Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 14-Sept-2014

The big story this past week had to do with Net Neutrality. Google once in partnership with Verizon and essentially against it have now changed their minds and Larry Cafiero told us why many sites participated in a "Internet Slowdown" in protest to the coming throttles to our access speed to it on Wednesday. Carla Schroder shows us how to build a Linux Server and 30 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu. Enjoy!

Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack provider, today announced the launch of Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0. The on-demand offering now enables enterprises to deploy the most current OpenStack edition, OpenStack Icehouse, in a robust, easy-to-use, enterprise-grade cloud service.

Ever wondered how you can actually use the GPIO pins on the Pi? We explain exactly what they are and how to use them. One of the things you may have noticed about the Raspberry Pi Model B+ is an increase in GPIO ports. These pins lining the side of the Raspberry Pi may be mysterious to some but they open up a world of physical interactions with the Raspberry Pi that you couldn’t do before.

The Readers' Choice issue is just around the corner, and we want to give everyone a chance to nominate their favorites before the vote. Have you stumbled across the most amazing game ever in 2014? Are you an Android developer that created the equivalent of digital sliced bread? Did you order a Linux-powered Borg implant on eBay, and think we all should be assimilated?

Intrinsyc debuted an SODIMM-style COM with up to 3GB RAM and 64GB flash, running Android 4.4 on a quad-core 2.5GHz Snapdragon 805, and a Mini-ITX baseboard. If you’d like to design with the same high-powered ARM Cortex-A15 silicon found in the latest Android smartphones and tablets, Intrinsyc Technologies has the board combo for you. Like its Mobile Development Platform Tablet (MDP/T) reference design released earlier this year, the $219 Open-Q 8084 System-on-Module (SOM) and $449 Development Kit build on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805. The Snapdragon 805 combines four Cortex-A15-like Krait 450 cores clocked at 2.5GHz with an Adreno 420 GPU claimed to be 40 percent faster than the previous Adreno 330.

In the wake of the celebrity photo breach, the media is humming with stories disparaging the safety of the cloud. Many longtime cloud critics are crowing, "I told you so!" and waiting for the world to go back to on-premises solutions only. News flash: 1) the cloud was never touted as being perfectly secure and 2) the cloud will continue to grow and grow. The number of servers in your physical environment will shrink over time. Security doesn't sell solutions -- features and pricing do. Features are cheaper in the cloud.

In the cloud world, the mantra is "automate everything." It's no surprise that as OpenStack expands its scope, automation projects are emerging within it. But, the variety and the sheer number of these projects is still surprising: there are over twenty!

Over the previous few months, since I wrote about Gibbon earlier this year on Opensource.com, visits to the Gibbon website have increased 1,000%, with visitors coming from over 70 countries around the world. The extra visits have lead to more downloads, with a current total of 80 Gibbon installations—a flexible, open, and functional school system—in various stages of testing. While still only in full, active use in two schools, with a third coming online in August, Gibbon is now being actively considered and assessed by a number of schools and institutions, including the UN Relief and Works Agency.

Drupal is a powerful and flexible open source content management system that powers a large number of sites on the Internet. Drupal's flexibility means that sites built with Drupal can vary widely in form and function. In most cases, this flexibility is a benefit, but it can sometimes also be overwhelming. Growing a Drupal powered website from Drupal Core to a finished, customized site, by selecting from a wide variety of modules and themes, can be a complicated and time consuming process.

The cloud is a big place. There's no one technology, no one source of information, and no one topic that can cover everything. But to me, that's what is exciting about it. It's a place where having a multidisciplinary background is not only helpful, it's essential.

Red Hat’s technology chief has floated over to Google following his abrupt and uncelebrated exit. Brian Stevens suddenly left the Linux distro and aspiring OpenStack cloud fluffer after 12 years as executive vice president and chief technology officer.

Daqri is prepping an Android-based augmented reality “Smart Helmet” that integrates 360-degree camera views, plus 3D depth and inertial movement sensors. Eyewear computers like Google Glass may be the wave of the future, but in the meantime, their most compelling role is for applications where having free hands is a necessity more than a convenience. This goes for motorcycle riders, as in the Skully P1 helmet, as well as many industrial workers.

When Firefox 32 shipped this week, Mozilla also officially ended its support of 1024-bit certificate authority certificates in its trusted store. While it still takes a considerable amount of resources to factor and crack a 1024-bit RSA key, important organizations such as NIST have been advising organizations to move to 2048-bit keys or higher going as far back as 2011. Microsoft announced a change to its certificate key length requirements shortly thereafter, yet others including Google, have been slow to follow suit. - See more at: http://threatpost.com/mozilla-1024-bit-cert-deprecation-leav...

Recently, the National Academy of Engineering announced fourteen Grand Engineering Challenges for the 21st century. Take a look, it’s a good list—promoting environmental sustainability, human health, and information technology that empowers people. But the last item on the list was most compelling to me—engineering the tools of scientific discovery.

LXer Feature: 07-Sept-2014

Well well well, the big story this week seems to be the row between those who want to boycott systemd because of its "complexity" and ambiguous "is it a daemon or OS building block" and its replacement init. Also, low-spec hardware desktop environments, Linux hardware revenue, 10 answers to 10 Linux questions, and how many (different kinds) Linux distros are on the top ten? Enjoy!

Every week, I tally the numbers and listen to the buzz to bring you the best of last week's open source news and stories on Opensource.com. read more

Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel community, beginning with the just-released 3.16 kernel

Imagination announced a 64-bit Warrior processor with a MIPS I6400 core that features hardware virtualization, multi-threading, and multi-clustering. Imagination unveiled its I-Class Warrior processor featuring a new family of 64-bit MIPS I6400 cores, thereby filling in the high end of its Warrior family. The new I6400 cores are primarily designed for SoCs used in servers and networking gear, and much like earlier MIPS64 cores have been used in Linux-oriented system-on-chips like Cavium’s carrier-grade Octeon III or Broadcom’s XLR. However, for the first time, 64-bit MIPS cores are also being promoted as a mobile solution.

Intel debuted three dual-core, 14nm “Core M” processors aimed at 2-in-1 laptops and high-end tablets, featuring 50 percent faster performance and sub-5W TDPs. Intel launched its 5th Generation Core processors at the IFA show in Berlin, promising 50 percent faster compute performance and 40 percent faster graphics performance compared to the 4th generation (“Haswell”) Intel Core processor. The Core M (“Broadwell-Y”) processors are the first commercially available 14nm fabricated processors, and they also incorporate a new version of its TriGate 3D FinFET transistor technology. They will be joined later this year by 14nm Atom Sofia processors based on its Airmont architecture.

While a good portion of my focus on Opensource.com is on OpenStack and related cloud technologies, my most recent background prior to joining the team here was in doing web design and development work for small businesses, nonprofits, and others who needed sites created for them quickly and easily. So while I'm a Drupal fan for a lot of things I do, the ease and simplicity of WordPress led me to use it for a number of projects.