Videos in category Operating Systems

In the race to gain desktop acceptance (and mimick as much as possible from the "big" desktops out there - Windows, MacOS-X, etc.), The main desktop players (GNOME and KDE) have also gained weight. A lot of it. Speed of the software has slowed down at the rate hardware has sped up, or even faster. In many cases they no longer fit in the pants people used to wear, and the pants people in develop...

With the increasing popularity of Linux in the embedded, desktop, and server world, HW vendors are jumping on the bandwagon to add support for their devices/chipsets/SOCs to the kernel; however, we in the community keep seeing the same mistakes (both technical and social) being made over and over again. In this talk I will give some examples of what to do if you want your HW to never be support...

Building a self-balancing scooter like the Segway(R) has previously been shown to be "not actually very hard" by Trevor Blackwell. I have replicated his experience by building my own two-wheeled self-balancing ride-on robot using only off-the-shelf parts, and open-source hardware and software. The presentation will go through how my scooter was built and the theory and practicalities of keeping...

This presentation looks at how to develop your own custom microcontroller hardware from scratch. Often laptops and general purpose computers are too powerful and too large to use for simple hardware projects. Often you can perform tasks like controlling DC motors, stepper motors, switches, LCDs, LEDs, buzzers/speakers etc. efficiently and effectively using inexpensive/free microcontrollers. Oth...

Currently, on Linux, a hardware-based timer runs at a set frequency (the famed HZ kernel parameter). With a setting of 200 or sometimes as much as 1000 this means that your laptop is waking up very frequently. This severely reduces the usefulness of power management technologies that put the CPU to sleep when it is idle.The Linux kernel is moving toward becoming tickless. Using its new high pre...

The overview: What records does the NAA preserve? How do digital records fit in? Why do we need to do 'digital preservation?' How might digital preservation be done? What has the NAA decided to do? The importance of open source. The software (all GPL): Xena - XML Electronic Normalising for Archives DPR - Digital Preservation Recorder Quest - Query Electronic Storage The technical detail: XML sc...

Google Tech Talks April 19, 2007 ABSTRACT Keyboards are inefficient for two reasons: they do not exploit the redundancy in normal language; and they waste the fine analogue capabilities of the user's motor system (fingers and eyes, for example). I describe a system intended to rectify both these inefficiencies. Dasher is a text-entry system in which a language model plays an integral role, ...

Everybody software developer makes mistakes. Most of the time they can be fixed.But as you gain more experience and your projects get larger and larger you enter the dangerous and exotic world of large-scale software design, with mistakes so seductive you won’t notice until years after you make them, and so dangerous you can’t risk fixing them even once you know about them.Based on knowledge fr...

This talk will describe how modern free software desktops using the Linux kernel handles device configuration. We describe how events created by the kernel will take its path from the kernel, through udev, D-BUS and HAL into every single application that needs to adapt to a changing environment. It will be explained how current applications, libraries and services are plugged into the device ev...

A collection of tried and tested generic techniques for testing software which give good returns on investment. For each technique we describe when you would use it, why you would use it, and how to use it. This is not an 'agile methods' talk, nor a 'test driven design' talk, nor an 'extreme programming' talk, rather it is about back to basics, good sense, and making the best use of your time t...