Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Valve's growing Linux team is already experiencing success in optimizing the Source Engine, and in particular their initial Left 4 Dead 2 game, for Linux. In fact, the native Linux build with the Source OpenGL renderer is faster than running the game on Windows 7 with DirectX!

On July 20, Adobe unveiled version 2.0 of the open source PhoneGap, a leader among the growing crowd of cross-platform, Android-compatible, mobile app frameworks. Open source developers welcomed new PhoneGap features such as a "Cordova WebView" function that enables developers to integrate code into larger native applications.

KDE has announced its Version 4.9 Releases to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Development Platform, dedicated to the memory of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. The full announcement has details. These releases got special attention to the general levels of quality and stability. In particular, there was a focus on eliminating any regressions from previous releases. Thanks to the efforts of the KDE Quality Team and its new contributors, the 4.9 Releases are the best ever.

Linux do(es) crash. It is not so frequent, but it happens. You know what to do when an application refuses to obey, but if everything fails, the last solution is using the supreme power on Linux: the magic SysRq key. By using this key with a combination of “Alt” and another letter, you will be able to make your computer respond no matter what. It was already evoked, but a little explanation does not hurt, and the more you know, the more prepared you will be when facing a real problem. Also, understanding the individual effect is always better than just repeating a combo learned by heart.

While word crept out last night that Nokia would be closing down their Brisbane office where several of the Qt components are maintained and developed, it looks like the Qt infliction is going much further. Nokia's now reportedly trying to offload Qt entirely.

July has turned out to be a pretty packed month. The Community Edition has been extremely well received in the community. Developers have already created some very interesting modifications to LunaSysMgr that have enhanced the user experience on TouchPads. We also officially announced the release of Enyo 2.0 at OSCON and have been picked up by xTuple to be their front end framework. The Developer relations team attended Open Web Camp in San Jose, Throne of JS in Toronto and GothamJS in NY. Head on over to our developer blog to read more about these events.

Launched in May, Inktank is one of the newest companies to enter the still very new open source cloud computing industry. But it’s got a great head start as the enterprise support arm of the Ceph storage system. The one-time doctoral thesis of founder Sage Weil, Ceph has been incubating as an open source project with L.A.-based web hosting company DreamHost over the last eight years.

As we reported in early July, Mozilla has pulled back on further development of its long-standing Thunderbird email platform, despite the fact that it has more than 20 million users. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has a blog post up about the topic.

Fewer than half of all registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) users have contributed to the open source project's mapping data according to a new study by researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Of the mapping platform's 500,000 registered members, approximately 38% had contributed data at least once. The study, which examined activity of registered OSM users up to December 2011, found that more than 24,000 users (about 5% of the total) had contributed at least 1,000 edited nodes.

In this week's 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile, we talk to Alan Cox. We learn how he originally got involved in Linux and why it remains important to him. He also gives us a bit of music education.

System administrators at the USENIX LISA 2011 conference (LISA is a great system administration conference, by the way) in Boston in December got to hear Michael Perrone's presentation "What Is Watson?" Michael Perrone is the Manager of Multicore Computing from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The entire presentation (slides, video and MP3) is available on the USENIX Web site, and if you really want to understand how Watson works under the hood, take an hour to listen to Michael's talk (and the sysadmin Q&A at the end).

Hitting OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend are some interesting benchmarks comparing performance of AHCI vs. IDE modes under Linux from an AMD Fusion system.

LXer Feature: 29-Jul-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Money can't buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community. Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it "will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings."

Google has released a new software framework that aims to give programmers the ability to create interactive experiences in physical spaces. It could potentially be used to build interactive art installations or games that involve physical interaction.

Keeping an eye on your disk is always very important, especially today when dealing with huge quantity of data. Take a look at your personal files and programs, and you will be surprised by how much disk space you consume. Baobab is a Graphical User Interface software to analyze a disk usage. Hopefully, Baobab can help you manage that, straight out of the box, and with very little installation required.

First it was Gartner, now Gabe Newell, the former Microsoft executive and billionaire computer games baron behind Half-Life, has laid into Windows 8. Newell, who oversaw the first three versions of Windows under Bill Gates among other roles during his 13 years at the software giant, has reportedly called Windows 8 a “catastrophe for everyone in the PC space”.

The weather outside may be frightful, to adapt a phrase for the scorched and overheated world here in the Northern hemisphere, but there's no denying that July is turning out to be delightful for our favorite operating system. The latest news now is the apparent return of none other than Dell to the desktop Linux world.

Hot on the heels of its Xfce build, the final release of Linux Mint 13 KDE is now available for download. This is an iteration that a lot of people have been anxiously awaiting, because it combines a lot of good things in a single package.

A survey of more than 3,600 Appcelerator Titanium developers has revealed that they would rather develop mobile apps for iOS than for Android. iOS led Android by 16 percent in the Appcelerator/IDC Q2 2012 Mobile Developer Report. Fifty-three percent of the respondents believed that iOS was winning in enterprise app development, whereas only 37 percent believed Android was.