For reasons that escape me, AMD has changed the structure of its web site -- and changed the link where we all can find out about its latest Catalyst proprietary video driver for Linux:

Here is the new link.

From the bottom of that page, you can drill down to the specs on the latest beta driver.

As always, you can (and should) follow RPM Fusion's latest Catalyst (and Nvidia) packages.

I was reading today about how the Korora spin on Fedora includes Handbrake, the popular cross-platform video transcoding/DVD-ripping utility.

But I am running regular Fedora 19, albeit with proprietary-package assistance from RPM Fusion and a few other repositories.

Still, Handbrake isn't in any of those repos.

So I searched and found HandBrake for Fedora GNU/Linux on Sourceforge.

The installation from the RPM was quick, and now I have Handbrake.

In a very much related matter, Korora looks like a great way to get Fedora with all the multimedia bits set up for you. The distribution's What's Inside page discusses what Korora adds to Fedora in a sort of roundabout way.

Aside from automatic installation of all the multimedia codecs and outside repositories, Korora includes the Jockey proprietary driver manager, which I could really use given all the trouble I've been having with my AMD APU's video component.

The releases are popping out of AMD in hot/heavy fashion. Just about a week after the proprietary AMD Catalyst 13.10 beta video driver for Linux was released, today AMD's Web site is pushing the 13.11 beta.

Read the rest of this post

Update on Oct. 8, 2013: In the past day or so, AMD has revised its Radeon/Linux page to reflect that the Catalyst beta it is offering for download is version 13.10. Hopefully this means we are closer to a new stable release of the proprietary video driver as well as a new package from RPM Fusion (which you can watch for here).

Original entry from Oct. 2, 2013:

AMD has released a new beta of its Catalyst video driver for Linux.

You wouldn't know it by looking at AMD's Catalyst for Linux driver page (though the 13.8 beta link points to the 13.10 beta zip file).

But you would know it by looking at the separate page announcing the 13.10 beta.

Read the rest of this post

Maybe it's the company I keep (on Twitter and the Fedora Planet anyway), but I keep hearing about Docker and its use of Linux Containers to deliver stand-alone applications:

• Docker: an open source project to pack, ship and run any application as a lightweight container
• Marek Goldman: Docker and Fedora

More about Docker:

Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.

Docker containers can encapsulate any payload, and will run consistently on and between virtually any server. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop will run at scale, in production*, on VMs, bare-metal servers, OpenStack clusters, public instances, or combinations of the above.

...

* Please note Docker is currently under heavy developement. It should not be used production (yet).

Is it possible to synchronize a local filesystem (really a directory and everything below it) with a filesystem/bunch-of-directories-and-files on a server with an ftp client application like FileZilla?

What I'm looking to do is create files and directories on my local drive and then use the client application to automatically (or at least semi-automatically) upload those new items to the server without me having to "drag them over" in the FTP client. I want to keep both directories in sync, much like Dropbox does, but without a third-party service in the middle, and without needing to upload the whole directory and contents, but just the changed/new items.

On the FileZilla forum, it is suggested that the tool for this job is not ftp but rsync.

I use rsync all the time for my local backups, and I'm not terribly well-versed in using it with ssh over the network, but I will look into this and see what I can come up with.

Others are suggesting Unison (1), (2), (3), (4) (5), which builds on rsync.

To make a long story I don't yet understand a whole lot shorter, rsync works in one direction, Unison in both, which can be better for backups when things are potentially changing on both server and client (or server and server, for that matter).

Problem with Unison: You must have Unison on both systems, and my shared hosting account's CentOS box doesn't offer it. It does have rsync, so I might have to go with that. Or I could just continue with my current arrangement of either working with the server's filesystem mounted over sftp most of the time, pushing local files over sftp some of the time, and using sftp to pull down backups on a regular basis.

Possible solution -- Csync: Rob suggests in the comments below that csync could work for this task. It only needs to be on the client side, and it both pushes and pulls files.

I've already installed it, and I'll look into making it work.

What I'm trying to do is keep filesystems in sync across different systems where there are potentially new and changed files on both sides.

The Ghost team has pushed out a release to the project's some-6,000 Kickstarter backers. Ars Technica staffer Lee Hutchinson reviews and posts in Ghost.

The double-paned Markdown/HTML view looks a lot like Ode's EditEdit, right?

According to the Ghost blog, while the code is only going to Kickstarter supporters right now, there will be a public release in the weeks ahead.

Does the release announcement include the names of every one of those 6,000 people? I think it does.

http://thoughts.smallpict.com/2013/09/20/bloggingIsDifferentAndNewTheseDays

Warning: The AMD Catalyst 13.9 Linux video driver was on the site this morning but has disappeared since then. As of 4 p.m. Pacific time on Sept. 19, 2013, it has not yet reappeared. AMD, it's your move.

Before the driver disappeared, here is what I wrote:

Now that the 3.11 version of the Linux kernel is available on my Fedora 19 system, AMD has released a new version of its closed-source, stable driver, version 13.9, that brings support to ... the 3.10 kernel.

Not that I haven't been running the 13.6 (suspend/resume worked) and 13.8 betas (suspend/resume didn't work in 13.8 beta 1, not sure about beta 2), because I have.

You can download the new driver here, though I recommend NEVER installing from what AMD provides and always, ALWAYS using a version packaged for your distribution, which for Fedora means the packages provided by RPM Fusion.

Running Fedora and needing AMD Catalyst for working 3D graphics means willfully ignoring new kernels that aren't yet supported and accompanied by a new kmod-catalyst package. That's what I'm doing with the new 3.11.1 kernel that moved into Fedora 19 today. I won't install a 3.11 kernel until there's a corresponding kmod-catalyst package from RPM Fusion to go with it. And given that this new 13.9 release of AMD Catalyst only supports the 3.10 kernel and isn't yet in the RPM Fusion repository (which, given the fact that it was just released, I totally understand), I'll wait for the next kmod-catalyst to roll onto my machine and once again test suspend-resume. If it works (like it did during the brief 13.6 beta window), I'll be of a mind to stick with the 3.10 kernel for a good long while.

But if suspend-resume doesn't work with the combination of Linux kernel 3.10.x and Catalyst 13.9, it'll be back on the beta train until AMD decides to better-support the GPUs it makes, including my AMD Radeon HD 7420g.

Potential problem: I just checked the AMD page, and the new driver is (hopefully temporarily) gone.

There's still more to do, but I have enough hacks roughed in to flip the switch on the responsive version of my Ode site.

Thanks to Hans Fast who did most of the work on this here and here.

I'll detail what changes I made to my main Ode theme's HTML and CSS in a near-future post (which I'm already working on).

Responsive design is a big thing for me. It was easy to do in Ode -- and easier thanks to hints from Hans. I still have quite a few elements in Ode's main Logic theme to work on, and I'll knock them down as I get the time to do it.

Thanks once again to Hans Fast for his code, and to Rob Reed for shipping such good code to start with in Ode.

Recent changes:

I tried to code the CSS so the "desktop" layout is what you see in tablets as well. I continue to think that most web sites, including this one, look pretty good on the standard 10-inch tablet (like a full-size iPad), and having sidebars pushed to the bottom is unnecessary on those devices.

So I simplified part of the CSS to make the site stay "normal" until 400px in screen width instead of 800px.

I also made some changes in sidebar behavior. When the screen is small, the sidebar not only goes to the bottom of the page, its text goes from float: right to float: left, and the colored image overlay on the sidebar disappears.