There are two misconceptions about Linux that have plagued the open source platform from the very beginning. Jack Wallen tries to assuage the doubts of those hesitant to learn something new, user-friendly, and powerful.
There's no doubt that demand for IT professionals with Linux skills is growing rapidly, and earlier this year I wrote about a brand-new certification program targeting newcomers to the open source operating system.
This week's Linux Top 3 strikes right at the core of Linux with a kernel update, a new release of the world's first Linux distro and a milestone update of Red Hat MRG.
I came across Terry through a Linux.com feature that mentioned him as a Linux hero. I was also familiar with his work for Free Software Magazine, so he seemed like a great subject.
Just a little more than two months after the release of version 3.5, Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Sunday unleashed the next new version of the Linux kernel.
Perhaps most notable among several key new features in Linux 3.6 is “hybrid sleep,” a capability much like one that has long been offered by Microsoft's Windows.
Have you ever wanted a watch running Linux? If the answer is yes, then you might want to know that the guys from Leikr have made this a real possibility.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has already sent in the Linux kernel staging driver changes for the Linux 3.7 kernel.
There's 662 source files changed this time around and more code was added then removed. Highlights for the Linux 3.7 kernel staging area include continued work on xgifb (the frame-buffer driver for XGI graphics cards), minor work and clean-ups on various Android components, Ramster is still being touched, a new Silicom Bypass driver, lots of work on the Comedi Linux driver, work on Ipack, lots of IIO activity, and various other work scattered throughout the kernel's staging area.
The perf performance counters sub-system and utility are seeing some mighty improvements with the Linux 3.7 kernel.
Ingo Molnar writes in the merge, "Lots of changes in this cycle as well, with hundreds of commits from over 30 contributors. Most of the activity was on the tooling side."
Jon Masters summarises the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community, including the 2012 Kernel Summit and the closing of the 3.6 merge window
Linux 3.6 has been officially released, and from most angles it appears to be a lack-luster one, bringing only what Linus calls “solid progress”. Of course like any major kernel release, Kernel 3.6 comes with a bevy of new drivers, optimizations and more. But one features stands out above all the rest, and it’s really a big deal.
With the Linux 3.7 kernel there is now support for the SPARC-T4 processor that Oracle introduced last year.
Great news, guys, it was just announced that the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel will incorporate support for multiple ARM System on Chips (SoCs) platforms.
Announced this morning on the kernel mailing list was F2FS, a new open-source Linux file-system that comes courtesy of Samsung.
The pull request for the EXT4 file-system updates targeting the Linux 3.7 kernel were sent in on Friday afternoon by Theodore Ts'o.
While the main DRM pull request for the Linux 3.7 kernel has yet to be submitted to Linus Torvalds, the Radeon DRM pull for the Linux 3.7 was just sent into David Airlie as the DRM sub-system maintainer.
While Linux 3.7-rc1 hasn't even been released yet as the merge window is still open, the Linux 3.7 kernel is exciting and users of the open-source Nouveau driver will be greeted by the Nouveau DRM driver rewrite / code restructuring. Due to the invasive Nouveau work, some early Nouveau tests under the Linux 3.7 kernel were carried out. The 3.7 results were then compared to the earlier Linux 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 kernel releases.
What’s Gimp3? Simply the port of Gimp 2.8 in GTK 3, or if you prefer the version after the 2.10 version. The look was quick indeed, because Gimp was consuming 100% CPU so I couldn’t check it at all.
I guess that this bug had to do with my compiling and it isn’t a real bug, but it isn’t really matter because all I wanted to see was the theme, which by the way was -by default- the impressive dark Adwaita!
The most awaited GIMP Magazine has been released. This first issue contains over 40 pages of tutorials, personal experiences, reviews and photos edited with GIMP and is available for free download. Users can also submit their own photos and tutorials. The magazine will release once every three months.
If you’ve ever taken the time to dig through the vast collection of Linux software titles, you know it’s easy to get lost among them. And with so many pieces of software available, it’s hard to know which ones are worth trying. So to help you out, I created a list of 10 of my favorite lesser-known (but very useful) tools available free for the Linux platform.
With the advent of Kindle, Nook, and the Apple iPad, many bibliophiles are slowly moving away from paperbacks and hardbound books. Earlier a book lover used to spend hours looking for that perfect book in a rustic library, now they just search for their favorite title on Amazon.com and they can start reading in minutes. Of course, not all are happy with this e-book market, and many authors -- though e-books being an established platform-- often sneer at this surging new medium of publishing.
Out of the myriad of utilities that are available for Linux, top is a troubleshooting tool that often comes up in conversation. With good reason, top is a tool that many users frequently turn to. It is is a small open source utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system, allowing users to monitor the processes that are running on a system, and to identify which applications are consuming more resources than they should. Whilst top (and other alternatives) are useful tools to monitor the running processes on a system, functionality does not extend to network activity.
John the Ripper is a free and Open Source password cracker. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords and It is one of the most popular password testing and breaking programs. It combines a number of password crackers into one package, autodetects password hash types, and includes a customizable cracker. JTR is available in official Ubuntu repositories.
Unvanquished is based upon the open-source id Tech 3 engine with the XReaL rendering improvements to form what they call the OpenWolf engine. There's a GL3 renderer with this work and they have been working to improve it as of late.
We have known about Valve's plans to make Steam more than just about gaming and beginning today you can buy some non-gaming software from the digital distribution client.
Developers working on the Unvanquished open-source game as a visually impressive project have been advancing their OpenGL 3.x renderer.
Unvanquished is based upon the open-source id Tech 3 engine with the XReaL rendering improvements to form what they call the OpenWolf engine. There's a GL3 renderer with this work and they have been working to improve it as of late.
Xfce is a lightweight and distraction free desktop environment with hight customizability and stability. The next major release of Xfce, Xfce is scheduled to happen next March. The previous edition of Xfce used GTK 2, and it was expected that the next major version will use GTK 3. But some of the Xfce developers are not convinced about switching to GTK 3.
For some, the 1st of the month is something to rejoice about, but unlike checks from the Department of Welfare, KDE brings nothing but good tidings and cheer with this latest series of updates, one day later.
The Gnome foundation has announced the second beta release of the Gnome 3.5.91 desktop environment. This codebase will be merge into Gnome 3.6 that is scheduled to be released soon.
A few days ago I had the great pleasure to interview Allan Day, GNOME designer and enthusiastic contributor.
The latest version of the GNOME Shell is here, has it addressed the concerns of users, or gone further down the path of simplification?
Every Detail Matters is an initiative that aims to focus attention on improving specific parts of Gnome 3 that would make a real difference in the user experience.
Designers work alongside developers to identify the bugs that need to be fixed to improve the UX in that area and then assist volunteers in resolving them.
Every Detail Matters is an initiative that aims to focus attention on improving specific parts of Gnome 3 that would make a real difference in the user experience.
Designers work alongside developers to identify the bugs that need to be fixed to improve the UX in that area and then assist volunteers in resolving them.
Gnome development is moving forward with leaps and bounds and the developers are trying to create a complete desktop environment to cater every needs of the user. Some new apps that have hit the spotlight are a new software installer for Gnome, Gnome Clocks, Boxes, Calender etc. Among this, developers are working on an app that will allow you to take quick notes and memos – Gnome Notes.
InSync is a Google Drive client for Linux PCs. Currently its in beta stage but works quite well. InSync previously supported integration with Unity desktop via Ubuntu app indicator, but with this release, it is tightly integrated with Gnome shell and other desktops like KDE and Cinnamon too.
Gnome 2 had some wonderful tools that allowed you to change and customize the desktop themes the way you like. With the arrival of Gnome 3, among with other killer features, theme customizations was gone. If some user needed to customize his/her desktop theme, he would need to edit the configuration files which is out of capability of most users.
Dreamlinux has been added to the sad list of the dead distributions today. The Brazilian distribution had released version 1.0 in 2006 and version 5.0 that was released this January was apparently the last one to exist.
Chakra 2012.08 review, code-named Claire, is the latest stable release of Chakra Linux, a semi-rolling release, desktop-centric, Linux distribution forked from Arch Linux.
Chakra uses the K Desktop Environment (KDE) exclusively, so it is no surprise then that Chakra 2012.08 was named after Claire Lotion, a popular figure in the KDE community who passed away recently.
I have written before about Zorin OS 6 (http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2012/07/zorin-6-best-operating-system-i-have.html) which is the main Zorin operating system for general everyday use.
I’m happy to announce AriOS 4.0 Final has been released. Built upon the solid base of ubuntu 12.04 LTS, AriOS comes with GNOME Shell as the default desktop, carefully modified and enhanced using a number of extensions to offer a better and more familiar user experience.
The Blender Foundation and its online community of developers were proud to announce earlier today, October 3rd, the immediate availability for download of Blender 2.64.
As stated in the release schedule for the 2.6x branch of the software, this version focuses on making a complete and functional VFX Pipeline, which incorporates a better motion tracking, green screen keying, title-based compositing, better color management, and much more.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the October 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.
Red Hat is seeking a new name for its JBoss Application Server project (JBossAS). This is the upstream project that Red Hat uses as the foundation for its commercial product JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. "We believe that the time has come to change the name of our project to better reflect the changes we've seen in its reason for existence so far, but also for what's to come in the future," said JBoss technical leader Mark Little.
Red Hat says its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has evolved to embrace far more than just Java, and to reflect this, it has launched a contest to rename the JBoss Application Server (JBossAS) to something more in line with its current vision of multi-language programming.
In a blog post on Monday, Red Hat Senior Director of Middleware Engineering Mark Little explained that JBossAS is a very different project than what it was when it launched as an open source Java EE application server.
After reviewing the last version of Ubuntu 12 a few months ago I wasn’t too impressed with the OS in general. Ubuntu kept loyal to its obscure following by not dipping its toes into the real reason Windows and OSX are popular. And I’m happy to say that it has finally broken out of that mold with Linux Ubuntu 12.10.
Gnome Clocks is the first Gnome 3 application for clock, world clock, alarm and stopwatch. It was developed in Google Summer of Code this year and we have covered a lot of articles on its development. The good news is its finally available in Ubuntu 12.10 and users can have a taste of it right away.
There have been reports of display issues concerning Linux distributions and Intel’s third generation processors. Codenamed Ivy Bridge, these processors were launched this year, so they are brand new to the market.
Like their predecessors, they come with Intel HD Graphics (integrated graphics), and there have been reports of freezing and lines on the screen (mostly freezing) when running many Linux distributions.
Peppermint three is the third major release of Peppermint OS, a lightweight LXDE-based web-oriented Linux distribution built on Ubuntu's LTS release. The focus of Peppermint are simplicity, stability, elegance, and web integration. In this review I will give my experiences with Peppermint on my netbook, having used it as my sole Linux distribution for the past few months:
David Tavares has announced a few days ago that the fourth Alpha version of the upcoming Pear Linux 6 operating system is now available for download and testing.
Last Christmas, my friend Norman Robinson gave me a BeagleBoard-xM computer to play with. The BeagleBoard is a small, single-board, ARM-based computer. As I started to work with it I was impressed with its relative performance and low-power consumption. However, due to its price (approx. $150), I didn't think it represented a tremendous value. After all, I only paid $199 for by HP Mini netbook at my local computer store and the netbook comes with a case and a keyboard!
Beer is as old as civilization itself, but beer brewers are still finding new ways of improving the way the stuff is made. Case in point: BrewPi, a fermentation temperature control system powered by the tiny Rapsberry Pi computer that’s taking the tech world by storm.
With the recent announcement of their Enterprise Pentesting Appliance (EPA), Pwnie Express has once again leveraged the power of open source and the Linux operating system to deliver a world-class security testing platform. Taking all of the software advancements developed on their “Plug” line of devices and combining it with the raw horsepower of a modern x86 computer, the EPA looks like it will make a formidable testing and research platform for serious security analysts.
There's a bit of a spat that started between Intel and Samsung developers working on the Tizen operating system.
This latest corporate food fight started when Intel's Arjan van de Ven noticed that the modern C-based Bootchart tool was replaced by a 2005 Java-version of Bootchart that is quite old and carries less features. The commit swapping out the modern Bootchart for the legacy Java Bootchart can be found here and happened back in August. The change was by Samsung's Kim Kibum.
When it comes to Open webOS on Android, things seem to progressing rather quickly. Open webOS isn’t even a week old yet, but within a few hours after HP released it, it was already booting on the Galaxy Nexus. Just a couple of days later we saw it booting on the Transformer Prime, and today, the source code for the Galaxy Nexus port has been posted online, so the open source community can officially go nuts.
As webOS failed to become a competitive mobile operating system, HP acquired now defunct-developer Palm. The former recently announced that webOS would become open source, and the first release of the new software is available.
Jolla, the company resurrecting the MeeGo mobile OS, has announced $260 million in funding and plans to reveal its first phone soon.
While the aging Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" operating system continues to be the most popular version, Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" finally has the 2 percent market share milestone in its sights.
Clearly, free Android apps can be part of highly productive tablet use.
Okay, sure, maybe you're not meant to use a tablet for productivity. Tablets are supposed to be for consuming content, for texting, email, and web browsing rather than creating content – or so some people think.
But if you hang out at coffee shops or pass through airports, you only have to count the tablets to know that people are using these devices for serious work, and in growing numbers.
A small team of cybersecurity researchers have lashed the computers together to form a homebrew computing cluster. They are stacked five levels high, braced in impromptu fashion with metal girders in the event of earthquakes, and woven together with colorful Ethernet cables. They serve as a cyber-Potemkin village — a distributed software simulation that is intended to mimic the behavior of an entire city’s worth of Android smartphones.
PhoneSuit has introduced a pico projector named “Light Play”. Now you would ask so what is so great about this device? Well, for starters it’s an Android Powered device. If you are still not impressed, then it comes bundled with a keyboard with motion control, which serves as the interface of the device, a tripod and also access to Google Play store, and all that for $500.
When compared to something similar yet different, Samsung Galaxy Beam and its 15 lumen bulb, Light Play seems more practical with its 50 lumens. This device is specifically designed to be projector and therefore looks like one, even though it runs (now old) Android Gingerbread with a custom UI.
As Tablets become cheaper more Americans are buying, with an increase from 11% to 18% in just 7 months, and it's mainly Android Tablets, dominated largely by the Kindle Fire. Two in ten, 21%, own a Kindle Fire, 8% the Samsung Galaxy, and the rest, a mix of others.
There has been a drop of 29% in one year of people buying an iPad as the realization hits that Android is more open, competitively priced and doesn't involve selling your soul to the devil.
Programmers seem to be prone to dyslexia, or is it that dyslexics are prone to programming? Whatever the cause, an open source dyslexic font is welcome news.
Yes reader, I am dyslexic and I am a programmer - and yes it makes things difficult, especially when I get an attack in the middle of a published article, and variable names are often more variable than they are supposed to be.
The School of Business and Information Management at Oulu University of Applied Sciences (OUAS) created an open source project management software named OpixProject. The objective was not to create something that would compete with the current project management software, but to place students in realistic problem-solving environments in order to reduce the gap between the concepts covered in the classroom and real-world experiences.
So how many of you ever thought of installing/configuring an application like Wordpress/Drupal and compact Big Data mammoth like Hadoop in less than few clicks?
I am sure everyone of you. A system admin loves automating his work and getting his/her most of the deployments done with some magic scripts. We all are living in the cloud world, its not a buzzword anymore, people are leveraging on it. So I will ask again how will you automate/autoscale/load-balance your entire application ?
Google has released a general purpose framework for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), as open source. Reranking is a technique that is used when there is a model that can offer several scored hypothesised outputs; rerankers can reorder the ranked outputs based on information not available to the original model.
Looks like we weren't the only Internet users that got fed up with Chrome's constant crashes, as the latest numbers show its popularity has been waning a smidge. The chart above shows worldwide mobile browser market share over the last 12 months. Back in May Chrome's adoption numbers just about matched Firefox's. And, at the end of last year, after a year of huge growth, different numbers found the Google made browser surpassed Firefox as the number two most popular browser, just behind Internet Explorer. But since then—perhaps because of the constant flash crashes, or that hip Internet Explorer campaign—Firefox has regained the No. 2 spot, according to numbers from Net Marketshare. Another way to spin the numbers is that Firefox's sped up six-week new release schedule attracted more users.
Mozilla, the organization behind one of the most popular browsers in the world, is busy developing a new mobile operating system of its own. Competing head-on with biggies like Android and iOS, the fledgling smartphone OS attempts to create its own niche by seamlessly blending the power of the web and the mobility of smartphones together. Codenamed Boot to Gecko (or B2G), the open-source project will include applications that will be written in HTML5. These apps can then use the device's API to run natively with the help of JavaScript.
Australis is the name of the new default Firefox theme that Mozilla has been working on for quite some time. The decision was made to release the update gradually, with some updates already in the browser, while others still waiting to be delivered to it. One of the next Australis-related updates comes in Firefox 19. You may have already seen how the new tab bar will look like in mock-ups that Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander released a while ago.
OpenStack. CloudStack. Eucalyptus. There are many open source platforms for building Amazon-like cloud services in your own data center, and they’ve all received an awful lot of attention in recent years. But are real companies actually ready to use them?
Oracle is making waves this week in the database world with not one, but two separate pieces of major database development release news.
On the one hand, Oracle issued an open source MySQL 5.6 release candidate. On the other, the company detailed its plans for the commercial Oracle 12c cloud database.
The course of open-source software does not always run smoothly, especially when the development of software becomes entangled with broader corporate strategies.
Java developers are not left out though, with improvements such as a new-style breadcrumb navigation bar, new member and hierarchy views, updated hints and refactorings, filtering for "Find Usages" and an "effective" POM editor tab for pom.xml files. Java EE developers will find a JPQL testing tool and enhancements to the REST service development features. FXML and the SceneBuilder are better supported in 7.3 Beta's JavaFX handling, which is also compatible with JDK 7u6 on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Today open source content management company MODX is launching a hosted cloud service to commercialize the product, much as Acquia and WordPress.com have done for Drupal and WordPress.
If you have been wanting to try out the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT operating system that's presently under development, there's now an easier way.
Rather than needing to install a current FreeBSD release and then upgrade to the "-CURRENT" packages from there, a FreeBSD developer has finally started offering snapshot images of the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT and 9-STABLE versions. Yes, finally ISO snapshots to make it easier to try out the current development state from a clean install.
Cross platform video editor Avidemux 2.6 has been released and it features a ton of changes to make the video editing easier and better. All the video editor internals have been rewritten and user will able to experience improved performance in editing and encoding tasks.
There's a new release of OpenShot, one of the popular open-source non-linear video editing applications.
The first release of AppStream-Core is now available, which provides support for creating the AppStream database and accessing it via a GObject-based interface. This basically comes down to the simple creation of "Software Centers" for Linux.
It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the California Senate and Assembly in late August.
A starter kit for the Arduino Uno open-source prototyping board which can be used by professional embedded system engineers and students is available from RS Components, writes Richard Wilson.
The kit contains the components required to start programming with the Arduino Uno board along with a guidebook featuring 15 different projects. There is a definite mechatronics flavour to the kit which includes a motor, servomotor and driver.
If there was an overarching message from the speakers at last week's Open Hardware Summit, particularly those in the first morning block, it's that openness isn't that critical. It sounds strange coming from a conference whose name starts with "open," but speaker after speaker talked about hybrids and doing whatever worked, not just doing what was open.
That's not to say they don't believe in the power of openness. The first words of Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's opening keynote were the very foundation of open source: "Everything I've learned as I built my own business is because people shared what they knew."
The rapid adoption of a single weed-killer for the vast majority of crops harvested in the United States has given rise to superweeds and greater pesticide use, a new study suggests. And while crops engineered to manufacture an insect-killing toxin have reduced the use of pesticides in those fields, the emergence of newly resistant insects now threatens to reverse that trend.
Farmers spray the herbicide glyphosate, widely sold under the Monsanto brand Roundup, on fields planted with seeds that are genetically engineered to tolerate the chemical. Found in 1.37 billion acres of corn, soybeans, and cotton planted from 1996 through 2011, this “Roundup Ready” gene was supposed to reduce or eliminate the need to till fields or apply harsher chemicals, making weed control simple, flexible, cheap, and less environmentally taxing.
Now they tell us? More than four years after investors in mortgage-backed securities began filing class actions accusing MBS issuers of deceiving them in offering documents -- and at least three years after federal judges began tossing class claims because name plaintiffs didn't have the requisite standing -- the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has redefined standing in MBS class actions. In a 38-page opinion that revives a class action against Goldman Sachs, the appeals court rejected what had been conventional wisdom, finding that a union healthcare fund represented by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd isn't limited to claims based on specific offerings it invested in. Instead, wrote Judge Barrington Parker for a panel that also included judges Reena Raggi and Raymond Lohier, the union fund has standing to assert claims related to every certificate backed by mortgages originated by the same lenders that originated the loans backing the notes purchased by the fund.
Such a policy, which received wider attention during Ben Bernanke’s Congressional questioning last year and was also highlighted this year in a paper delivered at the Jackson Hole conference (Woodford, opens to PDF), has not caught any visible traction with Washington policy makers possibly because it’s seen as either too radical, or simply too new.