Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After five years, a new stable release of FVWM has finally been announced. FVWM is a lightweight and fast window manager still used by a few distributions and offered as an option on several. This landmark release brings several new and improved features.

Open Invention Network (OIN) announced a 28 percent increase in membership in its open source patent protection licensing service since the beginning of the year, bringing the total to 334 corporate supporters. The 74 new organizations covered under OIN?s royalty-free license include Hewlett-Packard and Facebook, as well as smaller Linux-focused entities such as Clonezilla and Mandriva.

Aaeon announced a Qseven-format CPU module with an Intel Atom N450 processor as well as PCI Express, LPC, and SMBus expansion. The AQ7-LN module ships with up to 1GB of DDR2 memory and up to 4GB SSD storage, and offers dual display capability, plus SATA, gigabit Ethernet, and USB connectivity, says the company.

Just hours ago a new Linux KMS driver entered the world for the Cirrus GPU. Yes, as in that from Cirrus Logic for an ancient CL-GD5446 ASIC, this was a 2D-only 64-bit VisualMedia accelerator. But, fortunately, it is not for the actual hardware itself but rather the virtual incarnation that is emulated by QEMU and QEMU-KVM. Those running a Linux KVM virtualization stack with QEMU and the Cirrus adapter can now benefit from a kernel mode-setting driver.

April 15 brought some interesting developments in the office suite front. Oracle's press release announcing its intention of halting commercial interest in OpenOffice.org came hours before The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 1.

Last month I noted some of the problems facing embedded Linux on ARM SoCs in terms of graphics drivers with regard to the variety of memory management APIs available (for graphics there's primarily TTM and GEM within the kernel but also there's other options: HWMEM, UMP, CMA, VCM, CMEM, and PMEM). There's also other graphics driver problems in the ARM world, but the Linaro group has announced they've taken up the issue of embedded Linux memory management for graphics and other areas. They're forming a working group to hopefully work towards resolving this issue for their next six-month development cycle...

The forum discussion surrounding TransGaming's GameTree Linux and Cedega Technology continues, with some Linux gamers regretting that they ever even supported TransGaming. One user also brings up the past from when -- back in 2000~2001 -- TransGaming had pledged to open up their code-base once they reached 20,000 subscribers. They believed in an open-source philosophy at that time, but they never ended up opening up their code once hitting that milestone. Even though Cedega as we know it is now dead, this former fork of the X11-licensed Wine is still closed.

In yet another sign Intel is moving quickly into Android, its embedded Linux software subsidiary Wind River launched a new mobile technology development center in Stockholm focused on Android. Meanwhile, the Intel-backed MeeGo project appears to be gaining some new life for its handset development, with LG Electronics, ZTE, and China Mobile filling the gap left by Nokia, says an industry report.

sec-wall, a recently released security proxy is a one-stop place for everything related to securing HTTP/HTTPS traffic. Designed as a pragmatic solution to the question of securing servers using SSL/TLS certificates, WS-Security, HTTP Basic/Digest Auth, custom HTTP headers, XPath expressions with an option of modifying HTTP headers and URLs on the fly.

LXer Feature: 18-Apr-2011

Forgive my lateness once again in getting the LXWR out to you, I am out of town and working from a family member's Mac..how does anyone get anything done on these things? No keyboard shortcuts, no right clicking, safari sucks and of course I forgot my mouse! I need some Mac lessons methinks.. Enjoy!

Now that I've announced Groklaw articles will end in May, a number of lovely articles have appeared, and some beautiful comments have been posted here and elsewhere, not to mention a blizzard of emails I've received. Thank you, every one of you.

NGINX, the open-source BSD-licensed web-server designed to be lightweight and high-performance compared to Apache, has finally reached version 1.0.

The CentOS project released CentOS 5.6 on Friday April 8 a mere five days short of three months since Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6. Meanwhile CentOS 5.x users have been without security updates, and CentOS 6 probably won’t roll in until RHEL 6 hits the six-month mark. Can the CentOS project be relied on for anything but hobby usage?

Texas Instruments (TI) announced an & OpenLink& project, which has released a battery-optimized, open source Linux wireless driver stack for mobile devices. The initial release will support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM communications on TI's WiLink WL1271/3 and WL1281/3 chips, running on the ARM Cortex-based BeagleBoard and PandaBoard boards under Ubuntu, MeeGo, and Android, says the company.

Like almost any piece of software with rudimentary drawing capability, Gimp includes simple brushes like squares, circles, and fuzzy circles. While they get you by for many basic needs, there’s a lot more you can do. Everything from flowers and vines to flames and bubbles can be created by brushes, and today we’re going to show you some of the coolest ones out there.

After several years of redesign and development work, the Blender Foundation and its associated online developer community have announced the arrival of version 2.57 of their open source 3D content creation suite, the first stable release in the 2.5 series. According to the developers, this major milestone is not only stable because it's "mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1,000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published."

The number of truly free and open source games available for download is small in general, but in terms of genre, first-person shooters (FPS) have plenty of representation. This is largely due to the 3D engines that have been released into the free software community, which lend themselves well to FPS games. The Cube Engine 2 is one such 3D system, and Red Eclipse is the latest FPS to utilize it. Version 1.0 of Red Eclipse was just released a few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a try. It is free to download for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows

Like most Linux software, Samba is open source, so you can obtain the original source code files used by its programmers, and then compile a binary package for your own system. Doing so enables you to run newer software than your distribution maintainers provide, adjust compile-time options, set compiler features for optimum performance, and even modify the source code. Learn how.

Google Android boss Andy Rubin sees himself as a latter-day Gene Amdahl, insisting that anyone who questions his commitment to building an "open" mobile platform is merely spreading FUD.

To the Intel graphics mailing list, Chris Wilson has just published a set of thirty patches to be applied against their DRM tree that will end up being merged for the Linux 2.6.40 kernel. Some of these patches are quite interesting.