Showing all newswire headlines

... Project Sputnik, as it was called, proved popular and Dell decided to release the creation as a product; the XPS 13 Developer Edition is now available in the US and Canada, and will be available from early next year in other markets, Dell said.

The $1,549 Dell XPS 13 comes preloaded with Ubuntu 12.04, the long-term support version of the open-source OS. The XPS 13 features a Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. The Windows version of the same device costs $1,499; Dell initially expected the Ubuntu version to sell for a little bit less than its Microsoft counterpart.

High-energy physics experiments tend to generate huge amounts of data. While this data is passed through analysis software, very often the first thing you may want to do is to graph it and see what it actually looks like. To this end, a powerful graphing and plotting program is an absolute must. One available package is called Extrema (http://exsitewebware.com/extrema/index.html). Extrema evolved from an earlier software package named Physica. Physica was developed at the TRIUMF high-energy centre in British Columbia, Canada. It has both a complete graphical interface for interactive use in data analysis and a command language that allows you to process larger data sets or repetitive tasks in a batch fashion.

After earlier this week delivering a 12-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison with the open-source Linux Gallium3D graphics driver, being published today is a similar comparison on the NVIDIA side. Tested for this article were eight NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from multiple hardware generations while using the very latest open-source Nouveau driver code.

Splashtop, which is especially well-known to many people for its history of letting users run a lightweight version of Linux alongside other operating systems, has a new spin on streaming with Slashtop Streamer for Linux. Splashtop Streamer is an audio-video streaming server, enabling remote access to a computer from an Android device (tablet/phone) or an iOS device (iPad/iPhone/iPod). You can connect within a Local Area Network or through a cross-network or Internet connection. You can use Splashtop Streamer for Linux in conjunction with Splashtop 2 to connect to a remote computer running Ubuntu to use Linux applications and access their data.

My very first though was a foolish one; “They ported all of this games to Linux and I haven’t heard about even one of them until now?” Very foolish.

More than five years after it began selling PCs with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled in the United States, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has compiled a lackluster record in the eyes of many Linux advocates when it comes to promoting open source alternatives to Windows. Yet as a Canonical employee recently pointed out, Dell is now offering a $70 markdown on one laptop model when customers purchase it with Ubuntu instead of a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) OS. Is this a mistake, or a sign of changes to come on Dell’s part?

How to host your Web Site on Google Drive (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images included).

But now that a beta edition has been released, here are some screen shots from test installations of the KDE and GNOME 3 editions.

The H Community Calendar presents the coming month's events in various open source, development, Linux, Unix and other communities, from multi-day conferences to user group get-togethers

(Sacramento, CA, USA: November 29, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), applauds the release of the flagship report "The Information Economy Report 2012: The Software Industry and Developing Countries" by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The report provides specific recommendations on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for national policy makers and includes two examples of the value of LPI's training and certification programs for ICT development.

Well half a year has passed since Linux Girl last wrote about the invasion of the tiny, Linux-powered PCs, and she's delighted to report that the trend has shown no sign of slowing down. No indeed! "Tiny $57 PC is like the Raspberry Pi, but faster and fully open" is one headline that recently appeared, for example. "Meet the PengPod, a 'true Linux' tablet starting at $120" is yet another.

If in these days you take a look at the list of possible gifts/gadgets that will be hot in the next Christmas you’ll find almost for sure the Raspberry Pi. This is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also able to play high-definition video and sending the otuput through an HDMI interface to a TV or a monitor and all of this at a starting price of around 25$.

IT pros need to understand their role is changing in the face of the cloud, but that doesn't mean they don't have one.

Google has updated the Stable, Beta and Developer Channels of the desktop version of its Chrome browser with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The Stable Channel update closes seven security vulnerabilities, three of them rated High, and includes bug fixes. New stable Chrome versions for iOS and Android have also been released and include minor improvements. The iOS version of the browser now supports Apple's Passbook application.

As regular readers and podcast listeners will know, we were fortunate enough to meet Linus Torvalds at the end of July for an interview that was published in Linux Format 163. Well, here it is - complete with Linus' attempts to defend PulseAudio, the moment he nearly threw us out when he finds an iPhone, and his opinions on everything from Android and Apple's Macbook Air, to KDE, Gnome and the Raspberry Pi.

As a child I remember being fascinated by science, and developed an overwhelming urge to learn how everything worked. I loved science fiction, seeing authors explore the very edges of possible futures, extrapolating out the possibly feasible to its very limits. As I grew older and began a degree in Physics, I became even more certain I wanted to be a scientist and had a vision of what real science was all about. I remember the first few months of my PhD work being quite disappointing, learning that papers often lacked the necessary details to reproduce key reactions, or that I didn’t have access to certain papers due to their age or the journal they had been published in.

Do you want a serious—I mean serious—developer laptop? Then Dell and Ubuntu have the system for you in the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.

Last week I shared some early benchmarks of the Samsung Chromebook while running Ubuntu Linux. The Samsung Chromebook is very interesting since it's one of the few readily available computers on the market employing an ARM Cortex-A15 processor rather than Cortex-A9 or other models. The Cortex-A15 found in the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC proved to be very powerful and this Chromebook was quite a good deal with it being trivial to load Ubuntu Linux (and other distributions) while costing only $250 USD for this ARM-based laptop. In the past week I have carried out additional ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks, including a comparison of its performance the the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core ARM "Cardhu" tablet and several Intel Atom/Core x86 systems.

This guide shows how to work with the btrfs file system on Linux. It covers creating and mounting btrfs file systems, resizing btrfs file systems online, adding and removing devices, changing RAID levels, creating subvolumes and snapshots, using compression and other things. btrfs is still marked as experimental, but all those features make it a very interesting and flexible file system that should be taken into consideration when you look for the right file system.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably have an interest in 'openness' of some kind: open standards and open source software most likely, but you may also feel strongly about openness in other technology-enabled areas, like open data or open government - or openness as a guiding principle, no matter what the digital terrain.