Links 21/3/2012: Torvalds Secrets, Radeon HD 7000 Driver Now Free/Libre
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2012-03-22 00:15:30 UTC
- Modified: 2012-03-22 00:15:30 UTC
Contents
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Kernel Space
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To get the most out of your systems, you want detailed insight into what the operating system kernel is doing. A typical approach is to sample stack traces; however, the data collected can be time consuming to read or navigate. Flame Graphs are a new way to visualize sampled stack traces, and can be applied to the Linux kernel for some useful (and stunning!) visualizations.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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The TEA Text Editor is a very handy writing tool that delivers a much different user interface. For most computer users cranking out words or program code for digital consumption, text editors are often preferable to feature-bloated word processors. TEA pours on features yet keeps from getting too steamy.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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You may have heard a few days ago that Dear Esther, a game built upon Valve's Source Engine, would be ported to Linux and released in the coming months. Well, here's more details about that Source-based game is getting to Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Users who choose between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 are rarely making that decision on a purely rational basis. In my experience, users of GNOME 2 are often choosing what they know, while users of GNOME 3 are technophiles who enjoy anything that is new.
Neither is likely to go over the two generations of GNOME feature by feature. In many cases, the choice seems made before login.
But what happens when the two desktop environments are compared in general features? I'm a fan of neither GNOME 2 nor GNOME 3, but I decided to find out.
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New Releases
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Today sees the release of Legacy OS 4 Mini an Update / Replacement for TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta. Those updating from TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta will need to save any important documents, music etc to an external Hard Drive, USB stick etc as a full reinstall is required to update to this new version, sorry!
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Debian Family
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Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I've been running on my laptop since late 2010.
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In this interview, Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs, explains why the Puppet configuration management tool is a huge hit with sys admins, and tells us what to expect next from the popular open source project.
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We got another reminder of how disruptive open source software is to mobile computing this week, when Linux and Android merged back together. This appears to be good news for a number of parties, but Android and Linux developers and users seem particularly likely to benefit. The inclusion of Android code in the Linux kernel and the ability for Linux developers to more easily work on the Android environment and applications also ties into some of the key topics we’ll be covering in a Webcast March 21 titled ‘Open Source, A Tale of Two Cities in the Mobile Enterprise,’ presented by 451 Research and Black Duck Software.
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Web Browsers
Chrome
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Ever since Google started working on its Chrome OS operating system, it has had a pronounced focus on allowing users to only work with cloud-based data and applications. This has drawn criticism from many users, and some from us here at OStatic, as seen in this post. With Chrome OS, Google placed a heavy bet on the idea that consumers and business users would have no problem storing data and using applications in the cloud, without working on the locally stored data/applications model that they're used to.
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CMS
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Licensing
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Are developers actually chasing down license violations?
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Openness/Sharing
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There are some pretty basic things that a researcher can do to make their work into an open content project. Here are a few.
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Programming
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Finance
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Censorship
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The Obama administration has condemned Iran for trying to take control of the Internet. In addition, The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued guidance and licensing information to further support the free flow of information to citizens of Iran – a freedom the Iranian regime has consistently denied to its people.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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They're selling us out. Just weeks after Internet users from across the globe came together to to beat SOPA, the major ISPs are cutting a deal with Big Content to restrict web access for users who are accused of piracy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Concerned of the ACTA dossier many citizens contacted the press staffers of his colleague Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Commissioner Michel Barnier is right when he emphasized the need for better communications. Karel De Gucht had the opportunity to embrace the public attention to ACTA, and strengthen the institutional cohesion with the European public, help the transformation of the EU towards an “Europe of the citizens”. He didn’t exercise this opportunity, and it appears to me the reason is a fundamental disrespect to democratic principles, he doesn’t take the public seriously.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Microsoft Windows Falls to All-Time Low of ~60% in Switzerland, GNU/Linux Among Top Gainers
- What will it take for mainstream media (not just geeks' site) to cover it?
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- "Free Speech, Free Press": What the World Needs to Improve
- Darkness breeds corruption
- IBM prioritises a "lot of smoke and hype and use of trending buzzwords"
- IBM can pretend all it wants things are fine
- GAFAM Paying the Price for Pursuing US Military Money (Taxpayers' Money as 'Stimulus' With Strings Attached)
- The "cloud" in cloud computing is a cloud of smoke
- Observing Slop's Demise
- If energy becomes more scarce, then one rare/side perk (or upside) will be slop companies screaming for lifeboats
- Links 06/04/2026: Crackers Breached the European Commission, Why "Old Way of Campaigning Won’t Cut It Anymore"
- Links for the day
- Enron Versus NVIDIA (the Cost of Circular Financing, or Funding Your Own Customers to Buy Your Products) - “The Inventory Paradox” or “The Vibe Revenue Admission”
- Round-tripping (finance)
- You Know "The Economy" is Fake When 6 Months After Oracle Says Debt-Saddled 'Open' 'AI' (Slop) Will Pay It $300,000,000,000 Oracle Says It Must Lay Off 30,000 Workers at 6AM
- Oracle is in deep debt, which increased at a pace of almost 4 billion dollars per month lately
- Free Software Will Outlive GAFAM
- GAFAM is overhyped
- Techrights Was Further Decentralised Three Years Ago
- In 2020 we began working on IPFS stuff
- The Military Attacks on Dubai Internet City as Reminder That GAFAM Isn't Safe (Disregard the "Nobody Gets Fired for Buying GAFAM" Mindset)
- These are all realistic and foreseeable scenarios that GAFAM sceptics have long warned about
- The Wars Aren't Ending, Now We See GAFAM Facilities Being Bombed
- This is becoming a tech issue
- Links 06/04/2026: Turning 34, Throwing Things Away, and Printing in GNU/Linux
- Links for the day
- Links 06/04/2026: Ex-Microsoft Engineer Explains Why Azure Fails, Germany Prepares for War
- Links for the day
- EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part XI - EPO Strike Enters Its Second Week, EPO Sheds Off Qualified Staff to Make Way for Nepotists
- More than six months ago the "Cocaine Communication Manager" got arrested for cocaine use
- Another Microsoft Outlook Downtime
- Microsoft has sloppy code, it's not something suitable for mission-critical things
- Week 2 of April IBM Layoffs Accelerate Based on Rumours
- "Heard about Layoff at IBM"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 05, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, April 05, 2026
- Culture of Harassment Inside Microsoft, Says Former Director at Microsoft
- listen to Microsoft insiders
- Drone Strikes on Amazon (GAFAM) Datacentres Highlight Azure's Miniscule Share
- Azure is failing
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 35 Out of 200: How to Make ~10,000 Pound Sterling (13,220.50 United States Dollars) by Copy-Pasting and Editing 10 Pages
- Today it's Easter Sunday, so we'll keep this part relatively short
- Gemini Links 05/04/2026: Artemis II Mission Tracker, Meditation on Copyright, Alhena 5.5.5, "Gemini as the Final Frontier of Human Cognition"
- Links for the day
- Mainstream Media on "Practical Survivalism"
- Suffice to say, panic buying begets more panic and price surges
- Cloud Computing as a Cloud of Smoke (Your Hosting Provider is a "Legitimate" Military Target)
- When a French datacentre went up in flames people joked that the "cloud" meant a cloud of smoke
- Andreas Tille Congratulates Sruthi Chandran Before the Election for Debian Project Leader (DPL) is Even Over
- Andreas Tille, the current Debian Project Leader (DPL) who has been in this role for nearly 24 months
- When You Try to Change the World for the Better and Somehow They Find a Way to Say You Are the Villain
- Don't be a fool. Don't fall for inversions of narratives.
- Slop Was a Flop and Energy Crisis Will be Slop's Final Blow
- Today we see no slopfarms in Google News
- Links 05/04/2026: "Taiwanese Airlines to Hike Fuel Surcharges 157%" and Openly Racist Voter Suppression Starts in the US
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/04/2026: Playing with Hyprland and Migrating Antenna Filters
- Links for the day
- Links 05/04/2026: "Confidential Computing" as Proprietary Bundle of False Promises and "The Web Is an Antitrust Wedge"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 04, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, April 04, 2026
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 34 Out of 200: The Necessity of Transparency, Illuminating Garrett's and Graveley's 'Tag-Team' Act, Misusing the British Docket (From Far Away in America) in Efforts to Hide Bad Behaviour
- Transparency is paramount
- Red Tape at Red Hat (IBM)
- Now the guiding principles are the whims and moods of people who peddle buzzwords to manipulate IBM's share prices
- The So-called 'AI' (Slop) Companies Will Have the Plug Pulled
- It can vastly accelerate this bubble's implosion
- Dr. Andy Farnell on a "Technology Plan B"
- based around Free software
- Windows Lows Across the Mediterranean
- Judging by this month's data from statCounter
- The Future of the Net is 'in Space'
- Gemini Protocol is growing and GemText remains the same, so it's made to endure
- Linux Foundation Profits From Scams, Fraud, and Grifting
- Don't be misled by the name "Linux Foundation"
- Too Hard for IBM to Keep Everybody Silent About How the Company Has Gone South
- IBM is busy trying to keep disgruntled or ex workers silent using NDAs
- Microsoft Transmits Malware and Back Doors to GNU/Linux Servers, Media Points the Finger at Everyone But Microsoft's Servers
- Is Microsoft too poor to vet and check what it hosts and transmits?
- Gemini Links 04/04/2026: "Fuzz Guy", "Reusing Old Computers with Arch Linux and DWM", and Bubble v10.0 Released
- Links for the day
- Links 04/04/2026: eBay Scam, "Music Publishers’ X Copyright Lawsuit Officially on Pause"
- Links for the day
- Links 04/04/2026: Social Control Media Verdict and Bans, Whistleblower (Axel Rietschin) Explains How "Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars"
- Links for the day
- Reaching the End/Event Horizon of LLM Slop
- Are we moving towards a post-LLMs world?
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 03, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, April 03, 2026
- Gemini Links 04/04/2026: STXGE and Computer Relationships
- Links for the day