What price can you put on freedom? If you’re talking about software freedom, a new San Francisco-based computer company prices it at $1,949 and up.
Purism has turned to the crowdfunding site Crowd Supply to fund and launch its first-ever product—a laptop that's as open source friendly as it is technically feasible. Advertised as a "Free and Open Source laptop that respects your essential freedoms," Purism’s Librem 15 laptop, now in prototype and ready for manufacture, is designed to run entirely with open source software, requiring no proprietary drivers. The only proprietary code on the laptop resides in its Intel firmware.
Talk about the paradoxes of life! I woke up today and saw this article mentioning "3 cool features" of Windows 10. Of course the are cool. But they are neither "new" nor "Windows features" at all.
The author and I agree on one point: With Windows 10, Windows is becoming more and more like Linux.
Kubernetes is a project sponsored by Google, and then there's the Google Container Engine which is the Google Compute Engine equivalent of the AWS EC2 Container Service. We were very happy that the AWS integration used native Docker interfaces and integrated with Docker Hub.
After the most recent Top500 list of the best supercomputers in the world, only one thing is clear: Linux is still the leader of the pack.
The stage is set for SDN (software-defined networking) to change the way we push data through our infrastructures, with the promises of more agile network provisioning and management, as well as more affordable network hardware. But for many, the SDN concept is still amorphous. What does SDN look like in practice?
To shed light on this question, I sat down with a few Dell Networking S6000 switches running Cumulus Linux 2.3. There are many approaches to an SDN solution, but one of the most significant is the advent of white-box switches and à la carte switch firmware. This is the essence of the solution offered by Cumulus Networks.
Welcome to the age of containerization, where an ecosystem led by startup Docker is leading IT organizations to ineffable peaks of efficiency, helping them scale their workloads ever-higher, and probably baking them a nice cake to boot (it's my birthday, I have cake on the brain, sue me). Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services are all tripping over themselves to make sure prospective customers know that their clouds are the place to be if you want to get the most from Docker.
The second revision to the Linux kernel based D-Bus implementation is now available for review.
For those wishing to make use of the assisted H.264 video encoding, there's multiple FFmpeg Git branches around supporting libnvenc, such as this GitHub repository. However, building the NVENC Linux support isn't straightforward as for now it seems at least one header file must be fetched from NVIDIA's Windows version of the Video Codec SDK for the Linux build to pan out.
Earlier this week on Phoronix I posted benchmarks indicating potential block/file-system performance regressions using the Linux 3.18 kernel. Since then I've been carrying out more tests looking for any file-system performance problems on other hardware.
Tools such as Synaptic Package Manager provide a GUI for installing and maintaining the many Linux programs suitable for enterprise use.
We're about a month into the lifespan of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, but it looks like the game is about to get a little boost in its player base. According to Mac developer Aspyr, the Mac version of the game has been submitted to Firaxis and 2K for approval, with an estimated arrival time of next week.
Gaslamp Games has rolled out the "Bandit Raid on 'Fightin' Vicar Zedock Woodburn's Frontier Chapel" for the Clockwork Empires Steam Early Access alpha.
Feral Interactive are being sneaky, as they have given a little hint towards their next game, and it's quite obvious it's for Linux.
It's time to get excited folks. Feral Interactive ported XCOM: Enemy Unknown to Linux not too long ago, so we are all eager to see what they have up next. Luckily, we may not have to wait for long at all.
This Monday Steam has kicked off a new Weeklong Deal which will last until November 24, during which 11 titles for Linux are available at special promotional prices.
Of course buying games for Linux directly will help. Buy them using Linux and play them on Linux. Do not buy games that don't have a nice smiling penguin icon. In my humble opinion, this prohibits pre-ordering as well. We should be sure that a purchase is counted for Linux!
About a year ago, the Calligra community added a new application to the suite by the name of Krita Gemini, which combined the functionality of the Krita digital painting application with the touch optimised user interface of the tablet focused Krita Sketch, into a shell with the ability to switch between the two at runtime. The goal was to create a responsive user interface for Krita, and this is now a part of Calligra. In May of this year, Intel approached the team which produced Krita Gemini with the idea of doing the same for other parts of Calligra, by creating an application which would encapsulate the Words and Stage components in the same way as Krita Gemini did for the Krita component.
Since the introduction of Plasma widgets in KDE4, the whole desktop took a new direction, starting to become a more interactive way to communicate with the user, to say nothing about the fact that a desktop with widgets will look more beautiful than a plain, icon-only desktop.
What kind of operating system would you run on your PC? One that hogs resources leaving you with just enough to do your work or one that ‘glides’ over the resources leaving almost everything for you to use?
I would certainly choose the latter. And if I ran a business, where a penny saved is a penny earned, I would be even more conservative about it.
I use Arch Linux with KDE Plasma on my main machine. This combination gives me a fully optimized base OS with a desktop environment (DE) that is known for being the most feature-rich.
However, I am always on the lookout for a DE that can run efficiently on less-powerful (aka less expensive) hardware, with an easy to manage OS.
Linux Mint isn’t chasing touch interfaces, rethinking the way we use the desktop, or enacting any other grand experiment. It’s just a polished, modern Linux desktop system—and that’s why people love it. Linux Mint 17.1 (codenamed “Rebecca”) is on the brink of being released, and it continues the Linux Mint mission of refining the interface we use every day.
Caine 6.0 is derived from Ubuntu 14.04.1 (64 bit). That is a Long Term Support release, so that is a good thing. It uses the MATE desktop, rather than Unity, which is another really good thing. The ISO image can be obtained from their Downloads page (duh), and is relatively large (2.68GB).
SolydX, a Debian-based distribution that features the Xfce desktop environment and uses a rolling release model, is now at version 201411 and is ready for download.
The Mageia 3 Linux distribution has reached end of life and the developers have announced that the updates and security patches for the operating system have stopped completely.
Scientific Linux 6.6 vs. Scientific Linux 7.0, which of these Red Hat Enterprise Linux derived distributions are faster? Here's some benchmark results from a ten-core Xeon system.
Linux provides about 70 percent of Red Hat's annual revenue, and the slow-down represents "a significant risk" to Wall Street's expectation of subscription growth of 14 percent in 2015 and 15 percent in 2016, DiFucci said.
At the beginning of 2014, Red Hat embraced the community CentOS Linux distribution. It's a move that brought the clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) closer into the Red Hat organization.
In a video interview, Paul Cormier, EVP and President at Red Hat, details how the CentOS relationship has worked out over the course of 2014.
I currently use Fedora to power several web-based application servers (as part of my dayjob).
A recent Barbie book caused a row over its portrayal of women in technology. The book has since been withdrawn by Mattel, though you can still buy the Barbie The Computer Engineer doll on Amazon.
Two well-known and experienced Debian developers, both members of the project's technical committee, have announced they will be leaving the committee.
The resignations of Colin Watson and Russ Allberry from the panel come soon after senior developer Joey Hess resigned from the project altogether.
The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.4.5
We reveal how to install Ubuntu, the free open-source OS, on your laptop or PC
Want a small, low-power desktop computer that runs Ubuntu Linux, but don’t want to go through the hassle of installing and configuring the operating system yourself?
With Jolla have success with crowdfunding a tablet, it’s a good time to see if we can’t get some mid-range Ubuntu laptops for sale to consumers in the US. I’d like to get some idea if there is enough demand for a very open $500 Ubuntu laptop.
With Mint 17.1 Rebecca being days away from release, and Cinnamon 2.4 looking so good, here is an overview of some of the best looking themes which allow you to beautify your desktop.
The final version of Ubuntu MATE 14.04 LTS has been released and announced by Ubuntu MATE team few days ago, this release based-on Ubuntu 14.04 featuring MATE desktop environment 1.8. Unlike Ubuntu MATE 14.10 will supported for nine month, come with LTS version it will be support until 2019.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car, today announced that JVC KENWOOD Corporation, Linaro and OpenSynergy are joining The Linux Foundation and AGL to collaborate on the creation of an open automotive reference platform to accelerate rapid innovation and delivery of the connected car experience.
You’ve probably all seen those cheap, solar-powered lamps that you can stick into your garden to try and give it a classy bit of illumination during the night. If you’ve actually got one then you may have found out that they don’t shine very brightly and the plastic stakes can be very flimsy. So why not make your own version? What we’ll show you on this page is the beginning of an array of light-sensitive LEDs using a single LED, so that you can understand how the system works. We’ll use a special resistor called a light dependant resistor (LDR) or photoresistor that changes its resistance based on the levels of light it’s receiving.
AAXA’s Android-based M4 is claimed as “the world’s brightest battery powered projector,” with 400 lumens running on battery power, or 800 lumens plugged-in.
Samsung has long been known for offering many different models of smartphone, across a wide range of markets. But the company’s penchant for creating smartphone after smartphone has finally caught up with it as profits have plunged in the face of competition from lower-cost Android manufacturers on the low end, and Apple’s new iPhone 6 Plus phablet on the high end.
Samsung has hit some hard times, and now the company is restructuring its smartphone business to streamline operations and improve profitability. It will reduce the number of different smartphone models it offers by 30%.
People with Nexus 7 tablets say the latest major Android update – codenamed Lollipop – has slowed their slabs to a standstill. Google said today it is investigating the matter.
Rumors of Nokia's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Its lineup might seem empty now that it's relinquished control of its Lumia smartphones to a lumbering giant and gave up on those low-cost Asha devices earlier this year, but that doesn't mean the company's done crafting consumer gadgets just yet. Now Nokia's trying to revive its once-titanic consumer brand, starting with something a little... unorthodox. Meet the Nokia N1: a 7.9-inch Android tablet running some Nokia software that looks like a giant iPhone. It'll cost you $250 when it launches, but it's slated to land in China first in time for Chinese New Year (that's February 19, 2015) with a release in Russia to follow soon after.
Nokia has partnered with Foxconn to bring to market the first Nokia-branded, Android-powered device.
It runs an OS called Sailfish that can use Android apps as well its own native apps, and was created by a team with a bunch of senior Nokia refugees on it.
Jolla is a new tablet developed by a team of people who used to work for Nokia and it's powered by a Linux-driver operating system called Sailfish OS. The recently launched crowdfunding campaign has surpassed any expectations.
The Linux Foundation's OPNFV project won a significant endorsement this week from China-based ZTE Corporation, which stands to increase the global reach of the open source network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) initiative.
Based in Shenzen, China, ZTE is a major manufacturer of telecom...
How has the ELK stack emerged to become a leading open source data analysis platform?
Recently, I covered the news that Google has released Kubernetes under an open-source license, which is essentially a version of Borg, which harnesses computing power from data centers into a powerful virtual machine. It can make a difference for many cloud computing deployments, and optimizes usage of container technology. You can find the source code for Kubernetes on GitHub.
Get those proposals in: The Call for Papers for the 13th annual Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x, for those of you keeping score at home — ends in less than three weeks from today. Specifically, the CFP ends at midnight Pacific Standard Time on Dec. 10, but it doesn’t mean you have to wait until Dec. 9 to submit (even though many of you will…).
In preparation for the recently held OpenStack Summit in Paris, the OpenStack Foundation conducted one of its regular surveys of operators and application developers, who were asked to provide feedback on their experiences. These surveys have traditionally yielded a lot of good information, not just about OpenStack usage but what kinds of tools are being used in conjunction with the cloud computing platform.
If your office is like mine, you already have a lot of storage. Over the years, it's probably become quite a mix of storage-area networks (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS), and servers. More recently, your staff has started to use tablets, smartphones, and Chromebooks instead of PCs for work. A cloud would make sharing your files with your mobile staff much easier So, what's a CIO to do?
Splice Machine, which is building a scale-out database storage system for Hadoop that it said dwarfs traditional SQL database performance yet runs on commodity hardware, has now released version 1.0 of its relational database platform for big data.
Canonical claimed 20 million PCs had shipped from OEMs in 2013/2014 with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
Millions of open-source WordPress site owners received email notifications over the last 24 hours advising them of a site update. The new WordPress 4.0.1 update provides multiple security fixes and data-hardening improvements to help secure WordPress sites. The WordPress 4.0.1 update is the first incremental update for WordPress since the 4.0 release in September. The 4.0.1 update provides 23 bug fixes and an additional 8 security vulnerability fixes.
Today was another busy day in Linuxville. The results of the Debian general resolution on decoupling systemd are in and Phoronix.com is reporting that FreeBSD just received a million dollar donation. Joe Casad says TOR isn't as anonymous as users think and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols comments on the latest Top500 supercomputer list. Ubuntu 15.04 gets a projected release date and Sam Varghese interviews new SUSE owner head. Danny Stieben explains the differences between Unix and Linux and Jamie Watson test drives KaOS Linux.
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce it has received a $1,000,000 donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp. This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago, and serves as another example of someone using FreeBSD to great success and then giving back to the community. Find out more about Jan's reasons for donating below.
The FreeBSD has received their largest ever single donation: $1,000,000 USD.
The FreeBSD Foundation received the million dollar gift from Jan Koum, the CEO and co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging application that was acquired by Facebook earlier this year.
The FreeBSD project has received a massive $1 million (€800,000) donation from one of the WhatsApp co-founders, Jan Koum, and the developers are more than thrilled at the fact that they have secured their future, at least for a while.
There's a new version of LibreJS - version 6.0.6.
This is the first home wifi router on the planet that you can go out and purchase that ships only with software that respects your freedom.
The UK government has committed to a data standard which claims it will transform procurement in the UK and make government procurement contracts more transparent.
The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) will give governments the tools to open and share their procurement data. The UK will join Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia and Paraguay in committing to the standard.
There’s a lot of focus on Python for programming on the Raspberry Pi. Is this because it’s the only way to program the Raspberry Pi?
The Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP have female leaders and are anti-Trident, a symbol of their broad radicalism.
What makes a seemingly innocuous question like that noteworthy is the assumption that airstrikes are supposed to "work" in the first place.
Now, very few people read the full text of every story in any newspaper, so as an editor you have to ask yourself what a headline conveys on its own. I expect that most people who only read that headline assumed that the Palestinian referenced was an adult–and likely had a different reaction to the story as a result.
'There’s no way to get around the fact that oil and gas pipelines are dangerous and have exacted a devastating toll on people and wildlife,' attorney says
I asked a senior environmental journalist the other week what he thought was the single most under-reported environmental issue. He replied, unhesitatingly, wildlife poaching. “It’s as if the wildlife is just being hoovered out of Africa,” he said. “In the 1960s people campaigned around whales and wildlife. The Daily Mail actually put rhino poaching on their front page. But now there just doesn’t seem to be the same level of interest.” Dr Paula Kahumbu, a wildlife campaigner based in Kenya, echoes his sentiment, but adds that the UK public is still more active than most areas of the world. “Not a single African leader has spoken out on this,” says Kahumbu. “The silence is deafening.”
Though the claim is ubiquitous in business reporting, many readers still probably marvel that the financial crisis is long over, given that their own crisis is not–stagnant wages and reduced benefits being some of the ways the economy has been "reshaped."
But it's easy to feel that the Times' David Gelles thinks a rise in "mega-mergers" means just what his most prominent source, Mark Zandi from Moody's, says it does: "It reflects the economy, and it also portends better times ahead. Deals don't get done unless people feel pretty good about the future."
Ah, but which people, exactly? Does the fact that "CEOs are feeling pretty good about things" mean that the majority of US households–which rely on paychecks–should feel good too?
Here’s an obvious, yet poorly understood fact: a single social network could have a major influence on who gets to control our government in the future.
A recent research project claims it is possible for a well-funded and powerful entity such as a nation-state to identify up to 81% of people using the so-called TOR anonymity network. The technique relies on traffic analysis and depends on injecting a traffic pattern, such as an HTML file, then monitoring traffic at the exit node.
Ericsson Mobility Report finds no hiding place for technophobes, with 2.7bn mobile phones currently active
The US Senate voted against reining in the NSA's spying powers tonight, shooting down a proposal that was supported not just by intelligence reform groups, but by the director of the NSA himself.
Think you know how your local cops are spying on you? The ACLU of California’s “Making Smart Decisions About Surveillance: A Guide for Communities” is a new resource that can help you figure out what surveillance technology is being deployed in your community—and what you can do about it. And as we’ve pointed out, while we hope everyone continues to let Congress know that it’s time for real changes to spying by federal agencies, the use of surveillance techniques and technology by local law enforcement is an area ripe for grassroots organizing.
So, this evening the USA Freedom Act failed to get the 60 votes it needed for cloture to "advance" to a full floor vote. It ended up at 58 to 42. There was a short debate prior to the vote, and the debate was... stupid. Yes, there are some legitimate concerns with the USA Freedom Act, mostly in that it doesn't go far enough. But that's not what the debate was about at all. You had a bunch of bizarrely clueless Senators, many of whom insisted they were against the act because it would take the bulk collection out of the hands of the NSA and put it into the hands of the telcos -- with the claim being that the NSA could keep that data safer. Senators Susan Collins and Saxby Chambliss kept harping on that point. But it's flat out wrong. Because the whole point of this is that the telcos already have this data. The debate is between "telcos have the data" and "telcos and NSA have the data." Arguing that telcos-only is inherently more likely to lead to a privacy violation makes no sense at all.
Republicans and right-wing media are in panic mode. They've spent weeks describing President Obama as an "emperor" or a "monarch" for using his executive authority to grant a reprieve to some undocumented immigrants -- and are now faced with evidence that Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did the same thing.
The case of a Navy medical officer who refused to force-feed prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay prompted the country’s largest nursing organization on Wednesday to petition the Defense Department for leniency, citing professional ethical guidelines that support the officer’s decision.
A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.
Former Weld County sheriff’s deputy Tom Fallis was arrested on Tuesday on a charge that he allegedly murdered his wife on New Year’s Day 2012.
The Evans Police Department has reopened an investigation into the death of a 28-year-old woman after FOX31 Denver found evidence an Evans police detective misstated or omitted key evidence to disguise a murder as a suicide.
Three St. Paul police officers involved in the January arrest of a man — who recorded the incident and claimed he was being targeted because he was black — have been cleared of allegations that they used excessive force, police announced Friday.
But Christopher Lollie’s still angry, and he’s now suing the city and the three officers for stopping and arresting him without probable cause, for false imprisonment and for using excessive force.
There first consumer device is the Lantern, it acts as a receiver that is sent data from a satellite and the content is stored on it so you can access the information from you computers, similar to how a NAS device works. Websites that will be accessible from the device will be Project Gutenberg which hosts public domain book, Open Source Ecology which hosts designs for various items ranging from tractors to 3D printers, and Wikipedia. In addition to those will be news sites include Deutsche Welle.
If you’re a University of NSW student pirating stuff over uni Wi-Fi, and you’re not taking precautions like SSL or a VPN or something to hide your activities, the uni will fine you up to $1000 - ouch!
Lexi Alexander is one of a few Hollywood directors to have come out in support of file-sharers. While her opinions may not help her career, she believes that certain four letter acronyms are a bigger threat to the movie industry than the young brights minds previously jailed for file-sharing. Today we ask her why she decided to get involved in this heated discussion.