Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Artila Electronics announced an ARM9-based, Linux-ready industrial box computer with dual, isolated CAN bus interfaces, plus the SocketCAN open source CAN stack. The Matrix-522 is equipped with an Atmel AT91SAM9G20 processor clocked at 400MHz, and offers 64MB SDRAM, 128MB of flash, a microSD slot, failover support, an under three-Watt power draw, plus paired sets of Ethernet, USB, and serial ports.

The "enterprise distribution" business is a bit of a funny one; it often seems like an attempt - by vendors and customers both - to fit free software back into the business model long used by proprietary operating systems vendors. It will necessarily create some tensions between the values of the free software community (including free access, rapid development, and collaboration) and those of the business, which include rigid stability and the preservation of competitive advantage. Recent changes made by Red Hat show the effects that this tension can cause, especially when combined with strong, arguably unfair, competition.

This little known "law" is a corollary to the more famous Moore's Law of semiconductor growth. My last column created some interest outside of the Linux Magazine domain. In addition to being accused of shilling ARM processors, there were those who thought my prediction of ARM based supercomputers quite absurd. Of course, I have been wrong before, but not this time.

CrunchBang is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian. It comes in OpenBox and XFCE editions, and a very dark visual theme. It's the OpenBox version that I took a look at. Being based on Debian is a point is its favor as it means that standard trouble shooting and standard packages work on the system. The documentation on the website assures that CrunchBang is, essentially, a standard Debian installation with a few additional custom packages.

Recent changes to how RHEL kernel patches are distributed is creating barriers for developers. Why did Red Hat make this change? To stay competitive.

Opera Software has launched the first beta of Opera Dragonfly, an open source suite of debugging tools for web developers and designers that downloads automatically along with the Opera browser itself. The new toolkit aims to cover the full debugging workflow, from inspecting network access and downloaded resources, to correcting JavaScript issues and examining how CSS rules apply to the DOM.

A leaked Staples training guide suggests HTC and Dell are each prepping 10-inch tablets, and Samsung is readying an 8.9-inch tablet, all running Android 3.0 & Honeycomb& , while HP will offer a seven-inch WebOS tablet. Meanwhile, an analyst says early sales of the Motorola Xoom tablet have been disappointing, in large part due to the bugs and complex UI of Honeycomb.

Wildfire Games has announced the release of a fourth alpha version of its free cross-platform, real-time strategy game 0 A.D. Open sourced in mid-July of 2009, the historically-based game is similar to Microsoft's Age of Empires in that users create and build civilisations and must defend them against their enemies. The game focuses on the years 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. and includes six unique civilisations and several multi-player modes.

When KDE 4 was released, I hated it. It seemed a lot of my favorite customizations had changed, moved, or been removed. It was heavy and a resource hog. It didn't seem to work real well, things were either slow and crashy or didn't function properly. Subsequent updates did little to help. Until 4.6.1. I think KDE 4 is finally maturing into a stable and usable interface.

This article explains what makes cloud computing appealing to PHP developers and provides step-by-step instructions how to use the IBM Cloud to set up a PHP and DB2 development environment quickly. Learn how to provision Linux data and web application servers, connect to the virtual machines via SSH, use X Forwarding to install a pre-configured PHP distribution, and test your connection to DB2.

The KDE PIM community gathered at Osnabrück, Northern Germany for a weekend in February. The discussions covered recent achievements in KDE PIM, the current state of the community and applications, and brainstorming about the future and new cohesive and social applications. The meeting as usual had many attendees and was hosted, as in each of the previous 8 years, by Intevation GmbH. The agenda reflects the breadth and scope of this year's meeting, ranging from website maintenance to release engineering to features and tools.

Winamp announced its Winamp for Android 1.0 app, offering a redesigned interface, wireless sync over Wi-Fi, iTunes import, and Shoutcast radio streaming. Meanwhile, Hulu tipped the upcoming availability of its media player on selected Android phones, starting with the Samsung Nexus S.

The GNU Free Call project was released today. It's a project that's self described to be a new communication service to compete with Skype that is designed to be free as in freedom and free as in no cost. The GNU Free Call release announcement says, "We use the open standard SIP protocol and GNU SIP Witch to create secured peer-to-peer mesh calling networks, and we welcome all participation in our effort."

Like most word processors and layout applications, Scribus has a variety of tools that allow you to design once and use repeatedly. For pages, the tool is Master Pages. Master Pages are styles or templates in which you can position repeated elements like headers and footers or logos. Their initial creation can take time, but, once you have made them, Master Pages can be stored and applied with a few clicks.

A quite minor change in the process scheduler makes systems with 2.6.38 feel much faster, and more far-reaching changes to the VFS (virtual file system) make some tasks much faster. Some of the changes to driver code that deserve mention include Wireless LAN (WLAN) drivers and expanded support for current graphics chips from AMD and Nvidia.

Google's Linux-based Chrome OS operating system should be with us by now. But at that point last December when we were led to believe our netbooking futures were about to be redefined, Google postponed our date with destiny and asked us to try again in another six months. It seemed the road ahead wasn't quite as clear as Google wanted it to be, and six months is presumably enough time for the masters at Menlo Park to fine-tune their revolution and get things back on track.

While the Linux 2.6.38 kernel isn't even released yet, it's likely to be released in the next day or two. After that and a few days of downtime, the merge window for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel will be opened. What features can one expect for the open-source Linux graphics support? As is usual these days, there's lots of expected changes.

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has announced that it will hold its first ever summit on open source software development later this month. According to NASA, the Open Source Summit will bring together engineers, policy makers and open source community members to talk about "the challenges within the existing open source policy framework and propose modifications to facilitate NASA's development, release and use of software". The event will take place on the 29 and 30 March at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Xilinx recently released version 13.1 of their ISE Webpack toolkit. If you haven't used ISE, its the tool that lets you build logic descriptions for FPGAs using schematics, Verilog, or VHDL. You can simulate your design or build bitstreams suitable for use with most of the Xilinx FPGA or CPLD products. I applaud Xilinx for making a Linux version available although I have often noted quirks on the Linux side that seem pretty fundamental.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are the most influential distributions that use the Red Hat Package Manager. Although their influence lags behind that of Debian and Ubuntu, it is still strong enough that Fedora remains consistently in the top three most downloaded distributions on Distrowatch, and is the ultimate source of 50 (15%) of the 323 active distributions listed.