Linux

Submission + - Tizen Gets Boost From Bada Merger (itworld.com)

Submitted by LinuxScribe
LinuxScribe writes: As predicted last September, Samsung has announced plans to merge Tizen with its own Bada platform to create a new mobile OS that will fit well on low- and high-end smartphones. Last year, Bada had more global phone deployments than Windows Phone 7. The merger means each Linux-based platform will have access to more native- and HTML5-based apps.
Security

Submission + - NSA releases Security Enhanced Android (selinuxnews.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The NSA has released a set of security enhancements to Android. These appear to be based on SELinux, which was also originally created by the NSA.
Windows

Submission + - The Future of Auto Theft (autosec.org)

Submitted by NicknamesAreStupid
NicknamesAreStupid writes: Over the past twenty years, car theft has declined as new models incorporated electronic security methods that thwarted simple hot-wiring. The tide may now be turning, as cars become the next Windows PC. The Center for Automobile Embedded Systems Security has posted an interesting paper from UCSD and UW that describes how modern cars can be cracked. Unlike the old days of window jimmies, these exploits range from attacks through the CD or iPod port to cellular attacks that take inventory of thousands of cars and offer roaming thieves Yelp-like choices ("our favorite is mint green with leather") with unlocked doors and running engines.
Open Source

Submission + - Linux 3.2 has been released

Submitted by
diegocg
diegocg writes: "Linux 3.2 has been released. New features include support for Ext4 block size bigger than 4KB and up to 1MB, btrfs has added faster scrubbing, automatic backup of critical metadata and tools for manual inspection; the process scheduler has added support to set upper limits of CPU time; the desktop reponsiveness in presence of heavy writes has been improved, TCP has been updated to include an algorithm which speeds up the recovery of connection after lost packets; the profiling tool "perf top" has added support for live inspection in tasks and libraries and explore annotated assembly; the Device Mapper has added support for 'thin provisioning' of storage, and a support for a new architecture has been added: Hexagon DSP processor from Qualcomm. New drivers and small improvements and fixes are also available in this release. Here's the full list of changes"
Security

Submission + - Linux Developer Network Not to be Restored (itworld.com)

Submitted by LinuxScribe
LinuxScribe writes: The Linux Foundation has quietly restored all of the websites it took down following the September 2011 breach that affected Linux.com and all other Foundation websites--an attack that was linked to the August 2011 breach of kernel.org. But one website won't be coming back: the Linux Developer Network, launched in 2008. Content from the site will now be hosted across all of the Linux Foundation's web properties.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 Performance Compared vs. I (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Phoronix has benchmarked the Texas Instruments PandaBoard ES and compared its performance against Intel Atom N270, Atom Z530, Pentium M, and Core Duo T2400 processors. The OMAP4660 dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 development board generally loses out to Intel's older competition, but does manage to win in ray-tracing and other tests, and is advantageous on a per-Watt basis.
GNOME

Submission + - Linux Mint developer forks Gnome 3 (webupd8.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, has forked Gnome 3 and named it Cinnamon. Mint has experimented with extensions to gnome in the latest release of their operating system but in order to make the experience they are aiming for really work, they needed an actual fork. The goal of this fork is to use the improved Gnome 3 internals and put a more familiar Gnome 2 interface on it.
Android

Submission + - A Real Effort To Mainline Android Changes In Linux (phoronix.com) 2

Submitted by
ghostoftiber
ghostoftiber writes: "From the article: "Tim Bird, a Sony engineering veteran and the chair of the Architecture Group of the Linux Foundation's CE Workgroup, has announced a new concerted effort to get Android's changes to the Linux kernel back into the mainline Linux kernel tree." Android has been using Linux 2.6.x for it's devices since it's release, with patches from Google. To date they haven't been merged back into the kernel mainline but existed on kernel.org. Some of the features such as wakelocks would help with Linux tablet projects, but other features aren't fully realized and support remains spotty. The radio interface layer — referred to as the RIL — still exists as an ati/nvidia-esque shimloader scheme with modem "drivers" being nothing more than ihex files loaded by open code."
Open Source

Submission + - Music Player Amarok 2.5 Released (kde.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "The Amarok development team has released version 2.5 of its open source music player and organiser, code-named "Earth Moving". Among the changes highlighted by the developers are re-written support for USB mass storage devices, GPodder.net podcast synchronisation and an integrated Amazon MP3 store. The GPodder.net support includes the ability to browse directly from Amarok through the list of recommended podcasts on GPodder.net. Users of playlists on Amarok will find the new playlist functionality in 2.5 such as the ability to use formatted strings in Playlist layout items as prefixes and suffixes, dragging and dropping tracks in an empty area in the list of playlists to create a new playlist, and, in that same empty area, the addition of a new "create new playlist" action. The developers list a number of minor changes and bug fixes such as now correctly recognising iPhone 3Gs, not freezing in the playlist generator, reduced CPU consumption and workarounds to a Qt bug that crashed the player."
Linux

Submission + - Razor-Qt: A New Qt-Based Desktop Environment? (razor-qt.org)

Submitted by aglider
aglider writes: Phoronix has an interesting piece of news about a new emerging desktop environment. And it's Qt based!
From the project home page:

Razor-qt is an advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-Qt also works fine with weak machines.

Someone has already tagged Razor-Qt as

a KDE ripoff

What we have so far is version 0.4 as announced on a blog and, very important, a number of easy ways to install and test it on a few main Linux distributions. Maybe time has come for something really new in the desktop environment arena almost completely occupied by GNOME and KDE.
Linux

Submission + - EOMA-PCMCIA modular computer aiming for $15 and Fr (rhombus-tech.net) 3

Submitted by
lkcl
lkcl writes: "An initiative by a CIC company Rhombus Tech aims to provide Software (Libre) Developers with a PCMCIA-sized modular computer that could end up in mass-volume products. The Reference Design mass-volume pricing guide from the SoC manufacturer, for a device with similar capability to the raspberrypi, is around $15: 40% less than the $25 rbpi but for a device with an ARM Cortex A8 CPU 3x times faster than the 700mhz ARM11 used in the rbpi. GPL Kernel source code is available. A page for community ideas for motherboard designs has also been created. The overall goal is to bring more mass-volume products to market which Software (Libre) Developers have actually been involved in, reversing the trend of endemic GPL violations surrounding ARM-based mass-produced hardware. The Preorder pledge registration is now open (account creation required)."
Games

Submission + - Technical Details Behind the LAN-Party Optimized H (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Temporal
Temporal writes: "Yesterday, Slashdot reported on my LAN-party optimized house. But, lacking from the internet at that time were key technical details: How do I boot 12 machines off a single shared disk? What software do I use? What does my network infrastructure look like? Why do I have such terrible furniture? Is that Gabe Newell on the couch? The answer is a combination of Linux, PXE boot, gPXE, NBD/iSCSI, and LVM snapshots running on generic hardware over generic gigabit ethernet. I have even had several successful LAN parties with a pure-Linux setup, using WINE. Check out the full details."
Linux

Submission + - Munich's Move to Linux Exceeds Target (h-online.com)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "In May 2003, Munich's city council resolved to migrate municipal workstations from Windows to Linux and open source. Munich's LiMux project has announced that it has exceeded its annual target for migrating the city's PCs to its LiMux client. To date in 2011, the project has migrated 9,000 systems; it had originally planned to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich."
Mozilla

Submission + - Nightingale Media Player Preview Released (getnightingale.com)

Submitted by
ilikenwf
ilikenwf writes: "You may or may not remember the Mozilla-based Songbird media player, which dropped official Linux support in April, 2010. Since then, the Nightingale community fork has waxed and waned in terms of membership and progress, but thanks to having a completely new dev team has today produced a preview build based on Songbird 1.8.1. The team promises a release of a Songbird trunk based build later this year, with fixes and an upgrade to Gecko 6. Plans to support Linux, Windows, and Mac are in the works, with the preview builds being available only for Linux and Windows at the moment. Aside from trying to pull in refugees from the Songbird community, Nightingale wants more developers to aid in fixing dropped and broken features from Songbird — and to add new ones."
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Judge Dismisses 'Other OS' Class-Action Against So (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You may recall that in March of 2010, Sony decided to roll out an update that would remove the ability for PlayStation 3 owners to install a different operating system on the console, citing security concerns as the reason. Geeks and Linux enthusiasts were outraged at the move, particular since the "Other OS" functionality had been advertised as a feature of the PS3. A class-action lawsuit was soon brought against Sony. Many of the initial claims were thrown out, and now, a federal judge in California has granted Sony's motion to dismissed the lawsuit, saying, 'As a matter of providing customer satisfaction and building loyalty, it may have been questionable. As a legal matter, however, plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable.' Here's the full text of the order (PDF).
Linux

Submission + - Linux Mint Diverting Banshee Revenue (itworld.com)

Submitted by LinuxScribe
LinuxScribe writes: According Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre, the popular Linux Mint distribution has changed the Amazon.com affiliate code for the Banshee music player so that Mint, not Canonical or the GNOME Foundation, will receive the revenue from MP3 sales through Banshee. Though a trivial amount of money ($3.41 in November 2011), Linux Mint's actions still raise the question: how should revenue be shared between upstream and downstream FLOSS projects?

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