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At FOSDEM last weekend, California-based Linux hacker board vendor Pine64 previewed an extensive lineup of open source hardware it intends to release in 2019. Surprisingly, only two of the products are single board computers.

Demand for 3D printing skills is soaring, with many engineering job listings from a variety of fields, including biomedical, software, and transportation, requiring familiarity with 3D printing. read more

Eric Biggers and Paul Crowley were unhappy with the disk encryption options available for Android on low-end phones and watches. For them, it was an ethical issue. Eric said...

Even though lots of our data exists in the cloud today, you still need to protect your local files with a reliable backup solution. When I needed a new offsite backup solution for my Linux desktop files, I asked my editors and fellow Community Moderators at Opensource.com to share their recommendations. They provided some familiar and some new-to-me options. read more

Open source, like most areas of human endeavor, has institutions and rules that enable it to function. Recently, the open source community has been challenged regarding its licensing. Here's a scenario to illustrate the problem. read more

GitLab's open culture is one of its strongest assets and the main reason I use GitLab in DevOps transformations. The community edition's code is open source and the paid version makes its source code available for contributions. These are valuable factors rooted in the company culture its CEO has diligently maintained over the years. It doesn't hurt that its tools are great, too. read more

Take a look at the tools covered in the three previous articles, and you will see that understanding the glue that joins them together is as important as recognizing the tools themselves. Indeed, tools tend to be simple, and understanding what mkdir, touch, and find do (make a new directory, update a file, and find a file in the directory tree, respectively) in isolation is easy.

The Foreman is an open source software for managing the lifecycle of physical and virtual servers. It's a server management solution that helps system administrators to perform server provisioning and configuration to the orchestration and monitoring. Foreman offers support for provisioning tools such as Puppet, Chef, Salt Stack, Ansible etc.

Without question, 2018 was a big year for artificial intelligence (AI) as it pushed even further into the mainstream, successfully automating more functionality than ever before. Companies are increasingly exploring applications for AI, and the general public has grown accustomed to interacting with the technology on a daily basis. read more

Shoshana Zuboff's new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism goes into gory details of how companies collect, use, buy and sell your data for profit, often without consent or even the consumer knowing it was happening, until disasters reveal some of the dark underbelly—like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But, I’m a marketer, so I will focus on the subset of “surveillance marketing”—also known as “digital marketing”—where companies profit off of you, because they are set up to do so.

In 2018, we saw a clear demonstration of the free and open source software (FOSS) business model's importance when IBM moved to purchase Red Hat for $34 billion. The FOSS ecosystem also celebrated its durability last year, as the Open Source Initiative (OSI) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the open source movement. read more

We round up the most popular articles from the past week.

Cachet is a beautiful and powerful open source status page system written in PHP that allows you to better communicate downtime and system outages to your customers, teams, and shareholders. In this tutorial, we will install Cachet status page system by utilizing PHP, Nginx, MySQL, and Composer on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Ansible playbook files are text files in a YAML format. People who work regularly with them have their favorite editors and plugin extensions to make the formatting easier. When I teach Ansible with the default editor available in most Linux distributions, I use Vim's visual mode a lot. It allows me to highlight my actions on the screen—what I am about to edit and the text manipulation task I'm doing—to make it easier for my students to learn.

NetLogo is an open source, cross-platform tool that enables users to model a wide variety of natural and social phenomena (including biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, physics, psychology, art, and much more). It's a great way to learn how to develop small, agent-based model simulations and explore how large and small changes can affect an environment.

COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages.

Everyone goes to FOSDEM in Brussels to learn from its massive collection of talk tracks, colloquially known as developer rooms, that run the gauntlet of curiosities, covering programming languages like Rust, Go, and Python, to special topics ranging from community, to legal, to privacy. After two days of nonstop activity, many FOSDEM attendees move on to Ghent, Belgium, to join hundreds for Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp). read more

Linux takes a modular approach to processor scheduling in that different algorithms can be used to schedule different process types. A scheduling class specifies which scheduling policy applies to which type of process. Completely fair scheduling (CFS), which became part of the Linux 2.6.23 kernel in 2007, is the scheduling class for normal (as opposed to real-time) processes and therefore is named SCHED_NORMAL. read more

Virt2real has launched a Crowd Supply campaign for an open-spec, $89 “StereoPi” stereoscopic camera board designed to work with an RPi Compute Module and dual Raspberry Pi cameras. It supports spatial awareness, 3D depth maps, and 3D video livestreaming. Virt2real, the Russian firm that in 2013 brought us its Linux-based Virt2real wireless controller and remote-controlled […]

Linux has come a long way from its original offering. But, no matter how often you hear how easy Linux is now, there are still skeptics. To back up this claim, the desktop must be simple enough for those unfamiliar with Linux to be able to make use of it. And, the truth is that plenty of desktop distributions make this a reality.