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Proper spelling doesn't seem to be very important to many people these days. There are, however, those of us for whom it is. Yes, I am one of those people. While I'm not a spelling cop, misspelled words stick out when I encounter them. They hurt my eyes. They hurt my brain. Any good text editor or word processor packs a spelling checker. If you're working in plain text, you can go another route to check spelling: at the command line with a nifty utility called GNU Aspell (which I'll be calling Aspell from here on in). read more

SiFive has opened pre-sales on a “HiFive Unleashed” SBC that runs Linux on its new RISC-V-based, quad-core, 1.5GHz U540 SoC, with 8GB DDR4, a GbE port, and an FMC connector. SiFive followed up on its October announcement of the SiFive Freedom U540 — the world’s first Linux-driven RISC-V processor SoC — with a Crowd Supply […]

Retro game consoles that are easy to program are a great way to introduce anyone—and especially kids—to video game development. One of these is Gamebuino, a preassembled, handheld retro game console. It's kind of an Arduino on steroids, with a Nokia 5110 mobile phone display (84x48 pixels), LiPo charger and LiPo battery, an SD card reader, and an SD card with a bunch of games. MAKERbuino, which is basically a Gamebuino kit that you get to assemble and solder together, seemed more interesting to me. read more

Most people1 don't realise quite how much fun security is, or exactly how sexy security expertise makes you to other people.2 We know that it's engrossing, engaging, and cool, they don't. read more

Openbox is a lightweight, next generation window manager for users who want a minimal enviroment for their Fedora desktop. It’s well known for its minimalistic appearance, low resource usage and the ability to run applications the way they were designed to... Continue Reading →

When downloading files, particularly installation files from websites, it is a good idea to verify that the download is valid. A website will often display a hash value for each file so that you can make sure the download completed correctly. In this article, we will be discussing the md5sum tool that you can use to validate the download.

Open-source software runs something in your life even if you don’t realize it. Raspberry Pi fans take advantage of open-source software. Linux and BSD open-source servers run our websites and corporate networks, as well as in-flight entertainment units and computer kiosks. Open-source software sits at the core...

Last week, enterprise open source leader Red Hat RHT -2% announced it was acquiring CoreOS, an up-and-coming player in the red-hot container marketplace. Superficially, the motivation for this deal is straightforward: Red Hat needs to round out its container story, and CoreOS fits the bill. However...

Germany-based Linux vendor SUSE Linux has launched live patching for its enterprise Linux distribution that runs on IBM Power Systems and also a service pack for its real-tine enterprise distribution that will enable systems running it to handle both real-time and non-real-time workloads on a single virtual machine.

Members of the open source community are working on a new security-focused project for the Linux kernel. Named Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG), this is a loadable kernel module that will perform runtime integrity checking of the Linux kernel.

Doc outlines his plans for Linux Journal 2.0. A friend the other day casually called Linux Journal "the journal of record for the Open Source community". I think that's a good description of what we were for 23 years—because one sign of our "of record" status is how many people have told us that they have a collection of LJ issues going back many years.

Kubernetes continues to show its dominance of cloud container management -- as Cisco adopts it for its new container orchestration platform.

Versalogic has revealed preliminary details of its first Arm-based SBC. The quad-core i.MX6-powered “Tetra” features up to 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, and 128K MRAM, plus I/O including GbE, SATA, LVDS, HDMI, USB, serial, CAN, microSD, and miniPCIe, and runs fanless over -40 to 85°C.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup we cover the 20-year anniversary of the coining of the term "open source software," the release of LibreOffice 6.0, and more.

Who knew sharing would transform an industry? Feature Twenty years ago, the Open Source Definition (OSD) was published, providing a framework for the most significant trend in software development since then, and building upon Richard Stallman's prior advocacy for "free software."…

Video: "The reward of victory is often another set of battles."

Much of the software I've covered in the past has focused on engineering, chemistry or physics. However, a growing number of software packages are being written to apply computational resources to problems in biology. So in this article, I want to look at one particular package for biology named Biogenesis.

Twenty years ago, in February 1998, the term "open source" was first applied to software. Soon afterwards, the Open Source Definition was created and the seeds that became the Open Source Initiative (OSI) were sown. As the OSD’s author Bruce Perens relates, “Open source” is the proper name of a campaign to promote the pre-existing concept of free software to business, and to certify licenses to a rule set. read more

News updates for February 2, 2018.

Ansible is an open source automation tool used to configure servers, install software, and perform a wide variety of IT tasks from one central location. It is a one-to-many agentless mechanism where all instructions are run from a control machine that communicates with remote clients over SSH, although other protocols are also supported.