Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Faithful readers of the Linux Blog Safari column here at LinuxInsider may recall the woeful report a few weeks back that a murder had been committed -- by Apple, no less! -- and that the Linux desktop was dead. It was a distressing report, to be sure, not least because there was no corpse in sight.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has performed testing on the effects of overclocking and overvolting, and is now providing what it calls a "turbo mode" for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. While the Foundation has always supported these kinds of modifications, they have in the past voided the customer's warranty for the product – a sticky bit in the BCM2835 chip makes sure this operation cannot be performed undetected. The turbo mode option enables users to get more performance out of their Raspberry Pis without having to be afraid of affecting their warranty.

Animation and video editing in Linux can be treacherous territory. Anyone who has tried working in these media probably has experienced the frustration of rendering a huge file for an hour only to see the program crash before the export is finished. A bevy of tools and applications for manipulating video exist for Linux, and some are more mature than others.

Open hardware platforms like the Arduino have turned device development into a hobbyist enterprise in recent years, but the $20 price tag of a microcontroller board seems a lot less tantalizing when one adds in the costs of testing and debugging it. At LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego, David Anders addressed this issue and offered some guidance on finding and selecting tools for open hardware development, the majority of which are open hardware themselves.

According to reports from ITworld and ZDNet, Intel has said that it is now planning a variant of the Atom Z2760 (code-named Clover Trail) System-on-Chip (SoC) that will run Linux or Android-based operating systems. The chip was originally designed specifically for Windows 8 tablets. However, the company hasn't provided any further product details or intended target markets.

Zorin Linux 6.0 is a very capable replacement operating system for Microsoft Windows. It is also a bother-free alternative to other Linux distros that suffer from the usability issues of the Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity desktop interfaces. The Zorin Linux distro is an offshoot of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux but it has much more of the look and feel of Linux Mint with a few very substantial differences

Developers have improved support for new Apple MacBook laptops. The Radeon driver now supports PCIe 2.0 and the kernel now includes a driver for the Cinergy T Stick Black DVB-T receiver

IBM PureFlex System comes with the hardware pre-integrated and the management stack pre-loaded for convenience, but there are a few manual steps you need to do before it can be used to host resilient virtual servers. In this article, the authors explain and show how to set up and deploy a resilient virtual server (in this article, Red Hat's KVM hypervisor is used).

Scientists celebrated a breakthrough in their understanding of the human genome this month – the results of a large collaborative project driven by big data and built with Linux. ENCODE researchers mapped the DNA segments that regulate gene function. Source: Nature, "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome." On Sept. 5, Nature and two other scientific journals simultaneously published 30 papers with the results of the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Project. The 5-year project involved nearly 450 scientists from 30 institutions around the globe and produced scores of data on how and when genes are regulated.

I'm up in Helsinki at the Open Knowledge Festival (which, tempting fate, uses the abbreviation 'OK Festival'). It's an interesting event, even if it does occasionally lapse into the quasi-religious atmosphere that often accompanies 'open' tech issues. Thankfully, there are those willing to ask heretical questions. Some of the most valuable discussions took place this afternoon, covering the thorny issue of open data's business case. Yes, many can easily agree that open is good, but how can it benefit the bottom line?

Along with RedHat, Rackspace and many others, Canonical has been steadily marrying its cloud strategy to the open source OpenStack platform. In February of last year, we discussed how Canonical was deepening its relationship with OpenStack, and it has kept doing so. Now, in a new blog post, Canonical's Mark Baker notes that Canonical has released the Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack, for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu.

Join us for three days of inspired making, learning and celebration in London. Today we’re extremely proud to launch the new 2012 Mozilla Festival web site — and invite you to join us November 9-11 in London, UK. “We want … Continue reading

One of the stumbling blocks in migrating to the Linux desktop is the mistaken view that you can't take it with you. Your data must remain captive to the Microsoft operating system. Not true at all. A related misconception that stalls many Windows users from adopting the Linux OS is the belief that when you buy a new computer or install Linux to an existing computer, you must give up one operating system for the other.

For those interested in Wayland, Qt, and 3D, there's an interesting new Wayland compositor out in the wild. This compositor renders a 3D maze using Qt and brings in some Wolfenstein 3D elements while allowing Wayland surfaces to be rendered on the walls...

Linux distributor Red Hat, which is currently being sued for patent infringement by Twin Peaks Software, is fighting back at the company by alleging Twin Peaks is violating the GNU General Public License (GPL) for a tool that Red Hat holds copyrights on. The lawsuit brought by Twin Peaks alleges that Red Hat infringed US patent 7,418,439 in GlusterFS which the company had acquired last year.

Linux 3.6 can cut off the power to PCIe chips and ATA ports. A new userspace driver framework is designed to provide faster access to individual PCI/PCIe devices for virtualised systems. Linux kernel version 3.6, expected to be released in about one to two weeks, can send PCIe devices into the "D3cold" deep sleep state; this is supported by certain modern computers to completely power down individual PCIe devices (1, 2, 3). The Libata subsystem can now put individual ATA ports into such a sleep state; this is to be the basis for code that is being prepared for future kernel versions to support deep sleep states for optical drives, a technology that is called ZPODD (Zero-Power Optical Disk Drive).

GNOME developers have released the final beta of what will become GNOME 3.6. The GNOME 3.5.91 is set to be followed by 3.5.92 on September 19th (the release candidate). The full final general availability for GNOME 3.6 IS currently set for September 26th.

Updates Landscape control freak for Linux machines Canonical, the distributor of the Ubuntu variant of Linux, wants to be on the cutting edge and be stable at the same time. And as anyone who has dated knows, that is a tough balancing act that few people can manage. But a new strategy from Canonical will line up the fast-changing OpenStack cloud control freak that is part of the latest Ubuntu Server distribution with the Long Term Support stable version of the company's Linux.

LXer Feature: 16-Sept-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

A university research director has shown that Apple's iPad 2 is as fast as the Cray-2 vector super-computer out of Cray Research from the 1980's. With some work to to the software, the iPad 2 performance benchmark result is quite impressive...