In a previous post I discussed how to introduce users to Linux, where the focus was on the software side of the conversation. This post is all about the hardware.
The reason I put hardware second is because if we can’t provide the user with the software they need there is no point in swapping out their hardware. Hardware is always a compromise, whereas software is not.
WOW. Fifteen years ago today I made the first post ever at LQ, introducing it to the world. 15 Years. I know I've said it before, but 5,354,618 posts later the site and community have exceeded my wildest expectations in every way. The community that has formed around LQ is simply amazing. The dedication that the members and mod team has shown is both inspiring and truly humbling. I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member for their participation and feedback. While there is always room for improvement, that LQ has remained a friendly and welcoming place for new Linux members despite its size is a testament to the community. Reaching this milestone has served to energize and refocus my efforts on making sure the next fifteen years are even better than the first fifteen.
While part-time hobbyists do plenty of great work on GNU/Linux, most of the code thesedays comes from paid developers. So for our upcoming podcast, we want your opinions: which company does the most for Linux? You might argue that Red Hat or SUSE contribute the most with their patches and efforts to get Linux into enterprises, or you may say that Intel or Canonical are doing the best work.
I don't know how many of you out there are aware of a new TV series called Mr. Robot starting Rami Malek as a computer hacker that goes by the name of Elliot and uses Linux kernel-based operating systems to hack various entities.
I have been writing this blog since 2012 and I have been asked a number of times by other bloggers why I still use Google's Blogger service as opposed to a hosted Wordpress site.
The truth is that I still very much see Everyday Linux User as a hobby. It isn't a job and I am not actively trying to make money by doing it. I find the Blogger interface easy to use and the spam filters work quite well. I tried using Wordpress a while back and it became quickly apparent that with more power came more responsibility as I spent more time trying to keep Wordpress from being bombed by spammers than actually writing.
Based on the native encryption support added to EXT4 with the Linux 4.1 kernel, Linux 4.2 is bringing encryption support to the F2FS file-system.
Ted Ts'o has sent in the big batch of EXT4 file-system updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel merge window.
Following EXT4 adding encryption support to Linux 4.1, there's many fixes/clean-ups in Linux 4.2 for the new encryption code. Beyond sprucing up the EXT4 encryption code there's many other cleanups and fixes, including some xfstest failures that have been taken care of.
The release of the Linux 4.1 kernel is more significant than most, and not only because it was designated as a long term stable (LTS) release, or that it included contributions from 1,539 developers, the most in in Linux history. The release improves Btrfs file-system support for massive servers, adds encryption support to the latest ext4 file system, and offers enhanced support for Chrome OS, RAID 5/6 storage, and ACPI power management on 64-bit ARM systems.
David Airlie has sent in the main DRM driver updates for the Linux 4.2 kernel. There's a lot of open-source graphics driver work represented by this pull request, but sadly no Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA) changes were incorporated for Linux 4.2
Interested in starting a new career in IT? Linux is one of the hottest technologies in the market today, with tens of thousands of job openings, and salaries outpacing many other IT specialties. This presentation demonstrates the steps you should take to launch your career in Linux.
The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative has selected three security-oriented projects to receive a total of $500,000 in funding.
Linux 4.1 was officially released by Linus Torvalds on June 21, marking the first major update to the Linux 4.0 kernel which first debuted in April.
Oracle announced just a few moments ago that the second RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.0 open-source and cross-platform virtualization software was available for download and testing for all supported operating systems.
On June 25, Paul Davis from the Ardour project had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the Ardour 4.1 DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software, a major release that adds new functionality and fixes bugs.
The Ardour project is pleased to announce the release of 4.1 with a great line-up of new features such as input gain control, Save As for projects, click-free changes to processor order and meter position, relative snapping, faster waveform rendering, Hi-DPI/Retina support and more! As usual, quite a few bugs have been mercilessly slayed. Encouragingly, we also have one of our longest ever contributor lists for this release.
The Mars release (v4.5) of Eclipse is now available as the tenth annual release train. Eclipse Mars brings many new features to this popular, cross-platform integrated development environment.
Today we have some great news for all you WhatsApp fans out there, as it appears that there's now an unofficial desktop client for all mainstream operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
CodeWeavers, the developer of the commercial and cross-platform CrossOver application that lets Linux and Mac users run Windows apps and games, wants to know on which Windows programs they should concentrate their efforts.
This has been a long time coming, as the request for the Linux editor is very high on their voting system. This request has also been updated to state that it has been started.
Looks like an early birthday present is on its way to me, as the Terraria developers have officially stated Linux & Mac builds should be out in July.
The list of the most sold games on Steam for Linux is a very good tool to find out what the community is preferring and what they are playing right now. If something ends up on this rather exclusive list, then you know you'll probably have a great time with it. Some of the games have been around for some time now, so we already know that they are good, but there are also a few new entries that should prove more than interesting.
LEGO Minifigures Online originally appeared on SteamDB back in March, but the developers Funcom said to us directly Linux wasn't planned. Their official site, and SteamDB entry now officially mention Linux as a supported platform. Bring on the bricks.
Imagine you find yourself trapped in another world. You’re not entirely sure how you got there, other than that you tripped through a rift, more or less. Your surroundings are a mysterious mix of city ruins, wrecked pirate ships and space-ships from an unknown future. You seem to be trapped there, and to make matters worse, monstrous giants roam the land.
Looks like an early birthday present is on its way to me, as the Terraria developers have officially stated Linux & Mac builds should be out in July.
Just days after pushing out Dota 2 Reborn for Linux gamers, Valve has released a massive update to this Source Engine 2 game and it includes some driver/rendering fixes.
Valve developers have issued a new patch for Dota 2 Reborn, and it looks like they managed to fix some important problems, including the support for the AMD open source drivers.
Well I do love SteamDB, as it appears STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ II - The Sith Lords™ has a Linux icon added, so it looks like the previous ESRB leak about a Linux version could be true after all.
Geometry Wars 3 has been out on Linux for a while now, but sadly it was left outdated for too long with issues. The update is out, so how is the game on Linux?
ARK: Survival Evolved sadly won't hit the release date today for the Linux & Mac versions, but they sent word that it will release on Tuesday the 30th of June.
Cinnamon 2.6 has been officially released with many interesting changes and improvements. Cinnamon 2.6 will be used in Linux Mint 17.2 "Rafaela" that is planned to be released in end of June. In this article I'm going to review this release and tell you how you can install it on Ubuntu or derivatives. I hope you will like to use it. One more thing, when you use it please give your feedback.
To be fair, Plasma is not the only desktop whose development has become cautious. The years 2008-2012 saw user revolts against major changes to GNOME and KDE, and a mediocre reception to the introduction of Unity. In the aftermath, the developers of desktop environments were left understandably nervous, and remain concerned about the pace of change.
Also, in the last few years, Plasma has been ported to the Qt5 framework, and much of it rewritten. This process was unavoidable, and seems to have resulted in greater responsiveness, although questions of speed are notoriously subjective in computer interfaces.
Yet at the same time that this process has happened, KDE as a community has done little to extend the concept of the desktop. The innovations that marked Plasma 4, such as Activities, tabbed windows, and desktop layout, have received only minor tweaks -- the Activities window, for example, scrolls vertically in the latest Plasma releases instead of horizontally as in the first releases.
We are in good way to have a stable version for 15.08.
After several month of packaging in kde overlay and almost a month in tree, we have lifted the mask for KDE Plasma 5.3.1 today. If you want to test it out, some infos how to get it.
Jaroslaw Staniek, one of the developers of the Kexi open-source database creation tool distributed as part of the Calligra office suite for the acclaimed KDE desktop environment, has unveiled details about the development progress of Kexi 3.0.
Carlos Garcia Campos had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of a new snapshot towards the upcoming WebKitGTK+ 2.10 WebKit rendering engine for the GNOME desktop environment.
The GNOME Project will soon release the third milestone towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, GNOME 3.17.3, which means that most of the core components have been updated in the last couple of days, including the GNOME Boxes virtual machine manager tool.
The GNOME developers are hard at work these days, preparing to unveil the third milestone towards the highly anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, which means that many of the core components received major updates, including GTK+.
The development of the next GNOME release, 3.17, is going on and a new snapshot, 3.17.3, is now available. Give it a shot! Some of us will gather in San Francisco next week for the West Coast Summit 2015, and a month later we will all gather for GUADEC in Gothenburg, Sweden (no relation whatsoever with a conspiracy that doesn't even exist).
Since last blog post I have been designing and implementing a room menu for Polari.
Frederic Peters has just informed us about the immediate availability of the third snapshot for the upcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, due for release on September 23, 2015.
This is the second in a series of posts about recent design work for GNOME’s core applications. As I said in my previous post, the designs for many of these applications have evolved considerably, and we have major plans for them. Help is needed if these plans are going to become a reality though, so we are looking for contributors to get involved.
MythTV is a free, Open-Source and a complete Home Media Center Hub also available for Linux. MythTV is capable to record videos. It is an alternative to Windows Media Center or Tivo. Personally I like MythTV very much. This tutorial will walk you through a quick look at the interesting features of MythTV and also How to install MythTV Latest version 0.27.5 on Ubuntu 15.05/14.10/14.04 or Linux Mint Rafaela/Rebecca or Other Ubuntu Derivatives.
It has been around 10 days since the last update to opensuse Tumbleweed. That would have been snapshot 20150612. This is a brief note to explain the delays.
Red Hat had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of the first Development Preview of their upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.1 for ARM operating system.
The way that DevOps can work in an enterprise organization is to first understand that innovation is de-centralized, with the best ideas coming from the best sources, wherever they might be.
It's also important to have an open and collaborative culture in order to facilitate innovation and organizations need to be modular to be able to react to change.
Paul Cormier, Red Hat EVP and president of products and technologies, discusses two new products announced today at the Red Hat Summit.
Chris Wright, chief technologist for Red Hat, sat down with theCUBE cohosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman to discuss new developments in the open source world and NVF in telcom networks.
As the person who helps define Red Hat’s strategic vision, Wright has seen conversations shift from cost of ownership to innovation. “Today, there is a shift to operationalize complex systems,” he says. “There has been a change in open source technology from commoditization to a place where real innovation is happening, and new services are introduced quickly.”
RHEL 7.2 will also bring live kernel patching to RHEL, which Dumas sees as a critical security measure. Using elements of the KPATCH technology that recently landed in the upstream Linux 4.0 kernel, RHEL users will be able to patch their running kernels dynamically.
Yes, Red Hat is a Linux company. But, it's more than that. Back in 2011, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told me the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud would be Red Hat's future. Today, at Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat made it clear that it wants to be a cloud analytic powerhouse as well.
Red Hat hasn't shirked with its latest product release in this vein and has labelled its most recent release the Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform.
Red Hat is adding features to its virtualization software to stay competitive, but is also worried about staying relevant as the industry moves to embrace cloud and containers.
This release of OpenShift, traditionally known to techies as a platform-as-a-service or PaaS, hits lots of buzzwords. First, it embraces the popular Docker container technology. That means a developer can, theoretically, build an application, test it, and run it in its own server room or on a variety of clouds. Second, it supports Kubernetes, an orchestration scheme backed by Google GOOG that promises to ease the placement and management of lots and lots of containers across environments.
Attendees went nuts on social media – displayed on the big screen at the Summit – as they awaited a keynote from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
At its recent Summit, Red Hat announced that the preview version of its latest enterprise-class operating system (OS) was running on AppliedMicro’s 64-bit ARM server processors. At the event itself, HP had a live demonstration running on 10 X-Gene m400 cartridges in one of its ProLiant “Moonshot” servers. The demo was running Red Hat Development Preview Edition 7.1 and showing enterprise-class real-time data analytics. The key take away from the announcement and the demo is that ARM servers are available today and are fully capable of supporting enterprise-class data analytics workloads. This example system at the Summit showed a full functioning enterprise stack – including 64-bit ARM processors, the server platform, the Red Hat operating system, hypervisor, and Apache Spark applications. There is a “top-to-bottom” solution available for ARM.
Looking to establish itself as the leader in the nascent container technology market, Red Hat has enabled one of its flagship products to support containers fully and released a new container management platform, too.
Containers are a hot topic at the Red Hat Summit taking place this week in Boston, the same week the container industry is meeting in San Francisco for Dockercon, a conference dedicated to the operating system-level virtualization.
Red Hat thinks the 64-bit ARM architecture will be ready for the data center and cloud someday soon. The release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM (RHELA) to beta may be this year or early 2016.
Red Hat continues to make inroads into the enterprise storage software market, improving two of its core storage technologies and striking partnerships with key IT system resellers.
Red Hat have announced two new products at its Red Hat Summit event: OpenShift Enterprise 3 and Red Hat Atomic Enterprise. Both of these will both incorporate the Docker and Kubernetes projects, two hugely successful container projects.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst discusses how he considers potential acquisitions and where he might be looking for new companies.
Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are open source, scale-out software-defined storage solutions that run on commodity hardware and have durable, programmable architectures. Validated to work with leading partner hardware and software solutions, each Red Hat Storage product is well-suited for different enterprise workloads, bringing compelling benefits to enterprises.
RED HAT has announced the release of OpenShift Enterprise (OSE) 3, a new version of its Platform-as-a-Service offering.
Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)7, Openshift is built on Docker Linux containers with Kubernetes orchestration using technology developed in collaboration with Google.
Forget that software is eating the world. By now, it’s a foregone conclusion.
Equities researchers at Oppenheimer upped their target price on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to $88.00 in a research report issued on Thursday. Oppenheimer’s price target indicates a potential upside of 12.07% from the stock’s previous close.
Wall Street analysts liked what they heard at Red Hat’s annual Analyst Day, which was held in Boston on Wednesday.
Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated its Buy rating and price objective of $90, following the Red Hat Summit and Analyst meeting
Red Hat has used its 2015 'Summit' event in Boston to take the wraps off of JBoss Fuse 6.2 and Red Hat JBoss A-MQ 6.2 - with both products introducing new capabilities for developers working on enterprise application and messaging initiatives.
Red Hat has launched its Mobile Application Platform, at the company's Summit under way in Boston.
The Mobile Application Platform consists of tools and templates for building mobile applications combined with back-end services to handle features including authentication, data, and integration with existing systems. It is based on FeedHenry, which Red Hat acquired in October 2014.
Developers traveling to Boston for the Red Hat Summit, one of the industry’s premier open source technology events, are in for a treat! They will get a sneak peek at some exciting new 64-bit ARM€® development platforms featuring the AMD Opteron™ A1100 Series processor (codenamed “Seattle”).
Shortly after I joined Red Hat, we had nothing short of a revolution when organizational changes led to the content services teams being positioned alongside customer-facing roles such as technical support, account managers, and customer experience managers.
I'm probably one of the last people you want to comment on how to effectively lead and develop an organization. During my career, I twice held team lead positions. Both times I... well, I wasn't a disaster, but I do feel I could have been more effective.
Yet another feature being worked on for Fedora 23 is to make it easy to test cloud images locally from the Fedora Workstation/Server.
Currently this program only works on Fedora Linux and requires libvirt, libguestfs, and python-requests for supporting this local cloud testing. Testcloud makes it a one-step process for downloading, booting, and gaining access to a cloud image on your local system.
Since we use Fedora as the base for our distribution and thus follow the Fedora Project's life cycle, it means that Korora 20 Peach reached it's End Of Life status yesterday on June 23.
Korora Project has informed its users that the Korora 20 "Peach" Linux distribution reached EOL (End of Life) status on June 23, 2015, which means that it will no longer receive security patches and software updates.
I'd written about pdfpc earlier. I packaged it for Fedora and you can now install it directly using DNF. It's still in the testing repositories, so you'll need to enable the repository for the time being. I'm leaving the copr repository as it is, but please note that I will not update the packages there any more.
Kiara spoke about the importance of using Fedora on engineering careers. Then I shared the new features that Fedora 22 include. After that, we ate pizza.
I appreciate the work done by Luis Segundo and Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá coordinating the space.
I indent to discontinue and remove perl-Mail-GnuPG from Fedora.
Basically, it integrates with the vacation calendar of fedocal to show on the packager's info page if the person is on vacations or not.
Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are only available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests.
Brewmaster is Valve's codename for the next version of SteamOS currently available in a preview state. SteamOS Brewmaster is based on Debian 8.1 stable.
SteamOS Brewmaster is in an early preview state where Valve is soliciting the feedback of the gaming community. SteamOS Brewmaster is available in ISO and ZIP format and is the successor to SteamOS Alchemy. Brewmaster is powered by the Linux 3.18 LTS kernel with various SteamOS patches on top.
On June 25, Valve was more than happy to announce the immediate availability for download and testing of the first preview release of the next major version of its SteamOS Linux distribution, dubbed Brewmaster.
System76 teased all Ubuntu users with their brand-new Twitter campaign, which starts today, June 25, on Twitter, of course, as the well-known hardware company plans one of its biggest sales ever on July 4, 2015.
This week, Dustin Kirkland announced the Ubuntu Fan Project.
To steal from the description, “The Fan is not a software-defined network, and relies on neither distributed databases nor consensus protocols. Rather, routes are calculated deterministically and traffic carries no additional overhead beyond routine IP tunneling. Canonical engineers have already demonstrated The Fan operating at 5Gpbs between two Docker containers on separate hosts.”
In a recent email entitled "Getting ready for Python 3.5," Canonical's Barry Warsaw unveils the company's plans for switching to the Python 3.5 dynamic programming language as the default Python 3 version in the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, due for release on October 22, 2015.
Entroware is a UK-based company that specialized in selling hardware powered only by Linux operating systems. Proteus is the top-of-the-line laptop from Entroware, and it comes with either Ubuntu 15.04 or Ubuntu MATE 15.04.
After announcing the implementation of the Fan overlay network system in Ubuntu Linux, Canonical's Ben Howard had the pleasure of introducing the first ever cloud images that contain the new technology.
Red Hat is dominating the headlines today with their announcements and related from the Red Hat Summit 2015, but several interesting tidbits appeared from other projects as well. Tumbleweed hasn't been updated in quite a while, Neil Rickert knows why. Christine Hall reviewed Mageia 5 Monday and Dark Duck posted more screenshots today. Fedora and Korora 20s have reached their end of life and a new Ubuntu phone hits e-shelves.
Another Ubuntu phone, the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, has been made available in Europe - but you'll have to jump through a few hoops to secure one.
Canonical finally delivered the first smartphone powered by the Linux-based Ubuntu OS earlier this year. It swiftly followed up on the launch of the BQ Aquarius E4.5 with news of a follow-up, the Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition, which will also be made by Spain's BQ.
It’s only been a few weeks since Canonical unveiled a new Ubuntu phone, but the company is already back with another handset for the European market. This time the hardware comes from Chinese firm Meizu, packing a slick design and some pretty nice specs.
Canonical has announced that a few Tomcat vulnerabilities have been identified and corrected in its Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS operating systems.
Canonical published details about a couple of Python vulnerabilities that had been found and corrected in its Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
Canonical, through Adam Conrad, announced earlier the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha versions for some of the official flavors of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.
Meizu announced yesterday that the new MX4 Ubuntu Edition smartphone would be made available on its website through a system of invites, and that system is now live. If you're lucky enough, you might be able to buy one.
It has just been brought to our attention that there's a video on YouTube where a guy shows us how easy (or hard) it is to install the Ubuntu 15.04 distribution on Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 laptop.
Over the last few years, there have been several releases of mobile phones designed with open-source operating systems: Mozilla, Canonical, Samsung, and Jolla to name a few companies that have ventured into that industry. Their operating systems aim to break through the global dominance of Android and iOS — although Android has been their biggest challenge as phones based on it are the most popular in countries in which those companies have targeted customers. But none of these companies has been successful on a large scale; they have seen success with niche groups of customers, but nothing that can make a dent in Android’s global presence. Still, they haven’t thrown in the towel, and in some cases, have done quite the opposite.
After months of anticipation, the high-end Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition smartphone is going on sale—sort of.
The MX4 Ubuntu Edition will be available in Europe starting tomorrow, Canonical announced on the Ubuntu Insights blog, but will only be available to those who obtain an invite through an “interactive origami wall” on the Meizu website. The origami wall will be “filled with fun and interesting glimpses” of the latest Ubuntu phone, alongside the occasional randomly-generated invite.
There is no doubt that Ubuntu MATE is slowly becoming one of the most used operating systems in the Ubuntu family and the Linux ecosystems as well, but it's interesting to see that the Raspberry Pi version is one of the most downloaded.
Jonathan Riddell is no longer a member of the Kubuntu Community Council and the situation created by the Ubuntu Community Council, and the Kubuntu developers seems to have ended peacefully.
We reported earlier that the first Alpha releases of the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system are now available for download and testing, as announced by Canonical's Adam Conrad.
Lubuntu is one of the Ubuntu flavors that participates in the Alpha 1 release of the upcoming Wily Werewolf (Ubuntu 15.10) operating system, so we took it for a quick test drive to discover what is new.
Attendees were treated to a peak into upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 with Denise Dumas today during Red Hat Summit 2015. Elsewhere, Jonathan Riddell resigns his post at Kubuntu and Bodhi Linux founder Jeff Hoogland describes the four basic types of Open Source users. Lastly, Linux Voice wants to know which company does the most for Linux.
Today, June 24, the Ubuntu MATE team had the great pleasure of announcing that the Ubuntu MATE Boutique is now open for business and will offer you all sorts of interesting products.
Whether you want to keep an eye on devices on your home network or wish to monitor the performance of your website, the open source Nagios monitoring tool should be your first port of call. Although you’ll need a Linux box, the Nagios software is quick to install and straightforward to configure.
The Internet of Things is big marketplace and we keep hearing about companies like Intel, Dell, and Canonical who are trying to make some headway, but there are other competitors out there that are working just as hard and who are also using Linux as backbone, like Sierra Wireless for example.
Spire Payments’ new suite of Linux-based POS terminals (the SP range) continues to gain global acceptance by achieving Compass Plus approval for TranzWare system.
Arrow Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:ARW) today announced at the Freescale Technology Forum that it is now offering an open-source, specification-compliant board that is based on the new Freescale i.MX 7 microprocessor. Arrow also collaborated with Qualcomm Atheros Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, on the board’s Bluetooth & Wi-Fi capabilities and with Linear Technologies on the board’s power supply.
The current “Tizen community” setup is transparently “community theater” rather than being a real community model.
Tizen’s architecture is appealing to both Web and Native developers alike. We have a Web API that allows app developers to create programs using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and also a Native API that allows you to code in C / C++. Tizen is going to target a whole array of devices including TV’s, smart phones, watches, tablets, In-Vehicle Infotainment, and smart appliances.
The Schedule for the upcoming Tizen Developer Summit India 2015 in Bengaluru, India 30-31 July. This is a technical two day event aimed at application and platform developers that want to learn more about the Tizen Operating System (OS). There will be technical content for App developers, platform designers, ISVs, OEMs, hardware vendors, software vendors, open source enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to learn more about Tizen.
There are a few big changes to the Google Play Music app in v6.0, but there are changes coming to your wearable too. There's a new Android Wear companion app in there (v2.0), and with it comes real download management for music synced to the watch. Finally!
Kenwood today announced that its two aftermarket CarPlay and Android Auto systems unveiled at CES 2015 are now shipping to retailers with a suggested price of $900 to $950 each. The Kenwood DDX9702S and Kenwood Excelon DDX9902S are the only aftermarket units that allow drivers to switch between CarPlay and Android Auto without having to manually change settings or reset the unit.
As much as I wish the Apple Watch could do more, I find it the best smartwatch available, given its polished design and wide range of apps.
But there may be reasons to consider something else. For one thing, Apple Watch requires an iPhone. Pebble Time, in particular, works with both iPhones and Android devices and excels at battery life. But it falls short elsewhere.
The case that BlackBerry should give up development of its own platform and switch to using Android is one that never seems to lie down. One of the pioneers of the mobile phone industry, BlackBerry followed in the footsteps of the others – Nokia and Motorola – who helped shape the industry but unlike its peers, BlackBerry refuses to go down without a fight.
Amazon, following its monthly schedule, has made live a new Amazon Appstore for Android Free App of the Day Bundle, which features a total of 22 paid apps and games worth over $50 (roughly Rs. 3,150) available for free until Wednesday 11:59pm PDT (Thursday 12:29pm IST).
Medium made the announcement through a quirky blog post, explaining that the app went through a lot of testing before reaching the public.
We've never really been fans of skinning Android. Adding new features is fine, but OEMs try to "brand" the software by changing the colors and icons, which usually makes things look worse and really only serves to make things harder for new users. No OEM tries to "brand" the Windows UI—you can happily hop from one computer to another and all the icons and buttons will be the same. Similarly, on Android, when you hop from phone to tablet to watch to TV to car, if would be nice if all the designs and buttons on those devices looked the same.
Just over a week after LG said that it currently has no plans to update the G3 to Android 5.1 Lollipop, the company has given a similar heads-up about the G4 Android 5.1.1 update.
You might be forgiven for thinking that the Apple Watch is the only smartwatch worth buying. But watches running Android Wear are alive, kicking, and getting better.
Automakers like Chevrolet, Buick, and Hyundai have committed to offering Android Auto and Apple CarPlay connectivity in their production vehicles, but there’s still a big aftermarket community clamoring for smartphone functionality.
From the variety of devices and apps available to the near-endless array of customizations -- everything from basic home screen arrangements to advanced tools that change how a phone or tablet is used -- there's practically no limit to the possibilities for making the operating system your own.
Like many walkers and runners, I like to do walks/runs with RunKeeper and Pandora. Before I got my Sony SmartWatch 3, if I needed to see the name of a song or my RunKeeper stats while I was running, I would need to dig my phone out of my pocket, press the button to activate it, unlock it, navigate to the appropriate app, try to see the data in the bright sunlight by cupping my hands over the screen, then re-lock the phone, and try to put it back in my pocket without accidentally unplugging my earbuds. Needless to say it tended to take me out of the zen of my run.
The open-source nature of Android means that you can run the mobile operating system on just about anything if you've got the know-how. Case in point: A YouTube user named Josh Max has managed to get it running on his Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CX. If that name conjures up images of middle school algebra exams, it's because it's a graphing calculator.
Today in our ongoing series of people putting one thing into another thing, we present Android running on a Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CX, a robust graphing calculator popular with the pre-calc set.
Over the last fifteen years, I've tailored most of what I do personally and professionally to the open source way. It puts the needs of others first in my life, and I love showing people how they can use a secure and stable operating system on new or aging hardware to accomplish all of their technology needs and desires. I've also seen the open source community grow and hundreds of new, and constantly improving, projects and products emerge. I'm a regular user of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. And, I use Firefox, Audacity, OpenShot, VirtualBox, Wordpress, Drupal, Moodle, and more!
It's been exciting to see open source software and the open source way arrive from the periphery to center stage.
Source code repository company GitHub today released version 1.0 of its Atom text editor for working with code.
Contributors to the Atom open-source project have made several improvements to the software in recent months, adding features like preview tabs, cutting down on memory usage for large files, making text more readable by default, and, of course, squashing bugs.
Google has removed an extension from Chromium, the open source sibling to the Chrome browser, after accusations that the extension was installed surreptitiously and subsequently eavesdropped on Chromium users.
After including closed-source code that enabled Chromium to listen in to a computer's microphone, Google bowed to backlash and removed it from the open-source browser.
We’re happy to announce the completion of the first release cycle after Rust 1.0: today we are releasing Rust 1.1 stable, as well as 1.2 beta.
Read on for details the releases, as well as some exciting new developments within the Rust community.
Mirantis, Inc. have announced the general availability of Mirantis OpenStack 6.1, which is based on the Juno release 2014.2.2 of OpenStack. The release is optimised to run on Ubuntu 14.04.1 and CentOS 6.5.
Crunchy Data Solutions, Inc. (Crunchy), a provider of enterprise PostgreSQL support, technology and training, today announced the release of Crunchy MLS PostgreSQL, an open source database distribution supporting multi-level security.
Libreoffice is steadily nearing its 5.0.0 release moment. According to the release schedule, this is supposed to be unearthed somewhere early August. The source code for its first release candidate was made available a few days ago.
In LibreOffice 5.1 I've added an equalize width/height pair of adjustments to the "shapes" submenu when multiple objects are selected. Equalize Width and Equalize Height which adjusts the width/height of the selected objects to the width/height of the last selected object.
So many companies fall prey to the idea that “If you build it, they will come” that it is refreshing to encounter a CEO who accepts the brutal reality of business, that no one cares, that nobody wants your product unless they are systematically convinced, that creating successful company goes far beyond building a technology product but actually involves building a business.
Redis Labs says a $15m funding injection announced today will help the NoSQL database firm expand sales and marketing, as well as step up its software engineering activities.
The wonderful developers behind Git, the world's most popular open-source distributed version control system, were more than happy to announce the immediate availability for download of Git 2.4.5.
In 2002, an article in the Washington Monthly explored a new trend called "open-source biology." It asked, "Can a band of biologists who share data freely out-innovate corporate researchers?" The basic idea: Instead of squirreling away their research so no one else could use it, scientists would pool their findings.
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But this week, researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's "Biology Is Technology" conference have a reality check to share: Open-source scientific data is grossly underutilized and kind of a mess.
Despite the involvement of the military and private companies, the robotics field has had a remarkably open ethos. With robots in their toddler stage, it has still proven worthwhile to share research and techniques widely. The Open Source Robotics Foundation are working to keep it that way, with an open ethic that might just shape our future with robots.
Google hasn’t announced it yet, but the company earlier this year started offering free beta access to Cloud Source Repositories, a new service for storing and editing code on the ever-expanding Google Cloud Platform.
BMW is bringing software back in-house so it can deliver seamless digital experiences for its customers - something more valued than horsepower or engines in today's market, its digital business models lead said.
Digital tape is about the hardest-to-kill storage IT there is, unless you count carving out data onto rocks, the way it was done hundreds of thousands of years ago. Tape technology celebrated its 63rd birthday on May 21; IBM first made available its IBM 726 Magnetic tape reader/recorder in 1952. Strangely, unlike later IBM tape drives, the original 726 could read tape backward and forward. Tape has managed to get better with age. When tape first went to market, the media itself weighed 935 pounds and held 2.3MB of data. In 2015, that much tape weighs closer to 12 pounds, and 2.3MB would comprise one large photo or a short pop song. Tape storage densities are broken regularly; IBM's tape team recently demonstrated an areal recording density of 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch on low-cost, particulate magnetic tape. The breakthrough represents the equivalent of a 220TB tape cartridge that could fit in the palm of your hand. Companies such as Iron Mountain, Spectra Logic, IBM and others maintain large installed bases of tape storage around the world. Here are some key facts about tape storage.
When a white male kills people in a mass shooting in the US, the corporate media follow an algorithm not unlike the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief.
First, media deny that the attack constitutes terrorism. In their view, acts of political violence carried out against civilians are indisputably terrorism when they are committed by a Muslim, but this is not necessarily the case when they are committed by a white person.
This is the stage in which most media coverage of shootings by white Americans remains stuck. When Elliot Rodger massacred six people and injured 14 more in May 2014, he was not classified as a terrorist--even though he explicitly stated that his attack was motivated by an intense hatred of women, and that he sought to “punish” women, collectively, for “rejecting” him in the past.
Yet because of mounting pressure and criticism from independent media, activists and social media, in the wake of mass shooting after mass shooting carried out disproportionately by white men, corporate media are no longer able to remain in a state of such denial.
The “surprise” is that more people are killed by “white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims”: 48 vs. 26 since 9/11, according to a study by the New America Foundation. (More comprehensive studies cited in a recent New York Times op-ed–6/16/15–show an even greater gap, with 254 killed in far-right violence since 9/11, according to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, compared to 50 killed in jihadist-related terrorism.)
The Times suggests that “such numbers are new to the public”–but they won’t come as much of a surprise to those familiar with FAIR’s work. In articles like “More Terror, Less Coverage” (Extra!, 5/11) and “A Media Microscope on Islam-Linked Violence” (Extra!, 8/13), FAIR’s Steve Rendall has debunked the claim that terrorism is mostly or exclusively a Muslim phenomenon, pointing out that white, right-wing Christians are responsible for the bulk of political violence in the United States.
Classified documents appear on WikiLeaks.org, revealing that the American government is spying on its allies. American officials rush to deal with a sudden diplomatic crisis while publicly refusing to comment on leaked materials. And WikiLeaks proclaims that it’s just getting started.
Every night, Donna Young goes to bed with her pistol, a .45 Taurus Judge with laser attachment. Last fall, she says, someone stole onto her ranch to poison her livestock, or tried to; happily, her son found the d-CON wrapper and dumped all the feed from the troughs. Strangers phoned the house to wish her dead or run out of town on a rail. Local nurses and doctors went them one better, she says, warning pregnant women that Young's incompetence had killed babies and would surely kill theirs too, if given the chance.
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Then there's pollution of the eight-wheeled sort: untold truck trips to service each fracking site. Per a recent report from Colorado, it takes 1,400 truck trips just to frack a well — and many hundreds more to haul the wastewater away and dump it into evaporation ponds. That's a lot of diesel soot per cubic foot of gas, all in the name of a "cleaner-burning" fuel, which is how the industry is labeling natural gas.
We are in the middle of the first great mass extinction since the end of the age of the dinosaurs.
That's the conclusion of a shocking new study published Friday in a journal called Science Advances.
The study, which was conducted by a group of scientists from some of the United States' leading universities, found that over the past century-plus, vertebrate species have gone extinct at a rate almost 114 times faster than average.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
That's right - not one, not two, not 50, but 114 times faster than average!
The study also found that as many 477 different vertebrate species have disappeared since 1900, a mind-boggling statistic because it usually takes between 800 to 10,000 years for that many species to disappear.
The U.S. Senate has paved the way for the passage of Fast Track legislation, to give the White House and the U.S. Trade Representative almost unilateral power to negotiate and finalize secret anti-user trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yesterday a “cloture” vote was held—this was a vote to end debate on Fast Track and break any possibility for a filibuster, and it passed by the minimum votes needed—60 to 37. Today, the Senate voted to pass the legislation itself. TPP proponents only needed 51 votes, a simple majority, to actually pass the bill, and they got it in a 60 to 38 vote. Following months and months of campaigning, Congress has ultimately caved to corporate demands to hand away its own constitutional mandate over trade, and the President is expected to the sign the bill into law as early as tonight or later this week.
he Senate voted Wednesday to approve fast-track authority, securing a big second-term legislative win for President Obama after a months-long struggle.
The 60-38 Senate vote capped weeks of fighting over the trade bill, which pitted Obama against most of his party — including Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Passage of the bill is also a big victory for GOP leaders in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The Republican leaders worked closely with an administration they have more frequently opposed to nudge the trade bill over the goal line.
The government says it will delay or cut back a number of modernisation projects planned for Network Rail.
Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin says rising costs and missed targets make the €£38.5bn plan untenable.
He blamed Network Rail, saying it should have foreseen the improvements would cost more and take longer.
Labour said it had warned the government needed to change how the railways were run but had "dithered" over taking action.
Network Rail said the plan, which was launched last year as the "largest modernisation of the railways since Victorian times", was too ambitious.
Network Rail controls 2,500 stations as well as tracks, tunnels and level crossings.
Pope Francis’ much-anticipated climate change encyclical, released last week, is every bit as strong as environmentalists and other proponents of dramatic action on climate change had hoped. The pontiff affirms the scientific consensus that climate change is largely the result of human activity, calls for “urgent action” to develop renewable energy alternatives, and slams global development paradigms that create an “ecological debt” between the Global South and the wealthier North.
Many are predicting that the encyclical will be a game changer that will mobilize religious groups and galvanize lagging western nations, particularly the United States, to address climate change. And the encyclical will undoubtedly give the cause a huge moral push, especially at the upcoming international climate negotiations. But there are ominous warning signs already that a significant percentage of American Catholics — the very faith constituency that should be most receptive to the pope’s message — may turn a deaf ear to Francis. This means that not only are they unlikely to give up their SUVs, but also to support policies to address climate change or the candidates that back them.
Scott Walker is taking heat for claiming that supporting equal pay for women "pit[s] one group of Americans versus another."
Here in Wisconsin, howls of laughter could be heard echoing through the marble walls of the state capitol: after all, this is a governor whose divisive approach has helped make his state one of the most bitterly polarized in the country.
This fact—that there are always young kids at Mondawmin (it’s a major transportation hub, and the only way thousands of kids can get home)—is erased entirely from the equation. The use of the term “juveniles” is meant to prejudice the reader and criminalize otherwise legal and peaceful assembly. From the beginning of the Baltimore Uprising, in other words, it’s been evident the Baltimore Police Department was far more interested in manipulating the press and hyping the threat than they were protecting First Amendment activity and people’s property.
Dropbox made itself a household name by giving away cloud storage. The eight-year-old company, valued at $10 billion, had 300 million registered users a year ago; now it’s got 400 million. Its two-year-old effort to make money from business users has been less impressive. While Dropbox led the $904 million global market for business file-sharing last year with about a 24 percent share, No.ââ¬â°2 Box and No.ââ¬â°3 Microsoft each took about 21 percent and doubled their slice of the pie, growing almost twice as fast, according to researcher IDC.
Poor Microsoft. The beleaguered company just can’t catch a break. We’ve already told you about how Snowden’s revelations have forced the pride of Redmond to spend who knows how many millions opening two “transparency centers” to allow government IT experts to pore through source code to prove there’s no back doors baked into Windows or other Microsoft products. Trouble is, while its engineers have been busy plastering over all traces of old back doors, they’ve left a side door standing wide open, waiting to be exploited.
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The spooks have been reverse engineering. They’ve been dismantling Karpersky’s software, searching for weaknesses. They’ve been mining sensitive data by monitoring the email chatter between Kaspersky client and server software. In other words, while IT security folks outside the U.S. have been keeping a wary eye on their Windows servers while trusting their antivirus to be a tool to help them secure the unsecurable…well, their antivirus software has been being a Trojan in the truly Homeric sense of the word.
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In the meantime, Windows becomes less safe by the minute for corporations and governments hoping to keep private data private. I’m certain that Red Hat, SUSE, and even Ubuntu are taking advantage.
On the 16 of June, Ministers in the Justice Council have sealed a general approach on the Commission proposal on the Data Protection Regulation. Modern, harmonised data protection rules will contribute to making Europe fit for the digital age and are a step forward to the EU Digital Single Market. Trilogue negotiations with the Parliament and the Council will start in June; the shared ambition is to reach a final agreement by the end of 2015.
La Quadrature du Net, French Data Network and the FDN Federation are publishing an essay to accompany their legal action before the French Constitutional Court against the French Surveillance Bill. The three associations, opposed to the French Surveillance Bill since its introduction in the Council of Ministers on 19 March, continue their mobilisation against this unjust law, in spite of its adoption in the National Assembly1 and the Senate2. Citizens are invited to support this approach by sharing and commenting on this essay by Thursday 7am to bring their thoughts or suggestions for improvement before sending it to the Constitutional Council.
Would you change what you said on the phone, if you knew someone malicious was listening? Whether or not you view the NSA as malicious, I imagine that after reading the NSA coverage on Linux Journal, some of you found yourselves modifying your behavior. The same thing happened to me when I started deploying servers into a public cloud (EC2 in my case).
Although I always have tried to build secure environments, EC2 presents a number of additional challenges both to your fault-tolerance systems and your overall security. Deploying a server on EC2 is like dropping it out of a helicopter behind enemy lines without so much as an IP address.
In this article, I discuss some of the techniques I use to secure servers when they are in hostile territory. Although some of these techniques are specific to EC2, most are adaptable to just about any environment.
The French proposal would grant for-profit arbitrators, working in a system that creates perverse incentives, vast discretionary powers. This creates a serious risk on expansionist interpretations. Foreign investors would be able to use this biased system to challenge governments. As it is practically impossible to withdraw from trade agreements, the EU would be locked in.
BT is calling on the communications watchdog to let it scrap the traditional telephone network, as part of a campaign to loosen regulations that it says will help telecoms companies compete better with US internet companies such as Apple and Facebook.
The telecoms giant is planning to move all domestic and business customers to internet-based voice calls within a decade, but under current Ofcom rules must continue to provide a traditional phone service.
Study finds significant degradations of networks for five largest ISPs, including AT&T and Time Warner, representing 75% of all wireline households in US
Cox Communications, one of the largest Internet providers in the United States, has asked the court to order anti-piracy firm Rightscorp to hand over its tracking source code. The ISP describes the company's settlement scheme as extortion and hopes to punch a hole in its evidence gathering techniques.