Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 02-Oct-2011

In the LXWR this week we have memory leaks found on Firefox 6.0, an impatient distro dev sings a song, the KDE vs. GNOME schism and are Linux users playing to their strengths or shooting themselves in the foot? Enjoy!

Google is open sourcing one of its key JavaScript testing tools in an effort to get developers to speed up web applications. Google JS Test is used internally on the V8 JavaScript engine using in Chrome. Google has attributed much of the speed increases it claims for the browser to the performance of the V8 engine, and the company is clearly hoping this will improve matters further.

Microsoft is working with an Apache-licensed open-source project to make Hyper-V and Windows Servers an integral part of cloud-computing infrastructure. The software giant is providing support and technical guidance to OpenNebula to put Hyper-V on a list of hypervisors that the project officially supports.

Nokia is developing a new Linux-based & Meltemi& operating systems to replace Symbian on its feature phones, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, more details have emerged on the Linux Foundation's MeeGo-derived Tizen project, which also gained a bit of industry support beyond co-sponsors Intel and Samsung.

For those looking for an interesting read today, Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE's KWin and known for his insightful blog posts, has written about fighting the schism in free software; in particular, the KDE vs. GNOME battle...

Live DJs chasing a simplistic but attractive application are going to love Giada. At the same time, Giada also covers something I've been wanting for a year now, which is a way to trigger individual samples from a computer keyboard simply in real time.

The attack on Kernel.org last month was "a big wake-up call," according to Green Armor's Joseph Steinberg. "This breach could have been astronomically worse. If the attack had been carried out with more sophistication, the attackers could have done a lot worse damage than they did. The gut feeling is that it is more of an accidental intrusion."

It used to be very easy to install custom themes in Gnome 2, but if you have upgraded to Gnome Shell, particularly in Ubuntu Oneiric, you will find that there are not much customization options available for you. While Gnome Shell supports theming, there doesn’t seem to be an option for you to switch to the theme you want. For those who are tired of the default look in your Gnome Shell, here is how you can easily install and switch to a custom theme.

Red Hat is taking on VMware with five enterprise heavyweights through a vendor-neutral virtualisation community project based on its RHEV-M stack. Red Hat has been joined by Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp and SuSE to lead oVirt Project, planning on building a pluggable hypervisor management framework along with an ecosystem of plug-in partners around its virtualisation management tool for KVM.

Microsoft has hit back at concerns that secure boot technology in UEFI firmware could lock out Linux from Windows 8 PCs, saying that consumers will be free to run whatever they want on their PCs. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specifications, designed to reduce start-up times and improve security, allow computers to verify digitally signed OS loaders before booting. The feature in UEFI, the successor to BIOS ROM, is designed as a countermeasure against rootkits and other bootloader nasties.

Control4 announced a seven-inch tablet, meant for portable control of its Linux-based Control4 home automation, surveillance, and music-server system. In addition to the Control4 7" Portable Touch Screen, the company also announced a "Control4 MyHome -- Android" app.

Windows 8's Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot protocol could lead to eight-second boot times, but it could also be used to keep users from loading Linux on a Windows 8 PC, warns a Red Hat developer. Meanwhile, Casio signed a Linux-related patent agreement with Microsoft.

While AMD's open-source strategy was announced on Phoronix on 7 September 2007, it was on 17 September of the same year that the Novell/SUSE developers did their first public release of their xf86-video-radeonhd driver. This was the X.Org driver created by the Novell Linux engineers in months prior for R500 and R600 GPUs. Here is some special reading -- a letter that was volleyed from Novell to AMD that kicked off this entire process -- to celebrate what would have been the fourth birthday of this open-source Linux driver.

Many Linux distributions have taken the path of easy GUI-based installation, in order to appeal to a broader mix of users. But not Arch Linux, which emphasises simplicity of technical complexity over general usability. Richard Hillesley explains.

On Tuesday at XDC2011 Chicago I hosted a question and answer panel about contributing to X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel. Much of the information presented, however, is relevant to any open-source / free software project. The panel participants were largely graphics driver developers that started off contributing to open-source when at university and some of them have since moved on to working for major Linux companies, i.e. Intel and Red Hat. The talk was very interesting and Chicago computer science students were free to ask questions of them.

VMware announced a new version of its Linux-compatible VMware Workstation 8 software, designed to make it easier to build, share, and upload virtual machines (VMs) to cloud environments. VMware Workstation 8 offers 50 new features, with a special focus on connections with VMware's cloud-oriented virtualization software, including new remote connections and drag and drop to hosts running in vSphere.

There's more good news out of the 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference in Chicago. Besides the big news that the S3TC patent might be invalid, PathScale has a working OpenCL compute stack, and other events, here's something very exciting: Intel really expects to have working OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa for hardware drivers by the end of this calendar year!

AT T will begin selling the 4G version of its 10.1-inch Iconia Tab Android 3.0 (& Honeycomb& ) tablet Sept. 18 for $480 outright, or $330 on contract. The Acer Iconia Tab A501 4G closely follows the typical Honeycomb script, from the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor to the five- and two-megapixel cameras, but it's significantly cheaper than most of its rivals.

Ford and open source software/hardware provider Bug Labs say they'll collaborate to let developers create modules for the automaker's & Sync& in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. The jointly created & OpenXC& research platform will utilize hardware add-ons called & BugBases& and & BugModules,& as well as the cloud-based & BugSwarm& service, according to the companies.

The GNOME project has published version 3.1.91, the second beta version of GNOME 3.2. In just under two weeks, GNOME release candidate 3.1.92 is to follow. According to the roadmap, GNOME 3.2 is to be published on 28 September, but the developers are currently a few days behind.