Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For those of you who don’t already know about FAUmachine (FAU), it’s a virtual machine that allows you to install full operating systems and run them as if they were independent computers. FAUmachine is similar to VirtualBox, QEMU, and other full virtualization technologies. It is a project sponsored by the Friedrich Alexander University Computer Science Department in Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg*). FAU is a computer simulator that is an independent virtual machine project. The CPU is based on the virtual CPU in QEMU.

A short while ago, an article appeared in Linux Journal implying Git was the be-all and end-all of source code revision control systems ("Git—Revision Control Perfected" by Henry Van Styn, August 2011). I would like to challenge that assumption and declare to the world that the real perfect version control system is here, and its name is Mercurial.

Keep Everything. Share Anything. When a company like Google uses a tagline that includes the words "share anything" for a Dropbox-like cloud file storage system, my immediate reaction is "with whom?" Google, after-all, is a company that's made its money delivering ads based on what it learns about our habits. There's been debate about this very question since Drive launched.

My jet lag is gone, I've finally come back to ground, and at last I can start to sort out my experiences at the 10th annual Linux Audio Conference, held this year at CCRMA, the Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California USA. It was the first time the event had been held in the States, and the organizers obviously intended to make a good impression. I'll cut to the spoiler right now to let you know that they succeeded, with honors.

Precise Pangolin is a big step up in many regards. The new Ubuntu OS is friendlier with legacy hardware. It's peppier and more responsive. I find it is far less sluggish on my older gear. It flies on my newest hardware. However, while its Unity interface has been improved somewhat, it's still too limited and too confining, at least for some experienced Linux users.

The developers of PHP have released updates to thwart fresh attacks against systems that use the scripting language to dynamically generate web pages. All users are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.3 or PHP 5.3.13, as appropriate, after a serious security bug in PHP-CGI-based setups was disclosed. Developers attempted to fix this long-standing, but only recently discovered, flaw in a new version on 3 May, before deciding the fix was incomplete and releasing a new set of patches on Tuesday, 8 May 8.

LXer Feature: 08-May-2012

This item is dedicated, with thanks to Gus3. Without his suggestion it never would have been written. I stress the following text involves Linux only obliquely......but I hope all my friends here on LXer will find it interesting, and perhaps, useful.

While Ubuntu developers were listening to Mark Shuttleworth talk about Ubuntu 12.10, also happening at the same time was a Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting within the Fedora / Red Hat world. A new set of features were approved today for the Spherical Cow.

Agustín Benito Bethencourt (aka "toscalix") recently joined the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. He will be presenting the KDE Community Keynote at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn. Tomaz: You are active in the KDE Community—the Promo team, KDE e.V. Board of Directors, new ideas, big ideas, helping wherever you can. It seems from your blog posts that you do free software even in your sleep. What you do in Madrid in your free time? read more

While Btrfs, XFS, and EXT4 remain the far more popular choices when it comes to Linux file-systems, there still exists projects focused upon providing ZFS file-system support under Linux...

Gimp users, rejoice! After 3.5 years of development, Gimp 2.8 has finally arrived. This version of Gimp brings a plethora of changes and improvement, making Gimp a even better image editing software than its previous version.

This time we will take a look at the power manager for the Xfce 4 desktop. This tool can be used to reduce the power output of your system, and control a few useful options.

Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, hasn’t been happy with the direction his formerly favorite Linux desktop interface, GNOME, has gone. In fact, Torvalds downright hates GNOME 3.x. He’ll get no argument from me. I hate GNOME 3.x too. Recently though, Torvalds has start toying with Google’s new Chrome operating system’s Aura interface and, guess what, he kind of likes it.

The updates to PHP versions 5.3.12 and 5.4.2 released on Thursday do not fully resolve the vulnerability that was accidentally disclosed on Reddit, according to the discoverer of the flaw. The bug in the way CGI and PHP interact with each other leads to a situation where attackers can execute code on affected servers. The issue remained undiscovered for eight years.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

A Web server needs to support concurrency. The server should service clients in a timely, fair manner to ensure that no client starves because some other client causes the server to hang. Multiprocessing and multithreading, and hybrids of these, are traditional ways to achieve concurrency. Node.js represents another way, one based on system libraries for asynchronous I/O, such as epoll (Linux) and kqueue (FreeBSD). To highlight the trade-offs among the approaches, I have three echo servers written in close-to-the-metal C: a forking_server, a threading_server and a polling_server.

Suppose you are a C++ developer and you need to do some prototyping quickly in Ruby. When you pick up a Ruby reference book like the Pickaxe or browse the Ruby site, you see familiar constructs like class declaration, support for threads, and exception handling. Just when you thought you knew how Ruby works, you realize that concurrency in your Ruby code is not behaving like Boost threads, catch and throw are not what they seem, and others have used something called self all over the place in their Ruby script. Welcome to Ruby!

Microsoft announced on Monday that it would invest $300 million in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division for a 17.6 percent stake. The deal values the e-reader business at $1.7 billion. The move by Microsoft will help bolster the standing of Barnes & Noble’s fastest-growing unit. The bookstore giant had said this year that it was exploring strategic options for the business, including a potential divestiture or strategic partnership.

The Akademy 2012 Program Committee is proud to present the Akademy 2012 Sessions. Given the broad nature of KDE, the proposals submitted contained a wealth of interesting and valuable topics. From those, 28 proposals were selected that we felt would address the most relevant topics and be deep enough in the areas of most interest to the KDE Community.

SugarCRM has just debuted a controlled release of version 6.5 of its flagship open source CRM offering. In many ways, the release is an iterative change -- it does not represent the same major shift in functionality and user interface as version 6 did, when it was launched in 2010. In one key way, however, the new version is significantly different: The user interface is much more oriented to search technology.