Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Larry Ellison’s Oracle bowled out Solaris 11.2 last week – and what does this Unix-like give us? Cloud computing, yes, but also a stab at a datacenter-in-a-(large)-box. It's not too far off the database-as-a-box idea Larry's been banging on about since 1998. Oracle’s Solaris 11.2 announcement is larded with the usual boilerplate about enterprise scale, efficiency, security and compliance. What's new is a degree of software-defined networking (SDN) support. It’s for that reason that version 11.2 marks the latest chapter in Larry's campaign to turn Oracle’s massive-throughput Exalogic Elastic Cloud appliances into one-stop datacenters.

Let me start by saying this is absolutely not a Docker bashing article. I actually love Docker, and I think it is an outstanding piece of software that will have great success. But I have to confess, I’m not sure that it deserves the virtualization moniker that so many in the industry are hanging on it.

The Linux kernel has been updated, again. On Sunday, Linux Lord Linus Torvalds announced version 3.16 of the kernel is now good to go. Torvalds says “3.16 looked a bit iffy for a while” but “things cleared up nicely, and there was no reason to do extra release candidates like I feared just a couple of weeks ago.” You'll be excited by 3.16 if you're keen to run Linux on Samsung's Exynos or other ARM SoCs. Those keen on ARM CPUs as data centre alternatives to x86 will be pleased to note work to help Xen virtual machines suspend and resume. There's also a boot-from-firmware feature on ARM.

One of the many interesting things covered in Ji?í’s coverage of this years GUADEC was GNOME Builder — an IDE that will focus purely on GNOME applications, with a goal of making it “Dead Simple”. Ji?í’s post about day 4 at GUADEC covers the content of Christian Hergert’s talk about Builder (including him announcing the brave step of quitting his day job to work on it). While there are other IDEs in Fedora (like Adjuta and Eclipse) that can be used for development on the GTK+GNOME stack, none of these are focused purely on development of this type.

Ugoos is prepping an Android 4.4 “S85? media player dongle with a quad-core Amlogic S805 Cortex-A5 SoC clocked to 1.5GHz, and a quad-core Mali-450 GPU. Ugoos has spun a variety of Android media player boxes and dongles over the last few years, including a UT3 box, featuring Rockchip’s quad-core, Cortex-A17 RK3288 system-on-chip with a 16-core Mali-T760 GPU, now selling for $130. Before that was the Ugoos UT2, with the quad-core, Cortex-A9 RK3188 SoC clocked to 1.6GHz, with a Mali-400 GPU. Last year, the Chinese company introduced a dongle-style UM2 stick, running on the same RK3188 and Mali-400 GPU.

Itus Networks is set to launch a $149 “iGuardian” network security appliance on Kickstarter that runs OpenWRT Linux and the Snort IPS stack on a MIPS64 SoC. Few vendors have targeted the consumer network security appliance market, and even fewer have done so with pricing under $500. A San Jose, Calif.-based startup called Itus Networks, however, plans to protect your home WiFi router with a $149, open source Linux iGuardian device that offers both a network intrusion prevention system (NIPS) and a network intrusion detection system (NIDS). The device blocks cyber attacks while also filtering out malware “and other undesirable content,” says the company. Like other network security appliances, it sits between your Internet source and your WiFi router, acting as a security firewall.

The Akademy Program Committee is excited to announce the Akademy 2014 Program. It is worth the wait! We waded through many high quality proposals and found that it would take more than a week to include all the ones we like. However we managed to bring together a concise and (still packed) schedule.

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.

Open-sourcers running OpenSUSE’s development have adopted a browser-based model of development for their beloved distro. From now on, daily builds of new versions of OpenSUSE are to be developed and released for immediate testing.

So today we will show, how you can manage many yubikeys for many notebooks using privacyIDEA. privacyIDEA is an authentication system for two factor authentication - usually with OTP devices. In a recent version privacyIDEA started to not only answer authentication request, but it was also enhanced to be able to define client machines and add information, which authentication device could be used for an application on a client machine.

The latest in a recent series of updates to the Samba file system software fixes a critical vulnerability that could allow an attacker on the local network to take control of a host running a vulnerable version of the Samba nmbd NetBIOS name services daemon.

LXer Feature: 03-Aug-2014

In the LXWR this week we have a sleep tracker that runs Linux, open source tools for data journalism, Linux advocates in the wild, Jack Wallen askes if Is the cloudbook the future of Linux and the DARPA-derived microkernel used to protect drones from hacking gets released under the GPL v2. Enjoy!

The folks at VolksPC started showing off a software solution that lets you run Android and Debian Linux simultaneously on an ARM-based computer. This lets you use the same machine to run full desktop Linux apps like LibreOffice or Firefox as well as Android apps including Netflix, Hulu Plus, and any number of video games.

It's impossible to deny the amazing rise of Chrome OS. The Chromebook has taken the consumer world by storm and is repeatedly the top selling laptop around. This Linux-based platform was the ideal solution at the ideal time. The cloud proved itself not only a viable option but, in many cases, the most optimal option. The puzzle was simple to solve:

Axiomtek’s latest Mini-ITX board supports Intel’s 4th Generation “Haswell” Core processors, and offers dual GbE, 10 USB and six serial ports, and HD A/V. The MANO881 is billed as a “cost-effective” Mini-ITX board, adopting the Intel H81 chipset, which is more limited than the Intel QM87 and other Haswell-ready chipsets.

On most Linux systems, network management – both wired and wireless – is handled by a utility called NetworkManager. It is so ubiquitous that you may not even think about it. But, in Linux, there is always another choice. You can always do network management by manually configuring the appropriate configuration files. A better option is to use the utility wicd. Wicd provides interfaces using either GTK or KDE. This means you can use the one appropriate for the graphic libraries for your desktop. There is also a text-based interface, which uses the curses library. You can even use wicd within your scripts or on the command line with the CLI interface. This tutorial will walk you through most of the interfaces, and how to use them to configure your machine’s networking. This will include some issues, like using unusual setups of WPA security and adding functionality in the guise of network templates.

Nvidia Optimus is a hybrid GPU system which utilises what is known as "discrete switching" and has been long associated with headaches and limitations on Linux systems. After years of wait, Ubuntu 14.04 with its shiny new kernel finally shipped with proprietary driver compatibility that can be installed easily. This article will guide you through the installation process after quick background of Nvidia Optimus for the unfamiliar readers. For the seasoned destroyer of Xorg configuration, you can quickly jump to the installation section below.

For some time now, there has been much talk about the Raspberry Pi revolutionising the teaching of computing in schools. Linux User & Developer has devoted much space and attention to the growing number of Jamborees and the increasing attention teachers are giving to the small, £25 bare-bones machine. It is, say advocates, the perfect way to introduce children to the world of computing, allowing them to see and actually interact with the innards of the machines they are using. It is, they add, a great platform for programming and for creating all manner of electronic wonders.

W2Comp unveiled a faster, 4K-ready version of its Probox Android media player with a quad-core SoC, a Mali-450 GPU, Miracast, and a gaming-oriented remote. Hong Kong based reseller W2Comp, which previously introduced a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 based Probox2 Ultimate media player that runs Android 4.0, has now launched a faster model, called the Probox2 EX (Extreme), that runs Android 4.4 (“KitKat”). The new mini-PC is open for pre-orders at $150, with shipments beginning Aug. 8. There’s no mention of any support for Google’s upcoming remix of Google TV called Android TV, but the Probox2 EX would seem to have the advanced hardware to run it.

In a surprise move, HP has granted OpenVMS a new lease on life, effectively reversing last year's decision to mothball the venerable server OS. HP hasn't changed its mind about its latest OpenVMS roadmap, which has it ending standard support for some versions of the OS next year and pulling the plug completely by 2020. Rather, it has granted an exclusive license to another company, VMS Software Inc. (VSI), to take over after its own support ends.