Showing all newswire headlines

Last week we talked about a new X.Org release process proposal for improving the consistency and quality of X Server releases through taking a number of relatively simple steps. Well, this week from XDS2009, a revised proposal has been agreed upon now making it policy for X Server 1.8 / X.Org 7.6 and later.

When you say "log-structured file system," most storage developers will immediately think of Ousterhout and Rosenblum's classic paper, The Design and Implementation of a Log-structured File System - and the nearly two decades of subsequent work attempting to solve the nasty segment cleaner problem (see below) that came with it. Linux developers might think of JFFS2, NILFS, or LogFS, three of several modern log-structured file systems specialized for use with solid state devices (SSDs). Few people, however, will think of SSD firmware. The flash translation layer in a modern, full-featured SSD resembles a log-structured file system in several important ways. Extrapolating from log-structured file systems research lets us predict how to get the best performance out of an SSD. In particular, full support for the TRIM command, at both the SSD and file system levels, will be key for sustaining long-term peak performance for most SSDs.

The Pathscale compiler, a favorite of those using AMD (Opteron) clusters has been purchased by Cray and will be open sourced.

There are a plethora of opportunities for geeks to meet and greet one another throughout the year: linux.conf.au, Linux Congress, OSCON, Linux Plumber's Conference, LinuxCon, the list goes on. There is one, however, where the focus is purely on the customer, so-to-speak — the end user. The conference in question, aptly named the End User Summit, is quickly drawing near, and the Linux Foundation is wondering who wants to be there.

Jason Perlow has written an article about Richard Stallman, Watch Out for That Meteor, Stallman. There are some factual errors in the article, so let me step up to the plate and fix them. Here's Perlow's theme in a nutshell, as published in an extended caption under a disrespectful cartoon of Stallman: "Richard M. Stallman (RMS) the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has labeled prominent Open Source software developer Miguel De Icaza a “Traitor” for joining the Board of Directors of Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation as well as for his creation of the Microsoft .NET-compatible Mono software development framework. While RMS’s hatred of all things proprietary has fueled the FSF’s and GNU’s mission to create Free software alternatives for what seems like eons, the overwhelming desire for interoperability between open and proprietary systems makes this narrow-minded Cretaceous world view ripe for extinction." I have some news for you. The GPL ensures that Free Software will never be extinct. Thank you, Mr. Stallman, for inventing it. For that alone, he will go down in history. Perlow will not. And Miguel will not. You and I will not. But Stallman will. Do you know why? Because with just his brain, he changed the world for the better.

Openshot is a video editor for linux, is one of the best ones existing actually for linux. The news is that now has a PPA this mean easy install for Ubuntu users, but the big news is that the new version come with 30 new effects. See the video demonstration what you can do with Openshot. and follow the installation instauctions for Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic Koala

Your Linux computer may have hundreds of applications installed. How can any system menu be organized sanely? How can anyone find anything? Bruce Byfield examines the different approaches taken by the Gnome and KDE teams to deal with this.

With just a few modifications and some experimentation, your Ubuntu box can realise its untapped potential. We have identified 8 tips to help you achieve this. Most of the tips are really easy to implement, and are perfectly safe.

What the heck is happening in Redmond? Is Microsoft really giving away antivirus software? Yes, friends, it appears that they are. Come on Microsoft, we really want to hate you. I've carried this Microsoft voodoo doll* around with me for years--stabbing it every time I have to pay money for one of your products on a new laptop or desktop computer. I cringe when I see "Vista Ready." And, I almost hurl penguin when I have to activate my software. So, somebody please pinch me, wake me up, take the needle out of my arm and tell me it's all been a bad trip.

A group from the ETH technical institute in Zurich is working together with software giant Microsoft on a new kind of operating system called Barrelfish. The first results are now available under an open source license.

A new wave of women's liberation is crashing on an unexpected shore, the world of free and open source developers. The FOSS communities might pride themselves with being the promoters of free, open and transparant. It is a world where a meritocracy rules, where you are judged by your skills and not by who you are of who you know. Right? Wrong!

Hot on the heels of Android 1.6 (code name Donut), the Android development team has now released version 1.6 rel 1 of the Android NDK (Native Development Kit). The NDK is a toolkit comparable with the standard Android Software Development Kit (SDK), which allows Android developers to write parts of their applications in native code languages such as C and C++.

Learn about the virtualization capabilities of both HP-UX® and AIX®, the fundamental differences between virtualization products on HP and IBM® and how they integrate with the hardware platforms in which they run. The intent of this article is to educate you and also to help you make informed decisions as to which platform works best for you, from a feature and functionality standpoint and for your long-term strategic goals.

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is an open source Web development platform that uses Linux as operating system, Apache as the Web server, MySQL as the relational database management system and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language. In this Simple tutorial we will explain you how to install LAMP server on your Slackware 13. The installation will be done in 3 steps:

Microsoft has received support from an unexpected quarter in the dispute over Chrome Frame, an extension which embeds Google's Chrome browser in Internet Explorer. Mike Shaver, Vice President Engineering for Mozilla Corporation, gives his views in a blog posting in which he criticises the plug-in.

My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used. The appliance is based on Ubuntu Jeos LTS (8.04.3 at the time of this writing). Almost all used components are from the related repositories. This tutorial shows how the appliance was implemented.

Plymouth, the nifty boot splash program developed by Red Hat to replace RHGB and leverages kernel-based mode-setting to provide a flicker-free experience, is in the process of picking up more features. Committed to the Plymouth repository is now a DRM plug-in.

In a posting on his FSF blog, Richard Stallman has apologised for "repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false". The claim, that Mac OS X has a backdoor which could install changes without the user's permission, is one that Stallman has repeated, but he now says there "is no basis to claim there is one".

Bletchley Park, the top secret code breaking hub that played a pivotal role in the outcome of World War Two, has finally been awarded development funding of some £460,500 ($735,500) from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

I loved Amarok 1.4 and even used it in Gnome. Then, I really hated all the 2.x series until this 2.2 RC1. It's kind of slow, but it finally looks like a real music player and reminds me why I liked Amarok so much. I'm currently using it in Ubuntu Jaunty and since there are only .deb files for Ubuntu Karmic posted on the announcement download link (actually those are for version 2.2 beta), I thought I'd let you know how to install it in Ubuntu Jaunty (and Fedora, thanks to Fedora-ES).