Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A security firm has criticised Android's all-or-nothing permission approach, arguing it unnecessarily creates extra privacy risks for businesses and consumers. Users are obliged to accept a entire laundry list of requested permissions before they can download an Android app. Disagreement on any point means that the software package can't be downloaded.

For those of us veterans in the open source software (OSS) community, certain technologies come along in our lifetime that revolutionise how we consume and manage our technology utilisation. During the early 2000s the concept of high availiability (HA) and clustering allowed Linux to really stack up in the datacentre.

Via’s “Viega” is an IP65-ruggedized, 10.1-inch tablet that runs Android 4.2 on a Via dual-core SoC, providing 9-hour battery life and optional 3G and GPS. Via Technologies is getting into the rugged Android tablet market. The Viega tablet runs a fairly modern Android 4.2 build, and is designed for the showroom floor, warehouse, construction site, and other enterprise-level mobile computing environments, says Via.

On Jan 21, 2008, Marie Smith Jones died. Her death was not just a loss of one human being, she was the last speaker of the Eyak language. Eyak was spoken in southern, central Alaska. We permanently lost one color from the mosaic of our limited linguistic diversity. With a language, not only a language dies, but with it a part of a community's history, intellectual and cultural diversity, and cultural identity.

The embedded systems Linux distro, OpenWRT, has taken a step into the 1990s and added native IPv6 support. The release candidate is code-named “Barrier Breaker” and runs the Linux 3.0 kernel. OpenWRT 14.07's IPv6 support will at this point be of only limited end-user interest. However, it's an important move for the future, as a feature that might encourage more consumer kit vendors to implement OpenWRT, and it helps position the OS for Internet of Things applications that are going to need v6 support.

National Instruments unveiled a 2 x 3-inch module that runs real-time Linux on a Xilinx hybrid ARM/FPGA SoC, and can be programmed graphically with LabView. NI’s new “sbRIO-9651? system-on-module (SOM) is aimed at simplifying the design of custom data acquisition and control systems, by offering full compatibility with the NI LabView graphical programming environment. Additionally, the module’s core hardware and software compatibility with NI’s cRIO-9068 “CompactRIO” controller is said to further accelerate custom designs by letting programmers develop and test their software on an off-the-shelf system prior to the availability of custom hardware based on the SOM. To that end, the sbRIO-9651 SOM and cRIO-9068 controller system both use the same Xilinx Zynq-7020 SoC, and run a common “NI Linux Real Time” software stack.

Even simple build scripts show the power and flexibility of the emerging new build tool for JVM projects.

Flock 2014 will be held in Prague on the 6-9 August — that is less than a month away! In case you don’t know, Flock is a conference for Fedora contributors and users to come together, discuss new ideas, work to make those ideas a reality, and continue to promote the core values of the Fedora community: Freedom, Friends, Features, and First.

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

Mozilla believes success in the 21st century depends on digital literacy: the skills people need to read, write and participate on the web. Maker Party is all about teaching these skills in a fun, hands-on way. Participants meet up with others at events of all sizes to explore the how and why of building apps and webpages with code, design, media and interactive elements.

After pushing Chrome Remote Desktop to mobile, Google has finally announced official beta Linux support for its remote access and administration product. Earlier this year, Chrome Remote Desktop support was extended from Windows and OS X to Android, allowing users of the extension to get remote access to their Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops from the Chrome browser. But while Google promised that iOS support would come later this year, at the time there was no mention of equivalent support for remote access from a Linux machine.

Making money from open source. To many in the corporate world, that seems like a contradiction in terms. How are you supposed to make money from something that you give away? they ask. It can be done. A number of companies, large and small, have done quite well in the open source space over the years.

The newly released Raspberry Pi Model B+ has the same CPU, memory, and $35 price, plus a new 40-pin GPIO header, two more USB ports, and a microSD slot. Considering all the competition from open-spec hacker boards like the Odroid and BeagleBone Black, not to mention Pi clones like the Banana Pi, the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation was overdue for an update to the world’s most popular single board computer. To be sure, “this isn’t a ‘Raspberry Pi 2?,” as Eben Upton and the Pi gang note in today’s announcement of the Pi Model B+. The update uses the same aging, ARM11-based Broadcom BCM2835 processor and 512MB of RAM as the Pi Model B, disappointing those looking for a Cortex-something update, but also maintains perfect software compatibility with Raspbian and existing Linux distros and applications.

LXer Feature: 13-Jul-2014

In the LXWR this week we have the popularity of Firefox on the wane, building with JFrog, 5 reasons to switch to Deepin and the Raspberry Pi compute Module explained. Enjoy!

Leaked benchmarks show Via’s 64-bit Isaiah II edging out AMD’s Kabini and trouncing Intel’s Atom Z3770, amid speculation it may run both x86 and ARM code. German site 3Dcenter.org has published (translation) SiSoft Sandra benchmarks said to be leaked by Via Technologies subsidiary Centaur Technology for an upcoming Isaiah II architecture, the first major x86 refresh since the much neglected Via Nano. The benchmarks show the processor soundly beating the quad-core, 2.4GHz Intel Atom Z3770 (Bay Trail-T) tablet system-on-chip while edging out a 2GHz, quad-core AMD Athlon 5350 “Kabini” SoC.

What do the numbers behind an open source project tell us about where it is headed? That's the subject of Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona's OSCON 2014 talk later this month, where he looks at four open source cloud computing projects—OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and OpenNebula—and turns those numbers into a meaningful analysis.

Lend your Raspberry Pi's processing power to a good cause using BOINC, helping to cure disease along the way. Some people manage to use their Raspberry Pis all the time. Whether they’re powering a robot, an automated house, a media centre or even a normal desktop PC, there are some excellent ways to keep your Pi occupied.

LXLE has been kicking around for a while now and, for a supposedly lightweight distro, it’s looking fearsomely feature-packed right now. Having said that, it’s hard not to love LXLE, as it’s treading the line between resource efficiency and usability pretty well, and is borderline addictive when it comes to the DE itself. The clue’s in the updated acronym; rather than standing for ‘Lubuntu eXtra Life Extension’, as it did in the days before Lubuntu LTS releases, when LXLE was around to fill that niche using the LXDE desktop environment, it’s now pitched as the ‘LXDE eXtra Luxury Edition’.

Testing is an integral and important part of any software development cycle, open or closed, and Linux kernel is no exception to that. Developer testing, integration testing, regression, and stress testing have different individual goals, however from 1000 feet up, the end goal is the same, to ensure the software continues to work as it did before adding a new body of code, and the new features work as designed.

I'm in love with open source, but I've been dating open content for many years. You would think these two would jump at the chance to cross-promote, but too often that doesn't happen. Open source claims it has a headache. Open content says it's too busy. Really, a headache? Really, too busy?