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Links 4/4/2013: KDE 4.10.2 Released, Pear 7 is Out





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • What Is Our Goal Here?


  • Desktop

    • Linux in the Real World - A View from the Trenches


      Even among our ranks within Linux Advocate, there are "lively" debates on what our goals should be. But I will argue, given the current state of the Linuxphere.....

      That's not going to happen either. Our biggest strength is also our greatest weakness. Fragmentation.

      Let's break it down.

      First off, and not to get lost in semantics, I consider myself a Linux Mentor as well as an Advocate. Advocating is all well and good but without follow through, we're not getting the job done.

      Everyone who enters the Linux Advocate fold does so with their own motivation and expectations. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. That's just a fact of life. I can't expect a natural introvert to do what I do any more than (s)he can demand I code to their level of proficiency.




  • Server

    • Algo-Logic Presenting 10 Gbps Market Data Filter at HPC Linux Wall Street
      SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 3 — Algo-Logic Systems, Inc., a recognized leader in providing hardware-accelerated, deterministic, real-time, ultra-low-latency products, systems and solutions for accelerated finance, packet processing and embedded system industries, announces that it will present live demonstration of its newest FPGA-accelerated Market Data Filtering (MDF) application. This live demo will be showcased on Mon., April 8, at the HPC Wall Street Conference at Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.






  • Kernel Space

    • Another EXT4 Corruption Bug Gets Fixed
      A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.


    • Another EXT4 Corruption Bug Gets Fixed
      A few months back there was an EXT4 file-system corruption bug that impacted stable Linux kernel releases and was widely-covered. Today, another EXT4 file-system bug was corrected within the mainline Linux kernel.


    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD offers open-source Linux driver for hardware video decoding
        AMD's Unified Decoder has been the object of envy in the open-source community for some time. The silicon, which ships on the company's Radeon graphics cards, offers hardware-accelerated video decoding -- but thanks to legal and DRM issues, couldn't be used on Linux machines.


      • X and Wayland
        For me, networking of displays is the most important feature of GNU/Linux operating systems. Perhaps X became too fragile/complex/limited. Perhaps Wayland is the way forward, but without networking Wayland is pathetic. Now that it is coming together it is time for Canonical to get behind Wayland and share the load of generating good FLOSS with the rest of the world. Going it alone will mean serious fragmentation of GNU/Linux. OEMs, consumers, system administrators will have to choose which way to go. I can already see OEMs hanging back by using older releases of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. How long will it take Canonical to wake up to that?


      • NVIDIA Has New Driver Update To Fix Security Flaw


      • Intel Linux Driver Brings In Better Overclock Support
        Introduced last month was the ability to overclock Intel graphics under Linux while presented hours ago is a new Intel Linux kernel driver patch to provide better GPU overclocking support.


      • Digging Deeper Into AMD's UVD Code Drop
        Yesterday it was exclusively announced on Phoronix that AMD was releasing open-source UVD code so that their open-source Linux graphics driver can finally benefit from GPU hardware-accelerated video playback. Here's some more details.

        Now with the Linux kernel and Mesa/Gallium3D code having been published and having time to go through this code myself, after Fatima's article earlier, here's some more details. Of course, if you didn't already, first read AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support for the overview.






  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments/WMs



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kate: Search & Replace Notifications in KDE 4.11
        In KDE 4.10, the “Find All” and “Replace All” highlights all matches and at the same time shows a passive notification in a bar below the view. This bar is animated, and takes quite a lot of place in addition to the search & replace bar.

        Since some days, Kate Part can also show passive notifications floating in the view. Hence, we’ve changed the passive notification to appear on the bottom right as a small info message, showing the number of matches. However, in order to make this passive notification as small as possible, we removed the “Close” button, since the notification is hidden after 3 seconds anyway. Further, we removed the “Keep Highlighting” button. If you want to keep the highlights, just do not close the search & replace bar. The following video demonstrates this behavior, first for KDE 4.10, then how it currently will be in KDE 4.11 (watch the video in 720p):


      • KDE 4.10.2 Fixes Annoying and Dangerous Bugs
        KDE announced the latest release of their popular desktop environment today, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.2. This is an update/stabilization release that brought over 100 fixes. Some bugs were annoying, but one particular nasty bugger was also fixed.


      • KDE 4.10.2 Released, Fixes 100+ Bugs
        The KDE 4.10.2 point release is said to have over 100 bug-fixes. Reported improvements within the KDE 4.10.2 release include the Kontact Personal Information Management Suite, the KWin window manager, and others.


      • KDE 4.10.2 Brings over 100 Bugfixes




    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • MATE 1.6 supports systemd login
        The MATE developers have released version 1.6 of their desktop environment. Originally derived from the source code of the last GNOME 2 release, the desktop environment offers a similar user interface. MATE 1.6 now works with the login manager of systemd, which has largely replaced ConsoleKit for user and session tracking in several distributions, and is also due to be used in the, as yet unnamed, Ubuntu 13.10.






  • Distributions



  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



  • Growing the community – the case for a jumpstart
    There are several projects that can boast a clear track record of attracting, building and growing a community. LibreOffice is one of them, and so was his parent, OpenOffice.org . I’m not specifically speaking about the developers’ community, but rather about the worldwide community of localizers, QA testers, documentation writers and translators, local volunteers contributing their time to marketing and users support, designers… We had come up with a name back then : the Native-Lang projects. It simply meant the €« native-language projects €», communities working on the basis of their common language rather than on a country affiliation, which would have resulted often in politically complex and difficult situations.


  • SOS Open Source Has a New Face!
    I am proud to announce that finally SOS Open Source has found a new steward in the person of Raffaella Corona. Raffaella has over 5 years experience in the IT industry, she has been at the forefront in selling high value training courses about open source languages and applications.


  • ATEME Enables Industry First Open Source Implementation Supporting HEVC


  • ARM says most ARM powered servers will run open source software
    CHIP DESIGNER ARM says it expects its server chips to be deployed on servers that run open source software stacks.

    ARM has been a vocal and active supporter of open source software for many years and has taken a major role in a number of Linaro working groups in recent years. According to the firm open source software stacks will run on most of its upcoming server chips, with the firm citing market demand.


  • Avetti.com Launches Enterprise Open Source E-Commerce Software
    Avetti's enterprise e-commerce software used in many high volume online stores now has a Community Edition available under the OSL v3 Open Source License. A key feature is integration with the Open Ice Cat product database, which provides images, descriptions and specifications permitting merchants to create professional stores faster.

    The Community Edition software is designed for programmers, consultants, and do-it-yourselfers. For the first time the open source community has access to a full featured multi-store e-commerce solution for Java that is optimized for speed for both the EC2 Cloud and Data Center deployments. David Sopuch, CEO and eBusiness Director of Avetti.com Corporation said, "Finally the open source community now has a free fast solution that is full featured and can handle high volumes."


  • Open source community best fit for new wave of industrial development
    Open source is used just about everywhere, but when it comes to "safety-critical" systems, like software that flies planes or controls medical equipment, most of us assume that open source just doesn't fit the bill. The regulations and requirements are rigorous, and ill-suited to the usual "fail faster" approach of open source.

    Then, we learned about an initiative called Open-DO, which shows that FLOSS has a critical role to play, even in this specialized, highly regulated environment.


  • Web Browsers



  • SaaS/Big Data

    • 7 Search Engines for Big Data
      Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



  • Business

    • NxtGen Saves Millions Using Open Source
      NxtGen Data Center and Cloud Services has saved in excess of Rs 4 lakh per server by using free and open source software (FOSS).

      The company has saved more than $4,000 per server in licensing costs for setting up private clouds by using the open source based OpenStack cloud virtualization platform.


    • Headaches for Small Businesses
      Here’s where FLOSS can help. A small business can migrate to FLOSS in a day or two, often over a weekend, and have software that just keeps on working. Problems that drop off the radar:




  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.0 Reached End-Of-Life on March 31, 2013
      Even though it was known by most of FreeBSD users that the 9.0 release of the best BSD operating system will reach EOL (End-Of-Life) on March 31, 2013, we feel obliged to announce users that FreeBSD 9.0 is no longer supported.

      Originally released on January 10, 2012, FreeBSD 9.0 was a short-term supported release (one year), as opposed to the FreeBSD 8.3 release, which is still supported until April 30, 2014.




  • Project Releases



  • Public Services/Government

    • Open Source 'preference' mandate: overcoming government impasse in the public sector
      The Open Source industry have been waiting the best part of ten years for the UK Government to mandate a ‘preference’ for Open Source Software (OSS) over proprietary or closed-source alternatives.


    • Open government beyond open data and transparency
      The term "Open Government" (OG, hereafter) has been used since the 70s to refer to the effort to reduce bureaucratic opacity and open up governments to public scrutiny. Current notions of OG are thus the result of more than four decades of endeavours to increase the transparency of government actions. These efforts materialized mainly in the enactment of legislation on access to information, privacy, data protection and administrative procedures, and by creating ombudsman offices and supreme audit institutions.


    • Malaysian Government Adoption of FLOSS
      So far, only 9 agencies report using FLOSS desktop or client OS but that should change rapidly when more of the applications are FLOSS. 9 ministries have been declared self-reliant in FLOSS. Two hundred people participated in a conference on self-reliance in FLOSS for governmental agencies recently.


    • IRC clients for Linux
      Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is still widely-used nowadays as a communication method on the internet. On IRC, you will connect to IRC servers in which there will be individual chatrooms called channels. By joining a IRC server, you will be able to chat with other users who have connected to the same server, you can either chat on a channel with many other peeps or make a person-to-person conversation. Most Linux distros have official irc channels on freenode.net for users to come to ask questions and help other people. There are in fact many IRC clients in Linux but in this article, I will show you several IRC clients that I personally know and have used. All these clients are available in the repository of most distros I think you know how to install them already.




  • Licensing



  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming





Leftovers



Recent Techrights' Posts

Saving the Planet With Honesty, Transparency, and Sharing (Not Only of Computer Code)
GAFAM is destroying the only habitat humans and other animals have and it'll only get worse
Disinformation About Election Outcomes Even Before Any Election Outcomes (or Election/Voting!)
seeding doubt about election outcomes
Against Outsourcing of Sites and E-mail
Software Freedom is great, but it is not enough if you let someone else do it 'for you'
Drew DeVault: People Talking About My Attack Site (Against the Founder of GNU/Linux) is "Spam"
"Spam on sr.ht mailing lists"
"Oppose the Fascist"
what the founder of GNU/Linux said
Halloween, All Saints Day & Swiss citizenship
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
 
How Voting Does Not Work
You cannot vote from an "app"
Links 05/11/2024: Bluesky and Enshittification, Pugad Baboy, and Lots of Disinformation Flooding the Web
Links for the day
[Meme] Sweaty Under the Belly
"OK, my critics are 'spam'"
Microsoft Bribing Canonical (to Stop Competing) and Bribing Users to Shun the Competition
Canonical is worth shunning
[Meme] The 2024 'Info Bros'
And prehistoric googling
Computers Getting Worse (for the User) Over Time
This is like Windows-ism coming to "Linux" through the hardware
[Meme] How NOT to Vote
Another form of (mostly-unspoken-of) election interference
An LLM Inside a 'Search' Engine Means That Companies Tell You What They Want, Not What Web Pages to Visit
The future of 'googling' things might be as unreliable as using Social Control Media as a source of information
Google's Debt Has Increased and 'Cash on Hand' Fell by 22.27% This Past Year
These are the numbers that the corporate media intentionally leaves out
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 04, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, November 04, 2024
There's a Reason Why Techrights is Turning 18 and Tux Machines Will Turn 20.5 Next Month
I started advocating GNU/Linux when I was a teenager
Techrights Has a Long History of Fighting to Expose 'Team Mono' or Microsofters Inside GNOME
Never downplay the malice of Microsoft and its operatives
Gemini Links 05/11/2024: Halloween Over, Intention and Implementation, Bookmark Syncing
Links for the day
Microsoft Lost Nearly Half of Its 'Cash Reserves' This Past Year
Is Microsoft (MSFT) the next Intel (INTC)?
The Year Isn't Over Yet, There Will be More Waves of Microsoft Layoffs
Nowadays Microsoft just tries to conflate/equate its energy waste with "value"
The Corporate Media Blasted Bitcoin for Destroying the Planet and Must Do the Same to Incite the Public Against the 'Great Rigging of Wall Street' (Under the Guise of "AI", the Latest Gold Rush)
"AI" is the next "metaverse" (trailing by a few months)
[Video] Richard Stallman is Back to Halo and Gown (in Peru) With 2+ Hours of a Public Talk
The globetrotting Richard Stallman gave many talks at the end of last month
Going Strong Against the Wind
the abuse serves to emphasise or affirm the importance of what we do
Links 04/11/2024: Squashing More Software Patents and Taiwan at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/11/2024: Typing vs Writing and a Smol (Net) Pub
Links for the day
Links 04/11/2024: LibreOffice Had Adopted PeerTube, "Hey Hi" Hype is a Threat to the Energy Grids (Worse Than Fake-Coins)
Links for the day
[Meme] Social Control Telescreens With Microphone
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Shout-out to Christine From FOSSForce
Who noticed our short story
Not Boycotting Apple (Yet)?
"Apple Forces The Signing Of Applications In MacOS Sequoia 15.1"
statCounter This Month: Android Has Nearly Become Twice as Big as Windows
If it happened, it would be an unprecedented milestone
Why Technical Sites Need Not Make Political Recommendations or Endorsements
Except perhaps when it's for some purely technical role, e.g. FCC chief
[Meme] Apple Freedom
Freedom is... the ability to purchase as many 'i' things as you want
Apple's MacOS Shows Us the Vision of Computing That GAFAM Has for Us (Digital Prisons)
Freedom means "we the people" should be in control, not people being controlled by corporations (contemporary slaveowners)
"Active" as in One URL, One Emoji, and 4 Words in One Week
Diversity community in Fedora
Apple Vision Pro Has Failed, Just Like "Metaverse"
Vision Pro lacks software
Things That Can Improve Election Integrity
the first two relate to "tech"
Rigging Elections is Difficult, Cheating a Little is Not
Avoid social control media, it is the biggest rigger of all
"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"
On throwing stones in a glass house
Our Stance on Electronic (or Digital) Voting Machines
The simple activity of voting and counting ballots does not require thousands of complex machines with hundreds of millions of transistors and hundreds of millions of lines of code
Microsoft and "Retrospective Re-writing of History..."
in YouTube anyone can make stuff up (as one goes along)
This Coming Week
Go exercise your right to vote
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 03, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, November 03, 2024
Reddit is (Still) Lying and Faking
Don't fall for this phony idea that the above sites are grassroots or edgy; they're not
GNU/Linux Users Are Not Cheaters
The bottom line is, most cheaters use Windows
Links 04/11/2024: FCC, Broadband Industry Spar Over Net Neutrality; Software Patent Squashed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/11/2024: Official MyGemini.Space Announcement
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/11/2024: Election Thoughts, Plagiarism, and LLM Slop
Links for the day
Links 03/11/2024: Deere 'Right to Repair' (RoR) and "Threads Bans Anyone For Mentioning Hitler"
Links for the day
[Video] "El Movimiento del Software Libre y el Sistema Operativo GNU" by Richard M. Stallman
The footage is a bit jittery (taken with a phone apparently, and there's no tripod available), but the sound is OK and the words (in Spanish) are comprehensible
Android at New Highs (47%), Windows at New Lows (24%), Suggests Latest Data From statCounter
So the market share of Android is about double that of Windows
[Video] Richard Stallman's Talk in Spanish (in Peru Last Week)
Alternative URLs too
The Media Focuses on the Wrong Scandal
The real scandal at MIT was Gates
Gemini Links 03/11/2024: Fantasy Life Day and Worship
Links for the day
[Meme] Write Us Drivers and GTFO!
When you realise sanctioning BRICS devs goes against the community
Decommissioning Copper Lines Makes Us Less Safe
We've essentially degraded the robustness or reliability of critical systems
Life of an Addicted Lolicon Who Can Also Code
Personal blog as an open diary
[Meme] Reporting Crime is Not a Crime
Obviously!
Manchester Party for Techrights
If you choose to come, of course we'll cover the cost of the food and treats (but not travel)
Privacy is Not a Crime (in Places Where It is a Crime the Regime is Typically Very Rogue)
Also, criminals lack "privacy rights" to hide their crimes from the public
GNU/Linux "Market Share" in Lebanon More Than Doubled in a Few Months
Maybe it's a reaction to something? Assassination in Haret Hreik was in July.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 02, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, November 02, 2024
Nearly 40 Years Without Security Incidents
People who use Windows have come to sort of "accept" that security incidents are part of life or "normal"
[Meme] The Streisand Effect
Simon says, don't bother trying to suppress facts
Streisand Effect at IBM?
Trying to silence your workers isn't the best approach. It only makes colleagues even more curious.
Microsoft is a Gift That Keeps Giving (Future Stories to Techrights)
Microsoft has been trying to silence me using dirty tricks for nearly 20 years
Elon Musk Has Trashed Twitter for Ideological Reasons (and Propping Up Trump in Exchange for Financial and Political Favours Once in Public Office)
In case you didn't leave Twitter already, consider the fact that Twitter's (or "X"... whatever!) future is uncertain
Wall Street Has Demoted Intel, Seeing There May be No Future to Intel
Intel's loss isn't a loss to us
Free Software Licence Compliance is About Security Too
Linux as de facto proprietary off-the-shelf platform