Open Source

Last year the news circulated that Fedora was introducing a new package manager. Despite having made it into the last release, Fedora 18, DNF is still considered experimental. It is a fork of Yum that "uses libsolv via hawkey for a backed." Developers think the DNF is the answer to their packaging woes and Rahul Sundaram recently blogged about the progress. Some of the benefits of DNF over Yum include: * more compatibility with other languages * better performance & memory consumption * leaner codebase than Yum Rahul Sundaram, Fedora contributor, said, "In the course of the last several months, I have filed over a dozen bug reports and new feature requests mostly to bring dnf in line with what yum already supports." Some of the features it doesn't yet support include: *Delta RPM * history undo * parallel downloads * auto-remove * bash completion Despite the soon-to-be-added features, Sundaram implies that DNF is right on track to eventually replace Yum. Its commands are the same or compatible with Yum and Sundaram says he's put an alias for it in his .bashrc so as not to "have to throw away my muscle memory." Little else was said at this time, but the main point of the post is that DNF is shaping up nicely and is the future of Fedora package management. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software Fedora (7 alternatives, 1 review) yum (5 alternatives, post review) Related Blog Posts Maintain A Local Repo (post comment) Linux Shorts: Sabayon 13.04, Korora 18, and SythOS (post comment) Linux Shorts: Mageia 3, Slackware, and Fedora 19 (2 comments)

Plasma Workspaces 4.11 is to receive two years of stabilisation updates from its release, under a long-term support (LTS) scheme. KDE applications are not affected by the freeze and more feature releases of the desktop are expected

Last month we held the 7th Annual Collaboration Summit and as usual, there was a lot of interest in The Yocto Project. For those who don’t know, The Yocto Project provides a multitude of templates, tools and specific methods you can follow that make it easier than ever to create a custom Linux-based system for a product, regardless of the hardware architecture (read highlights of the new Yocto release here). In a new Linux Foundation training publication titled How Engineering Leaders Can Use the Yocto Project to Solve Complex Problems, the Linux Foundation’s Director of Embedded Solutions, Rudi Steif, outlines some common challenges that plague engineering leaders who work with embedded products. As a 20+ year experienced embedded engineer, Steif walks you through some specific scenarios that are common across all industries and shows how the Yocto Project was design specifically to address them. Some of the challenges addressed in this new publication include: Controlling your Linux operating system stack Distribution maintenance Build system and tooling Open source licensing requirements Getting the support you need Ramping up and scaling your organization If your organization is considering moving to Linux or you’re interested in exploring how the Yocto Project can make your next project easier, this new publication does a great job of taking you through the many advantages of using the Yocto Project for your embedded projects in the future. Download This Linux Training Publication An Excerpt From this Publication: The two principal approaches for building a Linux operating system stack for your product are the following: Top-Down: Leveraging an existing Linux distribution and scaling it according to product requirements; Bottom-Up: Building a custom Linux distribution for your product starting with the kernel and adding packages as needed; Both of these options have their advantages and their challenges. Let’s explore. Top-Down Leveraging an existing Linux distribution that you can download and install on your architecture of your hardware is not supported, peripheral devices have no drivers, and other problems typically found with embedded systems? Furthermore, how do you scale the distribution to your needs? All of those distributions come with a package management system that lets you install and uninstall components. While they are handling the dependencies, it remains a cumbersome process at the end of which you will have to create a file system image to install on your target hardware when going into production. Bottom-Up Building a custom Linux distribution from scratch gives you the most control over your operating system stack, including customizing and optimizing the Linux kernel potentially for multiple architectures, adding device drivers, and more. However, it is not a trivial task and the tools traditionally available have been limited. Enter: The Yocto Project The Yocto Project combines the best of both worlds. While the Yocto Project is not an (embedded) Linux distribution but creates a custom one for you, what it does provide is a set of common configurations to choose from. This includes a minimal system with console login, a system with a basic graphical user interface for mobile devices and even a system that is compliant with the Linux Standard Base (LSB), to get your team started quickly. After selecting your initial configuration and your target system, which can be an emulated target or actual hardware, the Yocto Project fetches all the necessary source code for the components that comprise the system, builds its own toolchain and then uses that toolchain to build all the other software components. Within a couple of hours or less, depending on your build system, the Yocto Project creates bootloader, kernel and root file system images according to your configuration that you can either launch in an emulator or transfer to actual hardware. After the initial build, compone

This edition of the Open Recall catches up with a number of open source project releases: siduction 13.1.0, Puppy Linux 5.6, Wifislax 4.4, Diaspora 0.1.0.0 and Moodle 2.5

The creation of new Android-related open source projects picked up in a big way in 2012, radically outpacing new iOS projects, according to data released by Black Duck Software. Black Duck manages and secures implementations of open source software, and has large samples of real-world data on open source software in use and in development. Its latest study shows that new Android mobile projects outstripped iOS projects by a factor of four in 2012, expanding by at least 96 percent in each year since 2007. New iOS project growth, by comparison, was 32 percent from 2011 to 2012. The analysis of open source mobile project data pulled from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, a repository of data containing about one million open source projects, and Ohloh.net, the public directory of free and open source software, looked at the growth of mobile open source projects over a five-year period beginning in 2007. According to Black Duck's findings: "Over 15, 000 new Android mobile projects were launched in 2012, bringing the total number of Android projects in the KnowledgeBase to more than 28,000. New projects associated with the iOS platform numbered nearly 2,500 in 2012, with a cumulative total of more than 7,000 projects. All other mobile platforms accounted for fewer than 500 new projects in 2012, for a total of fewer than 2,000 projects over the 2007 - 2012 period." "As the growth of open source has continued to evolve and shape attitudes towards the commercial value of software, it has begun to fundamentally alter a variety of software markets," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk, in a statement. "Black Duck's data on mobile OSS growth is yet more evidence of this." As we've noted, among handset makers, Samsung continues to be the big winner as developers and users continue to flock to Android. We've also reported on the fact that developers have more economic incentives to develop for the iPhone. Still, Android development is clearly running at a very healthy clip and the ecosystem of applications for Android is at critical mass. That news is even good for iOS users, because the more competition there is among app developers, the better things turn out for all mobile users. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software Android (3 alternatives, 3 reviews) ios (add alternative, post review) Related Blog Posts Samsung Calls Out Developers with $800,000 Galaxy S4 App Challenge (post comment) Google Touts Big Share for Chrome, and New Voice Search Plans (post comment) Android Chief Discusses Open Source and Emerging Tech Markets (post comment)

As the diminutive $25/$35 Linux-based Raspberry Pi devices continue to contribute to imaginative applications, they're also emerging as shining examples of new ways Linux can be deployed. Tinkerers have already put all flavors of Linux on the devices, and now, Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) have announced the release of Pidora 18, a custom version of Fedora specifically for the Raspberry Pi. Here is more on it. Pidora has its own web site set up, complete with download links, installation instructions, release notes and an announcement, which specifies the following: "We're excited to announce the release of Pidora 18 -- an optimized Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi. It is based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set. There are some interesting new features we'd like to highlight: * Almost all of the Fedora 18 package set available via yum (thousands of packages were built from the official Fedora repository and made available online) * Compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi * Graphical firstboot configuration (with additional modules specifically made for the Raspberry Pi) * Compact initial image size (for fast downloads) and auto-resize (for maximum storage afterwards) * Auto swap creation available to allow for larger memory usage * C, Python, & Perl programming languages available & included in the SD card image * Initial release of headless mode can be used with setups lacking a monitor or display * IP address information can be read over the speakers and flashed with the LED light * For graphical operation, Gedit text editor can be used with plugins (python console, file manager, syntax highlighting) to serve as a mini-graphical IDE * For console operation, easy-to-use text editors are included (nled, nano, vi) plus Midnight Commander for file management * Includes libraries capable of supporting external hardware such as motors and robotics (via GPIO, I2C, SPI) Pidora replaces Fedora Raspberry Pi Remix, a previous version of Fedora for the Pi. It's likely that we're going to see many more custom operating systems tweaked for the Pi, especially as more users find unusual applications for the low cost but powerful devices. As noted here this week, Raspberry Pis are even being chained together into supercomputers and powerful clusters, giving them credibility at the high-end of the computing landscape, where Linux has long had a strong foothold. For more on Raspberry Pis in high-end applications, see this post.  (Photo Credit: University of Southampton) Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts It's Easier Than Ever to Slap Your Favorite Linux Distro Onto a Chromebook (post comment) OpenMandriva Picks Name, Releases Alpha (1 comment) Raspberry Pis Chained Together Provide Massive Computing Muscle (post comment)

A freelance Java developer claims it took him only 30 days to build and launch a basic open source office suite that runs on multiple OSes.read more

NoPackageCyclesEnforcerRule automatically detects cyclical dependencies between classes from different packages; Macker helps define specific dependencies between packages and automatically verifies those rules

Google has announced that it will discontinue the ability for new projects on Google Code to host direct downloads of files. Existing downloads will continue to be available

Seneca College has released Pidora 18, its Fedora remix optimised for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. It features a special headless mode that makes it easy to install the distribution over the network