Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In June this year, we launched a new weekly feature on Opensource.com highlighting some of the most interesting open source news from around the web. Each Friday, we share our take on recent open source news from around the globe, including some stories you may know well and some you may have missed.

Welcome to PMC 1.2! The KDE community has a Christmas gift for you! We are happy to announce the release of KDE's Plasma Media Center 1.2 - your first stop for media and entertainment created by the Elves at KDE. Plasma Media Center is designed to provide an easy and comfortable way to watch your videos, browse your photo collection and listen to your music, all in one place.

What’s the latest status on all those cool embedded Linux and Android Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects of 2013? Most are moving forward, but delays are a common problem. Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have emerged over the last two years as a prime launch path for embedded Linux and Android devices. Sometimes it’s hard to decide when to cover these products: when they first launch, or only when they’ve reach their funding goals?

As explained before, "zRAM has been around for a while now and formerly known as Compcache. The kernel module tries to increase system performance by avoiding paging to disk and instead using a compressed block device in RAM with around a 3:1 compression ratio. Besides Google relying upon zRAM in modern versions of ChromeOS and Android, Ubuntu has also looked at it and other Linux distributions. zRAM is very popular within the embedded space where RAM capacities are limited."

Datawind is bringing three commercial “UbiSlate” versions of its 7-inch, Android 4.0 Aakash tablets to the U.S., including a model that starts at $38. Datawind’s three new UbiSlate tablets are based on the Aakash 2 educational tablet that shipped in India in early 2012, as well as an upcoming Aakash 3 model. The Aakash 2 was hailed as the world’s cheapest tablet, at about $40, and was available to schoolchildren at lower prices thanks to subsidization by the Indian school system. In India, sales of the Aakash 2 overtook the iPad according to U.K.-based Datawind.

Perhaps no other single Linux distribution release in recent memory has caught the attention of more people than Valve's Steam OS. SteamOS was first hinted at in the summer and is now a public beta codenamed 'Alchemist', available in a free download letting users see first hand the future of Linux gaming.

Dell and Red Hat will work together to propagate OpenStack clouds running the Linux distro, in what the PC maker claims is a first. The pair have announced they will jointly develop "enterprise grade" private clouds that are based on Dell hardware and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The first fruits are due next year.

Molecular dynamics computations make up a very large proportion of the computer cycles being used in science today. For those of you who remember chemistry and or thermodynamics, you should recall that all of the calculations you made were based on treating the material in question as a homogeneous mass where each part of the mass simply has the average value of the relevant properties. Under average conditions, this tends be adequate most times. But, more and more scientists were running into conditions that would be on the fringes of where they could apply those types of generalizations.

It was announced today by Robert Ancell at Canonical that right now they're running on a heavily-patched version of GNOME 3.6 and that they're not looking forward to upgrading the gnome-control-center version since it would involve a lot of work. Right now Canonical carries 61 patches atop the gnome-control-center and they are uninterested in upgrading the patches against the latest GNOME software code.

I've mentioned geocaching before, but if you've never taken the time to go out and do it, you're really missing out. Whether you're dragging your family through two feet of snow in the middle of the woods (yeah, I did that last year, I'm still not sure they've forgiven me) or following your GPS around a parking lot looking for a tiny micro-cache, geocaching is fun. You need only a few things to go geocaching:

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was a 1993 adventure game out of Sierra On-Line that was popular back in the day and is now being remade as "Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition." The title was announced back in October with plans to release the game for Windows, Apple OS X, iPad, Android, and Linux. The game re-make is being developed by Pinkerton Road and Phoenix Online Studios.

Cogent announced the CSB1890T10-Q15, a tiny (84 x 55mm) COM Express Type 10 Mini module with a 1.5GHz, quad-core AMD GX-415GA SoC, featuring PCI Express, SATA, and USB 3.0. Cogent Computer Systems offers a number of Atmel- and Marvell-based ARM computer-on-modules, and has now introduced a x86-based COM Express Type 10 module built around the AMD GX-415GA. This is the slower of AMD’s two quad-core, 64-bit G-Series SoCs at 1.5GHz, but offers the advantage of a much lower 15 Watt TDP. Other recent COMs built around the SoC include MSC Embedded’s C6C-GX COM Express Type 6 module.

The recently released Mint 16, nicknamed Petra, might be the perfect Linux desktop for newcomers. At its core is Ubuntu 13.10, but on top of this are desktops Mate and Cinnamon, the latter being the Mint project's homegrown user interface. Ubuntu gives a stable foundations on which to build, allowing the project to focus more on its desktops and less on the underpinnings. The result is a pair of desktops both worthy of consideration but with Cinnamon far more interesting as its hits version 2.0

RadiumBoards announced a $50 “HD Camera Cape” for the BeagleBone Black with a 1.3-megapixel Aptina sensor that provides 720p, 30fps video and Linux and Android support. There’s now a second commercially available camera cape (add-on board) for the BeagleBone Black single board computer, following up on CircuitCo’s 3.1-megapixel BeagleBone 3.1MP Camera Cape. The $50 HD Camera Cape comes from RadiumBoards, a Haryana, India based subsidiary of VVDN Technologies, and provides 720p, 30 frames per second video capture.

Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to the problem than simply running out of honey. Bees are one of the most abundant pollinators in the natural world. They are the unsung, unpaid facilitators of human agricultural practices and have been for as long as we have sewn seeds. Their disappearance would spell disaster for our food supply, with some estimating our species lasting only four years on this planet without them. So, what can be done?

Despite the backing of the Linux Foundation, this is a cross-platform effort, supporting all major desktop and mobile operating systems, initially including Linux, Android, Arduino, iOS, OS/X, Windows 7/8/RT, the Unity game engine, and “thin clients.” Missing here are the many controller-oriented real-time operating systems (RTOSes) that will initially dominate IoT at the device level, but Allseen appears to be looking at the long haul and the higher end of the market. Advanced OSes like Linux and Android are expected to increasingly move into controller-like, low end embedded duty as demand increases for greater intelligence and Internet connectivity.

I work for a private ISV and consultancy company focused on delivering software products for financial institutions. Three years ago my company decided to share our achievements and knowledge by publishing our application, FinTP, for processing financial transactions under an open source license. Here, I will explore the changes a company has to undertake when embarking on the transition from a traditional business model to a business model that supports open source. This is based on nine years of experience with a once commercially-available solution. The motivation for a transition like this comes from our company's ambition to be in a position of leadership in this changing and challenging industry.

Project Neon, the daily builds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 2 for Kubuntu, has started releasing ISO images for testing. These are very early previews of the next generation of KDE Software. It is strongly recommended not be installed on a production machine but can be tested as live images or installed into a VirtualBox or other VM. Crashes and bugs are virtually guaranteed. The only supported upgrade path is to install a later ISO image. More information on Rohan's blog. Project Neon introduction on the Dot. Experimental. Not for use in production environments. Dot Categories: Infrastructure

That's the headline and question NPR blogger Gene Demby explores in this article. Demby looks at why open source developers tend to be white men, interviewing people who say there are a variety of contributing factors that keep African Americans and Latinos from participating in software development including education, Internet access, pay inequality, and more.

The FreeBSD Foundation is sponsoring a new FreeBSD Journal publication that's about to begin publishing bi-monthly issues concerning BSD.