Summary: €· Announced Distro: Pear Linux 5 €· Other News: Ubuntu Web Apps, Ubuntu on Air, Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu 12.04, Steam for Ubuntu €· Softpedia Linux Blog: Ubuntu 12.10 will have a revamped Nautilus, Raspbian, and more... €· Review of the Week: Amnesia: The Dark Descent €· Video Clip of the Week: Introducing Ubuntu Web Apps
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Andy Green and Andy Beer started out trying to convert the world to open source. Now, they help users manage all kinds of tech
The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] sez, "Project Byzantium is a working group of the HacDC hackerspace, and is a live distribution of Linux for easily and rapidly deploying ad-hoc wireless mesh networks for the purpose of emergency communications. They presented last weekend in New York City at HOPE Number Nine and announced their second major release (v0.2a) on stage. They also gave away 500 copies on CD-ROM at the conference. They held workshops all weekend on how to use and test Byzantium Linux, and now they've released the .iso image of this release to the Internet.
Dell launched an experiment earlier this year to see if it could build a compelling Linux laptop for software developers. The effort, which is codenamed Project Sputnik, pairs the XPS13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04.
The software environment is tailored for developers, featuring a number of useful tools and a framework for automating the installation of specific development stacks and cloud deployment tools. Dell also did some work on hardware enablement, tweaking drivers to improve touchpad support and support for features like toggling WiFi from the keyboard.
Two articles crossed my virtual desk recently that confirmed an existing belief: using Windows for online financial transactions is a mistake.
While the AMD Linux graphics team is busy proposing an LLVM back-end staging area, the AMD CPU folks have begun work on the GCC compiler and preparing support for the next-generation Bobcat processors.
Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is over! Brian Beck has been named the 2012 Linux Foundation T-shirt Design winner.
His t-shirt design, entitled “Inspired by Linux,” was inspired by the values his mother instilled in him. Brian believes “a child’s exposure to technology should never be predicated on the ability to afford it.” And “because Mom taught me to share,” he said.
The Linux Foundation has announced the winners of its annual T-shirt design contest. This year, two shirts were selected by a community vote and will be printed and sold in the Linux.com store. This year's contest required participants to create designs based on the theme "Inspired by Linux".
Together with a new version of X Server, Linux 3.5 will offer improved hybrid graphics support. The new kernel supports "FireWire Target Disk Mode", which is a familiar Mac feature, and performance monitoring components can now keep an eye on userspace software.
The X.Org Foundation has finally officially announced to their members and the public via their web-site that they're now a 501(c)(3) organization.
Chris Wilson is now in effective control of the xf86-video-intel open-source graphics driver with being responsible for nearly all of its development activity. Plus there's some other interesting statistics to share.
After providing recent GitStats on Wayland, the X.Org Server, and Mesa, it's time to begin providing some new numbers on the prominent DDX graphics drivers for X.Org. First up is Intel.
After recently bringing up the G-WAN web-server, a Phoronix reader brought up Gatling. The Gatling software is a high-performance open-source web-server not known as widely as Apache, Nginx, or lighttpd.
After delivering some development statistics on the xf86-video-intel driver yesterday, today there's a look at the development activity surrounding xf86-video-nouveau. This is the X.Org driver for Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA driver.
While the open-source ATI driver doesn't have some super fast 2D acceleration architecture equivalent to Intel's SNA or a developer making prolific contributions to the DDX, as of earlier this month the Radeon driver has support for GLAMOR.
GLAMOR is the OpenGL-based acceleration architecture that comes out of Intel as well, but namely the Intel China team. GLAMOR isn't some highly-optimized and large code-base within the DDX, but basically pipes the 2D calls over OpenGL with Mesa. There's a GLAMOR shared library that other 2D drivers can tap into with just a few hundred lines of code added into the respective driver's DDX. This is the approach that the AMD developers are using for 2D acceleration on the Radeon HD 7000 series rather than writing up a new EXA 2D implementation, but it also works just the same for previous generations of Radeon hardware.
When you look online for reviews of social media applications, Windows and Apple platform applications always dominate the list. Linux geeks, however, have a long history of using social media tools to discuss geeky and techie topics online.
As you may be aware that a team of enthusiatic people is working on bringing out the first GIMP magazine. We spoke with Steve Czajka, the founder and Managing Editor of GIMP Magazine. Here is a quick interview of Steve.
Swapnil: What will be the highlight of the first issue of GIMP? Steve: Primarily photography, we connected with a few key photographers that do outstanding work and are exclusive to open source image editing tools. Issue one also has an incredible digital artist who did a master class tutorial for us. Outstanding work. And we also have a great gallery for both digital art and photography.
With all the excitement this week about Valve confirming their Linux plans on their blog and other worthwhile developments like collaborating with Intel on their open-source Mesa driver and Valve wanting to do things for open-source, EA and their Linux efforts have once again been brought up.
Within the Phoronix Forums there's new messages about wondering about EA and Linux now that Valve has announced. While Valve's doing exciting things, all indications I've seen so far have been that what EA's plans are for (Ubuntu) Linux are rather disappointing.
LightDM, a new lightweight, fast, extensible display manager, is now available for KDE. David Edmundson, a software engineer and project lead at KDE, posted changelogs of this release in his blog. The below picture shows a screenshot of LightDM 0.2.0 in Kubuntu Precise.
KDE developers are working on Qt frontend of the NetworkManager. This will ease creating and managing network connections for KDE users. We had posted earlier about the blueprint of QtNetworkManager, and currently, a patch has been added that allows users to configure wireless and wired connections.
Gnome Live is the absolute place if you want to learn what’s happening behind the scenes, what’s coming next and why we are getting all these controversial new features.
And there is more! Highly anticipated Apps and amazing new tools ..all in one place!
Gnome 3.6 may get a new photo browser, similar to Gnome Documents. With this app, you will not only be able to view photos in your local har drive, but also will be able to view pictures from the cloud services and media shares. The app also allows quick sharing of pictures to social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and also emailing it. One can also view photos in full screen mode and also create a slideshow.
MythTV 0.26 Alpha was released this morning as the first development milestone for this open-source PVR/DVR project on its new expedited release schedule.
The LinHES team and I are happy to announce the release of R7.3 (Crave). The changelog is up. To upgrade see this forum post.
The Linux Mint Team has released Linux Mint 13 “Maya” XFCE edition. This edition is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and is supported with security updates for a period of five years.
Pierre Schmitz, an Arch Linux developer, has announced the release of a new install media of Arch Linux Distribution. This CD .iso image contains the latest snapshot of the Arch Linux core repository. This install media no longer contains the AIF installer due to lack of maintainance and bug fixes. Rather some install scripts are provided which aid in installation. Beginners can learn more about the new installation mechanism from the Arch Wiki.
At long last, local winners have been crowned in their respective categories in the nationwide social media contest dubbed Social Madness.
More than 100 local contestants began the social media competition hosted by Triangle Business Journal and its affiliates across the country on June 1.
Head-to-head duels ensued and Triangle winners have been named.
Cinnamon, the project out of the Linux Mint camp for a new desktop that's based upon upstream GNOME but brings back memories of GNOME2, has now entered Fedora 17 through the stable updates repository.
Fedora developers have approved the inclusion of the Cinnamon desktop in Fedora 17 repos. The announcement comes just after inclusion of Unity in Fedora. But unlike Unity which was built using Open Suse build service, Cinnamon is going to be packaged by Fedora developers.
Websites will be able to hook into the Ubuntu desktop in the Linux distro's next release - allowing, for example, users to receive "new message" pings from webmail services.
Canonical boss and spaceman Mark Shuttleworth announced the availability of "web apps" in Ubuntu 12.10, due in October, at OSCON, Canonical marketing veep Steve George blogged. The new feature will make it possible for users to quickly jump to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, eBay and GMail from the desktop, he added.
The Raspberry Pi is one of the coolest computing innovations of the last few years. It’s a simple ARM-powered Linux computer that only costs $25, yet can already do so much. The initial goal was to use the Pi as a way for kids to inexpensively learn programming, but enthusiasts have been doing some really impressive things with the hardware.
The Raspberry Pi might have taken forever to arrive since its original conception, but at least software updates are coming hot and fast now. The makers of our favorite $35 computer-on-a-stick have just released a new version of Debian Linux optimized specifically for the Raspberry Pi called Raspbian.
The Android-based Ouya game console has already raised more than five million US dollars in its first ten days.
As written about last week, Ouya is a $99 Android game console that raised more than one million dollars in its first day on Kickstarter.
The Allwinner A10 is a low power ARM Cortex-A8 processor with Mali 400 graphics. It’s used in a number of inexpensive Android tablets, including most of Coby’s latest devices. But it’s also a popular chip for Android-powered set-top-boxes (or mini PCs) such as the MK802, Mele A1000, or Mini X.
Sprint hasn’t announced the LG Cayenne LS860 yet, but it will probably do it soon, especially since the handset has appeared in a leaked photo again – for the third time in the last few months.
We know by now that the Sony Xperia GX (SO-04D), that is due to land in Japan very soon, is likely to make an international appearance under the Sony LT29i model number and is codenamed ‘Hayabusa’. Below we have what is believed to be the first live pictures of the device itself. It looks like an early production model to us as it still carries the Sony Ericsson logo on the top of the phone. The handset itself looks almost identical to the Sony Xperia GX, although there are a few tell-tale signs that this is different.
Google’s second quarter earnings report shined a light on its newly acquired Motorola Mobility business. It was the first quarterly report since the $12.5 billion purchase closed in May, and overall the results were well received, as shares rose 3% in after-hours trading. Google reported second-quarter earnings of $2.79 billion, or $8.42 per share on revenue of $8.36 billion excluding Motorola. The results beat investor expectations, Dow Jones says. Even so, the wireless equipment business posted a loss of $233 million and depressed Google’s overall margin to 26.2% from 31.3% excluding the unit. However, shares are still down for the year, and analysts will continue to question the strategy behind the purchase of the Motorola business and its lineup of Android smartphones and tablets. The success of the deal hinges to a great extent on just how well the Android operating system does in the market.
Security outfit SecureState’s smart meter hacking framework, Termineter, has gone live over at Google Code.
The software is described as having a structure like Metasploit, with a similar interface and ability to be extended with external modules.
Open source is the best way to build and maintain big software projects. The more heads and hands you have on a project, over time, the more bullet-proof it can get.
Trouble is, everyone wants the maximum benefits from open source but few people want to put in the work for someone else's project. That's why VMware (VMW) went through its recent reorganization, promising to separate its open source cloud projects from its proprietary virtualization.
Open source is often the flag that's flown after failure. When IBM (IBM) failed in operating systems two decades ago, it slowly began embracing Linux, eventually unifying its whole product line under the open source operating system. The results were spectacular.
In the last 15 years of my career I have worked at several open source software companies, each with its own unique approach to software delivery, packaging, branding, and sales. Two things have become clear to me:
1. There is no single best way to build a successful business around an open source software solution 2. Success depends on an organization’s commitment to building real-world solutions and its readiness to deliver genuinely valuable services that help customers to be successful with the solutions.
Mozilla has released a beta version of the next version of its Firefox browser with better memory management and significant speed improvements.
Mozilla this week released an early desktop version of Firefox OS that will let developers experience the mobile OS before comes to phones.
The builds are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
In the beta version of Firefox 15, the Mozilla developers have implemented a "radical idea" to force add-ons to release memory allocated to them. According to the developers, many add-ons are causing memory leaks by not releasing their DOM structures when a tab is closed. This creates what the developers call zombie compartments – areas of memory that are never released.
Two years in, and still not quite a cloud operating system
Schools in the Czech cities of à  umperk and Hradec Králové have been using open source for years, the Czech open source news magazine LinuxExpres reports.
I rejoiced when the Western Canadian Provinces got together and revised the maths curriculum to use computers and calculators in teaching. I had been using computers in that role for 25 years but most teachers had never done it. They took two years of “professional development” to indoctrinate the teachers. The UK has given the teachers just months for radical change. I predict “uneven” results…
In ICT courses in Canada I have always been giving students the basics. I stretched “how to sit at a PC and turn it on” into disassembly/reassembly of ATX PCs with nomenclature and on-line shopping for parts… Instead of teaching them how to use M$’s office suite, I gave students a list of tasks to do with five different office suites and asked them to compare ease and performance. Instead of teaching students 300 features of Excel TM, I gave them real-world problems that could be solved several ways with spreadsheets and computer programming and had them learn the kinds of things that were better done with different methods. I exposed students to several spreadsheets and, yes, paper and pencil… Instead of limiting students to one PC with one hard drive, I showed them what they could do with thin clients, servers and clusters of servers, databases and web applications…
The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE.
Support for AArch64, the ARMv8 64-bit architecture, continues to move along within the GCC compiler world.
Besides the recently published AArch64 support for the Linux kernel, developers with ARM Holdings have also been tackling the compiler support and other areas of the Linux toolchain.
Open Source for America launched a petition Thursday to "Free the Code," an effort to encourage the U.S. federal government to release custom-developed, taxpayer-funded software as open source by default.
If you are curious how Valve and Intel improved the OpenGL performance of their Mesa driver and also at the same time finding areas for performance optimizations within the Source Engine, here's some of the tools used.
The tools that seem to be predominantly used, based upon what Intel's Ian Romanick wrote in a blog comment and from what I've learned in email communications and while at Valve, are Sysprof and APITrace.
Desperation seems to have caught up with the normally imperturbable tribal farmers of Adilabad which is evident from the abnormally large number of suicides by them since 2011. As many as 27 of them, all cotton farmers including a woman, from the aboriginal Gond, Naikpod, Mannepu and the Lambada plains tribe, figure in the list of 101 cotton farmers who have committed suicide since January 2011.
Giving up life, for whatever reason, was hitherto an unknown phenomenon in the primitive tribal communities which, paradoxically, have deprivation for a way of life. The gamut of Bt cotton, however, has dislocated their way of dealing with failures and like the trend in other communities, tribals are increasingly preferring the ‘easy way’ out.
In 2010, only one Gond cotton farmer had committed suicide owing to debts. There was a drastic increase in the extent of land under cotton cultivation and the incidence of suicides in the agency in the following year.
AMD isn’t expected to bring its new low power processors aimed at tablets to market until 2013. But according to Hexus, AMD will show off the first chips with its new low power “Jaguar” cores at the Hot Chips Symposium on August 28th.
In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.
The city of Oakland, California, is fighting back against Goldman Sachs by refusing to pay a penalty for getting out of an interest rate swap contract that is to Goldman's advantage.
Isn't that a hoot? Anyway, turns out that Goldman and the city of Oakland entered into a deal to protect variable interest rate bonds issued by the city in 1997. Oakland was given a fixed rate of under 6 percent to protect against inflation on those bonds.
A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary €£13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.
James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.
At the heart of Obama’s reelection narrative is the story that he battled the Big Bad Banks, mostly by passing regulation, and now those banks are retaliating by lining up behind deregulator Mitt Romney.
Total employment in California pulled back in June from a recovery high of 16.5 million, set in May. This data series has been volatile, with annual revisions each year that have shifted the trough in total employment between early 2009 and early 2010. For now, the low was set in November of 2009, at 15.93 million. While “recovery” seems the right word to use in describing California’s job market, it is still the case that unemployment is hanging at 10.7%, per the most recent data. That’s the third highest state rate, in the country. Worse, as of Q1, California’s “U-6ââ¬Â³, the broad measure of unemployment, was still above 20%. | see: California Employment in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2000-2012.
Rupert Murdoch has resigned from a string of directorships controlling his News Corporation's UK newspapers.