Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ten years ago, we built Firefox to keep the Internet in each of our hands — to create choice and put people in control of their lives online. Our focus has been on building products that drive the competition, energy and innovation we all need to keep the Web open, everywhere and independent. And last week, we pledged to do more.

Jolla quickly hit the Indiegogo goal for its first Sailfish-based tablet, with a quad-core Intel SoC, while Nokia tipped a similar Atom-based Android slate. After the MeeGo Linux project was killed off to make room for Tizen, and Nokia abandoned the smartphone-oriented Mer development branch of MeeGo it had used on the Nokia N9 in favor of Windows, several Nokia employees jumped ship to launch Jolla Ltd., which is also based in Finland. Jolla subsequently unveiled a Jolla smartphone in May 2013, running a Mer/Meego based Sailfish OS, and began shipping the phone by the end of the year. Now Jolla has already nearly doubled its $380,000 Indiegogo funding goal for a new Sailfish-based Jolla Tablet, which launched earlier today.

When you install new software in the terminal environment, you may often see informative dialog boxes popping up, accepting your input. The type of dialog boxes ranges from simple yes/no dialog to input box, password box, checklist, menu, and so on. The advantage of using such user-friendly dialog boxes is obvious as they can guide you to enter necessary information in an intuitive fashion.

Last Wednesday Microsoft announced they are transitioning the server side of their .NET platform to open source. As stated on their website: Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux.

If you can’t wait for the launch of the official Ubuntu smartphones (the first models are supposedly due later this year), don’t want to shell out for a new phone anyhow, or would prefer to use a different version of Linux on a portable device, there is an alternative. It’s possible to run a variety of popular Linux distros on a standard Android smartphone or tablet – everything from a simple BusyBox toolset right up to a full distribution with a desktop environment. You don’t even need to root your phone for some of the methods that we explore in this feature.

One of the strengths of the open source community has been its ability to bring concentrated effort to bear on big problems. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. And when tragedy strikes, or a pressing need arises, there are groups of people who gather together to attempt to solve the problems as a community. These five projects you may not have heard of. They are attacking some of the world's biggest problems and making a true impact in people's lives.

Lack of sufficient physical memory can significantly hamper the performance of Linux desktop and server environments. When your desktop is sluggish, one of the first things to do is to free up RAMs. Memory usage is even more critical in multi-user shared hosting or mission-critical server environments, where different users or application threads constantly compete for more memory.

Despite numerous options for passing config data to a program, there is still a need for a utility to handle complex hierarchical configuration and locate config files on distributed system. Here is one. Computer programs are made of code. However, most nontrivial programs can be configured to behave in different ways without changing the code. There are many ways of configuring a program such as: command-line arguments, environment variables, configuration files, reading configuration information from a database, and reading configuration data over the network. Each form of configuration is appropriate for certain situations. Many programs combine several forms of configuration. In this article, I explore the spectrum of configuration options for single programs, distributed processes (same program running on multiple cores and/or machines), and distributed systems (a collection of different programs running on multiple cores and/or machines). I will also present a Python package that can help with managing configuration when dealing with systems composed of multiple configurable components.

In the local food movement, open source principles are very much like the open pollinated seeds that farmers keep to grow next year’s crops. When farmers use their own seeds, they are in control of breeding and conserving for the future. In contrast, closed source and software as a service (SaaS) providers are more like the companies with patented seeds who exert control over farmers by requiring them to purchase new seeds each year, sometimes even controlling the sale of the harvested crops. Open Food Source (OFS) might be the longest running open source food hub software available today.

Microsoft has taken its first baby steps toward integrating Windows with the Docker application containerization tech that's caught fire in the Linux world, with the release of Docker client software that runs on Windows desktops. The client doesn't let you run Windows applications in containers. Microsoft is still working with Docker on that piece of the puzzle, which it says will arrive in the next version of Windows Server.

Intel is planning to merge its struggling mobile division with its PC division, and Rockchip released an ARM mobile SoC that was developed with Intel. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich recently sent an email to employees saying the company plans to merge its mobile computing division with its PC-Client group, according to the Wall Street Journal. In mid-2015, the PC-Client and mobile groups will combine under the leadership of Kirk Skaugen, currently a Senior Vice President at the PC-Client group.

Linux vendor Suse has kicked off this year's SuseCon in Orlando, Florida by announcing that it's getting into the software-defined storage business, starting early next year. The company made a new offering, known simply as Suse Storage, available in private beta beginning on Tuesday, with general availability expected for the first half of 2015.

You’ve probably all seen those cheap, solar-powered lamps that you can stick into your garden to try and give it a classy bit of illumination during the night. If you’ve actually got one then you may have found out that they don’t shine very brightly and the plastic stakes can be very flimsy. So why not make your own version? What we’ll show you on this page is the beginning of an array of light-sensitive LEDs using a single LED, so that you can understand how the system works. We’ll use a special resistor called a light dependant resistor (LDR) or photoresistor that changes its resistance based on the levels of light it’s receiving.

Yes we know, PC-BSD isn't Linux, it's BSD (actually FreeBSD to be precise), but aside from the kernel, it shares many of the same tools than any Linux distribution will include.

Congatec announced two Linux-ready, industrial thin Mini-ITX boards measuring 25mm thick, featuring Intel Atom E3800 and 4th Gen Core SoCs, respectively. Congatec may be a big name in computer-on-modules, but it announced its very first single board computer only last May: the AMD G-Series SoC based Conga-IGX Mini-ITX board. Now the German embedded firm is launching two more Linux-compatible Mini-ITX boards: the Intel Atom E3800 based Conga-IA3 and the Intel 4th Gen Core (“Haswell”) based Conga-IC87.

The holiday season is upon us and that means family, friends, fond memories, and food. I thought I would reminisce and revisit of some classic computer adventure games that I played with family and friends when I was younger. These classic games are playable on modern operating systems, including Linux, by using open source tools: DOSBox, ResidualVM, and ScummVM. And since it is Open Food Week here on Opensource.com, I will be pairing each game with a recipe from Mystery Manor, a site that covers computer adventure games! It's been a family favorite for many years.

For new Linux users, the command line is arguably the most intimidating thing. For crusty veterans like me, green text on a black background is as cozy as fuzzy slippers by a fireplace, but I still see CLI Companion as a pretty cool application.

LXer Feature: 16-Nov-2014

In the Roundup this week we have Tor not so anonymous anymore, the kernel's shellshock vulnerability, Larry Cafiero talks about the GNOME Groupon fiasco, Firefox at 10, .NET open sourced and much more. Enjoy!

Walmart, that well-known purveyor of the finest America has to offer, will flog a $99 Windows 8 tablet for this year's Black Friday. As you'd expect at that price, the E Fun Nextbook is an utter dog: it has a 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor with 1GB of RAM – the bare minimum for Windows 8.1 to function.

Google Glass has lost more than a bit of its momentum since the project was unveiled in 2012 – and a new report on Friday is claiming that even developers building apps for the techno-goggles are giving up. Reuters said that it spoke with 16 developers and found that more than half had abandoned their plans to write software for the Chocolate Factory's headgear. The coders cited reasons such as a lack of customer interest, poor hardware specs and more money to be had in enterprise software.