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Should kids be technically literate? Of course! Is the best way to teach them this skill by turning them into programmers? Well, that's a tougher question. First, to be blunt, in much of the world, even in affluent areas, schools are not equipped to handle this task. Aside from lacking the physical technology, many also are lacking in adequate staffing resources in order to teach programming courses. read more

We've made significant strides toward the long-rumored paperless society, but we still need to print hard copies of documents from time to time. If you're a Linux user and have a printer without a Linux installation disk or you're in the market for a new device, you're in luck. That's because most Linux distributions (as well as MacOS) use the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), which contains drivers for most printers available today. This means Linux offers much wider support than Windows for printers. read more

Dmitry's idea is that users should be able to set the day and time on their virtual systems, without worrying about other systems being given the same day and time. This is actually useful, beyond the desire to live in the past or future. Being able to set the time in a container is apparently one of the crucial elements of being able to migrate containers from one physical host to another, as Dmitry pointed out in his post.

News briefs for November 7, 2018.

Gumstix has expanded its Linux-oriented Geppetto online embedded board development platform with a free “Board Builder” service that offers a checklist interface for selecting modules, ports, and more. Gumstix has added a free Board Builder service to its Geppetto Design-to-Order (D2O) custom board design service. The Board Builder improvements make the drag-and-drop Geppetto interface even […]

Most Linux users have heard about the open source RISC-V ISA and its potential to challenge proprietary Arm and Intel architectures. Most are probably aware that some RISC-V based CPUs, such as SiFive’s 64-bit Freedom U540 found on its HiFive Unleashed board, are designed to run Linux. What may come as a surprise, however, is how quickly Linux support for RISC-V is evolving.

Opensource.com set a couple of big new records in October, with 1,025,814 unique visitors (our first time with more than a million visitors) and 1,574,964 page views. We published 94 articles last month, and welcomed 25 new writers. More than 63% of our content was contributed by members of the open source community, and our community moderators contributed 22 articles.

Git has become the de-facto standard for code versioning, but its popularity didn't remove the complexity of performing deep analyses of the history and contents of source code repositories. SQL, on the other hand, is a battle-tested language to query large codebases as its adoption by projects like Spark and BigQuery shows. So it is just logical that at source{d} we chose these two technologies to create gitbase: the code-as-data solution for large-scale analysis of git repositories with SQL. read more

If you are like me, you use several different chat and messaging services during the day. Some are for work and some are for personal use, and I find myself toggling through a number of them as I move from apps to browser tabs—here, there, and everywhere. read more

In 2006, Ben Adida wrote a 254-page PhD dissertation on "cryptographic voting systems." Now, he wants to fix America's broken voting machines.

Selenium is a great tool for browser automation. With Selenium IDE you can record sequences of commands (like click, drag and type), validate the result and finally store this automated test for later. This is great for active development in the browser. But when you want to integrate these tests with your CI/CD flow it’s time to […]

Like many programmers, I got my start solving problems with code. When I was a young programmer, I was content to code anything I could imagine—mostly games—and do it all myself. I didn't need help; I just needed less sleep. It's a common pitfall, and one that I'm happy to have climbed out of with the help of two important realizations: read more

Radxa has posted specs for a $49 and up, community backed “Rock Pi” Raspberry Pi lookalike with a Rockchip RK3399, USB 3.0, M.2, HDMI 2.0, and native GbE, plus optional WiFi, BT, and PoE. Radxa is prepping a Rockchip RK3399-based Raspberry Pi pseudo clone called the Rock Pi. It joins the RK3399-based NanoPi M4 in […]

Kernel release candidate adds support for two Chinese CPU families... will these be the final new CPU archs? The new, improved, and chilled-out Linus Torvalds emitted the first release candidate for Linux kernel 4.20 over the weekend.…

On most computer systems, Linux or otherwise, when you plug a USB thumb drive in, you're alerted that the drive exists. If the drive is already partitioned and formatted to your liking, you just need your computer to list the drive somewhere in your file manager window or on your desktop. It's a simple requirement and one that the computer generally fulfills. Sometimes, however, a drive isn't set up the way you want. For those times, you need to know how to find and prepare a storage device connected to your machine.

I don't claim to be a career expert, but I have noticed some important career mistakes many people make (some I've made myself!). These mistakes span how we approach our career growth, balance our careers with the rest of our lives, and the make the choices we do on a day to day basis. In the latest episode of my Open Organization video series, I delve into 10 of the most important career mistakes people tend to make.......

I don't think I need to start off by telling you that security and reliability are important in our code. We've heard it over and over and over again. Big—scale big—problems happen when we don't bake security in at the beginning, and then, make adjustments as we go. So, let's cut to the chase. How do we integrate security into DevOps?

Recent industry events have underscored the strength of open source in today’s computing landscape. With billions of dollars being spent, the power of open source development, collaboration, and organization seems unstoppable. Toward that end, we recently provided an array of articles, videos, and other resources to meet you where you are on your open source journey and help you master the basics, improve your skills, or explore the broader ecosystem.

The universe of Lamplight City is rich, complex and oddly familiar. The game draws on that ever-popular theme of a steampunk alternative universe, adding dashes of Victorian squalor and just a pinch of 1950's detective tropes. Is it just a mishmash of clichés then? Yes, but it all works well together to form a likable and somewhat unique universe—like a cheesy movie, you can't help but fall in love with Lamplight City.

Did you know Linux offers a way to recompress .Z files to .gz files? Yes, the znew command lets you do this. In this tutorial, we will discuss the basics of this command line utility using some easy to understand examples.