Linkage

I was sent this image this morning from Gert (not pictured), Naush (right eye and half-moustache) and JamesH (stripy shirt and chin). It’s not a terribly exciting photo – until you realise that it’s the first picture ever taken from the prototype camera add-on board we’re developing for release later in the year, which will plug into those CSI pins we expose in the middle of the Raspberry Pi. I will ask Gert, Naush and JamesH, who have been working on this in their free evenings, to answer questions in the comments below – they are also very active on our forums, so please come over and have a chat.

In the Internet of Things, physical objects will gather data and pass it into information networks and will consume data from those same networks. That mass of new information and its automated creation and consumption will change everything. Andrew Back looks at the practical aspects of this change and shows how you can build a point of the future with an Arduino-compatible Nanode and the Cosm web service.

The Xubuntu image is recommended for a lightweight desktop. The Ubuntu image uses Unity 2D which doesn't work very well on the Joggler's touchscreen. The base/server image can be used as a base to build/customise your own desktop or as a "utility" image for other purposes. eg - sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends lubuntu-desktop would install a minimal lxde desktop. The Btrfs version uses the new Btrfs filesystem. It uses LZO compression as well as the ssd_spread mount option that is optimized for non rotating storage and should be more friendly for write wear on the flash. The Ext4 version is a standard Ext4 filesystem with journalling switch on.

There’s about to be an amazingly cheap new Android tablet on the high street, courtesy of the Dixons Group stores, which are now listing a device called the KMS COMPON Touchpad 7 Tablet PC, a machine which also seems to be known as the Versus Touchpad 7.It’s a 7″ capacitive-screened Android tablet, running at 800×480 resolution, that’ll arrive running Android 4.0 on a 1GHz single-core Cortex A8 series chipset, with 512MB of RAM onboard, 8GB of storage space and all for and astonishing…

So I’ve been lucky to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi and with my new job at Ciseco I’ve been asked to play around with the GPIO’s and see what cool things we can get them doing. First up some basic info on the GPIO’s.The R-Pi has 17 GPIO pins brought out onto the header, most have alternated functions other than just I/O, there are two pins for UART, two for I2C and six for SPI. All the pins can be use for GPIO with either INPUT or OUTPUT, there also internal pull-up & pull-downs for each pin but the I2C pins have and onboard pull-up so using them for GPIO may not work in some cases.

For the lucky few who have a Raspberry Pi board in their hands, you can now use the GPIO pins as a web interface (German, google translation). [Chris] is turning this magical board is turning a small device that can play 1080p video into something that can blink LEDs via the web.

Free of charge, free of viruses and designed to outpace its rivals on low-end systems - Ubuntu has some obvious advantages.The operating system claims 20 million people use it a day. Not an insignificant number, but still a drop in the ocean compared to Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS X.Even so, lead designer and one-time astronaut Mark Shuttleworth hopes that last week's major upgrade to the Linux-based project will produce an outsized splash and increase the size of its somewhat divergent customer-base.

Rdio's online streaming service has launched in France and the UK. Pricing starts at £4.99 (about $8) per month for unlimited web streaming, jumping to £9.99 (roughly $16) when you add mobile support. Ready to rock? Hit up the source link below for a six-day free mobile trial, without any need to hand over those precious credit card deets.

We've just learned that issue 154 of Linux Format, the one with 'Learn to Hack' on the cover, was removed from Barnes and Noble bookstores in the US after a complaint was made. We'd like to apologise if you were affected and couldn't find a copy. As a reminder, we’ve put the contents of the main feature online: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/learn-hack

Good news for GIMP fans: after 2 long years in development the latest stable version of GIMP has been released – albeit not officially.The GIMP Users site notes that the final 2.8 builds are available to download from the GIMP FTP site - meaning an official announcement on the release is due soon.