Open Source

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

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

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

At the LinuxTag conference, the leader of Munich's Linux migration project, Peter Hofmann, emphasised that the City of Munich has no intentions to switch its Linux desktops to Windows

Yahoo recently purchased Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion. Tumblr pushes some surprisingly high numbers through their service, so aninside look at the architecture that Yahoo bought is well worth the read. The portion I found most interesting are the details on the MySQL database setup, and how Tumblr uses MySQL to scale massively, and keep the service available. High Scaleability interviewed Blake Matheny, Distributed Systems Engineer at Tumblr, who summed up their views on MySQL best: MySQL (plus sharding) scales, apps don’t. Nowhere in the discussion is mention of master-master replication, DRBD, or database clustering. Data in the database is replicated using standard master-slave MySQL replication, and, as quoted above, split between servers using sharding. Sharding, to grossly oversimplify, is the splitting of data between physical machines. In one example, Database A might hold all the user accounts for last names starting with letters A-M, and Database B might hold all the user accounts for last names starting with letters N-Z. The application would then need to look up in an index which database server would hold the account they were looking for. To scale this setup out horizontally from two servers to four, the database would be split four ways instead of two: A-G, H-M, N-T, U-Z, or something similar. Sharding provides a form of high availability in that even if one database server goes down, the entire application stays up, and only the users who’s accounts reside on the broken server would be affected. If you couple sharding with MySQL replication slaves for doing reads off of, it is even more likely that the application will “appear” to be up when a single database server is down. Appropriate error handling in the application could convey a message to the user indicating that something is wrong, and that the hosting company is working on it. Tumblr’s setup has survived more traffic than most sites will ever have to endure, and at a very high standard. When discussing Tumblr’s decision to move to a Java Virtual Machine and the Scala language, Blake said: …they target 5ms response times, 4 9s HA, 40K requests per second and some at 400K requests per second. The stats section towards the top of the article says the rest: 500 million page views a day 15B+ page views month ~20 engineers Peak rate of ~40k requests per second 1+ TB/day into Hadoop cluster Many TB/day into MySQL/HBase/Redis/Memcache Growing at 30% a month ~1000 hardware nodes in production Billions of page visits per month per engineer Posts are about 50GB a day. Follower list updates are about 2.7TB a day. Dashboard runs at a million writes a second, 50K reads a second, and it is growing. For many of us in smaller data centers, these numbers are pretty far out of our reach. Dumping “Many TB/day” into anything could cause a major problem with disk space. What fascinates me about Tumblr’s architecture is that 1) it is built entirely off of open source code, and 2) if Tumblr can scale their infrastructure with 4 9’s requirements and 500 million page views per day with MySQL, I think most of us can too. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software MySQL (14 alternatives, 9 reviews) Related Blog Posts Unix Architecture Showing it's Age (16 comments) Wikipedia Migrates to MariaDB (2 comments) Common Themes in Scaling (post comment)

It was just last week we looked at some of the proposed features for upcoming KDE 4.11 as it neared soft feature freeze. Well, today some new information about KDE 4.11 came to light. Aaron Seigo said today that 4.11 would be a "long term release." A long term release means a particular version will be kept up to date with stabilization and security updates for an extended period of time; in this case, two years. This will give distributions that skate safely in the well-worn groove of stability a chance to have a longer term plan and more stable offerings. Seigo said, "no new features [will be] added after 4.11.0 to Plasma Desktop and Netbook, though the code will be adjusted as needed to maintain and improve existing functionality." He believes this will help developers and distribution developers a chance to focus on polishing. For those that like upgrading each release Seigo said: This does not effect, in any way, anything other than the code currently in the kde-workspace repository. Applications are not affected, kdelibs and kderuntime will continue on as they currently are (with kdelibs in a feature freeze of its own already). I fully expect there to be a 4.12 and likely a 4.13 release of the applications, and how long that goes on will be up to the application developers and release team. Seigo continues as if this news will get ruffle some feathers. I suppose they've come to expect that any announcement will. He said focusing on stabilization and security for so long helped KDE 3.5 become so successful, but hopes any updates to 4.1x won't be overlooked when KDE built on QT5 and Plasma Workspaces 2 appear. So, hold on to your socks boys and girls, announcing a LTR is actually announcing KDE 5. It'll be here within two years if all goes as planned and distributions will begin including it. Additionally, Seigo took the opportunity to speak of "decoupling the Software Compilation" from the KDE base. He feels a longer release cycle than is the norm now would help developers make better apps. He said it's just getting too hard to get every little sub-project all ready to release at the same exact time. So, perhaps more independent development of the application stack would promote stability and less stressed developers (and release managers). Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts KDE 4.11 Beginning to Take Shape (9 comments) LibreOffice, Blender, and KDE, Oh My (post comment) Mageia 3 Delayed Again a Bit (1 comment)

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora operating system has a bit of a checkered history with the Raspberry Pi. It was originally the recommended operating system for the device before being stripped from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's downloads page, replaced by a version of Debian optimized for the Pi's ARMv6 chip. But Fedora is back on the Pi in the form of a new build developed by the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. It's called "Pidora." "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," the Pidora team said today. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments