Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

After Red Hat Legal caused a delay in the Fedora 18 code-naming process, the list of possible code-names for this "Beefy Miracle" successor have been narrowed down to eight. As expected by now, all of the names are quite peculiar and the Fedora board is trying to decide whether to even continue this code-naming process...

After looking recently at the impact on performance and power consumption of various Linux desktop environments running under Ubuntu 12.04 (Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox), there were requests by many Phoronix readers to look at the impact of KDE on 3D gaming. KDE's KWin compositing window manager offers several options that can be easily changed that have a direct result on the Linux system's performance for full-screen OpenGL games.

The Google engineer who wrote a contentious email that Oracle is hinging part of its Java patent case on has said that his words are being misconstrued. Timothy Lindhom, a former Sun engineer who joined Google in 2005, wrote an email in 2010 to Andy Rubin, head of the Android team, saying he had been asked to look into alternatives to using Java in Google's mobile operating system.

Chunky between the buns, Btrfs-free If you’re called Beefy Miracle, you better pack a punch. And when the Fedora crew christened their next Linux desktop, that was certainly the plan.…

There's a party in the PCIe cache and your kernel isn't invited Fusion-io is wooing programmers with a software development kit loaded with interfaces so apps can directly access a flash cache as a memory tier.…

Here's a look at the top contributors to the Wayland Display Server project and the related Weston reference compositor along with some other statistics to reflect its development history...

The writer Toby Young tells a story about how the modern 100m race is run in primary schools. At the starting pistol, everyone runs like mad. At the 50m point, the fastest children stop and wait for the heavier kids to catch up. Then all the youngsters walk across the finishing line together, holding hands. I have no idea if this is true, but the media class’s newly acquired enthusiasm for teaching all children computer programming is very similar.

Valve is currently exploring possibilities for "wearable computing" and they're also getting into blogging...

In my past several articles, I've looked at various packages to do all kinds of science. Sometimes, however, there just isn't a tool to solve a particular problem. That's the great thing about science. There is always something new to discover and study. But, this means it's up to you to develop the software tools you need to do your analysis. This article takes a look at the GNU Scientific Library, or GSL. This library is the Swiss Army library of routines that you will find useful in your work.

The recently released Who Writes Linux kernel contributor list reveals that some of the usual supporters of Linux -- Red Hat, SUSE, IBM, Intel, Oracle -- remain firmly behind the open source OS. There has also been a lot of attention on the other contributors, which now include Microsoft. What I find most fascinating about the Linux contributor list are the contributors that show some new direction and potential for Linux, in this case the processor players.

Yesterday I reported on it appearing the 295.40 NVIDIA Linux driver effectively fell off a cliff with a range of performance regressions, stability issues, and other problems. This issue has been confirmed by NVIDIA and they're working to address the situation...

Computer languages and software interfaces may fall under copyright protection if Oracle succeeds in its Java lawsuit against Google. Amazingly, "copyfighters" appear to have paid little or no notice to this rare extension of copyright into new realms. But the consequences and costs for the software industry could be enormous.

Kubuntu gets new sponsorship, ChromeOS gets a new look and Debian stick with the tried and true

Patches were published today that introduce pinging support for Wayland clients, in an attempt to determine if a client is dead or alive. Should a client not respond to the ping request, the Wayland client's surface is faded-out...

While the NVIDIA 295.40 Linux graphics driver closes a high-risk security vulnerability, there's many reports coming in that the proprietary driver's performance has effectively fallen off a cliff and also caused stability issues...

One of the big patent cases in tech will finally come to trial this week, as Oracle takes on Google in court over its use of Java software in its Android operating system. Oracle laid hands on the Java platform when it bought Sun Microsystems in January 2010 and it had filed suit against Google under the new Sun moniker of "Oracle America" by August that year.

It's been a few months since last running any AMD Fusion tests under Linux, so here's a look at the AMD A8-3870K "Llano" APU performance under both the latest Catalyst driver and the open-source Radeon Gallium3D stack with Ubuntu 12.04. Besides the open-source driver being handily beaten by the Catalyst binary driver, the power efficiency is also a disappointment.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the Linux 3.4-rc3 kernel on Sunday evening...

Developers behind ErLLVM, an LLVM back-end for supporting high-performance Erlang, have called upon this code to be included in mainline LLVM...

A new bill making its way through Congress could allow the government to snoop on private data.