Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The iPad has finally landed in the U.K., and I spent much of the past holiday weekend playing with mine. While investigating its use to sys admins, I came across this photo of someone using it to read shared docs from a server room. Trying out GoodReader, I established that you can transfer files from desktop to iPad. However, that's controlled from the desktop end, with the iPad viewed as a network share. I wanted to control the transfer from the iPad -- less forward planning required! You can also do this from an iPhone.

KDE has issued another update to the 4.4 desktop, applications and development libraries. KDE SC 4.4.4 brings, in addition to its funny version number, mainly small bugfixes that further polish the user experience. Most notable are probably sorting fixes for natural sorting in Dolphin, our nice file manager. The KDE release team also decided to do another release in the 4.4 series, 4.4.5, to come out next month, before fully concentrating on the 4.5 tree. SC 4.4.4 though is a stable update that is recommended to everyone running 4.4.3 or earlier. Packages from your favorite OS vendor will become available soon.

One of the companies that we have been collaborating with on some of the features for the Phoronix Test Suite has been CloudHarmony, which is a company that seeks to provide an assortment of information on different cloud computing platforms and offerings from the various firms. Using the Phoronix Test Suite they have been benchmarking a plethora of different cloud computing platforms and today they have published a huge batch of results -- benchmarks from over 150 different cloud server configurations from 20 different providers!

Over the next few weeks my articles will focus on software systems designed with special consideration for music composition by the use of algorithms. Wiktionary defines an algorithm as "... a precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps". By that definition algorithmic music composition is the process of using such procedures to generate values for the pitches, dynamics, rhythm, instrumentation, and other formal aspects of the composition.

LXer Feature: 01-June-2010

A month ago we began reporting some Linux hardware statistics from those Phoronix Test Suite users that utilize Phoronix Global for uploading their test results publicly so that they can share their benchmark scores with others and make it very easy for their friends or colleagues to compare their performance numbers via the Internet. In an effort to better track such hardware / software statistical information of the installed Linux base (as well as for other operating systems where the Phoronix Test Suite is supported), we are rolling out a new feature to expand upon this information.

DVD authoring can be a deceptively tricky business. Though it can take some time to convert source video to the proper MPEG format, the technical requirements for the various regions are standardized, so it is at least possible to configure the conversion tools and do it right, once and for all. What cannot be automated is building the disc structure that distinguishes a user-friendly disc with chapters, eye-pleasing menus, and a file hierarchy that makes sense from a down-and-dirty, technically-it-plays-but-it-looks-awful amateur job.

Standalone Network Attached Storage (NAS) servers provide file level storage to heterogeneous clients, enabling shared storage. This article presents the basics of NAS units (NFS servers) and how you can create one from an existing system.

When I spend time with other business owners the topic of “Vision, Mission and Values” often comes up. If an organization does not have a clear purpose and stated values, it can be easily tossed and turned by opportunities and obstacles that come along over time.

Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but one of the keyboard / mouse combos that clutter your desk or that your laptop was easier to control? If so then Synergy is the answer to your woes.

"Zonker" picks up right where he left off yesterday. In this Spring's Linux Distro Scorecard, he provides brief reviews of Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, Mandriva, openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu. Today, we get his take on the final three, and he delivers the payoff - the Linux Distro Scorecard - which can be a handy reference during the months ahead.

Next week at Computex, Via Technologies' WonderMedia Technologies subsidiary will demonstrate low-cost Android-based tablets based on the ARM9-based, 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm processor and related "SmartTouch" reference designs. The tablets will be manufactured by a variety of Chinese manufacturers, and sold for as low as $100 in the U.S. later this year, says Bloomberg.

Intel and Nokia joined forces earlier this year when they combined their mobile Linux operating systems to create MeeGo, an open source platform that is designed to support multiple hardware architectures and a wide range of mobile and embedded device form factors. The project officially launched last month when the source code and initial installable disk images became available.

Which Linux distro should I use? It's one of the most common questions for new and aspiring Linux users. There's so many to choose from, how can you pick the right one? Let's see if we can help clear it up a little and help you choose between all the other major distros. In order to give each distro its fair share of space, we're breaking this into a two-part series. Today, we'll review Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint and Mandriva. Tomorrow, we'll cover openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu as well as reveal our final "scorecard," which should provide you with a quick reference sheet for comparing Linux distros.

Ubuntu is probably the best known desktop GNU/Linux distribution at street level, picking up new users by word of mouth and astute viral marketing. So much so that for many users new to Linux, Ubuntu has become synonymous with Linux. Linux is Ubuntu; and Ubuntu is Linux. But Linux and free software come in many different flavours, and the adventurous user goes in search of wider options, other distributions and new desktops.

Google’s WebM, an open and royalty-free media format based on the VP8 video codec, was amongst the highlights coming out of Google I/O 2010. After examining the software license, open source pundits questioned whether WebM should, in theory, be classified open source software. The larger question is why Google allowed this debate to occur in the first place, and what it means for your organization when evaluating an “open source product”.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce the arrival of KOffice 2.2.0, half a year after version 2.1 was released. This release brings an unprecedented number of new features and bugfixes as can be seen in the full list of changes. There are two reasons for this very high development rate. Firstly, people have started to notice KOffice again and the developer community is growing. Secondly, Nokia is sponsoring development of KOffice for their mobile office viewer. Here follows a list of the most important changes in this release.

One week after Google open sourced its $124.6m VP8 video codec, Mozilla and Opera have called for its inclusion in the still-gestating HTML5 specification. As it stands, the HTML5 spec does not specify a video codec. Browser makers are free to use any codec they like, and the big names are split between the patent-backed H.264 and the open source Ogg Theora. In open sourcing VP8 and rolling it into larger media format known as WebM, Google is hoping to create a single open and royalty-free standard for video compression on the web, and though it hasn't specifically called for VP8's inclusion in the HTML5 spec, Mozilla and Opera see no reason to wait.

For the past six months we have been monitoring the performance of the very latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis across multiple systems. We have spotted a few regressions -- both positive and negative -- on occasion using our automated daily testing of the Linux kernel, but nothing like what we have encountered the past few days: the Linux 2.6.35 kernel performance has fallen hard. In fact, the performance has fallen very hard in a number of tests and right now, we would consider it a disaster. While the 2.6.35 code has not even seen its first release candidate yet, there are some massive performance drops in a variety of different tests that have yet to be corrected and nothing like we have encountered with previous kernel release cycles especially for a regression that has lived now for about one week.

After achieving success with the OLPC XO-1 laptop, the One Laptop Per Child foundation is setting in motion plans to create a working $100 tablet for CES 2011. Marvell Technologies announced Thursday that it will partner with the OLPC foundation to create the hardware for the proposed tablet, currently named the XO-3.