Showing headlines posted by arnieswap

Watch out Canonical, here comes another fully open source mobile OS.

The KDE Community just announced its ambitious Plasma Mobile platform.

For a couple of years now I've been hearing rumors about YaST being switched to Ruby from the proprietary YCP language. However, up to recently I haven't stumbled across any substantiating evidence. Fact of the matter now though is that it is happening, and the next openSUSE release may even use the new Ruby based YaST.

KDE’s Plasma is the most popular desktop environment in the GNU/Linux world. The community was also working on a Windows port of KDE Plasma so that these users can also take advantage of KDE’s technologies. The Windows project was in the state of limbo for quite some time and now KDE SC 4.10.2 is available for Windows.

openSUSE is one of the few very few 'original' GNU/Linux distributions which are driving some of the core developments in the free software world, whether it be the kernel or office suite like LibreOffice. openSUSE also offers one of the most polished GNU/Linux experience. So when a team of developers decided to create an openSUSE derivative, tentatively called FuSE Linux, curiosity rose what value will they add to the already awesome distribution? I reached out to the team with a set of questions. Here is the interview with Mark “Kigurame Gallifrey” van Tinteren and the FuSE team.

I run KDE Plasma Workspaces on all my devices - Plasma Desktop on my PCs, Plasma Netbook on my, as obvious, netbooks and laptops and Plasma Active on my Nexus 7. The reason I chose Plasma over others is the features and functionality it offers which are missing from every other desktop environments.

However, I do come across users who don't want all these features and functionality and instead need a very limited set of applications and features. They find GNOME or Xfce to be the best solution for their needs. Xfce can be increasingly appealing for older and slower hardware (though I am running Plasma on an Atom powered Dell Mini, which is an extremely slow machine, but I see no issues in terms of performance on this device).

Free software projects heavily rely on user feedbacks, especially bug reports. Filing bug reports is one of the best ways for a user to contribute to his favorite app and make it better. However at times lack of proper bug report makes it harder for a developer to understand what problems a user is facing. So as important as it is to file a bug report, it's more important to file it correctly. Incorrect bug report irritates a user as he feels that no one pays attention to his report and discourages him to file a report in future. At the same time it irritates a developer because he wants to know what's wrong, help the user and make the application better he doesn't even understand what the problem is.

Subsurface, the dive-tracking program written by none other than Linus Torvalds, is considering moving to Qt. Dirk Hohndel writes on his Google + page: Looking for experienced +Qt Project developer(s) with an interest in scuba diving... He then explains that they are considering moving to Qt: Subsurface is seriously considering a move to Qt but doing so without at least one or two experienced Qt developers as part of the team seems pretty foolish to me. So if you have worked with Qt in the past and are interested in scuba diving (or interested in a new fast moving project to participate in), please drop me a line / comment here.

ZFS on Linux reaches an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release. Version 0.6.1 not only brings the usual bug fixes but also introduces a new property called 'snapdev'. "The 'snapdev' property was introduced to control the visibility of zvol snapshot devices and may be set to either 'visible' or 'hidden'. When set to 'hidden', which is the default, zvol snapshot devices will not be created under /dev/. To gain access to these devices the property must be set to 'visible' This behavior is analogous to the existing 'snapdir' property.

Now The Linux Foundation has stepped in with a solution which will allow every (and not just one distro or only Linux distro) open source operating system to run on UEFI secure boot systems.