Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linus Torvalds has let release candidate five for version 3.13 of the Linux kernel into the wild for some festive footling. The Linux Lord let the new release candidate loose in this post that declares “Nothing really exciting stands out” which is “just how I want it.”

Many of our best articles in 2013 covered open source projects and businesses, including open business models for heirarchy and modes of operations within the company structure as well as businesses built on and serving up open source software or hardware.

In a previous article, I discussed Apache Tomcat, which is the ideal way to run Java applications from your server. I explained that you can run those apps from Tomcat's default 8080 port, or you can configure Tomcat to use port 80. But, what if you want to run a traditional Web server and host Java apps on port 80? The answer is to run a reverse proxy.

One of most widely respected repositories of embedded and mobile Linux news and information has returned to the web as an archive hosted here at LinuxGizmos.com. QuinStreet acquired LinuxDevices.com in Feb. 2012 through its purchase of a group of websites from publisher Ziff Davis Enterprise. After the acquisition, LinuxDevices remained frozen in time for about a year before vanishing in May, shortly after I launched LinuxGizmos.com. Following a constructive discussion about possibilities for bringing the LinuxDevices content back online, QuinStreet generously offered to license LinuxGizmos to host the LinuxDevices Archive on our site, as a “holiday present to the Linux community.”

Fedora 20 includes an improved Network Manager that can help enable a Software Defined Networking (SDN) environment. The Fedora 20 release includes the Linux 3.11.x kernel which support 2the Open vSwitch (OVS) virtual switch. Fedora 20 also includes a new LVM (Logical Volume Manager) thin provisioning capability. LVM is widely used tool in LInux for logical storage management.

If you're a fan of GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell, Fedora 20 will be a welcome update. This release sees an upgrade for Fedora's default GNOME spin, bringing the desktop to GNOME 3.10. Fedora's live desktop CD has used GNOME by default for many years now. Once upon a time that was completely unremarkable. However, since Ubuntu now has Unity, OpenSUSE pours its effort into KDE and Mint has worked hard to divorce Cinnamon 2.0 from GNOME 3, Fedora is, well, just about all GNOME has left these days.

Throughout 2013 there's been monthly alpha releases by Unvanquished and these updates have been heavy with new features. Details in full can be found via their web-site while some of the big items include many advancements to their OpenGL 3 renderer, new game models and other in-game assets, game-play improvements, visual improvements, multi-threading / SMP suport, SDL 2.0 support, and the first bits of their engine upgrade branch were merged.

A few days ago I delivered some benchmarks from the Xubuntu-powered Lini PC, a Linux-friendly $500 small-form factor PC that happens to be using the G3220. For those interested more in the Haswell Pentium performance, there are more benchmarks in this weekend Phoronix article. The Intel Pentium G3220 is a dual-core 3.0GHz processor (without any Turbo frequency), features 3MB of cache, SSE 4.1+4.2 instruction set extensions, based on a 22nm manufacturing process and other shared Haswell features, and has a 54 Watt TDP. The G3220 also boasts Haswell HD Graphics with a top frequency of 1150MHz. The Pentium G3220 premiered this past September and is currently retailing for about $70 USD.

For this weekend benchmarking of LLVM/Clang 3.4, testing is just being done from a single system and comparing just the LLVM/Clang/Compiler-RT 3.3 release against a SVN snapshot of the LLVM 3.4 branch with Clang and Compiler-RT. When LLVM 3.4 is officially declared as stable, more benchmarks will be coming on Phoronix and reference compiler performance benchmarks against GCC, etc. It's a cycle that comes every six months at Phoronix with major LLVM updates.

Last month I wrote how the Kdenlive project had gone dark after the KDE video editing software's leader had gone missing. Fortunately, the maintainer is alive and well and there's renewed hope for new developments within Kdenlive.

In June this year, we launched a new weekly feature on Opensource.com highlighting some of the most interesting open source news from around the web. Each Friday, we share our take on recent open source news from around the globe, including some stories you may know well and some you may have missed.

Welcome to PMC 1.2! The KDE community has a Christmas gift for you! We are happy to announce the release of KDE's Plasma Media Center 1.2 - your first stop for media and entertainment created by the Elves at KDE. Plasma Media Center is designed to provide an easy and comfortable way to watch your videos, browse your photo collection and listen to your music, all in one place.

What’s the latest status on all those cool embedded Linux and Android Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects of 2013? Most are moving forward, but delays are a common problem. Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have emerged over the last two years as a prime launch path for embedded Linux and Android devices. Sometimes it’s hard to decide when to cover these products: when they first launch, or only when they’ve reach their funding goals?

As explained before, "zRAM has been around for a while now and formerly known as Compcache. The kernel module tries to increase system performance by avoiding paging to disk and instead using a compressed block device in RAM with around a 3:1 compression ratio. Besides Google relying upon zRAM in modern versions of ChromeOS and Android, Ubuntu has also looked at it and other Linux distributions. zRAM is very popular within the embedded space where RAM capacities are limited."

Datawind is bringing three commercial “UbiSlate” versions of its 7-inch, Android 4.0 Aakash tablets to the U.S., including a model that starts at $38. Datawind’s three new UbiSlate tablets are based on the Aakash 2 educational tablet that shipped in India in early 2012, as well as an upcoming Aakash 3 model. The Aakash 2 was hailed as the world’s cheapest tablet, at about $40, and was available to schoolchildren at lower prices thanks to subsidization by the Indian school system. In India, sales of the Aakash 2 overtook the iPad according to U.K.-based Datawind.

Perhaps no other single Linux distribution release in recent memory has caught the attention of more people than Valve's Steam OS. SteamOS was first hinted at in the summer and is now a public beta codenamed 'Alchemist', available in a free download letting users see first hand the future of Linux gaming.

Dell and Red Hat will work together to propagate OpenStack clouds running the Linux distro, in what the PC maker claims is a first. The pair have announced they will jointly develop "enterprise grade" private clouds that are based on Dell hardware and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The first fruits are due next year.

Molecular dynamics computations make up a very large proportion of the computer cycles being used in science today. For those of you who remember chemistry and or thermodynamics, you should recall that all of the calculations you made were based on treating the material in question as a homogeneous mass where each part of the mass simply has the average value of the relevant properties. Under average conditions, this tends be adequate most times. But, more and more scientists were running into conditions that would be on the fringes of where they could apply those types of generalizations.

It was announced today by Robert Ancell at Canonical that right now they're running on a heavily-patched version of GNOME 3.6 and that they're not looking forward to upgrading the gnome-control-center version since it would involve a lot of work. Right now Canonical carries 61 patches atop the gnome-control-center and they are uninterested in upgrading the patches against the latest GNOME software code.

I've mentioned geocaching before, but if you've never taken the time to go out and do it, you're really missing out. Whether you're dragging your family through two feet of snow in the middle of the woods (yeah, I did that last year, I'm still not sure they've forgiven me) or following your GPS around a parking lot looking for a tiny micro-cache, geocaching is fun. You need only a few things to go geocaching: