Showing headlines posted by tracyanne

It's been two months since the last update to Oracle's cross-platform VirtualBox software but yesterday evening a new point release was made available that has a plethora of fixes and other minor improvements...

For the past seven years I have been writing annual year-in-review articles for the AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. Much progress has been made in recent years for bettering the OpenGL Linux support from these leading closed-source graphics drivers and this year is no exception. Up today is a recap of this year's AMD Catalyst graphics driver releases plus benchmarks of this year's driver releases going back to Catalyst 11.12.

Look at the founders of any Internet startup, and you're almost certain to find an open source expert among them. Take Google, the biggest Internet success story of them all. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built and ran their brand-new web indexing tool on servers running the open source operating system Linux—and still do, 13 years and several billion dollars in profits later. Pick an Internet startup—Facebook, Zynga, Groupon—and chances are you'll find open source software running on its servers (and an open source-savvy founder in the boardroom).

While Epic Games hasn't allowed for Unreal Tournament 3 to be released for Linux, the first native Linux game using Unreal Engine 3 was released today. Yes, Unreal Engine 3 for Linux...

When talking about open source, many people's first thought is the GNU General Public License (GPL). While the software world has been revolutionised by GPL, the hardware world has seen little change. 

The first beta release of Mageia 3 Linux is now available...

Valve has announced that their Steam Linux client is now available to all Linux gamers. It's open beta period now and just in time for the holidays...

Many programming languages include libraries to do more complicated math. You can do statistics, numerical analysis or handle big numbers. One topic many programming languages have difficulty with is symbolic math. If you use Python though, you have access to sympy, the symbolic math library. Sympy is under constant development, and it's aiming to be a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS). It also is written completely in Python, so you won't need to install any extra requirements. You can download a source tarball or a git repository if you want the latest and greatest. Most distributions also provide a package for sympy for those of you less concerned about being bleeding-edge. Once it is installed, you will be able to access the sympy library in two ways. You can access it like any other library with the import statement. But, sympy also provides a binary called isympy that is modeled after ipython.

OpenMW, the open-source game engine re-implementation for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, is out with a new release this week...

After yesterday sharing the general feedback submitted by over a thousand GNOME users (Part 1, Part 2) from the 2012 GNOME User Survey about their views on the popular Linux desktop environment, here's all of the responses to another one of the questions. The question came down to what features of GNOME are most important from your personal use and would not like them to go away.

Imagine drawing anywhere with your tablet. It's now possible! KDE and KO GmbH have released Krita Sketch, the first tablet and ultrabook version of Krita, the award-winning digital painting application. Optimized for touch screens and developed with a QML interface, Krita Sketch provides everything needed to create artwork from beginning to end.

While FreeBSD 9.1 has yet to be officially released, the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 9.1 "Isotope" release has already been made available this month. In this article are performance benchmarks comparing the 64-bit release of PC-BSD 9.1 against DragonFlyBSD 3.0.3, Oracle Solaris Express 11.1, CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.10, and a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.

Even as Facebook dumps HTML5 to embrace native app development, calling its early enthusiasm for HTML5 its "biggest mistake," Sencha, a leading provider of open-source web application frameworks and tools, has not only demonstrated real-world readiness of HTML5, but has actually built a Facebook app that performs better than Facebook's native apps. How's that?

I wanted to share my notes with you all from this TED talk with Clay Shirky. You can watch the video—and I recommend that you do—but since I took notes I figured I’d share my textual summary as well!

The KDE development camp has announced the immediate availability of the first release candidate for the forthcoming KDE 4.10 release...

Though billed as a maintenance update, there's more to TomEE 1.5.1 than just bug fixes. One new feature is a Maven archetype to help users create TomEE projects

With the 2012 GNOME User Survey now officially over, here's the start of the results. In this posting are the first (of two) batches of feedback that users supplied while filling out the survey. This year there were 4,494 people participating in the annual yet independent GNOME survey. Of the nearly 4.5k respondents, 1,950 of them also provided feedback with this first batch consisting of the first one thousand responses. The results from the survey in full will also be published this week.

The Balance NUMA branch of the Linux kernel has been merged for the current 3.8 development cycle...

The Blekko search engine has contributed terabytes of ranking metadata to the Conmon Crawl Foundation to assist them in their mission of democratising the web through accessible search

Dynticks, the Dynamic Tick Timer for allowing the Linux kernel to skip ticks while idling and resume to running at full HZ when encountering load, is in the process of being extended. Developers are working on making Dynticks work even under select workloads in order to enhance the performance of CPU-intensive tasks...