• Sailfish OS Nurmonjoki is now available

  After a very warm summer here in Northern Europe, many well deserved holidays are taken and many sailors are now rested after a year of full-on work. Sailors that were on duty during the summer have however worked on the latest iteration of Sailfish OS updates for our beloved community! After much developing and testing, we are now ready to release Sailfish OS 2.2.1. Sailfish OS 2.2.1 is named after the river Nurmonjoki which is located 300km north of Helsinki, on south western part of Finland.

• Sailfish OS "Nurmonjoki" Released For GDPR Compliance, App Updates

  While Jolla's Linux-based Sailfish OS mobile operating system hasn't turned out to be as great as many anticipated, today the Finnish company released Sailfish OS 2.2.1 under the Nurmonjoki codename.

• /e/ first beta soon to be released

  Next week, on Tuesday or Wednesday, we will release the first beta of /e/ mobile OS.

  I will then describe choices that have been done, what’s in, what’s not in, what remains to do, what to test and how. And probably a challenge for testers.

  [...]

  Of course we cannot support the 17K+ known Android devices. As the /e/ ROM itself is forked from LineageOS we can build for all LOS 14.1 (Android Nougat) supported devices, and not yet for LOS 15 (Android Oreo) supported devices (work in progress).

The Unix operating system has been around for decades, and it and its lookalikes (mainly Linux) are a critical part of the computing world. Apple’s operating system, macOS, is Unix-based, as are Solaris and BSD. Even if you’ve never directly used one of these operating systems, at least two-thirds of all websites are served by Unix or Unix-like software. And, if you’ve ever picked up a smart phone, chances are it was running either a Unix variant or the Linux-driven Android. The core reason that Unix has been so ubiquitous isn’t its accessibility, or cost, or user interface design, although these things helped. The root cause of its success is its design philosophy.

Good design is crucial for success. Whether that’s good design of a piece of software, infrastructure like a railroad or power grid, or even something relatively simple like a flag, without good design your project is essentially doomed. Although you might be able to build a workable one-off electronics project that’s a rat’s nest of wires, or a prototype of something that gets the job done but isn’t user-friendly or scalable, for a large-scale project a set of good design principles from the start is key.

• Auterion raises $10 million for open source drone operating system

  Auterion has raised $10 million in funding for its open source commercial drone operating system and launched its drone OS today as an enterprise version of the PX4 open source standard.

  The Zurich, Switzerland-based company will use the money to scale its operations and speed up development of its platform.

  The funding comes from Lakestar, Mosaic Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Tectonic Ventures. Auterion will continue to work in close alignment with the PX4 community, the most widely used open source drone autopilot software, to bring the technology to the enterprise.

• Open source drone software startup Auterion lands $10M seed funding

  Auterion, a startup that offers a drone operating system built on top of the popular PX4 open source software, has landed $10 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Lakestar, Mosaic Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Tectonic Ventures.

  The young Swiss company says the injection of cash will be used to work closely with the wider PX4 community to further develop the open source code, and to bring the technology to more enterprise customers in the form of the Auterion platform.

Coming only a month after the Neptune 5.4 release that introduced a new dark theme and updated several components, Neptune 5.5 bumps the kernel version to Linux kernel 4.17.8 and updates the graphics stack to Mesa 18.1.6, AMDGPU DDX 18.0.1, Nouveau DDX 1.0.15, and ATI/Radeon DDX 18.0.1.

"This update represents the current state of Neptune 5 and renews the ISO file so if you install Neptune you don't have to download tons of Updates," writes Leszek Lesner in today's announcement. "In this update we improved hardware support further by providing Linux Kernel 4.17.8 with improved drivers and bugfixes."