Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Project Tango was announced yesterday by Google and Motorola’s Advanced Research and Projects” (ATAP) group, which Google will retain when it sells Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. The 5-inch Project Tango smartphone prototype augments a basic Android phone with a pair of Myriad 1 vision co-processors from Movidius. It also integrates a variety of sensors, including a compass, gyros, and Kinect-like 3D visual sensors for integrated depth sensing and motion tracking.

The GNOME team has released the first beta of GNOME 3.12, the next major release for the popular desktop and UI environment. Unlike the past few releases, there's a ton of new stuff in GNOME 3.12. The highlights include a slew of new apps, a major makeover for the long-standing video player, better privacy controls, support for jump lists and quite a few other interface tweaks that make GNOME 3.12 more pleasant to use.

Jolla unveiled Sailfish OS 1.0, plus a Sailfish UI launcher app for Android devices, and tipped partnerships, including one for a custom Angry Birds phone. Jolla announced the completion of version 1.0 of its MeeGo Linux based Sailfish OS, which runs on its Jolla smartphone, now shipping throughout Europe. The Finnish company also announced a Sailfish user interface launcher for Android, “which can be used to simulate the Sailfish OS experience on Android devices.”

Fans of Linux gaming are having a great year. Steam has dramatically increased the number of games with Linux support available through their service. Though there is some disagreement about the exact number of games now available for Linux (some say 530, while others were only able to find 333 games when searching the catalog), there is no doubt that either figure is a huge improvement over the 60 available on the service this time last year. With many people listing PC gaming as the top obstacle keeping them from switching to an open source operating system, this is certainly welcome news. And Linux users have already shown that they're willing to support gaming with their wallets; just look at the most recent Humble Bundle, where Linux users continue to be the top-dollar contributors.

Google hasn’t just kept Motorola's patents in its deal with Lenovo, it's also keeping the mobile manufacturer's skunkworkish Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group. And that team has just unveiled a new smartphone dubbed Project Tango, which is aimed at developers.

Etm, an acronym for "Event and Task Manager," is a very useful calendar and planning tool. However, it is a bit cumbersome to learn and far less convenient to use than alternatives. It has an intuitive task-entry format, once you learn its plain text shorthand. Etm stores events, tasks and other user-generated notes and data in text files. You can create, modify and view entries using two primary methods.

My introduction to open source software began when I was sitting on a server room floor, with my head in my hands, completely frustrated with a Windows 2000 server. Every night there were some services that would crash. Every morning I would get yelled at by my over-bearing boss. I was new to the company, it was my first IT job fresh out of Network Admin college, where I graduated at the top of my class, but I couldn't fix this problem because it was a "known Microsoft issue," and I just had to wait for the update.

Swedish telecom software firm Enea has spun a free and open source version of its commercial Enea Linux embedded distribution and development platform. LOike most major embedded Linux distros these days, Enea Linux is billed as being compatible with Yocto Project code. Yet, Open Enea Linux (OEL) appears to be more fully dependent on Yocto code.

Those who want to prototype using the latest Qseven 2.0 computer-on-modules, including the new Intel Atom E3800-based MSC Q7-BT or i.MX6-based MSC Q7-IMX6 modules from MSC Technologies, have been limited by older Qseven 1.1 baseboards. Such boards often don’t support new and improved Qseven 2.0 signals including USB 3.0, HDMI, DisplayPort, serial, and I2S audio interfaces, says MSC. Now, MSC has built an MSC Q7-MB-EP6 board that supports both of these Linux-ready modules, as well as any Qseven 2.0 compliant COM.

The open source business model has an inherent ability to bring software rivals together. This approach to developing and distributing software keeps expanding the usefulness and success of the Linux operating system as well. Linux has not yet come close to replacing Windows on the desktop, but open source is much more than Linux. Its "co-opetive" nature is spreading through the enterprise.

Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we're now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.

I came to work with open source after an experience in college. We used a system called Usenet,a world wide distributed discussion forum. At the university, there wasn't an email client I liked, so I wrote one and just gave it (including the source code) to whoever wanted it. This experience introduced me to a community of people who made things and shared them; it also introduced me to a job at my alma mater as a Usenet administrator.

The next version of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch will run the Linux-based Tizen operating system instead of Android, suggests a USA Today report. According to the USA Today story, the next generation of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch will depend on Tizen’s HTML5 stack for its application development.

Denx is formally launching the 74 x 42mm “MCV” computer-on-module at Embedded World 2014, Feb. 25-27 in Nuremberg, Germany, along with version 5.5 of its Embedded Linux Development Kit (ELDK) platform and distribution (see farther below). The pioneering Gröebenzell, Germany based embedded Linux house, which created U-Boot, among other contributions, continues to develop a variety of Linux-ready embedded embedded systems and COMs, such as its Freescale i.MX53x based M53 module.

The first smartphones running Ubuntu will ship this year, Canonical now says – although the Linux vendor's hardware partners are hardly the first companies you might guess. In January, Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon said that getting major carriers on board with the upstart mobile OS was "longer-term," and that the first Ubuntu smartphones would be built by small manufacturers who serve small regions. Apparently he wasn't kidding.

Canonical announced its initial Ubuntu Phone manufacturers — Meizu and BQ — and said the first mid- to high-end phones would ship by the end of this year. Some images of the Ubuntu Touch UI running on a Meizu MX3 smartphone were leaked on Weibo in early January (see image below). Now, the connection has been confirmed, as Canonical announced that both China’s Meizu and Spain’s BQ would ship phones running Ubuntu.

OpenStack Object Storage (code named Swift) has a fairly frequent release schedule for improvements and new capabilities but naturally, there is always significant gravity around integrated releases for any OpenStack project. Even though the Havana release was very big for OpenStack Swift, with new support for global clusters, the upcoming Icehouse will be the biggest release yet for the OpenStack Swift project.

A Phoronix reader has sent in an IRC log today where Ubuntu VDPAU support was asked about and Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical responded. While the VDPAU state tracker inside Gallium3D has stabilized greatly and can be used by the Nouveau driver as well as the R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers, it will not be enabled. The Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix is widely supported by Linux multimedia software for offloading the video acceleration of popular video formats onto the GPU. This works really well in the open-source world with the AMD Radeon Linux driver stack since last year when they provided open-source support for UVD, the AMD Unified Video Decoder block found on most modern Radeon GPUs.

The iPac-9X25 is a web-enabled single-board computer that can “run an embedded server and display the current monitored or logged data,” says EMAC. Primary targets include embedded data acquisition and control applications that can make use of its industrial temperature (-40 to 85°C) support, low-power ARM9 CPU, dual Ethernet ports, and abundance of serial connectivity.

What if commercial software developers for popular Windows products sold Linux versions to a waiting market of open source users? Think in terms of paying a subscription fee to use a Linux version of Adobe's Photoshop image manipulation software, for starters. Is porting commercial products like Photoshop as a paid product for Linux a viable idea?