Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Toyota is its newest member. A major shift is underway in the automotive industry. Carmakers are using new technologies to deliver on consumer expectations for the same connectivity in their cars as they’ve come to expect in their homes and offices. From dashboard computing to In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI)jim, automobiles are becoming the latest wireless devices – on wheels.

First there was WebGL to bring OpenGL to the web-browser, and now there's WebCL to do the same for bringing OpenCL to the web. The Khronos Group is getting ready WebCL, to bring OpenCL to modern web browsers with JavaScript support. Early WebCL support is already available for the WebKit rendering engine.

LXer Feature: 04-Jul-2011

Here is a roundup of the big stories to hit our newswire this past week. Enjoy!

As promised in my Samsung Chromebook review, I'm using nothing but my Chromebook for a week. I'm a programmer, fledgling system administrator, and blog writer. This isn't going to be easy. Not only am I using this at home, but I'm leaving my workstations at work shut off.

IndigoVision announced a doubling of capacity to 2TB disks on its NVR-AS 3000 of Linux-based, surveillance-oriented network video recorders (NVRs). The NVR-AS 3000 systems are now available with up to 6TB of usable RAID 5 storage, as well as RAID 0/1 options, and can record full framerate video and audio from 64 cameras, and play back 20 streams simultaneously, says the company.

Even after using the Linux 2.6.38 kernel power regression workaround for those systems affected by the ASPM (Active-State Power Management) bug that was detected by Phoronix, some Linux users still don't have their netbook/notebook battery lasting as long as they'd wish. For some, Microsoft Windows 7 is still performing better on the battery and/or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and earlier. As I've said, there's still at least a couple more Linux power regressions and other areas for optimization that I've discovered and still haven't yet publicly documented in full, some in part due to still analyzing what's happening.

You energy-conserving* system administrators will enjoy learning to use loops in your scripts. Looping is a technique that allows you to repeat a process or set of commands indefintely or until the loop exhausts a particular list of items. For example, you want to copy a particular file to everyone’s home directory. How do you do it? Don’t say that you have a junior-level administrator do it. The correct answer is that you’d create a looping script to handle the job.

Released in July, Peppermint Two is based on Lubuntu 11.04, an Ubuntu-derived distribution using the LXDE desktop environment (see our overview). Its main distinguishing feature is that it mixes traditional applications with cloud applications that are closely integrated into the desktop.

Phoronix has identified the Linux power regression problems it previously noted in Linux 2.6.38 as being related to Active-State Power Management (ASPM) code for PCI Express -- and has published a workaround. The problem, which can result in low battery life with Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15, have been confirmed by Tom's Hardware Guide.

The secure shell, ssh, and its companion, scp, are tools that I use more or less on a daily basis. Being able to move files between machines without having to setup SAMBA or NFS is very handy when working with multiple systems. All that you need is to enable the secure shell daemon - sshd.

LXer Feature: 27-Jun-2011

Here is a roundup of the big stories to hit our newswire this past week. Enjoy!

Yesterday I mentioned what Anton Altaparmakov of Tuxera had recently said about their NTFS kernel driver being the fastest Linux file-system, which erupted into a large debate in our forums. Within that mailing list thread was also another interesting comment by Linus Torvalds. "Userspace filesystem? The problem is right there. Always has been. People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided."

The Mageia project has announced the arrival of a first preview of a Mageia port for ARM processors. According to the developers, the Mageia ARM port, code-named "arm eabi", will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors. It currently includes several development tools, basic network services, Firefox and LibreOffice and a full GNOME desktop environment – a minimal version of KDE is also included.

Ubuntu releases are always eagerly awaited, generating feverish debate on the blogosphere, but Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal has received an unprecedented amount of attention because it's different - in more than one sense of the word. This release is about the one area that's often overlooked in the Linux ecosphere, the desktop. Linux has struggled with the desktop; compositing window managers such as Compiz Fusion allowed you to play around with it but it still looked the same. But if you think the Gnome 3 Shell is different, wait till you experience Unity - and there's a lot more to it than glitter.

Twice a year, the Top500 Project publishes its list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In the last announcement, we continue to see Linux dominating the list. This is nothing new since Linux has been dominating since the mid-2000s. In fact, Linux share in supercomputing looks a lot like Microsoft’s historical share of the desktop market. I thought it would be interesting to take a step back and look at the performance capability of these computers as a whole and also how the rise of Linux is mirroring the geographical expansion of supercomputers.

For years, Nokia had been working on Linux as a future operating system for its smartphones and mobile devices. Then, the firm did an about-face and chose Windows Phone. Having had no luck with the penguin, the recent release of the N9 smartphone marks the end of an era.

Red Hat declared war on VMware’s Cloud Foundry today, announcing that 65 new companies have joined the Open Virtualization Alliance backing KVM in a month’s time. In May, Red Hat, SUSE, BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM and Intel, announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance. As of today, 65 new members have joined, including Dell. Scott Crenshaw, who leads Red Hat’s cloud effort, denounced what he called VMware’s proprietary cloud platform.

This isn’t something you’ll often do for work or a real project, but it’s fun and it can look cool. Tilt shifting a photo is something that can be done by expensive fancy camera equipment or, fortunately for us, free software. The idea is that when you take a photo of small scale objects like model towns, part of what reveals them as miniature is the difference in focus. When a camera is up close to small objects, it can’t focus on other nearby objects, making them blurry. Tilt shifting is applying this blur effect deliberately, to make large-scale objects appear small. Getting it just right can take a lot of time and effort, but the basic method is quite simple, and that’s what we’re covering today.

Adobe is preparing to supplement its popular-but-proprietary Flash product with a standards-based animation tool based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Supporting imported bitmap and vector graphics, Adobe Edge produces output compatible with browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, and the Safari versions used in Apple's iPad and iPhone, the company says.

The open-source developers working on the drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon and NVIDIA (via the Nouveau project) graphics hardware have tossed all their weight behind the Gallium3D driver architecture. The Gallium3D drivers have surpassed the "classic" Mesa DRI drivers in terms of capabilities, performance, and stability. The only strong holdout to Gallium3D has been Intel since they aren't convinced that it's the appropriate choice and they aren't interested in overhauling their Linux driver stack once more with the large upfront investment that's required in rewriting their user-space 3D driver in moving from classic Mesa to Gallium3D.