Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Network administrators have many tasks, and auditing the network is at the top of the heap. This isn't a problem if you have a small network. But what happens when that network outgrows your ability to simply walk around and manually make note of what is up/down, what OS a device is running, or what ports are open? When this happens you need to make use of one of the de facto standard open source network auditing tools — Zenmap.

CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft, is purchasing 882 Novell patents for $450 million cash, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted Monday by Novell. The deal is part of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell, also announced Monday, and expected to close in the first quarter of next year. In the original announcement, Novell stated only that CPTN would acquire "certain intellectual property assets."

It was announced this morning that Novell has sold off some portion of its intellectual properties to CPTN Holdings, (backed by Microsoft) for $450 million. The remainder of Novell assets will be acquired by Attachmate Corporation for about $2.2 billion. This should be of no surprise as Novell staked a For Sale sign in their front yard several months ago. But this has undoubtedly left users and developers wondering what will become of openSUSE.

Earlier today we put out benchmarks of ZFS on Linux via a native kernel module that will be made publicly available to bring this Sun/Oracle file-system over to more Linux users. Now though as a bonus we happen to have new benchmarks of the latest OpenSolaris-based distributions, including OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and Augustiner-Schweinshaxe, compared to PC-BSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

Using OpenGL and GLUT, you can increase the speed of your image processing by using the power inside your system's GPU. Video games have been making full use of GPUs for years. Now, even nongraphical products (like Matlab) are starting to take advantage of the number-crunching abilities of GPUs. You can do the same.

strace is a useful little utility – installed by default on most Linux systems – which allows you to find out what a program is doing under the hood by tracing the system calls it's making. strace is a great basic debugging tool; but it's also fascinating to use even when you're not tracing a problem. It can teach you a lot about how a Linux program works.

This year, KDE is delighted to have been chosen to take part in Google Code-in. Following the success of Google Summer of Code in previous years, Google Code-in is a new program to encourage pre-university students to contribute to free software communities. Like other participating organizations, KDE has provided a list of tasks that can be completed in short timeframes ranging from a few hours to a few days, whether they be simple bug fixes, documentation tasks or outreach projects and more.

In the first article in this series, we commenced our historical search for design patterns in Linux and Unix by illuminating the "Full exploitation" pattern which provides a significant contribution to the strength of Unix. In this second part we will look at the first of three patterns which characterize some design decisions that didn't work out so well.

LXer Feature: 22-Nov-2010

In this first part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. As a long time KDE 3.5 user he decided to see if he could get KDE 4.4 to look, feel and work the way he was used to KDE 3.5 working. Hang on everyone, its going to be a bumpy ride..

After reading the Linux 2.6.37-rc3 release announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list, another interesting thread was found and it's about getting hardware vendors to do their initial hardware bring-up under Linux prior to any Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X support. A number of reasons are provided why hardware vendors should support their hardware first under Linux and also why they should foster open-source drivers along with its challenges.

A new and improved Debian installer awaits for Debian 6.0, but is it better than what's gone before? We take a tour of Squeeze's installer beta and find out.

LXer Feature: 21-Nov-2010

The big stories this past week included an update on how far away Chrome OS is, a Ubuntu vs.Fedora comparison, 5 unusual games for Linux and a 200 line kernel patch that makes your desktop snappy. Enjoy!

The Ubuntu Font Family is the first time that a libre typeface has been designed professionally and explicitly with the intent of developing a public and long-term community-based development process. When developing an open project, it is generally necessary to have firm foundations: a font needs to maintain harmony within itself even across many type designers and writing systems.-

While the Mesa software stack has made some steps towards supporting OpenGL 3.x, this free software library used by open-source graphics drivers is still a ways from supporting this industry graphics API thats years old and has already been surpassed by OpenGL 4.x. There hasn't been too much major progress lately on GL3 support, but some think it could be achieved next year. When there is OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa, it will be released as Mesa 8.0. Regardless, the OpenGL 3 status document for Mesa has been updated.

While the Nouveau driver may not yet have a stable Gallium3D or DDX driver release nor does it have capabilities like stabilized power management or OpenGL 3.x, if you want to overclock your NVIDIA graphics card with this open-source driver, you can now do so today. Martin Peres who has been working on Nouveau power management support and timing management, has produced a patch to support custom clock manipulation of the NVIDIA graphics card's core clock, memory clock, and shader clock speeds. The voltages can also be manipulated too whether you are manually overclocking or underclocking your GPU with this Linux kernel DRM driver.

The weekend before Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, Nokia invited thirteen members of the KDE community to get together in their offices in that same city for a developer sprint. The topic was Ovi and KDE, specifically how they can work together to widen adoption for both communities, both from a software development perspective and from a purely collaborative effort perspective. The developers were also invited to the main Qt Developer Days (DevDays) event too.

Have you ever encountered the situation where you have plenty of tabs open in your browser and one of them is blasting out loud advertisement video? Yes, I know, it is very irritating, especially when you don’t know which tab contains the annoying video and you have to flick through all the tabs to locate (and stop) the ad. With Chrome Toolbox, you can now easily mute all the tabs with a single click. Chrome Toolbox is a Google Chrome extension created by Google. It is an enhancement and quick access tool combined into one.

There's just about two months left until the release of KDE SC 4.6, but Martin Gräßlin and other KDE developers have already begun thinking about and working on code for KDE Software Compilation 4.7 [granted, there are already people talking about KDE5 and KDE6] that is still eight months away. In particular, Martin has some prominent KWin compositing manager changes for the 4.7 release.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today the signing of several significant partnerships following the release last month of Ubuntu 10.10. Boxed Ice, Opsview, Riptano, Unoware, Vladster, Wavemaker and Zend all joined as Canonical Software Partners, their applications delivering solutions for business and personal use, and supported by commercial companies providing the highest level of service.

David Airlie sent in a DRM pull request to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel this week to fix some Intel DRM driver bugs as well as one ATI Radeon KMS fix. However, this pull request sparked another rant by Linus Torvalds about the quality of the work of the open-source Linux (DRM) graphics driver developers.