Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

Email is not unlike MPI. The similarities may help non-geeks understand parallel computers a little better. Continue reading →

This article should acquaint you with basic Arduino programming and show you how to write programs that interact with objects in the real world. (A mandatory disclaimer: the last time I really studied electronics was way back in high school, so this article focuses more on the programming aspects, rather than the electronic side of things.)

Earlier this month I benchmarked all the major Linux file-systems of Ubuntu 12.04: ReiserFS, JFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS. While Btrfs performed well with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it was not always the fastest although it does offer the most advanced feature-set. For those looking to tune a Btrfs file-system for performance, published now are some reference benchmarks showing the Linux Btrfs performance with varying mount options.

Con Kolivas announced this weekend the release of an updated BFS scheduler for the recently-released Linux 3.3 kernel. The new BFS scheduler is at version 0.420 and is codenamed "Smoking", with "a fairly large architectural change" since earlier versions of this out-of-tree kernel scheduler...

There's a few updates concerning Linux benchmarks of NVIDIA's brand new GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics card, the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 3 platform, and other Linux performance topics...

XBMC, the very well known open-source multimedia / HTPC project, has finally reached its XBMC 11.0 (codenamed "Eden") milestone...

There's new releases of some key EFL -- Enlightenment Foundation Libraries -- packages. This round of Enlightenment package updates has also introduced some new components...

Intel's open-source Linux graphics developers remain confident that we're likely to the final chapter of the lets-try-rc6-by-default-one-more-time saga. The RC6 power-savings feature for Sandy Bridge graphics hardware should hopefully be -- finally -- sane to keep enabled by default...

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon will be talking about using open-source tools for game development next weekend at the 2012 Flourish conference...

As Phoronix Forums readers have been quick to discover, early "beta" builds of AMD's Catalyst 12.3 proprietary Linux driver have begun to appear publicly...

'What? No, nobody called from Redmond or Nokia' Rovio has apparently changed its mind, with the company's CEO telling Reuters that a Windows Phone 7 port of Angry Birds in Space is in the offing, though he's not saying when.…

The PCI pull request went in yesterday for the Linux 3.4 kernel. Overall it's a fairly uninteresting pull for the 3.4 cycle, but there's two basic exceptions...

For those wanting to setup a Xen VGA pass-through configuration whereby your host graphics card can be controlled by a guest operating system, like Windows within Linux, here's a guide how to setup this interesting feature...

Freedom is more than just a word Open ... and Shut For developers looking to avoid the Dementor's Kiss of Apple's all-consuming iOS ecosystem, Google has long played the knight in shining open-source armour. Indeed, latest data from IDC and Appcelerator suggest developers are still betting big on Google, expecting its broad range of social products to mint them money. But given Google's track record in social, is this faith misplaced?…

Microsoft lacks the gravity to attract a port Rovio has shunned Windows Phone for the latest outing of the super-soaraway Angry Birds franchise, saying that it can't support every platform and has no plans to support that one.…

What does the Linux Btrfs file-system and Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game have in common?..

For those owners of Intel's latest-generation Core i3/i5/i7 "Sandy Bridge" processors, here's a quick look at the impact of some GCC tuning options specific to these latest AVX-enabled Intel processors...

Following recent advancements in the open-source Radeon Linux driver like 2D color tiling support, I've carried out some new benchmarks of the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver compared to AMD's official Catalyst driver. This time around, the open-source driver is seeing tests against AMD's binary blob when various performance-optimizing tweaks are enabled to see where the performance stands today.

The Document Foundation (TDF), which produces the leading open source office software suite LibreOffice, is on schedule for the release of a cloud version of its software next month.

The reverse-engineered Nouveau driver project has two huge surprises to share with the NVIDIA-using Linux desktop community today. One announcement concerns new hardware enablement (Kepler!) and the other concerns the Nouveau driver's position within the Linux kernel.