Hasta La Gadget!

Linux wizard Michael Larabel has been marking his benches over at Phoronix and in the process he’s proved that the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual processor — currently found in some of our favorite tablets and budget notebooks — is remarkably nifty with Ubuntu. The chip, which contains two Cortex-A15 cores clocked at 1.7GHz and a Mali-T604 GPU, was stacked up against the A9-based Tegra 3 from NVIDIA plus a few Intel Atoms to represent the x86 side of things. Although the various test rigs couldn’t be totally spec-matched in terms of RAM and storage, the scores were focused on pure computational grunt and they gave Samsung’s SoC a “surprising” lead. Check out the source link below and you’ll see that the majority of the graphs look similar to the one above, with the two weaker Atoms and the aging Tegra 3 being left for dust and only the Core i3, with its much higher wattage, being able to keep that Exynos ego in check — at least until the eight-core version gets here.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Samsung

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Source: Phoronix

We hope you weren’t getting settled in with OpenELEC 2.0. Hot on the heels of the finished 2.0 release, the developement team has pushed out a first beta of OpenELEC 3.0 that folds XBMC 12.0 Frodo into the Linux distribution for home theater PCs. Accordingly, most of the additions are those that come with XBMC’s code base: OpenELEC now supports ARM through the Raspberry Pi, betters its DVR support and slips in a modern audio engine. The distro-specific changes bring an update to the Linux 3.6 kernel, many more hardware drivers and an option to boot to RAM instead of a pokey hard drive. Running one beta based on another carries more than its share of risk, so be careful; if the positives for your living room continue to outweigh the pitfalls, 3.0 awaits at the source link.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Software, HD

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Source: OpenELEC

Not everyone is super happy with Canonical and the direction it has taken Ubuntu in. Sure, its popularity continues growing, but so does that of an upstart distro called Mint. In addition to swapping purples for greens, Linux Mint ditches the controversial Unity in favor of MATE and Cinnamon, its two GNOME-based desktop environments. With the move to version 14, code named Nadia, the codebase of Mint has caught up to Quantal and its accompanying desktops have received some minor improvements. The MDM display manager has also been updated, with support for user photos and themes added. The most welcome change is certainly to the package manager, which finally runs as root — meaning users no longer have to enter their password for every piece of software they install. To download and try out Linux Mint 14 for yourself hit up the source link.

Filed under: Software

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Via: Ars Technica

Source: Linux Mint

It’s something that has grieved users for years – the inability to watch Netflix on Ubuntu. Many users have created complicated, and often faulty, ways around the restriction, often going the virtual operating system route. Now Ubuntu users can watch Netflix directly by setting up Firefox and Microsoft Silverlight.

The process isn’t as simple as downloading a couple items and opening your browser. Users will have to use a custom version of WINE that makes it possible to use patches necessary for the entire method to work. So far, this works well with 32-bit varieties of the Ubuntu distro, having been tested on 12.20. If you’re using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu, you’re advised to wait for the PPA release, which is “coming soon.”

Although you have to do quite a bit of compiling, the process is fairly simple and straight forward. If you can’t handle waiting for the PPA to be released, you can do it all manually in the terminal. The process starts by downloading the WINE source (backup your WINE data first), then applying the various patches, of which there are five parts.

At this point, it’s all just a matter of compiling, which, as iHeart Ubuntu reports, can take a long time. During the compiling process, you’ll end up downloading “libfreetype6-dev,” followed next by the man of the hour, Microsoft Silverlight. As of right now, Silverlight 5 does not work, forcing users to use Silverlight 4 instead. Once Firefox and Silverlight are installed, running Netflix is as simple as opening your web browser.

[via iHeart Ubuntu]

Ubuntu gains unofficial Netflix support, PPA coming soon is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve had the chance to experiment with early versions of Firefox OS for awhile — just not in Firefox the browser, where you’d nearly expect it to have shown first. At least one person appreciates that seemingly natural fit. A new Firefox OS simulator add-on, r2d2b2g, lets us try Mozilla’s upcoming mobile platform from within the company’s own browser for everything that doesn’t depend on native hardware, including the browser and Firefox Marketplace. The goal is ostensibly to let developers test truly optimized web apps, although the simulator is also a good excuse for the curious to try Firefox OS without the hassle of a dedicated client or a real smartphone. If you can get by the early state of the simulator and the Xzibit jokes that come with putting Firefox on your Firefox, the extension is already providing a glimpse of a web-focused mobile future to Linux, Mac and Windows users at the source below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software, Mobile

Firefox browser add-on lets us try Firefox OS in an all-Mozilla universe originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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