Linux news - Feb 2, 2013

1 Automotive Linux

• The H Online has a post asking what's the next big platform for linux - http://www.h-online.com/open/features/What-s-the-next-big-platform-for-Linux-1794404.html. Its worth a read esp. since its not the Auto Industry's perspective but one from mainstream Linux.

2 Graphics

2.1 QT

• New QT software releases this week. QT5.0.1 released - http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/01/31/qt-5-0-1-released/. At the same time, a new release of QT Creator is available - http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/01/31/qt-creator-2-6-2-released/
• There's a new browser written with QtWebkit for rendering. All the widgets are QT based - QUPZilla. Its lightweight too. -http://www.qupzilla.com
• Finally, QTWayland is in development with a QT native compositor framework. Full code can be accessed fromhttp://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qtwayland

2.2 Enlightenment

• E18 development has started. - http://e18releasemanager.wordpress.com

2.3 Optimus support in Linux

• One annoynance with the latest Dell laptops we have is that Optimus graphics. With Optimus, there are 2 GPUs - Intel GPU and an Nvidia GPU. In BIOS if you don't turn off the Nvidia GPU and you boot linux, then the CPU fan runs continuously. The solution which IT teams give is to turn off the NVidia GPU and only use Intel. But that means you get a very low resolution when running Linux. Dave Arlie (maintainer for DRM) has started looking at this and even has some code which doesn't require you to turn off the NVidia GPU. Details - http://airlied.livejournal.com/76723.html

3 General Software Development

• Raymond Chen has an awesome post on the name 'pivot' and how its used in Microsoft nowadays -http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/01/22/10387008.aspx. We have similar things in all companies too, where we seems to reinventing the wheel by forgetting how things were done 5-10 years back. No prizes for guessing what we are reinventing :-)
• Martin Fowler makes a great point on Internal Programmability -http://martinfowler.com/bliki/InternalReprogrammability.html. Emacs (and Lisp) users nod in agreement!