• Midnight Commander Comes To IBM i

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who work extensively with files in the IFS will be happy to hear a new software utility has been ported to the IBM i PASE environment that could save them a bunch of time. The open source software, called Midnight Commander, gives developers and administrators a handy command line experience that can help speed up tasks, especially when giving commands to large number of files stored on remote machines.

  Midnight Commander was originally developed in 1994 as a file utility for UNIX, which was beginning to emerge from software labs to challenge minicomputer platforms of the day, …

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• An IBM i Year In Review

  December 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Another year is just about wrapped up for us here at IT Jungle. That means it’s time to ease off the news pedal just a tad and enter into a retrospective mood, with the hope of gaining some perspective on where we’ve been in 2018 and perhaps how we’ll start off 2019.

  It all started off rather poorly, way back in. . .

  January

  . . . when the big news was about Spectre and Meltdown, the two vulnerabilities that brought everybody rudely back to the real world following the New Year’s celebration. Nearly all types of processors, including …

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• Mono Comes to RPM, Making .NET on IBM i Even Easier

  December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Here’s some good news for IBM i developers who want to develop using Microsoft’s .NET framework and tools: the Mono runtime for IBM i is now available via the RPM and Yum open source delivery method. Delivering Mono this way should make it even easier for IBM i developers to take advantage of the popular .NET tooling and runtime.

  Jesse Gorzinski, IBM‘s business architect of open source technologies, broke the news on Thanksgiving Day. “#IBMi users have something to be thankful for today: .NET in RPM form! Yes, you can ‘yum install’ mono now, from @friedkiwi’s repo!!” Gorzinski wrote …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• IBM Showcases New Crop of ‘Fresh Faces’

  September 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  For a computer platform to remain vital, it must have a constant stream of new arrivals. This is just as true for IBM i, which has struggled to retain relevance in an increasingly homogeneous IT world, as it is for every other platform. But give kudos to IBM and its latest batch of “fresh faces” that highlight the fact that millennials are finding their way to IBM i and Power.

  While nobody is claiming that younger folks are knocking down the door to get onto IBM i, there nevertheless appears to be a solid group of individuals from the less-than-40 …

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• Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month

  August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.

  The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …

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• More Transparency Needed For Open Source Running on IBM i

  July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source may be the future of IBM i. It certainly seems that way at the moment. But if open source is going to soar to new heights on the platform, it will need better integration with the existing processes in place to monitor and manage the platform.

  That’s the opinion of JK Grafe, the CEO of Quad Nova Group, a Jacksonville, Florida-based IBM i consultancy that has offices up the Eastern Seaboard. By Grafe’s own admission, open source is a great thing for the platform. But the difficulty in seeing what’s actually going on with open source workloads …

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• IBM i Gets An Influx Of Machine Learning Tooling

  July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Thanks to the new RPM and Yum open source software delivery methods unleased by IBM earlier this year, IBM i shops can now run the latest in Python-based machine learning tools, including NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Scikit-Learn.

  Interest in using Python to build machine learning models has exploded in recent years, and we’re now at the point where Python is considered to be the predominant language for doing data science, followed closely by R, which is taught more in academic settings.

  While the capability to train or run a machine learning model isn’t generally the number one requirement for organizations …

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• RPM And Yum Are A Big Deal For IBM i. Here’s Why

  July 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  By now you’ve probably heard about Yum and RPM, the new processes that IBM will use to deliver open source software to IBM i customers. But you may have questions about how the process works, and what the benefits will be. IT Jungle talked with IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski to get the low down on why the new tech is so important to the platform.

  RPM, which stands for Red Hat Package Manager, is a piece of software created more than 20 years that allows customers in that Linux community to more easily distribute and install the various …

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• Yum, Liam Allan, and the Future of the Platform

  June 20, 2018 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to believe, but Liam Allan has become a veteran at these things. He might be only 21 years old, but the young Englishman already has become a sought-after speaker on the IBM i event circuit and a respected voice for open source development. At COMMON’s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, Allan elaborated on Yum’s arrival on IBM i, his own open source work, and the future of the platform.

  Allan first appeared on the IBM i scene two years ago, when he won the 2016 COMMON Student Innovation Award for his work on the IBM i …

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