Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In my last column, I mentioned the idea of disposable HPC. The concept is based on building clusters using low cost nodes (less than $500 each). Because lower cost nodes will run slower and have less cores than the big server nodes, they would need to be smaller and use much less power. They will also need a lowerThermal Design Power (TDP) to accommodate dense packaging designs.

The conventional wisdom about Linux is that it isn’t owned or created by any one company, but instead a whole group of players that give and take as needed. That said, there are several major companies that are readily identifiable as the biggest corporate sponsors of Linux, who market Linux most directly to enterprises, and who are in many people’s minds synonymous with Linux in both the server and desktop markets.

Just about anyone who’s attempted dual booting or another non-standard boot setup has, at some point, made their own system unbootable. If the words “GRUB Error 2? or “No Valid System Disk Found” make you break into a cold sweat, then fear no more. Now you can include the Super Grub Disk in your geek arsenal, and say goodbye to boot errors. SGD can work with Linux or Windows systems to bypass or repair the broken bootloaders that have kept many of us awake at night, and all in under 2MB. That’s right, it can even run from a floppy disk.

In preparation for this year's annual motorcycle trip, I purchased an Acer Aspire One Intel Atom N450 netbook. I'd been looking at netbooks for a while, and finally made my choice. I picked the Acer because of its decent price, reasonable battery life, the fact that it was powerful enough to do everything I needed for mobile blogging, and because it will fit nicely in one of the BMW's saddle bags. What follows are a few notes and suggestions for installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 10.04 on this model.

Linux's share of the desktop market grew to 1.13 percent, says Net Applications, making Linux the only OS to improve its position in May. Meanwhile, Linux server share dropped to 20.8 percent, but revenue share grew to 16.8 percent, says IDC, and UC Berkeley's Top500 survey shows Linux running on 91 percent of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

Profiting from Linux doesn't involve an obvious winning formula. There are as many different business models as there are distributions, and you seldom find much overlap between those that are working. Instead, you find something more like the world of medieval patronage. It's a place where the great distribution families fight for favour, sponsoring masked balls and conferences, while trying to attract geek heroes to work under their flags.

Canonical, the commercial presence behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution for servers and desktops, is in business to make money as well as to put out the best free operating system it can. Some businesses won't pay for support, some want basic support, and others (particularly companies making big investments in Linux for the first time) want all the hand-holding they can get. To better address the needs of different sets of customers, Canonical is packaging up its support services in a new way, which it calls Ubuntu Advantage.

Dropbox is a great way to synchronize files across multiple machines. A free basic Dropbox account gives you 2GB of storage, while pro paid accounts give you 50GB or 100GB of storage space. Dropbox works great on desktops; there are clients for Linux, Windows, and OS X. There are GUI tools provided to manage the Dropbox and set it up for these operating systems.

While Ubuntu and its derivatives (such as Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Netbook) are most popular on x86 and x86_64 systems along with a growing presence on ARM-based devices, ports of Ubuntu have been available for SPARC and IA64 architectures too. However, as the quality of these ports have been degrading, the IA64 and SPARC ports of Ubuntu Linux may be decommissioned during the Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" development cycle.

NPR Logo National Public Radio (NPR), a non-profit membership organisation, has announced that it plans to open source its NPR Android application. Created in 1970, NPR is a privately and publicly funded US media organisation that produces and distributes news, talk and entertainment programming. The NPR app for Android devices was created by Google developer Michael Frederick in his spare time. With the application, users can read, listen or create playlists of NPR stories, share them with friends and live stream audio from hundreds of NPR radio stations.

You'll find many Linux-based and/or open source options when searching for a Wi-Fi hotspot solution. Whether you're wanting to give away or charge your visitors for the wireless Internet, you should find something that will work. The best part is that most of these solutions are free -- you don't have to spends hundreds on a off-the-shelf hotspot gateway.

This year, like every year, KDE will be present at Linuxtag, which is held from 9th to 12th in Berlin. As usual, visitors will be able to meet KDE contributors, chat about KDE and KDE-related topics, get a demonstration of the newest hotness that will be released as part of KDE SC 4.5.0 this summer, learn about the background of the KDE community and the technology it creates and of course just catch up with what's going on in KDE-land -- and that's a lot!

LXer Feature: 07-June-2010

Some of the big stories this week include Google switching out Windows for Linux and Mac, hackers promise a demo of Android rootkit, Linux users vs. Linux Culture, does the Internet make you smarter and a whole lot more. Enjoy!

We've already shown you how to keep your desktop interesting by setting a video as your wallpaper and how to download and rotate fresh photos. This week, weblog Simple Help shows us how to rotate a photo of the Earth from space.

On May 19, Google unveiled something that many in the open source community had been expecting (and which the Free Software Foundation asked for in March): it made the VP8 video codec available to the public under a royalty-free, open source BSD-style license. Simultaneously, it introduced WebM, an HTML5-targeted open source audio-and-video delivery system using VP8, and announced a slew of corporate and open source WebM partners supporting the format, including web browsers and video sites such as its own YouTube property.

With a week having passed since the release of Linux 2.6.35-rc1, Linus Torvalds has now replaced it with Linux 2.6.35-rc2. This second release candidate for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel brings more changes than Linus would have liked to see, but a bulk of the activity is happening within the kernel's driver staging area.

Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media. Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.

The main problem you face when you're attempting to lift the lid on what makes Linux tick is knowing where to start. It's a complicated stack of software that's been developed by thousands of people. Following the boot sequence would be a reasonable approach, explaining what Grub actually does, before jumping into the initiation of a RAM disk and the loading of the kernel. But the problem with this is obvious. Mention Grub too early in any article and you're likely to scare many readers away. We'd have the same problem explaining the kernel if we took a chronological approach.

The biannual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world was released at the beginning of June and unsurprisingly, the vast majority (91 percent, to be exact) run some form of the Linux operating system. The Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson discussed the positive effect this statistic has on end users by citing that any improvements to Linux made by one of the supercomputer manufacturers got poured back into the kernel.

Since its 2008 debut, Android has grown - not only meeting all of the functionalities of the iPhone, but besting it in nearly all aspects. Here is our list of the top 10 things Android does better than the iPhone.