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Node-RED is a programming tool that lets you quickly connect hardware devices using a browser-based editor. It comes with a wide range of nodes that can be used to build flows in a drag-and-drop manner, significantly reducing your development time. Node-RED is installed with Raspian Jesse for Raspberry Pi, and there is also an option to download Node-RED separately. read more

Pine64’s Raspberry Pi-style “Rock64” SBC offers a quad -A53 RK3328 SoC with GbE and USB 3.0 ports for $25, $35, or $45 with 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of RAM. Yet another community-backed SBC with the same size, layout, expansion connector, and basic specs of a Raspberry Pi has reached market. While most of the pseudo […]

Open source has been amazingly good at solving two sets of issues: 1) infrastructure and 2) developer tools. This is because those developers and users are basically the same people—the developer is an "insider" to the problem, understands it well, and is motivated to solve it. read more

The release of Fedora 26 is just around the corner, and the choices for wallpapers in Fedora Workstation are pretty amazing. In addition to the Fedora 26 Default Wallpaper and the GNOME 3.24 Adwaita background, Fedora Workstation now includes a... Continue Reading →

Apache Cassandra is a free and open source distributed NoSQL database management system. It is used to store large data in decentralized highly available clusters. In this tutorial, we will be installing Apache Cassandra on CentOS 7 server.

The point-and-click graphical user interface available on Linux is a wonderful thing... but if your favorite interactive development environment consists of the terminal window, Bash, Vim, and your favorite language compiler, then, like me, you use the terminal a lot. read more

People's phones and all of the various sensors that may be built in to them is a source of scientific data logging that almost everyone carries around. Although the selection of sensors varies from phone to phone, they almost all have a camera. In this article, I take a look at a piece of software called Tracker that can be used to analyze videos you take of experiments.

Linux users need to check out their distributions to see if a nasty bug in libgcrypt20 has been patched. The patch, which has landed in Debian and Ubuntu, is to address a side-channel attack published last week.

For David Price, the first steps down the path to embracing openness started with a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. That diagnosis was a shock, and like many people with medical conditions in the digital age, Price began frequenting online forums for people with his affliction. read more

It feels great to say that KDE has active contributors across the globe. Two KDE contributors recently presented talks in Asia about their work and encouraged new contributors to join us and get started.

By any measure, the rise of open source software as an alternative to the old, proprietary ways has been remarkable. Today, there are tens of millions of libraries hosted at GitHub alone, and the number of major projects is growing rapidly. read more

I started brewing my own beer more than 10 years ago. Like most homebrewers, I started in my kitchen making extract-based brews. This required the least equipment and still resulted in really tasty beer. Eventually I stepped up to all-grain brewing using a big cooler for my mash tun. For several years I was brewing 5 gallons at a time, but brewing 10 gallons takes the same amount of time and effort (and only requires slightly larger equipment), so a few years ago I stepped it up. read more

Gibbon is a free and open source web-based Educational Management system that can be used to solve teachers and students daily problems. Gibbon is very flexible, extensible and themable application with many features, including online application forms, messenger, planner, external assessment, and much more. In this tutorial, we will go through step by step installation of Gibbon on Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Off-the-shelf, consumer home automation has fallen into a pretty standard pattern. You have a smart device (like a lightbulb or door lock) that talks to some kind of hub that you put on your network. It communicates with a cloud service owned by the device vendor, and you interface with that service via a mobile app. This provides an easy out-of-the-box experience and lets the vendor iterate on its service both in the cloud and on mobile; however, this model has a lot of weaknesses and is extremely limiting with what it can do. read more

If you use open source software, chances are you'll encounter a .tar file at some point. The open source tar archive utility has been around since 1979, so it is truly ubiquitous in the POSIX world. Its purpose is simple: It takes one or more files and "wraps" them into a self-contained file, called a tape archive because when tar was invented it was used to place data on storage tapes.

In July, we'll kick off our sysadmin series that will focus on helpful tools and tips for working in the field. We're also working on bringing you some interesting projects in home automation. Other series we have our eyes on this year are productivity hacks and UX for open source projects and products.

While working on the Linux command line, you might find yourself in situations where-in you need to display (or even change) the current system time. Not only that, if you work in a team with members in different timezones, you may want to keep yourself updated with time-related information for zones in which other members are sitting. If you're looking for a tool that lets you do all this (and much more), you will be glad to know there exists a command - dubbed date - that does all this.

This series previews the new self-paced Containers for Developers and Quality Assurance (LFS254) training course from The Linux Foundation. In earlier articles, we installed Docker, introduced Docker Machine, performed basic Docker container and image operations, and looked at Dockerfiles and Docker Hub.

We have a little problem on the web right now and I can only see it becoming a larger concern as time goes by: more and more sites are obtaining certificates, vitally important documents needed to deploy HTTPS, but we have no way of protecting ourselves when things go wrong.

The $25 NanoPi Neo Plus2 SBC combines the WiFi, Bluetooth, and 8GB eMMC of the Neo Air with the quad -A53 Allwinner H5 of the Neo2, and boosts RAM to 1GB. Despite bulking up in one dimension to 52 x 40mm, FriendlyElec’s NanoPi Neo Plus2 is still part of the headless, IoT-oriented Neo family, joining the 40 x 40mm, $8 NanoPi Neo, the wireless enabled, $20 NanoPi Neo Air, and the 64-bit $15 NanoPi Neo2.