03.29.14
Posted in News Roundup at 6:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Tizen
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Patches are continuing to be reviewed and refined for introducing weston-ivi-shell, a reference shell for Wayland’s Weston compositor within the world of In-Vehicle Infotainment systems, primarily for Tizen.
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Like most smartwatches, Samsung’s Tizen Linux-based Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are primarily companion devices to Bluetooth connected smartphones rather than full-fledged wrist computers. Yet, the Tizen SDK for Wearable released by Samsung yesterday enables a variety of modes on the Gear watches for both standalone and companion scenarios.
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When Samsung announced the Gear 2 and the Gear 2 Neo last month, the news came with the confirmation that the company was dropping Android from both devices. Instead, both smart watches are powered by Tizen. This may not mean all that much for consumers in the short term, but it does impact developers. For you, Samsung has just shared the first version of the Tizen SDK aimed at wearables. This is what you need to grab if you intend to build apps for the company’s two intelligent wristwatches.
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Android may rule the smartphone world, but it might not be top dog when it comes to smartwatches. Sony, for one, has decided not to team up with Google and its Android Wear project. Samsung won’t use it exclusively — it’s already tinkering with Tizen. “You don’t need to use the Android platform as long as you can still interact with it,” noted Tirias Research analyst Jim McGregor.
Flyme
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Renowned Chinese phone manufacturer Meizu has made its entry into the French market with the launch of its flagship smartphone, the Meizu MX3. This phone runs a homegrown fork of Android 4.2, dubbed Flyme OS 3.0, which the company claims to have “improved navigation” and “simple and fluid transitions”.
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Meizu is thinking to take the “Xiaomi route” and allow other phones to run its own version of Android. Called Flyme OS, Meizu’s platform builds on top of the Android core adding quite a few enhancements and tweaks along the way, all of which helped made Meizu phones popular in the first place.
China Mobile
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Verizon Terremark is making its biggest commitment yet to open-source cloud computing.
Today, the company announced it’s joining the Linux Foundation, an organization focused on promoting the growth of Linux, as a Gold member. The news comes several months after the launch of Verizon Cloud, its revamped cloud computing platform.
Jolla
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Jolla made available today its much anticipated v1.0 update of Sailfish, their mobile Linux distribution running on Wayland and powered by Nokia’s former MeeGo code.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Over the years, the Maxthon browser (formerly known as MyIE2 way back in the day) has spread its reach beyond Windows and into different platforms, including the Mac and three mobile OSes: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Wondering where the love for Linux is at? You don’t need to wonder anymore, because you can now download 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Maxthon for Linux.
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KKEdit is a text editor based on GTK3 for GNOME, currently under development, with several useful features for the average programmer.
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If you have attended my FOSDEM talk or seen the slides, you know about the concept of “component metadata” to describe (almost) all software components which make up a Linux system, as well as their public interfaces they provide for users and other software to access. This metadata specification was originally designed as part of the Listaller project for use with the 3rd-party software installer.
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Other than OpenOffice and LibreOffice, the Linux platform lacks any full-featured office suite. Both of these open source office suites have more in common with each other than truly distinguishing features. Both flip-flop in performance, depending on which Microsoft skill they attempt to emulate. Their user interface is strictly classic old school.
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Linux within cars was a big topic at this week’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley. Besides Intel talking up Tizen IVI, Xen Automotive is the work being done for using Xen virtualization on ARM hardware within automobiles.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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This code translates Microsoft High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) shaders from legacy Direct3D 9 to OpenGL GL Shading Language (GLSL) shaders.
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Grave is a new open world, procedural survival horror game being developed by Broken Window Studios, Inc. The game has a release target of early 2015 and will feature a fusion between modern horror and classic survival horror gameplay elements. It will be releasing on Windows, Mac and Linux.
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It’s been a while, but the Humble Weekly Sale is here again! This time, it’s called The Humble Weekly Sale: Rhythm Games, which features 3 games plus other 3 games if you pay more than $6!
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The UNIGINE Engine is built by none other than Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software. The technology they develop is getting better all the time, and with their recent expansion on the Linux platform, we’re all too glad to see that major updates have been implemented in the engine.
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We have just updated the released alchemist repository. This is the same content that was pushed to alchemist_beta last Monday
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I’ve been a sysadmin for a long time, and part of being a sysadmin is doing more than is humanly possible. Sometimes that means writing wicked cool scripts, sometimes it means working late, and sometimes it means learning to say no. Unfortunately, it also sometimes means cutting corners. I confess, I’ve been “that guy” more than once. A good example is SELinux. On more than a few (hundred!) occasions, I’ve simply disabled SELinux, because getting things to work right is often really frustrating and time consuming. The same is true with LVM (Logical Volume Manager). I didn’t get it. I thought it added an unnecessary layer of complexity. I thought it meant another potential point of failure. I thought it was stupid.
I was wrong.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 4:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel
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The Tux3 author intends to publish his Tux3 patches to the kernel mailing list in the next week or two with the intent of mainlining the file-system into the Linux kernel. There’s still some features to add and bugs to work through, but Phillips is now at a stage where he’s comfortable in seeing all of the code mainlined into the Linux kernel. He also hopes that by being in the mainline kernel will be an up-tick of interest and development support for the file-system. Samsung, among others, have been interested in potentially using Tux3 as an embedded Linux file-system. In fact, he said Samsung may be more interested in using Tux3 than their F2FS Flash-Friendly File-System project and he has been communicating with Samsung’s F2FS developers.
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With another Linux Foundation Summit means another time to hear an update about LLVMLinux, the Linux Foundation backed project to build the mainline Linux kernel with LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler in place of GCC.
Collaboration Summit
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The panel opened with Corbet pointing out that today “Almost all the people who work on the kernel are paid to do it. Only 10 percent to 20 percent are volunteers. What do your companies expect to get from your kernel work?”
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At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on March 26, a panel of leading Linux kernel developers discussed the current state of Linux development and collaboration.
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Software companies have long realized the economic and strategic value of using and contributing code to external open source projects. But they’re much slower to understand and apply the same open source methods of collaboration to their own projects internally, said Phil Odence, vice president of business development at Black Duck Software in a Collaboration Summit presentation today.
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Linux kernel developers Greg Kroah-Hartman, Jens Axboe, Dave Chinner, Matthew Garrett, and Mel Gorman participated in a panel discussion, moderated by LWN Editor Jon Corbet, at Collaboration Summit on Wednesday. Here are some of the highlights. For the full session, view the video, below.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA has already made its plans clear about the legacy drivers, but now the company decided that it’s time to explain a little better what it is going to do regarding the support for old video cards in UNIX systems.
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While Thunderbolt was promising from a technology perspective, it hasn’t seen too much adoption outside of Apple systems and the Linux support is still plaguing developers and causing nightmares among Linux users.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Ubuntu at 3:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Ubuntu has removed Amazon results from local search, according to Canonical staff
BASED on this thread which started from yesterday's article, Canonical has removed the controversial behaviour that the EFF and the FSF criticised (to the point where Richard Stallman advised people not to recommend or use Ubuntu). This is great news. Perhaps we are indeed seeing a reformed/reforming Canonical. Let’s hope for more of the same. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Makulu
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MakuluLinux was already a solidly performing distro, but the latest version, released last month, takes Makulu to the next level of usability and maturity.
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So here’s the summary. Makulu Linux is the distribution a lot of us think we would like to create, if we had the time, energy and especially the talent to do it. I don’t know anyone in the development team, so this is all speculation on my part, but I would say that it is a group of people who just don’t know when to stop — and I mean that as a compliment, and a very good thing.
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Today’s news search turned up quite a bit of data. Red Hat released their quarterly earnings this afternoon and while observers expected good news, some are now reporting not so much. ZDNet.com has two stories of interest today, the first is from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reporting on the Linux Collaboration Summit and the other is Jamie Watson’s hands-on review of Makulu Linux 5 Xfce. He said it was the most fun as one could have with Linux!
Zorin OS
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Zorin OS 8 installs smartly and runs without glitches. It is a solid choice for hassle-free computing, even if you ignore the education bundle. However, educators with access to computer stations in the classroom can benefit from using Zorin’s Education Edition rather than the Core release. Because it offers all the power of Ubuntu without the Unity interface, you can not go wrong with Zorin OS 8.
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If you choose the free version, you will then be offered a choice between the latest release (currently Zorin OS 8.1), which is based on Ubuntu 13.10, or the current Long Term Support (LTS) release (Zorin OS 6.4), which is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Furthermore, both the current and LTS releases have three versions: Core, Educational and Gaming. That’s quite a variety of versions to choose from — and there might even be a “Lite” version coming with LXDE!
Pisi
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When it became apparent early in 2012 that for political/financial reasons, Pardus was to be abandoned, a small group of Turkish volunteers came together to preserve the unique features of Pardus. The name of this project is Anka (Turkish for Phoenix). Initially the Anka-Team believed the fork could be named Pardus-Anka. Ultimately this was not possible – hence re-branding to Pisi Linux as a reference to Pardus and its package system PiSi (Pisi is Turkish for kitty).
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“Pisi GNU/Linux is built from scratch but it is a stable base. On top of that, we keep core user applications, such as Firefox, VLC, etc, up to date as much as we can. To ease the use of Pisi GNU/Linux many codecs are preinstalled allowing MP3 & DVD playback, Flash Player support,” reads the official website.
Black Lab
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“Today we are pleased to announce the beta 2 release of Black Lab Linux 5. This will be the last Beta for Black Lab Linux 5 until the final release. While it contains all the functionality that will be released in the gold release in May, right now we are working on stability. With that, lets go over what has changed with Black Lab Linux 5,” reads the official announcement.
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So what changes have been made? There have been quite a few changes to these distributions in terms of updates and functionality. First, we have focused more on the desktop computing spectrum. While we will continue to offer Black Lab Linux + Server Extensions Pak on our server hardware and the Server Extensions Pak as an additional download, we have decided to stick with what we do the best. Which is the desktop systems. We have heard from customers and users that those are the best releases we do, and while we arent totally lost on the server, we feel we have alot of contributions on the desktop.
OpenMandriva
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The first Beta version of OpenMandriva Lx 2014, a fully-featured Linux desktop and server sponsored by the OpenMandriva Association, has been released and can now be tested by users.
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The 2014.0 beta is a fantastic sneak-peek at what will become the final release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0. That being said, it is a beta, and as such you may encounter issues that prevent you from using the system normally.
Mageia
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When I bought the ZaReason Strata Laptop, I asked them to pre-load Mageia 4 to it. However, I knew that I was going to add more distros to the hard drive as soon as I can, to make it feel like the pentaboot HP Pavilion that died on me.
To begin, I wiped the original install and re-installed Mageia. Then, I tried to put PCLinuxOS into the hard drive, but the distro had problems with the display. As I could not achieve a decent display, I decided to do some research and try with PCLinuxOS later.
Misc.
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Simplicity Linux, a Linux distribution based on Puppy that uses the LXDE desktop, is now at version 14.4 Beta and brings a buckload of changes and improvements.
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Robert Shingledecker has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the Tiny Core 5.3 RC1 Linux operating system, one of the smallest full operating systems in the world.
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“‘Symbiosis’ is a special version of antiX developed in full collaboration with the Mepis Community and using the best tools and talents from each distro. It is a mid-weight OS designed to combine an elegant and efficient desktop with simple configuration, high stability, solid performance and medium-sized footprint.”
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With last weekend marking an update to the most commonly used Wayland Live CD, I decided to try it out and the different desktop environments that it ships using all the latest code, including the latest development code of Wayland/Weston and the various tool-kits.
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The new installer had to be fixed, due to some, small changes between system base of Sparky and LMDE. The network connection did not work after installation the live system on a hard drive (Base Edition 3.3 only).
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BBQLinux is an user-friendly Linux distribution made for Android Developers and for enthusiasts who want to test a bit of Arch Linux. It has everything on board to build AOSP or AOSP-based Distributions like OmniROM or CyanogenMod. It’s based on Arch Linux and uses Rolling Release system. BBQLinux uses Arch repositories so its a direct Arch derivative, for example Manjaro is based on Arch but uses their own repositories.
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Absolutely everything in it works with Linux, with the caveat that at least for the moment, you have to create a one-line file to get the wireless networking. All of the auxiliary functions work as well, such as Suspend/Resume and the Fn-keys for Sleep, Display Brightness up/down/off, and Volume up/down/off (mute).
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While perusing the news this evening I saw a review on NixOS 13.10 by Jesse Smith. Sandra Henry-Stocker wrote a tutorial on “networking basics for the beginner.” LinuxInsider’s blog safari targeted buzz on “Linux for the senior set” and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports OpenStack’s top operating system is Ubuntu. Finally, a new Debian Project News was posted.
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Linux Lite was created to dispel myths that a linux based operating system is hard to use.
We’re passionate about informing people that there are alternatives to proprietary operating systems.
The free software and open source world is a place from which you can take, but you must give back. This is a chance for people on our team to give something back.
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Tor-ramdisk, a tor server distro, was recently updated. Linux kernel, tor binary was updated and haveged was used as entropy generator.
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FatDogArm, a relatively new distro was released recently for ARM based computers. It is a small operating system targeted for desktop-style operations. FatDogArm achieved a new milestone with its first beta release. The distribution is quite small in size (less than 300MB). The logic behind the FatDog name is explained on the FatDog64′s site
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The distribution is published by Linpus Technologies, Inc., a Linux/Android software solutions outfit based in Taiwan. This is about the only Linux provider that does not have a defined release schedule. Whether that’s a good or bad practice is not something I’m going to address here.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Almost Final Release
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KDE has announced the Release Candidate of the 4.13 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. We kindly request your assistance with finding and fixing issues.
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Offering up more bug-fixes and translation updates is KDE 4.13 Beta 3. KDE 4.13 offers several application and platform improvements for KDE4 users until the Plasma Next and KDE Frameworks 5 experience is stable later in 2014.
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Qt
Kubuntu
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Kubuntu14.04 LTS Beta 1 (Trusty Tahr) is based on KDE Plasma 4.13 Beta 1, and this means that the final version will likely be based on the final build of KDE 4.13. This is actually very good news because the KDE 4.13 branch has a ton of new features that will be very well received by the community.
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KDE 4.13 is making it into next month’s release of Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, the KDE version of Ubuntu Linux.
Going back to January this year has been planning about shipping KDE SC 4.13 in the next (K)ubuntu release. As of today, there’s been mass package updates pushing all of the KDE components up to their latest 4.13 development versions; KDE 4.13 Beta 2 was released a few days ago.
Applications
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Sooooo after a brief period of testing the public beta we bring you the final stable release of KDE Telepathy 0.8.
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Small, affordable, and versatile, Raspberry Pi is a perfect platform for all kinds of creative projects. And as a photography enthusiast, you can put this tiny machine to a variety of practical uses. Transforming Raspberry Pi into a photography tool is not only great hacking fun, it also opens a whole new world of photographic possibilities. The Raspberry Pi for Photographers ebook can help you to turn a Raspberry Pi into a tool for fetching and managing photos, publishing photos on the web, controlling your camera remotely, and keeping your photos safe.
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The search functionality of KDE software is going through massive transition with Baloo replacing Nepomuk. We have written extensively about it here.
Misc.
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The summit is a joint technical meeting of developers working on ‘desktop infrastructure’ on the major Free Desktop projects. The event aims to support collaboration between projects by discussing specifications and the sharing of platform-level components. David Faure will be KDE’s primary representative at this year’s summit.
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