Weekend Reading: FOSS Projects

Linux Journal's FOSS Project Spotlights provide an opportunity for free and open-source project team members to show Linux Journal readers what makes their project compelling. Join us this weekend as we explore some of the latest FOSS projects in the works.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Mender.io, an Open-Source Over-the-Air Software Update Manager for IoT Devices

by Ralph Nguyen

Mender is an open-source (Apache 2.0) project to address over-the-air (OTA) software update management for Linux-based IoT devices.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Nitrux, a Linux Distribution with a Focus on AppImages and Atomic Upgrades

by Nitrux Latinoamericana S.C.

Nitrux is a Linux distribution with a focus on portable, application formats like AppImages. Nitrux uses KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications, and it also uses our in-house software suite Nomad Desktop.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Tutanota, the First Encrypted Email Service with an App on F-Droid

by Matthias Pfau

Seven years ago, Tutanota was being built, an encrypted email service with a strong focus on security, privacy and open source. Long before the Snowden revelations, the Tutanota team felt there was a need for easy-to-use encryption that would allow everyone to communicate online without being snooped upon.

FOSS Project Spotlight: LinuxBoot

by David Hendricks

Linux as firmware.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That may sound cliché, but it's still as true for the firmware that boots your operating system as it was in 2001 when Linux Journal first published Eric Biederman's "About LinuxBIOS". LinuxBoot is the latest incarnation of an idea that has persisted for around two decades now: use Linux as your bootstrap.

FOSS Project Spotlight: CloudMapper, an AWS Visualization Tool

by Scott Piper

Duo Security has released CloudMapper, an open-source tool for visualizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments.

When working with AWS, it's common to have a number of separate accounts run by different teams for different projects. Gaining an understanding of how those accounts are configured is best accomplished by visually displaying the resources of the account and how these resources can communicate. This complements a traditional asset inventory.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Ravada

by Francesc Guasch

Ravada is an open-source project that allows users to connect to a virtual desktop.

Currently, it supports KVM, but its back end has been designed and implemented in order to allow future hypervisors to be added to the framework. The client's only requirements are a web-browser and a remote viewer supporting the spice protocol.

FOSS Project Spotlight: WallpaperDownloader

by Eloy Garcia Almaden

Are you bored with the look of your desktop? Are the wallpapers that come with your distro enough for you? WallpaperDownloader is a graphical application that will help you customize your desktop and find wallpapers automatically.

WallpaperDownloader allows you to download, manage and change your favorite wallpapers from the internet. It is open source (GPL3) and totally free. Simply type in some keywords, enable the providers to include (up to six), select the download policy, and WallpaperDownloader does the rest.

FOSS Project Spotlight: the Codelobster IDE--a Free PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript Editor

by Stanislav Ustimenko

The Codelobster free web language editor has been available for quite some time and has attracted many fans. It allows you to edit PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, and it highlights the syntax and provides hints for tags, functions and their parameters. This editor deals with files that contain mixed content easily as well.

If you insert PHP code in your HTML template, the editor correctly highlights both HTML tags and PHP functions. The same applies to CSS and JavaScript code, which is contained in HTML files. The program also includes an auto-completion function, which greatly speeds up work for programmers and eliminates the possibility of errors.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Sawmill, the Data Processing Project

by Daniel Berman

Introducing Sawmill, an open-source Java library for enriching, transforming and filtering JSON documents.

If you're into centralized logging, you are probably familiar with the ELK Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana. Just in case you're not, ELK (or Elastic Stack, as it's being renamed these days) is a package of three open-source components, each responsible for a different task or stage in a data pipeline.

Are you involved in a FOSS project you'd like to see featured in Linux Journal?

Submissions should be 500-1000 words, in plain text (body of an email or an attachment), and should include an image (either logo or screenshot or photo). Send to ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

Carlie Fairchild is Linux Journal’s Publisher and guiding spirit. She’s been actively engaged in the Linux community for two decades and is responsible for setting the magazine’s overall direction. Carlie leads a motley team of geeks and journalists to ensure that Linux Journal stays true to its founding ideologies of personal freedom and open-source technical innovation.

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