Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linus Torvalds cursed out NVIDIA ten months ago when he was asked about the lack of Linux support for Optimus, NVIDIA's hybrid graphics technology. NVIDIA has now released a beta of its proprietary Linux graphics driver which finally supports Optimus. The sad thing here is that NVIDIA will be praised for the Optimus support, even though they sat back and waited for quite a while to let others build foundations they now use in their driver, which is fairly popular among users, but fairly hated among open source developers.

At the end of March was a new release of ZFS On Linux, a kernel module implementation of the ZFS file-system for Linux, and it was declared ZFS On Linux is now ready for wide-scale deployments. With this release (ZOL/SPL v0.6.1), new benchmarks are being done to compare ZFS to popular Linux file-systems. In this article is a brief preview against EXT4.

With the Radeon DRM changes for Linux 3.10 lining up and including Radeon Unified Video Decoder support, it's becoming easier to take advantage of Radeon UVD-accelerated video playback with AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver.

On Wednesday, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) held a conference? to discuss open standards and the question "Who makes the internet?" in preparation for its annual meeting in Berlin at the end of July. Hans-Joachim Otto, parliamentary state secretary of the German Federal Ministry of Economics, took this occasion in the German capital to reassure the internet standards committee that it has a firm ally in the German government. "We keep having to promote the freedom of the internet on an international level", said the FDP (Liberal) politician. "This is by no means a given."

While startups, developers, and small businesses flock to behemoth public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine that give them a profoundly efficient bang for their buck, bigger enterprises largely stick to paying the high cost for private clouds. They are wary of potential availability and security issues that, rightfully, could hamper (or cripple) their business. The perceived risk-reward of saving money by turning IT operations over to a public cloud hasn't yet permeated through to big businesses.

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that it and the Google Open Source Programs Office are jointly funding developer Pawel Jakub Dawidek to improve the Capsicum framework. Capsicum was originally developed by Robert Watson of the University of Cambridge and Ben Laurie from Google Research to extend the POSIX API and provide object-capability security to Unix-like operating systems. The goal of the framework is to give thin-client operating systems like Google's Chrome OS a robust security model that is relatively lightweight. Capsicum has been available in FreeBSD since version 9.0 and Google is working on a Linux version.

Sometimes all you need is a text editor for jotting down a few quick notes, but what about those times you need to get serious writing done? Your first thought might not be to turn to your web browser, but there are quite a few writing tools available for Google Chrome that you should consider. Google Docs is a great option, but all of the extra features can be excessive if all you want to do is keep a note. The Chrome Web Store is now home to many distraction-free writing tools for Google Chrome that are quicker to load and access than the competition.

Since we have been looking at FreeBSD, OpenVZ, and ProxMox, it seems only right to mention the other open source player in this market: OpenNode. OpenNode, like ProxMox, is a management layer built on top of OpenVZ containers and KVM virtual machines. Unlike ProxMox, which is built on Debian, OpenNode is similar to CentOS and Scientific Linux in that it is built off of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A good fit, since the stable OpenVZ kernel is also released for RHEL.

Scribus is an open source, graphical desktop publishing (DTP) tool that focuses on layout, frames, styles, color management, and intercolumn document flow. Scribus is free software that runs on the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms, and provides most of the capabilities of traditional DTP tools at no cost.

Not long ago, I wrote about how awesome it is to have shell access on a remote server. I still hold to that notion, but I received a lot of feedback on the issue. If you've considered paying even a couple dollars a month for shell access on a server, you might want to check out http://www.lowendbox.com.

Linux 3.9 includes drivers for new AMD graphics chips and for Intel Wi-Fi chips that are expected to become available this summer. Changes to the network subsystem will enable the kernel to be more efficient when distributing network traffic across multiple processor cores.

Luis Ibanez was recently awarded a People's Choice Award by our readers for his contributions to the site. It's no wonder he has so much to say and impart on open source projects—he works on them fulltime! In this Community Spotlight, Luis sheds light on what projects he contributes to, why he believes it is important we all give back at some point, and what open source tools he can't live without.

If there was a theme for Day One of the Linux Foundation's seventh annual Linux Collaboration Summit, taking place this week in San Francisco, it was that the Linux community has moved way, way past wondering whether the open source OS will be successful and competitive. "Today I wanted to talk about the state of Linux," Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, began his opening keynote on Monday. "I'm just going to save everybody 30 minutes. The state of Linux is freakishly awesome."

The flood of software patents has created an environment where companies are afraid that innovation leads to being hit by patent lawsuits. Every dollar spent fighting patent trolls and or waging patent wars is a dollar not spent researching, developing, and creating jobs. The situation is so bad that, in 2011, Apple and Google spent more on patent litigation and buying patents than they did on research. So it’s no surprise that some companies are looking for new ways to navigate the patent system while promoting openness and innovation.

Videos from the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions, recorded on April 15, are now available for on-demand streaming. The videos include presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.

Red Hat logo Following its preview of an OpenStack distribution, Red Hat is now offering an updated version of the software as part of an "early adopter program". The company has also initiated the RDO community project, which offers up-to-date OpenStack versions for Linux distributions within the Red Hat ecosystem. The Linux distributor announced the news at the ongoing OpenStack Summit Portland 2013.

While compiling OSS Watch's list of Open Source Options for Education, I discovered Koha, an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). I discovered, with some confusion, that there seemed to be several ILS systems called Koha. Investigation into the reason for this uncovered a story which provides valuable lessons for open source project ownership, including branding, trademarks, and conflict resolution.

Copying and pasting something does not necessarily mean the user will get what they think they are getting. With a little bit of HTML magic, one can even trick unwitting web site visitors into executing shell commands without their knowledge. The trick is by no means new, but it is currently being demonstrated again on several web sites which means Linux users especially have to be careful what they copy and paste.

Adobe's director of engineering for the Web Platform, Vincent Hardy, has confirmed that the company is not taking sides in the WebKit/Blink web rendering engine fork and will be contributing to both WebKit and Blink as they are open source. In a blog posting, Hardy pointed out that "Adobe actively contribute to Web standards and browser implementations" – mostly WebKit and Chromium, but the company also has some Gecko contributions to its name.

Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, who was hired three years ago to be a project manager at the U.S. Department of Defense's research and development division known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has announced via Twitter that he's returning to the private sector with Google. In his new role at Google, The Security Ledger reports, Zatko will be working in an unspecified role with Motorola Mobility's Advanced Technology and Projects division, reporting to Regina Dugan. Dugan is also new to Google, hired last month away from her position as director of DARPA.