Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

OpenSXCE 2013.05 is out in the wild as the community revival of the Solaris Express Community Edition...

Yesterday the ROSA Company announced the release of ROSA Desktop Fresh R1, "a new name distribution based on the ROSA Fresh platform." The announcement explained that this new "R" series is for "advanced users and enthusiasts who will appreciate rich functionality and freshness of distribution components without serious loss of quality."

Linux 3.10 sees improvements in the way lost packets at the end of TCP transactions are handled, speeding up HTTP data transfer. It also sees the addition of support for VLAN stacking and Realtek's RTL8188EE wireless chip.

Tagged on Friday was the first Wine 1.6 release candidate. For those curious about what will be found in this major release of Wine, in this article is a feature overview of Wine 1.6.

Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel sat down at LinuxCon Japan 2013 for a "fireside chat" (sans fire), ostensibly to discuss where Linux is going. While they touched on that subject, the conversation was wide-ranging over both Linux and non-Linux topics, from privacy to diversity and from educational systems to how operating systems will look in 20-30 years. Some rather interesting questions—seemingly different from those that might be asked at a US or European conference—were asked along the way.

It’s that time of year. The weather is warming, summer is upon us, the school year is at its end—and many folks are celebrating graduation from thier university. If you’re one of those people, congratulations! Now that you’ve completed your studies, you’re probably looking forward to the next big challenge: choosing a career path.

On June 1, the City of Oakland will co-host ReWrite Oakland as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. ReWrite Oakland will be an all day writeathon that will culminate with the launch of a new website called "Oakland Answers," based on last year’s Code for America project "Honolulu Answers." Oakland Answers will be citizen-focused website, written in plain-language, that makes it quick and simple for people to find City information and services they are looking for online. City staff and the community will collaborate to answer common questions generated by citizens.

There never will be a year when Linux conquers the desktop, because desktop computers are going to merge into tablet-style touch-driven devices and disappear. But desktop Linux was getting close, until Microsoft derailed it a few years back. The GNOME project’s recent release, GNOME 3.8, served to remind me of the significance of Microsoft’s actions.

In an overnight, grassroots movement, the open source platform Drupal has made an impact in Oklahoma. A group of more than 70 volunteer code sprinters—made up of developers, designers, and sys admins—congregated late Tuesday night at DrupalCon in Portland to create help4ok.org.

The Professors' Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshop is being held this year in Philadelphia from June 2-4. To prepare for the workshop, online activites are were assigned to be completed in stages and culminated on June 1.

Bsquare announced an Android 4.2 Mobile Development Platform (MDP) based on Qualcomm’s new 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) SoC featuring four ARM Krait 400 CPU cores plus an Adreno 330 GPU. The Snapdragon 800 MDP is available in both 11.6-inch tablet and 4.3-inch smartphone versions, and features surround sound, USB 3.0, and 802.11ac WiFi for up to 1.3Gbps streaming rates.

Haswell is here, Haswell is here, Haswell is here!!! After talking for months about the Linux kernel and driver development for Intel's Ivy Bridge successor, the heatsink can be lifted today on talking about Intel's Haswell processor. For the past few weeks I have been running and benchmarking an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor on Linux to mixed success. While the Haswell improvements are terrific, the Linux experience now is awaiting improvements.

For seeing where the current OpenGL driver performance stands for Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa development code were tested across four different processors to stress the HD 2000, HD 2500, HD 3000, and HD 4000 graphics capabilities atop Ubuntu.

The biggest change to Opera's browser in 17 years has debuted, with code for Opera Next released today for Windows and Mac. Opera Software today announced the beta availability of a completely re-engineered version of its browser that rips out the old plumbing in favour of Chromium, the open-source code that's the basis for Google's Chrome, and the WebKit layout engine, used in Apple's Safari and in Chrome*.

Raspbian is the Debian Linux distribution optimized for the ARMv7 Raspberry Pi. Older versions of Raspbian are based upon Debian Linux 6.0 on the Linux 3.1 kernel and GCC 4.4.5. However, the latest Debian Linux 7.0 on the latest Raspbian package-set has the Linux 3.6.11 armv6l kernel and GC 4.6.

Linux continues to grow not just because of any one vendor or particular use case, but because Linux is applicable to so many different use cases. Two such very different use-cases were on display this past week, with new releases of Pupply Linux and Backbox Linux

Perhaps you’ve considered migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? There are a host of good reasons for such a move. The most obvious one that comes to mind is to save on license fees, but don’t be fooled. For the migration process to be a success and the full benefits to be reaped, you must invest in the changeover itself. Don’t believe that because you want to save money long term you should skimp short-term. A look at the City of Freiburg’s attempted migration reveals the dangers of treating the new software as a drop-in replacement.

Last week I wrote about the emergence of a new Wayland Weston compositor renderer for the Raspberry Pi. There was a fair amount of discussion about it and since then additional details have emerged...

Wandboard.org announced a quad-core version of its Linux- and Android-ready Freescale i.MX 6-based open source boardset. The Wandboard Quad moves up to four Cortex-A9 cores at the same 1GHz speed, provides a more powerful Vivante GC355 GPU, doubles DDR3 RAM to 2GB, and adds a SATA port.

Being benchmarked today at Phoronix is a comparison of eight different BSD and Linux operating systems. The contenders for this performance roundabout include PC-BSD 9.1, DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1, Ubuntu 13.04, Linux Mint 15 RC, CentOS 6.4, Fedora 18, Mageia 3, and openSUSE 12.3. Which of these operating systems are the fastest and slowest for a variety of different workloads?