Recently, they launched a new series, “Superusers: The Legendary GNU/Linux Show,” which stars Aramis, a gnu who bares a strange resemblance to Richard Stallman, and a penguin named Adelie. The pilot episode for this series, called “Help,” deals with the Linux command by the same name and features some clever wordplay, utilizing lyrics from the old Beatles song. This would be in keeping with the brothers’ idea of making sure their videos appeal to kids and adults alike.
About eight years ago, I started lobbying to bring more Linux and open source software to high schools and higher IT vocational institutions in the Netherlands and Belgium. Here's how I did it and what you can learn from it to do the same where you live.
Real innovation happens in FLOSS and GNU/Linux where the pace of innovation sometimes is annoyingly fast. In the last few years, FLOSS has brought us the cloud in real measure, better and faster IT generally, Android/Linux and “apps”, more distros and rearrangements of the desktop than you could ever think of shipping, and most amazing of all, growth of >100% in users at a price of $0 to end-users.
It is good to know that his local school used GNU/Linux and OpenOffice before they moved to that community and that his children have no real problem using GNU/Linux at school. That squares with my experience over much of northern Canada. GNU/Linux just works really well for students and teachers. It’s fast, efficient and reliable so folks can get on with teaching/learning and not fighting software. The key thing is that GNU/Linux is affordable and schools can have about twice as much IT for the same cost as with that other OS.
I’ve spent my time in the tech support trenches…and someone else’s time as well. Please mark my dues paid in full. I’ve worked from the script-reader doing basic trouble-shooting, up to floor supervisor and level three support. My point? Not everybody who works support at a call center is an idiot, but some certainly are…
The Alliance 90 / The Greens in the parliament of the German state of Saxony are urging for a feasibility study on moving the state's public administrations to free and open source software solutions. The political group, free software users themselves since December 2011, say that lower IT costs and advantages in IT security should drive public administrations to using free and open source software.
My post about splitting up Linux distributions along dedicated server and desktop lines has produced interesting feedback. The comments -- both in public and privately via email -- are all over the place.
So I should probably have delayed this until Wednesday for sentimental reasons: that will be 23 years since I uploaded the 0.01 source tree. But I'm not an overly sentimental person, so screw that. I'm doing my normal Sunday release.
And as I mentioned in the rc4 notes, the previous rc was pretty small, possibly because neither Greg nor Davem had sent in any updates that week. Guess what? David's networking updates came in an hour after I did rc4, and sure enough Greg came in this week too, so - surprise surprise - rc5 isn't as small as rc4 was.
Oh well. It was too good to last.
I also got a report of an *old* performance regression in the dentry cache (since 3.10 - positively ancient), and that in turn made me look around some more, and there were a few other special cases that could cause us to not do as well as we should. I fixed some of it, and Al fixed the rest. So hopefully we not only fixed the reported regression, but are actually doing better than we used to.
Anyway, the size of rc5 means that I'm certainly not cutting the release early, which means that I will have to think about exactly what I will do about the next merge window. Because it looks like it might end up conflicting with my travel around LinuxCon EU. I haven't quite decided what I'll do - I might release 3.17 normally, but then just not open the merge window due to travel. Or, if there are more issues than I think there will be, maybe I'll delay the 3.17 release.
We'll see.
Regardless - the rc5 changes is about half drivers (networking, gpu, usb, input, ata..) with the rest being mostly a mix of filesystem updates (the aforementioned performance thing in the core vfs layer, but also some NFS export issues found by Al and misc other stuff), architecture updates (arm, parisc, s390) and core networking. And a smattering of other. Shortlog appended.
In other words, things look fairly normal, even if I'd have been happier with rc5 being smaller. But with the bump from networking and drivers, I'm not going to claim that this was either unexpected or particularly scary. I'm hoping we're done now, and that rc6 and rc7 will be noticeably calmer.
Knock wood.
Linus
Linux creator Linus Torvalds is well-known for his strong opinions on many technical things. But when it comes to systemd, the init system that has caused a fair degree of angst in the Linux world, Torvalds is neutral.
Today in Linux news Linus Torvalds tells Sam Varghese that he's Switzerland in the Systemd war as Paul Venezia is back to clarify his "split Linux in two" post and Linuxgrrl takes the community pulse. Jesse Smith reviews PCLinuxOS 2014.08. Clem has announced a change in naming protocol at the Mint project for upcoming 17.1. And finally today, Jim Zemlin talks about what it takes to be a successful Open Source project.
The latest flareup? None other than the suggestion that Linux be split in two.
The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) this morning officially unveiled the DisplayPort 1.3 specification that takes DP 1.2a even further.
Ben Skeggs sent in his Nouveau DRM driver changes for the drm-next tree of open-source NVIDIA driver improvements that will land in Linux 3.18.
Vesta Control panel is an open source, free, easy to install and configure web based control panel for Linux like systems. Using VestaCP anyone, even a novice system administrators can able to manage websites in VPS.
MKVToolNix is a complete set of tools to create, alter, and inspect Matroska files under Linux and other platforms. This application has been updated and the developers have made a number of important changes and improvements.
QEMU 2.1.1, a generic open source emulator and virtualizer that can run OSes and programs made for a different machine, has been released and it's available for download.
Opera 25 beta was released today and besides new graphical bookmarks and an improved Speed Dial, it finally supports Linux (for now, there are only 64bit debs available for download). This is the first Opera beta (previously known as Opera Next) release available for Linux since version 12.16, which was released more than a year ago.
The Opera developers have released a new version of their browser in the 25.x branch, but now they are no longer calling it Next, but Beta.
For Linux users, there are plenty of Dropbox alternatives, MEGAsync being the latest entrant. The service was the brain child of Kim Dotcom, founder of now defunct Megaupload, and it was launched on 19 January 2013 to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the seizure of his previous enterprise. MEGAsync now has a dedicated Linux client as well (unlike Google Drive).
Within the next year we should be getting our first glimpse of Ubuntu phones, powered by Canonical’s own mobile OS: Ubuntu Touch. It’s been available for use on various Nexus devices for just over a year now, however there is an alternative method of using it in the Ubuntu Touch emulator.
The emulator allows you to step into the Ubuntu Touch interface with all the relevant controls you could possibily need in order to properly emulate a phone or tablet. As well as finding out how the interface generally works, it’s an excellent platform for testing out Ubuntu Touch apps and developing for it.
A Golden Wake, an adventure title developed by Grundislav Games and published by Wadjet Eye Games, will be released on Steam for Linux on October 9.
Hatoful Boyfriend is a game about building interspecies relationships with birds.
A classic-era run 'n' gun game developed by Matthias “Lazycow” Bock for the 30 year old Commodore 64 home computer, Powerglove was initially released as an entry in last year’s RGCD 16K C64 Game Development Competition (where it placed 3rd out of 15 entries). Over the past nine months Matthias has further optimised, bug fixed, tweaked and crammed in additional levels and features into the tiny 16KB of available ROM space – and now the game is finally available to buy as an RGCD published physical C64 game cartridge (and download).
Terraria, a sandbox adventure game created by developer Re-Logic, is currently in development for Mac and Linux, according to a post on the game's official site.
A launch date for the new PC versions has not yet been announced, and the developer warns it's still in question if the ports are "feasible."
sWhile E19 didn't come out last week as talked about, it was released this morning! The Enlightenment E19 update is a huge upgrade over E18 or E17, especially if you're an early Wayland adopter.
Recently I spent some time to port and clean up the Snippets plugin and the underlying template interface for Kate 5. It's now fully working again and more powerful than ever. The template code was originally written by Joseph Wenniger and most of what I show here is still working like originally implemented by him. Still, there were some improvements I would like to show; also, I'm sure many readers might not be aware of this great feature at all.
KDE Plasma 5 is a completely new desktop experience for KDE users. built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5 and it introduces an updated artwork concept with cleaner visuals and improved readability, called Breeze, along with improved high DPI support and a converged shell, as well as a fully hardware accelerated graphics stack.
Black Lab Linux 6.0 Beta 1, a distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, is out and users can now download and test it.
Black Lab Linux was initially released to provide a real alternative to Windows and Mac OS X systems, but as time passed, the developer switched this approach to one focused more on open source design. Gone are the days of dreary desktops with all-too-known designs. We are now entering the GNOME world and it looks like it’s hit the spot.
4MLinux Multiboot Edition 10.0 Beta, a mini Linux distribution that is focused on the 4Ms of computing, Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g., playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (Linux games), has been released and is now ready for testing.
I have setup a COPR repository for Xfce 4.10 plugins that can be installed with EL-7. The original Xfce 4.10 repo for EL - 7 (xfce410_epel7) contains the core xfce packages. The new repo contains only plugins. I made a second repo just for organizational sake.
Fedora and LibreOffice developer Caolán McNamara recently blogged about some fonts (specifically some fonts for OSX) not showing up in the font chooser in LibreOffice on Linux. It turns out is was an issue with the way some fonts encode their names, and LibreOffice was not showing these thinking it was an error. Bottom line is that the issue is fixed, and the fix will be seen in Fedora in the future, resulting in better font support in LibreOffice — which is always a good thing!
Going back two years has been an initiative to build the Debian package base with LLVM/Clang rather than GCC -- for much the same reasons as building the Linux kernel with Clang. Thanks to Google's Summer of Code, there's been more progress on building out Debian using the latest Clang compiler.
As a parallel approach, we started to implement a suggestion from Linus Torvalds and a few others. Instead of trying to fix all upstream, where we can, we tried to update clang to improve the gcc compatibility.
OpenMediaVault 1.0 was released today as a Debian-based network attached storage (NAS) solution that uses Nginx, its own dashboard with widgets support, and other original features.
Canonical has announced that a couple of curl vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch operating system will debut its official launch on the octa-core Meizu MX4 in December but there is still no word on a device from the other launch partnet, Bq, yet.
In a blog post, Meizu announced that there MX4 will launch in December with Android 4.4.4 and Ubuntu Touch. The device is very poweful sporting a MT6595 octa-core processor, a 5.4ââ¬Â³ display and a 20.7MP camera.
The new Ubuntu Touch operating system from Canonical will power the new Meizu MX4 phone and it will be out in December, according to the latest information posted by the Chinese company. We now take a closer look at this new phone to see how it will hold up with an Ubuntu experience.
The Linux Mint developers have decided to announce the name of the next version of their distro, 17.1, and it's going to be "Rebecca."
The Linux Mint code names were never something very important, not for the developer and not for the community. It's hard to pinpoint the names of the previous releases, but that's not really an issue. The distribution is known for many other good things and the name is not really an important feature.
Jeff Hoogland, the founder and lead contributor to the Bodhi Linux project has announced that he is moving on to pastures new after four years at the helm.
Linux-based platforms for wearables include Android Wear, Samsung's Tizen SDK for Wearables, and now Intel's Yocto Linux and Intel Atom-based Edison computing module. The Edison was released last week in conjunction with the Intel Developer Forum. Prior to the formal launch, some 70 Intel Edison beta units have been seeded, forming the basis for about 40 Edison-based projects, says Intel.
Google has unveiled the first smartphones to run on its Android One platform, a standard designed to help push affordable smartphones in the developing world. The initiative kicks off in India, where Micromax, Spice, and Karbonn are all selling phones with 4.5-inch screens, 1GB of RAM, 5-megapixel main and 2-megapixel front cameras, 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek processors, dual-SIM slots, microSD expandable storage, and FM radios.
Under Android One, Google has developed its reference hardware designs — meaning OEMs no longer have to develop and test their own smartphones; they just pick up Google's ready-to-wear versions and get manufacturing. Google already has three local Indian smartphone makers signed up to do just that — Karbonn, Spice, and Micromax — all soon be be selling Google-designed, Android One-powered devices for around $100.
A question I get a lot is, “What makes an open source software project successful?” This isn’t a simple question, as every project is really different. But certainly there are some common characteristics: a vibrant and open community and ecosystem of contributors, an innovative goal or technology and investments from a diverse set of stakeholders are just a few.
Business benchmarks and market share help measure the success of a project over time. A blockbuster like Linux can tout nine code changes per hour, $10.8 billion in shared R&D investment and millions of developers. It runs 65 percent of smart mobile devices, 95 percent of high performance computing market, 55 percent of the embedded systems market, and most of world’s stock exchanges.
During the rise of Windows, I was using a desktop composed of a Conectiva Linux (now Mandriva), a window manager called Window Maker, and a Netscape browser. I connected to the Internet using my modem and PPP. Not bad for those who like alternatives. It so happens that at that time the maturity of the software we were using freely and openly was questionable. Furthermore, we didn't have a lot of options when it came to the tools we used to perform our daily tasks.
Recently, I was invited to talk at the Firebird Developers Day about Firebird. Firebird is a completely mature open source database management system and is used by companies worldwide. My presentation was about the launch of the FireServer Project, previously covered on Opensource.com: Migration to open source tool inspires new Linux distributiont. It's a Linux distribution based on CentOS and dedicated exclusively to providing a high performance environment to a Firebird database server. It also boasts an ecosystem of value-added services.
Representatives of Facebook on Monday announced the formation of a group, the TODO Project, intended to streamline the way open-source software projects, a big part of cloud and mobile computing, are executed. This may include such things as best practices for updating open-source software, ways of securing legal compliance, or tools and habits for making software that is freely available to anyone.
Open source is a popular approach to software, in which anyone can contribute to and use the code. Formal approval of changes comes from agreed-upon authorities who speak for the group. It is considered a good way to build software with fewer bugs, and such software makes up much of the world’s mobile and computer server operating systems, as well as many other applications.
Called "Pretty Easy Privacy" (PEP), the project's goal is to integrate the technology with existing communication tools on different desktop and mobile platforms. The development team launched a preview PEP implementation Monday for the Microsoft Outlook email client, but plans to build similar products to encrypt communications in Android, iOS, Firefox OS, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Jabber, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and Twitter.
The days of free and open source software being something that only pasty white guys living in their moms’ basements cared about are long gone. Today, the FOSS movement is absolutely huge, with even big companies buying into the concept thanks to the cost savings and beneficial functionality offered by increasingly competitive and polished FOSS options.
South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. said Monday it will hold a two-day conference on open-source to allow developers to share ideas on the new industrial trend.
This year's LinuxCon & Kernel Summit North America were notable for several reasons, not the least of which included being able to see the scenic views of downtown Chicago through the hotel lobby windows!
Below, the Samsung Open Source Group will share our top highlights of the conferences, as well as look forward to what we can expect from LinuxCon Europe next month in Germany.
Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that provides efficient resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications or frameworks. Mesos is a open source software originally developed at the University of California at Berkeley. It sits between the application layer and the operating system and makes it easier to deploy and manage applications in large-scale clustered environments more efficiently. It can run many applications on a dynamically shared pool of nodes. Prominent users of Mesos include Twitter, Airbnb, MediaCrossing, Xogito and Categorize.
CloudStack's lifeblood is its user community, so the Citrix shakeup is much ado about nothing
In a post last week, I took note of a big shakeup at Citrix, surrounding its cloud platform tools and the leadership behind them. Specifically, some important Citrix cloud executives (including General Manager Sameer Dholakia) left the company, and Citrix veteran Klaus Oestermann is now in charge of a newly formed cloud group. The the success of OpenStack has been cited as part of the reason for the shakeup, as Citrix officials have been questioned about touting CloudStack as far and away the most widely deployed open source platform in the cloud.
When the OpenStack Foundation released the results of a broad user survey it did late last year, one of the trends that emerged was that businesses could leverage the open source cloud platform on top of operating systems like Ubuntu and incur nearly no costs for the actual software infrastructure that runs applications. Cloud computing is reducing the cost of doing business for many organizations, especially many startups.
With that last thought in mind, Google is delivering a package to help startup businesses launch their business with free Google Cloud Platform services. Qualifying startups are to get a $100,000 credit for Google Cloud Platform services, in addition to 24/7 support from the company's technical solutions team.
HP's move to acquire Eucalpytus (see HP buys Eucalyptus, puts Marten Mickos in charge of cloud unit by my colleague Larry Dignan) is the latest example of asupplier trying to be a part of every industry party.
Austria's Bundesrechenzentrum, the federal government-owned computing centre praises the wide range of application uses of Apache OpenOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity tools. The solution can be adapted to the data centre's needs, integrated in its specialist applications and also allows document to be created and submitted automatically and semi-automatically. OpenOffice is the standard office suite at the computing centre since 2008, installed on 12000 PCs across the organisation.
Boston-headquartered Drupal services company Acquia will deliver the federal government’s govCMS project.
The project to create a standard content management system for federal government agencies was announced in May.
Late evening on Sept. 12, WordPress revealed that it was taking proactive measures to secure its WordPress.com users against the Google account disclosure. WordPress has an open-source content management system (CMS) as well an online service at WordPress.com, where users can create their own blogs. WordPress.com accounts can also be used by self-hosted open-source WordPress users to get a number of services from WordPress.com.
And that is how Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, founder of Automattic, and chairman of The WordPress Foundation, runs 22% of the Internet.
We recently updated our list of various licenses and comments about them to include the IPA Font license. It is a copyleft free software license for fonts, incompatible with the GPL.
Data.gov has taken open source to heart. Beyond just providing open data and open source code, the entire process involves open civic engagement. All team ideas, public interactions, and new ideas (from any interaction) are cross-posted and entered in Github. These are tracked openly and completed to milestones for full transparency. We also recently redesigned the website at Data.gov through usability testing and open engagement on Github.
Earlier this year cloud storage provider Dropbox open-sourced their own high-performance Python implementation, Pyston. Pyston is a JIT-based Python implementation built atop the LLVM compiler stack. The initial Pyston release was a bit basic but now after months of work, Dropbox is announcing the second version of Pyston.
CppCon ended last week as the annual meeting for any and all C++ developers. CppCon is filled with many interesting talks and the conference overall received rave reviews from C++ developers. While we weren't in attendance at the event, there's interesting notes and slides coming out from those in attendance.
If you have worked through this tutorial series so far, you'll recall that we’re teaching your cat how to use just enough of the open source tools needed to make it through Puppet Fundamentals. We installed the Learning VM (virtual machine) in our intro, learned some important command line commands, and learned how to edit a document in vim. This blog post — the final one in our series — is about how to use Git. Once you finish this tutorial, you'll have all the basic learning you need to start learning Puppet on your own, or by taking one of our training courses. (You'll find all these resources in the Learning section of our site.)
OpenForum Europe, an advocacy group focusing on IT openness in government, issued a press release earlier today announcing its launch of a new public Internet portal. At that site, anyone can report a government page that offers a document intended for collaborative use for downloading if that document is not available in an OpenDocument Format (ODF) compliant version. The portal is called FixMyDocuments.eu, and you can show your support for the initiative (as I have) by adding your name here (the first supporter listed is the EU's indominatable digital champion, Neelie Kroes).
The announcement coincides with the beginning of another initiative, Global Legislative Openness Week, which will involve global activities annd "events hosted by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership and members of the parliamentary openness community." A full calendar of events is here.
Chinese networking giant's new research site in the Sophia Antipolis technology hub is its 17th in Europe and will focus on chipset design and embedded technology.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in June unveiled a new portal for innovation in the public sector, the 'Observatory of Public Sector Innovation'. The observatory is to collect, share and analyse examples of public sector innovation and to provide practical advice to countries on how to make innovations work. The portal will be demonstrated at the OECD 'Conference on Innovating the Public Sector: From Ideas to Impact', which takes place in Paris, France, on 12 and 13 November.
Freenode's IRC server was compromised and passwords were likely sniffed by unidentified hackers, prompting a warning to users that they should reset their passwords as a precaution.
When people think of network virtualization, the advantages that come to mind typically include faster provisioning of networks, easier management of networks and more efficient use of resources. But network virtualization can have another major benefit as well: security.
Security researchers have demonstrated a hack that allowed them to get into the web interface of a Canon Pixma printer before modifying its firmware to run the classic 90s computer game Doom.
If there's one thing that animates the discussion of Obama's war plan against the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), it is the idea that the group could attack the United States. There is no evidence of such danger right now–a point that is certainly covered by the press (e.g., Washington Post, 9/13/14)–but the array of voices in the media saying otherwise can seem to overwhelm any reasonable discussions.
The NSW Police and Singapore's PCS Security Pte Ltd have been named as buyers of FinFischer malware, along with the intelligence arms of the Hungarian, Italian, and Bosnian governments.
The investigation into Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is led by a Republican special prosecutor, was unanimously approved by Wisconsin's nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, and includes the participation of elected county District Attorneys from both political parties.
When Scott Brown has a campaign proposal he needs to roll out, the Republican Senate candidate has a reliable partner in Fox News, which has produced numerous segments tailored around his campaign's initiatives.
The US National Science Foundation, Cisco, Verisign, Panasonic and boffins from around the world have thrown their weight behind a new “Named Data Networking Consortium” that aims to develop “a practically deployable set of protocols replacing TCP/IP that increases network trustworthiness and security, addresses the growing bandwidth requirements of modern content, and simplifies the creation of sophisticated distributed applications.”
If you needed another reason to hate Comcast, the most hated company in America, they’ve just given it to you: they’ve declared war on Tor Browser.
To hear Tom Wheeler and most of the big broadband players explain the net neutrality situation, the appeals court decision back in February laid out a "roadmap" for the FCC to continue to use Section 706 for its open internet rules. But that's not actually true. It's a clear misrepresentation of what the court actually said.