-specific constraint from the main application flow. We are part of the team developing and maintaining Drools—the world’s most popular open source rule engine and part of Red Hat—and, in this article, we will describe how we are changing Drools to make it part of the cloud and serverless revolution.

Why feedback, not metrics, is critical to DevOps

Most managers and agile coaches depend on metrics over feedback from their teams, users, and even customers. In fact, quite a few use feedback and metrics synonymously, where they present feedback from teams or customers as a bunch of numbers or a graphical representation of those numbers. This is not only unfortunate, but it can be misleading as it presents only part of the story and not the entire truth.

L2TP Tunnel Support Added To Systemd

The newest feature addition for systemd is supporting L2TP, the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, as part of its networking code. 

Systemd's networkd now has support merged for LT2TP tunnel support. L2TP can be used for extending a local area network (LAN) or also for VPN purposes when paired with the likes of IPsec for providing encryption. L2TP also has a variety of other use-cases with this bare protocol able to offer a layer two link over an L3 network.

libinput 1.12.901

The first RC for libinput 1.13 is now available.




Only two notable features in this release but patches are accumulating on
master, it's been 6 months since 1.12 and I've decided to postpone the two
major features (hi-res scrolling and totem support) to 1.14.




Touch arbitration has improved for tablets, especially on touch screens.
A timer set on pen proximity out means we don't get ghost touches anymore
when the hand lifts off slower than the pen itself. And location-based touch
arbitration means that parts of the screen can be interacted with even while
the pen is in proximity. libinput uses the tilt information where
available to disable touches in a rectangle around the pen where the hand is
likely to be but leaves the rest of the touchscreen available otherwise.
Where the UI supports it, this allows for bimanual interaction.




The test suite is installed on demand (meson -Dinstall-tests=true). Where
run from the installed location it will use the normal library lookups and
the quirks directory as defined by the prefix. This makes it useful for
distribution-level testing, i.e. run this on a test machine after updating
the package to make sure everything is as expected. Where available, you can
invoke it with the "libinput test-suite" command.




Other than that, a load of fixes, quirks added, cleanups, tidy-ups and so on
an so forth.




As usual, the git shortlog is below. Many thanks to all the contributors.

Libinput 1.13 Is Coming But High-Resolution Scrolling & Dell Totem Support Delayed

Libinput is fairly mature at this stage for offering a unified input handling library for use on both X.Org and Wayland Linux desktops. Libinput has largely reached a feature plateau with new releases no longer coming out so often and no glaring gaps in support. With it already being a half-year since the last major release, libinput 1.13 is now being buttoned up for release and available today is the first release candidate. 

Libinput 1.13 isn't that exciting of a release particularly since maintainer Peter Hutterer of Red Hat decided to delay the high resolution scrolling support. The Linux 5.0 kernel brought the much anticipated high resolution scrolling support for various Logitech/Microsoft mice to improve the scroll-wheel experience. Besides the kernel support, there is also the user-space support that needs updating. Peter decided to delay this functionality now until Libinput 1.14 to give it more time to bake.

New package in Fedora: python-xslxwriter

First Public Beta for SUSE Manager 4.0!