Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As was widely anticipated, today AMD is rolling out their Catalyst 10.7 graphics driver for Windows and Linux platforms. On the Windows side, their Catalyst 10.7 rolls out support for OpenGL ES 2.0. ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series graphics cards (along with the FirePro hardware) running Windows can now take advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0 support with HTML5 for in-browser graphics rendering. However, that support hasn't yet made its way to the Catalyst Linux driver, but there are other changes packed away in this month's update.

Android 2.2, AKA "Froyo," was announced amid wild phone-nerd scenes a couple of months back, although we're yet to see much of it in the wild. The only phone currently running a non-hacked version of Google's latest OS incarnation is the Nexus One, with all the other Google-powered smartphone users of the world still anxiously scrolling up and down the 'About Phone' page waiting for an over-the-air upgrade to arrive.

Why do some people choose to run Linux as their PC platform of choice while others opt instead for other ways of running their computing experiences? Is it market share, perceived ease of use, slick marketing overtures, users wanting to use what they already know? This list might explain why people might choose OS X or Windows. But what approach to computing (and life) prompts a person to use a Linux box on a daily basis? I’ll share my insights based on personal experiences and other observations accumulated over years of living the Linux lifestyle full time.

Measures to optimise the power management code and fully support the Turbo Core function of recent AMD six-core processors increase the data throughput and processing speed of Linux 2.6.35. Further kernel additions include tracing interfaces for KVM, another kernel configuration program, and functions for de-fragmenting the working memory.

If you've read me long enough, you know I am a desktop junkie. Much to Jaqui's chagrin, I do love my desktops. So much so I could have a different desktop every day and still not be completely happy. During my trials and tribulations with the Linux desktop I have, surprisingly, missed the whole Xfce train. Why? I have no idea. I've known of it, I've used it briefly, and never really thought much more about it. That is, until recently.

Chalk this one up as a victory for the free software movement: Thesis, the wildly popular proprietary WordPress theme from developer/designer Chris Pearson, is now available under a split GPL, the license that makes it possible to alter and redistribute this software as you see fit. Pearson’s decision marks the end of a high-drama clash between him and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPressWordPressWordPress and of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and a handful of related software. Some folks wondered if the battle of words might end in a battle of legal precedent as Mullenweg struggled to preserve free software principles and Pearson struggled to maintain control over his highly successful software.

LXer Feature: 25-July-2010

Troy: Peter, to begin, as a first time attendee of Akademy, what was your initial impression of the event? Peter: Okay, there were a lot more people than I expected. When I arrived at the university grounds, I met a guy who was also looking for the entrance, and we started talking. This was the starting point for talking and it just continued from there - talking and talking and meeting people everywhere. It was really nice that I could talk about an issue I was having with KMail. Many other people also use KMail and knew what I was talking about. read more

One of the best references for Linux and UNIX system administrators over the years has been the "Handbooks" (either Linux Administration Handbook (LAH) or UNIX System Administration Handbook (USAH) at various points). But the last edition was published in 2000 (as USAH), and included information on then-current Red Hat Linux 6.2 and FreeBSD 3.4. A new, updated version, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition (ULSAH), is due out any day now, and the principal authors, Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein, and Ben Whaley, agreed to answer some questions for LWN readers. Below are their answers on the book, the impact of Linux, the future for UNIX and Linux, and more.

If you read the previous R600g news post from less than an hour ago this should come as no surprise, but: the ATI R600g Gallium3D driver has finally reached the milestone of being able to properly run glxgears. This GLX demo is simple and useless as a benchmark, but is an important development milestone and as talked about in that previous news piece, Jerome hopes to tackle texture support within a few days so then we will see more interesting OpenGL capabilities and we are potentially just days away from being able to run Quake with R600g and a modern ATI graphics processor (you can already do so with an open-source driver stack using the classic Mesa R600/700 driver).

As an open source enthusiast, there are thousands of great tools available to me. However, some things in Linux are harder than they need to be. The world of open source has come a long way, but keeping an eye on what is going on outside of the open source arena can show that there are still areas where we need to improve. Here are three tools from IBM and Apple that I would love to see incorporated into the next great Linux distribution.

In two reports filed from this week's OSCON conference, The Register says that Google will open Android's internal development kit to contributors, and that Linux maintainers are holding tough in negotiating with the search giant regarding Android's readmission to the kernel. Meanwhile, Linux 2.6.35 RC6 was released, featuring enhancements to network scalability, memory management, and sleep-wait detection.

Google announced today via the Chromium Blog that it plans to release new stable versions of Chrome every six weeks. Though the team has managed to ship five major revisions in less than two years, the new accelerated pace means we could see Chrome 9.0 by the end of this year.

At the OSCON 2010 open source convention taking place in Portland, Oregon, O'Reilly Media's Edd Dumbill has announced the winners of this years O'Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their "dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source".

At Akademy, we ran in to many interesting people, including "random motorcycle adventurer" Henri Bergius, who is also a board member for Akademy co-organizers COSS among his many other free software related activities. Read on for the full conversation. read more

I've already covered tar and all the wonderful ways to use it, but it's not the only tool at your disposal. Another popular backup tool is afio. Depending on your distribution, it already may be installed.

Several patches submitted by a Google developer will enable the kernel to push considerably more data through network cables on multi-core systems. Some of the LAN and Wi-Fi drivers also promise greater throughput, or to use less power, due to various driver enhancements.

Back in January, we published the first benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: the spin of Debian that replaces the Linux kernel with the FreeBSD kernel while retaining most of the same GNU user-land and it uses the GNU C library. With those original tests comparing Debian GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Linux version ended up winning in 18 of the 27 tests. However, over the past six months, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has matured and it's also moved to using the FreeBSD 7.3 kernel by default (compared to 7.2 back in January) and the FreeBSD 8.0 kernel is also emerging as a viable option that can be obtained using Debian's package management system. Today we have updated test numbers looking at the performance of Debian with the FreeBSD kernel using two different notebooks where we ran the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD packages with both the FreeBSD 7.3 and 8.0 kernels, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, and then finally we tested the pure FreeBSD 7.3 and FreeBSD 8.0 operating systems.

When Oracle began the acquisition of Sun, few doubted that MySQL was the main asset of interest. With MySQL still breathing six months later, users hoped Sun's other projects would survive as well. But despite Oracle's early claims and intermittent assurances that OpenSolaris would remain open source software, very little else has been said. Some, including the OpenSolaris Governing Board, are beginning to think OpenSolaris will be allowed to die a slow and quiet death.

The team behind the cloud-based Peppermint variant of Ubuntu Linux released a scaled-down, fast-booting, site-specific browser (SSB) version. The "Peppermint Ice" distro switches to Google's Chromium as the default browser, and while still supporting native apps, is even more focused on web-based apps than is Peppermint.