11.13.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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A startling fact is that there are in excess of a billion people who have some type of disability. That represents approximately 15% of the world’s population with a physical, sensory or mental limitation that interferes with their ability to move, see, hear or learn. 350 million people in the world are partially sighted or blind. The faster computer technology evolves, the more excluded these individuals would become without development in computer software that seeks to address their needs.
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Whether you are actively considering a move away from Photoshop, or simply hoping there is a non-proprietary tool for reading your Photoshop images if you ever decide to stop subscribing to Adobe’s cloud, you’ve probably wondered about GIMP. A free, open-source, image editor, the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) has been a go-to tool for Linux users for years, but has a reputation for being hard to use and lacking many of Photoshop’s features. The reality has changed dramatically over the last couple years. GIMP now has a very competent user interface, as well as an extensive and powerful set of features. Its openly extensible nature means that in some areas, like running well-known image processing algorithms on your photos, it actually outshines Adobe Photoshop.
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I was disappointed with the “beta” release for GNU/Linux. It seemed “alpha” to me and was very awkward to install. There’s news of a new release for December, synchronized for That Other OS and GNU/Linux. It should be smoother this time. Perhaps I’ll really get to do something with it.
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With past ISP problems, I’ve been able to run a continuous ping to an outside IP address and show the tech-support representative that I have packet loss. Unfortunately, a running ping command doesn’t give a history of when the packets are lost. With SmokePing, not only is there a record of when packets are lost, but there’s also a graphical representation of how many packets were lost, and from several IP addresses to boot.
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I spent the past year writing The Librarian’s Guide to Academic Research in the Cloud, a book which focuses on using and thinking about cloud services in an academic research context. I’m fortunate enough to belong to a union that negotiated research leave for new faculty, and that leave made the book possible.
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Keeping a daily journal is one of the best ways to keep your thoughts organized. Not only can it help you think more clearly, it can also help you reflect on your past actions. After writing for a while, you’ll get used to putting your thoughts in text form and reflecting upon them. Journaling isn’t something new, though. The act of writing a journal has been practiced for centuries. However, it is now that this lost art form is regaining its popularity.
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We cut the cord a couple of years ago, the need to get TV over traditional TV Ariel was no longer needed and services such as TV Catchup, iPlayer and the other UK Catchup TV Channels streamed over the net to my TV were all we needed.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Ubuntu 13.10′s new Scopes feature is fed by heuristics to offer matches to your accumulated browsing and search requests gleaned from Github, reddit, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google News, The Weather Channel and Yelp. I find this level of search invasion too intrusive. If I wanted that approach to marketing, I would just bypass Ubuntu completely and grab a Kindle or rely more fully on the Google search engine.
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The most new-user friendly of all Linux desktop distributions, Ubuntu has a new, better release: Ubuntu 13.10, Saucy Salamander.
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Looking back on my time with Kubuntu 13.10 the thing which stood out the most was that not much stood out. Apart from having some network issues which slowed things down during my first installation attempt, my time with the distribution was quite good. The installer is nicely laid out, the KDE 4.11 desktop is quite polished, providing a clean, feature-rich environment. I like that Kubuntu comes with a guest account for those odd times people wish to borrow my computer. I’m also happy to see there is an option in the KDE System Settings panel to turn off the guest account for people who see the guest account as a security concern. The new user account manager is slick and easy to use, I’m quite happy to see it included in this release. So far I’m tentatively happy with the new Discover software manager. It looks pretty and it seems to work well enough. The software manager’s interface is a little busy for my taste, but otherwise I have no complaints. I think most people will take to it and those who don’t can fall back on the older package manager. Overall, Kubuntu 13.10 feels like a stable, mature release that has some nice new features, but nothing ground shaking that would put off existing users. I’m actually sorry this version is not a long-term support release and will only receive security updates for nine months, the short support cycle seems to be the only weak point in an otherwise excellent desktop operating system.
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I try to write articles for the readers on this site that I hope they will find useful and so I agreed to write the review on the basis that if it is a great book then I can share that knowledge and if it isn’t then I can also share that knowledge.
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Today in Open Source: SteamOS will not be based on Ubuntu. Plus: Metro Last Light out for Linux, and the Tuxmachines site has been sold
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Tuxmachines Site Sold
Foss Force is reporting that the Tuxmachines site has been sold. Here it is in case you missed it last month.
One of the most popular Linux sites, Tuxmachines.org, announced on October 28th that it has been tentatively sold for $1,000.
When Ms. Linton, who has also been involved with DistroWatch, started Tuxmachines it quickly grew to be an important destination on news about Linux and other open source projects.
More at Foss Force
It’s sad that the site is changing hands, but hopefully the new owner will keep it going for a long, long time.
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A USB key or thumb drive or USB stick is the best device to use in installing your favorite Linux distribution. It’s not just because it’s reusable forever (unless you mess it up), but the system runs much faster than if you used a CD or DVD disc for installation.
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grsync is a graphical rsync tool in ubuntu linux. It provides a graphical user interface to backup or sync important files & directories to remote machine or in local machine using rsync. It currently supports only a limited set of the most important rsync features, but can be used effectively for local directory synchronization.
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Flavours and Variants
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The highly anticipated Pear OS 8 Linux distribution has been officially released today, November 9, by David Tavares, the father of the Pear Linux Project.
There’s no official announcement for Pear OS 8, but we can tell you that the distribution boasts a new iOS 7 design, created by Ivan Matias Suarez. Moreover, the brand-new Pear OS 8 distribution features a set of pre-installed applications, including Pear Cloud, Clean My Pear 2, MyPear 6, as well as more than 3,000 downloadable packages from its generous software repository.
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David Tavares, father of the Pear Linux project, has just announced that he started a crowdfunding campaign for a new project, called Pear OS 8 Tablet Edition, a version of the Pear OS 8 Linux operating system for the Microsoft Surface tablet.
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So we found ourselves on unsure footing. While I am sure that the developers of Mint and Zorin are confident in their longevity within the the community…..
It’s simply a risk we cannot take. They are both some of the best examples of what Linux is and should be on the desktop. Both of these distributions will be used in our Reglue computers, as each of them has a specified purpose, depending on the power and size of the computer being installed.
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11.07.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Hectronic will soon begin sampling a Linux-compatible Qseven computer-on-module based on AMD’s dual-core, 1GHz G-Series SoC. Claimed as the first Qseven COM to use the new AMD SoC, the H6069 is equipped with 2GB of soldered DDR3 RAM and an optional 32GB SSD, and features dual display support, 12 Watt power consumption, and optional industrial temperature range operation.
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Automakers want to standardize on a Linux-based OS that would make vehicle infotainment systems act more like smartphones
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Sage Electronic Engineering, has released a free board support package for AMD’s community-backed Gizmo SBC equipped with the open source, Coreboot-based SageBIOS bootloader. SageBIOS BSP for Gizmo further supports the $189, G-Series-based Gizmo board with “free payloads and drivers to enable peripherals,” says the company.
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Digia announced an Android and Linux-targeted embedded version of its cross-platform Qt GUI framework called Qt Enterprise Embedded that combines a Qt Creator based IDE with a new embedded Boot to Qt stack. The Digia-backed Qt project also released the beta of Qt 5.2 with a new Scene Graphic renderer and the first production-ready support for Android and iOS.
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Wind River announced Wind River Linux 6, featuring Yocto Project 1.5 Linux kernel and toolchain, and expanded multi-architecture hardware support including 64-bit ARMv8. Wind River also announced a faster new Yocto-compatible version of its carrier-grade Wind River Open Virtualization software.
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But the less obvious engineering feat was achieving cross compatibility between the board’s custom Linux OS and Arduino’s application development software necessary to port C code to the device from Windows and Mac, as well as Linux.
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In August Intel launched the Yocto Project Innovation Challenge to help showcase developers who are building – or simply imagining — Yocto-based embedded Linux applications and devices.
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Wind River announced Wind River Linux support for Cavium’s newly shipping Octeon III system-on-chips. Aimed at high-end networking applications, the 28nm-fabricated Octeon III SoCs offer as many as 48 MIPS64 cores clocked up to 2.5GHz, support MIPSr5 architecture features like hardware virtualization, and integrate accelerators for deep packet inspection (DPI), packet processing, security, search, and QoS.
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Portwell announced a computer-on-module along with a pair of single-board computers built around Intel’s new embedded-specific Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips. The three Linux-friendly boards include a Type 6 COM Express Compact COM, a Mini-ITX style embedded motherboard, and an SBC implemented in the rarely seen Nano-ITX form factor.
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Suitable Technologies is offering $50 rentals of its “Beam” mobile telepresence robot, so 50 robotics enthusiasts can remotely attend the RoboBusiness conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Oct. 23-25. The Ubuntu- and ROS-based Beam will be available to the first 50 applicants, letting them explore the show at up to 1.5 meters/sec and interact with others via video conferencing.
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ISEE announced a highly compact single board computer powered by a 2GHz dual-core Cortex-A15 based Texas Instruments OMAP5432 system-on-chip. The IGEPv5 SBC ships with a Yocto-built Linux stack, but also supports Android, and is packed with I/O including five USB ports, mSATA, microSD, HDMI, DisplayPort, audio in/out, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth wireless, and more.
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In August Intel launched the Yocto Project Innovation Challenge to help showcase developers who are building – or simply imagining — Yocto-based embedded Linux applications and devices.
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10.28.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It seem that many of Ubuntu’s detractors became upset at the reference to “the Open Source Tea Party.” My gawd, it was just a joke–and to make sure everyone knew he was just kidding, he followed it with a winky emoticon.
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Thorsten Stettin has created a new PPA for Ubuntu / Linux Mint users who want to use the latest GIMP 2.9 development builds.
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Ubuntu 13.10 is officially released. Of course, it’s been in the news so much that the official announcement today feels like old news. But at least news of 14.04 will replace 13.10 next week. Until then, though, Ubuntu 13.10 is released for “Desktop, Server, Cloud, Phone, and Core products.”
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Canonical is moving ahead toward the convergence of mobile phone and desktop operating systems with the launch of Ubuntu 13.10 on Thursday.
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Many of you will have heard about Ubuntu’s convergence goals on the client side — running a single, consistent code-base and experience that adapts to phones, desktops, tablets, and TVs…but are you aware of our convergence on the cloud?
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Since the first release nine years ago today, Ubuntu Linux has been powering millions of PCs around the world. Love it or hate it, the Ubuntu project has made a great stride for the overall betterment of Linux, and no one can deny that. As its founder Mark Shuttleworth puts it, Ubuntu is all about total commitment to everyday users, making things “just work” for them.
Celebrating its 9th birthday today, I am going to share interesting facts and history behind Ubuntu Linux.
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Jack Wallen lists the 10 features that make Saucy Salamander a more polished Ubuntu distribution.
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On Thursday 17 October last week the latest release of Ubuntu 13.10- christened Saucy Salamander was released. The distribution- especially this current release- has been rocked by several controversies and has since dropped to number 3 on distrowatch. It however remains a veritable force to reckon with in the Linuxsphere where it has spawned a host of derivative distros such as the number one ranked Linux Mint. Countless blogs have been written on how to install it. I am here to offer some local tweaks to those guides.
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Things won’t get off to a rollicking start just yet. The early part of every development cycle is spent getting things up-to-date by syncing the latest versions of key development packages.
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The first version of Ubuntu 4.10, Warty Warthog, was released on October 20, 2004, nine years ago, marking the beginning of a great journey.
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Flavours and Variants
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I got a Masters in Computer Sciences from the University of South Paris in 2001. I was mostly interested in game development, but as it happened, I worked for banks, telecom and software companies in France and in Ireland. I had various job titles (web developer, IT engineer, software developer, J2EE architect), and in one company I was teaching rather than coding, but most of time my job was to design and to develop software or web applications.
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10.24.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Remember the “GNU/Linux costs more…” FUD from M$ and sycophants? Here’s what the French National Police found:
“Part of the TCO reduction comes in upfront costs: savings on licences and cost of licence access, and, when it comes to hardware purchasing, the force can buy desktops without an OS already installed, saving €100 or so per PC.
However, the savings aren’t just from software licences costs: the change has also meant a reduction in local tech support needed, while Canonical charges the organisation €1 per machine per year to provide support.”
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With the Mir display server failing to make the cut, Ubuntu 13.10, rather than being a stepping-stone on the way to form-factor convergence with 14.04, seems more like an obligatory release.
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Saucy, now officially known as Ubuntu 13.10, is a wonderful achievement by a very large and diverse collection of teams and individuals. Each of us is motivated by something different – in fact, we might have very different visions of what the ideal desktop looks like or what the default set of applications should be. But we manage, in the spirit of ubuntu, to work together to make something wonderful like 13.10, which serves the needs and goals of a very large number of people and communities.
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As the user types a search query in the Dash, the partial query is transmitted to Canonical’s servers, which will analyze the input and decide what to present. The new backend uses a number of heuristics to attempt to find the most relevant results to send back to the user. Some of the Internet sources that the new backend can tap include Github, reddit, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google News, The Weather Channel, and Yelp.
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Finally, the most expected distribution in Linux World, Ubuntu 13.10 ‘Saucy Salamander’ final has been released, there is no official release announcement yet, but the download page of Saucy has been updated with the final packages. Just like most of you, We also expected it very long. This awesome distribution has come with plenty of new features and improvements.
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LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Canonical has announced its free Ubuntu 13.10 Linux operating system (OS) release, which is available for both PCs and smartphones from today.
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Ubuntu 13.10 for servers and the cloud will feature OpenStack Havana, new deployment tools and other updates aimed at enhancing the scalability of the Linux-based operating system.
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Find out why Jack Wallen thinks that Ubuntu 13.10 is a solid, reliable platform that just works. Do you agree?
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While the Ubuntu 13.10 release is just over one week away, Mir still hasn’t officially landed in the Ubuntu Phone images as the new display server. There’s been some bugs but it looks like it will now be landing rather soon.
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Google’s now-famous driverless cars initiative seems to have kick-started a new kind of war. Various manufacturers are fighting tooth and nail to bring the most advanced driverless car technology to the market as fast as they can. But what’s even more intriguing to me was the presence of Ubuntu, first on Google’s driverless cars, and now here, on this Mercedes-Benz driverless research car. Autonomous long-distance drive technology demonstration on a Merc.
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Canonical announced that the next version of Ubuntu for server and cloud environments will be released on 17 October.
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Canonical continues to make the Ubuntu server edition speedier and more versatile in cloud environments.
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Ubuntu 13.10 may not be the most exciting desktop Linux, but it is very solid and contains many useful new features.
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After a few days of wrangling, the very latest Ubuntu Touch images have the Mir Display Server replacing Android’s SurfaceFlinger.
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Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) is scheduled for launch on October 17, but users of the previous operating systems from Canonical are wondering why they should upgrade at all, given the fact that the new one doesn’t seem to have too many features.
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The open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system, which in recent years has become one of the most popular distributions, is about to get a major update. On Oct. 17, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu project, will release Ubuntu 13.10, also referred to as the “Saucy Salamander,” with new desktop, server and cloud-facing features. On the desktop, the Saucy Salamander does not mark a dramatic visual departure from its predecessor, Ubuntu 13.04, also known as the “Raring Ringtail.” The 13.10 desktop does, however, benefit from a new Smart Scopes feature, which provides a unified search capability across local and network drives, as well search results from other user-definable online locations. With the Saucy Salamander, Ubuntu has also merged security and privacy settings into one system, making it easier to control and manage. In addition, the new Ubuntu release benefits from the recent Linux 3.11 kernel, providing improved performance and stability. For cloud users, Ubuntu 13.10 includes the latest OpenStack Havana release, as well as improvements to the Ubuntu Juju service orchestration system. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features packed into the Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander release.
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Over the past few years Ubuntu has become somewhat divided from the rest of the Linux community and it could easily be renamed “Linux Marmite,” as you either love it or hate it.
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Criticism gives you two main choices: either you can learn from it, or ignore it and keep on with what you are doing. Sadly, with the introduction of Smart Scopes on to the dash, Ubuntu 13.10 is mostly opting to ignore criticism, pushing ahead with changes that few seem to want and violating Unity’s original design principles in favor of contradictory new ones.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #337 for the week September 30 – October 6, 2013, and the full version is available here.
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Users who wanted Ubuntu without Unity can now try a new distribution called Ubuntu Classic that provides all the features, without any of the Unity components.
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While we are on track to successfully deliver Mir for Ubuntu on smartphones, we are unfortunately not going to be able to deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 as the default experience on the desktop.
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In the early days of Ubuntu, it was always a challenge to promote an OS that was so new and little known to the market; we were often asked ‘Ubun what…?”! Over the years, Canonical has grown rapidly, has innovated even faster and the community has spread the word all across the globe. Today, with over 25 million users, Ubuntu is now a safe and perfect choice for customer, offering a stylish and intuitive interface that is fast, secure.
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There are lots of interesting things ahead for Ubuntu desktop users in the next release, but what’s really going to be important is how well Ubuntu does on the smartphone.
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I believe that in the entire history of Ubuntu we are at the most exciting time we have ever experienced.
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One week after writing about the sad state of RadeonSI / GLAMOR support in Ubuntu 13.10, the GLAMOR EGL library has made it through the Saucy Salamander’s queue and landed into the archive for next month’s Ubuntu 13.10 release.
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I have been using Ubuntu Touch 13.10 as a daily driver on my Nexus 7 for about two and a half months now. There are a few minor hiccups and setbacks, but I can honestly say that it has improved drastically from the original MWC Demo.
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I have talked in the past about how critical I feel app developers are to the Ubuntu convergence story. If developers can go from idea to implementation to publishing quickly and easily, it will make the overall Ubuntu platform more attractive and featureful for users, partners, OEMs, carriers and more.
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A powerful new Ubuntu PC has been revealed by Linux computer company System76.
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All in all, I was very happy with the book. It takes some difficult subjects and boils them down nicely, giving the reader a way to quickly get services up and running. The miscellaneous tips provided are quite useful and will probably save readers a good deal of time over the course of a career. Server administration sometimes comes across as a dark art and it is nice to see a book which so thoroughly shines a light onto the subject. Whether you are studying to become a system administrator or just looking to set up a server at home to handle personal e-mail, I think this is a good text to get newcomers started.
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Will Canonical offerings for PCs, smartphones, tablets catch on?
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AppGrid, the lightweight (but proprietary) Ubuntu Software Center alternative which we covered recently, was updated yesterday and it should now work on Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10 and 13.10. Initially, the application was only available for Ubuntu 13.04.
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Want a really easy orchestration tool for Ubuntu on Microsoft’s Azure cloud? It’s here now with Ubuntu Juju.
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Full Circle – the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community
are proud to announce the release of our seventy seventh issue.
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Ubuntu continues to push the envelope and aggravate the community with each new release. In this newest version, there aren’t any “Unity” type changes to the UI, but one of the more controversial changes in recent memory is just about ready for prime time as they change the underlying Window Manager to “Mir”. Let’s take a quick look at that and some of the other changes from version 13.04 to 13.10.
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu 13.10 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.
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The distro before the LTS comes with some new toys in the shape of Canonical’s display server Mir. Is it a sign of good things to come?
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The final beta of Ubuntu 13.10 has been made available for download.
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After showing improved performance with the new VMware Fusio 6, are there any upgrades in moving virtual machines from Ubuntu 13.04 to the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 13.10?
As the latest Phoronix benchmarks to deliver, after I finished that VMware Fusion 6.0.0 testing on Ubuntu 13.04 from the Haswell-based MacBook Air system, I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 to see if there’s any performance improvements to find with the 13.10 “Saucy Salamander” packages over 13.04 stable.
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Ubuntu 13.10 , code-named Saucy Salamander, is set to hit a download mirror near you sometime next month. But that won’t happen until major bugs have been fixed.
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Along with the release of Ubuntu 13.10 Final Beta, Canonical also unveiled the second and final Beta version for the upcoming Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) Linux operating system.
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On the surface, based on the second beta just released, Ubuntu 13.10 is shaping up to be a solid, if slightly dull, Linux distro.
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Have an Android tablet or TV box with a Rockchip RK3188 processor, and wish it ran a desktop operating system rather than a mobile OS? A new build of PicUntu is available, bringing the full Ubuntu Linux experience to devices with RK3188 processors.
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Dobbie03 submitted his desktop to our Desktop Showcase, which is what you should do if you want your desktop featured here! All you have to do is post a nice big screenshot of your work to your kinja blog (the one that came with your commenter account), and include links to the wallpaper, widgets, skins, and tools you used to customize it!
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Canonical has assured its community that the Ubuntu desktop version is not lagging behind the Ubuntu Touch and that they are just aiming towards complete convergence.
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I, for one, am looking forward to comparing Wayland, Mir and X over the coming year to see which one best serves my needs. When we have options we all win.
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As we come up on just a few more days left to submit nominations for the Ubuntu Community Council, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write about my experiences on the council for the past 4 years (and 2 more if you’ll have me!) and why I highly encourage others to nominate themselves of folks in the community who they feel are qualified.
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Flavours and Variants
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Elementary OS 0.2 Luna is a linux distro that has become quite popular recently. It is based on Ubuntu and designed to look somewhat like a mac. There have been many attempts to get a mac like feel on the linux desktop and Pear OS is the most significant one. However all of them fall short somewhere or the other.
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1. Muelle by Manuel Puentes with 1261 Votes (15%)
2. Two Jack Lake by C Ayers with 1050 Votes (12%)
3. A Winter Magic by Luciash D’Being with 1033 Votes (12%)
4. Smolikas by George Blades Voulgarakis with 923 Votes (11%)
5. Moody by Robert Wicek with 813 Votes (10%)
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ArtistX 1.5, an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to enable artists and creators from a number of fields to work via a live and free environment, has just been released.
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Just when things were looking pretty dull today, I spotted an exciting tidbit of news. Jeff Hoogland announced a new release of Bodhi Linux today, September 12, 2013. It’s been six months since 2.3.0 was released and today’s announcement addresses that and future plans as well.
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Each Linux Mint release usually offers four flavors, to say nothing about LMDE: Mint Cinnamon, Mint MATE, Mint KDE and Mint Xfce. The MATE edition is based around a desktop environment forked from GNOME 2, featuring a similar interface and a familiar user interaction experience. MATE started as a need of some users to have the classic GNOME 2.x interface once GNOME 3 was released with huge interface changes. MATE does offer a classic, solid and familiar interface, and it also provides a compositing window manager for graphical effects and transparency.
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On October 3, David Tavares has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the third and last Beta release of the upcoming Pear OS 8 Linux operating system.
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Every six months, my world gets thrown into a state of pure, blissful chaos.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Free Software/Open Source
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Have you been looking for a job, or perhaps some work on the side? If so, and you have Linux or other open source skills, the news is good. Demand for Linux and open source workers continues to rise. We’ve covered this trend as reported by careers sites such as Dice.com, and by The Linux Foundation, but one of the most detailed breakdowns appears at LinuxCareer.com, through its IT Skills Watch report. In addition to reporting on demand for Linux skills, it breaks down how the demand looks for workers with skills in other areas ranging from PHP to Apache Tomcat.
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Indian enterprises are increasingly moving to open-source software, recognising the cost benefits and flexibility it offers over proprietary software. A falling rupee, which increases licensing costs, is likely to hasten the shift from softwares made by companies like SAP, IBM and Oracle.
The government has already embraced open-source in a big way — the Aadhaar project is a case in point. Now, companies like Hungama Digital Entertainment, Uttam Energy, Bilcare, payment processor Euronet, insurer Star Union Dai-chi and IT outsourcer iGate — have also started using open-source software. And the list is growing.
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To prevent disruptions and scale up its service while keeping costs down, Twitter has had to drastically change its core infrastructure, taking up open source tools while doing so.
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Unesco, the educational, scientific and cultural organisation of the United Nations, is promoting the development and use of open source solutions for water resource management. At the end of June, in Paris the UN officially launched a network of experts ‘Hydro Open-source software Platform of Experts’ (HOPE), to “contributes to the dissemination of innovative practices”.
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Oldenbourg Verlag just published a special issue on open source that I edited. Titled “the unstoppable rise of open source” it provides a five-article overview of open source past, present, and future.
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In all my writing work, I use only Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to get the job done. I’ve been questioned about this a number of times, and the best answer I can give people is: It’s complicated. There are lots of reasons I use FOSS over all other options, and I think I’m ready to put them all out there for y’all to see.
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I am happy to inform my readers that finally SOS Open Source will soon be released in open source!
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I vividly remember my first experience using the Internet in 2000. The amount of information I was hit with by typing my first search term, university, was far beyond my wildest imaginations. This plethora of knowledge filled my mind with wonder, excitement, and enlightenment. I suddenly had the power to read, analyze, and learn about anything and anyone. The knowledge created by some of the greatest minds in the history of mankind was at my disposal, free of cost and just one single click away. I felt empowered.
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Marten Mickos is one of the most respected leaders in open source. Here’s why.
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You can’t run a business—even a small one—without technology. You need computers, smartphones, file storage, a website, and a whole host of other tech assets. So how do you afford it all with a budget that’s tighter than a hipster’s jeans?
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Just days after a brand new cloud operating system was released, IBM is out with a new operating system of its own. FusedOS is IBM’s new research project that’s now an open-source general purpose OS.
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Open source is all about collaboration. When you write some code and put it out there for others to read, use, and build upon, you’re giving a gift to the world. With the instant global communication the Internet provides us today, countless developers around the world can (maybe even anonymously) collaborate, giving and taking code, sharing knowledge with each other, and advancing our collective corpus of work.
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There was a slight compensation when the German city of Munich reportedly were planning to distribute free CDs of Ubuntu 12.04 to its residents. That’s a step forward but certainly not good enough. Why I say it’s not good enough is because they can do more – a lot more than what they are currently doing.
Since these organizations will more than likely have their own support team and not rely on purchasing support contracts, the only reasonable source of revenue via clients buying support contracts for Open Source software gets blocked.
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DokuWiki is a simple but versatile wiki. Find out how to install, configure, and begin using DokuWiki.
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Where is Free & Open Source Software headed to? On the one hand, there is a trend that seems to veer it towards a more professional field, with new analysis and tracking tools that aim at improving not just the quality of code but its legal compliance as well. More and more large companies adopt FOSS either as users or as developers, or both, and that’s a good thing too. But does this announce the upcoming end of copyleft licences and that more structured approaches will ultimately kill the wild and spontaneous bunch that FOSS “once” was? No it won’t. First, the FOSS adoption among enterprise field does not depend on one license only. There’s also a lot of enterprise software released under GPL, by the way. But perhaps we have to accept and embrace Free and Open Source Software for what it is: an undefinable field that is at the same time a state of the art, a set of business models around software and services, a demand for our digital freedoms and a set of best practices on digital innovation alongside an extremely effective way to license software. And yet I’m not even sure I’ve covered it all. Today FOSS is growing not just in the enterprise: it’s at the core of the Makers’ movement and the 3D Printing revolution; it has inspired the Open Hardware movement, the Open Knowledge and countless other initiatives. Very few of these have reached a maturity stage and even inside the realms of FOSS development, things continue to be the same: at the beginning, a developer has an itch to sratch, and code to share with the world….
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Most students at Carnegie Mellon have used, or at least heard of, open-source software. Examples of such software include the browser Firefox and the mobile operating system Android. Open-source software, in most basic terms, makes its code publicly available for modification and distribution by users. Proponents believe that creating an open community of programmers who modify software for their own uses provides the best possible experience for users, allowing them to customize according to their own needs.
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Open source products have very uneven penetration into the world of business technology. If you look at content management systems or languages, open source rules. But if you look at the market for ERP software or for storage systems, open source hasn’t made much of a dent.
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Events
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The dates of October 23-24 have been circled on my calendar for a while. Why? Because All Things Open is coming to Raleigh, NC. It’s the first open source-focused conference of it’s kind to come to the capital of North Carolina. I’m also excited because having the conference come to Raleigh fulfills one of the five pillars in my definition of an open source city.
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It was really great to be able to attend LinuxCon in New Orleans in September. I’d like to thank again HP’s OSPO team and in particular Eileen Evans, VP leading it, to sponsor my travel there. HP is also a Platinum sponsor of both the Linux Foundation, CloudOpen & LinuxCon events.
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When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. That’s only fitting, given the fact that Raleigh is Red Hat’s playground–and Red Hat practically wrote the book on enterprise level open source.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Version 4.0 of GNU Make, the widely-used software that’s relied upon extensively by developers and those building their software from sources, is now available. GNU Make 4.0 does bring with it a handful of new features and capabilities.
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People trickled and and were greeted by the friendly face of FSF operations assistant, Chrissie Himes.
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Hey all. Things are busy here in MediaGoblin-land, but we’re making great progress. Since our last update several things have happened, including Natalie Foust’s branch being merged! So administrative tools have officially hit git master. That’s great news!
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Programming
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Use OpenCL with very little code — and test it from the Python console.
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It’s results like this that convince Jessica that when open source communities invest in diversity outreach, everyone benefits. Since implementing a beginner series, intermediate workshops, and open source sprints, the Boston Python user group has over quintupled in size, from 700 members to 4000+. They are now the largest Python user group in the world. That type of growth is something all open source communities should aspire to.
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The shell is the most basic of environments for working with your Linux system. Whatever you may think of working in a text environment, I guarantee that once you have fully experienced the power of simple text, you will be forever convinced. Text is compact. Text is fast. System administration over a network is best experienced at the shell level. Those forced to resort to graphical tools over a slow Internet connection are also quickly converted.
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Send this to a friend
10.23.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Applications
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Xnoise features a simplified interface. You see just the essentials: your media collection list and the title, album and artist for selections placed in the play list. The resizable media library sits openly on the left side of the application window. Its hierarchical tree design makes it easy to find any single track, artist, album or genre.
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Working remotely is not a new thing for Linux Administrators. Especially when he/she is not in front of the server. Generally, the GUI is not installed by default on Linux servers. But there may some Linux Administrators who choose to install GUI on Linux servers.
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Google has taken up development of Flash, calling it PepperFlash
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apt-fast is a “shell script wrapper” for apt-get and aptitude that can drastically improve APT download times by downloading packages with multiple connections per package. apt-fast uses aria2c or axel download managers to speed up the APT download time. Just like the traditional apt-get package manager, apt-fast supports almost all apt-get functions such as install, remove, update, upgrade, dist-upgrade etc. And one more notable feature is it supports proxy too.
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If you want to do quick everyday photo manipulations on a bunch of images, you will usually not go for Photoshop. Adobe Lightroom is what people inside the Photoshop universe will recommend you. Today we have an even greater solution for you. The formerly commercial, now Open Source tool LightZone will really excite you. The most enthralling thing is, it works totally different from anything you know…
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It’s a good week for music fans on Linux. Following the recent update to Banshee comes a new release of the lightweight Qt music player Musique.
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My daughters love the movie Pitch Perfect. I suspect our XBMC has played it more than 100 times, and I’m not exaggerating. Whether or not you enjoy young-adult movies about singing competitions and cartoon-like projectile vomiting, I’ll admit it’s a pretty fun movie. The question my girls ask me most often is about the audio-mixing software the protagonist uses to make her “sick beats”.
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Clementine is one of the most popular music players in the Linux world, absolutely loved for the Amarok 1.4 way things work and the huge list of available services it can connect you with and please your ears and heart. The music player/organizer has already reached maturity releasing version 1.0 and then bug fixing and slightly enriching functionality with 1.1 that was released 9 months ago.
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Xnoise, a media player for GTK+ with great speed and lots of features that allows listening to music and playing video in a very intuitive way, is now at version 0.2.19.
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This will probably be the shortest post I have to offer, about a single application.
You should be able to guess what this does, just by reading the title.
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Take a semantic Zeitgeist-powered application/file launcher and bind it to the panel. What do you get? Something worth putting in the spotlight, that’s what.
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Have you ever seen a system monitoring tool that sticks to your desktop, refreshes automatically, can have various beautiful GUIs, is highly customizable and can provide plethora of information (including weather information, e-mail notifications etc.) related to your system? Well, I am not sure if there is any system monitoring software that contains all these features, except one — Conky.
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The console calculators I’ve seen thus far have been slanted toward the scientific, with each one striving to be exceptionally precise and capable of some very impressive math.
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LiVES, a simple-to-use, powerful video editor and VJ tool that allows users to combine realtime and rendered effects, streams, and multiple video/audio files, is now at version 2.0.6.
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Just a few days after the Pitivi 0.91 Alpha, the official release has occurred with support for the GTK+ 3.x tool-kit, GStreamer 1.x APIs, and is now powered by the GStreamer Editing Services.
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Proprietary
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You are a Linux user, addicted to Facebook, tired from getting your web browser open all the time on the Facebook page, and searching for a Linux application that can use Facebook chat without losing the performance and the features ?
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Hello Linux Geeksters. Maxthon, a freeware internet browser working on Windows and Mac OS X comes to the Linux platform. There is no release date available, but things will get interesting from now. Firefox and Chrome will be obligated to bring new features to the two browsers.
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Project Releases
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AbiWord 3.0 is finally out with support for the GTK+ 3.x tool-kit and a significant number of other new features to the GNOME-focused multi-platform open-source word processor.
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Highly-performant, Open Source Big Data distributed database in use at Adobe, CERN, Comcast, eBay, GoDaddy, HP, IBM, Instagram, Netflix, Plaxo, and Sony, among others, to create modern, data-driven applications
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OpenZFS is the truly open source successor to the ZFS project. Our community brings together developers from the illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, and OS X platforms, and a wide range of companies that are building products on top of OpenZFS.
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Samba, which has been bringing Windows-compatible file sharing to Linux servers, Mac servers, and desktops for years, takes another step forward.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Now I plan to release a series of how-to articles covering configuration of multi-layout keyboards in Linux. It is obviously a task for the desktop environment in use for the particular Linux distribution. Let’s starts with the obvious leaders in the Linux world.
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If you want to know what video/audio codec are used for the video file you downloaded from somewhere, you can play the video itself. Most media player software such as VLC or MPlayer can display properties of a video file being played. However, there are command-line utilities that allow you to determine video properties quickly.
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The increasing popularity of Linux and Linux-native gaming platforms such as Steam is bringing mainstream gaming to Linux. If you are a hardcore gamer, you will probably pay great attention to the performance of the graphics card on your system. Many of you may be willing to shell out a couple of hundred dollars for high-end video cards to enjoy maximum gaming experience.
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The Novell networking protocol, IPX, is commonly used between Windows systems and NetWare servers (The IPX protocol). IPX stands for Internetwork Packet Exchange. This is a network layer that is commonly used with the SPX protocol that is the transport layer.
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ps displays information about active processes, with a number of custom fields that you can decide to show or not. For the purposes of this article I’ll focus on how to display information about memory usage. ps shows the percentage of memory that is used by each process or task running on the system, so you can easily identify memory-hogging processes.
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Games
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Monaco is coming to Linux on Monday, October 21, breaking down another barrier to entry for crafty players. Monaco is already out on Xbox 360, PC and Mac, and it even has a European boxed collector’s edition because it’s a high roller. The Linux edition will have “a ton of free/new content,” according to the announcement.
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We told you early in September that Shadowrun Returns (Steam Link) was going into beta soon and it looks to be finally hitting our digital shelves.
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These days, everyone is suddenly extolling the virtues of “open-source” gaming consoles, such as Valve’s upcoming Steam Box, Nvidia’s (NASDAQ: NVDA ) Shield handheld console, the kick-starter-funded Ouya, and the new Mad Catz M.O.J.O.
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“Linux has been around for so long that you wonder what Valve are thinking, but it does serve their interest in that this is a FOSS OS that can be picked up by any OEM,” suggested Lewis Ward, a research manager at IDC. “What Valve is doing could have the potential not to work but, from my experience, they’re very careful about how they go about doing what they do.”
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While more and more closed-source games — ranging from indie titles to AAA games — are heading to Steam ahead of SteamOS and Steam Machines, there still isn’t too many open-source games on Valve’s digital distribution platform. Here’s some information why one of the more popular cross-platform open-source first person shooters isn’t yet to be found on Steam.
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DICE is interested in developing for Linux, and feels the OS need only one “killer” game for the platform to become mainstream. Speaking with Polygon, DICE’s Lars Gustavsson said the team wants to get into Linux development “strongly”.
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It would only take one “killer” game for the Linux platform to explode its way into mainstream gaming, DICE creative director Lars Gustavsson told Polygon, revealing that the development studio would “strongly” like to get into Linux.
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If you haven’t heard by now, there’s a new gaming system called SteamOS that is trying to bring the world of PC gaming into the console-dominated living room. A custom Linux operating system that has been optimized specifically for video games, SteamOS is causing all sorts of excitement in the gaming community.
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The Bard’s Tale, an RPG developed and published by the famous inXile Entertainment studio, has arrived on Steam for Linux.
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Total War developer ‘absolutely intends’ to support SteamOS
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Net Games Laboratory, an independent development studio founded by veterans of some of Eastern Europe’s most successful online gaming companies, today announced that its team-based arcade space shooter Cannons Lasers Rockets will launch for PC, Mac and Linux on digital download platforms in November 2013. An online space shooter in which players choose from hundreds of spaceships to customize and team up to defeat other groups of players in fast-paced dogfights, Cannons Lasers Rockets’ highly-competitive gameplay draws from MMOs and MOBAs alike to create a new space combat experience. The game will be playable cross-platform across PC, Mac and Linux at launch, with mobile releases planned for later dates.
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Would you consider buying an Oculus if Steam games start to support it?
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Fistful Of Frags – First person shooter set in the Wild West times. Take part in frenzy team versus shootouts or play cooperative missions against AI managed enemies. Most of the classic black powder guns are available in single or dual wield setup.
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Q-Games’ fourth title in its PixelJunk series, PixelJunk Shooter, is migrating from PS3 to PC, Mac and Linux on 11th November.
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Major figures across the games industry have come out in support of Valve’s new SteamOS operating system, part of the company’s new approach to bring PC gaming into the living room.
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Running a SteamOS system is not quite as straightforward as buying a new game console, or even gaming on a Windows PC or Mac. If you’re scratching your head over the system’s niceties, inner workings and possible benefits, look no further: Tom’s Guide has provided answers in a convenient Q&A format.
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Valve’s Mike Sartaina briefly talks about Nvidia’s involvement with the Steam Machines prototypes.
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“This is another example of Linux moving into a sector and taking over,” suggested blogger Kevin O’Brien. “The proposed new Steam Box is good, but for any dedicated gamer, PCs are where the real action is. I think this can benefit all Linux users by getting Nvidia to open their drivers. Nvidia may not care about Linux users, but they won’t ignore Valve.”
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Valve has just announced a new Beta version for its Steam Linux client, this time with just a few changes and fixed.
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‘The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief’ is a thrilling crime adventure in three chapters from the creators of ‘The Book of Unwritten Tales’. Full of twists and turns, it immerses you in both sides of the story, combining thrill-of-the-chase whodunit with the risk and reward of a heist story.
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The Dead Linger is the definitive zombie apocalypse survival horror experience! Set in a planet-sized, procedurally generated world, survivors learn to fight, run, and survive against the never-ending and relentless zombie hordes.
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Alien Arena is a free, open-source first-person shooter built around the CRX engine, an open-source, Quake-based engine. It features a fast-paced gameplay taking place in a Sci Fi universe over dozens of maps. Alien Arena provides both single-player and multi-player modes.
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Of the newest game releases on Steam, around 20% of them are supporting Linux from the start, but that will certainly rise.
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Valve has been very clear that there will be a number of manufacturers making a number of living room-centric boxes running the recently announced SteamOS. Still, there’s a lot of attention being paid to the prototype box Valve is creating and distributing free to 300 lucky beta testers this year (before the boxes get a wider launch next year).
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Today the high-end gaming industry is controlled by two players Sony and Microsoft. It’s becoming a very tightly controlled walled garden leaving no place for 3rd parties.
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After last week announcing Steam Machines as the Valve-backed Steam “living room consoles” (a.k.a. Steam Box) powered by the Linux SteamOS, today Valve has released the prototype hardware details that they will be shipping to 300 beta testers.
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In an interview Friday Ryan Gordon talked with Kris Graft of www.gamasutra.com about Linux gaming development. With so many notable quotes available, it’s difficult to pick just one for the teaser. The central theme of Gordon’s responses is that Linux is a viable platform for gaming – more now than ever.
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Valve has completed their string of announcements this week for their Steam Machine, and today’s announcement was not what everybody wanted (a Half-Life 3 announcement), but a reveal of their controller for the Steam Machine.
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Chip company and graphics specialist Nvidia has put its considerable weight behind Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS.
By announcing plans to optimize the Linux-based SteamOS for its own range of components, Nvidia has ensured that Valve’s free operating system has a fighting chance and becomes a viable option for many PC gamers.
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If Monday’s announcement of SteamOS was greeted with a great deal of interest and speculation, Wednesday’s announcement that Valve was getting into living room PCs with broad compatibility and a full range of supported hardware was a major letdown. The limited information available doesn’t point to much of anything beyond “We’re doing a cheap living room PC.” So what are the options and potential for a Steam Box? To answer that, we need to consider three separate questions. Valve’s just-unveiled controller, while interesting, is unlikely to be the peripheral that makes or breaks the device, particularly since it’ll work on the Windows side of the equation as well.
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Just a few days after it was released, I purchased the game, Deluxe Edition, at USD64.99. Even though this is a hefty price, I wanted to support both Bohemia Interactive as well as Steam for their gallant Linux efforts.
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The Valve developers have been releasing their catalog of 3 at a steady pace, and now Half-Life: Source and Half-Life Deathmatch: Source have officially exited the Beta stages.
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Neverending Nightmares is a psychological horror game featuring a truly interactive narrative structure allowing the player to shape the outcome of the game. The player character navigates a chilling and constantly shifting reality as they experience false awakenings into new and different nightmares.
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Valve also promise that they’re working on bringing music, TV and movie services to SteamOS…
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It’s been a while in the making…
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Independent developer Polypusher Studios is delighted to announce the imminent release of its debut game, Montague’s Mount. The Irish studio has been working closely with UK publisher Mastertronic to complete the title and it will be launching digitally on October 9, 2013. Developed for PC, Mac & Linux, Montague’s Mount will be available on Good Old Games, Get Games and GamersGate. Fans of Steam can vote for the game on Greenlight.
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Chainsaw Warrior (Steam Link) from Games Workshop is the classic nail-biting game for one strong-nerved player!
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So two bits of Steam news for you, Valve has put 64bit support for Linux games into Steam now on the official non-beta client and also announced family sharing of games.
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2013 may go down in history as the year gaming came to Linux. It feels like there’s news of a new release every week, and they only seems to be comming faster. On the Steam platform alone, there’s almost 200 games for Linux users to download.
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Open source gaming console and kickstarter legend OUYA is facing some harsh criticism over what appears to be the bungled handling of a questionable campaign. OUYAs “Free the Games” fund promised to match funds raised by game developers on crowd funding sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
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Worlds of Magic is a 4X game being developed by a team of Master of Magic fans, determined to recapture the gameplay feel of the original MoM but with updated technology. Worlds of Magic was covered on GOL here during its successful crowdfunding campaign in April and has been making steady progress since then.
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Send this to a friend
08.28.13
Posted in News Roundup at 3:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Today in Open Source: Is Linux boring? Plus: How to Find Android tablet apps, and Crunchbang Linux is a minimalist’s dream distro!
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There are many people out there that want to start malware analysis and reverse engineering, but don’t know where to start, so this article intention is to show everybody interested in malware analysis a Linux lightweight distro for doing malware analysis with reverse engineering tools. This distribution is called REMnux, it is based on Ubuntu and it is maintained by Lenny Zelster, a business and tech leader with extensive experience in information technology and security.
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Desktop
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As soon as Apple launched their Haswell-based MacBook Air I purchased the “ultrabook” for its long battery life, great build quality, and impressive design. However, running Linux on the 2013 MacBook Air has been a pain. It wasn’t running cleanly but it looks like the major kernel booting problem comes down to a UEFI interaction issue.
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At the beginning I had plans to write one document, but later I understood that this document will be very big and I will write it very long time (having regard my current load). So I decided to write a several posts on this theme. This is the first post from the series. In this post I will concentrate on shortcomings of current GNU/Linux distros, in the second post I will try to write what should be done, to create a really usable GNU/Linux distro which can be a rival for proprietary systems.
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The thought of using Linux as a manager in a highly Windows- and Mac-centric corporate environment isn’t something to be taken lightly. Integrating with Active Directory, wrangling email with Microsoft Exchange, and taming quirky Microsoft office documents can be a challenge even with a well-equipped Mac. I decided to make a change after using a Mac at Rackspace for six years.
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Canonical is in talks with Dell on making a version of Ubuntu supported by the Chinese government available as a pre-installed OS on the PC maker’s upcoming products destined for the Chinese market.
Dell is a global partner for Canonical, and so the two companies are discussing using its Ubuntu Kylin OS in the future, said Leonard Tsai, Canonical’s Asia Pacific president, on Wednesday.
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Server
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The next generation of applications will be smarter — with built-in data, mobile and social capabilities — and it will be built on private clouds that run on Linux servers, says Arvind Krishna, general manager of development and manufacturing in the Systems & Technology Group at IBM. What’s still unclear, however, is the business model for delivering these future applications, he says.
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Twenty-one years after its introduction, Linux has reached unprecedented levels of deployment within enterprise environments, according to a recent study commissioned by enterprise Linux provider SUSE.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This week’s episode talks about the new verified teams paradigm for local community teams, mentions the release of 12.04.3, and talks about what is coming up at Ohio Linux Fest. Where the leader disappeared to over the weekend is also mentioned in passing.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, champion of all things open-source, has just announced a new collaboration with OpenBEL, an open-source platform for sharing scientific data.
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Final release of Linux 3.11 is expected within a week, Torvalds said in a message echoing his 1991 post about the project
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That made porting to further platforms far easier, and has helped drive the uptake of Linux across an incredible range of platforms, from supercomputers to smartphones to embedded systems – “just about anything else out there under the sun,” as Linus puts it. Had Linux remained trapped on the original Intel chipset, it would probably never have become the leading operating system it is today.
As Linus’ comments show, porting was never carried out with that aim in mind, and happened in an almost casual way. But then the same can be said about Linux in general, including that first, famously diffident post of 22 years ago.
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Linux just turned 22 and the open source revolution it sparked is just getting started, two experts suggest.
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Can the development model that is used to build Linux be extended for the life sciences? A new collaborative project will aim to answer that question.
The Linux Foundation is growing its roster of collaboration projects by expanding from the physical into the biological realm with the OpenBEL (Biological Expression Language). The Linux Foundation, best known as the organization that helps bring Linux vendors and developers together, is also growing its expertise as a facilitator for collaborative development projects.
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Graphics Stack
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The DRM compositor back-end for Wayland’s Weston now has a patch that provides hardware-accelerated screen capturing support by using VA-API with drivers that support this video decode/encode acceleration mechanism.
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Applications
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Linux is blessed with a good range of open source education software. The purpose of this article is to identify top notch open source software targeted at instructors and educational institutions. Educational establishments are constantly examining ways to reduce their overheads and save money, yet retain the delivery of high quality educational courses. Open source software solutions represent a way of fully embracing technology without causing a hole in the institution’s finances.
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I admit I spend most of my time with pacman and its evil twin, yaourt. But neither of those is a real console application, for managing packages in Arch. yaourt might spice things up, but it’s no more a console “application” than pacman is.
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Proprietary
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SDG Systems announced today the expansion of their professional service offerings, including broad Android and Linux software development services. The services now offered for Android and Linux include operating system (OS) porting and customization, mobile app development and application porting. SDG has long been a leader in OS porting to rugged mobile computers. In June, 2013, SDG Systems completed the implementation of Android (AOSP) 4.1 (“Jelly Bean”) on the Trimble Juno T41 rugged mobile computer. The implementation included support for enhanced GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3.75G cellular voice and data, barcode scanning and other technologies. SDG Systems is a strategic partner with Trimble MCS for Android and offers in-depth Android technical support and consulting services.
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WhatsApp and Viber are two of the finest and incredibly popular apps out there for Android. WhatsApp is my preferred way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Viber is not so far behind either. Since video and voice call features are also available in Viber, it’s a more complete package. Very recently, Viber team had made their desktop plans very clear and Windows and Mac version were released soon enough. Now its Linux’s turn, though Viber for Linux is available in 64 bit binaries only at the moment.
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Instructionals/Technical
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One of the features that Portage provides is to have post-processing done on request of the administrator for certain packages. For instance, for the dev-db/postgresql-server package we can call its pkg_config() phase to create the PostgreSQL instance and configure it so that the configuration of the database is stored in /etc/postgresql-9.2 rather than together with the data files.
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Games
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Nordic Games has announced that the second chapter of The Raven: Legacy of A Master Thief entitled “Ancestry of Lies” is now available for PC, Mac and Linux.
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Frogatto & Friends is an old-school 2D action/adventure platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog. Give it a try! We’re trying to push 2D platforming, pixel-art, and music into uncharted territory.
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Paranautical Activity the awesome looking FPS/Roguelike game from CodeAvarice is planning to add Co-Op multiplayer to jump in the game with friends! So this will make an already fun game far more awesome.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment’s Wayland ambitions are becoming a reality with Enlightenment E19 set to support operating as its own Wayland compositor using some interesting technology.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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From now on you can imagine that I’m starting every post with “I’ve fixed something”, since code works pretty stable, but sometimes I come across small issues and fix them.
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In this article, I explain changes to the plugin loading mechanism in KDE Frameworks 5. The article is intended for a technical audience with some affinity to KDE development.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The latest Gnome Shell release vn 3.9.90 is the first 3.10 beta marking the feature work wrapping up and heading to code-freeze state.
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The development team of Baobab (also known as Disk Usage Analyzer), a graphical utility to analyze disk usage in the GNOME desktop environment, announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download of the first Beta release of the upcoming Baobab 3.10 software.
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I’m Emmanuele Bassi, and I’ve been working on GNOME and GNOME-related technologies for the past 10 years, both as a hobbyist and as a paid software engineer. I am part of the team working on the core GNOME platform (GLib, GTK+, and Clutter, plus other libraries); I have been elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors for three years and I’m currently working as its secretary. I am also lead architect for Endless Mobile, a start up using GNOME technology.
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While traditionally the middle-click mouse button has been a convenient way to paste rather than Ctrl + V on Unix-like systems, GNOME designers are looking to change it up for their desktop.
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The GNOME developers announced a few days ago that the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package, a daemon run by all GNOME sessions to provide live access to configuration settings and the changes done to them, is available for download and testing.
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I was talking to Seif Lotfy at GUADEC about the gnome-music design, and this is a design proposal that has come out of that. It’s not proposing to add anything new, it’s just re-purposing the things that are already there.
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GNOME’s burgeoning suite of core apps are making me excited for the future of the Linux desktop.
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Controlling, changing settings, fine tuning and bringing the system closer to your needs is a vital thing and a point of special attention for Gnome users and developers. Gnome’s default tool for completing the important task of setting your system is constantly evolving to fit user needs and make our life easier with more options, better functionality and greater abilities.
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With 29 days left untill version 3.10 gets officially released, we already have reached the point where it’s all about bug fixing from now on and what a better timing for us to revisit Gnome’s Goals situation, see what the stage of completion is and compare the data with what the situation was on the beginning of this year.
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Manjaro 0.8.7 was released this morning, the latest update for the very nice and easy to use Linux distribution derived from Arch Linux.
Manjaro developers have been preparing for this release for the past two months and it was finally realized today.
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New Releases
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On behalf of the Manjaro development team I’m happy to announce our new stable release of Manjaro Linux ‘Ascella’. The last two months was a blast for us. Summer feeling and good people helped us to put this one together.
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The Core Update comes with a lot of feature enhancements for IPsec, smaller fixes for OpenVPN and fixed two denial-of-service attacks in the Squid web proxy.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Wallpaper contests are among my favorite things and today the OpenMandriva bunch announced the latest for their upcoming Lx release. The theme is “The Flavor of Freedom,” so warm up your GIMP, Inkscape, or whatever you use and get your submissions in.
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Red Hat Family
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In trading on Tuesday, shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) crossed below their 200 day moving average of $50.67, changing hands as low as $50.50 per share. Red Hat Inc shares are currently trading off about 1.9% on the day. The chart below shows the one year performance of RHT shares, versus its 200 day moving average:
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I’m a words guy. This summer, I was an intern for the content team—part of the marketing services group at Red Hat. They kept me busy writing copy for ads, editing Red Hat content, brainstorming on different projects, and even scripting videos. They don’t have me writing like a businessman, but like the Shadowman.
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Red Hat has carved out a strong reputation for its profitable Linux-focused strategy and the top-notch support it provides for enterprise customers, but there is no question that the company is betting on future growth in the cloud computing space. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is positioned to serve as the foundation for OpenStack-powered cloud deployments. Today Red Hat announced its new Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and expanded training in support of its OpenStack technology.
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Fedora
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Earlier this month I attended the first Fedora Flock, in Charleston, SC. This replaced the older Fedora Users and Developers conferences, none of which I had participated in prior. Other than certain difficulties with my return flight, this was a fun and interesting event, and I do hope Fedora has more of them going forward.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Despite the recent failure of the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign, developers are still doing some neat things with Ubuntu mobile. Over at XDA Developers, some aspiring developers have managed to port the operating system on to the Sony Xperia Tablet Z. However, the developer does warn that it is a very experimental port of the OS, and encourages members to make backups before trying it out.
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Its has been revealed this week that a copy of the Ubuntu Touch operating system has been successfully ported to the Sony Experia Z Tablet.
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Last week we had a look at the LXLE 12.04.3 Paradigm Linux Distro, and now we thought you would be interested to learn more about the latest Ubuntu 12.04.3 system update, which you can see in the visual above.
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The Ubuntu Edge project didn’t reach its goal of collecting 32 million dollars to finance the production of their smartphone but Canonical is nevertheless congratulated on the response they received.
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How many people really pledged for a phone? And was offering an $820 phone for $600 at the start a good or bad idea?
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Canonical has a very dedicated team building the Mir display server, and they are updating it on a constant basis. Version 0.0.10 has just been released.
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Canonical promised that Mir would be available as default for the released of Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) and now the company is searching testers that are willing to improve the overall experience.
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App Grid is a new lightweight Ubuntu Software alternative that tries to make application discovery easier by using a grid view which includes app screenshots and ratings.
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My experience with Ubuntu started in 2007 when i was doing the internship of my second year in Computer Engineering, the first week was really boring, the second week and while i was trying to fix the DVD driver, i opened the drawer then i found a Green CD of “OpenSUSE”, i booted with the live CD, the OS was a bit complicated and not easy to play with.
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Unity is the graphical environment that we ship in a default Ubuntu installation. Released for the first time about three years ago, Unity is focused on simplicity and consistency across multiple devices. In this article I am going to cover the history of Unity and how Unity 8 is driving a new era of code and design convergence in Ubuntu.
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Flavours and Variants
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I have installed a week ago with Elementary Luna, if you like GNU/Linux operating Linux, then you should have heard about Elementary Luna but if not, I will tell you that Elementary Luna is a new GNU/Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 12.04, the last Long term Ubuntu released.
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Win Enterprises announced a Mini-ITX single-board computer for digital imaging and other embedded applications, built around quad- and dual-core AMD Embedded R-Series APUs clocked at up to 2GHz. The Linux-friendly MB-73330 SBC features up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM, three HDMI ports and a DisplayPort, dual SATA 6.0 ports, eight USBs, dual gigabit Ethernet, and multiple PCIe and Mini-PCIe expansion options.
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Aaeon announced the availability of a Linux-friendly PC/104-Plus single board computer based on the AMD 615MHz G-Series T16R processor.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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A Samsung executive confirmed to The Korea Times that it will unveil its Galaxy Gear smartwatch on Sept. 4, along with the Galaxy Note 3 phablet, but quashed rumors of a flexible display. The Android-powered smartwatch, rumored to include a dual-core processor and a camera, will be the first of many Samsung and Apple smartwatches that will lead a surging 36 million unit a year market by 2018, predicts Juniper Research.
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Android
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We don’t know what number or name the next version of Android will be, but if all signs are pointing in the right direction we’ll likely see Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie here soon from Google. There’s no question they’re hard at work on the next major release, possibly set for later this year, and today we’re seeing some interesting tidbits on the Kernel side.
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Intel has released the Intel C++ Compiler v13.0 for Android OS, its first attempt at delivering an optimizing C/C++ compiler designed specifically for Google’s mobile platform.
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One of the big selling points of the Android ecosystem is that the operating system is open source. That means handset manufacturers can modify it to work on their handsets and tablets, or enterprising individuals can customize it to work on their own hardware.
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Complaints of stricture over structure, signs of technical prowess on the wane — the best days of the Apache Software Foundation may be behind
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Apache is great for many things, not so for others. Its proponents misunderstand its weaknesses, and its detractors misunderstand its strengths
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I have always been interested in science, technology and (most of all) computers. These are things that I always loved, even though they were sometimes difficult. I loved math and science class in school; I read science-fiction and fantasy novels in all of my spare time. I was the nerdy kid at school that was bullied and mocked. It would have been so easy to just give in and be “like everyone else”. I could have stopped reading. I could have played more sports.
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This is the sentiment that drove me into my open source career.
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Ask just about any person you meet whether they are using open source software (OSS) and the chances are good you will be met by a blank stare. Yet, people might be surprised when you tell them that they are either using it on the mobile device they own or on their social media platform of choice.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) promises to enable an agile infrastructure that’s orchestratable through automated policies. Avaya is now formally defining its approach to SDDC, which will make use of the open source OpenStack cloud platform.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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This year the LibreOffice Conference will take place in Milano, Italy. Come and join us for this excepional event from the 25th to the 27th of September 2013. Learn about migrations to LibreOffice, LibreOffice existing deployments, writing extensions and much more. Participate in hacking sessions and community workshops and most of all, meet the LibreOffice community face to face for a few days of exchange and fun!
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Education
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Shai Reshef dreams of making quality education affordable and accessible to everyone, and he sees the Internet as the road to get there. Reshef is the founder of University of the People (UoPeople), which bills itself as the world’s first tuition-free, degree-granting, non-profit online university.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCL has moved to the git version control system. The 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 branches and tags are identical in cvs and git. Henceforward, modifications will be made to git only. As of the present writing, git contains a merge of experimental into master, and a port of most 2.6.x improvements into master. This will form the basis of a 2.7.0 release sometime in the future.
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The FSF is pleased to announce that we can begin accepting GPG-signed assignments from contributors residing in the United States.
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This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
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It’s been 30 years since the GNU manifesto was penned. What began as frustration over a printer driver has grown into a massive social movement. The GNU system itself has exploded; not only is it a fully free operating system, but it has expanded to include an entire universe of software. Now, GNU is on the threshold of another amazing leap, and we want you to be a part of it.
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Project Releases
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Beyond making a whole lot of Intel X.Org driver changes and some recent yet-to-be-merged performance improvements, Chris Wilson has put out a new release of the Cairo graphics library.
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The Calligra team has released version 2.7.2, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active in the 2.7 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.7.1 and we recommend everybody to update.
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I am fully occupied this week and the next with training my new helpdesk team, so it took me a bit by surprise when Willy Sudiarto Raharjo tweeted that there was a version 1.0 of Calibre since this morning. Kovid Goyal, developer of Calibre, published the news in a blog post. It’s nearly seven years since Kovid started with Calibre – this was the time when the first E-ink based ereader device, SONY PRS-500, hit the market. At first, Calibre was merely a library which was able to convert e-book formats into Sony’s LRF format. It got ‘upgraded’ with a graphical user interface to manage Kovid’s growing ebook library.
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Public Services/Government
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The Australian government is seeing a lot more demand for open-source support, according to chief technology officer John Sheridan.
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Openness/Sharing
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David Bollier is no stranger to politics. The author, activist and independent commons scholar worked for Ralph Nader in the late-’70s and early-’80s, he’s a policy strategist and he has participated in or founded numerous public interest projects. But, over the years, he found himself increasingly disillusioned with political activism.
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Programming
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PHP is not a young language. As of 2013, it’s 18 years old; that’s old enough to vote. Many upstart languages have appeared over the years to try and unseat PHP as the “lingua franca” of web applications but it still commands over 80% of the web market. One reason for PHP’s popularity is no doubt the ease with which new developers can get started with it, but just as important is the fact that PHP has been evolving for all those 18 years.
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Github is a nice site, and I routinely monitor a couple of projects there.
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When the Google ChromeCast was announced it was an instant hit and all the units were ‘sold’ immediately. One of the core features of ChromeCast was the ability to play local content. This $35 device seemed to hold much more potential than the AppleTV and other such devices the market.
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Groklaw is “truly the canary in the coal mine,” suggested blogger Martin Espinoza. “When it is no longer possible to tell the truth online sufficiently for it to exist, none of us have the freedom of speech. The corporations which have bought our government are in the process of buying our silence and obedience as well, and the cost is turning out to be remarkably low.”
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Your ideas are stolen… from someone else.
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We caught up with the pioneers who brought us the Unix operating system and asked them to share some memories of the early days of Unix development.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Obama administration gave green signal to a chemical weapons attack plan in Syria that could be blamed on President Bashar al Assad’s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country, leaked documents have shown.
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Horrific scenes of dead and injured civilians in Syria have been a part of the conflict there over the past several years, but the reports of a chemical attack of some sort last week in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta have led U.S. policymakers and the Obama White House to threaten to attack in a matter of days.
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Finance
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“The task is not done, the journey is not complete,” said Martin Luther King III on Saturday’s 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.
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A small GOP lobby shop tied to the Tea Party and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, and which was active in the state’s recent recall elections, was awarded $500,000 in taxpayer dollars in what some are calling a backdoor, sweetheart deal cooked up by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair, outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder.
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Privacy
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facebook_logo-300x99Today Facebook has published it’s first transparency report, detailing law enforcement and national security requests from countries around the world. Britain requested data on 1,975 occasions, covering 2,337 users. In 32% of cases, Facebook declined to provide any data.
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…comparing the release of classified information about government spying to the assassination of Martin Luther King…
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Civil Rights
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Some media figures applaud the criminalization of investigative reporting
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