The Blog

In addition to yesterday’s release of Half-Life for Linux, Counter-Strike 1.6 was added to the Steam CDR as another game that Valve Software is making natively available for Linux. Counter-Strike 1.6 came back in 2000 and while there’s Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the original CS remains an extremely popular first-person shooter. The Linux port of Counter-Strike is currently … Read More

And now we come to my favorite part of this series, high-end Linux audio production. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: stable, efficient, and you don’t get gouged for software licenses. You have to be careful to select audio hardware that is well-supported on Linux, but this is less of a problem than it used to be. … Read More

As the next chapter after the Fedora 17 vs. Fedora 18 benchmarks for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, here are benchmarks comparing Fedora 18 to Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 13.04 on two separate PCs. The performance between the latest Fedora and Ubuntu Linux releases aren’t incredibly surprising with many of the key components being the same (or similar) versions, … Read More

Genetic and binary code. Image courtesy of artida / shutterstock DNA is the building block of life, but in the future it may also be the standard repository for encyclopedias, music and other digital data. Scientists announced yesterday that they successfully converted 739 kilobytes of hard drive data in genetic code and then retrieved the content with 100 percent accuracy. … Read More

DcData through its strategic alignment with Cloud9 Services, now proudly offers Sage in the cloud to expand on their growing list of cloud-based services. Sage ERP X3 is a Web / Cloud based all in one ERP/CRM and is the right, proven solution for mid-market customers with international ambitions and multi-national requirements. Sage ERP X3 technology is available on all … Read More

There was a time in computing when performance increases could be had by designing a more complex processor or turning up the clock speed. Those days are largely behind us and the most common solution at present is to add more cores to a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system, but this has practical scaling limits and there are downsides to a … Read More

Fedora has always intrigued me to keep track of the latest happenings in the Linux world and especially what’s brewing at the RHEL stable! Also, if I think of a comparable distro to Ubuntu, Fedora is the only legitimate choice! Just like Ubuntu, Fedora also inspires innumerable spins (like Kororaa, Fuduntu, of which I am a big fan now!). So, … Read More

VMware has invested $30 million in Puppet Labs, makers of the open source configuration and management framework Puppet and its commercial version Puppet Enterprise. This gives VMware the lion’s share of venture capital (VC) investment in the company which, in total, has $46 million of VC money backing it. The move comes six weeks after VMware’s parent, EMC, announced a … Read More

  After news of its development throughout all of last year, Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform for smartphones has made an official debut on two phones that will ship to developers working on apps. The phones will ship to developers in February, but won’t become available to everybody until later this year. As we’ve reported, Mozilla is primarily targeting emerging markets … Read More

There may be considerable debate over what, exactly, constitutes an “open cloud,” but open source software is frequently considered an important part of it. Cost, customizability, transparency and collaborative development are all among the benefits typically attributed to the use of such software in the cloud, and recently hosting provider Rackspace suggested another one: innovation. “Using open source cloud technology … Read More

OpenXC will set the hacker community loose on Ford’s car computer systems – expect a host of apps to improve vehicles’ performance and efficiency MIRROR, signal, manoeuvre – now set your engine to “supercar”. Car maker Ford has just released OpenXC – an open-source hardware and software toolkit that will let the hacker community play around with the computer systems … Read More

Slowly but steadily, the Pwn2Own hacker contest has become an important fixture in the world of testing the security of software applications, operating systems and hardware devices. The computer hacking contest is held annually and gets sponsored by titan-sized technology companies. Last year, we reported on how a group of French hackers won cash prizes in the competition for uncovering … Read More

Linux now supports F2fs, a filesystem that is specially designed for storage media with flash chips. The developers say that Btrfs is now faster to complete certain tasks and that Ext4 is more efficient when handling small files. On Friday, Linus Torvalds made available the fourth release candidate of Linux 3.8. Torvalds called on developers to test the RC and … Read More

There is far more to multi-media production on Linux than GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), the beloved drawing and painting program, though it seems that is all there is because it gets all the attention. GIMP is wonderful, but there is an entire universe of profession-level multi-media creation applications in all creative arenas: drawing and illustration, photography, desktop publishing, music, … Read More

If you consider NetApplications’ data set, then Linux owns only about 1 percent of the desktop OS market and Windows has almost 92 percent. But if you consider all computing platforms, including mobile, than Windows has only 20 percent and Linux has 42 percent – and that would be in the form of Google’s Android alone.Goldman Sachs recently published a … Read More