Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As illustrated today by the release of Intel's "Sandy Bridge" CPUs there is a new desire by Linux users: open-source drivers "out of the box" at launch. Over the years the expectations of Linux users have gone from simply wanting Linux drivers for their hardware to wanting open-source Linux drivers (read: no binary blobs) to now wanting open-source drivers in the distribution of their choice at the time the hardware first ships. This is a great problem to now be experiencing, as since starting Phoronix seven years ago, the Linux hardware experience has improved a great deal where it's no longer a question if there will be Linux support but when. Some hardware vendors, such as Intel, are now working towards this goal of same-day open-source Linux support -- and in some cases achieving it -- but for open-source Linux drivers for graphics it's a particularly tall hurdle to jump.

Last week we looked at Yum Plugins and how to extend Yum's functionality. This week, I'll look at a few of Yum's plugins, in particular the security plugin and the priorities plugin. As I mentioned last week, I'm using Fedora 14 in these examples. If you're on another system using Yum, like CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Yellow Dog (the original distro to ship Yum, by the way), the plugin behavior might be slightly different -- or the plugin may not be available at all.

Android is set to explode at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, with smartphones and tablet computers including a newly revealed HTC Shift 4G phone for Sprint and a four-inch smartphone/tablet hybrid from ViewSonic. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless is cutting the price of the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet by $100 to $500, says an industry report.

Not only has Intel's Sandy Bridge met the world today, but VIA Technologies launched the VIA eH1. The VIA eH1 is a discrete graphics card for PCI Express systems, but will it work with Linux?

Canonical's decision to go with the Unity shell on GNOME may be a game changer for Ubuntu, but it doesn't come without risk. Mark Shuttleworth's declared aims are to unite design with free software. He hopes to blur the line between the web and the desktop, to create an intuitive Linux desktop that is a thing of beauty, and to make Ubuntu and free software popular among the kinds of user who have never heard of free software before.

FreeBSD has a long and strange history, tracing its roots back to the original Unix from Bell Labs. FreeBSD can almost be seen as the older brother to the younger, more popular Linux. While they are similar, FreeBSD’s long history has given it a very different philosophy and purpose. You can, and many people do, run FreeBSD as a desktop OS, but that’s not where the systems real talent lies. While Linux has tried, and in many cases succeeded, to be everywhere that a kernel can run, FreeBSD has decided that it belongs in the datacenter, a belief that is personified in the FreeBSD slogan, “The Power to Serve”. FreeBSD’s Jails are a great example of where the philosophy of Linux and FreeBSD diverges and produces systems that are functionally similar but logically very different.

The smart mobile user shouldn't overlook Linux. The question is, which distro should you pick? You'll get a different answer depending who you ask. You'll probably be pointed in the direction of Arch for performance, Debian for stability and Ubuntu if you want easy access to the biggest collection of apps. If that's not enough choice to make your head spin, Slackware has its fans too – particularly among people who use older laptops.

This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools to astounding announcements from tech companies, here in no particular order are a few stories that stood out to us this year.

If you use Ubuntu, you're almost certainly familiar with GNOME, the default desktop environment that comes with it. You may have also heard that the next Ubuntu version--Natty Narwhal, version 11.04--will use the 3D-enabled Unity desktop by default instead, along with the Wayland graphics system... Now that there are already big changes coming down the pike, this is a particularly good time to take a fresh look at the Ubuntu desktop and all the many free alternatives that are available.

Support for fast USB 3.0 storage devices with USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP), an audio loopback driver plus extensions to support Apple's Magic Trackpad are only some of the advances that improve the hardware support of the forthcoming Linux kernel version 2.6.37; final release is expected in January.

VectorLinux is one distribution that seems to hum along under most users' radar. This is a mistake because Vector has many of the characteristics that make Linux great while adding some that has often been heralded by competitors as not existing except with larger commercial distributions.

There is a word that is to me as a pebble in a shoe, as fingernails on a blackboard, and that is the word consumer. Consumer is a perfectly good word that has become incurably tainted. One dictionary definition is "a person who acquires goods and services for his or her own personal needs". Farther down on the same Dictionary.com page it says "one that utilizes economic goods; specifically : an individual who purchases goods for personal use as distinguished from commercial use". And so we have Consumer Reports, consumer protection laws, Consumer's Union, and other organizations devoted to protecting consumer's rights and interests.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin [cq] has ordered government agencies there to open-source software by 2015, according to translated documents. Putin's order, signed this month, follows news reports from October saying the Russian government was planning to drop Microsoft products in favor of a national open-source operating system based on Linux.

This year, I'm giving up making predictions. By my count, my record for 2010 was slightly worse than random chance, and my inability to impress readers individually with cold readings makes me conclude that I should leave fortune telling to the tarot readers.

The Indian KDE community will organize its first conference at Bengaluru in March 2011. The 5 day event will bring together KDE contributors, Qt developers, users and FOSS enthusiasts. We realise that there are not many KDE/Qt related events that are accessible to Indians. FOSS conferences or meetings are an excellent way to show people the technology first hand and ways to contribute to it. We not only dazzle them with the world of KDE, but show them first hand how simple it is to get involved and make a difference. This is our motivation for conducting this event.

The second release candidate of the Document Foundation's fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, has been made available and announced in the Document Foundation's blog. In the announcement, the developers say the release is "beta quality software", ask for users to play with it so they can test and give feedback, and list over 80 individuals who have contributed to development between the third beta and current release candidate.

Using free software in education is not just about saving money. It's also about preserving choice, not locking a student's experience into a certain way of doing something. With Linux, there's no vendor lock-in. Free software is more likely to be open-standards compliant, and it's going to be more open to different languages, localities and curricula.

I've been thinking and thinking about everything, and I've figured out what I need to explain to you next. Reading the log of the recent OpenSUSE board meeting discussing setting up a foundation for the project turned on the light in my head: you need to understand bylaws. Because corporations are setting up foundations to get you to donate code to, and they set them up to suit themselves, not to benefit you. There's a difference between the community setting up a foundation to be a project's home and a corporate sponsor doing it. I'm going to write about that in more detail later. To really explain it, I need to explain some things that you might think will be boring or too foreign, but if you can learn Perl, you can learn bylaws.

LXer Feature: 27-Dec-2010

Welcome to the last Roundup for 2010 and please accept my apologies for being a day late getting this to you. It seems the holiday festivities have caused me to lose track of time.. Enjoy!

AMD has allowed their Radeon GPUs to be overclocked on Linux since 2008 when using their Catalyst driver with OverDrive support. Previous to that there was Rovclock for overclocking select ATI Radeon ASICs using an open-source program along with support for tuning the video memory timings and other options, which was a program written via reverse engineering. The Catalyst Linux driver supports OverDrive manipulation of the core and memory clocks, which is enough for most enthusiasts, but if you've been looking for more extensive features there is a new option.