Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you work in an organization that isn’t focused on development, where computer systems are used to support other core business functions, getting management buy-in for the use of open source can be tricky. Here's how I negotiated with my boss and my team to get them to accept and try open source software.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 3.14, saying that he was “feeling pretty good about it all”. The new 3.14 kernel includes a number of new features, among them deadline scheduling for real-time tasks. Traditional Linux systems have extended the concept of scheduling priorities to thos special tasks that run in the real-time scheduling classes. Like their non real-time brethren, real-time tasks would then be scheduled according to priority, with the highest receiving time first. Unlike regular tasks, real-time tasks running with the SCHED_FIFO class are actually able to lock up a Linux system by hogging all of the available CPU time at maximum priority, which is one reason why real- time scheduling is a privileged operation.

LXer Feature: 11-May-2014

This week in the Roundup we have how to record a terminal session on Linux, Mozilla offers FCC a net neutrality plan but with a twist, 5 easy ways to make a hacker's life harder, Appeals Court declares APIs copyrightable and Carla Schroder shows us a live Linux distro that helps protect your privacy. Enjoy!

Most of us encounter parts of our workday where we must write or document something. Whether for building out the plan of a project, for the documentation of a project, or for the creation of the project itself, like an article or blog post, writing is a part of many of our daily lives regardless of industry or field. Open source tools can be used to get writing done, and freely available resources can be used to supplement and enhance that work. As a content manager here at Opensource.com, there are seven open source tools and resources that I use everyday.

In our recent survey on free and open source software in the UK education sectors, we asked colleges and universities for their main reasons for not selecting an open source solution according to 12 criteria. Below you can see how important each of the criteria were rated for software running on servers..

Together with Linux.com, the Linux Foundation’s community website, we have set up a survey on SurveyMonkey with 32 open spec single-board computers. Pick your favorite three boards and answer a few questions about what you’re looking for in an open, hacker SBC and enter the optional drawing for a chance to win cool Tux, embedded Linux, and Android gear. Five randomly selected winners will receive a T-shirt, sweatshirt, hat, mug, or USB drive.

Code-sharing site GitHub has announced that Atom, its highly customizable code editor, has left beta and its full source code is now available to world+dog under the MIT open source license. Why another text editor? In an interview, GitHub developer Nathan Sobo told The Reg that he and the other developers wanted a powerful editor that was fully customizable using JavaScript, which Sobo argued is now the most popular scripting language in the world.

That reality became painfully clear to more than 40 million Target customers, whose credit card numbers got hijacked over the Christmas holidays. In an attempt to salvage the department-store chain’s reputation, the board yesterday removed CEO Gregg Steinhafel. Don’t be fooled, though. That was only a PR maneuver and, having come five months late, a bad one too.

Earlier this month Raytheon entered into a $15.8 million contract with the U.S. Navy to upgrade Raytheon’s control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to a May 2 Avionics Intelligence report. The overhaul, which involves a switch from Solaris to Linux, is designed to implement more modern controls to help ground-based personnel control UAVs.

LinkSprite, which hosts the open source project for Allwinner-based pcDuino single board computers, will be Allwinner’s “earliest access” partner to develop a “pcDuino8? SBC based on UltraOctaA80 (“A80?). This gives it a head start versus other open hardware projects that have focused on Allwinner’s A10 and A20 SoCs, such as Cubieboard.org and OLinuxino. The A80 began sampling in April, and first commercial devices based on it are set to ship starting in late June.

LXer Feature: 04-May-2014

The first week of May and the summer heat has arrived here in Phoenix. In the Roundup this week we have Keith Curtis learning to love Heartbleed, Google's Web Designer comes to Linux, Red Hat acquires Inktank, a nice Konqueror vs Firefox review (Konqueror was the first native Linux browser I used when I switched years ago), the new Firefox 29 looks a lot like Chrome if you ask me, the FCC chairman does nothing to instill any confidence in me and it being May 4th I hope you have a Happy Star Wars Day. Enjoy!

The Perfect Server - CentOS 6.5 x86_64 (Apache2, Dovecot, ISPConfig 3) This tutorial shows how to prepare a CentOS 6.5 x86_64 server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Mailman, and many more. Since version 3.0.4, ISPConfig comes with full support for the nginx web server in addition to Apache; this tutorial covers the setup of a server that uses Apache, not nginx.

The high correlation between science fiction fans and techies reaches its zenith with the BBC show Doctor Who. But who knew that showing off one’s inner Time Lord could actually be a winning career move? Last fall at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, Scotland, Red Hat engineer John “Warthog9? Hawley demonstrated a robot based on Doctor Who’s robotic dog K-9. His treadwheel bot runs Angstrom Linux on Intel’s open spec, Atom-based MinnowBoard single-board computer, the forerunner of the new MinnowBoard Max.

Via Technologies has been so consumed with its ARM-based Wondermedia and Via Elite system-on-chips recently that one forgets that the Taiwan-based company was known for years for designing low-power x86 processors like the Eden and Nano. Here, Via keeps it all in the family by spinning an AMOS-3003 industrial computer based on its circa-2012 EPIA-P910 pico-ITX SBC, which in turn is built around Via’s dual-core Nano X2 E-Series CPU and VX11H media system processor (MSP).

I know I’ve been posting these reminders for a while now, but this is the last one, since it’s also the last few days in which voting is open for the different sessions proposed for Flock (Fedora’s annual planning and development conference, in Prague this August). Fedora contributors can vote on the Fedora Elections page. Of course, it’s best if you can actually attend, but even if you won’t be able to, it’s helpful to vote on topics which you really think we need to be talking about.

LXer Feature: 27-April-2014

In the LXWR this week we have the founder of OpenBSD creating a fork of OpenSSL in the wake of Heartbleed, Out Of The Park Baseball 15 is released for Linux, Ken Starks asks what you would do to improve Linux, the death of net neutrality is coming and should Microsoft open source Windows XP? The question has been asked before and my opinion is yes they should..but they won't. Enjoy!

Last month, we looked at using Python and Flask to handle the Twitter OAuth process and build requests to obtain tokens. We’ve used Twitter in these tutorials because of the large amount of easily digestible data available. However, since Twitter adheres to the standards set out by OAuth 1.0, the code we’ve used to sign and build requests can be modified to work with any third- party API using the same standard without a great deal of work. For years PHP has been a mainstay of template generation, but now with well-documented frameworks such as Flask, Sinatra and Handlebars, the ability to use powerful scripting languages greatly improves our ability to make great web services.

Nvidia will award 50 of its 2.3GHz Tegra K1-based “Jetson TK1? SBCs to winners of a “CUDA Vision Challenge,” but all entries must be received by April 30. Nvidia unveiled the $192 Linux-based Jetson TK1 single-board computer, touted as the “world’s first embedded supercomputer,” in January, and demoed its use in a self-driving Audi. The board’s Tegra K1 SoC integrates four ARM Cortex-A15 cores, a 192-core Mobile Kepler GPU, and an ARM7 power management core.

Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s. You won’t get a burger there, though–its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who’ve rechristened the place McMoon’s. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the ‘60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites.

Not FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think - Scott

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at the French government's open source aspirations, open source seeds, and more.