12.08.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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12.04.13
Posted in News Roundup at 7:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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SuperTuxKart 0.8.1 has been officially released. It includes many new features and contribution from many new developers, making 0.8.1 the minor release with most bugfixes.
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Previously, we wrote about the Steam Machines beating the pants off the PS4 and Xbox One in the specs and pricing department, but it was all theoretical. Now we have actual confirmation from OEM provider iBuyPower, who has announced that their first Steam Machine will be available for only $499.
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While Linux gaming is quickly gaining ground, it seems not many are interested this year in speaking about open-source game development.
Nils Kneuper sent out a notice today that the game development room for FOSDEM 2014 is still seeking speakers. The “Call for Proposals” has been out for more than the past month, but to date they’ve only received two proposals for the two-day event taking place the first weekend of February in Brussels.
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With the start of a new month comes some new numbers out of Valve as part of their Steam hardware/software survey.
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The Linux experience, the breakthrough creativity of the gaming industry.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Linux Deepin is one of those unique Linux distributions for the desktop whose developers crafted a special desktop environment for it. Called the Depth Desktop Environment (DE), Linux Deepin’s DE is built atop GNOME 3 technologies, but with an interface that’s customized to provide what the developers consider a more user-friendly interface for desktop computing.
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12.03.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Ever come across a tutorial online that tells you to run a long terminal command, but want to know what each part of it actually means? ExplainShell does exactly that: paste in the command, and it’ll tell you what each portion of the code does.
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Marco Fioretti shows you how to download and get started with facedetect, free face detection and recognition software.
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12.01.13
Posted in News Roundup at 3:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Google has begun to roll out version 4.4 of its Android KitKat software to Google Play editions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One.
These special editions of the phone use the same hardware as other versions, but do away with the extra proprietary tweaks added by manufacturers. Kitkat has also been made available for the Nexus 4, 7 and 10.
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Russian robot developer R.bot will soon launch a pair of low-cost telepresence robots in North America. The Synergy Mime and larger Synergy Swan use an attached BYOD Android smartphone or tablet for display, camera, microphone, and wireless communications and control functions, and are being offered for a limited time to Android developers for $250 and $500, respectively.
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In other words, F-Droid is like an app store for open-source. More importantly, there is not just one “store”. Anyone can deploy their own repositories of apps, or Repos, much like the way the Debian repo model works.
We’ve now begun creating our own hosted F-Droid compliant repo where we can easily provide the latest greatest versions of all our apps. As we update the apps, F-Droid should notify you and allow you to update quickly and without hassle.
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“Many of my iPhone friends are converting to Android,” he wrote. That sounds fine and dandy, but we might ask, how many of those iPhone owning friends have ever bothered to read a post on Google+?
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Android is approaching Windows-like domination of the smartphone industry…
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At its investor meeting yesterday, Intel exhibited its readiness to face the new realities of the “post-PC era.” Led by CEO Brian Krzanich, top executives outlined strategic efforts to speed its mobile Atom system-on-chips toward 14 and 10nm geometries, 64-bits, and integrated basebands, and to look beyond Windows on the client end, with increased focus on iOS and Linux-based OSes like Android and Chrome OS.
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Intermec unveiled a rugged, Android-ready handheld computer designed for field service applications. The CN51 is equipped with a 1.5GHz, dual-core TI OMAP4 SoC, a 4-inch, 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, IP64-rated sealing, 12-hour plus battery, and options including 1D and 2D barcode scanners, keypads, GLONASS-ready GPS, cellular, and a 5-megapixel camera.
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The company recently updated its watch to improve notification support — a major issue for many reviewers — and says it plans to expand sales promotions for the holiday season in order to boost sales further. Samsung is also looking to expand the number of (Samsung) devices that can interface with the Gear; at launch, the smartwatch was limited to just one smartphone, the Galaxy Note III, but is now also compatible with the company’s bestselling Galaxy S 4.
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Qualcomm’s upcoming Toq smartwatch will be available from December 2nd. The company, better known for its processors that power most smartphones, will sell Toq directly from its own website, and no retail partners have been announced. The watch will interface with Android smartphones via Bluetooth and an app that will be made available from Google Play.
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There’s been several iterations of the smart watch idea. The Verge smartwatch roundup covers the state of play; The Independent has an interesting article on why a Google smartwatch makes sense, and the Samsung Galaxy Gear advert demonstrates nicely the desire for these “James Bond” gadget watches over the years.
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If we put our trust into the rapid progress of science, there will soon come a day when you won’t have to go to the doctor for a health checkup. You’ll have all the resources and devices that will actively monitor your health and keep giving you information. If, at all, something goes wrong, it will automatically inform your doctor that something is wrong. Thus, you won’t have to worry about your health as much as you have to right now.
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The top 20 search terms are as follows:
Android
iOS
Java
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The mobile processor giant also unveiled its fourth-generation 4G LTE processor with “significant” improvements in performance and power consumption.
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Google has unveiled what it’s calling a “sneak peek” at its Glass Developer Kit (GDK), a new way to write software for the Chocolate Factory’s privacy-stomping future-specs.
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Recon Instruments announced an Android-based $399 heads-up display (HUD) designed to fit inside ski goggles. The Snow2 is equipped with a 1GHz, dual-core processor, a 428 x 240 mini-display, plus WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and sensors, and it syncs to Android and iOS devices.
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Believe it or not, it wasn’t that long ago that Nokia and BlackBerry were the top two smartphone companies. Indeed, in 2006, in a preemptive move against the NTP patent troll, the Department of Justice asked that BlackBerry’s services be kept going even if NTP won their case. Seven years later most of us are just wondering how long the company can stay alive.
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Motorola announced today that the Android 4.4 KitKat update for the Verizon version of the Moto X would begin its rollout. This deploy comes a mere three weeks since KitKat was officially launched with the Nexus 5, an impressive turnaround to say the least (it’s also beats Google to releasing the update for Google Play Experience smartphones and some Nexus devices). Motorola says the update includes many of the KitKat enhancements, such as the interface refresh and smart dialer.
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It’s not built into Android yet, but Google has been overhauling the OS’s camera interface to be more photography-friendly.
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Consumer Reports evaluated Google’s Nexus 5 phone this week, and said it was “marred by Android 4.4 quirks.” While we ourselves found some aspects of the new Android version, also known as KitKat, to be improvements, we agree with CR that some trumped-up features don’t work as well as many initially thought, and some so-called improvements actually make the interface more annoying.
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One of the aspects I enjoy most about developing software in the mobile space is getting to work extensively with animations. Animations help engage the user, unify the overall experience, and are just plain fun. Over the past few iterations, the animation framework inside the Android SDK has really grown; this includes the number of interpolators.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Canonical has this week unveiled to the world its new unified Ubuntu mobile and desktop icons which have been designed to bring the two operating system closer together.
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OIL will test all new OpenStack hypervisors and software-defined networking (SDN) stacks, as well conventional OpenStack technologies, to make sure Ubuntu OpenStack offers a wide array of validated and supported technology options. Canonical leads development of Ubuntu.
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Discussed this morning during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit was figuring out the steps needed for bringing Ubuntu Touch mobile applications to the Ubuntu Linux desktop.
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Calibre is the best software to manage your ebooks and to convert them from one format into another, but it lacked any real integration with the operating system. This can now be changed with the Unity Calibre Scope, in Ubuntu 13.10.
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Canonical’s Leann Ogasawara started off the kernel session by basically saying 3.13 is what more or less will happen, but then other developers chimed in that made Linux 3.14 a greater possibility. Given that Linux 3.14 is not likely to arrive until March or April, it’s stable release is too close to the April debut of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to put much trust in its quality and fear of regressions. As a result, Linux 3.13 is the safe bet.
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Ubuntu 13.10 shipped with Qt 5.0 instead of Qt 5.1, since while it was available for months prior there were some “unfixed regressions” in the newer tool-kit release. With Qt 5.2 being right around the corner, Canonical is looking to switch to the newer open-source tool-kit release if there isn’t as much fallout.
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While most Linux distributions have switched from using sysvinit or Upstart to systemd as their init daemon, Upstart continues to be happily used within the Ubuntu camp. For the Ubuntu 14.04 development cycle there are more Upstart improvements planned.
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During the first day of the latest virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical developers plotted out the enabling of TRIM/DISCARD support by default for solid-state drives on Ubuntu.
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Mir, Canonical’s replacement for the X window system, will not make it into the next version of the Ubuntu desktop.
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Canonical has announced, through the voice of Oliver Ries, that Mir and Unity8 will be default in Ubuntu 14.10.
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When the MK802 Android mini PC hit the streets in 2012, one of the most interesting things about it was the fact that you could install Linux on it and turn it into a cheap, tiny desktop computer. Since then, dozens of small ARM-powered devices designed to run Android apps on your TV have hit the streets, and hackers have figured out how to run Ubuntu and other Linux-based software on many of them.
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Besides wanting to enable SSD TRIM support for Ubuntu Linux, developers are also looking at moving from DMRAID to MDADM for fake/software RAID configurations on the desktop operating system.
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The milestone that Kevin DuBois is cheering about is that Canonical’s display server for the Ubuntu desktop and Ubuntu Touch is working with the big four Android GPU vendors. Mir-enabled Ubuntu images now work for the Nexus 10 with an ARM Mali T-604 GPU, the Nexus 4 with a Qualcomm Adreno 320, the Nexus 7 with a NVIDIA Tegra 3, and the Galaxy Nexus with PowerVR graphics.
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A virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking place this week. The event was kicked off again by Jono Bacon and Mark Shuttleworth. During the event a few interesting tidbits of information were learned about Ubuntu Touch and Mir.
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The brightness settings for Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) have been broken since launch, and it seems that this problem has yet to be solved.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The Genode OS Framework 13.11 release happened this Thanksgiving Day and with it comes a whole lot of exciting — some experimental — features.
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A Phoronix reader pointed out this morning that a new VPX library release went under our radar earlier this month. What’s special about the libvpx 1.3.0 release is that it supports Google’s VP9 codec in a backwards compatible way.
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Over the years, Lance Spaulding has worked with a medical company, a non-profit foundation, a credit card company, a start-up, a small e-commerce business, and now a large defense contractor. But at least one thing hasn’t changed in that time: he’s a devoted Linux desktop user and tinkerer.
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11.30.13
Posted in News Roundup at 1:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Martin Gräßlin, KDE’s Kwin maintainer, has shared some new OpenGL implications due to changes made in the KWin 5 window manager due to relying on Qt5 with Qt Quick 2.
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This blog is no stranger to complaining about KDE desktop search. Way back in 2006 when the now defunct lobby4linux.com existed, and another shot across the KDE bow in 2009. My complaints are not lonely. I’ve talked with a lot of people who have a hard time settling in on a reliable search method in KDE. Now, Nepomuk has finally come of age and is actually a great tool to index your files. It doesn’t use a machine gun to chew through your files and RAM any longer and most times stays out of my way. I was hoping that this somehow would improve the search function in KDE itself.
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The GNOME 3.11.2 development release made it out a few days ago and with it comes many new features as developers work towards the stable GNOME 3.12 release in March.
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The Epiphany developers have recently released the second and probably the last maintenance release for the stable 3.10 branch of GNOME’s default web browser.
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