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‘Ubuntu Brings Advanced Screen Features to the Masses’

"GNU Screen is a powerful terminal multiplexer that makes it easy for users to manage multiple sessions at the command line. It provides rudimentary window management capabilities in text-based environments and enables users to detach a session and resume it later. The tool has long held a position of distinction among the most popular terminal utilities for system administrators. Although Screen is very powerful, it is also difficult to configure. Most users aren't even aware of its more advanced features and few take advantage of its full potential. In an effort to make Screen more accessible to the masses, the Ubuntu developers have assembled a nice collection of embellishments that make the program easier to configure and use. These improvements are delivered in the screen-profiles package, which was introduced in Ubuntu 9.04."

Fedora 11 Preview Release Announced

Fedora 11 Preview Release has been announced with a large number of new features, even more so than previous general releases. This includes Presto (delta RPM updates reducing bandwidth usage over 80% typically), automatic font and mime installer via PackageKit, Nouveau as the default driver for Nvidia cards (3D support is not mature and disabled however), simplified Anaconda text mode installation and minimal installation support, automatic Bug Reporting tool, native access to Microsoft Exchange using OpenChange, Firefox 3.1 and ThunderBird 3.0, Windows Cross Compiler (MinGW and a comprehensive set of cross compiled libraries), Ext4 as the default filesystem, experimental support for the next generation Btrfs filesystem, improved I18N with the switch to IBus input system by default, much improved Kernel Mode Support, many virtualization and security improvements, RPM 4.7, GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, Xfce 4.6, Linux Kernel 2.6.29, Python 2.6. GCC 4.4 and several other changes.

GlobalFoundries Announces 28nm High-K Metal Gate Process

GlobalFoundries, the former manufacturing arm of AMD, has announced they will have a 28-nanometer high-k metal gate process available in the second half of 2010. GlobalFoundries developed the 28nm process in conjunction with IBM, Chartered Semiconductors, Infineon Technologies, Samsung Electronics, and STMicroelectronics as part of the IBM Technology Alliance. According to The Tech Report, the new process will reportedly enable "40% better performance, over 20% lower power consumption, and 50% smaller die areas" versus the current 45nm process, but it was not mentioned what kind of performance numbers the 28nm process will have compared to the upcoming 32nm process.

PulseAudio 0.9.15 Released

PulseAudio 0.9.15 has been released with many new features. Phoronix covers the changes: "PulseAudio 0.9.15 introduces native support of Bluetooth audio devices using BlueZ, Apple Airport Express support, flat volume support (similar to Vista's audio controls), on-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices, and native support for 24-bit samples. The on-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices is great and as a result there is now proper S/PDIF support. With the release of PulseAudio 0.9.15 also comes an update to the PulseAudio Volume Control program. The PulseAudio Volume Control 0.9.8 update brings support for configuring sound card profiles and various other updates."

Tutorial: Build Your Own Linux Distribution

PCPlus has a tutorial on building your own Linux distribution with the customizations you want, derived from Fedora, using the graphical interface called Revisor. "We're used to thinking of Linux distributions being set in stone. They're either KDE or Gnome, use a certain kernel and bundle certain applications. But this doesn't have to be the case. If you find yourself making the same adjustments each time you install a new distribution, it's worth creating your own customised version. Revisor is a tool that lets you do just this, and in this tutorial, we'll show you how."

Performance-Testing Intel’s Nehalem

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia put Intel's new Nehalem to the test and found the technology a "game-changing development". Using an HP ProLiant DL580 with four quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 CPUs running at 2.93GHz per core as a baseline, Venezia's Nehalem system - which ran two quad-core Intel Xeon W5580 CPUs at 3.2GHz per core with HyperThreading enabled - performed roughly 60 percent faster across a battery of tests, including gzip compression, WAV-to-MP3 encoding, MPEG-4 to Flash Video conversion, and mysql-bench. Even more impressive, Venezia found, was that the Nehalem system did all that while serving double-duty as his workstation. "At the same time the Nehalem was executing my battery of tests, it was driving a 30-inch and a 24-inch monitor off an Nvidia Quadro FX 5500, playing an MPEG movie in full-screen on the 30-inch monitor, and running more than 500 processes across four virtual desktops, including dozens of terminal sessions, Firefox browser sessions, Java applications, and streaming audio — and it still put up these numbers."

‘Why Unix Matters to IT’

InfoWorld's Tom Yager writes in favor of Unix in IT, which has been increasingly losing ground to Linux. "Unix matters for a reason that escapes analysts' notice," Yager writes. "It's that little circle with the R in it." Asking whether IT would rather have a vendor's promise to interoperate with competitors' systems, or a contract obliging them to, Yager stresses the importance of The Open Group's registered trademark of the Unix 03 spec. "The trademark provides IT organizations that need to be sure, without need for digging, that Unix means something, and it does. It means that Unix enterprise solutions work and work together, without regard for the brand on the hardware" -- a guarantee of interoperability that is the "product of cooperation among Unix vendors, IT operations, universities, and professional organizations."

A Working X Input 2 Implementation

Peter Hutterer, Red Hat Xorg developer has posted the code for the first X Input 2 implementation. Peter is well known for his work on Multi Pointer X (MPX) and has more information on his blog. "XI2 is important for two reasons. One, it's the client-side API that enables applications to make use of MPX. For obvious reasons, I have some interest in getting this done. The other part of XI2 (and why it is called XI2) is that it's a new version of the X Input Extension. One of the goals here is a cleaned up API that is less painful to use than the first, current, version." Phoronix has other details as well.

TomTom Joins Open Invention Network

TomTom has become a licensee of the Open Invention Network. The OIN was initially formed by Red Hat, IBM and others to protect Linux by being a clearing house for over 275 patents and patent applications. These are available, on a royalty free basis, to any member licensee. Members must agree not to use their own patent portfolio against Linux. Companies can also contribute their patents to the OIN to make them generally available. OIN is also one of the backers of Linux Defenders. It appears the recent Microsoft patent agitation against Tom Tom is the reason behind this move.

GNOME Desktop Project Migrates to Git

Git has increasingly become the standard distributed source code management tool for free and open source software projects with the likes of Xorg, Samba, WINE, Perl and Ruby on Rails using it already. GNOME has now joined the Git bandwagon. A survey among GNOME contributors showed Git to be by far the most popular choice. Developers Behdad Esfahbod, Kristian Høgsberg, Owen Taylor, and Federico MenaQuintero and a number of volunteers formed a team and have helped migrate all the GNOME projects to Git. They have published the details of the migration.

Mobile OS Shootout: The Cross-Platform Developer Point of View

Engadget's recent piece, "Mobile OS shootout", provides a relatively thorough comparison of current smartphone platforms and what they have going for them, mostly from a consumer gadget hound's point of view. They provide a bunch of nice comparative tables, among them the table "Third Party Development". From this table we learn that each platform has its own SDK, whereby some of the apps available are considered "native" - a distinction most non-developers won't be able to grok, since it depends on an understanding of runtime environments, etc. It's hard to say exactly who this table is targeting, actually; the developer or the end-user that the rest of the article seems to target. Let's just investigate some of the assumptions it makes.

Why glxgears Is Slower with Kernel Mode Setting, Why It Doesn’t Matter

Fedora Project has been on the forefont of development and adoption of kernel mode setting to enhance the desktop linux experience by making fairly invasive infrastructure improvements that affect the interaction between Xorg and the Linux kernel. In the past, one of the common way to test Xorg performance has been to use glxgears. While that hasn't been a particular good way to do it ever, the switch to kernel mode setting for Intel drivers ahead of the Fedora 11 Beta release to be available shortly has exposed the fallacy of this. In short, don't use glxgears. There are better methods to assess performance.

How Vista Mistakes Changed Windows 7 Development

For the past several months, Microsoft has engaged in an extended public mea culpa about Vista, holding a series of press interviews to explain how the company's Vista mistakes changed the development process of Windows 7, InfoWorld reports. Chief among these changes was to 'define a feature set early on' and only share that feature set with partners and customers when the company is confident they will be incorporated into the final OS. And to solve PC-compatibility issues, Microsoft has said all versions of Windows 7 will run even on low-cost netbooks. Moreover, Microsoft reiterated that the beta of Windows 7 that is now available is already feature-complete, although its final release to business customers isn't expected until November.

‘Risk report: Four years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4’

Mark Cox, Red Hat's director of security response, has published his usual risk report, which includes very detailed statistics and other information on security issues and how they were handled in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Red Hat remains the only OS vendor to directly publish such information and provide the raw data as well. "Red Hat is continually developing technologies to help reduce the risk of security threats, and a number of these were consolidated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. The most significant technologies were SELinux and Exec-Shield. Exec-Shield is a project which includes support for the No eXecute (NX) memory permission, simulating NX via segment limits, Position Independent Executables (PIE), gcc, and glibc hardening. For more details, a table of the major security technology innovations in Enterprise 4 is available."

RIM Plans to Open Blackberry App Store

Following in the footsteps of Apple and Google, Research in Motion is planning to open an online store for its popular Blackberry smartphone. The store, dubbed Blackberry App World, aims to be a "convenient location for BlackBerry owners to download 'games, social networks, personal productivity applications and so much more.'" App World will feature freeware apps along with for-pay apps. The pricing for applications will start at free then jump to $2.99 at the low end and $999.99 on the high end. At the moment Blackberry App World is only open to developers, but there is a sign up page for users who want to be notified of when App World goes live for the public.

Red Hat’s Plymouth Sees New Work

Plymouth is a freedesktop.org project to create a flicker free graphical bootup system designed and developed by Red Hat and included in Fedora 10. Red Hat has been working on Xorg drivers and within the Linux kernel to improve and enhance the kernel mode support needed for Plymouth. Fedora 10 included support for many ATI cards and this is being developed further in Fedora 11 to cover Intel and Nvidia cards as well. Plymouth supports a flexible and powerful plug-in system which can be used to create Plymouth themes. Fedora includes several of them including a simple progress bar and the solar plugin. Now additional work is being done to improve many things and this will land up in Fedora 11 as well.

Red Hat’s JBoss Software Draws Patent Suit

InformationWeek reports that Red Hat is being sued for patent infringement by Software Tree. The patent involved is of an impedance-matching layer between an object-oriented system and a relational database. "Red Hat acquired open source developer JBoss in 2006 for $420 million. Software Tree contends that certain of Red Hat's JBoss products, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Hibernate, step on its patent. 'The infringing products have no substantial noninfringing uses,' Software Tree says in court papers. The lawsuit also names Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Genuitec as defendants because the companies sell JBoss-based software or include it on their products." This is not the first time Red Hat has been sued over JBoss technology. A previous suit was the first public GPL compatible patent settlement and protected not only Red Hat but downstream users and developers as well.