At the same time that Stockton, California teeters on the brink of bankruptcy the city is contemplating redoing their whole IT system for huge sums, of the same order of magnitude as their anticipated budgetary shortfall.
If you don't want to pay Microsoft tax and want an Ubuntu pre-installed PC, ASUS Eee PC 1225C is the machine you are looking for. Amazon has been selling this device since March 2012 for $422.
Open source is driving much of the innovation in the tech sector but there are key challenges in virtualization, cloud and big data, one IBM exec observed during his keynote at the Red Hat Summit tonight.
If you've been wanting to share your iPad's Internet connection with your Linux system without resorting to jail-breaking your tablet or going through other lengthy steps, it should now be possible to setup.
A new packet scheduler is designed to help avoid buffer bloat and "Early Retransmit" offers faster connection recovery after TCP packet loss. The E1000e driver already supports the network chip for Intel's next-generation desktop and notebook platform.
This is the second in our 30-week series that profiles a different Linux kernel developer each week. Last week we debuted the series with Linus Torvalds. The profiles we publish throughout the rest of 2012 should help illustrate how these developers do their work, providing important insight on how to work with them and what makes them tick.
I think that is a common question for every Linux user soon or later in their career of desktop or server administrator “Why Linux uses all my Ram while not doing much ?”. To this one today I’ve add another question that I’m sure is common for many Linux system administrator “Why the command free show swap used and I’ve so much free Ram ?”, so from my study of today on SwapCached i present to you some useful, or at least i hope so, information on the management of memory in a Linux system.
In preparation for the Wayland/Weston 0.95 release in early July, a pre-release is now available (v0.94.90) that gets ready for this important milestone.
While not as far along as the ARM Lima driver or even OpenFIMG, the open-source reverse-engineered "Freedreno" driver for Qualcomm's Snapdragon graphics hardware has hit a rendering milestone. There's also a small ARM Mali driver update.
Sony released the Open Shading Language in 2010 as "a small but rich language for programmable shading in advanced renderers and other applications." This simply wasn't a code drop of some no longer useful code to try to spark them some positive publicity, but OSL has kept advancing as an open-source shading language.
The Intel "i915g" Gallium3D driver now implements sRGB textures support, but this is basically the end of the road for new features.
Empathy 3.5.3 instant messaging client for the GNOME desktop environment has been announced earlier today, June 26th, bringing a completely redesigned contact list.
Since I have frequently recommended the Opera browser, I feel obliged to warn our loyal readers: if you're inclined to upgrade to Opera 12.00, don't. The new version of Opera is quite buggy. Wait for 12.01 or 12.02 or whenever it gets fixed.
What is this strange key and what does it mean anyway? “SysRQ” is short for the general term “system request”, however that doesn’t shed much light on its purpose. For that kind of information, we’ll need to step into our wayback machine and take a gander at computing history.
Watch out, Sony, Vizio is chasing your tail. Just yesterday Sony revealed its latest Google TV hardware, a $199 remake of the company’s first GTV products. And now today, Vizio took to the wires and announced its first player in the Google TV game, the $99 Co-Star.
Bruno Dilly of ProFUSION Embedded Systems announced EPhysics today to the Enlightenment developers list. EPhysics allows for physics effects to be added to EFL.
EPhysics doesn't implement its own physics engine from scratch but wraps around the Bullet Physics library. The most well known implementation of EFL is now perhaps through the Tizen project and EPhysics will be working its way here soon.
Peter Penz, the main developer of the Dolphin file manager for the KDE desktop and a K Desktop user since KDE v1.2, is calling it quits after contributing to KDE for more than the past half-decade. His reason for leaving the development of the popular open-source desktop environment is interesting.
Dolphin 2.1 will be released as part of KDE applications 4.9 on the first of August and to me this is a very special release: After 6 years of development, around 2700 commits and a lot of fun I'll be forwarding the maintainership to Frank Reininghaus. Frank did a great job during the last years to improve Dolphin and I'm really glad that he accepted the maintainership.
If your company uses Active Directory, then there is good news for you. According to Gnome developer Stef Walter you will be able to login to your Gnome desktop using your Active Directory username and password.
I'm not a fan of the GNOME 2 release series. It was my main desktop for years until I replaced it with KDE 4, which was far more innovative. A few months ago, I wrote pointing out some shortcomingsof GNOME 2, questioning the demand for what seemed to me like a desktop that had long outlived its usefulness.
Gnome developers work on a Screen Lock that is useful mostly for touch devices. They also work in a new Login Screen. The main purpose of screen lock is obviously to prevent accidentally actions to happen in the system. While Screen Lock shares lot of similarities with Login Screen -currently GDM- , it seems that these two aren’t compatible and will not be merged.
Users and admirers of Slackware were given a bit of jolt recently when the main project Website (and some mirrors) disappeared from the Internet. The hardware issue was eventually resolved and work resumed. Then today we hear from an avid Slackware watcher that Patrick Volkerding confirmed the next version number has been decided and sent lots of updates to Current.
Two day ago, on June 23rd, Ferdinand Thommes has announced the immediate availability for download of the siduction 12.1.1 Linux operating system.
As the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, Red Hat Inc. (RHT) released its Q1 2013 earnings last Wednesday. Revenue was $315 million, up +19% from a year ago, which is better than the street expectation of $310.8 million. Importantly, revenue grew +22% excluding the impact of currency. Operating margins in Q1 was 26.0%, up 108 basis point year over year. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is highly confident that they can continue to keep the operating margin improving by ~100bps per year. Billings grew +16% yoy (+20% yoy in constant currency), which is slower than the previous five quarters but still very healthy.
Red Hat announced its new business model and pricing for its OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS) offering at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 conference.
Btrfs is coming to RHEL 7 which is scheduled to be released soon, according to a report by Sean Michel of InternetNews.com. Vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat Tim Bruce said that Btrfs, which is available as a technical preview in Red Hat 6.3, will ship by default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, along with older filesystems like Ext4.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said the standardization — aka commoditization or componentization — of technology though the open source model has catapulted the information age into an information economy — but the battle against proprietary vendors is not over.
According to Sean Michael Kerner from InternetNews.com, the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system will have support for the Btrfs filesystem.
The Vice-President of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, Tim Burke, talked with Sean Michael Kerner, explaining him that Btrfs has been implemented and marked as experimental in the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 release, and the next major version, RHEL 7, will have full support for the Btrfs filesystem.
As the latest tests of Fedora 17 vs. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, here are benchmarks comparing the performance of an Intel Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" system on the two distributions named Beefy Miracle and Precise Pangolin, respectively.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is reaching out to Linux application developers and cloud developers, while strengthening a relationship with SAP. Indeed, the open source company has updated its Developer Suite for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift, the platform as a service (PaaS) offering. The moves are part of a bigger Red Hat partner and ISV (independent software vendor) push that’s unfolding this week in Boston, Mass.
At the Red Hat Summit, the company has already announced upgrades to its JBoss and OpenShift solutions. Now, the related Linux developer tools seek to ensure Red Hat remains relevant while customers shift their applications from physical to virtual and cloud services.
* DebConf11 financial report * Countdown to the freeze * Debian mirror redirector * Internationalisation sprint * Salzburg bug squashing party * Presentation in Romania * Bits from the DPL * Other news * Upcoming events * New Debian Contributors * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release * Important Debian Security Advisories * New and noteworthy packages * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN?
Small and medium-sized businesses prefer Debian over Red Hat and CentOS for operating their file servers, according to a survey released Monday by cloud storage network provider Symform.
PureOS 5 has just been released, coming with the latest Debian Testing packages, Linux Kernel 3.3.6, and more.
Updates to the popular Ubuntu Linux distro come around, with monotonous regularity, every six months or so. The latest implementation, 12.04, however, carries the “LTS” tag, short for Long Term Support, making it just that little bit different.
LTS releases only appear every 2 years and, rather than cutting edge new technologies, are all about consolidating previous updates to create a stable platform fit for enterprise deployment. Moreover, as of the 12.04 release (also referred to as Precise Pangolin) commercial sponsor Canonical has lengthened its LTS guarantee, pledging a full 5 years of support, updates and patches, both for servers (which have always had 5) and desktops which, previously, got just 3.
For years, the idea of developing software for the Ubuntu desktop has largely fallen into two distinct camps.
The first camp is for the enterprise space. Often there are specialized needs here, where companies will spend the money needed to get specific software developed. Sometimes this means funding an existing project, other times creating a new one themselves.
Recently I’ve reviewed the latest ‘consumer’ version of Ubuntu, namely 12.04, and found that it was pretty far away from being perfectly consumer friendly. The entire UI was scattered and disorganized, you were met with hundreds of updates and it wasn’t very easy to install anything. Then one of our readers suggested I review Mint 13 Cinnamon.
The Raspberry Pi single board computer (SBC) that began shipping in April in $25 and $35 versions has taken the hacker world by storm. Yet, the education-focused, development board is just the latest and cheapest of a number of recent open source, community hardware projects designed for hobbyist devices, educational platforms, prototyping, and even some limited-run commercial products. Most of the seven open-spec boards listed below cost $100 to $200, but unlike the ARM11-based Pi, they feature ARM Cortex-A8 and -A9 processors and support Android in addition to running various Linux distributions.
The 7.x branch of CyanogenMod is based on Android 2.3 "Gingerbread", but several features from Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich", have been backported to the 7.2 release of the popular modified firmware. These include rotation effects and transitions, as well as fixes to the telephony stack.
Even in the developed world, demand for Android is outpacing iOS, at least by some measures. Dice.com, for example, reports a 302 per cent increase in job postings for Android developers between 2010 and 2011, versus a 220 per cent jump for iOS developers. Vision Mobile reports that over 75 per cent of those surveyed indicated that they're now supporting Android.
There are many ways to interpret Microsoft's behavior last week regarding the Surface tablet and Windows Phone 8. Some of Redmond's hardware partners may choose to interpret it as a slap to the face. Microsoft's decision to try out the hardware game and reveal that current WinPho owners won't get an upgrade to version 8 might drive more hardware makers into Android's arms.
Vizio, a company best known for its inexpensive HDTVs, is looking to expand into another new market: it has just announced the Co-Star, a Google TV set-top box that will begin selling in July for $99.99. In addition to the standard complement of video streaming services and Google TV features, this new box will differentiate itself by including support for OnLive's streaming gaming service.
SectorQube, a Kerela based IT company, has claimed to make a micro-oven that runs on Android. The Microwave Android Integrated Device (MAID) has the capability to guide you to cook over 52,000 recipes (plus more downloadable from the Internet) via voice instructions. This is the first device of its kind in India, and now it seems that after smartphones and tablets, its time for Android to take over home and consumer devices too.
This May Be Google's New Nexus 7 TabletAccording to an allegedly leaked training document, this is Google's new tablet, a 7-inch Tegra 3 device running Android Jelly Bean. The document says that Nexus 7—as it is named—would hit the streets in July for $200.
The first and last time I visited Diaspora was back in 2010, when the social destination was still in it’s Alpha release. Although it had a reputation, as alpha releases do, of being buggy, I was surprised at how well it worked. It was impressive, a lot like Facebook but also quite different in its design. The problem was, there was nobody there. It was like entering an eighteen story highrise apartment building in which all the tenents had been evicted, hollow and filled with virtual echoes. So I ran back to the noise of the crowd on the virtual party that is Facebook.
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the launch of a new prototype of its open source Visual editor. The non-profit organisation behind the Wikipedia online encyclopedia says that the new editing environment should make it easier for users to contribute to its projects.
As the open source community continues to grow and thrive through the popularity of such enterprise ready platforms as Red Hat, the number of open source medical applications also grows with it. The truth is, medical software is expensive. Most health care providers – doctors, hospitals, dentists, independent clinics – have been under a lot of pressure to maintain or reduce run costs while at the same time continuing to provide the quality patient care and customer service expected of the medical care industry. In an effort to control these costs, many health care organizations are looking toward open source software to help them manage their complex billing and electronic medical records. This is an especially hot topic with the United States government mandating that health care providers move from a paper based system to a primary electronic medical record system over the next two years, complete with short term financial incentives in the form of government refunds for early compliance and hefty fines for late adopters.
Google's Chrome web-browser reached version 20 yesterday and for Linux users this marks the point that the web company has taken over Flash Player support on Linux from Adobe using its PPAPI implementation.
The Document Foundation has announced on June 22nd that the second Beta release of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.6.0 office suite is available for download and testing.
In our continuing series “Developer Interview”, Lionel Elie Mamane discusses his work with LibreOffice code and of his particular interest with Base. His lead role in maintaining the Base module is helping raise the use of Base among the LibreOffice community at large.
Joomla! is one of the world's most widely used content management software (CMS) that powers millions of websites. A new version of Joomla! 3 is scheduled to get released next September and they are looking for your help in the launch.
Something seems to be going on in the European Union. Over the next few weeks a range of really important debates and votes are taking place, all connected with openness in some way. Quite why everything is happening at once is not entirely clear - unless politicians are trying to get everything out of the way before their summer hols, perhaps....
Last week, #RioPlusSocial was one of the top trending global topics on Twitter. Part of the United Nations conference on sustainable development (called Rio+20), Rio+Social welcomed throngs of activists, politicians, moguls, and artists to Brazil, to discuss solutions for a growing list of global problems. Sponsored by the United Nations Foundation and several partners, the conference featured lectures and roundtable discussions with icons such as Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, the first woman President of Ireland Mary Robinson, billionaires Ted Turner and Richard Branson, and innovators such as Alnoor Ladha, a founding partner of Purpose, and Mashable founder Pete Cashmore.
Adobe has decided that it should do more to promote the range of web standards and open source projects that it is involved in and to that end it has now opened "Adobe & HTML" at html.adobe.com. The web site covers web standards, open source projects and the tools and services that Adobe offers in relation to those standards and projects.
Social games provider Wooga has released its HTML5 game Magic Land Island as an open source project called Pocket Island. The company started developing the game in 2011, when the emerging standard was gaining more and more momentum; the project was intended to highlight the capabilities of HTML5 as an alternative to Flash-based applications. The game was released in October 2011, and now Wooga has drawn its first conclusions about the viability of HTML5 for game development.
It was indeed a special moment. Surface, Microsoft's attempt to transform itself into a major hardware tablet vendor, in front of a hand-picked group of journalists and, eventually, millions of people around the world thanks to YouTube, and then... “Whoops!”
Acer has downgraded sales forecasts for Ultrabooks as the relatively hefty price tag and smaller screen size continues to limit adoption in Europe.
Microsoft has released an unscheduled, non-patch day update for Windows to update the Windows Update function itself. However, according to reports from readers, the Windows Update Agent update does not always run smoothly; The H's associates at heise Security also ran into problems on their test systems.
To hear folks in Hollywood talk about it, the US's indictment and prosecution of Megaupload are a done deal. Without any actual trial, people have decided that the company is clearly 100% evil and guilty. Yet, as we keep noting, the details of the indictment and prosecution keep turning up significant errors on the part of the US, as well as questions about the legality of what the US did. And plenty of people who really understand this stuff deeply are speaking out in agreement. The latest is a former federal judge, Abraham David Sofaer, who found the whole situation so troubling that he's helping the EFF -- for free -- with its efforts to get Megaupload users' data back.
This Wednesday July 4th, the European Parliament will have an opportunity to reject ACTA as a whole, in plenary, and destroy it forever. After four years of citizens' hard work, such a rejection would create a tremendous political symbol of global scale. La Quadrature du Net calls on all citizens to contact Members of the EU Parliament to urge them to reject ACTA, and beyond, to start a process to positively reform copyright law. A strong victory would set the ground for future reforms.