Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Valve's SIGGRAPH 2012 presentation last night -- about the Source Engine on Linux and their experiences with maximizing the OpenGL performance of their game engine on Linux -- was a success. More details about the presentation will be available in the coming days, including the slides. However, for those overly-excited, here's a few photos from the Valve Linux presentation in Los Angeles. There's also a photo of Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux, although it's not too clear and doesn't show (Ubuntu) Linux in the background with my photos from April when at Valve HQ being much more clear.

Nokia's back-room clear out continues with the Qt platform being sold to Finnish firm Digia Oyj for an undisclosed sum. As part of the deal 125 engineers will swap employers. Digia was a licensee of Qt, distributing commercial and freeware versions of the platform and development tools, but now it owns the whole shebang.

The speed of TCP data flows is dependent on two factors: transmission delay (the width of the data pipe) and propagation delay (the time that the data takes to travel from one end of the pipe to the other). Transmission delay is dependent on network bandwidth, which has increased steadily and substantially over the life of the Internet. On the other hand, propagation delay is a function of router latencies, which have not improved to the same extent as network bandwidth, and the speed of light, which has remained stubbornly constant. (At intercontinental distances, this physical limitation means that—leaving aside router latencies—transmission through the medium alone requires several milliseconds.) The relative change in the weighting of these two factors means that over time the propagation delay has become a steadily larger component in the overall latency of web services. (This is especially so for many web pages, where a browser often opens several connections to fetch multiple small objects that compose the page.)

The latest incarnation of the XFCE desktop proves once again that when you delve into the wonders of the Linux OS, something old definitely becomes something new again. The Linux Mint 13 team has released a specially flavored distro built around the latest version of the XFCE interface.

In Hollywood, the good guys nearly always win. In information security, the bad guys ("black hats") often win, in large part because the bad guys know how to collaborate much better than the good guys ("white hats"). Until now. From Lulzsec to Chaos Computer Club, hackers increasingly band together to spring sophisticated attacks on websites, mobile applications, and more, while the white hats have mostly failed to coordinate a robust defence.

Competition may be good for business, but competition among Linux desktops is currently so fierce that it may end up being to everyone's detriment in the medium-term. In a recent posting on his blog entitled Staring Into The Abyss, long-time GTK+ and GNOME developer Benjamin Otte addressed the idea that GNOME is both losing market share and declining in significance. That might sound like a GNOME-specific problem, but it also has implications for other desktops.

It should come as no surprise that Linux has a substantial presence in the scientific community. Solutions abound from high-performance computing clusters to visualization software. There's even an entire Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux targeted for scientific computation, appropriately named Scientific Linux.

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argues Brian Christian, chief technology officer of Zettaset.

The Open Group, the steward of the UNIX standards, has open sourced the CDE classic desktop for Unix under the LGPLv2 licence. The Common Desktop Environment and the Motif toolkit on which it is based, itself open sourced in 2000, became the de facto standard for Unix desktops in Unix's commercial hay day in the 1990s. CDE broadened the concept of simple window managers configured by means of text files which had previously dominated the Unix world; it included a desktop offering integrated applications and graphical configuration tools.

Google has been forced to temporarily deactivate a security feature in Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) intended to make it harder to pirate paid-for apps. The feature resulted in some purchased apps no longer working after devices on which they were installed on were restarted, requiring the user to reconfigure or even reinstall them. According to a bug report on Google Code, affected apps include several live wallpapers and applications with widgets or access to Google's account system.

The feature freeze and branching of Fedora 18 is scheduled to occur tomorrow. The FESCo meeting happened today where a few of the last features were approved for the Spherical Cow release...

The Khronos Group has released the latest version of its OpenGL graphics standard, 20 years after SGI first opened up the code. The latest revision, OpenGL 4.3, adds the ability to harness the GPU for shading and draw commands, ETC2/EAC texture compression is included as standard, and an improved debugging system has been added, along with security enhancements aimed at stopping information leakage between applications.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.5 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 4.8.4 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.

After almost four years, the Damn Small Linux project is back with the release of Damn Small Linux 4.11 RC1. Being just over 50MB in size, the release candidate is still as little as ever.

Between the arrival of both MATE 1.4 and KDE 4.9 and the emergence of SolusOS' brand-new GNOME Classic on the scene, there's no denying it's been an exciting few weeks here in the world of Linux desktops. That, in turn, has made it all the more difficult to witness the identity crisis that has apparently befallen GNOME itself.

Days ago benchmarks were shared from OpenBenchmarking.org that compared AHCI and IDE modes under Linux when it came to the resulting disk performance. There was a fair amount of interest generated out of that so some AHCI vs. IDE mode comparisons from a Serial ATA 3.0 SSD on an Ubuntu Linux host were benchmarked at Phoronix.

There has been some debate lately about whether or not GNOME has gone off the deep end into an abyss. Whether or not that's true is debatable. What is certain though, is that on the Linux Planet the Linux desktop is not an endangered species with no shortage of viable, sustainable options.

Adobe has announced Source Sans Pro, a new and free open source type family, which is the first of its kind from the software provider. The Source Sans Pro family currently includes six weights, from ExtraLight to Black, in upright and italic styles. Adobe is also offering language support for Latin script (including Western and Eastern European languages), Vietnamese, the pinyin Romanization of Chinese, and Navajo.

While disk management improvements might not be the first thing you think of when it comes to a desktop environment update, the disk utility (Disks) and udev within GNOME 3.6 will offer some new features...

Not only has Valve Software successfully ported the first-person shooter game Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux, but it actually runs faster on the open source OS than on Windows. Using high-end hardware, a version of the game running on Ubuntu 12.04 renders at 315fps, Valve's Linux team reports. That's a 16 per cent improvement over the Windows version, which only clocks at 270.6fps on the same configuration.