Scott Merrill
Latest from Scott Merrill
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Fedora Project Announces Pidora Remix for Raspberry Pi
The Fedora Project has been supporting Raspberry Pi, the diminutive $35 computer, for some time. Today they’re making the Pidora “remix” of the core Fedora distribution available. Like the Raspbian distribution of Debian, Pidora is compiled specifically to take advantage of the hardware already built into the Raspberry Pi. Read More
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SpiderOak Unveils Hive, Streamlines Zero-Knowledge Privacy Storage
An old saying states that “security is inversely proportional to convenience.” This explains the slow adoption of many important security technologies. HTTPS, the secure version of the HTTP protocol used to browse the world wide web, has been around for more than two decades, but it’s only been in the last couple of years that it has been enabled by default on many major… Read More
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Xen Moving To The Linux Foundation
The Xen project celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. It’s also moving to a new home at The Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project. Just like the Linux kernel, Xen enjoys contributions from a variety of different companies, so a vendor-neutral organization to host development and collaboration is a big win for the project. Read More
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Hosting Undergoes Massive Changes As Providers Move Towards Platform As A Service
The explosion of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings has greatly expanded the ways in which hobbyists and professionals deploy web sites and web services. For about the same cost as cheapo shared hosting, you can get your own small virtual machine at any number of providers, allowing you to tweak the entire instance to just the way you want it. If infrastructure… Read More
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Red Hat Announces RDO And OpenStack Partner Program
At the OpenStack Summit today, Red Hat announced RDO, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” In essence, RDO will function for Red Hat OpenStack much like Fedora does for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: new features will land upstream, get integrated into RDO, and eventually make their way… Read More
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A Precision Guided Firearm Powered by Linux
I’ve written a number of times about how ubiquitous Linux has become. It powers supercomputers and cell phones. It’s in automotive infotainment systems. It’s in medical equipment. It’s also now in firearms, thanks to the folks at Tracking Point. Read More
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Crowdfunding, Micro-Patronage, And The Future Of Free Software
The “free” in Free Software refers to “freedom”, rather than cost. It is largely a happy coincidence that Free Software is available gratis. Copyleft licensing certainly helps, but there’s no overarching reason that Free-as-in-Freedom software need not cost anything. As Free Software has evolved and matured over the years, several major developmental archetypes… Read More
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QloudSync: A Dropbox Competitor Running On 100% Renewable Energy
There is no shortage of cloud-based file storage and synchronization solutions: Dropbox, Box.net, Ubuntu One, and on and on and on. Most offer pretty much the same things. A few niche players offer something special, like Spideroak’s approach to encryption, or ownCloud’s host-it-yourself solution. QloudSync puts forward two interesting differentiators: it’s powered by… Read More
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Rackspace Extends Private Cloud Offering With OpenCenter
Rackspace, one of the original participants in the OpenStack project, has spent the last couple of years building a successful cloud business. Along the way, they’ve continued to contribute to OpenStack and even offer a streamlined installation process for people who want to “run like Rackspace” on their own hardware. Read More
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A Look At Karma, A Tiny Wi-Fi Hotspot On A Mission
We wander the streets with tiny computers in our pockets and in our hands. We talk casually to these computers, just like Captains Kirk and Picard talked to the computers on their Enterprises. With the push of a button, our computers give us unprecedented access to the bulk of human knowledge. These computers sometimes talk back to us. But underneath all the noise and chatter of speech… Read More
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Meet ownCloud 5, The Open Source Dropbox
ownCloud is a free software suite, written in PHP, that provides file storage, synchronization, and sharing. It provides the same basic features of Dropbox or Box.net. It also provides a whole lot more. Read More
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Canonical Unveils Ubuntu For Tablets, Developer Preview Available For Nexus Devices On Thursday
Hot on the heels of the announcement of Ubuntu on phones comes Canonical’s latest announcement: Ubuntu on tablets. This is, in many ways, a no-brainer: Android and iOS have already demonstrated that the same OS can work on both form factors. But the story is a little more interesting when you consider what Ubuntu offers. And developers can start playing with it on Thursday. Read More
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LibreOffice 4.0 Released Just In Time For Office 365 Refugees
Microsoft Office has long been the dominant office suite. Through the years there have been many contenders rise and fall: WordPerfect, Corel, StarOffice, and too many more to count. Sun Microsystem’s StarOffice eventually mutated into OpenOffice, which for a long time was the best alternative to Microsoft’s dominance. But when Oracle bought Sun, legions of developers… Read More
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Ceph-Powered DreamObjects Now Ready For Production Use
DreamObjects, DreamHost’s scalable cloud storage solution built atop Ceph, is now available to the general public. DreamObjects offers APIs compatible with Amazon S3 and Swift, making data migrations (in or out) fairly easy. And to celebrate the announcement, DreamHost is offering introductory pricing for new customers. Read More
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After Teasing Its Touch-Friendly Future, Canonical Officially Reveals The Ubuntu Phone OS
Ubuntu isn’t exactly a stranger to the mobile space — it started showing off its Ubuntu for Android project in early 2012, but it wasn’t about to stop there. Not long after teasing the prospect of a touch-friendly future for its peculiarly-named OS, Canonical has officially pulled back the curtains on its Ubuntu phone OS and it looks, well, great. Read More
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OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service, Headed to the Enterprise
Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service started as a hosted solution for developers. It was, ostensibly, Red Hat dipping its toe into the platform-as-a-service waters. It proved successful enough to keep going. In keeping with Red Hat’s open source ethos, the product was released as an open source project called OpenShift Origin. This allowed anyone to deploy and run the Red Hat… Read More
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Ubuntu Users: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
The Ubuntu Linux distribution has always been free. It’s also always welcomed donations from users. Historically, though, the donation page hasn’t been featured prominently on the Ubuntu website. As of yesterday, users who download Ubuntu are now invited to donate to Ubuntu. It’s important to note two things. First, donations are completely voluntary. Ubuntu is still free… Read More
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Perforce Aims to Bring Git to the Enterprise
It’s no surprise that the pace of technological innovation in the startup and web development world greatly eclipses the pace of technology adoption at most enterprise organizations. Enterprises are generally slow, risk averse, and demand long-term support for products in which they invest. Startups, web development shops, and open source enthusiasts move at a significantly faster pace. Read More
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Canonical Releases Updated Enterprise Management Solution for Ubuntu Linux
Ubuntu Linux, which started with the tagline “Linux for human beings,” was originally an easy-to-use Linux distribution for desktop users. Canonical picked what they considered to be the best of breed applications from the many thousands available in the Debian Linux distribution, put on a healthy dose of polish, and released their own version. They then repeated this release… Read More
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Badgeville Brings Gamification to Drupal Communities
It’s a classic quandary — getting people to participate in online communities can be hard, but getting people to participate well in online communities is even harder. To that end, behavioral management platform Badgeville has announced a new effort to bring its engagement-fostering gamification service to Drupal communities that want to reward their users for quality… Read More
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