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Debian

Submission + - GPL, Copyleft On The Rise

Submitted by paxcoder
paxcoder writes: Contrary to earlier analyses that predicted a decline of copyleft software share to as little as 50% this year, John Sullivan, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, claims the opposite has happened: In his talk at FOSDEM 2012 titled "Is Copyleft Being Framed?", Sullivan presented evidence of a consistent increase of usage of copyleft licenses in relation to the usage of permissive licenses in free software projects over the past few years. Using publicly available package information provided by the Debian project, his study showed that the number of packages using the GPL family in that distribution this year reached a share of 93% of all packages with (L)GPLv3 usage rising 400% between last two Debian versions.
Linux

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: what is the best distro for linux lessons? 8

Submitted by MBtronics
MBtronics writes: I work at an embedded hardware/software company and we are currently moving all our products for Windows CE to linux. Our core development team already uses their favourite distro for development, but the rest of the developers is still working on Windows. We are going to give a series of linux lessons (from 'what is linux' to installing, using and developing) for everybody in the company who is interested (including non-developers). They will be allowed to choose their own distro, but we will certainly get the question which one is recommended. My question to the slashdot-crowd: what distro (and windowmanager) do you think is the best to teach a generic public linux? We are currently thinking of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mint.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Beta1 has been released! 3

Submitted by donadony
donadony writes: It’s time to take another look at what is happening with the development of Ubuntu 12.04. As it stands, the first Beta of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin has been released. I just updated my own system.
What changed since Alpha? Not much, really. In fact, there’s really nothing groundbreaking or any new features added. Unity has been updated to version 5.4.0 which also sees the introduction of the new HUD feature. HUD still apparently has many outstanding bugs, but developers maintain that all bugs will be ironed out before Ubuntu 12.04 goes gold. also added recommendations to Ubuntu software center, new tool called “privacy”and other small new features.
Security

Submission + - Torvalds Calls openSUSE Security 'Too Instrusive' (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "The balance between security and ease of use is always a tricky one to strike, and Linux distros tend to err on the side of caution. But no less a luminary than Linus Torvalds thinks openSUSE has gone too far. When his kid needed to call from school for the root password just so he could add a printer to a laptop, that's when Linus decided things had gone off the rails."
Open Source

Submission + - How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "A decade ago, Linux developer Red Hat faced a decision that would make or break the company: whether to stop producing the very product that gave Red Hat its name. The company was built on Red Hat Linux, but when executive Paul Cormier joined the company as vice president of engineering in 2001, he knew Red Hat's devotion to open source alone couldn't create a business model capable of standing up to the Microsofts and Oracles of the world. He pushed for drastic action. Despite internal dissent (some engineers called Cormier "crazy") Red Hat dumped its free (as in beer) Red Hat Linux for the pricey, subscription-based, yet still open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux, creating a business model without disregarding the principles on which it was founded. Almost a decade later, the decision has paid off many times over: Red Hat will become the first billion-dollar open source company after its fiscal year ends Feb. 29."
Linux

Submission + - Leaving an administration position, Best Practices.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've been the server admin at a university for the past 5 years. Recently, I've been given the chance to move from servers to networking and jumped at it. As I find myself typing up all my open ended projects, removing certain scripts and stopping others. What would the community recommend as best practices for leaving some serves. I am trying to avoid a phone call that results in me having to remote in, explain something, jog to the other side of campus to access the machine, etc. Essentially I'm trying to cover all my bases so any excuse my replacement has to call me is seen as nothing but laziness or incompetence. I am required to give him a day of training to show him where everything is on the servers (web and database) in that day I'm going to make him change all the passwords but aside from locking me out and knowing what is where, what else should I be doing?
Cloud

Submission + - Node.js competition is getting strong! (developer.com)

Submitted by koper
koper writes: The growing popularity of Node.js and Opa, which unify client and server-side coding, is a clear indication that the Web of today is too complex, and the programming model needs to be refined and simplified. While Node.js is an inventive framework based on an existing, popular language (JavaScript), Opa has a lot to offer for those willing to invest time in learning a new language. I hope you will explore these languages further.
Debian

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Linux KDE distro? (debian.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Debian is dead as a KDE distribution. It used to provide packages for testing early and often, and even add patches from future releases so that the environment is as stable as possible.
But that is no more. Debian is now stuck with KDE 4.6.5 in testing and sid, and KDE 4.7.4 in experimental. Versions for which many annoying bugs have been discovered including kwin rendering bugs, often plasma crashes and device manager problems. KDE 4.8 solves them, but Debian is far from adapting it. They even consider freezing Wheezy with KDE 4.7.4 on board!

My question is: which distro would be the best to switch to for a Debian user who needs his KDE environment to be updated often and be stable?
Google

Submission + - ACM highlights Cambridge/Google's Capsicum security model for UNIX/ChromeOS (acm.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Communications of the ACM is carrying two articles promoting the Capsicum security model developed by Robert Watson (FreeBSD — Cambridge) and Ben Laurie (Apache/OpenSSL, ChromeOS — Google) for thin-client operating systems such as ChromeOS. They demonstrate how Chrome web browser sandboxing using Capsicum is not only stronger, but also requires only 100 lines of code, vs 22,000 lines of code on Windows! FreeBSD 9.0 shipped with experimental Capsicum support, OpenBSD has patches, and Google has developed a Linux prototype.
Open Source

Submission + - SUSE Linux Begins to Make New Partner Noise (thevarguy.com)

Submitted by
Joe Panettieri
Joe Panettieri writes: "Roughly one year after Attachmate acquired Novell and the SUSE Linux business, SUSE is showing several signs of progress. The SUSE organization seems more nimble and far more focused on strategic partnerships and customer acquisition, The VAR Guy senses. Here’s the update — along with some lingering challenges that the SUSE team must address."
Oracle

Submission + - Oracle extends RHEL support to a decade and offers Ksplice trial for RHEL 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago, Red Hat announced it was moving from 7 years of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a full decade. Today, Oracle announced that it was also extending its support duration for Oracle Linux from 8 years to 10 years. Apparently, they're also offering a free trial of Ksplice for RHEL in a move to convince more RHEL customers to switch to Oracle Linux, which advertises free Ksplice rebootless updates, legal indemnification, and lower costs (complete with an amusing cost calculator).

Personally, I'm holding out until Canonical counters by guaranteeing a full millenium of support for Ubuntu LTS releases.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Ubuntu's Business Desktop Remix: A Closer Look (thevarguy.com)

Submitted by
Joe Panettieri
Joe Panettieri writes: "In case there was any doubt that the long-term success of Canonical is tied in large part to Ubuntu’s viability as a desktop solution for businesses, Canonical CEO Jane Silber recently announced a new official spin of Ubuntu tailored at just that market. Will Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix soon find its way to an office near you? That may be too early to say, but here’s a look at what the latest Ubuntu flavor is all about."
Cloud

Submission + - Canonical Continues Ubuntu Cloud Push (thevarguy.com)

Submitted by
Joe Panettieri
Joe Panettieri writes: "Canonical this week released a new publication highlighting the way Ubuntu fits into cloud computing. Here’s a look at this latest effort to market Ubuntu to a cloud computing and cloud services audience, and what it says about Canonical’s strategy overall."
Linux

Submission + - Adobe To Drop Support For Flash Player On Linux (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Adobe has announced that they will be abandoning Linux support for Flash. Adobe will be leaving it up to Google to support Flash within their Chrome browser while Adobe will just be maintaining the Flash 11.2 release on Linux with security fixes for a period of five years. Adobe says they will ship a debug-enabled Flash Player and update their whitepaper, which may help the open-source community play catch-up.
Chrome

Submission + - Chrome only future for Flash on Linux (h-online.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Adobe has announced (http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer) that in future, the Flash Player for Linux will only be available through Google as part of the Google Chrome browser and not as a standalone download. The shipped plugin will also only support Chrome's plugin API. The changes will take effect after the release of Flash Player 11.2 later this year.
Linux

Submission + - Apple orphans Linux CUPS features- handicaps open source printing

Submitted by
donadony
donadony writes: "CUPS, is the printing standard that open source projects have used successfully to convert desktops and computers to become printer servers, allowing plug-in, modular type of printing. However, now Apple after it acquired it from its developer Michael Sweet, at Easy Software Products, in 2007, has chosen to abandon certain Linux exclusive features, and continuing with popular Mac OS X features.The changeover is being attempted by Appleto set new printing standards that will not require ‘drivers’ in the future. However, the journey in between from the present ‘driver-only’ printers that communities across the world are engaged to Apple’s printer-utopia, just got tougher and essentially involves more work for Linux users."
AMD

Submission + - KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The KWin window manager maintainer for KDE is looking at removing the legacy OpenGL 1.0 renderer from the KWin code-base due to the costs of supporting legacy hardware. This means dropping support for non-GL2+ graphics cards, which are all over six years old, but in the process would mean that for now there is no longer any support for the AMD Catalyst driver on the KDE desktop. Due to driver bugs, AMD's proprietary Catalyst software only works well with the GL1 renderer even though their latest hardware supports OpenGL 4.
Open Source

Submission + - Hackers In Space: Hackerspace Global Grid Interview (thepowerbase.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 Jens Ohlig, Lars Weiler, and Nick Farr proposed a daunting task: to land a hacker on the Moon by 2034. The plan calls for three separate phases:

Establishing an open, free, and globally accessible satellite communication network
Put a human into orbit
Land on the Moon
Interestingly enough, there is already considerable work being done on the second phase of this plan by the Copenhagen Suborbitals, and Google’s own Lunar X Prize is trying to spur development of robotic missions to the Moon. But what about the first phase? Answering the call is the “shackspace”, a hackerspace from Stuttgart, Germany, who’ve begun work on an ambitious project they’re calling the “Hackerspace Global Grid“.

We recently caught up with one of the core team members, hadez, who took some time to talk with us a bit about the current state of the project and what we should expect going forward.

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