Open-source News

Intel + Microsoft Contribute "SIOV" I/O Virtualization Spec To Open Compute Project  Phoronix

While GCC 12 is in stage four development and focused just on regression fixes, a few notable patches were merged this week into the codebase ahead of its official release expected in roughly a month or so...

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Global Linux-based Set Top Box Market Top Countries Analysis 2022-2029 | Sagemcom, Hisense, Coship – The Sabre  The Sabre

It's been a decade since the calls began for deprecating Linux's frame-buffer drivers "FBDEV" and the push for replacing FBDEV with DRM/KMS drivers. While DRM/KMS drivers are now commonplace even in the embedded space, FBDEV still won't die and with Linux 5.18 is seeing another round of fixes going in...

Linux on Mars: 17 flights later  IT PRO

Install VSCodium on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 Linux - Linux Shout  Linux Shout

New Trailblazers Fellowships power open hardware in academia Joshua Pearce Wed, 03/23/2022 - 03:00 Up 1 reader likes this

Witness the rise of open hardware! Last year, I wrote about how now is the time to start seriously thinking about a career in open source. Next, the UN backed open source, and earlier this year, the U.S. National Science Foundation began major funding for open source platform development. Now the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) has teamed up with the Sloan Foundation to fund Open Hardware Trailblazers Fellowships.

These Fellowships last one year and pay $50,000 or $100,000 to individuals to tackle some of the latest issues for integrating open hardware deep into academia. They want to connect a peer cohort of academic leaders pushing open hardware into academia and create a library of resources representing best practices in open source hardware in academia. My own work has shown that academics are willing to embrace open source with open arms. We surveyed American academics and found a supermajority (86.7%) of faculty respondents indicated a willingness to accept open source-endowed professorships.

Open hardware is already going strong in academia, with three journals dedicated to publishing on the topic: HardwareX, the Journal of Open Hardware, and The Journal of Open Engineering. In addition, many other publications like Designs and PLOS One frequently publish open hardware content. The Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) continues to bring like minds together, and open hardware's use in academia has become an area of study in and of itself. Notably, of course, open hardware decimates proprietary offerings on economic costs. As a general rule of thumb, subtract 90% from the price tag. There is a lot more money in the system to fund open hardware in academia as funders have noticed 100-1000 percent or more for the return on investment (ROI) of open source development after only a few months.

Explore open hardware What is open hardware? What is Raspberry Pi? What is an Arduino? Our latest open hardware articles

Sadly, many academic institutions are mired in the intellectual property dark ages and are not yet aware of open hardware techniques, and do not actively support their adoption. OSHWA wants to change that and hopes their Fellowship program will pave the way for open hardware in academia by setting up a network of advocates.

The Open Hardware Trailblazers Network is designed to:

1. Recognize existing leaders
2. Give those leaders tools to expand their work
3. Encourage the leaders' institutions to recognize and value their work
4. Identify and accelerate the development and dissemination of information about developing open hardware within the context of universities
5. Leverage diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice initiatives to broaden the community of open hardware practitioners at universities
6. Pair leaders with industry mentors to share knowledge when applicable

All Fellows will attend regular virtual meetings with their Fellowship cohort, including two in-person meetings with travel costs paid for by OSHWA. Fellows will be introduced to mentors or collaborators from the industry with relevant expertise. The Fellowship will build a beneficial network to share work being done, ask questions, and gain feedback from each other.

Example questions that may be answered as part of the Fellowship include, but are not restricted to:

• What documentation practices help academics share and disseminate their open hardware projects?
• What makes hardware more replicable in academia, and what is missing from current documentation standards?
• How do various fields of study approach problems such as licensing around open hardware in their departments, and what are common threads seen at other academic institutions?
• What is the business case for open hardware in academia, and how has open hardware developed in academia thus far?

That last one is particularly interesting to me, so drop me a line if you would like to collaborate on this in or outside of the Fellowship.

If you are in the U.S. and interested in one of the eight Fellowships, check out the Request for Proposals here!

Good luck!

The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) has teamed up with the Sloan Foundation to fund Open Hardware Trailblazers Fellowships.

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How our community uses Zulip for its open source chat tool Tim Erickson Wed, 03/23/2022 - 03:00 Up 1 reader likes this

When Backdrop CMS needed to upgrade our real-time chat platform, we had to balance ease of use with our preference for open source. Those criteria led us to Zulip, an open source chat and collaboration platform with many features we were looking for.

In this article, I'll explain our selection process and how we've implemented and adapted this tool across our organization. Maybe it's the right tool for your organization as well.

How our community outgrew our initial chat solution

Backdrop CMS is a fork of the Drupal project targeting small- to medium-sized businesses, non-profits, educational institutions, and companies or organizations who need a comprehensive website for a reasonable price.

For the first five or so years of the project, we used Gitter as our real-time chat platform. Gitter served us well during this time and had the following advantages:

• It's open source.
• It's easy to use.
• You can use a GitLab or GitHub account to log in.
• It is transparent and viewable without an account.

The Backdrop CMS project is now a little over seven years old. As users became more familiar with advanced chat tools like Slack, Gitter seemed increasingly frustrating for some of our most regular participants. Gitter did not provide channels or threads for organizing conversations, and the mobile app was very glitchy. We began to look for alternatives.

As the Backdrop CMS community began to research options, we struggled with our preference to use open source tools against a competing desire to reduce barriers to entry, especially for nontechnical users. Slack's familiarity gave it some appeal: it was a very popular platform, and most of us were already using it for other projects or jobs. These factors made the barriers to entry quite low. However, our tight budget and Slack's restrictions on free accounts were serious strikes against it.

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources Why we chose Zulip

We looked closely at several open source alternatives to Slack and pretty quickly settled on Zulip as our leading contender. We didn't have the budget for a paid hosting plan and were reluctant to take on the overhead of maintaining our own Zulip server. Still, the availability of free hosting for open source projects pushed us further in this direction. A current look at the Zulip website suggests that sponsorships may be available upon request for "worthy organizations" beyond other open source projects.

The most innovative feature in Zulip is the ability to create topics (or tags) within a stream—the Zulip equivalent of a channel. This makes it possible to view incoming messages in a single chronological stream, as we were used to in Gitter. However, users can also tag each message with a topic and filter them in order to view all the individual messages belonging to one topic independently.

For some of us, these topics were a powerful feature. Others found them confusing and difficult to use. While putting your message into a specific topic is optional, some new users felt pressure to use topics. The interface for finding or selecting topics does take some time to get used to.

 

In the early days of using Zulip, these topics were very informal. Now we find that they are becoming increasingly important as an organizational tool. Still, they remain the most significant frustration for new and even some experienced users.

Both iPhone and Android apps are available, and both seem to be working quite reliably for our community members.

How we've evolved with Zulip

As time goes on, we're seeing more and more of our support conversations move from our public online forum to the Zulip chat channel, which worries us, because information in the chat channel is far less accessible and public for those who are not using Zulip. This problem might be a side effect of how successful Zulip has become for real-time conversations.

To provide some context for the size and level of activity in our Zulip community, we have just over 240 accounts. On a recent Friday, over 13 different people posted a total of 75 messages. Some days are busier than this, and some are slower, but days like this feel pretty typical of late. Depending upon the time of the day, support questions in Zulip usually get some level of response within an hour or, on a slow day, 5 to 6 hours.

Until now, we've tried to keep most of the conversation in a single stream, with a few exceptions. The growth or success of any online community can be hampered by creating too many channels too early, none of which have sufficient activity. We now have a German language stream, an "off-topic" stream (our version of the water cooler), and specialty streams for events and infrastructure. We also have private streams for our leadership and one for security issues. We may be reaching a point where additional streams would be useful.

We know that not everyone in our community likes Zulip, but complaints are few. Of course, we don't know what we don't know—some people might have tried Zulip, grown frustrated, and never come back to tell us about it. On the whole, those of us most active in the community are happy with Zulip and would recommend it to other open source projects.

The Backdrop CMS community's search for a new collaboration and chat platform led to this open source tool.

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The post Best Linux Media Center Distros for Your Home Theater PC first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

There are a number of Linux media center distros out there, and some of them do more than one thing. But which one is best? Which one provides the most value? And which one

The post Best Linux Media Center Distros for Your Home Theater PC first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.

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