01.19.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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- Wine 1.7.11 Has Optional Start Menu, D3D CS Work
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According to the developers, a new tool has been added to automatically arrange all files in the book into folders based on their type. This function can be accessed via Tools->Arrange into folders.
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The screen sharing app will be able to be used by anyone with a Facebook account. Deskhop allows users to share their computer screen with a Facebook friend, useful for anyone wanting to give simple tech support to their family and friends.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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01.16.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Valve has been hard at work lately, and they have released an update to the SteamOS to improve its performance. The changes to the GPU and CPU come via reduced demands. According to a post on the Steam Community Group, the change we’re excited about includes, “Reduced CPU and GPU usage while games are running by interrupting Big Picture and overlay rendering.” The update also fixes some tearing issues, (vertical lines running through the screen) that were experienced on AMD platforms under strenuous gaming.
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It’s also another data point that suggests 2014 could be a big year for virtual reality. Developers have put out games and demos that operate in virtual reality since the release of the Oculus Rift development kit, but there are few tools available to launch each game without taking off the headset and interacting with a standard screen. User interface, the place you spend your time between games, is an unsolved problem.
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When SteamOS released at the end of last year, there were some features missing. Not just Steam features either, as drivers and support for AMD and Intel chipsets were also missing. There were work arounds for it, however Nvidia cards were clearly the best way to use the new OS. This situation hasn’t lasted long though, as SteamOS has been updated to now support these neglected cards.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I recently wrote about the Linux swap device and what it’s used for. This tutorial covers the basics of actually managing the swap devices and/or files on your system. Topics covered include how to enable and disable swap, how to create (and remove) additional swap space, and how to measure swap usage.
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This article proposes a new way to construct Linux® and Windows® images for private clouds built with the OpenStack cloud operating system.
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I use ssh everyday and it’s my main tool to connect and manage servers, so I’m always interested in articles about ssh.
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In part 5 of this Gtkmm tutorial I will be showing you how to use the treeview control and markup in a label. In this simple application there is a text entry used for entering text into a treeview. The label next to the text entry will turn red if there is no text entered in the text entry when the button is pressed.
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The battery recently died in my old Asus Netbook which gave me some fire to finally get together a functional filesystem for the Samsung Chromebook I’ve had for a little over a year. I published a rough file system with install instructions here last December. Since then a few things have changed in the structure of ChromeOS and the install script/file systems needed some updates.
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I had the pleasure of meeting Russell Pavlicek, who shares Xen community management responsibilities with Lars Kurth, at SUSECon last November and he, along with Dario Faggioli of the Xen community, poked me about writing a blog post describing the state of Xen support in libvirt. I found this to be an excellent idea and good reason to get off my butt and write! Far too much time passes between my musings.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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A music streamer lets you share your music, photos and videos with your network. If you have a Network-attached storage (NAS) device, it is likely that you already have the technology built-in to share your media. Using a NAS is a neat solution as it can be left on all the time, consuming very little power. However, this is only one method of sharing your multimedia around a home network.
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In the age of mobile computing and browser based mails like Gmail and Outlook.com, most users won’t bother about opening up a desktop mail client to check emails. However, there are certain situations where desktop email clients are much better than browser based clients and help gain productivity at workplace. Linux desktop has a number of desktop email clients. Although, they are not spoilt for choices like Mac and Windows users but there are mail clients are as good as Apple Mail or MS Outlook. Below is a list of email clients for Linux desktop which are the best in business.
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Back in the mid-1990s, a college friend (hi Russ!) and I would put our old 8088 computers to work rendering ray-traced images for days—literally. The end result would be, by today’s standards, incredibly low resolution and not terribly interesting. Still, the thought of a computer system creating realistic photos from nothing more than math equations was fascinating. As you probably already guessed, Russ and I weren’t terribly popular.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Stories from across the globe about pollution, weather, environmental issues, and wildlife
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MPs accused the government of seeking to bribe local councils to grant planning permission for controversial fracking projects today, just as new figures showed Britain’s shale gas regulator has only six staff dedicated to fracking full time.
They fear that the shale gas industry could be allowed to balloon without proper scrutiny and are especially concerned because, in only a fortnight, the regulator will be required to issue new fracking permits within two weeks, compared to the current 13-week wait.
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In at least four states that have nurtured the nation’s energy boom, hundreds of complaints have been made about well-water contamination from oil or gas drilling, and pollution was confirmed in a number of them, according to a review that casts doubt on industry suggestions that such problems rarely happen.
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On Wednesday, TEPCO stopped operating all 3 ALPS systems at the facility. The company officials say the system may take a long time to restart.
The container where the radioactive substances are stored has to be replaced when it fills up.
TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, crippled in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, said that the company plans to decontaminate all radioactive water stored in the tanks by March 2015, NHK reported.
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Parts of the US are braced for potentially record-breaking low temperatures as a “polar vortex” brings more freezing weather.
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This cold front is no joke, people. For the first time in 17 years, Minnesota called off school Monday for the entire state. “A person not properly dressed could die easily in those conditions,” warned National Weather Service meteorologist Scott Truett in St. Louis, describing the expected wind chill in Missouri tomorrow morning. The National Weather Service has described the wind chill as “life-threatening.”
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Government researchers have that monitor where the animals are. When a tagged shark is about half a mile away from a beach, it triggers a computer alert, which tweets out a message on the . The tweet notes the shark’s size, breed and approximate location.
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In five years, bicycling will be so common that it’s boring, says author Elly Blue
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01.15.14
Posted in News Roundup, Ubuntu at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past couple of weeks, touching on the different parts or projects at Canonical
Server
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At November’s OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, members of the OpenStack Foundation made clear that many IT departments are either already experimenting with the open cloud computing platform, or will do so this year. The foundation’s OpenStack Survey involved 387 OpenStack cloud deployments across 56 countries, and determined that OpenStack is very high on the list of technologies to work with at enterprises in 2014.
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Ubuntu Server 14.04 is set to include Nginx Web server as standard, along with the old favorite Apache
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The next version of Ubuntu Server is expected to include Nginx in the main archive, meaning it will “sit alongside Apache in 14.04 with full security updates over the life of the release,” Canonical employee Jorge Castro wrote today.
Financials
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The financial result for the Ubuntu maker is out. The company posted a loss of $21.3 million in fiscal year 2013, a straight fall of $10.2 million from the loss posted in fiscal year 2012, which was $11.1 million. The revenue earned in 2013 however, was $65.7 million, up from $56.8 million reported a year earlier.
Desktop/Tablets/Other
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A few days before the announcement for the end of life of Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), Canonical has released the last major update of its soon to be unsupported Ubuntu operating system, fixing no more than nine vulnerabilities discovered by various developers in the upstream kernel packages.
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The UK government now says that Ubuntu 12.04 is the safest operating system available, way ahead of Windows 8 and Mac OS X.
The Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) is the UK National Technical Authority for information assurance and they’ve done a series of tests to find out what is the most secure operating system available for the governmental apparatus.
The security assessment made by CESG included the following categories: VPN, Disk Encryption, Authentication, Secure Boot, Platform Integrity and Application Sandboxing, Application Whitelisting, Malicious Code Detection and Prevention, Security Policy Enforcement, External Interface Protection, Device Update Policy, Event Collection for Enterprise Analysis, and Incident Response.
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Tech Republic has five reasons why an Ubuntu tablet could do quite well in 2014.
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You won’t see an Ubuntu Edge at CES this week. Ubuntu’s parent company, Canonical, raised $12.8-million on Indiegogo to develop and build this Ubuntu Linux/Android-powered Ubuntu Edge combination smartphone and PC, but it still fell far short of its $32 million goal. So what?
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In an interview with PCpro that it was revealed by Mark Shuttleworth that Canonical is now leading the race for full convergence across all devices and architectures. There is also a possibility of shifting over from bi-annual releases to semi-rolling releases as mobile users are accustomed to updates being released ‘whenever’ they’re ready by the maintainers.
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Canonical has confirmed that the next point release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will be available on February 6.
The company has postponed by two weeks the release of the fourth maintenance build, but now the release date has been confirmed and set in stone.
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Ubuntu is the “Marmite” operating system within the Linux community. You either love it or hate it.
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Adam Conrad has announced earlier today, January 7, that the Ubuntu 13.04 Linux operating system, also known as Raring Ringtail among its fans, will reach end of life (EOL) on Monday, January 27, 2014, as Canonical will no longer provide security/critical fixes and software updates for it.
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Torrent search would be added to Ubuntu’s Dash, a central tool that lets users search files and applications on their desktop as well as online sources like Amazon or Wikipedia. The search tool prototype uses the Pirate Bay as a data source. It may be modified to filter out pirated content, but users can change the filters to suit their desires. It’s also possible that a future version could use a different data source.
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2013 was a phenomenal year for Ubuntu. It is difficult to believe that it was just a year ago today that we announced Ubuntu for phones. Since then we have built and released the first version of Ubuntu for phones complete with core apps, delivered Mir in production on the phone, built a vastly simplified and more powerful new app delivery platform complete with full security sand-boxing, created a powerful smart scopes service to bring the power of native search and online content to devices, delivered a new SDK with support for QML, HTML5, and Scopes, built an entirely new developer.ubuntu.com, created extensive CI and testing infrastructure to ensure quality as we evolve our platform, shipped two desktop releases, extended the charm store, delivered Juju Gui, spun up multiple clouds with Juju, and much more.
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Back in June, we were ready to announce the immediate availability for download of a new Linux distribution, called Unity-for-Arch, which used Ubuntu’s Unity user interface on a basic Arch Linux Live CD.
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The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu will enable TRIM support for SSDs by default in its upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release. For those unfamiliar with what TRIM is, it is a command the OS instructs to the drive to wipe invalid flash blocks when they are no longer needed.
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Mobile
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Ubuntu Phones should be released in 2014, according to Canonical community manager Jono Bacon.
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Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is no stranger to exploring rarefied territory. The man has, after all, been to space.
His interest in new frontiers means Ubuntu, the Linux distro he created, is also poised to make a great leap – to go where no Linux has gone before.
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He may have stepped back from the CEO role at Canonical, but Mark Shuttleworth is still very much the public face of Ubuntu.
He suffered a setback earlier this year when the crowdfunded Ubuntu Edge project – in which he invested a lot of personal capital, if not actual money – failed to get anywhere near its ambitious investment target. However, he tells us the project wasn’t a total failure, and may even be aped by the best-known smartphone maker of them all.
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Just before the holiday season sets in, Canonical has a surprise gift for all Ubuntu mobile fans. A new Ubuntu Touch image has been released and this is claimed to be the most stable release so far. Along with that, this release boasts a new way to dual boot with Android. This is a giant new step and will be specially welcome by enthusiasts who would like to experiment Ubuntu on their phones, leaving existing Android system untouched.
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Ubuntu for Android seems still far away but in the meantime Canonical is working on dual boot capability, allowing users to either boot into Ubuntu or Android.
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Canonical, creators of Ubuntu and more specifically Ubuntu Touch, have some potentially upsetting news. While in the process of developing Ubuntu Touch, the team has decided to narrow down hardware support to better focus on the operating system itself. They have officially dropped support for the Nexus 7 2012, Nexus 10, and Galaxy Nexus.
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Wi-Fi and Security
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My colleague, Silviu Stahie, wrote an interesting article earlier today, regarding the “ability” of the Ubuntu Linux operating system to store Wi-Fi passwords in plain text, “thanks” to the default design of the NetworkManager application, initially developed by Red Hat.
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Ubuntu operating systems are storing the Wi-Fi profiles, including the clear text passwords, outside the home folder, making them a lot more accessible.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Android and Steam, CyanogenMod Gallery, BlackBerry potential, developer interest, and growing interest from Intel
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If you are looking to stream your Steam games directly to any Android device, this one goes out to you. A new app called Limelight brings the PC game streaming functionality of the Nvidia Shield to any Android device of your choice.
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Huawei is set to enter the console wars with its own Android-based mini-console. The Chinese company unveiled the “Tron” this week at the Consumer Electronics Show and it could hit the market in May for a mere $120 or less.
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BlackBerry is placing its last hopes on Android, though not in the way you think. Instead of incorporating Android into its smartphones, the company’s forthcoming 10.2.1 update to its BlackBerry operating system will support native Android apps.
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Intel has been making code contributions to the 64-bit version of Android 4.4 code-named KitKat. Intel has completed the kernel work, which will ensure the OS is compatible with smartphones, said an Intel spokeswoman at the International CES expo in Las Vegas.
But 64-bit Android could reach tablets first. Intel said 64-bit Android tablets powered by its Atom processor code-named Bay Trail will become available in the first half of this year. The tablets are expected to sell for as low as $150.
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Owners of the international version of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3 should expect Android 4.4.2 KitKat to flavor their phablets before too long.
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