monkeyhybrid writes "Following a tweet from the developer of Maia (a cross platform game soon to hit Steam) that Linux was bringing him more game sales than OS X. Gaming On Linux decided to investigate further by reaching out to multiple developers for platform sales statistics. Although the findings and developer comments show Linux sales to still be sitting in third place, behind those of OS X and Windows, they are showing promise. Developer feedback certainly appears to be positive about the platform's future. With Steam OS on its way, surely leading to more big title releases making their way to the Linux platform, could Linux gaming be set to take the number two spot from Apple?"

SmartAboutThings writes "We are less than a month away from seeing the first ever Tizen smartphone from Samsung. The leaked image points toward a Feb. 24th launch date at MWC 2014 in Barcelona. The phone design is very similar to Galaxy phones, while the UI reminds us of Windows Phone 8. Samsung is also one of the world's top smartphone vendors, so it should have a decent chance at developing a mobile OS of its own, don't you think?"

enharmonix writes "I have a big decision to make. I am probably going to buy a laptop that I will primarily use for music. I would prefer an OEM distro so I don't need to install the OS myself (not that I mind), but I have no preference between open- and closed-source software as an end-user; I just care about the quality of the product. There are two applications that I absolutely must have: 1) a standard notation transcription program with quality auditioning (i.e., playback with quality sound fonts or something similar, better than your standard MIDI patches) that can also accept recorded audio in lieu of MIDI playback, and 2) a capable synthesizer (the more options, the better). If there's software out there that does both 1 and 2 in the same app, that's even better. I've played with some of Ubuntu's offerings for music a few years ago and some are very good, though not all of them are self-explanatory and the last time I checked, none of them really met my needs. I am not so worried about number 2 because I think I could pretty easily develop my own in .NET/Mono, which I think would be a fun project (which would be open source, of course). I am a Gnome fan so if I go with Linux, I will almost certainly go with standard Ubuntu over Kubuntu, but Gnome seems to rule out Rosegarden which was the best FOSS transcription software out there the last time I checked. The other solution I've thought of is to just shell out the $600 for Finale, which I'm more than willing to do, but I'm not so sure I want Windows 8 and I'm just not sure I can afford to go with a Mac on top of the $600 for Finale. I don't intend to put more than one OS on my laptop, either. Any slashdotters out there dabble in composing/recording, using MIDI, sound fonts, recorded audio, and/or synthesizers? What setup of hardware/OS/software works for you? Can FOSS music software compete with their pricier closed source competitors?" The KXStudio apps installed over Debian or Ubuntu tend to be pretty nice (better session handling that gladish provides at least).

An anonymous reader writes "A Pennsylvania school district is going Linux and building an open source high school with the help of student technology apprentices. As part of a 1:1 laptop learning program, 1725 high school students at Penn Manor School District are receiving new laptops running Ubuntu and open source software exclusively. Central to the program is a student help desk where student programmers created a Linux multicast imaging system titled Fast Linux Deployment Toolkit. The district posted pictures of the imaging process in action. Working alongside school IT staff, students also developed help desk software and other programs in support of the 1:1 student laptop program. The student tech apprentices also provide peer support for fellow students."

sfcrazy writes "Valve Software, the makers of Steam OS, is already winning praise from the larger free and open source community – mainly because of their pro-community approach. Now the company is 'giving back' to Debian by offering free subscription to Debian developers. This subscription will offer full access to current and future games produced by Valve. Since Steam OS is based on Debian GNU/Linux it's a nice way for Valve to say 'thank you' to Debian developers."

postbigbang writes "Imagine having thousands of images on disparate machines. many are dupes, even among the disparate machines. It's impossible to delete all the dupes manually and create a singular, accurate photo image base? Is there an app out there that can scan a file system, perhaps a target sub-folder system, and suck in the images-- WITHOUT creating duplicates? Perhaps by reading EXIF info or hashes? I have eleven file systems saved, and the task of eliminating dupes seems impossible."

diegocg writes "Linux kernel 3.13 has been released. This release includes nftables (the successor of iptables); a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs; a framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices; improved squashfs performance; AMD Radeon power management enabled by default and automatic AMD Radeon GPU switching; improved NUMA and hugepage performance; TCP Fast Open enabled by default; support for NFC payments; support for the High-Availability Seamless Redundancy protocol; new drivers; and many other small improvements. Here's the full list of changes."

jones_supa writes "OpenGL debugging has always lagged behind DirectX, mainly because of the excellent DX graphics debugging tools shipping with Visual Studio and GL being left with APITrace. Valve's Linux initiatives are making game companies to think about OpenGL, and the video game company wants to create a good open source OpenGL debugger to improve the ecosystem. AMD and Nvidia have already expressed interest in helping them out. Valve has been developing VOGL mostly on Ubuntu-based distributions under Qt Creator. The software currently supports tracing OpenGL 1.0 through 3.3 (core and compatibility), and is expected to eventually support OpenGL 4.x. Many more details on VOGL can be found at Valve's Rich Geldreich's blog." This looks much nicer than BuGLe. Valve is using Mercurial for version control and they plan to throw it up on bitbucket under an unspecified open source license soon. It works with clang and gcc, but debugging with gcc is currently very slow (hopefully something that can be fixed once the source is available and the gcc hackers can see what's going on). The tracer's internal binary log format can be converted into JSON for use with other tools as well.

darthcamaro writes "What follows in the footsteps of Heisenbug, Spherical Cow and Beefy Miracle? Apparently the answer is 'null' as is nothing. Fedora Linux 21 could well have no funky new name as its past predecessors have all had, thanks to a recent vote by the Fedora board to move away from the existing naming practices. Fedora 21 itself will not be out in the first half of 2014 either, instead the plan is now for a release sometime around August. A delayed release however doesn't mean something is wrong as Red Hat's community Linux distro aims to re-invent itself."

An anonymous reader writes "CES has come and gone, and we've gotten a chance to see many different models of Valve's Steam Machines. They're being marketed as a device for a living room, and people are wondering if they'll be able to compete with the Big-3 console manufacturers. But this article argues that Valve isn't going after the consoles — instead, Steam Machines are part of a long-term plan to keep the PC gaming industry healthy. Quoting: 'Over the years, Valve has gone from simply evangelizing the PC platform — it once flew journalists in from around the world pretty much just to tell them it was great — to actively protecting it, and what we're seeing now is just the beginning of that push. Take SteamOS. To you and me, it's a direct interface for Steam based on Linux that currently has poor software support. To Valve, though, it's a first step in levering development, publishing, gameplay and community away from their reliance on Windows and DirectX (and to a lesser extent Mac OS), systems that cannot be relied upon in the long term. ... As for Steam Machines, they are a beachhead, not an atom bomb. They are meant to sell modestly. ... The answer is that Valve is thinking in decades, not console generations.'"

sfcrazy writes "The openSUSE Forums were hijacked yesterday. An alleged Pakistani hacker who goes by handle H4x0r HuSsY reportedly exploited a vulnerability in the vBulletin 4.2.1 software SuSE uses to host the forum. vBulletin is a proprietary forum software. The openSUSE team notes that user passwords were not compromised. 'Credentials for your openSUSE login are not saved in our application databases as we use a single-sign-on system (Access Manager from NetIQ) for all our services. This is a completely separate system and it has not been compromised by this crack. What the cracker reported as compromised passwords where indeed random, automatically set strings that are in no way connected to your real password.' It's shocking to learn that SUSE/openSUSE are using proprietary forum software vBulleting as well as proprietary single sign on solution." SuSE was using vBulletin 4.x which has no known fix for the security hole, and they are leaving the forums offline for now. It seems likely they'll be upgrading to the 5.x series.

An anonymous reader writes with news that Red Hat and the CentOS project are "joining forces" to develop the next version of CentOS. For years, CentOS has been a popular choice for users who want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux without having to pay for it. Some of the CentOS developers are moving to Red Hat, but they won't be working on RHEL — they say the "firewall" between the two distros will remain in place. CentOS Project Chair Karanbir Singh said, 'The changes we make are going to be community inclusive, and promoted, proposed, formalised, and actioned in an open community centric manner on the centos-devel mailing list. And I highly encourage everyone to come along and participate.'

DeviceGuru writes "A Russian startup called Virt2real has produced a small $120 Linux-based WiFi controller board for remote control and video observation applications, and has demonstrated its use in a remote controlled car. Inspired by Back to the Future and James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, Virt2real's Bond Car demo (YouTube video) shows a Vauxhall (Opel) Vectra being remotely controlled by an iPad via WiFi. The iPad interface includes touchscreen-based steering wheel, brakes, and accelerator, which are mirrored in the car by a mechanical contraption that physically turns the steering wheel and pushes the brake and accelerator pedals. The company is now accepting orders for the first 1,000 of its Virt2real controller board, and is working on a Virt2real-based Bond Car it that will work with most cars."

Bill Dimm writes "An article on Softpedia claims that Linux distributions using NetworkManager are storing Wi-Fi passwords in plain text in /etc by default. The article recommends encrypting the full disk or removing NetworkManager and using a different tool like netctl. Some of the article comments claim the article is FUD. Is this a real problem?"

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat developers doing some holiday hacking have managed to get a bootable system with systemd + KDBUS on Fedora 20. KDBUS is a new DBus implementation for the Linux kernel that provides greater security and better performance than the DBus daemon in user-space. Systemd in turn interfaces with KDBUS for user-space interaction. Testing was done on Fedora 20 but the systemd + KDBUS configuration should work on any modern distribution when using the newest code."

An anonymous reader writes "The Maui OS Project has made their first stable release of the Hawaii Desktop. Hawaii is still catching up with GNOME, Xfce, and KDE in terms of features, but it's written from scratch atop next-generation open-source technologies. In particular, Hawaii 0.2.0 is powered by the brand new Qt 5.2 tool-kit and runs natively on Wayland's Weston 1.3 compositor. Hawaii 0.2.0 carries all standard Linux desktop features but more advanced desktop functionality is planned while focusing around a Wayland design and eventually their own Green Island Compositor."

An anonymous reader writes "With the release of SteamOS, developing video game engines for Linux is a subject with increasing interest. This article is an initiation guide on the tools used to develop games, and it discusses the pros and cons of Linux as a platform for developing game engines. It goes over OpenGL and drivers, CPU and GPU profiling, compilers, build systems, IDEs, debuggers, platform abstraction layers and other tools."

jones_supa writes "The x32 ABI for Linux allows the OS to take full advantage of an x86-64 CPU while using 32-bit pointers and thus avoiding the overhead of 64-bit pointers. Though the x32 ABI limits the program to a virtual address space of 4GB, it also decreases the memory footprint of the program and in some cases can allow it to run faster. The ABI has been talked about since 2011 and there's been mainline support since 2012. x32 support within other programs has also trickled in. Despite this, there still seems to be no widespread interest. x32 support landed in Ubuntu 13.04, but no software packages were released. In 2012 we also saw some x32 support out of Gentoo and some Debian x32 packages. Besides the kernel support, we also saw last year the support for the x32 Linux ABI land in Glibc 2.16 and GDB 7.5. The only Linux x32 ABI news Phoronix had to report on in 2013 was of Google wanting mainline LLVM x32 support and other LLVM project x32 patches. The GCC 4.8.0 release this year also improved the situation for x32. Some people don't see the ABI as being worthwhile when it still requires 64-bit processors and the performance benefits aren't very convincing for all workloads to make maintaining an extra ABI worthwhile. Would you find the x32 ABI useful?"

DeviceGuru writes "One of most widely respected repositories of embedded and mobile Linux news and information has just returned to the web. LinuxDevices.com, which tracked the evolution of embedded and mobile Linux from an unknown player to being at the heart of billions of mobile and embedded devices, transferred from Ziff Davis Enterprise to QuinStreet through an acquisition two years ago, then went dormant for a year, and finally vanished from the web in May. Now, through an arrangement with QuinStreet, more than 14,000 news items and articles are back online in the form of a LinuxDevices Archive, hosted by LinuxGizmos.com. The archive is searchable from a calendar interface that lets you click on any month of any year between 1999 and 2012, to see what was going on in that time period."

sfcrazy writes "Ironically while Netflix's infrastructure runs on Linux and Open Source technologies, the service doesn't support Linux, the platform. Netflix is available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and Chrome OS but not for desktop Linux. One of the reasons could be that Netflix still uses Microsoft's Silverlight which is not supported on Linux. However Linux users have managed to get it to work on their distros. Now openSUSE users can also run Netflix using Pipelight."