Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you are using a Firewire recording interface with the FFADO drivers, and keep getting a "ERROR: Could not communicate with the FFADO DBus service" message, or "Somehow the connection to the dbus-service of FFADO couldn't be established", I may have the solution for you.

For only the second time since Big Blue entered the Unix market for real in February 1990 with the launch of the RS/6000 line of workstations and servers, the company is letting customers who use its Power-based servers take a future AIX release for a test drive in an open beta program. The AIX 7 open beta, which launches today, gives customers a download of the binaries in a DVD ISO image that they can burn onto media and install on the last several generations of Power machines.

Spotify yesterday released a preview version of its peer-to-peer (P2P) music application for desktop Linux, packaged as Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04. The software shares most of the features of the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Spotify, but requires Spotify Premium membership.

Earlier this month the developers behind the Unigine Engine shared their latest update on this advanced 3D engine that's fully supported under Linux. With the latest work on this game engine, there are significant performance optimizations to UnigineScript (the developers say these optimizations are "HUGE"), volumetric light shafts, optimized rendering of meshes in non-instanced mode, optimizations of the Unigine math library, and a note there is a new terrain system on the way, among other changes. Unigine Corp also dropped their first public confirmation of a new strategy game they are developing.

Team Tiny Core announced the first release candidate for version 3.0 of its small-footprint, in-memory Linux desktop distribution. Tiny Core Linux 3.0 RC1 advances to Linux 2.6.33.3, and offers improved compressed swap in RAM, a 64-bit version, enhanced virtualization, and the Ext4 file-system, says the project.

Learn how to create partitions on a disk drive and how to format them for use on a Linux® system as swap or data space. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn about partitions and Linux filesystems for your own use.

Occasionally, when using the version control system Git, you may find yourself committing a file you didn't intend to. For example, you might want to commit two files separately, with different log messages (making it easier to roll back unconnected changes separately), but accidentally use the usually helpful shortcut git commit -a and commit both at once.

SystemRescueCD is a free, Linux-based CDROM image for system recovery that boots into a minimal graphical interface and provides a host of useful tools culled from many sources. In addition to the suite of dedicated recovery and repair utilities, the disk can get you to a basic desktop that includes network connectivity and a web browser. This is an important feature as, let's face it, most recovery work requires the odd visit to a search engine.

Windows is still the server platform of choice in India but enterprises, especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs), are increasingly favoring the Linux operating system, according to a new report Monday by Springboard Research. Between April 2009 and May 2010, overall Linux server OS adoption in India increased to 8.1 percent from 7 percent, and continues to rise, Springboard said in a statement. The study was based on data compiled from 408,756 servers in the country. The Windows Server platform, on the other hand, currently has a 91.8 percent share in India's enterprise market, with Windows Server 2003 accounting for 70 percent of adoption.

Last October I wrote about running Ubuntu 9.10 with older PC hardware, but over this past weekend I restored an even older Phoronix test system to see how it runs with the most recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and the very-latest Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot in relation to the older Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS. This antiquated system has an Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB IDE hard drive, and an ATI Radeon 9200PRO AGP graphics card.

Since late 2009, talk of how Google's Chrome OS is being positioned to "take on" Microsoft Windows has been promoted by individuals who I believe have no idea what they're talking about. By Google's own admission, Chrome OS is being designed for near exclusive use on netbook computers, due to its minimalist nature. And as we know, netbooks make up a small piece of the collective PC market. This clearly leaves out of desktops and laptops, which will remain dominated by the Windows OS (near term, at least).

Google has unveiled an experimental tool that lets non-developers develop applications for Android phones. This Google Labs project is known as App Inventor for Android, and it's based on platforms built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Scratch, the well-known visual web app builder designed for non-programmers as young as eight years old.

LXer Feature: 12-July-2010

If you've been grappling with Linux hardware problems, take heart: Jack Wallen has some strategies for resolving common issues--or avoiding them in the first place.

DuckDuckGo is a new search engine focused on relevant results and respecting user privacy. Actually a mash-up of several other sites like Wikipedia, About, Bing, and Yahoo, DuckDuckGo also uses it's own web crawler, the DuckDuckBot. DuckDuckGo uses what it calls Zero-click search results to try to guess what you are looking for and give it to you directly in your search results. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few weeks now, and I'm impressed. What further impresses me is that the entire site is built on open source tools, ranging from FreeBSD for the operating system to good old-fashioned Perl for the logic.

There's a delightful story that does the rounds regarding one of the founding fathers of Linux. It's said that during the early days of the opensource operating system's development, this fellow took to attending conferences in complete silence. All attempts to communicate via means other than hand gestures were refused. Instead, he pointed at things. Apocryphal or not, the tale remains highly relevant today. Our hero's beef was with the windows-based graphical interface metaphor and its knack for turning us into mouse-pointing morons.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the open core debate, and a popular opinion seems to inflict some sort of excommunication to anyone having a less than pure open source monetization process. Therefore I thought that I would add some unsolicited input to this matter. Now, what is a pure open source monetization process? The answers to that question echo the armchair soccer coaches who have been entertaining the world with their wrong predictions, while teams with less theory and more practice have advanced to better results.

If you haven't gotten our subtle hints during the past year or so, IRC certainly is not dead. It really is the best way to get knowledgeable support from the folks who know best. There are a few caveats, however, that may not be obvious to people new to this old-school chat protocol.

Battle beyond Windows, Jobs, and Linux Open...and Shut The desktop is dead. Just ask Microsoft and Apple. Or, better yet, ask Facebook and Google. Sure, we still use our desktops and laptops, mostly Windows PCs and Macs. What else would we use to draft our faxes? But the industry has moved on, and the petty squabbles over Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux no longer resonate like they once did. The twentieth-century desktop has given way to a new breed of "desktop" platform. It's called the web. Have you heard of it?

Reprieved from financial troubles with fresh investments, Mandriva released the final Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. The latest stable release is touted for offering faster boot times, enhanced "Smart Desktop" file-organization technology, easier printer and wireless configuration, and updates including GNOME 2.30.1 and KDE 4.4.3, says Mandriva.