Have you ever thought about how secure your Linux machine really is? There are numerous Linux distros, each with its own default settings, on which you run dozens of software packages with different version numbers, and numerous services running in the background, which we hardly … | Continue reading
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are usually associated with DevOps, DevSecOps, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), GitOps, and more. It's not enough to just say you're doing CI and CD; there are certain best practices that, if used well and … | Continue reading
NetBSD is famous for running on basically anything, but did you know its second claim to fame is the pkgsrc package manager? Like NetBSD, pkgsrc runs on basically anything, or at least anything Unix and Unix-like. You can install pkgsrc on BSD, Linux, Illumos, Solaris, and Mac. A … | Continue reading
In 2010, the My Little Pony franchise was rebooted with the animated show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The combination of accessibility to children with the sophisticated themes the show tackled garnered a following that cut across ages. I was swept up in the wave and dis … | Continue reading
At FOSS Backstage this year, I hosted a discussion on open source models and shared why I think subscriptions are a great way to support open source products. Picking a business model The company I co-founded, Nextcloud, only offers its services to customers on a (per user) subsc … | Continue reading
When reaching for a templating language for writing a Python web application, there are an abundance of robust solutions. | Continue reading
Have an old computer gathering dust in your basement? Why not put it to use? A backup machine could come in handy if your primary computer fails and you want to be online with a larger screen than your smartphone. Or it could act as a cheap secondary computer shared by the family … | Continue reading
In 1994, my family bought a Macintosh Performa 475 as a home computer. I had used Macintosh SE computers in school and learned to type with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, so I've been a Mac user for well over 25 years. Back in the mid-1990s, I was attracted to its ease of use. It d … | Continue reading
Get your new site up and running quickly with Hugo. | Continue reading
The open source hardware movement has long championed the importance of the right to repair, fully own the technology you buy, and be able to remix and reproduce gadgets, just like you can with music. And so, during this challenging time, open hardware is providing some answers t … | Continue reading
If there's one word people use to describe Git, it's "powerful." Nobody can deny that Git is indeed a powerful beast, but after months of struggling to do embarrassingly basic things in it, I realized that mere mortals like me were never going to wield that power through a comman … | Continue reading
The first personal computer I purchased with my own money was a Packard Bell, back in the mid-1990s. What I remember about that computer was that for US$ 1,500, I had an Intel Pentium processor with a few megabytes of RAM, a modem to connect to my dial-up internet, and no other d … | Continue reading
Many people say they want to learn Emacs, but many of them shy away after the briefest encounter. It's not because Emacs is bad or even that complex. The problem, I believe, is that people don't actually want to learn Emacs; they want to be comfortable with Emacs traditions. They … | Continue reading
These 30 software engineering rules and testing best practices might help save you time and headaches. | Continue reading
Product management is an interesting career. It's immensely rewarding to be the interface between users, business strategy, engineering, and product design. And it's also a highly lucrative career with increasing demand for ambitious and empathetic practitioners. | Continue reading
GNU Emacs isn't the oldest interactive text editor for Unix—it's predated (at least) by the Vi editor—nor is it the only Emacs in existence. However, it's surely the most popular Emacs and one of the best editors available on POSIX. | Continue reading
When I first heard about WebAssembly and the possibility of creating web user interfaces with Qt, just like I would in ordinary C++, I decided to take a deeper look at the technology. | Continue reading
I frequently get questions from open source project creators or new founders of commercial open source software (COSS) companies about the best way to market their product. Implicit in that inquiry lies more foundational questions: "What the hell is product marketing? How much ti … | Continue reading
The FreeMesh system promises to bring fully open source mesh networking to the masses. I recently had a chance to test it; it installed quickly, and the performance was great—especially for the price. | Continue reading
If you ask most developers when they prefer to work, many will say their most productive hours are at night. This may be especially true for open source contributors who are contributing to projects outside of their day job (though hopefully within healthy limits to avoid burnout … | Continue reading
I met Brendan Becker working in a computer store in 1999. We both enjoyed building custom computers and installing Linux on them. Brendan was always involved in several technology projects at once, ranging from game coding to music composition. Fast-forwarding a few years from th … | Continue reading
In my article about getting started with YaCy, I explained how to install and start using the YaCy peer-to-peer search engine. One of the most exciting things about YaCy, however, is the fact that it's a local client. Each user owns and operates a node in a globally distributed s … | Continue reading
Learning is hard work, and nobody likes work. That means no matter how easy it is to learn Bash, it still might feel like work to you. Unless, of course, you learn through gaming. | Continue reading
Christine Peterson finally publishes her account of the day "open source" software was coined, 20 years ago. | Continue reading
Are you just getting started with machine/deep learning, TensorFlow, or Raspberry Pi? I created rpi-deep-pantilt as an interactive demo of object detection in the wild, and in this article, I'll show you how to reproduce the video below, which depicts a camera panning and tilting … | Continue reading
In Linux, every program and daemon is a "process." Most processes represent a single running program. Other programs can fork off other processes, such as processes to listen for certain things to happen and then respond to them. And each process requires a certain amount of memo … | Continue reading
Are you a geek?If so, driving the future of healthcare is now within your grasp.What do you have to do?Learn the M programming language, and teach it to others.What’s the M programming language?The M programming language is also known as MUMPS. Which stands for Massachusetts Gene … | Continue reading
Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using. | Continue reading
Now you can write your C#/.NET code once, on any platform, and run it on Windows, Linux, and macOS. | Continue reading
Today officially marks 10 years of Opensource.com as a publication sharing free and open source stories. Here is a look at where we've come from, what principles help us succeed, and where we're going. People-powered* As we celebrate 10 years of publishing, our focus is on the p … | Continue reading
Most of the time when we connect to the internet, we don't think about the network protocols at work underneath that make it all possible. Right now, while you are reading this article, numerous packets are being exchanged by your computer and traveling across the internet. | Continue reading
Less than a year ago, I was in San Quentin State Prison serving a life sentence. | Continue reading
The goto shell utility allows users to navigate to aliased directories and also supports autocompletion. How it works Before you can use goto, you need to register your directory aliases. For example: goto -r dev /home/iridakos/development then change to that directory, e.g.: | Continue reading
In the decade since they were made a cornerstone of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, electronic health records (EHRs) have become omnipresent in the US health system. EHRs enable healthcare providers to keep track of their p … | Continue reading
What are the ways we can give to an open source community without contributing code?A recent comment to an Opensource.com article a career in open source went something like that they wanted to contribute to open source but lacked coding skills. In fact, code contributions are ve … | Continue reading
Historically and theoretically speaking, a decade, a century, or a millennium starts when the clock turns midnight on January 1 of the year one of its decimal order. For example, the 20th century started on January 1, 1901, not on January 1, 1900. The reason for this is simple: t … | Continue reading
I built my current desktop about three years ago and installed a solid-state drive (SSD). Later, I needed more storage space, so I installed a second drive—an older spindle and platter hard disk drive (HDD) that happened to be lying around. Recently, I decided to replace this HDD … | Continue reading
You may have used the Openbox desktop without knowing it: While Openbox is a great window manager on its own, it also serves as the window manager "engine" for desktop environments like LXDE and LXQT, and it can even manage KDE and GNOME. Aside from being the foundation for sever … | Continue reading
When you are working with complex distributed systems, you will likely come across the need for concurrent processing. At Mode.net, we deal daily with real-time, fast and resilient software. Building a global private network that dynamically routes packets at the millisecond scal … | Continue reading
The FVWM window manager started out as modifications to TWM, back in 1993. After several years of iteration, what emerged is an extremely customizable environment where any behavior, action, or event is configurable. It has support for custom key bindings, mouse gestures, theming … | Continue reading
One of Linux's many advantages is its ability to install and run on old computers. What Linux can't technically do is make an old computer's hardware magically perform better. After all, the hardware is the same hardware as ever, and sometimes old hardware feels notably slow when … | Continue reading
"Radio Rob" Hopkins lives in Tagish, Yukon, 120km south of the capital city, Whitehorse. It is here that he created Open Broadcaster, an open source system that enables small rural market radio stations to manage their operations and volunteers. | Continue reading
PyRadio is a convenient, open source, command-line application for playing any radio station that has a streaming link. And in 2019, almost every radio station (certainly, every one that has a web presence) has a way to listen online. Using the free PyRadio program, you can add, … | Continue reading
Open source is everywhere. It's in your computer at home, it's in your computer at work, it's on the internet, and a lot of it is managed with Git. Because Git is decentralized, many people also think of it as a kind of crowdsourced backup solution. The theory is that each time s … | Continue reading
Most people probably don't remember where they, the computing industry, or the everyday world were in 1996. But I remember that year very clearly. I was a sophomore in high school in the middle of Kansas, and it was the start of my journey into free and open source software (FOSS … | Continue reading
In mid-October, System76 made an exciting announcement for open source hardware fans: It would soon begin shipping two of its laptop models, Galago Pro and Darter Pro, with the open source BIOS coreboot. | Continue reading
Three months, ago the United Nations asked me to join a new advisory board to help them develop their open source strategy and policy. I’m honored to have the opportunity to work together with a group of established experts in open source licensing and policy areas. | Continue reading
It was fun to work at a large web property in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My experience takes me back to American Greetings Interactive, where on Valentine's Day, we had one of the top 10 sites on the internet (measured by web traffic). We delivered e-cards for AmericanGreeti … | Continue reading