Showing all newswire headlines

KDE's Sebastian Kügler has written how the Plasma 2 shell has become "somewhat usable" for early adopters and KDE enthusiasts for the technologies that will really be taking on the Linux desktop in 2014.

New version of the Xen Hypervisor has been released.

Lisp is one of those languages that people either love or hate. Count me among the Lisp lovers. I was brainwashed during my undergraduate studies at MIT to believe that Lisp is the only "real" programming language out there, and that anything else is a pale imitation. True, I use Python and Ruby in my day-to-day work, but I often wish I had the chance to work with Lisp on a regular basis.

Ubuntu 13.10 has arrived. And System76 has launched a touch-based Ubuntu notebook. Can the Darter Ultrathin counter Microsoft Surface, Apple MacBook Air and other even touch-based tablets?

The oSSum13 program includes keynotes, talks, workshops and a lot of fun. oSSum13 takes place November 15-17, 2013 following SUSEcon , our main sponsors' yearly conference. Registrations finalized before November 1st include free admission to Technology Showcase and Keynotes of SUSEcon on Friday November 15.

The Wireshark Foundation has announced that Wireshark 1.10.3, the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer, is now available for download, a version that patches vulnerabilities, fixes bugs, and updates protocols.

In my recent review of Lubuntu 13.10 I mentioned that it is possible to customise the Lubuntu desktop. This article shows you how to manipulate the LXDE controls to alter the desktop appearance, add panels and position them, create items on panels and modify the menu.

Aaron Seigo was the KDE developer to challenge Mark Shuttleworth to a public debate over his colorful comments regarding those opposed to Canonical's Mir Display Server for Ubuntu. Two weeks have passed since suggesting this public debate and there's still been no public response by Mark Shuttleworth, though Jono Bacon and others have commented on the matter.

Voyager Live 13.10 has been released. Voyager Live is a Xubuntu-based distribution with a highly customised Xfce desktop and a large number of usability improvements. These include retractable dynamic panels, the Skippy "exposé" plugin, and the Slingscold launcher for starting applications. Also presented on the desktop are Plank, a configurable and responsive dock for launching programs, a much-improved "Box Wall" for changing themes on the four virtual desktops, an excellent backup utility called "Box Backup", a new Conky control tool, and Startpages that allow to append applications and websites to any of the virtual desktops.

Aldebaran Robotics and Nuance Communications are teaming up to help Aldebaran’s pint-sized Nao humanoid robot interact better with its human companions — in 19 different languages. Nao, which runs a customized version of Gentoo Linux on its 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 brain, is touted as a programmable, interactive humanoid robot featuring motion, vision, tactile, and audio capabilities. All that, and it’s cute, too!

Google bid for the patents, but it didn't get them. Instead, the patents went to a group of competitors—Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony—operating under the name "Rockstar Bidco." The companies together bid the shocking sum of $4.5 billion. Patent insiders knew that the Nortel portfolio was the patent equivalent of a nuclear stockpile: dangerous in the wrong hands, and a bit scary even if held by a "responsible" party.

This afternoon, that stockpile was finally used for what pretty much everyone suspected it would be used for—launching an all-out patent attack on Google and Android.

Imagine being able to call for help without actually having your phone in your hand -- or how about controlling your phone from the palm of your hand, even if your Android or iOS device is stowed away in your pocket or purse?

I spent yesterday testing two-step verification with the best of intentions, but what I learned was that as currently designed it's just too hard. It worked fine on my PC, but every time I tried to use it on my mobile device, it went haywire and I shut it down. Too bad too because the password is clearly not enough.

Keith Packard put out the first release candidate to X.Org Server 1.15 this morning. The merge window is now over and a number of new features ended up getting merged for this delayed released...

On October 2nd, we ran a poll and asked our readers, mostly free software devotees, to pick from a list of seven statements the one that best described where Microsoft would be five years from now.

With a proposed change to the xf86-video-ati X.Org DDX driver, tiling support will be enabled by default for Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" hardware by default in order to boost performance...

Today in Open Source: Fedora 20 delayed by bugs. Plus: Kwheezy 1.3 screenshot tour, and how to install Ubuntu 13.10

Here at Linux Journal, we love system administrators. Partially, that's because many of us are system administrators, but more than that, we all realize just how important sysadmins are to any organization—and how overlooked they usually are.

After last week delivering a Linux hardware review of the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card with the binary Catalyst driver on Ubuntu, and then yesterday looking at the Radeon Gallium3D driver posing a threat to Catalyst when using the mature "R600g" driver on HD 5000/600 series hardware, up today are new open vs. closed-source benchmarks. In this article we're looking at the performance of the Radeon R9 270X GPU when using the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source graphics stack, then when upgrading to Mesa 10.0 with Linux 3.12 DPM, and then comparing those numbers to the proprietary Catalyst Linux graphics driver.

This is a solo Xfce build, focusing on bringing Xfce visually on par with modern desktop environments while at the same time keeping stability and speed a top priority. This is our 4th release and a major stepping stone as we have moved away from Ubuntu and moved completely to Debian as a base for this and future versions. This version is built from scratch and has undergone extensive testing while using it on a daily basis. Major changes since 3.0: rolling release; upgraded kernel to 3.10.3; extremely stable and fast; single desktop environment (Xfce upgraded to 4.10); easy to use traditional style environment; complete new look (themes, icons, decorations, wallpaper, lots of customisations); featuring complete out-of-the-box pre-installed software, codecs, Flash player and games.