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
- Brett Wilson LLP Sent Over 5 Kilograms (or Over 12 Pounds) of Legal Papers! Because Writing About Microsoft Abuses is 'Illegal'.
- How do you guys sleep at night? On a big pile of Microsoft money?
- Extremism as a Weapon Against GNU/Linux (Microsoft Lunduke)
- He ought to know the Halloween Documents. Wasn't he a Microsoft employee when these came out?
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- Microsoft-Sponsored Propaganda Site Has Removed False 'Hit Piece' About Dr. Stallman (With Fake and Misrepresented Imagery) But Only After 4 Years
- So they only removed that page some time around 2025, i.e. about 4 years after it had been published
- Always Check Your Inputs
- Garbage in, garbage out. Or wrong assumptions, wrong corollary.
- Dan Neidle Said That Tax Evasion Facilitator Mr Zahawi (Working to Silence Bloggers Through Brett Wilson LLP) Targeted Not Only Him (But The Others Kept Quiet)
- "Mr Neidle said after repelling Mr Zahawi he was contacted by bloggers and tweeters who had received similar threats. They deleted their work “and in most cases never commented publicly on anything again”."
- SLAPP Funding Transparency Urgently Needed in the UK and Elsewhere (in Practice, Not Just in Theory)
- Writing about crime - including Microsoft crime - is not a crime
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, July 09, 2025
- Elodie Bergot Still Doing Illegal Things at the EPO, Based on the Local Staff Committee Munich
- They keep taking away from the staff while compelling the staff to do illegal things
- Gemini Links 09/07/2025: Extreme Testing and Golang Documentation in Geminispace
- Links for the day
- Vice President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Complains That Techrights Gives Visibility to Legal and Technical Issues at the EPO
- "Follow-up on enquiries relating to Dir. 1218 and 1001"
- Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com and Various Slopfarms That Lie About "Linux" and Are Promoted by Google News
- Google does not seem interested in tackling this problem
- Links 09/07/2025: War Updates and Microsoft Moving to India to Cut Costs
- Links for the day
- GNU/Linux Was Always a 'Movement' of Inclusion of Tolerance
- Even the licences themselves remove access barriers
- Links 09/07/2025: "Subprime AI Crisis" and "OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially"
- Links for the day
- Huge Piles of Legal Papers ('Paper DDoS') Do Not Impress Judges and Regulators
- they just make judges and regulators even more suspicious of the eagerness to resort to 'paper DDoS'
- Lunduke Isn't Even Hiding His Anti-Linux Agenda (From "Linux Sucks" to "Linux is Pedophiles")
- just trying to make a lot of trouble
- Some People Use Computers to Get Actual Work Done
- Tolerance and inclusion must extend to acceptance that some people don't agree with you, might never agree with you, and imposing what allegedly works for you on them is unreasonable
- Example of "Old" Things That Still Work
- The notion that something being "old" implies it must be discarded is typically advanced by those looking to sell more of something
- Some Scheduled Maintenance Later Today
- Typically the most vulnerable service during short interruptions is IRC
- Computers Are Just a Tool
- People don't get married because they love weddings, folks don't join the army because they love war, and most drivers don't drive to work because they love cars
- Apple Way Past Its Prime
- Apple deserves a decline
- The FSF's SysOps Team Recovered From Serious Hardware Issue Within Hours
- About half a day ago I noticed that all/most GNU/FSF sites were not reachable and thus reached out to a contact for any details
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- Slopwatch: Turning Bugs Into FUD About "Linux", Getting Basic Facts Wrong
- all the screenshots are of fake articles; we don't want to link to any
- Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"
- Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had
- PCLinuxOS Recovering From Fire
- It looks like a nightmare scenario, where even backups onsite get destroyed
- Links 09/07/2025: More Heatwaves, Officials Culled in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/07/2025: XScreensaver and Resurrection
- Links for the day
- Links 08/07/2025: "Cyberattack Deals Blow to Russian Firmware" and "Cash Remains King"
- Links for the day
- FSF40 T-shirt message
- by Alex Oliva
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Creativity, Gotify with NUT Server, and Sudo Bugs
- Links for the day
- More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
- "pepe the frogs"
- Links 08/07/2025: Sabotage of Networking Infrastructure, Microsoft XBox Game Pass Deemed “Unsustainable”
- Links for the day
- Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
- And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
- Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
- Answers must be given
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Ancillary Justice and Small Web July
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025