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Fedora 9 Alpha Released

Feb6th
2008 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

The alpha release of Fedora’s next version, Fedora 9 was release today

The Alpha release provides the first opportunity for the wider community to become involved with the testing of Rawhide: representing a sanitised snapshot of Fedora’s development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release, it should boot on the majority of systems, providing both an opportunity to get a look at what new features will be included in the next release and also an opportunity to provide feedback and bug reports to help ensure that the next release is as good as possible.

Some highlights of Fedora 9 Alpha:

* GNOME 2.21 Development Release
* KDE 4.0
* Firefox 3 Beta 2
* Support for resizing ext2, ext3 and NTFS partitions during install
* Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems
* PackageKit
* Kernel 2.6.24

And numerous other improvements and enhancements.

Getting it:

The Alpha release is available both through mirroring system and via bittorrent.

For direct http access to a local mirror:

http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/test/9-Alpha/

For a list of mirrors carrying the content and the various protocols they support:

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/9-Alpha/

For bittorrent:

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

More Information:

For more information regarding the Alpha release, please visit the release notes page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/Alpha/ReleaseNotes

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NVIDIA Quietly Releases 171.05 Drivers

Feb2nd
2008 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

Last night NVIDIA quietly uploaded a new Linux display driver to their FTP server. This new driver is tagged 171.05, while the latest public driver has been 169.09. Having already three releases in the 169.xx series, this is a moderate update to 171.xx, but according to NVIDIA it’s not for everyone. There is no official change-log that NVIDIA has published for the 171.05 driver, and the change-log that ships with the driver hasn’t been updated (whether it be intentional or not). The only word that has come out of the NVIDIA camp on this new driver is from Christian Zander and he has said that this driver is only intended for use with the Tesla S870 GPU Computing Systems. The legacy NVIDIA Linux drivers have also been updated this week.
NVIDIA’s Tesla S870 GPU computing system is designed for high-performance computing (HPC) environments and has a total of 6GB of dedicated video memory, which is shared by the four 128 processing core GPUs that make up the S870, and is all housed inside a 1U rackmount chassis. NVIDIA’s Tesla was originally introduced in June of last year, but the 171.05 driver is the first Linux release to support the Tesla S870.
So far we noticed one change with the 171.05 driver and that is the introduction of a new NVIDIA utility, nvidia-smi. This utility is for the NVIDIA System Management Interface and provides system-state and diagnostic information. Nvidia-smi will dump this system information either as ASCII text or into an XML log. In addition to the output format, other arguments include -l for creating an infinite loop of nvidia-smi, -t for toggling the LED state, and -i for probing every specified number of seconds. According to the man page and the –help output, nvidia-smi is only designed for the NVIDIA Tesla S870. However, nvidia-smi had run with a GeForce 8 graphics card installed but with little information. Likewise, the 171.05 driver during our initial tests had worked just fine when using it in a non-Tesla environment.
You can try out this driver by heading on over to the NVIDIA FTP server.

Source: Phoronix

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ATI Radeon HD 3650 Reviewed

Feb2nd
2008 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

Last week AMD introduced the ATI Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series, which are the new low-end graphics processors compared to the Radeon HD 3800 series. These budget graphics cards are branded as the Radeon HD 3450, 3470, and 3650 and are all available for under $100 USD. While they may be cheap, they are the first graphics cards to introduce support for DisplayPort. DisplayPort is the newest digital display interface standard, backed by VESA, and is direct competition to HDMI. DisplayPort has yet to be fully supported by the available Linux display drivers, but the Catalyst Linux driver already supports these new ATI graphics cards and there will be open-source support through the RadeonHD driver in the coming days.

At hand today we have the Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB graphics card as Phoronix delivers
the first Linux benchmarks for this RV635 GPU.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 graphics card boasts 512MB of 128-bit GDDR3 video memory running at 1.6GHz, built on 55nm fabrication, 725MHz core clock, and contains 120 stream processors. The HD 3650 supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.0. Like the other graphics cards in the Radeon HD 3000 family, the RV635 is PCI Express 2.0 compliant and has other functionality common to the R600 series such as CrossFireX, ATI’s Unified Video Decoder, and HDMI support with 5.1 surround sound audio. An addition to the Radeon HD 3650 that cannot be found on the Radeon HD 2600 series, which the RV635 replaces, is support for PowerPlay. PowerPlay is supported by the binary Linux driver (and is expected in the future for xf86-video-radeonhd) for adjusting the core/memory frequencies and voltages in order to conserve power and reduce the heat-output when the graphics card doesn’t need to be fully utilized.

This budget graphics card from Sapphire had arrived in a small cardboard box that had contained a couple of accessories that were secluded from the PCI-E graphics card itself. These accessories had consisted of a component video output adapter, composite video adapter, one VGA to DVI dongle, DVI to HDMI audio/video adapter, Sapphire driver CD, Sapphire case badge, and a quick installation guide. For being a graphics card retailing for ~$100 USD or less, the packaging and included accessories were fine by our standards.

Continue reading the Review at Phoronix

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Ubuntu Live 2008: Take Ubuntu Further

Jan30th
2008 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

Ubuntu Live is a vibrant and important gathering of IT professionals, government and business leaders, educators, community leaders, enterprise and business users. The conference brings together the people who deploy and manage Ubuntu in organizations, companies offering services and solutions based on Ubuntu, customers of those services, users of Ubuntu, and the folks who build Ubuntu and other key open source software.

The two day event will allow participants to share their Ubuntu experiences, learn from each other, and catch up with the latest developments from Ubuntu, our partners, and the free software and open source ecosystem. Ubuntu Live is the meeting place for enterprise users and community developers to come together to exchange ideas and discuss projects face to face.

The Ubuntu Live program committee is now accepting proposals to lead sessions, panel discussions, and demos at the 2008 edition of Ubuntu Live. How are you taking Ubuntu further? Are you a guru using Ubuntu in unexpected ways? An entrepreneur launching a business with Ubuntu? An educator or researcher helping an underserved community thrive with Edubuntu? Are you a programmer, trainer, or system administrator with techniques or best practices to share? If so, submit a proposal to speak by February 4, 2008.

Co-presented by O’Reilly Media and Canonical, Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Live is conveniently co-located with the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) event, thus making Portland, Oregon the place to be during the week of July 21.

Wish there would be something similar here. It’s be great the Linux movement and for OSS in general. Event managers, are you listening?

For those planning to go for the Convention, here‘s more details

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Nokia To Acquire Trolltech

Jan28th
2008 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

Nokia, one of the leading cell-phone manufacturers will acquire Trolltech as announced by Nokia today. Trolltech which designed the Qt toolkit, on which KDE is based upon.

As per the Press release,

Espoo, Finland and Oslo, Norway – Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech (www.trolltech.com), a company headquartered in Oslo, Norway and publicly listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Trolltech is a recognized software provider with world-class software development platforms and frameworks. In addition to the key software assets, its talented team will play an important role in accelerating the implementation of Nokia’s software strategy.

 

Nokia will offer NOK 16 per share in cash. The board of directors of Trolltech has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept Nokia’s Offer. Holders of 35,024,830 shares, representing approximately 66,43 % of Trolltech’s issued shares and votes have as of January 27, 2008 irrevocably undertaken to accept the Offer. Haavard Nord, Vuonislahti Invest AS (controlled by Eirik Chambe-Eng), Teknoinvest and certain funds managed by Index Ventures are among the shareholders who have agreed to tender their shares to Nokia.

 

The acquisition of Trolltech will enable Nokia to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and develop its Internet services business. With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs. Nokia’s software strategy for devices is based on cross-platform development environments, layers of software that run across operating systems, enabling the development of applications across the Nokia device range. Examples of current cross-platform layers are Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C.

 Interesting news! Will KDE make it to Nokia’s cellphones? What will be the future of Trolltech I wonder

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openSUSE 11 Roadmap

Jan20th
2008 1 Comment Written by Sathya

openSUSE 11 Roadmap overview

  • Dec 6 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0
  • Jan 17 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1
  • Feb 07 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2
  • March 18 openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3
  • April 17 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1
  • May 2 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2
  • May 13 openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3
  • May 29 openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1
  • June 12 openSUSE 11.0 Goldmaster (internal)
  • June 19 openSUSE 11.0 Public release

Detailed roadmap to follow soon

I look forward to Beta 3 and RC1 release, as they’re a pretty good indicator as to what openSUSE 11.0 public release will be like.

At the moment, openSUSE developers still haven’t finalized whether KDE4.0 will be the default desktop environment, but the inclusion of PulseAudio is great news indeed!

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openSUSE 11 Alpha 1

Jan20th
2008 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.

openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1 Installer
The Beautiful New Look of the Installer

Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory,
we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth
a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not
suitable for production systems.

Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0

We have seen 1026 package check-ins since Alpha0 and countless bugs fixed. The main changes against Alpha0 are:

  • Sat Solver integration
    • Michael Schröder’s “sat solver” library is now the default package
      solver for libzypp, so make sure you doublecheck the selected packages
      - there might be suprises ahead. Please note that we need test cases
      for things that look funny to you (wiki link)
  • Heavy changes to the appearance of the Qt installation (ported to qt4)
    • Note that it’s still in draft state and your feedback is welcome
  • KDE 4.0.0
  • perl 5.10
  • glibc 2.7
  • NetworkManager 0.7
  • CUPS 1.3.5
  • Pulseaudio

Most Annoying Bugs

Due to the huge amount of changes, there are also several noticeable bugs:

  • The new solver does not yet have a “ignore this requirement”
    choice, i.e. it’s not possible to create a broken system. We’re still
    discussing if this is a bug or a feature :)
  • the CDs lack a huge amount of software. Many packages had to be
    taken out to make way for others. The CDs should still have a a
    completely working desktop, however.
  • the Qt port and its theme are early releases and create noticeably
    more flickering and drawing glitches, e.g. the progress bar is only
    visible on some installations
  • jpackage packages are broken and one package will complain during installation – just ignore
  • the installation crashes at the end when creating the x11 proposal:
    in this case, your desktop will still have a working X config, it just
    might not be the perfect one. You may need to call sax2 after it happens
  • PPC cannot be installed as the bootloader config can’t be written
    out. However, you can get a working PPC system when updating from alpha0

Media and Download

Please refer to software.openSUSE.org/developer for direct links to all the available media.

Have a lot of fun!

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Sun Buys MySQL

Jan16th
2008 1 Comment Written by Sathya

Here’s something which made me go :o

Kaj Arno:

After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.

Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for MySQL users?

Given Sun’s proven track record as the largest contributor to Open Source, I think MySQL users have plenty of reason to feel happy about the acquisition. There are many companies that attempt to ride the wave of positive attention towards Open Source, but in my judgement, Sun gets it right. Sun gets Open Source. Java has been released under the GPL. There’s the OpenSolaris operating system. There’s Open Office / Star Office. There’s the GlassFish application server. There’s the NetBeans IDE tool. And more.

Anxiety on the part of MySQL users may stem from Sun’s success with Java and Solaris. Will MySQL’s support for other programming languages and operating systems now be given less attention?

Absolutely not. MySQL is still being managed by the same people, and the charter is still the same. There is no need for reducing the set of platforms or languages. It only makes sense for us to continue to support defacto Web development standards like LAMP, as well as emerging ones like Ruby and Eclipse. This deal is about addition, not subtraction.

What does the acquisition of MySQL by Sun mean for the core MySQL community?

I’d like to think that the acquisition of MySQL by Sun will be seen as good news also by the core group of users who form the active MySQL community. This is because Sun is a safe haven for MySQL. Sun knows Open Source, and to the extent things change, I expect Sun to add value to our community. I don’t expect huge change, though. We continue to work with our quality contributors, we continue to provide our MySQL Forums, the Planet MySQL blog aggregator, we remain on the #mysql-dev and #mysql channels on Freenode, we provide MySQL University lessons, we meet at the MySQL Users Conference. We’ll put effort into connecting the many FOSS enthusiasts and experts at Sun — whom we will now learn to know better — with our active user community.

Read the entire post by Kaj Arno

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Lenovo Delivers SUSE Linux Based Laptops

Jan15th
2008 1 Comment Written by Sathya

PC vendor Lenovo has promised ThinkPads with pre-installed Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 for some time now. Lenovo will deliver the goods the week of Jan. 14. Lenovo will release pre-installed SLED 10 on its Intel Centrino processor-powered ThinkPad T61 and R61 14-inch-wide notebooks. In February, Lenovo’s pre-integrated Novell Linux offering will expand to include some Penryn-based ThinkPads. The ThinkPad T61 with SLED 10 Service Pack 1 will come with the Intel Core 2 Duo T7250. The T61 laptop is powered by a 2.0GHz processor with an 800MHz FSB (front-side bus) and a 2MB Level 2 internal cache. For memory it comes with 1GB of DDR2 SDRAM. For graphics, the T61 will use an Intel GMA X3100 GM965 on the motherboard. This, in turn, displays images on a 14.1-inch WXGA (Wide XGA) screen. This widescreen has a maximum resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. On the storage side, the T61 uses an 80GB hard drive that speeds along at 5400 rpm. The PC also includes a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. For network connectivity, the system will use a built-in ThinkPad 11a/b/g Wi-Fi wireless minicard.

The starting price for this system will be $949, $20 less than the same laptop with Vista Home Premium.

The R61 with pre-installed SLED has almost identical equipment. However, it’s been designed to be quieter and use less power than its T61 brother. Its price will also be about $950.

With both systems, Lenovo will provide direct support for the hardware and operating
system. Novell will provide maintenance updates for SLED directly to ThinkPad notebook customers.

Source: DesktopLinux

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KDE 4.0 Release

Jan13th
2008 1 Comment Written by Sathya

After countless days of waiting, KDE4.0, the first release of the KDE4 framework was released on Friday, January 11.

Here’s an official announcement from KDE’s site:

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.


The KDE 4.0 desktop

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better power management.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications — you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new file manager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0′s new technologies.

The Oxygen Artwork team provides a breath of fresh air on the desktop. Nearly all the user-visible parts of the KDE desktop and applications have been given a facelift. Beauty and consistency are two of the basic concepts behind Oxygen.

Desktop

  • Plasma is the new desktop shell. Plasma provides a panel, a menu and other intuitive means to interact with the desktop and applications.
  • KWin, KDE’s proven window manager, now supports advanced compositing features. Hardware accelerated painting takes care of a smoother and more intuitive interaction with windows.
  • Oxygen is the KDE 4.0 artwork. Oxygen provides a consistent, easy on the eye and beautiful artwork concept.

Learn more about KDE’s new desktop interface in the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide.

Applications

  • Konqueror is KDE’s established web browser. Konqueror is light-weight, well integrated, and supports the newest standards such as CSS 3.
  • Dolphin is KDE’s new file manager. Dolphin has been developed with usability in mind and is an easy-to-use, yet powerful tool.
  • With System Settings, a new control center interface has been introduced. The KSysGuard system monitor makes it easy to monitor and control system resources and activity.
  • Okular, the KDE 4 document viewer, supports many formats. Okular is one of the many KDE 4 applications that has been improved in collaboration with the OpenUsability Project.
  • Educational Applications are among the first applications that have been ported and developed using KDE 4 technology. Kalzium, a graphical periodic table of elements and the Marble Desktop Globe are only two of many gems among the educational applications. Read more about Educational Applications in the Visual Guide.
  • Lots of the KDE Games have been updated. KDE Games such as KMines, a minesweeper game and KPat, a patience game have had facelifts. Thanks to new vector artwork and graphical capabilities, the games have been made more resolution independent.

Some applications are introduced in more detail in the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide.


Filemanager, System Settings and Menu in action

Libraries

  • Phonon offers applications multimedia capabilities such as playing audio and video. Internally, Phonon makes use of various backends, switchable at runtime. The default backend for KDE 4.0 will be the Xine backend supplying outstanding support for various formats. Phonon also allows the user to choose output devices based on the type of multimedia.
  • The Solid hardware integration framework integrates fixed and removable devices into KDE applications. Solid also interfaces with the underlying system’s power management capabilities, handles network connectivity and integration of Bluetooth devices. Internally, Solid combines the powers of HAL, NetworkManager and the BlueZ bluetooth stack, but those components are replacable without breaking applications to provide maximum portability.
  • KHTML is the webpage rendering engine used by Konqueror, KDE’s web browser. KHTML is light-weight and supports modern standards such as CSS 3. KHTML was also the first engine to pass the famous Acid 2 test.
  • The ThreadWeaver library, which comes with kdelibs, provides a high-level interface to make better use of today’s multi-core systems, making KDE applications feel smoother and more efficiently using resources available on the system.
  • Being built on Trolltech’s Qt 4 library, KDE 4.0 can make use of the advanced visual capabilities and smaller memory footprint of this library. kdelibs provides an outstanding extension of the Qt library, adding large amounts of high-level functionality and convenience to the developer.

KDE’s TechBase knowledge library has more information about the KDE libraries.

Take a guided tour…

The KDE 4.0 Visual Guide provides a quick overview of various new and improved KDE 4.0 technologies. Illustrated with many screenshots, it walks you through the different parts of KDE 4.0 and shows some of the exciting new technologies and improvements for the user. New features of the desktop get you started, applications such as System Settings, Okular the document viewer and Dolphin the file manager are introduced. Educational applications are shown as well as Games.

Give it a spin…

For those interested in getting packages to test and contribute, several distributions have notified us that they will have KDE 4.0 packages available at or soon after the release. The complete and current list can be found on the KDE 4.0 Info Page, where you can also find links to the source code, information about compiling, security and other issues.

The following distributions have notified us of the availability of packages or Live CDs for KDE 4.0:

  • An alpha version of KDE4-based Arklinux 2008.1 is expected shortly after this release, with an expected final release within 3 or 4 weeks.
  • Debian KDE 4.0 packages are available in the experimental branch. The KDE Development Platform will even make it into Lenny. Watch for announcements by the Debian KDE Team. Rumours are that a Live CD is planned as well.
  • Fedora will feature KDE 4.0 in Fedora 9, to be released in April, with Alpha releases being available from 24th of January. KDE 4.0 packages are in the pre-alpha Rawhide repository.
  • Gentoo Linux provides KDE 4.0 builds on http://kde.gentoo.org.
  • Kubuntu packages are included in the upcoming “Hardy Heron” (8.04) and also made available as updates for the stable “Gutsy Gibbon” (7.10). A Live CD is available for trying out KDE 4.0. More details can be found in the announcement on Kubuntu.org.
  • Mandriva will provide packages for 2008.0 and aims at producing a Live CD with the latest snapshot of 2008.1.
  • openSUSE packages are available for openSUSE 10.3 (one-click install), openSUSE Factory (one-click install) and openSUSE 10.2. A KDE Four Live CD with these packages is also available. KDE 4.0 will be part of the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 release.

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