GNU/Linux is winning pretty much everywhere these days - well, aside from the desktop. On supercomputers, mobiles and embedded devices it dominates completely, but in the world of enterprise computing, where it has certainly done well, there's room for it to take further market share. How might it do that? One of the huge advantages that free software has over traditional closed source programs is that new companies can take existing code and come up with exciting new solutions very quickly, without the need for massive and long drawn-out research and development programs.
Wireless charging, a concept popularized by Android-powered smartphones, is fast picking up. Even Apple, which was known for ‘introducing’ revolutionary new technologies under Steve Jobs’ leadership, is now in the game of catching up with Android and offered wireless charging for the Apple Watch which will arrive next year.
Anyone who believes Google isn't "making a play" for desktop users isn't paying attention. In recent years, I've seen ChromeOS making quite a splash on the Google Chromebook. Exploding with popularity on sites such as Amazon.com, it looks as if ChromeOS could be unstoppable.
In this article, I'm going to look at ChromeOS as a concept to market, how it's affecting Linux adoption and whether or not it's a good/bad thing for the Linux community as a whole. Plus, I'll talk about the biggest issue of all and how no one is doing anything about it.
There is one truth that all the Linux faithful hold near and dear to their hearts -- that Linux is a leader when it comes to innovation. No other platform has been able to stake that claim for such a long period of time. Even when a different platform unveils something new, many times that innovation can be traced back to Linux.
One such technology is the convergent desktop. The idea behind the convergent desktop is simple -- a seamless transition from mobile to desktop (or laptop). This all started, for better or worse, with Ubuntu Edge. The idea behind Ubuntu Edge was brilliant: A high-end smartphone that, when plugged into a dock, would serve as a traditional desktop. Although the project ultimately failed (due to an inability to raise the $32 million dollars necessary to bring Ubuntu Edge to life), the idea stuck and now every platform is in a race to deliver the convergent desktop.
So allow me to clarify: I believe the time has come when a major, dedicated, server-only Linux distribution is needed. This distribution does not maintain any desktop packages or dependencies -- and is not a distro that merely offers a different default package set for desktop and server use cases.
This ends up being a pain in the neck in the x86 world, but it could be much worse. Way back in 2008 I wrote something about why the Linux kernel reports itself to firmware as "Windows" but refuses to identify itself as Linux. The short version is that "Linux" doesn't actually identify the behaviour of the kernel in a meaningful way. "Linux" doesn't tell you whether the kernel can deal with buffers being passed when the spec says it should be a package. "Linux" doesn't tell you whether the OS knows how to deal with an HPET. "Linux" doesn't tell you whether the OS can reinitialise graphics hardware.
Twenty-three years old. That got me thinking, “That means Linux will be 25 years old in just two years. A quarter of a century. What will happen to Linux between now and then? I should write down my predictions in an article and send it over to those swell chaps at Linux.com.”
A service capable of socket activation must be able to receive its preinitialized sockets from systemd, instead of creating them internally. For most services this requires (minimal) patching. However, since systemd actually provides inetd compatibility a service working with inetd will also work with systemd -- which is quite useful for services like sshd for example.
With the Linux 3.16 kernel is Intel graphics driver support for Userptr, allows user-space to wrap up malloc'ed memory and turn them into GEM buffer objects. Besides the Intel DDX support, there's now userptr support within Mesa's DRM library.
With X.Org Server 1.16 having landed in Ubuntu 14.10, it's time for some benchmarks comparing the 1.15 and 1.16 releases on Ubuntu while using the GLAMOR 2D acceleration library.
For some basic X.Org 2D benchmarks I tested a Radeon HD 7950 and R7 260X while running various Linux 2D desktop benchmarks on Ubuntu 14.10 with the Linux 3.16 kernel and Mesa 10.4-devel. In testing the two graphics cards, I was using X.Org Server 1.15.1 that was previously found in the Ubuntu Utopic archive and then switched to X.Org Server 1.16.0 with the rebuilt DDX driver packages too.
While the Linux 3.17 kernel isn't being released for a few weeks, we already have a good idea for the DRM graphics driver improvements coming for the Linux 3.18 cycle.
In complementing this morning's Radeon GLAMOR X.Org Server 1.16 benchmarks compared against X.Org Server 1.15, here's some benchmarks of the xf86-video-intel DDX with the 1.15 and 1.16 server releases via the Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic archive. SNA and UXA were the acceleration methods tested for this article, which are contained within the xf86-video-intel DDX rather than the xorg-server code-base, but still there's some performance changes to note.
Browsing the internet has different meaning to different people. While to some the web is a source of entertainment, to others it is a valuable and source of learning. Sadly enough, the internet is not widely available and easily affordable everywhere in the globe. Slow network speed is another problem. Developer Stefan Aleksic of ColdSauce tries to find a solution in an SMS (text) based browser for the third world countries which are yet to see the internet as we know it. He has named it the Cosmos Browser.
If you ever used elinks on Linux, you know how efficient and low-bandwidth text only browsing can be. Of course, it is not meant for visiting a website for downloading wallpapers, but it is more than sufficient if you want to read some information from the web. Cosmos will work on text and will not need any data plan or WiFi.
Popcorn Time 0.3.3 was released today and it comes with quite a few new features, including support for external players such as VLC, XBMC, MPlayer, mpv and others, Chromecast and Airplay support, 3 new themes and more.
Kubuntu has fully matured and stabilized and comes with the brand new KDE Plasma workspaces and other KDE technologies. Like any other operating system Kubuntu also needs a little bit of work to get it ready for you. There are a few things which are optional and I have added them here based on my own usage, you may not need them.
Re-Logic is looking to bring its popular indie acton adventure sandbox title Terraria to Mac and Linux platforms, the developer has revealed.
The current Humble Bundle, Humble Indie Bundle 12, has added three more games into the mix: The Bridge, Monaco, and Race the Sun. These games join seven other decent indie titles and a merchandise pack that's pretty pricey. Pay what you want to get SteamWorld Dig, Hammerwatch, and Gunpoint. If you pay more than the average price, you'll also get Papers, Please, Gone Home, LUFTRAUSERS, The Bridge, Monaco, and Race the Sun. Those who pay $10 or more will receive all of the above, plus early access to Prison Architect.
Tropico 5, a construction and management simulation video game first released for Windows earlier this year, will be released for Linux and OS X this week. Haemimont Games is releasing Tropico 5 for Linux and OS X on Friday, 19 September.
Frozen Sand has released a new update, 4.2.019, for its first-person shooter Urban Terror. If you already have Urban Terror installed, you only need to run the updater from the installation directory, without the need to download the entire game again.
OpenMW is an open source implementation of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind game engine and functionality that is still under development. A new update has been released for it and features lots of improvements.
After a long bugs triage, we have worked hard also to close your reported issues.. A long list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.3.0 is available through the KDE Bugtracking System.
From August 27th to 30th, 2014, nearly sixteen KDE lovers met in the 2nd LaKademy - The KDE Latin America Summit. The sprint took place in the Free Software Competence Center (CCSL) at University of São Paulo (USP) in southeast Brazil.
Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has shared a status update concerning the state of running the GNOME Shell desktop natively on Wayland without any X11 dependence. With GNOME 3.14, more progress has been made in making the Wayland experience really usable. Clasen also shares that Red Hat is hiring another Wayland developer.
The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project (now known as Files) have announced that version 3.14 RC1 has been released and is now available for download and testing.
Clonezilla Live, a Linux distribution based on DRBL, Partclone, and udpcast that allows users to do bare metal backup and recovery, has reached version 2.2.4-12 and is now available for download.
I spend more time looking at the family trees of Linux distributions than I do looking at my own family tree. I find it interesting to see how distributions grow from their parent distribution, either acting as an extra layer of features which regularly re-bases itself or as a separate fork. New distributions usually tend to remain similar in most ways to their parent distro, using the same package manager and maintaining similar philosophies. When I look at the family trees of Linux distributions one project stands out more than others: PCLinuxOS.
Open source training is a powerful tool, and the skills and experiences learned can be immediately applied to numerous real-world working situations. The use of a stable and flexible foundation means open source can be adapted to situations as required, making challenges easy to overcome.
Red Hat Challenge@Labs is a strong starting point for students, as they have the opportunity to design solutions for real problems and issues—and, if they're successful, pitch them to industry experts.
Just as a heads up, a new release of the Fedora Notifications app (FMN) was deployed today (version 0.3.0).
Frontend Improvements Negated Rules - Individual rules (associated with a filter) can now be negated. This means that you can now write a rule like: "forward me all messages mentioning my username except for meetbot messages and those secondary arch koji builds."
Disabled Filters - Filters can now be disabled instead of just deleted, thus letting you experiment with removing them before committing to giving them the boot.
OpenMediaVault is a NAS/SAN Linux distribution that I first wrote about on this site back in January 2013. That was when the version 0.4.11 was released.
The latest version, a milestone release, is OpenMediaVault 1.0. It is based on Debian 7 and uses that distribution’s ncurses installer, just like Ubuntu server.
This is a distribution you want to use if you are looking for an easy-to-use and feature-rich solution to set up a NAS for yourself. The browser-based management interface on this latest edition is a lot better than the one that shipped with previous editions. And it is also responsive.
In contrast to other databases that list hardware that is technically compatible with GNU/Linux, h-node only lists hardware that will not require any proprietary software of firmware to work with free software operating systems.
Assuming this post shows up then I'll have successfully migrated from Chronicle to a temporary replacement.
Chronicle is awesome, and despite a lack of activity recently it is not dead. (No activity because it continued to do everything I needed for my blog.)
Unfortunately though there is a problem with chronicle, it suffers from a bit of a performance problem which has gradually become more and more vexing as the nubmer of entries I have has grown.
AMD has partnered with Canonical to offer OpenStack private cloud to customers. The solution offers high-end hardware – a SeaMicro SM15000 server – running Ubuntu LTS 14.04 and OpenStack.
A few months ago, Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, had an unexpected hit on its hands: the Ubuntu Orange Box. This OpenStack cloud in a box, although made from consumer-grade components, was the star of May's OpenStack Summit.
Mozilla, with its Firefox OS, isn't the only player aiming to offer a reliable, competitive and affordable alternative to Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Ubuntu Touch, the mobile operating system developed by Canonical, will make its debut this December on a version of the forthcoming Meizu MX4 smartphone, according to a post on the Chinese manufacturer's Italian blog.
Mozilla, with its Firefox OS, isn't the only player aiming to offer a reliable, competitive and affordable alternative to Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Ubuntu Touch, the mobile operating system developed by Canonical, will make its debut this December on a version of the forthcoming Meizu MX4 smartphone, according to a post on the Chinese manufacturer's Italian blog.
A number of Libav vulnerabilities have been identified and fixed in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and an update has been issued for the operating system.
If there is any sexism on the part of the Linux Mint developers it's probably a kind of reverse sexism. Some might wonder why they haven't chosen any male codenames for Linux Mint. I have no idea why, nor do I really care. But I'm sure there are folks out there who might regard it as a bit misandric.
Maybe Linux Mint 18 should have the codename Bob or Steve or...some other male name? Hey, wait a minute...how about Jim? That would be a great codename! I can see it in the review headlines now: "Linux Mint 18 Jim rocks the open source world!" Are you listening, Linux Mint developers?
All kidding aside, I really don't care what developers use for codenames. Let them use male names, female names, animal names or some other kind of name. And I suspect that most people probably feel the same way. After all, the features and improvements in each software release are what we care about, not the informal naming conventions used by developers.
Moto 360, the smartwatch by Motorola, has set really high bar for smart-watches not only in design but also in durability. It’s unfair to even compare it to Apple Watch which we won’t see till next year (any by that time Android watches would have moved forward to the next generation leaving Apple behind to catch-up).
Nvidia’s 32GB LTE Shield Tablet is now available for pre-order. The Linux/Android powered tablet is priced at $399 and comes with an 8ââ¬Â³ (1,920 x 1,200) display, Tegra K1 CPU and 2GB of RAM.
I couldn't agree more with the sentiment that Apple's customers are buying the iPhone 6 so rabidly because of its larger screen sizes. One of the dumbest things Apple ever did was cling to smaller screens for so long. It completely ceded the larger screen phone market to Samsung and numerous other Android manufacturers.
A “Com 1ââ¬Â³ Indiegogo project is the first Android Wear smartwatch to use a Ingenics MIPS SoC. The watch offers IP67 waterproofing, WiFi, and a $125 price.
...the iPhone market share has been falling...
...Today Samsung sells twice the number of smartphones as Apple
If you're like me (and you're a Linux Journal reader, so you may actually be like me), you probably rotate through your cell phones and/or tablets every couple years. These little devices are so convenient and have been consistently dropping in price, while their power continues to go up, so you may have a few older devices sitting in a drawer. Thank Moore's Law for that—but what can you do with your old devices? There are a couple obvious things to do with old devices: some phone carriers allow you to "trade up", or you can hand them down to your kids or friends. However, there are quite a few uses for old devices aside from just pawning them off on your friends or disposing of them. This article is geared primarily at Android devices. Some of you may have older Apple iOS devices (it's okay if you do, I do too), and I'll drop hints on how to re-use those devices as well. With that, let's get started!
Too often coverage of free/open source software news and commentary tends to focus on either developments and activities in North America or in Europe. While much of the news is made on these two continents, there’s a wider world out there where folks are doing some substantial things, and promoting FOSS in their own way in their own areas.
A new open source project, PredictionIO, is building the MySQL of prediction.
In my experience, developers turn to forks as a last resort. To fork a project is also to divide its developer base, create disharmony, and potentially eviscerate all that made the project succeed in the first place. It's not a small matter to break up the family, as it were.
Yet sometimes, that's exactly what's required, and platforms like GitHub make forking trivially simple (even if the technology doesn't take care of all the human factors that complicate a fork).
Microsoft is spending $2.5 billion to acquire Mojang, the company behind the game Minecraft. Minecraft is one of the major games played on the Microsoft gaming platform Xbox. No wonder Microsoft is interested. Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. It began with creating barricades to ward off nocturnal monsters but people started developing various imaginative things as the game evolved. Minecraft can be a game of adventures or to relax. You can buy the game for $26.95.
In my nearly 20 years of engineering, I have found there are two types of creative people you must have in your groups if you want to be innovative while making awesome things. I call them "the Tool-igans" and the "Product Jocks." Both are passionate about technology and both love to build, but there are some key differences between them.
Xerte Online Toolkits is designed to be installed on a server and used by multiple users. However, for those who just want to try it out, Xerte works very well with XAMPP. XAMPP is prepackaged version of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and several other programs. It makes it possible for a user to run a web server on their own machine so that web-based projects, like Xerte Online Toolkits, can be run locally. XAMPP can even be installed on a USB drive so that you can take your Xerte Online Toolkits installation with you. There is a document with full installation instructions included with the Xerte Online Toolkits download, but the basic instructions are as follows:
Japanese researchers Yuya Yoshikawa, Tomoharu Iwata, Hiroshi Sawada have published a paper titled, “Collaboration on Social Media: Analyzing Successful Projects on Social Coding.” They looked at what factors made projects on “social coding sites” such as GitHub thrive. To do so, they gathered data on activity between February 2011 and May 2013 from the GitHub Archive on non-forked repositories with more than 30 commits. These data covered almost 42 million commits by 1.4 million developers to 317,000 projects.
MapR has given its customers a new way to use SQL to query their Big Data stores, with the addition of Apache Drill to MapR's eponymous Hadoop distribution.
Eclipse IoT now includes 15 projects collectively aiming to reduce the complexity of developing IoT/M2M solutions. Most of the Eclipse literature on this initiative uses that "IoT/M2M" label, because machine-to-machine communication is where it all started, and because it continues to be an essential part of IoT. But is IoT more all encompassing, which, Skerrett says, is what makes developing IoT solutions so challenging.
The fact is you can already access ownCloud on your Chromebook via the web interface, but it’s not very useful because you can’t really take full advantage of Chrome app to work on your files. You have to manually download each file, work on it using the Chrome apps and then upload then back to your ownCloud server.
Marten Mickos, the incoming head of HP's cloud efforts, sets an audacious goal for the open-source cloud. When the OpenStack Silicon Valley conference schedule was first announced several months ago, Marten Mickos was best known as the CEO of Eucalyptus, which is a rival effort to OpenStack. Mickos' position is now set to change thanks to his company's acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, which was announced Sept. 11.
While Rackspace has found Ironic safe to use in production, Ironic was not deemed to be ready to be part of the official OpenStack Juno release coming up next month.
Basho Riak Enterprise 2.0 release steps up NoSQL competition with Cassandra with prebuilt data functions, Apache Solr support, and SSD storage for hot data.
GovCMS will use open source software Drupal and will be hosted on a public cloud, which will be provided by Acquia. Drupal was selected after the team assessed 18 other CMS systems.
Red Hat has done a lot of work with CDOT, lately specializing in Fedora for ARM processors. Pidora, the Fedora Linux Remix specifically targeted to the Rasberry Pi, was primarily developed at CDOT.
Another company that we have been working with lately is Blindside Networks. They do a lot of work with CDOT on the BigBlueButton project, which is a web conferencing tool for online education.
NexJ is a Toronto-based software development firm that has worked with CDOT on various aspects of open health tools on the server side and integration of medical devices with smart phones.
We have recently started working on the edX platform, where developers around the globe are working to create a next-generation online learning platform.
Recently the group that I work with on pipe organs was able to add a rather unusual example to our collection: an early, self-contained theater organ, which would have been installed in the orchestra pit. Properly, this is a "pit organ."
The Eclipse integrated development environment has basic Wayland capabilities thanks to some student work this summer via Google's Summer of Code.
A new study of a small group of workers at industrial hog farms in North Carolina has found that they continued to carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria over several days, raising new questions for public health officials struggling to contain the spread of such pathogens.
What's interesting about this story is not that the cell phone system can track your location worldwide. That makes sense; the system has to know where you are. What's interesting about this story is that anyone can do it. Cyber-weapons arms manufacturers are selling the capability to governments worldwide, and hackers have demonstrated the capability.
National Archives reveals identity of Britain's Second World War special agent 'Fifi', the beautiful blonde employed to tempt spies from her own side into giving up their secrets
That's the normal declassification schedule, which at this point would still be nearly 18 years away. Fortunately, Ed Snowden's leaks have led to an accelerated schedule for many documents related to the NSA's surveillance programs, as well as fewer judges being sympathetic to FOIA stonewalling and exemption abuse.
We've talked several times about how the government makes it nearly impossible to sue it for abusing civil liberties with its classified surveillance programs. It routinely claims that complainants have no standing, ignoring the fact that leaked documents have given us many details on what the NSA does and doesn't collect. But in Yahoo's case, it went against its own favorite lawsuit-dismissal ploy.
Wisconsin election officials and advocates are being forced to make an "extraordinary effort" to adjust to voter ID restrictions that were just reinstated by a federal appellate court. Thousands of absentee ballots have already been sent to voters, and the majority of Department of Motor Vehicle service centers that issue IDs are only open only two days per week.
A proposed anti-terrorism law in France has freedom of expression advocates concerned. The bill, as our friends at La Quadrature du Net frame it, “institutes a permanent state of emergency on the Internet,” providing for harsher penalties for incitement or “glorification” of terrorism conducted online. Furthermore, the bill (in Article 9) allows for “the possibility for the administrative authority to require Internet service providers to block access to sites inciting or apologizing for terrorism” without distinguishing criteria or an authority to conduct the blocking.
Apparently, people care about preserving a free and open Internet. Earlier this month, I reported on how a consortium of technology companies, many of which depend on speedy and dependable access to their websites, launched a very public protest against controversial proposed changes to net neutrality regulations. The tech companies involved are calling themselves Team Internet. They are concerned that broadband service providers are developing business models that create slow lanes and fast lanes on the Internet, and that the FCC will provide its blessing for doing so.
A common provision allowing foreign investors to sue host governments has become a ticking time bomb inside trade agreements like the soon to be signed Trans Pacific Partnership. Some countries are now refusing to agree to the provision and are questioning its legal legitimacy. Jess Hill investigates.
The brother of Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has questioned the conditions of his brother's Swedish jail, slamming both the institution and the guards.
New research from Carnegie Mellon University shows that search engine results directly influence people's decision to pirate movies, or buy them legally. According to the researchers, their findings show how search engines may play a vital role in the fight against online piracy.