Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Gunnar Hellekson, Technology Strategist for Red Hat's U.S. Public Sector Group, presents a timeline created by tying together data about software the government has released as open source.

The first release candidate of the Linux 3.7 kernel was released on Sunday...

So you have installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal. Canonical offers a number of new features in Ubuntu 12.10 which we have already talked about. This post is to help an Ubuntu newbie to get a more comfortable Ubuntu experience. Because you do need to configure few things or install some applications to get the seamless and pleasant computing experience with Ubuntu. The post is actually a checklist of the stuff which I mostly do every time I install Ubuntu. Lets see the must to-do stuff after installing Ubuntu 12.10..

Jim Whitehurst presented on Saturday morning at the 2012 installment of TEDxRaleigh, speaking to a sold-out crowd in Raleigh’s Lincoln Theatre. Now in its third year, TEDxRaleigh has brought together local innovators, researchers and thought leaders to give local flair to a wildly successful national event.

Lightweight Linux distro usually comes in the file size ranging from 20MB to 50MB and they are best suited to use on a old computer. Recently, I come across this tiny Linux distro that weighs only 12MB and it boots up really fast. I am referring to Tiny Core Linux. Weighing at 12 MB, Tiny Core Linux is one of the tiniest Linux distro I have ever seen. Being a barebone distro, it only comes with a few essential applications that are required for it to boot up and run properly. It also comes with a graphical desktop, but if you are looking for a turnkey solution, this is not the one for you.

In mid-September, the 3.6 kernel appeared to be stabilizing nicely. Most of the known regressions had been fixed, the patch volume was dropping, and Linus was relatively happy. Then Nikolay Ulyanitsky showed up with a problem: the pgbench PostgreSQL benchmark ran 20% slower than under 3.5. The resulting discussion shows just how hard scalability can be on contemporary hardware and how hard scheduling can be in general. Borislav Petkov was able to reproduce the problem; a dozen or so bisection iterations later he narrowed down the problem to this patch, which was duly reverted. There is just one little problem left: the offending patch was, itself, meant to improve scheduler performance. Reverting it fixed the PostgreSQL regression, but at the cost of losing an optimization that improves things for many (arguably most) other workloads. Naturally, that led to a search to figure out what the real problem was so that the optimization could be restored without harmful effects on PostgreSQL.

Following its acquisition of Clutch.io in August, Twitter has made the Clutch A/B testing service and Clutch framework for writing native mobile apps available as open source.

The Bank of New Zealand was founded in 1861 and, on the verge of bankruptcy, purchased by the National Australia Bank Group in 1992. The acquisition was completed in 2003. It was rebranded BNZ, with a new logo and colors in 2008, to better align with its parent company, now known as NAB. BNZ promised its individual, agricultural and business customers positive, flexible and efficient service; access to a network of specialist expertise; and ongoing innovation.

Privileged control of your smartphone is one of the killer features of the Android operating system. This control, known as "root access," allows users to remove manufacturer and mobile operator hardware and software limits to takeover the device. I've written about competitor ClockworkMod's ROM Manager Premium app that you can use to automate and streamline maintenance and other tasks.

After having their project rejected by Kickstarter, the designers of the wireless lock system Lockitron went away and wrote their own crowdfunding platform, which they have now open sourced. Apigy Inc's Selfstarter enables companies to set up their own crowdfunding site, similar to Kickstarter, to host financing campaigns for their products. The very successful funding drive for Lockitron is already being run using the software.

Trinity, the fork of the classic version of the KDE desktop which appeared in wake of the backlash against KDE 4.0, is still being developed and, after a year of work, a new stable release, version 3.5.13.1, of the desktop environment is now available. Trinity is a fork that continues development of the old 3.x branch of the KDE desktop and which has been enhanced with additional features but is also designed to be both compatible with newer hardware and responsive on older systems.

Clay Shirky has done it again. In a fascinating TED Talk, Shirky examines the impact that collaboration tools developed for and by open source communities will have on the way citizens participate in public life and how they can steer the political processes.

Dot Categories: Sprints“From the hacking rooms, we hear the whistle of the train as it travels up and down the Matter Valley. Most of us arrived on that train, and soon will be leaving. Another amazing mass KDE sprint is coming to an end, and again a lot has been accomplished.”

TruthLogik, a New York based hip hop artist, says that in a million years he could not have imagined he would be recording an album using entirely free software. When he first stumbled on open source music-making tools, he thought about the computer classes he took in school. He had never been exposed to the idea that free software could be so well-made and uniquely useful. Making music using open source tools and software has been gaining some traction, so we sat down with TruthLogik and asked how he created a hip hop album solely using open source software.

The Linux Foundation and its Technical Advisory Board (TAB) have presented a plan to provide an easy way to start Linux systems where UEFI Secure Boot is active. The plan involves the very simple "loader" pre-bootloader that will be signed with a key from Microsoft. Typical Secure Boot PCs will come with the corresponding public verification key that allows them to start Windows 8 in Secure Boot mode – they should, therefore, also be able to start the mini-bootloader for Linux when Secure Boot is active, unless the Loader is included on the DBX blacklist that is maintained by the UEFI firmware.

OpenNebula, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud project, sees the majority of its deployment in industry, according to C12G's latest Cloud Architecture Survey. The survey, conducted by the commercial company behind OpenNebula over the second and third quarters of 2012, polled 2,500 users of OpenNebula and only analyses the responses from the 820 who reported having OpenNebula up and running.

As the latest AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU benchmarks under Linux, here's a quick look at the impact that Turbo Core Technology has under Linux. AMD Turbo Core is the technology that's been around for about two years going back to the AMD Phenom II CPUs that automatically shift the CPU frequency to a higher state when greater performance is desirable. Similar to Intel's Turbo Boost, it's basically the reverse of Cool 'n' Quiet and Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology.

Here's a look at how the open-source Intel Linux graphics performance has changed in Ubuntu 12.10 when comparing benchmarks results of Ubuntu Quantal development snapshots from the end of August to the beginning of October.

Our Beat Making Lab is applying for an Open Art grant, which would allow us to start development on our dream: open source beat making software we are calling PAMOJA, which means oneness or solidarity. The grant is sponsored by Mozilla and Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and would invest $15,000 towards development of the software. This would help us foster music creation in communities internationally.

Most everyone on the Internet reads Wikipedia, whether they rely on it or not, but few understand how wikis work or who owns the content. Understanding content ownership is important, because so many people freely contribute to wikis. If the wiki's owner or contributors decide to revise or move the content, that could lead to a lawsuit.