Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

The model that works for open-source projects might not work in the enterprise — or is that a false dichotomy?

I've been covering various scientific programs the past few months, but sometimes it's hard to find a package that does what you need. In those cases, you need to go ahead and write your own code. When you are involved with heavy-duty scientific computing, you usually need to go to parallel computing in order to get the runtimes down to something reasonable. more>>

Whether you prefer OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, which currently still are pretty similar, out of the box, they are missing some of the conveniences installed by their commercial counterparts. Granted, they are fully functional, but if you want a robust clip-art library and a decent selection of document templates, you'll want to add some extensions and templates. more>>

Here's some photographs from the first day of XDC2011, the annual X.Org Developers' Conference, which this year is taking place in Chicago, United States. XDC2011 is running through Wednesday and is being hosted at the Illinois Institute of Technology...

Using C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism, Microsoft's new tools for GPU computation.

Ubuntu derivative Bodhi Linux was released in a version 1.2 that moves up to Linux 3.0. Bodhi Linux 1.2 advances to a fresh new version of the lightweight Enlightenment 17 window manager and version 0.4 of the lightweight Midori web browser, and features improved documentation and a variety of new desktop themes, says the project....

The 2011 X.Org Developers' Conference is set to begin tomorrow morning in Chicago, Illinois, United States. This three-day event will focus on what's coming down the pipe for the X.Org Server, Mesa, the Linux kernel DRM, and related areas of open-source graphics and input...

There was the widely-reported Kernel.org security breach at the end of August, which resulted in the servers used for hosting the Linux kernel Git repository and other code to be forced off-line. Kernel.org has still not been restored, and now there's a related security breach at the Linux Foundation. Linux.com, the Linux Foundation itself, and related infrastructure are now "down for maintenance" this weekend...

Back in 2009 the Linux mascot, Tux, was temporarily replaced by Tuz. Tuz was a Tasmanian Devil character and the use of the logo was used to promote this endangered animal that's nearly extinct in Australia. Tuz replaced Tux in the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, but with Linux 2.6.30 there was the return of Tux. Now with the Linux 3.1 kernel that's a proposal (RFC) for a new Linux kernel logo...

How awesome are the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Season of KDE (SoK) programs? According to Daniel Moctezuma, "All the work done by students in GSoC/SoK will have an impact in Free Software and the world." Daniel is one of the 2011 GSoC students. Lydia Pintscher is the main administrator of these programs for KDE. She made the following report. read more

After the benchmarks a few days back of Intel Sandy Bridge Acceleration On Non-SNB Hardware, Chris Wilson of Intel who has been responsible for much of the "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration" work requested more tests, but this time to see the effect that the compositing window manager has on this new acceleration architecture. As a result, here is some quick tests of Intel's Sandy Bridge graphics under the Unity, Unity 2D, and GNOME Shell desktops.

This morning I shared some initial battery power consumption results for Ubuntu 11.10 from three different mobile devices. For all three of them, the power consumption on Ubuntu 11.10 was even higher than Ubuntu 11.04, which was already in a power hungry state. Before calling it a week to go handle XDC2011 matters, I ran some tests from a standard Intel Atom N270 netbook. Sure enough, Ubuntu 11.10 is doing a heck of a job at burning through power...

Next Tuesday at XDC2011 Chicago I am hosting a Q&A panel about contributing to X.Org and open-source projects, where the panel participants are largely comprised of well known X.Org and Mesa developers that began contributing while at university. In hopes of sparking new contributors to these key open-source projects, computer science students from the major Chicago universities have been invited to attend this panel discussion and anyone else wishing to learn more about open-source development. In preparation for this panel, I have been collecting some new development statistics on Mesa and X.Org.

Huawei is launching a 3.8-inch Impulse 4G smartphone on AT T, offering Android 2.2, 4G service, and a five-megapixel camera for a record-breaking $30 plus contract. Meanwhile, Kyocera teamed with Sprint to announce a three-inch, Kyocera Milano smartphone with Android 2.3 and a 3.2-inch camera for $50 plus contract....

Wine 1.3.27 brought Direct3D multi-sampling support and other features just two weeks ago, but it's been replaced today by Wine 1.3.28. There's some exciting changes in this release too with DirectDraw now defaulting to the OpenGL renderer, an initial version of the VBScript parser, and other changes...

Advantech announced a single board computer (SBC) that runs Windows CE 6.0, Linux, or Android on a Texas Instruments OMAP35x processor. The PCM-C3500 has either 128MB or 256MB of RAM, can include 2GB of flash storage, has four serial ports and four USB 2.0 ports, and features an Ethernet port with RJ45 connector, according to the company....

Aaeon announced an 18.5-inch panel PC that looks and works like an overgrown tablet. The ACP-5815 has a capacitive touchscreen with two-point multitouch, a choice of Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, CompactFlash and hard disk storage, a Mini PCI expansion slot, plus an optional camera and RFID reader, according to the company....

Chumby is readying a Linux-based IPTV set-top-box that can be remotely controlled by a Wi-Fi connected Android device. Soon to be offered as an open development platform, NeTV is equipped with an 800MHz Marvell processor, and it will include both a Webkit browser that can overlay content on video and a personalized news crawler....

iPhone and iPad users still wide open Apple has finally purged the imprimatur of disgraced web authentication authority DigiNotar from its Mac operating system.…

Sencha is encouraging interactive designers to switch to its new Sencha Animator v.1, "the industry's first purpose-built tool for creating CSS3-based animations that deliver plug-in-free rich-media experiences".