Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There have been a flurry of comments this week following my post why software defaults are important and why in the Linux benchmarks at Phoronix.com the tests are most often carried out in their default/stock configurations: it's what most everyone uses. There have been comments by Ted Ts'o on file-system default mount options and whether they are sane or not in the non-enterprise distributions and others have questioned if defaults like Compiz on in Ubuntu by default makes sense. Does using Compiz still hurt your graphics performance?

The newest release of Novell's openSUSE Linux debuts with LibreOffice, KDE 4.6, a zippy package management system and a new rolling release system that could eliminate the need for future big releases.

If you work for a company with an online presence long enough, you'll deal with it eventually. Someone, out of malice, boredom, pathology, or some combination of all three, will target your company's online presence and resources for attack. If you are lucky, it will be a run of the mill Denial of Service (DoS) attack from a single or limited range of IP addresses that can be easily blocked at your outermost point, and the responsible parties will lack the necessary expertise to overcome this relatively simple countermeasure. Your usual script kiddie attack against a site with competent network and server administration is fairly short. If you are unlucky, you'll experience something worse: A small percentage of attacks is from a higher caliber of black hat, and while more difficult to deal with, the individual generally bores easily and moves on.

There are a lot of mobile apps that use open source software, but how many of them are in compliance with open source licensing rules? As it turns out, not very many. A new study from open source services vendor OpenLogic reports that 71 percent of Apple iOS and Google Android apps are not in compliance. OpenLogic scanned 635 apps, including both free and paid on the Apple App store and Google Android Marketplace. Of those 635 scanned apps, 52 apps include Apache licensed code while 16 included GPL/LGPL licensed code.

Google has released a new SDK for its open source and royalty-free VP8 video codec, promising faster encoding and improved video quality. Mountain View has not changed the VP8 format, merely the software around the format. The new SDK is known as "Bali", and it's the second major update to the platform. According to a Google blog post, on x86 processors, Bali encodes 4.5 times faster than the initial V8 SDK release in "best" mode and 1.35 times faster than previous release, known as Aylesbury. Google likes to name its V8 SDKs after ducks.

The Linux Foundation announced keynotes and programming for its Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, scheduled for April 6-8 in San Francisco. The event will also kick off the year's Linux 20th anniversary celebrations, leading up to the official celebration in August.

LXer Feature: 09-Mar-2011

This is an addition to the series that was never at first envisaged. Indeed, within a recent thread (shown immediately below) and in my response to “hkwint”, I stated very clearly that I had absolutely no intention of writing further on KDE4, but this situation almost developed with a life of its own and I now think it needs to be brought out into the open for the LXer readers.

In certain situations, a small patch for 2.6.38 perceivably improves the response time of desktop environments. Transparent Huge Pages, on the other hand, simplify memory management, which is particularly relevant in terms of virtualisation and server software.

Recently, in conjunction with the rise of cloud computing, OStatic has been doing an interview series focused on the components in cloud software stacks, and how they create unique advantages. Last week, Hanspeter Christ, Deputy Process Manager of the Federal Spatial Data Infrastructure (FSDI) for Swisstopo--Switzerland's federal office of topography--caught up with us to discuss Swisstopo's cloud stack. The series began with our conversation with PHP Fog founder Lucas Carlson, where he provided many insights into a smart cloud stack.

Opera has opened an app store that works across disparate mobile platforms. The store can be accessed from virtually any mobile browser on any major phone platform, but it's built straight into the company's Opera Mobile and Opera Mini browsers, currently used by over 100 million phone owners across the globe.

When purchasing commercial software for Windows and Mac OS X you are almost always presented with the system requirements for the software and what the vendor recommends for an optimal experience. When dealing with open-source / Linux software, this is rarely the case. It's far less common to see free software projects that will list their recommended hardware/software configurations, even though in the case of computational and/or graphical intense free software, the recommended system hardware requirements are just as important.

The Freedom Box is starting to roll, with a fundraising drive that met its goals in a few short days, along with a newly formed foundation to oversee its development. What started as an idea in a talk given by Eben Moglen just over a year ago has more recently gained a lot of momentum. What can we expect to see from this "personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy", and when can we expect to see it?

Accelerated software development company Black Duck Software is beating a fast path towards the Android mobile development platform with a bundled software and services offering designed to help developers automate and ensure compliance and simplify the operational challenges of managing Android projects. Android Fast Start is built on a customized version of the Black Duck Suite preconfigured with Android to address change-management issues and automate legal and compliance-related obligations.

Exclusive Leading Enterprise Technology Event Features the Latest Advances in HPC and OEM Appliance Technology. Danville, CA – March 7, 2011. Whamcloud, a venture-backed company formed from a worldwide network of high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans, announced today their participation in the 9th Annual AMAX Technology Showcase 2011, an exclusive leading enterprise technology event, which will take place at AMAX’s corporate headquarters in Fremont, California on March 10, 2011.

A good stout Linux media server has a home in the enterprise because it's a better tool than traditional file shares for storing, archiving, and sharing company multimedia presentations.

Nokia has announced that it is selling the commercial licensing and professional services arm of its Qt group to Digia, a Finnish services and software company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Android moves pretty fast. It's import to know when, how and what to expect when you upgrade your device. Let's step through a recent upgrade from Froyo to Gingerbread on a Nexus One.

For the last 15 years we have been living in a Microsoft monoculture, which has had very real knock-on consequences for everyone online – not just for users of its products. Today, though, that monoculture is fading away, to be replaced by something much more complex.

When one's computer becomes unstable, it's natural to think first of a particular app or the desktop. After that, one may tend to suspect the operating system. Finally one may find it turns out to be hardware at fault. This is what happened to me recently, and at the operating system phase, Debian became a last resort. At first I blamed Sabayon and tried Linux Mint. When Linux Mint seemed to also be crashy, I resorted to the newly released Debian 6.0. I thought if anything was going to be stable, it'd be Debian. Although I finally found and replaced faulty hardware, I've learned a bit about Debian on the desktop. I've used Debian on my X-less server for years, but never thought of it much as a desktop system. So, here is a summary of my Debian desktop adventure.

Red Hat CTO, Brian Stevens, has defended the company's change to how it distributes the kernel source code in a blog posting. The company had changed its policy on how it distributed the source to its Linux kernel, a key component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Where it had previously shipped out a standard kernel with all the patches which needed to be applied to make that kernel into Red Hat's version, for RHEL6 it switched to shipping an archive with those patches pre-applied and details of the patches not explicitly listed.