Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When I founded my first startup in 2008, I was a programming newbie. A degree in economics from Oberlin College hadn’t prepared me for a career writing production-ready code. Despite my best efforts at slapping together crude HTML and CSS Django templates, my ability to contribute to our codebase was limited at best. So I started slowly teaching myself to code with online tutorials and lessons. After many disheartening starts and stops, I realized why I was having problems sticking with it: code lessons and videos felt like school to me, and I had no interest in returning to the classroom.

Based in part on MontaVista’s GENIVI-compliant in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) distribution, the Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) was released in April. In September, it was updated with an integrated version of Jungo Connectivity’s multimedia player middleware, and in October, Mentor Graphics announced a related Mentor Embedded Hypervisor that can work together with ATP and other IVI and telematics systems to enabled multiple VMs running on each core of a multicore SoC.

Reports this week that the National Security Agency uses radio signals to collect data from tens of thousands of non-U.S. computers, some not connected to the Internet, is sure to fuel more acrimony towards the U.S. spy agency.

The remotely-piloted Beam+ bot, which can be controlled via a WiFi, runs low-latency Skype-like video conferencing software on top of a Ubuntu-based embedded Linux OS. The original Beam model was introduced about two years ago, and currently starts at $16,000 (not including charging dock). The new Beam+ consumer model will be sold for about $2,000 (including charging dock) after all the 1,000 specially priced pre-order units have been sold.

In a Reddit exchange yesterday, Canonical’s Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon answered a commenter’s question about the expected arrival of phones running the new Ubuntu Touch interface. Wrote Bacon: “This is a long road though with many components, and I would be surprised if we see anything like this before 2015.”

conf.kde.in was announced in November, to take place February 21 – 23, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. This three-day conference, the biggest KDE event in India, will bring together Qt developers, KDE contributors, open source enthusiasts and users from all across the nation. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn, share, contribute, innovate and create around Qt and KDE technology.

Zato is a Python-based platform for integrating applications and exposing back-end services to front-end clients. It's an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and an application server focused on data integrations. The platform doesn't enforce any limits on architectural style for designing systems and can be used for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), REST (Representational State Transfer) and for building systems of systems running in-house or in the cloud.

The Intense PC forms the basis for a MintBox2 computer, jointly offered with the Linux Mint project, and it’s also available directly from CompuLab in a variety of customizable models. The Intense PC2 moves up from Intel’s 3rd Generation “Ivy Bridge” Core processors to the 4th Gen “Haswell”. The high-end model offers a quad-core Intel Core i7-4600U, clocked at 2.1GHz, with turbo mode reaching up to 3.30GHz. Other “Haswell” options are also available, including Core i5 and i3 chips, and the Intel Celeron 2955.

NVIDIA's latest release series is the 331.xx series (soon to hopefully be replaced by a newer version) while NVIDIA continues maintaining the 319 series as a long-lived branch. NVIDIA has put out 319.82 to provide new GPU support and X.Org Server 1.15 compatibility, the new xorg-server that was released one month ago and will begin appearing in new Linux distributions.

HP and Lenovo announced new Android all-in-one (AiO) PCs — the Slate21 Pro and N308 — while LG unveiled the Chromebase, the first AiO to run Chrome OS. Several new Android all-in-one (AiO) computers are joining the handful of models currently available, appearing at different price points for both enterprise and consumers. On the high end is the Acer TA272 HUL we covered yesterday, featuring a 27-inch WQHD (2560 x 1440) touchscreen, and the ability to double as a general purpose monitor.

Linus Torvalds has let release candidate five for version 3.13 of the Linux kernel into the wild for some festive footling. The Linux Lord let the new release candidate loose in this post that declares “Nothing really exciting stands out” which is “just how I want it.”

Many of our best articles in 2013 covered open source projects and businesses, including open business models for heirarchy and modes of operations within the company structure as well as businesses built on and serving up open source software or hardware.

In a previous article, I discussed Apache Tomcat, which is the ideal way to run Java applications from your server. I explained that you can run those apps from Tomcat's default 8080 port, or you can configure Tomcat to use port 80. But, what if you want to run a traditional Web server and host Java apps on port 80? The answer is to run a reverse proxy.

One of most widely respected repositories of embedded and mobile Linux news and information has returned to the web as an archive hosted here at LinuxGizmos.com. QuinStreet acquired LinuxDevices.com in Feb. 2012 through its purchase of a group of websites from publisher Ziff Davis Enterprise. After the acquisition, LinuxDevices remained frozen in time for about a year before vanishing in May, shortly after I launched LinuxGizmos.com. Following a constructive discussion about possibilities for bringing the LinuxDevices content back online, QuinStreet generously offered to license LinuxGizmos to host the LinuxDevices Archive on our site, as a “holiday present to the Linux community.”

Fedora 20 includes an improved Network Manager that can help enable a Software Defined Networking (SDN) environment. The Fedora 20 release includes the Linux 3.11.x kernel which support 2the Open vSwitch (OVS) virtual switch. Fedora 20 also includes a new LVM (Logical Volume Manager) thin provisioning capability. LVM is widely used tool in LInux for logical storage management.

If you're a fan of GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell, Fedora 20 will be a welcome update. This release sees an upgrade for Fedora's default GNOME spin, bringing the desktop to GNOME 3.10. Fedora's live desktop CD has used GNOME by default for many years now. Once upon a time that was completely unremarkable. However, since Ubuntu now has Unity, OpenSUSE pours its effort into KDE and Mint has worked hard to divorce Cinnamon 2.0 from GNOME 3, Fedora is, well, just about all GNOME has left these days.

Throughout 2013 there's been monthly alpha releases by Unvanquished and these updates have been heavy with new features. Details in full can be found via their web-site while some of the big items include many advancements to their OpenGL 3 renderer, new game models and other in-game assets, game-play improvements, visual improvements, multi-threading / SMP suport, SDL 2.0 support, and the first bits of their engine upgrade branch were merged.

A few days ago I delivered some benchmarks from the Xubuntu-powered Lini PC, a Linux-friendly $500 small-form factor PC that happens to be using the G3220. For those interested more in the Haswell Pentium performance, there are more benchmarks in this weekend Phoronix article. The Intel Pentium G3220 is a dual-core 3.0GHz processor (without any Turbo frequency), features 3MB of cache, SSE 4.1+4.2 instruction set extensions, based on a 22nm manufacturing process and other shared Haswell features, and has a 54 Watt TDP. The G3220 also boasts Haswell HD Graphics with a top frequency of 1150MHz. The Pentium G3220 premiered this past September and is currently retailing for about $70 USD.

For this weekend benchmarking of LLVM/Clang 3.4, testing is just being done from a single system and comparing just the LLVM/Clang/Compiler-RT 3.3 release against a SVN snapshot of the LLVM 3.4 branch with Clang and Compiler-RT. When LLVM 3.4 is officially declared as stable, more benchmarks will be coming on Phoronix and reference compiler performance benchmarks against GCC, etc. It's a cycle that comes every six months at Phoronix with major LLVM updates.

Last month I wrote how the Kdenlive project had gone dark after the KDE video editing software's leader had gone missing. Fortunately, the maintainer is alive and well and there's renewed hope for new developments within Kdenlive.