Earlier this year I was on the lookout for a Linux based NAS that had the more enterprise goodness I had encountered with my ventures into ZFS via FreeNAS ie CoW and data checksums, snapshots etc. and happened across Rockstor, but at the time it had no graphical UPS configuration. This for me was a show stopper (details below), my expectation was to adopt my dream NAS setup that ran on my favourite OS and to become a 100% Linux user again.
Agility is an essential component of keeping up with the speed of technology change. However, it comes with a caveat. You can have an IT process that is agile in terms of the development, but if your methodology for deployment or change requests is complicated and unnecessarily lengthy, your attempts at agility might be causing more frustration than innovation. This is where I believe DevOps comes into play – and in particular, continuous deployment, which I see as the ultimate goal of DevOps.
It doesn't look like KDBUS will be ready for merging into the mainline Linux kernel anytime soon.
This in-kernel IPC mechanism was dropped from Fedora Rawhide's kernel with the KDBUS developers wanting to rethink some of its design after it was available for a while on Fedora's development distribution.
We're half-way through the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window so here's a recap of the features that have made it thus far for this next open-source kernel cycle.
If by chance you have a Sun Ultra 40 M2, it's now supported by upstream Coreboot for freeing your BIOS.
The Sun Ultra 40 M2 is a dual Socket F workstation with NVIDIA MCP55 chipset. This board supports two, dual-core Opteron CPUs with DDR2-667MHz memory. This Coreboot port is working, but having memory on the second node causes the RAM initialization (raminit) to fail.
With Sunday's DRM graphics subsystem pull request for the Linux 4.4 kernel was an interesting extra comment by DRM maintainer David Airlie at Red Hat.
With Linux 4.4 bringing important fixes for EXT4's native file-system-level encryption, several Phoronix readers have inquired about how to actually use this new functionality.
The EXT4 file-system in Linux 4.1 brought file-system level encryption support while now with Linux 4.4 it appears to be in better shape with EXT4 maintainer Ted Ts'o recommending any EXT4-encrypted users update their patches against what's to be found in 4.4.
Olof Johansson sent in all of the ARM SoC/platform updates today for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.
During LinuxCon North America 2015, Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, had the opportunity to ask Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds a few questions about the kernel and its role in today’s tech hot topics.
Are you confused by the current state of support Linux users have for video streaming services? Are you curious why some services work in some browsers and not in others while some services don’t work at all? I was confused by this too so I decided to research this issue to find and share what the current state of video streaming services on Linux is.
Video streaming on Linux is currently a mess with some services supporting HTML5, others only supporting Flash and the rare oddball only supporting Silverlight. Despite this, it has actually been improved heavily and continues to improve every day. Just a couple years ago the landscape was vastly different, so I’m very excited because the future looks very promising.
As you may know, Monitorix is an open-source, lightweight system monitoring tool used on both Linux and Unix systems. It is used for monitoring CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, network usage, number of threads and number of voluntary and involuntaru context switches.
Today will go down in the history books of Linux gaming that’s for sure. Sadly, this release has been pretty quiet. I was hoping for a much bigger bang like we were given with the original announcement, as this release day is a bit of a let-down. We haven’t seen any major new games released with it today, I was expecting at the very least one of the Saints Row games and Rocket League, or just something with a bit of oomph to it.
The Long Dark, the beautiful survival game is now officially available for SteamOS & Linux today, it has also been updated with Steam Controller support.
Originally released on PC and PS4, Magicka 2, an all-new Magicka adventure with up to 4-player co-op, is also available now on Linux and Max, Paradox Interactive announced. Cross-platform play is included between Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. In addition, Magicka 2 will run on the newly available Steam Box with full Steam controller support.
Grow Home the wacky-looking, but intriguing game from Ubisoft's Reflections studio is now officially available for us Linux and SteamOS folk. It has a lot of good reviews, and I'm looking forward to trying it. Our editor flesk may be doing a review of it sometime, so look out for that.
Today while setting up some CUDA benchmarks, I noticed that CUDA 7.5 is now officially available for SteamOS.
With the majority of Steam Machines using SteamOS, it's a sale basically of Linux/SteamOS-native games. There are significant savings to be found on Alien Isolation, Borderlands 2, Shadow of Mordor, Metro Redux, DiRT Showdown, BioShock Infinite, and tons of other great Linux games.
60% of the Phoronix readers that participated in our weekend survey feel that SteamOS / Steam Machines will lead to a significantly greater market-share for Linux.
Valve has finally refreshed the Hardware page on the Steam website, and users are now somewhat confused about the announcements made there.
After three months of development work we are proud to announce the release of version 1.16 of the EFL, Elementary, Evas Generic Loaders and Emotion Generic Players.
So how do I feel about the “upgrade” from KDE 4 to the new KDE Applications15-Frameworks5-Plasma5? I guess it's better than switching from KDE3 to KDE4, but it's still aggravating. Yes, I know, it will take time before it's all polished-up (but, some things, like item #2 above, aren't likely to be fixed).
The KDE Community revealed that KDE Applications 15.08.3 has been released, marking the launch of a new maintenance version.
Plasma5.4.3 Bugfix release.
Linux has a bad rap as a daily driver – the programs aren’t written to run on Linux, it’s tricky to install stuff, and so on. But it might surprise people who think along those lines to learn that plenty of the distributions out there are actually quite simple to use. Here’s our latest appreciation of the desktop Linux landscape.
So, instead of writing a review of each of these new releases, I am simply writing one article comparing all three of them as desktop workstations (I won't be reviewing them as servers in this article). A battle royale. A no-holds-barred cage match. A Linux Distro Thunderdome. Or a friendly tea amongst three friends. Call it what you will…it means I only need to write one article instead of three. So I like the idea.
Recently I realized that it has been over 5 years I’ve been using Arch Linux continuously, one one or two of my computers. I have been using it in professional environment on my laptop and my workstation; I have been using it as a “home entertainment platform”, as it were, and as a family computer. This makes Arch Linux the distribution I’ve been using the most and for the longest period of time. Only Debian comes close with four years. I have also used Fedora, OpenSuse, Mandriva (OpenMandriva, Mageia and Mandrake/driva Linux as well), Ubuntu, Elementary, and I’ve tested several others, from the rather exotic ones to the most common distros.
What makes this release even more important is that with Leap, SUSE and openSUSE have finally come together. With this release openSUSE will start using the same code which is being used in SLE. So technically you are running the 'community' version of SLE.
Leap 42.1 is based on the Service Pack 1 (SP1) of SLE 12, which will be released soon. Leap will follow SLE’s release cycle so there won’t be the regular 9-month release, instead a new version of openSUSE Leap will be released when the new version of SLE is due.
The OpenSUSE community just released OpenSUSE Leap 42.1, a big “leap” from the previous release, OpenSUSE 13.2. Over the last year, the OpenSUSE community transformed its development process and now promises us “the first hybrid Linux distribution.”
Fans of SUSE Linux Enterprise, the Linux-based open source operating system, have a new option for obtaining a community-supported derivative of the OS in the form of OpenSUSE Leap, which debuted this month.
Red Hat (RHT) moved its open source container strategy forward this week with the release of OpenShift 3.1 and a public preview of Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform. The company says the offerings will help drive adoption of Docker-compatible containers in the enterprise.
Red Hat has further enhance its OpenShift cloud development platform for developing and deploying enterprise-ready applications with a new offering which includes OpenShift Enterprise 3.1 and Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform Public Preview.
Sell-side brokerage firm are predicting that Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) will post earnings per share of $0.38 for the current fiscal quarter. This is the Zacks Research consensus estimate based on the analysts they have polled. The company is slated to issue their next quarterly earnings report on or around 2015-12-17. It’s important to note that Zacks consensus EPS can often differ from FactSet or Thomson Reuters consensus numbers. Investors will be keeping a close eye on the direction these estimates move as the release date approaches.
Did you know there was a systemd conference? Well there is... and it was even held recently... and the videos from it were published rather quickly. Here is Lenny giving a status update. Enjoy! The first 10.5 minutes are announcements so skip to 10:30 to get to the start of the actual talk.
Fedora 23 KDE Plasma Desktop Spin brings you the best and the latest of Fedora and KDE Plasma Desktop. KDE Plasma Desktop is a modern and a familiar desktop environment for your everyday computing needs.
Fedora 23 KDE Plasma Desktop features Plasma 5.4.0, KDE Frameworks 5.15, and KDE Applications 15.08. Plasma 5.4 includes a new audio applet, Application Dashboard, updated breeze icon theme, KRunner autocompletion, and Networks applet with graphs. Notable changes in KDE Applications 15.08 are Frameworks 5 based Kontact suite app and file manager Dolphin. Additionally, Firefox is now the default web browser.
As you may know, Fedora 23 has been recently released in all the traditional flavors: Server, Workstation and Cloud. Starting with Fedora 23, the spin’s family has received a new member: Fedora Cinnamon.
After some releases bringing updates, bug fixes, refactoring, tests improvements and more minor features and automations, here is time again for a noticeable feature release!
Thanks to Fabio Colella, we now have NetBeans support in Ubuntu Make! Installing it is just a umake ide netbeans away and just relax while Ubuntu Make is doing the hard work so that you can enjoy this IDE.
The BQ Aquaris E5 HD is coming to Russia, according to a number of reports from various Ubuntu insiders. This comes after the phones have been made available both in Europe, United States, and India.
As you may know, Canonical has already made their Ubuntu Touch OS available by default on two smartphones, the Bq Aquaris E4.5, Bq Aquaris E5 HD and Meizu MX4, being available for ordering in United States, India and in countries from inside the European Union.
Imagination has launched the fastest 64-bit MIPS Warrior core yet with its P6600, as well as the M6250, the first 32-bit Warrior-M CPU that runs Linux.
Imagination Technologies announced the availability of three new processor IP designs based on its latest MIPS Release 6 architecture. Leading the way is the Warrior-P class P6600 — its fastest Warrior yet. There are also two low-end Warrior-M chip designs: an M6200 for RTOSes, and an M6250 that stands out as the first Warrior-M processor to run Linux.
Google's first hardware collaboration with LG brought us the Nexus 4. Like the Nexus 7, the Nexus 4 followed a philosophy of bringing as much power and quality as possible to a reasonably affordable price point. The Nexus 4 definitely wasn't a perfect phone, but it was certainly good relative to its price, and it showed that a phone can still be good even if it doesn't cost $600. About one year later Google and LG collaborated again to bring us the Nexus 5, a device which I and many other users fondly remember as an affordable phone that actually brought many of the specifications you would expect to see in a device that was priced significantly higher.
About a quarter of all apps on the Android smartphone operating system ask for users' precise location using GPS coordinates.
That's one of the findings from a Pew Research study that analyzed more than 1 million apps in the Google Play store.
Twenty-one percent ask for a user's approximate location. About 6 percent of those apps ask to read a user's contacts, while 4 percent ask for access to a user's call logs.
Many were hoping that Android Wear would signal the true start of the smartwatch revolution, and while Google's effort is easily the best we've seen so far in this particular field, there are issues that could prevent it from catching on in the way some have predicted.
The reliance on voice commands is arguably the biggest sticking point. Despite the hype behind products such as Google Now, Siri and Cortana, very few people feel comfortable using speech to control their phones when in public – and it often doesn't take that much longer to access the information you need using your touchscreen anyway.
Android tablets are enjoying a big surge in activations among enterprise users, to the point that in some industries Android is now leading iOS. And it's no wonder given the quality of the tablets on offer.
I've distilled all the manufacturers and models available down to six tablets from Sony, Google, Amazon, Dell and Samsung that I think are the very best currently available.
Quintiles, the world’s largest biopharma services provider, yesterday announced its contribution of enhancements to the ResearchKit framework which was designed by Apple to make it easy for researchers to gather data more frequently and more accurately from research participants using iPhone apps.
Took more time to write this than expected, thanks for back to back new activities for this. :)
As per predictions it was raining on this day. Temperature dropped little bit more. Thank to Jens for already mentioning this, most of the people were with umbrella's and for few hotel provided them.
Second day started with FPL's hangout. Meeting room speakers were not doing good join, so we decided just to project hangout on screen and dial in individually for listening and speaking.
This past weekend, the sixth-annual MozFest — Mozilla’s celebration of the open Web — convened hackers, teachers and organizers from across the globe to address some of the most pressing issues facing the Web today. Together, we explored how we can act as leaders in the tech, policy and social spheres to create a better Web for everyone.
11 years have passed since the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0, which was the first version of the internet browser.
Despite the fact that Google Chrome has become the most used internet browser, Firefox still has its supporters, being available as default on many Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.
Ubuntu Make, the command-line tool to assist in deploying the latest version of various developer tools on Ubuntu Linux, has added support for Rust.
Ubuntu-Make developer Didier Roche wrote today that Ubuntu Make 15.11 adds support for Rust. Simply running umake rust should setup "a good rust developing experience on your favorite Ubuntu distro."
Folks in the Big Data and Hadoop communities have been getting increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. Apache notes that Spark can run programs up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, and ten times faster on disk. When crunching large data sets, those are big performance differences
Mention the word "database," and most people think of the venerable RDBMS that has dominated the landscape for more than 30 years. That, however, may soon change.
A whole crop of new contenders are now vying for a piece of this key enterprise market, and while their approaches are diverse, most share one thing in common: a razor-sharp focus on big data.
The Internet of Things is getting a lot of attention at NASA, as the IT organization looks to support new ways sensors and advanced networks can drive its mission. With the addition of end points that collect information, much of the conversation centers around the data, said John Sprague, deputy chief technology officer for IT at NASA.
As the sensors and connected technologies that make up the Internet of Things find a home in the federal government, many agencies believe the adoption of open source technology will ensure that innovation isn't happening in silos.
As connected devices permeate global society, user data (from smartphone activity to Fitbit stats) and even lives (hello, car hacking) are at increasing risk. At a Nov. 10 summit sponsored by the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center, Federal Communications Commission CIO David Bray said the hyper-connected future might not work without radical openness.
This week is the last chance for developers to land new features into the GCC 6 compiler stack before it moves onto the next stage of development.
SUSE's Richard Biener confirmed today that the switch to Stage 3 development will happen on Saturday, 14 November. Stage three is a two-month period where the only new material allowed are regression fixes, new ports that don't touch existing compiler code, and documentation updates. No new functionality is permitted during this stage.
First and foremost, with the release of GCC 6 the default C++ mode will now be GNU++14/C++14 rather than GNU++98!
Each year, Software Freedom Day (SFD) events are organized by volunteers in dozens of cities worldwide. These events each take on their own character, but typically involve some sort of address from the organizers, demos and presentations from community members, and installfests and hackathons. Each venue and organizer will have their own agenda and timeline, and there were specific things that Fedora pitched to local attendees at a number of events this year.
The program, which apparently takes control of systems by exploiting a vulnerability in the Magenta ecommerce platform, also leaves a note in the form of a text file that instructs users that they must pay a ransom in Bitcoin equivalent to about $500 to have their files decrypted. According to reports online, the ransomware does actually decrypt files after users pay the ransom.
My talk, “Five lessons I learned about information security”, lasted for about 30 minutes and then I took plenty of technical and non-technical questions from the students. I’ve embedded the slides below and I’ll go through the lessons within the post here.
On the November 10 edition of ABC's Good Morning America, host George Stephanopoulos allowed GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump to greatly exaggerate the nation's unemployment rate when he falsely claimed that "unemployment is probably close to 20 percent."
"Do Not Track" is in big trouble after a new U.S Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling against it. On Nov. 6, the FCC issued a ruling stating that major Web services, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Pandora, Netflix and LinkedIn, do not have to honor Do Not Track requests.
The first time I heard about Do Not Track (DNT) was back in 2011 when I visited the Toronto offices of Mozilla. The basic premise of DNT is sublime: Simply put, it is a binary indicator for privacy preferences. The binary indicator is a simple HTTP header of DNT=1, which indicates the user doesn't want to be tracked, or DNT=0, which means the user is OK with tracking.
A federal judge has ordered an immediate halt to the NSA’s controversial phone records collection program, ruling that the program violates the Constitution.
US District Judge Richard Leon’s decision to end the collection is a victory for the plaintiffs in the case and for civil liberties groups who have been asserting that the program was unconstitutional since it was first exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. But while the ruling is important in principle for what it says about the legality of the program, its practical importance is minimal since the ruling only applies to the two plaintiffs who brought suit against the NSA—Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist, and his business.