Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Today I finally managed to get GNOME Shell installed so I could get a preview of what is to come on the Linux desktop (at least through the eyes of GNOME). This new GNOME will arrive sometime this year (2010) and will, I promise you, change the way you use your desktop. Finally someone has looked at the current desktop metaphor and said “It’s over!” Think about it, the current paradigm has been in play since, when, Windows 95? Earlier you say? CDE? Let’s stick with Windows 95, because that really solidified the whole “taskbar, start button, icons, notification try” metaphor in the eyes of the public. Well, public, that is about to change - drastically.

Covering SCO is a marathon, not a sprint, so after each big win, I tend to savor the moment, goofing off and enjoying a rest, knowing as I do that they never quit and there will be more awfulness to come.

For those from the Mandriva camp, you'll want to head on over to your favorite mirror to check out the freshly released beta of Mandriva Linux 2010.1. Mandriva 2010.1 Beta 1 is running with GNOME 2.30 that was released just this past week, provides a preview of GNOME Shell for a glimpse of what is coming with GNOME 3.0 later this year, and there is a wealth of other package updates too.

The Plasma Javascript Jam Session is a friendly competition that aims to reward creators of original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition. The competion concluded on March 31st with 11 successful submissions making the deadline. Judging has commenced, and it will not be easy: many excellent submissions were sent in ranging from the entertaining to the highly useful. Ranging in size from a few dozen lines to a few thousand lines of Javascript code, the submissions showcase a variety of ideas and possibilities.

Faced with disappointing sales, HP and Dell are scaling back investments in 10-inch netbooks, with HP possibly quitting the format entirely, according to DigiTimes. Other motivators were said to include expectations for re-invigorated sales of larger, more expensive notebooks fueled by a recovering economy.

The developers of Songbird, the open source and cross platform media player, have announced they are dropping Linux support. In an announcement on the company blog, VP of Engineering Georges Auberger said that "After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird". Auberger cited prioritisation issues for the small engineering team which have meant that the Linux version of Songbird has fallen behind the other versions on Windows and Mac. The company has therefore decided to focus on the Windows and Mac versions and delivering new features and device support on those versions.

Final Demand. Dear Linux, We own you. Pay up or else. Love, SCO - Merc Crimperman, Bizarre Cathedral

Ubuntu just released the beta 1 version of their new LTS (Long Term Support) Distribution, Lucid 10.04. The theme is based on "light" and it looks great. Here's what to expect and what not to expect when you first install this new flavor of Ubuntu: The first thing you notice when you launch the live CD is Ubuntu's new logo. Don't worry, they still have the basic logo but they added some new typography and use the logo like a registration mark. They went with the black desktop theme for their default which is fine, but they moved something around. The window manager buttons went from the right side to the left, which is difficult at first if you are not used to it.

Mel Gorman posted the seventh version of his Memory Compaction patches asking, "are there any further obstacles to merging?" The patches, first posted in May of 2007, provide a mechanism for moving GFP_MOVABLE pages into a smaller number of pageblocks, reducing externally fragmented memory. Mel explains that 'compaction' is another method of defragmenting memory, "for example, lumpy reclaim is a form of defragmentation as was slub 'defragmentation' (really a form of targeted reclaim). Hence, this is called 'compaction' to distinguish it from other forms of defragmentation."

From February 20th to the 21st, Linux enthusiasts from the greater Los Angeles area converged at the Westin Hotel near Los Angeles Airport to celebrate Linux and Free Software at the annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE8X). KDE was there once again showing attendees the work of the KDE community. The team was showing off Plasma Desktop and a prototype of the Plasma Netbook workspace. There were four new volunteers who did a great job representing KDE for the first time - Jonathan Prien, Wayne Speir, Aaron Reichman, and Barrington Daltrey. A special mention goes also to Gary Greene, who shipped out the KDE booth box for use at SCALE. Aaron Johnson gave a talk "A Basic Introduction to KDE", attended by about thirty people, that was well recieved.

There is a classic bit of computer wisdom that states “If you’ve got a problem, and decide to solve it with regular expressions, now you’ve got two problems.” This of course stems from the perception that regular expressions are a complicated mix of magic characters and Voodoo. Regular expressions can allow you to achieve elegant and concise program logic quickly and easily, but only once you’ve learned to understand how they work and why. Just about any Linux or Mac system comes with a powerful regex tool call grep and learning grep is an essential task for any power user or system administrator. Today, we’ll explore some of what you can do with grep and how it can be one of the most powerful tools in your geek arsenal.

Most of the time at Phoronix we focus on looking at the Linux graphics performance of the software drivers and hardware, since traditionally that has been one of the most troubling areas of Linux hardware support. Tides though have turned as AMD continues to back their own open-source strategy with providing documentation and pushing out code that enables open-source hardware support from 3D acceleration to power management, while Intel continues to back their fully open-source model too. Another area of hardware support that has caused much grief for users has been with printer support. Printers are not nearly as complex as a modern-day graphics processor, but the different vendors have not been quick to offer up any Linux support -- and binary-only drivers frequently back the ones that do. There is one printer manufacturer though that as of last year has begun supporting Linux from top to bottom with their entire line-up of printers. Not only are they providing CUPS drivers, but also they are even printing Tux in the corner of every box they ship right besides the Windows and Apple logos. Do you know who we are talking about? Probably not, but it's Lexmark.

Optimised virtualisation, support for recently introduced AMD and Intel processors, new versions of OpenOffice, PostgreSQL and Samba as well as numerous fresh drivers are all among the major advancements of RHEL 5.5.

Netfilter maintainer Patrick McHardy recently announced a first alpha-release of nftables, slated to eventually replace iptables as the standard Linux packet filtering engine. Nftables aims to simplify the kernel ABI, reduce code duplication, improve error reporting, and provide more efficient execution, storage and updates of filtering rules. Patrick began with a high level overview of the three pieces that comprise the firewall, "the kernel provides a netlink configuration interface, as well as runtime ruleset evaluation using a small classification language interpreter. libnl contains the low-level functions for communicating with the kernel, the nftables frontend is what the user interacts with." An insightful overview can be found on lwn.net.

The open source desktop world got a boost this week with the release of GNOME 2.30 -- the latest incarnation of one of the leading open source desktop GUIs that's a part of nearly every major Linux distribution. With GNOME 2.30, the open source effort is adding new features that aim to make it easier to connect to online services, such as social networking giant Facebook. The new release also includes preview technology in the form of the GNOME Shell, which will become a standard component in GNOME 3, the next major release due in six months.

KDE has enjoyed great success over the years and today marks another important step in the evolution of our growing community. Many years ago when KDE was just beginning we had a small user base and similar expectations of how the software should work. But with growth and success also comes new users and new expectations. As an effort to meet the growing demands of our user community KDE has identified 3 key areas in which we would like to better cater to users' needs. In order to achieve this it has been determined that there will be, going forward, 3 separate releases of each Software Compilation tailored to these areas.

IBM has announced the launch of a new Atom-based netbook from Simmtronics that will ship with Lotus collaboration software and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The device, which is largely aimed at small businesses in emerging markets, will sell for $190. It is currently available in South Africa and will be expanding to other regions in the future.

Last month's release of the KDE 4.4 desktop environment restored the faith of many after what has been something of a roller coaster two years. Even the most loyal KDEians found that loyalty stretched by the debut of version 4.0 in 2008. Reassessing, and with hindsight, I think it's fair to characterize the whole saga as both a cautionary tale and an admirable example. Admirable, because the KDE team has displayed a quality that is so often lacking in open source software development: leadership.

The MeeGo community has "opened the repositories" on early code for the netbook-oriented Linux platform, which combines Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. Images are available for the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and OS base "from the Linux kernel to the OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer."

Arnd Bergmann noted that he's working on removing the BKL from the Linux kernel, "I've spent some time continuing the work of the people on Cc and many others to remove the big kernel lock from Linux and I now have [a] bkl-removal branch in my git tree". He went on to explain that his branch is working, and lets him run the Linux kernel, "on [a] quad-core machine with the only users of the BKL being mostly obscure device driver modules." Arnd noted that this effort has a long history, "the oldest patch in this series is roughly eight years old and is Willy's patch to remove the BKL from fs/locks.c, and I took a series of patches from Jan that removes it from most of the VFS."