Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

"I will be continuing to commit bits and pieces of HAMMER, but note that it will probably not even begin to work for quite some time," Matthew Dillon reported on the new clustering filesystem he's developing for DragonFlyBSD. He noted, "I am still on track for it to make it into the end-of-year release."

LXer Feature: 04-Nov-2007

I have a slew of great articles for you in this week's Roundup starting with a trick most FOSS users already know of, how to crack Windows passwords with Linux. Plus Andy Updegrove sets the Record Straight on (Non)Voting in SC 34, Phoronix reviews ATI: Linux vs. Windows Vista, François Bancilhon of Mandriva writes an open letter to Steve Ballmer, new Asus laptop and Everex desktop offerings, an interview with Pamela Jones of Groklaw, Carla Schroder's Tutorial: Linux Backups For Real People, Part 1 and an Italian Judge Tells HP To Refund Pre-Installed XP.

The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take. Open document advocates are debating fundamental questions about whether there should be a single document format or multiple formats that interoperate, and the relative importance of format and applications.

"The problem with swap over network is the generic swap problem: needing memory to free memory. Normally this is solved using mempools, as can be seen in the BIO layer," explained Peter Zijlstra. "Swap over network has the problem that the network subsystem does not use fixed sized allocations, but heavily relies on kmalloc(). This makes mempools unusable."

Twice in recent weeks open source projects have surprised me with their lack of openness. In both cases, developers acted or spoke out in such a way as to intentionally push other developers away from their work.

A few days ago I was going to write up how French Linux distributor Mandriva had signed up a deal to deliver 17,000 Intel-powered Classmate PCs with a customized version of Mandriva Linux 2007, built on Mandriva Flash technology, to Nigerian schoolchildren. It wasn't a big deal, but it was still one more small step forward for Linux desktops.

Sun Microsystems is claiming its first major milestone in Project Indiana, with the release of an OpenSolaris developer preview binary distribution. The OpenSolaris Developer Preview features the core operating system, Gnome desktop and graphical installer contained on a Slim Install Live CD for x86. The SPARC edition is still in the pipeline.

StartCom has updated its multimedia-oriented Linux desktop with new features targeted at audio/video fans. While it can also serve as a general purpose desktop, StartCom MultiMedia Edition version ML-5.0.6 comes preloaded with a variety of tools to hear, view, edit, mix, dub, finish, and share music and video projects, the company says.

KOffice, the office suite built on KDE technology and in the KDE Communtiy has recently gotten a lot of press, but is still often underrepresented. In this interview, some key KOffice developers tell us about the recent progress of KDE's Office suite, about Open Standards and how KOffice plays an active role in bringing Freedom to users. We have talked to Boudewijn Rempt, developer of Krita, core KOffice contributor and KOffice release manager, as well as to David Faure who has been taking part in the OASIS, the organization that is responsible for advancing the OpenDocument (ODF) standard.

Thanks to a founding member of Free Geek Vancouver, the Green Party of Canada has quietly become the first major political party to make support for free and open source software (FOSS) part of its election platform. Like officials in the Green Party of England and Wales, deputy leader Adriane Carr sees the move as compatible with basic Green ideas, but IT consultant Neil Adair also points out the move serves the practical purpose of helping the party match the technical resources of more established parties.

I felt bad for Linux vendors after reading Peter Galli's eWeek article, which claims that Linux server sales on X86 hardware have run into a stone wall, going from a 53 percent growth rate to four percent decline over the past six quarters -- until I did a little research that easily refuted that claim.

The sound server PulseAudio is a relative newcomer to the Linux audio arena, but since it has been selected as the default setup in the next releases of at least two major distributions (Fedora and Ubuntu), it's probably time to start looking into it.

At the bottom of the Vim editor, you will find two things: the command-line buffer (where you can input commands) and the status line. In the default configuration, Vim has a simple and non-informative status line, but you can make the status line a lot more informative with simple methods.

Users of the popular Linux distribution MEPIS were getting worried about the distribution's leader, who had been rather quiet lately. Some Linux distributions -- Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Novell, for example -- have thousands of people working on them over the course of a month. Others, like MEPIS, have one developer, and users of the popular Linux desktop distribution were getting worried when Warren Woodford, MEPIS's CEO, had been laying low for the last month.

With a typical lack of fanfare the OpenBSD team today released OpenBSD 4.2 and this time around there are not only security improvements (what would you expect?) but also a good selection of speed improvements.

It's never PayPal's fault even when they are caught red handed lying to me. They do apologize though.

Have you ever had deja vu? I re-read books on occasion, because I like them, and every once in a while I’ll re-read a book that I think I’m reading for the first time. Then I’ll sit there with this twisted-up look on my face, wondering why all the words seem so familiar. Then I remember when and where I saw them last.

Not content to rely on the computing muscle supplied by Intel and AMD, HP has upped its focus on server accelerators. The hardware maker today announced a new program aimed right at incorporating things such as floating point boosters into its machines. The fresh HP Accelerator program joins a Multi-Core Optimization Program launched in June. Both efforts charge after similar goals with HP looking to improve the performance of software. Generally speaking, the Accelerator program covers hardware add-ons that can fit into HP servers and speed up specific tasks such as floating point operations. Meanwhile, the Multi-Core push centers on crafting code that can spread well across many-cored boxes.

The Xandros Linux-powered "ultra-mobile PC" (UMPC) has finally arrived. One of the most eagerly awaited laptops in some time, the tiny Asus Eee PC 4G, is now available. When the news first broke that Taiwanese computer manufacturer Asus was coming out with a less than two pounds mini-laptop for under $200 that would be running Linux, both gadget and Linux desktop fans were thrilled. Now that it's here, the Eee PC 4G's price has doubled, but early reviewers are still finding this Xandros-Linux powered laptop to be worth the price.

The Ubuntu operating system has been charged with crimes against hard drives. A number of users have complained this week about the OS (7.04/7.10) forcing drives to spin up and down at an unnatural rate due to some very aggressive power management features. According to Ubuntu wizards, however, this is a firmware/BIOS issue and not the OS's fault. A couple of user forums have started fill up with people commenting about their systems going through an unusual number of load cycles while under battery power. This excessive throttling of the hard drive could lead to quicker than expected hardware failures.