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The init Daemon The init daemon is the system and service manager for Linux. It is the first true process Linux starts when it boots and as such, has a PID of 1 and is the ancestor of all processes. The init daemon has been around since the early days of UNIX, and many people have worked to improve it. more>>

LXer Feature: 10-Nov-2011

I never knew I needed a tablet the same way I did not know I needed a cell phone. Once that first cell phone landed in my pocket, I never looked back. The transition was purely natural. It increased my productivity by allowing me access to hundreds of previously physically-based things. My phone now scans my receipts (no paper, no saving and stashing), tracks my tasks (no To Do lists floating around), takes photos (no extra camera), and a hundred other backpack-lightening life upgrades.

These two open hardware projects are great for learning embedded programming, and they take two different but complementary approaches. The Arduino project is both hardware and software: tiny low-power single-board computers that are programmed using the Arduino IDE (integrated development environment). The Arduino programming language is based on Wiring and Processing, which were developed as teaching tools, and to program microcontrollers. Arduino is especially good for learning the fundamentals of electronics principles and hardware. The BeagleBoard is more powerful and supports any ARM-capable operating system such as Debian Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, or Android.

Open source is about more than code: it's about unlocking all possibilities. Here are four unusual projects made possible by open source.

# Friendly conference organizer: And I'm glad you flew in 24 hours in advance; it will give you some time to enjoy our city. That is, if you're not too busy doing work.

# Stallman: Please don't try to pressure me to "relax."

Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works

Silicon Roundabout is hiring Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 developers jumped this year, with jobs requiring those skills increasing 70 per cent compared to the same period in 2010, according to a survey of the tech jobs in London by recruiters Azuna. Azuna collated every tech job advertised for London last month, a total of 100,000. HTML coders are still the most in demand, but also the most poorly paid – both at entry and top levels.…

Red Hat joined Facebook's Open Compute Project, intended to open source the design and development of second-generation data centers for powering web and cloud services. Red Hat has certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Open Compute specs, and will test RHEL and other software on Open Compute servers -- whose hardware specs have been contributed by AMD, Asus, Dell, and Intel....

The early years of the 21st century forever will be known as the age of social media. I don't know if that's something we should be proud of, but nonetheless, here we are. During the past decade, we've seen things like Friendster, Pownce, Twitter, Wave, Facebook, Tumblr, Buzz, Gowalla, Brightkite, Foursquare, Loopt, Plurk, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, Yammer and now Google Plus.

Penetration (Pen) testing and security auditing are now part of every system administrator's "other duties as assigned." BackTrack Linux (http://www.backtrack-linux.org/) is a custom distribution designed for security testing for all skill levels from novice to expert. It is the largest collection of wireless hacking, server exploiting, web application assessing, social-engineering tools available in a single Linux distribution.

KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, is the up-and-coming enterprise virtualization contender. It's lean, mean, fast, and runs unmodified guest operating systems with ease. In this crash course we'll quickly get KVM up and running on Ubuntu Server, install multiple guests, manage storage, and migrate guests to new hosts.

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about how you can use MPI to run a parallel program over a number of machines that are networked together. But more and more often, your plain-old desktop has more than one CPU. How best can you take advantage of the amount of power at your fingertips? more>>

The designer of LISP, father of AI, and inventor of garbage collection passed away this week leaving a legacy of far-sighted innovation

KDE4 has been flinging new technologies at us fast and furiously, many in the category of "semantic desktop." Semantic computing is the future of computing, and KDE4 has the only working implementation of a semantic desktop. The idea of a semantic Web has been kicking around for some years, and the semantic desktop is the same concept applied to the personal computer. Let's take a look and see what all the fuss is about. It starts with Nepomuk, Strigi, and Akonadi, which are odd names that have been bandied about much with little understanding.

Microsoft’s current strategy is to make Android more expensive by means of extortion, as last we mentioned just a few days ago. Or as Geek.com puts it, “Microsoft now earning royalties for every Kindle Fire sold?”

There's been a lot of talk about LLVM/Clang this week since LLVM 3.0 is approaching and there's been numerous OpenCL announcements that depend upon LLVM/Clang as its front-end for the Open Computing Language: Portable OpenCL, libclc, and now the high-performance Saarland project. There's now another worthwhile announcement and it comes from MIPS...

For nine years, my default desktop was GNOME. About the third of the time, I'd use another desktop or a shell, either for the purposes of review or just for a change, but I'd always return to GNOME. It was a no-fuss interface in which I could do my common tasks without any problem. But a glitch on my system that left GNOME unstartable coincided with the release of KDE 4.2, and -- not having the time to reinstall -- I switched to KDE. I haven't looked back since.

Samsung has introduced the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, the first handset equipped with Google's Android 4.0 & Ice Cream Sandwich& (ICS) operating system. The & Galaxy Nexus& has a 4.65-inch display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, an NFC (near field communication chip), and compatibility with 4G LTE and HSPA+ networks....

For some reason notifications are a big hairy deal to certain people in FOSS-land, like the fine KDE4 folks. And so we have all these popups, blinking icons, sound effects, and jumping systrays. The subject of notifications is a fine one for another day; for today I will share how to turn off the annoying blinking systray in KDE4.