Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

My father recently retired a 1-Ghz AMD (AMD) computer with 1 Gbyte of RAM that he'd built from mail-ordered parts. He'd dropped the cash for a new Dell (Dell) with Vista, which he likes quite a lot (no grousing, please, it happens), and let me have the old machine. My first move: Wipe it clean, install Linux, and prepare it for an exercise in "hand-me-down computing."

With Apoteket's server infrastructure reaching end of life and experiencing performance issues, Apoteket said it made the decision to replace both the hardware platform and the server operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel-based servers. This replaced its existing SPARC-based Solaris servers running an in-hosue developed ERP system. All servers at approximately 900 pharmacies have now been replaced with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Atmel(R) Corporation and TimeSys(R) announced today a free Linux(R) Board Support Package (BSP) for Atmel's ARM9-based AT91SAM9 Microcontrollers. Supporting the entire range of SAM9 products, this BSP includes Atmel's Linux kernel and drivers, BusyBox utilities for basic commands and features, and a Linux host/cross toolchain capable of re-building the Linux kernel and the basic packages included in the BSP. Together with a full documentation set and support services, this offering provides a ready-to-use package to validate Linux with Atmel microcontrollers.

Fabless chip supplier Broadcom Corp. (Irvine, Calif.) has joined the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation as an associate member. The group, originally formed by Motorola Inc., NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Vodafone plc, is chartered with delivering a consistent open-source Linux software platform for mobile phones. Broadcom said Linux is gaining momentum in mobile phones and that it would work with LiMo Foundation members to address power consumption, size and cost, in an effort to achieve widespread adoption of Linux-based handsets.

[If they only started making Linux drivers for their wireless cards... – Sander]

IBM has released a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The company announced on Sept. 18 the tool set, known as Lotus Symphony, at the IBM Collaboration Summit at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and ODF (Open Document Format), and can also output content in PDF format. "IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux," Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM Software Group, said in a statement.

"Here's a new version of my credentials patch. It's still very basic, with only Ext3, (V)FAT, NFS, AFS, SELinux and keyrings compiled in on an x86_64 arch kernel,"stated David Howells. He described the patch as,"introduce a copy on write credentials record (struct cred). The fsuid, fsgid, supplementary groups list move into it (DAC security). The session, process and thread keyrings are reflected in it, but don't primarily reside there as they aren't per-thread and occasionally need to be instantiated or replaced by other threads or processes."

Today (22 September) isOneWebDay, a project I'm proud to have been a part of sinceSusan Crawford thought it up many months before the first one last year. OneWebDay is meant as a day on which we celebrate the Web and what it does for each of us. So I want to celebrate what the Web does, and continues to do, for me as a journalist.The arc of my writing career is something of a parabola: a broad U-shaped valley between the time when I worked as a newspaper and magazine writer and editor and the time when I started writing on— and about— the Web, and everything that makes it good, including (and especially) Linux.

We’ve read your emails, and we’ve seen your posts. It’s pretty clear that you’re all smart cookies. Well, the time has come to test your open source smarts. Introducing the first ever Red Hat Certified Challenge.

Performance Technologies today announced the availability of another member of its AdvancedMC(TM) compute module product line -- the AMC121. The AMC121 features a 1.5 GHz Intel Core Duo processor with enhanced Intel SpeedStep(R) technology for more efficient power use, 64-bit memory to 2GB, USB2.0, and support for both AMC.1 (PCI Express) and AMC.2 (Ethernet) at the card edge. It is fully integrated with the company's NexusWare(R) carrier-grade, Linux(R)-based operating system and development environment. NexusWare is built on the 2.6.20 Linux kernel, and is CGL 3.2 registered (4.0 ready) as well as POSIX compliant.

When scientists and engineers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) in Indian Head, Maryland needed to ensure they could make reliable, qualitative predictions regarding the vulnerability and survivability of targets for U.S. Navy warheads, they turned to SGI for a new Altix system, capable to handle the data intensive application's demanding computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element requirements. Running on industry standard SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server 10 fro Novell(R), the new system also features 28TB of RAID storage in two SGI InfiniteStorage 220 direct attached systems for data consolidation.

Josh Triplettannounced the release ofSparse v0.04. Originally written by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Sparse has been maintained by Josh since 2006. Highlights of the new release include a new automated test suite invoked via'make check', a new utility named'c2xml' for generating an XML representation of C files, man pages for'sparse' and'cgcc', improved graphing, and numerous bug fixes.

A few weeks back I wrote a post on my blog page about this topic, and put some questions to my readers to know what everybody thought about it. I received a number of good responses, and so rewrote that post as an article (this one) so everyone can know more clearly what lies at the back of our minds when we use GNU/Linux as a home user.

Last week, we signed a deal with Microsoft. Remain calm. The good news is everyone paid attention. The bad news is it spawned a lot of questions - which I thought I'd answer here. The announcement was this: Microsoft will be supporting Project Virginia, Sun's soon-to-be-announced hypervisor platform - meaning we can consolidate and manage Windows (alongside Linux and Solaris). Secondly, Sun will support Windows virtualization - allowing Windows to do the same for Solaris. And finally, Sun agreed to package and support (or 'OEM') Windows for customers and partners that want to buy direct from Sun.

SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday. In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listedIBM ( IBM), Red Hat, Microsoft (MSFT), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

The word for today is disappointment. The New York Times says Apple is blowing its desktop opportunity, ignoring the channel, despite its incredible awesomeness. As to Linux, it’s still too geeky. This final verdict, issued by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal concerning a Dell laptop he reviewed with Ubuntu, has been spreading like wildfire on the Internets, even hitting some political blogs. Trouble is, Mossberg admits in his story that he talked to Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth who admits the current version of the software is not really aimed at mainstream users. He found it’s not something it admits it’s not, and somehow that’s a headline. Zonbu, which Mossberg did not review, is aimed at mainstream users. And early reviews on Zonbu are quite promising.

Anders Magnusson's BSD-licensed pcc compiler has been imported into CVS. He wrote to NetBSD's tech-toolchain list: "It is not yet bug-free, but it can compile the i386 userspace. The big benefit of it (apart from that it's BSD licensed, for license geeks :-) is that it is fast, 5-10 times faster than gcc, while still producing reasonable code. The only optimization added so far is a multiple-register-class graph-coloring register allocator, which may be one of the best register allocators today. Conversion to SSA format is also implemented, but not yet the phi function. Not too difficult though, after that strength reduction is high on the list."

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s decision last month to sell desktop PCs with Linux installed on them in Australia is giving hope to Linux advocates at the Encompass HP user group that a similar system may be on its way in the U.S. Steve Illgen heads the Linux special interest group within Encompass, an independent user group in Chicago and has about 15,000 members. He thinks that small and midsize businesses in the U.S. also need a Linux desktop to give them a less expensive alternative to systems running Windows Vista.

It used to be that taking advantage of Bluetooth on your system could be fiddly, and for the non-power user pretty intimidating; Fedora 8 hopes to change this with improvements to the interface and better integration of existing systems. To find out a bit more I spoke to Bastien Nocera, and had a play with the packages in Fedora 8 Test 2: read on to find out more and find a screencast of Bluetooth done right in Fedora!

Whenever the topics of background wallpapers for plasma comes up, 99% of the time first question is: can they be animated? Animated backgrounds would be cool, but the consistency with which people ask that is pretty impressive. So before I continue on let me just get that question out of the way: "Yes, background wallpapers can be animated." Whew! Now on to what I've been doing with backgrounds since yesterday

The technical manager of the JackLab project, Oliver Bengs, released the final 1.0 version of the JackLab Audio Distribution (JAD) today after a development period of over eight months. JAD 1.0 is based upon openSUSE 10.2 with the addition of a real-time Kernel for fast audio processing with the professional audio server JACK. JackLab 1.0 is the most comprehensive selection of open source audio and multimedia software to date. The Enlightenment D17 window manager (with ‘KDE-lite’ tweaks) is used by default, with the option of using the full KDE 3.5.7 instead.