FLOSS Weekly Episode 762: Spilling The Tea

December 20, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

Editor’s Note: We’re excited to announce that Hackaday is the new home of FLOSS Weekly, a long-running podcast about free, libre, and open-source software! The TWiT network hosted the podcast for an incredible seventeen years, but due to some changes on their end, they recently had to wind things down. They were gracious enough to let us pick up the torch, with Jonathan Bennett now taking over hosting duties.

Tune in every Wednesday for a new episode, featuring interviews with developers and project leaders, coverage of the free/libre software you use everyday (maybe without even knowing it), and the latest Open Source news.

This week Jonathan Bennett and Simon Phipps talk with Neal Gompa of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and more. The conversation starts off with asking Neal how he went from working on a minor project 11 years ago, to being the lead of KDE on Fedora. How does a company properly sponsor Open Source development? Neal speaks from his experience at Red Hat and other places, to give some really interesting answers.

The crew move on to what happened at Red Hat with CentOS, and why just maybe it was a good thing. Is the age of a company a good indicator of how they will treat Open Source? Is CentOS Stream the best thing to happen to Red Hat Enterprise Linux? What was it like to be at Red Hat during that time? How does a company manage the tension between sales and engineering? We cover this and more!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 762: Spilling The Tea” →

Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot

July 29, 2022 by Tom Nardi 57 Comments

The term “open source” can be tricky. For many people, it’s taken to mean that a particular piece of software is free and that they can do whatever they wish with it. But the reality is far more complex, and the actual rights you’re afforded as the user depend entirely on which license the developers chose to release their code under. Open source code can cost money, open source code can place limits on how you use it, and in some cases, open source code can even get you into trouble down the line.

Which is precisely what the Fedora Project is looking to avoid with their recent decision to reject all code licensed under the Creative Common’s “Public Domain Dedication” CC0 license. It will still be allowed for content such as artwork, and there may even be exceptions made for existing packages on a case-by-case basis, but CC0 will soon be stricken from the list of accepted code licenses for all new submissions.

Fedora turning their nose up at a software license wouldn’t normally be newsworthy. In fact, there’s a fairly long list of licenses that the project deems unacceptable for inclusion. The surprising part here is that CC0 was once an accepted license, and is just now being reclassified due to an evolving mindset within the larger free and open source (FOSS) community.

So what’s the problem with CC0 that’s convinced Fedora to distance themselves from it, and does this mean you shouldn’t be using the license for your own projects?

Continue reading “Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot” →

Constant Innovation And Useless Ducks

February 9, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 15 Comments

[Mike]’s hacks aren’t breathtaking in their complexity, but they got a good chuckle out of us. [Mike], the CEO of The Useless Duck Company, lives in a hub of innovation somewhere in Canada, where he comes up with useful gadgets such as a Fedora that tips itself, or a door that locks when you’re shopping for gifts for your wife and you’re in incognito mode.

It all started when he was trying to learn the Arduino, and he put quite a few hours into making a device that could wirelessly squeak a rubber bath duck from the bathroom. The whole project reminded us of our first clumsy forays into the world of electronics, with entirely too many parts to complete a simple function. The Arduino being the gateway drug it is, it wasn’t long before he was building a bartending robot.

We hope he continues to construct more entertaining gadgets.

Continue reading “Constant Innovation And Useless Ducks” →

A Blinky Fedora To Ring In The New Year

January 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Garrett Mace] decided to dress festive for New Year’s Eve. What he came up with is a fedora ringed in LEDs that react to music. The hardware uses 5050 LEDs on strips. Three of them encircle the head-gear providing a total of 114 RGB pixels. Each is a WS2811 module — a part which we’re seeing more and more of lately.

The video clip after the break starts off with a few minutes of demonstration. [Garrett] managed to code all kinds of animations for the hardware including several different styles of color sweeps and fades. You may start to think that the three bands always display the same patterns but keep watching and you’ll see a sparkle pattern that proves each dot can be addressed individually.

About 2:20 seconds into the video [Garrett] explains how he pulled it off and shows off the driver hardware. The strips are glued to a band of webbing that slides over the hat. The wires that drive the lights were fed through the center of some paracord and connect to an Arduino housed in a 3D printed case. Power is provided by a portable USB battery with a ShiftBrite shield and an MSGEQ7 chip complete the parts list.

Continue reading “A Blinky Fedora To Ring In The New Year” →

Hackaday Links: August 15, 2012

August 15, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

An Octopart for RC equipment

When [Zach] started building a quadcopter he found it very difficult to source the required parts. Thus was born CompareRC, an aggregation of several online RC retailers. There’s over 150,000 parts in the database, all searchable and sortable by lowest price.

Segway iPad Skype teleconferencing robot

It’ll be a while until robots completely eliminate the need for any human interaction, but until then there’s Double. It’s a two-wheeled balancing robot with an iPad dock, controllable via a remote iPad.

Free electronic design

In case you weren’t aware, Fedora has an electronic design distro that includes just about everything needed to build electronic circuits called Fedora Electronic Lab. FEL has PCB designers, circuit simulators, editors for just about everything, and support for PICs, AVRs, and 8051 micros. Thanks for sending this in, [Simon].

Make your own Megadrive ROMs

Last month, [Lee] sent in a build where he connected an Arduino Mega to an old Sega Genesis/Megadrive cartridge. He’s figured out how to read the contents of the cartridge now, allowing you to preserve your 100% complete Sonic & Knuckles / Sonic 3 save for time immemorial.

A surprising amount of graphics tutorials

Khan Academy, every autodidacts best friend, is now teaching computer science. Right now, there is a heavy focus on drawing graphics, and everything is coded in the browser (using Javascript…), but at least it’s a start. The fundamentals of programming are platform and language agnostic, so this looks to be a great way to learn programming.

Here’s a blog post from the lead dev of the Khan CS project.

Speed Up Web Browsing In Linux

January 11, 2011 by James Munns 46 Comments

In modern computer systems, the biggest bottleneck of information tends to be in communicating with the hard disks. High seek times and relatively slow transmission rates when compared to RAM speeds can add up quickly. This was a necessary evil back when RAM space and costs were at a premium, but now it is not uncommon to see 4GB of RAM on laptops, and even 12GB on desktops. For users whose primary computer use is browsing the internet (either for work, writing articles, or lolcats) and have some extra RAM, moving the browser cache to the RAM from the hard disk is a definite option for increasing speed.

In Linux systems (specifically Fedora and Ubuntu systems), this can be achieved for Chrome and Firefox by creating a larger ramdisk, mounting the ramdisk after boot, and then setting the browser of choice to use that ramdisk as a cache. The necessary commands to do this are readily available (internet archive) on the internet, which makes life easy. Using ramdisks for performance boosts are not exclusive to browsers, and can be used for other software such as Nagios for example.

We have previously covered a tool called Espérance DV for moving cache to RAM in Mac OSX, and for any Windows users feeling left out, there are ways of making Firefox bend to your will. Obviously you will see an increase in RAM use (duh), but this shouldn’t be a problem unless you are running out of free RAM on your system. Remember, free RAM is wasted RAM.

Fedora Rawhide Nightly Builds

August 27, 2009 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

fedora_rawhide

The devs over at the Fedora Project are hard at work on the development version: Rawhide. They’ve just setup automated nightly builds of the liveCD which can easily be downloaded and tested on a CD, DVD, USB drive, virtual machine, or separate partition.

Rawhide will be released as Fedora 12 upon completion. With this version you have a choice of Gnome 2.28 or KDE 4.3 for your desktop. There is also improved power management, expanded support for mobile broadband, easy bug reporting, and many more new or improved features. So roll up your sleeves, download last night’s build, and help test some open source software.

[via Download Squad]