Archive

Red Hat last week made Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host generally available, following a four-month live beta test. "The beta release was very successful," said Lars Herrmann, senior director of product strategy at Red Hat. Feedback from customers and partners "helped us refine several feature...

ChaletOS began as a personal project of developer Dejan Petrovic. Its name comes from the style of the mountain houses in Switzerland. Just as the Swiss Chalet is a distinctive design, so too is the look and feel of ChaletOS. This operating system has a familiar Windows-like style, with appealing si...

Google this week confirmed that it's preparing to launch a mobile payments framework called "Android Pay." Google SVP of Product Sundar Pichai discussed the project at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Android Pay will be an API layer of Android. Google will incorporate standard feature...

A team of open source evangelists is working within the General Services Administration as part of a federal initiative for more transparent government use of technology. 18F, a development unit within the GSA, was established a year ago to tap into the success of the United Kingdom's Government Dig...

If you favor the OS X environment, Pearl OS might be a Linux distro to feed your fancy. Pearl OS is a revival of the discontinued Pear OS distro. It picks up where Pear left off in early 2014. Pearl OS has two desktop versions: XFCE and MATE. Both are based on Ubuntu Linux distro version 14.04 Mini...

Technology wars are predictable. Every new wave of gadgetry brings a fight over who will be the next king of the software hill. The next big battle is brewing over control of the Internet of Things marketplace.

Marten Mickos, SVP and general manager of HP's cloud unit, preaches what at first glance may appear to be two opposing business models. One is the notion that developing open source software entails meeting a reciprocity requirement. The other is the idea that using open source software does not req...

Pivotal on Wednesday announced its decision to open source all of the core components of its big data platform, becoming the first big data industry player to do so. The company also announced its participation in the Open Data Platform, which seeks to encourage more enterprise collaboration, along ...

Korora, a Linux distro based on Fedora, the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, just keeps getting better. When I reviewed Korora 19, released in July 2013, I said it had the potential to grow in popularity among users looking for a better, more user-friendly Linux distro that reaches bey...

BitTorrent will begin to offer a series of original movies, dubbed "BitTorrent Originals," in a bid to enter the content entertainment space later this year. BitTorrent inked a deal with Rapid Eye Studios to handle original video content for its BitTorrent Bundle platform, which launched in May 2013...

The first smartphone to be powered by the open source Ubuntu operating system will arrive at retail in Europe beginning on Monday, Feb. 9. The Aquaris E4.5 will be offered to early adopters via a series of "flash sales" across the continent. The unlocked phone will retail for 169.90 euros or roughly...

Converting video files from a variety of media sources can be a huge chore. That task can be much more manageable with HandBrake, a GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder. It is available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows, which makes working on more than one platform a bit more co...

Good Technology on Tuesday announced a merger of its app container and app ecosystem with the Samsung KNOX enterprise security platform for Android. The product merger is the next step in the partnership aimed at eliminating virus and malware concerns that come with Android adoption in the enterpris...

2014 saw the rise of Docker, and ended with appropriately inflated hype and hysteria around a related container technology: Rocket. Immediately, discussions of uncertainty and doubt, and the familiar fear of forking unfolded. Would this be the end of Docker and a new beginning for container techno...

The Linux community is filled with friction and diversity. One of the advantages of open source software is the diversity that leads to innovative approaches to improve the computing environment. But can the diversity go too far? Is it a defining characteristic that kills programming creativity? Lin...