Games

Submission + - Phoronix has confirmation of a GNU/Linux Steam Client (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by nukem996
nukem996 writes: After initially reporting in 2010 that Valve is work on a native GNU/Linux client one has finally been confirmed! Michael Larabel recently visited Valve's Bellvue, WA based office and has been able to see it himself. Included in the article are screenshots of the client running and speculation of a release!
Games

Submission + - Valve's Steam & Games coming to Linux (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Valve's Steam and Source Engine-based games are coming to Linux. Michael from well known site Phoronix.com has been invitied to Valve's office and was able to spend a day with the developers and Gabe Newell himself. He is confirming the rumours about Linux ports from Valve, and has been able to play the games and work the developers himself. Attached in the article are pictures from Valve's offices with games running on Linux.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Codename, Theming Update Announced for Ubuntu 12.10 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth announced some changes for Ubuntu 12.10 (due in October), including the code name (Quantal Quetzal--no, really) and a theme update. Some other more meaningful announcements include a focus on the cloud in the server version and the lack of a transition from Upstart to systemd."
Linux

Submission + - Linus wins the Millennium Technology Prize (zdnet.com)

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."
GNOME

Submission + - MATE desktop 1.2 released with new features (mate-desktop.org)

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.
Open Source

Submission + - TI Developer Publishes Open-Source Qualcomm GPU Driver (phoronix.com)

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.
Linux

Submission + - Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Goes Stable On Linux (phoronix.com)

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.
Security

Submission + - Critical Flaw Found In Backtrack Linux (threatpost.com)

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."
Linux

Submission + - MythTV 0.25 released, new HW acceleration and audio standards support (mythtv.org)

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."
Linux

Submission + - 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

Submission + - Controlling Gnome 3 with Skeltrack (ubuntuvibes.com)

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.
Linux

Submission + - AT&T Microcell FAIL (fail0verflow.com) 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."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft counted as key Linux contributor, for now (networkworld.com)

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.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Linux on an 8 Bit micro (ubuntuvibes.com)

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.
Linux

Submission + - Adobe Releases Last Linux Version Of Flash Player (ubuntuvibes.com)

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.
Microsoft

Submission + - How Linus Torvalds Helped Bust a Microsoft Patent (wired.com)

Submitted by inhuman_4
inhuman_4 writes: Last December, Microsoft scored a victory when the ITC Administrative Law Judge Theodore R. Essex found that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents. But the ruling could also eliminate an important Microsoft software patent that has been invoked in lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and car navigation device-maker Tom Tom.

According to Linus Torvalds, he was deposed in the case this past fall, and apparently his testimony about a 20-year-old technical discussion — along with a discussion group posting made by an Amiga fan, known only as Natuerlich! — helped convince the Administrative Law Judge that the patent was invalid.
Linux

Submission + - Munich has saved €4M so far after switch to Linux (golem.de)

Submitted by Mojo66
Mojo66 writes: Mayor Ude today reported (german) (english translation) that the city of Munich has saved €4 million so far by switching its IT infrastructure from Windows NT and Office to Linux and OpenOffice. At the same time, the number of trouble tickets decreased from 70 to 46 per month. Savings were €2.8M from software licensing and €1.2M from hardware because demands are lower for Linux compared to Windows 7.
Linux

Submission + - Linux-3.3: Making a dent in bufferbloat? (cringely.com)

Submitted by
mtaht
mtaht writes: "Has anyone, besides those that worked on byte queue limits, and sfqred, had a chance to benchmark networking using these tools on the linux 3.3 kernel... in the real world? A dent, at least theoretically, seems to be have made in bufferbloat, and now that the new kernel and new iproute2 are out, should be easy to apply in general (e.g. server/desktop) situations..."
Amiga

Submission + - Amiga returns with Linux-powered mini PC (techreport.com)

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: Commodore has revealed the Amiga mini, a small-form-factor system that runs a custom Linux distro dubbed Commodore OS Vision. A trailer for the OS hardly inspires confidence, and the rest of the system doesn't help. While the Amiga mini features a high-end Intel desktop CPU and modern conveniences like Blu-ray, USB 3.0, and 802.11n Wi-Fi, it's stuck with one of the slowest graphics chips Nvidia makes. Some of the other specifications are head-scratchers, too. The mini comes with a whopping 16GB of RAM but only a terabyte of storage. You'll have to pay extra to get an SSD, which makes the $2500 asking price particularly onerous. The case, Blu-ray drive, and power supply are being made available separately, but at $345, they're hardly a bargain. Add this to the list of nostalgia-baiting remakes that don't live up to their inspiration.

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