Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

How do the Linux and open source communities define the open cloud? Our Leaders of the Open Cloud series posed this key question, along with many others, to industry heavyweights in the 10 weeks leading up to the CloudOpen conference in San Diego last month. Here, we’ve distilled their answers into a slideshow to illustrate the range of participants and viewpoints as well as some areas of contention.

With Unity 2D being abandoned and only providing Unity + Compiz in Ubuntu 12.10 as the default desktop, the out-of-the-box experience for low-powered ARM hardware on the stock Ubuntu desktop is a mess. Last month the decision was made by Canonical to do away with Unity 2D now that LLVMpipe is coming into shape as a decent Gallium3D software rasterizer inside Mesa. LLVMpipe has been talked about since its very early days on Phoronix for running OpenGL on the CPU. With this being the default software fallback now in order to support Compiz, rather than going with the Qt-based Unity 2D, it's okay for x86 users.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, has invested $1 million in Inktank, the company that provides commercial support for the open source Ceph distributed storage system. The investment comes in the form of a "convertible note" and will be used to fund the expansion of the company.

The tool collection util-linux has been extended to include resizepart, a utility that is useful when repartitioning. Some X.org graphics drivers now support hybrid graphics. The infrastructure to support UEFI Secure Boot is maturing.

NVIDIA has announced today the graphics cards that are no longer supported by their mainline Linux graphics driver going forward but will be moved to a new 304.xx Linux legacy driver branch. The information that NVIDIA officially posted today is basically the same as what I wrote two weeks back in NVIDIA To Discontinue Linux Support For Some GPUs. With the NVIDIA 304.xx proprietary driver series that they're currently on, they will be ending support for GeForce 6 "NV4x" and GeForce 7 "G7x" graphics processors.

"A while back I wrote a review on Windows 8, but when writing a review they tend to be more based on first impressions rather than how a system actually grows on you," wrote Ken Quirk, a committed Linux fan and Ubuntu user. "So, in the interest of fairness I have decided to give Windows 8 a fair crack of the whip."

The new release of PostgreSQL, version 9.2, has arrived, four months after the appearance of the first beta version. The new release includes read and write performance boosts, index-only scanning, new web-oriented functionality, and support for range data types. As shown in the beta, the new version promises to be much faster than its predecessor primarily thanks to index-only scanning, which allows searches to avoid reading the underlying tables and instead search only indexes. This new feature is used automatically, though there are caveats as to how effective it can be all situations, but where the required data is already indexed, for example in "big data" scenarios, the boost in performance can be huge.

While most of the Linux desktop talk these days is about Unity, KDE, and GNOME, advancing in a quiet but steadfast manner is Xfce. The next major release of Xfce, version 4.12, is due out in March. It's undecided at this time though whether Xfce 4.12 will use GTK2 or GTK3.

Continuing to advance as an open-source project is a game engine that's written from scratch with an aim of being compatible with the original Half-Life "Gold Source" engine. This GPL-licensed engine is already working with many original Valve games and mods. A Phoronix reader wrote in this morning to bring up Xash3D, which is self-described as a "Custom Gold Source Engine build from a scratch." The Xash3D engine isn't brand new but has been around for a while now and is continuing to mature -- it should already work for almost any existing single-player Half-Life mod without having any compatibility issues. The multi-player code to the Xash3D engine is also incomplete at the moment.

The WordPress developers have released an update to their open source publishing platform that closes important security holes. Version 3.4.2 of WordPress addresses two privilege escalation vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited by a malicious user to bypass certain security restrictions. WordPress is often a target for attackers and ensuring it is secure protects not only the published content but the readers of the content.

The thicket of lawsuits surrounding the mobile industry has grown to the point that it is hard for any individual action to stand out. If any case has managed to make itself visible in that crowd anyway, it is the battle between Apple and Samsung currently being fought in the US. The first stage of that battle has just been resolved, heavily in Apple's favor. It will be some time before this story truly reaches its end, but some of the more interesting implications for the industry, and for free software, can already be seen.

Motorola has unveiled three new devices in its Razr smartphone line, touting extended battery life and larger screen size as their main selling points. All three will be available from Verizon Wireless later this year. They will come preloaded with various Google services, including the Chrome browser, Google Play, Google Maps, Voice Actions for Android and Google+.

They say everyone has a story to tell, and certainly Linux geeks are no exception. So it was with great anticipation that Linux Girl came upon an "Ask Slashdot" posting recently titled, "How Did You Become a Linux Professional?" "I'm interested in taking my skills to the next level -- and making a career out of it," wrote blogger ternarybit.

It was five years ago today that AMD's open-source strategy for Linux graphics driver support was publicly unveiled. On 6 September 2007, one day after unveiling their new Catalyst/fglrx Linux driver, is when AMD lifted my embargo that allowed me to exclusively explain their open-source strategy in detail.

While the Catalyst Linux graphics driver was overhauled five years ago, not everyone is satisfied with the closed-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver. Here's some interesting comments by a prominent Linux developer and his less than stellar Catalyst experience. Some interesting Linux graphics driver comments were shared this week in an email by a prominent open-source developer who's been involved with Linux since 1996 and is responsible for one of the window managers. When I was liaising between this developer and a prominent game company, he shared some interesting driver comments, which he's allowed me to republish on Phoronix.

Want your site to look good, even though you're not a designer? Try a design framework. For as long as I can remember, I've known how to use a pencil. I can write with it, and I even can draw with it—although in my case, saying I can draw is something of a sad exaggeration. I might know how to use a pencil and thoroughly understand its technology, but that technical knowledge doesn't mean I can draw something aesthetically pleasing.

One month after version 4.9 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) arrived, the KDE Community has released the first of the monthly stabilisation updates to its desktop and software suite. As usual with these types of updates, KDE SC 4.9.1 improves the translations for many applications and fixes numerous bugs, some of which can cause KDE applications to crash.

The LinuxCon and CloudOpen 2012 conference held in San Diego last week were an epic success. Three days of keynotes and technical sessions from leaders in Linux, open source technologies and cloud computing sparked new conversations online in the days during and after the event. The information and ideas now circulating through the Linux community presented some new angles on old topics as well as a rare peek at the tools and technologies behind innovative companies and services.

Linux Mint founder and lead developer Clement "Clem" Lefebvre has provided further insight into his team's decision to create Nemo, a fork of GNOME's Nautilus file manager, and their plans for the new project. In a new blog post, Lefebvre says that he and his fellow developers chose to fork Nautilus because of the recent controversial design changes in version 3.6 of Nautilus, calling it "a catastrophe" as it "removes features we consider requirements".

These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.9.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.