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WordPress is best known as a website content management system, but it also a great learning management system (LMS) for delivering online courses. If that is what you are looking for out of WordPress, then H5P should be the top plugin on your list.

One way to get started with an open source community is to write about it. You can contribute to technical documentation, share how you use the software, or write an article for Opensource.com. But getting started writing is easier said than done. The two most common excuses I hear for not writing are: "I have nothing new to say" and "I'm not a good writer." I'm here to dispel both of those myths.

It's been a long time since I properly learned a new language—computer or human. Maybe 25 years. That language was Java, and although I've had to write little bits of C (very, very little) and JavaScript in the meantime, the only two languages I've written much actual code in have been Perl and Java. read more

What happened to the promise of live patching Linux kernels? This article looks at its history, its problems, and the cheapest and easiest ways to do it on Ubuntu Focal Fossa (20.04 LTS).

A few months ago, we got a requirement to provide a stable and reliable Domain Name System (DNS) server for a new project. The project dealt with auto-deployment using containers and where each new environment would generate a unique, random URL. After a lot of research on possible solutions, we decided to give PowerDNS (PDNS) a try.

Cloud-init is a standard—it would not be a stretch to say it is the standard—that cloud providers use to provide initialization and configuration data to cloud instances. It is used most often on the first boot of a new instance to automate network setup, account creation, and SSH (secure shell) key installation—anything required to bring a new system online so that it is accessible by the user.

The Free Software Foundation's (FSF) annual conference LibrePlanet went fully virtual in 2020 due to ongoing issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In our last week of preparations before the live event, increasingly disturbing news related to the virus made us realize we could not responsibly hold our usual conference on software freedom in person while protecting the safety of our participants and their communities.

I see this question popping up quite often in different conversations. Recently, we had a good discussion about it within my team. The main question was about how to communicate openly with the community, as well as have the space to build a team and work as a team. This can be challenging; for example, when a company or a sponsor pays a part of the contributors to work full time on a project. In this article, I will explain why agile works with the open source development model. read more

GNOME, the popular Linux desktop, didn't just avoid paying a patent troll, it won the right for any product under an Open Source Initiative license to use code covered by the company's patents.

iWave’s “iW-RainboW-G34D” is a Pico-ITX dev kit with 5.5-inch display and a CSI cam that runs Linux on an i.MX8M Mini via its “iW-RainboW-G34M-SM” module. The kit supports NXP’s eIQ ML software for image recognition. iWave Systems has launched a Pico-ITX form-factor development kit based around an unnamed NXP i.MX8M Mini based module that appears […]

Open source is doing great, but some open-source groups are getting knocked around by the pandemic. That's where the newly formed FOSS Responders come in.

Shiratech’s “SRT-96B-MAIN-SC20-E/A” is a 96Boards CE Extended SBC that runs Android on a Quectel SC20 module equipped with a quad -A7 Snapdragon 210, 4G LTE, GNSS, and WiFi/BT. The SBC features a CSI cam, a MEMs mic, accelerometer, and photometric sensor. Last week we reported on Shiratech’s Linux-driven Stinger96 96Boards IoT Edition SBC with a […]

As a backend developer at the Railwaymen, a software house in Kraków, Poland, some of my tasks rely on models that manipulate and customize data retrieved from a database. When I wanted to improve my skills in frontend frameworks, I chose Vue, and I thought it would be good to have a similar way to model data in a store. read more

There are plenty of great books to help you learn Python, but who actually reads these A to Z? (Spoiler: not me). Many people find instructional books useful, but I do not typically learn by reading a book front to back. I learn by doing a project, struggling, figuring some things out, and then reading another book. So, throw away your book (for now), and let's learn some Python. read more

A shared filesystem is a great way to add versatility and functionality to a homelab. Having a centralized filesystem shared to the clients in the lab makes organizing data, doing backups, and sharing data considerably easier. This is especially useful for web applications load-balanced across multiple servers and for persistent volumes used by Kubernetes, as it allows pods to be spun up with persistent data on any number of nodes. read more

Ampache is a free, open-source, and web-based software that allows you to host your own music streaming server. With Ampache, you can access your music and video over the internet. You can view, edit, and play your music via a web browser or any media streaming client.

Curl is commonly considered a non-interactive web browser. That means it's able to pull information from the internet and display it in your terminal or save it to a file. This is literally what web browsers, such as Firefox or Chromium, do except they render the information by default, while curl downloads and displays raw information. In reality, the curl command does much more and has the ability to transfer data to or from a server using one of many supported protocols, including HTTP, FTP, SFTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SMB, SMTP, and many more. read more

RackN has launched an open source “Edge Lab” reference architecture for building automated, multi-node Raspberry Pi clusters using its Digital Rebar platform for evaluating edge computing systems or emulating cloud platforms. RackN has posted open source code, instructions, and hardware recommendations on GitHub for setting up a Raspberry Pi cluster that works with its RackN […]

Techbase has launched a #CoronaIoT project that plans to build a wireless-enabled, open source Smart Delivery Box for contactless package delivery based on the Raspberry Pi and ESP32. Embedded Linux has already begun to play a role in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic in products such as open source ventilators and fever-ID equipment. Even […]

For years, there's been a security problem with how the GNU C Library dealt with single-linked-lists. Now, Check Point has released a patch, which will fix the problem once and for all.