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Freedreno Gallium3D Now Banging The Adreno A3XX

One month after Rob Clark began developing his Freedreno Gallium3D stack for Qualcomm's Adreno A3xx hardware, he's beginning to achieve visual success. While the code hasn't yet been merged into mainline Mesa, on an A320 as found on the Google Nexus 4 he has es2gears (the OpenGL ES version of glxgears) successfully running on this open-source code...

Read more at Phoronix

Dell Project Ophelia Android USB Set to Launch in July

Dell's thumb-sized Android USB device, revealed at CES, is set to ship in July this year. Good news for security-conscious IT staff?

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

The Windows Kernel's 'Achilles' Heel'

Life is like a roller coaster, as the popular saying goes, filled with both ups and downs. Here in the Linux blogosphere we've certainly experienced our share of downs in recent months -- thanks in large part to a frustrating spate of FUD -- but lately the clouds have parted and the sun is shining on Linux with full force once again. To wit: Last week we saw our favorite operating system named the "benchmark of quality." Now, the cheerfest continues with no less than a confession from a Windows kernel developer.

Read more at LinuxInsider

Samsung Beats Chromebook Pixel and Retina MacBook With New High-Res Laptop Display

Samsung is to unveil a new super-high resolution panel which could set the standard for notebook displays. This week, the company will launch a 13.3-inch QHD 3200 x 1800 panel with 276 pixels-per-inch (PPI), and offers greater pixel densities than Apple's Retina MacBook Pro 13 (239 PPI) and Google's Chromebook Pixel (227 PPI). Samsung has yet to confirm if its LCD panel will come to new ultrabooks, but if it does, Toshiba's 13.3-inch Kirabook — with its impressive 2560 x 1440 display — could have some high-resolution competition in the near future.

Jolla Prices First Sailfish OS Smartphone at €399 for a 2013 Launch

Jolla has just unveiled its first smartphone, which will go on sale this year for €399 (roughly $510). Running the company's MeeGo-derived Sailfish OS, It features a 4.5-inch display, a dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel camera, removable back covers, 16GB of onboard storage, and a microSD slot. According to Jolla, the handset will be "compliant" with Android apps, although it's not sure how many apps will be supported, nor is it clear where users will download the apps from.

Intel Releases 'Beacon Mountain' Android-on-Atom Dev Tool

Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery.…...

Indroid Inside

Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery.…

Stable Kernels 3.9.3, 3.4.46, and 3.0.79

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 3.9.3, 3.4.46, and 3.0.79 stable kernels. As always, they contain important fixes throughout the tree, so users should upgrade.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 3.9.3, 3.4.46, and 3.0.79stable kernels. As always, they contain important fixes throughout the tree, so users should upgrade.

Android-on-Intel Accelerates as Clover Trail+ Devices Debut

Lenovo’s Android-based K900, the first phone to use Intel’s dual-core 2GHz “Clover Trail+” Atom Z2580 system-on-chip, began shipping in China, and ZTE announced a Z2580-based, 4.5-inch “Grand X2 In” aimed at Europe. Yet, Atom-based Android phones won’t truly shine until Intel’s “Merrifield” SOC arrives in early 2014 using Intel’s 28nm, Tri-Gate “Silvermont” architecture. The first [...]

Read more at LinuxGizmos

I/O 2013: Google Glass Designers Predict Possibilities for Wearable Tech Market

There were approximately 6,000 attendees at this year's developer conference, and you can't walk a few steps without bumping into someone sporting the Android-powered specs.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Red Hat CEO Whitehurst on Innovation, OpenStack, Hadoop

As computing systems become commoditized, the "profit pools are going to evaporate" for enterprise software vendors, said Whitehurst.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Is Patenting Open Source Software The New Normal?

In an interesting new Outercurve Foundation blog post from Penn State professor Clark Asay, he discusses "the tactic of patenting open source software to guard against patent trolls and the weaponization of corporate patent portfolios...gaining momentum in the FOSS community." Depending on who you talk to, the practice of patenting open source creations is either poison or an obvious requirement in a competitive world.

Google And SAP: Two Very Different Cloud Strategies

While both Google and SAP shared a 1980's music sensibility at their respective conferences this week - Billy Idol performed at Google I/O and U2's Bono walked the floor at SAPPHIRE - the two companies see the future of computing very differently. Even when the two companies agree on the importance of cloud computing, their strategies couldn't be more different.

For one thing, SAP's new cloud isn't even a cloud. But then, SAP's Bono wasn't really Bono, either, but merely an impersonator.

Switching From Windows to Nix or a Newbie to Linux – 20 Useful Commands for Linux Newbies

So you are planning to switch from Windows to Linux, or have just switched to Linux? Oops!!! what I am asking! For what else reason would you have been here. From my past experience when I was new to Nux, commands and terminal really scared me, I was worried about the commands, as to what [...]

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Samsung: Galaxy S4 Sales to Hit 10 Million Next Week

That's a faster sales rate than the Galaxy S3, the company's co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun said recently in an interview. [Read more]<

Read more at CNET News

How Four Open Source Usage Models Impact Compliance

Before I jump into my topic, here is some background for those new to open source licenses. Open source licenses, like any license, grant the licensee certain rights that are usually reserved by and for the copyright holder (the author of the open source software (OSS) code), and spell out conditions that must be met by the licensee. You may use the OSS according to the grants given, so long as you comply with the requirements of the license.

Before I jump into my topic, here is some background for those new to open source licenses.

Open source licenses, like any license, grant the licensee certain rights that are usually reserved by and for the copyright holder (the author of the open source software (OSS) code), and spell out conditions that must be met by the licensee. You may use the OSS according to the grants given, so long as you comply with the requirements of the license.

The first question to ask regarding potential copyright infringement: Is there an act involved that is restricted by copyright law? If there is, you need permission from the copyright holder to proceed with that act. If the copyright holder has granted a license, you must comply with the conditions of that license. In the case of open source licenses, the operative question ends up being: Is there a distribution? Distribution is the key act that triggers the license requirements of most open source licenses. If there is a distribution, there must be compliance by the person or entity making the distribution.¹

ownCloud Fixes Critical Security Vulnerabilities

The ownCloud developers have released versions 5.0.6, 4.0.15, and 4.5.11 to fix a number of serious vulnerabilities in their software including SQL injection, code execution and privilege escalation problems...

Read more at The H

DRM Graphics Driver Comes For Dove/Cubox

The SolidRun CuBox is advertised as the "world's smallest desktop computer" with a size of just two-inches cubed (5cm). The CuBox is powered by an ARM PJ4 800MHz SoC and now it has available an open-source DRM Linux graphics driver...

Read more at Phoronix

VMware's vCloudDirector Has Me Confused

After working with VMware's vCloudDirector for a while, I'm still confused.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Google Engineers: We're Trying to Fix Android Fragmentation

During a Google I/O fireside chat, a team of Google Android engineers acknowledged continuing fragmentation issues with Android's software. Also: might Android get dramatically different camera abilities? [Read more]

Read more at CNET News

Hackable SODIMM-style ARM9 COM has Onboard Display

Crystalfontz America has announced availability of an SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) with an optional onboard 128 x 32-pixel OLED display. The tiny CFA10036x module is built around Freescale’s 454MHz ARM9-based i.MX28x SOC (system-on-chip), includes 128MB or 256MB of RAM, and houses its open-source embedded Linux OS in a microSD slot. We’re used to hearing about Kickstarter [...]

Read more at LinuxGizmos

The Fedora Project ARMs Up

Red hat backs the development of Fedora on ARM-based datacenter servers.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Google Sets Up to Challenge Amazon Web Services

Google's cloud platform garnered a ton of interest at Google IO and comparisons to Amazon Web Services. However, the burden of enterprise proof lies with the search giant for now.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Blender Dives Into 3D Printing Industry (Libre Graphics World)

Libre Graphics World looks at the use of Blender in 3D printing; the recent 2.67 release includes a "3D printing toolbox." "While Blender cannot help with making actual devices easier to use, it definitely could improve designing printable objects. And that's exactly what happened last week, when Blender 2.67 was...

50 million Apache OpenOffice Downloads in a Year

The Apache Software Foundation has announced that, just a little more than a year after their first release of OpenOffice, the open source productivity suite has been downloaded 50 million times...

The Apache Software Foundation has announced that, just a little more than a year after their first release of OpenOffice, the open source productivity suite has been downloaded 50 million times.

Read more at The H

Your Cloud Provider Is Toast. Now What?

Your cloud provider is great. Your cloud provider is cheap. Your cloud provider is out of business. Now what do you do? If your favorite consumer cloud service goes out of business or simply feels it's time to end-of-life a particular application, it's frustrating but life goes on. More often than not, you weren't paying for the service, anyway. But for an enterprise, losing access to a preferred SaaS application can be devastating. Just ask Xeround's customers.

Your cloud provider is great. Your cloud provider is cheap. Your cloud provider is out of business.

Now what do you do?

If your favorite consumer cloud service goes out of business or simply feels it's time to end-of-life a particular application, it's frustrating but life goes on. More often than not, you weren't paying for the service, anyway. But for an enterprise, losing access to a preferred SaaS application can be devastating.

Just ask Xeround's customers.Recently the Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) provider terminated its cloud database service, giving free users a week to pack up and move on, and paid customers just two weeks:

Read more at ReadWriteCloud

The Last GNOME 3.8 Point Release Has Been Made

GNOME 3.8.2 was released this morning and it serves as the last bug-fix release in the GNOME 3.8 series. All work now is being focused on GNOME 3.10...

Read more at Phoronix

Linux: The Gold Standard of Code

There are few things more gratifying to those of us here in the Linux blogosphere than seeing the many and varied virtues of our favorite operating system get officially recognized. It happens with increasing regularity these days, of course -- after all, there are so very many virtues to consider -- but recently an example emerged that has been warming FOSS fans' hearts ever since. "Linux code is the 'benchmark of quality,' study concludes" is the headline that started the ball rolling.

Read more at LinuxInsider

A More Colorful LibreOffice Unveiled

In the first article in this series I pointed out some problems I and other LibreOffice users have with the standard LibreOffice color palette, and I talked about how colors are specified, both on computers in general and within LibreOffice .soc files. Let's now see how to generate a new set of colors. The process requires finding some base colors to start with and scripting some code to build darker and lighter variations of them.

The process requires finding some base colors to start with and scripting some code to build darker and lighter variations of them. Since I'm not particularly gifted (rather the contrary!) in artistic color-related work, I needed to get my colors from someplace. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a list of color names as used in CSS (cascading style sheets). However, that list is in alphabetic order, and I'd rather group colors in families (reds, greens, blues, browns, and so on). A Wikipedia article provides a suitable table. With some cutting, pasting, and minor editing, I ended with the following text file:

Open Source Hardware Trademark Application Rejected

On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was "merely descriptive." Trademarks are intended to identify a specific source of goods or services, protecting that source from confusion in the...

On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was "merely descriptive."

Trademarks are intended to identify a specific source of goods or services, protecting that source from confusion in the minds of consumers with other sources. Naturally then, if you try to obtain a trademark which is just a description of a type of product or service, it is proper that you should be refused; it would not be distinctive and it would distort the market by allowing one source to control the generic term. If I market a car for a hamster, I should not be able to get a trademark for the name hamster car, as that would improperly restrain competitors from bringing their own hamster cars to market. So, should we be pleased that the application was rejected?

KVM Virtualization Still Being Ported To 64-bit ARM

After KVM virtualization was brought to ARM last year with the ARM Cortex-A15 SoCs supporting hardware virtualization, support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) SoCs is being prepared...

Read more at Phoronix

SlateKit Shell: A New Qt5/QML Web-Browser

SlateKit Shell is a new QML-based web-browser sporting a "sliding drawer" user-interface. The WebKit-powered browser is written entirely in QML and JavaScript...

Read more at Phoronix

Now, a Master's-Level Computer Science Degree, Delivered via MOOCs

Massive open online courses will soon deliver an advanced comp-sci degree at a very, very low price, courtesy of Georgia Tech, Udacity and AT&T.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

New IntelliJ-Based Android Studio IDE Now Available

At Google I/O today, Google released an early access preview version of an Android integrated development environment (IDE) based on IntelliJ IDEA. To its IntelliJ foundation, Android Studio adds an enhanced drag-and-drop GUI layout editor, Gradle-based build system, Lint tools, Android-focused wizards, and the ability to preview how apps look on different screen sizes. Like [...]

Read more at LinuxGizmos

Quad-Core Android Phone Keeps Cool With Water Pipe

NEC has announced an Android smartphone that uses a water-cooling system to keep its quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro system-on-chip (SOC) from overheating. The NEC Medias X 06E integrates a liquid cooling pipe near the SOC to cool off the 4.7-inch phone, which is being marketed at Japanese women. Liquid cooling has been used in [...]

Read more at LinuxGizmos

Chromebook Pixel: Google I/O Could Reveal Its Secret Mission

The amazing hardware in the Chromebook Pixel tips Google’s hand on a greater trajectory for ChromeOS. Whether Google I/O begins to reveal the details is one of this week’s big questions.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Security Appliance Taps 12-Core QorIQ PowerPC SOC

Nexcom announced a network security appliance with Unified Threat Management (UTM) services based on Freescale’s new 12-core, 1.8GHz QorIQ T4240 system-on-chip (SOC). The NSA 5640 is equipped with up to 6GB of DDR3 RAM, 2GB NAND flash, mini-PCI Express expansion, eight gigabit Ethernet ports, optional 4-port 10GbE connectivity, and PowerPC Linux support. The NSA 5640 [...]

Read more at LinuxGizmos

Gluster Workshop at LinuxCon Japan 2013

Heading to LinuxCon Japan 2013? If you’ll be attending the conference or will be in Tokyo on May 31st, we’d like to welcome you at the Gluster Community Workshop.

We’ll have a full day of talks on all things Gluster, including:

Read more at the Gluster Community blog.

Best Linux Tools for Enterprise Developers and Systems Administrators

The best Linux applications and tools for enterprise systems admininstrators and developers can be found in three major areas: continuous build, configuration management/ provisioning and version control.

It's a testament to Linux's ubiquity and versatility today that so many “best of” lists are published focusing on the free and open source operating system.

Just in the past few months here on Linux.com, for example, we've looked at the “best servers for Linux in 2013” and the “2013 top 7 best Linux distributions for you.”

It should come as no great surprise, then, that enterprise IT folk should have their turn in the spotlight. Specifically, it's time to zero in on the best Linux applications and tools for enterprise sysadmins and developers.

Three Logical Areas

We began by posting a short, informal poll on Google+: What are the best Linux apps and tools in this class? We were greeted with a multitude of nominations. Among those named by commentators were the following:

Qt Creator
KVM
Puppet
Red Hat Satellite
Nagios
Archipel
Terminator
Samba
Cobbler
Git/Subversion
Perl
mrepo
Python
SaltStack
Wireshark
Clonezilla

“The items on there make sense,” Stephen O'Grady, co-founder and principal analyst at RedMonk, told Linux.com. “The logical areas are continuous build (Hudson/Jenkins), configuration management/provisioning (Chef/Puppet) and version control (Git, primarily).”

'Always Growing and Changing'

Indeed, “the primary software technologies and communities I think of when it comes to tools for Linux sysadmins and developers, which are DevOps tools, are: Chef, Puppet, CFEngine, Juju and Salt, all backed commercially by Opscode, Puppet Labs, CFEngine and SaltStack, respectively,” agreed Jay Lyman, senior analyst for enterprise software at 451 Research.

“There are also some other tools and frameworks, such as Apache Web and application servers, Git, Jenkins, node.js, PHP, Python, RabbitMQ, Ruby and others that we see used frequently with Linux in the enterprise,” Lyman told Linux.com. “Additionally, there are a host of data and 'big data' tools that are commonly used with Linux, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Riak, and data management technologies such as Cassandra and Hadoop.”

Of course, “as part of the polyglot programming trend, the list of popular and useful tools is always growing and changing, so this list is by no means exhaustive,” he added.

It does, however, highlight how today's enterprise developers and systems administrators “tend to leverage a variety of resources and are more adept and empowered to use the best tools for the appropriate jobs, which is a main driver of polyglot programming,” Lyman concluded.

Samsung Grabs 95 Percent of Android Smartphone Profits

The Korean handset maker earned $5.1 billion of the $5.3 billion in global profits seen by Android smartphone vendors last quarter, says research firm Strategy Analytics. [Read more] ...

The Korean handset maker earned $5.1 billion of the $5.3 billion in global profits seen by Android smartphone vendors last quarter, says research firm Strategy Analytics. [Read more]

Read more at CNET News

Android 4.3 Pops Up Ahead of Google I/O

A leak tips off security enhancements in the Android update expected to be unveiled at Google I/O. [Read more]

Read more at CNET News

Kubuntu, KDE Has Little Hope For Ubuntu's Mir

Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE's KWin window manager, has been vocal against Canonical's Mir Display Server from the beginning. He's now written another blog post on the matter in which he makes it rather clear there is little hope of seeing KDE running on the Ubuntu Wayland-competitor...

Read more at Phoronix

Raspberry Pi Camera Module Now Available

After being in development since late last year, the Raspberry Pi camera module is available to purchase and the software to support it is now built into Raspbian.

Read more at The H

Nokia 'Very Interested' in Tablets, but Don't Hold Your Breath

A Nokia executive hinted the phone maker is 'looking at' tablets. But there are at least three major hurdles for Nokia to consider, including its depleting financial position and an already aggressive mobile market space.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Local Root Vulnerability in the Kernel

Commit b0a873ebb, merged for the 2.6.37 kernel, included an out of bounds reference bug that went undetected until Tommi Rantala discovered it with the Trinity fuzzing tool this April. It wasn't seen as a security bug by the kernel developers until an exploitwas posted; the problem is now known as CVE-2013-2094. Mainline kernels 2.6.37-3.9 are vulnerable, but Red Hat also backported the bug into the 2.6.32-based kernel found in RHEL6. Expect distributor updates shortly.

Canonical to Maintain Linux 3.8 Until August 2014

Canonical employees have announced that they plan to provide security fixes and minor improvements for Linux kernel version 3.8 until August 2014. However, the code will be maintained separately from the official stable and long-term kernels...

Read more at The H

What's Behind the Hybrid Cloud Hype?

Hybrid cloud technology is garnering much attention of late -- whether for cutting-edge development and the continuous integration and release processes achieved through devops, or for traditional enterprise-proven approaches to infrastructure and applications. There's more to hybrid clouds than hype. The ability to manage different infrastructures and applications across a range of cloud computing environments allows organizations to align their many applications, initiatives and units with whichever cloud environments make the most sense.

Read more at LinuxInsider

Cut Yourself a Tasty Slice of Gnome-Pie App Launcher

Gnome-Pie could be one of the best user interfaces for accessing menus on any Linux desktop. It is a radial visual application that keeps your hands on the keyboard or the mouse to quickly launch any application. Launching frequently used programs could not be easier or more fun. Gnome-Pie brings functional eye candy to the menu interface of any Linux desktop environment. Much like the launcher add-on Synapse I reviewed recently, you can use it to either supplement or ignore the built-in Linux menu system.

Read more at LinuxInsider

FOSS Knowledge, Part 3: Reaching the Goal

In my last two posts, I discussed the evolution of open source knowledge: where we came from, where are we now, and how did we get here. I provided some examples of common misunderstandings and knowledge gaps and suggested that such gaps may be due to the need to take action without taking as much time to prepare and plan as is optimal. The sum total is that misconceptions and misunderstandings about open source persist both within and outside the software industry.

In my last two posts, I discussed the evolution of open source knowledge: where we came from, where are we now, and how did we get here. I provided some examples of common misunderstandings and knowledge gaps and suggested that such gaps may be due to the need to take action without taking as much time to prepare and plan as is optimal. The sum total is that misconceptions and misunderstandings about open source persist both within and outside the software industry.

On a practical level, companies that have not been tracking use of open source software--whether via internal development, out-sourcing, or software acquired from vendors--may suddenly find themselves being held accountable, for example, by being asked for a software bill of materials listing all open source software and applicable licenses. Such a situation then sets in motion some amount of scrambling to answer the request, which may not allow time to think through a thorough and pro-active solution for the future.

Open Source Code and Business Models: More Than Just a License

As an organization or even individual there always seem to be questions when considering whether or not to make your project or code snippet open source. Many times, it starts with trying to figure out which license to use. But there are many other things to consider. We derived a...

Open Recall: Scratch 2.0, Plans for Vim 7.4, GlusterFS 3.4 Beta

In this edition: a beta for GlusterFS 3.4, version 2.0 of the Scratch interactive programming tool and language, GNU Awk 4.1.0, plans for the upcoming Vim 7.4, and version 2.0 of the open source data management platform CKAN...

Read more at The H