Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Our own Jason Hibbets and Jen Wike are live blogging from OSCON 2014! This year's O'Reilly Open Source Conference already has all of the exciting vibes and makings of a great event. Keynotes started this morning at 9:00am PCT (live stream) in Portland at the Oregon Convention Center.

Electric Objects has achieved Kickstarter funding for its Android-based EO1, a wall-mounted, 23-inch HD signage computer for displaying digital art. New York City based Electric Objects is one of several companies reinvigorating the wall-mounted digital picture frame form-factor with more affordable prices, smartphone access, and other modern amenities. Like Framed, which is based on Windows Embedded, Electric Objects’s EO1 picture frame has easily surpassed its Kickstarter funding goals. There are still 17 days left, however, to get in on discounted pricing, including $299 for a May 2015 release, or $499 (the eventual retail price) for a wooden-framed version, or a beta test model due in Jan. 2015.

SSH offers a highly secure channel for remote administration of servers. However, if you face an audit for regulatory or business requirements, such as Visa/Mastercard PCI, you need to be aware of some potential authentication related short-comings that may cause headaches in an audit.

Cisco has picked up a lipstick-gloss in one hand and a pig in the other, by re-launching its developer program to have another shot at attracting third party coders to its platforms. For not the first time, The Borg has hit upon the idea that getting others writing functions and applications for it is a big chunk of its future. It's not even the first time it's called the program the Cisco Developer Network (or DevNet in the parlance of today's announcement).

When Microsoft swallowed half of Europe's biggest tech company, it was only a matter of time before it spat something out. And so it has, ending Nokia's thirty-year roller-coaster ride. However, the decision will make tens of million of its customers take a look at Android – surely the last thing Microsoft wanted to happen.

No matter how much I love Plex, there's still nothing that comes close to XBMC for usability when it comes to watching your network media on a television. I've probably written a dozen articles on Plex during the last few years, so you know that's tough for me to admit. Still, no matter how many Plex-enabled devices I might buy (Roku, Amazon Fire TV, phones, tablets, Web browsers), I run XBMC on all my televisions. The interface, when coupled with a back-end MySQL database, is just unbeatable.

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

Read our Python masterclass for beginners and follow it up with ten projects in Understanding & Implementing Python volume one. Python is one of our favourite programming languages and we’ve covered it a lot over the years in Linux User & Developer. We’ve compiled ten of the best Python projects in the first edition of our digital Developer Manual, available now from our Newsstand app.

Google has shown off a candidate for a new Chrome OS user interface. Dubbed “Athena”, the new UI appeared fully grown from the head, and Google+ page, of Googler François Beaufort. Athena “is a brand new project the Chromium OS team is experimenting with in order to bring a new kind of user experience,” Beaufort writes, adding “As you can see below, the first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management.”

A new Linux distribution is looking to overcome the limitations of Debian on ARM, by running both Linux apps and Android apps in native mode. Produced by the group that created the MicroXwin kernel-based X Windows implementation, the VolksPC distribution is designed to give users an ARM-Debian environment that supports Debian's range of desktop applications, while improving support for things like YouTube playback and HD video.

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2014

We have a lot of good FOSS stuff for you this week including the new Raspberry Pi Model B+, an inordinate amount of Android apps wanting to read your text messages, saving endangered languages, an inside look at Linus Torvalds office, Carla Schroder shows us 6 lightweight distros and Ken Starks explains when "free" can suck. Enjoy!

This week KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the third and last in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.13 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.11. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Beneath these releases KDE announced the second beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!

Since we deployed Ask Fedora, we’ve seen a healthy rise in its usage. Unfortunately, I haven’t statistics to show for this. I still need to figure out how I can get some. In this post, I’ll introduce Ask Fedora for the benefit of those still unaware of it and then write a little about how you can help us help yourself and our users via this Q&A forum.

Mirantis, a pure-play OpenStack vendor and Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that Oracle Linux and Oracle VM have been integrated into the Mirantis OpenStack distribution, offering joint customers a supported, enterprise-grade OpenStack distribution optimized for running enterprise workloads. The integration is a collaborative effort of Mirantis and Oracle to adopt innovations from the community and offer more choice to customers.

BDR Basic Schema32ndQuadrant, global experts in PostgreSQL support, training, development, migration and consultancy, have announced a free and open source extension to PostgreSQL (licensed under the same terms): Bi-Directional Replication (BDR).

Thomas Smith will be speaking at OSCON 2014 about Project Gado. He has always wanted to be an inventor, and I spoke with him about what it's like to work as a technology consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this interview, Thomas tells me more about how Project Gado came to life, how the Gado community evolved, and how open source is applied to everything.

dockerThe various Working Groups in Fedora have been talking quite a bit about Docker recently. (In case you haven’t seen all the hype, Docker is a platform for distributing and running application containers — a form of light-weight operating system-level virtualization. It also features a cute whale as its logo.)

This guide explains how to configure samba server on CentOS 7 with anonymous and secured samba servers. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

Spencer Hunley is an autistic professional, former Vice Chair of the Kansas City Mayor's Committee for People with Disabilities, and current board member of the Autism Society of the Heartland & ASAN's Kansas City chapter. In August, Spencer will be giving a talk, Universal Tux: Accessibility For Our Future Selves, at LinuxCon in Chicago. He also gave a talk, Maximizing Accessibility: Engaging People with Disabilities In The Linux Community, at LinuxCon North America 2013.

What's in a name? Quite a bit, actually. To ensure compatibility between products sharing the same name, it's important that users can expect a core set of features to be consistent across different distributions. This is especially true with large projects like OpenStack which are made up of many interlocking components.