Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This past week, Linux 3.6 was released, but perhaps the bigger news is what is coming in Linux 3.7 as the continuous evolution of Linux pushes development forward.

LXer Feature: 07-Oct-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

If you have been wanting to try out the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT operating system that's presently under development, there's now an easier way. Rather than needing to install a current FreeBSD release and then upgrade to the "-CURRENT" packages from there, a FreeBSD developer has finally started offering snapshot images of the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT and 9-STABLE versions. Yes, finally ISO snapshots to make it easier to try out the current development state from a clean install.

Google has released a general purpose framework for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), as open source. Reranking is a technique that is used when there is a model that can offer several scored hypothesised outputs; rerankers can reorder the ranked outputs based on information not available to the original model.

Using Linux in cars is a hot topic, even if the market is less visible to most developers than tablets or mobile phones. The Linux Foundation (LF) announced an initiative at the second Automotive Linux Summit in Gaydon, UK, however, that may result in a higher profile for automotive Linux development. The initiative is called Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), and its goal is to produce a distribution tuned for deployment throughout a vehicle, including in-dash systems, instrument clusters, and even safety-critical engine control units. A number of automakers and industry players are on board — which sparked some confusion at the announcement, because many of the same companies are also involved with existing Linux-based automotive efforts like GENIVI.

The School of Business and Information Management at Oulu University of Applied Sciences (OUAS) created an open source project management software named OpixProject. The objective was not to create something that would compete with the current project management software, but to place students in realistic problem-solving environments in order to reduce the gap between the concepts covered in the classroom and real-world experiences.

CEMEX is fostering innovation by changing the way employees work. It is encouraging a change in practices towards more collaboration, transparency, and openness, and enabling these changes through a Social Networking platform with a business sense, called Shift. These changes are challenging existing management practices, and opening the creative and strategic arena to all levels of the company. After only 18 months of being in place, these new practices have already produced benefits in an unprecedented scale and speed.

The Calligra Suite is an unusual compilation of office tools with much potential -- but it has a good deal of maturing to do before it can advance beyond its mediocre performance following a debut almost three years ago. Calligra is a fork of KDE's KOffice that grew out of unresolved disputes among KOffice developers. The project team recently announced the second stable release.

Everyone is talking about maps lately. Google maps are no longer on the iPhone. Apple maps have some serious bugs. Luckily, open source maps are making a move.

While the main DRM pull request for the Linux 3.7 kernel has yet to be submitted to Linus Torvalds, the Radeon DRM pull for the Linux 3.7 was just sent into David Airlie as the DRM sub-system maintainer. The Linux 3.7 kernel offers the following highlights as explained by Alex Deucher in this email..

Inkscape is a magnificent open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It is used for many purposes like designing icons, textures, cartoons, graphics, etc, but did you know that you can now print what you draw in Inkscape on 3D? Thanks to TinkerCAD you can!

After what the developers call "11 months of grueling work", the very first release candidate for the ARM version of openSUSE is now available. The release is based on the current openSUSE 12.2 and supports ARM7-type hardware. This includes Texas Instrument's OMAP3 and OMAP4 Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC), Marvell's ArmadaXP 510 and Freescale i.MX51 processors.

Open source is about more than the code, it’s about the culture. The open culture that many open source communities embrace is entrenched in organizations like Code for America. It’s obvious as I sit here during the opening day of the Code for America Summit in San Francisco, CA.

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) opened up registration for the FANG Challenges, a set of three next-generation military vehicle design competitions that will kick off in January, and will put tools based on approaches borrowed from software development and chip design in the hands of teams of engineers and designers. In an effort to reinvent how such complex systems are designed and built, DARPA is preparing for the first real test of its efforts to use open-source software and Web collaboration—with millions of dollars in prize money at stake.

Oracle's proprietary posture may have soiled the welcome mat and vilified its good standing in the FOSS community as CEO Larry Ellison pushes the balance point between servicing his customers and nickel-and-diming them to turn a higher profit. Clearly, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems -- and with it OpenOffice and Java -- the company has not acted very neighborly with open source developers.

Microsoft has released a new JavaScript development environment, dubbed TypeScript, and says it is designed to help developers write more complex apps with the popular scripting language. Long-time Reg readers may recall that Microsoft has form giving the world new technologies, but not always for altruistic reasons. During its epic antitrust battle with the US Department of Justice, Microsoft's in-house use of the terms “embrace and extend” or “embrace and smother” came to light to describe the practice of releasing non-standard products, among them software development tools, then using Microsoft's market share to none-too-gently steer the industry towards buying those products to the detriment of competitors.

A revised patch-set was published a few days ago that can make meta-data operations for the Btrfs file-system approximately 20% faster. The latest patches build upon what I wrote about in February with A Patch That Can Make Btrfs 5~10% Faster. The idea comes down to providing an extent buffer cache for each i-node so that the item doesn't need to be searched from the root of a B+ tree everytime, thereby making searches quicker. The earlier patch wasn't merged but now it's up to a second version consisting of three patches and a stated 20% performance improvement for meta-data operations.

With the recent release of the Unity 6.6 desktop for Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2, benchmarks were done to see how the OpenGL gaming performance compares to that of Unity 6.4 from the earlier beta state of the Quantal Quetzal, plus the respective Compiz versions. At least for Intel Ivy Bridge graphics under some workloads, it looks like the Unity/Compiz updates are slowing down the GL performance even further.

MartUX is a new OpenIndiana/Illumos-based Solaris distribution for reviving SPARC hardware support. MartUX_OpenIndiana is based upon OpenIndiana oi_151a, which was released for x86 hardware one year ago, but this LiveDVD distribution release is focusing upon SPARC hardware support. This is the first SPARC release of an OpenIndiana / Illumos distribution.

The latest achievement within the Wayland camp is wlterm, a native terminal emulator...