Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Viking OS is an open-source head-mounted display (HMD) operating system for wearable computing, including smart glasses. The operating system is derived from FreeBSD to integrate more closely with Apple.

At a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, today, Deutsche Telekom announced that sales of the ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fire powered by Firefox OS will start soon in Europe. T-Mobile Poland will offer the Firefox OS-powered smartphone via its online sales channels already from tomorrow on and from July 15 nationwide in 850 shops.

How the economics of open source make sense for large scale, national healthcare infrastructure projects. A recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, examined "the use of open source electronic health records within the federal safety net."

Freescale is shipping a series of hardware/software development kits for its ARM CPU-based Vybrid F series SoCs, based on an ARM Cortex-A5 core, optionally along with a second ARM core of the Cortex-M4 variety. The kits include Freescale’s compact Tower System hardware accompanied by a customized version of the Eclipse-based ARM DS-5 toolchain.

Open Source Bridge is a conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way. I have a new favourite conference. I spent two days at Open Source Bridge in Portland OR. It’s a fascinating event. I joked at first that it was "very Portland," but what does that really mean?

Google has patched a “master key” vulnerability in Android that was recently identified by Bluebox Security, according to an industry report. The vulnerability, which allowed hackers to modify APK code without breaking an app’s cryptographic signature, could convert 99 percent of all Android apps into malicious Trojans, claimed Bluebox.

As always the Linux kernel community has been busy moving the Linux mainline to another finish line and the stable and extended releases to the next bump in their revisions to fix security and bug fixes. It is a steady and methodical evolution process which is intriguing to follow. Here is my take on the happenings in the Linux kernel world during June 2013.

This past week has been busy one on the Linux Planet with a major new community Linux release (Fedora 19), a milestone update for a major enterprise distro (SLES 11 SP3) and new hardware for Linux Mint.

SUSE Linux is juicing its Enterprise Server 11 variant of Linux with Service Pack 3. Among many nips and tucks, the SP3 update brings support for new and emerging hardware to the operating system. The company, the open source operating system arm of the Attachmate conglomerate owned by the private equity trio of Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital, and Thoma Bravo, already moved to the Linux 3.0 kernel with SLES 11 SP2 in February 2012.

Digia and Qt-Project.org have released version 5.1 of their Linux-ready cross-platform development framework. Qt 5.1 offers new Qt Quick declarative UI language controls and layouts, improved OpenGL support, sensor and serial port support, an updated Qt Creator 2.7.2, and preliminary versions of Qt for Android and iOS.

Rob Clark has expanded his Freedreno efforts from just being a reverse-engineered user-space (Gallium3D) graphics driver for Qualcomm's Adreno/Snapdragon hardware. Rob has now written his own DRM/KMS kernel driver for dealing with the Snapdragon graphics hardware.

Following several days of rumors that the release of Samsung’s first Tizen-based smartphone had been delayed, the Korean language website i24news.com reported today that Samsung officials have stated that the launch of the company’s first Tizen device is being pushed out by two months.

FossilShale Embedded Technologies announced an SODIMM-style CPU module based on a Texas Instruments DM385 digital media processor with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 core. The DM385-SOM primarily targets embedded imaging tasks, such as surveillance and medical imaging devices, and is supported with a carrier board, several I/O adapters, and customized Linux and Android software stacks.

My 2006-vintage Sony Bravia flat-screen "Full HD" TV has Linux inside. I can tell because it comes with a two-page printout of the GPL, included almost as a warning. "Watch out", it seems to say. "This TV comes infected with freedom." Not that it's worth hacking: you can make breakfast in the time that passes between a click on the remote and a change on the screen. (I'm barely exaggerating here. Switching between the TV's eight HDMI inputs is amazingly slow.) But being a Linux device says volumes about what has happened to TV already, because the freedom it contains at the device level also ranges outward from the operating system to the network on which that operating system was born and grew up. That network was, and remains, the Internet.

This year I get to go to OSCON for the first time ever! I’ve been on the library conference circuit for years, but this will be my first non-library con and I’m ready to learn as much as I possibly can in three days. The conference is actually five days long, it starts with two days of tutorials (which I won’t be able to attend), but I plan on attending at least one session during every time slot during the next three days of sessions and keynotes. I went through the program and want to attend so many things (including things in the same time slot).

We're forecasting sunnier skies in Hawaii today, as Gov. Neil Abercrombie is scheduled to sign the state's first open data bill into law. The bill requires data already deemed public to be made available online and requires the state CIO to set policy and procedures that include "whenever practicable, the use of machine readable, non-proprietary technical standards for web publishing." Sen. Glenn Wakai, Chair of Hawaii's Technology and Art Committee, co-sponsored bill HB632.

After almost 10 years in open source, Robin Muilwijk is still fighting the misconceptions that come with working in the industry. He says the toughest part is finding the right balance between openness while continuing to promote the open source way of doing business.

Ted Ts'o has already sent in his pull request for EXT4 file-system changes targeting the Linux 3.11 kernel.

The world of open-source software, by design, is something of a collective. Instead of well-defined teams of developers working on a project for pay, open-source software is the result of an amorphous community making contributions – some good, some bad. Everyone is part of the project, everyone has a stake. Despite the collective nature of the process, there are some obvious stars in the open-source firmament. Linus Torvalds invented the Linux kernel. Richard Stallman came up with the philosophy of free software. But what about the next generation of open-source leaders? Here’s a look at six whose names you might want to remember.

Larger open source frameworks often transition into a business for the maintainers. They serve as consultants, sell commercial licenses, and develop custom features for customers on demand. It’s difficult to expand from geeky early adopters to business-oriented mainstream users. Potential business users need to see that the project has a strong ecosystem, including integrators and consultants who can support customers.