New DiskStation NAS Devices from Synology Have 1-2 Bays

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February 6, 2015

Network-attached storage devices can have up to 8 bays, sometimes more if they come in blade form factor, but that much is ultimately unnecessary for home and small offices.

One or two bays are enough if the drive capacity support is large enough. In the case of Synology’s two latest models, the top storage capacity for each drive is 6 TB.

That means that the top capacities for the new DS215j and DS115 are of 6 TB and 12 TB, respectively. A bit less when RAID mode is activated.

Average read… (read more)

The End of CrunchBang Linux

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LWN

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February 6, 2015

The developer of the CrunchBang Linux distribution has announced that the project has come to an end. “That said, when progress happens, some things get left behind, and for me, CrunchBang is something that I need to leave behind. I’m leaving it behind because I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value, and whilst I could hold on to it for sentimental reasons, I don’t believe that would be in the best interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian.“

Facebook Funds GNU Privacy Guard Development

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ZDNet

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February 6, 2015

The social media giant has pledged thousands to assist in the development of the open-source security project.

Oracle Adds Oracle Linux Images to Docker Hub Registry

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The Linux Foundation

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February 5, 2015

Looking to take advantage of the growing enthusiasm forDocker containers among application developers, Oracle today announced that images of Oracle Linux are now available on the Docker Hub Registry.

Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president for Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, says Oracle wants to make it simpler for developers to select an operating system stack at the same time they are downloading other components from the Docker Hub Registry, which in effect is rapidly becoming a central distribution point for software that supports Docker containers.

Read more at IT Business Edge or see Oracle’s full press release.

Black Lab BriQ rev4 Is a “Mac Mini” type PC That Runs Black Lab Linux

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Softpedia

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February 5, 2015

Black Lab BriQ rev4 is a new mini PC put together by the same guys who are also working on the Black Lab Linux distro. This is not their first attempt, as the version number shows, and it’s actually a pretty powerful solution.

It looks like this kind of effort, of building a mini-PC powered by the same Linux distribution that you’re also developing, has been getting more traction lately. This is not the first company to do this and it probably won’t be the last. As long as you have the design… (read more)

The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going Broke

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The Linux Foundation

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February 5, 2015

The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.

Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

“I’m too idealistic,” he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. “In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job.” But then the Snowden news broke, and “I realized this was not the time to cancel.”

ownCloud Hooks Up Global Mesh Cloud for Universities, Researchers

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OStatic

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February 5, 2015

ownCloud, Inc., the company behind the popular ownCloud open source file sync and share software, has announced a project that for the first time ties together researchers and universities in the Americas, Europe and Asia via a series of interconnected, secure private clouds. It’s yet another example of the momentum that ownCloud has. As I covered in a post yesterday, survey results from LinuxQuestions.org showed experts at the site to be very interested in the ownCloud platform.

OpenCloudMesh, a joint international initiative under the umbrella of the GÉANT Association, is built on ownCloud’s open Federated Cloud sharing application programming interface (API). The project, focused on linking up global universities, is focused on “taking Universal File Access beyond the borders of individual Clouds and into a globally interconnected mesh of research clouds.”

Lustre 101: Inside The Lustre File System

By

insideHPC

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February 5, 2015

The white paper, Inside the Lustre File System, describes the inner workings of Lustre in a way that is easy to understand, yet is technical enough for many users and systems administrators. Lustre is a mature and stable file system that has consistently been able to respond to the needs of organizations that require high performance throughput and expanding capacity.

Report Shows Apache Spark Gaining Momentum

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OStatic

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February 5, 2015

Folks in the Big Data and Hadoop communities have been getting increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. According to Apache, Spark can run programs up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, and ten times faster on disk. When crunching large data sets, those are big performance differences.

In OStatic’s recent interview with Eucalyptus cloud originator Rich Wolski, he cited Spark and other technologies competitive with MapReduce as being very interesting. Databricks and Typesafe are now out with some survey results that bolster the case for Spark usage being on the rise. Here are details.

Ozon OS Gets GTK+ Theme Update, Still No Release Date for This Beautiful OS

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Softpedia

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February 5, 2015

Ozon is a new OS in the making that uses a custom shell called Atom ES. It’s based on Fedora and it looks like the developers are making some great progress with it.

New Linux distributions are a dime a dozen, and most of them are actually poorly built and with no future whatsoever. The Linux history is littered with the rotting bodies of distros that are not maintained anymore or that have been abandoned. Building an operating system is not an easy task, and building one that’s as complex as… (read more)