Eugenia Loli Archive

In the article High Availability with Open Source, Josh Kuo looks at three of the popular Open Source projects to implement High Availability redundancy (failover): Heartbeat, keepalived, and CARP. The article talks about where each of these three excels and some implementation ideas. Josh also mentions the DRBD utility to sync two remote filesystems to aid in an advanced High Availability setup.

In a nod toward the RTOS market that founder Jim Ready pioneered, MontaVista is shipping a new version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution said to offer true real-time performance along with a very small footprint. MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Version 5.0 boasts enhanced real-time performance and lower resource usage.

Apple has upgraded its Mac Pro desktop with a pair of 3GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors. It can have up to 16 GB of RAM, although it isn't cheap. Apple has already published benchmarks.

The startup ZenZui is introducing a zooming user interface to facilitate web browsing on mobile phones. The company is commercializing technology that it licensed from Microsoft, in particular the AppLens and LaunchTile interfaces developed by ZenZui's founders while they were at Microsoft Research.

Hi-Mobile sent us in the very popular Nokia N80 smartphone. While the phone was released about 10 months ago, just last month there was a brand new and free firmware upgrade that upgrades it to version 4.x which adds VoIP functionality. The upgrade is available for all N80 models, even the ones that were not released under the "Internet Edition" brand. Read more for our test.

"With Haiku getting closer and closer to an R1 release I think it is time for little review on the achievements of the development team in the last months. Haiku is being covered on various websites and blogs lately especially after attending SCaLE and the already famous tech talk at Google. But although it might seem that Haiku is only weeks away from the so important first release there is still a lot of work that has to be done, networking being the biggest." More here.

Nokia released a new update for their Linux-based N800 internet tablet, v3.2007.10-7 which includes improvements and fixes in video and Flash performance and quality, Bluetooth connection, browser stability, activating touch screen and keys lock, new camera app, rdesktop and more. Nokia also wrote an good-looking front-end to Real's Rhapsody service that includes a 30 days free trial. You can choose from millions of songs to fetch and playback via WiFi (no permanent downloading). In my test, the N800 managed 4 hours of battery life of fetching+playback using Rhapsody. Screenshot here.

Today at CTIA, Symbian is announcing version 9.5 of its operating system. The new version delivers improved performance including lower memory and processor requirements, more multimedia features including support for advanced camera features, better PC connectivity, support for DVB-H and ISDB-T Mobile TV standards and improved network and connection management features. Symbian 9.5 is fully backwardly compatible with all member of the Symbian 9.x family. Read here for more.

Windows Vista has had something of a troubled birth. Hyped features were pulled, and the project as a whole took far longer to complete than expected, partly due to standing still while MS dropped everything to work on WinXP Service Pack 2, but in part also due to a decision to "reset" and scrap much of the new development. This has led some commentators to dub the project a "train wreck."

The Beryl project has won a lot of press time so far with its impressive tricks -- even more than its slower-evolving daddy, Compiz. There are several lose ends to Beryl's core engine and incompatibilities with existing applications or technologies. However, something that really put off a lot of people when they try Beryl is its dreadful settings manager.

It's Sunday afternoon here, there is no better time to spend by having some fun with some of the abilities of operating systems. There is definitely quite some rocky road still for speech recognition and in extend natural language & artificial intelligence. Hopefully we will still be alive when that happens.

"One thing that I've been playing with off and on for some time is a small efficient little solution for handling basic Bluetooth proximity detection, specifically for being able to perform certain actions when a cell phone or other Bluetooth device is in range of my Powerbook." More here.

During my 8 years of Linux on and off usage I have tried more distros than I have chocolate bars. Each one of my previous encounters meant that I had to spend at least 2 days configuring before I have a desktop that I was somewhat comfortable with. With Ubuntu Feisty Fawn's latest test beta --for the first time ever-- this was not the case. I was up and running with all the niceties I wanted within 2 hours.

Hi-Mobile.net sent us in a review unit of Panasonic's flagship point-n-shoot camera, the LX2. This camera kept the first place among other similar products in the past year with its two unique features: HD video recording and wide-angle for landscape shooting.