Fedora 11 on coLinux (fixes)

Recently HenryN (of coLinux) made some minor changes to the Fedora 11 image for coLinux. The new image is available from the coLinux forum at SourceForge or directly from [FedoraPeople] or [MegaUpload] (70.3 MB).

Thanks!

Note: the original image has been replaced by this fixed image. If needed the original image is available upon request. However it should be considered obsolete.

Beijing LUG meeting (8th of September 2009)

Last night I attended a meeting of the Beijing Linux User Group. It was for me the first time I could attend it during my time in Beijing and it is certainly something I will do more often. Every 2nd Tuesday of the month they will have a group meeting in which they will have speakers about a subject. I was lucky to listen to Coly Li and Ulrich Drepper.

Coly Li is a kernel developer who supervised a Google Summer of Code student, YuEr, who ported openSUSE to MIPS. YuEr showed what he had done, the results and the errors still left. He was able to start a X11 session using FVWM on a Gdium (MIPS-based smartbook). For this he had used a cross-platform RPM build environment targeting MIPS and qemu. Amazing results for such a short period he was able to work on it.

Ulrich Drepper gave the same talk as he did at the RedHat Summit in Chicago about 'Acceleration Through Stream Computing'. In this talk he explains how to speed up applications by using vectorization and the vector extensions as provided by SSE. Using templates and partial specialization in C++ it is possible to speed up applications without a lot of changes. The specialized critical code could be altered by experts and just a rebuild would suffice. He explains this for instance with a simple example of a vector scaling and translation... the result speaks for themselves. It was also apparent that Ulrich is not a promoter of CUDA (or even CTM) either. In my opinion they result in vendor-lockin. The alternative to look for is OpenCL...

Overall it was a nice evening. I talked to a talented bunch of 'folklore dancers' wearing T-Shirts. If you ever have the chance to be in Beijing, stop by... you will not regret it.