Need a cool gift idea? Hankering to build a robot army? These Arduino-powered robotics kits are affordable, expandable, and the perfect way to learn robotics OR conquer your enemies.
Read more at ZDNet
When my journey into the world of open source began in the mid-90s, the easiest way to get installation media was to buy CD sets from online stores and have them shipped to you. Being interested in experimenting with different operating systems, I always bought the giant bundle that included all the distributions. Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, SUSE, and several now defunct distributions were include for me to play with, but the bundles also came with installation discs for the various BSD distributions (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and later, OpenBSD).
Read more at OpenSource.com
While digging through the Internet, we’ve recently found a new and powerful 64-bit expandable SBC (Single-board computer) called PINE64 that costs only $15 (approximately €14).
Just by looking at its features, we can notice that PINE64 is a versatile single-board computer, which is capable of running the latest versions of the Android mobile operating system, as well as any other modern GNU/Linux distribution on its open-source hardware.
Read more at Softpedia Linux Blog
A few minutes ago, December 7, Mr. Linus Torvalds, father of Linux kernel, had the great pleasure of unleashing the fourth RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel. Linux kernel 4.4 RC4 is now available for download from the usual places (see the download links at the end of the article), and, according to Mr. Torvalds, things are still calm and there’s nothing stands out.
In numbers, the fourth Release Candidate version of the Linux 4.4 kernel consists of approximately 70% driver updates, especially for things like GPU, SCSI, sound, and networking, 15% networking updates, and 15% is split between core improvements, architecture updates, and others.
KaOS is proud to present the 2015.11 ISO.
The policy is, once a first pacman -Syu becomes a major update, it is time for a new ISO so new users are not faced with a difficult first update. With new builds effecting over half of the KaOS repositories (currently at about 2100), that new ISO is more than due.
As always with this rolling distribution you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.16.0, Plasma 5.4.3 and KDE Applications 15.08.3.
Most notable major updates to the base of the system are the Boost 1.59.0/ICU 56.1 stack, Glib2 2.46.2 stack, a move of Mariadb to the 10 series, Perl 5.22.0 stack, Linux 4.2.6, all Texlive packages updated to their 2015 versions, Qt 5.5.1 and Systemd 228.
Artwork received several updates. The all new logo is implemented over various parts of the system.
A fully scalable slideshow with SVG based images and QML based text was designed for the installer, replacing the old png based slides.
This ISO uses the CRC and finobt enabled XFS filesystem as default. CRCs enable enhanced error detection due to hardware issues, whilst the format changes also improves crash recovery algorithms and the ability of various tools to validate and repair metadata corruptions when they are found. The free inode btree does not index used inodes, allowing faster, more consistent inode allocation performance as filesystems age.
KaOS specific settings for SDDM, kwin and kinit make it possible to start a Plasma Wayland session right from the login manager. An X11 session is of course still default, but the drop-down menu has a wayland entry too. The default web-browser Qupzilla is one of the first applications that heavily relied on X11 in its code that is fully ported to run a Wayland session too.
This ISO KaOS uses the Systemd provided Systemd-boot for UEFI installs, Gummiboot is depreciated.
Calamares, the used installer framework, has moved to the 2.0 series. Highlights of the changes and additions:
Known issues:
To create reliable installation media, please follow the instructions from the Download page. KaOS’s ISO’sdo not support unetbootin, and DVDs need a burn speed no higher than 4x.
