11.23.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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From October 24 to October 30, the KDE Educational team (KDE Edu) gathered for its annual work sprint at the Computer Science faculty of Universidad de A Coruña, Spain. The sprint was a mixture of hacking, discussing, getting to know more about Spanish culture, socializing, and meeting new team mates.
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conf.kde.in 2014 is taking place February 21 – 24, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. The conference is a vibrant occasion for sharing ideas, knowledge and, most importantly, support and enthusiasm for KDE and for open source. It is an event for both new and experienced technology enthusiasts. Collaboration and freedom are the main features.
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We welcome contributors, users, people who want to become either of those, anyone interested in free and open source software, freedom and community. This is an opportunity to learn about the latest from KDE, to discuss technical points with technical contributors, and to discover how to use the wide range of KDE software.
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Digia’s Heikkinen Jani shared this morning that the Qt 5.2 RC1 version won’t be out tomorrow as was originally expected. The release isn’t happening since there’s still a lot of pending integration for Qt5 Git and so further testing is needed to verify the fixes and work through any issues. They are hoping though to have out a new pre-RC1 test snapshot soon. Ideally, Qt 5.2 RC1 will be released later in the week.
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KDE has released the second beta of the new versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The second development version towards the GVFS 1.20 application for the upcoming and highly anticipated GNOME 3.12 desktop environment, has been released for testing a few days ago, introducing several important features, improvements, cleanups, translations, and bugfixes.
Various areas have been covered in this new development release of GVFS, the virtual filesystem for the GNOME desktop environment, designed to allow users to easily access remote data via FTP, SFTP, SMB, WebDAV, as well as local data via MTP, OBEX, or Udev integration, including SFTP, SMB, AFP, archive, trash, recent, and daemon.
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The first development release towards GNOME Power Manager 3.12 has been announced a few days ago by the GNOME developers. This version introduces a few fixes, updated translations, and one new feature.
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The GNOME development team has released the second maintenance release for the stable GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package, which is part of the GNOME 3.10.2 desktop upgrade.
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Speculation notwithstanding, the GNOME desktop environment is not dependent on systemd, the init system that has been the subject of much discussion, two senior GNOME developers say.
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The second and most probably the last maintenance release of the stable Evince 3.10 document viewer application for the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment has been released a few days ago, a version that fixes five annoying bugs and updates several translations.
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Broadway, an HTML5 back-end for GTK3 to allow running GTK3 programs in modern web-browsers, has picked up an interesting feature.
As of this morning, GTK+ Git has initial touch event support for Broadway. The commit message by Red Hat’s Alexander Larsson reads, “This seems to get something going on an ipad, but some events seem to get swallowed. For instance, window dragging doesn’t work.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Phoronix is continuing to test the performance of open source Linux drivers on Source Engine games with this installation focusing on the performance of the Haswell i7-4770K. They compare it to a number of RV770 based AMD GPUs as well as the newer HD 6450. As you can see in the result the performance of the HD 6450 and HD 4550 are almost exactly the same and are the only two Radeons that do not leave the Intel’s GPU in the dust. If you have experience with the HD 4650 you have a very good idea as to how Intel’s 4600 performs as the results are very similar.
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There’s been work on Weston to support run-time switchable renderers for Weston. That’s now been accomplished and with the latest Git code it’s easy to switch from Pixman to the OpenGL renderer. The debug binding of “mod-shift-space W” will now cause the compositor to switch from using the software-based Pixman renderer to the OpenGL renderer. This key-bind renderer switching is useful for debugging, stressing the run-time switchable renderer support, and there’s cases where the OpenGL renderer isn’t used right away by Weston since the Pixman renderer is able to start-up more quickly.
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With the forthcoming release of Mesa 10.0 there is now OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL 3.3 compliance. That compliance is for core Mesa and the Intel DRI driver. The Radeon and Nouveau drivers don’t have as advanced OpenGL support since most of the upstream GL / GLSL enablement is done by Intel developers and thus the focus on their own driver while the Radeon/Nouveau support usually trails.
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Libdrm, the DRM library that interfaces between the user-space graphics components (namely Mesa and the X.Org drivers) with the Linux kernel DRM drivers, is now up to version 2.4.48. Big with libdrm 2.4.48 is Intel “Broadwell” and AMD Radeon “Hawaii” GPU support.
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11.22.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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11.21.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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OneNote is a proprietary computer software package for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It enables a user to capture what is important in their personal and professional life, captured by making notes, to-do lists, photos, audio clips, or videos. Information is stored in a non-linear form. OneNote is developed by the behemoth, Microsoft. Whilst the program is available for Android, it has not been ported to Linux.
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Aqua Connect, Inc., the worldwide leader in Mac Remote Desktop Services, announced today a new product offering in their line of Mac OS X remote access solutions. The Aqua Connect Load Balancer for Linux was designed to improve on the current functionality of the Mac version while providing a more cost efficient platform for load balancing.
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Viber Desktop is now also available on Linux, in addition to Windows and Mac platforms.
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I decided I could take at least some action toward stemming the theft and perhaps catching the perpetrator, by setting up a security camera. I knew that GNU/Linux had utilities for recording from motion detection cameras, and some preliminary searching revealed that the motion program was likely to suit my needs.
It so happened that a friend had recently passed along to me a decent webcam, so all I needed to do was find a target machine on which to set up the software. An old laptop would have been ideal because of the small size, but I didn’t have one available.
What I did have was an old all-in-one unit, an early LCD monitor with a built-in computer–in the person of a laptop motherboard–in its base. I even had Debian (Squeeze) already installed on that machine, since I’d set it up for my father-in-law to use when he visits. But I’d taken the machine out of service a couple of years ago, judging that, as a single-core machine with a 433 MHz Celeron and 192 megabytes of RAM, it was getting a little long in the tooth to be useful anymore. So, could this ancient machine actually be used for a motion detection security camera?
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You flashed an SD card with Raspberry Pi image, and plug the SD card into Raspberry Pi. Then what next? The first thing to do after booting Raspberry Pi is to configure your Raspberry Pi. Each Raspberry Pi system comes with its own software configuration tool. For example, use raspi-config for Raspbian, firstboot for Pidora, etc.
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Nagios® Core™ is an Open Source system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better.Nagios Core was originally designed to run under Linux, although it should work under most other unices as well.
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MariaDB is the community developed fork of Mysql and is a great alternative to it. Its free and open source and is developed by the original developers of mysql. MariaDB is much superior to mysql in terms of features. Check out the comparison between mariadb and mysql.
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11.19.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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For most tech professionals, the words “open source operating system” naturally translate to Linux. And so it’s understandable that those same tech pros would be a bit confused by startup Cloudius Systems’ announcement in September of a new open source operating system for the cloud, OSv.
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Records obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy (DBA/CMD) shed new light on a technology, OpenMIND, utilized by law enforcement/counter-terrorism fusion center personnel in gathering and analyzing mass amounts of “open source intelligence” derived from the online lives of Americans.
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Andy’s first point began with an astute observation. Open source software is often discussed in terms of being a “stack” (LAMP, for instance). It is no longer a stack, however, but a tower. A tower that spans software and hardware. With the source or schematics being available, not only can we stand on the shoulders of the giants of our field but on the shoulders of everyone who contributes. It’s an embarrassment of riches.
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From simple bookkeeping packages to full-blown ERP systems, open source software can provide free options for small businesses that don’t have the budget for big-ticket enterprise applications.
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In August, the Fedora Project held its first Flock conference, a replacement for the North American and European FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) events. Flock was a four-day, planned conference with talks, workshops, and hackfests, in contrast to FUDCon’s barcamp model. In the interest of reaching beyond the community and reminding everyone that Fedora is so much broader than just a Linux project, the invited keynote speakers were from open source areas outside of the Fedora Project. One of those keynotes was by Dave Crossland, creator of the open font Cantarell and an active part of the free font movement.
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The hobbies that inspired the scientific curiosity of my generation were Erector Sets, Science Fair Electronic Kits from Radio Shack and model rockets with balsa wood fins that we meticulously assembled and painted. While these toys piqued our curiosity in science and engineering our ability to share our discoveries were limited by geography. These fascinating distractions were often purpose-built and confined our creativity within their intended purpose.
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This story is definitely a first for me. Not just because every story is unique in itself, but that it’s one of personal matter. The thing is, I quit my well-paid job, just to spend time on the things I’m very passionate about: open source development and information security. Not only was quitting my job a serious step, also the decision to share my personal story after 10+ years of working with open source software and security. Well, here you go. It’s my hope to intrigue others, find their passion in life and also go for it!
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Who wants to tackle the complex problem of helping educators create learning service agreements? I don’t see too many hands. How about you there, reading this article? Wait, you weren’t aware that this is an issue that impacts the education system? Well, here’s an open source project that solves this problem and needs more collaborators.
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For most of us, Google shutting down Reader was annoying. For Jacob Cook, it was a call to arms.
He’s now building an operating system that anyone can use to replace all of the services that Google provides — or any other cloud company, for that matter. Email, chat, file sharing, web hosting: With Cook’s arkOS, you’ll be able to run all of those essential services on a secure, private server in your own home that’s about the size of a credit card.
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Facebook’s HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) open-source project that’s been seeking to implement a high-performance PHP, is in the middle of a lock-down and for three weeks they are focusing on nothing bot boosting the performance of their PHP implementation and seeking to hit feature parity.
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There was nothing new in what Matt Dugan said. There were no ground breaking revelations. He just methodically made his case, point by point, explaining why open source was usually, if not always, the best solution for business.
To me, this was just what the doctor ordered. I’d just sat through a forty-five minute lecture in that very same room from an open core guy that had left me fearing that enterprise open source companies were just as greedy and potentially as unethical as the proprietary guys. Dugan fixed that and quickly reaffirmed my faith in the notion that open source is where the good guys live.
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Mahout components implement popular algorithms and can be unplugged easily when no longer needed.
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MediaCore CE is the community edition of MediaCore, a Web application that powers a multimedia hosted platform targeted towards the educational market and run by MediaCore, Inc. It is a Python application built atop the Django Web framework.
Published under the GNU General Public License version 3, MediaDrop is free to download and use. However, because it is a Django application, installing it is a little bit more involved than the point-and-click process commonly associated with PHP applications.
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Wireless connectivity between devices and display monitors remains mostly fantasy today, Google’s Chromecast notwithstanding. But it could become a big deal for tablets, smartphones and even traditional PCs in the future. And it may even work on Linux, if the nascent OpenWFD project succeeds—which would be very good news for open source hardware vendors.
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The Gate One HTML5-powered terminal emulator and SSH client that goes without needing any browser plug-ins and supports many SSH/terminal features is working on bringing X11 support to the web-browser. The developer claims that this X11 support in the browser written in HTML5 will be fast enough to support video playback and he’s made a video demo as proof.
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Linux and MySQL are old news. Partners must now open their minds to NoSQL, Hadoop, KVM, OpenStack and OpenDaylight
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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LaTeX is a typesetting system that gives you full control over how everything in your document is rendered. The problem is its really steep learning curve. One option is to use a basic text editor and learn all the markup you need for your document. The other option is to use an application that wraps the markup to some degree. LyX does this very nicely. While a fully WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX doesn’t make sense (since your doc isn’t fully rendered until sent to an output device), LyX does provide a pseudo-WYSIWYG interface where you can see how different regions will be rendered.
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Key updates include:
• Background rendering/export support
• Curve effect added to FX Colour Correction effects
• Magnetic snapping enabled on all panels (can be turned off)
• Ruler added to timelines
• Right click functionality (Export, Add FX)
• Free users can now specify where media folders are located
• ‘Insert/Replace’ source option added
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More than a year and a half ago, Google promised to bring its Google Drive to the Linux. Those who want to use the cloud-synchronized file system on the the open-source operating system, though, will have to keep on waiting.
In April 2012, when Google Drive launched, Google said, “The team is working on a sync client for Linux.” In May 2013, the update was, “The team is still working on it.” I asked for another update and got it Sunday: Google doesn’t “have anything new to share at this time in terms of timing.”
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You can use GNOME Tweak Tool and Unity Tweak Tool to change your configuration options in Ubuntu 13.10.
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Recently I’ve discovered this project that has great ambitions:
arkOS is an open-source platform for securely self-hosting your online life.
Everything started from the founder Jacob Cook and the CitizenWeb Project he founded. It’s designed to run on a Raspberry Pi – a super-low-cost single board computer – and ultimately will let users, even of the non-technical variety, run from within their homes email, social networking, storage and other services that are increasingly getting shunted out into the cloud, and so under the control of big companies.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Valve has outlined a number of presentations that will taking place at their upcoming developer conference event, the inaugural Steam Dev Days, hosted in Seattle early next year. A session schedule includes presentations involving reps of AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Unity and Oculus, and of course a whole bunch hosted by the Valve Software team.
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For the first time in the history of Linux gaming, we have the trifecta: video game engines, digital distribution, and finally hardware manufacturers all working together.
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Pandora: First Contact is a science fiction 4X turn-based strategy game on a planetary scale – a spiritual successor to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
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Originally due to start today the open beta for Nuclear Dawn the FPS/RTS game should hit in a few days!
We reported the game to you a few times (including with screenshots here) and it has hit multiple delays due to various issues over time, now though it looks to be hitting our platform in just a few days time.
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A few days ago, in addition to the already existing Humble Bundle Sales and Weekly Sales, the Humble Bundle Store appeared on the market.
The Humble Bundle Store will assault with reduced prices, but in comparison to Humble Indie Bundles or Humble Weekly Sales, you can not pay what you want.
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Nuclear Dawn the RTS/FPS hybrid is powering it’s way onto Linux with a possible open beta later this week!
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Faster Than Light (more commonly known as FTL) is a top-down, real-time strategy game on Steam, made by indie team Subset Games. The player takes control of the crew in a space vessel that’s in possession of critical information that must be delivered to an allied fleet several sectors away. However, to make the game more challenging, you are pursued by a large rebel fleet in every sector.
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Valve is fervently working on the new operating system and users can now trick the Steam client to think that is running under SteamOS.
Valve has started to integrate functionalities between Steam and SteamOS. In order to get a glimpse of that you will have to get the latest Beta.
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Wow, there’s a nasty poke in the eye to Linux and Mac gamers. id Software seems to be regressing in its support of Linux. This is quite odd given what Valve is doing with SteamOS.
I guess Valve is just going to have to convince id Software that Linux is worth supporting. For the record, my money is on Valve. They know what they are doing, and I think the folks at id will do a quick turnabout when all is said and done.
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