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Linux

+ - 129 Linus wins the Millennium Technology Prize->

Submitted by
udas
udas writes "Also on Google Plus:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/101722761973350504830/posts/iDp7MpWdRJN
This is the world’s largest technology prize. It is rewarded ever two years for a technological innovation that significantly improves the quality of human life, today and in the future. This year, Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, maker of a new way to create stem cells without the use of embryonic stem cells, are both laureates for the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize.

This prize, which is determined by the Technology Academy of Finland, is one of the world’s largest such prizes with candidates sought from across the world and from all fields of technology. The two innovators will share over a million Euros. The final winner will be announced by the President of the Republic of Finland in a special ceremony on June 13, 2012."
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Biotech

+ - 98 $4,829-per-hour supercomputer built on Amazon cloud to fuel cancer research-> 1

Submitted by neelwebs
neelwebs writes "Farid and his team recently decided they wanted to stop cutting corners, specifically for a joint cancer research project conducted with Nimbus Discovery, which does computer-based drug discovery. The key was that instead of using Schrödinger’s internal cluster, they opted to build a 50,000-core supercomputer on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

It ran for three hours on the night of March 30, at a cost of $4,828.85 per hour. Getting up to 51,132 cores required spinning up 6,742 Amazon EC2 instances running CentOS Linux. This virtual supercomputer spanned the globe, tapping data centers in four continents and every available Amazon region, from Tokyo, Singapore, and Sao Paolo, to Ireland, Virginia, Oregon, and California. As impressive as it sounds, such a cluster can be spun up by anyone with the proper expertise, without talking to a single employee of Amazon."
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GNU is Not Unix

+ - 115 tethr: Getting online in a crisis->

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes ""tethr builds products and services that connect people to the world, enabling the collection and distribution of critical data. The tethr Platform supports the open integration of crisis response applications. Ultimately, tethr establishes a robust communications ecosystem, deployable instantaneously, anywhere on Earth."

From the BBC article (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120413-communicating-in-a-crisis/1)
"What he and his team have come up with is a package of hardware that fits into a case about 6in-long, 4in-wide and 3-in tall (15cmx10cmx7.5cm). It contains the hardware necessary to connect to the net via satellite modem, wi-fi, 3G, ethernet and even dial-up. It also comes with OpenBTS, an open-source GSM messaging box and platform. This prototype runs with a version of the open-source operating system Ubuntu Linux. The software could be tailored to any situation, but right now, Huslage has it loaded up with a database, VOIP software similar to Skype, Ushahidi, and Open Street Map. The user interface, Huslage says, is like a webpage, and is designed to allow the user maximum control over what type of connections to use for certain tasks, and also giving simple instructions on how to, say, point the satellite modem in the right direction."
More information:
http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2012/03/26/untethered-hardware-connectivity-in-a-crisis/
http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/19450685278/tethr-evolving-networks
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/OpenBTS"
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GNOME

+ - 124 MATE desktop 1.2 released with new features->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "For those of you that still feel that GNOME 2 is the best desktop environment, but don't want stick to old distros. MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, with all the names changed to avoid clashes with GNOME 3. Version 1.2 brings fixes, but also new features such as undo/redo in the file manager."
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Open Source

+ - 139 TI Developer Publishes Open-Source Qualcomm GPU Driver->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Not being content with the state of open source graphics drivers for Linux, a developer working for Texas Instruments has reverse-engineered his competitor's (Qualcomm) driver and written an open-source Snapdragon driver. With being tainted by legal documents at Texas Instruments, the developer who is also involved with Linaro, had no other choice but to work on an open source graphics driver for his competitor in his free time. The open source Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno driver is called Freedreno."
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Linux

+ - 153 Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Goes Stable On Linux->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The open source Nouveau driver that's a reverse-engineered incarnation of NVIDIA's official proprietary driver for Linux, has reached its biggest milestone. The Nouveau driver is now being considered stable within the Linux kernel and leaving the staging area with a pledge of a stable ABI. Phoronix has summarized the state of the Nouveau driver, which works fine if you don't care about performance or are fine with running hardware that's a few generations old."
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Security

+ - 121 Critical Flaw Found In Backtrack Linux->

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting on a critical security flaw in the latest version of Backtrack Linux, a popular distribution that is used by security professionals for penetration testing. The previously undiscovered privilege escalation hole was discovered by a student taking part in an InfoSec Instutite Ethical Hacking class, according to the post on the group's Web site.
"The student in our ethical hacking class that found the 0day was using backtrack and decided to fuzz the program, as well as look through the source code," wrote Jack Koziol, the Security Program Manager at the InfoSec Institute. "He found that he could overwrite config settings and gain a root shell." An unofficial patch is available from InfoSec Institute. Koziol said that an official patch is being tested now and is expected shortly."
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Linux

+ - 155 MythTV 0.25 released, new HW acceleration and audio standards support->

Submitted by
unts
unts writes "The highly configurable Linux PVR, MythTV, has reached the 0.25 release, over 500 days after the previous full release. New features include VAAPI support, E-AC3, TrueHD, and DTS-HD audio, the ability to control other home entertainment devices via HDMI CEC and additions to the API to allow HTTP live streaming. The release notes for 0.25 don't reflect the release status at the time of writing, but should contain most of the relevant changes.

MythTV can be used as a backend (recorder) and frontend (viewer), but can also feed other frontends such as appropriate versions of XBMC. Hopefully the new HTTP streaming API will lead to even more ways to get your video fix from MythTV."
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Linux

+ - 120 SCHED_DEADLINE v4 released->

Submitted by
c1oud
c1oud writes "After more than one year of development, the 4th version of the SCHED_DEADLINE Linux scheduler has been submitted to the kernel community. Besides taking into account prior comments and observations, this version improves the handling of rq selection for dynamic task migration and has native integration with the PREEMPT_RT project (although a patch for the standard mainline kernel is provided as well). The official development has been moved to a GitHub repository"
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Ubuntu

+ - 120 Why Ubuntu Is Not Contributing To Linux, Or Is It? ->

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes "This story is special, as it was created in an open source manner. The story was written in collaborative fashion by 2-3 dozen people working on it simultaneously. The story is a shining example of the collaborative power of Google Docs. We would like to thank all those who contributed to this story. The 'writers' debate the contribution of Ubuntu to the development of Linux kernel."
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Linux

+ - 178 Ask slashdot: Recommendations for Linux telecommuting tools 2

Submitted by rodrix79
rodrix79 writes "Hi all. I am trying to move from Windows to Linux (Ubuntu, but maybe to Mint). The problem is I telecommute full time and I am having a hard time trying to find the right tools to keep communication flowing with my clients (which are mostly on Windows / Mac). Any good recommendations from Linux telecommuters? Thanks in advance."
Linux

+ - 121 Controlling Gnome 3 with Skeltrack->

Submitted by dartttt
dartttt writes "Skeltrack is a Free and Open Source Software library by Igalia for tracking the human skeleton joints from depth images.

It is implemented with GLib and uses plain mathematics to detectthe human skeleton and although it does not use any database, it was inspired by Andreas Baak's paper:A Data-Driven Approach for Real-Time Full Body Pose Reconstructionfrom a Depth Camera

Skeltrack devs have recorded very cool videos showing Gnome Shell and Linux games being controlled through gestures."
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Linux

+ - 196 AT&T Microcell FAIL-> 1

Submitted by CharlyFoxtrot
CharlyFoxtrot writes "The geeks over on the fail0verflow blog took apart an AT&T Microcell device which is "essentially a small cell-tower in a box, which shuttles your calls and data back to the AT&T mothership over your home broadband connection." They soon uncovered some real security issues including a backdoor : "We believe that this backdoor is NOT meant to be globally accessible. It is probably only intended to be used over the IPSEC tunnel which the picoChip SoC creates. [...] Unfortunately, they set up the wizard to bind on 0.0.0.0, so the backdoor is accessible over the WAN interface.""
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Microsoft

+ - 160 Microsoft counted as key Linux contributor, for now->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "For the first time ever, and probably only temporarily, Microsoft can be counted as a key contributor to Linux. The company, which once portrayed the open-source OS kernel as a form of cancer, has been ranked 17th on a tally of the largest code contributors to Linux. The Linux Foundation's Linux Development Report, released Tuesday, summarizes who has contributed to the Linux kernel, from versions 2.6.36 to 3.2. The 10 largest contributors listed in the report are familiar names: Red Hat, Intel, Novell, IBM, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Nokia, Samsung, Oracle and Google. But the appearance of Microsoft is a new one for the list, compiled annually."
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Ubuntu

+ - 115 Linux on an 8 Bit micro->

Submitted by dartttt
dartttt writes "Dmitry Grinberg has successfully booted Ubuntu 9.04 on an 8 bit micro machine with 6.5 KHz CPU and 16 MB RAM.

Grinberg did this experiment on a ATmega1284p, 8-bit RISC microcontroller clocked at 24MHz and equipped with 16KB of SRAM and 128KB of flash storage. Since the RAM was too low, he added 30-pin 16MB SIMM to the machine and a 1 GB SD card to host Ubuntu image.

Minimum system requirements for running Linux are considered to be a 32bit system with proper Modern Memory Management Unit (MMU) and 1 MB RAM. The experiment was done to prove that Linux can successfully run on an 8 bit micro.

To get the world's slowest Linux Computer running, he had to write an ARMv5 emulator which supports 32bit processor and MMU. A similar machine can be made very easily and everything should come in about $20. He has also provided full source code and a porting guide."
Link to Original Source
Linux

+ - 102 'Linux switch saved city millions and reduced complaints'->

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes "By migrating to its own Linux distribution, LiMux, the German city of Munich reduced both IT costs and user complaints, according to figures provided by Mayor Christian Ude.

"The current impact on the budget for the LiMux project amounts to a total of €11.7 million," (US$15.6 million) Ude wrote in a reply to questions asked by Marian Offman of the Christian Socialist Union on March 19. The questions were asked because the party was concerned about a failed migration from Windows to Linux in Vienna.

The city of Munich started the LiMux project in 2004 and began migrating from Windows NT to a fully open source desktop infrastructure in 2006, while the mayor revealed that maintaining the Windows infrastructure would have cost many millions more..."
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Linux

+ - 203 Adobe Releases Last Linux Version Of Flash Player->

Submitted by dartttt
dartttt writes "Adobe has released Flash Player version 11.2 with many new features. This is last and final Flash Player release for Linux platform and now onward there will be only security and bug fix updates. Last month Adobe announced that it is withdrawing Flash Player support for Linux platform. All the future newer Flash releases will be bundled with Google Chrome using its Pepper API and for everything else, 11.2 will be the last release."
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