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Did you ever try to configure a printer on a GNU/Linux desktop distribution at the end of the '90s? Or even before? To make a long story short: That was fine if you worked at a large organization with an IT team to handle it and dedicated hardware or a printing server. There were many different standards and protocols to handle printers. And only a few big vendors (usually Unix vendors) provided specific support and drivers for their entire range of products. read more

Brotli is a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding, and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods.

In 2018, I surpassed a few personal milestones. In February, I celebrated 15 years of working at Red Hat. Then, in May, I turned the big 40—so you can imagine why I might be feeling more reflective of life in general these days. read more

News briefs for January 28, 2019.

As part of its new LF Edge initiative for open source edge computing, the Linux Foundation announced a new Project EVE based on Zededa’s cloud-native based virtualization engine for embedded containers. The LF Edge umbrella organization for open source edge computing that was announced by the Linux Foundation last week includes two new projects: Samsung […]

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Elizabeth Renieris about digital identity, ethics, boiled frogs, and horses with lasers.

Last week articles from our linux.conf.au speaker series and Kevin Sonney's open source tools series were big hits with readers. 

E-Con has launched a Linux-driven “e-CAM130_CUXVR” robotics vision kit with up to 4x 13MP, MIPI CSI-2 cameras with synchronized 4K support, designed to work Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Xavier kit. E-Con Systems’ e-CAM130_CUXVR is its first camera kit based on Nvidia’s latest, Linux-powered Jetson AGX Xavier module. The kit includes a V4L2 Linux driver, Gstreamer 1.0, […]

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the 16th of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

In this tutorial, we will go through the Vanilla Forum installation and setup on CentOS 7 system by using Nginx as a web server, MySQL as a database server, and optionally you can secure transport layer by using acme.sh client and Let's Encrypt certificate authority to add SSL support.

The default desktop of Fedora Workstation — GNOME Shell — is known and loved by many users for its minimal, clutter-free user interface. It is also known for the ability to add to the stock interface using extensions. In this article, we cover 3 simple, and useful extensions for GNOME Shell. These three extensions provide […]

by Doc Searls Today is Data Privacy Day, known in Europe as Data Protection Day.

It's not new. Though created in 2006, it commemorates the Council of Europe treaty creating "the first binding international instrument which protects the individual against abuses which may accompany the collection and processing of personal data and which seeks to regulate at the same time the transfrontier flow of personal data." The treaty was signed on January 28, 1981, a date when the ancestors of today's PCs were still in the wombs of IBM and Apple. Hats off to Eurocrats who were decades ahead of a problem that's worse than ever.

Clearly, a day isn't enough—not when most humans are still naked as newborns in the digital world, and not much better equipped to protect and project their privacy there.

See, like nature in the physical world, the digital world came without privacy. But while we've had millennia to make privacy meaningful in the physical world, we've had only a few decades here in the virtual one where you're reading this now. And so far we've failed.

Sure, most of us alpha geeks are adept at guarding our private lives and spaces in the digital world, but let's face it, that world is a jungle where the apex predators are vampires living off the blood of personal data, and the sum of victims rounds to everybody.

So, although we salute the organizations celebrating this day, we are looking instead at the gigantic pile of work to be done before humans begin to enjoy the same degrees of personal privacy online as they've had in the offline world since the invention of clothing and shelter.

That work is the job of the world's hackers, which is us. And that's why we're declaring 2019 Data Privacy Year. Because a year should be enough at least to start making real progress toward personal data privacy online.

It should help to know two things: Go to Full Article

An open source software's (OSS) sustainability relies on passionate developers willing to contribute to the project. Therefore, a project's survivability depends on its ability to retain developers, onboard new ones (i.e., newcomers), and, maybe more importantly, create a community of users who promote its adoption and use.

Intel’s Linux-compatible RealSense Tracking Camera T265 for autonomous robot and drone development is built on its Myriad 2 VPU. The dual-lens, 6DoF T265 camera requires no external sensors for V-SLAM localization. Intel opened $199 pre-orders for its first Intel RealSense camera equipped with its Movidius Myriad 2 visual processing unit (VPU). Even more so than […]

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the 15th of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

It's said if you ask 10 people about DevOps, you will get 12 answers. This is a result of the diversity in opinions and expectations around DevOps—not to mention the disparity in its practices. To decipher the paradoxes around DevOps, we went to the people who know it the best—its top practitioners around the industry. These are people who have been around the horn, who know the ins and outs of technology, and who have practiced DevOps for years. Their viewpoints should encourage, stimulate, and provoke your thoughts around DevOps.

Edge computing? -- data processing near where data is generated -- is growing ever more important with the rise of 5G and the Internet of Things. But, it has no standardization to speak of. The Linux Foundation's newly minted LF Edge seeks to remedy this problem.

Pulseway provides a product of the same name that's built to enable IT personnel and give them the ability to monitor, manage and automate their systems and the tasks or applications that they host. And, the best part is that they can do all of these things anywhere and everywhere, from their pockets. In fact, I wrote about Pulseway once before, so check out that article for an introduction.

There seems to be a mad rush at the beginning of every year to find ways to be more productive. New Year's resolutions, the itch to start the year off right, and of course, an "out with the old, in with the new" attitude all contribute to this. And the usual round of recommendations is heavily biased towards closed source and proprietary software. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's the 14th of my picks for 19 new (or new-to-you) open source tools to help you be more productive in 2019. read more

Nothing to see here Analysis Apple has been granted several patents in recent years related to the Swift programming language, which the iPhone-slinging biz open sourced in 2015 under the Apache 2.0 license with a Runtime Library Exception.…