Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 7, 2011
by sjvn01
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Broadcom (Yes, Broadcom) joins the Linux Foundation

A major pain point for Linux desktop users over the years has been a lack of Wi-Fi chipset support. That’s been changing for the better over the last few years, but I still find it a little amazing that on Monday, January 10th, the Linux Foundation will announce that Broadcom, yes Broadcom, will be joining the Foundation.

You see, for years, Linux notebook users have had a hate-hate relationship with Broadcom. While Atheros and Intel provided Linux Wi-FI drivers and code, Broadcom did little to nothing for Linux users. Broadcom started changing its ways in 2007 and started offering more and more support for Linux. Then, in September 2010, Broadcom released the source code for the “initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for its latest generation of 11n chipsets.”

Since then, that driver has been integrated into the latest Linux kernel release 2.6.37 and, as a result, is actively being improved upon by the entire Linux community. Even so, for Broadcom, with its vast portfolio of semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, to join the Linux Foundation is a surprise. It’s also a very pleasant one.

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January 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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Qualcomm & Atheros: The Marriage of 4G and Wi-Fi

The biggest technology news this week didn’t come from CES in Las Vegas. No, the biggest news story was that Qualcomm, a major mobile phone radio silicon player, is buying Atheros, one of the leading lights of Wi-Fi silicon. Put them together and what do you get? I’ll tell you what you get; you eventually get PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, whatever, that can cheaply connect with both 4G and Wi-Fi networks.

Universal connectivity is one of the big CES themes. As NPR’s Laura Sydell said she’d seen “more Internet-connected devices than I’ve ever seen [before] at CES and some of them are talking to one another.” Of course, people at CES are also seeing how all this connectivity can fail, and I mean really fail as Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be “happy” to tell you all about that.

Besides there just not being enough bandwidth to go around at CES, one of the things they’re not telling you at CES is how hard it is to put all that 3G, 4G and wireless technology into a single device. That’s why I thought the news that Sierra Wireless bringing ready to go 4G for device OEMs was noteworthy news. This isn’t easy to do.

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January 6, 2011
by sjvn01
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New OpenSUSE Foundation will still be dominated by Novell

One of the questions that has yet to be completely answered by Attachmate’s pending acquisition of Novell is what will happen to its associated community Linux, openSUSE. Some people in the open-source community, including my friends, Pamela Jones of Groklaw and Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, a founding partner at the law-firm, Gesmer Updegrove, are concerned that Attachmate/Novell will be calling the shots in the post-buyout openSUSE.

Much as I hate to disagree with two people I respect and like so much, I don’t see why they think that there’s a big deal is here.

Jones points out that “There’s more than one stakeholder in the OpenSUSE foundation being set up, and you’ll see that discussed in the log. Trademarks have economic value, and if the community is helping in building that value, I think it’s logical that they should gain a share of ownership rights so as to get some share in that value and some say in what happens with the trademark.”

She’s right, of course. The other stakeholders should get something more than a virtual pat on the head, but they won’t. This was also the case before Attachmate arrived on the scene. When push came to shove Novell has controlled openSUSE since the day it was first spun out.

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January 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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LibreOffice: Ready for Liftoff

LibreOffice, the Oracle-free fork of the OpenOffice office suite, may, or may not, end up being the default office suite in Ubuntu, but its first release is almost here.

Before getting into that though, there have been rumors running around that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, had already committed to using LibreOffice in its next release, Ubuntu 11.04. True, Ubuntu has always been interested in replacing OpenOffice with LibreOffice Indeed, Mark Shuttleworth told me back when LibreOffice was starting to break away from OpenOffice that, “The Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. That’s not the same thing though as saying it’s going to ship in Ubuntu 11.04.

Earlier today, Rick Spencer, Ubuntu’s Engineering Director, told me that “The Ubuntu desktop team and the community are making a final call on whether to go with Libre or OO.org at the Ubuntu/Linaro Rally scheduled for Dallas next week and assuming a decision is reached there we will confirm it at that point. The informal mail post sent by Matthias, one of our developers was simply pointing out the options available, not confirming a decision.”

No matter what Ubuntu may, or may not, do though LibreOffice is on its way to its first release.

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January 5, 2011
by sjvn01
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CES: Here comes 4G for your Laptop

4G broadband technology has taken its own sweet time to reach users, and while a few would argue that we still don’t have 4G, the ITU has finally admitted that WiMAX, LTE, and HSPA+ do indeed deliver 4G speeds.

Call it what you will, T-Mobile’s Evolved High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA+) network supports simultaneous voice and data with download speeds in the 5-10Megabits per second (Mbps) range and upload speeds in the 5-7Mbps range. Verizon’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) answers this with 5 to 12Mbps downloads and 5Mpbs uploads. And, even Sprint’s troubled WiMAX network has download speeds in the 6-8Mbps range with 2-4Mbps upload speeds.

Of course, what you’ll see with your 4G smartphone depends on what the 4G infrastructure is like in your area. In some places at least, WiMAX is already fast enough to be considered a last-mile replacement for cable or DSL.

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January 4, 2011
by sjvn01
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Two Android Operating Systems!?

I already think there are too many different versions of Android and associated software stacks for Android’s long-term good, then I read that Google may be supporting be supporting “two parallel [Android] software paths for tablets.” Ack! No! Just no!

It seems that the forthcoming Android Honeycomb will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, such as the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip, to work. I can buy that. It’s tough luck for anyone using a Samsung Galaxy Tab or a Dell Streak, but that’s life on the bleeding edge of technology.

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