Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It appears we have a new price/performance standout in the open source single board computer game. Longmont, Colorado based LinkSprite Technologies, which hosts the open source project for Allwinner-based pcDuino SBCs, has just announced a $39 board with a set of features that would typically go for about $60. The pcDuino3Nano offers the same dual-core, 1GHz Cortex-A7 system-on-chip and all the other features of the $77 pcDuino3 SBC except for the LVDS interface, I2S stereo digital audio output, and built-in WiFi. It also adds a second USB 2.0 host port, and upgrades the LAN interface from 10/100 to 10/100/1000 Ethernet.

If you read Opensource.com’s recent series of articles by young professionals about their exposure to the open source way, you’ll have noticed a common thread: open source is an essential part of IT education. But not enough schools are incorporating open source into their curricula.

From Trolltech to Nokia and Nokia to Digia, the programming language Qt has had a challenging corporate life even though it retained fans among developers. Now, the language's next phase of life has begun in earnest, spun out of Digia into a separate subsidiary tasked with bringing the commercial and open source Qts back into alignment.

Online learning is becoming more prevalent, which means educators need easy to use tools for creating online learning materials. There are several closed source, commercial programs available (e.g., Adobe's Captivate), but these programs are expensive (even at academic discount prices) and are sometimes too complex for educators who just want to quickly and easily create a learning object. An excellent, easy to use, open source alternative is Xerte, a learning object creation tool developed by the University of Nottingham.

Secure OpenVPN with two-factor authentication from WiKID. In a previous tutorial, we showed how to configure PAM-RADIUS to support two-factor authentication. Now, and in future tutorials, we will add remote access services to this server that will also use WiKID for two-factor authentication. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to leverage that setup to add two-factor authentication through radius to OpenVPN on Centos 7.

I am a visual learner. When I try to teach something, I naturally like to use visual examples. That usually involves me working for hours to create flowcharts in Google Docs using the drawing program. Yes, it works, but it's a very cumbersome way to create a flowchart. Thankfully, I recently discovered Lucidchart.

There is a long list of sites powered by Open edX, a platform hoping to be powerful and extensible enough that education experts can use it not only to run courses, but to try out new ideas for how to educate online. See the full list on GitHub. In this interview, I spoke with Ned Batchelder of Open edX about his team (photo below, Ned is in blue) who he says are working to make the platform "the best place to experiment with new ideas, and then share those ideas with other educators who can build on them and make their own improvements." Let's see how they're looking to reach that goal today.

I am very proud to belong to a generation of professionals who has seen the emergence of free and open software and the revolution it is today.

Data.gov has taken open source to heart. Beyond just providing open data and open source code, the entire process involves open civic engagement. All team ideas, public interactions, and new ideas (from any interaction) are cross-posted and entered in Github. These are tracked openly and completed to milestones for full transparency. We also recently redesigned the website at Data.gov through usability testing and open engagement on Github. read more

LXer Feature: 14-Sept-2014

The big story this past week had to do with Net Neutrality. Google once in partnership with Verizon and essentially against it have now changed their minds and Larry Cafiero told us why many sites participated in a "Internet Slowdown" in protest to the coming throttles to our access speed to it on Wednesday. Carla Schroder shows us how to build a Linux Server and 30 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu. Enjoy!

Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack provider, today announced the launch of Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0. The on-demand offering now enables enterprises to deploy the most current OpenStack edition, OpenStack Icehouse, in a robust, easy-to-use, enterprise-grade cloud service.

Ever wondered how you can actually use the GPIO pins on the Pi? We explain exactly what they are and how to use them. One of the things you may have noticed about the Raspberry Pi Model B+ is an increase in GPIO ports. These pins lining the side of the Raspberry Pi may be mysterious to some but they open up a world of physical interactions with the Raspberry Pi that you couldn’t do before.

The Readers' Choice issue is just around the corner, and we want to give everyone a chance to nominate their favorites before the vote. Have you stumbled across the most amazing game ever in 2014? Are you an Android developer that created the equivalent of digital sliced bread? Did you order a Linux-powered Borg implant on eBay, and think we all should be assimilated?

Intrinsyc debuted an SODIMM-style COM with up to 3GB RAM and 64GB flash, running Android 4.4 on a quad-core 2.5GHz Snapdragon 805, and a Mini-ITX baseboard. If you’d like to design with the same high-powered ARM Cortex-A15 silicon found in the latest Android smartphones and tablets, Intrinsyc Technologies has the board combo for you. Like its Mobile Development Platform Tablet (MDP/T) reference design released earlier this year, the $219 Open-Q 8084 System-on-Module (SOM) and $449 Development Kit build on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805. The Snapdragon 805 combines four Cortex-A15-like Krait 450 cores clocked at 2.5GHz with an Adreno 420 GPU claimed to be 40 percent faster than the previous Adreno 330.

In the wake of the celebrity photo breach, the media is humming with stories disparaging the safety of the cloud. Many longtime cloud critics are crowing, "I told you so!" and waiting for the world to go back to on-premises solutions only. News flash: 1) the cloud was never touted as being perfectly secure and 2) the cloud will continue to grow and grow. The number of servers in your physical environment will shrink over time. Security doesn't sell solutions -- features and pricing do. Features are cheaper in the cloud.

In the cloud world, the mantra is "automate everything." It's no surprise that as OpenStack expands its scope, automation projects are emerging within it. But, the variety and the sheer number of these projects is still surprising: there are over twenty!

Over the previous few months, since I wrote about Gibbon earlier this year on Opensource.com, visits to the Gibbon website have increased 1,000%, with visitors coming from over 70 countries around the world. The extra visits have lead to more downloads, with a current total of 80 Gibbon installations—a flexible, open, and functional school system—in various stages of testing. While still only in full, active use in two schools, with a third coming online in August, Gibbon is now being actively considered and assessed by a number of schools and institutions, including the UN Relief and Works Agency.

Drupal is a powerful and flexible open source content management system that powers a large number of sites on the Internet. Drupal's flexibility means that sites built with Drupal can vary widely in form and function. In most cases, this flexibility is a benefit, but it can sometimes also be overwhelming. Growing a Drupal powered website from Drupal Core to a finished, customized site, by selecting from a wide variety of modules and themes, can be a complicated and time consuming process.

The cloud is a big place. There's no one technology, no one source of information, and no one topic that can cover everything. But to me, that's what is exciting about it. It's a place where having a multidisciplinary background is not only helpful, it's essential.

Red Hat’s technology chief has floated over to Google following his abrupt and uncelebrated exit. Brian Stevens suddenly left the Linux distro and aspiring OpenStack cloud fluffer after 12 years as executive vice president and chief technology officer.