Showing all newswire headlines

On the evening before the first online Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical has revealed its plans for "Mir", a next-generation display server which will run as a system-level component to replace the X Window system. Canonical has rejected Wayland, seen by many as the successor to X Windows, because they feel it recreates X semantics in its input event handling and parts of the protocol include privileged shell integration which the Mir specifiers would rather not have. The decisions along this path of development appear to have been taken in the summer of 2012.

Pretty much everyone agrees that Google's Chromebook Pixel is too expensive to just run the Chrome OS Web browser. But what if it could run Android tablet apps as well?

Here we go another Humble Bundle, this time an Android bundle! Pay what you want, get games, support charity.

Acer reportedly may ship 7 million Android tablets this year, based on data obtained from undisclosed sources in the company’s supply chain. “Acer currently ships 200,000-300,000 Iconia B1-A71 tablets, a 7-inch sub-$150 entry-level model, every month, and is set to launch an 8-inch model and another 10-inch one for the entry-level segment in the near [...]

In the flurry of polarized discussions that have emerged since yesterday's Ubuntu Mir announcement, some have speculated that Valve's interactions with Ubuntu may have had a hand in them developing their own display server. This is most likely not the case and the first-generation Linux-based Steam Box from Valve will almost surely be running an X.Org Server...

It is probably a fair bet that as long as humans are Homo sapiens we are going to see forking of our binaries. As with most things there are both reasons to cheer and have a feeling of doom. Here we are going to look at the three most popular Office Suites: OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and Microsoft Office.

Following two years of collaborative development, the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) this week announced the availability of v1.0 of MirrorLink, which defines methods for implementing interoperable phone-centric car connectivity. According to the CCC, MirrorLink enables controlling a nearby smartphone from the steering wheel or via dashboard buttons and screens. The technology is said to make [...]

Barry Kauler, the developer of the Puppy family of Linux distributions, has released version 5.5 of the Wary and Racy branches of the project. Wary is the edition of Puppy designed to be run on older hardware, whereas Racy has more features and needs more system resources but is based on Wary. For version 5.5, both editions had most of their underlying system libraries and some of the applications updated during the development phase; this took almost a year from the release of Wary 5.3 in April 2012.

Torvalds may have come to terms with the Linux GNOME interface, but what he really, really likes is his new Google Chromebook Pixel's display.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Scientific Linux 6.3 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. He is a professional 3D artist and co-director of Gecko Animation Ltd.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that since the release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012, it has seen 40 million downloads of the 3.4.x release series. This number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge; language packs and source tarballs were not counted. The ASF has released a comma-delimited text file with the download numbers for every individual day and has plotted the results in a graph showing the cumulative and daily downloads.

The X Window System is old, but it works. Many distros including Ubuntu, had been headed toward the use of Wayland as an alternative Linux display technology. Though apparently Wayland is not good enough for Ubuntu anymore. "The traction that Ubuntu Touch is creating is great and the team is happy with where this is leading us," Ubuntu Developer, Oliver Ries wrote. "However, in order to implement the vision of converged devices, some changes to our Display Stack are necessary. After thorough research, looking at existing options and weighing in costs & benefits we have decided to roll our own Display Server, Mir."

A new system launched to curb online piracy of intellectual property is meant to be educational, not punitive, says the organization behind it. But suspended Internet service or slowing service to a crawl sounds pretty punitive to critics of the Copyright Alert System (CAS).

Miguel de Icaza, well known the GNOME project founder and leader of the Mono camp, has left Linux for OS X...

Over the last couple of months there have been a number of discussions on the Arch boards about the forum policy of only providing support for Arch Linux, culminating in this long thread about Archbang users (login required) being denied support and having their threads summarily closed. As it emerged in the discussion, there seem to be two separate issues at play here; the question of Arch-derivatives using the Arch brand (logo, colours and even the forum style sheets), and how the wider community of GNU/Linux distributions are treated on our boards.

This week, a vote on updating the project bylaws, fixing the "Tomcat situation" after 4.1, and discussions around the support lifecycle. Some respectable progress in knocking out major and blocker bugs for 4.1.0 as well. The project also welcomes two new PPMC members and three new committers.

You must be thinking: “What do you mean by refreshing storage? I didn’t think you could drink storage?” No, sad to say, this blog post isn’t about the type of refreshment you get from a crisp cold glass of Anaconda Cola (yum!) It’s about the action of manually refreshing anaconda’s view on the storage configuration it’s working with. Why would you want to do that?

Let’s step back a second first. The custom partitioning tool in Anaconda (Fedora’s installer) still has a lot of rough edges to the design in Fedora 18 GA. The Anaconda team has been putting a lot of work into improving it in their Fedora 19 branch. We’ve got a ton of bugs, thoughtful (and some not so thoughtful ) comments from forums and blogposts, and some preliminary anaconda usability test data! (You’ll be hearing a lot more about that last bit soon, don’t worry! ) The team has pored over all of this information and has had a number of brainstorming sessions and discussions on how to address the identified issues, both over IRC, the mailing list, in bugs directly, and in person.

At the beginning of last year I tested the CompuLab Trim-Slice, which was a great ARM-based Linux desktop for the time. While the hardware now shows its signs of aging in the fast-paced ARM world, modern Linux distributions can still be loaded up on the platform...

The DRM Chair has only a limited number of use before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair. A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted.