Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

XML co-inventor and languages expert Tim Bray has taken a job at Google just a month after he left Oracle. "As of this morning I work for Google. The title is 'Developer Advocate'. The focus is Android. Fun is expected," he wrote in a blog post titled "Now A No-Evil Zone". Bray, who is among a growing list of Sun veterans to have jumped ship since Oracle bought the company earlier this year, didn't mince his words about his new anti-iPhone job with the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

One of the great advantages of the OpenDocument format is that it is simply a zip file. You can unzip it with any archiver and take a look at the contents (which is a set of XML documents and associated data), change it, re-zip it and you have a new document. But, the OpenDocument Format specification, section has one little extra restriction when it comes to zip containers. The file called “mimetype” must be at the beginning of the zip file, it must be uncompressed and it must be stored without any additional file attributes. If you don't do this then many applications (such as Officeshots.org) may refuse to open your documents. In this article I will show you how to correctly create ODF documents using zip.

Following the release of Fedora 13 Alpha this week we delivered Intel graphics benchmarks looking at the performance of an Intel Atom Netbook using the very latest kernel, DRM, and Mesa packages that Fedora is known for carrying. There are regressions in the Intel stack worth noting, but in this article, we are continuing in our Fedora 13 benchmarking by looking at the general system performance of the Linux desktop.

In February 2010, the International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA) asked the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to put Indonesia, Brazil, India, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam on its "Special 301" watch list in part because of their policies encouraging the adoption of open source software (OSS) by government agencies. Open Source for America (OSFA) believes the IIPA's request to be both irresponsible and misleading in its characterization of OSS. OSFA strongly urges the USTR, and all government agencies, to firmly reject such unfounded pressure to blacklist or penalize any country for policies allowing or encouraging the use of OSS.

Back in 2007 we reported on Valve looking for a senior software engineer to port their Windows-base games to Linux, then in 2008 we said the Source Engine would be coming to Linux based upon our sources (something that we still believe in), later that year we also found a few Linux libraries with the Left 4 Dead game.

As we come to the end of Akkana Peck's excellent series on mastering GRUB2, it's not clear what advantages it has over legacy GRUB, or even good old LILO. It seems it's gone backwards. In today's installment we learn how to translate some common and mysterious error messages, and how to manage a multi-boot system with GRUB2.

Part of the repositioning of the KDE brands was choosing an appropriate 'KDE Software Label' for developers working on applications outside the main KDE Software Compilation. Technology developed by KDE is used far and wide, as can be witnessed on kde-apps.org and other sites. Some of these applications are developed by people closely entrenched in the KDE community, others by developers who just happened to like KDE technology and don't feel part of the KDE community in any big way. To allow authors to express their connection to the KDE community, the KDE community has chosen three appropriate labels. We are also presenting the first draft of a guide for distributors of KDE software on how to integrate their communications with our brands.

For a few years I have been trying to create a "distributed cluster storage system" (see below) on standard Linux hardware. I have been unsuccessful. I have looked into buying one and they do exist, but are so expensive I can't afford one. They also are designed for much larger enterprises and have tons of features I don't want or need. I am hoping the Linux community can help me create this low cost "distributed cluster storage system" which I think other small businesses could use. Please help me solve this so we can publish the solution to the open source community.

Ex-Sun open source veteran Simon Phipps has been elected to the board of directors at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) group. Phipps confirmed in a blog post today that he would start his new role on 1 April. On Monday he quit Oracle-owned Sun, where - prior to Larry Ellison's acquisition of the database firm - he had worked for nearly a decade. His resignation marked the latest in a long line of big guns at Sun who have left the firm following Oracle's $7bn takeover.

Late last year we reviewed the Jetway NC92 Atom IPC motherboard that was a nice Mini ITX board with an Intel Atom N230 processor. A few weeks after that, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new Pineview processors were shown off. The Atom N400 and D510 Pineview CPUs are only a moderate upgrade from the very common Diamondville Atoms, but the newer Atoms are beginning to work their way into more nettops and netbooks. Jetway is one of the vendors that was quick to design a new IPC motherboard that bears the Intel Atom D510 dual-core processor with Intel GMA 3150 graphics and the NM10 Express Chipset.

CloudLinux Inc., a software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, has announced that VPS.NET, a leader in the cloud hosting arena, will begin to offer CloudLinux as one of its standard Linux Operating Systems (OS) on all of its VPS cloud offerings. VPS.NET is an elastic cloud hosting provider offering instant scalable Virtual Private Server (VPS) solutions. By leveraging its Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) technology, the CloudLinux OS allows VPS.NET to deliver increased performance and flexibility to its suite of secure cloud service offerings.

Mozilla is updating its open source license after more than 10 years of use. On Wednesday, at a new site dedicated to the license overhaul, the Foundation announced that it's now gathering update suggestions from world+dog and that it hopes to release a completed document by October or November. The Mozilla Public License was originally developed at Netscape by current Mozilla head Mitchell Baker, and the Foundation has used version 1.1 with apps like Firefox and Thunderbird for more than a decade. Version 1.1 has also been used with various other projects, including Sun's OpenSolaris and Adobe's Flex.

Given the outcry in the open-source community over the coupon deal Novell struck with Microsoft, you can only begin to imagine the mother of all rumpuses that would ensue if SUSE actually ended up in the Redmond bed, but these things have a habit of dying down eventually. What happens if Microsoft doesn't buy Novell, and SUSE gets sold off to somebody else? Where would that leave Microsoft's plans to co-exist with Linux and learn from its customers that want to run an open-source OS as well? And what would happen to the fruits of its 2006 agreement with Novell: the joint research facility, the strides towards interoperability, virtualization compatibility and so on? The truth is, that might all have to be abandoned. No doubt other companies will be running a ruler over Novell, but if Microsoft decides it wants Novell, it will be hard for anyone to stop it.

Haiku OS, the nine year old project to develop an open-source BeOS-compatible operating system, is hoping it will receive a new OpenGL stack this year. The Haiku project, like X.Org, will be participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project where the search engine giant pays many student developers to work on code for various open-source projects. There's a long list of ideas for where Haiku OS could use some help, and one of them includes a hardware 3D acceleration stack...

It's been just a month since releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 and that was followed by the release of our PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 operating system, but since then work has been flowing into the next release of the Phoronix Test Suite and related benchmarking technologies. The next release, Phoronix Test Suite 2.6, is codenamed Lyngen and will be officially available in May. Today the first alpha release for Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 is available...

When it comes to Intel's X.Org driver for Linux, xf86-video-intel, the most recent release was version 2.10 and it arrived in early January complete with Pineview (their next-generation Intel Atom systems) support, X-Video improvements, and various other features. The xf86-video-intel 2.11 driver is now emerging as their next quarterly update that brings in the KMS page-flipping and DRI2 swap events support. However, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which is set to be released in April, will not be shipping with either of these drivers. Instead Canonical has decided to stick with the xf86-video-intel 2.9 driver that was released last September...

A joint resolution on Transparency and State of Play of ACTA negotiations from virtually all party groups in the European Parliament was tabled earlier today. It will debated tonight and faces a vote on Wednesday. If approved, the resolution marks a major development in the fight over ACTA transparency. It calls for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searchers at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection.

Remember Terra Soft and its Yellow Dog Linux for Power processors? Well, Yellow Dog is no longer the darling Linux for Apple machines since the latter company switched to Intel Core and Xeon processors for its PCs and servers a few years back. And Terra Soft doesn't exist any more, after it was acquired by a Japanese company called Fixstars in November 2008. But Yellow Dog is still digging in the back yard to find a cool spot to lay down, and this time around it's playing with Nvidia's CUDA programming environment for its Tesla family of GPU co-processors.

The KDE España association is organizing Akademy-es 2010 in collaboration with Itsas (the Free Software group of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU) and the Department of Culture of the Basque Goverment. This event gathers contributors to and users of KDE software and will be held in the Engineering Technical School of Bilbao from the 7th to the 9th of May.

Google has opened the door to iPhone-like 3D games on certain Android handsets, offering support for the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics standard with its latest Android Native Development Kit (NDK). Mountain View announced the third release of its Android NDK in a Monday blog post. The chief addition is Open GL for Embedded Systems 2.0 native libraries, bringing the platform in line with Apple's iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre.