Links 23/11/2013: Games in the News
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Valve Pushes Out Large Team Fortress 2 Update
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown Looks Set To Hit Linux
XCOM: Enemy Unknown will place you in control of a secret paramilitary organization called XCOM. As the XCOM commander, you will defend against a terrifying global alien invasion by managing resources, advancing technologies, and overseeing combat strategies and individual unit tactics.
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Valve—It Really Does Love Linux
I’ve teased about Steam, speculated about Steam and even bragged about Steam finally coming to Linux. Heck, check out the screenshot for just a partial list of games already running natively under our beloved OS. Little did I know that the folks at Valve not only planned to support Linux, but they’re also putting a big part of their future behind it as well!
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Ouya goes white with new limited edition, more expensive microconsole
Underdog microconsole Ouya is facing increased competition with the release of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 this month, but the company will have its own new hardware this holiday season with a limited edition white version of the tiny device. The new Ouya doubles the internal Flash storage of the base model to 16GB, otherwise the two machines appear to be identical. But that new color and extra storage come at a price: the white Ouya is $129.99, $30 more than the original. The limited edition is available for pre-order now for those in North America. However, it remains to be seen whether a new coat of paint will lure many consumers to the struggling console, especially with the added cost. While Ouya recently boasted that it now offers more than 500 games, few of those are notable exclusives, and even those that are, like Towerfall, will soon be available on other platforms.
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Open gaming platform Ouya matches funds for game developers
In their latest efforts to support independent content developers, OUYA has created a $1 million matching fund for game developers at http://freethegamesfund.com, which will double kickstarter pledged funds up to $250,000.
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Valve to reveal virtual reality prototype, big plans for Steam support
Abrash will be immediately followed by Joe Ludwig heading up a “Virtual Reality and Steam” session, wherein Valve will detail its plans to both support and promote VR gaming through the Steam store. The company behind the hallowed Half-Life series has already added support for Oculus Rift gameplay to Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and Ludwig describes Valve’s relationship with Oculus as friendly and collaborative. Still, much as with the Steam Machine itself, Valve appears unwilling to sit back and let all the hardware design be done by others. While Valve will only be showing off its prototype headset to a selection of developers and publishers, it does mark an effort to expand the VR development and support ecosystem.
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Hero Of The Kingdom To Come To Linux In 2014
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Joe Danger & Joe Danger 2 To Come To Steam For Linux
Links 23/11/2013: Copyright Reform and Abuses
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Amazon to Lawmakers: Keep the Internet Open & Limit Copyright Excesses
Speaking to members of a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Courts subcommittee, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy has urged that potential barriers to digital content delivery should be addressed in order to ensure the development of distribution platforms. Exorbitant statutory damage awards for copyright infringement could chill innovation, the executive warned, adding that the Internet should remain a non-discriminatory and open platform to maintain consumer choice.
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Judge Chin Reimagines “Fair Use” for the Internet Age
Last week, Judge Denny Chin handed down the latest opinion in the now-eight year battle between Google and the Author’s Guild (among others) over Google’s massive book scanning project. If the Author’s Guild fails to overturn the Judge’s decision on appeal, it will mark an enormous watershed in the ability of Web site owners to display copyrighted works without the prior permission of the owners of those works.
At issue was the appropriate application of the “fair use” doctrine under U.S. law to the Google project, a rationale that allows certain types of copying to be permissible that would otherwise be actionable. As applied by Judge Chin, the scope of that doctrine has seemingly been expanded by orders of magnitude. Indeed, in the case at hand, the judge has broadened its scope so dramatically that it’s difficult not to conclude that he was struggling to find sufficient legal precedents to justify a favorable outcome for Google. Many will contend that he fell short in that effort, and that his intent was instead to rebalance, if not rewrite, the doctrine itself in order to bring it into the Internet age.
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Instagram Act: UK.gov’s latest copyright landgrab stymied – for now
Remember the notorious ‘Instagram Act’? If you recall, clauses smuggled into April’s Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act (ERRA) – in the name of allowing reuse of orphan works – paved the way for the Government to grab your photographs and other visual images, in breach of international conventions.
The mechanics of the scheme were promised for later in the year, to be detailed in a statutory instrument (SI).
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Pirate Party Gets Observer Status at World Trade Organization
Pirate Parties International (PPI), the international umbrella organization for dozens of Pirate Parties worldwide, has been granted observer status by the World Trade Organization. PPI will join a host of major international players during the upcoming conference in Bali next month. The WTO’s decision is a major breakthrough for the political organization, which hopes to influence decision making on key issues related to copyright and privacy on the Internet.
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IOC Demands 2014 Olympics Piracy Takedowns & Blocks “Within Minutes”
The International Olympic Committee is pushing for the most concerted effort yet to ensure that pirate coverage of the 2014 Olympic Games reaches as few unauthorized screens as possible. In order to protect four major local media companies and others internationally, the IOC has issued demands for the creation of a “rapid response team” authorized to remove or block infringing content and links “within minutes.”
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Warner Bros. Admits To Issuing Bogus Takedowns; Gloats To Court How There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do About That
One of the bizarre side notes to Hollywood’s big lawsuit against the cyberlocker Hotfile was a countersuit against Warner Bros. by Hotfile, for using the easy takedown tool that Hotfile had provided, to take down a variety of content that was (a) non-infringing and (b) had nothing to do with Warner Bros. at all (i.e., the company did not hold the copyright on those files). In that case, WB admitted that it filed a bunch of false takedowns, but said it was no big deal because it was all done by a computer. Of course, it then came out that at least one work was taken down by a WB employee, and that employee had done so on purpose, annoyed that JDownloader could help possible infringers download more quickly.
Links 23/11/2013: KDE News
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KDE Edu 2013 sprint
From October 24 to October 30, the KDE Educational team (KDE Edu) gathered for its annual work sprint at the Computer Science faculty of Universidad de A Coruña, Spain. The sprint was a mixture of hacking, discussing, getting to know more about Spanish culture, socializing, and meeting new team mates.
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conf.kde.in 2014
conf.kde.in 2014 is taking place February 21 – 24, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. The conference is a vibrant occasion for sharing ideas, knowledge and, most importantly, support and enthusiasm for KDE and for open source. It is an event for both new and experienced technology enthusiasts. Collaboration and freedom are the main features.
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KDE Commit-Digest for 3rd November 2013
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KDE Commit-Digest for 27th October 2013
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Akademy-fr in Toulouse, 23 and 24 November 2013
We welcome contributors, users, people who want to become either of those, anyone interested in free and open source software, freedom and community. This is an opportunity to learn about the latest from KDE, to discuss technical points with technical contributors, and to discover how to use the wide range of KDE software.
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The Qt 5.2 Release Candidate Is Being Delayed
Digia’s Heikkinen Jani shared this morning that the Qt 5.2 RC1 version won’t be out tomorrow as was originally expected. The release isn’t happening since there’s still a lot of pending integration for Qt5 Git and so further testing is needed to verify the fixes and work through any issues. They are hoping though to have out a new pre-RC1 test snapshot soon. Ideally, Qt 5.2 RC1 will be released later in the week.
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KDE Ships Second Beta of Applications and Platform 4.12
KDE has released the second beta of the new versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested.
Links 23/11/2013: GNOME News
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GNOME’s Virtual Filesystem Gained SFTP Push Support
The second development version towards the GVFS 1.20 application for the upcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment, has been released for testing a few days ago, introducing several important features, improvements, cleanups, translations, and bugfixes.
Various areas have been covered in this new development release of GVFS, the virtual filesystem for the GNOME desktop environment, designed to allow users to easily access remote data via FTP, SFTP, SMB, WebDAV, as well as local data via MTP, OBEX, or Udev integration, including SFTP, SMB, AFP, archive, trash, recent, and daemon.
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GNOME Power Manager 3.11.1 Relies On Intltool 0.50
The first development release towards GNOME Power Manager 3.12 has been announced a few days ago by the GNOME developers. This version introduces a few fixes, updated translations, and one new feature.
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GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10.2 Fixes Laptop Battery Remaining Time Issue
The GNOME development team has released the second maintenance release for the stable GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package, which is part of the GNOME 3.10.2 desktop upgrade.
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Developers deny GNOME dependent on systemd
Speculation notwithstanding, the GNOME desktop environment is not dependent on systemd, the init system that has been the subject of much discussion, two senior GNOME developers say.
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Evince 3.10.2 Fixes Five Annoying Bugs
The second and most probably the last maintenance release of the stable Evince 3.10 document viewer application for the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment has been released a few days ago, a version that fixes five annoying bugs and updates several translations.
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Broadway Gets Touch Support; GTK3 On The iPad
Broadway, an HTML5 back-end for GTK3 to allow running GTK3 programs in modern web-browsers, has picked up an interesting feature.
As of this morning, GTK+ Git has initial touch event support for Broadway. The commit message by Red Hat’s Alexander Larsson reads, “This seems to get something going on an ipad, but some events seem to get swallowed. For instance, window dragging doesn’t work.”
Links 23/11/2013: Graphics Stack News
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NVIDIA GeForce 700 Series On Linux Run Excellent
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Intel’s HD4600 versus AMD’s 4600 on Linux … with special guests
Phoronix is continuing to test the performance of open source Linux drivers on Source Engine games with this installation focusing on the performance of the Haswell i7-4770K. They compare it to a number of RV770 based AMD GPUs as well as the newer HD 6450. As you can see in the result the performance of the HD 6450 and HD 4550 are almost exactly the same and are the only two Radeons that do not leave the Intel’s GPU in the dust. If you have experience with the HD 4650 you have a very good idea as to how Intel’s 4600 performs as the results are very similar.
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Wayland’s Weston Received New Features Yesterday
There’s been work on Weston to support run-time switchable renderers for Weston. That’s now been accomplished and with the latest Git code it’s easy to switch from Pixman to the OpenGL renderer. The debug binding of “mod-shift-space W” will now cause the compositor to switch from using the software-based Pixman renderer to the OpenGL renderer. This key-bind renderer switching is useful for debugging, stressing the run-time switchable renderer support, and there’s cases where the OpenGL renderer isn’t used right away by Weston since the Pixman renderer is able to start-up more quickly.
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Khronos Keeps Advancing, Pushing Its Standards
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AMD Radeon R9 290 On Linux
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The State Of Mesa OpenGL GL3/GL4 Updated
With the forthcoming release of Mesa 10.0 there is now OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL 3.3 compliance. That compliance is for core Mesa and the Intel DRI driver. The Radeon and Nouveau drivers don’t have as advanced OpenGL support since most of the upstream GL / GLSL enablement is done by Intel developers and thus the focus on their own driver while the Radeon/Nouveau support usually trails.
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Libdrm 2.4.48 Has New Hardware Support
Libdrm, the DRM library that interfaces between the user-space graphics components (namely Mesa and the X.Org drivers) with the Linux kernel DRM drivers, is now up to version 2.4.48. Big with libdrm 2.4.48 is Intel “Broadwell” and AMD Radeon “Hawaii” GPU support.
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Perl Bindings Come For Wayland
11.22.13
Recently-Published Distro Screenshots
11.21.13
Links 21/11/2013: Applications and Instructionals
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OneNote Alternatives
OneNote is a proprietary computer software package for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It enables a user to capture what is important in their personal and professional life, captured by making notes, to-do lists, photos, audio clips, or videos. Information is stored in a non-linear form. OneNote is developed by the behemoth, Microsoft. Whilst the program is available for Android, it has not been ported to Linux.
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Aqua Connect Releases New Load Balancer Product for Linux
Aqua Connect, Inc., the worldwide leader in Mac Remote Desktop Services, announced today a new product offering in their line of Mac OS X remote access solutions. The Aqua Connect Load Balancer for Linux was designed to improve on the current functionality of the Mac version while providing a more cost efficient platform for load balancing.
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Viber updates desktop app, brings support for stickers; launches Linux client
Viber Desktop is now also available on Linux, in addition to Windows and Mac platforms.
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Viber introduces paid sticker shop, drag/drop photos, Linux support and more to its desktop app
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Viber Desktop 4.0 Brings Official Linux Support
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Partition Tables
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TCP/IP Protocol: Network Time Protocol (NTP)
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13th installment: how slow is too slow for a motion detection security cam system?
I decided I could take at least some action toward stemming the theft and perhaps catching the perpetrator, by setting up a security camera. I knew that GNU/Linux had utilities for recording from motion detection cameras, and some preliminary searching revealed that the motion program was likely to suit my needs.
It so happened that a friend had recently passed along to me a decent webcam, so all I needed to do was find a target machine on which to set up the software. An old laptop would have been ideal because of the small size, but I didn’t have one available.
What I did have was an old all-in-one unit, an early LCD monitor with a built-in computer–in the person of a laptop motherboard–in its base. I even had Debian (Squeeze) already installed on that machine, since I’d set it up for my father-in-law to use when he visits. But I’d taken the machine out of service a couple of years ago, judging that, as a single-core machine with a 433 MHz Celeron and 192 megabytes of RAM, it was getting a little long in the tooth to be useful anymore. So, could this ancient machine actually be used for a motion detection security camera?
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Install and set-up Roundcube webmail interface
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How to configure Raspberry Pi for the first time
You flashed an SD card with Raspberry Pi image, and plug the SD card into Raspberry Pi. Then what next? The first thing to do after booting Raspberry Pi is to configure your Raspberry Pi. Each Raspberry Pi system comes with its own software configuration tool. For example, use raspi-config for Raspbian, firstboot for Pidora, etc.
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Python3 Scripting (Part 1?)
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How to install Nagios 4.0.1 (Monitoring Tool) in ubuntu 13.10 server (Saucy Salamander)
Nagios® Core™ is an Open Source system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better.Nagios Core was originally designed to run under Linux, although it should work under most other unices as well.
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Learn to Install, Configure, Maintain, Update, and Secure Linux
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Running ownCloud 5.0 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Wheezy
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How to configure keyboard layouts in Cinnamon (video)
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How to install WordPress Multisite on Centos VPS with Apache
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Manage Your Configs with vcsh
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RCPlive: Inter-VLAN Routing
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Using TrueCrypt on Linux and Windows
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How to manage Linux server with GUI
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Ubuntu 13.10 Desktop Installation Guide Step by Step
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LibreOffice Math Introduction
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Install MariaDB on CentOS 6.4
MariaDB is the community developed fork of Mysql and is a great alternative to it. Its free and open source and is developed by the original developers of mysql. MariaDB is much superior to mysql in terms of features. Check out the comparison between mariadb and mysql.
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How to monitor system temperature on Linux
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