Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I am a community moderator for opensource.com as well as a mother, a librarian, and a former public school teacher. When I began writing for this site over two years ago, it was due to my son's education and how both private and public schools were largely neglecting digital technology, global citizenship, and digital literacy.

Yesterday I outlined the AMD Radeon DRM graphics changes that were queued up for the Linux 3.13 kernel that will soon be officially under development. Now for Intel Linux customers there's an overview of the Intel DRM graphics driver changes for this next kernel release cycle.

Development on OpenWFD just started less than two weeks ago and there haven't been any public announcements of the work yet, but Anzwix has already latched onto the interesting work. OpenWFD seeks to be an implementation of the WiFi Display Standard and Miracast technologies, which basically are a standard equivalent to "wireless HDMI cables."

KDE's Sebastian Kügler has written how the Plasma 2 shell has become "somewhat usable" for early adopters and KDE enthusiasts for the technologies that will really be taking on the Linux desktop in 2014.

Lisp is one of those languages that people either love or hate. Count me among the Lisp lovers. I was brainwashed during my undergraduate studies at MIT to believe that Lisp is the only "real" programming language out there, and that anything else is a pale imitation. True, I use Python and Ruby in my day-to-day work, but I often wish I had the chance to work with Lisp on a regular basis.

Aaron Seigo was the KDE developer to challenge Mark Shuttleworth to a public debate over his colorful comments regarding those opposed to Canonical's Mir Display Server for Ubuntu. Two weeks have passed since suggesting this public debate and there's still been no public response by Mark Shuttleworth, though Jono Bacon and others have commented on the matter.

Aldebaran Robotics and Nuance Communications are teaming up to help Aldebaran’s pint-sized Nao humanoid robot interact better with its human companions — in 19 different languages. Nao, which runs a customized version of Gentoo Linux on its 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 brain, is touted as a programmable, interactive humanoid robot featuring motion, vision, tactile, and audio capabilities. All that, and it’s cute, too!

After last week delivering a Linux hardware review of the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card with the binary Catalyst driver on Ubuntu, and then yesterday looking at the Radeon Gallium3D driver posing a threat to Catalyst when using the mature "R600g" driver on HD 5000/600 series hardware, up today are new open vs. closed-source benchmarks. In this article we're looking at the performance of the Radeon R9 270X GPU when using the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source graphics stack, then when upgrading to Mesa 10.0 with Linux 3.12 DPM, and then comparing those numbers to the proprietary Catalyst Linux graphics driver.

The United States energy grid is composed of many moving and non-moving cyber security assets that all have to, to some degree, speak the same language. The language of machine-to-machine communications has become big business lately, however devices that control how the power gets from the plant to your light switch have been talking their talk for many years.

It might seem strange coming from the founder of OpenLogic, a company focused on helping others succeed with open source, but the fact is that closed source is better than open source in certain situations.

A few days back I delivered benchmark results of a 13-way graphics card comparison comparing the OpenGL gaming performance between Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 8.1. In that article there were multiple AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards tested using the binary drivers for each operating system. On Wednesday I then shared results with the Radeon Gallium3D driver compared to Catalyst on Linux and Windows while today are some of the early Nouveau results compared to the proprietary NVIDIA GPU drivers on Windows and Linux.

The latest company now offering low-cost ARM development boards for pushing their platform to ARM Linux and Android developers is VIA Technologies. VIA claims their new Springboard platform is "the fast path from prototype to production" and only costs $100 USD, but the specifications aren't all that impressive.

Toradex has launched a pair of Linux-ready SODIMM style computer-on-modules that incorporate the Freescale Vybrid SoC and start at as little as $26 in volume. The Colibri VF61 COM incorporates the Vybrid VF6xx SoC, which combines a 500MHz Cortex-A5 processor running Linux with a 167MHz Cortex-M4 microcontroller, while the low-cost Colibri VF50 COM uses the VF5x SoC model which omits the Cortex-M4 and runs at 400MHz.

Echelon Corp. announced an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) framework for peer-to-peer networking of embedded controllers. The IzoT multi-protocol stack is now available in an ARM-ready beta version and reference implementation optimized for the Linux-based Raspberry Pi SBC, and will soon be included in Marvell’s Easy Connect SDK for Marvell’s 88MC200 WiFi SoC.

Learn how to migrate your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x or 6.x instances safely from IBM SmartCloud Enterprise to IBM SoftLayer.

What are the ways we can give to an open source community without contributing code? A recent comment to an Opensource.com article a career in open source went something like that they wanted to contribute to open source but lacked coding skills. In fact, code contributions are very helpful and welcome for most open source projects, but there are a lot of other ways to contribute.

Opensource.com has a community moderator program, and I am proud to be a part of it. Recently we all met in person with the Opensource.com team in downtown Raleigh, NC at Red Hat Tower. One of our discussions centered around open source software for education, and Ruth Suehle, who leads Fedora's marketing team as well as writes for and advises Opensource.com, pointed out the wonders of Reveal.js, a new tool for preparing slide presentations. "It's what the cool kids are using," she said. And, boy was she right! A quick visit to the example presentations page is enough to persuade any skeptic.

Earlier this week I published an extensive set of results from thirteen discrete AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards benchmarking various OpenGL games and comparing the Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8.1 performance when using the official AMD and NVIDIA drivers for each operating system. Those results were very interesting for both the AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, but now it's time to see how the Intel graphics are performing under Ubuntu and Windows 8.1 Pro x64. Making things even more interesting here is that Intel has only an open-source Linux driver and no closed-source solution.

ARM announced an embedded version of its ARMv8 architecture that will add virtualization and lightweight Linux support to the next of generation Cortex-R processors. The ARMv8-R architecture is 32-bit, but borrows features from the 64-bit ARMv8-A such as hardware-based virtualization and a more advanced MPU, enabling safety-critical embedded applications like automotive computers to run RTOSes, bare metal code, and Linux and Android on a single processor.

Mentor Graphics announced a small-footprint hypervisor designed for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and automotive telematics systems that use its Linux-, Android-, Nucleus-, and AUTOSAR-based automotive middleware. Mentor Embedded Hypervisor supports single- or multi-core AMP and SMP architectures, as well as ARM TrustZone security technology, and can partition devices and memory to prevent unauthorized access.