That Was The Week That Was (TWTWTW): Edition 4

This is the fourth edition of TWTWTW, a weekly blog observing the latest developments in the open source world. TWTWTW aims to give a summary of the most important open source news of the week. For this edition, we present a succinct catchup covering hardware and software.

Hardware Releases

Litebook has launched a competitively priced laptop. At a mere $249, the laptop has a decent specification. With a 14″ display, an Intel Celeron N3150 quad-core Braswell processor, a 1920×1080 pixel display, 4GB of RAM, the laptop runs the Elementary OS Linux distribution. Litebook’s website

NVIDIA has announced the Jetson TX2, a single board computer that fits in embedded systems. It’s an AI platform for factory robots, smart cameras, commercial drones, and other embedded devices. It’s built around the NVIDIA Maxwell architecture with 256 CUDA cores delivering over 1 TeraFLOPs of performance. 64-bit CPUs, 4K video encode and decode capabilities at 60 fps, and a camera interface capable of 1400 MPix/s.

Software Releases

There’s lots of software to report this week. First off, NASA has released its 2017-18 software catalog. It offers many of the tools NASA uses to explore space and broaden our understanding of the universe. Some of the software packages are new to the catalog.

One of our Killer Apps is Atom, a hackable cross-platform text editor for the 21st Century developed by GitHub. Release 1.15 of Atom has been released offering better handling of duplicate selections with multiple lines, tabs of deleted files are retained, making sure cursors are always visible by default, and other improvements. Read more about the new release at Atom’s Blog.

There’s a warm fuzzy feeling when application developers see the light and open source their software. Kylo is now released under an open source license. This is important news for business analytics’ users. Kylo is a solutions platform for delivering data lakes on Hadoop and Spark. The platform seeks to aid companies address challenges in data lake implementation. Their owners, Teradata, has released the platform under the Apache 2.0 license. If you didn’t know, a data lake is a storage repository, in its natural format, that helps the collocation of data in various schemata and structural forms.

Notable new releases of interesting open source software:

VidCutter – cross-platform video trimmer application has released version 3;
LongoMatch – sports video analysis program that supports real-time and post-recording analysis;
Green Recorder – a simple yet functional desktop recorder for Linux systems. Built using Python, GTK+ 3 and ffmpeg;
KDevelop – a cross-platform IDE for C, C++, Python, JavaScript and PHP;
Heaptrack – sees its first stable release. It is a heap memory profiler for C/C++ applications.

Reviews

The Asus Tinker Board is a new ARM-based single-board computer (SBC) which stands out from the crowd. It’s tiny, affordable, with strong performance, and targeted at the DIY/hobbyist market. Essentially a complete PC — motherboard, CPU, GPU, system memory and more — all in one package, it is priced at £54.99. Read our review.