Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A startup called the Citizen Web Project has raised over $23,000 in crowdsourcing funds for an alpha-stage fork of Arch Linux intended for hosting easily-administered web services on low-end hardware. Initially available for the Raspberry Pi, ArkOS is designed for securely self-hosting websites, email, social networking accounts, and cloud services via an open source “Genesis” server gateway application.

There's been comments early on out of AMD that they would like to see the Mantle API supported on other platforms and it was reiterated this week during AMD's APU13 Developer Summit. AMD would like Mantle on Linux and Apple OS X as it would be significantly easier to do an efficient renderer with Mantle than OpenGL, according to AMD. Mantle also has uses beyond game-engines, reportedly in workstations and R&D too. One of the slides shared during the APU13 summit stated "Mantle + SteamOS = powerful combination!"

MariaDB has capped off a dazzling year with the release of a beta of Version 10 of the free MySQL replacement. The beta of the database was announced on Thursday and sees the technology gain some features that can't be found in the MySQL database upon which it is based, further driving a wedge between it and the Oracle-backed technology it was created to displace.

Who wants to tackle the complex problem of helping educators create learning service agreements? I don’t see too many hands. How about you there, reading this article? Wait, you weren’t aware that this is an issue that impacts the education system? Well, here's an open source project that solves this problem and needs more collaborators.

"We've done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect," Slackware founder Pat Volkerding wrote. "Slackware is well known for its simplicity and the fact that we try to bring software to you in the condition that the authors intended."

The Linux kernel is one of the largest and most successful open source projects today. A report from the Linux Foundation addressing Who Writes Linux (2013) shows that recent releases of the Linux kernel, that happen now at 70-days intervals, include over 10,000 patches, made by more than 1,100 developers, representing over 225 corporations.

Having put out some new and updated OpenCL benchmarks this week (details in the aforelinked article) along with the release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.4, this week when running some GPU comparisons for a forthcoming Linux graphics card review, I also took the time to do some new reference OpenCL benchmarks.

Chris Mason changed the default meta-data block size on Friday with this Git commit. The meta-data block size was changed to 16KB by default (or the page-size if it happens to be bigger than 16KB) rather than just defaulting to the page size. Chris Mason's commit message explains that a 16KB meta-data block size for Btrfs yields faster performance and less meta-data fragmentation for almost all workloads. The downside to the change is a slight increase in lock contention on root nodes for some workloads, but that can be worked around.

Presto is a distributed SQL query engine developed in-house at Facebook that they use for scouring their 300+ petabytes of data at the social network company. Facebook uses Hadoop clusters but Hive and other existing open-source tools didn't provide the low-latency results the company wanted, so a team set to develop Presto.

Axiomtek and Nexcom each announced Linux-friendly 3.5-inch single board computers built with dual- or quad-core Intel Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips. The Nexcom EBC 355 and Axiomtek CAPA841 SBCs each feature dual gigabit Ethernet ports, dual Mini-PCI Express slots, and dual display capabilities with HDMI, VGA, and LVDS interfaces, plus support for extended temperature operation.

I am a community moderator for opensource.com as well as a mother, a librarian, and a former public school teacher. When I began writing for this site over two years ago, it was due to my son's education and how both private and public schools were largely neglecting digital technology, global citizenship, and digital literacy.

Yesterday I outlined the AMD Radeon DRM graphics changes that were queued up for the Linux 3.13 kernel that will soon be officially under development. Now for Intel Linux customers there's an overview of the Intel DRM graphics driver changes for this next kernel release cycle.

Development on OpenWFD just started less than two weeks ago and there haven't been any public announcements of the work yet, but Anzwix has already latched onto the interesting work. OpenWFD seeks to be an implementation of the WiFi Display Standard and Miracast technologies, which basically are a standard equivalent to "wireless HDMI cables."

KDE's Sebastian Kügler has written how the Plasma 2 shell has become "somewhat usable" for early adopters and KDE enthusiasts for the technologies that will really be taking on the Linux desktop in 2014.

Lisp is one of those languages that people either love or hate. Count me among the Lisp lovers. I was brainwashed during my undergraduate studies at MIT to believe that Lisp is the only "real" programming language out there, and that anything else is a pale imitation. True, I use Python and Ruby in my day-to-day work, but I often wish I had the chance to work with Lisp on a regular basis.

Aaron Seigo was the KDE developer to challenge Mark Shuttleworth to a public debate over his colorful comments regarding those opposed to Canonical's Mir Display Server for Ubuntu. Two weeks have passed since suggesting this public debate and there's still been no public response by Mark Shuttleworth, though Jono Bacon and others have commented on the matter.

Aldebaran Robotics and Nuance Communications are teaming up to help Aldebaran’s pint-sized Nao humanoid robot interact better with its human companions — in 19 different languages. Nao, which runs a customized version of Gentoo Linux on its 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 brain, is touted as a programmable, interactive humanoid robot featuring motion, vision, tactile, and audio capabilities. All that, and it’s cute, too!

After last week delivering a Linux hardware review of the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card with the binary Catalyst driver on Ubuntu, and then yesterday looking at the Radeon Gallium3D driver posing a threat to Catalyst when using the mature "R600g" driver on HD 5000/600 series hardware, up today are new open vs. closed-source benchmarks. In this article we're looking at the performance of the Radeon R9 270X GPU when using the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source graphics stack, then when upgrading to Mesa 10.0 with Linux 3.12 DPM, and then comparing those numbers to the proprietary Catalyst Linux graphics driver.

The United States energy grid is composed of many moving and non-moving cyber security assets that all have to, to some degree, speak the same language. The language of machine-to-machine communications has become big business lately, however devices that control how the power gets from the plant to your light switch have been talking their talk for many years.

It might seem strange coming from the founder of OpenLogic, a company focused on helping others succeed with open source, but the fact is that closed source is better than open source in certain situations.