Showing headlines posted by bob

Lower Saxony says 'auf wiedersehen, pinguin' The German state of Lower Saxony plans to follow Munich's example, and migrate a reported 13,000 users from Linux back to Windows.…

Fedora loves Python, and the Fedora Magazine is no exception. Are you looking at learning Python, or improving your Python skills? Over the last year, Fedora Magazine contributors have been providing some awesome tips, tutorials, and learning project ideas. Here is a selection of articles that can help you get started on improving your skills. […]

While Web browsers are the primary medium through which users download stuff from the Internet, there are some Linux commands that also let you do this. In this tutorial, we will discuss one such command - curl - that among other things lets you download stuff from the Web.

DARPA announced the first grants for its $1.5 billion Electronic Resurgence Initiative for accelerating chip development. More than $35 million went to a “Posh Open Source Hardware” project for developing and verifying hardware IP. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the first grants for its Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI). The initial round, […]

In May, I wrote an article about building a preamplifier for a moving coil phono cartridge. At the time, I had recently replaced my aging moving magnet cartridge with a nice new moving coil cartridge, and my phono preamplifier did not provide enough voltage gain to directly use the new cartridge. read more

News briefs for July 26, 2018.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the first grants for its Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI). The initial round, which will expand to $1.5 billion over five years, covers topics ranging from automating EDA to optimizing chips for SDR to improving NVM performance.

Many companies partner with universities on research to develop new products, improve their existing products, or simply increase their profits by leveraging university research and development (R&D) capabilities. Generally, these relationships use a proprietary standard research agreement (PSRA); for historical reasons, these agreements contain significant intellectual property (IP) monopoly language and restrictions on both the company and the university. read more

Adlink’s has launched a rugged, customizable Apollo Lake panel PC series called “SP-AL” with IP65-protected 7- to 25-inch capacitive or resistive screens, expansion via mini-PCIe and Adlink FM modules, and extended temperature, shock, and vibration resistance.

Package managers make life so easy that many of us have forgotten what things were like in the olden days when getting a piece of software to work with your system was a real test of patience and endurance. read more

Every computerized device uses some form of software to perform its intended tasks. In the early days of software, products were stringently tested for bugs and other defects. For the last decade or so, software has been released via the internet with the intent that any bugs would be fixed by applying new versions of the software. In some cases, each individual application has its own updater. In others, it is left up to the user to figure out how to obtain and upgrade software. read more

Learn a few different ways to get a progress bar for your dd command.

One enduring and complex piece of jargon is the use of "free" in relation to software. In fact, the term is so ambiguous that different terms have evolved to describe some of the variants—open source, FOSS, and even phrases such as "free as in speech, not as in beer." But surely this is a good thing, right? We know what we mean; we're sharing shorthand by using a particular word in a particular way. Some people might not understand, and there's some ambiguity. But does that matter? read more

Timers add yet another way of starting services, based on... well, time. Although similar to cron jobs, systemd timers are slightly more flexible. Let's see how they work.

Many Linux users think that working in a terminal is either too complex or boring, and try to escape it. Here is a fix, though — four great open source apps for your terminal. They’re fun and easy to use, and may even brighten up your life when you need to spend a time in […]

Roundcube is a free and open source web-based webmail solution written in PHP. It is a web-based IMAP client, so you can also access your email server from your web browser. This tutorial shows you how to install RoundCube on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).

Google unveiled a stripped-down “Edge TPU” version of its Tensor Processing Unit AI chip plus a Cloud IoT Edge stack for Arm-based IoT gateways that run Linux or Android Things. An NXP-based dev kit is due in October. Google announced a lightweight, embedded version of its enterprise focused Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (Cloud TPU) AI […]

In a previous article, I gave an overview of cryptography and discussed the core concepts of confidentiality (keeping data secret), integrity (protecting data from tampering), and authentication (knowing the identity of the data's source). Since authentication relates so closely to all the messiness of identity in the real world, a complex technological ecosystem has evolved around establishing that someone is who they claim to be. In this article, I'll describe in broad strokes how these systems work. read more

Dave Hansen from Intel posted a patch and said, "Intel is considering adding a new bit to the IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES MSR (Model-Specific Register) to tell when RSB (Return Stack Buffer) underflow might be happening. Feedback on this would be greatly appreciated before the specification is finalized." He explained that...

Gumstix announced a version of its Aerocore 2 drone control board that runs Linux on Nvidia’s Jetson TX2. The Geppetto customizable board provides a Cortex-M4 running PX4, and offers USB 3.0, micro-HDMI, and support for LTE, GPS, and 4x HD cameras. The Aerocore 2 drone control board arrived in 2014 and was followed in 2016 […]