Team communication app Slack today announced the formal availability of a beta version of its app for devices running the Linux operating system.
“These builds may have some bugs or rough edges, but we won’t push out anything that we know to be extremely buggy or non-functional,” Slack says on the Google Forms page where you can sign up for beta access to the Slack Linux app. “We humbly ask only one thing of those who join: please give us your honest feedback so that we can make your Linux experience great.”
This year, the effect will be more pronounced as more OEMs and retailers are delivering GNU/Linux desktops than in 2014. Further Chrome OS has share and it’s a browser running on GNU/Linux. There’s a lot of Chrome OS in USAian schools. Globally, Chrome OS had 0.46% share in May but only 0.29% in August, so the assertion will be dead with school coming back. Then there’s Android/Linux…
[Voltagex] was fed up with BSODs on his Windows machine due to a buggy PL2303 USB/serial device driver. The Linux PL2303 driver worked just fine, though. A weakling would simply reboot into Linux. Instead, [Voltagex] went for the obvious workaround: create a tiny Linux distro in a virtual machine, route the USB device over to the VM where the drivers work, and then Netcat the result back to Windows.
IBM continues to invest in Apache Spark -- an open source platform for big data analytics. The latest moves involve Apache Spark for Linux running on IBM mainframes, plus partnerships with three data-mining software companies.
The Linux Foundation has announced that Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exams have been made available in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. Also, the Essentials of Linux System Administration course (LFS201) can now be taken in Portuguese as well.
While Libinput 1.0 was planned to happen around versions 0.13~0.14 of this input handling project for X.Org and Wayland (and Mir coming up too), we're now up to version 0.21, but it looks like 1.0 is finally coming up soon.
Nvidia developers have just published a new Beta driver for the Linux platform, and it looks like the company is preparing for some serious improvements, which should land shortly in the stable branch as well.
The development of the Launchpad platform was put on hold until a few months ago, but that's no longer the case. A new major upgrade has been released for Launchpad, and it looks like Canonical means business.
The Friendly Interactive Shell which is commonly called and abbreviated as FISH is a shell for UNIX and UNIX like Operating System. It is released under GNU General Public License v2.
Kodi, a media player and entertainment hub that used to go by the name of XBMC, was upgraded to version 15.0 a while ago, and now the developers behind it are working on the first major upgrade that should land pretty soon.
Spec Ops: The Line, a third-person shooter developed by Yager and published by 2K Games, is now available on Steam for Linux with a huge 80% discount.
Earlier today, August 3, the developers of the popular Unvanquished FPS (first-person shooter) game announced the release of the Alpha 42 build, a version that brings several improvements in many areas and resolves some of those nasty bugs reported by users since the previous Alpha build of the title.
Hopefully Feral Games will be able to further improve the performance of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor with forthcoming updates on Steam for Linux. Additionally, hopefully they will add command-line switches for controlling the benchmark mode for this game so that we'll be able to deliver more performance test results in the future with Phoronix Test Suite integration. Meanwhile, hopefully AMD will work on a prompt Catalyst Linux driver update to correct the incredibly poor performance and issues with this game, as I outlined in last week's results.
We all know that every one like games, so we have created a list of games you can play from your Linux terminal.
The Masterplan, a squad-based heist game developed and published by Shark Punch on Steam, has been released for the Linux platform as well.
Before getting too excited, it's far from being a AAA game that's launched exclusively for Linux nor anything that will drive mass amounts of people over to Linux in order to experience the game. The game that's currently Linux-only -- but Windows and OS X support is expected in about one month -- that launched on 31 July is Don't Be Patchman.
While id Software used to be the game company that was very Linux-friendly and always porting their titles over to Linux even when its gaming market was tiny and often overlooked by other game studios, today marks three years since they came out to say Linux hasn't produced positive results and since then haven't released any Linux-native titles as it doesn't "pay the bills" for the level of work involved.
The Enlightenment team has announced a major update to their Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.
Three years, five months and eleven days... yes, it's the elapsed time since our last release announcement. But don't despair! We're still alive and kicking.
We've been busy working on our next release which is much more ambitious than the previous one. As part of this future release, we had to adjust a bit how we store some information. That is why today we are announcing a transitional minor release.
Behold Zanshin 0.2.2!
For the second time I had the chance to attend Akademy, this time in cold and rainy La Coruña. It has been a week of interesting talks, good food (except for one Tortilla incident), and hacking.
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KRunner History is Back
Supposedly this was one of the reason I still saw quite a few people running Plasma 4 during the conference but now there’s no more reason not to do the switch! ;)
Today, August 4, Matthias Klumpp was extremely happy to announce the release of the final version of his Tanglu 3 GNU/Linux distribution, dubbed Chromodoris Willani and based on the latest stable Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
The developers of the Debian-based Q4OS Linux distribution built around the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) project, which aims to keep the spirit of the legacy KDE 3.5 desktop environment alive, informed Softpedia earlier about the immediate availability for download and testing of the first snapshot of Q4OS 2.0.
With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
On August 4, SUSE announced that its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Appplications platform now offers built-in support for IBM Power Systems running the SAP HANA column-oriented, in-memory, relational database management system.
Back in May, we reported about the availability of an ISO image of the open-source CentOS 7 Linux operating system for the ARM64 (AArch64) hardware architectures, designed for those who want to build ARM devices powered by the CentOS distribution.
Mark Cook, vice president of finance and controller of open-source technology firm Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) since 2007, has resigned, signing on to take over the chief financial officer role at Morrisville-based e-commerce software firm ChannelAdvisor (NYSE: ECOM).
Fedora 23 has branched off rawhide heading for it’s Alpha release hopefully next week.
Steve McIntyre, a renowned Debian developer and leader of the "Debian-CD" team, wrote an interesting announcement a couple of days ago informing us all that there was a new team of developers for Debian, maintaining all of their UEFI packages.
The Debian Project proudly announced the dates, the schedule, and the venue for the annual meeting of all Debian developers, contributors, and supporters for 2015, DebConf15.
A HPLIP vulnerability has been identified and corrected in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.
Canonical's Joseph Salisbury reported the summary of the Ubuntu Kernel Team meeting that took place on August 4, 2015, on the official IRC channels of the project.
The Erle-Spider has an aluminium exoskeleton and is equipped with an ARM Cortex-A8 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of internal storage, has accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure, temperature sensors, 4 USB ports, Ethernet port, UART, I2C, microSD slot and has 18 degrees of freedom.
The majority opinion in the Ubuntu community seems to be that the Ubuntu Software Center is a terrible piece of software and that it needs to be replaced or fixed urgently. We compiled a list of reasons why users don't like the application and why they think Canonical should really consider a change.
Olli Ries of Canonical has published a blog post outlining the various client technologies being worked on for Ubuntu, their roadmap, and the plans for making Ubuntu 16.04 a grand Long Term Support release.
If you're still confused by Snappy, Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Touch, and Desktop Next, Olli's new blog post explains those technologies being worked on and how Ubuntu Personal is their next-step for converged devices and leveraging these technologies that have been in development for a while.
As you may know, Ubuntu Developer Tools Center is an command-line, open-source tool that enables the users to easily install the main platforms for Android application development.
It’s only 242 days until April 1st, 2016, the month where another great Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release will be born. Ubuntu 16.04 will be the most sophisticated release of Ubuntu so far.
Jeff Hoogland today announced the pre-release of upcoming Bodhi Linux 3.1.0 with new E17 fork Moksha. Hoogland released the "pre-release" so users might try his new desktop fork and report their thoughts in comments. Bodhi 3.1.0 is scheduled for release on August 24 with 3.2.0 projected for February 2016.
Ubuntu MATE is the newest member from the Ubuntu family, becoming an official flavor starting with the release of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.
There’s no reason why Linux and Android shouldn’t get along well—after all, they’re pretty much cousins. You’ve probably heard of apps that let you remotely control an Android device from the desktop. There are also apps that do the vice versa and make it possible to control a Windows computer from an Android device.
Linux users need not feel left out. We’ve discovered more than enough apps that can turn your Androids into powerful Linux remote controllers, and today we’ll present some of our best findings.
GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath discusses open source software and GitHub’s plan to expand internationally. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “Bloomberg West.”
Dono produced photorealistic worlds for the memorable stars of Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and many more of Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpieces using a suite of open source tools, including Blender for 3D, Gimp for image editing, and Natron for compositing. The only non-open source software was the rendering engine, Octane.
Open-source software has been a growing phenomenon for more than two decades, but in recent years it has risen in importance in a whole new way: as a key to rapid innovation for startups and corporate giants alike.
One example of open-source software being used to increase the velocity of technical innovation can be seen with Airbnb. In early June, Airbnb did something that might sound crazy. It decided to give away a sophisticated software tool it developed called Aerosolve.
Aerosolve uses machine learning to understand what consumers will pay for a certain kind of room in a certain place — and helps people figure out how to price their Airbnb rentals.
Adobe has made its Legal Department Style Guide available to everyone under a Creative Commons license. This shows that open source principles are illuminating even the foggy world of legal writing. I've taken a pass through the guide, and can affirm that it's generally sound and useful. It could help reduce obscurity in legal documents and foster more effective communication.
After four years of working tirelessly to improve diversity in tech, the Ada Initiative is shutting down. As a nonprofit organization, they led unconferences that brought women in tech together to help them find their feminist identities, they led impostor syndrome workshops, and they even had workshops for allies who want to help women in tech. Their programs and camps were one-of-a-kind, and the industry will be sorely missing their presence.
The world inside the data center has been changing too, and it is changing fast. The large, status quo storage companies are just as nervous. This group of large legacy system companies has ruled the data center for the past 40 years. They’re the ones selling all that pricey systems hardware—especially in storage found in every organization. They are pushing their brand of reality, and when those companies came knocking, you paid, even as you felt something was not right.
I’m really pleased with the lineup of keynote speakers and sessions we have planned for LinuxCon, CloudOpen and ContainerCon taking place in Seattle in just two short weeks. Content is our first priority for these events, and I think developers, SysAdmins and executives will be happy with what they find in the keynote hall, session rooms and workshops.
Matchstick was meant to be an open hardware and software dongle that would provide an alternative to closed streaming products such as Google's Chromecast, but after less than a year, the project is no more and will be refunding the money it raised in its successful Kickstarter campaign.
The Pointer Events specification devised by the W3C is designed to deal with the increasing spectrum of input devices for the web from touch-input to pens or a conventional mouse. The Pointer Events specification provides a clean API for dealing with all sorts of input devices.
Today marks five years since the announcement of Illumos, the community-based derivative of OpenSolaris to create a fully open-source operating system.
Open source is not just about making something publicly accessible. It is a set of values—a way of working that practices open collaboration between a community to build or maintain something. On the basis of these values, today we can observe a vibrant and thriving open source community responsible for many of the great successes in many industries.
The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) has made a donation in the range of $50~100k USD to the OpenBSD project.
On August 3, Ken Moore from the PC-BSD development team had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the sixth maintenance release of the Lumina Desktop 0.8 desktop environment for PC-BSD and FreeBSD OSes.
This machine runs Debian. It used to run the testing distribution, but somehow in the past I needed something that wasn't in testing so it runs unstable. I've been using Debian for some 16 years now, though not continuously, so although running unstable can be risky, usually it isn't, and I've unborked it enough times that I felt pretty comfortable.
When some bureaucrat tells the world that there are no other options than non-free/slavery software for vocational schools, I know they’re lying. It’s just not true. If businesses want school graduates to use non-free software they should do their own training. It’s not up to government to do what they could do for themselves. It’s not government’s job to preserve the Wintel monopoly. That’s not good for the economy and it’s just wrong to indoctrinate citizens into slavery. Extremadura is cranking out graduates who know GNU/Linux and Free Software. Businesses should accept that and use Free Software too. There’s just no reason that businesses or government should throw money to the wind that could be better spent buying machinery or buildings or hiring people locally.
MeowCAD is an online free and open source electronic design application tool. Its focus is on schematic and PCB design for electronic circuits. Since MeowCAD is a completely FOSS SaaS, it circumvents the problems with vendor dependence. For example, one can download and run local copies of MeowCAD, thus giving the designer complete control over their own tools.
With the rising use of wearable devices, Underwriters Laboratories is working to establish a cyber-security framework to help protect the devices. As more personal digital wearable devices are bought and used by consumers, the risk of data theft and related security issues rises as hackers seek to find new security vulnerabilities to cause mayhem for device users.
There is a caveat readers need to be aware of though – the survey results are somewhat helpful to Coverity, given that it’s main line of business is building tools for testing commercial software for vulnerabilities.
Being a single mom has created a desire in me to find more resources for parents, especially those who are under served or low income.
Some progressives expressed dismay last week to discover that Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, doesn't favor a policy of open immigration. While such a policy would undoubtedly allow billions of people in the developing world to improve their lives, there are not many people in the United States who relish the idea of the country's population tripling or quadrupling over the next three or four decades.
Scott Walker's former top aide Cindy Archer has become the poster child for allegations that state prosecutors investigating corruption around Walker ran amok and engaged in aggressive, unconstitutional "raids" on people's homes.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) ramps up, there are more and more calls for proper legislation surrounding it, and proper standards for its advancements. As we recently reported, trade groups are urging the U.S. Congress to be wary of too much government intervetnion in IoT development. There are also some concerns about IoT security and the standards surrounding it.
Privacy advocates have long been working toward a coherent Do Not Track standard, and this week a new option is being put on the table. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with companies including Medium and DuckDuckGo, have introduced a new Do Not Track standard that they claim to be "stronger" than those currently going around. The standard sticks to Do Not Track's existing tenets: it should be opt-in, and enabling it should tell websites and advertisers not to store and share information on the person visiting them. Supporting the standard is also voluntary, which is less of a choice and more of an acknowledgement that there's no legal backing that requires websites not to track anyone.
Around the U.S., the agents that control the public have been observed to beat up, shoot, kill, and arrest members of the public, with a special focus on protesters, members of minority groups, and people making recordings of the actions of those agents. This is often followed by fabricated accusations against the victim, meant to create false justification for the attack itself.
Captured on cellphone video, the incident received attention because we are living in a moment when many people have decided that the state-sanctioned killing of black people by law enforcement is worth our attention—and that’s very uncomfortable for those who want to believe that every police killing must be in some way justified, if we could only see how. So Keunang’s autopsy—five months later—was likely to make some kind of news, but what kind?
Being a cis white man who's a native English speaker from a fairly well-off background, I'm pretty familiar with privilege. Spending my teenage years as an atheist of Irish Catholic upbringing in a Protestant school in a region of Northern Ireland that made parts of the bible belt look socially progressive, I'm also pretty familiar with the idea that that said privilege doesn't shield me from everything bad in life. Having privilege isn't a guarantee that my life will be better, in the same way that avoiding smoking doesn't mean I won't die of lung cancer. But there's an association in both cases, one that's strong enough to alter the statistical likelihood in meaningful ways.