Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Football Manager 2014 went into beta last week on Steam for Linux. While it shouldn't be too surprising to the Phoronix-reading Linux graphics enthusiasts, the new non-FPS game has illustrated new Linux graphics driver bugs.

Every so often I like to look at the trends in the technology our readers use to access the site. What kind of computers, what kinds of operating systems, mobile or desktop, etc. There's a lot of interesting data in the latest numbers. But for anyone who's been on the web back into the 90s, here's the most striking piece of information. Fewer than 50% of the visits to TPM now come from computers running a windows operating system.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a new line of Linux-ready, embedded-focused QorIQ system-on-chips based on a new ARM-compatible, core-agnostic Layerscape architecture. The first three QorIQ LS1 SoCs offer dual ARM Cortex-A7 cores clocked at up to 1GHz, and include networking-, display-, and cost-optimized models featuring 2-3 Watts power consumption.

While the Ubuntu 13.10 desktop isn't using Mir/XMir by default, the packages are available within the archive for those wanting to test out the next-generation display server for Ubuntu. To see how the 2D/3D performance is when running under XMir with the Unity System Compositor, I ran some new benchmarks using this week's Ubuntu 13.10 release.

Wind River announced Wind River Linux support for Cavium’s newly shipping Octeon III system-on-chips. Aimed at high-end networking applications, the 28nm-fabricated Octeon III SoCs offer as many as 48 MIPS64 cores clocked up to 2.5GHz, support MIPSr5 architecture features like hardware virtualization, and integrate accelerators for deep packet inspection (DPI), packet processing, security, search, and QoS.

Suitable Technologies is offering $50 rentals of its “Beam” mobile telepresence robot, so 50 robotics enthusiasts can remotely attend the RoboBusiness conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Oct. 23-25. The Ubuntu- and ROS-based Beam will be available to the first 50 applicants, letting them explore the show at up to 1.5 meters/sec and interact with others via video conferencing.

Portwell announced a computer-on-module along with a pair of single-board computers built around Intel’s new embedded-specific Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips. The three Linux-friendly boards include a Type 6 COM Express Compact COM, a Mini-ITX style embedded motherboard, and an SBC implemented in the rarely seen Nano-ITX form factor.

Code.org, the organisation that believes “every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming” has signed up Microsoft Bill Gates and Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg to teach programming. The pair will each participate in an “Hour of Code”, 60-minute programming tutorials that are one one of the initiatives planned for 2013's Computer Science Education Week (CSEW) starting on December 9th. Gates will also participate in a one-hour video conference with a school that signs up for CSEW.

A Shenzhen-based startup called Wizarm has launched an Indiegogo campaign for a hackable media player with DVR recording, HDMI pass-through, Miracast support, and video overlay capabilities. The Wizarm device dual-boots Android and Linux on a Samsung Exynos 5250 system-on-chip, and offers SATA storage and extensive I/O including USB, HDMI in/out, DisplayPort, and S/PDIF.

Oracle has popped out a white paper that may well turn some heads, because it contains robust criticism of open source software. Titled “The Department of Defense (DoD) and Open Source Software” and available here as a PDF to those with Oracle accounts or here in Dropbox, the document's premise is that folks in the USA's Department of Defense (DoD) could think it is possible to save money if they “... avoid buying commercial software products simply by starting with open source software and developing their own applications.”

Jessica McKellar is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and open source developer. She helps organize the Boston Python user group and plays a big role in diversity outreach by introducing and welcoming more beginners and women. Participation has increased from 0-2% to 15% and the user group has sustained this over the past two years.

Earlier this week there was the news of Intel contributing their OpenMP Runtime to LLVM in order to advance the open-source compiler project. Now to end off the week is news that Apple, who continues to invest significantly into LLVM and employs many of the key contributors, has open-sourced their stack unwinder for the project.

ISEE is shipping one of the tiniest Linux-enabled SODIMM style computer-on-modules we’ve encountered. The IGEP Aquila COM is based on TI’s popular, industrial-focused Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 system-on-chip, offers 3D-accelerated video, Ethernet, USB OTG and Host ports, serial, CAN, and numerous other interfaces, and is supported with a compact baseboard and Yocto-built embedded Linux.

Mad Catz announced $250 pre-orders for its Nvidia Tegra 4-based Android game console. The MOJO Micro-Console for Android ships with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, USB and Ethernet ports, and a separate gamepad controller with multiple modes for playing games on TVs, PCs, or other Android devices.

[Updated Oct 10] — Intel unveiled a family of embedded-specific Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips based on its 22nm Silvermont architecture, featuring TDPs ranging from 5 to 10 Watts, and offering interoperability with its Quark SoCs. The Intel Atom E3800 SoCs have already been tapped by a handful of companies for new computer-on-modules (COMs) and single-board computers (SBCs) of various shapes and sizes.

You've probably heard of OpenStack. It's that cloud software that's getting a lot of attention from big names in the IT industry and major users like CERN, Comcast and PayPal. However, did you know that it's more than that? It's also the fastest growing open source community in the world, and a very interesting collaboration among technology vendors and users.

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

For nearly two years there's been a feature branch of LibreOffice to provide an OpenGL-based canvas implementation to LibreOffice. This OpenGL canvas has now finally been merged into the open-source office suite.

ADL Embedded Solutions is shipping one of the industry’s first PC/104-style single board computers to use Intel’s 4th Generation Core i7 (“Haswell”) processors. The Linux-friendly ADLQM87PC SBC provides numerous interfaces for storage, networking, display, and USB, offers PCI Express expansion via a mini-PCIe socket and a self-stacking PCIe/104 bus, and can support -40 to +85°C operation.

Popular source-code warehouse GitHub was back online today after weathering a huge denial-of-service attack throughout the week. The status page of the San Francisco-based outfit charts the progress of the assault and the attempts to end it. Problems with the web service first cropped up on Tuesday, 1 October, before the team realised they were facing a denial-of-service storm. This first wave was dealt with late on Wednesday only for a second phase of the attack to flare up again on Thursday.