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In this first piece, I’ll be demonstrating the installation and configuration of OpenLDAP on Ubuntu Server 18.04. All you will need to make this work is a running instance of Ubuntu Server 18.04 and a user account with sudo privileges.

The $120 to $165 “SparkFun Autonomous Kit for Sphero RVR” extends the $250 Sphero RVR robot with an Raspberry Pi Zero W, a pan-tilt camera, GPS, and an optional ToF distance sensor. SparkFun Electronics recently completed a successful Kickstarter project for its Sphero RVR, a four-wheeled tank-treaded robot that offers optional programming via a Raspberry […]

Ever since the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Panopticlick initiative in 2010, I’ve been sensitized to the risks and potential harms that come from adtech’s tracking of consumers. Indeed, in the years since, it has gotten far far worse. People are only now discovering the bad stuff that has been going on. For example, iPhone apps have been secretly recording users' keystrokes (see ZDNet, Feb 8, 2019), and Android apps with more than 2 billion downloads were committing ad fraud on real humans’ devices behind their backs (see BuzzFeed News, Nov 2018).

Let's say you've found an open source project you really love and you want to do more than just contribute. Or you love coding, but you don't want to spend the rest of your life interacting more with your computer than you do with people. How do you combine your love for open source software with your love for the community in a way that allows you to invest your time in both? read more

Up until now, in this ongoing C programming tutorial series, we have discussed quite a few concepts, but missed a basic one. It's about negative numbers. Yeah, though we briefly mentioned signed vs unsigned variables in one of our initial tutorials, we didn't actually discuss how negative numbers are stored in memory.

This article gives you a step by step guide to turn your Fedora Silverblue into an awesome gaming station with the help of Flatpak and Steam. Note: Do you need the NVIDIA proprietary driver on Fedora 29 Silverblue for a complete experience?

Intel has stopped development on new Intel Compute Card modules. The new follows the revelation that Samsung has discontinued its Artik line of computer-on-modules. Intel is pulling the plug on its Intel Compute Card product line following Samsung’s recent discontinuation of its Artik computer-on-modules. The early demise of these Linux-compatible module families hardly reflects on […]

Last November, I wrote about key differences between MySQL and TiDB, an open source-compatible, cloud-based database engine, from the perspective of scaling both solutions in the cloud. In this follow-up article, I'll dive deeper into the ways TiDB streamlines and simplifies administration. If you come from a MySQL background, you may be used to doing a lot of manual tasks that are either not required or much simpler with TiDB. read more

News briefs for March 22, 2019.

This guide shows how to install and configure the free backup software restic on Debian Buster to store off-site backups at the cloud storage company Wasabi. The main advantage of this guide is that it provides obligatory append-only backups. This means that once a backup has been made, it is secure in the sense that it cannot be overwritten or erased from the system the backup was made from.

Natural language processing (NLP), the technology that powers all the chatbots, voice assistants, predictive text, and other speech/text applications that permeate our lives, has evolved significantly in the last few years. There are a wide variety of open source NLP tools out there, so I decided to survey the landscape to help you plan your next voice- or text-based application. read more

The community of infrastructure developers working on Neutron—the network connectivity-as-a-service project used by 92% of production OpenStack deployments, according to the 2018 OpenStack User Survey—has been busy extending the project to support new use cases driven by the rollout of 5G, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and edge computing. read more

Here we examine 10 of the most intriguing, Linux-driven SBCs among the many products announced in the last four weeks that bookended the recent Embedded World show in Nuremberg.

Ibase’s 21.5-inch “UPC-7210” and “UPC-6210” panel PCs run Linux or Windows on 7th Gen Kaby Lake-U and Bay Trail CPUs, respectively. Highlights include 64GB SSDs, mini-PCIe, mSATA, and IP65 protection. Sometimes there’s a fine line between digital signage players and touch-panel PCs. Touch panels tend to be bulkier with lower resolution and fewer multi-display options […]

It's been said that "Software is eating the world," and every company will eventually become a "software company." Since open source is becoming the mainstream path for developing software, the way companies manage their relationships with the open source projects they depend on will be crucial for their success. read more

Pydio is a free and open source cloud-based file-sharing and synchronization software that allows you to access all your data storages from the central location. It is very alternative to other file-sharing software such as ownCloud and Nextcloud. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Pydio on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

The last month has seen an explosion of new Linux-based SBCs ranging from a next-gen BeagleBone AI and a Whiskey Lake based UP Xtreme to the first maker boards from Google and Nvidia. A recent Global Market Insights report projects the single board computer market will grow from $600 million in 2018 to $1 billion […]

In one of our earlier articles, we discussed the basics of bitwise operators. I hope you went through that article and are now ready to witness and understand some practical usage examples of these operators.

How to provide robust monitoring to low-end systems.

News briefs for March 21, 2019.