Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Read our Python masterclass for beginners and follow it up with ten projects in Understanding & Implementing Python volume one. Python is one of our favourite programming languages and we’ve covered it a lot over the years in Linux User & Developer. We’ve compiled ten of the best Python projects in the first edition of our digital Developer Manual, available now from our Newsstand app.

Google has shown off a candidate for a new Chrome OS user interface. Dubbed “Athena”, the new UI appeared fully grown from the head, and Google+ page, of Googler François Beaufort. Athena “is a brand new project the Chromium OS team is experimenting with in order to bring a new kind of user experience,” Beaufort writes, adding “As you can see below, the first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management.”

A new Linux distribution is looking to overcome the limitations of Debian on ARM, by running both Linux apps and Android apps in native mode. Produced by the group that created the MicroXwin kernel-based X Windows implementation, the VolksPC distribution is designed to give users an ARM-Debian environment that supports Debian's range of desktop applications, while improving support for things like YouTube playback and HD video.

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2014

We have a lot of good FOSS stuff for you this week including the new Raspberry Pi Model B+, an inordinate amount of Android apps wanting to read your text messages, saving endangered languages, an inside look at Linus Torvalds office, Carla Schroder shows us 6 lightweight distros and Ken Starks explains when "free" can suck. Enjoy!

This week KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the third and last in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.13 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.11. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Beneath these releases KDE announced the second beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!

Since we deployed Ask Fedora, we’ve seen a healthy rise in its usage. Unfortunately, I haven’t statistics to show for this. I still need to figure out how I can get some. In this post, I’ll introduce Ask Fedora for the benefit of those still unaware of it and then write a little about how you can help us help yourself and our users via this Q&A forum.

Mirantis, a pure-play OpenStack vendor and Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that Oracle Linux and Oracle VM have been integrated into the Mirantis OpenStack distribution, offering joint customers a supported, enterprise-grade OpenStack distribution optimized for running enterprise workloads. The integration is a collaborative effort of Mirantis and Oracle to adopt innovations from the community and offer more choice to customers.

BDR Basic Schema32ndQuadrant, global experts in PostgreSQL support, training, development, migration and consultancy, have announced a free and open source extension to PostgreSQL (licensed under the same terms): Bi-Directional Replication (BDR).

Thomas Smith will be speaking at OSCON 2014 about Project Gado. He has always wanted to be an inventor, and I spoke with him about what it's like to work as a technology consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this interview, Thomas tells me more about how Project Gado came to life, how the Gado community evolved, and how open source is applied to everything.

dockerThe various Working Groups in Fedora have been talking quite a bit about Docker recently. (In case you haven’t seen all the hype, Docker is a platform for distributing and running application containers — a form of light-weight operating system-level virtualization. It also features a cute whale as its logo.)

This guide explains how to configure samba server on CentOS 7 with anonymous and secured samba servers. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

Spencer Hunley is an autistic professional, former Vice Chair of the Kansas City Mayor's Committee for People with Disabilities, and current board member of the Autism Society of the Heartland & ASAN's Kansas City chapter. In August, Spencer will be giving a talk, Universal Tux: Accessibility For Our Future Selves, at LinuxCon in Chicago. He also gave a talk, Maximizing Accessibility: Engaging People with Disabilities In The Linux Community, at LinuxCon North America 2013.

What's in a name? Quite a bit, actually. To ensure compatibility between products sharing the same name, it's important that users can expect a core set of features to be consistent across different distributions. This is especially true with large projects like OpenStack which are made up of many interlocking components.

A security firm has criticised Android's all-or-nothing permission approach, arguing it unnecessarily creates extra privacy risks for businesses and consumers. Users are obliged to accept a entire laundry list of requested permissions before they can download an Android app. Disagreement on any point means that the software package can't be downloaded.

For those of us veterans in the open source software (OSS) community, certain technologies come along in our lifetime that revolutionise how we consume and manage our technology utilisation. During the early 2000s the concept of high availiability (HA) and clustering allowed Linux to really stack up in the datacentre.

Via’s “Viega” is an IP65-ruggedized, 10.1-inch tablet that runs Android 4.2 on a Via dual-core SoC, providing 9-hour battery life and optional 3G and GPS. Via Technologies is getting into the rugged Android tablet market. The Viega tablet runs a fairly modern Android 4.2 build, and is designed for the showroom floor, warehouse, construction site, and other enterprise-level mobile computing environments, says Via.

On Jan 21, 2008, Marie Smith Jones died. Her death was not just a loss of one human being, she was the last speaker of the Eyak language. Eyak was spoken in southern, central Alaska. We permanently lost one color from the mosaic of our limited linguistic diversity. With a language, not only a language dies, but with it a part of a community's history, intellectual and cultural diversity, and cultural identity.

The embedded systems Linux distro, OpenWRT, has taken a step into the 1990s and added native IPv6 support. The release candidate is code-named “Barrier Breaker” and runs the Linux 3.0 kernel. OpenWRT 14.07's IPv6 support will at this point be of only limited end-user interest. However, it's an important move for the future, as a feature that might encourage more consumer kit vendors to implement OpenWRT, and it helps position the OS for Internet of Things applications that are going to need v6 support.

National Instruments unveiled a 2 x 3-inch module that runs real-time Linux on a Xilinx hybrid ARM/FPGA SoC, and can be programmed graphically with LabView. NI’s new “sbRIO-9651? system-on-module (SOM) is aimed at simplifying the design of custom data acquisition and control systems, by offering full compatibility with the NI LabView graphical programming environment. Additionally, the module’s core hardware and software compatibility with NI’s cRIO-9068 “CompactRIO” controller is said to further accelerate custom designs by letting programmers develop and test their software on an off-the-shelf system prior to the availability of custom hardware based on the SOM. To that end, the sbRIO-9651 SOM and cRIO-9068 controller system both use the same Xilinx Zynq-7020 SoC, and run a common “NI Linux Real Time” software stack.

Even simple build scripts show the power and flexibility of the emerging new build tool for JVM projects.