Intel adds Developer Edition and installer to Clear Linux distribution

Intel has announced a major update to its Clear Linux distribution. These include a new installer and a new Developer Edition. There will also be hardware-optimized programmer software stacks for Deep Learning and Data Analytics.

With the announcements, Intel continues to focus on open source, which according to the company “drives the software-defined infrastructure that has transformed the modern data center and ushered in the data center era,” reports ZDNet.

“Today, the vast majority of the public cloud runs on open source software; and new contributions from Intel are ready to create a future in which everything is software-defined, including new areas such as cars, industry and retail.

Clear Linux is a rolling-release Linux distribution. The operating system remains close to the general Linux kernel, but Intel has optimized its variant for performance and security on its x86 platforms. Clear Linux can be used for all the usual purposes of Linux, but is specifically designed for use in the cloud and with containers.

Developer Edition

Intel has now announced a new installer to bring Clear Linux to the current times. It still uses the Intel-specific swupd update and package manager.

Also new is the Developer Edition. First of all, this version gives developers a version of Linux that is designed to work as well as possible with the company’s hardware. In addition, its basic programming bundles are curated to provide all relevant developer tools with a single installation command. For example, the command ‘c-basic’ offers everything you need to develop in C.

In this update Clear Linux goes further with Intel hardware-optimized programmer software stacks for Deep Learning and Data Analytics. The Deep Learning Reference Stack is an integrated, high-performance open source stack, optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. The stack includes Intel Deep Learning Boost and is designed to accelerate Artificial Intelligence (AI) use cases such as image recognition and speech recognition.

The Data Analytics Reference Stack is designed to help enterprises analyze, classify, recognize and process large amounts of data on Intel Xeon Scalable platforms using Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.

Filesystem in Userspace

Furthermore, Clear Linux uses a stateless design concept, which helps developers save time in resolving conflicts between the operating system, the user and system configurations. It does this by following different classes of configurations in different locations. A factory reset can therefore be performed by removing and restarting the ‘/etc’ and ‘/var’ repositories.

In addition, a Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) debugging system was unveiled. FUSE dynamically retrieves debug information during a debug session. So when programming in Clear Linux, the debug packages are already built in.

Finally, Clear Linux comes with the latest stable compilers. At the moment this is GCC9, but the plan is to switch to GCC10 when it becomes available.