Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Freescale Semiconductor has begun taking orders for a Power Architecture development platform for Android-based products, opening a new category of embedded devices to Google's open-source mobile operating system.

A Qt developer has brought a piece of KDE to Maemo. After plasmoids, this week brings the Plasma desktop. Also a KDE Maemo mailing list.

An open memo from the U.S. DoD declares that open source software is no worse than traditional software, perhaps even useful.

The mobile phone market suffered a six percent drop in shipments year to year, but saw a 5.6 percent improvement over the previous quarter, says IDC. Meanwhile, Motorola, which showed a 6.4 percent yearly drop, according to IDC, posted 3Q earnings that beat analyst predictions.

In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell's blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city's switch to Google's corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save. Still, the Novell blog post is intriguing because it's a missive from an open source-focused company criticizing the Los Angeles decision with barbs frequently aimed at open source solutions. It claims that L.A. should have opted for Novell's fee-based Groupwise solution. Huh?

When running a modern Linux graphics driver stack in a composited environment there is a lot less tearing -- particularly with regard to video playback, but OpenGL applications too -- now than there was in the past, but there is still room for improvement. One of the ways to improve this is by properly controlling the display of buffers with how often the swaps occur and to sync them with the monitor's refresh rate or the rate at which the compositor is running.

If you're fetching several resultsets that contain a lot of common data, it can make sense to obtain a single resultset that has all the data that's required, store it in a temporary table, and then select from this temporary table as needed.

The Linux-Kongress is traditionally where kernel developers exchange honors and advice about new features and enhancements. This year a number of speakers presented performance improvement data and discussed what aspects of Linux can be drawn out even more.

While recent Ubuntu releases have been more about careful enhancement and distribution maintenance, the current version 9.10 offers a new look as well as a whole range of new technical features – the developers have restructured the distribution's standard filesystem, boot system and hardware maintenance, and they have introduced new software. Not everything is completely new; many changes were introduced into Ubuntu as part of a gradual development process and have now reached the maturity required for general use.

Canonical's Ubuntu project released the final Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, featuring faster boot times, improved audio and 3G connectivity, an enhanced Netbook Remix, and more robust cloud support, among other features. The release follows IBM's announcement that it is launching an Ubuntu-based cloud computing distribution for businesses.

KDE-based distribution Kubuntu has released version 9.10 which adds a new variant showcasing the up and coming Plasma Netbook setup. The release also adds OpenOffice KDE 4 integration and extra installer beauty thanks to artwork from KDE's Oxygen team.

Nokia's second annual Maemo Summit brought together 400 developers and power users of the Linux-based tablet community in Amsterdam over the October 9-11 weekend. Maemo Community Manager Quim Gil said the primary goal was to bring the community together for the social and interactive benefits, but the three-day program also provided a solid introduction to the new Maemo 5 release, a preview of Maemo 6, and a chance to work with the Nokia N900 — which ships with as close to a standard Linux distribution as the marketplace has seen delivered on a usable mobile phone.

Rob Weir has an eye-opening report on how the Microsoft-stuffed committee implementing fixes to OOXML is extending the "standard", which turns out to be not exactly standard, to better conform to Microsoft Office 2007, and without following usual procedures. That is utterly backwards. Normally, vendors work to make their products conform to the standard, and it's very unusual for a "standard" to be made to conform to one vendor's proprietary product. I want to reproduce the article here, because it is an object lesson, a timely one.

Just over one year after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, OpenOffice.org (OOo) project developer Joost Andrae has announced that the free office suite has been downloaded more than one hundred million times since the launch of version 3.0. OpenOffice is an open source office suite from Sun Microsystems for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems. The download total doesn't include, for example, installations included with various Linux distributions or copies included on CDs given out by magazines, so the actual number is likely much higher.

MontaVista Software announced more Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) for its MontaVista Linux 6 commercial embedded development distribution. The MSDs are separated into industrial automation, multi-core networking, Android, automotive and portable multimedia, and multifunction-printer versions, and support processors from Cavium, Freescale, Intel, and Texas Instruments, says the company.

”Dual-booting with Windows and desktop Linux is a snap to do.” This statement is at best a half-truth as it really depends on the skill set of the person trying to install Linux along side Windows. Despite this, I hear people stating this as a fact nearly everyday. Drives me bananas. When it comes to running multiple operating systems on a computer, I think that most distro providers do little to deter their users from making what can be serious partitioning mistakes. Figuring that it must be the end user's sole responsibility to "get it right," people are often seen in the various users forums complaining how Linux deleted their Windows install. Clearly there has to be a more consistent way of addressing this.

Xen made a big splash when it was introduced, and VMWare has long dominated the virtualization space. But Red Hat's KVM promises to leave Xen in the dust, and challenge VMWare. At least that's what Red Hat says will happen.

Novell wants the US Supreme Court to review its seemingly-never-ending legal tete-a-tete with SCO over the famous UNIX and UNIXware copyrights. As noticed by Groklaw, Novell has filed a motion with a federal appeals court asking for a 90-day stay in the SCO case so it can file a writ of certori petition with the Supremes. This would ask the Supremes to review the lower court's decision that SCO can take its copyright crusade to trial.

This week at the Eclipse Summit Europe held in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Microsoft has announced new initiatives and projects. In one initiative, Microsoft plans to assist Eclipse developers with utilising the new functionality offered by Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Another initiative sees Microsoft wanting to enable Java and PHP developers who use Eclipse as a development environment to build applications that are suitable for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. Support for Silverlight, Microsoft's RIA (Rich Internet Applications) technology, is also planned.

I've never done a follow up post on a topic before, but I think this is a topic worth further discussion. Yesterday I posted a rather pointed article focused on Intel and what I consider to be a very poor business decision regarding the GMA500 GPU.