Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

FiveNinjas has launched a “Slice” media player on Kickstarter based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, with a 1TB HDD and a customized version of XBMC. UK-based startup FiveNinjas developed the Slice because the developers found it annoying when their media players became useless when carried beyond an Internet connection. Unlike most media players, the Slice ships with a 1TB hard disk drive for storing plenty of video for offine playback.

Skully has achieved Indiegogo funding for an Android 4.4 based motorcycle helmet with a head-up display, GPS navigation, and a 180-degree rearview camera. Last October, Skully Systems (then called Skully Helmets) unveiled its high-tech Skully P1 motorcycle helmet and launched a beta testing program. The P1 never reached market, but has been refined into an AR-1 model that was launched on Indiegogo on Aug. 10. The Skully AR-1 quickly blasted past its $250,000 Indiegogo flexible funding goals, and had surpassed $900,000 at publication time. Helmets are available starting at $1,399, with shipments due in May 2015.

OpenXanadu, a subset of Ted Nelson’s vision of a world brought together by Xanadu, has been released nearly six decades after its original conception

KDE is now getting into the swing of releases numbered 5. Today we add Plasma 5's first bugfix update. The release features KDE's flagship desktop project as well as the base software needed to keep your computer running. Plasma will have feature releases every three months and bugfix releases in the months in between.

The beauty of open sourcing development resources is that a single library or wrapper, once released to the world, can be integrated and built out by thousands of other people. And because the future of any new platform depends on what people can do with it, over the past few months Leap Motion has released a steady stream of open source assets and examples to help devs get started with our v2 tracking beta.

The WiFi Pineapple makes man-in-the-middle attacks incredibly easy, but users better know what they're doing before trying out the Pineapple at the biggest hacker hangout in the U.S. A classic example of that wisdom can be seen via a screenshot tweeted by @JoFo after an intern deployed a Pineapple at Def Con 22.

Google Android handset owners have had access to the new KitKat release, aka Android 4.4, for the better part of 2014. Now at along last KitKat is coming to the open-source Android x86 project, which enables android to run on regular x86 desktops and notebooks.

Most of us want our computers to be easy to use and we also want our computers to be secure. Unfortunately convenience and security are typically in opposition to each other. Making a system both secure and easy to use is often a juggling act involving compromise. This week we turn our attention to projects which want to provide stable, secure and easy to use operating systems. We begin with a review of HandyLinux, a project which is designed for new computer users. In our News section we discuss Ubuntu's push to improve the distribution's documentation, a tutorial on securing FreeBSD and a recommendation from the EFF for people maintaining many complex passwords across multiple computers. In addition, we discuss Linux Mint's plans for the project's "Debian" edition. Plus, in our Questions and Answers section, we talk about what to do when running out of disk space on an advanced file system such as Btrfs or ZFS. We also discuss software back doors and rumours of compromised open source projects. We wrap up this week by covering recent distribution releases and looking ahead to fun new developments to come. We wish you all an amazing week and happy reading!

Mirantis, the world's leading pure-play OpenStack company, today announced the speaker lineup for OpenStack Silicon Valley 2014, a community event to be held September 16, 2014 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The speaker line up includes top cloud executives from Cisco, Citrix, Dell, eBay, Ericsson, Eucalyptus, HP, Intel, Red Hat, VMware and more. OpenStack customers will share practical tips on deploying private and hybrid cloud solutions and experts will debate controversial topics that range from whether OpenStack needs a benevolent dictator to a call to sign an industry peace treaty in the cloud platform wars.

Storm Energy has upgraded its “SunSniffer” solar plant monitoring system to a Linux-based platform running on a Raspberry Pi SBC. Germany-based Storm Energy is the latest of a growing number of companies building commercial products based on the hackable Raspberry Pi single board computer. The company’s SunSniffer system is designed to monitor photovoltaic (PV) solar power installations of all sizes, and the latest version can also control the equipment, says the company. The new SunSniffer version adds a Raspberry Pi SBC along with a custom expansion board and customized Linux OS, which combine to enhance the system’s flexibility and upgradability.

The beta release of third elementary OS out now and is recommended mainly for developers and testers. It includes updates to drivers and the Linux kernel along with GTK 3.12

We're all familiar with the idea of virtualized computers. Not only are they a great way to better utilize resources in a server room, but they also allow you to create and destroy servers in the blink of an eye. That's perfect for a lab or training environment. Unfortunately, it's always taken a rack of actual hardware to create a training lab for Cisco hardware.

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

You can install any modern Windows or Linux version, desktop or server, using Hyper-V in Windows 8.1. But you'll need to bring your own license and software for the base OS. Here's how to get that OS cheap or even free.

LXer Feature: 10-Aug-2014

The big news articles from the previous week to hit the LXer newswire. Enjoy!

Once upon a time in Fedora Core 1 through Fedora Core 3, updates were handled via a manual process involving emails to release engineering. Starting with Fedora Core 4, a private internal updating system that was available only to Red Hat employees. The modern world of Bodhi began in Fedora 7 at the same time that Fedora Core and Fedora extras were merged. It introduced the concept of Karma and it was written in TurboGears 1.x and it is still in production today, seven years and many revisions later.

Talk about hitting a sugar-coated nerve. Last week, Anne LoVerso graciously shared with us the moving story of her experience as a Systems Management summer intern at Red Hat. She said she's leaving the company "a changed person," having discovered "that open source is more than a word used to describe some vague coding communities" and having "learned how to use git correctly, how to write Go, and how to navigate a Linux dev environment efficiently."

This document describes how to install and configure Wordpress on CentOS 7. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. This tutorial explains the process of installing Wordpress on CentOS 7.0 in the form of a simple-to-follow guide.

UniPi is seeking Indiegogo funding for a Raspberry Pi add-on for building automation with analog and digital I/O, changeover relays, and 1-Wire interfaces. The Raspberry Pi has found its way into many a home automation project, from lighting controls to automatic sprinkler systems, and is often used as a prototype for commercial systems. But is the modest RPi up for managing an entire building? No problem, says Czech startup UniPi, which is offering Indiegogo funding packages of 99 Euros ($133) and 109 Euros ($146) for its UniPi building automation add-on board.

At the Flock 2014 conference in Prague, Aditya Patawari delivered a talk on the Fedora Project’s use of Ansible for orchestrating its services. System administrators face many challenges today, as new servers, applications, and updates to these systems are constantly needing to roll out. Deciding whether to deploy virtually or on bare metal; configuring and managing systems and their access credentials is also a continuous and repetitive challenge which Patawari calls the “sysadmin loop.”