I guess their new Metro GUI uses graphical images more extensively, so any kinds of speed up is good, leaving CPU time for other usage or just preventing your CPU to heat up. And browsers such as IE will benefit from this too, as they have to render a lot of images (I don't know about Firefox, maybe they use libjpeg). Note that some linux distros have already done this by switching to libjpeg-turbo a while ago.
It seems that they use -O3 optimization in GCC, which is dangerous as it could lead to code running incorrectly, even gentoo recommend against it. I think it would be better if they optimize dalvik VM instead of changind build flag.
Er, currently the compositor on X runs independently from the server, a lot of data has to pass between them, creating unneccessary round trips and degrade the peformance (wayland is an effort to unite the server and the compositor). So I don't really think adding compositor will make much performance improvement or any at all.
By default KDE loads too much services, most of which I never use. The same goes for its features, I use less than 20% of them. And those 20% of features can be duplicated by combining other pieces of software, most of the cases it will work better too. Back in earlier versions KDE was quite unstable too, crashing a few times a day, although that has improved greatly now. Last but not least, KDE is abit sluggish on my sandy bridge based laptop with 6GB of RAM, which is unacceptable as I expect everything to be as snappy as possible on this kind of hardware.
So, to sum up, I tried KDE and found it works but not as quite well as my other setup, so I abandoned it. Now I use plain xmonad, load a few gnome daemons such as gnome-keyring, gnome-polkit-auth or network manager, for other desktops app such as file manager I use those from GNOME. PS: I couldn't stand GNOME 3 at all, Unity is okay but not optimal, XFCE lacks a few features such as per-folder-sorting-scheme, same goes for LXDE, KDE is the best out of them but still not as good as my current setup.
Why don't they use ogg vorbis instead? We don't have software patent here so MP3 is as free as Ogg Vorbis, but if they decided to be as free as possible (CC licensed) then the latter would be better.
alsamixer -c0 should let you config the first sound card of your computer, not PulseAudio switches. Note that sometimes you might have two hardware sound cards or more, in that case choose the correct one in alsamixer.
Regarding to system wide daemon, I have never used PulseAudio that way so I can't say anything, but running a sound server as root doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Jack detection can be done in many ways, and different vendor have their own way of doing so, unless somebody get a hardware specification set for your sound card, I don't think it will be easy to fix. And yeah, it is a driver problem.
Re:Most programs don't need a 64-bit address space
on
Linux 3.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
But it will reduce the address space available for ASLR, am I right?
Why do you need low latency for typical music playback on desktop? It is only for audio professional doing mixing from multiple sources. For laptop users like me, saving 1 W means 5~10% more battery life.
Re:They fix the sound bullshit yet?
on
Linux 3.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Another" audio subsytem? Today standard is PulseAudio on ALSA, and that it has been like that for at least 4 years. Before ALSA there was OSS but Linux developers disagree with how OSS do the sound mixing and resampling in kernel space (for better latency, they said) and OSS went closed source for awhile. PulseAudio is an effort to unite all the sound server/mixer (ESD from GNOME, aRTs from KDE or ALSA's own dmix) plus some nifty features like better battery life (less wake ups per second). Update your FUD once in awhile, please.
It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine, PulseAudio as a sound server (mixer) and ALSA to talk to the hardware, the rest (OpenAL, gstreamer, OSS, ESD) are either obsolete or totally different stuff unessential to audio playback. Earlier problems related to closed source softwares (Flash, Skype) or badly written HW drivers are mostly fixed.
A G+ acc is required to use that 'sharing' feature, and it will post the story on your G+ page. I did not realise that Google Reader community was that big. Back then the Recommended section had many interesting stories, now it is plagued with life hacker posts. I started to hate google after that.
The base install is limited, they did a great job auditing the code. But the moment you install something from the port, if that software contains bug, then OpenBSD is no more secure than Linux running that software. Or even worse, as OpenBSD refuses to have some kind of MAC implemented, Linux has SELinux/AppArmor/Tomoyo while FreeBSD has TrustedBSD. While those aren't silver bullet to every problem, they help in limiting the damage caused when your potential unsecure software gets compromised.
OOXML standard is a few dozen megabytes, and that is without the scripting part. While OpenDocument standard is a 7,4 Mb zip file. It isn't suprising that LO couldn't support OOXML properly.
You can use the Backport repo of Debian, they have a fairly new version of kernel and some other software there. Though the last time I tried it fried my system (I was using nvidia binary blob back then)
Re:Anyone rebuilding their kernel still?
on
Linux 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Gentoo, duh. I could still roll my own kernel in Fedora to apply some patches that haven't been accepted in the main tree yet, just fix the rpm sources, add new patch, rpmbuild and yum localinstall:)
Mostly it is related to bad behaved hardware or incompleted driver. In my case enable rc6 power saving on sandy bridge boost my battery capacity from 3,5 to 6 hours on linux (it is around 4,5 to 5 hours on windows), turn off or reduce wifi tx power helps too. So check your laptop hardware, there might be some that haven't had power management yet.
I'm not a native German speaker, just someone who is learning the language. In that sentence, 'Morgen' (morning) already implies will happen in the future, so the 'werden' (as 'will' in this case) is not needed. Without it, the sentence will be "Es wird bald regnen", or "I will rain soon". (I have been studying only for 2 years, so take what I said with a grain of salt).
I am not a doctor, but IMHO, most of the bacterias on the keyboard of your personal computer are _yours_ bacterias, meaning they came from your body, your sweat and you are used to it. So I don't think they will do much harm to yourself, unless your immune system is borked somehow. Of course, a dirty keyboard is still need to be cleaned, so it won't look too bad, or become a colony to bad germs. And yeah, this only apply to your personal keyboard, mean no one else but you touch it. Or maybe keyboard sharing between family members, your body is more resistant to their germs.
NaCl is open source, but Mozilla has refused to include it in Firefox. Also NaCl is quite different from ActiveX, if you have time to read the papers you will see that it is highly secure without hurting the performance much, as the code is analyzed before executing to make sure it won't do anything macilious.
There isn't many detail now, even their website is just an wiki page. Nevertheless, I hold high hope for this one, living in a 3rd world country, I have always interested in fighting illiteracy and connecting people with the power of the internet. Of course there are many projects like that, both by the government and other organisations, but they aren't very successful. One of the reason for their failure, IMO, is that normal desktop PC requires proper maintenance, especially in remote areas where the weather aren't very friendly with electronic devices. The fact that many projects re-use old PC doesn't help either. Most 'computer room' just sit there gathering dust after the local get bored with playing games, chatting and half of the computer dies. LTSP is another choice, but we still need someone to be there to fix in case problems arise, and there isn't many FOSS technician here. So we need some kind of computer that is really cheap, require little maintenance (for both software and hardware), easy to deploy. Actually Intel promised us that kind with their Atom CPU, but AFAIK an Atom-based PC still in 200~250$ range, which is not cheap at all. And now this project seems promising.
As a laptop user, there are two problems prevent me from using a stand-alone WM instead of a full DE: - Power management: To switch between profiles when the power is plugged in or not. - Network connections: Wifi and broadband connections. iwconfig/ifconfig/wpa_supplicant can serve me, but too much of a hassle. And broadband connection is really a pain, the last time I tried to use wvdial, I can get a connection, but suffer random system hangs. After that I stick to GNOME2 till now.
Installing GNOME power manager/network manager pulls a whole mess of GNOME dependency in, it defeats the purpose of running a standalone WM. Of course, if anyone can show me how to deal with those two, I would be appreciated. On my old laptop (which I use as a desktop, mostly), I put plain OpenBox on it and have no problem using it at all.
As for Alsa/another sound server replacing OSS, OSS do the mixing (and resampling?) in the kernel space, citing latency is one of the reasons, while alsa let userspace programs the jobs. IMO, that kind of works does not belong to kernel space, so I prefer alsa.
Regarding to pulseaudio, dmix is fine, but pulseaudio is better with features like glitch free playback (ironically, this is the reason why pulseaudio glitches so bad on some systems with broken drivers), you can set the resampling algo, per stream volume control, flat volume (another problematic feature), and as some people said, it is the only setup that allow output via bluetooth devices but I haven't tried it yet. The main reason for many problems related to it is the horrible audio drivers on Linux (as always), so you can't exactly blame pulseaudio, at least it always has fallback mode, and the distros never set them as default. Back when pulseaudio was first integrated into Ubuntu (around 8.04, right?), it didn't work well for me and stop working for many other. But now, most people I know have absolutely no problem with pulseaudio. PS: Aside from dmix, there are several other sound servers like arts, esd etc.... too, I'm glad that we get rid of all that and now pulseaudio on alsa is the standard.
Well, Truetype BCI is useful but today most computer screens are LCD it isn't enough anymore, we also need a good subpixel rendering method, the one included in Freetype isn't so bad but isn't as good as Cleartype either. And the Cleartype code in freetype had been removed, unlike the BCI, which is only disabled, so we who don't live in the US can't use it either. (there are still a way to patch freetype though). I wonder how long will we have to wait until we can have nice looking fonts on Linux desktop.
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I guess their new Metro GUI uses graphical images more extensively, so any kinds of speed up is good, leaving CPU time for other usage or just preventing your CPU to heat up. And browsers such as IE will benefit from this too, as they have to render a lot of images (I don't know about Firefox, maybe they use libjpeg).
Note that some linux distros have already done this by switching to libjpeg-turbo a while ago.
It seems that they use -O3 optimization in GCC, which is dangerous as it could lead to code running incorrectly, even gentoo recommend against it. I think it would be better if they optimize dalvik VM instead of changind build flag.
Er, currently the compositor on X runs independently from the server, a lot of data has to pass between them, creating unneccessary round trips and degrade the peformance (wayland is an effort to unite the server and the compositor). So I don't really think adding compositor will make much performance improvement or any at all.
Same here.
By default KDE loads too much services, most of which I never use. The same goes for its features, I use less than 20% of them. And those 20% of features can be duplicated by combining other pieces of software, most of the cases it will work better too. Back in earlier versions KDE was quite unstable too, crashing a few times a day, although that has improved greatly now. Last but not least, KDE is abit sluggish on my sandy bridge based laptop with 6GB of RAM, which is unacceptable as I expect everything to be as snappy as possible on this kind of hardware.
So, to sum up, I tried KDE and found it works but not as quite well as my other setup, so I abandoned it. Now I use plain xmonad, load a few gnome daemons such as gnome-keyring, gnome-polkit-auth or network manager, for other desktops app such as file manager I use those from GNOME.
PS: I couldn't stand GNOME 3 at all, Unity is okay but not optimal, XFCE lacks a few features such as per-folder-sorting-scheme, same goes for LXDE, KDE is the best out of them but still not as good as my current setup.
Why don't they use ogg vorbis instead? We don't have software patent here so MP3 is as free as Ogg Vorbis, but if they decided to be as free as possible (CC licensed) then the latter would be better.
alsamixer -c0 should let you config the first sound card of your computer, not PulseAudio switches. Note that sometimes you might have two hardware sound cards or more, in that case choose the correct one in alsamixer.
Regarding to system wide daemon, I have never used PulseAudio that way so I can't say anything, but running a sound server as root doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Jack detection can be done in many ways, and different vendor have their own way of doing so, unless somebody get a hardware specification set for your sound card, I don't think it will be easy to fix.
And yeah, it is a driver problem.
But it will reduce the address space available for ASLR, am I right?
Why do you need low latency for typical music playback on desktop? It is only for audio professional doing mixing from multiple sources. For laptop users like me, saving 1 W means 5~10% more battery life.
"Another" audio subsytem? Today standard is PulseAudio on ALSA, and that it has been like that for at least 4 years. Before ALSA there was OSS but Linux developers disagree with how OSS do the sound mixing and resampling in kernel space (for better latency, they said) and OSS went closed source for awhile. PulseAudio is an effort to unite all the sound server/mixer (ESD from GNOME, aRTs from KDE or ALSA's own dmix) plus some nifty features like better battery life (less wake ups per second).
Update your FUD once in awhile, please.
It's a common FUD. Nowaday Linux audio works just fine, PulseAudio as a sound server (mixer) and ALSA to talk to the hardware, the rest (OpenAL, gstreamer, OSS, ESD) are either obsolete or totally different stuff unessential to audio playback. Earlier problems related to closed source softwares (Flash, Skype) or badly written HW drivers are mostly fixed.
A G+ acc is required to use that 'sharing' feature, and it will post the story on your G+ page. I did not realise that Google Reader community was that big. Back then the Recommended section had many interesting stories, now it is plagued with life hacker posts. I started to hate google after that.
The base install is limited, they did a great job auditing the code. But the moment you install something from the port, if that software contains bug, then OpenBSD is no more secure than Linux running that software. Or even worse, as OpenBSD refuses to have some kind of MAC implemented, Linux has SELinux/AppArmor/Tomoyo while FreeBSD has TrustedBSD. While those aren't silver bullet to every problem, they help in limiting the damage caused when your potential unsecure software gets compromised.
OOXML standard is a few dozen megabytes, and that is without the scripting part. While OpenDocument standard is a 7,4 Mb zip file. It isn't suprising that LO couldn't support OOXML properly.
You can use the Backport repo of Debian, they have a fairly new version of kernel and some other software there. Though the last time I tried it fried my system (I was using nvidia binary blob back then)
Gentoo, duh. I could still roll my own kernel in Fedora to apply some patches that haven't been accepted in the main tree yet, just fix the rpm sources, add new patch, rpmbuild and yum localinstall :)
Mostly it is related to bad behaved hardware or incompleted driver. In my case enable rc6 power saving on sandy bridge boost my battery capacity from 3,5 to 6 hours on linux (it is around 4,5 to 5 hours on windows), turn off or reduce wifi tx power helps too. So check your laptop hardware, there might be some that haven't had power management yet.
I'm not a native German speaker, just someone who is learning the language. In that sentence, 'Morgen' (morning) already implies will happen in the future, so the 'werden' (as 'will' in this case) is not needed. Without it, the sentence will be "Es wird bald regnen", or "I will rain soon".
(I have been studying only for 2 years, so take what I said with a grain of salt).
In fact you can even fix it yourself while waiting for a patch with systemtap: http://www.outflux.net/blog/archives/2012/01/22/fixing-vulnerabilities-with-systemtap/
I am not a doctor, but IMHO, most of the bacterias on the keyboard of your personal computer are _yours_ bacterias, meaning they came from your body, your sweat and you are used to it. So I don't think they will do much harm to yourself, unless your immune system is borked somehow. Of course, a dirty keyboard is still need to be cleaned, so it won't look too bad, or become a colony to bad germs.
And yeah, this only apply to your personal keyboard, mean no one else but you touch it. Or maybe keyboard sharing between family members, your body is more resistant to their germs.
NaCl is open source, but Mozilla has refused to include it in Firefox.
Also NaCl is quite different from ActiveX, if you have time to read the papers you will see that it is highly secure without hurting the performance much, as the code is analyzed before executing to make sure it won't do anything macilious.
There isn't many detail now, even their website is just an wiki page. Nevertheless, I hold high hope for this one, living in a 3rd world country, I have always interested in fighting illiteracy and connecting people with the power of the internet. Of course there are many projects like that, both by the government and other organisations, but they aren't very successful. One of the reason for their failure, IMO, is that normal desktop PC requires proper maintenance, especially in remote areas where the weather aren't very friendly with electronic devices. The fact that many projects re-use old PC doesn't help either. Most 'computer room' just sit there gathering dust after the local get bored with playing games, chatting and half of the computer dies. LTSP is another choice, but we still need someone to be there to fix in case problems arise, and there isn't many FOSS technician here.
So we need some kind of computer that is really cheap, require little maintenance (for both software and hardware), easy to deploy. Actually Intel promised us that kind with their Atom CPU, but AFAIK an Atom-based PC still in 200~250$ range, which is not cheap at all. And now this project seems promising.
As a laptop user, there are two problems prevent me from using a stand-alone WM instead of a full DE:
- Power management: To switch between profiles when the power is plugged in or not.
- Network connections: Wifi and broadband connections. iwconfig/ifconfig/wpa_supplicant can serve me, but too much of a hassle. And broadband connection is really a pain, the last time I tried to use wvdial, I can get a connection, but suffer random system hangs. After that I stick to GNOME2 till now.
Installing GNOME power manager/network manager pulls a whole mess of GNOME dependency in, it defeats the purpose of running a standalone WM.
Of course, if anyone can show me how to deal with those two, I would be appreciated. On my old laptop (which I use as a desktop, mostly), I put plain OpenBox on it and have no problem using it at all.
As for Alsa/another sound server replacing OSS, OSS do the mixing (and resampling?) in the kernel space, citing latency is one of the reasons, while alsa let userspace programs the jobs. IMO, that kind of works does not belong to kernel space, so I prefer alsa.
Regarding to pulseaudio, dmix is fine, but pulseaudio is better with features like glitch free playback (ironically, this is the reason why pulseaudio glitches so bad on some systems with broken drivers), you can set the resampling algo, per stream volume control, flat volume (another problematic feature), and as some people said, it is the only setup that allow output via bluetooth devices but I haven't tried it yet. The main reason for many problems related to it is the horrible audio drivers on Linux (as always), so you can't exactly blame pulseaudio, at least it always has fallback mode, and the distros never set them as default.
Back when pulseaudio was first integrated into Ubuntu (around 8.04, right?), it didn't work well for me and stop working for many other. But now, most people I know have absolutely no problem with pulseaudio.
PS: Aside from dmix, there are several other sound servers like arts, esd etc.... too, I'm glad that we get rid of all that and now pulseaudio on alsa is the standard.
Well, Truetype BCI is useful but today most computer screens are LCD it isn't enough anymore, we also need a good subpixel rendering method, the one included in Freetype isn't so bad but isn't as good as Cleartype either. And the Cleartype code in freetype had been removed, unlike the BCI, which is only disabled, so we who don't live in the US can't use it either. (there are still a way to patch freetype though). I wonder how long will we have to wait until we can have nice looking fonts on Linux desktop.