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I can’t recall the exact time I learned about open source software, but I can certainly narrow down the place. I quickly realized how transformative it could be. In 1996, I was sitting in the tech support department of a large ISP that provided hosting and connectivity to the Fortune 1000. Most of our servers ran Solaris, floppy disks arrived via snail mail, and we applied security updates manually adhering to a regime of updates and invoices prescribed by Sun Microsystems. It was a huge change from my university career of dumb terminals and mainframes.

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, more and more tech companies are providing their users with transparency reports that detail (to the extent they're allowed) government requests for user data. Amazon -- home to vast amounts of cloud storage -- isn't one of them.

After my project to control my Christmas Tree lights with my Raspberry Pi, what would be my next project? I eventually landed on tinkering with Pi Musicbox, a spin of Raspbian with Mopidy that allows users to play all sorts of streaming services—like Spotify, TuneIn, SoundCloud—and local sound files on a 'headless' Raspberry Pi. In this guide, I'll show a bit of the work I had to do to get Pi MusicBox working to my satisfaction as well as some of the issues I'm still dealing with. read more

Many Linux admins rely on a centralized remote monitoring system (e.g., Nagios or Cacti) to check the health of their network infrastructure. While centralized monitoring makes an admin's life easy when dealing with many hosts and devices, a dedicated monitoring box obviously becomes a single point of failure; if the monitoring box goes down or […]Continue reading... The post How to set up server monitoring system with Monit appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to monitor Linux servers with SNMP and Cacti How to install and configure Nagios on Linux How to configure Nagios for audio alerts and mobile notifications How to monitor and troubleshoot a Linux server using sysdig How to set up a cross-platform backup server on Linux with BackupPC

The GParted team is proud to announce a new stable release of GParted Live. This live image contains GParted 0.22.0 which now supports reading and writing file systems to disk devices without partition tables, in addition to supporting GPT partition names. Items of note include: based on the Debian's 'Sid' repository as of 2015-03-23; now uses systemd which is the new default system init on Debian; includes GParted 0.22.0: adds read and write support for unpartitioned whole disk devices; adds read and write support for GPT partition names. This release of GParted Live has been successfully tested on VirtualBox, VMware, BIOS, UEFI, and physical computers with AMD/ATI, NVIDIA, and Intel graphics.

Rethink Robotics’s one-armed, Linux- and ROS-based “Sawyer” manipulation robot is smaller, faster, stronger, and more precise than the earlier Baxter. When MIT spinoff Rethink Robotics announced the $25,000+ Baxter manipulation robot in 2012, it inspired a whole new category of small, relatively low-cost robots for light manufacturing and product assembly. The fixed, two-armed, “collaborative” robot […]

Activities are virtual desktops. They share a common panel and menu, but each has its own layout and selection of items on the desktop. In addition, each has its own virtual workspaces and wallpaper.

When it comes to picking a programming language to use when teaching people how to program, there are many, many options. Scratch is a good choice when teaching the basics because of its drag and drop building block method of programming. Python or Ruby are also good choices—both languages have a straight-forward syntax, are used in major real-world projects, and have excellent communities and supplemental projects built around them. Or there is Java, Objective-C, and C#, which are solid programming languages and marketable job skills. Honestly, they are all good choices, but when it comes to teaching programming in an academic setting, are they really the best way to go about doing it? read more

Patent trolls -- sometimes known more politely as "Non-Practising Entities" (NPEs) -- probably have few fans among Techdirt readers, but there are some who try to justify their activities. Here's how the argument usually goes:

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 6.5. With this release we continue to enhance and improve Black Lab Linux for public consumption. While the base is the same, the Open Distribution Release comes in four flavors. GNOME, MATE, XFCE and KDE. The XFCE release is built into the GNOME release because of customer demand. Some of our users run things like legacy 64-bit hardware, terminal services and certain systems where GNOME may not run all that great.

The GParted team, through Curtis Gedak, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the popular GParted Live CD distribution used by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to partition and manage disk drives.

"We shouldn't expect Apple or Google to make a device that is completely secure," Weidman said. "If you turn the device off, melt it and bury it, then maybe it will be entirely secure—that's the nature of things." -

Ubuntu security isn't difficult: Hardening your Ubuntu installation is usually a straight forward process. Yet sometimes in our haste, we forget to address important security measures early on. In this article I'll share my essential Ubuntu security hardening techniques.

The next major release of Gnome (3.16) is scheduled to be released on March 25. Here is a pre-release, sneak peek.

The release of Windows 10 is on the horizon and once again many people in the Linux community are up in arms about potential “abuse” of the secure boot protcol that UEFI supports.

Ubuntu MATE 14.04.2 is available for download. This release fixes a few issues that were present in 14.04.1, adds some new features and updates some packages. It is important to state clearly that Ubuntu MATE 14.04.2 is not an official Ubuntu flavour!

Last night I bought a Tracfone online. This morning, when I bring up FOSS Force on the browser, I’m greeted by an ad hawking Tracfones. Likewise, a few months ago after I purchased a coolant reservoir for my 27 year old BMW, I was greeted by ads on every site I visited for companies specializing in parts for old BMWs. We’re all used to this, right? Even if we just conduct a simple Google search, we’re liable to be followed around by ads pertaining to that search for hours, if not days or weeks. Well, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.

In today's open source roundup: How to run Windows software in your favorite Linux distribution. Plus: Four tools to securely delete data in Linux, and MIPS-powered Chromebooks might be on the way.

Variscite released a tiny “VAR-SOM-DUAL” module starting at $46 that runs Android or Linux on a Freescale i.MX6 Dual, and offers onboard WiFi and Bluetooth.

Tue, 24 Mar 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.2.2. Plasma 5.2 was released in January with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.