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Recon Instruments announced an Android-based $399 heads-up display (HUD) designed to fit inside ski goggles. The Snow2 is equipped with a 1GHz, dual-core processor, a 428 x 240 mini-display, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and sensors, and it syncs to Android and iOS devices. The Snow2 updates a previous MOD Live HUD wearable that was similarly […]

Olimex’s OLinuXino project announced a tiny, Android- and Linux-ready single board computer based on Allwinner’s 1GHz, Cortex-A8 based A10 processor, and the first one to be offered with a mini-PC enclosure. The open source A10-OLinuXino-Lime offers 512MB of DDR3 RAM, an optional 4GB of NAND flash, plus HDMI, SATA, USB, and Ethernet, starting at only […]

While (U)EFI is frowned upon by many Linux users due to the security disaster known as Secure Boot or other UEFI compatibility problems with running Linux on systems, there are a few benefits...

The latest edition of SUSE's community Linux distribution is ready to use.

AMD unveiled the Radeon R9 290 graphics card at the beginning of November as one step down from the new flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card. Numerous Windows reviews praised the graphics card for its great performance, but what wasn't clear at the time was how the Linux performance and compatibility was for this new $399 USD graphics card. AMD hadn't offered any review samples to Phoronix for conducting any Linux-based testing and benchmarking, but it's more clear now why that didn't happen: the Linux performance isn't stellar. I bought an XFX Radeon R9 290 and now there's many Linux benchmarks coming out of this graphics card that's riddled by what might be driver issues. I already regret having purchased the AMD Radeon R9 290 for use on Linux; the graphics card is hot, power hungry, noisy, and the OpenGL results aren't too good.

Jailhouse virtualization was announced today by Siemens to address real-time, safety, and security requirements.

At the school district where I am the director of information technology, over 90% of our information systems have been transitioned to open source software. Ubuntu is the server operating systems at the district office and schools, while the Ubuntu desktop is deployed for students, teachers, and administration through the use of diskless clients. As a result, students and teachers use primarily open source programs which include LibreOffice, Scribus, the Gimp, and Inkscape, to name a very few. We are able to centrally control over 2300 workstations at 16 schools and keep software much more current than many districts attempting to maintain commercial software packages. We have achieved significant energy savings, over 70% on our clients, and greatly reduced licensing costs.

Security researchers have discovered a Linux backdoor that uses a covert communication protocol to disguise its presence on compromised systems. The malware was used in an attack on a large (unnamed) hosting provider back in May. It cleverly attempted to avoid setting off any alarm bells by injecting its own communications into legitimate traffic, specifically SSH chatter.

Requests from governments worldwide for user information have more than doubled since three years ago. Worse still, says Google, is what the US won't let us tell you...

Google also urged Washington to take action to shore up privacy protections for US citizens: We strongly believe that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) must be updated in this Congress, and we urge Congress to expeditiously enact a bright-line, warrant-for-content rule. Governmental entities should be required to obtain a warrant--issued based on a showing of probable cause--before requiring companies like Google to disclose the content of users' electronic communications.

Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman tried to get Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond’s judge to only hand down a community service sentence. Hammond, instead, received 10 years in jail...

Following my recent post on the initiatives now in place to rebalance the demographics of the Linux Kernel community, I would like to share a set of specific training activities to get beginners, specifically college students, involved in the kernel. These were created by an enthusiastic group at Red Hat, including Matthew Whitehead and Priti Kumar, and unfolded on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), and State University of New York at Albany.

Yesterday there was news that OpenACC 2.0 parallel programming support was coming to GCC complete with GPU acceleration support for NVIDIA GPUs. While it was exciting on the surface, it appears that this work may be poisonous and could have a very tough time making it upstream...

Many programs exist that try to serve as a replacement for MATLAB. They all differ in their capabilities—some extending beyond what is available in MATLAB, and others giving subsets of functions that focus on some problem area. In this article, let's look at another available option: FreeMat.

I remember the first time a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and showed me how I didn't need to type commands and path names fully—I could just start typing and use the Tab key to complete the rest. That was so cool. I think everybody loves Tab completion because it's something you use pretty much every minute you spend in the shell.

Littlebits is disrupting the open hardware space. It's "an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with magnets for prototyping, learning, and fun." The company is the invention of Ayah Bdeir, an MIT graduate and TED senior fellow, and was founded in September 2011. This is the normal for our kids: piecing together parts to make something they want to use, and being creators not just consumers! For one, many parents in the western world are having children later in life. Women often delay having a baby until they start a career, finish graduate school, or have more disposable income. A large majority of these mothers are highly educated and tend to be savvy consumers. Bear in mind, women are the leading or sole breadwinner in 40% of American households with children under 18. Here are the 5 big reasons why littleBits is exciting and different:

Linux-mad ex-Nokia bods prep mobes for Helsinki launch Finnish startup Jolla has revealed when the first batch of its Sailfish OS–based smartphones will be available to customers, along with new information about what software will be on offer when the devices ship.…

Xamarin, the company driving the development of the Mono open-source .NET framework that is generally loved or hated by Phoronix readers, has announced a new partnership with Microsoft...

We are celebrating the SELinux 10th year anversary this year. Hard to believe it. SELinux was first introduced in Fedora Core 3 and later in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. For those who have never used SELinux, or would like an explanation...

An even cloudier ultrabook? We'll make it so, says Dell Dell is taking another stab at making the Sputnik Ultrabook it converted from Windows to Ubuntu even cloudier for developers.…

Okay fanbois ... time to compile your very own Apple II The Computer History Museum has scored something of a coup, publishing – with Cupertino's permission – the source code for the Apple II's DOS, version 3.1.…