A customer was denied warranty for a desktop computer, in a major computer store in the UK, because he had deleted the pre-installed Windows OS and had Linux on it.
Maybe you’ve heard about Linux and are intrigued by it. So intrigued that you want to give it a try. But you might not know where to begin.
Wine is very well known in the Linux community since it lets you run Windows apps on your Linux computer. But Darling, it's counterpart for running OS X apps in Linux, has never gotten as much attention. A redditor reminds us that the Darling project is alive and kicking.
Using Linux as the operating system has not been a matter of religion or partisanship. Not even a matter of personal choice. It's a matter of pragmatic necessity. To give you a better picture of why, here's the story of Ricky.
In short: We installed a computer for a financially-disadvantaged kid. We taught that kid how to use the computer. That kid was supremely happy with his new Linux computer. We left. The end.
First, we started with Windows XP, then we moved to nothing but Linux because Microsoft refused to sell us licenses that were cheap enough to make our organization viable. Also, in less than a week of uses Windows, we were flooded with calls from parents complaining about viruses and malware. At that time, we were placing six computers in homes per week, so the complaints were a logistics nightmare for us.
Some people can't believe that Microsoft is working on a version of Windows Server for ARM processors. I only wonder what took the software giant so long.
After the cacaphony erupted over my columns in August and September, I thought I might take a break from the systemd wars for a while, but the battles I’ve seen in forums across the Internet seem to be escalating. As I predicted, the release of RHEL 7 with systemd as the only option for system and process management has reignited the debate.
Over the weekend I began posting Ubuntu 14.04 LTS vs. 14.10 benchmarks of the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers to show how their software stack has advanced. With our NVIDIA graphics testing it's slightly different since the performance state of Nouveau hasn't changed a lot in the past six months since the re-clocking support overall is still in quite inadequate shape for end-users. However, for some new open-source NVIDIA Linux benchmarks to share today is a look at the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 14.10, then with the Oibaf PPA enabled plus the Linux 3.17 stable kernel, and lastly when using Ubuntu 14.10's supplied NVIDIA proprietary driver.
Timothy Arceri who previously crowd-funded work to add new GL extensions to Mesa and did so successfully multiple times has now written a new blog post on the topic of reducing the CPU usage in Mesa to potentially improve frame-rates.
Eric Anholt while working at Broadcom on the Raspberry Pi graphics driver has sent out patches that add support for DRI2 with GLAMOR to the xf86-video-modesetting driver.
That’s right, Linux can get that music stream to your desktop in many ways. If you’re a lover of Spotify, Pandora, Last.fm, SoundCloud...you name it, there’s a way to stream that music. But don’t think you’re limited to using a web browser. Linux has clients, and plenty of them.
Mac? Only if it's a vim macro.
After collecting more than twice of their goal on Kickstarter in 2012, the retro action platformer was released for Windows in September last year but is now available for Linux for the first time in an open beta on Steam.
We at Toadstool Games are proud to announce a milestone in the spread of our game Symphony Quest. In the 4 days after our release 500 people have come and joined us on the quest through Dischord! We can only hope that the more heros come forth to join the battle against those mean goblins! When we started this project our only hope was to create something which people would enjoy and have fun with, so help us out and spread the word!
Aspyr Media has written a blog update concerning the state of the OS X and Linux port of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth.
Aspyr Media has detailed in a new blog post their progress on the Mac & Linux Civilization: Beyond Earth ports.
Oculus just fired an email to developers notifying them of their latest SDK release, 0.4.3 Beta. The latest version seems like a significant release with numerous feature additions and stability / performance improvements.
Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty is the remake of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee and the Linux release isn't far off.
Andy, Thanks so much for picking up the topic of color pickers (pun intended).
Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for six years straight.
So, for all who feared that somehow KDE now decided to be “like Apple” or “like GNOME”, which translates for them to “Not giving the user any options”, fear not: In those cases where it makes sense, a flexible UI is precisely the embodiment of “Simple by default. Powerful when needed.”
The new release of ebook reader, editor and library management software Calibre 2.7 comes with alot of bugfixes and support for the new device Kindle Voyage, which was launched just a couple of days ago. The support for new devices is one of the developer’s priority, the application is capable to sync to e-book reader devices.
Today we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Black Lab Linux 6. Black Lab Linux 6 is the fruit of over a year of labor and brings about many exciting new features and some big changes to the Black Lab Linux platform. In Black Lab Linux 6 we focused on a few core improvements. Usability, by changing to a UI that has strong features, accessibility, and speed. We also have improved driver support and multimedia features that set Black Lab Linux apart from the rest. Black Lab Linux 6.0 has also improved how we deliver updates to our users. Being based on LTS technologies Black Lab Linux 6.0 is supported until April 2020. All incremental updates will be released via apt-get.
Today we're releasing Qubes OS R2! I'm not gonna write about all the cool features in this release because you can find all this in our wiki and previous announcements (R2-beta1, R2-beta2, R2-beta3, R2-rc1, and R2-rc2). Suffice to say that we've come a long way over those 4+ years from a primitive proof of concept to a powerful desktop OS which, I believe, it is today.
Puppy Linux is one of the smallest and one of the lightest distributions that can be found. It's been out of the news lately and it's not getting the same kind of attention that it used to have, but the OS is actually utilized as a base for numerous distros. LxPup is just one of them, but it has been very well received by the community and users really seem to like it.
The Manjaro developers are already preparing to launch a new edition of the operating system, but they are having some problems with a few of the packages they intend to implement. So, in the meantime, they are working to improve the current branch of the OS, 0.8.10. There is nothing really major in the update pack, with the exception of a few kernel updates, but it doesn't mean that it's not a good idea to upgrade nonetheless.
OpenSUSE has rolled up its Factory and Tumbleweed into a single project that will carry the name Tumbleweed from November 4.
The devs had created a measure of confusion among users by elevating Factory – once an indicator of the current unstable code-cut – to the same rolling-release status as Tumbleweed.
As a long-time openSUSE I wondered about the future of Factory and Tumbleweed when the project announced Factory’s evolution as an independent rolling release of the distribution.
Tumbleweed maintainer and the lead Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman was not very positive about the future of Tumbleweed, which was considered to be a ‘kind-of’ rolling release version.
Back then Ludwig Nussel of openSUSE told me, “The new Factory is not here to replace Tumbleweed. Both rolling distributions accomplish different goals. The Tumbleweed initiative provides rolling updates of selected packages (~10% of the packages in Factory) on top of the most recent openSUSE released version. Tumbleweed therefore always has openSUSE releases as base. Factory on the other hand is a full rolling distribution where all packages, even core ones are continuously updated and rebuilt.”
After more than five years of development, SUSE on Monday rolled out SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, a brand-new version of the enterprise-class edition of its popular Linux platform. Built for reliability, scalability and security, the new release is designed to help companies efficiently deploy and manage highly available IT services in physical, virtual or cloud infrastructures.
Congratulations are in order for the fine folks at SUSE LLC. Today in Nuremburg, Germany SUSE announces the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (SLES 12). SLES 12 is a much-anticipated release due to several improvements. I had the pleasure of speaking with SUSE's George Shi, Product Marketing Manager and Kerry Kim, Director of Strategic Marketing about the release and some of the new features.
Suse has released its Suse Linux Enterprise 12 (SLES 12) operating system, claiming it is the most reliable, scalable and secure platform for deploying and managing server workloads, whether hosted on-premise, in the cloud or a mix of both.
Our top story on this October 27, 2014 is the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. There are a couple of interesting user reviews of recently released Ubuntu 14.10 and Bodhi Linux lives with the release of 3.0 RC2. "Bob Young talks about the origins of Red Hat" and, finally, "The Document Foundation joins the Open Source Business Alliance."
Bob Young, who've I've known for 20 years, is not a technology guy. The "Linux" part of Red Hat Linux came from Marc Ewing. Still, if it hadn't been for Young, Red Hat (named after Ewing's grandfather's Cornell University lacrosse cap), might have just been another long forgotten Linux company.
The Fedora 21 Beta release, originally slated for 28 October, has slipped by one week. It is now targeted for the first week of November.
Mozilla community was there and Luis Manuel from Panama show how to develop small app for Firefox OS.
"The 'new' Debian would be rather weak," said blogger Robert Pogson. "Would it have the hundreds of mirrors that make Debian wonderful? I doubt that. Debian is a great distro. Disemboweling it out of spite is just wrong. Why can't we come to some amicable agreement? Why do we have to race at full speed to the edge of a cliff when we don't know if we can stop?"
The main focus for Canonical right now is the Ubuntu Touch operating system scheduled to show up on phones and in shops in a couple of months. The recent Ubuntu 14.10 launch and the start of the Ubuntu 15.04 development cycle has complicated things a little for the developers.
Ubuntu 14.10 aims to simplify large-scale cloud deployments with improved container, hypervisor and bare metal support
While both the Ubuntu Touch branches should normally adopt the Ubuntu 15.04 system as code-base, the developers have decided to keep the RTM version utopic-based, so that it will be ready for usage on the Meizu phone, announced to be released with Ubuntu Touch.
This wonderful project explores the borders between hacking, learning computers, hacking and electronics: it’s a kit you can hack and a learning course you can use to teach people how to create real hardware.
HTC developer LlabTooFer revealed the timeline of the Android 5.0 Lollipop OS update to HTC devices. HTC One (M8) and HTC One (M7) will get the OS update in January or February. Meanwhile, HTC Desire EYE, HTC One (M8) Dual SIM, HTC One (M7) Dual SIM, HTC One (E8), HTC One (E8) Dual SIM, and HTC Butterfly 2 should receive the update in January to March. The HTC One Mini 2 and Desire 816 will more likely get the mobile software update in March to April. HTC One Max, HTC One Mini, and HTC Butterfly S will run with the Android 5.0 Lollipop OS in March to May.
Phablets have always been a source of controversy among mobile phone users. Some people love them, and others loathe them. A redditor started a thread that quotes a VP of engineering for Android who thinks that many users really want phablets but don't know it yet.
Wipro's open source practice has been made under its Business Application Services division, under which the company intends to build open source platforms that enable online services on a large scale.
The company will shift its focus to applications, infrastructure, including operating systems, databases, cloud technologies and software defined infrastructure. Significantly, in the Product Engineering space, Wipro believes licensable IP blocks will help shrink product development timelines.
Catalyst, an open source software specialist based in Christchurch, New Zealand, has taken ownership of ePortfolio project Mahara's trademark and will also lead the its partner programme, it announced overnight.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with this year’s All Things Open conference. There were a few glitches, as might be expected, but not enough to matter. Was it perfect? Probably not. Perfection at a conference would probably be pretty boring — and boring would be a fault keeping it from being perfect, if you’ll excuse a little circular logic. Let’s just say say that ATO was more than good enough — and then a lot more.
The Mozilla Foundation staged a Mozilla Festival in the UK over the weekend, and one of the projects developers delivered was a port of Firefox OS working to the Raspberry Pi.
The Mozilla Foundation held its much anticipated festival in England this past weekend, and one of the projects shown off by developers is a port of Firefox OS working with he Raspberry Pi. The diminutive, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi devices (shown here), priced at $25 and $35, have quickly won over hackers and hobbyists who are taking Linux in new directions, including even supercomputing.
Now, Mozilla appears to belive its Firefox OS mobile platform can engage developers working on robotics and other applications for Raspberry Pi boards.
Mozilla released an experimental “PiFxOS” build of Firefox OS optimized for the Raspberry Pi, with an early focus on robotics and media players.
If you observe the old adage "follow the money" right now, it seems that you'll be led straight to OpenStack. Today, there is yet more news about venture funding for an OpenStack-focused startup. SwiftStack, which specializes in software-defined storage based on the OpenStack cloud platform, announced that it closed $16 million in funding to scale its efforts to enable storage scalability for the enterprise.
LibreOffice is a fine example of what FLOSS can be. When FLOSS projects reach this level of penetration in usage there’s no limit to how far they can go. We’ve seen this before in the Linux kernel, Apache web-server, MySQL database, PostgreSQL database and many others.
The Document Foundation (TDF) joins the Open Source Business Alliance (OSB Alliance), to strengthen LibreOffice ecosystem by creating stronger ties with companies and organizations deploying the free office suite on a large scale.
The previous RC in the series had a very short list of changes and just a couple of regressions, which indicated that we might get a stable version soon. It looks like that wasn't the case after all and that we still have to be patient and gaze with great interest at what the devs are doing.
FreeBSD 10.0 was a big step forward for this distribution and a natural evolution from the 9.x branch. People tend to forget that open source is not the same thing with Linux and there are other distros out there that might be using a completely different base, like BSD for example. The first point release for FreeBSD 10.x is also an important step for the devs because it gathers a huge number of changes that will make users’ lives much easier.
After Pantomime a GNUMail release had of course to follow. The same words as for Pantomime apply.
GNU Libtool hides the complexity of using shared libraries behind a consistent, portable interface. GNU Libtool ships with GNU libltdl, which hides the complexity of loading dynamic runtime libraries (modules) behind a consistent, portable interface.
I am pleased to announce version 1.6 of GNU Guile-ncurses. Guile-ncurses is a library for the creation of text user interfaces in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language. It is based on the ncurses project's curses, panel, form, and menu libraries.
PacketFence is a free and open source Network Access Control (NAC) solution. It can be used to effectively secure small to very large heterogeneous networks.
If you’ve developed plugins for the Eclipse environment, you’re moderately aware that Eclipse’s update manager can behave in strange ways from a user perspective. Things have gotten better with the p2 Remediation Support in Kepler (4.3.0) but what about dependency resolution done by Maven plugins, like Tycho, at build-time ? You get to specify a list of repositories, their content is aggregated, and if your request is satisfiable, it will be satisfied. Of course there’s some criteria p2 will attempt to optimize. For example, preferring highest version with fewest dependencies (minimize transitive closure) from a set of identically named units.
LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler went ahead and enabled C11 as the default C language for the upcoming LLVM 3.6 release.
Stewart was referring to Aécio Neves, governor of the state of Minas Gerais and the favorite of "investors and business people in Brazil." Neves ended up losing to incumbent President Dilma Rousseff, described by Stewart as "a former Marxist guerrilla who praises Mr. [Hugo] Chávez as 'a great Latin American.'"
[...]
Cardoso belonged to the same party as Neves, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, which despite its name takes a center-right line. This may explain why Neves' "pro-growth" policies were not as convincing to Brazilian voters as they are to New York Times columnists.
Obama's small war means big profits -- and little oversight -- for defense contractors and hired guns.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's appeal against the arrest warrant hanging over him is being considered by a court in Stockholm, with the chief prosecutor expected to report back before midnight.
Peter Carey’s new novel, Amnesia, features an activist on the run from the US government. He talks to Tim Martin about his intuitive connection with the WikiLeaks founder
Peter Carey is in Melbourne flogging his latest book Amnesia, about an Australian female cyber-terrorist, a kind of Julian Assange in drag. When I call the two-time Booker Prize winner's hotel, he's wolfing down the last of a cold steak sandwich. Gough Whitlam had died earlier that week and was still on his mind.
Peter Carey's new novel Amnesia counterpoints modern hackers with murky incidents in Australia's recent past as a writer explores where countries and individuals stand in the modern world.
Climate change is rarely discussed on the Sunday talk shows. It'd be nice if when they did discuss it, the conversation was less about political positioning and more reality-based.
The FBI recently searched a government contractor's home, but some officials worry the Justice Department has lost its 'appetite' for leak cases
IT IS strange that the Obama administration has so avidly continued many of the national-security policies that the George W. Bush administration endorsed. The White House has sidelined the key recommendations of its own advisers about how to curtail the overreach of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has failed to prosecute those responsible for torture, on the principle that bygones should be bygones, extending a courtesy to high officials that it has notably declined to provide to leakers like Chelsea Manning. The result is a remarkable degree of continuity between the two administrations.
Yet this does not disconcert much of the liberal media elite. Many writers who used to focus on bashing Bush for his transgressions now direct their energies against those who are sounding alarms about the pervasiveness of the national-security state. Others, despite their liberal affectations, have perhaps always been enthusiasts for a strong security state. Over the last fifteen months, the columns and op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post have bulged with the compressed flatulence of commentators intent on dismissing warnings about encroachments on civil liberties. Indeed, in recent months soi-disant liberal intellectuals such as Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley have employed the Edward Snowden affair to mount a fresh series of attacks. They claim that Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and those associated with them neither respect democracy nor understand political responsibility.
[...]
Snowden and his companions have shown that national-security liberals’ arguments for deference rest on false assumptions. The truth is that not only are America’s overseas interventions problematic by themselves, but they are also increasingly undermining domestic liberties. Intelligence efforts that are supposed to be focused abroad turn out to have sweeping domestic consequences. It’s impossible to distinguish intelligence data on domestic and foreign actors. Security officials in various countries can work together across borders to circumvent and undermine domestic protections, actively helping each other to remake laws that restrict their freedom of operation. And at home, officials can use these new arrangements to work around and undermine civil rights. This commingling of domestic and international politics is complex and poorly understood. It helps explain why national-security liberals have such difficulty in comprehending—let alone refuting—Snowden’s and Greenwald’s arguments.
From last Tuesday, Parliament Square was wrapped in wire mesh. In one of the more surreal scenes in recent British political history, officers with trained German shepherds stand sentinel each day, at calculated distances across the lawn, surrounded by a giant box of fences, three metres high – all to ensure that no citizen enters to illegally practice democracy. Yet few major news outlets feel this is much of a story.
With an estimated one in three American adults having been arrested at some point in their lives, and 16 million people — about 7.5 percent of the adult population — who are felons or former felons, the question of how to reintegrate the 700,000 people who are released from prison each year has become increasingly urgent.
Ceppos assigned another Mercury News investigative reporter, Pete Carey, to review Webb’s reporting against the charges of the media critics. On October 12 the Mercury News published Carey’s findings, which backed up Webb’s work and actually added new information, particularly regarding the 1986 search warrant against Blandón and his arms-dealing associate, Ronald Lister. But though Webb’s reporting was vindicated, the assignment to Carey was an omen of the paper’s increasing defensiveness.
In my last update, I noted that the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) chapter remains the centre of attention, with rumours swirling around that the President-elect of the new European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, would pull a rabbit out of his hat by announcing that ISDS would be dropped. That didn't happen, and it seems that once more, the UK is to blame.
Authorities have carried out raids across Germany in pursuit of the operators of movie streaming portal Kinox.to. The individuals are also said to be behind other sites including Movie4K, FreakShare and BitShare. Throw alleged extortion, arson and the fact the sites are still online into the mix, and the plot only thickens.
The MPAA has informed the U.S. Government about two dozen piracy-promoting websites it would like to be gone. The list includes major torrent sites The Pirate Bay and Kickass.to, file-hosting services such as Uploaded and Rapidgator, as well as Russia’s social network VK. The popular Popcorn Time application was also welcomed with a mention.
