Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Learn how to get started with Minecraft Pi, a brilliant tool for learning to code Python on the Raspberry Pi...Minecraft is a revolutionary sandbox game in which the protagonist, known only as Steve, is tasked with surviving and thriving in a huge, blocky 3D world considerably bigger than planet Earth. Each one-metre segment of the world is represented by a block. The block could be any one of a number of items and the deeper you dig into the earth the rarer the items might be. It’s your challenge to dig, build and survive against an army of nocturnal monsters by harnessing the items you discover.

To promote this influential open source conference, put on by Tim O'Reilly and O'Reilly Media since 1999, Opensource.com is interviewing some of the speakers from the line-up prior to the event. We ask them how they got where they are, why open source?, what tips and knowledge can they lend our readers, and finally, for a sneak peek into their OSCON 2014 talk. Check back here on Monday, July 7 when we kick things off. A full list of speaker interviews will live on this page.

Escape from Windows to Linux and begin your journey with open source software, or learn all about the educational Kano for Raspberry Pi. With collected mumbling on Twitter, Windows XP finally took its final beath. Or at least, its security support stopped. Where to go from there though? Do you stay with Microsoft and risk Windows 8 or do you start a life with Linux and escape the walled garden? We have you covered with our complete guide on making the jump from Windows XP to Linux.

Despite significant delays, Oracle is once again moving forward with Project Jigsaw, a major undertaking that aims to allow Java developers to break their programs down into independent, interoperable modules. Jigsaw was first intended to be a major features of Java 8. By 2012 Big O decided that waiting for Jigsaw to be ready would delay the entire Java 8 release, so work on the module system was postponed until a later version.

At this point, I have more usernames and passwords to juggle than any person should ever have to deal with. I know I'm not alone, either. We have a surfeit of passwords to manage, and we need a good way to manage them so we have easy access without doing something silly like writing them down where others might find them. Being a fan of simple apps, I prefer using pass, a command line password manager.

Many of you Linux junkies will probably spend most of your time in terminals, and so may be wondering how to spice up the plain old boring-looking terminal environment. If you are looking to enhance the look of your terminal window, one way is screenFetch. According to its creator, screenFetcher is a "bash screenshot information […]Continue reading... The post How to create a nifty terminal theme inside a Linux terminal appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to manage multiple terminal windows on Linux Desktop How to record and replay a terminal session on Linux What is a good terminal emulator on Linux?

A robotic, mechanical reader of printed books that melds together the Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorms. When the Raspberry Pi camera module was originally released we thought it would be great to show that you can use the camera with some of the Lego robots and that there’s a whole lot of awesome stuff you can do with it. We put something together that was just an arm to turn the Kindle and the camera to read it aloud; we thought that would be really interesting but it got the wrong type of attention. We got a lot of comments saying, “Well there’s already stuff that can do that”. People missed the point that we were trying to show a tour de force with a Raspberry Pi. So we doubled down and decided we just had to put together a mechanical version that would turn pages – just so we could make our point [laughs]. So the first Bookreader did the Kindle and we read a book off of it out loud and people were like, “Well that’s cool, but there’s already software to do that”.

Linux has long been both the cloud and the datacenter's favorite operating system, but it wasn't until CoreOS came along that anyone designed a Linux just for the cloud and datacenter. If you manage a cloud or a datacenter, chances are you run CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), or Ubuntu. These are all great server Linux distributions, but none of them were designed to be deployed over hundreds or thousands of servers at once. Now there is such a distribution: CoreOS.

Linux's quest to become the default operating system for motor vehicles has taken a step closer to reality, with the Linux Foundation releasing downloads of code from its Automotive Grade Linux project. The project, announced here, is described as being built on Tizen IVI, adding “key applications developed in HTML5 and JavaScript into a single open source reference platform”.

The OpenSSL project, having suffered sharp criticism following the revelation of a string of serious security vulnerabilities, has published a roadmap explaining how it plans to address users' concerns.

Love them or hate them, presentations are a major part of life in both academia and business. Traditionally, creating a presentation meant using Microsoft's PowerPoint, but Apple's Keynote and LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org's Impress are solid alternatives. The problem with all those applications (aside from the closed source nature of the first two) is that you need those applications installed in order to view the presentations you've created. You can try your luck opening the file in Google Drive or the like, but your success will vary.

SteamOS is here, the future of gaming and Linux. You can read about it in our massive feature. Steam Machines, on the other hand, won’t be making it onto store shelves, or virtual shelves, for quite some time. The solution to this dilemma is quite simple, then: make your own Steam Machine using the same image the OEMs have at their disposal. Creating a Steam Machine yourself will also be a lot cheaper than some of the commercial offerings coming up. Until recently you would have got the best out of it with an Nvidia graphics card; however, AMD and Intel chipset support is now included.

Toradex’s “Viola” carrier board extends its Linux-ready Colibri COMs, and ships as a $69 open-spec SBC loaded with its Vybrid-based Colibri VF50 COM. Swiss embedded vendor Toradex has jumped on the trend of offering carrier boards for its computer-on-modules that can double as sandwich-style, open source single board computers. The Viola board is available separately for $22 ($19 at 1,000+), letting you add any of the eight available Colibri COMs, or you can buy a pre-integrated version installed with the low-cost Colibri VF50 module.

There’s a lot that you can do with £5.5m. You could employ a couple of hundred people for a year for starters, or set up some small businesses. You could be sensible and invest in technologies, or you could pay for lots of operations. Alternatively, you could buy lots of sweets or several million copies of the Adam Sandler movie of your choice.

LXer Feature: 29-Jun-2014

The big news to hit the LXer Newswire this week includes Jim Zemlin pumping up Linux to Wall Street, a cool distro categorization tool made by the Berkeley LUG, where KDE is going, a couple of Linux sysadmin articles, the Supreme Court puts Aereo out of business and why should you run Linux on IBM Power hardware? Good question.. Enjoy!

As the moment, the most popular web servers are Apache and Nginx. Apache is the most successful and famous open source project whereas Nginx (pronounced Engine X) is a web server that was developed in Russia by Igor Sysoev back in 2002.

Phytec’s Linux-ready, Pico-ITX “PhyBoard” SBC boasts a soldered TI Sitara-based PhyCore-AM335x COM, dual Ethernet ports, and industrial temperature support. Phytec, which makes a PhyCore-Vybrid SOM computer-on-module built around the Freescale Vybrid system-on-chip, also offers a PhyCore-AM335x COM. The latter, which is built around the Cortex-A8 based Sitara AM335x SoC from Texas Instruments, is now being extended with a Pico-ITX form-factor PhyBoard-AM335x carrier board, the first of a coming line of PhyBoard products.

A moving memorial to Internet whiz kid Aaron Swartz, "The Internet's Own Boy" may be the most emotionally devastating movie ever made about hacking and freedom of information. Documentarian Brian Knappenberger creates a spellbinding portrait of Swartz's life and political convictions — the promise of which was cut short by his suicide in early 2013 at the age of 26 — while posing powerful intellectual arguments about failures in the U.S. justice system, especially when it comes to the World Wide Web. Since Swartz has already been canonized online, there's likely a substantial audience ready and waiting for a well-crafted tribute documentary. The more salient question in the age of Internet piracy may be whether they're willing to pay to watch it.

Amptek is prepping a uClinux- and Cortex-M3 based “iCon” SBC for IoT, equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, USB, and CAN, and running on under half a Watt. uClinux on a microcontroller represents the simplest expression of the Linux operating system, sort of the flipside to Android or Ubuntu on the high end. Despite this platform’s limitations, however, it draws only a smidgin of electricity, and provides a capable wireless platform while also supplying numerous industrial interfaces. All these attributes are showcased by the iCon single board computer (SBC), which probably deserves more than being stuck in the doldrums on Kickstarter, with nine days left to go.

If you saw last issue you might remember the DoodleBorg, a massive remote-controlled tank of a vehicle designed and built by PiBorg, makers of add-ons for the Raspberry Pi. This month we’re looking at their XLoBorg, a board designed to help you measure movement and determine direction, among other things. At under £10/$16, it’s a bargain too, because as well as featuring a three- axis accelerometer, it’s also kitted out with a three-axis magnetometer (digital compass). In this tutorial we’ll be using the accelerometer to turn our Pi into a tilt controller and mock up a simple demo to show how you could integrate it into your Pygame-powered games…