Enlightenment

Submission + - Enlightenment Terminal Allows Video Playback, PDF Viewing (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The E17 Enlightenment project has released a new version of its Terminology terminal emulator. With Terminology 0.3 comes several fancy features, including the ability to preview video files, images, and PDF files from within the terminal. There's new escape sequences, inline video playback, and other features to this terminal emulator that's only built on EFL and libc.
GNOME

Submission + - GTK+ 3.8 Released with support for Wayland (gmane.org)

Submitted by kthreadd
kthreadd writes: Version 3.8 of the GTK+ GUI framework has been released in version 3.8. A new feature in GTK+ 3.8 is support for Wayland 1.0, the display server that will replace X on free desktops. Among the other new featurs are improved support for themeing, fixes to the geometry management and improved accessibility. There is also better support for touch, as part of a long going effort in making GTK+ touch-aware.
Linux

Submission + - The end is nigh for The Linux Game Tome (happypenguin.org)

Submitted by Sodki
Sodki writes: The Linux Game Tome, one of the most important websites related to video gaming in GNU/Linux, will shut down on the 13th of April, according to a news post published on the website. The decision was made due to the "lack both the time and the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat", which has resulted in "spam clogging the forums, lack of updates and increasing brokenness of the site". This might not be the end, though. The maintainers of The Linux Game Tome will make available a dump of the games database, so that anyone interested can cook up a new and updated version of the website, and a worthwhile effort will be considered for a transfer of ownership of the domain. The current source code of the website, which is from 1999, will not be available because "it is not fit for human consumption".
Programming

Submission + - SpaceX: Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles (lwn.net)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "On day two of the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference, Robert Rose of SpaceX spoke about the "Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles". In his talk, he discussed how SpaceX develops its Linux-based software for a wide variety of tasks needed to put spacecraft into orbit—and eventually beyond. Linux runs everywhere at SpaceX, he said, on everything from desktops to spacecraft."
Linux

Submission + - Matthew Garrett Gives Tips to Survive Bricked UEFI Samsung Laptops (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: UEFI guru Matthew Garrett who cleared the Linux kernel in Samsung laptop bricking issues has come to rescue beleaguered users by offering a survival guide enabling them to avoid similar issues in the future. According to Garrett, storage space constraints in UEFI storage variables is the reason Samsung laptops end up bricking themselves. Garrett said that if the storage space utilized by the UEFI firmware is more than 50 per cent full the laptop will refuse to start and end up being bricked. To prevent this from happening he has provided a Kernel patch that would ensure that Linux does not fill up more than 50 per cent of UEFI firmware's storage space.
Linux

Submission + - Longest running Linux distribution Slackware switching to the MariaDB database (slackware.com)

Submitted by
Gerardo Zamudio
Gerardo Zamudio writes: "The big news here is the removal of MySQL in favor of MariaDB. This shouldn't really be a surprise on any level. The poll on LQ showed a large majority of our users were in favor of the change. It's my belief that the MariaDB Foundation will do a better job with the code, be more responsive to security concerns, and be more willing to work with the open source community. And while I don't think there is currently any issue with MySQL's licensing of the community edition for commercial uses, several threads on LQ showed that there is confusion about this, whereas with MariaDB the freedom to use the software is quite clear. Thanks are due to Heinz Wiesinger for his work on transitioning the build script, testing, and getting us all behind this move. He's been working with MariaDB (and their developers) for several years now. Vincent Batts also had a hand in the early discussions here — he met Daniel Bartholomew of MariaDB on a train last year and got a copy of the source to play with to pass the time on the journey (ah, the miracle of thumbdrives :), and was impressed with not only MariaDB itself, but also with the welcome that Slackware was getting. We expect they'll be responsive to any concerns we have. In the vast majority of situations, MariaDB is entirely compatible with existing MySQL databases and will drop right in with no changes required. There's an article available outlining the areas in which MariaDB differs from MySQL that I'd recommend reading:
https://kb.askmonty.org/v/mariadb-versus-mysql-compatibility/
Thanks to the MariaDB Foundation! We look forward to working with you.

For more information about MariaDB, visit their website: http://mariadb.org/"
Linux

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: new to Linux, which build? (archlinux.org) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm a very new user to Linux looking for a distro that allows me to control and customize, but I'm not sure where to start. I had a friend install Ubuntu 12.04 on my computer, with the E17 window manager and somehow I managed to crash it during the copying of some non-important files and now my computer won't boot (the hardware's fine though). I've found descriptions of Arch Linux to be spot on to what I'm looking for and want ( /. user serviscope_minor mentioned Arch a couple weeks ago and it caught my attention), but my experience in the terminal is literally about an hour.
That said, I really want to learn more, don't mind hard work, enjoy challenges, and am perfectly willing to spend hours and hours for months on end to learn command line.
I grew up in Windows, and these days use a notebook running an old version of Ubuntu with GNOME exclusively--I'm comfortable in the GUI of Linux systems, but that doesn't translate into any kind of behind-the-scenes ability...
Any suggestions, projects to start with, books to read, or tutorials to do to try would be appreciated.
The Internet

Submission + - A 50 Gbps TCP connection with Multipath TCP (multipath-tcp.org)

Submitted by Olivier Bonaventure
Olivier Bonaventure writes: The TCP protocol is closely coupled with the underlying IP protocol.
Once a TCP connection has been established through one IP address,
the other packets of the connection must be sent from this address. This
makes mobility and load balancing difficult. Multipath TCP is
a new extension that solves these old problems by decoupling TCP from
the underlying IP. A Multipath TCP connection can send packets over
several interfaces/addresses simultaneously while remaining backward
compatible with existing TCP applications. Multipath TCP has several use
cases including smartphones that can use both WiFi and 3G or servers
that can pool multiple high-speed interfaces. Christoph Paasch, Gregory
Detal and their colleagues who develop the implementation of
Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel have achieved 50 Gbps for a single TCP
connection by pooling together six 10 Gbps interfaces. See here for
technical details and full source code.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Chinese open source community is brought into the global Ubuntu community (canonical.com)

Submitted by GovCheese
GovCheese writes: Canonical, the software company that manages and funds Ubuntu, announced that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will base their national reference architecture for standard operating systems on Ubuntu, and they will call it Kylin. Arguably China is the largest desktop market and the announcement has important implications. Shuttleworth's phrasing of, “The release of Ubuntu Kylin brings the Chinese open source community into the global Ubuntu community,” will irk many who already feel Shuttleworth controversial, but the partnership further cements Ubuntu as an open-source influencer. This is a win for Ubuntu. Is it a win for the open-source community?
Google

Submission + - Post "Good Google", Who Will Defend The Open Web?

Submitted by
psykocrime
psykocrime writes: "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have BOTH the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"
KDE

Submission + - KDE releases Plasma Media Center 1.0 (kde.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos. Media files can be on the local filesystem or accessed with KDE’s Desktop Search."
Google

Submission + - Revealed: Google Chrome WAS Exploited at Pwnium 2013 (internetnews.com)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Sean Michael Kerner has revealed an inconvenient truth: earlier this month, 'Google Chrome running Chrome OS was hailed as being a survivor in the Pwnium/Pwn2own event that hacked IE, Firefox and Chrome browsers on Windows. Apple's Safari running on Mac OS X was not hacked and neither (apparently) was Chrome on Chrome OS. Google disclosed this morning that Chrome on Chrome OS had in fact been exploited — albeit, unreliably. The same researcher that took Google's money last year for exploiting Chrome, known publicly only as 'PinkiePie' was awarded $40,000 for exploiting Chrome/Chrome OS via a Linux kernel bug, config file error and a video parsing flaw.' So, was it really Google Chrome, or was Linux to blame?
KDE

Submission + - What's going on in KDE Plasma Workspaces 2? (vizzzion.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you’ll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - The Pirate Bay's Oldest Torrent is "Revolution OS" (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement."
Android

Submission + - Pwnie Express Releases Pwn Pad Ahead of Schedule (thepowerbase.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The team at Pwnie Express seems to have a lot of trouble standing still, as it doesn’t seem more than a few months go by before they are talking about yet another disruptive open source product that they are about to unleash on the security community.

First it was their Pwn Plug, which combined an off the shelf SheevaPlug with a feature packed open source firmware that turned it into an incredibly capable security tool. Then came the absolutely diabolical Power Pwn, which hid the same type of functionality into what looked like a standard power strip.

Today they’ve launched their latest product, continuing along the same line of hiding cutting edge open source security tools in plain sight: the Pwn Pad.
Education

Submission + - Educational Linux distro provides tech-bundle for kids and educators (opensource.com)

Submitted by
Jason Hibbets
Jason Hibbets writes: "Finally, a version of Linux designed for kids and education. In this interview with Jim Klein, founder of Ubermix, we discover a Linux distribution designed with kids, education, and educators in mind. This could change the way our the next generation learns about Linux and open source software like Celestia, Stellarium, Scratch, VirtualLab Microscope, iGNUit, and more."
Security

Submission + - BackTrack successor Kali Linux launched (scmagazine.com.au)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: Kali, the sixth instalment of the BackTrack operating system has been launched. The platform is a favourite of hackers and penetration testers and has been entirely rebuilt to become more secure, transparent and customisable. Metasploit too has been rebuilt to be more stable with an optional noob-friendly interface. Kali even works on ARM devices and comes ready to go for your Raspberry Pi.
GNOME

Submission + - GNOME Responds To Canonical's Mir By Rushing Wayland Support (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical's plan to develop the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu rather than going with their original plans to adopt Wayland has been met with criticism from KDE developers that "Mir is an answer to a question nobody asked. It’s a solution to problem which does not exist." The GNOME response to Ubuntu's Mir is that they will now be rushing support for the GNOME desktop on Wayland. Over the next two release cycles they plan to iron out the Wayland support for the GNOME Shell, the GTK+ toolkit, and all GNOME packages so that by this time next year you can be running GNOME entirely on Wayland while still having X11 fall-back support.
KDE

Submission + - KDE releases Plasmate 1.0, a Plasma Workspaces SDK (kde.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "The KDE Plasma Workspaces team is excited to announce the first stable release of Plasmate: an add-ons SDK that focuses on ease of use. Plasmate follows the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well". As such, it is not a general purpose IDE but rather a tool specifically tailored to creating Plasma Workspace add-ons using non-compiled languages such as QML and Javascript. It guides each step in the process, simplifying and speeding up project creation, development, adding new assets, testing and publishing. The goal of Plasmate is to enable creating something new in seconds and publishing it immediately."
Virtualization

Submission + - Linux KVM Ported to ARM64/AArch64 (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Linux KVM has been ported to ARM64 just ahead of the release of the architecture, it has been revealed. Just last year ARM KVM virtualization support for Cortex-A15 32bit ARM processor was published. Marc Zyngier of ARM released a set of 29 patches that contained the implementation of KVM for ARM that depends on the pre-arm64 rework as well as tiny perf patch published earlier. Some of the newly released port are support for 4k and 64k pages and 32-bit as well as 64-bit guests.

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