What sets the Endless apart from other low cost machines is Endless OS, a highly customized version of Ubuntu Linux with Gnome (and lots of other interesting technology such as Xapian and OStree) that not only handles TVs as output devices (it scales and formats video output for readability), but also includes a huge library of applications and educational content. This is important because in emerging markets the Endless system will be useful and well-featured even if you don’t have any kind of networking services available.
Gumstix and KIPR have used Gumstix Geppetto to design a new Linux-on-Sitara based robot controller for upcoming K12-focused autonomous Botball contests.
The nonprofit KISS Institute for Practical Robotics (KIPR) has been holding regional and international Botball Educational Robotics competitions for K12 students since 2003. At this year’s international competition, which runs this week from July 7-11 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, KIPR joined with Linux embedded board manufacturer Gumstix to announce that the companies have designed next year’s KIPR controller device for Botball robots using the online, drag-and-drop Gumstix Geppetto hardware development tool.
Grandstream’s “GVC3200ââ¬Â³ is an Android based videoconferencing device that offers 9-way SIP/Android sessions, a 12x zoom HD camera, and triple HDMI displays.
Any Android device with a front-facing camera is potentially a personal videoconferencing device, especially now that Google Play has apps like Skype and Google Hangouts. Yet, we haven’t seen many Android- or Linux-based systems that do business-class, room-sized videoconferencing, let alone non-video conferencing systems like this week’s Android-based DCN Multimedia Conferencing System from Bosch. The only recent exception we can recall is Google’s VC-ready Chromebox for Meetings, which runs the Linux-based Chrome OS.
“I got a very minimal Linux running (kernel 0.93p11) and then later bought a set of disks from Duke University (kernel 0.93p13still SLS),” he said. “My first really useful Linux was Kernel 1.2.8 Slackware 2.3. I couldn't get X Windows to run but this was MS DOS days so color Bash was pretty cool. I had an offline packet reader for mailing lists from bulletin boards. I also used minicom to dial up GEnie. Later I started using SLIP to get to to the Internet and dropped GEnie.”
Luckily, there's a whole other world of Linux. There are dozens of smaller distros that specialize in lightweight desktops that do the basics – manage windows, and offer file browsers, launchers and sometimes a menu bar of some sort – but otherwise stay out of the way. The point, after all, is the applications. Why waste RAM running a fancy desktop when all you want to do in interact with the apps you're running? If you have the RAM to spare, well, sure, why not? But not all of us do.
Linus Torvalds was interviewed by Slashdot last week and his comments on artificial intelligence has been making the rounds since. He basically said AI would not lead to human-like robots because the neural network would remain limited. Despite that, Google has "applied for at least six patents on fundamental neural network and AI." In other news, Kali Linux 2.0 is expected at DEFCON 23 and the Free Software Foundation has approved another Linux OS for its "fully free" list. Docker 'Tinkerer Extraordinaire' said Open Source is hostile to women and Megatotoro posted Pisi Linux is still alive and kicking.
The AMD developers have announced that a new Catalyst Linux driver, 15.7, has been released and is now available for download. It's been a while since we had a stable version of the Catalyst driver, but it's still not all that impressive.
As you may know, Dzip is an open-source, command-line software for file compression/decompression. It has drag and drop support, the users being able to easily create .dz files. But unlike WinZip or other software, it does not copy the extracted files to temp and move them to the destination when finished, the files being copied to the destination directly.
This month, we welcome Thien-Thi Nguyen as the new maintainer of GNU Superopt.
It's been a while since last reporting on Unvanquished (mostly because it seems their RSS feed is broken), but they've continued moving along with their open-source game and Daemon engine. This first person shooter is now up to its 41st monthly alpha release.
After a month of bugfixing, we give you Krita 2.9.6! With lots of bugfixes, but bugfixes aren’t the only thing in 2.9.6, we also have a few new features!
Papyros is a new Linux distribution built from scratch that uses the Material Design guidelines. Developers chose to build an entirely new desktop shell that perfectly simulates the use of Material Design, and the team is really close to releasing the first testing version for the public.
I'm happy that Pisi is still with us. It has become too silent and almost secluded, but I still hope Pisi does not go extinct.
ChaletOS is a Xubuntu-derived distribution, with very little to no publicity surrounding it. Even its official domain, a humble, unassuming Google sites page, does not offer too much information. I came across ChaletOS while reading Gizmo's Freeware forums, and I was hooked by its rather stylish, colorful looks.
The design goal for Alpine Linux is to provide a secure and lightweight distribution, which should cater the needs of most of the Linux users. It is based on musl and BusyBox; today Alpine Linux 3.2.1 has been released, in this article we will be reviewing the noteworthy features of this Linux distribution and the installation process for this latest release.
We’ve been awfully quiet lately, which usually means something is brewing below the surface. In the past few months we’ve been working feverishly on our next generation of Kali Linux and we’re really happy with how it’s looking so far. There’s a lot of new features and interesting new aspects to this updated version, however we’ll keep our mouths shut until we’re done with the release. We won’t leave you completely hanging though…here’s a small teaser of things to come!
Flock is our big, annual contributor conference, where we get together to talk about what we’re working on and what we want to do in future releases, and also actually get in rooms together to hack on ideas. It’s also great fun, and a celebration of our “Friends” foundation.
The new Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition was officially released in Europe a couple of weeks ago, but it's available only in a limited fashion. Now, Canonical has announced that the number of invites to purchase the phone has been increased so that more users can order it.
Canonical has started to improve Launchpad again, and developers have made a number of changes and improvements. It looks like the recent Git integration is not the only new feature that will be made available.
Ubuntu 15.10 is now in the middle of the development cycle, and developers are upgrading packages left and right. One of those packages is the systemd component, which has been recently made default in Ubuntu.
Canonical published details a couple of days ago, in a security notice, about an HAProxy problem that was identified and fixed for its Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 14.10 operating systems.
" It is still a WIP and it is also quite early, but if you want to try out Snappy Personal Desktop," http://carla-sella.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/snappy-personal-desktop.html
For those interested, it's becoming possible to play with Ubuntu's Snappy next-generation package manager from a personal desktop.
Lenovo is preparing to ship laptops preloaded with Ubuntu in India. The first of these systems will be the Lenovo Thinkpad L450, featuring only one of two CPUs, but the selection may widen over time and expand to other countries.
Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has partnered with computer OEM Lenovo to launch the ThinkPad L450 series running the Linux distro in India. Starting at Rs 40,000, the laptops will be available to purchase from selected commercial resellers and distributors.
A disagreement between the founder of Kubuntu and the Ubuntu Community Council has roiled the Linux community and left the project rudderless, as Jonathan Riddell left Kubuntu’s governing body late last month.
The Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), an organization working towards an open standard for virtual reality devices, has announced that OSVR software now accommodates Android devices, adding to existing distribution for Windows and Linux.
Furthermore, the influence of a Github portfolio should not be underestimated. This may seem skin-deep, but importance lies in the fact that a high-quality Github portfolio reflects time and energy spent curating one’s projects. For instance, a good Github project is well-documented, contains a well-written README (or overview) and is well-marketed online so as to gain approval throughout the community (via stars – similar to “likes” on Facebook). The skills required to create and maintain a high-quality project speak loudly.
Reliance Communications (RCOM) and Sistema Shyam Teleservices, also known as MTS India, are increasingly adopting open source software as it helps them significantly cut costs.
Michelle Brush will talk at OSCON this year about how engineers and architects in tech can make better decisions by understanding their environment. How? Through behavioral economics, a discipline that, in her words, straddles psychology and economics.
Sprints are one of the most effective tools for building momentum and community around an open source documentation project. For the past four years, the Open Help Conference & Sprints has hosted doc sprints for a number of prominent open source projects, and often has been the first sprint venue for a project. Open Help celebrates its fifth year in 2015 with a venue upgrade and space for six doc sprints.
When you deal with a lot of documents every day, whatever you write—whitepapers, manuals, presentations, different marketing materials, contracts, etc.—at a certain point (most commonly, at the final stage) you have to interact with different people, specifying and discussing details, proofreading and approving them.
This is why we need open source more than ever, particularly in the underlying data infrastructure that undergirds the modern enterprise. You don't need to take my word for it. You can download it. You can trust the code and your own experience.
While the cardinal virtue of open source may be that anyone is free to modify/fork the code, the reality is that few actually do. But the first virtue—free and unfettered access to code—is powerfully important, too, and it's the right that most people associate with open source.
I suppose it's rather fitting that I'm mentioned twice in the book, because that's how many times I've worked at Red Hat: initially from 2005 to 2007 (my first "real" job after college) and again from 2012 to the present. In the interim, I happened to write an article for Opensource.com, which ultimately ended up quoted in the book (on page 94).
Mirantis, which has emerged in recent years as a leading vendor in OpenStack software and services, is helping enable cloud hardware though the launch of its new Mirantis Unlocked Appliances program.
The OpenStack Foundation has a problem - its' community voted on the name 'Meiji' for its post-Liberty release, but apparently there are some historical challenges with the name.
As evidence of how hot the cloud computing space remains, the company has just announced that it has raised $83 million in new funding.
In the previous article, we saw that the increasing adoption of open-source databases is causing a dent in Oracle’s (ORCL) dominance in the database market, as well as its earnings. On June 17, 2015, Oracle announced its fiscal 4Q15 and 2015 results. Software licensing and support contribute approximately half of Oracle’s overall revenues.
Oracle has just released a new major version for VirtualBox, which is one of the most used and powerful applications of its kind for Linux users. The 5.0 version has been in the making for quite a while, and the stable version has finally landed.
This blog is dedicated to the Solaris Firewall. The current firewall bundled with Solaris is IPF version 4.1.9. It has been introduced in Solaris 10u3.
This is one more data point among several that major players in the proprietary part of the IT landscape find real value in the technology coming out of OpenBSD, and that tracking the source closely helps their own innovation. Another recent case in point is the news of Solaris moving to PF instead of IPF, reported here recently.
Previously a paid product, RESTfm is now free and open source, with a paid support model so everyone has the ability to try it and see the benefits for themselves. The RESTfm source code is now available under an MIT licence from GitHub.
There’s the cathedral — where an exclusive team of developers build and produce a product that is later released with the source code, which is top-down and closed. Then there’s the bazaar — where the software is developed online and amongst numerous developers with different agendas and approaches, which is bottom-up and open.
The one-stop-shop value proposition has been around as long as the data center itself, but few vendors are able to deliver upon the promise nowadays due to the sheer scope of work involved in delivering applications at scale. One of the few exceptions to the rule is HashiCorp Inc., which officially launched its first commercial solution this morning to tackle the fragmentation of DevOps.
Project Jupyter, an open-source software project led by Fernando Perez of University of California, Berkeley and Brian Granger of California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo has been granted $6 million over the next three years. The grant will help expand Project Jupyter to support scientific computing and data science applications in more than 40 programming languages.
In order to shift American culture and win our campaigns for social, environmental, and racial justice, we must have the best, latest tools available, and they need to be able to sync-up. As a communications professional who often gets roped into fundraising, website design, and other various aspects of nonprofit work, I've been searching for over a decade for the perfect set of tools to handle communications, marketing, and fundraising. It doesn't exist.
British Airways is giving developers tentative access to small amounts of its data, launching a scheme to open up some of its APIs.
Jean-Michel Mourier, CTO of Blue Frog Robotics, wrote in an email to SD Times that, “About 80% of BUDDY will be open source. Today, all of the major components are open source: the brain of the robot, which controls navigation, facial expressions, object and voice recognition, interfaces that control interactions, learning, making connections as well as domotics. In addition, elements of BUDDY’s mechanics are open so that developers can build accessories.”
The open source essence of Beveridge’s idea is not unprecedented. In 2011, London design practice ‘00’ initiated WikiHouse, an open source project for designing and building houses that offers users the opportunity to download customizable Creative Commons-licensed plans. Using a method that has drawn comparisons to Ikea furniture, the building pieces are then cut from plywood by CNC routers and snapped together with wedge and peg connections, to be assembled onsite in less than a day.
The latest OpenSSL security hole isn't a bad one as these things go. It's no Heartbleed, Freak, or Logjam. But it's serious enough that, if you're running alpha or beta operating systems, you shouldn't delay patching it.
Fortunately, the affected OpenSSL versions are not commonly used in enterprise operating systems. For example, it doesn't impact shipping and supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Ubuntu. In the case of Ubuntu, it does affect the 15.10 development release, but the patch is already available.
The results are fascinating.The Census Project is very, very good at identifying projects which are still widely popular, but which are hardly maintained. This is the sweet spot for the Core Infrastructure Initiative to look into to try to identify lurking issues and help find a way to fix them before they become problems for our core infrastructure.
The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) has announced a new project to help determine which open-source projects are critical to Internet infrastructure, and in need of additional support and funding. The Census Project is an experimental tool meant to gather metrics and prioritize projects for CII review.
The open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library project came out today with a high-severity security advisory and patched a single vulnerability, identified as CVE-2015-1793. OpenSSL is a widely used technology that helps to enable Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) encryption for Web data transport for both servers and end-user devices.
A 'HIGH SEVERITY' BUG is currently unpatched in OpenSSL, the open source software used to encrypt internet communications, and a new version is due to be released on 9 July.
There's a critical vulnerability in some versions of the widely used OpenSSL code library that in some cases allows attackers to impersonate cryptographically protected websites, e-mail servers, and virtual private networks, according to an advisory issued early Thursday morning.
We heard another big OpenSSL vulnerability would be announced soon and today it's been made public: OpenSSL's latest "high" severity security vulnerability.
The OpenSSL project has disclosed a new certificate validation vulnerability.
If the probability of your assets being prodded by attackers foreign and domestic doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you, don’t read this article. If you’re operating in the same realm of reality as the rest of us, here’s your shot at redemption via some solid preventive pen testing advice from a genuine pro.
Now that’s an intriguing question, isn’t it? Just about every other computerized process has proven to be vulnerable, and as voting becomes even more technology based, it becomes increasingly vulnerable as well. Computer systems are generic processing hosts, and to a computing platform, data is simply data. The fact that certain information tallies votes rather than credit card transactions does not make it any harder to hack. Moreover, the U.S. has a long history of documented voting fraud, so there’s no reason to assume that politicians, and their backers, have suddenly become paragons of virtue. Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.
When you come down to it, the only thing that’s different today is that altering votes might be easier, and that those motivated so do so may be harder to catch. So why aren’t we hearing more about that risk?
For years now, the global jihadist movement centered in the Middle East has been split into two broad factions, represented by the al-Qaeda franchise on the one hand, and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) on the other. The latter is rooted, in part, in the Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad group founded by the Jordanian Bedouin Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which was once a rival of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
“BP Deal Will Lead to a Cleaner Gulf” is the headline the New York Times puts over a July 8 editorial that, in its tone and substance, makes a pretty good illustration of why it almost assuredly won’t.
Thirteen million UK families will lose an average of €£260 a year due to Budget changes to working-age benefits, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
Tax credit changes could hit three million families, which are likely to lose an average of €£1,000, it said.
Even taking into account higher wages, people receiving tax credits would be "significantly worse off," said Paul Johnson, director of the IFS.
On Sunday, as we reported here, the Greek people voted NO to more loans and increased austerity measures by the ECB and IMF. It was a historic referendum result that revived that old-fashioned idea of democracy in a Europe now controlled by shady financial institutions and faceless international creditors. Winning a NO vote was an enormous victory for Greece’s ruling party Syriza, and yet shortly after the result, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned (full story here). He had hinted that anonymous, powerful people had forced him out of his job, and in this video Varoufakis makes some more comments that should make all of us feel quite nervous about the future of our political and economic systems.
The challenge to DRIPA brought by David Davis and Tom Watson was discussed in court today, as the government sought to refer key questions to the EU courts.
The social network is currently in the advanced stages of launching a music video service similar to YouTube that will pay artists for video streams using advertising revenue.
Hacking Team, a controversial Italian company that specialises in selling powerful surveillance software, has been colossally hacked. Included in a 400GB cache of files released publicly are alleged hotel bills, invoices from government agencies for computer exploits, passwords, and possibly even the source code for a number of the company's products.
I knew he had fast cancer, but this news was still a gut-punch. He was practically the model of what an activist could be: someone with integrity who could go from community meetings to street marches to think-tanks to a Parliamentary inquiry to a board-meeting without ever sacrificing his integrity.
Well, Spain's officially a police state now. On July 1st, its much-protested "gag" law went into effect, instantly making criminals of those protesting the new law. Among the many new repressive stipulations is a €30,000-€600,000 fine for "unauthorized protests," which can be combined for maximum effect with a €600-€300,000 fine for "disrupting public events."
A new study has found that blocking access to torrent and linking sites results in the opposite effect. Instead of driving people towards legal websites and services, many of the blocked sites simply move to other domain names where they enjoy a significant and sustained boost in traffic.
A group of prominent legal experts, including the Cato Institute, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Institute for Justice have come out in support of Megaupload and Kim Dotcom. The groups urge the appeals court to undo the forfeiture of millions of dollars in assets, which they describe as a dangerous violation of due process rights.