My primary desktop system is a Dell 745 with 6GB of RAM and Intel Core 2 1.86 Ghz processors. For Windows 7 that same kind of PC is pretty slow, but for Linux it snaps right along.
Several financial services firms are teaming up to launch the OpenMAMA project to deliver a new open-source messaging API, according to the Linux Foundation.
NYSE Technologies and several financial services firms have launched the OpenMAMA project to deliver an open-source messaging API for financial services and telecommunivations. OpenMAMA 1.1 for x86-based Linux platforms has been released, and additional messaging middleware for high-volume, high-speed transactions on Linux and other platforms will follow, according to the Linux Foundation.
Chris Wilson has taken a break from his Sunday hacking on the SNA acceleration architecture to put out the first release candidate for the upcoming xf86-video-intel 2.17.0 release.
The xf86-video-intel 2.17 release isn't going to be terribly exciting, since much of the interesting developments happen within Intel's kernel DRM and Mesa components, but there are a couple of fixes in this upcoming driver.
On the last day of the month, AMD has released Catalyst 11.10 as their October 2011 proprietary Linux driver update.
AMD Catalyst 11.10 / fglrx 8.90 series has "early look" Ubuntu 11.10 support (even though it's been in since the fglrx 8.89 series), production-rated support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, and 2D performance improvements for the AMD Brazos platform.
It appears as if Skype has taken action to contain the information that is posted on the skype-open-source blog, which posts progress on a Skype reverse engineering project.
Pay what you want. Voxatron will cost $15, but we're letting you set the price!
For those that weren't present at the Qt Developer Days 2011 in Munich this past week, here's some of the content that's now available online from this conference that marked the beginning of the Qt Project.
Kate Stewart announced on October 28th that thr Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook and ARM editions reached EOL (End of Life) on October 29th, 2011.
The ARM and Netbook editions of Lucid Lynx were released 18 months ago, on April 29th, 2010. Since then, it received important security updates and critical fixes.
On October 29th, 2011, Canonical stopped supporting the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook Edition and the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) ARM Edition.
Once upon a time there was DSL (Damn Small Linux) which provided a full workable system in a 50 MB image. I used to have it on a small tertiary partition for repair and rescue tasks on my main systems. It was never or at least very rarely needed as I recall, but I liked the pre-set radio stations in XMMS and the backgrounds and conky config in DSL, so I ended up running it more and more over Zenwalk 2.6, which at the time was using a very half-baked early XFCE 4.4, if only to listen to internet radio on a geeky minimalistic looking box.
DSL is no more and has been superceded by TinyCore, which is only 10 MB in size. If that is too minimal for you there is another option, SliTaz GNU/Linux. It is a small distribution based in Switzerland that at exactly 30 MB in size sits somewhere in the middle and comes in French and English by default. You choose your language after booting. It€´s been around for a while, I had a look at their 1.0 release in 2008 and was impressed. It is mainly intended as a live system but can be installed to hard drive. For being this small it includes a load of functionality, the Lighttpd web server for instance which makes it perfect for loading from USB stick or CD and running a website from memory.
The Linux From Scratch (LFS) project has released Version 7.0 of its manual for building a custom Linux installation. The new version of these step-by-step instructions uses more recent components than previous editions – for example the recently introduced version 3.1 of the Linux kernel, the fairly recent GCC version 4.6.1, and the Glibc 2.14.1. The new LFS also explains how to set up a "/run" directory in the root directory using tmpfs, an approach taken by various distributions for several months.
There's a lot to like about Mandriva 2011.0. The user interface has been tweaked and simplified, documentation and supporting services have continued to improve and clever ideas such as Timeline make it well worth experimenting with - at the very least by enthusiasts with virtual machines.
Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) closed Friday's trading session at $51.86. In the past year, the stock has hit a 52-week low of $31.77 and 52-week high of $52.00. Red Hat (RHT) stock has been showing support around $49.19 and resistance in the $53.33 range.
It was a bit perplexing when two weeks ago, apropos of nothing, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat affirmed its commitment to the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) messaging integration software that is at the heart of its Enterprise MRG-Messaging variant of the Linux stack it sells. Now we know why.
This morning, the Linux Foundation and a bunch of important financial services giants that make use of such messaging software have backed an alternative project, launched today, called OpenMAMA.
OpenMAMA is an effort to standardize and simplify the MAMA APIs that have been in use since at least 2002. The basic idea behind have an open source implementation of MAMA is to have a level-set, a baseline implementation that is used to promote interoperability. The financial industry, especially stock exchanges like the NYSE are not strangers to Linux. The Big Board itself has been running on Red Hat since at least 2008. There has also been collaboration among financial services vendors as part of the AMPQ messaging standard too.
By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.
Unity, the desktop interface in today’s Ubuntu 11.10, was designed with this specific vision in mind. While the interface for each form factor is shaped appropriately, Unity’s core elements are arranged in exactly the way we need to create coherence across all of those devices. This was the origin of the name Unity – a single core interface framework, that scales across all screens, and supports all toolkits.
As UDS continues over in Florida, USA thoughts have turned on how to make integration between applications and the Unity desktop better.
In opening keynote address of Ubutnu Developer Summit (UDS), Mark Shuttleworth said that lots of efforts will be put this cycle to make Ubuntu more power users friendly. Emphasis will be on improving multi-tasking, multi-monitor support and other features for power users.
With 12.04 LTS, the support will also be extended to 5 years which has been 3 years until now for LTS releases. Also a more streamlined desktop experience will be delivered to corporate users who deploy Ubuntu at mass scale.
Mark also talked about some plans for the next 14.04 LTS release, due in 2 years. He said that there will be efforts to deliver the core Unity platform to a range of devices that include smartphones, tablets and TVs.
Plans for improving the performance and start-up time for Ubuntu’s Software Centre in 12.04 have been discussed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.
I can't speak for everyone, but I can at least speak for myself. I am not "too cool" to use something that looks "slick" (I mean comon, have you seen Enlightenment).
What I'm not about to use though is something that was clearly designed for a touch screen on my computer that has a 15+inch monitor driven by a keyboard and mouse. I'm not about to use something that is resource greedy. And I most certainly not about to use something that makes most all the choices for me about how my desktop should be laid out. I'm the one that is going to be using my computer - so how about I get to choose how the GUI works best for me?
Mark Shuttleworth makes no apologies for the Ubuntu Unity Linux desktop interface, in fact he sees it as the foundation for his company's platform strategy as the company moves beyond desktops, servers and the cloud.
Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, delivered a keynote address today at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), reminding the Ubuntu faithful of the progress made this past year. He also delivered his vision for the road ahead, which involved leveraging Unity to bring Unity to multiple types of smart screens including phones and tablets.
n a recent blog entry, Mark Shuttleworth, owner of Canonical and the de facto leader of Ubuntu development, announced that future versions of the OS will be optimized for tablets and smartphones. By spring 2013 (assuming the company keeps to its rigid release schedule), version 14.04 LTS “will power tablets, phones, and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server, and the cloud.”
Shuttleworth’s ambitions are certainly timely. While it has become apparent that Linux will never challenge Windows’ core constituency of desktop and laptops, the definition of what constitutes a computing platform is expanding at an enormous rate thanks to continued advances in smartphone and tablet capabilities. Android and iOS have already established themselves as clear challengers to the Windows paradigm while ARM is threatening the x86 portion of the vaunted Wintel Alliance. Even more importantly, this is scarcely an idea the Canonical owner jotted down half-baked. Ubuntu’s Unity GUI, writes Shuttleworth, was specifically designed to scale across a wide range of devices from small touch screens to desktops, and to provide a consistent operating environment across all of them.
Mark Shuttleworth, the optimistic leader of Ubuntu, has shared his 'next' big plan and it has everything to do with the markets where Linux is already strong -- non desktop markets.
Mark Shuttleworth is as close as Linux has ever had to Steve Jobs. He has vision, he’s articulate, and he can move an audience. But, can he move a market that’s in love with Android phones and Apple iPad tablets to give Ubuntu a chance? I think he has a shot.
I’ve known for over a year that Ubuntu was going to try for the smartphone and tablet market, so when Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth told me he was going to expand to devices, I wasn’t surprised. Technically, Ubuntu, and its parent company, Canonical, have the chops to do it.
October saw the release of the latest version of the Ubuntu family and that includes Xubuntu, the Xfce edition. I’ve just installed Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook and the experience was rather good.
The netbook in question is an eMachines (Acer) model eM350. The specs are: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive. I'd been using it for a couple of months with the default installation of Windows XP.
So several weeks back, the wonderful Kubuntu folks, on behalf of Canonical, supplied a tablet to help me test modifications I’ve been making to allow Bangarang to be more touch friendly. Bangarang was shipped with Plasma Active One with some very basic modifications to help make it at least tolerable on a touch device. I’ve spent a little more time trying to improve the touch mode and the supplied tablet has made it so much easier for testing.
An open-source hardware group on Monday announced a US$89 credit-card sized motherboard based on an ARM processor that could be used for robotics, gaming and medical devices.
BeagleBoard's BeagleBone development board is targeted at the open-source hardware community, which includes hobbyists and engineers writing code for hardware with open-source specifications. Some BeagleBoard projects include bringing Linux-based Android and Ubuntu operating systems to its hardware.
BeagleBoard.org announced a new open-platform, hobbyist-focused development board -- priced at just $89 and equipped with a Linux distro that boots in ten seconds. The BeagleBone offers an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 720MHz, 256MB of RAM, two 46-pin expansion connectors, a USB host port and multipurpose device port, on-chip Ethernet, and a microSD slot.
Motorola's Atrix 2 is well worth its $100 on-contract price, at a time when some Android smartphones are selling for $300, says this eWEEK review. Dual-core, 1GHz performance, a 4.3-inch qHD display, and a responsive eight-megapixel camera offer good value, and an extra $300 brings you the nifty Lapdock 100 accessory.
HP announced last week that it will keep its PC division instead of spinning it off as the company had previously discussed. The future of the company’s mobile strategy and the fate of the webOS platform remain unclear, however.
First, Samsung has Intel (INTC) as a partner in this effort. Intel is desperate to find a way out of ARM's hammerlock in the mobile space, and this may be its best chance. It should work seriously to make this work, especially after the Nokia debacle. DigitalTrends says Intel is dedicated to mobile Linux.
Second, there is Samsung's size. Samsung is now bigger than Apple (AAPL) in smart phones based on shipments. It's starting on true innovations like flexible screens. The company has motivation to improve margins at the unit because it's not doing as well in chips and TVs as it hoped.
The first-ever LinuxCon Europe wrapped up on Friday October 28 in Prague. The LinuxCon portion of the week was just one part of a combined schedule that also incorporated Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) 2011, the Linux Kernel Summit (LKS), and the GStreamer Conference.
By all accounts the event was a success, attracting more than 800 attendees — a number that threatened to overflow the meeting rooms of a few of the more popular sessions. In fact, the far-greater-than-expected turnout already prompted the Linux Foundation (LF) to look for a larger venue for the 2012 conference. The co-location of LKS and ELCE meant that a lot of talks dealt with the kernel itself (file systems, device drivers, kernel module development, etc.) and with embedded development, but there was plenty of other content as well — desktop environments, databases, license questions, and more.
We’ve had browser wars back when Netscape was still the king. Today, it’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all battling it out to see who’s top dog. There are plenty of different categories where they are being compared, such as speed, memory efficiency, functionality/features, and more.
Open source has been vital in creating the cloud. The open source process allowed many companies to use what began as Google's (GOOG) MapReduce, evolving it into things like Hadoop (originally a Yahoo (YHOO) project), entire cloud stacks like Red Hat's (RHT) OpenShift, and services like Amazon's (AMZN) EC2 in relatively short order.
Following a six-week public beta, The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced that the project's new extensions and templates repositories for LibreOffice are now online. In a post on the TDF blog, Florian Effenberger, a member of the Foundation's Board of Directors, says that the sites are just "one of the many community efforts at the LibreOffice project", adding that the repositories will "benefit of millions of LibreOffice and free office users worldwide".
Last Friday was the day for both parties to get their negative mojo on as they each filed oppositions to the motions of the other. The three motions addressed are:
* Google's motion that it not be held liable for patent damages occuring prior to July 20, 2010 (see, Google Files Motion for Partial SJ on Oracle's Failure to Mark);
* Google's motion to strike two "rebuttal" damages reports (of Oracle) by Dr. Kenneth Serwin (see, Google Loses Lindholm Email Battle); and
* Oracle's motion to exclude portions of the expert reports (of Google) of Gregory K. Leonard and Alan J. Cox (see, Google Loses Lindholm Email Battle)
GNU Solidario is happy to announce the release of GNU Health 1.4.1, in which we have incorporated support for PyPI, the Python Package Index Digg this article
The Ruby development team announced the release of version 1.9.3 of its open source programming language. Described as basically being "an implementation-improved version of Ruby 1.9.2", the first release of the new stable series of Ruby improves library loading performance and brings changes to the Ruby licence.
Mozilla developer Michael Bebenita has released a JavaScript-based H.264 decoder that is intended to run natively in Web browsers. The decoder, which can display video at 30 frames per second on conventional hardware, is yet another compelling demonstration of JavaScript’s performance potential.
JavaScript creator Brendan Eich included a demonstration of the H.264 decoder—codenamed Broadway—during a presentation at the ACM’s annual OOPSLA conference. The demonstration attracted some attention, prompting the developers to publish the source code.
If you have no idea what you’re paying good money for when you enroll in a health insurance plan, there’s a good reason for that: insurers profit from your ignorance. And they’re waging an intense, behind-the-scenes campaign to keep you in the dark.
In my first appearance before Congress after leaving the insurance industry, I told members of the Senate Commerce Committee that insurers intentionally make it all but impossible for consumers to find out in advance of buying a policy exactly what is covered and what isn’t, and how much they’ll be on the hook for if they get sick or injured. Insurers are quite willing to provide you with slick marketing materials about their policies, but those materials are notoriously skimpy when it comes to useful information. And the documents they provide after you enroll are so dense that few of us can understand them.
I know you join me in welcoming her back with her on target posts relating to our core job of exposing Goldman Sachs as to their many actions which contributed to our current financial crisis and to the economic demise of our great middle class.
GoldmanSachs666 is a non monetized site which has run from day one by volunteers such as Joyce. We welcome and appreciate the efforts made by her and the many others who have participated over the past few years of our existence.
The Basis Fund filed a similar suit against Goldman in June 2010, but a U.S. district court dismissed the suit in July since the Australian hedge fund was not able to prove that its purchases from Goldman were made in the United States. Basis filed its lawsuit on Thursday to the New York County Supreme Court, rather than in the federal court system, in order to sidestep that complaint.
Basis lost $67 million in its dealings with Goldman Sachs in 2007, according to Lewis: Eleven million dollars from a $12 million investment in Point Pleasant and another $56 million out of a subsequent $81 million investment in Timberwolf. The hedge fund is suing for an additional $1 billion in punitive damages, because they say Goldman practiced systemic fraud as it tried to unload $1 billion in Timberwolf on unsuspecting customers.
Lewis said that Basis plans to use the discovery process in order to dig up more information about Goldman's development and marketing of the Point Pleasant and Timberwolf securities. They said they plan to look at internal emails; investigate Goldman's dealings with Greywolf, a firm with Goldman ties that helped select Timberwolf's underlying assets; probe the ratings agencies that stamped Timberwolf with a AAA rating; and ask Goldman executives to testify in court.
After two tours of duty in Iraq, 24-year-old Wisconsin native Scott Olsen managed to escape unscathed and with seven medals for valor. But Olsen was critically injured in an Occupy Oakland march last week by a police projectile. According to eyewitnesses, Olsen was acting as a human barrier between unarmed civilians and Oakland police in riot gear who were charged with keeping a public park cleared for sanitation purposes.