LWN.net featured content

[$] Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

corbet — 2012-05-28T16:53:17+00:00

Projects the size of LibreOffice often tend to get a little unwieldy; the size of the code is such that even seemingly trivial tasks like removing dead code can take a long time. Considering the sheer size of the project and the fact that its copyright ownership is distributed, it would be natural to doubt the sanity of anybody proposing to simultaneously move 1.5 years worth of work to a new base and adopt a new license. But that is just what LibreOffice has in mind. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 24, 2012

corbet — 2012-05-24T01:24:34+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 24, 2012 is available.

[$] A uTouch architecture introduction

corbet — 2012-05-22T19:50:36+00:00

As the Linux desktop increases in popularity, the user interface experience has become increasingly important. For example, most laptops today have multitouch capabilities that have yet to be fully exposed and exploited in the free software ecosystem. Soon we will be carrying around multitouch tablets with a traditional Linux desktop or similar foundation. In order to provide a high-quality and rich experience we must fully exploit multitouch gestures. The uTouch stack developed by Canonical aims to provide a foundation for gestures on the Linux desktop.

Click below (subscribers only) for an overview of the architecture of uTouch contributed by uTouch hacker Chase Douglas.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 17, 2012

jake — 2012-05-17T00:41:53+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 17, 2012 is available.

Tasting the Ice Cream Sandwich

corbet — 2012-05-15T20:46:56+00:00

Owners of Android handsets can be forgiven for feeling frustration over how long it took to get an update from the 2.3 "gingerbread" release. Google's flat-out effort to improve tablet support led to a 3.0 ("honeycomb") release that was not deemed suitable for handset use—or for open-source release. It was only with the 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" cycle that all that new code became available for handsets—sort of. Six months after the 4.0 release, your editor finally got his hands on a device that can run it; what follows is a review of sorts.

Highlights from the PostgreSQL 9.2 beta

jake — 2012-05-14T23:08:22+00:00

The PostgreSQL project has just released a beta of its next major version, 9.2. As usual with its annual release, this version includes many new features, most of which are targeted at improving database performance. The developers have been hard at work improving response times, increasing multicore scalability, and providing for more efficient queries on large data. They also found time to include some other major features, so let's explore a few of the things 9.2 beta has to offer.

Guest author Josh Berkus does just that in the full article from this week's edition.

A bcache update

corbet — 2012-05-14T19:36:10+00:00

Bcache is a mechanism for using a solid-state drive as a fast cache for one or more slower drives. LWN last looked at bcache almost two years ago. Since then, the project has been relatively quiet, but development has continued. Click below (subscribers only) for an update on bcache from this week's Kernel Page.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 10, 2012

corbet — 2012-05-10T01:05:07+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 10, 2012 is available.

Accounting systems: a rant and a quest

corbet — 2012-05-08T20:10:52+00:00

Attentive long-time readers of LWN may remember that this business is based entirely on free software with one distressing exception: our business accounting is still done using the proprietary "QuickBooks Pro" package. QuickBooks does not lack for aggravations, but the task of replacing it has never quite attained a high enough priority for something to actually happen. Good replacements in the free software community are hard to come by, accounting is boring, our accountant deals easily (and cheaply) with QuickBooks files, and the existing solution, for the most part, simply works. Or, at least, it used to simply work.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 3, 2012

corbet — 2012-05-03T00:30:49+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 3, 2012 is available.

A report from the Linux Audio Conference

corbet — 2012-05-02T17:47:35+00:00

LWN is pleased to post the first article from our latest guest author: Dave Phillips. Dave writes: "My jet lag is gone, I've finally come back to ground, and at last I can start to sort out my experiences at the 10th annual Linux Audio Conference, held this year at CCRMA, the Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California USA. It was the first time the event had been held in the States, and the organizers obviously intended to make a good impression. I'll cut to the spoiler right now to let you know that they succeeded, with honors." Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

Fixing the unfixable autofs ABI

corbet — 2012-04-30T16:34:26+00:00

One of the few hard rules of kernel development is that breaking the user-space binary interface is not acceptable. If there is user-space code that depends on specific behavior, that behavior must be maintained regardless of how inconvenient that may be. But what is to be done if two different programs depend on mutually-incompatible behaviors, so that it is seemingly impossible to keep them both working? The answer may be to violate another rule by putting an ugly hack into the kernel—or to do something rather more tricky.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full article from this week's Kernel Page.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 26, 2012

jake — 2012-04-26T00:34:53+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 26, 2012 is available.

GCC and static analysis

corbet — 2012-04-21T16:36:49+00:00

Concurrency tends to make programming hard. Kernel development obviously involves dealing with a lot of concurrency, but there is also a lot of multi-threaded user-space development that suffers from the same issues. It would be nice if the computer could help developers avoid race conditions and other problems that arise in concurrent environments. Some developers at Google have been working on just such a project for some time, but they have just relocated the project from GCC to the LLVM Clang compiler, saying that GCC is not suited to the work they want to do. The result has been a sort of wake-up call for GCC developers. Is the GCC compiler suite not well suited to the creation of static analysis tools?

LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 19, 2012

corbet — 2012-04-19T02:54:33+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 19, 2012 is available.

LFCS 2012: The future of GLIBC

jake — 2012-04-18T15:59:23+00:00

The core library that sits between user space and the kernel, the GNU C library (or GLIBC), has undergone some changes recently in its governance, at least partly to make it a more inclusive project. On the last day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Carlos O'Donell gave an update on the project, the way it will be governed moving forward, and its plans for the future. GLIBC founder Roland McGrath was on hand to contribute his thoughts as well. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

Toward more reliable logging

corbet — 2012-04-13T20:06:18+00:00

Messages from the kernel are created by humans, usually using one of the many variants of the printk() function. But, increasingly, those messages are read by machines in the form of log file parsers, automated management systems, and so on. The machines have, for some time, struggled to make sense out of those human-created messages which, often as not, are unpredictable in their organization, lacking important information, and subject to change. So it is not surprising that there has been ongoing interest in adding some structure to kernel log messages; the subject was recently raised by the audience at the Collaboration Summit kernel panel. At about the same time, a new attempt to improve kernel logging was posted to the linux-kernel mailing list; click below (subscribers only) for a report from next week's Kernel Page.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 12, 2012

corbet — 2012-04-12T01:18:55+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 12, 2012 is available.

LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

jake — 2012-04-11T19:18:23+00:00

Keith Packard has been working on the X window system since the early days, but more recently has been doing lots of work to enable its replacement. X has long held the position as the way that graphics is done on Linux (and other Unix) systems, but that is changing. He came to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held April 3-5 in San Francisco, to talk about the Wayland protocol and the Weston server, and how they could interoperate with X. Wayland looks to be an interesting change for desktop graphics on Linux.

LFCS 2012: The kernel panel

jake — 2012-04-11T00:08:33+00:00

On the first day of this year's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, several kernel developers sat down with moderator Greg Kroah-Hartman for another edition of the kernel panel. The developers covered a wide range of kernel subsystems, from graphics and memory management, to storage and networking. As is usual, a lively discussion ensued, covering a number of topical and longtime kernel concerns.

Click below (subscribers only) for LWN's report from the event.