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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.
Linux

Submission + - Patching Dependencies (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We were caught in a situation where if we upgraded Postfix, we might break the installed MySQL client. There are a couple of things wrong with this situation. First off, why, oh why, does Postfix require a MySQL client to be installed? Postfix is our MTA, a mail transfer agent, setup because it is easy to configure and we need to do a couple things differently from what is available out of the box. We have absolutely no use for MySQL on every server in the environment. Secondly, why was the third party MySQL (or is that first party, since it is from Oracle?) installed over the default filesystem?
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.
Operating Systems

Submission + - CentOS 6.4 Released (centos.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 derivative CentOS version 6.4 has been released just 15 days after it supstream provider. According to the release notes some of the major changes include the addition of Microsoft's Hyper-V drivers and that Samba is now upgraded to the latest upstream version. Among other new features are full support for parallel NFS as well as the inclusion of virtio-SCSI, which makes it possible to connect directly to SCSI LUNs and offers better scalability compared to virtio-blk.
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.
Unix

Submission + - Sudo Authentication bypass Vulnerability Emerges (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: A new vulnerability has been discovered in sudo whereby protection offered by the utility can be bypassed to execute commands which are otherwise only executable through sudo along with the correct password. If a few prerequisites are met; the sudo timestamp is reset using sudo -k; and system time clock is set to epoch the user can execute commands without having to enter password again. The Sudo versions that are affected by this vulnerability are 1.6.0 through to 1.7.10p6; 1.8.0 through to 1.8.6p6. Versions where the vulnerability is fixed have already been made available – 1.7.10p7 and 1.8.6p7.
KDE

Submission + - KDE Software Compilation 4.10.1 Released (kde.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. Over 100 recorded bugfixes include improvements to the Personal Information Management suite Kontact, the Window Manager KWin, and others. KDE's Development Platform has received a number of updates that affect multiple applications."
Ubuntu

Submission + - Canonical Announces Mir: A New Display Server Not On X11 Or Wayland (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the Ubuntu Wiki is now the Mir specification, which is a next-generation display server not based on X11/X.Org or Wayland. Canonical is rolling their own display server for future releases of Ubuntu for form factors from mobile phones to the desktop. Mir is still in development but is said to support Android graphics drivers, open-source Linux graphics drivers, and they're pressuring hardware vendors with commercial closed-source drivers to support it too. They also said X11 apps will be compatible along with GTK3 and Qt/QML programs. Canonical isn't using X11 or Wayland with their future Unity desktop as they see many shortcomings from these existing and commonly used components. Will Mir work as Ubuntu's own display server?
Debian

Submission + - Gamer Rewrites Valve's Steam Installer For Debian (thepowerbase.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Gaming on Linux is a very real thing right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you’re using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop?

If you’re GhostSquad57, you rewrite the installer for Debian and upload it to Github. GhostSquad57 uploaded his efforts to Github yesterday, and has since reached out to the Linux community...
Debian

Submission + - Debian Allows Trademark Use For Commerical Activities (debian.org)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: According to the new trademark policy, Debian logos and marks may now be used freely for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. Stefano Zacchiroli, current Debian Project Leader and one of the main promoters of the new trademark policy, said "Software freedoms and trademarks are a difficult match. We all want to see well-known project names used to promote free software, but we cannot risk they will be abused to trick users into downloading proprietary spyware. With the help of SPI and SFLC, we have struck a good balance in our new trademark policy. Among other positive things, it allows all sorts of commercial use; we only recommend clearly informing customers about how much of the sale price will be donated to Debian."
Android

Submission + - Embedded Developers Prefer Linux, Love Android (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: In a recent EE Times 2013 Embedded Market study, Android was the OS of choice for future embedded projects among 16 percent of the survey's participants, second only to 'in-house/custom' (at 28 percent). But if a spectrum of disparate approaches can be lumped together as a single option, why not aggregate the various shades of Linux to see how they compare? Parsing the EE Times data that way makes it abundantly clear that Linux truly dominates the embedded market.
Games

Submission + - Steam Linux Sale - 3x as many Linux sales as Mac! (gamasutra.com)

Submitted by
lars_doucet
lars_doucet writes: "I'm an independent game developer lucky enough to be on Steam. Recently, the Steam Linux client officially went public and was accompanied by a site-wide sale.

The Linux sale featured every single Linux-compatible game on the service, including our cross-platform game Defender's Quest. In preparation for this article, I asked the good people of Reddit's /r/linux_gaming subreddit what sort of data they'd like to see, and today I'd like to answer both their questions and yours.

Bottom line: during the sale we saw nearly 3 times as many Linux sales of the game as Mac (Windows still dominated overall)."
Firefox

Submission + - Ubuntu Touch wins beats Firefox OS for 'Best of MWC' from CNET (cnet.com)

Submitted by
Jono Bacon
Jono Bacon writes: "This week at Mobile World Congress both Firefox OS and Ubuntu have been wooing the audience with their mobile offerings. CNET reviewed both and felt that Ubuntu was "the clear winner". From the article, "The team thought that Ubuntu Touch, the tablet version of which we got our hands-on for the first time at MWC, feels more like the complete package at this point. We liked its slick, elegant interface that makes use of every side of the screen and puts your content and contacts front and center, minimizing the time spent hopping back to a home screen"."
Microsoft

Submission + - Linus Torvalds To Secure Boot Supporters: This Is Not A Dick-Sucking Contest (muktware.com) 1

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Quite a lot of people raised their eyebrows the way ex-Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett made Microsoft the 'universal' control of any desktops PCs running with UEFI secure boot. Though the intentions of Garrett were clear — to enable GNU/Linux to be able to run Linux on Windows 8 certified PCs with secure boot; it was clearly putting Microsoft in a very powerful position. Linus, while a supporter of secure boot, exploded at Garrett and Howells when they proposed its inclusing in the kernel. Linus responded: Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's *your* issue. That has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kernel I maintain. It's trivial for you guys to have a signing machine that parses the PE binary, verifies the signatures, and signs the resulting keys with your own key. You already wrote the code, for chissake, it's in that f*cking pull request.

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