Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Microsoft has warned the European Commission that planned regulations covering Windows and browsers will only increase Google's dominance of the search business. The European Commission (EC) proposes to force Microsoft to distribute other browsers with Windows as well. Firefox, Opera, and of course Chrome all automatically default to Google as their primary search engine.

The latest addition to AMD's Radeon HD 4000 series (R700) family is the ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card, which was released in late April. We finally have our hands on this graphics card which uses the RV740 -- the first 40nm GPU -- and have proceeded to run our usual assortment of Linux-based tests. Along with the transition from a 55nm to 40nm process, the Radeon HD 4770 has been designed to bridge the current R700 solutions to their next-generation graphics processors that will be introduced later this year. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 may cost less than $100 USD, but it packs serious performance capabilities.

Last week, blood was shed in the Firefox community as two popular extensions to the browser - NoScript and Adblock Plus - finally started slugging it out over a conflict that had been underground for quite some time. It came to a head when Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant woke up in the morning next to a severed horse's head. What followed was a series of public fire-bombings, shootings, and unprovoked tire-iron beatings that left a trail of blood winding around the world. Ha, no, just kidding. Two passive-aggressive nerds, each acting in their own self-interest, got into a blog slap-fight, the only collateral damage being several thousand Twitter messages.

I've noticed, as I get older, time seems to go exponentially faster. Unfortunately, this meant high school lasted an eternity, and I'm burning through my thirties at warp speed. Some events make me more aware of this than others -- it seems like it was only last week that Fedora 10 made its first mark upon the world. But no, another release cycle has nearly come full circle, and today the Fedora Project announced the Preview Release of Fedora 11 (codenamed Leonidas). This preview will be followed by a release candidate (scheduled for a May 12 appearance), with the final version hitting the streets on May 26.

Dear Mr. Ellison, I'm sure there are many reasons for Oracle buying Sun. You might not be having meetings this week about OpenOffice.org. You might be having meetings next week about spinning it off into a foundation. But if you keep interest or control over OpenOffice.org, please consider the following. Let me make my laundry list for what I think is important for OpenOffice.org. My letter to Santa Claus, perhaps; my wish list for a win/win/win situation for Oracle, users, and of course me and other OpenOffice.org providers of products and services.

Take it as you will, but a group of interested Linux gamers have launched the Ubuntu Gaming Team. The mission of this newest Ubuntu focus group is "to give the open source gaming world a boost!" They intend to promote gaming on Ubuntu, connect free software gamers together on Ubuntu, address barriers to the development of free and open-source games, promote such games, and to organize gaming events.

More on the Ubuntu Gaming Team can be found on their Wiki page or on Launchpad...

X.Org 7.5 with the X Server 1.7 release was planned for release at the start of this month, but sadly they far from made it -- no test releases of the new X Server are even available yet. Though after reading Phoronix, Daniel Stone remembered this release schedule and has decided to give another try at X.Org 7.5...

An area where open-source games have traditionally lacked is with regard to delivering high-end graphics capabilities that can compete with modern day commercial games. To this day, many open-source games still look like something that would have been pushed out of a commercial game studio years ago due to lacking proper artwork and a game engine that has an OpenGL renderer that can sustain delivering impressive graphical features with modern hardware...

Finally we have a stable, official release of GCC 4.4. This major update to the GNU Compiler Collection brings forth Graphite, which is a framework for providing loop optimizations and eventually will be used to provide automatic parallelization support...

The Ubuntu development team this afternoon announced the final release of Ubuntu 9.04, the latest version of its desktop operating system. This latest release of Ubuntu includes a number of new features including improved graphics, a better notification system and new cloud computing capabilities.

As I've mentioned in a previous Linux Line post, I am not a programmer. Yet Linux is built on the philosophical principle of freely sharing source code. This is how those who create Linux frequently advocate it. But if I'm not a programmer, and source code therefore means little to me, why do I use Linux? Why do I spend much of my time suggesting others use it? Is it just because it's available for free? (Spoiler: No.) These are interesting questions that are not discussed very often.

We are very excited to announce the release of the first public version (v1.0) of the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop. It comes after 2 years of development and months of beta tests by many organizations from our growing users community, and some of them are already using it in production. Now organizations can deliver to their PC users either Windows or Linux applications or a mix of the two on the same user desktop via the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop.

The "open" characteristic of open source tools helps enhance, rather than complicate, the teaching process, say its exponents. Roman Tuma, software practice director at Sun Microsystems, Asia South, said the open source model offers an entirely new way for developers and "increasingly knowledgeable", interactive users to collaborate and build upon the shared work done in the development of OSS.

Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called "Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement". It concluded: "I'll say it again: In one fell swoop Oracle drew a square around the open source movement and unless it can prove that it can remain independent--it is a dead movement." Needless to say, I wasn't too convinced by the argument. At that time, this was a purely theoretical discussion, but with the acquisition of Sun and hence MySQL by Oracle, those points suddenly gain a new pertinence.

It's April 23rd and exactly on time Canonical has released Ubuntu 9.04 a. k.a. Jaunty Jackalope for download. Ubuntu 9.04 comes in three flavours: the Desktop edition, the Server edition and the Netbook Remix a.k.a. UNR. According to the press release: "Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition delivers a range of feature enhancements to improve the user experience. Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. Enhanced suspend-and-resume features also give users more time between charges along with immediate access after hibernation. Intelligent switching between Wi-Fi and 3G environments has been broadened to support more wireless devices and 3G cards, resulting in a smoother experience for most users."

"Overall, Fedora does have a good reputation for being an early adopter of many useful features. I’ve seen people mention in a few places that a lot of software has improved and stabilized a lot after being included in Fedora." ... "I think that Fedora definitely gets credit for that. If you look on a lot of news sites, you’ll see that a lot of people are fairly aware of how and where things have come from. Of course, there are plenty of places where people are off the mark, but that’s to be expected, too."

Earlier this month we published Intel Core i7 Linux benchmarks that looked at the overall desktop performance when running Ubuntu Linux. One area we had not looked at in the original article was the virtualization performance, but we are back today with Intel Core i7 920 Linux benchmarks when testing out the KVM hypervisor and Sun xVM VirtualBox. In this article we are providing a quick look at Intel's Nehalem virtualization performance on Linux.

For those that missed it, Xfce 4.6.1 was released this week. It features a series of bug-fixes and minor improvements atop the recently released Xfce 4.6.0 code-base...

Canonical this afternoon debuted its Ubuntu 9.04 release of Linux, the tenth release since the company founded the Ubuntu project in October 2004. This iteration of Ubuntu, code-named "Jaunty Jackalope," comes with mixes designed specifically for three platforms: netbooks, desktops, and servers.

When Oracle Corp. agreed to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. today, it took a leap into the hardware realm. And so the obvious question is: Can the software-centric database and applications vendor succeed with Sun's hardware business? "I'll hand it to Larry Ellison: That man can shop," said Laura DiDio, an analyst at Information Technology Intelligence Corp., a research and consulting firm in Boston. "This deal is very, very complementary for Oracle. It gives them instant credibility with hardware, virtualization, open source, storage and cloud computing."