Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The next version of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch will run the Linux-based Tizen operating system instead of Android, suggests a USA Today report. According to the USA Today story, the next generation of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch will depend on Tizen’s HTML5 stack for its application development.

Denx is formally launching the 74 x 42mm “MCV” computer-on-module at Embedded World 2014, Feb. 25-27 in Nuremberg, Germany, along with version 5.5 of its Embedded Linux Development Kit (ELDK) platform and distribution (see farther below). The pioneering Gröebenzell, Germany based embedded Linux house, which created U-Boot, among other contributions, continues to develop a variety of Linux-ready embedded embedded systems and COMs, such as its Freescale i.MX53x based M53 module.

The first smartphones running Ubuntu will ship this year, Canonical now says – although the Linux vendor's hardware partners are hardly the first companies you might guess. In January, Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon said that getting major carriers on board with the upstart mobile OS was "longer-term," and that the first Ubuntu smartphones would be built by small manufacturers who serve small regions. Apparently he wasn't kidding.

Canonical announced its initial Ubuntu Phone manufacturers — Meizu and BQ — and said the first mid- to high-end phones would ship by the end of this year. Some images of the Ubuntu Touch UI running on a Meizu MX3 smartphone were leaked on Weibo in early January (see image below). Now, the connection has been confirmed, as Canonical announced that both China’s Meizu and Spain’s BQ would ship phones running Ubuntu.

OpenStack Object Storage (code named Swift) has a fairly frequent release schedule for improvements and new capabilities but naturally, there is always significant gravity around integrated releases for any OpenStack project. Even though the Havana release was very big for OpenStack Swift, with new support for global clusters, the upcoming Icehouse will be the biggest release yet for the OpenStack Swift project.

A Phoronix reader has sent in an IRC log today where Ubuntu VDPAU support was asked about and Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical responded. While the VDPAU state tracker inside Gallium3D has stabilized greatly and can be used by the Nouveau driver as well as the R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers, it will not be enabled. The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix is widely supported by Linux multimedia software for offloading the video acceleration of popular video formats onto the GPU. This works really well in the open-source world with the AMD Radeon Linux driver stack since last year when they provided open-source support for UVD, the AMD Unified Video Decoder block found on most modern Radeon GPUs.

The iPac-9X25 is a web-enabled single-board computer that can “run an embedded server and display the current monitored or logged data,” says EMAC. Primary targets include embedded data acquisition and control applications that can make use of its industrial temperature (-40 to 85°C) support, low-power ARM9 CPU, dual Ethernet ports, and abundance of serial connectivity.

What if commercial software developers for popular Windows products sold Linux versions to a waiting market of open source users? Think in terms of paying a subscription fee to use a Linux version of Adobe's Photoshop image manipulation software, for starters. Is porting commercial products like Photoshop as a paid product for Linux a viable idea?

Planet unveiled a Linux-based, 16-channel network video recorder called the NVR-1620, with dual HDD bays, dual displays, and up to 2560 x 1920 resolution. Taiwan-based Planet has a long track record of making networking and surveillance appliances. Its latest NVR-1620 network video recorder supports 16 IP video channels, and up to 16 devices can be networked for 256 total channels accessible via a central monitoring site. In addition, most mobile platforms, including Android, are supported for remote viewing.

I'm a newcomer to the tech industry. I don't have a degree in Computer Science or Engineering. I'm a writer by trade and training, so coming to work for Red Hat after years of freelancing and crappy office jobs was a real shock. Which is to say, a pleasant shock. Tattoos? Sure. Pink hair? Oh, yes. Start time? Whatever suits you best. And unlike other places I've worked, not a single man has expected me to make them a cup of coffee, and nobody tells me to "smile love, nobody likes a sadsack in the office!" (I frown when I concentrate. I'm sorry! And by that I mean I'm totally not sorry.)

A few days after Asus announced the first Chromebox mini-PC to be introduced the original Samsung Chromebox, HP unveiled its own Chromebox model, which similarly runs on Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS. Meanwhile, Google announced “Chromebox for Meetings,” an enterprise video-conferencing system that initially will be built on the Asus Chromebox, but later this year be available with the HP Chromebox and an upcoming Dell Chromebox

If you've been thinking that there must be a better way to handle email than the email client supplied natively in Android, I bring good news: There is, and it's called "Aqua Mail." As things are right now, my on-device solutions are a bit of a mess. I have my Gmail-produced work emails appearing in the Gmail client, while my personal, custom-domain email is housed in the Android-native client.

Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.6. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates; providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

When Asus jumps into the increasingly hot Chrome OS market by shipping its $179 Asus Chromebox in March, it will likely be the new price leader among computers that run Google’s Linux-based Chrome Operating System. It’s $20 cheaper than the hot-selling, $199 Acer C720 Chromebook, although it lacks the latter’s screen and keyboard. You get the same 4th Generation (“Haswell”) dual-core Intel Celeron 2955U, clocked at 1.4GHz, as you do with the C720, complete with integrated Intel HD graphics. Later this year, there will also be a Core i3-4010U version, as well as a Core i7 model that will not be offered in the U.S.

Last week, five Joomla! project leaders shared insights into their roles and advice for how to be a great leader in an open source community. Here, we share with you five more leaders in open source sharing wisdom and advice for men and women interested in learning more about how to have a successful career in open source.

The latest Linux distribution benchmarks to share at Phoronix are a comparison of Manjaro Linux 0.8.8, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development state, openSUSE 13.1, and Fedora 20. All tests were done from an Intel Core i5 4670 Haswell system to look at the current state of various Linux distributions when it comes to various areas of open-source performance.

There are few women developers and even proportionately less working in open source communities. However, a career in OSS is ideal for women who are seeking balance in their lives whether the balance is starting a family or maintaining balance with friends and a strenuous and engaging hobby. It’s well established that there’s a shortage of women pursuing careers in computer science. UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that just 0.3% of students majoring in technology-related fields are female, despite the high demand for those skills. As few as 1.5% of open source contributors are women.

Real Time Logic announced a new version of its lightweight, Linux-ready “Mako Server” embeddable webserver that ships with C source code, along with the BarracudaDrive file server plugin. The software is available in a free version for non-commercial and educational use.

Nvidia is cozying up just a little with the open source community, with it emerging in late January that it's kicked some driver code into the Nouveau open source graphics driver project. The company has previously been the recipient of hate mail from the open source community as being difficult to work with. However, with a new chip – the Tegra K1 – on the way, Phoronix noticed an unusual development: the company has provided some hardware enablement patches into the driver.

"I realize that as a number, 3.14 looks familiar to people, and I had naming requests related to that. But that's simply not how the nonsense kernel names work," Torvalds wrote. "You can console yourself with the fact that the name doesn't actually show up anywhere, and nobody really cares. So any pi-related name you make up will be *quite* as relevant as the one in the main Makefile, so don't get depressed."