Chromebooks are capable web-focused PCs, and a great choice for anyone who needs a laptop for travel or working outside the office. Thanks to a wide variety of fully featured web apps—some of which work offline—a Chromebook can cover many of the same use cases as a regular PC.
Of course, there are times when nothing less than the flexibility of a full PC desktop environment will do. A Chromebook can still prove useful in those moments if you set it up to run a traditional Linux desktop operating system. Originally designed with developers in mind, Chromebooks can run a full Linux desktop in either dual-boot mode or as a “chroot.”
It looks like the mainline Linux kernel will support one less CPU architecture come Linux 4.12.
The AVR32 architecture for 32-bit RISC micro-controllers designed in Norway and used in some Atmel products is set to be discontinued from the mainline kernel.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has officially released Linux kernel 4.11. After eight release candidates, kernel 4.11, codenamed Fearless Coyote, comes with numerous new features and fixes. The major Linux Kernel 4.11 features are scalable SSD swapping, SMC-R support, AMDGPU power management improvement, Turbo Max 3.0 improvements, new perf ftrace tool, etc.
Freshly derived from the Linux 4.11 kernel release less than 24 hours ago, GNU Linux-libre 4.11 is available with additional "deblogging" to make the kernel more free software friendly.
I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.65 kernel.
All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...
Open source projects and telecom's standards development organizations must work together to speed production of multi-vendor interoperability and automation for NFV and SDN, according to a Linux Foundation whitepaper released today. Such an effort requires close coordination, however, as well as a realization by each side of what it does best and careful attention to legal and intellectual property challenges.
Thanks to Docker and LinuxKit, Linux and open source are closer to conquering the world than ever—sort of. Here's how Docker hopes to use LinuxKit, a new Linux Foundation project, to sneak Linux into Windows servers, Mac laptops and even IoT devices.
Mesa 17.1, the next big release for open source graphics drivers on Linux is closing in on release. The third release candidate is now available for testing. This RC fixes around 34 noted bugs in the release notes.
There are hundreds of Microsoft Project alternatives, and we have covered them before. There are cross-platform and Web alternatives, but in this article I will focus on Microsoft Project alternatives for Linux in particular.
The distinction is a bit tricky because technically Web-based alternatives can be used from Linux, too. Some of the apps I’ve included have a Web version as well, but my main consideration was if they run on Linux or not. So, if an app has a Linux install, it’s included here.
Of course, I can’t include all the project management apps for Linux, so I tried to narrow down my selection to the five I consider the best.
Indeed, the system you are running on your machine already have launcher or in other case you are using minimal desktop or you don't like to scroll through launcher to find an App you want to launch. It won't be wrong to say Gnome-Pie can be alternative option to your Current OS menu. Gnome-Pie is an awesome circular launcher designed to be fun, fast and visually appealing for Linux desktop. Basically it is made of several pies, each pie consist of multiple slices. The use can press a key stroke to open desired pie. By activating one of its slices, applications may be launched, key presses may be simulated or files can be opened.
Multiprocess Firefox mode is disabled on Ubuntu due to incompatibility with the Ubuntu Modifications add-on that's preinstalled. So, here's how to enable it.
Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues [Steam, Official Site], the RPG from Portalarium has another major update released and here's a look at what's new.
The Linux beta can be accessed by anyone on Steam, you just have to own a copy and opt-in to the Beta, no password is required.
I should note, that the game as a whole is early in development and their Linux support is brand new too, so there may be a number of issues.
In comparison to Heavy Gear Assault, another mech game that supports Linux that's in Early Access, Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps instantly feels more accessible. The controls are easy and it actually has a reasonably quick tutorial for the basics.
The Linux Beta isn't "officially supported", but it's there if you want to try it. The developers told me it should be live on the main installation with no opt-in required, but that gave me a "missing executable" error, however, the Linux Beta branch did work without issues. They state they just haven't had enough testing to put up a Linux/SteamOS icon on the Steam store.
Today we’re proud to release Krita 3.1.3. A ton of bug fixes, and some nice new features as well! Dmitry and Boud have taken a month off from implementing Kickstarter features to make Krita 3.1.3 as good and solid as we could make it. Thanks to all the people who have tested the alpha, the beta and the release candidate! Thanks to all the people who have worked on translations, too, and to Alexey Samoilov for picking up the maintenance of the Ubuntu Lime PPA.
Krita, one of the most popular open-source graphics editors available, has a new release — and it's already available to install on Ubuntu.
After a long time of development, pain, tragic loss, and so on, I'm proud to announce, today, the release of feren OS 2017.0 Stable! This release sports a Linux Mint 18.1 base, which contains the latest and greatest of LTS, and more!
OpenELEC is designed to be a lightweight and easy to use distribution for media centre computers and it just had a fresh release this weekend.
The Rockbox project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Rockbox 3.14. Over 4 years have passed since the last release, and in that time we've been busy adding features and fixing bugs to give you the best Rockbox experience yet on the widest range of targets ever.
If you can't wait, hurry up to https://www.rockbox.org/download/ and get the release now! If you're still curious about what has changed, read on for a slightly more detailed summary and list of changes.
Enjoy Rockbox - we enjoy making it.
Sure, Red Hat is a major Linux company. Indeed, most would say it's the Linux company, but moving forward, what Red Hat wants to be is the private cloud company.
Before one uses an item - be it a car, a piece of silicon, or even software - it is desirable to have assurances as to its quality. What assurances these are can vary depending on the part and use, but they are all some degree of "will this work as I expect it to when I use it".
Linux distributions (distros), roughly speaking, have two styles of release: periodic stable (where there are formal releases of the distribution, like Debian or RHEL/CentOS) and rolling release (where the package versions are always updating, like Gentoo). These stable-release distributions are always frozen (in some fashion) from an associated rolling release, be it another distro or a special branch for this purpose. (So Debian freezes from its unstable/testing branches, while Fedora freezes from its rawhide branch, which is in turn approximately re-frozen to become RHEL/CentOS.) Although these associated rolling distros (sub-distros?) are usually intended primarily for improving the quality of the main distros, they often become commonly-run in their own right (Fedora, Debian testing).
Of course there are quality assurance efforts involved in the freezing process, but I want to talk about the rolling efforts. Ultimately, we'd like some degree of assurance that package updates don't break (first) unrelated components on the system, (second) other packages that depend on it, and (third) expectations of direct users of the package. For each of these, there are automated tests that can be run (e.g., verifying dependencies, ABI compatibility checks, regression suites, etc.), and it is also desirable to have human verification as well. So let's look at some!
Eurotech’s “CPU-521-17” is a -20 to 70€°C ready thin Mini-ITX board that runs CentOS, Ubuntu, or Windows on Intel’s 6th Gen Core CPUs.
Eurotech has spun a variety of Linux-ready SBCs over the years, such as its i.MX6-based CPU-351-13, but the new 6th Gen Core “Skylake” based CPU-521-17 is the first Eurotech Mini-ITX board we’ve seen. Like the CPU-351-13 and most other Eurotech boards, the rugged, thin Mini-ITX board supports its Everyware Software Framework (ESF), a commercial version of the open source Java/ OSGi “Eclipse Kura” middleware for IoT gateways.
The Pinebook ships with BSP Linux, that I wrote some lines about, but another official distribution (Operating System) available is Android 6.0.
This Android can easialy be installed using the Pine 64 installer tool. Everything you need is a micro SD card and and adapter or a card reader that supports micro sd in the computer you are doing this.
Sometimes all you need is a single function. That’s the idea behind serverless computing, where individual functions spin up on demand, perform a minimal piece of work (serve as an API endpoint, return static content, and so on), and shut down. It’s cheap, it uses minimal resources, and it has little management overhead.
Most of what we currently identify as serverless computing kicked off with AWS Lambda, later joined by similar services on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Bluemix. But there’s a healthy complement of open source serverless architectures available—not only facilitators for the serverless frameworks on a particular cloud, but full-blown methods to deploy serverless frameworks on the cloud or hardware of your choosing.
The file sync and share movement started over a decade ago, led by the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and others, and became popular very fast. The killer feature was having all your files available on all your devices. No more forgetting to bring that important document to a meeting, emailing files, or handling multiple USB sticks. Files were always there when you needed them! That its growth happened with the start of the smartphone age made file sync and share even more useful.
But its popularity wasn't just about having access to your own files on all your devices: it also made sharing easier, enabling a new level of working together. No longer emailing documents, no longer being unsure whether your colleague's feedback came on the latest version of your draft, no longer fixing errors that were already fixed.
The Linux Foundation has used its news chain to unveil the OpenChain Specification 1.1 and an accompanying Online Self-Certification service.
The technology is positioned as a means for organisations to ensure consistent compliance management processes in what is being called the open source software supply chain.
At the end of this month, after six-and-a-half years working there, I’ll be leaving the Dutch Association of Audiological Centres (FENAC) where I’ve been working as developer. I’ll be switching to Free Software-related projects, which I’ll write about around june 1st.
If you are joining the thousands of OpenStack enthusiasts as we converge on Boston for the OpenStack Summit (May 8-11), don't be surprised if someone asks you, "Where is the Design Summit?"
This year, nary a Design Summit sign will be found. That's because the Design Summit is no more. True to the ever-evolving, continuously improving nature of open source projects, the OpenStack community is trying something new. The Design Summit has been reorganized and split into two separate events: the Forum and the Project Teams Gathering (PTG).
Yes, a new Month of LibreOffice begins today, crediting contributions all across the project. This time we’re giving away real printed stickers for your laptop, desktop PC or other kit! If you help the LibreOffice community in various ways, we’ll add your name to a wiki page and then, at the end of the month, you’ll be able to claim your sticker. It’ll look like this:
While the original SPIR intermediate representation from the Khronos Group was derived from LLVM IR, SPIR-V that's used by OpenCL 2.1+ and Vulkan is not. But there is still work underway on being able to translate from LLVM IR into a SPIR-V back-end.
On Friday, the Trump administration removed all of the EPA's climate information from the agency's website. In its place was this announcement: "We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt."
The official EPA announcement of the changes says they're needed to "reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt." Removing them, according to the EPA spokesman, was needed to "prevent confusion."
The World Health Organization Bulletin this month has an article about the need for new models of research and development for tuberculosis and antimicrobial resistance. The article describes a new funding framework called the 3P Project.
[...]
The project’s funding model will ensure that a new regimen is affordable and accessible to all those in need.
The National Security Agency is now suggesting government departments and businesses buy smartphones secured using virtualization, a technology it currently requires only on tablets and laptops
The change comes about with the arrival of the first virtualization-based smartphone security system on the U.S. Commercial Solutions for Classified list.
Barack Obama will deliver a speech this September at a swanky healthcare conference for investors run by Cantor Fitzgerald. As Fox Business News first reported on Monday, the firm is paying him $400,000.
The ensuing criticism of Obama for cashing in on his presidency has been thunderous – but has overlooked exactly whose money he is taking.
Cantor Fitzgerald, a major Wall Street brokerage house, lost 658 of its 960 employees when the World Trade Center was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. But when it settled a long-running lawsuit against American Airlines for $135 million in 2013, the proceeds didn’t go to the families of the dead.
Iraq’s Foreign Minister this week asked the United States to develop a financial plan for the reconstruction of the country after ISIS, similar to a program developed for Western Europe after the Second World War.
In discussions with Special Presidential Envoy to the Coalition Brett McGurk, Ibrahim al-Jaafari stressed the need for “collective support from the international community to contribute to the reconstruction of infrastructure after the defeat of terrorism.” Jaafari suggested “the adoption of a project similar to the Marshall Plan which contributed to rebuilding Germany after the Second World War.”
The hardest part of reversing the warming of the planet may be convincing climate change skeptics of the need to do so. Although scientists who study the issue overwhelming agree that the earth is undergoing rapid and profound climate changes due to the burning of fossil fuels, a minority of the public remains stubbornly resistant to that fact. With temperatures rising and ice caps melting — and that small minority in control of both Congress and the White House — there seems no project more urgent than persuading climate deniers to reconsider their views. So we reached out to Jerry Taylor, whose job as director of the Niskanen Center involves turning climate skeptics into climate activists.
It might seem like an impossible transition, except that Taylor, who used to be staff director for the energy and environment task force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and vice president of the Cato Institute, made it himself.
Did you hear the story this weekend about how Trump's Chief of Staff Reince Priebus went on TV and said that the administration is "looking at" changing libel laws or amending the 1st Amendment of the Constitution? You probably did. It's dumb and wrong and it makes no sense, but that doesn't mean that the President isn't already doing great harm to free speech. But first, let's cover Priebus's nonsensical comments.
Social media companies are putting profit before safety and should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate crime material promptly from their websites, MPs have said.
The largest and richest technology firms are “shamefully far” from taking action to tackle illegal and dangerous content, according to a report by the Commons home affairs committee.
The inquiry, launched last year following the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right gunman, concludes that social media multinationals are more concerned with commercial risks than public protection. Swift action is taken to remove content found to infringe copyright rules, the MPs note, but a “laissez-faire” approach is adopted when it involves hateful or illegal content.
Open Rights Group has responded to an inquiry by the Commons Home Affairs committee, which calls for Internet companies to do more to take down hate speech and illegal content.
Today InternetLab, Brazil’s leading digital rights organization, released their 2017 report on local telecommunications companies, and how they treat their customer's private information. Brazil’s “Quem defende seus dados?” (“Who Defends Your Data?”) seeks to encourage companies to compete for users by showing who will stand up for their customer privacy and data protection. That is why InternetLab, one of the leading independent research centers on Internet policy in Brazil, has evaluated key Brazilian telecommunications companies’ policies to assess their commitment to user privacy when the government comes calling for their users' personal data.
This report is part of a continent-wide initiative by South America’s leading digital rights groups to shine a light on Internet privacy practices in the region, based on EFF's annual Who Has Your Back report. (Last week both Paraguay's TEDIC and Chile’s Derechos Digitales published reports, and digital rights groups in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina will be releasing similar studies soon.)
EFF has joined a coalition effort, led by Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ), to oppose the federal government’s proposal to scrutinize the social media activities of Chinese visitors. Specifically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seeks to ask certain visa applicants from China to disclose the existence of their social media accounts and the identifiers or handles associated with those accounts.
Last year, EFF opposed a similar CBP proposal concerning foreign visitors from countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). CBP finalized this proposal in December 2016.
This let it grab the phone calls and messages of US citizens which mentioned or otherwise involved people outside the US it was keeping an eye on.
The surprising shutdown of the NSA's email harvesting program -- one that operated "upstream" and grabbed not just communications to and from surveillance targets, but also those "about" surveillance targets -- is good news. Considering the NSA had done nothing but abuse this specific privilege, the shutdown is a welcome surprise. But it's not great news, for a variety of reasons.
First, the shutdown arrives on the heels of a yearlong denial of surveillance requests by the FISA court. This indicates the NSA was either still abusing its collection or the court no longer felt the program was Constitutional, at least not the way the NSA was running it. The shutdown seems to reflect the NSA's inability or unwillingness to shift towards more targeted surveillance methods -- ones that won't sweep up lots of US persons' communications inadvertently.
Facebook's secretive advertising practices became a little more public on Monday thanks to a leak out of the company's Australian office. This 23-page document, discovered by The Australian, details in particular how Facebook executives promote advertising campaigns that exploit Facebook users' emotional states—and how these are aimed at users as young as 14 years old.
Jeff Sessions’s first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as attorney general kicked off with a ride in a Black Hawk helicopter. It began just after sunrise at the Davis-Monthan airbase outside Tucson, Arizona, and ended in Nogales, where he delivered a blistering address in which he vowed to take the “fight” to the criminal elements that have turned border communities into “war zones.” The performance was repeated a week later in El Paso, Texas. This time around, Sessions was accompanied by John Kelly, the retired Marine general turned Department of Homeland Security secretary overseeing the nation’s top immigration enforcement agencies. “This is ground zero,” Sessions said. “This is the front lines and this is where we’re making our stand.”
The display was typical of the Trump camp. From the moment he launched his campaign, Trump put a radically reimagined vision of immigration enforcement at the center of his agenda — one that emphasized a wall across the southern border and, at times, the removal of every undocumented immigrant in the country. The justification always had something to do with the tremendous, unprecedented threat emanating from the border and from immigrants. Now that Trump’s 100th day in office is nearly here, the nation has had a glimpse of the president’s response.
No major Internet service provider has done more to prevent implementation of net neutrality rules in the US than Verizon. After years of fighting the rules in courts of law and public opinion, Verizon is about to get what it wants as the Federal Communications Commission—now led by a former Verizon lawyer—prepares to eliminate the rules and the legal authority that allows them to be enforced.
For several years now cable and broadband providers have been using hidden fees to covertly jack up their advertised rates. These fees, which utilize a rotating crop of bullshit names, help these companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock the consumer with a significantly higher-rate post sale (often when locked into a long-term contract). The practice also allows the company to falsely claim they're not raising rates on consumers. They omit that they're talking about the above the line rate being charged, implying that anything below the line (where real fees like taxes are levied) is outside of their control.
For example, for several years now, CenturyLink has been charging its broadband customers an "internet cost recovery fee," which the company's website insists "helps defray costs associated with building and maintaining CenturyLink's High-Speed Internet broadband network" (that's what the full bill is supposed to be for). Comcast and other cable companies have similarly begun charging users a "broadcast TV fee," which simply takes a portion of the costs of programming, and hides it below the line. The names differ but the goal's the same: falsely advertise one rate, then charge consumers with a higher price.
Cory Doctorow fears for the future. Rising inequality, political instability and technological surveillance are merging to create a world, he says, in which "there are disasters - and those disasters are human-made".
Most sci-fi writers might use this insight to create a dystopia, but Doctorow, 45, has been creating something more optimistic. His new novel Walkaway shows how catastrophes can create "the first days of a better nation".
The U.S. House of Representatives today voted 378 to 48 to pass a controversial bill that would make the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee. H.R. 1695, the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017, will effectively strip the Librarian of Congress of oversight over the Register, and is likely to increase industry influence over an already highly politicized office. The bill does nothing to improve the functioning of the Copyright Office, nor to fix any of the serious problems with copyright law, including its excessive and unpredictable penalties.
It seems that this spring really is the time for obscure copyright disputes with odd connections to the US's weak-kneed compliance with the Berne Convention on copyright. We've already written a few times about the moral rights claim by the guy who created the giant "Wall St. Bull" statue, as well as a lawsuit against a Wall St. church for moving a 9/11 memorial -- both of which reference VARA, the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. VARA was passed as part of the US's slapdash attempt to pretend it complied with the Berne Convention, a document that was created in 1886, and which the US took over 100 years to even pretend to comply with. VARA wasn't the only such move in 1990. That very same year, Congress also passed the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act of 1990, or AWCPA.
TPG, Telstra, Optus and Foxtel as well as the companies’ subsidiaries, such as iiNet and Internode, will be obliged to block their customers from accessing BitTorrent site Kickass Torrents under a Federal Court injunction handed down today.
The site-blocking injunction is the third successful application lodged by copyright holders under anti-piracy legislation passed in 2015.
ARIA members Universal Music Australia, Warner Music Australia, Sony Music Entertainment Australia and J Albert & Son, along with APRA AMCOS, last year brought the application for injunction. The application has been coordinated with the aid of Music Rights Australia.