This is a tumblelog. It's like a blog with more short-form posts. It's stuff I like.
Late last week, I came across a link at HackerNews giving some intriguing insight into how /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin came to be. Many of you will be surprised to learn that no, there is no divine plan behind all this separation.
Ubuntu TV is to be the first proof point of this new strategy. Silber says that you’ll be able to watch your own media files, streaming media, or broadcast media. The goal is to combine all of these media sources without radically changing user behavior. Specifically, Ubuntu TV is not simply a Linux desktop on your TV. Canonical, says Silber, does not believe in the “browser on your TV” experience. “Browsers belong on secondary devices — tablets, phones, etc,” Silber told me.
Specifically, the developers in the Fedora Project are proposing to move all executable files into the /usr/bin directory and their libraries into /usr/lib or /usr/lib64, as needed.
(via Thom Holwerda)
While the BFS scheduler is getting ready to celebrate its second birthday, in just three weeks AMD’s open-source Radeon graphics driver strategy for Linux will be turning four years old. It was on the 6th of September in 2007 that I exclusively broke the news to the world on AMD’s open-source strategy, which has ended up being a game-changer in the Linux world. AMD continues to support open-source hardware enablement on their latest graphics processors and recently even hired more developers to work on the code and documentation. How far have they come though in four years?
(via OSNews)
Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) creates a secure end node from trusted media on almost any Intel-based computer (PC or Mac). LPS boots a thin Linux operating system from a CD or USB flash stick without mounting a local hard drive. Administrator privileges are not required; nothing is installed. The ATSPI Technology Office created the LPS family to address particular use cases. LPS-Public is a safer, general-purpose solution for using web-based applications. The accredited LPS-Remote Access is only for accessing your organization’s private network.
This is pretty beastly.
The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn’t have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system’s core—2.6.20—runs on the foundation.
That’s what Scott Gilbertson of The Register claims in a searing review. It seems that Unity, much like KDE 4.0, is not quite ready for prime time.
Luckily, as Gilbertson and several others point out, Ubuntu still offers a “Classic” option with the old Gnome 2.x desktop environment.
That’s not to say there isn’t much to love in Ubuntu 11.04 with the new Unity Interface being the primary news, but even for a beta this release is way too rough. Unity - regardless of what you think of it - isn’t ready for prime time and it seems unlikely Canonical will iron out all its problems before the planned final release in April.
That’s pretty darn cool.
I’ve been ragging on GNOME a little bit lately, so let’s balance things out by talking about something I found quite fascinating: the Gtk HTML back-end. This will enable you to run any Gtk -application inside Firefox 4.0 (only Firefox 4.0 is supported at the moment).
According to Thom Holwerda, representatives from Debian, Fedora, Mageia, Mandriva, RedHat, openSUSE, and Ubuntu met at the SUSE headquarters to discuss a universal Linux installer.
There have, of course, been two main ways to publish a program for Linux users. One is to use a .tar.gz source or binary, which usually leaves novice users confused and advanced users angry at the messy structure. The other is to try and write a package for every major packaging system (often confusing users who never learned what a “distribution” is… or how they could install a Debian package on an Ubuntu machine). This new store, “AppStream”, may change all that.
Interesting choice. As Shuttleworth notes, a huge issue with Qt apps in Ubuntu have been the inability to integrate with Gnome’s system settings. It looks like Canonical is providing a remedy in the form of Qt dconf bindings.
As part of our planning for Natty+1, we’ll need to find some space on the CD for Qt libraries, and we will evaluate applications developed with Qt for inclusion on the CD and default install of Ubuntu.
(via Thom Holwerda)
