Continuing my updating on latest intel linux graphics-related activity, some hours ago Jesse Barnes’ patches which add support for 3 display pipes to our Linux i915 driver have landed onto intel-gfx mailing list. This is one feature I am particularly very interested in, and it is great to have those patches available in the open-source world now – months before the IVB-based hardware will arrive at the consumer market.
All you Humble Bundle purchasers know the drill. Check out your Humble Bundle download page for links to Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of SpaceChem, the mind-bending, molecular machine-building puzzle game by Zachtronics Industries!
The much anticipated Rage video game was released yesterday by id Software as the inaugural title on their next-generation id Tech 5 engine. Unfortunately, as expected, this first-person shooter mixed with racing game was released without a native Linux client at launch.
This newest bundle, The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, is similar to previous HIBs: you pay what you want, the games are cross-platform, and there is no DRM (Digital Rights Management) restricting the user. But this newest bundle isn't nearly as popular as some of the past bundles, most of which have generated more than one million dollars (USD) in less than two weeks and even two million dollars.
One week into this Frozen Synapse Bundle, there's $832k as of this morning from 175k sales. The average contribution price is just $4.75 USD. This is still a very modest amount and it should cross one million dollars as there is still six days left to the sale period, but the pace of sales isn't as fast as some of the other bundles.
KDE is having a global birthday party to celebrate 15 years and everyone is invited. Well, since we all can't actually get together in one spot, they'd like to inspire a bunch of parties happening simultaneously across the globe on October 14.
It all began much the way Linux began, with a message to a Usenet usergroup. Matthias Ettrich posted, "Programmers wanted!" for a "New Project: Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)". The rest is history. 15 years ago Ettrich was looking to create an interface for endusers - the regular desktop user and he and his fellow developers succeeded. KDE became the most popular desktop environment for free Unix desktops and remained so until the rise of Ubuntu propelled GNOME into that position. It will be interesting to see where the dueling desktops end up in the coming years.
September 7, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.2 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. The October updates are especially interesting for those using the new Akonadi-based Kontact Suite, as it contains many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications such as KMail, and others retrieving information using Akonadi.
If you're still waiting for the GNOME 3 series to tolerate more than one work-flow, then GNOME 3.2 is going to disappoint you.
Although the new release contains dozens of improvements, both practical and aesthetic, it still supports only a single work flow, just like GNOME 3.0. Despite six months of protests, the GNOME team seems to have decided that, if it just ignores the complaints, eventually they'll go away.
That said, some of the improvements might just be enough to reconcile you to the GNOME 3 series. While some improvements are useful but minor refinements, others ranging from task-oriented documentation and accessibility improvements to online integration tools, would be welcome additions to any desktops.
Install a lightweight operating system that’s always up to date. Featuring the speedy Openbox desktop and built on the rolling release Arch Linux, Archbang delivers both minimalism and up-to-date software. Best of all, it’s a lot easier to set up and use than a vanilla Arch installation.
George Vlahavas from the Salix OS development team, proudly announced on October 4th that the a new edition of the Salix OS operating system is now available for download, featuring the Ratpoison window manager.
The build server that produces RPMS for the software repository for PCLinuxOS has switched over to RPM 4.8.x as of today. This comes after a month worth of notices and reminders posted.
My test box was the old and abused T60 laptop, with 2GB RAM and an ATI graphics card. It never had hardware issues with Mandriva or PCLinuxOS or many other distributions, which indicates there might be some deep problem in the Mageia core. A shame really, as I wanted to see what the distro could do when committed to hard disk and running.
Based on the live session testing and the installation, there's a lot to be done still. Mageia needs a lot of bug fixing and polish. There are too many bugs and errors to allow a smooth and seamless desktop experience. The visual aspect also needs improving. My biggest gripes were the slew of errors and warnings that the user just need not see, the archaic layout of the desktop and the selfish installation that simply ignored my Windows.
I ought to give the Mageia team some slack, given the fact this is their first release. So yes, more work is needed, and the distribution will mostly likely improve over time. I hope some of my finding will make into the future editions. For the time being, based on my testing, Mageia is not mature enough for desktop use. Will keep in touch.
When you’re talking serious server Linux, chances are you’re talking Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) , so it’s good news that the beta is now ready for the next edition: RHEL 6.2
Coming on the heels of the news that Red Hat is acquiring Gluster, a cloud-storage software company, it should come as no surprise that it will offer improved cloud deployment support. Of course, there’s a lot more here than just better cloud support.
Equities research analysts at UBS AG (NYSE: UBS) lowered their price target on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) to $50.00 in a research issued note to investors on Wednesday. They currently have a “buy” rating on the company’s shares.
Red Hat produced a video entitled Default to Open: The History of Open Source and Red Hat. Since it is about history, it has a number of older clips... bits and pieces I've seen before but quite a bit of new stuff too. Enjoy it embedded in webm format or use the link below to download it for local playback.
It's no secret that as the last remaining public, U.S company focused on open source (after the acquisitions of Novell and Sun Microsystems), Red Hat is on a tear. The company is on track to become the first $1 billion a year open source firm, and we've predicted before that acquisitions are on the horizon for the company as it rakes in the revenues. Sure enough, enhancing its increasing focus on cloud computing and Big Data, Red Hat has announced that it is paying $136 million for Gluster, a privately held storage firm. This is just one of what will likely be several upcoming acquisitions from Red Hat.
As the Register notes, Gluster's name comes from the combination of GNU and cluster, and the firm specializes not only in storage solutions but in solutions that help organizations crunch and manage large data sets. Gluster was originally created at California Digital Corp., which makes supercomputers.
As part of the OpenWorld extravaganza being hosted by Oracle in San Francisco this week, Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at the software giant and the guy who is responsible for the company's Linux and Xen hypervisor variants, gave a brief preview of the next iteration of Oracle's homegrown Linux kernel.
The Fedora Project proudly announced last evening, October 4th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta version of the upcoming Fedora 16 operating system, due for release in November 2011.
Yesterday there was the announcement by Mark Shuttleworth that Ubuntu 12.04 is codenamed Precise Pangolin. But what will its friendly competition be called? The voting is taking place right now for the Fedora 17 codename. Beefy Miracle is again a contender for the next release of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.
When I got home yesterday I had a few messages asking about whether or not I had seen yesterday’s CC (Community Council) Meeting. I was away from my computer for most of the day yesterday so I didn’t get a chance to read the log of the meeting until late last night. This is one CC meeting I wish I had been able to attend.
Balancing all of those options, I think we have just the right mix in our designated mascot for 12.04 LTS. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Precise Pangolin.
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) will be named "Precise Pangolin". Shuttleworth's inspiration came when he "recently spent a few hours tracking a pangolin through the Kalahari", and noted their precision and toughness. Many alternative suggestions including "Perky Penguin" and "Porangi Packhorse" were rejected for a variety of carefully considered reasons.
AK: Your story about how “A Few Million Monkeys Randomly Recreated Shakespearean work” Got you featured on many tech-news websites. Can you introduce yourself to cloud.ubuntu.com readers. (Your background, Studies, where you work, your hobbies, your future dreams…etc)
I work at Intuit in Reno, NV as a Senior Software Engineer. I love watching The Simpsons (which finally paid off). I like to try out new technologies and try to do things that have not been done before. Trying out these technologies usually leads to a personal project – none of which has been as successful as the Million Monkeys project.
Is it possible to reduce the need for upgrading by reusing a computer? Absolutely! There is a very green solution that can extend the useful life of any PC. It can result in less frequent purchases of new hardware and software, or breathe new life into a computer that can then be reused by someone else who could benefit from it. It's called Ubuntu.
Okay, so we might have made most of that up, but the developer of the robotic arm really is an aerospace engineer, he really does have a broken wrist, and he really did create a voice-controlled arm for under $60 — and better yet, he did it using an open-source operating system (Linux), a bunch of open-source tools, and of course he made all of his work open source so that you too can make your own robotic helping hand.
The Limo Foundation along with the Linux Foundation are joining forces to create Tizen as an open source alternative to Google’s Android. The game plan will launch with a SDK in early 2012. This means Intel will say bye-bye to MeeGo.
Adobe folks must be feeling the roller coaster ride of the Kindle Fire supporting Adobe’s Flash, while Tizen will be HTML 5 based.
Tizen is aimed at tablets, smartphones, netbooks and in-vechicle systems.The Limo Foundation has a number of backers with Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Orange, Samsung and others. Add Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm and others in the LinuxFoundation.
T-Mobile announced two mid-range Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread") phones from LG Electronics, featuring set-up wizards and how-to guides for novice users. The 3.8-inch MyTouch and the 3.5-inch, QWERTY slider MyTouch Q are equipped with 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, five-megapixel cameras, and support for T-Mobile's HSPA+ 4G network.
According to the company, Android secured 43.7 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS market during the three-month period ended August 2011, jumping 5.6 percentage points from the 38.1 percent market share it had at the end of May. Apple's iOS platform came in second place with 27.3 percent market share at the end of August, ComScore said. In the three-month period ended May, Apple's operating system secured 26.6 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS market.
When Tata Motors unveiled the Tata Nano—the $2500 car, the automative world was taken by storm. The engineering minds behind the cheapest family car pulled off something no other company could. The Government of India had similar plans for computers. The OLPC project showed promise but did not catch up. They (the organization behind OLPC) have however been able to attract some state governments to join them.
Last month at XDC2011 Chicago, I managed to get my hands on what should be the production hardware model of the XO-1.75 laptop that is expected to be released in the coming months by the OLPC project. The low-cost OLPC laptop targeted for students is now ARM-based and consumes very little power.
India's much talked about US$35 tablet running Android 2.2 Froyo is finally launched. World’s cheapest tablet will be called 'Aakash' and it's exact price is Rs.2,276. At current rates, final cost will be around US$50, which still makes it the world's cheapest tablet. If the price point of this Android tablet impressed you already, specifications are going to impress you even more.
India's "$35" tablet has launched at a price of $61, but may be subsidized by the government to as low as $30 for students, according to one report. Developed by U.K.-based Datawind, the "Aakash UbiSlate 7" tablet runs Android 2.2 on a 366MHz Conexant processor, with 256MB RAM and 2GB flash, and features a seven-inch, 800 x 480 resistive display.
"In the end it won't be Linux that makes it a niche, it will be simple economics," said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. "Nobody will pay even close to iPad pricing on anything but an iPad, and ZaReason will have to charge close to iPad money to get decent hardware in the thing." So, ZaReason will likely "sell enough to stay in business and make a little profit, but it won't set the world on fire."
ZTE is better known for its OEM feature phones, but the company has recently started to roll out a suite of Android tablets. Today, one of the company’s latest tablets, the V55, won FCC approval and judging from the label pic above the device appears to be headed for Sprint.
Jerry Shen, the CEO of ASUS, has recently gone on the record about the new tablet arena that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has created. First off, he said that he has no immediate plans to slash the price of the original ASUS Eee Pad Transformer to keep up with the Fire. We have already seen some companies do this in the wake of Amazon’s rumored 100,000 pre-orders of their new tablet, but ASUS says they are still gaining successful results from their tablets.
With Apple news everywhere today because of the iPhone 4S release, it's hard to remember other new products. But it's hard to ignore a leaked screenshot of Amazon's order system showing Kindle Fire orders coming in at over 2,000 per hour.
F4S: Please, give us a brief introduction about yourself.
I got my Ph.D in astronomy in 1978, and my research work afterwards has been primarily concerned with developing Fortran and C software to support my astronomical research. My development environments over the years have been IBM System/370, VAX minicomputers, Solaris boxes, and then Linux on PC’s from 1996 to the present. That Linux development environment has been an enormous benefit for me so I have been happy to contribute back by participating in such open-source projects as PLplot (plplot.sf.net), FreeEOS (freeeos.sf.net), and now the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net).
The KVM Forum 2011 was held at the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver, Canada on August 15-16. It was co-located with LinuxCon North America 2011.
LinuxCon and the KVM Forum were both sponsored by The Linux Foundation who recorded a large number of videos from both events. Unfortunately, The Linux Foundation had few security breaches to deal with on their kernel.org and linux.com domains which (I'm guessing) has greatly delayed them doing post-production work on the recordings and posting them publicly.
It’s been quite a while since we did that post on Firefox’s upcoming tablet User Interface, and guess what, it’s finally here! Firefox for Tablets has just landed in Aurora channel, which means, you can now download it, test it, and make the product even better. The tablet version includes all the features we discussed in our earlier post along with some additional features. Here’s more about it :
A major incompatibility between Mozilla's browsers Firefox and SeaMonkey, and McAfee's ScriptScan plug-in has caused "a high volume of crashes", according to Mozilla. The problem first came to light in September, when members of the McAfee forum began reporting problems with version 14.4.0 of ScriptScan, a tool which checks web pages, as they are loaded into the browser, for malicious code. This is the first time since July that Mozilla has found it necessary to block a plug-in.
"This is the first commercially supported way to run applications on JRuby in a production environment," Mike Piech vice president of product management and marketing for Engine Yard told InternetNews.com. "JRuby is really important to both the Ruby and Java world."
It's official: After some early posts that reported that the OpenStack cloud computing platform will be spun out from Rackspace, OpenStack officials have confirmed that a new nonprofit foundation will oversee development and evangelism beginning in 2012. OpenStack is presenting significant challenges to proprietary cloud computing platforms and offering a flexible, open source alternative, so this promises to be good news. OpenStack's oversight will also differ significantly from some of the open source cloud platforms backed solely by commercial entities.
Rackspace says that it is planning to create an OpenStack Foundation next year to take over the governance and ownership of the OpenStack trademark. The OpenStack project was launched in July 2010 to manage a new open source cloud platform created by Rackspace and Nasa; since then Citrix, Dell, Intel, AMD, HP, Cisco, Canonical and others have joined the initiative. However, there have been concerns about the governance of the project, specifically that Rackspace has too much control since buying Anso Labs which gave it a majority of seats on the project board. A reformation of voting processes within the project in March this year did little to reduce those concerns.
There is a lot of buzz around the term "big data." It's a topic that Oracle is now jumping into with both feet with a new big data engineered system as well as new Hadoop and NoSQL software offerings.
Oracle remains committed to Intel and to Linux even as it continues to promise the delivery of Solaris 11. That's the message that Oracle executives delivered during a keynote at the OpenWorld conference this week.
The commitment to Intel is particularly key, since Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's comments during the company's recent earnings call. Ellison said that he didn't care if Oracle's Intel x86 server business dwindled down to zero. Oracle Executive Vice-President John Fowler said during his OpenWorld keynote that he received a few calls about his boss' comments. He stressed that Oracle remains comitted to Intel.
During his keynote on Oracle's Java strategy at the JavaOne conference, the Vice President of Development for the Fusion middleware, Adam Messinger, had to announce that the release date of Java 8 has been postponed. Instead of late 2012, the new version is now only likely to be released six months later, in summer 2013. Around nine million Java developers, as counted by Oracle, had to wait more than four-and-a-half years for Java 7, which was released this summer after repeated delays. To make up for the postponed release date, Oracle's Java developers plan to use the extra time to extend the feature set.
Based on the excellent SIL Graphite font technology and Philipp H. Poll’s Libertine Open Fonts project, LibreOffice has got extraordinary DTP capabilities with the extended Graphite version of Linux Libertine and Biolinum font families.
Oracle made a number of announcements about current and future versions of Java at the annual JavaOne conference this week, including the availability of an early access version of JDK 7 for the Mac OS, plans to "bridge the gap" between Java ME and Java SE, an approach to modularizing Java SE 8 that will rely on the Jigsaw platform, a new project that aims to use HTML5 to bring Java to Apple's iOS platform, the availability of JavaFX 2.0, a pending proposal to open source that technology, gearing up Java EE for the cloud and a delay in the release of Java 8.
The Mac OS X version of VirtualBox has seen comparatively few changes, with an issue that caused the VirtualBox GUI (Graphical User Interface) to lock-up during the start-up of a VM being one of the major fixes. For Linux, a bug that prevented removable storage from being detached after restoring a VM snapshot has been fixed, and hard-links that caused the installation of VirtualBox to fail on file systems such as OpenAFS have been removed. Two hardware acceleration issues, one causing incorrect rendering and potential crashes when switching to/from full screen, the other causing problems when using Compiz under Ubuntu 9.10, have also been fixed.
It was just about a year ago that I was writing about the launch of LibreOffice, and now here we are today, marking the free productivity software suite's first year.
The Document Foundation (TDF) and LibreOffice turned one year old last month, and it has been a good year. LibreOffice was a dive into the unknown, and an opportunity to prove what the community already knew: that a chance to swim free could only bring positive results.
The goal of the GNU PDF project from its beginning in 2007 was to provide a complete implementation of the emerging ISO standard for PDF, ISO 32000-1. We've had free software PDF viewers for a long time, but at the time most of them didn't support newer PDF features like annotations and forms.
The team of free accounting software GNUcash is providing mentorship to students in the Google Summer of Code program this summer. Two of the three students have successfully completed their projects.
The latest beta version of Gephi has been released, download it for Windows, Mac OS and Linux platforms. This release focus on new features for both users and developers, and the new license unlocks opportunities for business. The Ranking and Preview modules have been completely rewritten in a modular way and can be now extended with plug-ins! Preview can now be extended in many ways, for instance group shapes or edge bundling. Moreover, continuous progress have been made on the dynamic network support and we release today the last big part: statistics over time, available from the Statistics module when the network is dynamic. Thanks to users who reported bugs, it’s the only way to fix them.
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. Today we will help you get started by showing you some of the options available and how easy it is to get started.
Google has updated its Google Docs app for Android tablets, but the cloud-based office suite is far from ready for the prime time on Android tablets.
The app doesn't come with and WYSIWYG text editor which may enable a user to do any 'real' work on Google Docs using the tablet. All you get is a simple text editor where you can type content.
Depending on how you count, anywhere from seven to more than a dozen Republican candidates are running for president. But it was a non-candidate who fueled one of the biggest weeks of campaign coverage to date.
Speculation that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie might enter the fray made the 2012 presidential election the No. 1 story in the news media the week of September 26-October 2, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Coverage of the campaign accounted for 15% of the newshole studied last week. That was the third-biggest week for campaign coverage this year—and the biggest not to involve a candidate debate.
And, the GS sp0kesperson reminded me, since Goldman bought part of Abacus for itself, I w as not permitted to describe the entire event as a “fraud.”
The Canadian Council of Archives is Canada's leading archivist organization, with a mandate "to preserve and provide access to Canadian documentary heritage by improving the administration, effectiveness and efficiency of the archival system." The CCA's comments on the C-32 digital lock provisions:
Just when you think you have seen it all a case of copyright violation has been filed by an astrology publisher against a keeper of a timezone database. This has caused the TZ database to shut down pending further proceedings. TZ is widely used in the GNU/Linux world.