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An open source project is currently in the works to build an electric vehicle powered by in-wheel motors. The goals are ambitious: 1) Build an electric vehicle with a minimum range of 186 miles that can theoretically be put into production and sold for under $22,700. 2) Share the design so that others can replicate or customize the platform. 3) Do it all in less than a year.

Buying the latest games will typically get you top-quality graphics and an iTunes-ready soundtrack, but that won’t necessarily translate into compelling gameplay. And even if it does, there’s no guarantee you’ll be kept entertained for more than a few hours. The solution? Try one of these open source takes on classic PC games.

Fortunately, open source software is here to save the day. This is software that often has the same features as commercial software, but it's free. I know, it sounds too good to be true, but it really exists and I use it a lot.

Purdue University and Red Hat Inc., the world's leading open-source solutions, are collaborating to create a two-year doctoral research position for Discovery Park's Research Center for Open Digital Innovation.

The RPi Foundation announced a $10 price cut for the Raspberry Pi Model B+ and launched a “Sense HAT” add-on. Meanwhile, Pi competition continues to emerge.

Definition: RTFM (Read The F'ing Manual). Occasionally it is ironically rendered as Read The Fine Manual, a phrase uttered at people who have asked a question that we, the enlightened, feel is beneath our dignity to answer, but not beneath our dignity to use as an opportunity to squish a newbie's ego. read more

With Hiera, you can externalize your systems' configuration data and easily understand how those values are assigned to your servers. With that data separated from your Puppet code, you then can encrypt sensitive values, such as passwords and keys.

Nobody appreciates good documentation. Instead, good documentation is simply there, existing, answering questions, solving problems, and quietly serving its purpose. The bad—or the complete lack of—documentation, on the other hand, you notice. read more

Oracle's chief architect of the Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold, has outlined a “proposed schedule for JDK 9” that will see it delivered on Thursday, September 22nd, 2016.

The Tor Project has shuttered its cloud proxy service citing security vulnerabilities, usability bugs and a lack of resources. Tor offers its users the capacity to surf the Web anonymously, bouncing traffic through a series of relay servers so that no observer at any point can tell where that user's traffic is traveling to or coming from.

The complexity of application stacks keeps going up. Way, way up. Application stacks have always been complicated, but never like this. There are so many services, so many tools, so much more compute power available, so many new techniques to try, and always the desire, and the pressure, to solve problems in newer and cooler and more elegant ways.

It all sounds so straightforward: Put your code up on GitHub or start/join a project at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), build a community of like-minded individuals, start a company, take in some funding, and then IPO. Or maybe not.

Hackers have taken an interest in Elasticsearch, a popular enterprise search engine. A researcher based in Texas, whose own Elasticsearch server was hacked, today published results collated from a honeypot he built to get a sense of how widespread attacks are against the vulnerability that did in his server.

Don't think you're vulnerable? You might want to double check that.

Samsung unveiled a series of IoT-focused “Artik” SoCs and modules, including dual- and octa-core COMs that integrate wireless radios and run Yocto Linux. After Samsung acquired home automation hub vendor SmartThings, we imagined it would quickly convert the RTOS-based system to Tizen Linux. Instead the Gen 2 SmartThings hub announced in January ran another Linux […]

Canonical announced collaborative, cloud-oriented IoT projects using the lightweight Ubuntu Snappy OS with Acer (aBeing One), GE (ChillHub), and Microsoft. In January, When Canonical announced its lightweight, IoT-oriented Snappy version of its Ubuntu Core OS, it was revealed that Snappy was baked into the Ninja Sphere home automation hub, as well as a special version […]

Minor updates abound for interesting distros

"Learn to code" is the new mantra for the 21st century. What’s often lost in that statement is exactly what makes programming so useful if you’re not planning to switch careers and become a software engineer. Just because we’re surrounded by computers doesn’t mean the average person needs to be able to reprogram their smart fridge. read more

John Dickinson is Director of Technology at SwiftStack and Program Team Lead (PTL) of the OpenStack Swift project. Last year, he gave us an update on Swift's progress with Storage policies: Coming to an OpenStack Swift cluster near you for Opensource.com. In this follow up interview, John offers tips for improving community collaboration on open source projects, and gives us a preview of his upcoming OpenStack Summit talk. read more

Password managers are a great way to supply random, unique passwords to a high number of websites. But most still have an Achilles’ heel: Usually, a single master password unlocks the entire vault.