Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system is available as a preview release. One Linux user at Network World decided to take the plunge and see if there was anything Windows 10 had to teach Linux.
Back in 1979, a video game was being developed for the Atari 2600 -- Adventure.
The programmer working on Adventure slipped a secret feature into the game which, when the user moved an “invisible square” to a particular wall, allowed entry into a “secret room”. That room contained a simple phrase: “Created by Warren Robinett”.
RancherOS, the latest minimal Linux-based operating system for running Docker containers, was recently launched by Darren Shepherd, Rancher Lab's CTO. In contrast with Boot2Docker (another lightweight Docker-centric distribution) which openly discourages production use, RancherOS's announcement claims the new OS is production and scale-ready.
Members of the Magic Lantern community are saying that this development will open the door to a universe of possibilities. While Magic Lantern was previously a set of hacks running on top of Canon code, being able to run Linux on a Canon DSLR means the developers will be able to implement new features cleanly and access the camera’s hardware directly.
It’s no longer April Fools Day, so what we are about to tell you is no joke, but the real deal. The awesome developers behind the well-known and acclaimed Magic Lantern third-party software add-on that brings a wide range of new features to Canon EOS cameras, have announced that they’ve managed to port the Linux kernel to Canon DSLRs.
A patch series that's been baking for a while by Laércio de Sousa provides Xephyr input hot-plugging and other changes needed to allow for single-GPU multi-seat support.
The Calibre eBook reader, editor, and library management application has been updated to version 2.23. The developer has made some minor improvements and Calibre now comes bundled with Qt 5.4.1.
Krita is an open-source digital painting software that proved to be a very powerful and useful solution. The developers have just issued a new update for the 2.9 branch of the application, and they have implemented a large number of improvements.
The Google developers have announced that the Google Chrome browser has been updated and that a few important security fixes have been implemented.
In September, Google launched ARC—the "App Runtime for Chrome,"—a project that allowed Android apps to run on Chrome OS. A few days later, a hack revealed the project's full potential: it enabled ARC on every "desktop" version of Chrome, meaning you could unofficially run Android apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. ARC made Android apps run on nearly every computing platform (save iOS).
Your $200 Chrome OS device is about to become more exciting. Google has opened the floodgates for developers to ‘port’ their Android apps to Chrome OS device. It actually goes beyond Chrome OS powered devices. Any device running Chrome, the browser, is now capable of running Android apps.
StarNet Communications Corp, (http://www.starnet.com/) a leading publisher of remote Linux desktop solutions today announced the release of the industry’s first X Windows terminal emulator capable of displaying a full remote Linux desktop over the Internet using only a standard browser.
Datacenter automation is one of the strongest features offered by the Mesosphere technology. This post is a follow on from our recent presentation at the Bay Area Infracoders meetup where we demonstrated how an organization can use Mesosphere to easily construct a simple continuous deployment pipeline from source code repository to your datacenter.
Valve has published the results of the Steam Hardware Survey for March, and it looks like Steam for Linux is again rising, although it is difficult to say if it's something permanent or just a simple spike up the graph.
Out There: é Edition is a really nice space exploration game with zero combat. It impressed me during the beta, and the final release is now available.
Thanks to Night Dive Studios we now have a few more real classic games on Steam for Linux. A chance for some younger gamers to relive the experience.
The Banner Saga developers tweeted out recently that the game is nearing the final stages for Linux! I know quite a few are waiting on it, so I'm happy to relay the news.
I've spent more hours than I care to admit in search of the perfect portable game controller to use with my laptop. I wanted something compact and Bluetooth enabled, so the Nyko Playpad seemed to fit the bill quite nicely. Unfortunately this little device is intended for the Android and iOS platforms. PC gaming was clearly an after thought for this thing, as is evidenced by the Android firmware updater that will prompt you to flash a PC-friendly version of the firmware, only to deny the request with promises that said feature is in the works. Highly doubtful. The Android software hasn't been updated in years, and is absolute rubbish. I finally had to use their Windows updater to flash the latest firmware.
The Calligra team has released version 2.9.2, a the bugfix release of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. Updating the software is recommended to everybody.
The Calligra Team, through Jarosà âaw Staniek, was proud to announce today, April 2, that the second maintenance release of their Calligra office suite for KDE desktop environments has been released with a great number of improvements to the Krita digital painting software, for which we have a separate announcement.
It's been a very long time coming, but GNOME has finally hit its stride--in a big way. Since the release of GNOME 3, people have declared that this particular Linux desktop is dead. Those naysayers can now put their hatred aside and enjoy the hard work that the developers have put into making GNOME 3.16 the single most polished iteration of this open-source desktop to date... and quite possibly any Linux desktop.
The GNOME Project has announced recently that their upcoming GUADEC 2015 developer conference will take place between August 7 and 9 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and that all those who want to submit talk proposals can do so right now.
The Evolve OS project has just changed its name to Solus after a trademark spat over a name owned by UK's Secretary of State office.
Black Lab Linux Desktop, a distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that is now using the MATE desktop environment, has been upgraded to version 6.5 RC1 and is now available for download and testing.
NEW : Release Candidate versions are now available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are only available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests.
Earlier in March we announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host, a small footprint, container host based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. It provides a stable host platform, optimized for running application containers, and brings a number of application software packaging and deployment benefits to customers. In my previous container blog I gave the top seven reasons to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host. One reason was the ability to do atomic updates and rollbacks. In this blog I provide an in-depth look into atomic updating and how it differs from a yum update. And, speaking of atomic updates… it just so happens that our first atomic update was made available yesterday.
This is a short blog post to get over my writer's block. For the last 2 years, Fedora has had a computer festival called FLOCK in either Europe or North America. The first FLOCK happened in beautiful Charleston SC in 2013. The second FLOCK was in the wonderful capital of the Czech Republic, Prague. This years FLOCK is to be held from August 12-15 in Rochester New York. The main website is having some issues (various links aren't pointing to the correct places because Wordpress is being obstinate) but these are being worked on as I write and hopefully will be fixed soon.
Fedora’s quality makes complacency easy. But in truth, we’re always under construction — or we should be. You could call that constant disruption by different names. Risk positive. Forward leaning. Embracing change. Since inception, Fedora was intended to avoid the status quo. So what’s next for shaking up said status?
Fedora 22 was different from other releases most significantly by the way it was distributed - namely in three purpose-designed editions. However, Paul Frields is floating another method for future Fedora releases. He suggest Fedora 23 or 24 may consist of "some combination of a strongly managed center, curated stacks, and an expanding nebula of containers."
Dennis Gilmore has announced the other day that the upcoming Beta release of the Fedora 22 Linux operating system is now in freeze and no other packages than the ones who fix the accepted blocker or repair two bugs that have been declared exceptions to the freeze.
Recent reports show us that a known Ubuntu bug, which was submitted to Canonical’s Launchpad bug-tracking website about half a decade ago, still exists in the current version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system and Canonical refuses to fix it for unknown reasons.
While many computer manufacturers are in a race to the bottom -- both in price and quality -- some makers continue to produce reliable high-quality machines. One of these manufacturers is System76. If you aren't familiar, it manufactures and sells desktops and laptops running the Ubuntu operating system. In other words, Linux fans can buy one of these machines and have it running the Linux distro out of the box -- no need to format the drive to remove Windows.
With the latest Git code for Mesa 10.6 development, the Raspberry Pi VC4 Gallium3D driver has switched to using the NIR intermediate representation.
Here, we’ve got the best new and updated apps from last month in one place for your easy perusal. We’ve split this story over two pages to make it easier for you, but if you’d rather read it all as one, just click here.
We’ve been contacted by a couple of our readers to inform us that the official Android 5.0.1 update for the T-Mobile LG G3 is finally available. As of right now, it’s not an OTA update, but it is – according to our readers – available through the LG mobile support tool. Checking the T-Mobile software updates page reveals that T-Mobile still has it in “testing” mode.
As we push deeper into Samsung’s Android 5.0 Lollipop roll out, we’re starting to see new details emerge. Among those details are rumors regarding a Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1 update. With reports and rumors swirling, we want to help set your expectations appropriately as we take a look at what we expect from a Samsung Galaxy Android 5.1 update.
Even though the Moto 360 was late out the gate compared to Android Wear devices like the Samsung Gear Live or LG G Watch, it’s still considered a first gen Android Wear device. While there’s a lot that we loved about the Moto 360 — as mentioned in our review — it did come with its fair share of shortcomings and thus, there was still plenty of room for improvement in a followup.
Google announced an Asus “Chromebit” HDMI stick running Chrome OS, plus four new low-cost Chromebooks, and opened its Android-to-Chrome OS app porting tech.
Open source code creation opens the door for IT developers across varied industries to adopt, modify and customize technology to their organization’s specific needs. Companies are free to contribute to and adopt code so long as resources—such as intellectual property software audit services—are applied to ensure that the ground rules established by the code’s originator are acknowledged and followed.
I started getting involved with open source as a Computer Science (CS) grad student. I was using a combination of open source and proprietary software in my research. Given the nature of research, being able to rapidly prototype a concept and customize the tools involved are both hugely important goals. I found that open source tools often gave our team this win-win scenario where we were able to quickly try a variety of tools at no cost while also being empowered to modify or even combine solutions. This was a big advantage over using closed proprietary software.
ONOS' community today announced the availability of the second release of its open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS), named Blackbird, that is focused on performance, scale and high availability. ONOS is the first open source platform to define a comprehensive set of metrics for effectively evaluating the "carrier-grade quotient" of SDN control plane platforms/controllers and to publicly publish the performance evaluation of its Blackbird release using these metrics.
The library is known as IGInterfaceDataTable, and is intended to make “configuring tables with multi-dimensional data easier.” In other words, Instagram said, like its own app for Apple’s forthcoming smart watch.
OPEN-XCHANGE, the security conscious open source white label productivity provider from Germany, has announced a three-way merger to create one of the largest open source companies in Europe.
The deal sees the company join up with Dutch DNS software vendor PowerDNS and Finnish IMAP server provider Dovecot to form a pan-European powerhouse.
The new deal sees the combined Open-Xchange take a 90 percent market share in the secure DNS market and some 130 million user accounts.
We caught up with Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna to get his thoughts on the news, starting with the advantages that the combined company will bring to the open source market.
Only a couple of days after releasing the final build of the Firefox 37.0 web browser, Mozilla has now pushed the next major version of the application to the Beta channel. We were very curious to see what’s new, so we have downloaded Mozilla Firefox 38.0 Beta in order to report its new features and improvements.
The Tor Project, through Mike Perry, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release of the Tor Browser Bundle 4.0 software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
A web-based threat modeling tool was developed by undergraduate students at St. Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada, as part of Mozilla’s Winter of Security project in 2014.
The open source Cloud Foundry Foundation is growing today with the addition of OpenStack vendor Mirantis to its membership roster. The move is a very interesting one for many reasons.
In a sign that OpenStack clouds are becoming the purview of only the high and mighty—not to mention wealthy—companies that can fund their own distributions of the open source platform, OpenStack-based private cloud vendor Nebula announced its closing this week.
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.4.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 50 fixes over LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.4.1.
Fotoxx, an open source, free, and powerful image manipulation software for Linux kernel-based operating systems has reached version 15.04, an important release that brings several new features, various improvements, as well as bugfixes.
Open data and going digital are subjects high on the international agenda for global development, particularly when it comes to financing improved services and infrastructure for the poorest people in the world. Young people from Laos to Lagos aspire to become software developers, and smartphones are set to put unprecedented computing power into every corner of the earth. But the paradox is that many governments still only have rudimentary information technology infrastructure and often can't find trained and skilled staff to design and run it.
The Slovak Republic wants to reduce the administrative burden on citizens and companies, and to avoid the need to repeatedly request information. The Ministry of Finance in February signed a contract for a base registry to make it possible for public administrations to exchange data and information. The EUR 13 million project will also result in standards for data sharing between public administrations.
Given the opportunity to use one of the Intel Galileo boards, we wanted to build something that would honour Galileo's memory and pay tribute to his discoveries. What better way than to do something related to his primary focus - astronomy.
One of the most important aspects of open source is the license that describes how one can modify, distribute, and use the software and/or hardware for commercial applications.
The creator of MirageOS, Anil Madhavapeddy, says it’s “simply irresponsible to continue to knowingly provision code that is potentially unsafe, and especially so as we head into a year full of promise about smart cities and ubiquitous Internet of Things. We wouldn't build a bridge on top of quicksand, and should treat our online infrastructure with the same level of respect and attention as we give our physical structures.”
In the hopes of improving security, performance and scalability, there’s a flurry of interesting work taking place around blocking out functionality into containers and lighter-weight unikernel alternatives. Galois, which specializes in R&D for new technologies, says enterprises are increasingly interested in the ability to cleanly separate functionality to limit the effect of a breach to just the component affected, rather than infecting the whole system.
Fox News host and Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson acknowledged he instructs his employees that "you can't go after Fox ... because I work there." Carlson added that the rule is a "conflict" and "Is that unfair? Yes, it is. But that's what it is."
In client-server, we're calves and sites are cows. We go to sites to suckle "content" and get lots of little unwanted files, most of which are meant to train advertising crosshairs on us. Having Do Not Track in the world has done nothing to change the power asymmetry of client-server. But it's not the only tool, nor is it finished. In fact, the client-side revolution in this space has barely started.
In a major breach of public trust and confidence, the Chinese digital certificate authority China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) certified false credentials for numerous domains, including several owned by Google. The deliberate breach had the potential to seriously endanger vulnerable users, such as journalists communicating with sources. The breach was discovered by Google and published on its security blog on March 23. Despite this serious lapse, it appears CNNIC's authority will not be revoked, and that its credentials will continue to be trusted by almost all computers around the world.
By design, the research company’s numbers don’t reflect the amount of money spent by U.S. taxpayers funding the NSA’s operations. Nor do they indicate how much of this $47 billion is being born by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, as far as I can tell. What I do know is that many foreign governments have been publicly investing in Linux and open source projects since Snowden’s revelations that back doors for the NSA have been built into many proprietary U.S. enterprise software products.
Both Google and Mozilla are taking aggressive measures against Chinese certificate authority CNNIC.
Invizbox aims to do exactly that. The project follows in the footsteps of Anonabox, the crowdsourced effort that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring a router that anonymizes Internet traffic to market, but was later pulled by Kickstarter after its custom hardware claim came under scrutiny.
Kurt Opsahl talks to Dark Reading about government surveillance and privacy in anticipation of his Interop keynote.
Matt DeHart, Anonymous activist and alleged WikiLeaks courier, was formally arraigned today, but he did not appear in court. Matt is pleading not guilty to all charges against him, so he waved his formal court appearance and pled not guilty by submitting papers to the court. He remains imprisoned in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
The Department of Homeland Security is seeking bids from companies able to provide law enforcement officials with access to a national license-plate tracking system — a year after canceling a similar solicitation over privacy issues.
[...]
In a privacy impact assessment issued Thursday, the DHS says that it is not seeking to build a national database or contribute data to an existing system.
A former CIA spy manager is raising a serious question about the way the intelligence agency handled the national-security risk raised in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer who was recently convicted on espionage charges for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen.
In 2007, John Kiriakou became the first Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official to publicly confirm that agency interrogators waterboarded a high-value detainee, terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah — a revelation that had previously been a closely guarded secret.
Five years after this unauthorized disclosure to ABC News, the veteran CIA officer pleaded guilty to leaking to journalists the identity of certain individuals who were involved with the CIA's rendition, detention, and interrogation program. He was sentenced to two and a half years in federal prison.
Typically, when a war ends, so does the combatants’ authority to detain the other side’s fighters. But as the conclusion of the US war in Afghanistan approaches, the inmate population of Guantánamo Bay is likely to be an exception – and, for the Obama administration, the latest complication to its attempt to close the infamous wartime detention complex.
With U.S. combat operations officially ended in Afghanistan, some U.S. lawyers for five Afghan detainees at Guantánamo wrote the Obama administration Monday asking that the captives be freed.
European internet providers would be allowed to profit from “two-speed” data services under proposals being considered in Brussels, opening a transatlantic divide on telecoms regulation after the US banned similar tactics last week.
In documents seen by the Financial Times, EU member states are proposing rules that would establish a principle of “net neutrality” but still allow telecoms groups to manage the flow of internet traffic to ensure the network worked efficiently.
It's been a unique experience for me as a Techdirt writer, one who does not delve into the net neutrality debates and posts very often, to watch the effect the wider coverage about net neutrality has had on the general public. Without being scientific about it, there are certain markers for story penetration I notice and have noticed specifically when it comes to net neutrality. For instance, a couple of months ago, my father called me up with a simple question: "What should my position be on net neutrality?" The question itself isn't generally useful, but the simple fact that a grandfather is even asking about it means something when it comes to the public consciousness of the topic itself. So too is the appearance of the topic and debates on the Sunday news programs. But maybe the most important indication that net neutrality has become, at the very least, a thing the public is discussing is the topic's appearance in seemingly unrelated venues. Even if the take was wrong, coverage in political cartoons was something cool to see, for instance. But the topic coming up as the theme of a politically-motivated video game is even more exciting.