Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There is more to a hard drive than its size. While the amount of disk space is all you see marketed about a hard drive on a sales page, there is actually an extensive amount of coding that goes into making a hard drive capable of handling your applications and data in the first place. Most Linux distributions currently default to using the ext4 file system, but the future for many of them lies with the B-tree file system, better known as Btrfs.

Canonical is planning to release the "Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu for phones" on Thursday 21 February. This release will allow developers to put images of the phone-optimised Ubuntu onto the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones. The images are billed as "early previews" to allow developers to create applications for the phone operating system and, rather than being a snapshot of development, will be supplemented by daily updates.

Gaming on Linux has long been a hit and miss exercise in frustration. Some users tried to get WINE working well enough to run Windows games on Linux, while others built Linux native games. As of last week, Linux users won't need to struggle nearly as much to get great games. Valve announced the official debut of Steam for Linux. With Steam for LInux, users will now gain access to a large library of titles including Counter-Strike, Half-Life and Team-Fortress 2 that will run on Linux.

GitHub , the Git-centric project hosting and collaboration company, has announced the open sourcing of Boxen, its management and automation tool used within the company for managing Mac systems. The project, which was originally named "The Setup", was designed to allow developers to go from a new laptop to a system ready to hack the GitHub.com source within thirty minutes with a single command. They then ditched "The Setup" and wrote Boxen to replace it, so that any company could use it.

An update on events and happenings at SCALE 11x coming next weekend in Los Angeles.

LXer Feature: 17-Feb-2013

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

The future of open is a dynamic landscape, ripe with opportunities to increase civic engagement, literacy, and innovation. Towards this goal, the Science Program at Creative Commons is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation and members of the open science community to facilitate the building of an open online course, an Introduction to Open Science. The actual build will take place during a hackathon-style "sprint" event on Open Data Day on Saturday, February 23 and will serve as a launch course for the School of Open during Open Education Week (March 11-15).

No longer will anyone be able to say "there's just no market for gaming on Linux." After years of patient waiting and an endless stream of rumors, anyone can now have Steam on Linux. Following several months of beta testing, Valve gave the open source world a Valentine's gift yesterday by fully releasing the Steam for Linux client.

A trademark battle has erupted following a company’s bid to stake a Europe-wide claim to the name "Python" - that of many devs’ favourite scripting language. The Python Software Foundation has said it’s wrestling UK-based host Veber for its own name after the company informed the software people it was applying for Community Trademark on the name “Python”.

Two researchers at the University of Erlangen in Germany have demonstrated a way of accessing an encrypted Android smartphone using a freezer. To access the cryptographic key stored in the phone's memory, they placed the phone in the freezer compartment for an hour, with the result that the memory content remained – almost literally – frozen. They used a special tool to read the cryptographic key from the phone's memory (cold boot attack).

The Linux kernel now includes everything that is needed to use 3D acceleration with all GeForce graphics chips. Drivers have also been added for a Wireless Gigabit chip and a PCIe WLAN chip from Realtek. In his email announcing the release of Linux 3.8-rc6, Linus Torvalds emphasised that he wanted the seventh release candidate to be the last one. When he released RC7 on Friday, however, he made no mention of whether there would be an eighth RC before the final version of Linux 3.8.

In a 2010 post here on OStatic, I asked this question: "Is It Too Late for an Open Source Challenge to Android?" And in a follow-up post a few weeks ago, I discussed the impending arrival of a slew of mobile phones based on Firefox OS and Ubuntu. Now, there are even more concrete signs that we are going to see heavy competition among open mobile operating systems this year. Not ony have Firefox OS-based phones arrived (seen above), but Ubuntu phones are coming faster than many people thought they would.

We are proud to announce that Firefox Flicks will welcome back: Edward Norton (Oscar Nominated Actor), Shauna Robertson (Producer of hit comedies, including Superbad & Knocked Up) and Couper Samuelson (We Own the Night and Sundance Winning short, Whiplash ), to the judging panel, along with new judges Bob Harvey (EVP Global Sales and Marketing for Panavision), Franklin Leonard (founder of the Black List) and Catherine Ogilvie (EMEA Marketing for Dolby).

In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributor Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy conference week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further. Holding their annual conferences at the same time and the same place will foster interaction, knowledge transfer and technical progress.

The Linux kernel now includes everything that is needed to use 3D acceleration with all GeForce graphics chips. Drivers have also been added for a Wireless Gigabit chip and a PCIe WLAN chip from Realtek. In his email announcing the release of Linux 3.8-rc6, Linus Torvalds emphasised that he wanted the seventh release candidate to be the last one. When he released RC7 on Friday, however, he made no mention of whether there would be an eighth RC before the final version of Linux 3.8.

The Lua IDE Decoda, which has been used to create code for many Lua-based games, including its author's game Natural Selection 2, is being open sourced to help the tool improve with a wider community

Badly chosen warning messages caused some consternation with Google recently as its Chrome browser began declaring supported Linux systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 obsolete. The problem was brought to public attention by Red Hat evangelist Jan Wildeboer in a Google+ posting when his browser announced "Google Chrome is no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete".

Cloud storage may be on the move, but local network-attached storage (NAS) systems continue to be in hot demand, especially as they integrate cloud backup and mobile access. In the enterprise NAS, unified storage, and SAN (storage area network) world, Linux shares the pie with Unix and Windows. But in the faster-growing small and medium business (SMB), small office and home office (SoHo), and consumer NAS segments, Linux is clearly dominant.

Want to improve the integrity of your data? Place constraints in the database, as well as in your application. NoSQL, the catchall phrase for non-relational databases, is all the rage among Web developers. However, it's somewhat unfair and unhelpful to use the term NoSQL to describe them, given the variety of technologies involved. Even so, there are some fundamental differences between traditional relational databases and their NoSQL counterparts. For one, as the name implies, NoSQL databases don't use the standard SQL query language, and use either their own SQL-like language (for example, MongoDB) or an object-oriented API. Another difference is the lack of two-dimensional tables; whereas SQL databases operate solely with such tables, NoSQL databases eschew them in favor of name-value pairs or hash-like objects. And finally, NoSQL databases typically lack the features that led to the development of relational databases, namely transactions and data integrity.

The Linux kernel developers have long been aware of the need for better testing of the kernel. That testing can take many forms, including testing for performance regressions and testing for build and boot regressions. As the term suggests, regression testing is concerned with detecting cases where a new kernel version causes problems in code or features that already existed in previous versions of the kernel. Of course, each new kernel release also adds new features. The Trinity fuzz tester is a tool that aims to improve testing of one class of new (and existing) features: the system call interfaces that the kernel presents to user space.