Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

"With all the tickless and other goodies going into the kernel in the last few months, there is a lot of hope that this helps Linux reduce power consumption," Arjan van de Ven began on the lkml, "and the good news is that it does... once you fix some bugs and fix a bunch of userspace applications." He referred to a promising graph generated utilizing the recently introduced PowerTOP utility, measuring power consumption before and after applying a series of related bug fixes.

Synfig Studio is a 2-D animation program that uses vector graphics. Although it has only just released version 0.61.06-1, it is already approaching early maturity, with enough tools and innovations that professionals might seriously consider using it. The only real question about its future is the minor one of whether the developers can learn the difference between practical and merely arbitrary changes in standard interfaces and tools.

Linux and Eclipse leaders and programmers are trying to make Eclipse the IDE of choice for Linux software development.

aKademy 2007 goes on. Monday was filled mostly with the KDE e.V. meeting, and finished with a social event at the city chambers.

The Software Freedom Law Center, provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software, today released a white paper that considers new U.S. Federal Communications Commission rules, which go into effect today, governing Software-Defined Radio devices.

Try as it might, Microsoft could find it very hard to wiggle out of its GPLv3 connection.

Open Tuesday is back with renewed vigour after a brief hiatus. Once again the Joburg open source community will have a chance to come out the computer screen and meet each other while learning a little bit more about local developments.

Aewin has announced a highly integrated 3.5-inch form-factor single-board computer (SBC) that accepts either Pentium M or Celeron M processors. The EM-7302 runs Linux, offers modular PC/104 and optional mini PCI expansion, and targets embedded applications such as interactive kiosks, parking gate control, and medical equipment.

One of the many uses of having a Red Hat Consultant on site is to provide “best practices” in regard to using or deploying Red Hat Linux or any of Red Hat’s applications. These best practices come from the way a product was written as well as how the product was originally intended to be used. Although we lean towards sticking to these best practices and procedures, sometimes they need to be modified and adjusted to meet the special needs of a client. Knowing how to make a product work within a customer’s specialized environment is also a great use of a Red Hat Consultant.

Linux-powered robots are flocking to Atlanta this week to compete in the Robocup scientific competition. The eleventh annual event has attracted at least two Linux-based designs aiming to replace Sony's Aibo as the de facto hardware platform for standard Robocup league play.

Alan Cox posted an updated LibATA PATA (IDE) status report on the lkml. Improved from a previous status report [story] he noted, "current kernels now support HPA (Host Protected Area) but default to honouring it. Probably a wrong default for PATA but we need to decide the right way to expose it nicely." He went on to note, "no PATA hotplug support yet. Need warmplug helpers for some chipsets (eg some intel ICH) to avoid risk of hangs."

Microsoft cleared the air July 5 on its obligations to GNU General Public License Version 3 support, declaring it will not provide support or updates for GPLv3 under the deal it penned in November with Novell to administer certificates for the Linux distribution. Microsoft also said July 5 that its agreement with Novell, as well as those with Linux rivals Xandros and Linspire, were unaffected by the release June 29 of GPLv3 by the Free Software Foundation.

A small company near Torino, Italy is shipping a tiny ARM9-based processor module designed for use with low-cost carrier boards. Elpa's RD129 comes pre-installed with the latest Linux kernel (currently 2.6.21.5), and is available with a handy development board.

There's probably more open source in your organization than you think, which makes it critical to put some governance standards in place.

After interviewing Axel Dorfler yesterday, in this second installment of Five Questions, we interview Robert Szeleney, the main driving force behind SkyOS. SkyOS has been in development since the late '90s, but for the past few years, it has seen rapid development.

Should you believe Red Hat's claims that its new Exchange marketplace for "open source business applications" contains nothing butopen source business applications? We say "no" - since not even Red Hat appears to have a good answer for this question.

OpenOffice.org suffers from a wildly inconsistent user interface (UI) that combines unique elements with borrowings from Microsoft Office. Now, in the upcoming version 2.3, it is finally having some of the cosmetic procedures it so badly needs -- at least in the charts subsystem. The changes include a new default color scheme and a heavily revamped wizard, but only small changes in functionality, making this revision a case study in UI design for both better and worse.

For many seasoned Linux developers, device drivers still remain a bit of a mysterious black art practiced by a select few. While no single article could possibly attempt to covered everything there is to know about writing drivers, Valerie Henson gives us a brief taste of what's involved, by implementing a device to return "Hello World" using all the major driver frameworks.

The Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has offered a prize for the best campaign against Microsoft's attempt to gain international standardisation for its Office format.

Look at how to create scripts that are able to record their output, trap and identify errors, and recover from errors and problems so that they either run correctly or fail with a suitable error message and report. Building scripts and running them automatically is a task that every good administrator has to handle, but how do you handle the error output and make intelligent decisions about how the script should handle these errors?