While I have long believed thin client computing is the way to go for most of us, Android/Linux took off on small cheap computers before GNU/Linux.
A student help desk was spun up at the same time. Laptops are prepared by a group of students for the whole school; one senior even created an imaging program that is now up on GitHub.
Good news for users of Chromebooks, the notebooks that run Google's net-centric Chrome OS: you can now run Linux right within a window instead of having to switch back and forth between the two operating systems.
François Beaufort, a Google employee, said this is possible through the downloadable Crouton extension for Chrome.
Acer kicked off its CES yesterday by announcing the $249 Chromebook 15, a new Chromebook laptop that — for now at least — is the biggest one you can buy. We just got our hands on it here in Las Vegas, and even at a glance it looks like there's fierce new competitor in the Chromebook market.
The advancement of the Linux kernel in 2014 was nothing short of fantastic! The kernel added so many new features and is now more than 19.1 million lines of code.
If the change gets merged into Kernel 3.20, the future Linux systems will not need to be rebooted after a kernel upgrade. This may not seem important for the regular users but due to the fact that the Linux powered servers are common widespread, this change would be quite an exciting and useful feature.
Going along with yesterday's X.Org Server Saw More Code In 2014 Than 2013, But Its Heydays Are Over article looking at X.Org development statistics for 2014, here's a look at the Wayland's development for last year.
For those getting back into Mesa/Gallium3D driver testing from Git following the holidays, Marek Olšák published another big set of patches this weekend.
MRescueKit is a free, live, bootable, minimal, fast, portable and open source computer operating system that brings you all the tools that you need to rescue a broken OS, recover lost files from damaged drives, as well as to backup your files or clean your system from malware and nasty viruses.
The distribution is derived from the latest version of the well-known 4MLinux operating system and comprises of four standalone distributions that are also based on the 4MLinux, including Antivirus Live CD, BakAndImgCD, 4MParted, as well as 4MRecover.
I failed to make a note of who submitted btag as a console-environment audio file tagger, and I apologize for that. I do try to give credit where and when it is due.
It seems that everyone has their little magic transcoding line for having Plex and Chromecast to play nice, as everyone runs an underpowered server that cannot do live transcoding.
I came across Salt while searching for an alternative to Puppet. I like puppet, but I am falling in love with Salt :). This maybe a personal opinion but I found Salt easier to configure and get started with as compared to Puppet. Another reason I like Salt is that it let’s you manage your server configurations from the command line, for example:
This will be really useful for testing out games on Linux and seeing exactly how good/bad they perform. Especially Unity games to see exactly how poor they can be on Linux.
I've played a little bit of it, and it seemed to work perfectly fine on Linux.
Nowadays, I try to use as many FOSS as possible. I have recently fully migrated to Linux which gives me an amazing work environment.
GNOME Internet Radio Locator (GIRL) version 1.0.0 ("Fenchurch") was released on January 3rd, 2015.
The first major 1.0.0 release is dedicated to the writings of the English writer, humorist and dramatist Douglas Adams.
The latest release of Makulu Linux has two major things going for it: first, it is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, rather than Debian, and second, it uses the Xfce desktop. Makulu seems to be doing a tour or rotation of desktops so perhaps having Xfce shouldn't be a surprise, anyway.
The Release Announcement / Release Notes give some interesting insight into the background and development of this release, as well as the major features of this release. As always with Makulu Linux, aesthetics was a major focus, and it includes loads of beautiful wallpapers, themes, icons and fonts. The other major focus was speed, thus the choice of Xfce for the desktop, and Firefox rather than Chrome, the synapse launcher rather than slingscold, and the inclusion or omission of various other packages.
Well, it's that fabulous time of year again. The time where we all have a few days in a row off work so we can concentrate on the things we really care about, like spending time with family. But after about an hour we all get pretty tired of that and get to work on Pentoo :-)
[...]
In addition to all the boot loader changes and the standard updates, we have switched metasploit live to using ruby 2.1. This change was not only important because ruby 1.9 support is ending soon, but because it was a near 600% increase in speed. Remember waiting 30+ seconds for msfconsole to load? Well, those days are gone.
Korora, an unofficial Fedora Remix distribution with tweaks and extras to make the system work out of the box and that aims to provide an improved user experience, has been upgraded to version 21 Beta.
It has been just over a year since I last reviewed Xubuntu, so this review is well overdue.
Xubuntu has been one of my favourite distributions for a long time and for a number of very good reasons.
Xubuntu comes with the XFCE desktop environment which means that it is lightweight and highly customisable.
What I also like about Xubuntu over some of the other XFCE based distributions is that it doesn't overload you with applications. You get just enough to cover the bases but it is then up to you to install what is important for your needs.
Drive CX, the display one, is powered by Nvidia's Maxwell architecture and supports "every major OS in the world" — which for the world of cars includes QNX, Linux, and Android. Basically, it's a small computer inside your car capable of processing 16.6 megapixels across multiple screens. In Huang's automotive vision, everything can be a display. Smart mirrors? Check. Displays in the car's pillars? Check. Head rests? Of course — put a screen on it!
If you look at Samsung’s marketing, they are definitely ready to do battle at CES next week over their Smart TVs or should I proudly say Tizen Smart TVs. The are introducing their new S’UHD TVs (S for Samsung?) as the “Most Seductive TV of all time. PERIOD“. This is a bold statement to make indeed as we know that there are some highly seductive TVs already from the world of LG and Sony, to name a couple.
By buying a stake in Vuzix, however, Intel is also getting involved in the enterprise side of wearables — an area where functionality trumps stylishness. Vuzix’s flagship M100 smart glasses may have been fairly rudimentary when we tried them out last year, but that hasn't stopped the company securing a deal with Lenovo to sell the devices to industrial and commercial markets in China. Vuzix says it's also targeting the medical, retail, and materials management sectors, claiming that companies can use the M100’s internet-connected display to give workers "unprecedented access to information, data collection and more." Google is trying to crack the same markets with its Glass at Work scheme, developing the software that will help Glass connect to real workplace scenarios.
Nokia recently unveiled a snazzy new Android tablet that looked suspiciously like the iPad mini. Now, Chinese company Onda has done one better with a dual-booting iPad Air knockoff that offers high-end specs at competitive price.
2014 has drawn to a close, or just about, but 2015 has yet to get going. In fact, as of writing, nobody has announced their next latest and greatest. We’re still waiting for Mobile World Congress, which won’t be until a little later in the year to see what Sony, Samsung and HTC have to offer. Right now though, we have a list of smartphones that many of you might have picked up towards the end of 2014, perhaps in Black Friday sales, perhaps through upgrades. Either way, here’s our pick of the best Android smartphones for January 2015.
CES 2015 is just about here. It’s the first big trade show of the new year. While the actual show floor opens up on Tuesday January 6th, we’ll start seeing announcements flooding in as early as tomorrow. Yep, companies are always looking to get their products announced ahead of their competitors, and every year it happens earlier and earlier. We will be at CES this year, we’re sending Nick to cover the entire thing by himself. And no that’s not a punishment.
It's entirely possible to find the nearest pizza restaurant using Google Maps. Or Yelp. Or even just searching in the browser of your choice. But why would you go to all that trouble when something like Pizza Compass exists? It's both a compass that uses pizza as its needle, and a compass that points you to pizza. It's deep, man. So deep it's overflowing with pepperoni and onions like a Chicago pie. I really wish I hadn't eaten before I started writing this post.
While Apple CarPlay and Android Auto promise to make your car's in-dash system infinitely more bearable in the not so distant future, you're still stuck in the unfortunate position of having to choose between one or the other. Not so Parrot's whimsically named RNB6, which lets you go both ways. Oh, and it has a dash cam built right in.
In November 2014, Google rolled out Android 5.0 Lollipop to Nexus users but it created several bugs. The bug fix updates Android 5.0.1 and Android 5.0.2 Lollipop resolved some issues but there are still errors that remain that can be addressed manually.
At the end of the last year, Google released an Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update to Nexus 7 2012 users. That update delivers some crucial fixes though the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update situation is still extremely murky. Here, we breakdown what we know about the situation and take a look at what Nexus users in general need to know about the most current version of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
XDA developer, HolyAngel has released an update to his SkyDragon Google Play Edition ROM to version 4.2.1, which is based on stock Android 5.0.1 update, base firmware 3.11.1700.2 and updated to kernel version 3.0.4.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop update continues to make significant progress and the highly anticipated update is now available in two brand new regions ahead of the U.S. Galaxy S5 Android 5.0 Lollipop release that appears set to begin sometime this month.
Getting exposure right when using ND filters can be tricky, unless you enlist the help of NDFilter. This open source app for Android makes it possible to calculate the correct shutter speed for the given ND filter with consummate ease.
Large projects such as Linux and GIMP demand constant development, to keep up with the ever changing face of technology if for no other reason. If the decision were made tomorrow to pause development on Linux for a few years and just fix bugs and work on security issues, in rapid time Linux would begin to lose its dominance in the enterprise. After two years sans development, the operating system would already be well down the road to obsolescence and almost hopelessly behind. The same would be true of GIMP, even as it continues to gain ground on Photoshop.
You've been using open source software for a while, and now you want to give back to the community. Even with solid advice, you're probably finding that it's difficult to sift through all of the projects out there to find one that's right for you.
To help, I've put together a list of five open source projects that you should consider joining in 2015. Many of them may not be the highest profile projects out there, but they do offer some interesting challenges. And helping them is a great way to give back to the community.
Studios today are remaking everything, slapping on a new coat of paint and reselling you the same experience - but better - for largely the original price. Resident Evil has had how many remakes already? But, for some fans, the studios aren’t focusing on the correct titles and they remake the game themselves.
Google's Duncan Laurie converted "WTM2" motherboard in Coreboot to having Broadwell SoC support. WTM2 is short for Whitetip Mountain 2 and is Intel's codename for one of their consumer reference board (CRB) designs, which is what's sampled and tested by Intel's partners such as Google.
Prior to 2014, Docker was not well-known, but that all changed over the course of the year. The open-source Docker container virtualization project got its start in March 2013, and in 2014 hit its full stride, achieving its 1.0 release milestone and the embrace of many of the world's leading IT vendors.
By leveraging open source software and establishing best practices to protect this data at an ongoing rate, these agencies can take a cue from the private sector and enjoy a sense of trust in the way they store and collaborate on private data.
Today, it is almost impossible to name a major player in IT that has not embraced open source. Only a few short years ago, many would have argued we would never see that day. Many of us remember the now infamous “Halloween Documents,” the classic quote from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer describing Linux as a “cancer,” and comments made by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, saying, “So certainly we think of [Linux] as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market. But I really do not think in the commercial market, we’ll see it [compete with Windows] in any significant way.”
Producing the barcode itself is trivial in Inkscape -- the leading Free/Open Source Software vector drawing application -- ever since the extension became part of the standard distribution, with version 0.46. The current version supports several kinds of barcodes, including the UPC and EAN types.
With its Firefox browser rapidly losing share, and its financial ties to Google finished, the Mozilla Foundation finds itself facing the most pivotal moment in its history since its founding more than a decade ago.
“We’re utterly confident in our stability and viability going forward,” Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in a recent interview with Stephen Shankland of Cnet.
But just because the foundation can continue, does that mean it should?
I think there is still an essential role on the web for a non-profit organization that can develop services that may not generate big profits, but where it would be valuable to have a more neutral player.
But at the same time, at this moment, it’s difficult to say what Mozilla is doing that is so essential to the world.
Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
At a steady clip, database-as-a-service functionality has been emerging as an important component of the evolution of the OpenStack cloud computing platform. When the OpenStack Icehouse version arrived in April of last year, the Trove database-as-a-service project was one of the under-the-hood offerings. And since then, OpenStack releases have featured significatnly improved versions of Trove.
As 2014 ended, there were many eloquent summaries of the state of open source and the state of cloud computing, but one of the most focused ones came from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. In an online post that was fresh on the heels of a knockout financial quarter for Red Hat, Whitehurst lauded the fact that open source technology is now pervasive, and provided glimpses of how his company is gaining momentum with its cloud efforts.
“Today, it is almost impossible to name a major player in IT that has not embraced open source,” Whitehurst said. “Only a few short years ago, many would have argued we would never see that day.”
The firm already has a prototype that’s in the hands of early customers with plans to go public in 2015, The Register has learned.
The move follows delivery of an ACID-compliant graph database for use with FoundationDB’s existing NoSQL engine.
The document database, like FoundationDB’s graph store, would run on top of the company’s recently upgraded key-value store engine. If it is successful, FoundationDB could succeed in throwing up another bridge between the once-separate worlds of NoSQL and relational databases.
The LLVM project had a great 2014 with a ton of new developers and contributions to the compiler infrastructure and its Clang C/C++ compiler front-end.
In 2014 there were the releases of LLVM 3.4 in January of last year, LLVM 3.5 mid-year, and now LLVM 3.6 is being readied for release in the weeks ahead.
I am glad to announce the release of version 6.2.0 of GNU Chess. GNU Chess is a chess-playing program. It can be used to play chess against the computer on a terminal or, more commonly, as a chess engine for graphical chess frontends.
Before getting too excited over this latest GNU project, it will likely only be relevant to a few Phoronix readers as it's a highly scientific. The GNU Nano-Archimedes project page describes the software, "GNU nano-archimedes is a Technology Computer Aided Design tool (TCAD) for the simulation of various technology relevant situtations involving the dynamics of electrons such as the transport in nanometer scale semiconductor devices (nanodevices) and time-dependent many-body problems coming from, for example, quantum chemistry and/or atomic physics. It is based on the Wigner equation, a convenient formulation of quantum mechanics in terms of a phase-space (completely equivalent to the Schroedinger equation), and the density functional theory (DFT). It is also able to deal with time-dependent ab-initio many-body simulations."
If you're not into all of the modern, resource-intensive Linux games or just prefer something more skillful, GNU Chess has been updated for some terminal gaming action.
A number of new monitors that support AMD FreeSync are being shown off this week at CES. FreeSync is AMD's method of matching the monitor's variable refresh rate to that of the graphics card that is similar to the now VESA-approved DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync.
OP Pohjola customers outside Finland are still facing difficulties logging in to the company’s online banking platform, as a cyber attack stretched into a sixth day. Danske Bank’s services were also down on Monday, but it was unclear whether or not that was due to a denial of service attack.
That North Korea was responsible for the Sony hack is the most improbable bit of US propaganda of 2014. There is ample forensic evidence that the hack was an inside job, while the evidence that it was North Korea is … secret. Not one of my myriad contacts who are present or retired security service officers believe it. But geek stuff aside, there are many adjectives that apply to the North Korean regime, most of them unpleasant. Sophisticated is not one of them.
Policing the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over two years in order to prevent a possible Julian Assange escape has already cost the British taxpayers over €£9 million, and the bill keeps growing.
The estimated direct cost of policing outside the Knightsbridge building for WikiLeaks founder that took asylum there in June 2012 runs to €£11,000 per day.
Of all the problems Sir David Attenborough has witnessed throughout the natural world, he sees none so pressing as the one facing our own species, which he believes could die out if we don't tackle booming populations.
Himself a patron of Population Matters, a UK charity advocating sustainable human populations, Attenborough believes more women around the world urgently need to be given political control of their bodies.
"It's desperately difficult, the dangers are apparent to anybody," he told The Independent.
"We can't go on increasing at the rate human beings are increasing forever because the Earth is finite and you can't put infinity into something that is finite.
The battle for the rights of animals is not only about animals. It is about us. Once we desanctify animals we desanctify all life. And once life is desanctified the industrial machines of death, and the drone-like bureaucrats, sadists and profiteers who operate them, carry out human carnage as easily as animal carnage. There is a direct link between our industrial slaughterhouses for animals and our industrial weapons used on the battlefields in the Middle East.
The recent passage by Congress of new legislation favourable to loosening controls on risky Wall Street trading is just the most recent example of the consolidation of plutocratic power in Washington. The new rules, written largely by Citibank lobbyists and embraced by the Obama administration, allow large banks to continue using depositors’ money for high-risk investments, the very pattern that helped create the 2008 financial crisis.
This move was supported largely by the establishment in each party. Opposition came from two very different groups: the Tea Party Republicans, who largely represent the views of Main Street businesses, and a residue of old-line progressive social democrats, led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Conservative media personalities have long ignored the public's overwhelming support for wider access to birth control, instead pushing long debunked myths that birth control is cheap and easy to access, is only about preventing pregnancies, and can cause abortion.
"Selma," the new biopic of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., offers a snapshot into the civil rights leader's time in Selma, Alabama, as he led a march through hostile territory to pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson into promoting the Voting Rights Act.
On New Year's Eve, Christian Jose Gomez allegedly attacked his mother with an ax. Angry that she had been "nagging" him about moving some boxes up to the attic, Gomez beheaded Maria Suarez-Cassagne in the family's garage and tried to stuff her headless body into a garbage can, according to investigators. When he couldn't do that, he fled the home on his bike and was soon captured by local deputies in Oldsmar, Florida. Gomez calmly confessed to the crime and said he'd been planning it for days.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors without Borders, is an organization that saves lives in war-torn and underdeveloped regions, providing health care and training in over 70 different countries. MSF saves lives. Yet, nobody thinks that doctors can “solve” healthcare. It’s widely understood that healthcare is a social issue, and universal health care can not be achieved by either the voluntary work of Doctors or by way of donations and charity alone.
Late 2014, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced a small software utility called “Let’s Encrypt”, aimed at website administrators. It reduces the time and skill required to encrypt a website from three hours and much Googling to twenty seconds and one command. That initiative is more important than just being another random utility.
Still reeling from combat injuries, Mike Helms opened the letter from the Pentagon, afraid of more bad news.
Military doctors had already told him he couldn’t get treatment for a head injury he’d sustained in a blast in Iraq. After the intelligence officer complained to Congress, he was fired.
But reading the notice, Helms realized it was the best outcome he could have hoped for: Investigators had concluded the military had illegally retaliated against him for blowing the whistle.
A rapist and murderer is to be put to death in Belgium this week, despite Europe’s ban on the death penalty, after a court granted him the right to euthanasia.
Frank Van Den Bleeken, 52, is not physically ill but claims his “psychological suffering” is unbearable and that he would prefer to die than spend more of his life behind bars.
Airport security is a farce. And yes, we laughed at your nude body scans.
The shadowy Court of Protection's treatment of a 72-year-old grandmother is a national scandal, says Christopher Booker
TELLY ON DEMAND OUTFIT Netflix has been accused of jumping when the copyright cartels say 'jump' and of blocking overseas users from watching international content via a virtual private network (VPN).
Torrentfreak is first with the news about the Netflix action, reporting that the subscription streamer is acting because the industry that feeds it, the entertainment business, wants total control over who sees and views its content and where.
We asked Netflix to comment and it told us that it has not recently made any new efforts in the direction of VPNs.
The marble façade of the U.S. Supreme Court building proclaims a high ideal: “Equal Justice Under Law.”
But inside, an elite cadre of lawyers has emerged as first among equals, giving their clients a disproportionate chance to influence the law of the land.
A Reuters examination of nine years of cases shows that 66 of the 17,000 lawyers who petitioned the Supreme Court succeeded at getting their clients’ appeals heard at a remarkable rate. Their appeals were at least six times more likely to be accepted by the court than were all others filed by private lawyers during that period.
The lawyers are the most influential members of one of the most powerful specialties in America: the business of practicing before the Supreme Court. None of these lawyers is a household name. But many are familiar to the nine justices. That’s because about half worked for justices past or present, and some socialize with them.
All around the world today people are celebrating the works that enter the public domain. But there’s not much to celebrate in Australia, where nothing will enter the public domain for another 10 years.
Strangely unreported by mainstream media, there is a major revision of the copyright monopoly underway in the European Union. And the person in charge, Julia Reda, is a Pirate Party representative. The tide is turning.
A controversial ruling would give trade courts new power over the web, and a frightening new weapon against piracy