Friday, April 2, 2010

Nvidia drops the opensource driver

Since lately I was thinking on 3D on Linux I was (a little disappinted) when I was told that Nvidia drops their Opensource drivers. Ok, their support has always been historically mininal, with only the basic 2D acceleration and many of the major features (like power management, RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS) crippled at best, but I feel somewhat disappointed.
They suggest to use their X.Org VESA driver instead.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0 released

The unigine guys shows what a Linux box well equipped can do with a well prepared environment... I must say I'm impressed and, even if I've not run the benchmark tests yet because I don't want to mess up my 'production' system :), I'm very glad to see what a linux driver can do in both 64 or 32bit environment, even if some users complain problems... but IMHO this is a great step in any manner!!!

Monday, March 22, 2010

Nvidia releases CUDA 3.0

Since I'm not a gamer I've never been very interested in the 3D performance of my GNU-Linux boxes (mmmh, until I saw compiz) but the more Linux is close to Windows for functionality and ease of use, the more i get interested in the differences, in term of performances, between the two. Even if recently ATI took over Nvidia in the middle market segment, it seems to me that the latter is more active in the driver development for Linux. Being a (very) pragmatic person I don't mind whether the driver itself is -or how much is- opensource or not, I've always felt comfortable with Nvidia drivers and press releases like this one are music for my ears!

Sunday, March 14, 2010

New GNOME 2.29.0 shell released

Even If I personally prefer the new KDE 4.x for personal use, I work everyday with the GNOME so I must admit that I began to follow its development process. Having said that, here there is the announcement of the new GNOME Shell release with all the new improvements list.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Kubuntu boot

I must admit that, even if I use Ubuntu on daily basis, I'm not a great fan of this distro; but, loving the KDE environment, I've often installed Kubuntu -a distro with great potential but maltreated by Canonical- on my old laptop. Even if it's two years that I don't install Kubuntu I was a little surprised of these boot benchmark results, even if I would have preferred a direct comparison with Windows 7.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

KDE SC 4.4.1 released

Two days ago the KDE team proudly released the KDE Software Compilation 4.4.1. This release fixes some annoying performance issues like those that that afflicted kmail and konsole; many widgets also received their part of bugfixing. You can found a (far from being complete) changelog here.

Prejudice

At first glance I couldn't believe in what was written in this quite old post, I woudl expect this kind of things here in Italy where, according to my personal experience, there is still too much diffidence toward free software - (the old story "If it does not cost, cannot be serious/reliable/etc"). Even if the situation is getting better and better those who would gain effective advantage from opensource software, are those who resist the more... At least the Microsoft supporter in the Elios post had what she deserved.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Skype & Ubuntu 9.10

Lately I've wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to make skype 2.1.0 to detect my integrated microphone: all my efforts were to no avail. A colleague of mine had a similar problem with a different laptop. On Ubuntu forums somebody suggested that the problem can be fixed installing the package "padevchooser" to help configure your PulseAudio and select the proper Mic input. That worked great but I had to downgrade to version 2.0.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Experts say US must do more to secure the Internet

The government must take a more active role in securing the Internet, industry experts told Congress Tuesday, arguing that as businesses and governments rely more on cyberspace the prospect of a serious attack grows....



Monday, February 22, 2010

Language

In these days I'm involved in the translation process of the core of the jAPS (please note the lowercase 'j') framework into English and I'm revising the documentation of the plugins I'm responbile for. I must admit this is neither a fast nor simple task, I'm doing my best...

Friday, February 19, 2010

There are things that bring your memories back. There are experiences and reasonings that you make yours. Sometimes it happens to find them condensed in a post that I had to read breathlessly. Thank you Mark Pilgrim

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Cyber attacks: one of the largest attack in the world

More than 75,000 computer systems around the world, have been hacked! The attach began in late 2008 and was discovered last month. The attack targeted proprietary corporate data, e-mails, credit-card transaction data and login credentials at companies in the health and technology industries in 196 countries.
The attack could be in process and is therefore still uncertain how much data is stolen...

News by
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/17/AR2010021705816.html?hpid%3Dtopnews

Or

http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplrubriche/tecnologia/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=30&ID_articolo=7274&ID_sezione=38&sezione=News

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

I love KDE4

Hi! Since the beginning I used KDE 4 as my preferred DE. But, since Fate does not lack a certain sense of humour, I work everyday with GNOME. I'm looking forward to compile it from scratch in my Lenny box and -guess what?- the renewed KDE site is tempting me a lot! I bet I'll spend my sunday compiling...