Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I've been working with and using Linux far longer than any other platform. Through those years, I've pretty much seen and used it all. Interestingly, my tune has changed on a number of things -- one opinion is about the relative security of Linux. Back in the day, I would have looked you in the face and said squarely, “There's no way anyone is going to hack a Linux server!” My tune now is a bit more somber, sober, and far more realistic. But before I get the chance to sing you that tune, let me set the stage.

In past articles, I've explained how to set up a SOCKS proxy with SSH. I've demonstrated how to tunnel traffic with SSH. I've even shown how to circumvent a company firewall with SSH. I've never been able to use SSH completely as a VPN, however, and that's always bummed me out—until I discovered sshuttle.

ShiraTech announced an SODIMM style computer-on-module (COM) running Linux on an ARM Cortex-A5-based Atmel SAMA5D3 processor. The AT-51 COM integrates interfaces for TFT LCD display, gigabit Ethernet, USB, CAN, SDIO/MMC/SD, audio, image sensing, serial, analog, and digital I/O, and features low power drain and wide temperature operation.

MEN Mikro announced a rugged, Linux-ready box-PC for use on trains, buses, airplanes, and construction and agricultural vehicles. The BL50W comes with single- or dual-core AMD G-Series APUs, provides dual full-HD DisplayPort outputs, expands via SD, mSATA, and Mini PCIe slots, offers gig-E, WiFi, GPS, and cellular connectivity, and supports wide temperature fanless operation.

Userland Frontier was an object-based (outline-based?) scripting environment that moonlighted as a content management system. Or, perhaps it was a scriptable content management system. Or, perhaps it was an outliner, and it grew into a content management system that you could script. I'm sure someone out there will have an opinion or definition that's more accurate, but I think that the outliner freaks in the audience will all agree that it was an impressive outlining and (ultimately) web publishing system. (I don't know if it was as good an outliner as MORE, but my goal isn't to start an outliner-flame-war here...)

AMD's Alex Deucher announced today via his personal blog that programming guides and register specifications on the 3D engines for the Evergreen, Northern Islands, Southern Islands, and Sea Islands GPUs is now in the NDA-free public domain. These parts represent the 3D engines on the Radeon HD 5000 through Radeon HD 8000 series graphics processors.

Dot Categories: KDE Success StoryFree and Open Source Software in Taiwan has made impressive strides thanks to the work of the 'ezgo' team. They have put together a pre-configured set of Open Source software which makes it easy for teachers and students to get up and running. The New Taipei City government has decided to install ezgo 11 on 10,000 PCs for elementary schools, bringing thousands of students in contact with Linux, KDE and educational Free Software. The ezgo team has written up an account of ezgo and how it came to be. Enjoy the read!

The folks who planned the RTP180 conference for Open source all the things a few weeks ago in North Carolina did so in an open source manner. Using Triangle Wiki—a local collection of information about the towns of and around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill that anyone can edit and add to—they posted info, found speakers, and coordinated the agenda. Then, they opened the event by bringing in "contributors" from the crowd to give the introduction.

Texas Instruments is shipping a development kit for designing data concentrator devices targeting “smart grid” applications. The kit’s single-board computer is based on a TI Sitara AM3359 system-on-chip, provides power line communication (PLC), RF, Ethernet, and serial connectivity options, and is backed by an “extensive” Linux software stack.

I met with a special guest—Dries Buytaert, Belgian creator of the open source platform Drupal and general all-round entrepreneur, to get his views on open source, web publishing, web startups, and entrepreneurship. Drupal, the open source platform he developed 13 years ago, has grown immensely, now underpinning around 1 in 50 websites and a huge community of developers. Sites running on Drupal range from the White House and NBC, to the EU's Digital Agenda site—and indeed my own site.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC. The consumerization of IT—with employees bringing their own devices and basic IT services like processing, storage, and networking becoming easily purchasable—means that CIOs have an opportunity to do more than keep the proverbial lights on. CIOs increasingly have the opportunity to become strategic partners within their organizations. And that’s exactly what Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon is doing.

Roku revamped the low and mid range of its Linux-based streaming media player line with new features and a curvier design, and announced a content partnership with M-Go. The new $50 to $80 models offer several new functions including a headphone jack and WiFi Direct on the remote, but the product line still lacks built-in capabilities for playing YouTube videos or streaming media from LAN shares

Dot Categories: DeveloperA recent Dot article explained changes in the KDE release cycle that will be happening with the upcoming introduction of Frameworks 5. The changes to KDE's libraries are enough to warrant a name change from 'Platform' to 'Frameworks'. This article provides some background, an overview of the changes, and the benefits and improvements that can be expected from KDE Frameworks 5 for the entire Qt community. A later article will address Frameworks 5 benefits for KDE developers.

NetGear is shipping a hybrid IPTV set-top box (STB) that supports terrestrial DVB-T, OTT, broadcast, and VoD HD video. The STB1100 runs Linux 2.6 on Cavium’s ARM 11-based PureVu Celestial CNC1800L STB processor, supports adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming technology, and offers I/O including WiFi, Ethernet, and USB ports.

While most developers are focused around new innovations for Wayland (or Mir), there's still life ahead for the X.Org Server in maintaining legacy support and other cases where the xorg-server will not die for years to come. In improving the X.Org Server, Adam Jackson at Red Hat has been working on rewriting the GLX portion of the X.Org Server.

Dave Stokes has worn a lot of hats in his career, from network engineer to CTO and beyond. He's someone eager to learn and who values communication, so he jumped at the chance to become a community manager for Oracle's MySQL project, a role he's now held for nearly four years.

As it's been nearly one year since we last put out some reference benchmarks of Amazon's EC2 Cloud, or compared the different operating system's in Amazon's cloud, it's time to kick off a new round of cloud performance benchmarks. Coming out today are new benchmarks of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud when benchmarking various on-demand instance types.

Kontron announced a Linux- and Android-ready Pico-ITX single board computer with extended temperature support, built around a Texas Instruments Sitara AM3874 system-on-chip. The KTAM3874/pITX provides up to 2GB RAM and 16GB flash, supports HDMI/LVDS dual displays, runs on less than 5 Watts, and offers I/O including Ethernet, USB 2.0, serial, CAN, and SATA, plus mini-PCIe and microSD expansion.

What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.

For the past few days at Phoronix we have begun looking extensively at the Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics under Linux, since receiving the System76 Galago UltraPro. The Iris Pro 5200 are the new high-end Intel Haswell graphics that have 128MB of embedded video RAM on the die, which should yield a nice performance boost when properly implemented within the Intel Linux driver. Already our testing has found the Iris Pro performance on Linux has doubled with open-source driver improvements since Haswell's launch. Now we're out today with our first Intel Iris Pro OpenGL gaming benchmarks between Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 8 for this Intel Core i7 Ultrabook.