While I use Inkscape myself the designers I knew used Adobe Illustrator for vector work. And boy was some of their stuff good - what they could with that Bezier spline tool beggared belief. One guy's Illustrator portrait of his girlfriend looked like it was painted...
I've heard a number of international folks complain that antibiotics are almost never prescribed in the UK and yet a number of UK hospitals have had MRSA outbreaks. Does anyone have a league table of the cleanliness of each country's hospitals?
I use a Chromium nightly tarball unpacked to a directory in/tmp on Slackware 13.0. It wasn't straightforward but I did get it working by copying some libraries from firefox into the same directory.
Then, when a second questioner asked if Native Client would be "an important part" of Chrome OS, Pichai said "work is underway to make [Native Client] work on ARM." And though he declined to "go into all the technical details," Papakipos explained that Native Client applications would run on ARM just as they run on x86 chips.
OSNews also questions why such a device would need such a large SSD. I can well believe it will be ARM based (so long as the ARM version of flash is up to the job) but that hard drive size seems excessive even if it is keeping two copies of the OS (one for restoration purposes). It will also be interesting to see if the Moblin boot time work and Kernel Mode Setting support would/could be supported in an NVIDIA binary driver...
Almost all modern operating systems will push out memory that looks inactive to swap so that the memory can be used as a disk cache instead. I have access to a 4Gbyte machine where only 2Gbytes of memory are "in use" but it still uses swap.
...resulted in the author saying that it's quite disparate and unwieldy. The report was titled "Where Linux Kernel Documentation Hides" and was written by Rob Landley. So things aren't much better for kernel programmers either...
Intel pay for a lot of X devs at the moment who do upstream development as well as Intel driver development: Eric Anholt, Jesse Barnes, Keith Packard (of at least Xrandr and COMPOSITE fame), Ian Romanick, Carl Worth... Red Hat employ some upstream X devs too: Dave Airlie, Peter Hutterer, Adam Jackson, Kristian Høgsberg (who made Wayland) spring to immediate mind (I think they also used to emply Jesse and Carl) Novell employ Matthias Hopf. Nokia employ Daniel Stone.
There's an (incomplete?) list of xorg devs on ohloh. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they aren't out there hacking away...
I've been testing out the beta and I've been finding that things are generally better than in 9.04. Hopefully this release should be more stable for Intel graphics card users too (the major work Intel was doing reworking their stuff is calming down). However be warned if you use multiple monitors and compiz - xorg lockups will lie in store. Boot speed is improved too. The Moblin version of Ubuntu felt unfinished though and had lots of lockups for me (plus it is absolutely not geared for enterprise style networks - I couldn't get on my Uni's wifi because with Moblin because there's nowhere to enter a wifi username. Regular Ubuntu was no issue though). Obviously some people are going to be upset about Pulseaudio being there but you can see improvements there that the Linux desktop has been needing for some time (even though it's not there yet).
There are areas that don't seem quite polished enough and people will moan about the Linux apps look terrible and how open source people keep doing this on purpose. If I hadn't seen multimon stability issues I would have already have switched from my 8.04 install.
I'm guessing you had some particular problem or were looking for out of the box support. I've been able to have in browser Flash support since at least 2005 regardless of Linux distro.
Slashdot isn't a great support forum though (just because I say it works for me doesn't mean it didn't work for you nor will I follow up on this. You will find better advice on http://www.ubuntu.com/support/communitysupport ) but for what it's worth you might want to take a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/Flash . Another hint is to install the libflashsupport package too (but as always some people say that makes things much worse whereas others say that makes things better).
Yes it's the cool Amiga stuff Matt Dillon. I still remember getting DICE on two Amiga Shoper coverdisks and the ever useful FMS (thanks Matt!). It's interesting to note that Dave Jones (who later tweaked FMS) is a Red Hat Linux kernel hacker.
There may have been issues using tickless kernels with virtualisation solutions but that might have been when using tickless kernels as hosts rather than guests (it's not something I've looked at) and in all likelihood the problem has been solved by now.
If the disk is powered off for many minutes (for example ten minutes) then the savings compared to the cost of spin up will be substantial (it looks like the pay off starts at around 10 seconds after the hard disk has been put to sleep if you read what is written in Extending Battery Life with Laptop Mode). It may even be possible to sleep the disk for longer if everything the user needs is cached (e.g. listening to music sequentially with a big buffer). The killer is that all all those spin ups and spin downs cause increased wear and tear. As such the problem is knowing when it is safe to spin the disk down such that it won't be immediately spun back up again (this may be solvable by forcing a long writeback time at the risk of bigger data loss). See laptop-mode.txt for some examples.
It's incredibly hard to say because the summary doesn't provide enough detail in and of itself to diagnose the problem (e.g. which graphics card, which chipset, which drivers are being used, which version of Ubuntu and so on). The most likely explanation is that hardware is being left on in Linux that other OSes are powering down when on battery. Examples of this:
Wired ethernet ports that are often put into some off state under Windows such that they will no longer work until the laptop is plugged into the mains but saving power while not in use while on the battery.
Similarly if the poster is using a particular graphics drivers (free or closed - depends on the hardware) they may not be powering the hardware down as aggressively as the drivers on another operating system. I've seen Intel graphics cards on Windows that reduce display quality presumably to increase compression (you can visibly see the artifacts) when on battery to decrease power draw.
Hard disks might not be spun down as often (or at all) under Linux.
USB sockets may not be auto suspending depending on the version of the distro/hardware.
The tickless kernel may not be working effectively (or at all depending on kernel version) - there might be a program that is preventing the kernel from idling for a long period of time because it is doing some unnecessary program (this may tie back into graphics drivers again).
The SATA controller might not be powering down as it does on other OSes.
The screen might not be as dim as it is on other OSes.
The sound hardware might not be powering itself off properly/completely.
The wifi might be be being put into a low power mode/being turned off on other OSes.
There could be bugs in a driver under Linux.
Other OSes might have a program monitoring temperature sensors and scaling hardware functions appropriately (e.g. slowing down fans if the machine is cool).
And so on...
As you can a myriad of reasons and not nearly enough information to whittle down the cause. Further how do you know each OS is using the same defaults? It could be that Windows says you are running out of battery later than Linux does (I'd imagine that this sort of thing could only account for 10 minutes difference to actual empty battery though) or the display is defaulting to a different brightness - it could be that lots of little things are adding up to the major difference.
A few years ago I had access to a Thinkpad T60 and it would draw two watts less power under Windows XP than under Ubuntu Gutsy. That doesn't mean things don't change over time but nor does it mean that people aren't seeing real problems now. If you know how to constructively help, things can get progressively better on your system but it can take some time and you need to know how to track these things down. Tools like powertop help and developers have been putting together good power management practices for Linux guides. However in all honesty posting to Slashdot is unlikely to help you obtain a solution (and indeed there is no guarantee of a solution even over a long period of time).
The Linux kernel has an explicity notice saying the userland is exempt: here's a COPYING file from 2.4 series of the Linux distribution. The link is to the file in a git Linux kernel history repository Dave Jones created (alas the git dates are incorrect) so you can see when the notice was added by looking at the history of the file...
As you suggest, you have to provide the source even if you have not made any modifications to the GPL code if you are doing commercial distribution - it is not enough to point to an upstream source.
Slashdot Mirror
While I use Inkscape myself the designers I knew used Adobe Illustrator for vector work. And boy was some of their stuff good - what they could with that Bezier spline tool beggared belief. One guy's Illustrator portrait of his girlfriend looked like it was painted...
I've heard a number of international folks complain that antibiotics are almost never prescribed in the UK and yet a number of UK hospitals have had MRSA outbreaks. Does anyone have a league table of the cleanliness of each country's hospitals?
I use a Chromium nightly tarball unpacked to a directory in /tmp on Slackware 13.0. It wasn't straightforward but I did get it working by copying some libraries from firefox into the same directory.
Sorry about the botched link...
From a Register article talking about Chrome OS:
You can also follow the bugs that are being worked on in the ARM native client port.
OSNews also questions why such a device would need such a large SSD. I can well believe it will be ARM based (so long as the ARM version of flash is up to the job) but that hard drive size seems excessive even if it is keeping two copies of the OS (one for restoration purposes). It will also be interesting to see if the Moblin boot time work and Kernel Mode Setting support would/could be supported in an NVIDIA binary driver...
Almost all modern operating systems will push out memory that looks inactive to swap so that the memory can be used as a disk cache instead. I have access to a 4Gbyte machine where only 2Gbytes of memory are "in use" but it still uses swap.
One of the comments makes it clear that Opera will no longer have to use Qt for the *nix build. Will this just mean better platform integration or more speed though?
For multimon on the fly you really need xrandr 1.2 though. In an interview a while back an NVIDIA dev mentioned they hadn't had the time to add xrandr 1.2+ support but it looks like xrandr 1.2 will be arriving to the NVIDIA binary drivers soon.
You're welcome!
Brendan Eich's notes about an early draft and "Programming in the large" and a blog post about ECMAScript 5's strict mode (which does far more checking) talk of features that will hopefully give people a better change at dealing with the issues you raised.
OK not so useful to you now but hey...
...resulted in the author saying that it's quite disparate and unwieldy. The report was titled "Where Linux Kernel Documentation Hides" and was written by Rob Landley. So things aren't much better for kernel programmers either...
Intel pay for a lot of X devs at the moment who do upstream development as well as Intel driver development: Eric Anholt, Jesse Barnes, Keith Packard (of at least Xrandr and COMPOSITE fame), Ian Romanick, Carl Worth...
Red Hat employ some upstream X devs too: Dave Airlie, Peter Hutterer, Adam Jackson, Kristian Høgsberg (who made Wayland) spring to immediate mind (I think they also used to emply Jesse and Carl)
Novell employ Matthias Hopf.
Nokia employ Daniel Stone.
There's an (incomplete?) list of xorg devs on ohloh. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they aren't out there hacking away...
You can create a USB stick version from the CD after you boot it. If you know what you're doing you can even use the ISO to create a USB stick version directly. Slashdot isn't a great support forum and one of the one mentioned on http://www.ubuntu.com/support/communitysupport will probably be better but https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick may be of use to you.
I've been testing out the beta and I've been finding that things are generally better than in 9.04. Hopefully this release should be more stable for Intel graphics card users too (the major work Intel was doing reworking their stuff is calming down). However be warned if you use multiple monitors and compiz - xorg lockups will lie in store. Boot speed is improved too. The Moblin version of Ubuntu felt unfinished though and had lots of lockups for me (plus it is absolutely not geared for enterprise style networks - I couldn't get on my Uni's wifi because with Moblin because there's nowhere to enter a wifi username. Regular Ubuntu was no issue though). Obviously some people are going to be upset about Pulseaudio being there but you can see improvements there that the Linux desktop has been needing for some time (even though it's not there yet).
There are areas that don't seem quite polished enough and people will moan about the Linux apps look terrible and how open source people keep doing this on purpose. If I hadn't seen multimon stability issues I would have already have switched from my 8.04 install.
I'm guessing you had some particular problem or were looking for out of the box support. I've been able to have in browser Flash support since at least 2005 regardless of Linux distro.
Slashdot isn't a great support forum though (just because I say it works for me doesn't mean it didn't work for you nor will I follow up on this. You will find better advice on http://www.ubuntu.com/support/communitysupport ) but for what it's worth you might want to take a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/Flash . Another hint is to install the libflashsupport package too (but as always some people say that makes things much worse whereas others say that makes things better).
Yes it's the cool Amiga stuff Matt Dillon. I still remember getting DICE on two Amiga Shoper coverdisks and the ever useful FMS (thanks Matt!). It's interesting to note that Dave Jones (who later tweaked FMS) is a Red Hat Linux kernel hacker.
The tickless/dynticks Linux kernel patches first appeared in 2.6.21 for the x86 platform. amd64 tickless patches appeared a bit later in 2.6.24. It isn't just a matter of changing the HZ either - it looks at what timers are set to go off and idles until the soonest timer is set to go off or an interrupt arrives rather than firing wakeup events and then realising there is nothing to do (so it's not just switching between fixed frequencies).
There may have been issues using tickless kernels with virtualisation solutions but that might have been when using tickless kernels as hosts rather than guests (it's not something I've looked at) and in all likelihood the problem has been solved by now.
If the disk is powered off for many minutes (for example ten minutes) then the savings compared to the cost of spin up will be substantial (it looks like the pay off starts at around 10 seconds after the hard disk has been put to sleep if you read what is written in Extending Battery Life with Laptop Mode). It may even be possible to sleep the disk for longer if everything the user needs is cached (e.g. listening to music sequentially with a big buffer). The killer is that all all those spin ups and spin downs cause increased wear and tear. As such the problem is knowing when it is safe to spin the disk down such that it won't be immediately spun back up again (this may be solvable by forcing a long writeback time at the risk of bigger data loss). See laptop-mode.txt for some examples.
This sounds like more PAE shenanigans. Using PAE on 32 bit Windows has already been well covered by The Old New Thing.
The Adobe Linux flash devs have seen that comic too and reckon the issue with Linux full screen flash performance is down to graphics card driver capabilities and the difficulty in discovering them.
It's incredibly hard to say because the summary doesn't provide enough detail in and of itself to diagnose the problem (e.g. which graphics card, which chipset, which drivers are being used, which version of Ubuntu and so on). The most likely explanation is that hardware is being left on in Linux that other OSes are powering down when on battery. Examples of this:
As you can a myriad of reasons and not nearly enough information to whittle down the cause. Further how do you know each OS is using the same defaults? It could be that Windows says you are running out of battery later than Linux does (I'd imagine that this sort of thing could only account for 10 minutes difference to actual empty battery though) or the display is defaulting to a different brightness - it could be that lots of little things are adding up to the major difference.
A few years ago I had access to a Thinkpad T60 and it would draw two watts less power under Windows XP than under Ubuntu Gutsy. That doesn't mean things don't change over time but nor does it mean that people aren't seeing real problems now. If you know how to constructively help, things can get progressively better on your system but it can take some time and you need to know how to track these things down. Tools like powertop help and developers have been putting together good power management practices for Linux guides. However in all honesty posting to Slashdot is unlikely to help you obtain a solution (and indeed there is no guarantee of a solution even over a long period of time).
The Linux kernel has an explicity notice saying the userland is exempt: here's a COPYING file from 2.4 series of the Linux distribution. The link is to the file in a git Linux kernel history repository Dave Jones created (alas the git dates are incorrect) so you can see when the notice was added by looking at the history of the file...
As you suggest, you have to provide the source even if you have not made any modifications to the GPL code if you are doing commercial distribution - it is not enough to point to an upstream source.
This issue pretty much happened a few years ago. The MEPIS Linux distribution was "forced" to comply with the GPL by distributing the source code itself rather pointing to an upstream distribution (found via linux.org).
For those who don't get the parent's joke Logo is often considered to be derived from LISP.