Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The open source Xen hypervisor was all the rage in 2005 across many Linux vendors. At the time, Red Hat specifically called out Xen as being a key part of its technology roadmap for 2006 and beyond. Red Hat started to move away from Xen in 2008 with its acquisition of KVM founder Qumranet. Other Linux vendors have also progressively moved to embrace KVM as the Linux virtualization technology of choice as well.

Japanese internet service provider NTT Plala announced a TV set-top box (STB) that runs Linux or Android on an STMicroelectronics dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The Hikari TV Smart TV STB supports DLNA and OTT (over-the-top) services, can run HTML5 apps, and is optimized for NTT Plala’s Hikari TV cloud-based gaming service.

When I tell people about OpenGamma, reactions are often incredulous. We’ve built a full market risk analytics platform for capital markets—with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, such as a declarative calculation engine, a flashy HTML5 GUI, and a comprehensive analytics library—and we’ve released it under the Apache 2.0 License. And, our key customers and users at the moment are some of the world’s most secretive technologists: hedge fund managers. To an outsider, this may look like a curious combination.

With the release of the Linux 3.9 kernel being imminent, here's a recap of the most interesting features coming to this next Linux release.

Mentor Graphics has merged the Linux-based automotive infotainment technology it acquired in February from MontaVista Software into its own in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform. Additionally, the new Mentor Embedded Automotive Technology Platform (ATP) complies with Yocto Project 1.3 and GENIVI 3.0 requirements, says Mentor.

The push to cloud transforms the way we apply information security principles to systems and applications. Perimeters of the past, secured heavily with traditional network devices in the outermost ring, lose effectiveness day by day. Shifting the focus to defense in depth brings the perimeter down to the individual cloud instances running your application. Security-Enhanced Linux, or SELinux, forms an effective part of that perimeter.

CompuLab has introduced a rugged, fanless, microserver based on 3rd Generation Intel Core Processors, clocked up to 2.5GHz. The Linux-friendly “uSVR” runs from -20 to 60° C, accommodates up to four internal 2.5-inch drives, networks via WiFi and up to six GbE channels, and expands modularly.

Oracle has redoubled its efforts to address the recent spate of vulnerabilities related to Java running in web browsers, but the renewed focus on security has had an unfortunate side effect – namely, that Java 8 will no longer ship by its planned September 2013 release date. According to Mark Reinhold, chief architect for Oracle's Java platform group, the database giant's recent efforts to patch highly publicized security holes in the Java plug-in have sapped the resources of the ongoing Java 8 development effort.

If your password is as easy as 123, we need to talk. The first password I ever remember using when I started in system administration was ".redruM" (no quotes). It was by far the craftiest, most-impossible-to-guess password ever conceived by a sentient being. Sadly, a mere 17 years later (wow, it's been a long time!) that password probably could be brute-force compromised in ten minutes—with a cell phone.

Linus Torvalds cursed out NVIDIA ten months ago when he was asked about the lack of Linux support for Optimus, NVIDIA's hybrid graphics technology. NVIDIA has now released a beta of its proprietary Linux graphics driver which finally supports Optimus. The sad thing here is that NVIDIA will be praised for the Optimus support, even though they sat back and waited for quite a while to let others build foundations they now use in their driver, which is fairly popular among users, but fairly hated among open source developers.

At the end of March was a new release of ZFS On Linux, a kernel module implementation of the ZFS file-system for Linux, and it was declared ZFS On Linux is now ready for wide-scale deployments. With this release (ZOL/SPL v0.6.1), new benchmarks are being done to compare ZFS to popular Linux file-systems. In this article is a brief preview against EXT4.

With the Radeon DRM changes for Linux 3.10 lining up and including Radeon Unified Video Decoder support, it's becoming easier to take advantage of Radeon UVD-accelerated video playback with AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver.

On Wednesday, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) held a conference? to discuss open standards and the question "Who makes the internet?" in preparation for its annual meeting in Berlin at the end of July. Hans-Joachim Otto, parliamentary state secretary of the German Federal Ministry of Economics, took this occasion in the German capital to reassure the internet standards committee that it has a firm ally in the German government. "We keep having to promote the freedom of the internet on an international level", said the FDP (Liberal) politician. "This is by no means a given."

While startups, developers, and small businesses flock to behemoth public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine that give them a profoundly efficient bang for their buck, bigger enterprises largely stick to paying the high cost for private clouds. They are wary of potential availability and security issues that, rightfully, could hamper (or cripple) their business. The perceived risk-reward of saving money by turning IT operations over to a public cloud hasn't yet permeated through to big businesses.

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that it and the Google Open Source Programs Office are jointly funding developer Pawel Jakub Dawidek to improve the Capsicum framework. Capsicum was originally developed by Robert Watson of the University of Cambridge and Ben Laurie from Google Research to extend the POSIX API and provide object-capability security to Unix-like operating systems. The goal of the framework is to give thin-client operating systems like Google's Chrome OS a robust security model that is relatively lightweight. Capsicum has been available in FreeBSD since version 9.0 and Google is working on a Linux version.

Sometimes all you need is a text editor for jotting down a few quick notes, but what about those times you need to get serious writing done? Your first thought might not be to turn to your web browser, but there are quite a few writing tools available for Google Chrome that you should consider. Google Docs is a great option, but all of the extra features can be excessive if all you want to do is keep a note. The Chrome Web Store is now home to many distraction-free writing tools for Google Chrome that are quicker to load and access than the competition.

Since we have been looking at FreeBSD, OpenVZ, and ProxMox, it seems only right to mention the other open source player in this market: OpenNode. OpenNode, like ProxMox, is a management layer built on top of OpenVZ containers and KVM virtual machines. Unlike ProxMox, which is built on Debian, OpenNode is similar to CentOS and Scientific Linux in that it is built off of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A good fit, since the stable OpenVZ kernel is also released for RHEL.

Scribus is an open source, graphical desktop publishing (DTP) tool that focuses on layout, frames, styles, color management, and intercolumn document flow. Scribus is free software that runs on the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms, and provides most of the capabilities of traditional DTP tools at no cost.

Not long ago, I wrote about how awesome it is to have shell access on a remote server. I still hold to that notion, but I received a lot of feedback on the issue. If you've considered paying even a couple dollars a month for shell access on a server, you might want to check out http://www.lowendbox.com.

Linux 3.9 includes drivers for new AMD graphics chips and for Intel Wi-Fi chips that are expected to become available this summer. Changes to the network subsystem will enable the kernel to be more efficient when distributing network traffic across multiple processor cores.