LinMin’s Virtual Appliance enables Bare Metal Auto-Provisioning of Windows Server, Linux, VMware ESXi and other Hypervisors on Servers, Blades and Virtual Machines in Fast-Growing Cloud, Hosting, Big Data, PaaS and IaaS Data Centers

BELMONT, Calif. - July 29, 2014

Hardkernel launched a $30, 60 x 36mm Raspberry-Pi compatible “Odroid-W” wearables oriented SBC, adding eMMC, ADC, RTC, a fuel gauge, and step converters.

Hardkernel’s Odroid project developed the Odroid-W (Odroid-Wearable) for a partner’s Internet of Things prototyping platform, after first considering and dismissing its quad-core Odroid-U3 single board computer. The Odroid-U3, which was rated as the third most popular Linux hacker SBC in our recent survey, used too much power for use as an IoT and wearables platform. The Raspberry Pi was more power efficient, but too large. No doubt, RPi compatibility also had its attractions, as the project ended up building its own Raspberry Pi pseudo-clone implemented on a COM (computer-on-module) style form factor.

The main part of GUADEC 2014, the premier annual GNOME conference, has just ended in Strasbourg, France. The core days are made up of talks, keynote presentations, as well as the GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting.

The GUADEC core days have been packed with exciting, interesting talks. There were presentations on important initiatives in GNOME, such as Wayland and continuous performance testing. GTK+ had a strong presence, with talks on GTK+ dialogs, CSS, and the GTK+ Scene Graph Toolkit. There was also a whole day of talks on GTK+ applications.

They say you never forget your first computer. For some of us, it was a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIe. For others, it was a Pentium 233 running Windows 95. Regardless of the hardware, the fond memories of wonder and excitement are universal. For me, I'll never forget the night my father brought home our first computer, a Tandy 1000. Nor will I forget the curious excitement I felt toward the mysterious beige box that took up a large portion of the guest bedroom. This happened at a time when simply having a computer at home gave a school-age child an advantage. I have no doubt my experiences from that time positively influenced my path in life.

In the decades that have passed since the beginning of the personal computer revolution, computers have gone from being a rare and expensive luxury to a mandatory educational tool. Today, a child without access to a computer (and the Internet) at home is at a disadvantage before he or she ever sets foot in a classroom. The unfortunate reality is that in an age where computer skills are no longer optional, far too many families don't possess the resources to have a computer at home.

The Qt 5.4 feature freeze is set to go into effect on 8 August with already there being a large number of changes for this next major Qt5 tool-kit release.

Heikkinen Jani of Digia sent out a reminder this morning that the 5.4 feature freeze is effective beginning 8 August. The Qt 5.4 code will be branched from Qt's "dev" branch on 11 August.

Everything there is to know about Android Wear smartwatches including LG G Watch, Motorola Moto 360, Samsung Gear Live, HTC One Wear and Google Gem.

Building highly customized live images isn’t easy and running them in production makes it more challenging. Once the upstream kernel has a stable, solid, stackable filesystem, it should be much easier to operate a live environment for extended periods. There has been a parade of stackable filesystems over the years (remember funion-fs?) but I’ve been told that overlayfs seems to be a solid contender. I’ll keep an eye out for those kernel patches to land upstream but I’m not going to hold my breath quite yet.

At the annual OSCON (Open Source Convention) last week, those stuck in a worldview of open source from the previous decade would have suffered serious cognitive dissonance.

First, Microsoft was an anchor of the conference, with a full-scale display from Jean Paoli's subsidiary Microsoft Open Technologies. As I walked past I repeatedly heard people expressing shock that Microsoft was there at such scale. Wholehearted support for open source still largely stops at the boundaries of Microsoft's Azure cloud offering, but plenty of staff people with genuine open source credentials were showing their wares. Microsoft's journey is definitely progressing.

Steam OS images were made available for free download yesterday. I grabbed the images, created an ISO and booted a high-end system on it (it was a working Windows 8 desktop). Instead of automated install, I chose advanced install so I could see what was going on. It was a pure Debian installer experience.

Android is a Google product—it's designed and built from the ground up to integrate with Google services and be a cloud-powered OS. A lot of Android is open source, though, and there's nothing that says you have to use it the way that Google would prefer. With some work, it’s possible to turn a modern Android smartphone into a Google-less, completely open device—so we wanted to try just that. After dusting off the Nexus 4 and grabbing a copy of the open source parts of Android, we jumped off the grid and dumped all the proprietary Google and cloud-based services you'd normally use on Android. Instead, this experiment runs entirely on open source alternatives. FOSS or bust!

OpenSUSE "Factory" up to now has referred to the development version of the openSUSE Linux distribution while being announced by SUSE today is that it's also going to serve as an independent distribution under a rolling-release development model.

OpenSUSE Factory will still serve where openSUSE development takes place, but it's also going to aim for being a distribution on its own as a "tested and stable fresh-daily bleeding-edge distribution."

Benchmarks of Valve's Source Engine games (and other Steam titles for that matter) aren't done in all Phoronix driver tests and graphics card articles for various reasons, among which is that there's other more GPU-demanding OpenGL tests to utilize for modern hardware. However, for those curious about the performance of various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards using the latest proprietary drivers, here's some updated numbers.

This article is just to serve as some quick, updated reference results for those that keep requesting new Source Engine game results on the AMD/NVIDIA Linux drivers. At the common 1080p resolution with the high performance proprietary drivers, Valve's popular games with native Linux ports remain rather CPU bound but these results are requested nevertheless. Coming up in the days ahead will be the open-source driver results for Valve's popular games.

Peach OSI, a new Linux distribution based on Xubuntu that aims to be friendly towards new users and to provide all the software that regular users need, has been released.

NVIDIA is working on adding HEVC/H.265 video decoding support to VDPAU.

NVIDIA developers are extending the "Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix" interfaces to allow the HEVC/H.265 requirements. The work aims to enable hardware-accelerated decoding of HEVC content under VDPAU and to provide a reference implementation for this video decoding. José Hiram Soltren, the developer that worked on this support, is also working on a HEVC decode patch for FFmpeg and MPlayer based upon the new API.

The third day of GUADEC was mostly devoted to lower level parts of the GNOME stack. There were talks on GTK+, CSS, Wayland, and WebKitGTK+, but also an annual general meeting of the GNOME Foundation.

The day started with Matthias Clasen’s talk on improvements in GTK+, especially in dialogs. Matthias demoed the changes for the whole time of the talk, switching between the code that was behind the dialogs and dialogs themselves. Matthias also showed how dialogs adapt to the environment they’re running in. GTK+ developers have been accused that they only care about GNOME, but they actually care about how GTK+ 3 apps look in other environments and good news for users of other desktop environments is that a lot has recently been done in this direction.

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 32 Beta 1 has been released, marking the start of another branch for the famous Internet browser.

For small and medium-sized businesses looking to save money, open source applications offer an easy way to reduce expenses related to software licensing and subscriptions. In addition, many open source applications offer additional features or better usability when compared with their closed source counterparts.

This month, we've updated our list of open source software that are good options for SMBs. Many businesses have their first open source experience when they deploy a Linux-based server, and our list includes a wide variety of server software, such as operating systems, accounting, ERP and mail and groupware solutions.

In a move that will please devotees of open source cloud storage, hosting giant Rackspace (RAX) has announced it will officially support two additional types of open source MySQL databases, from MariaDB and Percona.

This is the fourth release of the 0.2 series as part of the GNU project; it is primarily a maintenance release, but does introduce a significant (preview and undocumented) feature---parameterized traits. A generic `super` method has also been added to satisfy more sophisticated subtyping that `__super` alone cannot handle.

Most Android users are by now well aware of Cyanogen and their custom operating system CyanogenMod (CM). Earlier this month CM11 M8 was finally released which brought CM users up to Android 4.4.4. However if you own a Nexus 5 you can now install CM11S.