Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Just over two weeks after the official release of Scientific Linux 5.6, the Scientific Linux (SL) developers have announced the arrival of the LiveCD and LiveDVD variants of version 5.6 of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone. The LiveCD/DVD versions allow users to run the distribution directly from a CD or DVD drive without having to install it. Alternatively, it can also be installed to the local hard disk or users can run the LiveCD image from a USB flash drive.

Acoustic fingerprinting has been given a tremendous boost by the mobile smartphone business. You have probably seen the basic scenario in television commercials, if not in person: a user holds up a phone to capture a few seconds of audio playing nearby, and the application computes a "fingerprint" of the track, which is then used to query a remote database for the mystery artist and track name. The space has been dominated by proprietary software, but a new — and open source — project was unveiled last week, named Echoprint.

gDEBugger, a program developed by Graphic Remedy for debugging, profiling, and analyzing OpenGL (and OpenCL) applications, was a very useful tool for graphics developer. gDEBugger worked with GPUs from all major vendors, is capable of locating graphics pipeline performance bottlenecks, allowed dynamically editing GLSL shaders in real-time, and had many other capabilities. This powerful utility was even made free of charge to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux users. Graphic Remedy was acquired by AMD last month and already the non-Windows users have been shafted with their OS support being dropped.

UCubed, the Ubuntu & Upstream Unconference, is a compact unconference that brings together Ubuntu and Debian users in one place to exchange notes, talk about what they are passionate about and share knowledge and experience. This year's UCubed happened a few months ago at the Madlab in Manchester, and The H decided to look up organiser, Les Pounder, to see how it went and what's next.

If you work with Debian-based systems, you probably know the basics of working with dpkg and APT's tools, but there's much more available. To find out which packages have release-critical bugs, hog the most disk space, or still use older versions of files that have been upgraded, you want Debian Goodies.

SeaMonkey Logo The SeaMonkey Project developers have made version 2.2 of their "all-in-one internet application suite" available to download. SeaMonkey 2.2 is a major update that is based on the same Gecko layout engine as the recent Firefox 5.0 release.

CERN announced version 1.1 of its Open Hardware License (OHL), a legal framework & designed to facilitate knowledge exchange across the electronic design community. The license is intended to become for hardware what the GPL (General Public License) is for software, the organization says.

For an independent game with no storyline, no tutorial, and graphics that make Windows 95 look slick, Minecraft has developed an amazing following. Who could have ever predicted that shuffling virtual cubes around could be so fun and so full of possibilities? And if, somehow, you find yourself running out of ideas for your virtual world, many clever folks have come up with tools to improve, extend, and just plain cheat. While there are dozens of such tools out there, not all of them are Linux friendly. Of those, several seem to do the same job. We decided to run through all the Minecraft utilities for Linux we could get our hands on, several from each category, to find out what works and what’s better left to the Creepers.

Linux is popular in cloud computing infrastructure largely thanks to its flexibility and source code availability for customization and fine-tuning. Similarly, the open source OS is used by supercomputer system engineers as a resource that can be expanded or stripped down like no other option.

Open source software is used extensively by CERN, the particle physics lab behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. In fact, the organization even maintains its very own Linux distribution—based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux—called Scientific Linux CERN. Inspired by the productivity of Linux development, a group of CERN engineers have decided to bring the advantages of the open source software development model to the world of hardware.

Back in April, Phoronix announced with some fanfare that the 2.6.38 kernel - and those following - had a "major" power management regression which significantly reduced battery life on some systems. This problem has generated a fair amount of discussion, including this Launchpad thread, but little in the way of solutions. Phoronix now claims to have located the change that caused the problem and has provided a workaround which will make things better for some users. But a true fix may be a while in coming.

Microsoft Corp has demanded that Samsung Electronics Co Ltd pay $15 for each smartphone handset it makes based on Google Inc's Android operating system as the software giant has a wide range of patents used in the mobile platform, local media reported on Wednesday.

So you think you’re a Linux expert do you? You scored big-time on my two recent Linux quizzes: Are you a Linux guru? and Return of the Linux Quiz and you think you’re ready for the big time. Well, does The Linux Foundation have a quiz for you!

How do you make sure that your passwords are safe? You can make them longer, complicate them by adding odd characters, making sure to use different passwords for each user account that you have. Or, you can simply skip them all together.

While 2011 may not necessarily be the year of the Linux desktop, it could very well be the year of the Linux-powered tablet. This past week, HP rolled out its Touchpad tablet, which is powered by webOS. As is the case with Google's Android, webOS leverages Linux at its core.

MSFT vs Android image Microsoft has announced that it has signed a patent agreement with Taiwan's Wistron Corporation that will cover the company's tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other devices running Android or the Chrome platform. Wistron will pay royalties to Microsoft under the agreement.

Eccentric indie game developer Robert Pelloni (& Bob's Game& ) announced he is developing a gaming handheld prototype based on Linux that will sell for $10-20 by year's end. The 400MHz ARM-based & nD& device will offer a 2.4-inch, 320 x 240 display, and Wi-Fi, and will be supported soon with a Linux SDK, claims Pelloni, although many are skeptical the device will see the light of day.

"Who makes up this insanity?" asked Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. "It is like saying, 'motorcycles are gonna kill delivery vans' while ignoring that they are two different vehicles for two completely different roles!" A netbooks is "a 'baby laptop,' and as such is good for most jobs a laptop is good for," he explained. A tablet, by contrast, "does one job and one job only: consume content."

phpMyAdmin Logo The phpMyAdmin developers have released versions 3.3.10.2 and 3.4.3.1 of their database administration tool; these are security updates that fix a total of four security holes. Rated as "highly critical" by Secunia, the vulnerabilities include a session manipulation bug in Swekey authentication that could be exploited to overwrite session variables, a possible code injection hole in the setup script and a regular expression quoting problem in Synchronize code.

Joining John Bridgman and Alex Deucher in working on the open-source driver stack at AMD are two new, but familiar, names: Michel Dänzer and Christian König. These two Linux graphics driver developers are now officially AMD employees.