Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

Linux has come a long way in its short life, and it's more reliable and stable than ever. But things still go wrong, and you can diagnose and fix just about anything. Compositing window managers are a huge step forward in making graphical environments more stable. But sometimes your nice Linux graphical desktop still locks up, and then what do you do? Drop to a console is what you do, by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 on your keyboard. This takes you to a console that is independent of your graphical environment

CompuLab unveiled two Linux-friendly, x86 based surveillance oriented mini-PCs: the Fit-CCTV supports 16 analog cameras, and the Fit-PoE supports four PoE-fueled IP cameras. In September, CompuLab announced the first four customized versions of its x86-based, 16 x 19 x 4cm Fit-PC and more powerful Intense PC mini-PCs. The fanless computers, which support 40 to 70°C […]

When the US Federal government shutdown from October 1 - 16 this year, a small Drupal shop in the Washington DC area turned a list of freelance gigs for furloughed employees in a Google doc into a website in five hours. Unfurlough.us went live at 1:00 am EST on October 4, accumulating 50,000 page views in a little over a week.

The KDE Calligra fork of KOffice is eyeing its 2.8 release and with it will come several new features. Calligra 2.8 final is expected in January but out today is the first beta...

InHand Electronics announced the Hydra-F6, a customizable, MIL-SPEC ruggedized, 7-inch, WSVGA tablet that runs Android 4.2 on a Freescale i.MX6 SoC. InHand’s Hydra-F6 tablet is built around its Fury-F6 embedded board for the dual- and quad-core models and its similar Siren-F6 for the single-core version of the Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6. Announced in August, the 2.5 […]

Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 has shipped, here come the derivatives, with both Oracle and CentOS releasing new versions of their respective Red Hat–alike Linux distros.

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News

3.13-rc2 has been released on November 29th. This release candidate includes several small bug fixes. Please read the 3.13-rc2 release announcement.

The latest iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (6.5) is now available, and it's a serious contender to usurp all other platforms as king of the enterprise space. This particular release was designed specifically to simplify the operation of mission-critical SAP applications. The new release focuses on key enterprise-specific areas, including:

ZaReason's latest incarnation of their Android tablet, the ZaTab ZT2, is a sturdy little chunky monkey.

The nice folks at Usenix clued me in to this-- enter your email address(es) to see if you have any compromised accounts. The information is compiled from public records, and I can't promise that it's complete, but it should be useful. Adobe is the latest big breach, and it has information on several others including Stratfor and Yahoo.

Nowadays we see beautiful design everywhere in our daily life. The digital world is no exception. Many of the websites we visit and the desktop and mobile apps that we use started to be so beautifully designed, that user perceptions on design started to change. As a result, everybody is becoming more design savvy. Users who didn’t care about contrast, button color or responsiveness in the past now critique companies whenever they make a user interface or experience update. Do you remember the user reaction after several Digg re-designs? Why don’t you use GIMP over Photoshop even though as an average user you won’t need most the extras Photoshop has? There are hundreds of other examples where you will see design and user experience having a great impact on product adoption rates and continuity. Open source software always has the advantage of offering a free alternative to mainstream solutions, but it doesn’t guarantee user adoption.

But that's not the most interesting way to use kexec. If you can load arbitrary code into the kernel, you can load anything. Including, say, the Windows kernel. ReactOS provides a bootloader that's able to boot the Windows 2003 kernel, and it shouldn't be too difficult for a sufficiently enterprising individual to work out how to get Windows 8 booting. Things are a little trickier on UEFI - you need to tell the firmware which virtual?physical map to use, and you can only do it once. If Linux has already done that, it's going to be difficult to set up a different map for Windows. Thankfully, there's an easy workaround. Just boot with the "noefi" kernel argument and the kernel will skip UEFI setup, letting you set up your own map.

Why would you want to do this? The most obvious reason is avoiding Secure Boot restrictions

This release introduces the video metadata support added by Abhinav Badola for GSoC 2012, and lots of makernote updates, especially added lenses. This is also the first release that includes the (still experimental) CMake build files. (Video metadata support means that Digikam will be able to manage video files -- ed.)

Most of us would agree that the NSA has spread its nets too far and cut deeply into our personal privacy. Ultimately, and perhaps ironically, I am hopeful this transgression will leave us with better protection for our personal communication than ever before.

Linux Mint 16 "Petra", based on Ubuntu 13.10, was released recently and is available as usual in two editions: MATE and Cinnamon. Let's take a look at what's new.

A little old but still good-- Juliet Kemp writes an excellent Android coding for beginners series. "CyanogenMod offers a customised open-source firmware version of Android for a variety of phone and tablet hardware. It provides some features not available in the vendor-supplied firmwares, it's more customisable (if you want, you can build CyanogenMod for yourself), and it allows you to avoid the bloatware that comes with vendor firmware. It also tends to give quicker access to updates. There are a few more reasons, too, why you might want to try CyanogenMod; for me, the opportunity to lose a particularly annoying piece of proprietory software on my Galaxy S2 was a big gain."

Whether or not desktop 3D printing is the forerunner of the "third industrial revolution," as Jeremy Rifkin and Chris Anderson have suggested, it's definitely one of the hottest tech trends around. Open source DIY hacker engineers, artists, and craft designers have led the surge on the low end while higher-end models are already being used in rapid prototyping and short-run, custom manufacturing.

Linux has not received much attention from the major gaming houses, even though it seems a natural fit as a robust gaming platform, so the announcement of the Steam for Linux beta last December generated a lot of interest. A Linux game port can be done in one of two ways. The first way is to use the operating system's own resources and to make allowance for a variety of versions and functinally equivalent applications. The second way is to recreate the norms of another operating system and require specific applications and versions. Despite the client being available as a .DEB package, Valve's Steam beta for Linux generally opts for the second approach, making it less promising than it might have been.

One of the really neat features of coding for a portable platform like a phone is that you can use its motion sensors to control the UI. How useful this is in a particular app varies from "neat gimmick" to "UI perfection" -- admittedly the example here is more on the "gimmick" end of the spectrum, but it'll get you started with using the Android motion sensors. We'll carry on using the code from the previous three tutorials, but this time, we're going to add a detector which enables you to start the timer by shaking the phone.

And now we come to my favorite part of this series, high-end Linux audio production. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: stable, efficient, and you don't get gouged for software licenses. You have to be careful to select audio hardware that is well-supported on Linux, but this is less of a problem than it used to be.