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The Last Independent Mobile OS

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 15th of December 2018 12:00:25 PM Filed under
OS
Linux

The year was 2010 and the future of mobile computing was looking bright. The iPhone was barely three years old, Google’s Android had yet to swallow the smartphone market whole, and half a dozen alternative mobile operating systems—many of which were devoutly open source—were preparing for launch. Eight years on, you probably haven’t even heard of most of these alternative mobile operating systems, much less use them. Today, Android and iOS dominate the global smartphone market and account for 99.9 percent of mobile operating systems. Even Microsoft and Blackberry, longtime players in the mobile space with massive revenue streams, have all but left the space.

Then there’s Jolla, the small Finnish tech company behind Sailfish OS, which it bills as the “last independent alternative mobile operating system.” Jolla has had to walk itself back from the edge of destruction several times over the course of its seven year existence, and each time it has emerged battered, but more determined than ever to carve out a spot in the world for a truly independent, open source mobile operating system.

After years of failed product launches, lackluster user growth, and supply chain fiascoes, it’s only been in the last few months that things finally seem to be turning to Jolla’s favor. Over the past two years the company has rode the wave of anti-Google sentiment outside the US and inked deals with large foreign companies that want to turn Sailfish into a household name. Despite the recent success, Jolla is far from being a major player in the mobile market. And yet it also still exists, which is more than can be said of every other would-be alternative mobile OS company.

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Now you can run nginx on Wasmjit on all POSIX systems

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 11th of December 2018 09:17:26 AM Filed under
OS
Linux
Server
BSD

Wasmjit team announced last week that you can now run Nginx 1.15.3, a free and open source high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, in user-space on all POSIX system.

Wasmjit is a small embeddable WebAssembly runtime that can be easily ported to most environments. It primarily targets a Linux kernel module capable of hosting Emscripten-generated WebAssembly modules. It comes equipped with a host environment for running in user-space on POSIX systems. This allows you to run WebAssembly modules without having to run an entire browser. Getting Nginx to run had been a major goal for the wasmjit team ever since its first release in late July.

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Growing Your Small Business With An Affordable OS

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 10th of December 2018 08:11:08 AM Filed under
OS
Linux

Your small business needs to grow, there's no doubt about that. Expansion is the name of the game when you have a one or two man company, and you're going to want to bring on at least 20 or more people to really get the cogs grinding. And if you're working on a digital interface, slowly phasing pen and paper out of the office you operate in, you're going to need plenty of people around to oil the engine and keep the tech in a usable state.

Because of this, technology helps your small business grow, and can do quite a few wonders for the time and effort you invested into it. Even if you're working on a minimal budget, there's quite a few option to look into to make sure you've got just as much of a chance as the shop next door to you that seems to have a never ending stream of customers. After all, you've got to get your internal processes working perfectly first, and with a bit of technological aid, you might manage that faster than you first thought.

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GNU Guix and GuixSD 0.16.0 released

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 7th of December 2018 02:50:04 AM Filed under
OS
GNU

We are pleased to announce the new release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.16.0! This release is (hopefully!) the last one before 1.0—we have been closing most key items for 1.0 over the last few months.

The release comes with GuixSD ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image of GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries. Guix users can update by running guix pull.

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BSD: New FreeNAS and HardenedBSD

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 6th of December 2018 10:14:24 AM Filed under
OS
BSD
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GNU Guix receives donation from the Handshake project

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 4th of December 2018 11:41:16 AM Filed under
OS
GNU

Just a few days after it turned six, Guix received a great birthday present: the Handshake project, which works on the design and implementation of a decentralized naming protocol compatible with the Domain Name System (DNS), made a large donation to the GNU Project via the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Of this donation, 100,000 USD go to GNU Guix.

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CentOS Linux 7.6 (1810) released

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 4th of December 2018 01:06:13 AM Filed under
OS
Linux

We are pleased to announce the general availability of CentOS Linux 7
(1810) for the x86_64 architecture. Effectively immediately, this
is the current release for CentOS Linux 7 and is tagged as 1810, derived
from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Source Code.

As always, read through the Release Notes at :
http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS7 - these notes
contain important information about the release and details about some
of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes
are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from
the users.

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Distros: FreeBSD 12.0 RC3, New BlackArch ISO and Sparky News

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 1st of December 2018 06:13:06 PM Filed under
OS
  • FreeBSD 12.0-RC3

    The third RC build for the FreeBSD 12.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, armv7, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

  • New ISOs and OVA Image released!

    Today we released the new BlackArch Linux ISOs and OVA image. For details see the ChangeLog below.

  • Sparky news 2018/11

    The 11th monthly report of 2018 of the Sparky project:
    – Sparky’s Linux kernel updated up to version 4.19.5 & 4.20-rc4
    – the ‘etcher-electron’ package changed its name to ‘balena-etcher-electron’; uninstall the old one and install the new one if you use the tool
    – Advanced Installer fstab config has been improved and the old fashion /dev/sdX device numbers is replaced by UUIDs now
    – Sparky Backup Core got configuration of all supported desktops and window managers so a new iso image displays your desktop name at the boot screen now
    – APTus got a new small tool called quick-list which searches packages in the repository and displays info about them; thank’s to Elton
    – the first Sparky Small Business Server development iso is out, but it is not usable yet, it is really development image

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Choosing Linux: 2 Awesome Tools To Find Your Perfect Linux OS

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 27th of November 2018 04:02:29 PM Filed under
OS
Linux

Applying a critical lens and picking a favorite is outside the scope of this article, but I encourage you to just try both! My personal preference is LibreHunt, because it's dead simple and visually appealing. It makes an effort to cut out the fluff and get to the core of what you want. That's where I'll steer people when they ask "hey, I want to ditch Windows but what Linux OS should I use?"

DistroChooser lets you really dial in your specific requirements and needs, but perhaps to a fault when it comes to certain beginners who just want an OS that works flawlessly out of the box. But I'll emphasize again that they're both incredibly valuable tools.

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Review: Haiku R1 Beta1

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 26th of November 2018 01:59:26 AM Filed under
OS
Reviews

As you can probably tell by this point, I ran into a number of frustrating problems while using Haiku. The main ones were the network connection constantly dropping every few minutes, and the operating system failing to boot on my workstation. There were some other aspects that I wasn't thrilled about - the title bar being a tab at the top of windows looks weird and inefficient to me, but that is a matter of taste.

Having an operating system which only has one user account and doesn't require passwords is a non-starter for me. Some people may like the convenience and simplicity of having a completely open, one-user system (it does streamline things) but it wouldn't be suitable for any of my environments or devices, apart from my mobile phone.

In short, in my situation and in my environments, Haiku is not a practical option. However, there are several aspects of the operating system and its surrounding project that I think are great. Haiku has unusually clear and well organized documentation. Most open source projects could use Haiku as an example of how to make user guides. There are little details I like, for example the notes on how to set up wireless networks are available locally, on the install media. This is a minor detail, but it's unfortunate how many projects explain how to get on-line in resources which are only available on-line.

Haiku's desktop is clean, the look is consistent across applications and visual elements don't use up much space. It took me some time to get used to having the application menu and task switcher on the right side of the screen instead of the left, but I like the way the desktop is presented.

One of Haiku's best features is that it is fast and responsive. Whether the system is booting, launching programs, browsing the web or displaying a video, the desktop is highly responsive. Everything feels light and reacts almost instantly to input. This is behaviour I usually only see in super light (and minimal) Linux window managers and I really appreciated the how everything happens quickly on Haiku.

So while Haiku is not practical for me, and I'm guessing for many people, I do think there are aspects of the project which should be held up as a good way to do things in the open source community. I must also applaud Haiku's team for porting several applications, including LibreOffice, to their operating system. Haiku has a lot of its own applications, but I think many users will appreciate having ports of popular programs in the HaikuDepot.

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