Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support.

Nokia CEO is a coward to not give the exact count of Lumia sales in his Q4 results, the launch quarter for Lumia. So lets do some math based on the available info, to count exactly how many it was. When Microsoft launched Windows Phone a year ago, Microsoft proudly told the world that they shipped 2 million Windows Phone smartphones by HTC, Samsung and others. They soon were spooked, however, when the sales dwindled and dried up and stopped giving the sales breakdown. By the Spring, Microsoft insisted all Windows Mobile smartphones be counted together with Windows Phone - even as these two platforms are incompatible. And still the sales of 'the third ecosystem' kept falling, down to about 500,000 units by Q3. And early numbers from Q4 from Microsoft's best market, the USA, reveal that even more than a year after its launch, Windows Phone sales are still severely lagging its older and obsolete cousin, achieving only 1.4% or about 520,000 units. Windows Mobile meanwhile refuses to die, and in the USA achieved 2.4% market share of new sales according to Nielsen or about 890,000 unit sales.

Not directly related to FOSS but of interest I think - Scott

GNU Solidario is happy to announce the release of Health 1.4.3. This version contains many enhancements and fixes. Check at the end of this article for some important links. For more detailed information, please check the Changelog at: http://health.gnu.org/Changelog

Razor-qt is a new desktop environment based on the QT toolkit. I installed it from the PPA and gave it a quick go. It’s early days for the project, but it might eventually become a refuge for lovers of KDE 3 in the same way that Xfce has become popular with people who want to recreate the Gnome 2.x experience.

Google's 2011 Code-In, which is a winter program similar to their Summer of Code, ended earlier this month with many contributions to some leading open-source projects.

LXer Feature: 30-Jan-2012

As I walked into the Hilton on Saturday morning I knew something was up. I saw lots pf people wearing lanyards with a silhouette of a Penguin, it seemed SCaLE 10x was upon me already in full swing. I walked right onto the exhibitor floor and 'did a loop' through the Expo as it were..

Marek Olšák has made another exciting commit to the Mesa mainline Git repository this weekend... What he's accomplished now is making it possible to successfully advertise OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support within the R600 Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000 series and later...

Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer running Google's Chrome OS may not be catching on with consumers, but hundreds of schools across the country have adopted the web-oriented notebooks, the search giant claims. Earlier this month at CES, Samsung showed off a sleeker new version of the Chromebook that switches to a faster Intel Celeron processor, also promising it would release a & Chromebox& mini-PC.

The Ubuntu operating system is to replace its application menus with a "head-up display" (HUD) box. Users control the HUD interface by typing in the command they want carried out. Developers of the Linux-based software say they will initially offer the HUD as an option, allowing users to "hide" their menu bars. They say that using the HUD is faster than "mousing through a menu" and makes applications feel more powerful

At SCALE 10x a new FUSE implementation was presented that while still having the file-system in user-space, the kernel component is now responsible for more of the work.

Perl has been around for more than 20 years. During that time, it has received its share of both praise and criticism, and lots of misconceptions surround it. Much of this stems from long-outdated notions of what Perl used to be, but have nothing to do with what Perl actually is today. Perl hasn't been standing still. It's been growing continuously and evolving, and that growth has accelerated dramatically in the past few years. Moose is one of the technologies at the heart of this "Perl Renaissance", which also includes other exciting projects that have emerged, such as Catalyst and DBIx::Class.

As a systems administrator, I tend to think about source code and computing platform in large numbers. Computers however are getting smaller and more powerful, and the reality of computers that we put in or on our body as a normal daily routine is coming closer, and for many is already here. When our safety, our liberty, and our sense of humanity are tied to programmable devices, should we not only hope, but expect that we should have the right to examine how these devices function?

LXer Feature: 22-Jan-2012

What a week, no? What started out as Wikipedia joining Reddit, Mozilla and others in blacking out their websites this past Wednesday in protest to the SOPA and PIPA vote in Congress, quickly exploded into thousands of websites following suit. For one, it made surfing the internet on Wednesday a scavenger hunt to find a site that wasn't dark. And two, the ensuing media storm it created had the effect of actually getting Congress to postpone their vote on it. I have been in Los Angeles all weekend attending SCALE 10x and will have my full review for you later in the week, but I will tell you that it was bigger and better than ever. Enjoy!

MPlayer2 -- a fork of the popular MPlayer open-source project that's added on several new features -- has been quiet for a few months but is still being actively developed. The discussion surrounding MPlayer2 was resurrected in the Phoronix Forums this past week. One Phoronix reader immediately jumped to say that "Mplayer2 is dead. Nothing new for 11 months now." and to also criticize the program for the lack of supporting the (outdated) MPEG-1 format.

Back in October 2011, the Free Software Foundation speculated on the possibility that Microsoft might be trying to block out other operating systems from loading within a computer, using a new concept known as the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). Microsoft showed it off a couple of months back, booting up Windows 8 in eight seconds. Linux users: Should you be concerned?

In last week's Weekend Project, we learned what the Arduino platform is for, and what supplies and skills we need on our journey to becoming Arduino aces. Today we'll hook up an Arduino board and program it to do stuff without even having to know how to write code.

Linux 3.3 can change the size of ext4 filesystems faster and supports ACPI 5.0, LPAE for ARM processors, Ethernet teaming and hot replace for software RAID. Meanwhile, Linux 3.1 has reached the end of the line, and the Linux Ate My RAM web site explains why Linux often appears to use all of the RAM.

I saw a post on the Xfce blog Tuesday or Wednesday about changing versioning scheme of the next Xfce release. I saved the URL knowing that I'd want to write about it. Just thank goodness that a storm blew in and caused my computer to shut off. Otherwise, I might have never seen the Update 2. Dirty rats.

Supposedly we've won today. Both the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives have been shelved by their respective sponsors. However, these acts have been shelved before, and the bags of money sent to DC didn't suddenly devalue, so I'm sure the next SOPA is being written as we speak. What did make me happy, though, was Neelie Kroes: the EU commissioner for the digital agenda has unambiguously distanced herself from SOPA, which she calls "bad legislation". Obama, the next time you want to make a statement with teeth, just wait for Kroes to do it for you.

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) released a security-enhanced version of Android based on the hardened SE Linux, featuring stricter access control policies. SE Android restricts the system resources available to an Android app regardless of user permissions, blocking malware such as the "GingerBreak" exploit at six different steps during execution, says the NSA.