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Yes, you can run Windows 7, but only on hardware fit for Windows 10. In a stunning example of consensus-building, Microsoft has somehow persuaded the big names of silicon that it would be better for all concerned if they quietly euthanize Windows 7 and 8.1.

At the 14th annual Southern California Linux Expo (a.k.a., SCaLE 14x), Dru Lavigne will discuss common "gotchas" associated with creating and maintaining documentation, and she'll talk about available open source tools. She'll also provide an overview of Sphinx, an open source documentation generation system originally created for the new Python documentation.

The past year was a bustling year for Fedora. Fedora 22 and 23 were released, and with their releases, all of the different sub-projects of Fedora have been doing their share of contributing to the overall success of Fedora.

This year, SCaLE 14x attendees will have the opportunity to hear Anthony Chow speak on how to get started contributing to OpenStack. Anthony is network engineer with a passion for sharing and promoting technologies that enable community growth. He's currently working on Docker and OpenStack Magnum.

The combination of Google's Summer of Code program and students working on numerous KDE projects during it  has served as a long and successful tradition for KDE. KDE, being a big organization with a large community associated with it and hosting many projects of different facets provides a lot of opportunities for students to participate in this program and to contribute to an open-source project that they are interested in.

I had the chance to talk to Ticketmaster's Victor Gajendran who will be attending (and speaking) for the first time at SCaLE 14x this year, which is taking place on January 21 and 22 in Pasadena, California. He'll speak to attendees about how his company uses open source and how to empower your small teams to be part of a large, effective whole. Find out more about his talk, Lessons learned (the hard way) by doing DevOps at scale, in this interview. read more

Long-awaited CPU in build systems, SDN gear for now AMD is at last officially shipping its 64-bit ARM-based server chip, the Opteron A1100 aka Seattle. This wee beastie packs a load of networking and storage interfaces, and is seemingly eyeing up hyper-converged boxes in data centers.…

Hello, open gaming fans! In this week's edition, we take a look at Superpowers goes open source, Oculus Rift VR headset support for Linux, Interesting talks at upcoming GDC conference, and more. Open gaming roundup for January 9 - 15, 2016 read more

Wind River announced a “Helix Chassis” connected car software suite, featuring Linux-based “Cockpit,” VxWorks-based “Drive,” and cloud-based IoT functions. Intel software subsidiary Wind River has been busy developing its automotive oriented software for several years. The results of this process have ranged from safety critical, real-time control software based on its venerable VxWorks RTOS, to […]

Being a system administrator is all about understanding what's going on underneath the hood of the machines you maintain. What really happens when a service runs or a command is executed? One tool to help system administrators keep tabs on how programs are interfacing with the operating system beneath them is strace. read more

Schuyler St. Leger is one of the superheroes of the maker movement. He's a speaker, young maker, and was featured in Make magazine. His famous presentation, Why I love my 3-D Printer has received over 300,000 views on YouTube. read more

Like many others in my generation, I started out using computers with names like Apple II and Commodore 64 before moving on to Windows. I can still remember the Windows 3.1 that sat in my parents' house for years in high school. I then left computers alone for a while and decided to work on cars for a living, just as OBD II was becoming the standard.

Zero-day exploits are a hacker's best friend. They attack vulnerabilities in software that are unknown to the software maker and are therefore unpatched. Criminal hackers and intelligence agencies use zero day exploits to open a stealth door into your system, and because antivirus companies also don't know about them, the exploits can remain undetected for years before they're discovered. Until now, they've usually been uncovered only by chance.

In this week's Top 5 articles of the week, we highlight an interview with Bob Reselman about documentation best practices, the top 10 legal developments of last year in FOSS, two tutorials for Linux and music, and the results of our poll asking which Linux distro do you use?

This article explains how to set up a TLS enabled vsftpd server on a Debian 8 server. FTP is a very insecure protocol by default because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure.

The single largest group of users on high-performance computing clusters has to be the chemists. Their CPU-year count is definitely at the very top of the list. Because of this heavy use, several different packages have become standard tools that most computational chemistry researchers use.

If you're interested in improving your GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) skills and you'll be attending SCaLE 14x this month, you'll want to check out Akkana Peck's talk, Stupid GIMP tricks (and smart ones, too). Peck knows a thing or two about GIMP—she's the author of Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional. In her SCaLE 14x talk, Peck plans to answer the age-old questions, "How do you get rid of the ugly power lines in that landscape photo, and would it look better with a purple sky?" and "How do you take that picture of you and your ex and replace his face with Brad Pitt's?" In this interview, she shares three of her favorite GIMP tricks, and she explains how GIMP stacks up against Photoshop. read more

There’s nothing as jarring for a sysadmin as seeing this kind of message on a mailing list: This is the most serious bug you’ll hear about this week: the issues identified and fixed in OpenSSH are dubbed CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778.... Continue Reading →

Server hardening. The very words conjure up images of tempering soft steel into an unbreakable blade, or taking soft clay and firing it in a kiln, producing a hardened vessel that will last many years. Indeed, server hardening is very much like that.

Joins Google and Facebook in trying to grab market share. Chinese search-and-everything-else web giant Baidu has joined Google and Facebook in open-sourcing its artificial intelligence (AI) program in a bid to become a standard in an increasingly important market.