Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Companies often discuss completely changing their back-end infrastructure, but rarely do. The cost of diverting resources and slowing product enhancements during the transition—as well as the impact on customers— can strike fear into the hardiest of executives, chief technical officers, and developers.

Improve and better manage your web downloads for mirroring, mass grabs or just better control over your files. Download managers seem to be old news these days, but there are still some excellent uses for them. We compare the top four of them on Linux.

A startup called Savioke has unveiled a Linux- and ROS-based SaviOne hospitality robot, currently being tested at a California hotel for room service duty. Savioke’s “SaviOne” stands three feet tall, weighs less than 100 pounds, and can roll along at a typical human walking pace of 4 mph. The touchscreen-equipped robot lacks arms or legs, but can operate a smart elevator on its own via a wireless signal. The so-called “Botlr” can also carry up to two cubic feet of material, which is perfect for its job description: delivering towels, phone chargers, snacks, and other items to hotel guests. The SaviOne has just started a pilot program under the name “A.L.O.” with the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, Calif., a member of the Starwood Hotels and Resorts family.

Whenever you install a new Linux distribution on a computer, it is in general recommended that you connect to the internet via a wired connection. There are two main reasons for this: one, your wireless adapter may not have the right driver loaded; second, if you are installing from the command line, managing WiFi is […]Continue reading... The post How to manage a WiFi connection from the command line appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to find the public IP address from command line How to look up the geographic location of an IP address from the command line How to monitor Nginx web server from the command line in real time

What is intelligence? Not exactly the spook kind, but rather what isthe definition of intelligence in humans? This is pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence#Definitions

By most accounts, the self-appointed and arguably too influentialcreators and thinkers of the day around the 'One Linux' idea fit thedefinition of intelligent people - at least in the technical realm

MYIR announced a sandwich-style single board computer that runs Linux on a Freescale i.MX28x SoC and features -40 to 85°C operation and a CAN bus interface. MYIR specializes in low-power ARM single board computers (SBCs) and computer-on-modules (COMs), with the latter including the MYC-SAM9X5-V2 (using Atmel’s ARM9-based AT91SAM9X5) and MYC-AM335X (using TI’s Cortex-A8 based Sitara AM335x). With the new MYC-IMX28X COM and associated MYD-IMX28X development board, the company is mining the Freescale i.MX28x, a 454MHz, ARM9 system-on-chip that has been used in many embedded Linux boards, most recently including Technologic’s TS-7400-V2.

Cloud-friendly Linux vendor CoreOS has snapped up Docker container hosting startup Quay for an undisclosed sum, in a move designed to flesh out its offering for business customers. "We are building out a set of products to offer a complete solution for users who are running their infrastructure in this new, container-y way," CoreOS founder and CEO Alex Polvi told The Reg in a phone briefing. "Quay, in joining us, is definitely part of that story."

Toshiba announced wireless-enabled development kits based on its dual-core Cortex-A9 “TZ5000 ApP Lite” SoC, supporting Ubuntu and Android 4.4, respectively. The RBTZ5000-2MA-A1 (Linux) and RBTZ5000-6MA-A1 (Android) kits are anchored with two vastly different development boards. The Ubuntu-based “2MA” version is a full-featured, 90 x 55mm board while the “6MA” (Android) module is a mere 57 x 24mm and integrates HDMI and USB connectors at each end, making it more suitable for developing stick/dongle style media players and other Internet of Things devices. Both designs target IoT, streaming media, “and other content-rich consumer devices,” says Toshiba.

FiveNinjas has launched a “Slice” media player on Kickstarter based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, with a 1TB HDD and a customized version of XBMC. UK-based startup FiveNinjas developed the Slice because the developers found it annoying when their media players became useless when carried beyond an Internet connection. Unlike most media players, the Slice ships with a 1TB hard disk drive for storing plenty of video for offine playback.

Skully has achieved Indiegogo funding for an Android 4.4 based motorcycle helmet with a head-up display, GPS navigation, and a 180-degree rearview camera. Last October, Skully Systems (then called Skully Helmets) unveiled its high-tech Skully P1 motorcycle helmet and launched a beta testing program. The P1 never reached market, but has been refined into an AR-1 model that was launched on Indiegogo on Aug. 10. The Skully AR-1 quickly blasted past its $250,000 Indiegogo flexible funding goals, and had surpassed $900,000 at publication time. Helmets are available starting at $1,399, with shipments due in May 2015.

OpenXanadu, a subset of Ted Nelson’s vision of a world brought together by Xanadu, has been released nearly six decades after its original conception

KDE is now getting into the swing of releases numbered 5. Today we add Plasma 5's first bugfix update. The release features KDE's flagship desktop project as well as the base software needed to keep your computer running. Plasma will have feature releases every three months and bugfix releases in the months in between.

The beauty of open sourcing development resources is that a single library or wrapper, once released to the world, can be integrated and built out by thousands of other people. And because the future of any new platform depends on what people can do with it, over the past few months Leap Motion has released a steady stream of open source assets and examples to help devs get started with our v2 tracking beta.

The WiFi Pineapple makes man-in-the-middle attacks incredibly easy, but users better know what they're doing before trying out the Pineapple at the biggest hacker hangout in the U.S. A classic example of that wisdom can be seen via a screenshot tweeted by @JoFo after an intern deployed a Pineapple at Def Con 22.

Google Android handset owners have had access to the new KitKat release, aka Android 4.4, for the better part of 2014. Now at along last KitKat is coming to the open-source Android x86 project, which enables android to run on regular x86 desktops and notebooks.

Most of us want our computers to be easy to use and we also want our computers to be secure. Unfortunately convenience and security are typically in opposition to each other. Making a system both secure and easy to use is often a juggling act involving compromise. This week we turn our attention to projects which want to provide stable, secure and easy to use operating systems. We begin with a review of HandyLinux, a project which is designed for new computer users. In our News section we discuss Ubuntu's push to improve the distribution's documentation, a tutorial on securing FreeBSD and a recommendation from the EFF for people maintaining many complex passwords across multiple computers. In addition, we discuss Linux Mint's plans for the project's "Debian" edition. Plus, in our Questions and Answers section, we talk about what to do when running out of disk space on an advanced file system such as Btrfs or ZFS. We also discuss software back doors and rumours of compromised open source projects. We wrap up this week by covering recent distribution releases and looking ahead to fun new developments to come. We wish you all an amazing week and happy reading!

Mirantis, the world's leading pure-play OpenStack company, today announced the speaker lineup for OpenStack Silicon Valley 2014, a community event to be held September 16, 2014 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The speaker line up includes top cloud executives from Cisco, Citrix, Dell, eBay, Ericsson, Eucalyptus, HP, Intel, Red Hat, VMware and more. OpenStack customers will share practical tips on deploying private and hybrid cloud solutions and experts will debate controversial topics that range from whether OpenStack needs a benevolent dictator to a call to sign an industry peace treaty in the cloud platform wars.

Storm Energy has upgraded its “SunSniffer” solar plant monitoring system to a Linux-based platform running on a Raspberry Pi SBC. Germany-based Storm Energy is the latest of a growing number of companies building commercial products based on the hackable Raspberry Pi single board computer. The company’s SunSniffer system is designed to monitor photovoltaic (PV) solar power installations of all sizes, and the latest version can also control the equipment, says the company. The new SunSniffer version adds a Raspberry Pi SBC along with a custom expansion board and customized Linux OS, which combine to enhance the system’s flexibility and upgradability.

The beta release of third elementary OS out now and is recommended mainly for developers and testers. It includes updates to drivers and the Linux kernel along with GTK 3.12

We're all familiar with the idea of virtualized computers. Not only are they a great way to better utilize resources in a server room, but they also allow you to create and destroy servers in the blink of an eye. That's perfect for a lab or training environment. Unfortunately, it's always taken a rack of actual hardware to create a training lab for Cisco hardware.