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Comment Beware EFI (Score 1) 260

by ah42 (#42223403) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Laptop With Decent Linux Graphics Support?

I just bought a laptop myself (MSI-GT70), and the hardware (as far as I can tell) worked flawlessly with linux (even Optimus, see my above comment about bumblebee).

However, the major stumbling block was EFI and Windows Dual-Boot (I have my reasons):
No matter how I tried, I could not get any EFI bootloader to boot linux. I could get grub-efi, efi-shell, elilo, to all boot themselves, but none of them are able to boot the kernel. So I must use linux in Legacy (BIOS) mode.

Since windows is pre-installed, and the new recovery system isn't actually a proper installer (as far as I can tell. I haven't wanted to risk wiping the installation to test...), I must continue to boot windows in EFI mode.

So now my dual boot menu is actually chenging between BIOS and EFI, instead of choosing an option from the grub menu.

Comment Re:It's a very sad thing to admit, but (Score 2) 260

by ah42 (#42223387) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Laptop With Decent Linux Graphics Support?

I honestly have to agree with the ease of setting up Bumblebee. When I bought my current laptop online, it was advertised as nVidia graphics, and nowhere did it mention intel... so I was disappointed (and quite confused) to find X using the intel driver. I had never heard of this Optimus thing, and 5 minutes later, I had bumblebee installed, and running.

https://launchpad.net/~bumblebee/+archive/stable
Graphics

Submission + - Nvidia Unveils Ultra-Efficient Kepler GPU

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Nvidia unveiled it's latest flagship graphics processing unit, the GeForce GTX 680. According to the company GeForce GTX 680 blazes through the latest titles faster than AMD's top-of-the-line Radeon HD 7970. The new architecture, codenamed "Kepler," revolves around what's dubbed an SMX, with control logic plus 192 cores—more than enough to offset the power-saving move of running at 1x graphics clock instead of 2x. The GeForce GTX 680 features eight SMX blocks (1,536 cores) running at 1,006MHz; 128 texture units; eight geometry units; four raster units; and 32 ROP units.
Games

Submission + - Nvidia's Fermi GPU architecture makes its debut (techreport.com)

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: Fermi is here. Nvidia has lifted the curtain on reviews of its latest GPU architecture, which will be available first in the high-end GeForce GTX 680 graphics card. The underlying GK104 processor is much smaller than the equivalent AMD GPU, with fewer transistors, a narrower path to memory, and greatly simplified control logic that relies more heavily on Nvidia's compiler software. Despite the modest chip, Nvidia's new architecture is efficient enough that The Tech Report, PC Perspective, and AnandTech all found the GeForce GTX 680's gaming performance to be largely comparable to AMD's fastest Radeon, which costs $50 more. The GTX 680 also offers other notable perks, like a PCI Express 3.0 interface, dynamic clock scaling, new video encoding tech, and a smarter vsync mechanism. It's rather power-efficient, too, but the decision to focus on graphics workloads means the chip won't be as good a fit for Nvidia's compute-centric Tesla products. A bigger GPU based on the Kepler architecture is expected to serve that market.

Comment News from Seti@Home (Score 4, Informative) 248

by ah42 (#36135664) Attached to: Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins

From the relevant thread over at Seti@Home:

"Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field. " - Eric Korpela
The Internet

AT&T Suggests To 300K Employees To Lobby the FCC 239

Posted by kdawson from the call-your-uncle-sam dept.
Several readers sent in the news that AT&T's top lobbyist sent a letter to all 300,000 employees urging them to give feedback to the FCC as it gears up for rulemaking on net neutrality. He even supplied talking points approved by the PR department. The lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, suggested that employees use their personal email accounts when they weigh in with the FCC. Pro-net-neutrality group Free Press has now likened Cicconi's letter to astroturfing: "Coming from one of the company’s most senior executives, it’s hard to imagine AT&T employees thinking the memo was merely a suggestion."
The Internet

Submission + - Does P2P Streaming Media Have a Future? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
shadowmage13
shadowmage13 writes: "After reading that streaming will overtake downloads, at least in music, my interest in P2P internet radio/TV has been rekindled. Years ago, there were a couple of projects showing promise, but today IceShare, PeerCast, and FreeCast have all been inactive for a long time. There are obviously technical limitations that make P2P media streaming difficult, but proprietary options exist, and I just don't see the technology taking off without an open source solution. I always thought this had a lot of potential. What happened to these projects, are there others, and does this have a future?"

Comment Re:ubuntu trouble (Score 1) 655

by ah42 (#28104741) Attached to: Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?

If it's the same bug I kept hitting, try this:

edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules to include on a line by itself "ac" and then run: update-initramfs -c -k all

Short version: if the ac module is loaded, it boots fine. Something wonky in ACPI. This worked for me in 8.10, at least.

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