Engineers are some of the heaviest number-crunchers around. If you are a grad student, post doc or undergrad, you usually get whatever is lying around as your work machine. Also, depending on how inflexible your local IT department is, you may be forced to use one of the commercial operating systems around these days. What are lowly students to do when they need to do heavy computational work? You may be interested in looking at CAELinux (Computer Assisted Engineering). This project provides a live CD that gives you all the open-source tools you might need for your engineering work. And, because it is a live CD, you can use it without touching the local drive of the machine you are using.
Many different things make the Linux Planet go around, and one of them is the desktop. This past week, two key Linux desktop technologies advanced -- the new GNOME 3.2 release and the 1.0 release of PulseAudio.
Way back when, before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, and even before Hewlett-Packard became hardware buddies with Big Red with the original Exadata Database Machine, Dell was Oracle's chosen buddy for running parallel Oracle databases using Real Application Cluster on top of Linux. But now Oracle is in the hardware business, and it looks like Dell is fixing to take the parallel Oracle database fight to Oracle.
With its latest appliance, Oracle has officially embraced big data, including Hadoop and NoSQL.
The kernel.org web servers are back on line and are once again delivering the Git repositories of some Linux developers – including the main repository of the development branch of Linux maintained by Linus Torvalds. However, the frontpage links to the archives with the sources for the Linux kernel point to files that have yet to be uploaded. Following four weeks of downtime, kernel.org is thus at least partially back in business. The administrators took the servers offline for maintenance work around a month ago, following the discovery in late August that an attacker had obtained access to some servers.
Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges look to Linux to enable innovation in the new enterprise
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., October 5, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that three new members have joined the organization: Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges.
The OpenShot video editor for Linux is easy to use and very powerful. You can work with audio, video, or images to create cool video projects with amazing effects. OpenShot will let you add subtitles to your videos, and you can export your videos to many popular video formats. This is a fantastic video editor with many effective features. You can even use OpenShot to adjust the gamma, hue, and brightness of your videos. Real-time previews are also available when working with your video. If you want to install OpenShot just use the following commands from the Linux command line. $ sudo apt-get install openshot
Those two words have driven fear, annoyance and hate into the hearts of many users and developers for some time now. I am here to say today, in case you had not noticed, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I say with certainty that the days Adobe Flash enjoys as a dominant web development tool are numbered.
Anyone who is old enough to remember the Atari 2600 will recall the plane warfare game which provided hours of fun for two players and you fought it out. It also spawned numerous clones on the same system, with tanks and a plethora of others my failing memory has chosen to forget. Happier times.
Yes, pretty much anybody using KDE probably agrees that Firefox sticks out inside the K desktop like a drop of milk on black coffee. It is a superb browser and the quick development pace Mozilla has adopted is only making it better in a much faster fashion, but looks are also very important, aren't they? How about making Firefox look like a native KDE app? Check out the screenshot below!
The power of Gnome Shell lies in its extensionability. It is this power that transforms the barely unusable vanilla Gnome Shell desktop environement into a powerful and extremely usable and productive desktop environment. Gnome shell has a number of useful installations to enhance the user experience. To learn how to install and enable them using the Gnome Tweak tool check out our post on Installing and using Gnome Shell. In this post we will look at some must have Gnome shell extensions
The link in question is for TexOS, the Texas Open Source Project. The Texas Open Source Project, according to its site, “is working with local, non-profits in the San Angelo, Texas, area to provide technology to students who don’t have access to it at home.”
Salix Ratpoison 13.37 is released! This is probably the first ever linux distribution release featuring Ratpoison as the main window manager. The aim of the Ratpoison edition is to create a system that is fully usable with the keyboard only, no mouse required! For everyone that is not familiar with Ratpoison, Ratpoison is a window manager for X "with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence". Ratpoison uses a workflow that is similar to that of GNU screen, which is very popular in the terminal world. All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes.
Major enhancement release with many updates. Most notable updates include, Linux 3.0.4 and GParted 0.9.1. We have dropped the legacy PCManFM for PCMan-Mod, and man is it nice. Lots a little PCManfm bugs that have existed for years are now quashed. Xfburn replaces SimpleBurn for burning CDROM/DVD media. Chntpw was added to the boot menu. Adding Luxi fonts improved international language support. Although it's not the newest released, Firefox is updated to firefox-6.0.2 and is compiled for i486 (official branding included) with permission from the Mozilla Foundation. OpenSSH is updated to 5.9p1 with the ecdsa key created by default. People have been complaining about Parted Magic being hard on laptop batteries, so CPU frequency scaling on anything with a battery is now set to “on-demand” at boot. See the changelog for all the updates. There are many.
typically ‘calculates’ the necessary utilities for configuration, building and installation of systems.
My laptop is very old, so old that many people don’t even remember the model. This is one of the last models designed and actually produced by IBM before it was sold to Lenovo – a good old IBM X31, upgraded to 2Gb RAM at the day of purchase in 2005. There is no single thing it cannot do for me – it works just perfectly for many years, and, perhaps, for a few years to come.
Gluster is a spin-off from California Digital Corp, a supercomputer maker that was tapped by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to build its Itanium-based "Thunder" parallel supercomputer in 2003, which at one point was the second fastest supercomputer in the world. The techies behind it, led by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster's CTO, founded Gluster in 2005 to build a better file system.
The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) recently announced it has increased its membership by adding 134 new members, bringing the group's total to more than 200 members since its formation back in May of this year. That's a 20-fold increase in membership since its launch, signaling a strong growth of interest in KVM's core technology and a growing number of companies hungry to partner and build an ecosystem of solutions around an open source platform.
In its report, Piper Jaffray writes, "Red Hat is the market-leading provider of Linux and open source software and solutions. We believe the open source movement represents a tectonic shift in the way software is developed, licensed, and consumed. Red Hat's early-mover advantage, market share leadership, and execution capability should enable it to grow at two to three times the rate of the broader software industry over a multi-year horizon, in our view."
Red Hat (NYSE:RHT): UBS reiterated its rating of Buy for this company and changed its price target from $54 to $50. About the company: Red Hat, Inc. develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system. The Company’s Web site offers information and news about open source software and provides an online community of open source software users and developers.
Debian gurus Raphael Hertzog and Roland Mas, are looking to raise money to fund the translation of their seminal Debian book “Cahiers de l’Admin Debian Squeeze” into English. The pair have set up a crowdfunding campaign here to finance the three-month task of translating the book’s 450 pages.
Linux Mint's claim to fame is usability and the search for the perfect Linux desktop. As a distribution Mint arrived on the scene in 2006 with release 1.0 code named "Ada". It never formally made it as a stable release, resulting in little fan fare. However with release 2.0 codenamed "Barbara" Linux Mint made its mark on the community. Over the next 2 years Mint released 5 versions and if you haven't guessed it already they were all codenamed after feminine first names.
RoweBots Inc., the leading supplier of tiny embedded Linux-compatible real-time operating systems (RTOS) products, today announced that the Unison™ Operating System (OS) is a core component in a variety of medical equipment. The Unison OS controls operating room equipment, intelligent eyewear and other advanced medical devices for the home, physician’s offices and hospitals.
In a message on the MeeGo email list today, Carsten Munk proposes the Mer project as a sustainable way for MeeGo and other communities to work with Tizen. Munk explains that many MeeGo project contributors originated from the Mer project, which stood for Maemo Reconstructed. “We were big on open governance, open development and open source,” he says.
Nokia is rumored to be developing an open-source OS for its low-end handsets, codenamed Meltemi, despite having failed to drive MeeGo to the point where it could save the company’s smartphones. Apparently being led by Nokia EVP of Mobile Phones Mary McDowell, so the WSJ‘s sources tell them, Meltemi named after “the Greek word for dry summer winds that blow across the Aegean Sea from the north.”
So why would Nokia appear to do a 180 and try a product release based on another form of Linux, codenamed "Meltemi"? Wasn't MeeGo good enough? And what about Symbian, which Nokia just completed outsourcing development and support to Accenture?
Like any detective, I started out making a list of possibilities.
By going for the Windows Phone platform, Nokia has put itself in a difficult spot as far as low end phone segment is concerned.
LG announced an Optimus LTE phone that runs Android 2.3 on a dual-core, 1.5GHz processor, sports a 4.5-inch "True HD" IPS display with an unprecedented resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, and an LTE modem. Meanwhile, T-Mobile posted -- and then hid -- a web page showing two LG-manufactured MyTouch-branded phones said to be "coming soon."
The Aakash is designed and built by UK firm Datawind, known for their cheapo web-browsing kit. It features a resistive screen, a 366MHz processor and 2GB of storage, along with a couple of USB ports and space for a micro SD card. Connectivity is Wi-Fi, though cellular is already in production, and the government will be selling it to students for a shade under €£20 a pop.
India’s Human Resources minister Kapil Sibal will unveil the country’s $35 tablet computer meant for students, officially on Wednesday.
The tablet was developed as part of the National Mission on Education as a low cost alternative to high-end tablets which were available at $200. Even the latest tablet made by an Indian company called Pepper was priced $99.
It's possible the launch of Tizen will eventually add some more variety to the mix, but in the meantime a California vendor of Linux PCs has set its sights on delivering what it believes will be the first fully open source tablet.
Adobe has entered an agreement to acquire Nitobi, the startup behind PhoneGap. Alongside news of the acquisition, Adobe and Nitobi have jointly announced plans to donate the PhoneGap project to the Apache Software Foundation.
PhoneGap is an open source mobile development framework for building applications with standards-based Web technologies. The project provides a cross-platform Web runtime that allows application developers to reach multiple mobile operating systems with a single code base. It includes a custom API stack that enables platform integration and exposes device capabilities.
Big Blue has passed the code to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb), where it is already being used in a National Institutes of Health funded study of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGeneR). The COPDGeneR team is studying the CT scans and medical records of over 10,000 patents in an attempt to understand causation factors and find cures.
Proprietary software vendors like to scaremonger over the use of open source software. They like to highlight the "inherent dynamism" that exists in open source libraries that are exposed to community development at all times.
When Ballarat makes its debut in January 2012 as the first regional centre to host Australia's national Linux conference, it will also see a number of first-timers involved on the organisational front.
First things first: Unless you visit only very simple websites, Dillo will probably not be your one and only Web browser. However, you may find it very useful as a secondary browser because of its speed. It loads in under a second and renders just as quickly. It can be your go-to tool when you want a fast means to enter a site and find key information.
Firefox 7 was recently released. That’s right, less than a month after the release of Firefox 6 comes numero 7. But why? Why would one of the most popular browsers out there put out major releases so close together? Could it be the fact that 6 was so bad they wanted to call “do-over!” to try to make things right?
A year after it pulled the plug on silent updates in Firefox 4, Mozilla said it will debut most of the behind-the-scenes feature by early next year.
In a post on his blog, developer Brian R. Bondy says that, while Mozilla’s rapid release process has allowed the development team to release a new version of the Firefox browser every six weeks, modifying restricted files under Windows has been difficult due to the introduction of User Account Control (UAC). By default, UAC prevents software from making changes to c:\Program Files\ without the user’s permission, in the form of a confirmation dialogue box. Bondy argues that "if a user with administrative access gives permissions to Firefox one time via a UAC prompt, and that user has automatic updates on, then there is no reason we should continue to ask them to elevate the permissions each and every time we want to apply an update."
Firefox users who are still running a 3.6 version of the web browser should prepare themselves for receiving an advertised update on Thursday. Users will receive a prompt with the option to update the browser from their version to the very latest. Mozilla is quick to note that this has “no bearing on support levels”, which means that Firefox 3.6 will continue to receive updates after the update prompt has been launched.
Owen O’Malley recently collected and analyzed information in the Apache Hadoop project commit logs and its JIRA repository. That data describes the history of development for Hadoop and the contributions of the individuals who have worked on it.
Version 3.0 of the open source cloud toolkit OpenNebula has been launched; according to its developers this is used by thousands of organisations to build IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) clouds. The release includes "new innovative features" which have been "developed to fulfill the needs of leading IT organizations running production environments".
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 2.5.1 This sub-release introduces several bug fixes and many important improvements – for example, performance improvements during a database restore, the ability to write to global temporary tables in read-only databases, etc. For the full list of changes please refer to the Release Notes, Chapter 2 “New in Firebird 2.5ââ¬Â³. Firebird 2.5.1 has 100% compatible on-disk structure with Firebird 2.5.0, so it is recommended to migrate to 2.5.1 as soon as possible.
Oracle’s rumored NoSQL database made its splashy debut, along with Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, on the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 main stage Monday. Less trumpeted was news that MySQL, the venerable open-source database, got an update that vows to speed query and improve cluster capabilities.
Oracle’s extended diatribe against the NoSQL crowd — including Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, and Redis — sought to expose their limitations and sow some serious doubt over their open-source roots. But the white paper has now vanished from Oracle’s website, surviving only through Google’s search cache, and Oracle has launched a new attack on the NoSQL movement. On Monday, at its massive Oracle OpenWorld conference in downtown San Francisco, Oracle unveiled its own NoSQL database.
While the news about NoSQL has garnered much attention, Oracle has quietly published a development milestone release (DMR) for MySQL.
The MySQL 5.6.3 DMR includes a major revision of the software’s optimizer, which the company claims will make file-sort optimizations up to three times faster by searching more intelligently and dumping unneeded data during the process.
Oracle announced last night, October 3rd, a new maintenance version to its popular and powerful VirtualBox virtualization software, VirtualBox 4.1.4, which brings many improvements and lots of bugfixes.
Standard document formats are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.
The first time round, JavaFX was a closed source attempt to dislodge Flash, Silverlight and the other plugin runtimes from being the way that people delivered rich applications on the internet. This time around, Oracle has released version 2.0 of its JavaFX RIA (rich internet application) technology as an open source based platform. The release was announced at JavaOne, which is being held in parallel with the company's in-house OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
In contrast to previous attempts, in the opinion of many of the Java experts who have been testing the beta since February, it comes across as a much more rounded product. Whether Oracle will be able to compete with alternatives such as Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's AIR/Flex is, however, open to question, especially as those platforms are already under pressure from the emerging HTML5 ecosystem.
Oracle filed its case management statement last Friday specifying the claims it would assert. (Oracle v. Google - Oracle Specifies Claims It Will Assert) In its statement Oracle identified 26 claims it would be asserting, although it also suggested that there were only 15 unique sets of claims because of what Oracle described as "claim mirroring." Monday Google responded with its own case management statement identifying the grounds for invalidity it would assert against each of Oracle's asserted claims.
Each of the parties has now come forward and filed an additional Case Management Statement (Google Statement - 480 [PDF]; Oracle Statement - 481 [PDF]) on the issues of the patent reexaminations; whether the case should be stayed pending those reexaminations; the amount of time required for direct and cross-examination at trial, and the issue of damages. Not surprisingly, the positions of the parties are diametrically opposed.
The iSchools Project, a government-funded ICT for education integration initiative, recently made a push for open-source software during the Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2011 held at St. Paul’s University in Tuguegarao, Cagayan Valley last September.
Working on the theme “Smarter Communities Choose to be Free", this year’s SFD aimed to educate and convince technology users to choose open-source software instead of using proprietary software or unlicensed software.
A developer at heart, Team Capital Bank EVP and CIO/CTO Ghan Desai takes a hands-on approach to technology development while taking advantage of free, open source solutions.
For most small and midsize businesses (SMBs), costs and availability of in-house IT resources dictate the type of software they procure. This is why industry insiders are urging these companies to consider open source software (OSS) and leverage the low start-up expenditure and availability of support offered by market players.
Small businesses, enterprises and even governments use Asterisk-based technologies to enable feature-rich voice communications over a Web connection. But not all current and prospective Asterisk (News - Alert) users know the true power of the open source software.
Richard Stallman's FOSS idea was anti-capitalist. Eric Raymond's open source attitude is profoundly pro-capitalist.
Yet the first open source companies to emerge in the early part of the last decade used FOSS licenses, not the "permissive" BSD-type licenses Raymond favors. They wanted community support, and an equal relationship among developers encouraged it.
The Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented annually by FSF president Richard Stallman to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.
Last year, Rob Savoye was recognized with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his contributions to compiler and testing tools, and his leadership of the GNU Gnash project, a fully-free replacement for Adobe Flash. Savoye joined a prestigious list of previous winners including John Gilmore, Wietse Venema, Harald Welte, Ted Ts'o, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Alan Cox, Larry Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza and Larry Wall.
Nearly one year ago I wrote about Digital Mars wanting to merge the GNU D Compiler into GCC. Finally it looks like merging the compiler for the D programming language is nearing a point of reality.
For the last four years, KSEB has created over 840 databases across the state. Almost all its applications in major functional areas, operating either in a centralised or local architecture, use PostgreSQL. About 700 PostgreSQL databases have been used in the Oruma project, and over 4,000 employees of KSEB access these databases on a daily basis. Saras has about 140 databases, which are used by about 1,000 users for daily transactions. Three projects under implementation (the Human Resource Information System or HRIS, the Supply Chain Management or SCM, and HT/EHT billing software) also use PostgreSQL databases. The HRIS will have a single database, and over 500 users are expected to use it on a daily basis. The SCM system uses PostgreSQL, and about 1,000 users are expected to access this centralised database for daily transactions. And about 30 people will use the HT/EHT billing software, every day.
Occupy Wall Street is an open source protest.
Well actually….no. The second Development Milestone Release of MySQL Cluster 7.2 introduces support for what we call “Multi-Site Clustering”. In this post, I’ll provide an overview of this new capability, and considerations you need to make when considering it as a deployment option to scale geographically dispersed database services.
You can read more about MySQL Cluster 7.2.1 in the article posted on the MySQL Developer Zone.
MySQL Cluster has long offered Geographic Replication, distributing clusters to remote data centers to reduce the affects of geographic latency by pushing data closer to the user, as well as providing a capability for disaster recovery.
LONDON: Drug companies are learning how to share. In a bid to save both time and money, some of the industry’s biggest names are experimenting with new ways to pool early-stage research, effectively taking a leaf out of the “open-source” manual that gave the world Linux software.
Typesafe Stack 1.1 includes latest versions of the open source Scala language and Akka middleware
As the government works on drawing up yet another definition for open standards, the man in charge of the Cabinet Office's team of IT coders is keen to talk about a future where all government tech is based on, well, open standards.
This month, the Center for Media and Democracy's new Food Rights Network launches a series of interviews with "food and farm heroes." It's easy for an organization dedicated to exposing corporate spin to focus on negative corporate propaganda with its ubiquity, but we would be remiss not to highlight courageous people who fight corporate agendas and spin in other ways, large and small. Some devote their lives to it.
Sewage sludge can contain heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, perfluorinated compounds, nanoparticles, pathogens, known endocrine disruptors, and more. Of those, only 10 heavy metals out of dozens are regulated in sewage sludge that is applied to land where animal feed is grown as fertilizer. The strictest regulation, which the EPA calls "Class A Biosolids" ("biosolids" is a term the sewage industry made up to make sludge sound more palatable), has the same restrictions on heavy metals, plus two other criteria: it must have no detectable salmonella or fecal coliform, and it must be treated so that it is not attractive to disease-carrying organisms like rats or flies. But this leaves in and unaccounted for numerous other pathogens, as well as an array of heavy metals and other substances like PBDEs concentrated in the resulting sludge.
For six years Overstock.com has waged a war to expose Wall Street mischief. We did not go looking for a fight, but our company was attacked, and we learned we were not alone: the same manipulation-for-profit tools that Wall Street had deployed against us had also been deployed against many American companies, harming job creation, innovation, and economic growth. We knew that if left unchecked and unexposed, Wall Street's games could ultimately damage U.S. capital markets.
So in 2005 and 2007 we filed two lawsuits. The first case was against a hedge fund (Rocker Partners) and hatchet-job-for-hire research team (Gradient Analytics), both with ties to Jim Cramer. The second case was against a group of eleven Wall Street prime brokers, culminating in Goldman Sachs. The hedge fund in question (Rocker Partners) hired famed lawyer David Boies, and the prime brokers showed up with an army of the most prestigious law firms in America. Our lawyers were Dore Griffinger, Ellen Cirangle, Jonathan Sommer and Catherine Jackson of Stein & Lubin, a small but excellent San Francisco law firm.
Three years ago, I left my 15-year career as a financial professional, because I was disgusted and disturbed by the rampant evidence of corruption in the relationship between our banking system and our government.
At the time the Tea Party was emerging and I was confident that between their exploding wave of anger and our newly minted president's soaring aspirations for all of us -- we would align to confront and resolve the blatantly corrupt relation ship between banking and our government and more broadly BUSINESS and STATE.
Late Sunday night, after a flurry of PR flack-directed prebuttals that had eyebrows arching and anticipation building, Bloomberg Markets Magazine released an epic exposé about Koch Industries' misdeeds during the last three decades.
Fifteen Bloomberg journalists from around the world contributed to the story.
The TRAIN Act, introduced by ALEC alumnus Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK), "would create a special committee to oversee the EPA's rules and regulations, and require the agency to consider economic impacts on polluters when it sets standards concerning how much air pollution is too much."
In a message it posted today, Wikipedia said it has hidden the Italian-language portion of the site due to a new law proposed by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's administration.
The Retail Council of Canada represents more than 43,000 store fronts of all retail formats across Canada, including department, specialty, discount, and independent stores, and online merchants. It board of directors include representation from Canada's largest retailers. The RCC's comments on digital locks in Bill C-32: