SciFi
Stellarium 0.20.3 Released with Tons of Changes [Ubuntu PPA]
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 29th of September 2020 03:30:15 AM Filed under


Free-software planetarium Stellarium 0.20.3 was released a day ago with numerous changes. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04 via PPA.
Stellarium 0.20.3 fixed nutation and, with it, season beginning times, included many changes in AstroCalc tool, Oculars and Satellites plugins, and updated DSO catalog.
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Help with COVID-19 research using Folding@home on Linux
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 1st of April 2020 11:16:08 AM Filed under


Right now, every human on the planet is affected in some way by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people are looking for ways they can help. People are making masks and starting projects to invent or provide critical equipment. One thing you can do is donate what you have. If you're like me, you have computing hardware sitting idle much of the time—that's a resource that can contribute to finding a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as things like Alzheimer's disease and cancer.
[...]
Folding@home started in 2000 with volunteers donating CPU and GPU time on computers that would otherwise be idle to work on things like creating antibiotics and curing cancer, and since then has made many important contributions. Currently, Folding@home makes more than 100 petaflops of processing power available to researchers. One current high-priority project is the research being done to find ways to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Folding@home software can be installed on almost any computer. There are client downloads for Windows, macOS, and Linux. There is a VMware appliance. There are also projects to get the client running on Android and a Chrome plugin. There's even a Docker image.
In this article, we’ll look at the Linux install and configuration, and we’ll look at a headless install for CentOS 7 that you can use to build multiple VMs.
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9 open source robotics projects
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 14th of April 2016 11:13:19 AM Filed under

Open source isn't just changing the way we interact with the world, it's changing the way the world interacts back with us. Case in point: open source robotics.
Robots are playing an increasing role in our world, and while we perhaps haven't reached the utopian future with robotic housekeepers imagined for us in the Jetsons, robotics are making advances in fields that fifty years ago would have been completely unimaginable.
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Introducing MrRobot, Ubuntu Touch App Enabled Robotics Powered by Raspberry Pi
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 25th of August 2015 05:34:56 AM Filed under

Today we have the great pleasure of introducing you to a brand-new project developed during the Ubuntu ShenZhen hackathon by Joseph Wang. It is called MrRobot, just like the TV show we taked about in a couple of articles right here on Softpedia.
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Linux-based bipedal robot endures kicks and dodgeball attacks
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 18th of March 2015 01:13:44 AM Filed under

OSU demonstrated its speedy, bipedal ATRIAS robot withstanding a barrage of kicks and dodgeballs. ATRIAS runs on ROS and a real-time Xenomai Linux kernel.
Researchers at Oregon State University’s Dynamic Robotics Laboratory have demonstrated their Linux-driven ATRIAS robot withstanding a considerable beating while keeping its cool. OSU recently posted videos of its unusual torture testing procedures, which include human kicks and a barrage of dodgeballs, as reported by IEEE Spectrum. Eventually, the human-sized bipedal robot is knocked from its feet, but not before it absorbs a lot of hits. The robot protects itself with strategies such as side stepping and hopping on one foot
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Linux for Astronomers
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 12th of February 2015 08:33:19 PM Filed under


I've looked at specialty distributions that were created for engineers and biologists in previous articles, but these aren't the only scientific disciplines that have their own distributions. So in this article, I introduce a distribution created specifically for astronomers, called Distro Astro. This distribution bundles together astronomy software to help users with tasks like running observatories or planetariums, doing professional research or outreach.
From the very first moment of booting up Distro Astro, you will notice that this distribution is aimed at astronomers. The look and feel of items, from the boot splash screen to wallpapers and screensavers, have all been given an astronomical theme. Even the default wallpaper is a slideshow of Hubble images.
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Imitate Fake Hollywood Terminal Hacking Melodrama with This Amazing App for Ubuntu
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 19th of December 2014 07:10:43 PM Filed under




We all know that Hollywood movies are the worst place to see some accurate depiction of anything from real life and that includes computer terminals. Well, there is a solution for that now and we can only hope that some misguided producer will see the new "hollywood" package made for this exact purpose.
Hollywood movie producers invest a lot of time and money in custom interfaces and GUIs that don't really do anything, but they think they’re nice and interesting on film. Most of the time, someone is hacking away by typing frenetically while windows with crazy stuff open and close. This is why this kind of image is now seared into the public's consciousness and hacking looks more exciting than in real life. It isn't.
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NASA’s R2 bot to receive legs via SpaceX
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Saturday 15th of March 2014 01:51:59 AM Filed under

The 330-pound Robonaut 2 measures 3 feet, 4 inches tall from the waist, and is equipped with more than 350 sensors. Its stomach-located brain runs Linux on 38 PowerPC-based processors. The robot is operated remotely by humans, using the Robonaut Tele-operation System (RTS). This telerobotics system requires a ground- or space-based user to wear a 3D visor, vest, and pressure-sensitive gloves. (For more on the R2, see our original coverage.)
According to the OSRF, the R2 team also uses the open source Gazebo simulator to simulate R2 for development and testing. NASA and ROS.org released their Gazebo models of the R2 and the ISS as open source.
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Top 10 tech tricks we're sick of seeing in movies
Submitted by srlinuxx on Tuesday 26th of October 2010 08:29:22 PM Filed under


cnet.com: Think how awesome it was the first time you saw a lightsaber in action. Or how your mind was officially shredded when Neo mastered the Matrix. Technology in movies is cool. But for every thrilling example of cool-ass tech, Hollywood seems to produce a tired, dated cliche.
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Michael Crichton, million-selling science-fiction author, dies at 66
Submitted by srlinuxx on Wednesday 5th of November 2008 07:42:42 PM Filed under

latimes.com: Best-selling author Michael Crichton, who wrote such novels as "The Andromeda Strain" and "Jurassic Park," and created the popular TV drama "ER," has died at 66, his family said today.
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Canonical Chooses Google’s Flutter UI SDK to Build Future Ubuntu Apps
For those not in the known, Flutter is an open-source UI SDK (software development kit) created by Google to helps those who want to build quick and modern applications for a wide-range of operating systems, including Android, Linux, Mac, iOS, Windows, Google Fuchsia, that work across desktop, mobile, and the Web.
A year ago, Canonical teamed up with Google to make the Flutter SDK available on Linux as Snap, the universal software deployment and package management system for Ubuntu `and other GNU/Linux distributions, allowing those interested in building beautiful apps on the Linux desktop.
| Python: Security and NumPy 1.20 Release
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4 Best Free and Open Source Graphical MPD Clients
MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.
MPD runs in the background playing music from its playlist. Client programs communicate with MPD to manipulate playback, the playlist, and the database.
The client–server model provides advantages over all-inclusive music players. Clients can communicate with the server remotely over an intranet or over the Internet. The server can be a headless computer located anywhere on a network.
There’s graphical clients, console clients and web-based clients.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 4 best graphical MPD clients. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to listen to their music collection via MPD.
Here’s our recommendations. They are all free and open source goodness.
| LWN on Kernel: 5.12 Merge, Lockless Algorithms, and opy_file_range()
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