Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Now that we have open source beer, open source cars, and open source photography, a social networking service run by Red Hat and based around open source software comes as no surprise. The name of the project is Mugshot, and the official definition describes it as "an open project to create live social experiences around entertainment." That may sound vague, but it's actually a useful service, and there are quite a few things you can do with it.

Ingo Molnar reviewed Con Kolivas [interview]'s swap-prefetching patches suggesting that they were ready for inclusion in the mainline kernel, "I've reviewed it once again and in the !CONFIG_SWAP_PREFETCH case it's a clear NOP, while in the CONFIG_SWAP_PREFETCH=y case all the feedback i've seen so far was positive. Time to have this upstream and time for a desktop-oriented distro to pick it up." He went on to describe swap prefetch, "to the desktop user this is a speculative performance feature that he is willing to potentially waste CPU and IO capacity, in expectation of better performance. On the conceptual level it is _precisely the same thing as regular file readahead_. (with the difference that to me swapahead seems to be quite a bit more intelligent than our current file readahead logic.)"

The executive editor of DesktopLinux.com installs Kubuntu Feisty Fawn on his "trusty old Thinkpad testbed" and relates his experiences. The verdict? Thanks to a little assistance from Automatix2, Feisty's a real winner!

The Mozilla Quality weblog has announced a Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.4 and 1.5.0.12 Community Test Day tomorrow. The Community Test Day will allow interested members of the Mozilla community to test release candidates of the upcoming Firefox 2.0.0.4 and 1.5.0.12 releases. The Mozilla Wiki has a page with full details about the Firefox 2.0.0.4 and 1.5.0.12 Community Test Day, which will take place on Friday between 7:00am and 5:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (2:00pm and 12:00pm UTC/GMT).

The e-mail and calendar server software start-up adds support for the up-and-coming version of Linux.

Following up to feedback on his merge plans, Andrew Morton [interview] posted an updated summary of what he is pushing upstream for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.22 kernel. His list included, "a few serial bits, a few pcmcia bits, one little security patch, the blackfin architecture, small h8300 update, small alpha update, swsusp updates, m68k bits, and lots of UML updates." He also noted that he'll push some of the memory management queue including, "an enhancement to /proc/pid/smaps to permit monitoring of a running program's working set. The SLUB allocator, it's pretty green but I do want to push ahead with this pretty aggressively with a view to replacing slab altogether. Generic pagetable quicklist management. We have x86_64 and ia64 and sparc64 implementations, but I'll only include David's sparc64 implementation here. I'll send the x86_64 and ia64 implementations through maintainers."

Yesterday Trolltech released the second beta of Qt Jambi, the Qt API for Java. With this release we also released the source code including the Generator under GPL, opening the option for making KDE libs accessible to Java. Though it does not work together with gcj, it does work together with the open source Harmony Virtual machine and runtime.

When you're designing and developing new software systems, it is often hard to see how all the pieces are suppose to fit together. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one tool that allow developers and architects to ease the process and create a big picture before committing to a particular technology.

Unicon Systems, a Linux handheld software and hardware technology developer from Menlo Park, California, started shipping its Mobile Linux Development Kit (MKitTM). MKitTM ($599) is the first and only unique mobile Linux development kit on the market. It gives professional developers and manufacturers the ability to create new handheld devices for medical, industrial, security and educational applications. Unicon’s patented, wireless, and mobile chip-on-film Linux computer is based on an ARM9 embedded CPU running full blown Linux 2.6 and attached to the back of a 3.5” touch screen. It is equipped with multiple connectivity options, including two 2.0 high-speed USB host ports and WiFi.

The Open Source Health Care Alliance (OSHCA) Conference 2007 is being held May 8 - 11, 2007 inKuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Red Hat today released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, featuring a 2.6.9-55.EL kernel paravirtualized for i686 and x86_64 machines. RHEL 4.5 also provides NFS performance metrics and updated kernel support for Infiniband connectivity, according to the release announcement.

Kristian Høgsberg posted an update on the effort to rewrite the Linux kernel FireWire stack [story] explaining, "as you may know, we've been working on a new FireWire stack over on linux1394-devel. The main driver behind this work is to get a small, maintainable and supportable FireWire stack, with an acceptable backwards compatibility story." He went on to request the stack's inclusion in the mainline kernel,...

After several years of decline, the demand for certification and training in GNU/Linux and other free software areas is stronger than ever. That's the general opinion of experts in the field, as they discuss where certification has been, current course offerings, customer services, and trends for the future.

Ten Tec is an American manufacturer of all sorts of radio equipment based in Tennessee. They make a neat little black box which attaches to any PC via a serial port. The box, called the RX-320D, is a shortwave (general coverage) receiver that works very well indeed with performance rivaling more expensive desktop receivers. If you read Ten Tec’s advertising you’d think you need Windows based software to use this radio. Think again.

The news has quickly gotten around that Dell will be bringing Ubuntu Linux to some of its consumer desktops. Analysts and Linux rivals alike think this is a good move for both Linux and Dell. The big question now is, "How important is it really?"

Linux users have a multitude of choices for personal finance applications, including GnuCash, KMyMoney, Kapital, and others, not to mention being able to run Quicken under WINE. One good alternative that runs on multiple operating systems and manages finances with ease is Moneydance.

Open source technology now has a firm foothold in the public sector, according to a new survey.

While officials for Red Hat and Novell's SUSE have welcomed the move as good for the industry, they also downplayed its competitive significance.

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

Ubuntu has been the wonder child of Linux distributions since it debuted in 2004, and it has enjoyed mostly good reviews. However, a favorably disposed reviewer found Ubuntu 7.04 to be disappointing and presented his point of view candidly in a review published today by ExtremeTech.com.