Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This past week has been busy one on the Linux Planet with a major new community Linux release (Fedora 19), a milestone update for a major enterprise distro (SLES 11 SP3) and new hardware for Linux Mint.

SUSE Linux is juicing its Enterprise Server 11 variant of Linux with Service Pack 3. Among many nips and tucks, the SP3 update brings support for new and emerging hardware to the operating system. The company, the open source operating system arm of the Attachmate conglomerate owned by the private equity trio of Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital, and Thoma Bravo, already moved to the Linux 3.0 kernel with SLES 11 SP2 in February 2012.

Digia and Qt-Project.org have released version 5.1 of their Linux-ready cross-platform development framework. Qt 5.1 offers new Qt Quick declarative UI language controls and layouts, improved OpenGL support, sensor and serial port support, an updated Qt Creator 2.7.2, and preliminary versions of Qt for Android and iOS.

Rob Clark has expanded his Freedreno efforts from just being a reverse-engineered user-space (Gallium3D) graphics driver for Qualcomm's Adreno/Snapdragon hardware. Rob has now written his own DRM/KMS kernel driver for dealing with the Snapdragon graphics hardware.

Following several days of rumors that the release of Samsung’s first Tizen-based smartphone had been delayed, the Korean language website i24news.com reported today that Samsung officials have stated that the launch of the company’s first Tizen device is being pushed out by two months.

FossilShale Embedded Technologies announced an SODIMM-style CPU module based on a Texas Instruments DM385 digital media processor with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 core. The DM385-SOM primarily targets embedded imaging tasks, such as surveillance and medical imaging devices, and is supported with a carrier board, several I/O adapters, and customized Linux and Android software stacks.

My 2006-vintage Sony Bravia flat-screen "Full HD" TV has Linux inside. I can tell because it comes with a two-page printout of the GPL, included almost as a warning. "Watch out", it seems to say. "This TV comes infected with freedom." Not that it's worth hacking: you can make breakfast in the time that passes between a click on the remote and a change on the screen. (I'm barely exaggerating here. Switching between the TV's eight HDMI inputs is amazingly slow.) But being a Linux device says volumes about what has happened to TV already, because the freedom it contains at the device level also ranges outward from the operating system to the network on which that operating system was born and grew up. That network was, and remains, the Internet.

This year I get to go to OSCON for the first time ever! I’ve been on the library conference circuit for years, but this will be my first non-library con and I’m ready to learn as much as I possibly can in three days. The conference is actually five days long, it starts with two days of tutorials (which I won’t be able to attend), but I plan on attending at least one session during every time slot during the next three days of sessions and keynotes. I went through the program and want to attend so many things (including things in the same time slot).

We're forecasting sunnier skies in Hawaii today, as Gov. Neil Abercrombie is scheduled to sign the state's first open data bill into law. The bill requires data already deemed public to be made available online and requires the state CIO to set policy and procedures that include "whenever practicable, the use of machine readable, non-proprietary technical standards for web publishing." Sen. Glenn Wakai, Chair of Hawaii's Technology and Art Committee, co-sponsored bill HB632.

After almost 10 years in open source, Robin Muilwijk is still fighting the misconceptions that come with working in the industry. He says the toughest part is finding the right balance between openness while continuing to promote the open source way of doing business.

Ted Ts'o has already sent in his pull request for EXT4 file-system changes targeting the Linux 3.11 kernel.

The world of open-source software, by design, is something of a collective. Instead of well-defined teams of developers working on a project for pay, open-source software is the result of an amorphous community making contributions – some good, some bad. Everyone is part of the project, everyone has a stake. Despite the collective nature of the process, there are some obvious stars in the open-source firmament. Linus Torvalds invented the Linux kernel. Richard Stallman came up with the philosophy of free software. But what about the next generation of open-source leaders? Here’s a look at six whose names you might want to remember.

Larger open source frameworks often transition into a business for the maintainers. They serve as consultants, sell commercial licenses, and develop custom features for customers on demand. It’s difficult to expand from geeky early adopters to business-oriented mainstream users. Potential business users need to see that the project has a strong ecosystem, including integrators and consultants who can support customers.

A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6 confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and "unbundled" buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The GAO also interviewed faculty regarding benefits of this transparency and offering of new options for students purchasing course materials.

When running Fedora 19 with its updated open-source Linux graphics drivers, 15 different Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs were compared when looking at the open-source Linux OpenGL performance. The tested graphics processors span from the Intel HD Graphics 4600 "Haswell" integrated graphics to the AMD Radeon HD 7950 "Southern Islands" graphics card to the vintage Radeon X1800XL.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appears to be ramping up for an investigation of Patent Assertion Entity (PAE) practices. In a noteworthy, welcome development, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez recently gave a significant policy speech outlining a roadmap for possible FTC action. Chairwoman Ramirez’s remarks are some of the most direct and specific to date from a senior US Government official regarding "harmful PAE activities," and follow on in more detail the concerns laid out by President Obama last February.

The Linux Mint project and CompuLab announced an updated version of their MintBox mini-PC, which comes with Linux Mint pre-installed. The MintBox 2 switches to a faster Intel Core i5 processor, doubles the storage to a 500GB HDD, adds a second gigabit Ethernet port, and bumps the price up to $599.

With Fedora 19 presenting a nice "out of the box" experience for AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, benchmarks of the open-source driver were done and compared to previous generations of AMD hardware. Sadly, there's still much work ahead for the Radeon HD 7000 series driver in being able to catch up with the hardware supported under the mature R600 Gallium3D driver.

With Thursday's announcement that Mir will ship by default in Ubuntu 13.10 on the desktop, many Ubuntu users were caught by surprise that this experimental display server will be ready by October. Up to now, Ubuntu 13.10 was expected to continue using an X.Org Server by default on the desktop (with only an experimental option for Mir) while the new Ubuntu Touch project would be using Mir on mobile devices, until next year. With the pressed timeline for the migration to Mir, at Phoronix we have already carried out our first Mir benchmarks. In this article are the first benchmarks of Intel graphics when running on Ubuntu 13.10 with a native X.Org Server (as done now on current Ubuntu Linux releases) and then when deploying the same Unity desktop environment atop XMir with the Mir unity-system-compositor.

Dot Categories: KDE Official NewsThe second beta of the 4.11 releases of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform is available. The beta 2 release announcement has highlights, links to release details and download instructions. The development focus is on bug fixing, polishing and general stabilization.