Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Timesys announced LinuxLink support for PMC-Sierra's MIPS-based WinPath3-SuperLite networking system on chip (SoC), a scaled-down version of the WinPath3. The company also announced a free Timesys University embedded Linux training series, starting with classes focusing on home automation with the Freescale i.MX51, medical devices employing the i.MX53, and internet radios using the Texas Instruments AM3517.

For me, using multiple browsers is part of my work style. On all of my computers, I switch among several browsers, and I keep finding reasons to come back to SeaMonkey. This latest version is a drastic retooling. Even though its innards are revved up with the Firefox engines, SeaMonkey still has its own personality and is not the Firefox browser.

When you lose your Internet connection is the fault of your ISP? Or is it a problem on your side of your connection? Here is how you find out using standard Linux networking tools, and avoid embarrassing tech support calls that conclude with "Yes, dear customer, you broke it your own self."

Remember how SCO told the court in SCO v. IBM that Linux wasn't ready for the enterprise until IBM got involved in the year 2000 and allegedly worked to make it "hardened" for the enterprise by donating code? It said that it wasn't until 2001, with version 2.4 of Linux, that Linux was ready for enterprise use. Linux, SCO said, was just a bicycle compared to UNIX, the luxury car, until IBM did all that. Not only is that chronology not true, I think I can show you evidence that SCO knew it was not true or could have and should have known. Just in case the case ramps up again in some form, I thought it would be good to add the evidence to our collection.

Wind River announced a partnership with GoAhead Software whereby the two companies will become & preferred integration partners,& selling GoAhead's OpenSAFfire middleware to embedded Linux customers. The company also announced a & Wind River OpenSAF Quickstart& professional services and technical support package for its OpenSAF customers.

In this installment of our series examining the performance of SandForce-based consumer SSDs we dig into the IOPS performance of the drive. How does it stand up to an enterprise-class SSD? Let's find out.

Google has said that the next version of Android, dubbed "Ice Cream Sandwich", will be open sourced "by the end of the year," and that it will not open source the current Android incarnation, Honeycomb, before that time. Earlier this year, the latest version of Android, the tablet-centric Honeycomb, debuted on the Motorola Xoom tablet. It was soon revealed, however – by the press, not by Google – that the company had no intention of immediately open sourcing Honeycomb. Typically, Google develops the latest version of Android behind closed doors, before releasing the OS to open source around the time the first devices hit the market.

April saw the release of Kdenlive 0.8. I'll take you through some of the new features, along with some notes on how I built it for Debian Sid. Kdenlive 0.8 is a release that fixes bugs and adds new features rather than being a complete departure from the previous version, probably welcome news to the regular users. New features aside, my hope for this revision is that it can overcome the main shortcoming of Linux video editing programs: poor stability. It didn't crash while I was testing it, but user feedback in the long term will be the real indicator of improvements that have been made in this area.

LXer Feature: 08-May-2011

In the Roundup this week we have Unity not all that unifying, Steven Rosenberg can feel the speed, Mono Developers get the Axe from Novells new owners, Oracle's claims against Google drop from 132 to 3 in one fell swoop and Emery Fletcher asks just what is the target audience for Natty Narwhal? Enjoy!

Our last two articles have presented an initial performance examination of a consumer SandForce based SSD from a throughput and IOPS perspective. In this article we dive deeper into the throughput performance of the drive, along with a comparison to an Intel X-25E SSD. I think you will be surprised at what is discovered.

Sponsored in part by NVIDIA, at the University of Utah they are exploring speeding up the Linux kernel by using GPU acceleration. Rather than just allowing user-space applications to utilize the immense power offered by modern graphics processors, they are looking to speed up parts of the Linux kernel by running it directly on the GPU. From the project page: "The idea behind KGPU is to treat the GPU as a computing co-processor for the operating system, enabling data-parallel computation inside the Linux kernel. This allows us to use SIMD (or SIMT in CUDA) style code to accelerate Linux kernel functionality, and to bring new functionality formerly considered too compute intensive into the kernel. Simply put, KGPU enables vector computing for the kernel."

Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28 with a brand new interface and a couple default application changes. But all the talk is about Unity, that brand new interface. As one might predict, reactions are all over the spectrum. The Unity interface has taken design cues from popular mobile systems with the focus being on saving screen space and making everything readily accessible from within that limited space. It appears designers were shooting for easy and beautiful, but some users are finding adjustment during these early days a bit challenging.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0 was released in March with many new features, including GPU-based acceleration, but on the Linux side this support was disabled. The Mozilla developers found the Linux GPU driver support to be a problem, even with the open-source solutions. It looks like though by Firefox 6 the Linux GPU acceleration will be in better standing.

The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers for its LinuxCon Japan 2011 conference taking place from 1 to 3 June 2011 at the Pacifico Yokohama in Yokohama, Japan. The welcoming remarks will be presented by Noriaki Fukuyasu, Director at Linux Foundation Japan, and followed by a keynote from Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who will discuss the 20th anniversary of the Linux operating system.

As tech lead of the Google Linux Storage Team I get to see how Linux runs on tens of thousands machines in Google's cloud. Over the last year our team migrated this super system from ext2 to ext4, an educational and exciting experience to say the least. We learned a lot about the impact of the Linux file system on Google.

May 6th, 2011. Today, KDE has released a series of updates to the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks. This update is the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.6 series. 4.6.3 brings many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.6 series and is a recommended update for everyone running 4.6.2 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.

The ability to scale out to third-party vendors without worrying about vendor lock-in, as well as the ability to move virtual workloads between different environments, are benefits of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that Red Hat has been espousing for a while now.

GNU Denemo is a free music notation program for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows that allows users to create notations for the text-based LilyPond sheet music printer. Composition, transcription, arrangement and playback functions can be controlled using a keyboard, MIDI keyboard or microphone. Among the new features of version 0.9 are unlimited undo and redo capabilities, a MIDI input feature for chords, MIDI shortcuts, mouse-controlled playback speeds, the support of numerous additional LilyPond functions, an import feature for LilyPond files as well as various composition tools such as components for shuffling notes or reversing or mirroring a selection.

For many years we have heard warnings that software patents pose a threat to the free software community. Repeated warnings have a tendency to fade into the noise if they are not followed by real problems; to many, the patent threat may have seemed like one of those problems we often hear about but never experience. The recent ruling in the US that Google is guilty of infringing a software patent held by a patent troll named "Bedrock Computer Technologies" serves as a reminder that the threat is real, and that solutions will not be easy to come by.

Novell's new Spacewalk-based SUSE Manager 1.2 deserves points for its support of both SUSE and Red Hat enterprise Linux flavors, says this eWEEK review. But, author Jason Brooks adds, while the server management tool makes sense for users coming from a Linux perspective, it suffers from some configuration hiccups, due in part to the challenge of integrating two different distributions.