Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linus Torvalds announced the final Release Candidate (RC) for what will become Linux 3.15, noting that he felt pretty comfortable with the state of things at this point. The 3.15- rc8 kernel contains just a smattering of core kernel fixes (some in the scheduler, some in the filesystem code), and a few more architecture- specific patches, but relatively little overall in the way of churn. In other words, 3.15 is largely baked and ready to go, with the weekly RCs serving their purpose of gradually tapering off toward the final RC7 or RC8 release. Oftentimes, final Linux kernels are released following the RC7 timeframe, with no need for an RC8 to be issued, but on this particular occasion there was enough in the way of small last-minute fixes for Linus to feel justified in holding off another week with an RC8 instead.

It's OSCON time again, and this year the tech sector is abuzz with talk of cloud infrastructure. One of the more interesting startups is Docker, an ultra-lightweight containerization app that's brimming with potential. I caught up with the VP of Services for Docker, James Turnbull, who'll be running a Docker crash course at the con. Besides finding out what Docker is anyway, we discussed the cloud, open source contributing, and getting a real job.

Sprint has launched the “LivePro,” an Android-based, ZTE-built DLP projector and 3G/4G mobile hotspot shareable by eight WiFi-users, with a 4-inch display. ZTE showed off the LivePro at January’s CES show as its “Projector Hotspot“, and it’s now coming to the U.S. via Sprint under the LivePro name. On July 11, Sprint will begin selling the device for $450, or $299 with a two-year contract. Of course, the real money is in the data plans, which start at $35 per month for 3GB of data.

Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, Atmel, and Dell have launched a consortium that will develop open source standards for Internet of Things connectivity. In December when Qualcomm, the Linux Foundation, and several major consumer electronics companies announced the open source Allseen Alliance for standardizing Internet of Things connectivity, we wondered at the absence of major semiconductor companies. Well, here they are, starting up their own rival IoT group called the Open Interconnect Consortium. Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, and Atmel have launched OIC along with computer manufacturer Dell and Intel’s embedded software provider Wind River.

The Odroid project launched an “Odroid-XU3? open source SBC based on Samsung’s HMP-ready Exynos5422, which mixes four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores. Hardkernel’s Odroid project announced pre-orders for the Odroid-XU3 at $179, with shipments starting on Aug. 18. The open-spec single board computer is the fastest of over a dozen other Samsung-based Odroid siblings, including an Odroid-XU model that it essentially replaces. Whereas the $149-$169 Odroid-XU runs Samsung’s original eight-core Exynos5410 Octa system-on-chip, the Odroid-XU advances to the new Exynos5422, which was announced back at February’s Mobile World Congress.

During his last six years working as an elite security researcher for Google, the hacker known as Morgan Mayhem spent his nights and weekends hunting down the malware used to spy on vulnerable targets like human rights activists and political dissidents. His new job tasks him with defending a different endangered species: American national security journalists.

Cisco earlier this year unveiled its plans to build smarter routers and switches to help manage the massive flows of data expected between Internet-connected devices and the data center. This re-architecting of the Internet to bring computing capabilities to the edge of the network is what the company calls “fog computing” and it could help alleviate the data center strain that Gartner analysts predict will come from 26 billion installed units in the Internet of Things by 2020.

Trust in government is not exactly at an all-time high. Sure, there are oppressive governments such as Iran and China that filter and block web content, but even the USA has a spotty record. With all the news of PRISM and other spying programs, it is hard to tell which way is up anymore. One way to solve this dilemma is through transparency and honesty. Unfortunately, as long as governments use closed-source software, it is hard to audit and trust the actions. Today, Canonical announces that not only has Munich taken an open approach to computing with Ubuntu, but the city is saving millions of euros too. Using open-source software and saving money? maybe all governments should make the switch to Linux.

Boardcon’s “EM210? SBC integrates a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird SoC via a COM that runs Linux and Android, and features wireless, display, and camera options. Boardcon Embedded Design, of Shenzhen, China, specializes in Samsung SoC-based embedded boards, such as its recent EM4412 single board computer, which is built around a quad-core Exynos4412 system-on-chip. The company’s new EM210 SBC runs the older, slower, S5PV210AH (“Hummingbird”), the same 1GHz Cortex-A8 SoC that powered Samsung’s first Android-based Galaxy phones.

CEO of open source cloud productivity suite Open Xchange (OX) has told The INQUIRER about his hopes for a more open internet. Open Xchange is a cross-platform service that provides a range of web apps, cloud storage, encrypted email and instant messaging. The service can be downloaded - white labeled, free of charge and self-configured - with the company's business model based on optional support and configuration. It is licensed to a range of ISPs and telcos across Europe, running on Linux systems.

Spark is a company inspired by Zach Supalla's deaf feather. "My dad has lights in his house that flash when someone rings the doorbell. I wanted to make lights that would flash when my mom texted him, so they could stay in better touch," explains Zach. This led Zach to create a connected lighting product that his team launched on Kickstarter in late 2012 called the Spark Socket. The Socket was unsuccessful, but afterwards Zach pivoted his team to focus on developing tools for others building connected products.

Learn how to install Hacklang, configure the Apache server to talk to the Hack instance and then build a Hack app. A little while ago Facebook unleashed a new programming language unto the world. That language is called Hack and it’s what we’re going to be looking at today. Hack is unique in that, unlike a lot of new languages, it hasn’t been released at or before v1. For the past couple of years Facebook has been working on writing Hack and porting the desktop version of their service to it, meaning that Hack has already proven to be a system that’s fully capable of running huge websites – and these days, it doesn’t get much bigger than Facebook.

LXer Feature: 06-Jul-2014

Some interesting stuff for sure in this week's Roundup for you including patents stopping your microwave from being awesome, why it is still hard to share files directly, reviews of XFCE and CoreOS, alternatives to Skype on Linux and last but not least if you love Linux, the government probably knows. Enjoy!

Learn how to get started with Minecraft Pi, a brilliant tool for learning to code Python on the Raspberry Pi...Minecraft is a revolutionary sandbox game in which the protagonist, known only as Steve, is tasked with surviving and thriving in a huge, blocky 3D world considerably bigger than planet Earth. Each one-metre segment of the world is represented by a block. The block could be any one of a number of items and the deeper you dig into the earth the rarer the items might be. It’s your challenge to dig, build and survive against an army of nocturnal monsters by harnessing the items you discover.

To promote this influential open source conference, put on by Tim O'Reilly and O'Reilly Media since 1999, Opensource.com is interviewing some of the speakers from the line-up prior to the event. We ask them how they got where they are, why open source?, what tips and knowledge can they lend our readers, and finally, for a sneak peek into their OSCON 2014 talk. Check back here on Monday, July 7 when we kick things off. A full list of speaker interviews will live on this page.

Escape from Windows to Linux and begin your journey with open source software, or learn all about the educational Kano for Raspberry Pi. With collected mumbling on Twitter, Windows XP finally took its final beath. Or at least, its security support stopped. Where to go from there though? Do you stay with Microsoft and risk Windows 8 or do you start a life with Linux and escape the walled garden? We have you covered with our complete guide on making the jump from Windows XP to Linux.

Despite significant delays, Oracle is once again moving forward with Project Jigsaw, a major undertaking that aims to allow Java developers to break their programs down into independent, interoperable modules. Jigsaw was first intended to be a major features of Java 8. By 2012 Big O decided that waiting for Jigsaw to be ready would delay the entire Java 8 release, so work on the module system was postponed until a later version.

At this point, I have more usernames and passwords to juggle than any person should ever have to deal with. I know I'm not alone, either. We have a surfeit of passwords to manage, and we need a good way to manage them so we have easy access without doing something silly like writing them down where others might find them. Being a fan of simple apps, I prefer using pass, a command line password manager.

Many of you Linux junkies will probably spend most of your time in terminals, and so may be wondering how to spice up the plain old boring-looking terminal environment. If you are looking to enhance the look of your terminal window, one way is screenFetch. According to its creator, screenFetcher is a "bash screenshot information […]Continue reading... The post How to create a nifty terminal theme inside a Linux terminal appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to manage multiple terminal windows on Linux Desktop How to record and replay a terminal session on Linux What is a good terminal emulator on Linux?

A robotic, mechanical reader of printed books that melds together the Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorms. When the Raspberry Pi camera module was originally released we thought it would be great to show that you can use the camera with some of the Lego robots and that there’s a whole lot of awesome stuff you can do with it. We put something together that was just an arm to turn the Kindle and the camera to read it aloud; we thought that would be really interesting but it got the wrong type of attention. We got a lot of comments saying, “Well there’s already stuff that can do that”. People missed the point that we were trying to show a tour de force with a Raspberry Pi. So we doubled down and decided we just had to put together a mechanical version that would turn pages – just so we could make our point [laughs]. So the first Bookreader did the Kindle and we read a book off of it out loud and people were like, “Well that’s cool, but there’s already software to do that”.