Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

Free Ultimate Game Card Generator – Video


Free Ultimate Game Card Generator
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Free Ultimate Game Card Generator - Video

Free Software Incentive – Video


Free Software Incentive
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Free Software Incentive - Video

AMD joins LibreOffice, adds GPU grunt to free software suite

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LibreOffice, the open source office suite created by disaffected Oracle developers, has signed up Advanced Micro Devices to the free software cause and plans to add the chip company's GPU acceleration system to the code base.

The Document Foundation (TDF), which produces LibreOffice, already has Intel on-side for silicon and financial support, but the addition of AMD is designed to use the firm's graphics processing engine to speed up spreadsheet calculations in particular, which will come as welcome news to users who have complained that the Calc app was too slow.

"It is great to work on LibreOffice with The Document Foundation to expose the raw power of AMD GPUs and APUs, initially to spreadsheet users," said Manju Hegde, VP of heterogeneous solutions at AMD, in a statement.

"Bringing the parallelism and performance of our technology to traditional, mainstream business software users will be a welcome innovation for heavy duty spreadsheet users, particularly when combined with the compute capabilities of the upcoming generation of AMD Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) based products."

The HSA approach allows software to switch between CPU and GPU to get maximum grunt as needed by putting them on the same processor package (where possible) and sharing the same access to memory for more seamless linkage. AMD already has open source optimization tools for OpenC, Python, Java, JavaScript, and C++ AMP to use the system.

"It is exciting to work together with AMD and their ecosystem to take advantage of AMD's cutting edge innovation right inside LibreOffice," said Michael Meeks, TDF board member. "The growth in performance and is something we're eager to expose to LibreOffice users."

The AMD announcement is another round of good news for the open source rebels. After Oracle showed less-than-enthusiastic support for the OpenOffice project it inherited from Sun Microsystems, the TDF was formed as a fork and has been growing fast with multiple revisions to the install code and plans for an extension into Android, iOS, and the cloud underway.

OpenOffice development, meanwhile, has languished as a part of the strife, with Oracle offloading the code onto the Apache Software Foundation as soon as possible. It has been named a Top-Level Project by the ASF and the team tells El Reg it'll publish when the software is good enough.

There's still a large OpenOffice user base, but the increasing industry support for LibreOffice has got to be worrying for the original squad.

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AMD joins LibreOffice, adds GPU grunt to free software suite

UPDATED: GAME actively promoting Ouya’s SNES emulation

Retailer GAME has chosen to highlight Ouyas emulation functionality as part of its promotion for the console.

GAMEs Ouya splash page features, amongst other things, the logo for popular SNES emulator Super GNES. The free software allows users to run any game for which they have downloaded a ROM (a digital copy of a game).

The legality of emulation has always been an area of debate, although most would accept that whilst the development and ownership of emulator software itself is legal, providing and obtaining game ROMs is certainly not.

Why should it matter that Ouya potentially allows players free access to twenty year old games? Because Nintendo is still in the business of selling that software via the Virtual Console.

In fact, no-one is as accomplished the art of re-selling its software to the same users multiple times.

At a time when GAME is significantly reducing its Wii U and Wii shelf space across its UK stores, this move is unlikely to improve relations between the pair.

UPDATE: The Ouya page on GAMEs website no longer carries the Super GNES branding.

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UPDATED: GAME actively promoting Ouya's SNES emulation

Free, as in Freedom

Dell has long been one of the most Linux-friendly PC manufacturers. But with its project Sputnik, Dell has really embraced open source software in a way unique to all PC makers. Sputnik is the nickname for Dells newest Linux laptop the XPS 13 Developer Edition, a sleek ultrabook that runs Ubuntu out of the box.

If the idea of running Linux full-time is foreign or novel to you, this is not the laptop for you. Likewise, if youre of the opinion that Linux on the desktop just isnt ready for everyday use, then this is not the laptop for you. Its also not the laptop for the Linux geek who scoffs at everything but Arch and loves to search out obscure hardware drivers.

Dells newest Linux laptop is a sleek ultrabook that runs Ubuntu out of the box.

The XPS 13 Developer Edition is aimed squarely at people already working in Linux and already comfortable with the platform, but whod rather do without all the fiddling. Dell is trying to create a computer where everything just works Linux without the tedious process of getting all your hardware humming perfectly.

And Im happy to say that Dell has pulled it off. Out of the box, Ubuntu 12.04 does indeed just work. In fact, everything just works trackpad, keyboard backlight, function keys and all the other little bits that sometimes require extra tweaks, even in Ubuntu.

That said, there are some hardware shortcomings that may give you pause. The ultrabook features hardware from the higher end of the XPS line 8GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD, Intel HD Graphics 4000 and a Intel i7-3537U CPU that clocks in at 2.00Gz. Following Apples lead, none of that hardware is upgradeable. And while the specs are respectable, many developers may want more RAM and perhaps a larger storage drive, neither of which are currently available in the developer edition. The screen is also glossy Gorilla Glass which makes it strong, but prone to glare. There is no matte option.

The real hardware disappointment though is the lack of ports just two USB ports, a DisplayPort and a headphone jack. Theres no SD slot. A $5 USB SD card reader fixes that, but it eats up a precious USB port and frankly, for a laptop priced north of $1,500, there should be a third USB port. Even my Asus netbook manages to pack in three USB ports.

The other major issue in my testing was Wi-Fi. Dells wireless card works just fine in Ubuntu, but reception was terrible. Where my MacBook Pro, Asus netbook and iPad would all pull four bars, the Dell never managed to top two. Worse, in places the others had only two bars, the XPS failed to connect at all. A bit of research revealed that this is an issue across the XPS line, likely a result of construction materials and antenna location rather a problem with Ubuntu, but its definitely a snag. If you travel a lot and frequently have to connect to weak Wi-Fi signals, the XPS is probably not the best choice.

On the plus side, battery life was good. During casual use web surfing, half a dozen tmux panes and a virtual machine running the XPS will last about 5 to 5.5 hours, provided you dim the screen a bit (and you can dim the screen to about 50 percent brightness and still see everything just fine). More intensive tasks like compiling software will obviously eat up battery life much faster. Suffice to say that battery life is pretty good for a Linux machine, and if youre willing to dive deep into the power management config files you can probably coax even more out of it.

The first thing I did when the XPS arrived was upgrade Ubuntu, first to 12.10 and then to the just released 13.04. As with nearly every company that works with Ubuntu, Dell is sticking with Canonicals Long Term Support releases, which lag a bit behind the Ubuntu mainline. Most of Dells customizations (more on those in a minute) have since made it into the Linux kernel proper, so all the XPSs hardware worked just fine with Ubuntu 13.04. But personally I found nothing particularly compelling about the latest release, so I restored to the more stable 12.04 release using the built-in 4GB recovery partition, which made things fast and painless.

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Free, as in Freedom