• The open source AsteroidOS is a new alternative to Wear OS

  AsteroidOS is a new Linux-based open source operating system that can be used as a replacement to Wear OS.

  A small team of developers have been hard at work on the smartwatch platform for the last four years. As the culmination of their efforts, this week the first stable version was made available to the public. It plays nice with a few Wear OS-compatible smartwatches.

• Das blinkenlights are back thanks to RPi revival of the PDP-11

  The designers left the I2C port of the Raspberry Pi free for hacks, and “it is not very hard to add support for such things in the simh emulator, so the PiDP-11 can use them as I/O”.

  The SR switches on the PiDP-11's SR switches can be set to boot various operating systems (this part is a work in progress), so instead of RSX-11MPlus users can choose BSD, DOS-11, Unix System 6 or System 7 and the like.

 

• How Android P Will Increase Battery Life

If you are a software developer in your 20s or 30s, you've grown up in a world dominated by Linux. It has been a significant player in the data center for decades, and while it's hard to find definitive operating system market share reports, Linux's share of data center operating systems could be as high as 70%, with Windows variants carrying nearly all the remaining percentage. Developers using any major public cloud can expect the target system will run Linux. Evidence that Linux is everywhere has grown in recent years when you add in Android and Linux-based embedded systems in smartphones, TVs, automobiles, and many other devices.

Even so, most software developers, even those who have grown up during this venerable "Linux revolution" have at least heard of Unix. It sounds similar to Linux, and you've probably heard people use these terms interchangeably. Or maybe you've heard Linux called a "Unix-like" operating system.

So, what is this Unix? The caricatures speak of wizard-like "graybeards" sitting behind glowing green screens, writing C code and shell scripts, powered by old-fashioned, drip-brewed coffee. But Unix has a much richer history beyond those bearded C programmers from the 1970s. While articles detailing the history of Unix and "Unix vs. Linux" comparisons abound, this article will offer a high-level background and a list of major differences between these complementary worlds.

• AsteroidOS 1.0 is now available to replace WearOS on your smartwatch

• AsteroidOS, a Wear OS alternative for your smartwatch, gets version 1.0 release

• AsteroidOS puts out first stable build, open source, compatible with many smartwatches

E-Con’s 55 x 30mm “eSOMiMX7” COM can simultaneously run Linux and FreeRTOS on the Cortex-A7 and MCU-driven i.MX7 SoC. It offers up to 2GB RAM and 64GB eMMC, with options including WiFi/BT, up to 2x GbE, extended temp support, and an “Acacia” carrier.

E-Con Systems’ eSOMiMX7 computer-on-module is the first NXP i.MX7 based model in its line of Linux-driven eSOM branded modules. These include its i.MX6-based 70 x 45mm “μQseven” form-factor eSOMiMX6 and 54 x 20mm eSOMiMX6-micro. Designed for IoT applications, industrial HMI, test and measurement, ebook readers, and wearables, the module supports 800MHz single- or 1GHz dual-core i.MX7 models and is available with an Acacia evaluation kit (see farther below).