Showing all newswire headlines

Android was everywhere at Mobile World Congress last week - there seems to be no stopping Google's mobile operating that's now almost as ubiquitous as a colour display. But the success hides the platform's problems, insists one analyst. Former Nomura analyst Richard Windsor paints a picture of increasing fragmentation creating a clear dividing line down the middle - with one half of the split populated by shoddy low-end devices that look good but "barely work".

The ‘rolling release’ meme has been a popular one for years in Ubuntu. It’s one of the top requests from members of our user community. And it’s popular with Canonical team members too (who, largely, come from the community and share its values). The problem for me is straightforward: a rolling release isn’t actually a release at all. It offers little certainty for those who need certainty. And we essentially accommodate the need for daily crack with our development releases, which have become highly usable (for developers) because of the strong commitment the Canonical and community teams made to daily quality throughout the release cycle.

Right now on Ubuntu they use ConsoleKit for managing logged-in users, but ConsoleKit is no longer maintained. The functionality of FreeDesktop.org's ConsoleKit has since been integrated within systemd. With no longer having upstream maintenance provided to them, the plan is to switch to logind. However, the logind component can mostly work without a full systemd-based system, so that's the only part they're looking at using for the future of Ubuntu.

The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.1, the first maintenance and bug fix release for LibreOffice 4.0, which arrived just under a month ago. The new version fixes over a hundred bugs and also sees an update of the Impress Remote in Google's Play store.

Nine years have gone by since Canonical was founded; the 19th release of its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution will take place in October this year. Thus, it is fair to assume that the founder of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, is by now used to the reaction whenever Ubuntu moves in a direction different to the prevailing conventional wisdom. The latest move is from the Wayland display server to Mir, a display server that is an in-house creation. As usual, there is moaning aplenty, while people try to find reasons for the announcement.

Apple vs. Samsung initially ended with a billion-dollar verdict in favor of Apple, but there have been plenty of wrinkles since. This week brought about another, as Nokia filed an amicus brief on behalf of Apple, Inc. in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Pete Herzog began an article he wrote for opensource.com last year about Hacker Highschool by saying: "It might sound strange, but every industry and profession could benefit from an employee as creative, resourceful, and motivated as a hacker." You see, Pete is not only motivated by what open source and open thinking can do to change our world, he is moved by it. He tell us that his passions change every few years, but always revolve around open source.

Systech recently demonstrated the first model in a new series of Linux-powered M2M (machine-to-machine) intelligent gateways at the Distributech smart grid conference in San Diego. The highly modular SysLink M2M Gateway series enables access to a wide variety of sensors and devices for monitoring and control purposes.

The STRaND-1 satellite, currently orbiting Earth, is getting ready to transfer spacecraft control over to a stock Nexus One smartphone running Android.

Puppy Linux is a distro I keep coming back to. No matter how entrenched I become with any flavor of Ubuntu, sans the Unity desktop or Linux Mint's Cinnamon and KDE desktops, nothing can beat the speed, convenience and reliability of Puppy Linux on a stick.

That would have gotten everyone’s attention. A fine of $731m USD sounds like a lot of money, but to an outfit like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, it’s chump change. If you want to send a message, make it hurt the other party at the receiving end.

Digium – which promotes Asterisk (the open source IP PBX) — has finally launched a cloud-based PBX service, aptly called SwitchVox Cloud. No doubt, there’s demand for hosted voice services. But what exactly is Digium's strategy here? Bryan Johns, a product manager at Digium, offered some insights to The VAR Guy.

In its latest sales campaign, the HumbleBundle team has released four commercial games for Android, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. As before, prospective buyers can choose their own price for the DRM-free game package. Buyers who pay more than the average price for the "Humble Bundle with Android 5" will receive two extra games. The current average price is $6.64. All games are DRM free, but there are no plans for any of the titles to be open sourced in this round of Humble Bundle.

Linux Caixa Mágica 19 has been released. Linux Caixa Mágica is a Portuguese Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and featuring the latest GNOME 3 desktop with GNOME Shell. The most important features of this release are software updates to GNOME 3.6, LibreOffice 3.6.2, Linux kernel 3.5, Mozilla Firefox 19.0 and Google Chrome 24.0.1312.56, as well as a new version of the Portuguese citizen card software program with support for digital signatures of PDF files. Another interesting new feature is the introduction of Caixa Mágica TopApps, a one-click, web-based software installation tool. This version offers a possibility to upgrade directly from Caixa Mágica 18, while Wubi, a utility designed to install the distribution from Windows, is also available.

Here it is, KDE Software Compilation 4.10.1. A few weeks ago, KDE 4.10.0 was added to Slackware-current, along with all its updated dependencies. Essentially that was the same set of packages which I had made available on my ‘ktown‘ repository earlier, Pat Volkerding simply recompiled them using the provided KDE.SlackBuild framework.

GNOME 3 is making major progress with each and every release. Six months ago, when 3.6 was close to release, I wrote about how excited I was about the improvements that were on their way. That release was a big step up from the previous version in terms of user experience. Now we’re on the cusp of GNOME 3.8, and I find myself in exactly the same position. Testing GNOME 3.8, it is a huge improvement on 3.6. It’s more effective, satisfying and polished. Basic operations like selecting a window or launching an application have seen major improvements and the overall experience feels like yet another upgrade.

LibreOffice 4.0 is now available to install for all Ubuntu 12.10 users. This process is not very difficult, unless you are lacking copy and paste abilities. Thankfully LibreOffice 4.0 will work on Ubuntu 12.10, 12.04 and any Ubuntu derivatives using the commands found here.

gThumb is one of Gnome’s great choices when it comes to image viewers and browsers, but I admit that we have overlooked it for far too long. With version 3.1.4 getting released a few hours ago, I had the chance to test the application new features and general abilities for a typical daily use.

It would seem that Oracle is getting serious about addressing security issues in Java. Late Monday the company pushed Java 7 Update 17 that fixes two security holes that were already being exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities addressed in Monday’s patch had been known since at least February 1 and were originally scheduled to be fixed in a scheduled security update in April, according to a security blog on the Oracle website:

... I have dozens of scripts on our support system here that had the old dyn.com domains in them for connection to the client sites when providing service each month. ...