I've known for ages that Linux had migrated from enthusiasts to big business. It wasn't until this weekend's Florida Linux Show, where I spoke on desktop Linux, that I realized how fully Linux has become part of the IT mainstream.
The first thing that brought this home to me was a session on "Using Red Hat ClusterSuite and GFS (Global File System) to Provide Highly Available Virtual Machines." I hadn't expected a big turnout for this session. It's a highly technical subject that only matters to big businesses with sophisticated IT departments. Besides, it was Saturday morning in Orlando, Florida! I was wrong.
A virus run in Wine is akin to taking a ferocious tiger out of the jungle, paralyzing it, then hooking up all of its nerve endings to virtual jungle simulator. It's not a perfect simulation, though, so the jungle maybe doesn't look right, and plus there's an omnipotent power that can change anything that goes on in the simulation, or even destroy it and the tiger's consciousness with a few twitches of his fingers. Now that's power.
Digital video capture cards and USB dongles can be had for less than $50 a piece. With such cheap hardware, turning a Linux server into a personal Digital Video Recorder (DVR) becomes very tempting. Of course, you don't just want to watch live TV but also pause it, setup automatic captures of those science programs that air at 3 am, or record the live network coverage of events you are planning to attend in person, so you can watch them at a more agreeable hour.
We may well be at the start of a sea change in computing: If your OS costs more than, say, 10 percent to 15 percent of your hardware's cost, it might be viewed as costing too much.
In Monday's "On Computers" column, I make reference to WINE, which, technically is not a Windows "emulator." I did so using the word "Emulatiion" up front. Here's why: "Emulation" was the easiest word I could find to explain to fellow non-geeks what WINE actually does. No, it isn't, strictly speaking, an "emulator." WINE advocates say it's much more than that, and I'm willing to believe them.
What does it take to create a pinball machine for the biggest metal band in the world? Custom art, Linux programming, and a whole lot of love. Here is the Metallica pinball machine.
Zoom is an essential performance analysis tool for all Linux developers and users. Version 1.5 features several enhancements to help increase programmer productivity and optimize Linux application performance. This reduces costs by making software faster and more energy efficient. Zoom is available for $199 (USD) and offers a free 30-day evaluation period.
In talking at the Web 2.0 Summit, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management at Google, mentioned how apps that work on the web will work in Chrome OS, adding, "As a user, you don't install software, you don't maintain software."
The vice president of product management at Google has said in an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that the Chrome OS will be designed in light of the best features of the Chrome browser.
"Chrome has been doing very well for us," Sundar Pichai said, adding the browser has about 30 million users worldwide a year after a release.
So, once again, I make no apology for waving the flag for Linux. Indeed, I'd actively encourage users to give it a try. Yes, it is different from Windows, but certainly rewarding. Most distributions come as a LiveCD so you can run it without installing on your PC. As it is open source, you have nothing to lose other than a bit of your time.
For me, the end of October marks the release of Ubuntu 9.10, which calls itself "Linux for human beings." I've been running the free Ubuntu Linux operating system on my main laptop since May, and I'm pretty happy with it.
So with the purchase of an IBM T40 (a tough notebook), increasing system administration time was not an option. This alone forced an serious consideration of Linux as an alternative operating environment. That was five years ago. Now an established Linux user, I can clearly profess the capabilities and benefits of Linux for small and large businesses, especially, when it comes to notebook deployment.
After all, possibly the most important philosophy behind Linux today, is freedom.
When it comes to video playback on Linux, the premiere choice for video acceleration is currently using VDPAU with its CPU-efficient, GPU-accelerated capabilities that even has no problems playing 1080p video files with extremely low-end hardware. However, VDPAU is not yet widespread in all Linux video drivers, and other free software developers have been working on improving other areas of the Linux video stack too. One of these developers is GNOME's Benjamin Otte who has been working on using Cairo/Pixman for raw video in GStreamer. Additionally, he has organized a Linux video "hackfest" that will take place next month in Barcelona, Spain to further this Linux video playback work.
So, after being completely betrayed[1] by Ext4 not once, but twice, I decided to evaluate my FS options for /home .
* FAT* are not an option, neither is NTFS. * Ext2 is primitive and HFS/HFS+ is just not Linux. * JFS is nice, but (atleast parted) doesn't support grow/shrink. * I've used XFS before, and found it to be more reliable than Ext4. However, deleting dirs with thousands of small files is too slow (a common operation when compiling) * ZFS would've been an option if my earlier experiences with ZFS-FUSE weren't so horrid. * Did not even consider NILFS. It's too new, and I don't know much about it.
Unknown Horizons is a FREE and open-source, real-time 2D strategy game for Windows and Linux.
As is the case with the majority of open source games, Unknown Horizons is available for Linux as well as Windows. Give it a go on your favorite distro!
Yet another solution would be to always make sure there are representatives of at least one major KDE centric distro attending the same conference, and refer people to them. This one is the easiest solution, but it isn't much in terms of solving an actual problem.
So in a slightly reckless move I decided to update the machine to the next Kubuntu: karmic koala. This meant going to KDE 4.3. To my relief the install went very well. All important settings for digikam and kmail were migrated automatically. Dolphin is really nice and more intuitive for non-professional users. The kwin effects add a nice touch of class (translucent wobbly windows). Plasmoids on the desktop (photo frames and weather forcast) were very well received.
In short: good karma! Thank you very much, Kubuntu team.
Linux has had multiple desktops since Adam was a cowboy but under KDE 4 you can have multiple-multiple desktops. Confused? Bear with me ...
The code that actually does something is minimal: a bit of UDS entry creation for dates and a simple SPARQL query to forward to the nepomuksearch KIO slave. Yes, it is as easy as that since we can simply set the UDS_URL property of an item to a nepomuksearch URL and KIO will take care of the rest. Smooth. Thanks a lot David Faure. Once again you paved the way.
GSB provides an integrated, easy-to-install, and rather complete GNOME desktop environment. In keeping with Slackware philosophy it installs just a minimal set of GNOME packages and then allows the user to add the applications he or she may need. GSB also includes packages which add improved package management and simplified localization to Slackware as well as offering some popular applications not included in the official Slackware repositories.
Ive always prefered the minimalist DE. XFCE was always a favorite of mine and whilst my hardware is more than modern enough to run the latest DE, Ive always been of the opinion that no matter what your specs, you shouldn’t needlessly throw CPU cycles away on “bling features” that apart from being visually appealing serve little purpose. Having said that I cannot live in the past forever so “onwards and upwards” with KDE 4.3.1!
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It would not be fair to be critical of Chakra on the basis of it being incomplete in terms of default packages, if this is an example of later versions I can see Chakra being VERY popular. Its fast, functional & compatible. In regards to KDE I found it smooth, fast and puts Windows 7 to shame since I was running a very GFX appealing distro on only 512mb of ram and an old rig.
In celebration of Gentoo's 10th birthday, the Gentoo engineering team banded together and created the Gentoo 10 LiveDVD of the latest packages for this rolling Linux distribution. Less than a month after releasing Gentoo 10.0, the Gentoo Ten team has released Gentoo 10.1.
PC-BSD is a good distribution for the adventurous newbie up to the intermediate user who isn't afraid to tinker or afraid of a little command line work to make things 100% the way they want. It's still got some issues to iron out, but I figure that in time it'll be one of the top desktops out there for people to use. But in the meantime I can't really see it as a good daily driver.
Mandriva announces the upcoming launch of Mandriva Linux 2010, the latest version of its innovative operating system. Mandriva Linux 2010 will be available from Tuesday, 3rd November.
Mandriva 2010 will include OpenOffice.org 3.1 (based on the Go-OO branch) and that means more features like SVG support, 3D transitions ,VBA support, KDE 4 integration and Includes useful Extensions.
Mandriva Linux 2010
Mandriva is another much-anticipated Linux release and Mandriva Linux 2010 is expected to be released on November 3. One of the major features implemented in Mandriva Linux 2010 is the use of the Moblin platform for mobile devices. Built around the Atom processor used in most netbooks. Moblin is optimised for quick startup, shutdown and taking advantage of the smaller size of netbooks.
Fedora 12 provides "out of the box" support for kernel mode-setting with ATI R600/700 series graphics hardware, but it does not provide 3D acceleration by default. However, Red Hat's X developers have made it very easy to enable this 3D support for the ATI Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series hardware by just installing a special Mesa package from yum. In this article we are taking a quick look at where the R600/700 3D support is at in Fedora 12.
Fedora 12 which is scheduled to debut this November has some of the best features ever. Like all it’s previous releases, Fedora has always included cutting edge technologies. In this article we will have a look at 9 awesome features that Fedora 12 has.
CentOS 5.4 is based on RHEL 5.4, which was released in August. The key enhancement to RHEL 5.4 was the addition of full support for the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor, which has been implemented in preview form in CentOS 5.4. Other RHEL 5.4 enhancements include cluster improvements, new graphics drivers, laptop docking support, ALSA audio infrastructure, improved Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) enablement, security and tools enhancements, and a host of general Linux kernel improvements.
The team behind Eeebuntu, an ASUS Eee netbook-optimised version of Ubuntu Linux, has announced that compatibility issues with Ubuntu 9.10 – Karmic Koala – has led them to abandon Ubuntu and build their work upon Debian Linux from now on.
Boot speed has been a hot topic for a long time now and Ubuntu has come a long way in the last few releases. For Ubuntu 10.04 the target boot speed is 10 seconds! The reference platform for this target is a Dell Mini 9 netbook with a slow CPU and fast SSD that makes it an excellent "middle of the road" machine. Some people's machines will be slower, some will be faster.
There’s also a plan to improve the speed on the installation process. Currently when installing packages in Ubuntu the download is a separate step from the unpack/configure. Ubuntu will be able to install package faster by doing downloads and installs in parallel. While downloading the cpu and disk are mostly idle. While installing the network is idle. Doing them in parallel is a good way to utilize both systems.
One the whole there are some nice benefits to the upgrade, as long as you don’t depend on the features I mentioned above. As I finally finish this post we have a mere four days before Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released, now may be a great time to snag the ISO for the Release Candidate and try it out on your own system.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #165 for the week October 18th - October 24th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Release Candidate for Ubuntu 9.10 now available, October 21st America's Membership Board Meeting, Ubuntu IRC Council Elections, Keeping Ubuntu CD's Available, LoCo News, Launchpad: The next six months, Meet Matthew Revell, Launchpad offline 4:00UTC - 4:30UTC October 26th, The Planet, TurnKey: 40 Ubuntu-based virtual appliances released into the cloud, and much, much more!
Yesterday the Ubuntu devs released Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Beta was Thursday, and after a quick check of the new LiveCD I must say the update looks pretty nice. Just booting in with the LiveCD brought a very nice new feature that I have to write about in the coming days. I saw a message that one of my partitions has a number of errors, something I suspected but hadn’t confirmed yet. You should definitely grab the ISO file and burn the disc yourself to see some of the great improvements coming down the pipeline for us.
The ShipIt scheme allows people to order a copy of Ubuntu on a CD for free through the mail. However, with Ubuntu growing in popularity Canonical has decided to make a few changes to the way the programme works.
Thecus Technology announced a Linux-based, seven-bay networked-attached storage (NAS) appliance. The N7700Pro runs on an Intel Core 2 Duo with up to 4GB of DDR2 800 memory, has dual gigabit Ethernet adapters plus a PCI Express x8 slot, and supports 14TB of storage, says the company.
Upstart massively multicore chip designer Tilera has divulged the details on its upcoming third generation of Tile processors, which will sport from 16 to 100 cores on a single die.
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There are a lot of differences between the Tile family of chips and these graphics processors, but the key one is that the Tile multicore processors run Linux directly (albeit a homegrown one) and are being designed not just for digital signal and networking processing, but to run that standard LAMP stack - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
The hype surrounding the anticipated launch of Nokia's flagship N900 smartphone is refusing to die down despite the Finnish mobile phone maker saying shipping of the smartphone has been delayed till November.
Linux is not new to the mobile phone world, but in the past the majority of Linux-based phones were sold in China or were feature phones with “hidden” Linux builds, such as the Motorola RAZR2 V8, MotoZine ZN5, and Motorola ROKRs. Companies have taken the power of Linux and are bringing that to the mass market with these latest smartphones. These Linux-based operating systems are attractive to device makers because of the free or relatively inexpensive licensing agreements. We also see some of these high end Linux-based operating systems being quite open, primarily when looking at Google Android and Nokia Maemo 5 and 6. Palm’s WebOS is primarily a closed system at this time.
The moment the MySQL founders, who have been handsomely rewarded, took VC money they turned MySQL from being a hobby project/company, and into a major technology company and an asset. The change happened years ago, it's just that they're only starting to wise up now.
In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news stories in chronological order. We will continue to update this post until either the acquisition or the EC’s investigation closes.
Third, multimedia continues to be a hot topic. Songbird, cPlay, Kaltura, Elltube, and others aim to help users do more with their audio and video files.
Apart from the custom Line-of-Business (LOB) applications on LAMP, there are some really powerful frameworks built on OSS. A significant part of the web today runs on Open Source Content Management System (CMS) frameworks like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.
As most people have noticed by now, The Symbian Foundation has released the source code of their microcernel under an open source license. While any open source release of formerly proprietary software is something I warmly welcome, I doubt that it will take of as an actual open source project.
There's a difference between releasing software under a FOSS license and running a successful FOSS project. The latter involves a sufficiently large community of developers, ways how they can contribute [...]
The Blender Foundation just posted news of two e-books issued by the government of Thailand, one covering the 3d content creation suite Blender and one covering the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP. I have a special affection for both of these programs, for several reasons.
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GIMP proved that open source is not limited to uber-geeks and embedded systems. But the skeptics continued, revising their theory to say that "well, GIMP is just 2D, and that's really not very hard. You'll never see a complete open source 3D suite offering fully professional capabilities."
GRUB, also known as the GRand Unified Bootloader, is a modular, portable bootloader that supports a number of platforms, including standard BIOS-based PCs, IEEE-1275 platforms (such as the OLPC and some PowerPC/Sparc64 hardware) and coreboot, the free (as in freedom) pre-boot initialization framework.
At foss.my 2009, Brian Aker asked Richard Stallman at his keynote, about the Oracle/Sun acquisition (with a focus on MySQL), with regards to the parallel licensing approach used by MySQL.
Today is the 2nd day of FOSS.my 2009, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference organized and suported by grassroot communities in Malaysia, and the high tide being Richard Stallman's keynote speech about free software movement of more than 2 hours, right before the delayed lunch.
Although the website looks the same, apparently the back-end is totally different and the existence of a large open source software community developing and supporting the code makes it more secure.
Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.
A group working to produce an open and transparent voting system to replace current proprietary systems has published its first batches of code for public review.
Version 2.6 of LLVM, the Low-Level Virtual Machine, has been released. This modular compiler infrastructure, which can replace many parts of the GNU Compiler Collection and go far beyond the conventional roles as a code compiler such as being used within Apple's Mac OS X OpenGL implementation for providing optimizations and is similarly going to be used within Gallium3D, has taken a major leap forward with the 2.6 release.
IPv6 is the next generation of the Internet Protocol, and will dramatically expand the number of addresses available for web sites, as well as millions of mobile devices with Internet access. Although the transition will address some of the network’s challenges, others will clearly persist. That includes disputes over peering, which have quickly made the jump from IPv4 to IPv6.
A class action lawsuit was filed yesterday against Best Buy alleging that its "Price Match Guarantee" is a fraud.
So, remember last week when we wrote about how anti-net neutrality lobbyists from AT&T had crafted astroturf letters for various "special interest groups" to sign -- but someone forgot to remove the boilerplate "XYZ Organization" in the first paragraph? We also noted that there was little evidence that the group -- the Arkansas Retired Seniors -- actually existed. However, Matt Cutts did a bit of digging and found that the name of the guy who signed the letter -- Bob Sells -- appears to have worked in PR for Southwestern Bell for 28 years (there appears to be only one Bob Sells or Robert Sells in Little Rock).
A prominent foe of health care reform sent a memo to allied groups last week urging greater coordination in the health care message wars as Democrats work to hammer out a final bill.
In the memo obtained by CNN, Conservatives for Patients Rights leader Rick Scott wrote that the health care bills now emerging from the House and Senate will be "target rich environments" – but he implored reform opponents to synchronize their strategies before attacking.
Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington - As President Obama's push for a healthcare overhaul moves toward its final act, the oft-vilified health insurance industry is on the verge of seeing a plan enacted that largely protects its financial interests.
The protestors attempted to deliver a letter to ABA President Edward Yingling listing their concerns and demands, but no representative of the ABA would come out to accept the letter, guaranteeing that the protestors would try again later.
Is GSG's charitable contribution admissible "res gestae" on the issue of "consciouness of guilt"? Didn't Bernie Madoff donate millions to charity? Millions of other people's money. Yes Viniar, Henry Paulson performed "admirably" for his "former" firm. $16.71 billion divided by $200 million = 83.5, you're in the "prosperity gospel" ballpark!
Lobbyists will continue to have free rein across Whitehall after the Government backed away from imposing new regulations on the industry.
Details of meetings between civil servants and lobbyists will not to published, despite calls from MPs on the Public Administration Committee, who made the recommendation after a six-month inquiry
A relatively small number of Americans have paid a huge price in Iraq directly. Not just the 4,300 killed or 31,500 physically wounded, but the entire million-plus who have served there at one point or another.
Huffington Post national editor Nico Pitney appeared on CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday morning to debate the White House campaign against Fox News.
KAS serves as a mouthpiece for policies supported by Dick Cheney, who, since leaving office, has denounced the U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the Bush administration's use of torture, and opposed President Obama's plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Attorneys for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have issued a takedown notice in an attempt to silence a parody website that was posted in support of the Yes Men's embarrassing prank poking fun at the Chamber's stance on climate change legislation.
In a letter sent to the Chamber's attorneys today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) demands that the baseless claims be withdrawn immediately.
Eternally excellent Rachel Maddow allowed me to join her tonight (pretty much the only reason I own a TV now is to watch her show) for a discussion about John McCain's "Internet Freedom Act," also known as "The Great Telecom Reacharound of 2009."
He is, of course, defending Billboard's obsolete "charts" which are still based mostly on CD sales and radio play, but just comes across as someone who doesn't even realize what he's measuring (at 43:15 on the podcast):"Right, okay, the one thing that does skew our ratings is that older people buy more music. They steal less music.... So like, you know, a Bruce Springsteen or a Madonna might overperform on the album sales chart relative to some more subjective measure of their popularity. But as far as like who's stealing what... I mean, what use is that?"And that, right there, is why Billboard has become so obsolete. It's lead by people who think that file sharing is "stealing" and that it's meaningless in figuring out where the money is in music.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by whatsonbarclna: Links 27/10/2009: Video Playback Hackfest, Mandriva Linux 2010 Comes...: ...record the live network coverage of.. http://bit.ly/2tDafp...