Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work in Plasma, with extra sources for the Weather data engine, work on the applet browser, and the start of SystemTray and RSIBreak plasmoids and a "next generation" application launcher, named Lancelot. Cut-down versions of Korundum and Smoke libraries for writing scripted Plasma applets. More interface work for Amarok 2. More work on XESAM (a shared metadata specification) integration in Strigi. An Akonadi resource for Facebook information.

Microsoft's patent indemnity agreements with several Linux vendors are unsettling the marketplace, Ubuntu leader says.

Full Circle issue #3 has come out. An independent magazine for the Ubuntu community, it features handy how tos, a preview of Compiz Fusion and a review of Ubuntu on a Macbook and more.

OutKafe, a cybercafe management suite distributed under the free GNU/GPL licence, has just had version 5.2.0 released. Largely a feature oriented release, the release is recommended for all current users.

No one would have believed me if I had said five years ago that Microsoft would have a page on its Web site called “Open Source at Microsoft” with the following remarkably sane and reasonable statement on the subject:

Grafpup 2.0 is a compact Linux distribution based on Puppy Linux and aimed at graphics professionals. It offers a variety of options for installation, a custom set of configuration utilities, and a niche suite of applications for digital artists. The graphics are soothing, and the Openbox desktop runs smoothly even on older hardware. Despite a few problems, Grafpup is a good choice for graphic designers and writers on the go.

Some entertaining lguest documentation discussed in an earlier story was merged into the mainline kernel with the commit message, "the netfilter code had very good documentation: the Netfilter Hacking HOWTO. Noone ever read it. So this time I'm trying something different, using a bit of Knuthiness." Both Netfliter and lguest, as well as the documentation for both, were written by Rusty Russell. He describes the lguest driver as, "a simple hypervisor for Linux on Linux. Unlike kvm it doesn't need VT/SVM hardware. Unlike Xen it's simply 'modprobe and go'. Unlike both, it's 5000 lines and self-contained."

In an interview today with Linux-Watch, controversial Linux leader Kevin Carmony confirmed rumors that he had resigned as CEO of desktop Linux vendor Linspire on July 31. Carmony said he plans to work on several of his own business projects, and on Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

Once upon a time there was a prosperous and entrepreneurial port city namedEMR. EMR had many ships and many ship owners who ferried lots of people to the healing spas that existed in nearby mountains. Unfortunately for the ships and passengers, the harbor was quite rocky and treacherous. Shipwrecks were common with large and grievous losses of life. Many of the entrepreneurs in the city thought that EMR could benefit from a modern marvel called alighthouse.

The Oxygen team has announced a wallpaper contest. Send in your wallpaper and it might become part of the default set of wallpapers for KDE 4.0. The Oxygen team is solliciting contributions from the community. The jury is nobody less than Icon GodFather David Vignoni, The Mad Scientist Nuno Pinheiro, The Loud American Ken Wimer and Oxygen Swiss Army Knife Riccardo Iaconelli.

LXer Feature: 05-Aug-2007

Some of the big news this week includes Mepis going back to Debian, Linus speaks out on the desktop, Microsoft finally got the result they wanted in Mass, An LXer settles the Mandriva - PCLinuxOS debate, some KDE 4.0 screenshots and Matt Hartley goes two for two in the FUD section of the LXer Weekly Roundup.

Google's first mobile phone will run a Linux operating system on a Texas Instruments "Edge" chipset, and will likely ship to T-Mobile and Orange customers in the Spring of 2008, according to unconfirmed reports. "GPhone" call minutes and text messages reportedly will be funded by mobile advertising. News of the so-called "GPhone" or "G-Phone" broke quietly about two weeks ago in the island nation of Singapore, where Jennifer Tan of Reuters subsidiary Anian Research filed a report on July 12.

I am growing infernally curious about what the end-of-the-year sales figures for Dell’s Ubuntu machines will be. Not just how many bought those machines or in what proportion to Windows users, but how their long-term experiences shape up against others (as well as whether or not they elected to buy support). What if Linux has its big day in the sun, and simply doesn’t achieve more than a small percentage of the market?

Nick Piggin used 'git bisect' to track a lmbench regression to the main CFS commit, leading to an interesting discussion between Nick and Ingo Molnar. Ultimately the regression was tracked down to the temporary configurability of the scheduler while it is tuned for optimal performance, "one reason for the extra overhead is the current tunability of CFS, but that is not fundamental, it's caused by the many knobs that CFS has at the moment." The solution, already coded but not yet merged in the mainline kernel "changes those knobs to constants, allowing the compiler to optimize the math better and reduce code size," and as a result result, "CFS can be faster at micro-context-switching than 2.6.22."

A style sheet that makes it easy for you to test various web 2.0 colors on your site.

It appears that Vector Linux is moving to a faster release schedule. Vector Linux SOHO 5.8 is only a few months old but the first release candidate of Vector Linux SOHO 5.8.6 has been announced..

"So I tried to hold people to the merge window," Linus Torvalds began in announcing the 2.6.23-rc2 kernel, "and said no to a few pull requests, but this whole '-rc2 is the new -rc1' thing is a disease, and not only is -rc2 late, it's bigger than it should be. Oh, well."

Rather fast Brainf*ck esoteric programming language interpreter written in JavaScript. Available under terms of the GNU GPL license.

Black Hat USA 2007 was fast-paced, fun, and informative. It demonstrated that security is big business. The halls were lined with vendors, some new, some old, and the smell of money was everywhere. Still, I'm left thinking this year's show had a different tone to it than last year's.

It has been almost two years since LWN covered the swap prefetch patch. This work, done by Con Kolivas, is based on the idea that if a system is idle, and it has pushed user data out to swap, perhaps it should spend a little time speculatively fetching that swapped data back into any free memory that might be sitting around. Then, when some application wants that memory in the future, it will already be available and the time-consuming process of fetching it from disk can be avoided.