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Linux Foundation Scales, Raspberry Music Pi & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Back to school, back to work, back to just about everything else free and open source this week: The temperatures could be a little cooler in California, but there’s a modicum of cool to go with the heat.

Like the following items in this week’s wrap…

Tipping the Scales for Linux: Sean Michael Kerner over at Datamation wrote an article accompanying a video interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, who says, among other things, why the foundation is just going to keep growing.

raspberry pi
With a few tweaks, this Raspberry Pi makes a pretty decent sound system. (Photo credit: jwrodgers, Creative Commons Attributions Share-Alike 3.0 Unported)
“In some respects, the Linux Foundation now provides ‘Foundation as a Service,’ though that’s not the the goal that Zemlin has,” Kerner writes. “Given the broader efforts of the Linux Foundation in 2015, Zemlin also has no plans to rename the Linux Foundation either.”

The four-minute interview video, on the Datamation page, is worth a watch. Good news from the foundation, indeed.

Awesome Audio from Raspberry Pi: From across the pond, ElectronicsWeekly.com puts the Raspberry Pi through some audio paces with a couple of tweaks, and gives it good marks in a somewhat long and detailed article.

Where at one time multi-room audio “was only for the well-off, or the extraordinarily ingenious,” the article states, “Raspberry Pi has changed all that, and now the only qualification for such a system is the ability to follow step-by-step instructions – and maybe £100 (about $155) per room for good sound through existing loudspeakers, and under ~£30 (about $46) if you have an old set of computer speakers lying around and are really not fussed about quality.”

That means, if you’re not Neil Young…

But with some Raspberry Pi hi-fidelity add-ons mentioned in the article, including Class-D power amplifiers “delivering tens of watts,” you could make a better-than-adequate sound system. It sounds like a potential weekend project for those audiophiles out there.

Open-Source Gmail Alternatives: Meanwhile over at Opensource.com, Jason Baker writes an article offering readers five — no, actually eight — open-source alternatives to Gmail. The list include these five — Roundcube, Zimbra, SquirrelMail, Rainloop and Kite — while adding three more options: HastyMail, Mailpile, and WebMail Lite. Of these, I’ve used SquirrelMail (“webmail for nuts” — no, really) in the past and I remember liking it. Your mileage may vary.

Have a great weekend, stay cool (if you’re in California), and see you Wednesday.

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One Comment

  1. Scott Dowdle Scott Dowdle September 11, 2015

    I’ve been running two Zimbra systems for about 9 years now… and it is a turnkey solution full of features that works very well… from a web-based client. If you want to check it out Larry, I’d be happy to create an account for you. A new account with no emails, contacts, calendar events, etc… is pretty boring… and hard to get a feel for the power of the system… but what’cha gonna do?

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