Showing headlines posted by hkwint

For VA VistA we have a conundrum, the originator of the code, the US government, has left the code basically licenseless. I believe this means that the choice if preferred license should be up to the most substantial third-party developers. I believe that the most substantial way to make VistA better is to make contributions that make further development easier. MUMPS is a great language but it makes VA VistA inaccessible to most programmers.

Shell Scripts are very useful but not all that fun to look at. They have simple user input and output text. But, there is a way to spice up your scripts and make them a bit more eye catching with a simple program called "Figlet". read more

Going all control-freak on a Samba share and trying to finely slice-and-dice file permissions is the path to madness. Charlie Schluting has some sensible ideas on managing file permissions on your fileserver.

This week at Phoronix a number of the stories we cover pertained to Gallium3D, the Linux graphics stack in general, and more Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks. In the Gallium3D world we covered news about work on bringing this driver architecture to the Haiku OS and interestingly X-Video and EXA coming to Gallium3D...

Besides the ATI Catalyst Linux driver still lacking public XvBA support (the library is in the driver, but there's no documentation or public implementations of it) even though we exclusively detailed the X-Video Bitstream Acceleration architecture nearly a year ago for enhancing HD video playback on Linux, the other leading problem we usually end up facing with AMD's proprietary Linux driver is their slow response time with supporting new X Server and kernel releases. AMD's policy has been not to focus on providing support for unreleased kernels/X servers, and then to provide the support once out, but while they do provide new releases on a consistent monthly basis, things usually don't end up working out as planned. In some cases it has taken AMD months to support new Linux components within their proprietary driver stack to the point that most recently support for the Linux 2.6.29 kernel wasn't even added until after the Linux 2.6.30 kernel had been out...

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.
[ Good news! Not that Google is making an OS - who cares? - but there's finally something else in the blogosphere than Mono - hkwint ]

Click here for the joke of the month.

The Ubuntu Technical Board has been asked for a position statement on the use of C#, specifically the Mono implementation, by applications in Ubuntu.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about a digital and analog circuit simulator called ksimus. One of my readers asked what the difference was between ksimus and ktechlab so I thought I'd take a look at ktechlab.

Low-cost, energy-efficient Userful Multiplier desktops running on Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop have transformed the way SASSA officials capture and process social grant applications in rural South Africa.

[ Thanks to LXer reader Trevor for making us aware - hkwint ]

Please proceed to 'full story' to watch the video.

Please proceed to Full Story to see the video

The trouble with the present FOSS brand is that it is not created by those with a stake in it; rather, it is created and controlled by those who oppose FOSS and all that it stands for. Bruce Byfield reports on the importance of defining the FOSS brand outside the community.

Back in May we shared that NVIDIA was readying its OpenCL Linux driver and had submitted their OpenCL 1.0 NVIDIA drivers to the Khronos Group for certification. As of this morning, NVIDIA has now released its OpenCL driver for Linux (and Windows), but it's only available if you are a registered NVIDIA developer...

Small screen? Crummy touchpad? Not a problem for Conkeror. Conkeror is a Web browser with an Emacs-style look, feel and configuration. It uses Firefox's HTML rendering engine and works with most Firefox extensions, but it provides a keyboard-driven interface and makes excellent use of screen space. It's a fitting Web browser for Netbooks with their imprecise touchpads and small screens. Conkeror uses the same free software license as Firefox.

As Greg Maxwell nicely pointed out it appears Theora can compete with other formats used to distribute video content online. He compared output generated by YouTube's encoding mechanism with output generated by the new Theora enconder (as of writing libtheora 1.1alpha2 is the latest release). The result in a nutshell: Theora delivers similar performance to whatever encoder setup is currently used at YouTube - this means online streaming services can use open media technology without paying a significant price in bitrate or quality compared to current setups.

Canonical, the commercial organization behind the Ubuntu variant of the Debian distribution of Linux, said today that it has certified its Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition to run on all 17 configurations of Hewlett-Packard's sixth-generation of ProLiant servers. As El Reg was crabbing about earlier this week, HP does not officially and fully support Ubuntu, as it does commercial Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell. With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems from those two respective vendors, HP has signed OEM deals that allow it to sell and front-end installation and technical support on behalf of those Linux disties, and the parties divvy up the money so they each get a cut of the action.

Microsoft plans to remove Internet Explorer from the versions of Windows 7 that it ships in Europe, CNET News has learned.

Russia investigates Microsoft (MSFT) for antitrust violations with Windows XP.

[ Actually, this story is not about free software but about the addiction of Russia to XP and their habit of controlling whatever company does business in Russia. It's about what happens if two monopolies collide. I find the whole case too freakin' funny to let pass unnoticed. If Microsoft stops distributing XP, at least the post will be delivered as the Russian post offices run Linux - hkwint ]

In a previous tech tip, we saw how to use kill to monitor processes. Another option is to use ps. With both methods, you can check $? for success/failure. However, note that kill -0 may return failure even if the process actually exists. This happens when the current user has no permission to the process in question, for example: kill -0 1.