Blender 2.7.8 Released With Plenty of Improvements.

Blender 2.78 Released: Works On VR Support, Adds Grease Pencil

Blender 2.78 is now officially released to end out September for this open-source, cross-platform 3D/animation program. New to Blender 2.78 is spherical stereo rendering support for VR, a grease pencil for full 2D drawing and animations, viewport rendering improvements, freehand curves drawing over surfaces, bendy bones support, alembic support, new physics capabilities, and various new add-ons.

Cacti vs Nagios vs Pandora FMS, in depth

A Neat YouTube Subscriber Count Tracker for the Linux Terminal

A Primer on OVN

OVN is a virtual networking platform developed by the fine folks over at openvswitch.org. The project has been in the works for nearly two years now and is starting to mature to the point of being production ready. In this posting I’ll walk through the basics of configuring a simple layer-2 overlay network between 3 hosts. But first, a brief overview of how the system functions.

Calibre 2.69 eBook Manager and Reader Supports Kobo Driver 4.1, Overdrive Books

Today, September 30, 2016, Calibre developer Kovid Goyal announced the release and immediate availability for download of yet another maintenance update to the popular, free, and open source ebook library management software. Calibre 2.69 is now the latest and most advanced version of the application, and it comes two weeks after the release of Calibre 2.68, bringing support for firmware version 4.1 to the driver for Kobo e-book readers, along with support for Overdrive books on the device.

[How To] See Which Terminal Commands You Use The Most

How to install MediaWiki on an Ubuntu 16.04 VPS

Perform Hot Backups of MySQL Databases with Percona XtraBackup on Ubuntu 16.04

I think ‘Particle Fleet: Emergence’ just became my new Linux gaming addiction

I’m a big strategy game fan, I like building stuff and especially destroying stuff. I did a quick check on new Steam releases today and came across ‘Particle Fleet: Emergence’ [Official Site, Steam] and I don’t want to put it down.

It's Been Three Years Since Valve Announced SteamOS, Steam Machines

This week marks three years since Valve publicly announced Steam Machines, SteamOS, and the Steam Controller. The Steam Controller seems to be gaining the most traction of these three efforts. This week the Steam Controller is on sale if you are looking at picking it up for just $35 rather than $50. The Steam Controller appears to still be going strong and there have been some indications Valve may be launching a new Steam Controller in the not too distant future.

Red Hat, Logicalis in digital transformation partnership in Latin America

PromonLogicalis, a provider of information technology and communication solutions and services in Latin America, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced a collaboration that aim to help organizations navigate the digital transformation of their infrastructures to pave the way for cloud and the software-defined technologies, and to advance open source technology awareness in the region. Open source is delivering significant advancements in many areas of technology through community-powered innovation, including cloud computing, mobile, big data, and more. And, as companies embrace modern technology as a competitive advantage via digital transformation efforts, many are turning to open source because of the flexibility and agility it can enable.

Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Downgraded by Zacks Investment Research to “Hold”

An Easy Way To Try Intel & RADV Vulkan Drivers On Fedora 24

Fedora 25 should have good support for the open-source Vulkan Linux drivers (particularly if it lands the next Mesa release) while Fedora 24 users can now more easily play with the latest Mesa Git RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers via a new repository. A Phoronix reader has setup a Fedora Copr repository that is building Intel's Vulkan driver from Mesa Git plus the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver re-based from its source (David Airlie's semi-interesting GitHub branch). Fedora COPR, for the uninformed, is the distribution's equivalent to Ubuntu PPA repositories.

Meeting users, lots of users

Every year, I introduce Fedora to new students at Brno Technical University. There are approx. 500 of them and a sizable amount of them then installs Fedora. We also organize a sort of installfest one week after the presentation where anyone who has had any difficulties with Fedora can come and ask for help. It’s a great opportunity to observe what things new users struggle with the most. Especially when you have such a high number of new users. What are my observations this year?

96Boards SBCs host Intel Joule and Curie IoT modules

Gumstix announced two SBCs this week, based on Intel Joule and Curie IoT modules and built to 96Boards CE and IE form-factor specifications, respectively. At Linaro Connect Las Vegas 2016, where earlier this week Linaro’s 96Boards.org announced a new 96Boards IoT Edition (IE) spec, Gumstix announced support for 96Boards.org’s open SBC standards with two new single-board computers. Both SBCs will be available for purchase in October.

ORWL — First Open Source And Physically Secure PC, Runs Linux And Windows

ORWL is the first open source, physically secure computer. Using a secure microcontroller (MCU) and an ‘active clamshell mesh’, the device makes sure that nobody breaks the security of the system. Its maker, Design Shift, has also launched a crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply.

Purism Is Still Hoping To Build A GNU/Linux Free Software Librem Smartphone

Purism, the startup behind the Librem laptops with a focus on free software and user privacy/freedom, still has their minds set on coming up with a GNU/Linux smartphone. Purism continues selling their high-priced laptops and their Librem 11 is forthcoming as an Intel-based tablet/convertible device with stocking station. Next on their horizon they want to produce "the ideal no-carrier, Free Software phone running a bona fide GNU+Linux stack."

Asterisk 14 Improves Open-Source VoIP

Digium, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Asterisk open source PBX project announced the release Asterisk 14 this week, continuing to evolve the decade old effort, making it easier to use and deploy.

Yahoo open-sources a deep learning model for classifying pornographic images

Yahoo today announced its latest open-source release: a model that can figure out if images are specifically pornographic in nature. The system uses a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data (like dirty images) and getting them to make inferences about new data. The model that’s now available on GitHub under a BSD 2-Clause license comes pre-trained, so users only have to fine-tune it if they so choose. The model works with the widely used Caffe open source deep learning framework. The team trained the model using its now open source CaffeOnSpark system. The new model could be interesting to look at for developers maintaining applications like Instagram and Pinterest that are keen to minimize smut. Search engine operators like Google and Microsoft might also want to check out what’s under the hood here. “To the best of our knowledge, there is no open source model or algorithm for identifying NSFW images,” Yahoo research engineer Jay Mahadeokar and senior director of product management Gerry Pesavento wrote in a blog post.

Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Uber to Keynote at Apache Big Data and ApacheCon Europe

Vendors Pile on Big Data News at Strata

Cloudera, Pentaho and Alation are among vendors making Big Data announcements at this week's Strata event. Vendors big and small are making news at this week's Strata + Hadoop event as they try to expand their portion of the Big Data market. Cloudera highlighted a trio of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects to which it contributes. Among them is Spark 2.0, which benefits from a new Dataset API that offers the promise of better usability and performance as well as new machine learning libraries.

New alliances focus on open-source, data science empowerment

How can data science make a true market impact? Partnerships, particularly amongst open source communities. As IBM solidifies its enterprise strategies around data demands, two new partnerships emerge: one with Continuum Analytics, Inc., advancing open-source analytics for the enterprise; and another with Galvanize, initiating a Data Science for Executives program. Continuum Analytics, the creator and driving force behind Anaconda — a leading open data science platform powered by Python — has allied with IBM to advance open-source analytics for the enterprise. Data scientists and data engineers in open-source communities can now embrace Python and R to develop analytic and machine learning models in the Spark environment through its integration with IBM’s DataWorks Project. The new agreement between IBM and Galvanize, which provides a dynamic learning community for technology, will offer an assessment, analysis and training element for Galvanize’s Data Science for Executives program. This program empowers corporations to better understand, use and maximize the value of their data. The program will support IBM’s DataFirst Method, a methodology that IBM says provides the strategy, expertise and game plan to help ensure enterprise customers’ succeed on their journey to become a data-driven business.

Apache Spot: open source big data analytics for cyber

Chinese open source blockchain startup Antshares raises $4.5M through crowdsourcing [Ed: Microsoft-connected]

August and September 2016: photos from Pittsburgh and Fresno

Libre Learn Lab: a summit on freely licensed resources for education

Libre Learn Lab is a two-day summit for people who create, use and implement freely licensed resources for K-12 education, bringing together educators, policy experts, software developers, hardware hackers, and activists to share best practices and address the challenges of widespread adoption of these resources in education. The 2nd biennial conference is Saturday, October 8th, and Sunday, October 9th, at the MIT Tang Center. The keynote addresses will be delivered by the FSF’s own Richard M. Stallman, former Chief Open Education Advisor Andrew Marcinek and founder of HacKIDemia Stefania Druga. At the event, there will be a special tribute to Dr. Seymour Papert (the father of educational computing) by Dr. Cynthia Solomon.