The fact that Russia's ROSA Labs once collaborated with Mandriva is evident in the company's latest release, ROSA Desktop 2012. Nevertheless, since breaking from Mandriva, ROSA Labs has forked the distro onto its own unique development path. ROSA Desktop 2012 is an LSB-compliant distro that features a customized KDE desktop. The free edition sports only free software; the Extended Edition includes nonfree components and proprietary software, such as codecs. ROSA Labs says that by developing ROSA Desktop 2012 with its own software development and build environment—ROSA ABF—the company is able to achieve unmatched technological independence, high quality and up to five years of technical support. Examples of new features include EFI/UEFI support, improved hardware detection and improved compatibility with Windows 8. Supported languages include English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.
The targets in the company's cross hairs for the recently introduced Wind River Intelligent Network Platform are equipment providers who—in the face of exploding traffic—are in need of powerful building blocks to help them build faster, smarter and safer networks. The solution is designed to deliver improved network intelligence, security and speed, and the scalability to support the move to software-defined networking. Wind River claims a 1100% improvement in IP-forwarding and up to a 500% improvement in throughput for UDP and performance boost for TCP. Wind River Intelligent Network Platform is composed of software that manages a consolidated control and data plane system, as well as software engines that provide fast packet acceleration and content inspection. Additional engines for specialized needs, such as accelerated traffic flow-classification, will follow. The platform comes configured with Wind River Linux and a comprehensive suite of integrated development tools.
For most employees, security is something they leave for folks like us to deal with. With its new SecurED training modules, Digital Defense Inc. (DDI) is employing the oldest trick in the book—humor—to get nongeeks to realize the importance of collaborative enterprise security. DDI has partnered with Emmy-award-winning comedy writer T. Sean Shannon to develop training modules, each 5–7 minutes in length, that promote a culture of security awareness. Humorous situations are used to maintain attention and increase the “stickiness factor”. The modules can be accessed via a PC, laptop, iPad/tablet or mobile device and are accessed through an organization's LMS. Designed as a year-long program to be viewed monthly, the 12 modules cover topics like password security, acceptable computer use, safe browsing, dangers of social-media sites, preventing viruses and malware and installing software from unknown sources.
The best perk in working for a magazine is that shameless plugs are free. In all seriousness, Linux Journal readers certainly will be interested to know that our own Hack and / columnist, Kyle Rankin, has written a new book titled DevOps Troubleshooting: Linux Server Best Practices. The purpose of DevOps is to give developers, QA and admins a common set of troubleshooting skills and practices so they can collaborate effectively to solve Linux server problems and improve IT performance, availability and efficiency. Kyle walks readers through using DevOps techniques to troubleshoot everything from boot failures and corrupt disks to lost e-mail and downed Web sites. They'll also master indispensable skills for diagnosing high-load systems and network problems in production environments. Addison-Wesley Professional is the publisher (and royalty provider) for DevOps. So, Kyle, about those royalties....
With the release of the new YippieMove API, Wireload Inc.'s YippieMove is upgrading itself from e-mail migration service to e-mail migration solution provider. Since its inception, YippieMove has been actively slaying the beasts involved in moving e-mail history between different e-mail vendors. With the release of the YippieMove API, YippieMove is aiming to become the go-to e-mail migration service for vendors to integrate with. The move opens up a new market for third-party software developers and enables e-mail vendors and ISPs to create fully automatic inbound e-mail migrations for new accounts. Vendors or ISPs potentially could add a simple step to their sign-up process that would enable users to bring over their e-mail archives from any provider or solution to the newly created account in just a few clicks. The custom-built technology has been built from scratch and perfected by YippieMove during the past four years.
Veteran programmer Jason R. Briggs' inaugural venture into book publishing, Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming, aims to inspire the same love of computing that he experienced decades ago hacking his Radio Shack TRS-80. Python for Kids, published by No Starch Press, is a lighthearted introduction to the Python programming language, full of fun examples and original color illustrations. Briggs begins the book with the basics of how to install Python and write simple commands. In bite-sized chapters, he explains essential programming concepts. By the end of the book, readers have built simple games and created cool drawings with Python's graphics library, Turtle. Each chapter closes with offbeat exercises that challenge readers to put their newly acquired knowledge to the test.
We Linuxers always are happy to see new vendors embrace the Linux and open-source paradigm. STEC Inc. is also finding much more to like than it ever imagined after recently developing Linux drivers for its PCI Express-based solid-state drives. STEC reports that coupling the new open-source Linux with the company's high-performance s1120 PCIe Accelerator SSD card dramatically broadens the range of applications for the device. Furthermore, the combination results in “very promising performance results never seen before”, such as a boost to Oracle application performance to more than 160,000 transactions per minute. Other improvements include an improvement in application response times by maximizing I/Os per second on a single server and a lower TCO by reducing data-center operational and capital expenditures.
If you are an e-book fan in North America, Kindles or NOOKs probably are the among the first devices that come to mind. If the Berlin-based txtr has its way, however, you soon may find yourself reading e-books on the company's new beagle e-book reader. The txtr beagle, with its 5" screen, 1/4" profile and 4.5oz weight, is billed as the smallest and lightest e-book reader on the market. txtr says the beagle will run for a year on AAA batteries and does not require cables or chargers. It is the first companion reader to receive e-books sent from a smartphone, says the device developer. The Android-based txtr beagle is part of the overall Adobe-certified txtr eReading platform, but does not count as an extra device. txtr believes that these characteristics, as well as a price point for telecom providers potentially as low as $13.00, are the raw materials for a truly global, mass-market e-book reader.