Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open source software contributions often spring from passion—the passion to give back to the community, or simply the burning desire to create something new. The same passion that drives individual contributors also drives the team behind IndiaHacks to help develop the skills and networks of those individual contributors.

Microsoft has embraced Linux on its Azure cloud for some time now. Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Ubuntu are all supported on Azure. Now, Microsoft is taking the next step: It's adding Ubuntu to the first public technical preview of Azure Stack, its customized private and hybrid cloud bundle.

A fast site is more sustainable and typically more efficient with happier users who can find what they need quickly and easily. Just because a site isn't fast doesn’t mean, however, that it is easy to maintain. How do you balance the need for speed with the convenience of easy maintenance? In this post we’ll talk about how you can optimize WordPress, an open source content management system (CMS), to meet both needs.

We narrow down the very best home theatre distros out there to make your choice a little easier.

In this week's Top 5 articles of the week, we highlight five interviews with presenters of this year's Southern California Linux Expo—SCaLE 14x. Of the 19 total interviews and articles published on Opensource.com for this series, the most popular topics were: Kubernetes, Docker, patents, DevOps at scale, strace, and OpenStack for beginners.

Open organizations explicitly invite participation from external communities, because these organizations know their products and programs are world class only if they include a variety of perspectives at all phases of development. Liaising with and assisting those communities is critical. And community calls are my favorite method for interacting with stakeholders both inside and outside an organization. In this article, I'll share best practices for community calls and talk a little about how they can spur growth.

Owen DeLong is a Senior Manager of Network Architecture at Akamai Technologies, a leader in content delivery network (CDN) services that help to make the Internet "fast, reliable, and secure." He will be speaking at SCaLE 14x about IPv6 adoption (because we're out of IPv4!). Owen is also a member of the ARIN Advisory Council—an advisory group to the Board of Trustees on Internet number resource policy and related matters—and is an active member of the systems administration, operations, and Internet Protocol policy communities.

In this tutorial, I will guide you trough the Graylog2, Elasticsearch and MongoDB installation to build a scalable log server node with advanced log search capabilities. I will use Ubuntu 15.10 for this installation. Elasticsearch is a distributed search server based on Lucene that is available as OpenSource software. Graylog2 is a centralized log management and log analysis framework based on Elasticsearch and MongoDB.

This article was co-written by Josh Berkus. At SCaLE 14x, we will give a talk focused on helping speakers provide a more positive experience for their audiences. But there are many different facets of conference organizing that could use improvements, each facet with its own audience. In this article, I will focus on just one of those: How conference organizers can make the event more positive for the attendees.

If you manage a business which deals with physical goods, supply chain management is an important part of your business process. Whether you're running a tiny Etsy store with just a few customers, or a Fortune 500 manufacturer or retailer with thousands of products and millions of customers worldwide, it's important for you to have a close understanding of your inventory and the parts and raw materials you need to make your products.

At a recent meeting, I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Curt Carver, CIO at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, speak on the priorities (and challenges) for today's CIOs. Themes from his talk were familiar, but important: CIOs must help the business grow, gain competitive advantage, and remain secure. He also emphasized many challenges: IT skill set, modernizing IT while keeping the lights on, and maintaining security and compliance.

If you've ever wondered what Android would look like as a desktop PC OS, then try this for size: Remix OS from China. It's a very rough-around-the-edges build of Android x86–an ongoing port of Google's open-source OS from ARM gadgets to x86 PC's–with some closed-source stuff to create a multi-tasking desktop with moving windows, an application bar, and so on, but with Android's look-and-feel. It tries its best to map keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements to the normally fingertip-driven user interface.

KDE contributor Ken Vermette has written The Quintessential 2016 Review of Plasma 5.5 which was released last month, a 9 page cover of the good, the bad and the beautiful. Plasma 5.5 marks the beginning of the lifecycle where the vast majority of people will find it capable of serving as their workhorse environment. While at the beginning of the year Plasma 5.2 was exciting but a little wobbly, 5.5 has seen enough iteration to mature and close the significant issues found by the majority of early adopters. As of 2016 Plasma 5.5 has evolved well beyond where Plasma 4 ended while showing no signs of slowing down in the slightest, and I confidently recommend trying it out.

Most people have a limited view of Girl Scouts. They know about the cookies but do they know about the code? Carrie Raleigh is the STEM program manager for Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio in California where she says they are much more than a cookie program. Girls Scouts has been coordinating experiences to help teach girls life skills for over 100 years, and as our world changes, they will need to as well. To learn the right skills for our current world, Girl Scouts is focusing their efforts on teaching girls about robotics, cybersecurity, coding, gaming, and gaining STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) career exposure. Read more in my interview with Carrie who will be speaking at SCaLE 14x this year on Girl Scouts and computer science for middle schoolers.

Your Linux distribution of choice says a lot about you. Of course, one of the many great things about Linux is the diversity of options you have to choose between. Maybe you like a slimmed down minimalist option. Maybe having all of the bells and whistles is important to you. Or maybe you just prefer a distribution that you find easy to use.

At the 2016 Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 14x), long-time tech writer and editor Bob Reselman will give a talk called The 7 Rules for Creating World Class Technical Documentation, v.2016, which is based on an article he wrote more than six years ago. In this interview, he offers an update to the rules, and talks about how attitudes toward project documentation are changing.

In today's online retail market dominated by cut throat competitions, one player stands in the forefront, leaving the pack far behind, and that is Amazon. Amazon has been judiciously expanding its business model to satisfy consumer appetites, and I think Amazon Prime membership lies in the center of its expanding business model. Starting out as unlimited free-shipping membership, Amazon Prime has grown over time to include a variety of other perks, including unlimited streaming music, movies and TV dramas, unlimited photo gallery, free e-book library, and now same-day/one-day delivery.

Welcome, one and all, to 2016. I wish every one of you a happy and prosperous new year. I have been meaning to write this column for a while. It is one part observation, one part lecture, and mostly utter rambling, so please do stay with me. I hope that, if nothing else, this column shares an important insight that came to me a while back that you may find interesting.

When I was pitching The Open Organization, publishers always asked me the same question: "Is this a book about management or leadership?" And my answer was always the same: "The Open Organization is a book about management." After all, it's about the ways Red Hat, the open organization I lead, uses a networked organizational model (one we adopt from the open source world) to make decisions and coordinate, and those are management issues.

In 2015 there were a variety of legal issues of importance to the FOSS (free and open source) community. Continuing the tradition of looking back over the top ten legal developments in FOSS, my selection of the top ten issues for 2015 is as follows..