Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Android may not be as fully open as many FOSS fans would like it to be, but the fact remains that it's essentially the poster child for Linux's success in the mobile world. So it was with some dismay we looked on at the impromptu battle that sprang up recently between Google and Acer over Alibaba's Aliyun OS.

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth the linkage. This edition looks at the Python Foundation's new Distinguished Service Award, the SmilePlug, Firefox turning 10 years old and a JavaScript LINQ library.

Given the shock they've had to endure as a result of the ongoing Secure Boot saga over the past year or so, Linux geeks may perhaps be forgiven if they're a tad sensitive to apparent attempts to exclude Linux from other new technological developments as well. It was perhaps less-than-entirely surprising, then, that FOSS fans reacted so swiftly to the initial news about Intel's Clover Trail Atom chip.

LXer Feature: 24-Sept-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

In continuation of NVIDIA Tegra With Open-Source Graphics Is Coming, here is the video that covers all of what's currently going on in the open-source Tegra world.

“What a crazy week,” said Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, a cloud-based digital map publishing company, in an interview with TPM. Gundersen’s point is well taken, given his small 25-person startup, based in Washington, D.C., just won a $575,000 grant from the journalism innovation nonprofit the Knight Foundation. The grant was awarded to MapBox specifically to allow the company to focus most of its resources over the next few months on improving its own main source of map data, OpenStreetMap, a free crowdsourced world map created by volunteer cartographers. It’s helpful to think of OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the “Wikipedia” of digital maps (although it’s not actually tied to Wikipedia). MapBox is an outside private company that uses the OSM data to build maps and mapping software, much of which it makes open source, for anyone to use for free, but some of which is proprietary and which it charges high prices to other companies and government agencies to access.

The chairs of the W3C's HTML Working Group have presented a plan to approve a stable HTML5 specification before the end of 2014. The plan proposes to formally define a stable set of features as HTML 5.0, but when the HTML Working Group will approve this plan is as yet unknown. Features for which no stable specification is available by then could be moved to an extended "HTML 5.1" set of features that could be completed by 2016.

Speed is essential in multimedia, graphics and signal processing. Sometimes programmers resort to assembly language to get every last bit of speed out of their machines. GCC offers an intermediate between assembly and standard C that can get you more speed and processor features without having to go all the way to assembly language: compiler intrinsics. This article discusses GCC's compiler intrinsics, emphasizing vector processing on three platforms: X86 (using MMX, SSE and SSE2); Motorola, now Freescale (using Altivec); and ARM Cortex-A (using Neon). We conclude with some debugging tips and references.

Similarly to current versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Linux is now capable of a hybrid sleep state. The 3.6 kernel also provides improved random data and reduces the work load of EFI bootloaders.

With flexible I/O options and Linux capability, the Raspberry Pi offers enormous potential for hardware development. Andrew Back takes us through the possibilities with his hardware-hacking getting-started guide for the credit-card-sized Linux computer.

Faithful readers of the Linux Blog Safari column here at LinuxInsider may recall the woeful report a few weeks back that a murder had been committed -- by Apple, no less! -- and that the Linux desktop was dead. It was a distressing report, to be sure, not least because there was no corpse in sight.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has performed testing on the effects of overclocking and overvolting, and is now providing what it calls a "turbo mode" for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. While the Foundation has always supported these kinds of modifications, they have in the past voided the customer's warranty for the product – a sticky bit in the BCM2835 chip makes sure this operation cannot be performed undetected. The turbo mode option enables users to get more performance out of their Raspberry Pis without having to be afraid of affecting their warranty.

Animation and video editing in Linux can be treacherous territory. Anyone who has tried working in these media probably has experienced the frustration of rendering a huge file for an hour only to see the program crash before the export is finished. A bevy of tools and applications for manipulating video exist for Linux, and some are more mature than others.

Open hardware platforms like the Arduino have turned device development into a hobbyist enterprise in recent years, but the $20 price tag of a microcontroller board seems a lot less tantalizing when one adds in the costs of testing and debugging it. At LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego, David Anders addressed this issue and offered some guidance on finding and selecting tools for open hardware development, the majority of which are open hardware themselves.

According to reports from ITworld and ZDNet, Intel has said that it is now planning a variant of the Atom Z2760 (code-named Clover Trail) System-on-Chip (SoC) that will run Linux or Android-based operating systems. The chip was originally designed specifically for Windows 8 tablets. However, the company hasn't provided any further product details or intended target markets.

Zorin Linux 6.0 is a very capable replacement operating system for Microsoft Windows. It is also a bother-free alternative to other Linux distros that suffer from the usability issues of the Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity desktop interfaces. The Zorin Linux distro is an offshoot of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux but it has much more of the look and feel of Linux Mint with a few very substantial differences

Developers have improved support for new Apple MacBook laptops. The Radeon driver now supports PCIe 2.0 and the kernel now includes a driver for the Cinergy T Stick Black DVB-T receiver

IBM PureFlex System comes with the hardware pre-integrated and the management stack pre-loaded for convenience, but there are a few manual steps you need to do before it can be used to host resilient virtual servers. In this article, the authors explain and show how to set up and deploy a resilient virtual server (in this article, Red Hat's KVM hypervisor is used).

Scientists celebrated a breakthrough in their understanding of the human genome this month – the results of a large collaborative project driven by big data and built with Linux. ENCODE researchers mapped the DNA segments that regulate gene function. Source: Nature, "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome." On Sept. 5, Nature and two other scientific journals simultaneously published 30 papers with the results of the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Project. The 5-year project involved nearly 450 scientists from 30 institutions around the globe and produced scores of data on how and when genes are regulated.

I'm up in Helsinki at the Open Knowledge Festival (which, tempting fate, uses the abbreviation 'OK Festival'). It's an interesting event, even if it does occasionally lapse into the quasi-religious atmosphere that often accompanies 'open' tech issues. Thankfully, there are those willing to ask heretical questions. Some of the most valuable discussions took place this afternoon, covering the thorny issue of open data's business case. Yes, many can easily agree that open is good, but how can it benefit the bottom line?