Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

For the past couple of weeks, I have been setting up my new laptop. It’s a challenge, since a number of items – the wireless card, the LightScribe capacity on the DVD drive, the webcam and the modem – are not supported straight off the CD with GNU/Linux. I’m frustrated that I don’t have the time to sit down and focus on each of these puzzles. However, I find that after eight years of using GNU/Linux, my attitude to these puzzles has changed.

Dave Gutteridge just wrote a rather nerdy, rambling but interesting article called Windows Is Free in which he explains that the choice between Linux and Windows is effectively a choice between two free products. I have noticed the same thing with other software companies. There is a phase in the life of any piece of software where piracy threatens its existence. It’s not during the earlier stages when a program needs, above all, to be taken up by as many people as possible. Once a program is dominating the market, piracy helps again; this time it works to suppress any competition. It’s in the middle stages, when a company needs extra revenue to grow and develop its product and support new users, that piracy can do the most damage.

Prospective speakers and presenters at the first-ever Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) European Conference now have until Aug. 31 to submit proposals. Set for Nov. 2-3 in Linz, Austria, the event will be held in conjunction with the 9th Real-Time Linux Workshop. The deadline for proposing presentations, demos, and birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions is Aug. 31.

"People who think'volatile' really matters are just fooling themselves," Linus Torvalds quipped during a lengthy discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list. The thread began with a series of patches to"makeatomic_read() behave consistently across all architectures" which included"removing thevolatile keyword from allatomic_t andatomic64_t definitions that currently have it, and instead explicitly [casting] the variable asvolatile inatomic_read()."Earlier in the discussion Linus had suggested that while it didn't actually fix any bugs it did help hide bugs and make them less likely to be triggered.

Three times so far, I've had that aimed at me. There was also the time when a man much more than twice my age asked me to dinner after a brief computer-related conversation in a book store (note that I was jailbait). It gets old, and it gets old fast. I've heard from plenty of women before about the annoyances of men at tech events who think it appropriate to have a come on be the first (or one of the first) things they say to any lady there. So, this is for all the obnoxious straight men (and lesbians too, I suppose) at tech events: STOP IT! We don't come to these things to be hit on, I swear.

[I thought this would be appropriate to post, especially given the row over the Linux Journal Ad.—Sander]

In a series of 5 patches, Jesper Juhl propsed moving 4K stacks from a debug feature to a non-debug feature, defaulting it to be enabled in the -mm tree. He referred back to a lengthy earlier discussion in which he had proposed making 4K stacks the default in the mainline kernel, then added: "Based on the comments in that thread I conclude that 4KSTACKS are not really considered a debug-only feature any longer, but the time is not right (yet) to make them the default - and it's certainly not yet the time to get rid of 8K stacks."

A small Canadian company specializing in hardware/software reference designs for handheld Linux devices has introduced a Linux OS stack and software development kit for Texas Instruments's (TI's) DaVinci processors. Empower Technologies claims that its LDK6446 (LEOs development kit) includes the first available LCD touchscreen support for TI's DM6446 development board. The LDK6446 includes Empower's LEOs (Linux embedded OS) Linux implementation, together with a toolchain and software development kit.

Recent developments in Linux video games shows a stunning improvement in support, not only by a better library of games for the operating system, but also for games not intended for Linux. Linux may finally gain some publicity if the developers continue to improve not just the video games, but also for the applications needed by the games.

Finding an addictive computer game on a Friday evening can be dangerous. Instead of doing things you have been promising your wife, you spend the weekend in front of your computer playing the game and trying to explain that "this is for work." This is exactly what happened to me when I discovered Battle Tanks. Battle Tanks is an arcade-style game, where you drive a tank, pick up weapons, and blast enemies. While this doesn't sound like a particularly original concept, it's the implementation that makes the game so much fun to play.

It was time for a new computer for my Grandparents. Their ancient Windows 98 PC had become so slow that it was unusable. The replacement, an inexpensive Acer PC, came with Windows Vista preinstalled. It was up to me to set up the new computer and support it. So I decided to wipe out Vista with a Debian 4 base install and set up an easy to use environment for my Grandparents. In this multi-part series I will tell you about how I did it, starting with my reasons for choosing Linux over Vista.

Foreword: Today's nascent robotics market has engendered about 10 general purpose software development frameworks, including nine that support Linux. This article surveys seven of them, before wrapping up with an analysis of market trends likely to shape the robotics software landscape of tomorrow.

Admins with the Gentoo Project say they have disconnected major parts of its website a week after discovering it could be vulnerable to a command injection attack that allows bad guys to remotely execute code on the machine. At time of writing, users trying to access Gentoo Archives and at least seven other areas of Gentoo.org got a message saying they were unavailable. Gentoo pulled the server hosting the sections "to prevent further exploitation and to allow for forensic analysis," according to Gentoo's homepage.

Wind River's stock price rose significantly when the rumour came out that IBM would be interested to acquire Wind River. Earlier IBM was not that interested in Linux based operations as the company had its own operating systems but IBM has now moved toward Linux and according to industry sources the acquisition of Wind River would be suitable for IBM.

I use RT as a request/bug tracker, but until recently hadn’t set it up with an email address plugged directly into it. This was because I don’t run my own email server - that’s centralised - which makes setup a bit more difficult. And undocumented, hence this post. Convincing users to use a different email address may well be tough, but at least you yourself can start bouncing relevant emails to the RT address, thereby creating a more trackable system. There are 2 basic steps: 1. setting up the mail gateway to RT; 2. mail pickup from the external central server. Note that I’m using exim4 - other mail programs will obviously work differently. These are the details...

IT shops the world over are continuing their inexorable march: They're jettisoning legacy Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sparc systems running Solaris and moving to commodity Intel or AMD-based x86 systems. And now Transitive Corp. is here to help with its QuickTransit application migration software, the most popular version of which transfers Sparc-based systems onto x86 servers.

Open source moves at a different speed to commercial software. This has become apparent over the last decade as Linux and its Open Source fellow travelers (Apache, Open Office, MySQL, Firefox et al) gradually established their position in the software world. It may have been frustrating for the Open Source activists, more vocal than numerous, who had been hoping for more instant gratification than the software market delivered. Nevertheless Linux and many of its associated Open Source products continued their forward march.

Linux started out on desktops and servers, but has now shipped on about 20 million mobile phones. Ever wonder how it made the jump? In a new whitepaper, embedded industry pioneer Jim Ready offers a concise technical retrospective on Linux's transition into a mobile phone OS. Ready credits semiconductor vendors, embedded Linux providers, and the open source community with helping to make Linux the powerhouse it is today in the mobile phone market. Other factors include Linux's horizontal, vendor-neutral nature and customizability, and "Moore's Law," which over time has resulted in processors powerful enough and memory inexpensive enough to make Linux practical in mobile devices.

As I was getting ready for LinuxWorld, I went around booting Knoppix on everything I could get my hands on, and all the Dells I tried from other people at the office all worked fine. The deal was sealed when the D620 of the last post arrived and worked so well. It was time to try Linux on the Dell C400.

No other hardware nowadays supports GNU/Linux as weakly as wireless network adapters. Between the constant release of new models and major vendors who are uninterested in supporting the operating system, free drivers for wireless cards are next to impossible to reverse engineer. Nor can you find many retailers willing to customize laptops as readily as they do workstations. In this situation, ndiswrapper and the Broadcom firmware cutter provide a functional, if not always satisfactory, solution.

For the third year in a row, the geeks will gather in Bickford Park to eat drink and be nerdy. This year, just like last year, non-geeks and people who just like penguins, are invited. A computer swap meet is planned along the south edge of the park (tentatively 10am - 3pm) where we have the luxury of having a truck come by ,later in the day, to pick up the detritus. So bring all your computer junk and tell all your friends. The gathering starts at 11:00 hours and will end at 20:00 hours.