Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Cinnamon Desktop project recently released version 2, a major overhaul of the desktop environment that's best known as the default option for Linux Mint's flagship release. Cinnamon 2.0 will be part of Linux Mint 16, "Petra", scheduled for release towards the end of November. The team behind Cinnamon plans to backport the 2.0 release for the Debian edition of Mint, as well as most recent LTS release: Linux Mint 13.

I recently announced a call to action for GNOME 3.10 Test Day for Fedora 20 on Facebook and I got a response that caused me to think about how everyone from the general public to developers submit and fix bugs for an open source project. This was the interaction..

Linux 3.0 was first released in July of 2011 and become the first 3 release after Linus Torvalds decided that Linux 2.6.40 was too big a number. The Long Term Linux kernel title, means that the 3.0.x cycle has a longer life than typical kernels. Long Term Linux kernel can live two years or more and currently the leading edge of long term kernels is the 3.10 kernel.

Last month NVIDIA announced they would begin providing open-source GPU documentation and ultimately supporting the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau graphics driver project for their Linux desktop customers. NVIDIA released some basic documentation in that initial push and now they have followed up with a tiny bit more documentation.

Taiwan-based Gigastone announced the first U.S. release of the SmartBox, a $40 Linux-based mobile accessory that combines an SD card reader, a WiFi content streamer and personal wireless network, and a 2500mAh-strong battery charger. The SmartBox lacks its own internal storage or Internet access, but can wirelessly stream SD card content to up to six mobile devices via WiFi.

Avnet released two Linux-based Software Defined Radio (SDR) development kits that combine Xilinx ARM/FPGA Zynq-7000 SoCs with Analog Devices RF transceiver modules. The SDR Evaluation Kit uses the community-backed Zedboard SBC and supports 2.4 to 2.5GHz operation, while the more advanced SDR Systems Development Kit is based on a Xilinx ZC706 baseboard and spans the spectrum from 70MHz to 6GHz.

This week I featured the first Linux review of an AMD Radeon Rx 200 series graphics card in the form of an AMD Radeon R9 270X "Curacao XT" benchmarked on Ubuntu. If you're looking to buy a new graphics card for use on the Linux desktop but prefer NVIDIA hardware or buying a GPU isn't dependent upon the incomplete RadeonSI driver, being looked at today on Phoronix is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Kepler graphics card.

A Willow Garage spinoff called Unbounded Robotics announced a mobile manipulation robot designed for research and business automation and due to ship next summer for $35,000. The UBR-1 runs Ubuntu Linux and Robot Operating System (ROS) on a 4th Generation Intel Core processor, has a 7 degrees-of-freedom arm with a dexterous gripper, and moves at speeds up to 1 meter per second.

Opensource.com free eBooks are one of the many ways we strive to share open source knowledge and passion for implementing it beyond technology (but there too)—in business, education, government, law, health, and other areas of our lives.

Reach Technology announced a 4.3-inch display module development kit for HMI applications with 480 x 272 resolution and either a resistive ($449) or capacitive ($499) touchscreen. The G2 module runs embedded Linux on a 454MHz Freescale i.MX28 processor, offers Ethernet, USB, CAN, and I2C interfaces, and is supported with Qt Creator IDEs in Linux and Windows versions.

Football Manager 2014 went into beta last week on Steam for Linux. While it shouldn't be too surprising to the Phoronix-reading Linux graphics enthusiasts, the new non-FPS game has illustrated new Linux graphics driver bugs.

Every so often I like to look at the trends in the technology our readers use to access the site. What kind of computers, what kinds of operating systems, mobile or desktop, etc. There's a lot of interesting data in the latest numbers. But for anyone who's been on the web back into the 90s, here's the most striking piece of information. Fewer than 50% of the visits to TPM now come from computers running a windows operating system.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a new line of Linux-ready, embedded-focused QorIQ system-on-chips based on a new ARM-compatible, core-agnostic Layerscape architecture. The first three QorIQ LS1 SoCs offer dual ARM Cortex-A7 cores clocked at up to 1GHz, and include networking-, display-, and cost-optimized models featuring 2-3 Watts power consumption.

While the Ubuntu 13.10 desktop isn't using Mir/XMir by default, the packages are available within the archive for those wanting to test out the next-generation display server for Ubuntu. To see how the 2D/3D performance is when running under XMir with the Unity System Compositor, I ran some new benchmarks using this week's Ubuntu 13.10 release.

Wind River announced Wind River Linux support for Cavium’s newly shipping Octeon III system-on-chips. Aimed at high-end networking applications, the 28nm-fabricated Octeon III SoCs offer as many as 48 MIPS64 cores clocked up to 2.5GHz, support MIPSr5 architecture features like hardware virtualization, and integrate accelerators for deep packet inspection (DPI), packet processing, security, search, and QoS.

Suitable Technologies is offering $50 rentals of its “Beam” mobile telepresence robot, so 50 robotics enthusiasts can remotely attend the RoboBusiness conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Oct. 23-25. The Ubuntu- and ROS-based Beam will be available to the first 50 applicants, letting them explore the show at up to 1.5 meters/sec and interact with others via video conferencing.

Portwell announced a computer-on-module along with a pair of single-board computers built around Intel’s new embedded-specific Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips. The three Linux-friendly boards include a Type 6 COM Express Compact COM, a Mini-ITX style embedded motherboard, and an SBC implemented in the rarely seen Nano-ITX form factor.

Code.org, the organisation that believes “every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming” has signed up Microsoft Bill Gates and Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg to teach programming. The pair will each participate in an “Hour of Code”, 60-minute programming tutorials that are one one of the initiatives planned for 2013's Computer Science Education Week (CSEW) starting on December 9th. Gates will also participate in a one-hour video conference with a school that signs up for CSEW.

A Shenzhen-based startup called Wizarm has launched an Indiegogo campaign for a hackable media player with DVR recording, HDMI pass-through, Miracast support, and video overlay capabilities. The Wizarm device dual-boots Android and Linux on a Samsung Exynos 5250 system-on-chip, and offers SATA storage and extensive I/O including USB, HDMI in/out, DisplayPort, and S/PDIF.

Oracle has popped out a white paper that may well turn some heads, because it contains robust criticism of open source software. Titled “The Department of Defense (DoD) and Open Source Software” and available here as a PDF to those with Oracle accounts or here in Dropbox, the document's premise is that folks in the USA's Department of Defense (DoD) could think it is possible to save money if they “... avoid buying commercial software products simply by starting with open source software and developing their own applications.”