HP has become the latest “legacy” IT vendor to announce it would ship commodity switches for web-scale data centers that support network management software other than its own.
Hewlett-Packard said on Thursday that it would sell a new line of networking switches that are manufactured by a Taiwanese company and depend on Linux-based, open-source software from another company.
HP, once at the center of high-tech manufacturing, will not make the new networking equipment but will act as a reseller, providing both online ordering and worldwide support for the product.
The demand for Linux developers has jumped seven per cent in comparison to last year, a study has shown.
The 2014 Linux Jobs Report shows that hiring managers at tech-powered companies are focusing more attention on Linux talent, and that’s reverberating in the market, with stronger than average salary increases to those working with the OS.
Linux is now 24 years old, and its community of developers, contributors and users shows no signs of shrinking. The annual “Who Writes Linux” report from the Linux Foundation was released today, and it includes many interesting nuggets about the people and companies who build Linux. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that the 3.15 kernel release cycle was said by the report to have been the busiest such cycle in the history of Linux.
The platform-drivers-x86 pull request has been filed for the Linux 3.20 kernel and it includes some prominent additions.
First up, the Toshiba ACPI driver (toshiba_acpi) is closer to feature-parity with its Windows counterpart. The Linux Toshiba ACPI driver now supports USB Sleep & Charge functions, USB Sleep functions under battery, USB Rapid Charge, USB Sleep & Music, support for keyboard functions mode, support for Panel Power On, support to enable/disable USB 3, etc. There's also driver clean-ups and other improvements for this ACPI laptop driver specifically for Toshiba hardware.
The Linux kernel sits at the core of all Linux-based operating systems and is produced in an open-source, multi-stakeholder process. It's a process that has evolved over the last two decades, with a steady flow of new developers pouring into the community and contributing code. In a new report released by The Linux Foundation Feb. 18, the pace of Linux code contribution is detailed with data looking at eight Linux kernel releases in 15 months—beginning with the Linux 3.11 kernel, released in September 2013, and ending with Linux 3.18, which debuted Dec. 8, 2014. The Linux development report finds that more than 80 percent of code contributed to the Linux kernel comes from developers who are paid for their work. The overall number of developers is also growing, with 1,458 contributing code for the Linux 3.18 release. Looking at the companies that contribute to Linux, Intel continues to lead the way, with 10.5 percent of code contributions during the development period covered in the report. In this slide show, eWEEK examines key data points on the state of Linux development.
The number of unpaid contributions to the Linux kernel has fallen again since the last major update, as work on the open source operating system (OS) is increasingly borne by corporations.
The annual report from the Linux Foundation, which runs the project, showed that unaffiliated developers accounted for 12.4% of all patches during the fifteen months leading to December 2014, more than any single company.
While Intel's implemented ETC2 support in their driver and is supported by their latest hardware, Gallium3D is finally getting some ETC2 support.
Enpass is a multi-platform password manager which received a massive update recently and with it, the application is now available for Linux (64bit only for now).
Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night is a new title based on 1987 Games Workshop classic board game with the same name. A Linux port of this title has been made available.
A puzzle platformer with surreal imagery, Tulpa, was released late last month and almost flew completely under our radar. The game mixes highly contrasting colours, strange environments and moody music to an interesting effect which you can appreciate in the trailer below:
So all plasmoids are gathered in Blue Systems office in beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain for Plasma Sprint 2015. One of the points I wanted to discuss was future of Plasma Media Center. Plasma Media Center got ported to KDE frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 library during last GSoC and with the help of our great Visual Design Group we also revamped the user interface fro Plasma media center. We also have integrated it as Plasma Shell package so plasmashell can load it as shell package and also can switch to mediacenter shell pacage.
One of the things I’ve been sorely missing when doing UI design and development was a good way to preview icons. The icon picker which is shipped with KDE Frameworks is quite nice, but for development purposes it lacks a couple of handy features that allow previewing and picking icons based on how they’re rendered.
Qt 5.5 is expected to ship in about two months and with this release will come a number of new and exciting features.
Qt 5.5 is in the process of being branched and an alpha release issued, prior to a beta in March, and the release candidate in April followed by the official Qt 5.5.0 release.
The GNOME developers announced that Nautilus (now known as Files) is now at version 3.16 Beta 1 and is ready for download and testing.
David King, the developer of the default webcam viewer of the GNOME desktop environment, Cheese, has announced the immediate availability for testing of the first beta version of the upcoming Cheese 3.16 update, which will be distributed as part of the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop, due for release on March 25, 2015.
As we’ve reported earlier today, the GNOME development team is hard at work to bring you the latest GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, due for release on March 25, 2015. GNOME Boxes, the default virtualization software of GNOME based on QEMU, will also be part of the forthcoming release of the graphical environment, bringing a number of enhancements and new features. The first Beta version of GNOME Boxes 3.16 is now available for testing.
Red Hat has updated its infrastructure-as-a-service offering for enterprise businesses with a new iteration of the Linux OpenStack platform intended to help clients deploy cloud services.
Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for February 18th, 2015...
The time has come to introduce you guys to a new Linux kernel-based operating system, designed for creative people who were searching for a good-looking, reliable, and modern distribution for all of their multimedia creation needs. Future Studio OS is based on a mix between Debian GNU/Linux Jessie and Sid, using a low-latency Linux kernel and the KDE4 desktop environment.
Meizu, the second Ubuntu phone manufacturer, has kept the details of their Ubuntu Touch phone hidden, the rumors saying that Meizu is holding the details to reveal them at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.
Canonical, creator of the Ubuntu operating system, has been aggressively pitching itself as the enabler for a world of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This enablement has occurred via its “Snappy” Ubuntu core, the most recent rendition of Ubuntu which is a cut down operating system. Snappy shares the same libraries as today’s Ubuntu but via a simpler mechanism. Canonical points to Snappy’s upgradeability and core security as differentiators that will help it succeed in this space.
The entry-level dual-SIM Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition is available for sale if you're in the European Union. The first of its kind Ubuntu powered smartphone features a 1.3.GHz Quad Core Cortex A7 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 2150 mAh battery. Basic specs to be sure, but what is interesting is that Ubuntu seems to run on hardware designed for Android phones. which means that it shouldn't be too hard to see this OS running on other devices.
It seems, as well as the variety of different smartphone manufacturers in the android world, there is also an increasing number of operating systems becoming available. While all, fork off of android in one capacity or another, there was one particular OS which has (for a long time) been gaining attention, that is Ubuntu OS. However, in spite of the increased attention and seemingly fervor for an Ubuntu OS running device, the actuality of bringing one of these devices to the market has proved difficult.
Ninja Blocks, a new kind of smart home controller that got funded through Kickstarter already, has announced that it will provide support for Ubuntu Snappy Core and it will make it feel right at home in the "Internet of Things."
Ubuntu developers are working on the 15.04 version of their operating system and they have made some interesting changes so far, but they also entertained the possibility of adopting GTK+ 3.16. Unfortunately, that wasn't meant to be.
We have to admit that today’s flash sale of Ubuntu phones was a successful one, especially because we managed to get one too and because we saw a lot of happy people posting tweets about purchasing the first-ever Ubuntu-powered smartphone. The Ubuntu Phone flash sale is now over, as announced by BQ on their Twitter account, and confirmed by Canonical.
Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems have been updated in order to couple X.Org X server vulnerabilities that have been found by devs.
Besides Canonical developers having released a new version of Mir, they've also continued concurrently advancing the Unity 8 UI.
The arrival last week of Linaro's open source 96Boards specification -- ARM's first pseudo-official SBC form factor standard -- shows that ARM is serious about bringing order to the chaotic ARM hacker board scene. 96Boards is a preemptive attempt to consolidate Linux and Android development before a new wave of ARMv8 hacker boards hits the scene later this year.
Linaro's 96Boards.org developer community and standards organization has defined a 96Boards Consumer Edition (CE) spec for ARM single board computers running Debian, Android, and other Linux-based distros. The spec defines either an 85 x 54mm or 85 x 100mm footprint, as well as standardized 40- and 60-pin expansion connectors for stackable boards. A higher-end Enterprise Edition (EE) spec will follow in the second quarter.
It's only been two weeks since the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B was released but the foundation that designs them says it's already shipped 500,000 units.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation confirmed to ZDNet that it has already sold half a million units of its latest computer, the fifth model it has released since its modest launch in 2012. As well as the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, the foundation has also released the 2.1 revision last year, as well as the model B+, model A+, and the compute module.
The 500,000 milestone for the Raspberry Pi 2 means the latest version now accounts for roughly 10 percent of the five million Raspberry Pi units shipped overall. The Pi hit its five million sales high-water mark this week, massively dwarfing the 10,000 units that Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton expected the foundation would sell in total, but which instead it reached within hours on the first day of sales in February 2012.
Adlink is prepping a rugged, compact “MXE-200i” box-PC preloaded with Wind River’s Linux-based IDP XT IoT gateway stack running on quad- or dual-core Atoms.
BlackBerry rolled out a major software update Thursday, allowing users of its entire suite of BlackBerry 10 devices such as the Z10, Q10 and Z30 to access Android applications and a host of other features, including Blend.
Owners of several Android Wear watches (Sony Smartwatch 3, LG G Watch, and Moto 360 so far) have reported seeing an update hit their devices to bring it up to Android 5.0.2. The corresponding build number is LWX49K for the G Watch and Smartwatch 3, LWX49L for the Moto 360.
The email application of Samsung Galaxy 4 Minis can be made to repeatedly crash with a simple email that need not even be opened, according to researcher Hector Marco.
A crafted email gobbled up by the native email client running on Android 4.2.2.0400, a superseded operating system that was the latest stock offering for the S4 Mini.
Marco did not specify if the bug also bites earlier Android versions, but if that is the case this flaw will impact a great many more users. Google estimates 52.4 percent of users operate Android version 4.2 and earlier, while 19.8 percent run 4.2.x.
Even though Apple is baked into my past, I can’t help but think that writing an Android guide is a little like writing a guide to the future. Every operating system aspires to create a universal experience, yet Android may do the best job of actualizing and implementing it for a consumer market. The Google OS offers unprecedented compatibility thanks to its line of next-gen wearable technology, including the experiment-gone-mainstream, Google Glass, and a slew of recently-announced smartwatches. Everything seems to be going Android’s way.
Android Wear feels like it's nowhere near its full potential and that the only thing holding it back is Google. You could say there's a kind of courage in doggedly sticking with simplicity, in refusing to rush out functionality that would give it feature parity with the as-yet unreleased Apple Watch. I'd love to know if the developers inside Google are standing on that principle or just waiting to see how people react to what Apple has made.
In the meantime, we have unassuming watches like Sony's SmartWatch 3. Even if you're part of the tiny sliver of users to whom it's designed to appeal, you have to admit that there's nothing really special about it.
BlackBerry rolled out a major software update on Thursday, allowing users of its entire suite of BlackBerry 10 devices such as the Z10, Q10 and Z30 to access Android applications, and a host of other features, including Blend.
The company said the BlackBerry 10 OS 10.3.1 gives users the ability to access both the BlackBerry World appstore and the Amazon Appstore that provides access to a host of Android applications previously unavailable on the BlackBerry platform.
Want to contribute to an open source project, but don't know where to start? Finding the first problem to fix in an unfamiliar codebase can seem pretty difficult—and even more so if it counts millions of lines of code—but it's usually much easier than it looks. This article should give you a few tips and ideas on how to get started.
Splunk, the log analysis system that's evolved into a full-blown, machine-generated data processing platform (also described as "Google for visual analytics"), faces competition from a rising wave of open source competitors. One of the most prominent, Graylog, has unveiled its formal 1.0 release. Graylog's success won't be in meeting or exceeding Splunk's feature set or performance, though; it'll be in capturing or re-creating Splunk's existing ecosystem of users and applications.
As midnight Wednesday becomes Thursday morning, SCALE Team members continue to put in hours, doing everything from wiring the rooms to stuffing swag bags, getting ready for 8 a.m. Thursday morning, when registration opens. Once that happens, the show is on the clock and all the work that those on the SCALE Team have put in so far — the long hours of work prior to, and leading up to, the show — and the work that the team puts in during the course of the show becomes the cornucopia enjoyed by the attendees.
Reunions are quick — those who keep in touch through emails or social media over the course of the year meet face-to-face for the first time since last February. Security is called at times (just kidding, right Phillip Ballew?) and quick hellos give way to pitching in with what’s left to be done before the show opens in around eight hours.
A panel of Platform as a Service and container experts at Collaboration Summit Monday didn't agree on many things - including the relative importance of PaaS and containers, which is more useful for developers, and how the ecosystem will evolve. But they all agreed that the PaaS ecosystem relies on open source to remain relevant and useful.
Pivotal has taken a giant leap by open sourcing its big data platform. So what's to stop companies from downloading the software and managing it in-house? Is Pivotal drying up its own revenue stream? Not really. Large enterprises will need the company's support, as well as commercial licensing for some features. "We don't feel that we are at risk in any way," said Pivotal's Michael Cucchi.
RightScale is out with its 2015 State of the Cloud report, always one of the more definitive barometers for the state of cloud computing. The findings show that private clouds may be waning in momentum, hybrid clouds are the favorite solution for most enterprises, and Docker and container adoption are absolutely on fire.
Centrify, in conjunction with big data companies MapR, Hortonworks and Cloudera, hopes to bring major changes to the way enterprises handle Hadoop security, data privacy and user authentication. This week, it introduced what it is billing as the channel's first comprehensive identity management solution for Hadoop.
The administration of the Italian region Emilia-Romagna will complete its switch to Apache OpenOffice next month, says Giovanni Grazia, an IT project manager for the region. Emilia-Romagna is making the Open Document Format ODF the default on all 4200 workstations, across 10 departments and 5 agencies.
Emilia-Romagna is adding several tools to the OpenOffice suite, “improving the user experience”, says Grazia. Three of these are publicly available OpenOffice extensions, but others are being developed especially for the region. The latter will be made available as open source within the next few weeks, Grazia says.
The first of the official OpenOffice extensions used in the region is Alba, which makes it easy to insert in a document one or more pages with a different orientation. The second is Pagination, which improves the insertion of page numbers. Third is PDFImport, which allows the import of PDFs into OpenOffice.
WordPress 4.1.1 is now available. This maintenance release fixes 21 bugs in version 4.1.
Some of you may have been waiting to update to the latest version until now, but there just wasn’t much to address. WordPress 4.1 was a smooth-sailing release and has seen more than 14 million downloads in the last two months.
The next version of the Lumina desktop environment has just been released! Version 0.8.2 is mainly a “spit-and-polish” release: focusing on bugfixes, overall appearances, and interface layout/design. The FreeBSD port has already been updated to the new version, and the PC-BSD “Edge” repository will be making the new version available within the next day or two (packages building now). If you are creating/distributing your own packages, you can find the source code for this release in the “qt5/0.8.2ââ¬Â³ branch in the Lumina repository on GitHub.
The major difference that people will notice is that the themes/colors distributed with the desktop have been greatly improved, and I have included a few examples below. The full details about the changes in this release are listed at the bottom of the announcement.
Reminder: The Lumina desktop environment is still considered to be “beta-quality”, so if you find things that either don’t work or don’t work well, please report them on the PC-BSD bug tracker so that they can get fixed as soon as possible.
The PC-BSD developers behind the original Lumina Desktop Environment have put out a new "spit and polish" release of Lumina.
The last part is in place, you can still smell the solder in the room. Your open hardware project is complete. So, what comes next? The hard part: do you need a license?
The first step is to determine if you have anything to license. For those of us coming from the software world, this step may seem odd.
Michael Weinberg, Vice President at Public Knowledge and a board member of the Open Source Hardware Association, tells us, "Software is protected by copyright (and protected automatically), so you can safely assume that you have something to license when you write software."
The web is about to get faster thanks to a new version of HTTP – the biggest change since 1999 to the protocol that underpins the world wide web as we know it today.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol is familiar to most as the http:// at the beginning of a web address. It governs the connections between a user’s browser and the server hosting a website, invented by the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Ad blockers have always been controversial among publishers. Many web publishers resent the use of ad blockers and feel that they are being cheated out of their rightful ad revenue. Some have even started to block access to their content when they detect an ad blocker in a reader’s browser.
[...]
Readers don’t use ad blockers because they want to cheat publishers out of revenue or act in an otherwise aggressive or nasty way. They use them because some web advertising has become incredibly obnoxious or intrusive.
Qualcomm announced yesterday the introduction of four new Snapdragon processors that the company says will "take 4G LTE and multimedia to new heights". These new processors are the Snapdragon 620, 618, 425, and 415.
Abu Bakr Mohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi – the great Persian physician often described as the grandfather of pediatric medicine – was a meticulous man. Before the age of 30, he discovered ethanol, thanks to the careful application of the then new art of distillation.
When overseeing the building of a new hospital in Baghdad, al-Razi hung raw meat around the city and broke ground where the meat putrefied most slowly. And, in one of the 200 or so books that he wrote, he created the first and most extraordinarily detailed account of one of the most infectious diseases ever known.
Together with FFDN, a federation of community-driven non-profit ISPs, La Quadrature du Net is bringing a legal action before the French Council of State against a decree on administrative access to online communications metadata. Through this decree, it is a whole pillar of the legal basis for Internet surveillance that is being challenged. This appeal, which builds on the European Union Court of Justice's recent decision on data retention, comes as the French government is instrumentalizing last month's tragic events to further its securitarian agenda, with an upcoming bill on intelligence services.
We reported earlier today on Lenovo bundling adware with some of its newer computers, but over the last few hours it’s emerged that the situation is worse than originally thought.
The software, named Superfish, was pre-installed by Lenovo on some consumer computers. The software injects unwanted advertising into users’ browsers in search results and on third-party websites.
News broke last night that Lenovo has been shipping laptops with a horrifically dangerous piece of software called Superfish, which tampers with Windows' cryptographic security to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the user's browsing. This is done in order to inject advertising into secure HTTPS pages, a feature most users don't want implemented in the most insecure possible way.1
Imagine that you are a major global seller of laptop computers and that you were just caught preloading those machines with ultra-invasive adware that hijacks even fully encrypted Web sessions by using a self-signed root HTTPS certificate from a company called Superfish. How do you explain why you did it?
Lenovo deserve criticism. The level of incompetence involved here is so staggering that it wouldn't be a gross injustice for the company to go under as a result[1]. But let's not pretend that this is some sort of isolated incident. As an industry, we don't care about user security. We will gladly ship products with known security failings and no plans to update them. We will produce devices that are locked down such that it's impossible for anybody else to fix our failures. We will hide behind vague denials, we will obfuscate the impact of flaws and we will deflect criticisms with announcements of new and shinier products that will make everything better.
AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
With reference to writing to the Commission (dated 9/9/2013) on alleged hacks into the Dutch based SWIFT-server and Written Questions on the alleged infiltration of the Belgium based Belgacom servers and the Commission systems with the use of REGIN-malware (E-010269-14 of 5/12/2014);