Items tagged with Open Source
Following what Linus Torvalds called a "very quiet" week, the Finnish American open-source software guru officially released the Linux 3.9 kernel. The latest kernel had been in development for 10 weeks and includes a device mapper target that allows a user to configure a solid state drive (SSD) as a cache for hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase...
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After getting delayed a couple of days, the Linux 3.8 kernel is all polished and ready to go, Linus Torvalds announced. The big new feature in the 3.8 kernel is F2FS (Flash-Friendly File system), a new file system designed specifically to take advantage of NAND flash memory-based storage devices, such as solid state...
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AMD isn't yet ready to welcome its upcoming Radeon HD 8000 Series graphics cards to the world, but the company is preparing for the impending launch, in part by publishing initial open source Linux drivers. Found in the Mesa graphics library, the open source drivers pertain to the Radeon HD 8870 and 8850 graphics cards. Barring any delays...
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After several setbacks and delays, the folks at Fedora have just released their newest Linux distro, Fedora 18, otherwise known by its code-name "Spherical Cow." One of the big new features in Fedora 18 is that it now supports UEFI Secure Boot by using bootloaders that have been signed with Microsoft certificates. In short, you should have...
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The lukewarm response to Windows 8 might be just what Linux needs to gain a wider mainstream audience. Either way, Linux is more popular than ever these days, and that's good news for Red Hat, the open source company that makes a living serving Linux to the enterprise market. Red Hat's revenue for its third fiscal quarter came out to $343.6...
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The next version of Linux will not support Intel 386 processors. That's bad news if you haven't upgraded your machine in, oh, 20 years or so, but other than for the sake of nostalgia (and to give those old machines some real-world purpose), the discontinuation of support for old CPUs isn't likely to send shock waves through the Linux community....
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It took a little longer than Linus Torvalds would have liked, but after a last minute delay and an extra Release Candidate (RC) release, Linux 3.7 is all polished up and out in final form. Torvalds initially hoped to roll out Linux 3.7 last week, but said he was "uncomfortable" with the release candidate due to some last-minute issues, most...
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Just over two months ago, Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.6 kernel in final form, opting to push it out to the public rather than building what would have been an eighth Release Candidate. At the time, he said he couldn't think of a major reason to do yet another RC. Since then, work has shifted to Linux 3.7, and...
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While we spent Sunday watching the Patriots beat up on the Bills, Linus Torvalds was busy putting the final touches on the Linux 3.6 kernel, which he released in final form to the public yesterday afternoon. He had previously contemplated building one more Release Candidate, which would have been the eighth, but after a week since announcing...
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We thought it might be nice to have a quick rundown of some of the best apps that are free, open source, and cross-platform. Experienced users may find fault with us for leaving out their favorite app, but hopefully they will agree that the ones we’ve picked here are deserving of recognition. We especially hope this is useful to those...
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As the resident open source zealot, I thought it might be nice to have a quick rundown of some of the best apps that are free, open source, and cross-platform available to our readers. Experienced users may find fault with me for leaving out their favorite app, but hopefully they will agree that the ones I’ve picked here are deserving...
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Mozilla on Monday is expected to announce that it's no longer going to develop its popular Thunderbird email client, leaving such chores to the open source community at large. News of Mozilla's decision came to light when a confidential letter sent out to "Mozillians" was leaked to the Web for all to see. "We’ve been focusing efforts...
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These are strange, strange days that we're living in. HP buys Palm, then basically kills it when they murdered webOS. But then, due to consumer outcries (or just guilt?), webOS is brought back into the fold, but not in a shipping product. No, HP is actually going to invest time and resources to open source webOS. Yes, really. The company this...
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Leave it to the creative cooks working in the kitchen at XDA Developers' forums to come up with a way to serve Android 4.0 'Ice Cream Sandwich' (ICS) on Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet device. A locked bootloader made things more challenging than they had to be, but as with similar recipes, installing ICS on the Nook...
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CTL probably isn't on your short list of laptop makers if you're in the market for a new notebook, but if you're specifically looking for an Ubuntu-powered machine, perhaps the Oregon-based outfit should be. The 14.1-inch MB40U is CTL's first Ubuntu compatible notebook, and the company's pretty excited about it. So much, in fact, that it's...
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The non-profit group Geeks Without Frontiers today released open source software based on an upcoming WiFi standard. It lets Linux machines be their own WiFi network, no hardware required. The software is based on the not-yet-ratified IEEE 802.11s, an extension to the 802.11 WiFi standard. 11s creates wireless "mesh"...
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In a recent interview, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin declared Linux the victor in its decades-long war with Microsoft. Asked about the importance of MS as a continuing rival, Zemlin stated, "I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival...
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Red Hat, the company responsible for delivering Linux and a myriad other open source solutions, has today announced an expanded partnership with Fujitsu that extends the technology leaders' collaboration to the cloud. We're starting to hear more and more about the cloud these days, and it's not a surprise. As Internet connections become easier...
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If you are one of the people that happens to be running a bleeding-edge 'alpha 1' version of Ubuntu Linux on your main desktop machine (and who isn't?), you may have noticed a particular change in recent days: OpenOffice has been replaced by LibreOffice for the upcoming (next April) Ubuntu 11.04 release. What is OpenOffice, what is LibreOffice,...
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Google has decided to renege on its promise to support both H.264 and open source codecs in its Chrome browser, dropping support for the former and vowing to completely back the latter. This change will take place in the next couple of months, the search giant said in Chromium blog post. "We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media...
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When you think about portable gaming handhelds, you probably think first of Nintendo and Sony. Which is perfectly logical given just how important the Game Boy line was in the history of gaming and just how popular the PSP line is today. But the handheld gaming world is much, much bigger than just two giant companies. All sorts of smaller...
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Just over five months after the browser first entered public testing with an alpha release, Mozilla released Firefox 3.6. Although we had previously heard about delays for the latest version of this popular browser, the actual delay was much shorter than some had expected. So what will you get with Firefox 3.6? Well, for starters, Mozilla...
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