Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

There's less than a week until the Ubuntu Developer Summit begins for Ubuntu 12.04 (codenamed the Precise Pangolin). The schedule for the event in Orlando, Florida is beginning to get filled up so here's some of what you can expect to see discussed for this next Ubuntu release due out in April...

Freescale Semiconductor announced a system on chip (SoC) platform, combining a Linux-ready ARM Cortex-A5 application processor with a Cortex-M4 microcontroller intended to run a real-time operating system (RTOS). The company's unnamed & asymmetrical-multiprocessing-architecture& SoC features a wide range of peripherals, and is designed to enable simultaneous real-time control and graphics-rich application processing, primarily in industrial applications....

Linus Torvalds was worried that the Linux 3.2 kernel might be of a worrying size due to the belated release of Linux 3.1. Merge requests are now starting to come in for the Linux 3.2 kernel and the staging merge alone touches several hundred thousand lines of code...

Traffic manager, content optimizer, and firewall swim together In the wake of its acquisitions of Zeus Technology and Aptimize back in July, WAN optimization appliance maker Riverbed Technology has tweaked three software appliances for speeding up and securing cloudy applications to complement its Steelhead appliances.…

State-sponsored trojans will be harder to get rid of A leading computer scientist has warned that the latest so-called Trusted Computing proposals may restrict the market for anti-virus and security software.…

OCZ Technology announced what it claims is the first 2.5-inch SSD (solid state drive) to include up to 1TB of storage, with a SATA 3.0 version delivering reads at up to 560MB/sec. Also released was a PCI Express-based hard disk/SSD combo that also packs 1TB, but revs performance to 910MB/sec., according to the company....

ViewSonic has begun selling a $200, seven-inch tablet that runs Android 2.3. The ViewPad 7e is equipped with a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, 4GB internal storage, 800 x 600 pixel screen resolution, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, dual cameras, and a micro-HDMI port, says the company....

Contec announced a fanless box PC intended for embedded applications, with a height of just 1.4 inches. The BX-956 includes an Intel Atom D510 processor, two CompactFlash slots, two gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, plus a VGA port and a serial port, according to the company....

Here's some new features and other upcoming work that may excite Linux enthusiasts in the Phoronix software/hardware playground...

Microsoft has signed a patent agreement with $28 billion Taiwanese original device manufacturer (ODM) Compal Electronics. With this tenth Android agreement, over half of all Android devices are now being made by companies that have signed Android-related licensing pacts with Microsoft, claims the company....

Released several weeks late due to malware attacks on kernel.org in August, the Linux 3.1 kernel is out now, with a variety of enhancements to performance, virtualization, and power management. It also includes support for near field communication (NFC), the OpenRISC open source CPU, Nintendo's Wii controller, and 3D acceleration with Nvidia GEForce graphics processor units (GPUs)....

The Web site http://www.kickstarter.com is an interesting place. Basically, it's a site that allows people to invest in various projects, giving people real money to develop an idea. Those ideas vary from film-making to programming video games, but the concept is the same regardless of the project.

Two weeks ago AMD introduced the Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs to much excitement, although many were letdown by the initial results, and it was months after showing the first Linux benchmarks of an AMD Dual-Interlagos pre-production system. In the days that followed I delivered some initial AMD FX-4100 Linux benchmarks when securing remote access to a low-end Bulldozer system running Ubuntu 11.04 (and there were also some Linux benchmarks from independent Phoronix readers), but then last week a Bulldozer kit arrived from AMD. The centerpiece of this kit is an eight-core AMD FX-8150 CPU, which is now being used to conduct a plethora of AMD Bulldozer benchmarks on Linux.

Earlier this month I wrote about the AMD porting their open-source Linux graphics driver to Windows EC7. Here's a few details that were learned in the past two weeks...

As more languages target the browser, they're using JavaScript as their output format

One of the features that NVIDIA introduced in the 290.03 Beta Linux driver that was released on Friday is support for an OpenGL shader disk cache...

After going through ten release candidates, the Linux 3.1 kernel should be released by early next week. However, with the Linux 3.1 kernel release cycle having been dragged on by more RCs than normal and the Kernel.org hacking incident, the Linux 3.2 kernel may end up being abnormally large and its worrying Linus Torvalds...

It was just in August that NVIDIA was pushing out driver betas for their Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD 285.xx series, but now that the series is stable, they have moved onto the 290.xx series. On Friday NVIDIA released the 290.03 Linux driver beta.