Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One the coolest file systems in User Space has got to be GlusterFS. It has a very unique architecture that allows it to be configured for specific storage requirements and scenarios. It can be used as a high-performance parallel file system, or a cloud based file system, or even a simple NFS server. All of this in user-space. Could GlusterFS represent the future of file system development for Linux?

New Versions of the KDE Development Platform, the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, and many applications are released today with the version number 4.5.0. The KDE team focused on the usability, performance and stability of many previously introduced new features and technologies. Below, find the 3 separate announcements for each of KDE's products: The Development Platform, the Applications Compilation and the Plasma Workspaces.

Linux is broadly available on mobile devices, but competing implementations could lead to problems down the road for developers and confusion for customers, according to a Qualcomm executive.

Make no mistake about it: Open source developers can be a very passionate bunch. At the LinuxCon conference, the topic of why Google Android code is not part of Linux was the subject of some intense discussion. One such discussion became so heated that a panelist wound up telling a combative audience member to "shut up" before asking them to leave.

While Linux 2.6.36 development continues apace, a number of new stable releases iron out various quirks in previous versions. New versions of PowerTop and graphics drivers for AMD and NVIDIA graphics chips offer numerous enhancements and bug fixes.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is preparing a "Zeen" Android e-reader that interfaces with a new HP printer, says an industry report. Meanwhile, HP has postponed its WebOS-based "Hurricane" tablet to 1Q 2011, and the company -- beleaguered by the recent resignation of CEO Mark Hurd -- lost the lead designer of the WebOS-based Palm Pre, say reports.

If LinuxCon 2009 was all about the desktop, then the underlying theme of LinuxCon 2010 is the desktop is dead, at least as we know it and the new desktop meme will be a mobile device. But, as pointed out by Rob Chandhok in his keynote, the mobile platform has a long way to go, both in terms of hardware standardization and software. The problem is there are simply too many choices.

Linux is not known for gaming, and when most people think of Linux games, they think of a few free and open source games that are good but not numerous. Nevertheless, there is a growing pool of free and commercial independent gaming developers who are pushing the envelope by offering their games on multiple platforms, including Linux. They are available for purchase and download right over the Internet (often DRM-free), and some of them are pretty high quality. Here are five more you might not have played but are definitely worth giving a try.

Journalist and digital rights activist Danny O'Brien came to GUADEC to try to educate GNOME hackers about the threats facing journalists, their computers, and their online communication from governments and organized crime. But free software can help, so he wanted to outline the features that he thinks could be added to desktops to help secure them and protect the privacy of all users, not just journalists. Part of his job as internet advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is to talk to internet developers and "persuade them to think about how journalists in repressive regimes are affected" by the choices those developers make.

There's no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it's all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson -- a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device -- is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google's mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we've got the goods on it.

In our last article we discussed the benefits of leveraging the services of other applications before attempting to duplicate existing functionality in our own applications. Built-in applications such as Maps, Email, Phone (yes that is an application too), SMS, Media Player, Camera and others are all at our disposal and may be called upon to bring sought-after functionality to our applications.

Free software is a different beast from gratis software. Free software activist, Richard Stallman, discusses the importance of freedom across all modes of computing. The software developer and political activist is best known for his creation during the early 1980's of the GNU Project, which combined with Linus Torvalds' kernel programming efforts in the early 1990's to form what we today refer to as the Linux operating system.

Canonical developer Rick Spencer has blogged about the recent discovery of a canonical-census package in the Ubuntu repositories. Although initial speculation suggested Canonical was tracking the users of pre-installed systems with Ubuntu, Spencer points out that the idea of the census package is actually to count the number of OEM installed Ubuntu system without identifying the users of those systems.

Google's Android has won partial re-admission to the Linux kernel, but much work lies ahead for a full re-entry. Code written by Linux kernel maintainer Rafael Wysocki has been adopted in the kernel tree that re-implements Android's wake locks feature — to stop a device from completely shutting down — in what has been called a "socially acceptable way".

Even the nearly-defunct XGI Technology Inc is able to produce open-source graphics driver code for Linux while VIA continues on with their Linux mess, even with XGI developers working from Windows. In preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari and this month's release of X Server 1.9, a new release of the XGI DDX driver has been made available.

I’ll get back to my coverage of R real soon, but I wanted to continue my thoughts on Cloud HPC. In addition, one of the reasons I need to postpone this article again is my small personal Limulus cluster had to be been taken apart, measured, checked, and reassembled. I use this cluster to try things (like R) and develop software. I am working with a sheet metal fabricator on the next (and final) revision of case modifications. I also installed a new kernel that caused some USB issues. I resolved the issue by using a different cable, but the old kernel still works fine with both cables, go figure. Without USB I cannot control the power to the nodes (unless I rewire some things), so it was slow going for a while. In any case, I had more thoughts about Cloud HPC as well.

Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president for Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, came to LinuxCon with a message: The open source operating system will remain a priority at Oracle even now that it owns Sun Microsystems and its competing Solaris OS.

Martin-Éric Racine has just announced the release candidate of the X.Org Geode 2.11.9 driver in preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari. The AMD Geode driver is not to be confused with the AMD/ATI Radeon drivers for Linux, but rather this is the driver Geode GX and Geode LX embedded SoC such as what's used by the One-Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. When announcing this driver, Martin-Éric has shared that AMD engineers are back to actually contributing work towards this driver.

If you've ever run a Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB), or booted from a rescue disk, you've probably used a version of SYSLINUX, even if you didn't know it at the time. SYSLINUX, the work of H. Peter Anvin, is a bootloader for Linux which can boot from an MS-DOS FAT filesystem or create a bootable floppy (very old-school!); its close cousin ISOLINUX handles booting from CDs and similar media. SYSLINUX has always been enormously useful for first-time installs, when you're often booting from a machine that is currently running Windows, but until fairly recently, you had to switch to another bootloader post-install, since SYSLINUX doesn't handle ext* filesystems.

A local outbreak of a mobile trojan in Russia has shown us something new: The Android operating system might need an antivirus. The malware was detected by security firm Kaspersky, who confirmed the file is named “Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a” and is downloaded as a typical .APK Android app. The company stated this is the first known Android (Android)-specific trojan.