In May 2008, just less than a year ago, Intel and Wind River Systems co-announced their interest in producing open source linux automotive applications. Wind River Systems produces linux-based softwares and operating systems for embedded platforms. Intel’s interest in the mobile platform was strengthened by its low cost Atom processor and was actively supporting the Moblin project, an opensource linux operating system.
Archive for July, 2009
Noob Introduction to Kernel Mode Settings and Rootless X-Server
Friday, July 24th, 2009In the past 2 months, there has been much hype over Kernel Mode Settings (KMS) and Rootless X-Server. The inclusion of KMS into kernel version 2.6.29 is one of the major move towards KMS for enabling Rootless X-Server with various graphics hardware.
So what is KMS and Rootless X-Server and why the average linux user should be concerned?
KMS addresses the handling of video hardware which in turn displays the nice graphical user interface to the user. As its name suggests, means the kernel will set up the display’s resolution and depth mode (eg 800×600x32bits).
Microsoft succumbing and recognizing Linux as mainstream!
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009Bill’s company in Redmond, Washington stunned the opensource community when they shared driver source code to the linux kernel on 20th July 2009.
Microsoft submitted source code for 4 drivers which allows linux to run Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Up to 22,000 lines of code has been submitted and will likely be included in the next linux kernel version 2.6.30.1.
A tsunamic surprise, for the opensource community, to see Microsoft, whom have fought so many civil public cases to protect its own interests, is bending and contributing source code out of its own free will. This act validates the rise of open source linux operating systems and shows that linux is recognized as an worthy adversary to commercial software giants such as Microsoft.
It was also added that “Microsoft’s goal is to become a platform linux users could turn to“
It is irony when 10 years ago, the exact opposite can be said about linux vs Microsoft.
Source : Network World
Open source linux alternative for every app
Monday, July 20th, 2009For every popular commercial application, there should be a known opensource application existing somewhere.
SGLNX recommends The Linux Alternative Project to all readers! Linuxalt.com contributes to the opensource community by constantly searching for linux equivalent software that can perform as well as the paid and popular commercial applications. The Linux Alternative Project is a constant growing database of equivalent linux softwares.
CheckInstall for linux newbies
Thursday, July 16th, 2009For new linux users, installation of new packages/applications can be quite a breeze. Each distribution has its own graphical front-end package installers. eg Synaptic Package Manager for Ubuntu, PackageKit for Fedora, YaST for openSUSE.
The popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE have their own software repositories where users can use the grahical front end package manager to install their desired application softwares (packages). However, there are always new open source applications being developed and not all make it to be included in these repositories.
Can we use Firefox please? It is safer!
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009Some interesting news for leisure.
Last week in Washington DC, a staff from the State Department requests permission from Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to use Mozilla Firefox instead in the office..
He says it is safer. And free! [ That did raise some laughter ].
A snippet of Hillary Clinton’s reply
“….. help us save money on stuff that we shouldn’t be wasting money on, and give us the chance to manage our resources to do more things like Firefox, okay?”
If the US of A is encouraging towards open source, why not us too?
Respect to Jim Finkle whom raised this suggestion in the DC Town Hall Meeting!
News source : Boing Boing
Actual Release : USA State Government QDDR Hillary Clinton’s remarks dated 10th July 2009
Boot up speed craze
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009Fast booting aka “Instant On” is one of the most desirable feature for all PC users.
Apple using EFI is able to boot up in about 10 seconds in the Intel Macs.
More recently, the first batch Asus EEE 7″ netbooks running on a customized Xandros distribution is able to boot up in about 20 seconds.
Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS reaches end of life.
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) is considered the first linux distribution that offered support committed by its makers at Canonical for up to 3 years!
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Desktop
However, as the LTS is only for up to 3 years for its desktop version, the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS will reach its end of life today, 14th July 2009.
Make Ubuntu complete with these additional installations!
Saturday, July 11th, 2009Since Canonical created Ubuntu for the masses, it has encouraged many users to try linux and eventually switch over to linux completely.
The ease of trying out with its Live CD and GUI installation with support of most common hardware makes it more popular for linux beginners.
According to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is still the top of the preferred list of linux distribution. The Ubuntu packs in all the necessary tools and drivers for a fresh installation on any PC so that it can boot up into a working desktop/laptop without the user having to have any terminal or sudo knowledge at all. This is one of the main key advantage of Ubuntu when compared to other linux distributions. So successful such that some recent linux distributions try to emulate them and even use Ubuntu’s software repositories to update their own distributions. eg Linux Mint, GoS, etc.
