Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

XBMC, the open source media center, has steadily grown from its humble origins as an X-Box only replacement environment into the cross-platform, de facto playback front-end for multimedia content. It merges the file-centric approach taken by traditional video players with an add-on scripting environment that handles remote web content. The project is currently finalizing its next major release, version 11.0 (codenamed Eden), which includes updates to the networking and video acceleration subsystems, broader hardware support, and numerous changes to the APIs available to add-on developers.

While there's still two months left until Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" will be officially released, here are the first benchmarks of this forthcoming long-term support release. Included are desktop and workstation benchmarks along with a look at the boot performance and power consumption. The Ubuntu 12.04 LTS releases are compared to earlier Ubuntu Linux releases going back to the 10.10 release.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2012

Its been quite the week, Canonical pulls the funding for Kubuntu, Jared Smith steps down as the Fedora project leader and then Robyn Bergeron is named as his successor, unsung heroes of Linux, Is Linux still cool? Is is fractured? and Why The Linux Desktop Matters More Than Ever, This Time? All these questions and more in this week's Roundup. Enjoy!

If you're coming from FreeNAS 7 to Ubuntu, you remember the very handy torrent server that was built in. Well we can exactly replicate that with Transmission's and its WebGUI. A torrent server provides you a great way to download torrents directly to your server. It also allows you to constantly seed torrents, even when your main computers are off. I use this to host copies of OS's (such as Ubuntu!) so other people can download them faster.

As an intern with the Monty Program AB, Vangelis Katsikaros recently had an opportunity to ask the project founder and MariaDB creator, Michael Widenius (aka "Monty"), a variety of interesting questions. Vangelis generously offered to share that conversation exclusively with Linux.com readers. Here is the transcript from that interview.

gnome-shell-logoEver since Gnome started the extensions site where developers can submit their extensions to the library, there have been a great number of useful extensions that appear in the list. With the new extension site, installation of extensions is simply a mouse click. Gone are the days where we still need to add a custom repository just to install an extension. Below are 10 of the best Gnome Shell extensions that we uncovered from the library.

After trying the openSUSE beer at FOSDEM, which is specially brewed at a small Bavarian brewery near the Nürnberg SUSE office and where many of their developers reside, I began wondering if other Linux distributions were represented by beer, what beers would they be? Continue on for this enjoyable weekend article where the leading Linux distributions are described in terms of beer.

Because of the way many Linux distributions make their way into the wild unfettered by commercial overlords, it's sometimes hard to draw a precise bead on who is using what flavor of Linux. In the world of commercial operating systems, by contrast, it's easy as pie to identify Microsoft Windows and Mac OS as the most widely used platforms.

Expanded open source adoption across industries spurs demand for scanning and cloud tools. A testament to the ever-growing popularity of open source, OpenLogic continues to be successful across a wide variety of industries. While technology and financial services companies continue to be OpenLogic’s top two customer verticals, 2011 was marked by rapid growth in three new industries: manufacturing, government, and media.

"it is good to see Linux entering the tablet space ... [but] the Spark is the wrong device to start with," said Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor. "My first issue is the price: The $138 Android tablet is transformed into a $260 Linux tablet. By the time this hits the market, Android equivalents will be selling for $99 or less." The Spark's hardware, meanwhile, "is lackluster."

Open source hardware is increasingly making the news, as Ford partners with Bug Labs to “advance in-car connectivity innovation”, thousands of US Radio Shack stores start stocking Arduino, and Facebook releases the plans for energy-efficient data centre technology via Open Compute. But could it change the world? Andrew Back takes a look at five projects which just might.

LXer Feature: 05-Feb-2012

Is it February already? This week we have a new Linux powered Spark tablet and btrfs goes production ready. Take the road less traveled in installing Ubuntu, the death of file sharing, Venn diagrams and a whole lot more. Enjoy!

This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support.

Nokia CEO is a coward to not give the exact count of Lumia sales in his Q4 results, the launch quarter for Lumia. So lets do some math based on the available info, to count exactly how many it was. When Microsoft launched Windows Phone a year ago, Microsoft proudly told the world that they shipped 2 million Windows Phone smartphones by HTC, Samsung and others. They soon were spooked, however, when the sales dwindled and dried up and stopped giving the sales breakdown. By the Spring, Microsoft insisted all Windows Mobile smartphones be counted together with Windows Phone - even as these two platforms are incompatible. And still the sales of 'the third ecosystem' kept falling, down to about 500,000 units by Q3. And early numbers from Q4 from Microsoft's best market, the USA, reveal that even more than a year after its launch, Windows Phone sales are still severely lagging its older and obsolete cousin, achieving only 1.4% or about 520,000 units. Windows Mobile meanwhile refuses to die, and in the USA achieved 2.4% market share of new sales according to Nielsen or about 890,000 unit sales.

Not directly related to FOSS but of interest I think - Scott

GNU Solidario is happy to announce the release of Health 1.4.3. This version contains many enhancements and fixes. Check at the end of this article for some important links. For more detailed information, please check the Changelog at: http://health.gnu.org/Changelog

Razor-qt is a new desktop environment based on the QT toolkit. I installed it from the PPA and gave it a quick go. It’s early days for the project, but it might eventually become a refuge for lovers of KDE 3 in the same way that Xfce has become popular with people who want to recreate the Gnome 2.x experience.

Google's 2011 Code-In, which is a winter program similar to their Summer of Code, ended earlier this month with many contributions to some leading open-source projects.

LXer Feature: 30-Jan-2012

As I walked into the Hilton on Saturday morning I knew something was up. I saw lots pf people wearing lanyards with a silhouette of a Penguin, it seemed SCaLE 10x was upon me already in full swing. I walked right onto the exhibitor floor and 'did a loop' through the Expo as it were..

Marek Olšák has made another exciting commit to the Mesa mainline Git repository this weekend... What he's accomplished now is making it possible to successfully advertise OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support within the R600 Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000 series and later...

Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer running Google's Chrome OS may not be catching on with consumers, but hundreds of schools across the country have adopted the web-oriented notebooks, the search giant claims. Earlier this month at CES, Samsung showed off a sleeker new version of the Chromebook that switches to a faster Intel Celeron processor, also promising it would release a & Chromebox& mini-PC.