In the early days of Linux it was possible to do high-quality audio recording, but it was often difficult to set up. Then Ubuntu Studio made it a lot easier. Back in 2000-2002, after studying B2B marketing, I started to work at an engineering office. Aside from marketing and sales stuff, I was in charge of optimizing the number of workstations and licenses to match our real needs and cut costs. We had many expensive CAD workstations that were mainly running Unix at the time, from vendors such as SGI, IBM, and Sun, with costly CATIA, Euclid, and Unigraphics software. read more

In 1998, I was part of SGI when we started moving to open source and open standards, after having been a long-time proprietary company. Since then, other companies also have moved rapidly to working with open source, and the use and adoption of open source technologies has skyrocketed over the past few years. Today company involvement in open source technologies is fairly mature and can be seen in the following trends: read more

Imagination Technologies is announcing that a new MIPS-based development board for IoT is in the works.

A Phoronix reader has exclusively shared with Phoronix a set of SGI marketing tapes that were formerly confidential and deal with "Selling into an NT Environment", among other topics.

The Khronos Group has released the latest version of its OpenGL graphics standard, 20 years after SGI first opened up the code. The latest revision, OpenGL 4.3, adds the ability to harness the GPU for shading and draw commands, ETC2/EAC texture compression is included as standard, and an improved debugging system has been added, along with security enhancements aimed at stopping information leakage between applications.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced in partnership with Ma3bar a series of GNU/Linux "Train-the-Trainer" workshops for Linux professionals from throughout the Middle East on June 9-12 and June 14-17, 2010.

LXer Feature: 07-Jul-2009

In part one we wrote a basic bare bones port check program, in this part of the series we take the next step and fixup a few issues plus begin breaking out the code. This small program is a decent introduction (but definitely not definitive) to network programming.

The short 3D animation movie will be produced by a team of approx 6 people, working at it for at least 6 months.

For anyone with an historical perspective about our industry, the demise of Silicon Graphics Inc. is a scary example of the truism that great technology is no insulation from the changing vagaries of the marketplace. (Also, that iffy business decisions don't help.) Still, remembering the heyday of this one-time maker of the absolute coolest workstations on the planet, it's sad to see it acquired for a paltry $25 million.

For the past month or so I have been reading of the potential acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. I have seen this dubbed as the Blue Sun. After a month of negotations it now looks like this may be a reality. What does the future hold if and when this pushes through? What are we to expect?

LXer Feature: 21-Sept-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have, The Large Hadron Collider survives its first attacks from hackers, 5 Useful Tips to Customize Firefox 3, Android gets closer to being released, Carls Schroder opines on what it means to be a "geek" and University of Santa Barbara researchers show incredibly easy it is to compromise the security on a Sequoia Systems voting machine. Also, 10 things Linux does better than Windows, a Richard Stallman interview, VLC gets a new look and Google Chrome for Linux?

After nine months, an open secret can finally be acknowledged: The OpenGL code that is responsible for 3-D acceleration on GNU/Linux, which was released by SGI in 1999, has been running on licenses that were accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative. Today, however, the FSF has announced that the licenses in question, the SGI Free License B and the GLX Public License, have been rewritten after months of negotiation between the FSF and SGI. The problem is now resolved, and the result is a code contribution that the FSF ranks as one of the greatest given to the community by a proprietary company.

Given the prevalence of DirectX nowadays, we tend to forget that 10 years ago an all-out war was being waged between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics in the field of 3D APIs. The two companies were both trying to win over developers, with Microsoft using its financial muscle and SGI relying on its experience and its reputation in the field of real-time 3D.

Already announced, the new winner is IBM’s RoadRunner – the first supercomputer to break the ‘mythical’ 1 TFop/s barrier. At a recent benchmark, it achieved 1.026 TFop/s on the Linpack benchmark. The OS is yet to be confirmed, but pretty-much every other IBM computer in the list is running a version of SUSE. I’ll be guessing much the same as you! Assuming the remainder of the list looks a lot like the previous list (November 2007), running second and third, we find a couple of IBM Blue Gene systems, then SGI and Hewlett Packard get a look in.

LXer Feature: 10-Jun-2008

In a recent article, Linux File Systems: Ready for the Future?, Henry Newman expands on what he feels are shortcomings in current GNU/Linux filesystems. Specifically, he believes current Linux filesystem technology cannot meet the demands that massive implementations of 100TB or larger require. He states he received some emotional responses trying to either refute his information or impugn his character, although those comments do not show on either of the article's pages. This prompted me to get the real scoop on how Linux filesystem technology is trying to keep pace with the ever-growing need for storage space.

New release of nettest is available. Nettest is a network testing tool originally developed by SGI which I am maintaining out of need.

Bug stamp-out list for March 30, 2007

Bug stamp-out list for March 23, 2007

Bug stamp-out list for March 9, 2007

Bug stamp-out list March 2, 2007

Release-critical Bugreport for February 23, 2007

Bug stamp-out list for February 17, 2007

Bug stamp-out list for February 9, 2007

One of the age-long problems with the Linux operating system was never the lack of functionality but the lack of major commercial applications porting their software to Linux. The movie industry has shown high demand for such software to be ported and, after a long wait, companies such as Autodesk and Softimage have ported fully supported Linux versions of their applications for their dedicated customers.

Bug stamp-out list for January 26, 2007

Bug report for January 19, 2007

Release-critical Bugreport for January 12, 2007

Bug stamp-out list for January 5, 2007

Bug stamp-out list for December 22, 2006

Return values are not just important but as age has taught me - essential. Use return values to your advantage and wrangle them when you can. Breaking things out helps, but making sure you let everyone know that you did break out some code might be just as important.

Bugreport for December 15, 2006

Bugreport for December 8, 2006

Cooperation Aimed at Driving Open Source Adoption.

Bug stamp-out list for December 1, 2006

SGI today announced an order with the U.S. Government for a massive SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 system and maintenance services. The order is the result of SGI's close collaboration with Fed Centric Technologies, a Bethesda, Md.-based company that specializes in supporting the mission-critical applications, infrastructure and professional services requirements of the Department of Defense, intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security and federal law enforcement communities. Powered by 128 Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 9000 Series Processors, the new system features 4TB of globally shared memory running under a single instance of SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell(R).

Bug stamp-out list for November 17, 2006

Bug stampout list November 10, 2006

Release-critical Bugreport for November 3, 2006

Release-critical Bug Report for October 27, 2006

Bug stamp-out list for October 20, 2006

Release-critical Bugreport for October 13, 2006

Release-critical Bugreport for October 6, 2006

In August of this year, SGI announced that they were able to run a single system image of the Linux OS over 1024 processors on an Itanium-based Altix 4700 supercomputer. How was this feat accomplished? This week at the Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo (ICE) in Singapore, Neuner presented a session that described the Linux kernel modification that helped to make this possible. HPCwire caught up with him before the conference to ask him about the Linux improvements and where the future of single system image scalability is headed.

The Jahshaka Project today announces the availability of the OpenLibraries 0.3.0, a powerful, cross-platform set of C++ libraries that provide developers with key components to create, test and deploy rich media applications.

Some bugs have an additional set of tags indicating they only apply to a particular release: O for oldstable (woody), S for stable (sarge), T for testing (etch), U for unstable (sid) or E for experimental. X indicates that the package is not in testing.

Bug report for Debian. Some bugs have an additional set of tags indicating they only apply to a particular release: O for oldstable (woody), S for stable (sarge), T for testing (etch), U for unstable (sid) or E for experimental. X indicates that the package is not in testing.

Cluster Resources, Inc. announced today that TORQUE Resource Manager passed a new milestone in its continued success, reaching 50,000 downloads since August 2005.

Terascale Open-Source Resource and QUEue Manager, more commonly known as TORQUE, is a resource manager derived from the original Open PBS project that provides control over batch jobs and distributed compute nodes. With more than 2,500 patches and enhancements since its release in 2004, TORQUE has incorporated significant advances in the areas of scalability, flexibility, and feature extensions.

Organizations adopting Linux might not abandon Unix entirely. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, has migrated its e-mail system from Sun hardware and Solaris to HP servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But even though the use of Linux on production servers is growing, the practice isn't yet the norm at the laboratory, said Douglas Hughes, a service engineer at JPL Information Services.