Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

While AMD has their open-source Linux driver stack, their GPU's BIOS hasn't been open-source though in years prior there was talk of reverse-engineering the ATI BIOS. That project didn't pan out but now there's a new developer claiming to have an open-source video BIOS for Radeon hardware.

We are pleased to accept nominations for this year's Readers' Choice Awards! Please peruse the following list of categories and write in your favorites to nominate them. We will accept nominations until August 18, 2013. Voting will begin on August 26, 2013, so please check back at that time to cast your vote.

Geeksphone has started taking pre-orders for its first commercial smartphone running Firefox OS. The Peak+ offers double the RAM and offers better battery and graphics performance than the original Peak developers phone, and it runs the latest Firefox OS 1.1 build.

Elizabeth Leddy gave the next talk I attended entitled, Wish I Knew How to Quit You: 10 Secrets to Sustainable Open Source Communities. Elizabeth works with Plone but wasn’t really involved in open source until about five years ago. With open source we often start by working at a company that supports a specific open source application and there are two paths we can take. One path is that you start to get annoyed with the way things are going and so you jump to another open source project. Or you can get involved in the open source community so thoroughly that you can move from one related company to another (this is what I have been doing with Koha so I totally understand this path).

While 64-bit Linux desktop support has been in good shape for years, it seems there's a surprising number of Intel/AMD Linux desktop users undecided whether to use the 32-bit or 64-bit installation images of their favorite Linux distribution. For the latest perspective on 32-bit versus 64-bit Linux performance, here are said benchmarks from the latest Ubuntu 13.10 development state.

The Mozilla Labs team recently posted about a new personalization initiative for Firefox, which fits into the larger “Personalization with Respect” aspiration that Jay Sullivan articulated in May. We want to give individuals more participation in their Web interactions so they can more easily get what they want, in a clearly defined way. This idea is gaining traction with leading publishers and marketers who see their craft as providing valuable, engaging and content-rich experiences to their audiences.

Every year I attend the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference as an exhibitor. This year's conference was busier than any I've ever been to. So many people had either heard of us (ByWater Solutions) or Koha or just about open source in general. One librarian though approached our booth with caution. She informed me that she was told to come see what we were about by a manager but that she was very nervous. What she actually said was, "Open source scares me."

Google today unveiled a $35 HDMI stick-style device that wirelessly beams content from the Chrome browser of a desktop, laptop, or mobile computer to an HDTV. The Chromecast beaming technology initially supports content from Netflix, YouTube, and Google Play, and the controlling Chrome browser needs to be running on recent versions of Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS, and Chrome OS.

A Linux Foundation executive revealed that the 2014 Toyota Lexus IS is the second major automobile to offer an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system based on Linux. Meanwhile, ABI Research projects that Linux will quickly grow to represent 20 percent of automotive computers by 2018, pulling closer to Microsoft behind industry-leading QNX.

Indie videogame designer Nick Liow launched the Open Game Art Bundle in June this year. It was a simple idea: independent videogame designers contribute game assets—animations, soundtracks, character designs—and customers can pay any price they want to access them. Nick describes it as a sort of cross between Kickstarter and Humble Bundle, and like Humble Indie Bundle, the income is split between the developers themselves and charities (including Creative Commons). But there was one big twist: if the bundle reached its goal of $10,000 by July 15, all assets would become public domain under the CC0 public domain declaration.

Red Pitaya has launched a Kickstarter campaign to build an open source Linux-based measurement and control single-board computer. The $359 Red Pitaya, which can replace thousands of dollars worth of test equipment, will initially ship with smartphone apps for oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, waveform generator, frequency response analyzer, and PID controller functions.

The Linux Foundation announced the schedule for its LinuxCon North America conference, to be held in New Orleans on Sept. 16-18. LinuxCon features luminaries including Linus Torvalds, Google’s Chris DiBona, and Valve’s Gabe Newell, as well as dozens of presentations on all things Linux. LinuxCon is the Linux Foundation’s major public conference, and the flipside to its invitation-only Linux Collaboration Summit, which was held in April.

We plan our features, write our elegant and efficient code, and test it to make sure it does everything the customer would want. Then, after the application ships and everyone involved pats each other on the back for a job well done, we start getting reports — sometimes within days, sometimes much later on — that there is something wrong with the application. It lets people harvest personal data, or exposes the customer to compromise, or worse yet, it is wormable and can be used to attack other devices with the app on them. It appears we have forgotten to include some simple, easily integrated security development practices.

This past week saw all kinds of developments on the Linux Planet. We witnessed an ongoing discussion about civility in Linux kernel development, Slackware turned 20 years old and Mark Shuttleworth launched (yet another) phone effort.

It appears (and evidently its "developer" is admitting it) that the exFAT Linux kernel module was based upon source-code found from a Samsung developer for their exFAT driver. The code likely leaked out of Samsung accidentally by a developer pushing their Linux kernel source tree externally to GitHub when it should have been made private.

No longer content to live under Google's shadow, Samsung has announced its first-ever developer conference, to take place in San Francisco in October. It's no secret that Samsung has been the leading supplier of Android devices for some time now – by a wide margin. According to one study, fully 94.7 per cent of all profits in the Android device market went to the South Korean firm in the first quarter of 2013. Yet so far, the main event for Android developers each year has been the Chocolate Factory's Google I/O conference, also held in San Francisco. The event routinely sells out months in advance, with tickets running out mere minutes after online registration begins.

Canonical launched the first smartphone running its mobile version of Ubuntu on Indiegogo, with a funding goal of $32 million. The Ubuntu Edge will ship in May 2014 with dual-boot Android support, a full Ubuntu desktop in docking mode, a 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 display, 128GB of storage, and the “fastest available multicore processor.”

In many cases, scientific research takes you into totally new areas of knowledge, never before explored by others. This means the computational work you need to do may be totally new as well. Although typically such code development still happens in C or FORTRAN, Python is growing in popularity. This is especially true in physics.

BitTorrent released a beta version of a new Linux- and Android-ready peer-to-peer file sync package. BitTorrent Sync currently operates on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops, Android smartphones and tablets, and an evolving list of Linux-based devices, including the Raspberry Pi and numerous NAS products, enabling on-the-go, secure uploads and sync from mobile to storage devices, as well as M2M/IoT scenarios.

A Phoronix reader has shared two NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver "hacks" he's written for overriding some functionality of the NVIDIA binary blob for GeForce hardware.