General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

Raspberry Pi Gets Chromium Port

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 09:08 PM PDT

On Thursday, British hacker Liam McLoughlin, more popularly known by his nom de plume Hexxeh, announced the release of a Raspberry Pi port of the open-source Chromium browser. The talented hacker, whose highly fruitful association with Chromium OS dates back to its very inception, has been busy playing around with the Raspberry Pi ever since he got hold of one back in April. This release of Chromium for Raspberry Pi Beta is a testament to all his hard work.

The Chromium binaries released by Hexxeh on Thursday are strictly meant for Raspberry Pis running Raspbian OS, with the young hacker telling all others "running Squeeze or anything that isn't hardfp" to not even think about installing Chromium. Further, he recommends that interested parties take the trouble of overclocking their Pis before running Chromium.

"Whilst it's not required, using the 224MB memory split, overclocking your Pi and using a fast USB stick or SD card for your root filesystem will improve your browsing experience," Hexxeh wrote in a post on his blog. "I've had the RaspberryPi.org blog frontpage load in as little as 5 seconds by combining all three of these. With that said, let's get started."

"If you're closer to Europe than the US, type this into a shell: bash <(curl -sL http://goo.gl/5vuJI). If you're closer to the US than Europe, type this into a shell: bash <(curl -sL http://goo.gl/go5yx). Let that command run for a while. It'll download about 35MB and probably take a while to do it's thing. Once it's finished, you can launch Chromium by typing: chrome –disable-ipv6."

While this is a decent start, Hexxeh's ultimate aim is to port Chromium OS to the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi.

Report: Universal Stylus in the Works at Microsoft

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 08:55 PM PDT

A universal stylus capable of interacting with all kinds of displays, and not just touch-sensitive ones, is said to be in the works at Microsoft. According to the venerable MIT Technology Review, the said stylus has already won a lot of praise internally, with the decision of whether or not to move forward with its development now resting with the powers that be at the Redmond-based software giant.

The stylus, reportedly being developed by researchers at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, is said to leverage a built-in camera for keeping track of its position and angle as it moves across the display. This is accomplished through the camera counting the number of pixels as they move past it to zero in on the stylus' exact position, and thereby effectively turning the grid of pixels into a navigational guide. According to the report, the angle is calculated based on which pixels are in and out of focus.

Such a stylus, if it ever sees the light of day, will in all likelihood be aimed at people with non-touchscreen Windows 8 devices, as it's something that could help them better appreciate the upcoming operating system's touch-friendly Metro UI.

Image Credit: LatestMobileReviews
Posted by Shri Krishna

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