Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It seems like only yesterday that Palm announced its brand new Linux-based WebOS and Palm Pre, ready to shake up the world with awesomeness and Linux in a little package. They matched that announcement up with a nifty little SDK that emulated the entire OS in VirtualBox, and was released as a .deb package for Ubuntu. Someone even posted a HOWTO on the Linux Journal web site about it!

MontaVista Software announced that MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 6.0 has been registered as compliant to the Linux Foundation's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 5.0 specification. MontaVista appears to be the first Linux distro to have registered for CGL 5.0, which was announced at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit last week, offering advancements in everything from streaming media to security.

Google has announced the availability of two open source hash functions for producing 64- and 128-bit hash values from strings. The company states that these functions are suitable for such applications as hash tables – eg. indexing a database – but are not suitable for cryptography.

Key KDE developers have been blogging about new projects aimed towards portable devices. As Aaron Seigo says, "In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors." For us mortals, that means an interface for smartphones, tablets, and handhelds.

Ross Turk is the new director of community at Talend , a company that's not afraid to say they use an open core model. In this H Half Hour, The H asks Turk about how the open core model works at Talend and how the company is building a community around its data transformation and management tools.

Mixbus is a version of Ardour2 for Linux and OSX that replaces Ardour's native mixer with one designed by the Harrison company, a manufacturer of professional audio mixing boards. Harrison consoles have been used to mix the soundtracks for many popular movies - see the advertisements on the site - and their products can be found in major broadcast, film, and audio post-production studios, as well as in live performance venues. Mixbus has been designed to emulate the best features of an analog mixer with the added value of Ardour's audio capabilities and Harrison's unique DSP core. Indeed, current Ardour users will find familiar territory in the Mixbus recorder/editor and a whole new world in the mixer section.

Project Bossanova itself is not a game but they're simply trying to focus on and sponsor a game who's primary focus is on Linux support. The game they chose is RunServer's MMT, which was first shown off at the Game Developers' Conference 2009 in Moscow. It's built using our favorite game engine, the Unigine Engine. RunServer also integrates their own middle-ware code.

Google is baking specifications for a tablet based on its Chrome OS into its open source Linux code, the company confirmed. Meanwhile Google flattened its executive structure, promoting Android creator Andy Rubin and others to senior vice president roles, and has also acquired Pushlife, makers of an iTunes-like music app for Android.

The open-source ATI/AMD Radeon Linux driver stack has made a lot of improvements in recent times with their Gallium3D drivers becoming mature across all generations and support for new features (such as DRI2 page-flipping) landing in the mainline code and beginning to make its way to users. The time required to bring up support for new generations has also been reduced greatly and with the Radeon HD 8000 series there should be a turning point for their open-source strategy. In this article, we are providing an updated look at the course of the open-source driver's performance for the past two years.

LXer Feature: 11-Apr-2011

In the Roundup this week we have Ubuntu announcing that 11.10 will not ship with the Gnome classic DE, is it worth rooting a Nook Color, Novell shows of Mono for Android, praise for the D-Link Boxee and last but not least PJ says there will be no more Groklaw after May 16th. Enjoy!

As a data junkie, I'm forever looking for better ways to display charts and graphs, especially from Python. There are lots of Python plotting packages available, but if you want output that's pretty enough that even your Mac friends will be impressed, consider using CairoPlot. CairoPlot isn't packaged for most distros, but it's an easy install. The current release is version 1.1 at the CairoPlot Launchpad page. You can download the cairoplot-1.1.tar.gz from there, or check it out with bzr if you prefer. (Once 1.2 is ready the project may move to Sourceforge.)

Years ago there was this ad campaign by the Wendy’s hamburger chain that asked the question Where’s the Beef?. The commercials were rather funny and “Where’s the beef?” has become a way to ask “where is the substance?” or to call attention to the lack thereof. Before GP-GPU, multi-core, and clusters, I have been asking a similar question about HPC development tools. In particular, “Where are the parallel programming tools?” This question has become fundamentally important to the future of computing and the answer is not quite clear.

If you're a Windows user, you may find your new Linux system to be a bit different from what you're used to. One of your first tasks will probably be installing additional software, including some of IBM's extensive software for Linux. In many cases, installing software on a Linux system requires you to log in, become the super user (or root) for some tasks, open a terminal or shell window, and mount a CD-ROM, DVD, or USB drive. This article guides you through these basic first-time user tasks and more.

It's hard to believe, but this year marks the 20th anniversary of Linux. If you're a new Linux user, you might wonder how it all got started. As part of the Linux Foundation's celebrations for the 20th anniversary of Linux, Linux.com is going to be running a series of stories that looks at the history of Linux — starting with the history of how it all began.

So many computers head for landfill when they are still able to carry out useful work. However, some organizations and individuals do what they can to put these machines into the hands of people who can use them. Naturally, this is an ideal application for Linux, and having had a quick look at it, I suspect that wattOS would make a good choice for refurbishing older computers.

As well as sounding the alarm when navigating to a nefarious web site, in the future the Windows version of Google's Chrome browser will block downloads of infected .exe files. Users will, however, still be able to override this feature and download them anyway.

Whenever software development or any other type of project requires collaboration, the process of exchanging files, saving them, revising, and re-uploading can be tedious. Because of this, developers have created revisioning control systems. These systems have even been used for documentation in collaborative tools like wikis. Sparkleshare is an extension of these collaboration tools that provides a simple and easy-to-use interface: your own file manager.

Open is the new closed. Nokia has admitted that its "open and direct" Symbian source code is not open, proving – once again – that the word has been stripped of all discernible meaning. Late last week, a little over three months after the Symbian Foundation shut down its web servers, Nokia returned the Symbian source code to the web. It announced the move with a blog post entitled "We are open!", and the post was penned by Petra Söderling, the "Head of Open Source" for Symbian smartphones.

Who'd have predicted that overpriced slivers of silicon, covered in oleophobic glass trying its best to repel your sticky fingers, would become the first great technological innovation of the 21st century? Most of us thought this would happen decades ago. We were promised by those mouldy second-hand sci-fi books of our youth, and I've since wasted far too much time and money pretending the time has already come.

Many computer-aided design (CAD) users in the Linux community were thrilled recently with the beta release of DraftSight, a freeware (meaning zero-cost-but-proprietary) CAD package for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. DraftSight's creator, Dassault Systèmes, is a well-known CAD shop most famous for its Windows product SolidWorks. Although this new app is not open source, it is the first professional-level package available for free on Linux that can read and write the industry-standard .DWG file format. Free software CAD still has a long way to go, but for now DraftSight offers Linux users a rare glimmer of hope.