Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Mandriva development team this morning made available the second release candidate for its Linux 2009 Spring release. Codenamed Estephe, RC2 includes a number of desktop enhancements including KDE 4.2.2, Gnome 2.26. kernel 2.6.29 and X.org server 1.6.

NVIDIA had ended out March with five Linux display driver releases with it ranging from a day to a week between updated Linux drivers were pushed out from this Santa Clara company. It's been just over a week since their last display driver release, but it looks like April will be another month of fierce Linux/Solaris/BSD driver updates from NVIDIA.

This afternoon NVIDIA has pushed out the 185.19 Beta driver...

With the launch of the Radeon HD 4800 series in June of last year, AMD made an evolutionary leap in their Linux support. For the first time, when introducing a brand new graphics processor (the RV770) it was greeted by same-day Linux support, compared to the past where Linux users had to wait many months for any new level of support. Not only was there this Linux support via the Catalyst driver, but there was even open-source support in the X.Org driver the very same month. In the months that followed, they then introduced CrossFire support, OverDrive, and other features to put their Linux Catalyst suite closer to their Windows driver. This morning AMD is announcing a high-end refresh of the RV770 GPU that will be known as the RV790 and is found in the Radeon HD 4890 graphics card. Is AMD continuing to play ball with Linux? We will tell you this morning as we look closely at the ASUS Radeon HD 4890 on Ubuntu Linux.

Intel Corp. plans to turn over to the Linux Foundation control of Moblin, the Linux operating system it developed for netbooks using its Atom processor. Setting Moblin free could help attract more interest from netbook makers that have mostly stuck with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP OS to date, and open-source developers who are turning an eye towards the Google Inc.-backed Android smartphone operating system. It also raises the possibility that Moblin development could be steered toward Nvidia Inc.'s Ion platform, which combines Nvidia graphics with Intel's Atom CPU, or the rival ARM smartphone processor that many are touting as the next big thing for netbooks.

Another month and another edition of Full Circle Magazine, the magazine published by and for Ubuntu Linux fans. Issue 23 includes all the usual features including a guide to troubleshooting in Command and Conquer, part 7 of programming in C and part 4 of Web development. The MOTU interview this month is with Steve Stalcup, and the top five list is a collection of the best task managers.

Everybody has a version of Windows that's their favorite. What version it is depends a lot on your age. Some of my older colleagues swore blind that Windows 95 was the pinnacle of computer science, at least when it was released. For most people, XP is their favorite Windows. Somehow Microsoft got everything just right with XP, but it's extremely hard to quantify exactly what. Ubuntu is like that. It's like a warm pub on a cold night -- inviting and welcoming to everybody. If you switch to Ubuntu you're still gonna have to learn stuff. That's just the way computers are. But Ubuntu also has that magical "Windows XP factor" -- it's as functional as you need it to be, yet is still accessible. It 'just works'.

Expanding its Ubuntu training series, Canonical is planning to make an Ubuntu Server training course available later this year. In a blog posting Canonical, the financial backer of Ubuntu Linux, said that the new course is being designed in response to requests from both students and partners.

Python programming is all the rage because it is clean, easy to learn, and powerful. It supports creating both command-line and graphical applications, and has at least four good toolkits for writing graphical applications. Akkana Peck introduces us to Tkinter, and shows us how to create an all-purpose timer (for cooking and other reminders for absent-minded geeks) in one lesson

The recession has sharply accelerated interest in open source technologies among enterprise IT buyers, says an eWEEK story. Pointing to recent remarks made by Alfresco GM Matt Asay, the story says that cost pressures and the growing maturity of open-source software has led to a pronounced shift in recent months. Only two and a half years ago, potential buyers of Alfresco's Linux-ready web content management tools were telling Asay that open source software was "too risky" for them. A week ago, the same buyer changed his mind, telling Asay that in the current economic climate, he could lose his job buying expensive proprietary software, according to the story.

Freescale may be the first semiconductor company to associate itself aggressively with portable Linux devices. The former Motorola semiconductor division is sharply targeting the low-priced Linux-based Netbook market, which is hot in the world market and just starting to get warm in the US. read more

Back in December we looked at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC graphics card. This mid-range ATI graphics card had performed well under Linux and what separated it from the other Radeon HD 4650 graphics cards on the market was its factory overclock of 650/900MHz. While not factory overclocked beyond the RV730PRO specifications, PowerColor has the PowerColor SCS3 Radeon HD 4650 512MB, which instead offers passive cooling. Is this an ideal candidate for a Linux-based HTPC? In this article we are looking at the PowerColor SCS3 Radeon HD 4650 512MB.

This story is part bug hunt, part open-source love-story. The bug was a particularly gnarly, beautiful little bug and I'm going to try to convey some of that to you. But the other half of the story is really the thing here; The Guardian is serious about engaging with the wider technology community - while we work hard to open out our data to the world at large, we also participate by speaking at conferences, sponsoring events, and sometimes in the simplest way of all; contributing code and fixes for the Open Source software that we use.

The NY Times is reporting on 2 articles to be published in the NEJM. One on a study from the RWJF and the second from the esteemed Mandl-Kohane brain trust out of Harvard. A highlight: "the current health record suppliers as offering pre-Internet era software — costly and wedded to proprietary technology standards that make it difficult for customers to switch vendors and for outside programmers to make upgrades and improvements... encourage the development of an open software platform on which innovators could write electronic health record applications"

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has announced the government will throw out the controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act and start again. The provision involved a three strikes and you're out plan for alleged copyright infringement. "Section 92a is not going to come into force as originally written. We have now asked the minister of commerce to start work on a replacement section," the prime minister said.

Standards always imply wide public access, an openness of the standard in both setting of the standard as well as access to the standard. It is therefore important to realise that an Open Standard would necessarily have to meet higher standards of openness than those provided by article 41 of document SCP/13/2. It is furthermore important to add that “de facto standards” are typically not standards, but vendor-specific proprietary formats that were, as the secretariat correctly pointed out in the introduction to this discussion, “strong enough to impose themselves on the market.” It is for this imposition on the market that “de facto standards” are commonly used to describe monopolistic situations and corresponding absence of competition, which conflict with the basic purpose and function of standards.

The open-source version of Microsoft's Silverlight is adopting hardware-based decoding for video, a move that will boost multimedia on Linux devices. Moonlight is adding support for Nvidia cards to offload the work of H.264 and VC1 decoding from the software player to the actual hardware. Nvidia features the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) so that the video card - not the software player - does the decoding. It's a small but significant development.

JAMA has a blockbuster article on Health IT vendor 'Hold Harmless' contracts. Linux Medical News readers know is just the tip of the proprietary Electronic Medical Record iceburg such as the interoperability scam, the failed EMR business quandry, and the sustainability conundrum among many other things that has yet to be widely discussed. Courageous and forward-thinking past LMN contributor Scot Silverstein has a number of further analyses. Unfortunately the knee-jerk solution will likely be to change the proprietary contracts which naturally the proprietary vendors will want more money for. The real answer is education among purchasers to only use EMR software that is Affero General Public Licensed and a law that states that all Electronic Medical Records purchased with federal funds be Affero General Public Licensed.

Bringing the freemium model to the musty world of textbook publishing, Flat World Knowledge (FWK), a Nyack, NY-based publisher of open-source commercial textbooks, has raised $8 million in its first round of funding. Investors include Greenhill SAVP, High Peaks Venture Partners and Valhalla Partners. Founded in 2007, it received $1.5 million in seed money. The company recruits authors on various subjects, and then makes its books available as free web-hosted textbooks for any student to use.

Memory leaks and code exploits are a fact of life for both browser developers and their users — regardless of the specific browser in question. For the developers at Mozilla, both issues have been on their minds this week, as browser bugs of both sorts have been all over the news. Security researchers published code on Wednesday that reportedly would allow an attacker to load unauthorized software on a target's computer simply by having the target view a specially-coded XML file. According to reports, Mozilla developers were blindsided by the bug and immediately raced to find a patch.

Red Hat Inc. posted a lower quarterly profit on Wednesday, but the results surpassed most estimates as sales grew sharply and the software company moved aggressively to rein in costs. In after-hours trading, shares of Red Hat, a provider of open-source software used by businesses, rose more than 4% to $15.72 following the report.