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
- Get Ready for Increase in PIPs and RAs at IBM, Red Hat, and Other Companies Devoured by IBM
- IBM's "market cap" has just fallen to 199 billion dollars and it has about 70 billion dollars in debt
- Like Kyndryl, Multiple Securities Fraud Investigations Into IBM
- Remember what happened to Kyndryl
- Who Next After IBM? (Bubbles Don't Last Forever)
- the demise of companies with "ai" in their name/domain
- GNU/Linux Estimated at 8% "Market Share" Today (in statCounter)
- Days ago it said 7.1%, then 7.3% or 7.4%
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- Links 16/07/2026: Solar Greenwashing by Energy-Wasting GAFAM and Growing Concerns About Harm by Social Control Media
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/07/2026: Photography, Agility, and "Today I have Truly Become a Linux User."
- Links for the day
- Rebellion Brewing at Microsoft
- As always, we welcome Microsoft whistleblowers
- Technology Against Human Nature
- Losing a sense of what it means to be alive
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 15, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, July 15, 2026
- IBM Down to $211.20, the Market in General is Up
- No recovery for IBM today
- UEFI 'Secure Boot' Still Not Secure in 2026, New Holes (or Bypasses) Still Being Found
- In 2026 there are still many people who call it "secure" and pretend to themselves that it is about security. It's not. It never was.
- Gemini Links 15/07/2026: Lab 6, Retrospective 2, and "Getting Back Into Gemini"
- Links for the day
- Links 15/07/2026: "Gianni Infantino Under Fire" and "Todd Blanche's Record Raises Alarming Questions About the Future of the US DOJ"
- Links for the day
- Allegedly More IBM RAs (Mass Layoffs) Same Day the Stock Crashed
- No paper trail, so it never happened, right?
- Techrights Was Right: Microsoft's Layoffs Tally Was False, Far More People Are Being Sacked
- "The Xbox Bloodbath Is Actually Way Bigger Than It Seems"
- IBM Sinking to Lowest Levels Since 2024, But Will Any Executives Be Arrested for Securities Fraud?
- 52-week high of $332.46 and now down to $212.94
- Microsoft Whistleblowers Say "The Entire Thing is Going to Fall Apart" and There Are "No Benefits" to Being Part of Microsoft
- "Multiple sources, who chose to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal"
- IBM's Crash Continues Today
- Stocks go up and down, but they don't typically go down by over 25% in a single day
- How Long Before GNU/Linux is Measured at 20% in Chad?
- The main way to get people to adopt Vista 11 is to sell them a new PCs and in poor countries it happens a lot less
- Making Techrights Faster Down Under (Australia and New Zealand)
- there's more to life than speed
- Strikes at the EPO Approved for the Rest of the Year, "€1,3 Billion Taken From Staff Income"
- Intensity can be revised and increased over time
- Focusing on What We Really Ought to Focus on
- Today we'll focus mostly on EPO affairs
- Violence is Not a Joke
- "Police say Widdecombe killing was targeted but motive remains unclear"
- How to Properly Measure the Performance of a Patent Office
- A "contribution from staff [which] is published by SUEPO Munich."
- EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part XIV - "Not One of Us" (How the Group Dubbed by EPO Insiders "Alicante Mafia" Pushes Out Talent, Replacing It With Friends)
- misuses the EPO's budget like it is a fountain of money for his friends
- LibreTech Collective Abandons Microsoft GitHub and All Other Proprietary Software
- Each time a project eliminates control by a hostile party it stands to gain
- Links 15/07/2026: US Regime "Cuts Two Utah National Monuments by More Than 90%", "Hormuz is Less Crucial Than It Was"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/07/2026: Old Computer Challenge, "Trial by Fire", LLM Slop Destroying Companies
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 14, 2026
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 14, 2026
- Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni Becomes Program Manager at the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- Heshan's addition means that the FSF is growing after a solid financial year (best in years)
- Michael McMahon Explains Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks on the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- The real solution is a curb on botnets. A mitigation strategy, however, would involve going static.
- Matters of Public Safety
- "Police say Ann Widdecombe killed in 'targeted attack' as motive investigated"
- The Register MS and Its Promotional Microsoft Content
- It's not too hard to see what the business model of The Register MS is
- IBM: From $306 to $212 in 7 Days, IBM Won't Go Up More Than 50% to Where It Was at 'Peak Vapourware'
- There's a limit to how much or how long a company can fake its performance and its potential [...] Early this morning a few insiders ("traders") cashed in on their "pump-n-dump"
- Red Hat Staff Needs to Start Looking for the Next Job
- Workers can conveniently lie or deny it to themselves, but waves of PIPs ("silent layoffs") will sweep over more and more units or teams as the company runs out of money to play with
- IBM the Next Bear Stearns
- IBM cannot recover if all it has to show is vapourware
- IBM Stock Collapses and It's Only the Beginning
- Will GAFAM soon follow and will any executives be arrested for the accounting fraud insiders have long cautioned about?
- I'll Be Extremely Difficult for Microsoft to Sell Any XBox Consoles Now
- Microsoft understands this
- How Software Freedom Would Benefit Everybody
- A society that denies control by greedy companies would do a disservice to monopolies and improve all services to citizens
- Links 14/07/2026: Harsh But Also Fair Criticism of Hey Hi (AI) Slop, 'Open' AI Shuts Down Its Own Products as Funds Run Out
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 14/07/2026: Old CD Binder and AWK
- Links for the day
- In Defence of Physical Tickets
- Tickets are not some "app" and not some "code" on some "screen"
- Microsoft Layoffs Not Limited to XBox (False Narrative in the Mainstream Media)
- Microsoft is becoming less relevant and workforce reductions won't end any time soon
- Links 14/07/2026: Plagiarism Spun as "Training", Zelensky Announces Leadership Shuffle
- Links for the day
- The Register MS Has Just Published "AI" Webspam That Mentions "AI" 54 Times. It Was Paid to Do This.
- Who pays for all this "AI" hype or "buzz"?
- Gemini Links 14/07/2026: Self-Advocacy Online; "The Internet Is Dead: How the Web Lost Its Human Soul"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 13, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, July 13, 2026
- Modern Technology Harms Women More Than Men (Because the 'Tech Bros' Who Dominate STEM Have a Poor View of Women)
- “Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.”
- Internet Relay Chat Trolls Are Not Expressing Opinions, They Are Saboteurs
- For the record
- Links 14/07/2026: "The Freedom of Information Act Is in Serious Trouble"; Irish Datacenters Use Up Almost 25% of Total Energy
- Links for the day