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Imagination Technologies announced it is licensing a new version of its Meta core IP for Linux- and Android-based mobile devices. The Metaflow family of processors combines the Linux-ready Meta Series2 processor IP with the company's Ensigma UCCP IP for Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and analog and digital TV and radio, says the company....

Adobe doesn't see "the year of the Linux desktop" happening, so they've decided to kill off the Linux desktop client for their AIR run-time. Adobe AIR 2.7 was recently released for creating rich Internet applications, but the Linux desktop client wasn't updated. This wasn't an oversight or delay in development, but Adobe is dropping the Linux desktop client so they can focus on mobile platforms such as Android and Apple iOS...

Huawei tipped a & MediaPad& tablet running Android 3.x, said to be due June 20 and to be the company's smallest and lightest offering. Meanwhile, rival Chinese manufacturer Lenovo will release both consumer and enterprise 10-inch Android tablets, under the IdeaPad and ThinkPad brands respectively, says an industry report....

Mageia represents the magic one can find if they harness the power of community with a good codebase and selfless coordinators and developers. Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux, a worthy distribution in its own right. Most forks happen because of differences in opinion of the way the code or project is headed. Perhaps someone thinks a particular focus or feature should be followed or added.

On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance - for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction - I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline.

Disclaimer

This post is a bona fide rant. It tells how a hardcore Linux user (me) decided to abandon Linux as a desktop platform and the reasons behind this decision. It might provoke some controversy, but I frankly don’t care. I’m generally known as one of the biggest supporters of GNU/Linux, I’ve taught courses on Linux administration, I’ve spoken at Linux conferences and I naturally use Linux as my primary desktop on all my machines. Well, that last part is not so true anymore. Here the story begins…

This week, the Commit Digest includes a featured article about Kst, the fastest real-time large-dataset viewing and plotting tool. Also in this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on C++0x support in KDevelop, including support for variadic template parameters in the parser, new browser-like tabs, and many bugfixes throughout KDevPlatform In Plasma, suspend/hibernate services added to the powermanagement dataengine, battery applet replaced with QML port from Plasma-Mobile, and many bugfixes read more

And pick up your multI-cores "The world is built on C++," Herb Sutter tells The Reg. Considering he's one of the language's chief stewards, we question his impartiality. But he does have a point.…

Yesterday we shared that Fedora 16 may use the Btrfs file-system by default on new installations. Beyond switching from EXT4 to Btrfs, there are also many other changes planned for this next release of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution...

Xfce 4.8 is a major upgrade to the popular lightweight desktop environment. 4.8 was released in January 2011, replacing 4.6. Xfce 4.8 is available in Debian Testing, Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, Fedora 15, and probably other Linux distributions. There is more to Xfce than meets the eye; let's dig under the hood and uncover some of its hidden goodies. Xfce is broken up into several dozen packages, so you have a lot of control over which components you install. In Debian and Natty you can install the Xfce4 meta-package to get a complete desktop environment with niceties like Network Manager, themes, a top panel, a dock, system menu, and a nice logout dialog with a complete set of actions: log out, shut down, restart, suspend, hibernate, and save session. Figure 1 shows how it looks in Natty.

As you might have noticed, we love talking about file systems. In these discussions the term "inode" is often thrown about. But what is an inode and how does it relate to a file system? Glad you asked.

So now, there's a whole lot of .NET developers out there who are wondering what they are going to do with all their experience. If I were a smart aleck, I would suggest they come to the Dark Side of Linux and work on Mono (and yes, we also have cookies). True, that is indeed my standard mode of operation, but in this case I must suppress my natural smart-assery because I am not sure where Mono stands with Linux.

LXer Feature: 06-Jun-2011

Ubuntu and Canonical attract a lot of praise and a lot of criticism, and are characterized as angels and devils and everything in between. Love 'em or loathe 'em, Ubuntu has been an energizer all across the Linux world, especially desktop Linux.

With the extensive Linux power consumption tests that I've been carrying out to solve some nasty Linux kernel power regressions and find other areas for optimization, one of the requests that has come in frequently is to compare the power consumption of the KDE, GNOME, Unity, Xfce, and LXDE desktops. After the article earlier this week to look at how the desktop environments / compositing window managers affect OpenGL performance, I carried out a quick desktop power test. In this article are battery power consumption results for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu.

The bottom line is this: I'm a married man today. I really don't have time to struggle with poorly documented programs which don't give out helpful error messages and require source-level hacking to figure out what the !@#$ is going on.

Given the lack of evidence, I feel many of the claims regarding the "learning" that takes place in a community (what does it mean for a collection of individuals who come-and-go to "learn?") are overstated. For example, to say that "The responsibility for your learning rests in your own hands; people can and often will help you, but they're not obligated to." says to me that you are as likely to be unsupported by a group of strangers as anything else---which does not, to me, define a learning community in any way, shape, or form. And, perhaps most disappointingly, there are no concrete strategies or solutions offered: we are left to believe that people who want to learn things can magically do so if they have (1) time (an incredibly valuable and hard-to-come-by resource), (2) the Internet, and (3) committed members of a magical FOSS community who will stand by the learner's side and mentor them as they decide they want to learn... something.

So, moving on to the highlight of the talk: Actually using the command line. Not as a last resort because you can't find another way, but because it's a nice place to be and you like it.

The first thing to consider is, the command line is a very customiseable place, and it's not always going to be at its friendliest out-of-the-box. For instance, this is not an easy-to-interpret screen:

I managed a couple of months. There were niggles and issues, but I gritted my teeth and bore with it until one day, I snapped. It was a trivial issue, really: Gnome-screensaver was conflicting in an odd way with xscreensaver, and I wound up unable to change any of my screensaver settings. Which was annoying, because the screen kept locking me out. So in what might be considered a slight over-reaction to a malfunctioning screensaver, I sacrificed an hour of productivity and wrote my own GUI.

When a Finnish computer student sat down and wrote a new kernel, his goal wasn't to make the best OS possible to run 3D-accelerated applications on. When RMS was inspired to begin the GNU project, it wasn't so that he could make a suite of applications that would make it trivially easy to integrate social networking sites into your desktop environment.

Those that follow my Twitter feed know that over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the various open-source and closed-source graphics drivers. But it was not like the usual Phoronix benchmarks simply comparing the driver performance. Instead it was to see how each driver performed under the various desktops / window managers now being used by modern Linux installations. In this article are the first results of this testing of Unity with Compiz, the classic GNOME desktop with Metacity, the classic GNOME desktop with Compiz, the GNOME Shell with Mutter, and the KDE desktop with KWin. These configurations were tested with both the open and closed-source NVIDIA and ATI/AMD Linux drivers.