Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A few weeks back, I discussed the possibility of cell phone clusters. While cell phone processors continue to get faster, there are other issues that make them a poor platform for traditional HPC. As I mentioned, there are other “crowd sourcing” possibilities that may have some interesting applications for clusters of smart phones. Recently, Samsung announced the first dual core smart phone using the ARM Cortex-A9 Processor. The Cortex-A9 used by Samsung runs at 1 GHz. For an old timer like myself, that is amazing. My first cluster used 450MHz dual core processors.

The Linux kernel has been purged of a bug that gave root access to untrusted users – again. The vulnerability in a component of the operating system that translates values from 64 bits to 32 bits (and vice versa) was fixed once before – in 2007 with the release of version 2.6.22.7. But several months later, developers inadvertently rolled back the change, once again leaving the OS open to attacks that allow unprivileged users to gain full root access.

There are plenty of people who have offered explanations for why Linux thrives anonymously on servers and as Android on smartphones but lags behind on the desktop. Though reasons abound, at least one significant one is a self-inflicted wound: the Terminal Bully.

Commercial operating system maker Novell is close to selling itself off after breaking it into two bits, according to the is New York Post. Citing unnamed sources, the Post says a "strategic buyer" will shell out cash to acquire the SUSE Linux business that Novell paid $210m for in November 2003. That Linux business has just finally made it to break-even, according to Novell, and will by our estimates generate maybe $145m in revenues in fiscal 2010. (Novell brought in $108.2m in Linux platform sales in the first nine months of fiscal 2010 ended in July).

With the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 a few weeks back we decided to run some benchmarks of this operating system against PC-BSD 8.1, OpenSolaris b134, and Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS. For those unfamiliar with Nexenta Core Platform, it is an operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a Linux user-land provided by the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron" package repository, complete with apt-get support for easy package installation.

Mozilla has reportedly stopped issuing security updates for its open source Firefox web browser as it looks into a bug that is causing some users' systems to crash. According to InfoWorld, the non-profit organisation behind the development of Firefox is no longer alerting users of older versions to upgrade to the latest releases – typically users automatically receive an update notification within 24-48 hours of the release being available.

Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth has defended Canonical's lack of participation in GNOME against accusations of riding on the coattails of the project's number-one maintainer, Red Hat. After giving it some thought, Shuttleworth concluded that open-source is bigger than any single project and that Canonical's mission is adding new tools and components to the ecosystem at large, rather than focusing on aspects that already work.

The Mozilla Project announced the release of a new JavaScript benchmark that focuses on real world applications and forward-looking applications. Called Kraken, the benchmark addresses the elements of the Web that people often complain about for being too slow.

It is not quite ready for primetime, but with the announcement of OpenIndiana, a so-called spork of Oracle's OpenSolaris Unix distribution, the server world is getting a familiar, re-opened, and community-developed operating system aimed specifically at data center workloads.

Marina is a senior software engineer at Red Hat and has been involved in free software development for quite some time. She shares with us her opinions about the importance of software freedom and how to get more women involved in the free software community.

While Kristian Høgsberg is now likely on his way to Toulouse, France for the 2010 X Developers' Summit, over the past day he has been working on some minor changes to the Wayland Display Server that he has now been working on for a while to leverage the latest Linux graphics technologies like kernel mode-setting and is something we initially reported on back in 2008 when it began.

If Debian means one thing, it’s functionality. You typically don’t go to Debian for cutting-edge features or fancy bells and whistles, but if you’re after an extremely versatile, stable, and dependable Linux, it can’t be beat. One of Debian’s newer offerings is the ability to create a custom Live CD directly from their website. You choose your options, they generate the image. Like all things Debian, it’s not flashy, you’ll get no AJAX animations or jQuery effects, just a functional, flexible, and powerful tool, and here’s how to use it.

The Linux-based Android mobile platform is exploding, with thousands of tasty apps to choose from. Juliet Kemp shares a few of her favorites, from secure remote administration to eBooks to file managers and more. The huge number of apps available for Android is both a joy and something of a trial. Finding an app that does the thing you want can be something of a hit-and-miss experience. Here's a roundup of a few of the most useful ones.

In a discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Linus Torvalds leaked the fact the he became a US citizen last week. The Linux inventor grew up in Finland where he studied at the University of Helsinki. He moved to the US in 1997 to work for the chip developer Transmeta. For several years he has lived in Portland, Oregon, and receives an income as a Fellow of the Linux Foundation.

In our last article we examined the steps required to prepare an Android application for publication to the Android Market, or for that matter, any number of other venues for distributing Android applications.

After complaints from users, Dell has now released the modified source code from the version of Android that runs on its Streak tablet. Over the summer, complaints had mounted that Dell had not released its changes to the GPL-licensed components, including the Linux kernel, that make up the tablet's operating system. After a period of silence, at the end of August Dell said it would address the issue. Dell have now released the source code, which includes the Linux kernel, BlueZ Bluetooth stack, the WLAN WPA supplicant, WebKit web browser and JPEG Library.

Linus Torvalds rarely makes appearances at conferences, and it's even less common for him to get up in front of the crowd and speak. He made an exception for LinuxCon Brazil, though, where he and Andrew Morton appeared in a question and answer session led by Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin. The resulting conversation covered many aspects of kernel development, its processes, and its history.

The folks who brought the three-part Penumbra series to the Linux community now bring us another even more terrifying adventure. Amnesia: The Dark Descent follows Daniel as he confronts a sinister dark shadow in his quest to hunt and kill evil Alexander in order to save his own mind and life. Danger hides in every corner. Risk life and limb at every turn, your very sanity in peril with every step into the dark descent.

In a low-key announcement at the end of last week, Google's open source supremo Chris DiBona announced that their project hosting service, Google Code, is ending its embargo on open source licenses they don't like. These include the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) controversial AGPLv3 (a licence designed to make the give-back compulsion of the GNU GPL apply to web-hosted services like the ones Google provides) and Sun's CDDL (the licence used by OpenSolaris and by many of the former Sun's Java projects).

Email, love it or loathe it, there's no getting away from it. On an average day I process hundreds of emails, but haven't yet found an open source mail user agent (MUA) that I really like. Ten years ago this wasn't surprising, but today? Why aren't open source mailers keeping up with the rest of the Linux desktop, and being blown away by Gmail?