i-neo - Slashdot User

Comment: How to step down as a maintainer ? (Score 1) 909

by i-neo on Friday July 31 2009, @06:13AM (#28894283) Attached to: Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — "I've Had Enough"

The most interesting point is missing from the article quote: a patch was provided by Alan Cox to commit his decision:

--- MAINTAINERS~ 2009-07-23 15:36:41.000000000 +0100
+++ MAINTAINERS 2009-07-28 20:09:32.200685827 +0100
@@ -5815,10 +5815,7 @@
S: Maintained

TTY LAYER
-P: Alan Cox
-M: alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
-S: Maintained
-T: stgit http://zeniv.linux.org.uk/~alan/ttydev/
+S: Unmaintained
F: drivers/char/tty_*
F: drivers/serial/serial_core.c
F: include/linux/serial_core.h

It is pretty explicit, maybe more than words.
It's a sad that such conflicts happen, but its usual in larger projects.
Sometimes the LKML and Linus especially lack the delicatness to say things,
even if they may be right, saying things in a way that do not offend people
is often the best way to keep their attention and motivate them going toward
the direction wished.

Let's hope Alan will continue its work on other areas for the benefits of the community.

Intel GMA500 graphic and Linux 0

Submitted by i-neo on Tuesday May 12 2009, @08:47AM

i-neo writes "You have probably already heard of the Intel GMA 500 graphic chipset that is integrated in the Poulsbo chipsets (UL11L, US15L, US15W). In fact it is commonly found in netbooks such as Sony's VAIO P series, Dell's Inspiron Mini Series 12, and Acer's Aspire One 751.

One great thing about it is that it provides great features for a low power consumption.

Unfortunately there is little support for the graphic driver on Intel side. Since the GMA 500 is specific, it cannot benefits the unified drivers developed by Intel. On Windows XP you will have to install a specific driver (read not installed by default) to unleash the power of your graphic card, you might then be able to view 1080p movies on your netbook (geek knows why ;) ).
But on Linux there is simply no support, so your best chance to have a GUI is to use the VESA Xorg driver... This article details the issues.

I am really surprised to see so little support for this graphic card on Linux since Linux is the OS of choice for embedded system such as netbooks. There are some binary blobs available for older Xorg / kernels, but they do not work anymore.

The goal of this story is to give more visibility on the Poulsbo / GMA 500 support issue on the manufacturer side as well as on the customer side. When you choose a netbook, it may be an important criteria if you intend to use Linux. A few customers have already began regrouping in this facebook group to highlight the problem.

So what is Intel waiting for to provide proper support for this graphic chipset ? Is it due to licensing issues with PowerVR ?"

Latest EVE Online Patch Destroys Windows Systems 0

Submitted by Smoke2Joints on Thursday December 06 2007, @03:06AM

Smoke2Joints writes "The latest EVE patch is a big expansion of the game, introducing new environments, missions, ships, an overhauled graphics engine supporting DX10 effects, deleting your system boot.ini file, numerous bugfi- hold on, what? Apparently they have withdrawn graphics update patch because a vast crowd of people have been unable to boot up again after applying the patch. Vista is apparently unaffected, but XP users and below have had a nasty present left for them. Official statement here. Nice work guys."

Linus on Linux-> 0

Submitted by aerthling on Wednesday August 22 2007, @09:45AM

aerthling writes "APC Magazine has an interview with Linus about his kernel's versioning scheme, his view on the impact it has had, his personal hobbies, and most importantly, which distributions he runs at home.

Funnily enough, the only distributions I tend to refuse to touch are the "technical" ones, so I've never run Debian, because as far as I'm concerned, the whole and only point of a distribution is to make it easy to install (so that I can then get to the part I care about, namely the kernel), so Debian or one of the "compile everything by hand" ones simply weren't interesting to me.
"
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PSP custom firmware team fights back against theft 0

Submitted by Brianech on Wednesday August 22 2007, @02:37AM

Brianech writes "What happens when a a website steals credit for a software release, and the release team makes modifications to recent revisions to prevent such theft at the cost of end user? In recent days M33, a PSP custom firmware team, modified their firmware to include an encryption scheme based off of the md5 hash. This was done to prevent sites, namely PS3News.com (WARNING:A LOT OF ADS) from editing their release. The problem was that once the ps3news did edit the firmware, it became useless, and resulted in the site's user's PSP's being "bricked," a term to describe a nearly ruined PSP. The debate over whether the action taken by the M33 team was ethical is raging on in PSP community sites such as PSP Hacks , and MaxConsole . The M33 team also included the name of the owner of ps3news.com site, and the name and home address of the person who receives advertising payments from the site, in their firmware's readme file. They also included a warning not download the firware from the above mentioned site, along with accusations that ps3news.com posted IP addresses and full names of well known PSP hackers Lan.st . These accusations can no longer be validated as ps3news have taken their PSP forums and files offline for the time being."

Microsoft gets company's code-signing cert revoked 0

Submitted by Beryllium Sphere(tm) on Tuesday August 21 2007, @01:48AM

Beryllium Sphere(tm) writes "Australian firm Linchpin Labs released a free tool called Atsiv on July 20 to allow 64-bit Vista users to install unsigned drivers.

It was a simple hack: a signed driver that could install other drivers without checking their signatures.

By August 2, Microsoft had persuaded Verisign to revoke Linchpin's code signing certificate. The revocation takes effect the next time a computer is rebooted.

Scott Field of Microsoft said "Microsoft is committed to protecting its customers from potential as well as actual security threads[sic]".

History buffs may remember a similar incident from 1997 in which the author of an ActiveX control to shut down a computer found his certificate revoked.

Lockergnome coverage of the Linchpin Labs story.
Microsoft announcement of revoking Linchpin's certificate and adding them to the blacklist in Windows Defender as "potentially unwanted software"."

Flash Player 9 Gets H.264 Support-> 0

Submitted by

ReadWriteWeb

on Tuesday August 21 2007, @01:47AM

ReadWriteWeb writes "Adobe announced today the latest version of its near ubiquitous Web video software, Adobe Flash Player 9. It's codenamed Moviestar, because it includes H.264 standard video support — the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players. In other words, the quality of video has been substantially improved from the previous version of Flash Player 9. Also added to the mix is High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support and "hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback".

Adobe claims that these advancements will extend their leadership position in web video "by enabling the delivery of HD television quality and premium audio content"."
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Ingmar Bergman dead 0

Submitted by

mernil

on Monday July 30 2007, @04:59AM

mernil writes "Legendary Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman has died at the age of 89. He died on Monday morning at his home on the island of Fårö, his daughter Eva Bergman told news agency TT. Bergman won three Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, for The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly and Fanny and Alexander. He also won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, presented at the 1971 Oscars ceremony."

Intel open sources multicore programming tool-> 0

Submitted by

Tech.Luver

on Tuesday July 24 2007, @11:47PM

Tech.Luver writes "From:: Tech Luver :: Jon Stokes at ARSTechnica writes: ( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070724-inte l-open-sources-multicore-programming-tool.html ) " Intel announced today that they're open-sourcing their cross-platform Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) template library. While the company contributes code to open-source project like the Linux kernel and drivers, the opening of TBB marks the first time that Intel has taken a commercial tool and open-sourced it, making it Intel's largest open-source commitment to date. The aim of TBB, is to make it easier for coders in C++ to express task-level parallelism. TBB works by abstracting parallelism above the level that most programmers are currently used to, especially those coders who use POSIX or Windows threads. ""
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Blackberry ban for the French Cabinet->

Submitted by on Wednesday June 20 2007, @03:24AM

An anonymous reader writes "The Financial times reports that members of the new French cabinet have been told to stop using their BlackBerries because there is "a very real risk of interception" by third parties, i.e. the NSA. Members of some French government departments had still been using the devices in secret despite an earlier ban."
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