Showing all newswire headlines

In a move that shouldn't be much of a surprise, given the close collaboration between Canonical and Inktank—not to mention Mark Shuttleworth personally—around the open source Ceph storage system for Big Data and the cloud, the two companies on Monday announced a deal to provide full support for Ceph on Ubuntu. Here are the details, and what they mean for the channel.

Installing Debian may be a trivial task for someone. It has never been so easy for me. To start with, my first attempt to install it failed epically. Installation of Debian 6.0 Squeeze without a network connection was a serious mistake. Has installation improved in Debian 7.0? It was my task to study this.

There may be no part of the channel in which open source is better positioned to dominate than Big Data. Not only are open source solutions such as Hadoop and Ceph enjoying huge popularity for building Big Data infrastructure, but open source relational database technologies are also proliferating among enterprises looking to cut software costs. Survey results released Tuesday by EnterpriseDB on PostgreSQL adoption show just how much that's the case.

Android is a lot more free than iOS, but there are limits. We need to break through those. At its birth, Android was the horizontal and open solution to the problem of Apple's vertical and closed silo. On Android, hardware makers and software writers could build devices and apps, free to operate outside the walls of any vendor's closed garden.

On June 4th, the 4.1.0 release of the Apache CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform arrived. This is the first major CloudStack release since its March 20th graduation from the Apache Incubator. This release includes numerous new features and bug fixes from the 4.0.x cycle. It also includes major changes in the codebase to make CloudStack easier for developers; a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages; and completes the changeover to using Maven, the Apache software project management tool.

The development team behind the GNOME Boxes project announced a few days ago the second unstable release of the upcoming GNOME Boxes 3.10 application, a GNOME utility that allows users to manage remote or virtual systems.

Some features on the WordPress Jetpack plugin are duplicated by other plugins. However, if I need a function that’s available in Jetpack, I’ll try running that version first before installing another plugin to do the job. Why? I’ve already got Jetpack installed, so why install another plugin if it’s not necessary? If I’m not happy with the way the Jetpack version works–and sometimes I’m not–I can always go plugin hunting to see if I can find another solution.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: June 4, 2013) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI: http://www.lpi.org), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced a partnership initiative with Big Data Cloud (http://www.bigdatacloud.com/) -- a not-for-profit organization evangelizing the new technology movement regarding Big Data and the Cloud. The partnership initiative will promote events and other educational resources for LPI alumni on topics related to Big Data and the Cloud. Big Data Cloud hosts annual events and monthly meetups and has over 2700+ members. It is founded and operated by Third Eye Consulting Services & Solutions LLC (http://thirdeyecss.com/).

Valve has released the results of the hardware and software survey of May. As part of this monthly survey, Steam users are being asked what CPU, graphics card or operating system they are using.

Monit is a free open source tool used to manage and monitor processes, programs, files, directories and filesystems on a local or remote LINUX/UNIX systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

Lars Torben Kremer proudly announced last evening, June 3, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of his popular Snowlinux 4 operating system.

The Epiphany development team announced a few days ago that the unstable version 3.9.2 of the Epiphany web browser for the GNOME desktop environment is available for testing. The good news in this release is that the developers removed the support for the WebKit1 API layer, in favor of WebKit2, which is far more advanced. Moreover, Epiphany 3.9.2 is now able to start up with Wayland, and it allows users to run a standalone instance with a custom profile.

The White House announced a set of executive actions on Tuesday to crack down on abusive patent infringement lawsuits. The steps will rein in firms, described by detractors as “patent trolls,” which acquire portfolios of patents and make money by suing other companies. Critics of these firms say they do not create new products themselves and hamper innovation by tying up legitimate businesses in costly court fights.

The Wasteland 2 developers have shown off a new update which gives us a small glimpse of inventory management. They also state they are still a few months away from a Beta release. Wasteland 2 is the Kickstarted sequel to Wasteland (an RPG released in 1988) that gathered nearly 3 million dollars in funding so it's still one of the highest earning Kickstarter games ever, next to their other Kickstarted game Torment: Tides of Numenera which got just over 4 million!

From the 'Open to Code' files:

There a a lot of different metrics to validate the health of an open source project. In my opinion, one of the most critical is the number of different code authors. The open source OpenStack cloud platform this week has crossed a key threshold in that regard, now boasting 1,006 different source code authors (from the period of may 2010 to June 3, 2013).

Since the beginning the Linux desktop era, users and pundits have been asking when the year of the Linux desktop would be here. This past week saw three different answers to that question with the release of Linux Mint 15, Fedora 19 beta and the closing Ubuntu bug #1.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Debian Wheezy and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

On June 1, the City of Oakland will co-host ReWrite Oakland as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. ReWrite Oakland will be an all day writeathon that will culminate with the launch of a new website called "Oakland Answers," based on last year’s Code for America project "Honolulu Answers." Oakland Answers will be citizen-focused website, written in plain-language, that makes it quick and simple for people to find City information and services they are looking for online. City staff and the community will collaborate to answer common questions generated by citizens.

Several Android tablets running on Intel Clover Trail+ Atom processors broke cover at Computex Taiwan. Intel’s dual-core, 1.6GHz Atom Z5260 is fueling a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 tablet, as well as Asus’s 6-inch Fonepad Note and 10-inch MemoPad FHD10 tablets, while Asus also unveiled a hybrid 11.6-inch Transformer Book Trio, combining an Android slate [...]

So it goes in America. No one's immune from the threat of patent litigation, not even 18-year high school students in possession of an award-winning science project in one of the most prestigious science fairs around.