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Rethink Robotics’s one-armed, Linux- and ROS-based “Sawyer” manipulation robot is smaller, faster, stronger, and more precise than the earlier Baxter. When MIT spinoff Rethink Robotics announced the $25,000+ Baxter manipulation robot in 2012, it inspired a whole new category of small, relatively low-cost robots for light manufacturing and product assembly. The fixed, two-armed, “collaborative” robot […]

When it comes to picking a programming language to use when teaching people how to program, there are many, many options. Scratch is a good choice when teaching the basics because of its drag and drop building block method of programming. Python or Ruby are also good choices—both languages have a straight-forward syntax, are used in major real-world projects, and have excellent communities and supplemental projects built around them. Or there is Java, Objective-C, and C#, which are solid programming languages and marketable job skills. Honestly, they are all good choices, but when it comes to teaching programming in an academic setting, are they really the best way to go about doing it? read more

Variscite released a tiny “VAR-SOM-DUAL” module starting at $46 that runs Android or Linux on a Freescale i.MX6 Dual, and offers onboard WiFi and Bluetooth.

Tue, 24 Mar 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.2.2. Plasma 5.2 was released in January with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

Spurred on by IoT, open source Linux will grow from a 56.2 percent share of embedded device shipments in 2012 to 64.7 percent in 2017, says VDC Research.

Cyanogen, a venture-funded startup, is offering a new open-source version of Android that it hopes a significant number of mobile device makers will adopt as an alternative to the ubiquitous Google brand. This slide show covers the key features of Cyanogen OS and examines why this new version of Android may draw more attention in the coming months.

This tutorial explains the installation and usage of X2Go on Ubuntu. X2Go is a remote desktop application to access X-Desktop enviroments over a network connection, it is well suited for low bandwidth connections, has support for sound with PulseAudio and allows desktop sharing. The application has two parts, the x2goclient for the client side and x2goserver (which has to be installed on the desktop system that shall be accessed). The X2Go client software is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The OpenStack project feels different from other open source projects to me. Let me try to explain. read more

Networking focused distros get an update.

Some of my recent articles have been about the Linux philosophy and its impact on the daily activities of system administrators like myself. One of the basic tenets of the Linux philosophy is to use software leverage, and one of the important corollaries of that tenet is to automate everything. read more

Gumstix has updated its wireless enabled, Linux-oriented Overo Storm modules with new “Storm-Y” models that add WiFi access point and BLE 4.1 functions. Last summer, when Gumstix announced a Storm-P version of its wireless-enabled Overo Storm computer-on-modules, the company said the Storm was its most popular model. Whereas the Storm-P added WiFi Direct support via […]

Our last poll, in which our readers picked their favorite programming lanaguage for beginners, had almost 30 comments and 2,300 votes. And, it's still open for voting! Python leads C/C+ and Javascript, and a few others, with over 1,000 votes. read more

Open Source in Education A collection of articles from educators, students, advocates, parents, and more who are implementing open source in education and working toward a more open knowledge base for everyone. read more

Microsoft, still struggling to gain a foothold in the smartphone market, is pressing ahead with efforts to have its software bundled on Android devices from major manufacturers, with Samsung as its first partner.

Large enterprises and nuclear laboratories aren't the only organizations that need an Internet access policy and a means of enforcing it. My household has an Internet access policy, and the technique I've used to enforce it is applicable to almost any organization. In our case, I'm not too concerned about outside security threats.

AndersDX unveiled a panel computer based on a Sitara AM3354 SoC, with WiFi and BT, and a 5.7-inch, VGA resistive or 4.3-inch, WVGA capacitive touch display. We typically cover UK-based AndersDX (Anders Electronics) in its role as a distributor of products such as CompuLab’s mini-PCs and embedded boards, or TinyGreenPC’s Pi Media Player. In the […]

Monitoring Network Traffic or Bandwidth Usage is an important task in an organisational structure or even for developers. It is sometimes required to monitor traffic on various systems which share the internet bandwidth. There might be situations where network statistics are required for decision making in the networking areas or use the logged information on the network traffic for analysis tasks.

Nearly six months have passed since a major Drupal SQL injection vulnerability was disclosed, and yet attackers are continuing to try, sometimes successfully, to exploit websites that have failed to update their systems.

I learned about David Lippman from an article on TeamOpen and realized I needed to talk to him more about his work in open education and open source. David is a professor at Pierce College and has saved students a million dollars with his shared textbooks. He also built IMathAS, a free, open source math assessment and course platform. read more

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.