Open Source

Fedora Infrastructure Compromised 115

Trailrunner7 writes "The infrastructure of the Fedora Project was compromised over the weekend and an account belonging to a Fedora contributor was taken over by an attacker. However, Fedora officials said they don't believe that the attacker was able to push any changes to the Fedora package system or make any actual changes to the infrastructure. The attack appears to have targeted one specific user account, which had some high-value privileges. The attacker was able to compromise the account externally, and then had the ability to connect remotely to some Fedora systems. The attacker also changed the account's SSH key, Fedora officials said."
Linux

Submission + - Fedora 15 Changing Network Device Naming Scheme (digitizor.com)

dkd903 writes: Fedora developer, Matt Domsch, has announced that Fedora 15 is breaking the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices by adopting a new scheme called Consistent Network Device Naming. The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, the actual problem starts.
Government

UK To Offer PCs For £98, Subsidized Internet Connections 224

Sam writes "The UK government wants to offer low-cost computers as part of a 12-month trial during Race Online 2012. The scheme, which aims to reach out to the 9.2 million adults that are not yet online, 4 million of whom are considered socially and economically disadvantaged, aims to 'make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web.' Prices will start at £98 ($156.01) for a refurbished PC, with subsidized Internet connections available for as little as £9 ($14.33) a month or £18 ($28.65) for three months. The cheap computers will run open-source software (think Linux) and will include a flat-screen monitor, keyboard, mouse, dedicated telephone helpline, delivery, and even a warranty. The cheap Internet packages will use a mobile dongle to help people access the web."
Open Source

Submission + - UK To Offer PCs For £98, Internet For £

Sam writes: The UK government wants to offer low-cost computers as part of a 12-month trial during Race Online 2012. The scheme, which aims to reach out to the 9.2 million adults that are not yet online, 4 million of whom are considered socially and economically disadvantaged, aims to "make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the web." Prices will start at £98 ($156.01) for a refurbished PC, with subsidized Internet connections available for as little as £9 ($14.33) a month or £18 ($28.65) for three months. The cheap computers will run open-source software (think Linux) and will include a flat-screen monitor, keyboard, mouse, dedicated telephone helpline, delivery, and even a warranty. The cheap Internet packages will use a mobile dongle to help people access the web.
 
Portables

ARM Powered OLPC XO-1.75 Laptop Is Faster Than X86 229

Charbax writes "Not only is power consumption halved to less than two Watts and price of the motherboard reduced, the performance of the next generation OLPC Laptop is actually better for running full Fedora Linux compared to x86. Here's a video interviewing OLPC's CTO, Edward J. McNierney, where he explains how and why OLPC's world class engineers are making this change of CPU architecture. If OLPC XO-1 threatened Intel enough to start the netbook market and has reached two million poor kids in third-world countries thus far, XO-1.75 may help start the ARM-powered Linux laptop market. Do you think Fedora/Sugar will do, or should OLPC attract Chrome OS and Android solutions for education to get faster help from the big boys of Silicon Valley in bringing Linux software successfully to the next billion PC/laptop users?"
Linux

Submission + - ARM Powered OLPC XO-1.75 Laptop is faster than x86 (armdevices.net) 1

Charbax writes: Not only is power consumption halved to less than 2 Watts and price of the motherboard is reduced, the performance of the next generation OLPC Laptop is actually faster to run full Fedora Linux compared to x86. Here's a video interviewing OLPC's CTO Edward J. McNierney where he explains how OLPC's world class engineers are making this change of CPU architecture and why. If OLPC XO-1 threatened Intel enough to start the Netbook market and has reached 2 million poor kids in third world countries thus far, XO-1.75 may help start the ARM Powered Linux laptop market. Do you think Fedora/Sugar will do or should OLPC attract Chrome OS and Android solutions for education to get faster help from the big boys of Silicon Valley to bring Linux software successfully to the next billion PC/Laptop users?
GUI

Xfce 4.8 Released 193

PerlDudeXL writes "Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6. [..] Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions."
Software

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25

conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."
Linux

Submission + - Xfce 4.8 released (xfce.org)

PerlDudeXL writes: "Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6. [..] Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions."
Education

Advice On Teaching Linux To CS Freshmen? 467

copb.phoenix writes "I'm a sophomore Computer Science student teaching computing labs to a freshman class, getting ready to go over the major ins and outs of the Linux terminal and GUI. While I have my own ideas and the professor over this class to lean on, I've found it difficult to get the few students that I've tried to teach in the past to connect the dots and understand how it relates to what they already know about computers. Does anybody out there have any advice on how to engage and inspire our upcoming class? (Perhaps important: Our machines are running Ubuntu Hardy.)"
Firefox

Why Linux Loses Out On Hardware Acceleration In Firefox 456

devtty writes with some bad news for Linux users, from OSNews: "The release notes for Firefox 4.0 beta 9 noted that it comes with hardware acceleration for Windows 7 and Vista via a combination of Direct2D, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations 'using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9.' Furthermore, Mac OS X has excellent OpenGL support, they claim, so they've got that covered as well. No mention of Linux, and there's a reason for that. 'We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think "crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time" buggy) that we had to disable it for now,' explains Zbarsky, 'Heck, we're even disabling WebGL for most Linux drivers, last I checked...'" An update to the story softens this news slightly, saying that "hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver)."
Firefox

Submission + - No Hardware Acceleration Firefox for Linux (osnews.com) 4

devtty writes: Yesterday, the ninth Firefox 4.0 beta was released. One of the major new features in Firefox 4.0 is hardware acceleration for anything from canvas drawing to video rendering. Sadly, this feature won't make its way to the Linux version of Firefox 4.0. The reason? X' drivers are "disastrously buggy". Boris Zbarsky, long-time Mozilla developer, commented on the issue over at Hacks.Mozilla.org. The release notes for Firefox 4.0 beta 9 noted that it comes with hardware acceleration for Windows 7 and Vista via a combination of Direct2D, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations "using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9". Furthermore, Mac OS X has excellent OpenGL support, they claim, so they've got that covered as well.

No mention of Linux, and there's a reason for that. "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now," explains Zbarsky, "Heck, we're even disabling WebGL for most Linux drivers, last I checked..."

Data Storage

Lustre File System Getting New Community Distro 68

darthcamaro writes "Oracle acquired a lot of open source tech from Sun that has since been forked — or is in the process of being forked. The open source Lustre high performance computing file system isn't on the list of forked projects, but it is getting a new, community-driven distro that is trying really hard to say that they're not officially a fork. 'Since April of 2010 there has been confusion in the community, and we've seen an impact in the business confidence in Lustre,' Brent Gorda, CEO and president of Whamcloud told InternetNews.com. 'The community has been asking for leadership, the commitment of a for-profit entity that they can rely on for support and a path forward for the technology.'"
Linux

Embedded Linux 1-Second Cold Boot To QT 141

An anonymous reader writes "The blog post shows an embedded device cold booting Linux to a QT application all in just one second. This post also includes a link which describes what modifications were made to achieve this."
Games

Cedega Being Replaced By GameTree Linux 124

An anonymous reader writes "TransGaming Cedega, the software forked from Wine that allows running Windows games under Linux, is being discontinued and replaced by GameTree Linux. This new software is also free. From the new website: 'TransGaming is pleased to announce the continued development of Cedega Technology under the GameTree Developer Program. This repositioning of the technology that powered the Cedega Gaming Service will allow the entire Linux community to gain free access going forward. Cedega is a cross-platform enablement technology that allows for Windows-native games to be executed on both the Linux desktop and embedded Linux platforms.'"

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