Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Thirteen months after Intel debuted its “Bay Trail” SoCs, we’re still seeing new boards based on it emerge, as in the case of this Aaeon COM Express module. Although Taiwan-based Aaeon pre-announced the “COM-BT” computer-on-module last October, as part of Intel’s big Bay Trail sytem-on-chip rollout, the module is just now becoming available for production shipments. It conforms to PICMG’s COM Express Type 6 “compact” form-factor specs, measuring 95 x 95mm, and offers a choice of 0 to 60°C or -40 to 85°C temperature operation.

For the past six years, I’ve been privileged to work among people who have dedicated their personal and professional lives to advancing the causes of fair, local, organic, and sustainable agriculture at the Rural Advancement Foundation International, a nonprofit organization based in Pittsboro, North Carolina. While my colleagues and I care deeply about how our food is grown, we care just as much about those who grow our food. Our mission is to cultivate markets, policies, and communities that sustain thriving, socially just, and environmentally sound family farms. We directly assist individual farmers who rely on our staff of experienced farm advocates, and we work at the local, national, and international levels for a more just and sustainable food system for all.

Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On OpenSUSE 13.2 This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Docker has broken a record in the speed in which it moved from being a disruptive technology to a commodity. The speed of adoption and popularity of Docker brings with it lots of confusion. In this post I wanted to focus on a trend of commentary that has been gaining popularity that I’ve started to hear more often recently from users who just started using Docker: whether it makes sense to use OpenStack if they’ve already chosen to use Docker.

Phil Shapiro, one of my fellow Opensource.com Community Moderators, gave a talk at All Things Open 2014 about open source and libraries. This is a recap of that talk.

Ten years ago, we built Firefox to keep the Internet in each of our hands — to create choice and put people in control of their lives online. Our focus has been on building products that drive the competition, energy and innovation we all need to keep the Web open, everywhere and independent. And last week, we pledged to do more.

Jolla quickly hit the Indiegogo goal for its first Sailfish-based tablet, with a quad-core Intel SoC, while Nokia tipped a similar Atom-based Android slate. After the MeeGo Linux project was killed off to make room for Tizen, and Nokia abandoned the smartphone-oriented Mer development branch of MeeGo it had used on the Nokia N9 in favor of Windows, several Nokia employees jumped ship to launch Jolla Ltd., which is also based in Finland. Jolla subsequently unveiled a Jolla smartphone in May 2013, running a Mer/Meego based Sailfish OS, and began shipping the phone by the end of the year. Now Jolla has already nearly doubled its $380,000 Indiegogo funding goal for a new Sailfish-based Jolla Tablet, which launched earlier today.

When you install new software in the terminal environment, you may often see informative dialog boxes popping up, accepting your input. The type of dialog boxes ranges from simple yes/no dialog to input box, password box, checklist, menu, and so on. The advantage of using such user-friendly dialog boxes is obvious as they can guide you to enter necessary information in an intuitive fashion.

Last Wednesday Microsoft announced they are transitioning the server side of their .NET platform to open source. As stated on their website: Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux.

If you can’t wait for the launch of the official Ubuntu smartphones (the first models are supposedly due later this year), don’t want to shell out for a new phone anyhow, or would prefer to use a different version of Linux on a portable device, there is an alternative. It’s possible to run a variety of popular Linux distros on a standard Android smartphone or tablet – everything from a simple BusyBox toolset right up to a full distribution with a desktop environment. You don’t even need to root your phone for some of the methods that we explore in this feature.

One of the strengths of the open source community has been its ability to bring concentrated effort to bear on big problems. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. And when tragedy strikes, or a pressing need arises, there are groups of people who gather together to attempt to solve the problems as a community. These five projects you may not have heard of. They are attacking some of the world's biggest problems and making a true impact in people's lives.

Lack of sufficient physical memory can significantly hamper the performance of Linux desktop and server environments. When your desktop is sluggish, one of the first things to do is to free up RAMs. Memory usage is even more critical in multi-user shared hosting or mission-critical server environments, where different users or application threads constantly compete for more memory.

Despite numerous options for passing config data to a program, there is still a need for a utility to handle complex hierarchical configuration and locate config files on distributed system. Here is one. Computer programs are made of code. However, most nontrivial programs can be configured to behave in different ways without changing the code. There are many ways of configuring a program such as: command-line arguments, environment variables, configuration files, reading configuration information from a database, and reading configuration data over the network. Each form of configuration is appropriate for certain situations. Many programs combine several forms of configuration. In this article, I explore the spectrum of configuration options for single programs, distributed processes (same program running on multiple cores and/or machines), and distributed systems (a collection of different programs running on multiple cores and/or machines). I will also present a Python package that can help with managing configuration when dealing with systems composed of multiple configurable components.

In the local food movement, open source principles are very much like the open pollinated seeds that farmers keep to grow next year’s crops. When farmers use their own seeds, they are in control of breeding and conserving for the future. In contrast, closed source and software as a service (SaaS) providers are more like the companies with patented seeds who exert control over farmers by requiring them to purchase new seeds each year, sometimes even controlling the sale of the harvested crops. Open Food Source (OFS) might be the longest running open source food hub software available today.

Microsoft has taken its first baby steps toward integrating Windows with the Docker application containerization tech that's caught fire in the Linux world, with the release of Docker client software that runs on Windows desktops. The client doesn't let you run Windows applications in containers. Microsoft is still working with Docker on that piece of the puzzle, which it says will arrive in the next version of Windows Server.

Intel is planning to merge its struggling mobile division with its PC division, and Rockchip released an ARM mobile SoC that was developed with Intel. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich recently sent an email to employees saying the company plans to merge its mobile computing division with its PC-Client group, according to the Wall Street Journal. In mid-2015, the PC-Client and mobile groups will combine under the leadership of Kirk Skaugen, currently a Senior Vice President at the PC-Client group.

Linux vendor Suse has kicked off this year's SuseCon in Orlando, Florida by announcing that it's getting into the software-defined storage business, starting early next year. The company made a new offering, known simply as Suse Storage, available in private beta beginning on Tuesday, with general availability expected for the first half of 2015.

You’ve probably all seen those cheap, solar-powered lamps that you can stick into your garden to try and give it a classy bit of illumination during the night. If you’ve actually got one then you may have found out that they don’t shine very brightly and the plastic stakes can be very flimsy. So why not make your own version? What we’ll show you on this page is the beginning of an array of light-sensitive LEDs using a single LED, so that you can understand how the system works. We’ll use a special resistor called a light dependant resistor (LDR) or photoresistor that changes its resistance based on the levels of light it’s receiving.

Yes we know, PC-BSD isn't Linux, it's BSD (actually FreeBSD to be precise), but aside from the kernel, it shares many of the same tools than any Linux distribution will include.

Congatec announced two Linux-ready, industrial thin Mini-ITX boards measuring 25mm thick, featuring Intel Atom E3800 and 4th Gen Core SoCs, respectively. Congatec may be a big name in computer-on-modules, but it announced its very first single board computer only last May: the AMD G-Series SoC based Conga-IGX Mini-ITX board. Now the German embedded firm is launching two more Linux-compatible Mini-ITX boards: the Intel Atom E3800 based Conga-IA3 and the Intel 4th Gen Core (“Haswell”) based Conga-IC87.