Showing headlines posted by Ridcully

With Fedora 19 being released soon, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has begun evaluating potential changes/features for Fedora 20. One of the features that was approved today is a build change for the RPMs that can yield greater code security but at the potential cost of performance. The change that was approved today is a GCC flag change for now using "-fstack-protector-strong" on building Fedora RPM packages rather than just the "-fstack-protector" argument. The -fstack-protector flag has the compiler generate extra code automatically to check for buffer overflows.

The Cubieboard open SBC project began shipping a faster Cubieboard2 version of its open source Linux and Android SBC, and revealed prototypes of a new, larger, enhanced Cubietruck model. Like the $59 Cubiboard2, the Cubietruck uses an Allwinner A20 dual-core Cortex-A7 SoC instead of the original’s single-core A10, and adds a 2GB RAM option, WiFi, Bluetooth, gigabit Ethernet, VGA, and SPDIF ports.

Digia has been experimenting with porting Google's open-source Chromium web-browser in the Qt world. This experimental prototype of Chromium in the Qt world is still very primitive and for now only works on Linux/X11 and gyp/ninja is used as the build system wrapped around qmake.

In this article, I've decided to follow up on a topic I wrote about not in my column directly, but as a feature article called "PXE Magic" in the April 2008 issue. In this column, I explain how to piggyback off of the work the Debian and Ubuntu projects have done with their PXE configuration to make your own fancy PXE menu without much additional work.

Canonical is hiring more engineers to work on their Mir Display Server and Unity desktop interface. For their Mir software engineer they are looking for someone that's great at C++, knows how to use the CMake build system, experiences with performance/robust/application-architecture designs, has experience with Linux development, and is experienced with OpenGL. Past experience with X.Org or Wayland isn't mentioned at all on the page. The Unity engineers they want are for working on the Unity APIs and Unity user-interface, as well as a quality engineer working on the UI.

Sony unveiled a supersized, 6.4-inch phablet running Android 4.2 on a 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 processor. The Xperia Z Ultra features Triluminos display technology with 1920 x 1080 progressive scan resolution, as well as 2GB RAM, LTE, an 8-megapixel camera, IP55/IP58 water and dust resistance, and a slim 6.5mm profile.

Open Badges is a big idea that’s come a long way in a very short time. It was less than a year and a half ago that Mozilla and MacArthur Foundation launched the first version of an open source system for issuing and sharing badges as a way to recognize, standardize and reward both traditional and informal learning.

With all of the controversy surrounding the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux on non-Unity desktops, a Canonical engineer sought to find out what Linux desktops would work atop Mir if using the XMir X.Org Server compatibility layer. Thomas was able to get the GNOME 3 Shell, Xfce, and LXDE running on XMir.

Like Jason Perlow, I doubt that the NSA is really that into me. It's all those other three-letter acronym (TLAs) organizations, such as the FBI, IRS, and SEC, which might have access to my data that I worry about.

It would be pretty handy to have five Linux live distros ready and waiting on your USB drive. Multisystem is an awesome tool created by LiveUSB.info, that works similar to our Windows based MultiBootISOs USB creator, but was created for use within Linux. It also uses Grub2 instead of Grub Legacy, and can be run from within Ubuntu Linux to create a Custom Multiboot UFD containing your favorite Bootable Live Linux Distributions.

The operating system at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD 9.0. It's been exposed that the operating system powering the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0. It's not a huge surprise FreeBSD is being used over Linux, in part due to the more liberal licensing. The PlayStation 4 is x86_64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD.

AntiX 13.1 was released this past week for those looking to load Linux on low-end computers. AntiX isn't a Linux distribution about killing off X.Org, but rather is about running Linux on low-end hardware.

The Linux 3.10-rc7 kernel was released today and if all goes according to plan this will be the last release candidate prior to the official release of the Linux 3.10 kernel.

For those curious how AMD's Bulldozer CPUs are performing with this week's release of LLVM 3.3, here are some benchmarks of LLVM/Clang 3.3 along with some early benchmarks of the latest Clang 3.4 development code from the AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core CPU.

Edward Snowden, the former CIA technician who blew the whistle on global surveillance operations, has opened a new front against the US authorities, claiming they hacked into Chinese mobile phone companies to access millions of private text messages. His latest claims came as US officials, who have filed criminal charges against him, warned Hong Kong to comply with an extradition request or risk complicating diplomatic relations after some of the territory's politicians called for Snowden to be protected.

Intel's Chris Wilson has done a Saturday morning release of the xf86-video-intel 2.21.10 driver to get out more performance tweaks and regression fixes. This xf86-video-intel 2.21.0 release also takes care of X-Video support for Haswell (though using VA-API is still the best video playback choice for Intel) and various other bugs. Chris lists the bugs.

A request from Reg forums, where dogged, a silver badge commentard, asks: I've decided to do something about my old Motorola RAZR V3xx. I love this thing. The form factor is perfect. It's pocket size, it's damage resistant, it's HSDPA, it's easy to use, it never drops calls, it gets four days usage from its tiny battery without issue.So, i thought, I'm still a programmer. I can do embedded work, I do it all the time. Why not? Why not? Because it's 2013 and there are no available resources to study from is why not.

Up this Saturday morning on Phoronix are some OpenGL/gaming performance benchmarks of eight different desktop environments currently available from the Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" package archive when using Intel Core i7 "Haswell" graphics with the Linux 3.10 kernel and Mesa 9.2.

For those wishing to play with the next-generation Unity 8 interface atop the Mir Display Server while running Ubuntu Touch, a Personal Package Archive (PPA) is now available. There's also been other Mir and Unity 8 progress made this week.

A Chinese startup called “Geak” (seriousy!) has developed an Android 4.1 smartwatch with built in WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and GPS wireless communications. The China-targeted Geak Watch runs on a 1GHz MIPS architecture SoC equipped with 512MB RAM and 4GB flash, and features a 1.55-inch 240 x 240-pixel touchscreen and IPX3 water resistance.