Ubuntu is by far the fastest OS in our tests, until multi-tasking is brought into the picture, where it becomes a lot slower.
There seems to be trouble in the works over at Linux Today, and everybody’s keeping damn quiet about it.
The first hint that something was wrong came on Saturday when the site posted no new content. This seemed odd, but not too unusual since weekend postings are often slim on the site. But when usually busy Monday came and went with still no new posts, the “what’s-up-with-that” factor was raised. Things started to get back to normal on Tuesday, however, when new posts began showing-up on the site again, though the pickings were slim, only six posts on a day when normally there would be four times as many.
I figured that the folks at Linux Today had just experienced some kind of hiccup in their operations or that maybe everyone took the weekend off to celebrate some sort of open source spring break. Then, yesterday at about 1 pm EDT, the site posted a rather cryptic article, Picking Ourselves Up, Dusting Ourselves Off, by Michael Hall, a former managing editor at both Linux Today and Linux Planet who’s been spending the last several years working “on other sites in Linux Today’s parent company.”
The 2600hz Project is home to a collection of open-source telephony software that enables the use of the FreeSWITCH, Asterisk and YATE switching libraries.
In this episode: Canonical and Gnome may benefit from some relationship counselling. GTK+ 3.2 will enable you to run Gnome apps through a web browser. The Debian Derivatives Exchange (DEX) project has launched and Firefox 4 is here. Share our discoveries, listen to our marketing slogans and hear your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
Among the additions for kernel version .39 are the Xen network backend, support for ipset, and the rudimentary Poulsbo graphics driver; the kernel hackers have now also completely eradicated the BKL. Greg Kroah-Hartman has taken up maintaining the series 33 kernel again because it is the basis of the real-time branch.
I have no idea if the patch will be accepted, or even noticed, but I've done it and now anyone who gets the compile error...
One of the most commonly mentioned terms at Phoronix is KMS, as in kernel mode-setting, whereby the GPU mode-setting is done in kernel-space rather than user-space with an X.Org DDX driver. The major open-source drivers were quick to adopt KMS support in their DRM drivers since it allows for cool features like a cleaner boot process, faster and more reliable VT switching, more reliable suspend-and-resume, greater security by running the X Server as a normal user, the ability to have a Linux kernel panic message (like a Windows BSOD), and for new technologies like the Wayland Display Server to emerge. However, not all Linux distributions are yet on this KMS bandwagon.
If you're not following the many Linux development mailing lists out there, the latest major discussion surrounding the Wayland Display Server that's spanned the Wayland, DRI/DRM, and Fbdev mailing lists has been about using Wayland on "dumb frame-buffers", KMS vs. fbdev, and DRM drivers on embedded SoCs.
Generic video decoding is not new to Gallium3D or even to being worked on with Google's Summer of Code. Back in 2008 was the first attempts at Gallium3D video decoding when MPEG support in shaders and exposed by XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) was the target. It made progress with the Nouveau driver, but the work is not heavily used at this time.
The mplayer2 Website says, "mplayer2 is an advanced general-purpose video player. A fork of the original MPlayer project, it contains significant further development and supports a number of features not available in other Unix players." But no reason was found to indicate why a fork was desired. Perhaps a hint or two can be gleaned by the difference.
cation that will allow you to treat your computer desktop much like you would an actual desk - or perhaps a pinboard. It basically allows you to take notes, pin pictures, keep a diary, temporarily place a video or music file for easy reach, or just about anything you can imagine you do at a desk.
The open source community has long offered alternatives to commercial applications, but businesses for the most part have shied away from those free alternatives, claiming compatibility or support issues as the reason. That may be true for certain lines of business applications, but it's not true for all open source applications. Case in point, open source alternatives to Microsoft Outlook exist and offer features that match many of Outlook's core features and are compatible with different mail servers, services and hosts.
I have been working for the last few weeks on porting Cheese to GTK+3. I found some challenges along the way, and migrating from LibUnique to GApplication was definitely one of them, so I thought that this might deserve some special attention. New and more detailed documentation is now available, but I created a small flow chart just to have an overview of how GApplication works within a real application which is familiar to us.
The Ardour Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) can now use multiple processor cores for signal processing, and the maximum permitted number of cores is adjustable. A "global port matrix" simplifies the routing of signal paths. Exporting has become significantly more flexible: Ardour can now export multiple formats in one go, and version 3 also supports more than two audio channels. Further information can be found on the New features coming in Ardour 3.0 page.
Here at MakeUseOf, we strive to bring you the very best tutorials, reviews and articles to make your daily tech life that little bit easier. We’re not alone (of course!) and occasionally it’s only right to highlight some of our own favourite resources elsewhere on the web.
Pixeljam Games, a n independent games development team that creates retro styled arcade games, is pleased to announce the launch of the new version of their classic dinosaur themed racing game, Dino Run SE. The prehistoric arcade game includes an abundance of new features with its release, including new game modes, new levels, and enhanced gameplay.
That’s right folks, we’ve set up a Minecraft server for all FCM readers to play around in. Load up Minecraft, log in, click Multiplayer and enter: ronnietucker.kicks-ass.org and connect.
Canonical and games publisher Introversion have teamed up to bring two hugely popular games to the Ubuntu desktop – at a special price.
For the next 30 days the innovative real-time strategy game Darwinia and iconic computer-hacking simulator Uplink can be bought from the Ubuntu Software Centre for just $9.99 US, down $2 from $12.
Thanks to the readers that pointed out Molten Sky, a tactical modern air combat simulator from Big Little Team, is due to have a demo release for Linux next month.
Blocks That Matter is a puzzle/platformer that combines the magic of Mario Bros., Tetris and Minecraft into one package. The game is inspired by their own other game Tuper Tario Tros (TTT) that combined Mario and Tetris but had only one level. TTT became quite popular so the developers came up with another full blown game inspired by it. Blocks that Matter will be released in April for Xbox Live Arcade and in May for Windows, Mac and Linux.
People tend to attribute what happens around us in the world to intentions. We believe things happen for a reason. This is quite a strong human tendency already present in very young children. Put a 3 year old in front of a room where stones are moved around by some invisible means like magnets. Ask the kid what is going on and he or she will describe the events in the room in terms of "the blue stone wants to talk to the red one". We know stones usually don't really want a lot - so why does the child perceive such intentions? This phenomenon not only forms the base of early religions (attributing 'intentions' to weather, trees or growth of crops) but also results in making conflicts worse. Psychologists call it "the fundamental attribution error" and it is fundamental (hence the name) to our perception of the world.
(As requested by my audience, I wish to make a distinction in pointing out that my post is mistaken in thinking that the described features of KDE are a default. They are, contrarily, a BUG with my own installation. Nevertheless, I will hold the secondary method of connecting to the internet as something that can be revised and improved.)
As KDE worked on the new Network Manager for version 4, they decided to make the interface more powerful and through the use of the network manager widget, more accessible to users. The interface is indeed powerful and full of features aimed at working out every corner of customization on a given network. Wireless or wired network, they both have their particulars when it comes to connecting to the internet.
If you head on over to the Nokia Labs Qt Blog there is a post about "multi-process Lighthouse", which is worth reading. It's written by Jørgen Lind about how up until now Qt has lacked a multi-process client/server solution, but now they are looking for the Wayland Display Server to fill this void. Jørgen and other Qt developers ended up writing "Qt Compositor", which is a Nokia Labs project for making Qt-based Wayland compositors.
Geolocation is not a new feature, but in digiKam 2.0 it has been thoroughly reworked to streamline the process of geotagging photos. The new Geolocation interface (Image €» Geo-location) aggregates all geotagging tools in one place. The interface itself consists of three parts: the map pane contains a map and a toolbar with several navigation tools; below the map pane, there is a list of selected photos; the sidebar on the right displays the currently active section.
After 2 months of development the Phonons are proud to present Phonon 4.5.0, the new and incredibly awesome version of our multimedia abstraction library for Qt and KDE.
The release candidate of GNOME 3.0 is due out, and the final release is just days away (6 April), but the GNOME Shell continues to advance with just days to go. GNOME Shell 2.91.92 is now available with a number of improvements.
It's only been a little over two weeks since the last developmental release, but a substantial list of bug reports have been closed. Several changes have occurred as well. Some of these include:
* New network indicator for NetworkManager 0.9.
* Multi monitor improvements
-- Enable workspaces_only_on_primary so that workspace switching only affects the primary monitor -- In the overview, show windows for each monitor on that particular monitor -- Use new "pointer barriers" to trap the mouse cursor at hot screen corners -- Don't use a slideout for the workspace selector if it's at a monitor boundary
* Greatly sped up search
[...]
This week release is version 0.2.0. It features GNOME 2.91.92, including :
* soon to be released Network Manager 0.9 and new UI integrated in GNOME Shell and GNOME Control Center (be careful, it has still rough edges) * a11y support should be improved
Pardus 2011 is not only beautiful; it's also effective. A new, happy Pardus user may be right now playing with her laptop and she may be learning about a totally new--and certainly safer--computing experience.
The author, Nathan Willis, contacted me earlier this week to ask some questions, and I feel his article provides a very comprehensive review of the core issues, including the problems with Arch’s devs refusing contributions in this area and stalemating Arch’s security improvements for years. I think it’s great that LWN is reporting to their subscribers so candidly and giving this issue much needed visibility.
Sabayon. I’m unsure if it got the name after an infamous Italian dessert. Still, it’s “the most beautiful linux distro out there” as some people would say. That might be the case out of the box, but we all know that we can modify any distro to any extent and make it look any way we want. I’ll admit, I’ve always wanted to try Sabayon. This gentoo-based distro is one of the rare that is quite popular, and that I haven’t ever tasted. It currently ranks #6 on DistroWatch (last 6 months ranking), but for some weird reason, none of my friends are running it – I even have some linuxy friends that have never even heard of it (!). But maybe I just have strange friends. Anyway, Sabayon comes in 2 versions: G and K. Obviously, these are the first letters to their respective desktop environments. It also comes with Xfce, LXDE, and E17, but the first two are the most “important” editions of Sabayon. What’s interesting is that neither G or K can be burned to a CD, as the ISO is over 2 GB in size. I smell a lot of crapware. Do continue reading about this interesting distro.
PCLinuxOS 2010.12 is not as good as the spring edition. There are just too many errors, most of which could have been solved by a more careful system validation. After all, few or almost none of these showed up in the last two releases I've tested, so it's nothing inherent in PCLinuxOS that is bad, it's the integration of parts done in a sloppy manner. A bodge work, if you like, which fits nicely with my username, Roger Bodger.
At the end of the day, PCLinuxOS worked, but it was scarred. There's no benefit to its default scheduler, most people won't notice or care. The 32-bit only architecture is not a dealbreaker, but it projects a certain reputation. Multimedia problems are a sore spot. But the worst thing is the package manager. You can't really enjoy your Linux without it.
I like PCLinuxOS and I hope it will break into the big league one day, but the Holiday release just shows how difficult this task is, without immense resources to check and double-check every little thing. Now, since PCLinuxOS is a rolling release, you can safely install an older edition and then upgrade it to the latest patch level, which is what I'd recommend. For me, PCLinuxOS 2010.12 Gnome is a missed opportunity.
There's apprehension that Centos is probably not going to survive for long. The developer group is really too small and the method that they use to prepare and subsequently deploy Centos is too slow. Scientific Linux and OEL are infinitely superior in every way (paid developers, planned schedules, better communication, etc). IMO, Scientific Linux is no less stable, it's just that CentOS has gained the reputation for the earlier timely and good releases. And there's this inertia of change on the mindshare. However, the recent irregularity will definitely force a lot of CentOS user to move to Scientific Linux, and it's for good.
Most of you will need no introduction to Scientific Linux, but, as it's sort of customary for a review to give a short overview before getting started I'll do just that. Scientific Linux is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) much like the CentOS project, rebuilding the distribution from upstream source rpms and removing and replacing the branding that vendor has applied to the installer, slides, wallpapers and whereever else in the system. Scientific Linux is put together predominantly by CERN and Fermilabs with the help of "various other labs and universities around the world" as the web site puts it. It provides a common install base while also leaving space for site specific customizations and modifications to fit more specialist needs for the labs, but can of course also just be installed as is. It is fully compatible with RHEL, being essentially the same product, but makes a few minor but important tweaks and additions, in contrast to CentOS. Being based on EL but having the additional layer of QA of the Scientific Linux community should make for a very stable product indeed, but you might as well use it because in a way you have paid towards it with your taxes, as long as you live in Europe. After all, I believe these institutions are all government and EU funded. Now, if that isn't a good reason, finally we're getting something for our money.
Both Red Hat and Ubuntu have been in the press a lot lately because of changes they are making in their distribution. What everyone seems to forget with both companies are just that companies not communities. While they do a great job of being great community members, people will always complain about them. Here is what we gleaned from the posts I read:
For Red Hat the change is just how the distribute the kernel itself. They are now shipping just a completely patched Kernel. This is instead of shipping a patch set for each and every bug release that was available. Who does it affect? The folks that want to look in the kernel. As far as we can tell that's it. We at Linuxinstall.net don't think that this is an issue for them and more just a reason for people to complain and wish things were better the old way.
The idea of an open source company pulling in a billion dollars in annual revenue probably would have been unimaginable a decade ago, but Red Hat has drawn close to that milestone -- and it's likely because of its commitment to Linux, not in spite of it. Red Hat's continually evolving use of Linux and open source makes it "a more reliable multi-product, multi-service company," observed Geek 2.0 blogger Steven Savage.
Critics of free and open source software are fond of making the argument that software must be locked up, patented and jealously guarded if it is to serve as the basis for a successful business. Well, Red Hat just refuted such claims in a big way this week with its fourth quarter earnings report, which blew away analysts' expectations and placed the company well on track for billion-dollar revenues in the upcoming year.
On March 22, 2011, the DebConf committee decided that DebConf12, the Debian developer conference of 2012, will take place in Managua, Nicaragua. This will be the first time DebConf takes place in Central America. The exact dates have yet to be determined. More details may be found on the organizers' wiki.
In a two-and-a-half hour meeting on Tuesday evening, the Managua bid narrowly won over the bid from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Teams had been preparing their bids since mid-2010, seeking venues and local sponsors in their respective cities and countries.
Ubuntu Unity’s "non-accelerated" sibling Unity 2D has began to play UI catch-up with its older brother.
Recently I received an email where someone asked me point blank why it seems like there is better adoption for 32bit Linux vs that of 64bit. Honestly, I can see why this would be confusing. With the general thought that 64bit Linux is faster, many people are finding themselves being drawn to it over that of the 32bit option. In this article, I will be explaining why the desire to try 64bit Ubuntu is just silly. Not saying you should avoid it by any means, rather that choosing to install it over that of a 32bit distro is simply unneeded most of the time.
We’re now just over a week away from the beta release of Ubuntu 11.04, but to keep ourselves pepped up in advance of the date we thought we’d share this neat Narwhal wallpaper for your desktop.
A fun game to play now would be “spot the difference” with that xterm and what your xterms look like right now when running Natty Alpha 3. If you happen to notice the small artefact the congratulations, that miscalculation was causing all kinds of havoc and driving me nuts for the past 4 hours.
That's not all that's new in the new version: there were also a lot of bugs fixed as well as other slight changes.
In conclusion, the Xfce edition of Linux Mint is moving to a Debian base for a better release schedule, more mainstream packages, and better performance.
Jon Masters takes a break from his usual kernel column format this month to introduce us to the world of embedded Linux with an overview of the BeagleBoard and its Linux kernel port…
The Dell Inspiron Duo is a netbook that can transform to a tablet and it uses the Dual Core processor. The screen is 10 inches with a resolution of 1366Ãâ768. It uses a capacitive touch display. The convertible feature was designed in a unique way so that it will not rely anymore on swivel that seems not too robust for many users.
971 teachers from primary four to six, in all schools designated to receive laptops countrywide, will undergo an extensive training in using the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) computers.
The second phase of the capacity building program kicked off yesterday in several primary schools in the Northern and Southern provinces.
Although the African Union (AU) has sealed a deal with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project to buy XO laptops for distribution in African schools, the project still faces funding and organizational hurdles.
According to Kareem, following 5 factors must be considered when deciding whether or not to use open source software:
1) Cost reduction 2) Speed of implementation 3) May not have a foundation to support future desired functionality 4) Code ownership may be a problem 5) May need to change systems to match the OSS application
Firefox 3.6.16 and Firefox 3.5.18 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 4.
Firefox 4ââ¬Â²s brand new Sync feature is one of the main attractions of the latest release. It allows you to sync browser data, such as bookmarks, preferences, history, and tabs – but not extensions – across multiple Firefox installations. Here’s how it’s done…
Firefox 4 is another major breakthrough for Mozilla. It has restored Firefox's competitiveness at a critical moment when other browser vendors are gaining momentum. Microsoft is back in the ring with IE9 and seems to be more focused on standards than ever before. Mozilla will have to become more agile if it wants to stay ahead of the game.
Firefox 4 is now live for the general public. There has been a very good response about the browser till now with the download count touching over 5.3 Million in within 20 hours of launch. Firefox 4 has a lot of amazing features and performance improvements which will make your web browsing experience even better.
By Tuesday, IE 9 had taken just 0.87 percent of the worldwide market; as of Wednesday, even the newly released Opera 11 browser also had a steady lead over IE9, StatCounter reported.
One of the best things about Firefox is the huge number of useful add-ons that can be downloaded for it, enabling users to customize the browser to their needs. Some time ago, we put together an official WWD add-ons collection for Firefox,
Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox's latest Web browser versions include increased support for the HTML5 Web programming language.
Linux distribution: To the best of my knowledge, PCLinuxOS was the first to distribute the final release of Firefox 4. That is based on the fact that when I got to work yesterday morning one of my colleagues who runs PCLinuxOS was already gloating about it having come in with the latest batch of updates. It was also updated on openSuSE 11.4 on one of my netbooks yesterday evening. I'm sure there are various other Linux distributions which are already updating to Firefox 4, or will be in the next few days. But keep in mind that some, such as Ubuntu (and thus most of the Ubuntu derivatives) won't include it until their next major release.
As you no doubt have noticed by now, Mozilla launched Firefox 4 this week. It was downloaded 7.1 million times in the first 24 hours, and is now up to 15 million downloads and counting. We figured a Firefox infographic would be nice to celebrate this event, so we made one for you. We hope you like it!
Firefox 4 was recently unleashed, boasting many new features including the promise of dramatic speed and performance advancements across the board. In addition, Opera Mini 6 (for J2ME, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian/S60 phones) and Opera Mobile 11 (for Android, Symbian, Windows 7 desktop, MeeGo and Maemo) also came out for handheld devices.
Solaris 11 is available as a developer preview now in something called Solaris 11 Express which came out in November.
Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m104 is available for download.
You know when a piece of software is mature when it starts being adopted by financial services organizations. ING Financial Services recently moved a number of sites from Oracle Stellent to Drupal. Among these sites are http://ing.us, the main portal for their US market. The driver behind this migration was to move to a platform that was more dynamic and provided faster time to market.
Today I added a couple examples to the Fedora wiki’s upstream release monitoring page that will allow maintainers to track new releases of Drupal modules. You can simply follow the template to add yours.
The upstream release monitoring system is provided through the courtesy of long-time Fedora contributor Till Maas, whose cnucnu software informs participating maintainers by filing a bug when the upstream releases a new copy of their software. Although most if not all maintainers monitor feeds and mailing lists, the bug is a reminder of what’s left to do, and doesn’t require the maintainer to stop what they’re doing when they get an email or RSS notification. Instead, they can trust their bug list.
Open source software might be free to download, but it ends up costing as much as traditional software because of the complexities of supporting it, or inflexible licensing structures. Or so the argument goes.
You would expect to hear this from Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison or any of the other grand old men of proprietary software. It is more surprising when you hear such thoughts being aired by the head of corporate services at Canonical, the commercial operation behind Ubuntu-flavoured Linux.
This year, it was given to Rob Savoye. Savoye is a long-time free software hacker, who has worked on GNU and other free software for over 20 years. He has contributed to dozens of projects including GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, multiple major GNU/Linux distributions, and One Laptop Per Child. Savoye has led the effort to produce a free software Flash player, Gnash. This work has enabled free software users to avoid dependency on a pervasive piece of proprietary software. Rob is also CTO and founder of Open Media Now, a nonprofit dedicated to producing a freely licensed media infrastructure.
Chris Woolfrey: Can you explain what GamingFreedom.org is, and it’s relationship with Gluon?
Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen: GamingFreedom is a social network for makers and players of games, based on the concept that there are very few people who make games who don’t also play them. So, rather than view game distribution as a way of pushing a product to the users in order to make back the money that was invested, GamingFreedom views it as a social thing: you have an idea for a game, you build that game, and you distribute the game to some repository, which in our case is GamingFreedom.org. From there you can download the game and play it, and you can then provide feedback if you want; through ratings, commenting, even user submitted screenshots and other such things.
Interestingly, a headline from the Court of Audit’s own news excerpt is: “Ministries already use a lot of open source.”
This report, too, doesn’t seem to be available, except for a summary in English.
Headlines from outfits covering the story have read “Netherlands open source report says no savings can be made.” Discussion boards have chimed in stoking a conspiracy to cook numbers, government succumbing to Microsoft lobbying, and so on.
My take: Much ado about nothing.
First, I think we can agree The Netherlands has an issue with transparency, at least when it comes to handling this issue. But, beyond that I doubt there is any behind-the-scenes-lurking.
When the Open Source Observatory wrote about the first report, they noted it was written by one person in the Ministry of Interior, and largely meant for an internal audience. Only after pressure from representatives in Parliament did the Ministry send over the report.
Report, here, may even be the wrong word. Governments do a lot of internal prospecting via memos, briefs, etc. just like any other organization. Similar to the issues I brought up about the relationship between the US Congress and its Congressional Research Service, government needs some room to think on its own. Not every document amounts to an answer that should be translated into policy.
It could be that in this case the Parliament caught wind of someone’s quick calculations and wanted to see the analysis without any word on how “official” the document was, the background of the writer, or the vetting process, if any, the report was put through. In all reality, it may be a “bad” report.
The moral of the story is this. Do not wait until the phone rings. Do not wait until the lawyers are sharpening their pencils. Make sure you are in good shape now. The costs -- monetary, health, and welfare -- are not worth it.
For more on how you can get your hands around Open Source licensing, read my post from Day 1 of LinuxCon 2010 and visit the Linux Foundation for more details on their license programs.
As has been discussed before, HTC have a somewhat "interesting" interpretation of the GPL that allows them to claim they don't need to provide source code until between 90 and 120 days after the release of binaries. It's probably noteworthy that the FSF (who, you know, wrote the license and all) disagree with this interpretation, as do the kernel copyright holders (who, you know, wrote the code that the license covers) I've talked to about it. Anyway, after a pile of screaming and shouting from all sides HTC have tended to release their source code in a timely manner. So things seemed better.
The telephonic hearing in SCEA v. Hotz was yesterday, the one about how to handle jurisdictional discovery, and here's what Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero decided to do. Keep in mind, though, that this is still not the main event. This was about how to handle George Hotz's impounded devices, which is related to Sony's expressed need to do discovery to oppose Hotz's motion to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds. So we're still in the buildup phase, where SCEA is fighting like the devil to find a way to pin Hotz to California's jurisidiction, which so far it has been unable to do. It's a split decision, you might say, with Hotz winning some and losing some and ditto for SCEA.
I almost fell off my chair when I heard the news that Paramount will be releasing the Tunnel for free on bit torrent with no DRM of any kind!
No matter what the film is like, Paramount and the guys behind the tunnel have basically won. A film which would have gone straight to DVD somewhere in a junk bin somewhere could just have been elevated to the most downloaded movie of May (maybe).
Bodhi Linux v1.0.0 Distro Review with Enlightment Desktop