Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Inkscape is a magnificent open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It is used for many purposes like designing icons, textures, cartoons, graphics, etc, but did you know that you can now print what you draw in Inkscape on 3D? Thanks to TinkerCAD you can!

After what the developers call "11 months of grueling work", the very first release candidate for the ARM version of openSUSE is now available. The release is based on the current openSUSE 12.2 and supports ARM7-type hardware. This includes Texas Instrument's OMAP3 and OMAP4 Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC), Marvell's ArmadaXP 510 and Freescale i.MX51 processors.

Open source is about more than the code, it’s about the culture. The open culture that many open source communities embrace is entrenched in organizations like Code for America. It’s obvious as I sit here during the opening day of the Code for America Summit in San Francisco, CA.

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) opened up registration for the FANG Challenges, a set of three next-generation military vehicle design competitions that will kick off in January, and will put tools based on approaches borrowed from software development and chip design in the hands of teams of engineers and designers. In an effort to reinvent how such complex systems are designed and built, DARPA is preparing for the first real test of its efforts to use open-source software and Web collaboration—with millions of dollars in prize money at stake.

Oracle's proprietary posture may have soiled the welcome mat and vilified its good standing in the FOSS community as CEO Larry Ellison pushes the balance point between servicing his customers and nickel-and-diming them to turn a higher profit. Clearly, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems -- and with it OpenOffice and Java -- the company has not acted very neighborly with open source developers.

Microsoft has released a new JavaScript development environment, dubbed TypeScript, and says it is designed to help developers write more complex apps with the popular scripting language. Long-time Reg readers may recall that Microsoft has form giving the world new technologies, but not always for altruistic reasons. During its epic antitrust battle with the US Department of Justice, Microsoft's in-house use of the terms “embrace and extend” or “embrace and smother” came to light to describe the practice of releasing non-standard products, among them software development tools, then using Microsoft's market share to none-too-gently steer the industry towards buying those products to the detriment of competitors.

A revised patch-set was published a few days ago that can make meta-data operations for the Btrfs file-system approximately 20% faster. The latest patches build upon what I wrote about in February with A Patch That Can Make Btrfs 5~10% Faster. The idea comes down to providing an extent buffer cache for each i-node so that the item doesn't need to be searched from the root of a B+ tree everytime, thereby making searches quicker. The earlier patch wasn't merged but now it's up to a second version consisting of three patches and a stated 20% performance improvement for meta-data operations.

With the recent release of the Unity 6.6 desktop for Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2, benchmarks were done to see how the OpenGL gaming performance compares to that of Unity 6.4 from the earlier beta state of the Quantal Quetzal, plus the respective Compiz versions. At least for Intel Ivy Bridge graphics under some workloads, it looks like the Unity/Compiz updates are slowing down the GL performance even further.

MartUX is a new OpenIndiana/Illumos-based Solaris distribution for reviving SPARC hardware support. MartUX_OpenIndiana is based upon OpenIndiana oi_151a, which was released for x86 hardware one year ago, but this LiveDVD distribution release is focusing upon SPARC hardware support. This is the first SPARC release of an OpenIndiana / Illumos distribution.

The latest achievement within the Wayland camp is wlterm, a native terminal emulator...

Android may not be as fully open as many FOSS fans would like it to be, but the fact remains that it's essentially the poster child for Linux's success in the mobile world. So it was with some dismay we looked on at the impromptu battle that sprang up recently between Google and Acer over Alibaba's Aliyun OS.

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth the linkage. This edition looks at the Python Foundation's new Distinguished Service Award, the SmilePlug, Firefox turning 10 years old and a JavaScript LINQ library.

Given the shock they've had to endure as a result of the ongoing Secure Boot saga over the past year or so, Linux geeks may perhaps be forgiven if they're a tad sensitive to apparent attempts to exclude Linux from other new technological developments as well. It was perhaps less-than-entirely surprising, then, that FOSS fans reacted so swiftly to the initial news about Intel's Clover Trail Atom chip.

LXer Feature: 24-Sept-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

In continuation of NVIDIA Tegra With Open-Source Graphics Is Coming, here is the video that covers all of what's currently going on in the open-source Tegra world.

“What a crazy week,” said Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, a cloud-based digital map publishing company, in an interview with TPM. Gundersen’s point is well taken, given his small 25-person startup, based in Washington, D.C., just won a $575,000 grant from the journalism innovation nonprofit the Knight Foundation. The grant was awarded to MapBox specifically to allow the company to focus most of its resources over the next few months on improving its own main source of map data, OpenStreetMap, a free crowdsourced world map created by volunteer cartographers. It’s helpful to think of OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the “Wikipedia” of digital maps (although it’s not actually tied to Wikipedia). MapBox is an outside private company that uses the OSM data to build maps and mapping software, much of which it makes open source, for anyone to use for free, but some of which is proprietary and which it charges high prices to other companies and government agencies to access.

The chairs of the W3C's HTML Working Group have presented a plan to approve a stable HTML5 specification before the end of 2014. The plan proposes to formally define a stable set of features as HTML 5.0, but when the HTML Working Group will approve this plan is as yet unknown. Features for which no stable specification is available by then could be moved to an extended "HTML 5.1" set of features that could be completed by 2016.

Speed is essential in multimedia, graphics and signal processing. Sometimes programmers resort to assembly language to get every last bit of speed out of their machines. GCC offers an intermediate between assembly and standard C that can get you more speed and processor features without having to go all the way to assembly language: compiler intrinsics. This article discusses GCC's compiler intrinsics, emphasizing vector processing on three platforms: X86 (using MMX, SSE and SSE2); Motorola, now Freescale (using Altivec); and ARM Cortex-A (using Neon). We conclude with some debugging tips and references.

Similarly to current versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Linux is now capable of a hybrid sleep state. The 3.6 kernel also provides improved random data and reduces the work load of EFI bootloaders.

With flexible I/O options and Linux capability, the Raspberry Pi offers enormous potential for hardware development. Andrew Back takes us through the possibilities with his hardware-hacking getting-started guide for the credit-card-sized Linux computer.