Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This week we release the Express and Community Editions of eXo Platform 4.0: The Open Source Enterprise Social Platform. For me, the eXo adventure started almost 10 years ago when I coded the first JSR 168-compatible Portlet Container (here's hoping 10 years works the same way Eddie Cantor had in mind). At the time, our first customer, the US Joint Forces Command (part of the Department of Defense) pushed us to create a company to help them build their content collaboration system during the Iraq war.

As we've noted recently, Mozilla, the nonprofit entity behind the Firefox browser and other open source tools, has detailed significant changes to its executive management as it positions nearly all of its momentum behind its new Firefox OS mobile platform. Even the CEO is stepping down this year as Firefox OS becomes job number one.

Almost a year after the last release of the Open Build Service (OBS), the openSUSE developers have announced version 2.4 of their software. The biggest new feature in the distributed packaging and build service is support for the PKGBUILD format from Arch Linux which becomes the third packaging format the service can now use – the other two being RPM and Debian's packaging system. Furthermore, OBS 2.4 introduces the 64-bit ARM AArch64 architecture as a target infrastructure and kernel, and bootloader packages can now be signed to work with UEFI Secure Boot.

Congatec AG announced a Linux-ready COM Express Type 6 computer-on-module (COM) based on AMD’s new Embedded G-Series system-on-chip (SOC). The Conga-TCG is offered in two quad- and two dual-core versions backed with up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and features extensive I/O, including HDMI, DisplayPort, SATA, and 10 USB ports.

On 30 April 1993, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau were given official permission by CERN in Geneva to distribute the libwww library free of charge, "to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint. Whew!" (Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web).

Recently, a former student of mine wrote me asking how to handle an overzealous white-hat hacker. In this case, the hacker had probed the publically exposed computer networks and assets of my friend's company, then left multiple copies of a document describing the weaknesses he found -- and asked to be hired to close the holes and locate more weaknesses.

While LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler already has feature complete C++11 support and the developers have already been working on C++14 features, there are some open projects where the GCC alternative is in need of some assistance...

Churnalism US is a new web tool and browser extension that allows anyone to compare the news you read against existing content to uncover possible instances of plagiarism. It is a joint project with the Media Standards Trust.

The Linux 3.9 kernel was officially released late Sunday night marking the second major Linux kernel release of 2013 so far. The new release includes the usual long list of driver updates, but this time also includes a number of really interesting performance boosts as well. SSDs can now be leveraged to help speed up the operations of (soon to be legacy) spinning disks.

The Hadoop ecosystem relies on composability — the ability to use output from one tool as input to the next — to efficiently process data at scale, from simple projects, to processing streams of real-time data, to building data warehouses.

The AMD Radeon Linux testing consisted of a mixture of AMD Radeon HD 5000 and Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards. As mentioned in the earlier article and numerous other Phoronix pieces, the open-source Linux graphics driver support for the very latest Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" graphics cards is still a work-in-progress and maturing within the new "RadeonSI" driver. Radeon HD 7000 testing will come separately due to the less than complete OpenGL support at this time. For Radeon HD 7000 series users the best bet right now is just using the proprietary AMD Catalyst graphics card. With the Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs and older not being supported by the mainline Catalyst driver and the legacy Catalyst driver not working well on the latest Ubuntu Linux release, this limited the AMD testing to the HD 5000/6000 families.

When developing systems or devices based on embedded Linux or Android, does it make sense to use commercial development tools? In this guest column, Brad Dixon, Director of Open Source Solutions at Mentor Graphics, suggests several reasons why commercial development tools and support can potentially save time, resources, money, and opportunity costs.

Previously, I erroneously titled my column as ""SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis". It turned out that by the time I'd finished writing it, I had spent a lot of time talking about SIGALRM and how to set up timers to avoid scripts that hang forever, but I never actually got to the topic of stdin analysis.

Last week North Bridge Venture Partners and Black Duck Software released the 7th Annual Future of Open Source survey. Previous years' surveys have generated interest industry-wide, with implications that cross industries and ecosystems.

The Obsidian project, an open source unit test generator built for the JUnit framework, has been in development for two years at the College of Charleston's Cyber Infrastructure Research and Development Lab for the Earth Sciences (CIRDLES). Using open source components such as JUnit and Netbeans, Obsidian concentrates on building standardized test implementations that are comprehensive and easy to maintain.

New native configurations for GDB 7.6 include AArch64 GNU/Linux (64-bit ARM on Linux), FreeBSD/PowerPC, x86_64/Cygwin, and Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux. New target configurations are ARM AArch64, ARM AArch64 GNU/Linux, Lynx 178 PowerPC, x86_64/Cygwin, and Tilera TILE-Gx GNU/Linux.

Power management is always an issue in portable device. Be it a laptop or a mobile device, you always want the battery to last as long as possible without it dying on you. If you are running Linux on your laptop, you can make use of the TLP module to manage your computer’s power usage in the background.

While the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver already has support for at least 36 variants of Intel's forthcoming Haswell processors with faster integrated graphics, it turns out some were missing. The reserved PCI IDs weren't added and it turns out that some products are actually going to be using the IDs.

Dot Categories: DeveloperIn this week's KDE Commit-Digest.

Calligra sees improvement in read-only mode handling and initial code for COffice (Calligra for mobile); Fill Tool is ported to strokes KDE-PIM adds an option to limit the item age in Google Calendar; introduces theme manager. Work on Nepomuk Service 2. Wacom tablet management sees large GUI rework and more utility classes. Artikulate adds course skeleton. KDevelop includes updated Branch Manager dialog.