Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Nick Piggin posted an efficient algorithm for converting a data structure, "this is my 'data structure switch' algorithm that can convert one data structure into another, with just a single unlikely branch in fastpaths and no locking or atomic operations (the branch is only triggered when the data structure is in the process of being converted). A pointer indirection is generally also needed when converting a global data structure."

The long-awaited KDE 4.0 desktop environment will be available to users in December but a development platform version will be released on October 30 to give third party developers time to port their applications to the new platform.

Lenovo finally started shipping SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on its T-Series ThinkPads for its mainstream business users. Now, the company appears to be considering offering another Linux, very possibly Ubuntu, for the enthusiast market.

LXer Feature: 09-Sept-2007

The big stories this week include Microsoft and the ISO vote saga, the countdown is on to Ontario Linux Fest, The French Ministry for Education has migrated 2,500 servers over to Linux and The Women of Tech. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

Stefan Richter posted the IEEE1394 subsytem and FireWire subsystem TODO lists noting, "it seems also appropriate to disclose the current manpower behind FireWire driver development and maintenance. There are just two people who regularly work on the drivers: Kristian Høgsberg (author and maintainer of the new firewire subsystem, in the past also involved with the old ieee1394 subsystem) and me (co-maintainer of both the new and old subsystems). But we both have a lot of other projects going on at the moment."

When typewriters ruled the desktop, all paragraphs had a ragged right justification, with each line starting at the same position on the left, but with a variable right margin. Full justification -- lines whose left and right sides all ended in the same positions -- were the mark of professional typography, and beyond the means of the average user.

Tagua, a generic boardgame for KDE, is approaching version 1.0, and the developers decided it's time to get the word out on this exceptionally cool application by releasing a first Alpha.

Bharata Rao posted a query to the Linux Kernel mailing list looking for ideas on how to best handle filesystem namespace unification with Union Mount, "typically this is done by reading the directory entries of all the union'ed layers (starting from the top and working downwards) and merging the result by eliminating the duplicate entries. This is done by extending the getdents/readdir system calls to support the notion of union'ed directories."

One of the more humorous ad series today is the Geico "caveman" commercials, featuring a caveman complaining about the stereotype of something being "so easy a caveman could do it." Since we don't have to worry about offending cavemen (or cavewomen), companies can safely poke humor at that demographic group and not worry about alienating anyone. However, you might want to think twice about saying "it's so easy your mom can do it."

Trolltech recently released many smartphone developers' dream combination-the Linux-based Greenphone and its open-source Qtopia Phone SDK. The Trolltech Greenphone is a full-featured tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900MHz) mobile phone with a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera. Like many other modern smartphones, it features a QVGA touchscreen, Bluetooth, client USB, mini-SD Flash and stereo audio connectors.

Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company -- far from it. "We had a predominantly Microsoft-oriented shop," says David Christian, Mindbridge CTO. But the company, which at the time offered an "intranet in a box" application, began hosting the software for its clients. "That required us to get a good handle on Linux, because Linux was the only inexpensive, cost-efficient way of handling that in a scaled environment," Christian says. "And I didn't want to add Microsoft to our customers' overhead." The more Christian worked with Linux, the more he liked it. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Microsoft's ISO standardization ambitions for its Office Open XML file format have hit a rough patch, as OOXML recently failed to garner enough votes for fast-track ratification. ODF (OpenDocument Format) advocates are pleased, but they're fooling themselves if they think that the lack of ISO standardization for OOXML is going to put any kind of a dent in the dominance that Microsoft holds over the office productivity market.

Recent conversations with knowledgeable colleagues has recently reached a point where it is difficult to have a rational conversation about any aspect of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software without having to invoke an entire other discipline to speak about it. As well, the lines of demarcation between EMR software engineering, law, licensing, economics, politics and public policy has now become so intertwined that it is becoming nearly impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. A nexus may have formed in which these are inextricably linked.

If you are a systems or network administrator and you do not own a copy of this book, stop reading this right now and go get one. If you are a manager responsible for the care and feeding of a technical team, purchase copies for yourself and each of your team members. Heck, even if you’re unfortunate enough to be married to a systems administrator (*gasp*), buy a copy for your significant other and steal it when they aren’t looking. It’s that good. You’ll get a better understanding of what he or she does on a daily basis, as well as be able to finally explain it to your mother-in-law. (True story!) Here’s why.

Author of OpenBSD's hardware driver layer for wireless Atheros devices,Reyk Floeter, sent a query to the Linux Kernel mailing list regarding the recent licensing debate surrounding the Linux"ath5k" driver,"I'm still trying to get an idea about the facts and the latest state of the incidence that violated the copyright of my code, because I just returned from vacation."

AMD announced on Sept. 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. The company announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops.

The most referenced and most often used command on any Linux distribution is man, which lets users read the manual pages of other commands. Here are a couple of less well-known but useful commands that let you bookmark a position within a man page, and test a command you read from the man page without closing the page.

Apple faces calls to open iPhone. Office 2.0 Conference Apple is facing fresh calls to open the iPhone as new evidence emerged of the technical and legal challenges developers face putting their software on the device.

"The current VM can get itself into trouble fairly easily on systems with a small ZONE_HIGHMEM, which is common on i686 computers with 1GB of memory," Rik van Riel said explaining a small patch to cmscan.c. He continued, "on one side, page_alloc() will allocate down to zone->pages_low, while on the other side, kswapd() and balance_pgdat() will try to free memory from every zone, until every zone has more free pages than zone->pages_high." He noted that highmem could be filled up with "page tables, ramfs, vmalloc allocations and other unswappable things quite easily and without many bad side effects, since we still have a huge ZONE_NORMAL to do future allocations from. However, as long as the number of free pages in the highmem zone is below zone->pages_high, kswapd will continue swapping things out from ZONE_NORMAL, too! Sami Farin managed to get his system into a stage where kswapd had freed about 700MB of low memory and was still 'going strong'."

If you have video footage that you want to capture, edit, and share with friends or family (or even use professionally), you'll be happy to know that you can do it all with open source tools. I'll show you how to author a DVD that can play on most home players.