Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 21-Nov-2010

The big stories this past week included an update on how far away Chrome OS is, a Ubuntu vs.Fedora comparison, 5 unusual games for Linux and a 200 line kernel patch that makes your desktop snappy. Enjoy!

The Ubuntu Font Family is the first time that a libre typeface has been designed professionally and explicitly with the intent of developing a public and long-term community-based development process. When developing an open project, it is generally necessary to have firm foundations: a font needs to maintain harmony within itself even across many type designers and writing systems.-

While the Mesa software stack has made some steps towards supporting OpenGL 3.x, this free software library used by open-source graphics drivers is still a ways from supporting this industry graphics API thats years old and has already been surpassed by OpenGL 4.x. There hasn't been too much major progress lately on GL3 support, but some think it could be achieved next year. When there is OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa, it will be released as Mesa 8.0. Regardless, the OpenGL 3 status document for Mesa has been updated.

While the Nouveau driver may not yet have a stable Gallium3D or DDX driver release nor does it have capabilities like stabilized power management or OpenGL 3.x, if you want to overclock your NVIDIA graphics card with this open-source driver, you can now do so today. Martin Peres who has been working on Nouveau power management support and timing management, has produced a patch to support custom clock manipulation of the NVIDIA graphics card's core clock, memory clock, and shader clock speeds. The voltages can also be manipulated too whether you are manually overclocking or underclocking your GPU with this Linux kernel DRM driver.

The weekend before Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, Nokia invited thirteen members of the KDE community to get together in their offices in that same city for a developer sprint. The topic was Ovi and KDE, specifically how they can work together to widen adoption for both communities, both from a software development perspective and from a purely collaborative effort perspective. The developers were also invited to the main Qt Developer Days (DevDays) event too.

Have you ever encountered the situation where you have plenty of tabs open in your browser and one of them is blasting out loud advertisement video? Yes, I know, it is very irritating, especially when you don’t know which tab contains the annoying video and you have to flick through all the tabs to locate (and stop) the ad. With Chrome Toolbox, you can now easily mute all the tabs with a single click. Chrome Toolbox is a Google Chrome extension created by Google. It is an enhancement and quick access tool combined into one.

There's just about two months left until the release of KDE SC 4.6, but Martin Gräßlin and other KDE developers have already begun thinking about and working on code for KDE Software Compilation 4.7 [granted, there are already people talking about KDE5 and KDE6] that is still eight months away. In particular, Martin has some prominent KWin compositing manager changes for the 4.7 release.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today the signing of several significant partnerships following the release last month of Ubuntu 10.10. Boxed Ice, Opsview, Riptano, Unoware, Vladster, Wavemaker and Zend all joined as Canonical Software Partners, their applications delivering solutions for business and personal use, and supported by commercial companies providing the highest level of service.

David Airlie sent in a DRM pull request to Linus Torvalds for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel this week to fix some Intel DRM driver bugs as well as one ATI Radeon KMS fix. However, this pull request sparked another rant by Linus Torvalds about the quality of the work of the open-source Linux (DRM) graphics driver developers.

Getting network stats on a Linux machine is not particularly difficult. With tools like sar, Iperf, and vnStat available for nearly every distribution, command-line aficionados can get the low-down on their network with just a few useful commands. Take, for instance, vnStat, a popular network traffic logger. vnStat is different from a network sniffer like Wireshark since it polls the network interface stats going to and from the kernel. Wireshark, on the other hand, actually monitors packets coming in and out of your machine.

Following the publication of Mozilla's audited financial statements for 2009, Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, has taken the opportunity to re-examine Mozilla's mission, its successes, opportunities and challenges.

I'm happy to announce the first Release Candidate version of Medical, the Free Health and Hospital Information System. This version is the result of over 2 years of hard work, and I see it as the starting point for a modern, scalable Free Health and Hospital Information System.

Back when the 2010 Linux Plumbers Conference was looking for presentations, the LibreOffice project had not yet announced its existence. So Michael Meeks put in a vague proposal for a talk having to do with OpenOffice.org and promised the organizers it would be worth their time. Fortunately, they believed him; in an energetic closing keynote, Michael talked at length about what is going on with LibreOffice - and with the free software development community as a whole. According to Michael, both good and bad things are afoot. (Michael's slides are available for those who would like to follow along).

When Microsoft released the seventh Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 last Wednesday, Microsoft said that the browser had overtaken its competition in terms of JavaScript performance. Microsoft based its statement on the results of the well-known WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark: according to Microsoft's tests, IE9 PP7 came out on top.

An Oracle official detailed on Tuesday the submissions of upcoming Java releases to the formal specification process, including versions 7 and 8 of Java's standard edition. The technologies under consideration have been formulated as JSR (Java Specification Requests) for consideration by the Java Community Process, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java platform group, said in a blog post. "These JSRs have been a long time coming. They're now -- ?nally -- on the JCP  ballot for approval; results should be available in two weeks."

Often you may not necessarily know what kind of hardware you have—you may have a no-name box from a smaller company or a used machine. This month, I present the tools you can use to find out what you have installed.

With Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" set to be released in the coming months, we have decided to run a set of benchmarks looking at the performance of Debian 6.0 across different sub-systems relative to the performance of Debian 5.0 "Lenny" and Debian 4.0 "Etch" to see how this new release may stack up.

As open source adoption has ramped up in recent years--especially at businesses and organizations--Black Duck Software has steadily been extending its role in the growth, largely through a series of acquisitions. The acquisitions have transformed it from the open source auditing entity that it originally primarily functioned as into a player in the open source deployment, management and development space, and more. With its latest acquisition of the assets of SpikeSource, it is continuing that trend--all focused on open source.

The London Stock Exchange has hired 81 open source software staff for the development of the delayed Linux-based system being implemented on its cash markets. The developers on the new system will work in a C++ environment, on which the new Millennium Exchange Linux matching engine will operate. Some development is also being conducted "externally", the LSE said, referring to staff at the platform's original base in Sri Lanka. The LSE is replacing a Microsoft .Net environment.

Guarding your private network from the perils of the Internet is no easy task. The basics are pretty much the same from a defensive standpoint no matter how you slice it. Firewalls of one type or another protect an internal network by using two separate Ethernet connections with a software proxy filtering the traffic between the two ports. Linux serves as a great platform for this role with tools like netfilter/iptables.