Seems after getting the middle finger from Linus Torvalds for its hardware support and lack of open-source drivers, Nvidia has started to care more about the Linux users. Most recently, the GPU manufacturer has open-sourced its 3D Tegra driver code.
Friday, March 29 2013 @ 10:05 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
After I install a new version of Linux, I usually take a good look at the screen. Does it have a task bar? Can you find your window after it was minimized? Lately, some developers have been struck by some sort of amnesia brought on by the stress created by the mobile sector offerings.
Fortunately, in Linux we do have plenty of other choices. I will describe some of them in this article, and I’ll attempt to measure the RAM memory requirements. I use free command in an xterm before and after the graphic environment is started on a separate X server (Xephyr). The computer is an older 64-bit machine, running Ubuntu 12.04 with LXDE as desktop environment.
There are thousands of charities. Aids Research, Cancer Research, the British Heart Foundation. This fragmentation is killing our chances of actually curing Cancer. If you funnel all the money from Aids prevention, Comic Relief, Leukaemia and so forth there is no doubt in my mind we’d have cured Cancer by now. If we coerce the scientists working on making Shampoo into curing Cancer we’d have an even better shot. We might even save more lives in the long run. Don’t question how useful Shampoo scientists are to curing Cancer, just accept they are scientists and trust me.
Friday, March 22 2013 @ 08:01 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
KMix is KDE’s forgotten redheaded stepchild.
It is old, has been maintained my Christian Esken since early 2001, and has grown organically. Through no fault of Christian’s or anyone else’s, it is buggy, messy, and nobody else wants to help fix it, or at least has the constitution to do so.
Back when our team was dealing with operations, optimization and scalability at our previous company, we had our fair share of troubleshooting poorly performing applications and infrastructures of various sizes, often large (think CNN or the World Bank). Tight deadlines, “exotic” technical stacks and lack of information usually made for memorable experiences.
The cause of the issues was rarely obvious: here are a few things we usually got started with.
Tuesday, March 05 2013 @ 05:45 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
GlusterFS is a distributed file system which is supposed to scale to large storage sizes. Besides file distribution it also offers “RAID” like features: if you have two GlusterFS servers you can either stripe the data on both of them, or mirror them. Or, if you got more servers, you can even create more complex setups with a mixture of striping and mirroring. The client protocol is very similar to NFS, and thus clients can GlusterFS servers via GlusterFS-Fuse or directly via NFS.
Thursday, February 28 2013 @ 04:51 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
I ordered the new Project Sputnik laptop from Dell to replace my six-year-old MacBook. It’s basically the most-tricked-out version of the XPS 13, running Ubuntu 12.04 instead of Windows 8. I won’t get into why I dislike Apple’s OS, but I run Linux on my desktop and on any server machine I login to, and I enjoy a consistent experience. The most appealing part about Project Sputnik, as opposed to installing Linux on any ol’ Windows laptop (or a MacBook, for that matter), is that it includes a Dell-managed PPA for the hardware. In theory, this means that Dell is committed to making sure that the laptop’s hardware “just works”.
At some point over a decade ago I received my first real Unix account on Northeastern CCS’s computing infrastructure. I realized that my primary method of development — editing files in BBEdit and uploading them via FTP — wouldn’t scale for college-level projects, so I decided to learn how to efficiently edit files on a remote host. I used Pico for a while but became annoyed at its lack of syntax highlighting, so I used the only other editor I remembered bumping into: Vim.
What you can learn from the monster LibreOffice project
Saturday, February 16 2013 @ 08:04 AM CST Contributed by: Linegod
A large legacy code base is a challenge for any team to embrace and improve. So how well does a distributed team of volunteers address the problem?
A talk at FOSDEM shed light on how the large and diverse team assembled by The Document Foundation (TDF) is approaching the huge LibreOffice code base left in the wake of Oracle's withdrawal from OpenOffice.org. The result is not only an impressive sequence of on-time releases, but also a range of development innovation. In particular, the "bi-bisect" technique they've developed could be a great approach for others faced with large, complex code bases.
We are reaching the final run for Mageia 3 release: beta 2 isos are available for tests. This was a real release full of server failures and bugs . Still, the QA team did a fantastic work as usual.
