Showing headlines posted by bob

The first release candidate for KDE's Plasma Media Center 1.1 release is now available. Plasma Media Center supports viewing photographs, watching movies, and listening to music from one central KDE component...

The Elementary OS crew, a group of young designers seeking to create a beautiful and simple Linux distribution, have released Elementary OS 0.2 "Luna" as their latest Ubuntu-based operating system...

OpenIndiana, the operating system seeking to let Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris project live on within the open-source community, is finally out with an update. This isn't a stable OpenIndiana release but rather is still a pre-release to 151a...

The Common Display Framework (CDF) proposal for the Linux kernel that started last year is still being worked on. The CDF code is now up to its third revision, but this isn't likely to be the final revision before pushing it for mainline inclusion...

A set of patches were published this weekend to improve the Nouveau NVIDIA Gallium3D graphics driver's handling of video playback acceleration for certain scenarios...

Here’s the lineup of IRC channels we created on irc.freenode.net for remote attendees to follow along. You may want to configure them in your IRC client now to make your remote attendance easier. I’ve linked each channel name up to the freenode web client just in case it’s helpful.

With Fedora more liberally pushing down package updates compared to Ubuntu Linux and other fixed-release distributions, how has the performance evolved since the release of "Schrödinger's Cat" in early July? Here's some benchmarks showing how the Fedora 19 performance has evolved with a newer kernel and other changes...

A set of six patches were published for Mesa on Friday that allow for profiling support with Gallium3D's "Clover" state tracker for OpenCL support...

Here’s a quick rundown of the day 1 talks that have transcripts and / or video recordings:

Scarcely a week after the Intel-backed Minnowboard.org project began shipping its $199 open-hardware single board computer, the AMD-backed GizmoSphere.org project released an unrestricted version of its $189 Gizmo SBC’s schematic and electronics distributor Digi-Key added Wandboard.org’s open, Freescale-based $83-144 boardset to its online catalog. The moves reflect the current infatuation of embedded developers, makers, and [...]

I occasionally get asked why I spend so much of my free time writing software and giving it away for free. There are a number of reasons for this—I like to build things and I use it as an excuse to practice and improve my skills—but one of the most driving motivators for me is that I see open source contributions as a civic duty, a moral obligation to the rest of the world.

In February of this year, I reported that the Raleigh Public Record—a local, online news publication in Raleigh, NC—was in the process of creating an open source solution to extract data from PDFs. The problem many news journalists have is easily and quickly (which is very important given the nature of their job) converting data and images into a usable format from documents they use for their reports (see an example here). The project, DocHive, is now phasing into the next cycle of development under the leadership of Edward Duncan. He tells us what he has planned for his team over the next six months. But first, I asked:

Collaboration is one of the key principles of the open source way and a major topic here on opensource.com. One of our goals to highlight great collaboration stories, and when we discuss collaboration, the need for the perfect collaboration tool frequently comes up. One article, Avoid the tool trap when building communities, provides some great insights (hint: people create community, not tools). Email is still undoubedly one of the most preferred tools out there for collaboration. In fact, collaboration on the the Linux kernel started with the famous email Linus Torvalds sent to a mailing list back in 1991.

Are you a Linux desktop user who loves Ubuntu but is wary of Unity? You're in luck. There are lots of Ubuntu spins, both from Canonical and independent developers, which preserve the basic infrastructure and essence of Ubuntu but replace the default Unity desktop. Here are five of my favorites:

There are already many articles out there comparing Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and BeagleBone Black; this is not one of those articles. What I was looking for and couldn’t find was a comprehensive article that would summarize all of the pros and cons of the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black, and what each platform is best suited for. When I couldn’t find that article, I decided to write it myself.

One of the feature limitations of using the Mir Display Server up to this point has been when using multiple monitors (or say a laptop connected to a projector) the only display configuration possibility is using a cloned mode whereby the screens are the same. Canonical's Mir developers have begun working on improved multi-monitor handling...

AMD announced the most power-efficient model yet in its new line of Linux-ready AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-chips. The dual-core, 1GHz GX-210JA SoC offers a low 6W TDP and 3W “expected average power,” making it well suited for a wide range of fanless embedded devices. AMD announced its Embedded G-Series system-on-chips in April. Unlike earlier G-Series [...]

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Don't be a CM fashion victim Configuration Management (CM) isn't just about IT, but in the space I have, I want to look at some issues around implementing an IT CM solution.…

Around a year ago, a school in the southeast of England, Westcliff High School for Girls Academy (WHSG), began switching its student-facing computers to Linux, with KDE providing the desktop software. The school's Network Manager, Malcolm Moore, contacted us at the time. Now, a year on, he got in touch again to let us know how he and the students find life in a world without Windows.