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Cobbler simplifies system provisioning by centralizing the tasks that are involved in setting up and administering an installation server. This article discusses some of Cobbler's features, how to install it, and how to create a configuration suitable for automatically installing multiple client machines.

The Lima driver is slowly but surely progressing for supporting ARM Mali graphics hardware in an open-source world. A Mesa driver has been started, their demo code can be faster than the binary driver, user-space memory management is being tackled, and evidently the management at ARM Holdings isn't too happy...

The Tiny Parallel Proportion Scheduler (TPPS) is a new I/O scheduler for Linux to appear on the kernel mailing list. Robin Dong explains in his mailing list announcement for this new I/O scheduler to use cgroup on high-speed devices., "We want to use blkio.cgroup on high-speed device (like fusionio) for our mysql clusters. After testing different io-scheduler, we found that cfq is too slow and deadline can't run on cgroup. So we developed a new io-scheduler: tpps (Tiny Parallel Proportion Scheduler).It dispatches requests only by using their individual weight and total weight (proportion) therefore it's simple and efficient."

Version 1.1.1 of GStreamer Core and Plugins have been released, which provide new features and plug-ins for this important open-source multimedia framework. Since GStreamer 1.0 included new plug-ins include Microsoft Smooth Streaming (mssdemux), DASH adaptive streaming (dashmdemux), Bluetooth device interaction via the bluez plug-in, JPEG2000 encoding/decoding via the openjpeg plug-in, and other yadif, srtp, sbc, fluidsynth, midiparse, mfc, ivtv, accuraterip, and audiofxbad plug-ins.

When your data and work grow, and you still want to produce results in a timely manner, you start to think big. Your one beefy server reaches its limits. You need a way to spread your work across many computers. You truly need to scale out.

Android is a lot more free than iOS, but there are limits. We need to break through those. At its birth, Android was the horizontal and open solution to the problem of Apple's vertical and closed silo. On Android, hardware makers and software writers could build devices and apps, free to operate outside the walls of any vendor's closed garden.

On June 4th, the 4.1.0 release of the Apache CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform arrived. This is the first major CloudStack release since its March 20th graduation from the Apache Incubator. This release includes numerous new features and bug fixes from the 4.0.x cycle. It also includes major changes in the codebase to make CloudStack easier for developers; a new structure for creating RPM/Debian packages; and completes the changeover to using Maven, the Apache software project management tool.

ARM announced a 28nm-fabricated Cortex-A12 processor design claimed to offer 40 percent higher performance than the Cortex-A9, while drawing the same power. The Cortex-A12 is paired with a power-efficient Mali-T622 GPU and Mali-V500 video coprocessor, and supports hybrid Big.Little SoC configurations in partnership with the Cortex-A7. Billed as a successor to the popular Cortex-A9 processor, the similarly ARMv7 Cortex-A12 design advances to a 28nm process that offers 40 percent faster performance in the same power envelope, claims ARM.

Inside Secure announced that its Linux- and Android-ready SafeZone Encryption Toolkit has achieved U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) FIPS 140-2 certification. SafeZone, which is integrated within Inside Secure's MatrixDAR and QuickSec VPN Client for Android products, now secures data in transit over SSL/DTLS and IPSEC, as well as "data at rest" on Android devices.

Insyde Software announced a development platform for deploying Android on Intel x86 reference platforms. “Software Platform for Android” offers production-ready software components built around Insyde’s UEFI Secure Boot technology and “Humanos” version of Android, and provides a variety of Android tools, as well as customization and testing services.

The Western world's smartphone market has devolved into a duopoly of Apple's iOS and Google's Android. In the rest of the world, however, the mobile story has yet to be written... and this is where Mozilla hopes users will embrace its mobile operating system, Firefox OS. The browser-maker wants Firefox OS to be the gateway drug to the wider Mozilla software platform for the web's next billion users.

While there's OpenCL drivers available for Linux, on Ubuntu there is no OpenCL driver shipped by default and the proprietary driver implementations aren't always great. Intel has their closed-source OpenCL SDK for the CPU, AMD has their OpenCL support in the Catalyst driver, and NVIDIA has their OpenCL/CUDA support bundled within their binary driver. When it comes to open-source support, the Gallium3D OpenCL support is still primitive and isn't shipped by default. Intel has the Beignet project for open-source OpenCL but that's even worse off than the Gallium3D OpenCL support.

The fourth release candidate to the Linux 3.10 kernel is now available. Last week Linus Torvalds was upset with 3.10-rc3 being so large, but now he's happier that this new kernel is smaller in size than its predecessor. The work found in Linux 3.10-rc4 is the usual assortment of bug fixes across the driver and architecture subsystems in particular.

Dozens of computer scientists urged an appeals court today to block the copyright claims over application programming interfaces (APIs) in the Oracle v. Google court battle, arguing that APIs that are open are critical to innovation and interoperability in computers and computer systems.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Digikam adds video properties search in Advanced Search tool; Okular better supports annotations in rotated pages; In KDE Workspace, sorting of tasks is possible by activity; the KDE Classic cursor theme becomes an image-based theme; Easier drag and drop of items in Dolphin Places; Network Management shows connection details; Skrooge adds a possibility to open report from dashboard widgets.

The announcement of the students accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) 2013 opens a new chapter in KDE contribution. KDE has participated in GSoC since its first season in 2005. Every year is special and exciting for both the students and the KDE Community. Outstanding students get to try their hands at real world programming, some for the first time and some as experts. They have the experience of working in a free software community, being part of a top technical team.

The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn't infringe on the design of the Apple iPad, according to reports. Although Apple does hold a European design patent, the Court has limited the applicability of the patent based on prior art. The iPad has predecessors, such as a Knight Ridder concept tablet dating back well over a decade before Apple's product was released. The iPad may have a "unique character," the court adds, but the Galaxy Tab is sufficiently different that an informed person can tell.

The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.8.1. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.8.0 relative to previous releases of GCC.

Back in 2010, champions of a free web were ecstatic over Google's plan to seed the internet with a patent-free video. VP8 was going to crush the patent-heavy H.264, now celebrating its 10th birthday. Or so we were told. In May of 2010, Google open-sourced VP8, the video compression codec component to the audio-visual WebM format, which it had bought and developed earlier that year, and threw open the WebM Project to all comers.

Higher Ed’s in trouble, in case you hadn’t heard. Burdened by runaway costs, unsustainable infrastructure, outrage over tuition increases, declining public dollars, and outmoded degree programs, colleges and universities are struggling to satisfy the needs of their current patrons, let alone cater to a global student population that is expected to double by 2025. Built right into a university’s DNA, however, is the key to its evolution and, ultimately, its survival: the sharing of knowledge, the sharing of resources, and the sharing of power.