In a nutshell, I just replaced a 2011 HP Mini netbook with a 2014 HP mini-notebook. Both run Linux. Thank you, HP.
A while ago, Google finally rolled out the second-generation Chromebook Pixel we had all been eagerly waiting for.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced the immediate availability for download and upgrade of new maintenance releases for Linux kernel 3.19, 3.14, and 3.10, all of them bringing approximately the same improvements, bugfixes, and updated drivers.
You can create an STL file using OpenSCAD and then use the Slic3r program to convert an STL file into a g-code file for your printer. I’ll take you through this process, below.
Yesterday I learned about a tool that’s going to change my daily behavior working on servers.
Ashes of The Singularity is a large scale real time strategy game from Stardock & Oxide Games that should see a Linux release.
Endless Legend for Linux started off so well only to fall flat on its face months later. Sadly, it now seems Endless Legend will not be coming to Linux, as the developers state it’s really not a priority any more.
We have now reached the end of the development cycle and here comes a release candidate for you to download, build, and test. Enjoy it as fast as you can, the final release is scheduled next Wednesday.
As expected, the GNOME development team, through Frederic Peters, has announced earlier today, March 18, the immediate availability for testing of the GNOME 3.16 RC (Release Candidate) desktop environment. The release is dubbed internally GNOME 3.15.92.
Q4OS is intended to be more than a community-supported general purpose Linux distro. The Trinity desktop provides a lightweight KDE environment and the Q4OS platform shows strong potential for business use. This distro could provide an interesting alternative for home and small business use, when the missing pieces between the current beta and a 1.0 and beyond release history are added.
Installing Arch Linux is a bit like building your own house. You have to dig the foundation, erect the walls, build the roofs, run the plumbing and electrical wiring around it ... and all the rest of it. In other words, installing Arch Linux is not at all like renting an apartment, just moving in, and letting the landlord take care of everything else.
The root cause of this has been traced back to our source code analysis group and the mass scans performed on the Fedora versions prior to RHEL 7 rebase. These scans were performed using a couple of source code analysis tools including Coverity and cppcheck and the warnings were addressed as normal bugs. This explanation is also supported by the decreasing number of found use-after-frees in Fedora from versions 17 to 19, which served as basis for RHEL 7. Interestingly, other weaknesses like buffer access problems and overflows are unaffected, which is probably combination of a) inherent difficulty of their detection via code analysis and b) large number of false positives, making the developers less inclined to address these types of warnings.
It's one of those eternal problems between developers and operators that even DevOps can't entirely solve. System administrators want the most stable operating system possible, while programmers want the latest and greatest development tools. Red Hat's solution for this dilemma has been to take those brand spanking-new tools, test them out on the latest stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and then release them to developers.
Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis is every cloud commentators dream. They’ve got the perfect story – high growth, massive funding and sufficiently frequent newsworthy content to keep people entertained. In the past the dramas have revolved around Mirantis’ strained relationship with Red Hat, things are moving up a notch today with the company throwing a barb in VMware‘s direction.
One of the new offerings with the Fedora 22 release is a Vagrant box for the Atomic host. While we’re a few months away from the final release, we have an alpha out last week and test candidates for Fedora 22 beta spinning up as we speak. Ready to try out one of the Vagrant boxes? We’ll step through downloading and running the boxes for libvirt/KVM and VirtualBox.
Fedora 21 XFCE is fedora 21 featuring XFCE desktop version 4.10, include applications that will enhance your productivity. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment that is designed to be speedy, It loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources. The Fedora Xfce Spin is a high-quality Xfce experience for Fedora users and developers. Enjoy the benefits of the Xfce desktop’s clean and quick interface. Get more done faster, and run your desktop on this innovative Fedora platform.
Increased diversity is crucial to the future of open source. A range of contributors from varying backgrounds brings broader experience to the table, which makes for healthier projects — and ultimately better software. To make Fedora a more diverse community, the Fedora Council (our new governance and leadership body) has an open position for a Diversity Advisor, and we need your help to find the perfect person for this role.
Clement Lefebvre announced a few minutes ago, March 18, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate versions of Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 “Betsy” Cinnamon and MATE, two computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and built around the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments created by Linux Mint developers.
The RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 2, codename Betsy, has been announced earlier today by no other than the father of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre. Both Cinnamon and MATE editions of LMDE 2 have been released for testing and we were asked by our users to create screenshot tours.
David Callé has announced earlier today that he developed a web-based application for the developer.ubuntu.com website designed from the ground up to allow anyone to create Web Apps for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system that powers the awesome Ubuntu phones everyone talks about these days.
Rohith Madhavan has announced today the immediate availability for download of the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 operating system for the Raspberry Pi 2 computer board. The new binary image of Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) is dated March 14, 2015, and brings several interesting features and improvements.
Canonical has been talking about its mobile plans for quite some time, promising that it will one day create a truly all-encompassing ecosystem that bridges the gap between mobile and desktop systems.
Five years have passed since the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and as such on 30 April they're putting the Lucid Lynx release at an end-of-life state with no future support updates -- including no more security updates. Those wishing to move on without wiping the system(s) should upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and after that they're then able to move onto Ubuntu 14.04, the newest Long-Term Support release.
Do you remember Ubuntu 10.04? Well, we do, and we can tell you that while the Desktop version is no longer supported since May 9, 2013, the Server edition will be supported until April 30, 2015. Back then, when Ubuntu 10.04 was announced, all LTS (Long Term Support) releases were supported 3 years on the Desktop and 5 years on the Server.
Kubuntu 15.04 development is in full swing and it’s looking like our 10th anniversary edition will be a classic. We’re the first distribution to ship a stable version with Plasma 5, the desktop which is getting tech journalists excited. My new favourite desktop they say. A masterpiece in the making they’re calling it. The most exciting release in a long time they exclaim.
It was recently brought to our attention that the main PPA (Personal Package Archive) software repositories of the current stable release of the Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system have been re-organized and in order for users to receive the latest software updates, they must manually add a new PPA into their distributions.
Need a truly portable Linux computer? Over on NODE, Chris Robinson shows how build a Linux-powered computer inside of a USB charger for ultimate portability.
The smartwatch market is filling up with unique hardware designs to suit your tastes, but many of them share identical software features, as they are running Google’s Android Wear OS. Huawei recently joined the smartwatch market with its announcement at MWC 2015, but the company is apparently unhappy with the lack of freedom offered by the Android Wear platform.
Google is losing the battle to establish Android Wear as the de facto platform of the smartwatch and wearables movement. Recently passing just over one million downloads of the Android OS client app from the Google Play Store, the combined effort of Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, Asus, and Sony has not led to a breakout hit. That’s before the juggernaut of Apple Watch, and Pebble’s second major iteration of software and hardware, overpower the market.
Last week, Google started rolling out a Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop update to replace Android 5.0.2 Lollipop and Android 5.0.1 Lollipop. Android 5.1 Lollipop is a substantial upgrade for Nexus smartphones and tablets and today, we want to take a look at five things you need to know about Google’s Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.
Google is introducing a new age-rating system for Android apps and games on its Google Play store, while also revealing a new policy of reviewing apps before they are published on the store.
The new age-rating system will see Android developers completing a questionnaire about their app or game’s content before it is published, rather than simply choosing a rating.
Pebble OS-based smart watches are social creatures. Let’s teach Flappy Tux to get in touch with Android smartphones
The number of apps claiming to sharpen your mind through daily mental calisthenics has exploded. Many of them are excellent at making brain training and language learning fun, offering a better way to kill some time on your phone or tablet than smashing candy pieces.
LG L90 is the affordable smartphone went official a year ago with a 4.7" display, Snapdragon 400 chip, and an 8MP cam all running on Android KitKat OS. It is pretty much the same phone as the LG G2 mini, but with front keys instead of the iconic rear control deck.
According to Luciano Carvalho, an engineer at Motorola, the DROID Turbo on Verizon is to receive an update straight to Android 5.1, bypassing all versions of Lollipop before it. Not to waste resources, the reasoning to skip other builds is stated to be Verizon’s urge for the device’s software to highlight VoLTE (HD Voice), which is native to Android 5.1. Beyond that, no other reason is listed.
Having Nintendo’s games on other platforms is something we’ve always asked for, and it seems like the Japanese gaming giant is finally giving in to that plea. The company has confirmed that they are in partnership with mobile game publishing house DeNA to release games under the Big N banner on smartphones and tablets later this year.
Neptune launched a WiGig-connected “Neptune Suite” on Indiegogo, comprising an Android smartwatch, a barebones phone and tablet, and a keyboard and TV dongle.
Neptune, which launched the full-featured, Android-based Neptune Pine smartwatch last year, tipped a Neptune Duo product in February that was to comprise an autonomous smartwatch that controlled a “dumb” smartphone. The Duo concept, which essentially flips the typical smartwatch paradigm on its head, has now blossomed into an Indiegogo project called the Neptune Suite.
The Kolab Collaboration Suite has been adopted by companies and governments around the world, making it one of most successful "poster children" for Free Software and Open Standards. In order to chart the next steps forward, the Kolab community is excited to announce the inaugural Kolab Summit to be held in The Hague on May 2-3, 2015.
Charlie Kravetz said he was a little nervous at SCALE 13x. Not only had his presentation slides gorped about a week ahead of the expo (he got them back together and working, of course), it was Charlie’s first time speaking in front of a group. And the message he wished to convey in his talk, “Accessibility in Software,” was an important one.
The convergence of OpenStack-based cloud computing and the telecom industry is continuing apace. We've reported on Red Hat's partnership with Telefonica to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications technology into OpenStack. And we've covered Canonical and Juniper Networks' partnership to oversee co-development of a carrier-grade, OpenStack solution.
The Apache Software Foundation is putting together what looks like it will be one of the better open source events of the year: ApacheCon North America, to be held in Austin, Texas, April 13th - 16th. Austin is a fun place to visit, and the agenda for ApacheCon looks excellent. You can register by March 21st to take advantage of the earlybird pricing and here are more details on the event.
OpenSSH 6.8 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.
OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.
OpenSSH 6.8 was released this morning and with this version a lot of their internal code was refactored to make OpenSSH more library-like.
OpenSSH, the world’s most popular open-source, 100% complete SSH (Secure Shell) protocol that also includes SFTP (Secure FTP) client and server support, has been updated today, March 18, to version 6.8. This release includes a great number of new features and many bug fixes to make OpenSSH more reliable and stable than ever.
When you think of GitHub, you think of open source software. Of course, just putting your code on GitHub doesn’t make it open source; you still need to explicitly choose a license for your code that allows others to use it. A new look at the number of projects on GitHub made available under open source licenses reveals that a significant number of developers aren’t doing that. However, recent efforts by GitHub to encourage project maintainers to license their code and to simplify the process appear to be bearing fruit.
Today pianist Kimiko Ishizaka and MuseScore.com made their recording and score of Johann Sebastian Bach's collection of solo keyboard music, called the Well-Tempered Clavier, available to the public domain so anyone can download and fork it.
The project is called the Open Well-Tempered Clavier. And of the piano performance, critic Grego Applegate Edwards says, "In all the years, all the versions, I have never heard 'Book 1' done better than on the new recording by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka."
OpenPower Foundation members pulled the curtain back on a number of open source cloud datacentre technologies including the first commercially available OpenPower-based server, and the first open server spec that combines OpenStack, Open Compute and OpenPower architectures.
The Open State Foundation has published the budgets and spending data of Dutch local governments for the years 2012-2013. Visitors to the openspending.nl portal can download the raw data, view the data of a specific local government, or compare the data of two governments.
The original founders of Arduino—the popular programmable DIY electronics kit—appear to have had a falling out. And that might bring about what could be the world’s first open-source hardware fork, a sort of developer schism that's much more common in the software world.
The GNU part comes from the Pratchett universe. In clacks code, G is an instruction to send a message, N instructs the clack operator not to log it, and U instructs the recipient to turn it round at the end of the line and send it back.
Android has been around for years, and it has seen its share of malware, even in Google’s official Play store. Although third-party security vendors had to jump in and come up with a line of defense against ill-intended apps, Google had the inspiration to introduce the Bouncer app-vetting system that kicked malicious apps out of its marketplace.
So, almost every company do this appears to be giving ease of use priority over any real security. Besides using static keys and trusting broken SSL connections, they don’t include a way to easily update the firmware or software on these IoT devices. That means 90% of the devices will never be updated. That makes thieves happy.
Do you remember Iraq? How about its capital Baghdad? In the campaign to bring “Democracy” to that nation, the United States and its Western allies were able to utterly destroy that country. Now, the Kurds have their own independent region, the Shi’a control Baghdad and the south, and the Sunnis are somewhere in the northeast and eastern part of the country. Iraqi libraries have been destroyed (Baghdad library being a prime example), its monuments pulverized (the ancient city of Babylon was used as parking lots for US tanks, the national museum of Iraq was looted, and its objects can now be purchased on e-bay). Its power grids, roads, bridges, homes and much more were made extinct. The war to bring “Democracy” to Iraq has brought close to a million deaths and injuries in Iraq and an average death toll of 500 a day since 2008. The country has in a sense lost its cultural, social and moral fabric. That is why Daesh has been created and one can say a truly monstrous group, whose moral stance is unlike anything that we have seen in recent times is ravaging it. They have killed people and destroyed the cultural heritage of that region. One only has to mention the Mosul Museum which held artifacts from ancient Assyria amongst others, and the Mosul library which held the treasures of ancient Christianity in the East, which were all destroyed. According to President Bush, at the time of his tenure, about half a million Iraqis had died, and now the numbers may be closer to seven hundred thousand.
Although the “violent bona fides” of ISIS are “not in doubt to anyone paying attention,” Adam Johnson, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, notes that, “much of the ISIS threat — namely that which targets the West — has been habitually overstated by an uncritical media.”
The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn't find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
We had been noting, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, how the country that then held a giant "free speech" rally appeared to be, instead, focusing on cracking down on free speech at every opportunity. And target number one: the internet. Earlier this week, the Interior Minister of France -- with no court review or adversarial process -- ordered five websites to not only be blocked in France, but that anyone who visits any of the sites get redirected to a scary looking government website...
The dead drop shipments help to foil a Snowden-revealed operation whereby the NSA would intercept networking kit and install backdoors before boxen reached customers.
The man who implemented an illegal dragnet admits that governments (only authoritarian ones, he suggests? or does the use of such methods make a government authoritarian?) might exert control via the Internet.
If it weren’t for Cheney’s long history implementing just that type of monitoring (certainly on the rest of the world, and to an extent on Americans), I might think he’d been hanging around with Edward Snowden!
Documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge.
Evidence of the fake Facebook account was found in a cache of files provided by the Mall of America to Bloomington officials after a large Black Lives Matter event at the mall on December 20 protesting police brutality. The files included briefs on individual organizers, with screenshots that suggest that much of the information was captured using a Facebook account for a person named “Nikki Larson.”
Now the uninitiated reader might have formed the impression that the Tor Browser was just some sort of slick repackaging of Firefox plus some add-ons, and that you can just use the browser of your choice with a suitable proxy setup and quit your BSD.whinging. They might assume that. I used to think that long ago but then I started to look into it and realized it's a little more involved...
You are travelling by plane to see your newborn grandchild. As you board the aircraft, the cabin crew address you by name and congratulate you on the arrival of a bouncing baby boy. On your seat, you find a gift-wrapped blue rattle with a note from the airline.
In Twitter data strategy chief Chris Moody’s vision of the future, companies surprising their customers like this could become an everyday occurrence – made possible because Twitter is listening.
In a long-overdue nod to both privacy and security, the administration finally moved Whitehouse.gov to HTTPS on March 9th. This followed the FTC's March 6th move to do the same. And yet, far too many government websites operate without the additional security this provides. But that's about to change. According to a recent post by the US government's Chief Information Officers Council, HTTPS will (hopefully) be the new default for federal websites.
For quite some time now, we've been covering how various law enforcement agencies have been using "Stingray" (or similar) cell tower spoofing devices to track the public. Beyond the questionable Constitutionality of such mass surveillance techniques, what's been really quite incredible is the level of secrecy surrounding such devices. We've written about how the US Marshals have "intervened" in various court cases to hide info about the use of Stingrays -- and even telling local law enforcement to lie about their use of the devices. We've written about law enforcement officials claiming "terrorism" as the reason for needing Stingrays, but then using them for everyday law enforcement. We've written about the company that makes Stingrays, Harris Corp., forcing police to sign non-disclosure agreements barring them from revealing any info about their use. It also appears that Harris Corp. misled the FCC to receive approval for its mobile tower spoofing capabilities. Some police departments have even withdrawn evidence rather than talk about their use of Stingrays.
The comedian, whose full name is Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, was arrested on January 14 after writing "I feel like Charlie Coulibaly" on Facebook.
A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a woman to 70 lashes after she allegedly insulted a man on the messaging service WhatsApp.
The 32-year-old, who has not been named, admitted to insulting the man but also refuted the verdict, according to reports in GulfNews.com and other local media.
Now that it's pretty much settled that the public has the right to record the police*, legislators are now moving to peel back this begrudgingly "granted" First Amendment protection.
If one Texas lawmaker gets his way, it would be illegal for regular folks to get close to police and record video of them.
This proposal comes at a time of heavy police scrutiny nationwide, after an officer shot a teenager to death in Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson police have been assaulted, too, in recent days.