Earlier this week, the Linux Foundation, in conjunction with job board Dice.com, published its 2012 Linux Jobs Report--a collection of survey results that gave an interesting picture of the state of the jobs market for Linux.
Overall, the news was positive, and much reported on in the media: job demand for Linux professionals is high, with employers adding more Linux job openings, and paying more to acquire and keep good Linux talent.
Design, ideology and primary audience are the main distributions where Linux and Windows 8 differ greatly. However, they all have been developed on the basic principles of OS design and it is quite obvious that there will be some overlap, in-fact they are bound. According to some Linux fans, Microsoft has been stealing from the open source community for a long time. And now Microsoft is nearing the point where the company simply appropriates good Linux features.
When it comes to webcams these days, most people are using their laptops over desktops. The cameras are centered, integrated, and require no configuring. They're a cinch and usually have great resolution. So, then what do we do with all of those old wired desktop webcams that we've accrued over the years? Even if you still use an external USB one, chances are you're not using it daily, so why not come up with a better use for it?
Paul Rausch started his career at 14, tinkering with open source programs like Linux and building computer servers in his garage.
The Linux supercomputer is a multiprocessor cluster, consisting of 14 compute nodes, each with several high-speed multi-core processors, as well as 448 gigabytes of available memory. A high-speed local area network connects nodes on the supercomputer, which is designed to solve computationally large problems such as complex antenna engineering and analysis.
Greek insurer Interamerican Insurance will use the UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software from Chicago-based Clerity and vCOBOL Enterprise from Westchester, Ill.-based Veryant to transition its environment from COBOL to Linux.
Here's another reason to celebrate today besides the release of Wayland 0.85: Mesa 8.0 has been officially released! Mesa 8.0 is what brings OpenGL 3.0 compliance to several open-source graphics drivers, advances the Gallium3D architecture, brings many new features, and a heck of a lot of other changes that materialized over the past six months.
The release announcement can be found here, but it really doesn't say anything. "Mesa 8.0 has been released. Mesa 8.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 8.0.1."
A patch has been sent over to the Btrfs developers that can result in the next-generation Linux file-system being 5~10% faster in writes by introducing an extent buffer cache for each i-node.
Miao Xie sent over a patch to linux-btrfs asking for comments about this patch that provides an extent buffer cache for each i-node. "This patch introduce extent buffer cache for every i-node. By this way, we needn't search the item from the root of b+ tree, and can save the search time. Besides that we can also reduce the lock contention of the root."
Besides Kristian Høgsberg's keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen's Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more.
The talk itself, which happened in the X.Org development room, was about "how-to write a Wayland compositor" and the speakers were Robert Bragg and Neil Roberts. Robert and Neil work for Intel's Open-Source Technology Center out of London and as of late have been tasked with Wayland work.
Keith expects that there will be no performance penalty of running X applications on Wayland versus running them as you have already for decades on bare metal. In fact, he says it's one of his goals to see there aren't any performance drops, but the performance of X applications on Wayland may actually yield a performance boost. The performance boost would come as a result of handling swap requests with Wayland being much simpler.
Among the X/Wayland items still to be solved is how to synchronize keyboard mapping changes, the acceleration architecture for X on Wayland, and how to handle RandR-like display configuration changes. In terms of the acceleration architecture discussion it came down to how to best accelerate X apps on Wayland and whether some DDX driver code from the various hardware drivers should be pulled out or what would be the best approach.
Red Hat's SPICE project that's used in KVM/QEMU virtualization environments is working towards better graphics support, which also includes work on a DRM driver and Gallium3D component for offering 3D acceleration support within guest virtual machines.
Alon Levy of Red Hat presented at FOSDEM last weekend about "Xspice: Integrating spice-server into Xorg", during which he talked a lot about their graphics driver plans. Right now QEMU/KVM really doesn't have any guest 3D support in the manner that VirtualBox or VMware graphics exposes OpenGL/DirectX support to guest systems and in turn passes the graphics calls onto the host system so it can be executed on bare metal.
Codeweavers offers downloads of its Crossover Games for $39.95 and Crossover Professional for $69.95 but if you apply coupon code "CrossOverNow" this will drop CrossOver Games to $27.96 And Crossover Professional to $48.96 That's 30% off the normal retail selling price.
The latest Humble Indie Bundle ended earlier this week without much fanfare and less than $1M USD in sales, but there's a new special weekend bundle that's a bit different from the rest... This new bundle lasts for only the weekend (28 hours left) as three teams compete to each make a brand new game in the span of this weekend.
The name of this new bundle is "The Humble Bundle Mojam" where "Mojang and friends create games from scratch in the span of a weekend! Pay what you want to get the games, and all proceeds go to your choice of four excellent charities!"
Indie game fans can now blind pre-order Gamasutra sister site Indie Royale's Valentine's Bundle at a recommended ââ¬/£/$10 or ââ¬/£/$5 USD contribution, and a minimum of $3.99 USD.
The games offered this time include a fantastical first-person action-adventure game (Steam for PC), an IGF-nominated puzzle adventure title (Steam for PC and Mac, Desura for PC and Linux, DRM-free PC, Mac and Linux download), a 'scorching' single and multiplayer arcade-strategy game (Steam for PC and Mac), and a world premiere on PC for a pair of retro RPG-defense games (Desura for PC, DRM-free PC download).
GNOME3, KDE4, and Unity were all Vista-like in their failures. GNOME3 and KDE4 completely abandoned everything that people had come to expect from the respective projects. KDE4 has regained some ground as it has become more stable and feature-rich, but it is still no where near as popular as it once was. People fled to GNOME2 to avoid KDE4, and GNOME3 has caused such a problem that GNOME lost ground. GNOME3 is bad enough that two projects have come about to make something that sucks less. MATE is one of them. It's a fork that aims to continue GNOME2, much the way Trinity is meant to continue KDE3. Cinnamon is the other, and it aims to provide some GNOME2-like features to GNOME3. Unity is the interface of Ubuntu, and is the most polarizing software project I have ever seen. The debate about Unity can get as heated as debates about Vi or Emacs.
The 10th KDE PIM Meeting in Osnabrück finished on 12 February. Starting with pizza Friday afternoon running until Sunday around 17:00, the meeting attracted more than 20 hackers working on the various parts of KDE PIM. There was talk, code, beer, a group picture and even an anti-ACTA demonstration. Read on for a report on the meeting.
Window Applets is a pack of two GNOME panel applets that lets you put the window title and buttons on the top panel. Since GNOME 3, Window Applets stopped working but today, a new version has been released with support for the GNOME 3 classic / fallback panel.
Gnome 3 has failed to win users over. Unity was so unpopular it wiped out Ubuntu’s lead on Distrowatch and made Linux Mint number one. With the dominant desktop (Gnome) and the dominant distribution (Ubuntu) both failing to set users’ hearts racing we’re reminded once again why we love using Linux – there’s so much choice.
I have wanted to review Salix OS for a while now. It does seem to be the one derivative of Slackware that really synchronizes itself with Slackware development, to the point where even the version numbering system is the same. I have already tried out a few other derivatives, like Zenwalk, Kongoni, VectorLinux, and Porteus; on the whole, all of those worked relatively well, but there were a few things here and there that bothered me about each of them. I would like to see if Salix OS can overcome that.
Chakra is a desktop-centric, Linux distribution that was derived from Arch Linux, but is now a fork of that distribution. Unlike Arch Linux, which supports several desktop environments, Chakra is a KDE-only distribution.
The latest edition, Chakra 2012.02, code-named Archimedes, was released on February 12. Since there is very little difference, other than changes in software and kernel versions, between this latest release and Edn, the previous release, this article offers a summary review only. You may read the previous review here.
On the morning of 9/11, Whitehurst thought he would be a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group forever. He met his wife there. He loved the work. He was happy, he told Business Insider.
But as the towers were falling down, he got a call from Leo Mullin, the CEO of one of his biggest clients, Delta Airlines. "Jim I need you now. I need you to be my treasurer," Mullin said.
One thing you don't quite get accustomed to in reporting developments in cloud technology is how even the virtual things become virtualized. Last December, Red Hat released a software storage appliance based on the GlusterFS software-based NAS system that Red Hat acquired in October. That product is a way to apply the same methodology that GlusterFS customers used to build network-attached storage pools completely from existing storage.
Less than four months after its acquisition by Red Hat, Gluster, now known as the Red Hat storage unit, is announcing new storage products. The Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced this week, is essentially a rebranding of the Gluster product, or what the company refers to as "baselined." This means that it now uses the Red Hat Linux open-source operating system rather than the CentOS operating system it had used previously, and it has also been retested and re-certified. In addition, it now supports a new file system option, the Extensible File System (XFS).
Who uses Ubuntu, where and why? That’s a question a lot of parties in the open source channel likely ask themselves. It’s also one that’s hard to answer, since public data on Ubuntu deployment is scarce. But it became a little less so recently with the publication of the results of Canonical’s latest survey of Ubuntu server users. Read on for the highlights.
Linux Mint 12 KDE has been released. This is the Ubuntu-derived line from Mint, but it is not from Kubuntu. They have taken their own Linux Mint 12 distribution and integrated KDE with it. The result is very nice - if you are one of the many who want to avoid the current desktop wars going on with Gnome, this could be an excellent alternative.
Canonical, through Kate Stewart, announced a few hours ago that the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system is now in Feature Freeze state.
"Hello Ubuntu Developers, 2100 UTC has now passed and we are in Feature Freeze for Precise. Many thank yous to those developers who got their tested work in on time!"
Not content with having thrown out the “traditional” computer desktop in favour of the radically new Unity desktop, Mark Shuttleworth now hopes to transform the desktop even further. And this even before most Ubuntu users have got used to the last changes.
Shuttleworth’s latest plan is to introduce a new “heads-up” interface, one that will completely remove the need for traditional menus along the top of the screen. In their place will be a heads-up display which will remain hidden most of the time and only appear when needed.
Being in Feature Freeze, the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system received numerous updates today, including the Privacy Settings mentioned in an article earlier.
Among other noticeable features, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS now has an Unity Video Lens, allowing users to easily track their video files stored locally, or search for videos online, via popular websites like YouTube or Vimeo.
With today's updates, the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system received many new features and improvements, including the Privacy Settings, Video Lens for Unity and the HUD (Head-Up Display) system described in this article.
Originally introduced by Mark Shuttleworth last month, the Head-Up Display, or HUD for short, is some sort of add-on for the Unity interface allowing users to interact with application's menus by pressing the ALT key.
With Unity getting most of the attention lately in Ubuntu and the feature-freeze coming in tomorrow, I decided to take the latest Kubuntu alpha for a spin and see how KDE 4.8 for netbooks looks and behaves. But first, a little about 12.04 as a whole.
Raspberry Pi Foundation has released first SD card image for $25 computers that will go on sale on February 20.
Based on Debian Squeeze (6.0), the image includes LXDE interface, Midori web browser, development tools and example source code for multimedia functions.
Android 5.0 is big news, and in the coming months as we learn more about it, I’m sure there will be quite a few things to get excited about. I have a feeling that some things might be missing, no matter how hard I dream about them, but here they are; the 5 things I want to see from Android 5.0, Jelly Bean
New research from Localytics claims that Android fragmentation might be becoming less of a issue.
If correct, this could start bringing more popular apps to Android phones faster -- or maybe even first. But the catch is, the Android ecosystem is far more variable than the iPhone landscape. That makes it a bigger long-term risk for app developers.
Many popular consumer apps are still are rolled out first for the iPhone. (Hello, Instagram?) That's because many Android phones are running substantially older versions of Android, which limits which apps they can support. Plus, Android phones come in a dizzying array of sizes, configurations, and capabilities -- compared to a fairly small selection of iPhone models. Also phone manufacturers and wireless carriers tend to customize the Android interface (in "flavors" such as HTC Sense and Motorola Blur).
Localytics provides analytics tools that app developers use to monitor how people use apps. Data gathered from Localytics users during two weeks in January indicate that most Android phones now have "remarkably similar specifications." Localytics notes that this significantly simplifies the job of deploying mass market Android apps.
Official branding for HTC‘s Mobile World Congress smartphone line-up has emerged, suggesting that the quadcore device codenamed Edge/Endeavor will launch as the HTC One X, while the dualcore Ville will be the HTC One S. Insiders confirmed the impending One X branding to Pocketnow for HTC’s flagship, fitting with information SlashGear has heard independently about the mid-tier Ville’s launch name.
Viewing that the adoption of Android 4.0 has fallen short of original expectations and Microsoft will launch Windows 8 in the third quarter of 2012, Google is likely to launch Android 5.0 (Jelly Bean) in the second quarter and appeal for adopting Android 5.0 and Windows 8 in the same tablet PC, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.
Perhaps Nvidia's most exciting disclosure, though, was that the Icera acquisition will also bear fruit relatively soon: the company's new integrated 3G / 4G LTE system-on-chip, codename Grey, will be headed towards devices this year. "We will have shipping modems this year, hopefully sooner than later," Jen-Hsun said, suggesting that the move will help Nvidia compete against Qualcomm, which is tracking towards Snapdragon chips with integrated LTE as well. Presently, LTE phones and tablets have radio chips that are separate from the processor, a setup that's not terribly good for long battery life, among other concerns.
We're getting down to the wire here as Mobile World Congress approaches so it makes sense to get a few final leaks for various smartphones. Such is the case here as we learn a few finer details for the HTC One X. Formerly known as the Edge and/or Endeavor, this model is said to be designed with a Super LCD display as opposed to Super AMOLED. While it could look as nice as the HTC Rezound's display, the larger 4.7-inch screen is not going to be quite as dense.
Additionally we have learned that the One X will come with 32GB internal storage and forgo a microSD expansion port. If so, this would be one of the only HTC Android smartphones to not offer expandable memory.
At the end of last month we told you about a very interesting $260 tablet powered by the Mer mobile-optimized OS and KDE Plasma Active. The so-called Spark tablet has now gone up for pre-order on the Make Play Live website.
Typically, a pre-order requires a credit card in order to secure your device, but not in this case. All Make Play Live require is your name, email address, what region you live in, and how many Sparks you want. Then, when stock is available you will be emailed a priority product code, which guarantees you get a Spark as soon as your number comes up. As a bonus for pre-ordering, Make Play Live are offering 500 free points for the add-on store that should go live at launch.
Linpus is rolling out a new version of its Android-based operating system designed to run on tablets, netbooks, and notebooks with x86 processors. It’s based on Google Android 4.0, and the notebook version adds support for hardware that you wouldn’t normally find on an Android tablet.
The device you will soon be looking at is a $256 7-inch tablet running on a basic mobile version of Linux, and its name is Spark. The software user interface goes by the name Plasma Active and has been in the works for some months, ramping up to this point at which this tablet can bring the lovely functionality to the market with what we hope is a beta version of the Spark tablet. You’ll find that the software experience looks familiar if you’re used to using a Linux environment on your computer now, but that the tablet itself isn’t all that impressive when it comes to hardware.
XBMC, the open source media center, has steadily grown from its humble origins as an X-Box only replacement environment into the cross-platform, de facto playback front-end for multimedia content. It merges the file-centric approach taken by traditional video players with an add-on scripting environment that handles remote web content. The project is currently finalizing its next major release, version 11.0 (codenamed Eden), which includes updates to the networking and video acceleration subsystems, broader hardware support, and numerous changes to the APIs available to add-on developers.
I did a bit of fixing knowledge by exposing students and staff of K-12 schools to GNU/Linux. We sure freed up resources by bringing “dead” machines back to life and getting better and more reliable service from our PCs. Only a few schools have an official policy against FLOSS. Many just don’t know.
Long after its competitors replaced blank New Tab pages with personalized content drawn from your browsing habits, Mozilla reveals the beginning of its own New Tab revamp.
Apache Hadoop has been the driving force behind the growth of the big data industry. You’ll hear it mentioned often, along with associated technologies such as Hive and Pig. But what does it do, and why do you need all its strangely-named friends, such as Oozie, Zookeeper and Flume?
Dr. Richard. M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, addressed a mammoth gathering at IIT-Madras on Monday, February 6, 2012. Speaking on the topic 'Free Software, Freedom and Education' in front of a crowd of at least 3,000 students, teachers and activists, Dr. Stallman elaborated on a variety of topics including the history of the free software movement, the difference between free software and open source software and the dangers of proprietary software.
Blender 2.62 was released on Thursday with notable improvements to the Cycles Render Engine, motion tracking, the Blender Game Engine, and much more.
Blender 2.62 is the project's February release to succeed Blender 2.61 from December. The 2.62 release builds upon the Cycles Render Engine from the previous release along with incorporating new UV tools and other work. The new Cycles Render Engine improvements include support for render layers and passes, multi-GPU rendering, border rendering, BVH caching, and much more. The new UV editing tools include an advanced interactive stitch tool, a tool to compute seams for islands, sculpting tools, and much more.
The Consumer Committee (IMCO) within the European Parliament is considering an overhaul of the current standardisation system in Europe. The FFII presents a paper on the proposed recognition of ICT specifications from consortia.
"They propose minimum rules against trade and antitrust abuses. It's hard to imagine up an awkward specification which would fail the test", explains FFII standards analyst André Rebentisch.
I just read an article about the software business littered with “zealot” and “restrictive” in relation to licensing of FLOSS and how ASFL is the only way to do business with FLOSS etc. It’s pretty sickening to read these parasites of FLOSS denying the reality that the GPL works and works well. It allows startups to have a head start. It allows startups to innovate and not to have to compete against their own code used against them by competitors in closed source software.
Instead these “pro-business” parasites would have us believe that working for free for M$ and the like is just great for the world of IT. It would be laughable if they weren’t so seriously trying to undermine FLOSS at every turn. These traitors actually promote non-free software as some kind of virtue and perpetuate the myth that using the GPL “infects” software and harms business.
The researchers designed the structure of the nanorobots using open-source software, called Cadnano, developed by one of the authors — Shawn Douglas, a biophysicist at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. They then built the bots using DNA origami. The barrel-shaped devices, each about 35 nanometres in diameter, contain 12 sites on the inside for attaching payload molecules and two positions on the outside for attaching aptamers, short nucleotide strands with special sequences for recognizing molecules on the target cell. The aptamers act as clasps: once both have found their target, they spring open the device to release the payload.
Continuous integration is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance as continuous delivery (and its sidekick, DevOps) begin to find adoption in many enterprises. Simultaneously, the number of viable CI packages is shrinking quickly.
For those who don’t know, WebKit is today’s predominant layout engine, used by the major web browsers on almost all platforms. Examples are Safari on OS X, Windows and iOS, or Google Chrome on OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, to name only a few (1).
The reactivation of the litigation between IBM and SCO is largely a procedural matter aimed at resolving the pending claims and counterclaims that the companies have brought against each other. Due to the court's previous conclusion that Novell is the rightful owner of UNIX, the reactivated litigation between SCO and IBM isn't going to be an opportunity for SCO to turn the tide in its favor.
My enemies are the purveyors of non-free software who try to lock the world into doing things their way and paying for each iteration. M$ is chief among them but many of their “partners” are cut from the same cloth. Apple does charge less for software but it’s still lock-in one way or another. That lock-in and emphasis on keeping the cost of IT high is a terrible waste of resources especially when the enemy is restricting what I can do with hardware that I own.