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Although some people think open source projects only need programmers—and experienced ones, at that— open source project needs go beyond the ability to write code. They also require testing, technical support, documentation, marketing, and more. And contributing to projects also is a great way to improve technical skills and connect with people who share similar interests. One barrier to participating in open source projects is not knowing how to join and get started. In this article, I'll explain how to start contributing to an open source project. read more

SanCloud unveiled an enhanced version of the BeagleBone Black SBC, with 2GB RAM, GbE, extra USB ports, barometric and temperature sensors, and 6-axis MEMS. Manchester UK-based SanCloud showed a prototype of a “BeagleBone Enhanced” variant of the BeagleBone Black single board computer, in TI’s booth at CES earlier this month. BeagleBone Green(click to enlarge) Like […]

This is the second article in what will be a four-part series on the current state of 3D printing compared to how things were three years ago when I wrote my first series on 3D printing. Of course, this is Linux Journal, so the focus will be on Linux and open-source-specific aspects in 3D printing. I won't dwell much on proprietary products.

This flaw isn't nearly as bad as first reported, but Linux administrators still need to fix it.

Cory Doctorow is good with words. He just prefers stringing them into sentences, not subroutines. "I was a software developer," he says. "I'm much better at writing science fiction novels. Like, seriously."

Facebook is rolling out a new feature on its Android app that will let mobile users access the social network anonymously over The Onion Router network, or Tor.

Contribute to open source! It’ll look great on your resume! It’s gratifying work! You may have heard people make these statements, or ones similar to them, numerous times throughout your career. They’re not wrong—contributing to open source is a rewarding endeavor in multiple dimensions—but, when software engineers advise other software engineers to contribute to open source they usually mean code contributions. This is a fair assumption to make, but the reality is that there are numerous opportunities to contribute to open source without writing a single line of code. read more

Carl Sagan once said, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." Katrina Hayes is clearly an exception to that—she uses her knowledge and skills to great effect to debug code. Katrina took time from her busy schedule prior to her presentation, Logging in the debugger's toolkit at the upcoming ScaLE 14X to talk to Opensource.com. She talks to us about her surprisingly minimal use of tools and a bit about her debugging process. read more

Exploit takes a long time to cook Windows, but gives hackers a menu of evil options Shmoocon Foxglove Security bod Stephen Breen has strung together dusty unpatched Windows vulnerabilities to gain local system-level access on Windows versions up to 8.1.…

IRC, short for Internet Relay Chat, is a great way for individuals and teams to communicate and work together. Although there are new apps like Slack that mimic it, IRC itself has been around for decades. It’s a time-tested system with a... Continue Reading →

The Linux- and Android-friendly “JaguarBoard” SBC, based on a 64-bit quad core Atom processor, has won over 600 percent of its Kickstarter funding goal. Hong Kong-based Jaguar Electronic HK’s successful Kickstarter campaign for a $65 “JaguarBoard” SBC based on the quad-core Intel Atom Z3735G processor will end on Jan 22, having conjured up more than […]

Kubernetes and Docker are the latest buzz words in the IT sector. Businesses and IT enthusiasts alike are clamoring to learn more about containerization. I managed to grab Red Hat software analyst Jason Brooks, who will be speaking at SCaLE 14x about Kubernetes, to ask him a few questions about the software and container movement.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at IBM's flexible mainframes with Golang, Mozilla keeps FireFox OS in play for IoT, and other news.

The Wine team members released version 1.8 of their project this week. The project has been in constant development since 1993 and reached version 1 only in 2008, so new releases are major events.

So, you want to start using that open source thing... read more

Many people have decided to implement Let's Encrypt into their production sites. I find this still a very bad idea to be done without being very (but really very) careful. Let's Encrypt brings you freedom but also limits you in using the certificate with SHA-256 RSA Encryption. Support for SHA-2 has improved over the last few years. Most browsers, platforms, mail clients and mobile devices already support SHA-2. However, some older operating systems such as Windows XP pre-SP3 do not support SHA-2 encryption. Many organizations will be able to convert to SHA-2 without running into user experience issues, and many may want to encourage users running older, less secure systems to upgrade. In this tutorial, we are going to deal with this incompatibility in a simple, but still nasty way.

iCracked’s “Ocean” is a tiny battery powered microserver and power pack that comes with Debian but also supports Android, Raspbian, and other Linux builds. You might call iCracked the “Uber” of the iOS device repair market. Founded in 2010, the company has since grown into a network over 4,000 “certified iTechs” located in a dozen […]

Open letter calls on site to be more responsive and accelerate own development More than 1,100 maintainers of GitHub projects have put their names to an open letter expressing frustration that the famous software hub is ignoring them.…

Several months ago, Red Hatters David Egts and Gunnar Hellekson welcomed Paul Smith, Red Hat Public Sector VP, onto their podcast, The Dave & Gunnar Show, where they discussed Smith's experience in an open organization. The conversation is insightful—and we recommend tuning in. read more

Parker Abercrombie is a software engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he builds software to support Mars science missions. He has a special interest in geographic information systems (GIS) and has worked with teams at NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy on systems for geographic visualization and data management. read more