Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I’m very happy with Ubuntu as a desktop operating system. I’ve used it for years with no significant issues. In fact, Ubuntu excels where other disributions fail. Even Linux arch rival Windows, is often left in the last century compared to the innovations perpetrated by the Canonical group. But what about Natty Narwhal? Is the hype worth the effort? I’d have to say, “Yes.” Although, I’m not 100 percent sold on Unity, I’m impressed with its boot speed, shutdown speed, and snappy performance. Oh, and there’s that little matter of The Launcher.

So I noticed a few days ago that videos on msnbc.com had stopped working. I’m running Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity. Yes, I know, no flame wars please. At first I hated it, and now I just use it on all of my machines. The icon bar is on the left. Big deal.

Skype is hopping mad after a hacker reverse-engineered part of its code and posted the results on the Internet. Efim Bushmanov says he intends to make Skype open source, but company officials have implied he may be threatening the security of their product. It's unclear whether any legal action is in the works.

Recently, I predicted that the future of the PC may not be powered by the x86 processor architecture. With ARM chips assimilating everything from smartphones to cars, and companies like Nvidia working on high performance CPUs based on the ARM architecture, the assumption that x86 will continue to dominate the PC no longer looks iron-clad.

Copenhagen Suborbitals is a self-described Danish open-source, privately-funded, non-profit organization with a mission to launch humans into space. On Friday in a major test, it successfully launched a rocket and prototype spacecraft from a platform in the Baltic Sea to about 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers) above the Earth.

If you're a normal desktop Linux user, it has probably been while since you thought about the X Window System. Modern distros let you configure your video card without ever touching xorg.conf, and by and large the window managers and GUI toolkits just work without getting in your way. But there is still one lingering pain point: the clipboard. Between most user apps, cut, copy and paste work without a hitch, but terminals, text editors like Emacs and Vim, and a few other stragglers refuse to cooperate. If that sounds familiar, consider checking out Parcellite.

From April 7 through 9 I attended Beyond, a series of lectures, workshops, and concerts promoted by the DISIS group at Virginia Tech - a.k.a. VTech - in Blacksburg VA. The festivities included presentations from Professor Brad Garton and Create Digital Music's Peter Kirn, plus some incidental ramblings from yours truly. The concerts featured performances by VTech's own Linux Laptop Orchestra, accompanied at times by percussionist extraordinaire Ron Coulter and a group from the Boys And Girls Club of Roanoke. Other performances included improvisations with some unique hardware controllers (more about those performances below) and original works composed by the participants.

Embedded GPUs on Linux are a big mess due to their lack of fully open-source drivers, memory management complications, and other technical issues. However, there is some good news to report today and that's on the emergence of a new open-source KMS driver.

In this series we've been working over the 2.6.32 kernel, which is a bit old. Let's kick the tires on a 2.6.38.2 kernel to see if it helps or hurts performance of the SandForce SSD.

FOSS icon In a posting on the 451 Group's blog, Matthew Aslett presents an analysis that says there is a trend towards permissive, non-copyleft licensing. The topic has come to the fore since Oracle announced it was donating the OpenOffice.org source code to the Apache Software Foundation and relicensing it under the permissive Apache Software Licence 2.0. In the ensuing debate, the merits of permissive non-copyleft licences like the ASL 2.0 versus reciprocal copyleft licences like the GPL and LGPL came up. Aslett took the opportunity to gather some data.

If you needed a demonstration that Oracle is not CentOS, then look no further than the fact that only two weeks after Red Hat announced its Enterprise Linux 6.1 update, software giant Oracle has kicked out its Linux 6.1 clone. This is despite Red Hat's attempts to slow down the RHEL cloners and others – such as Oracle and the former Novell – that offer technical support for RHEL distributions.

Earlier this week there were Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04 benchmarks looking at the overall system performance as well as the power consumption. Both of these Linux distributions had performed close to one another, as is expected considering the similarities in their kernel and other packages, but there were some discrepancies in the disk tests. Speculations in the forums were that some of the performance differences might be attributed to SELinux, so here are some tests seeing the performance impact of SELinux on Fedora 15.

HP is actively considering licensing its WebOS operating system to other manufacturers, according to industry reports. "It's not correct to believe that [WebOS] should only be on HP devices," HP CEO Leo Apotheker was said to have told an audience at AllThingsD's D9 conference.

It's official, kernel version 3.0 is on its way. Linus confirmed this both in an announcement and by checking in the first 3.0 release candidate. The new branch is not expected to include any major milestones in terms of features, but it may stimulate developers to adopt policies of cruft removal and modernization.

Ubuntu Logo Ubuntu project sponsor Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu Linux distribution will be pre-loaded on new ASUS Eee PC series netbooks. According to Canonical, the Taiwan-based computer manufacturer began shipping three new Ubuntu-based Eee PC models through its sales channels on 1 June.

Over time, software developers tend to learn that micro-optimization efforts are generally not worthwhile, especially in the absence of hard data pointing out a specific problem. Performance problems are often not where we think they are, so undirected attempts to tweak things to make them go faster can be entirely ineffective. Or, indeed, they can make things worse. That is a lesson that the kernel developers have just relearned.

OK. Step one in spending 30 Days With...Ubuntu Linux is to get Ubuntu Linux installed so I can use it. I have already narrowed it down to Ubuntu, so I don't have to bother with the question of which Linux, but the first question I need to address at this point is how to install it.

Recently, myself and my colleagues at Pelagicore decided to try to ditch Skype for an open replacement. We have been suffering stability issues with Skype for a long time, but our customers rely on it for contact with us and most people know how it works. However, recent events such as Microsoft buying Skype and cancelling support for Asterisk motivated us to try the alternatives.

The rolling-release Arch Linux distribution has just enabled floating point textures for Mesa. This was the hotly-debated feature for Mesa that provides OpenGL floating point textures and render targets, but is disabled by default since its protected by patents in the United States and elsewhere. Arch Linux users when building new versions of Mesa will receive this support irrespective of their physical location.

700MHz processor, 256MB of RAM. It doesn't seem that long ago since I was running a desktop PC like that. However, these are the specs of a new keyring-sized computer to be released by a UK not for profit company. They hope to be able to sell it for $25 dollars a pop, and best of all, it runs Linux.