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Higher education is not just about producing valuable workers, but about educating people to become thinking, lifelong learners who contribute in many positive ways to society, be that local or global.

I spent the past year writing The Librarian’s Guide to Academic Research in the Cloud, a book which focuses on using and thinking about cloud services in an academic research context. I’m fortunate enough to belong to a union that negotiated research leave for new faculty, and that leave made the book possible. The content of the book might be interesting to Linux users (here is an excerpt), but I wanted to talk about the process for writing the book, which was very Linux-intensive.

Tizen is a fresh new project, but it has roots in several pre-existing platforms including the distributions Moblin, MeeGo and LiMo. According to the Tizen Association, "The mobile marketplace has undergone extensive change over the past few years.

Should your government consider a "request for partnership" to prevent duplication and save tax-payer dollars in IT? Yes No If you’re familiar with any type of government procurement process, it usually involves an RFP—a request for proposal. But today, with declining revenues and limited resources, the approach to partnerships and getting work done may change within government in the near future. I forsee a shift from the traditional RFP process to a request for partnership.

Whether in the US or abroad, most everyone is familiar with American Idol. While not an open source project or community, American Idol is a good example of the power of participation, and how understanding this power and providing value can be profitable. American Idol has perfected the art of inspiring millions of people to work together toward one end goal—and the show has made millions. So, how do you get people to participate in something for free and make money from it?

The Linux 3.12 kernel was released on Sunday evening but prior to that was a last-minute pull request that got rejected by Linus Torvalds and with it he reaffirmed the focus of Linux on 64-bit...

Via Technologies announced a line of ARM-based Via Springboard SBCs supported with Android and Linux BSPs, and support services from prototyping to pre-production testing and diagnostics. The first Springboard is the $99, Pico-ITX-based VAB-600, built around a Via WM8950 SoC with a single 800MHz Cortex-A9 core, and featuring an I/O extender card and an optional […]

The release of Fedora 20 has been delayed by another week -- both the due-out beta and the final release -- over unresolved bugs...

With all the benefits of open source, improper management of its use may result in substantial legal, business, and technical risks. Most research and design managers know that they have to manage open source licenses, but not many are monitoring for security vulnerabilities and other bugs in open source libraries they use. Do you know the importance of monitoring open source for vulnerabilities before, during, and after using it?

Mahout greatly simplifies extracting recommendations and relationships from input datasets. Here we look at setting up Mahuout and running its recommender on a small data sample.

Today, transparency is a critical aspect in all areas of government. With Internet access, citizens are looking for more information about what is going on in their cities and are looking for more ways to hold their government representatives accountable. One of the best ways to provide transparency and make it easier for citizens to obtain the city services they require is to become an open source city. An open source city is one that uses a variety of new tools, including apps, to make information availble to citizens and interact with them as well. Following are 10 tools to help open source cities maintain transparency.

By day, Red Hat product manager Burr Sutter works to make developers more successful and productive with open source tools, technologies, and techniques. So it's no surprise that he wants to ensure his own children know how to solve technical problems as well. So when summer vacation rolled around this year, Sutter encouraged his son to complete some courses on CodeAcademy and to sign up for a couple of iD Tech Camps. In this interview, Sutter talks about why he wants his children to know how to fix the tech tools they use every day, how he balances that with other "kid" activities, and more. Parents who are looking for a way to get their children to learn code, to fix their computers, or just learn how online communities work may pick up some tips from Sutter's experiences.

Digia announced an Android and Linux-targeted embedded version of its cross-platform Qt GUI framework called Qt Enterprise Embedded that combines a Qt Creator based IDE with a new embedded Boot to Qt stack. The Digia-backed Qt project also released the beta of Qt 5.2 with a new Scene Graphic renderer and the first production-ready support […]

Major telecommunications companies are intent on transforming the Internet – from an information center for all of us to a profit center for them. They want to charge consumers extra for use of the websites and applications we want most.

First phone to launch with Firefox OS 1.1 South Korean electronics giant LG has joined the likes of Alcatel, Geeksphone, and ZTE by offering a handset based on the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox OS platform.…

Educators in the US and worldwide are increasingly preoccupied with: 1) how children learn, 2) how best to prepare children for the future, and 3) what role digital technology plays in the classroom—all of which is controversial and widely debated. Various theories and models of education and intelligence have played a large role in shaping this discussion. Noted developmental psychologist, Howard Gardner of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, has been instrumental for many years.

Artila Electronics announced the release of an 80 x 50mm computer-on-module (COM) that runs Linux or Android on an ARM Cortex A8-based Freescale system-on-chip. The M-5360A module plugs into application baseboards via three bottom-side headers carrying numerous I/O interfaces including dual LVDS, VGA, SATA, Fast Ethernet, SD, USB 2.0, serial, and CAN bus. The credit […]

I get asked a lot by people who are interested in helping out open source projects, but have absolutely no programming skills. What can they do? Well, here’s a few ideas how non-programmers can contribute to open source projects. It is worth noting that it is best to contribute to software that you actually use yourself. That way you feel the benefits.

In 2009, our friends at Development Seed launched a pretty revolutionary concept—a completely open source intranet-in-a-box called Open Atrium. It was regarded as a giant leap forward for open source, for social collaboration, and for Drupal. Way back then (okay, it was just four years ago), an open source solution that could stand toe-to-toe with proprietary solutions like Basecamp and SharePoint was unprecedented. Open Atrium came on the scene and directly into the limelight because for the first time, a distribution of the open source Drupal code base felt really and truly like an all-in-one product.

If your Linux computer fails to boot after a kernel upgrade, disk swap, or other system change, you're not helpless. The Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) gives you ways to control the boot process and recover. Or, if necessary, emergency boot disks that you create with an external tool can come to the rescue. Learn procedures and GRUB commands that can help you boot in problem situations, and find out about a life-saving external tool for BIOS-based systems.