Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

For the past several years, I've used a custom-built file server at my house. I've upgraded it many times, but it began life, as near as I can recall, in April 2000. When I say "upgraded", I mean the internals have been swapped completely on at least two occasions among other things. The most-recent major upgrade was in 2006 (or thereabouts) when I added a software RAID5 with three 500GB hard drives (later expanded to six). It has chugged along merrily for years, but lately it has begun showing its age. For starters, two terabytes of space isn't all that much anymore. Also, it's not as efficient power-wise as I would like (in my measurements, it draws between 1.8 and 2.0 amps continuously, depending on load). Finally, the case for this server takes up way too much space (it's a full tower).

Phones choke on big, slow and crashing upgrade Sony says its customers should avoid upgrading their Android devices to Ice Cream Sandwich, adding that many of them won't get the option anyway.…

After delivering benchmarks in March showing the performance gains of GCC 4.7 on Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, here's a look at how the latest LLVM/Clang 3.1 compiler from Apple is shaping up for these latest Intel CPUs.

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon, the famed Linux game developer, in the past has sharply criticized open-source Linux graphics drivers as not being mature and putting the Linux desktop into a dangerous position. In speaking to Ryan this weekend, his views on the open-source graphics drivers have changed...

"If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it is the light of the oncoming train" ~ Robert Lowell. Oh yes, another good quote. This post is on SSH tunneling, or as I like to call it 'Poor Man's VPN'. Contrary to the sysadmin's popular belief, SSH tunneling actually can be very valuable use for both techies and home users. more>>

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work in Umbrello towards supporting the automatic layout of diagrams and exporting to the graphviz dot format, along with optimization, bugfixes, and further migration of qt3 classes to qt4 KDevelop sees further work on the new debugger, which now displays variable values in tooltips and has a proper queue and optimization Kig refactors and improves the PGF/TikZ exporter Digikam includes further work to support XMP sidecar files and fixes to compile on ARM processors read more

Quake2World, a standalone game built atop the id Tech 2 engine but with sharply better graphics and other improvements, has finally reached a beta state. There's a number of features to this latest open-source first person shooter...

Linus Torvalds has put out the first release candidate for the forthcoming Linux 3.4 kernel...

Wine 1.5.1 was released today as the second development release following last month's stable Wine 1.4 release...

One of the targeted mobile platforms to target with Qt 5.0 has been Apple's iOS, but it looks like some technical problems may prevent Qt5 from coming to your iPhone or iPad...

Gabe Newell of Valve, the company behind Steam and the Source Engine, has allegedly sent over a message to Phoronix...

The DRM render-nodes work has been revived. This DRM branch originally started out when working on support for enabling two X.Org Servers to run off of a single graphics card...

David Airlie has a last-minute pull request for the Linux 3.4 kernel following last week's main DRM pull. This latest Git pull request is set to introduce DMA-BUF PRIME support in the mainline kernel...

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" can boot faster... sometimes. If you are not lucky, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can boot more than twice as slow as Ubuntu 10.04, the previous LTS release. Here are boot performance results of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on six distinct notebooks and comparing the Bootchart results upon clean installations of Ubuntu Linux going back as far as six years from the days of the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake" release.

Christian Ude, the mayor of Munich and occasional political cabaret artist, is trumpeting the cost savings made by switching from Windows to Linux, claiming his city has saved over €4m over the last year alone. Ude claims that Munich's IT department saved about a third of their total budget last year by dumping Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and OpenOffice. Buying new Windows software and upgrading systems so they could actually run it would have cost over €15m, with another €2.8m due in 3 to 4 years of license renewal, according to official figures.

Another session taking place next week at the 6th Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, besides Qualcomm allegedly wanting to kill all proprietary drivers, is two Microsoft engineers talking about their Linux driver development experiences...

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Akonadi improves Google Applets and Exchange 2003 support Simon introduces additional "finalize" step for command plugins KWin now supports live updates for thumbnails in tabbox and a new example script: "demands attention on current desktop," along with many bugfixes KDevelop introduces support for bzr (libdbusmenu-qt), storing a .kdev4 file in a project directory, opening files at a given line, and further work on a new debugger, as well as many bugfixes read more

There's a number of DRM-related updates today in the open-source Linux graphics world. First of all, libdrm 2.4.33 was released today (announcement). What makes this DRM library update noteworthy is that it integrates OMAP support and adds Trinity surface support on the Radeon DRM side. AMD published the open-source Trinity code (alongside the Radeon HD 7000 series DRM code) last week. The enablement code for the upcoming AMD Fusion "Trinity" APUs wasn't too bad -- compared to GCN / Southern Islands -- since it's based upon an existing GPU, but the support is available. The R600 Mesa Gallium3D driver was also updated to handle AMD Trinity.

While Ubuntu support for ARM hardware is in great shape with Canonical investing significantly in the rapidly-growing ARM-based mobile market and the to-be-growing ARM server-space, plus other Linux distributions taking on ARM, official support for Fedora on ARM hasn't been quick to come by. In fact, Fedora developers still remain unconvinced about taking on ARM as a primary architecture...

This past week on the Linux Planet has been all about key development milestones. The GNOME 3.4 desktop is nearly done, openSUSE is at its second milestone and Fedora is trying to figure out what will follow the Beefy Miracle.