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I built a music-light show for Halloween, but I improved it and added more features as I worked on the Christmas project. In this series, I'll provide comprehensive instructions to build a fully automated Christmas music/light show that turns on automatically at a given time or that you can plug and play.

Open source software enables Google to build things quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, allowing us to focus on solving new problems. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we know it. This is why we support open source and make it easy for Googlers to release the projects they're working on internally as open source. read more

Congatec’s “Conga-MA5” is a Linux-ready COM Express Compact Type 10 Mini module with Apollo Lake SoCs, up to 128GB eMMC 5.1, and -40 to 85°C support. Congatec was one of the first embedded vendors to announce computer-on-modules based on Intel’s Atom E3900 and other Apollo Lake Pentium and Celeron SoCs. The offerings included a Qseven […]

In my first article on getting started with the Groovy programming language, I left off with an example of reading a CSV file in Groovy. In this article, I'm going to move to a more idiomatic Groovy style (make it groovier, as some would say), cover the use of Groovy maps as lookup tables, and finish up by using maps to calculate some results. First things first—here is the final example from the last article, in more idiomatic Groovy: read more

The New C C99 is the C standard ratified by the ANSI and ISO standardizaion groups. It presents a significant amount of changes to the C language. These changes are the result of sibling competition between C and C++. The initial... Continue Reading →

This guest column from analyst firm VisionMobile Ltd. examines the impact of open source on the IoT, and suggests how companies can maximize its benefits. ? ? A Guide to Open Source in IoT by Stijn Schuermans, Senior IoT Analyst, VisionMobile Ltd. ? Introduction With the dawn of the Internet of Things, software is making […]

In part 1, we installed and tested the Postfix SMTP server. Postfix, or any SMTP server, isn't a complete mail server because all it does is move messages between SMTP servers. We need Dovecot to move messages off your Postfix server and into your users' email inboxes.

Everything has a season, and as organizations age—communities, charities, companies, churches and more—they face similar diseases of time. These are emergent patterns of failure that arise not from mistakes but from the consequences of earlier success. In open source, we are seeing the same patterns emerge; this should not be a surprise. read more

At the recent ELC Europe event in Berlin, Bird gave a “Status of Embedded Linux” keynote in which he discussed the good news in areas like GPU support and virtually mapped kernel stacks, as well as the slow progress in boot time, system size, and other areas that might help Linux compete with RTOSes in IoT leaf nodes.

With the recent release of Fedora 25, Fedora 23 will officially enter End Of Life (EOL) status on December 20th, 2016. After December 20th, all packages in the Fedora 23 repositories will no longer receive security, bugfix, or enhancement updates,... Continue Reading →

This tutorial shows how to prepare a Debian 8 (Jessie) server (with nginx, BIND, Dovecot) for the installation of ISPConfig, and how to install ISPConfig 3.1. ISPConfig 3 is a web hosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache or nginx web server, Postfix mail server, Courier or Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server, MySQL, BIND or MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more. This setup covers nginx (instead of Apache), BIND as DNS server, and Dovecot (instead of Courier).

Animation is a robust field with a large number of specialties and an even larger number of tools for creating a particular look or style. In the past two months, I've covered Krita Animation for hand-drawn digital cel animation and StopGo for stop motion animation. read more

The internet didn't come with privacy, any more than the planet did. But at least the planet had nature, which provided raw materials for the privacy technologies we call clothing and shelter. On the net, we use human nature to make our own raw materials. Those include code, protocols, standards, frameworks and best practices, such as those behind free and open-source software.

Open source continues to drive rapid innovation in the 3D printing industry. This makes sense if you stop and think about it—a 3D printer exists to make other things. Combining that philosophy with free software and open source hardware helps other people participate in improving the objects that it makes, and in making the printers faster, smarter, and cleaner. Here are a few of my favorite open source 3D printing innovations from 2016: read more

In previous years, we have distinguished between open source cloud and others. But as cloud technologies have evolved it’s evident that any cloud without open source would be the equivalent of an automobile without an engine.

The Linux Foundation released its 2017 schedule, including an Embedded Linux Conference in Portland on Feb. 21-23 that needs proposal ideas by Dec. 10. This year, Linux Foundation events attracted over 20,000 “developers, maintainers, sysadmins, thought leaders, business executives and other industry professionals from more than 4,000 organizations across 85 countries,” and 25,000 are expected […]

Over the past few years, interest in both civilian and commercial use of drones has continued to grow rapidly, and drone hardware sits at the top of many people's holiday wish lists. read more

Traditionally, platforms and software stacks were implemented using proprietary software, and consisted of various software building blocks that originated as a result of internal development or via third-party software providers with negotiated licensing terms.

When we think about skills needed to build open structures and establish open mindsets, collaboration jumps to mind immediately. In order to collaborate effectively, communication—or rather, clear communication—is imperative to making it all work. read more

In the previous article, we looked at some of the basics of rsyslog -- a superfast Syslog tool with some powerful features for log processing. Here, I’ll be taking a detailed look at the main config file.