Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

I use PHPUnit and the DbUnit extension for my unit tests. Because I use InnoDB tables with foreign keys I cannot use an SQLite database or temporary tables to run my unittests on. So, I have set up a separate MySQL server to run all my unittests on. The only downside is that after a while, you get a bunch of unused databases on the server. So, I have written a simple bash cronjob that deletes all databases from the server that have not been used for some time.

Microsoft is not the only browser maker JavaScript coders targeting Firefox can now test their apps with free tools that started life serving the developers on Microsoft's once mighty Internet Explorer.…

How well do AMD's FireGL/FirePro workstation graphics cards work with the open-source graphics drivers for Linux? It's something we never have really focused on up to this point, since after all, most workstation users are satisfied with using proprietary display drivers on Linux. It is the workstation market that drives the proprietary Linux driver development after all for AMD and NVIDIA, and that is really the focus of development, not Linux gamers or enthusiasts. But curiosity got the best of me, so here's what happens if you try to use an expensive FirePro graphics card with the open-source driver stack and the Mesa Gallium3D driver.

Xompu (website in German - some basic information in English) is a new German company whose goal is to provide an easy-to-use complete computer, backed up by service support. Xompu released their computer a few weeks ago. And guess what? It runs Plasma Desktop and other KDE software. Damien Tardy-Panis interviewed Robert Konopka, one of the founders of Xompu, to find out more about the company and why they chose KDE software. Read on to find out more about Xompu, what they think of KDE and our software, and news on job opportunities with the company.

As talked about at length yesterday, the Catalyst 11.3 driver that was just released is not compatible with the X.Org Server 1.10 final ABI. What this means is that this proprietary Linux driver update will not work on Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, and other Linux distributions experiencing major updates. AMD for at least the past seven Ubuntu releases has been seeding Canonical with driver pre-releases to meet the support deadline on new versions of this popular Linux operating system. Over last night, they did this once more...

Version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is set to be released in a little more than a week, but what will it mean much for users in terms of performance? We will be looking at the LLVM 2.9 and Clang performance in the coming days (along with GCC 4.6, which was just released). We are beginning this weekend by providing a look at how using LLVM 2.9 affects the performance of the Mesa Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver relative to the previous LLVM 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 releases.

"In cooperation with the Dutch Digital heritage Foundation and the Club for History and ICT, we will be celebrating Document Freedom Day 2011 in Royal Library (National Library for the Netherlands) in The Hague this year on March 30th. The theme for this event will be "Open Heritage". The importance of information and open formats is in this branche very well known, because of broad availability, openness of information and endurable access.

FOSDEM 2011 The Java* track at FOSDEM 2011 started off on the right foot by dealing with the state of the OpenJDK head on – both politically and technically – with a talk from Oracle's Mark Reinhold. There were quite a few speakers at Java DevJam and lots of Java tech over the two days, but this talk was needed to start to clear the air, hindsight suggests.…

Canonical has opened up to the public its vast database of components that are certified to work with Linux in general and its own Ubuntu.

The first stable release of the free office suite is available for download. The Internet, January 25, 2011 - The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project. Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

A short while ago "Ty W" posted an interesting question on StackOverflow. Apparently, most graphics software cannot scale images the right way. Usually it's hard to notice the flaw but the linked article does a great job of explaining the problem. PHP's GD library suffers from the same issue, but Ty discovered that the sample PHP program provided with the article did not work on partially transparent images. After a couple of hours of fiddling I managed to get a working solution. Apparently, the imagegammacorrect() function in PHP deals badly with images that have an alpha channel. I suspect that it tries to apply the same calculation to the alpha channel that it applies to the red, green and blue channels. To work around this, my solution splits the aplha channel from the original image. The alpha channel is resampled regularly while the red, green and blue channels are resampled using gamma correction.

Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010.1H release was missing and has been that way for months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive. Even the OpenSolaris Governing Board is out of the loop and they may abandon the cause in August if Oracle doesn't make their OpenSolaris intentions clear and appoint a liaison. This evening though is one of the first signs that Oracle may let the OpenSolaris operating system live on with their support...

Firefox has been taking heat from Google Chrome over speed for some time, but the world's most popular open source browser is getting ready for a comeback. Can Firefox 4.0 woo back some of the early adopters who've embraced Chrome? It looks like it will have a very good shot.

Twitter does not generally allow you to have a discussion. At least not me, who can barely say anything in less than a 1000 words, but here is a recent thread. The opinion about the software not being feature rich is a valid issue and being too complicated is something that I too find with writing software in general. But that the author feels it is less feature rich because it is Open Source, or more correctly, because it is free is something that bothers me.

In Part 1 we learned how to safely install CHDK on a Canon point-and-shoot camera to get high-end features. Today we learn how to use some of those features like movie zoom, RAW mode, histograms, and much more.

Compiz is a compositing window manager that enables users to enjoy clever desktop effects and transparency. Compiz is included in many distributions' default installs and in many others' repositories. At one time its future was in question with new major desktop environments planning to incorporate their own effects. When those effects failed to materialize as publicized, the popularity of Compiz continued to grow. But with newer systems and desktop enviroments, Compiz needed to be rewritten. So, after a long developmental period, Compiz 0.9.0 was released.

Open-source suppliers have not been successful with their appeal against the award of a contract by the Federal computer science at Microsoft. [PJ: That's the Google Translate version. According to a comment on Jan Wildeboer's coverage, "If within 18 months, 100 000 Swiss voters sign a petition for a referendum (Volksabstimmung), new legislation can be introduced via this mechanism."]

CMS-Maestro is a new PHP-based content management system (CMS) released by South African Web development company Valente Online. Easy to install and use, CMS-Maestro offers the basics such as page and article management and adds to that the ability to add additional widgets, and manage menus and a range of media formats. In a release the company says that “CMS-Maestro is built with extensibility in mind and is designed in a modular fashion, therefore additional features and functionality can be added easily to the Maestro”.

Dell is working with Canonical to help customers float Ubuntu-powered open-source clouds while also cozying up to developers. The hardware maker, better known for flogging PCs and servers running Linux's chief OS rival Windows, is working with Canonical on plans to take the sweat out of setting up Ubuntu clouds on its data-hungry Poweredge C 1100, 2100, and 6100 1U-to-4U servers. Dell's director of cloud software solutions John Igoe has promised The Reg that reference implementations for Dell's servers running the Amazon-cloud-ready Ubuntu will be ready in the "next few months".

As part of its effort to graduate its Chrome browser to the upcoming Chome OS, Google is working to add device orientation to the browser's capabilities. Not that orientation — the ability for an app or OS to know that up is up and down is down — is all that revolutionary of a breakthrough. Developers have been tapping to that ability on the iPhone (UIDeviceOrientation) and Android-based devices (SensorManager) for some time. But adding it into the browser itself is another step towards the Google Grail: the browser as operating system.