Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

Getting network stats on a Linux machine is not particularly difficult. With tools like sar, Iperf, and vnStat available for nearly every distribution, command-line aficionados can get the low-down on their network with just a few useful commands. Take, for instance, vnStat, a popular network traffic logger. vnStat is different from a network sniffer like Wireshark since it polls the network interface stats going to and from the kernel. Wireshark, on the other hand, actually monitors packets coming in and out of your machine.

Following the publication of Mozilla's audited financial statements for 2009, Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, has taken the opportunity to re-examine Mozilla's mission, its successes, opportunities and challenges.

I'm happy to announce the first Release Candidate version of Medical, the Free Health and Hospital Information System. This version is the result of over 2 years of hard work, and I see it as the starting point for a modern, scalable Free Health and Hospital Information System.

Back when the 2010 Linux Plumbers Conference was looking for presentations, the LibreOffice project had not yet announced its existence. So Michael Meeks put in a vague proposal for a talk having to do with OpenOffice.org and promised the organizers it would be worth their time. Fortunately, they believed him; in an energetic closing keynote, Michael talked at length about what is going on with LibreOffice - and with the free software development community as a whole. According to Michael, both good and bad things are afoot. (Michael's slides are available for those who would like to follow along).

When Microsoft released the seventh Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 last Wednesday, Microsoft said that the browser had overtaken its competition in terms of JavaScript performance. Microsoft based its statement on the results of the well-known WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark: according to Microsoft's tests, IE9 PP7 came out on top.

An Oracle official detailed on Tuesday the submissions of upcoming Java releases to the formal specification process, including versions 7 and 8 of Java's standard edition. The technologies under consideration have been formulated as JSR (Java Specification Requests) for consideration by the Java Community Process, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java platform group, said in a blog post. "These JSRs have been a long time coming. They're now -- ?nally -- on the JCP  ballot for approval; results should be available in two weeks."

Often you may not necessarily know what kind of hardware you have—you may have a no-name box from a smaller company or a used machine. This month, I present the tools you can use to find out what you have installed.

With Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" set to be released in the coming months, we have decided to run a set of benchmarks looking at the performance of Debian 6.0 across different sub-systems relative to the performance of Debian 5.0 "Lenny" and Debian 4.0 "Etch" to see how this new release may stack up.

As open source adoption has ramped up in recent years--especially at businesses and organizations--Black Duck Software has steadily been extending its role in the growth, largely through a series of acquisitions. The acquisitions have transformed it from the open source auditing entity that it originally primarily functioned as into a player in the open source deployment, management and development space, and more. With its latest acquisition of the assets of SpikeSource, it is continuing that trend--all focused on open source.

The London Stock Exchange has hired 81 open source software staff for the development of the delayed Linux-based system being implemented on its cash markets. The developers on the new system will work in a C++ environment, on which the new Millennium Exchange Linux matching engine will operate. Some development is also being conducted "externally", the LSE said, referring to staff at the platform's original base in Sri Lanka. The LSE is replacing a Microsoft .Net environment.

Guarding your private network from the perils of the Internet is no easy task. The basics are pretty much the same from a defensive standpoint no matter how you slice it. Firewalls of one type or another protect an internal network by using two separate Ethernet connections with a software proxy filtering the traffic between the two ports. Linux serves as a great platform for this role with tools like netfilter/iptables.

ine has come a long way in the last few years, making it fairly simple to install many popular Windows games on Linux. Cedega and PlayOnLinux have made it even easier by providing GUI assistance and management of your games. One game series, however, has proven to be consistently difficult to get working, and that’s The Sims. With its copy protection, hefty system requirements, and extensive dependencies, The Sims 3 is the most difficult of all. If you’ve been struggling to get this game up and running in Linux, look no further.

Zentyal 2 is something a little bit different, although it too has changed its name recently: version 1 was called e-Box. A decade younger than its rivals, it is based on Ubuntu, but its developers skip the normal semi-annual releases, and only use the Long Term Support ones that Canonical releases every other year. E-Box version 1 was based on Ubuntu 8.04 and version 2, now called Zentyal, uses Ubuntu 10.04.1.

The openSUSE community is on a voyage of introspection and self discovery. SuSE Linux has been around in one form or another since 1992, and, with the possible exception of Slackware, has an older provenance than any other Linux distribution, yet openSUSE is still in search of a unifying vision that sets it apart from its rivals and its past.

Mentor Graphics is shipping a version of its Mentor Embedded Linux development platform supporting networking applications developed on NetLogic Microsystems' MIPS-based multicore, multithreaded system-on-chips (SoCs). The Mentor platform, which is available in a free "Essentials" version as well as a commercial version, supports the XLR and XLS families today, with support for the newer XLP processors planned shortly.

Last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 generated much excitement from its loyal customers. Many of Red Hat's partners are hoping the release will provide them with an opportunity to make a great deal of money off the back of it, too. Although the RHEL 6.0 server OS includes numerous significant new features -- a new hybrid 2.6.32 kernel; support for more cores and memory; better reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) capabilities; the ext4 file system by default; and so more -- it was hard to discern that from the clamor of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) hardware partners preparing to make money by selling more of their lovely server boxes and associated services.

Last month I said what OpenBenchmarking.org is and how it should change the benchmarking / automated testing landscape once it's released in conjunction with Phoronix test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" early next year. I have also showed off the new graphing capabilities for this software and provided another update at the end of last month. Here now is another update with some more exciting details.

Heralded by Linus Torvalds as a "huge improvement," a 233-line kernel scheduling patch written by Mike Galbraith is making the rounds to rave reviews, reports Phoronix. Due for possible inclusion into Linux kernel 2.6.38, the "sched: autogroup" patch is claimed to reduce latency by a factor of 10, with noticeable improvements in 1080p video playback, according to "before-and-after" videos run at Phoronix.

During Red Hat's official launch event for their new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6) release, executives from the company focused heavily on new performance gains. While performance and scalability are key elements of RHEL 6, so too is security. With RHEL 6, Red Hat is debuting a number of new features into its enterprise Linux, including new virtual security services as well as the System Security Services Daemon. Security services aren't the only area of RHEL 6 built for security, as all RHEL 6 packages now benefit from a new 4096-bit RSA hardware signing key as well.