Showing headlines posted by bob

In a previous article, I talked about an add-on card for the Raspberry Pi called the ControlBlock. It allows game controllers to be connected as regular joystick devices, but it also has a really incredible power switch feature.

Joining a new community can be a daunting task for a myriad of reasons. The angst can be especially strong when joining a new technical community, some of which have a reputation for being acrimonious and tough on new members. While it's possible to stumble into a den of iniquity, I think you'll find most technical communities to be fairly reasonable, and following a few simple steps can ease your transition from non-member to member. read more

Backups are an incredibly important aspect of a system administrator’s job. Without good backups and a well-planned backup policy and process, it is a near certainty that sooner or later some critical data will be irretrievably lost. read more

Purpose is the first thing to consider when you're assembling any team. If one person could achieve that purpose, then forming the team would be unnecessary. And if there was no main purpose, then you wouldn't need a team at all. But as soon as the task requires more expertise than a single person has, we encounter the issue of collective participation—an issue that, if not handled properly, could derail you. read more

In the previous article, I showed how to use the grep command, which is great at finding text files that contain a string or pattern. The idea of directly searching in a "grep-like" way is so useful that there are additional commands to let you search right into PDF documents and handle XML files more naturally. Things do not stop there, as you could consider raw network traffic a collection of data that you want to "grep" for information, too.

In this fourth and the final installment, we will discuss the concept of aliases as well how you can use them to make your command line navigation easier and smoother.

Critical Link’s MitySOM-335x Maker Transition Kit adds an open source, BeagleBone Black like carrier board to its Linux-supported TI Sitara AM335x COM. Critical Link has launched a sandwich-style “MitySOM-335x Maker Transition Kit” that expands upon its MitySOM-335x computer-on-module with a carrier board that closely resembles the community-backed BeagleBone Black SBC. The kit enables makers to […]

International Data Privacy Day is right around the corner and to mark the event we’re happy to announce that Firefox Focus, the privacy browser, is now available for iOS in 27 languages covering billions of users around the world. Mozilla’s … Read more

Kontron’s “mITX-APL” thin Mini-ITX offers Intel Apollo Lake SoCs with triple displays, dual GbE, dual SATA 3.0, mini-PCIe, and Kontron Secure Solution. Kontron’s 2.5cm high mITX-APL supports commercial 0 to 60°C operation, and is aimed at Point of Sale, Point of Information, medical, industrial automation, and digital signage applications. It joins other thin mini-ITX boards […]

In 2012, Andrew Nesbitt was inspired by the 24 Ways to impress your friends advent calendar to start a new project: 24 Pull Requests, an open source contribution event. Participants are challenged to open one pull request for an open source project on GitHub every day from December 1 through December 24. read more

In the first article in this series, I provided a brief overview of NTP and explained why NTP services are critical to a healthy infrastructure. Now, let’s get our hands dirty and look at some security concerns and important NTP options to lock down your servers.

After installing my first solid state drive (SSD) in a computer that was running Linux, I have begun to explore how to take care of them. Solid state drives are different than traditional magnetic drives in the way that they operate, and they require different care from the software side in order to function optimally. read more

The grep command is a very powerful way to find documents on your computer. You can use grep to see if a file contains a word or use one of many forms of regular expression to search for a pattern instead. Grep can check the file that you specify or can search an entire tree of your filesystem recursively looking for matching files.

The sudo command makes it easier to manage your Fedora system. Certain commands in Fedora expect to be run only by a privileged user or administrator. The sudo command lets you run a command as if you’re the administrator, known as root. Unlike some... Continue Reading →

Enclustra unveiled two Linux-ready COMs based on the quad-core Cortex-A53 based Zynq UltraScale+ ARM/FPGA SoC with DDR4 RAM up to 8GB. Enclustra’s SODIMM-style Mars XU3 and larger Mercury+ XU1 computer-on-modules run Linux on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. They follow Enclustra’s announcement earlier this month of a Linux-friendly Mercury+ AA1 COM running on an Intel/Altera […]

We’ve ... recently created a new project within OCI called go-digest (which was donated and migrated from docker/go-digest). This provides a strong hash-identity implementation in Go and services as a common digest package to be used across the container ecosystem.

Today’s release of Firefox includes various features for developers and users that enable a richer and safer experience on the web. WebGL 2 enables a new generation of 3D graphics on the web Firefox is the first browser to support … Read more

VIA’s 3.5-inch “VAB-630” SBC deploys Android 5.0 on a dual-core, Cortex-A9 SoC, and provides optional touchscreen and wireless modules. The VIA Technologies VAB-630 SBC follows several signage oriented products from VIA that run Android on homegrown Cortex-A9 SoCs, such as the VIA Elite E1000 Pico-ITX SBC. The VAB-630 runs Android 5.0 on a similar 1GHz […]

Solaris Unix will not be seeing any significant upgrades, but Oracle will continue to support it for years to come.

In the past, maintaining technology infrastructure, deploying applications, and provisioning environments involved many manual, iterative tasks. But in today’s DevOps arena, true automation of these tasks has arrived. The benefits of automated configuration management range from time savings to elimination of human error.