Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Summer releases of the latest smart phones from Apple, Blackberry, Google and Palm have excited geeks all over the world. The big question on the mind of Linux users has to be "Can I sync my Linux machine and my cool new phone?" Paul Ferrill finds the answers for the new Palm Pre.

Do you have a linux server without a keyboard or monitor? Need to administer the server on-site but don't want to lug over a monitor and keyboard (or kvm)? Then setup the server to output the console to a serial port and use screen/minicom (Hyperterminal or putty in Windows) to console into the server over a serial cable.

Linux Journal's Shawn Powers shows us how to deal with odd filenames on the commandline in this video.

The next version but one of Nokia's Maemo mobile Linux operating system will use Qt rather than GTK+ for its application development framework. Basing Maemo Harmattan on Qt will make it easier for developers to write applications for both Maemo and Symbian, Nokia's smartphone platform, the Finnish company's development platform product manager Quim Gil said last week at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has approved South African company Jumping Bean as an official LPI Training Partner. The LPI qualifications are an internationally recognised Linux industry certification. “Becoming an approved LPI training institute is an important achievement for us” says Joseph Neusu. The vendor-neutral LPI certificate has three levels of certification from junior to senior Linux professional.

One of the requirements for the upcoming public release of Officeshots.org is that all uploaded files are run through a virus scanner before they are made available. Picking a virus scanner for this job was easy: ClamAV. Finding a PHP library to interact with ClamAV proved harder though. The 3rd party library page for ClamAV points to two different libraries that provide PHP bindings for ClamAV but both appear to be dead and expunged from the internet. So, I created my own using the clamd TCP API, and because Officeshots is built using CakePHP I implemented it as a Cake plugin.

Later this year or early next year Intel will be introducing Moorestown, which is a code-name we have known going back to 2007 and is their next-generation CPU platform for Mobile Internet Devices. Intel's Moorestown is an SoC design and is expected to be used within smart-phones, in addition to MIDs...

With the cloud computing wave poised to reach the world market in the next 12 to 18 months, open source software and coding techniques are about to hit the big time. That’s because open source software and the methodologies that accompany it have already been proven to be the chosen route for the vast majority of companies aiming to capitalise on the cloud phenomenon. For evidence of this, you need look no further than the route companies such as Amazon, Google and Rackspace have taken in building out the massive datacentres they plan to begin selling capacity on in the coming years.

To add a bit of color to your man pages install the most pager. Add the MANPAGER setting to your shell ~/.profile to make the setting available when you login.

It is that time of the year again. Akademy 2009 is about to begin in only a few days. Held in the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium close to the beautiful beaches of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, this event is shaping up to be a special conference.

The GNU General Public Licence is falling in popularity, looking at all the versions of the GPL as a whole, according to figures released on Tuesday by Black Duck. At the same time, Microsoft's open source software license, MS-PL, is gaining ground in the open source world, the company said. Black Duck, which provides services and products for developers working with open source code, compiled the figures from its database of more than 200,000 open source projects collected from the internet.

[The lead is a tad misleading. GPL has lost some percentage but it lost to BSD and MIT, not to MS-PL - Sander]

I have trolled my Twitter feeds looking for something exciting or provocative related to Open Source, but nothing, other than the release of Fedora 11 and Firefox 3.5 is jumping out at me and frankly neither is particularly news worth, despite the large number of people that are supposedly downloading both code sets. Has Open Source lost its mojo? Has it become so common place that there are no real innovations to talk about? Or is it simply the summer lull?

Linux Journal's Shawn Powers shows us how to use nice and renice to change the priority level of your processes.

One of the benefits of moving the different graphics hardware drivers over to using kernel mode-setting, an in-kernel GPU memory manager (whether it be GEM or TTM), and other newer X innovations is the possibility of now running the X Server without root privileges. By doing so, this of course improves the security since this very large chunk of code is no longer running with all of these high-privileged rights.

Due to now living in a KMS-enabled world, at least on the Intel and ATI side (the NVIDIA side is still slowly but surely coming via Nouveau), it's rather easy to get the X Server running without any special rights...

For those of you using PHP in the development of web-sites or even on the desktop (like what we do with the Phoronix Test Suite), PHP 5.3.0 has finally been released! This major update to PHP5 brings support for namespaces, late static bindings, closures, new PHP extensions, plenty of bug fixes, and much more.

Keith Packard has been the release manager for the X Server 1.6 series and back in early May he issued an X Server 1.6.2 release cadndidate to close a few more X.Org bugs in this critical piece of software. After pulling in another heaping of bug fixes, Keith has now announced X Server 1.6.2 Release Candidate 2, which will go on to become the official 1.6.2 release assuming no bugs or regressions appear.

In X Server 1.6.2 are over 36 bug fixes that address a variety of different problems from DRI2 to EDID to fixing up other problems...

Earlier this month we reported on Linux support for a new, unreleased Intel IGP after several commits hit the Intel driver's X.Org DDX driver (xf86-video-intel).

This code added a new mobile and desktop component but of course not many details regarding this next-generation Intel graphics processor have been revealed. Within the code this new chip is currently referred to as IGDNG, which we take to mean Intel Graphics Device Next Generation.

Recently more work for IGDNG has landed within Intel's mainline DDX driver tree...

During this weekend (and after almost 24 hours of work), the KDE Community Forums have undergone a complete overhaul, resulting in a much improved look and additional features. The first and most user-visible change is the new forum theme. It is heavily inspired by "Air", the default Plasma theme in the soon to be released KDE 4.3. Also, the board is now powered by the phpBB forum software and has gained a number of extra features. The changes are quite numerous and deep, so some bugs may have slipped through our tests. The whole KDE Community is encouraged to visit the forums and report issues.

Today, exactly one month since the release of KOffice 2.0.0, the KOffice team releases the first bugfix release in the 2.0 series. This release contains no new features but lots of bugfixes for almost all of the components in KOffice 2.0. We are planning at least two more bugfix releases of 2.0 before starting the 2.1 series in October this year.

When working on the beta of Officeshots.org I ran into an interesting problem with file type and MIME type detection of OpenDocument files. When a user uploads an ODF file to Officeshots I want to determine the MIME type myself using the PHP Fileinfo extension. On Linux, the PHP Fileinfo extension relies on the magic file that is provided by the file package. The magic file contains a series of tests that can determine the file type and MIME type of a file by its contents. I found out that the magic file is incomplete for OpenDocument files. In this article I will show you what is wrong with the magic file and how you can fix it.