Showing all newswire headlines

Martin Peres and Timothée Ravier ignited the Linux graphics security discussion this morning in Brussels during FOSDEM. Their talk, which was entitled "DRI-next/DRM2: A walk through the Linux Graphics stack and its security", went over the current issues and some of what's being tried to improve the situation. The idea ultimately comes down to exposing a secure API to user-land and restricting GPU's RAM access rights.

The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie is the complete guide to the ANSI standard C language programming. The authors are the developers of C, and show readers show to take advantage of all of the rich tapestry of C. The book is a classic. However, there is a good range of books that teach C and are available to download without charge. To cater for all tastes, we have chose a diverse selection of informative books for C.

If you’re a Linux desktop user like myself you may have experienced problems finding for a decent Twitter client. In many distributions the default is Gwibber, it’s even integrated into the Unity desktop for Ubuntu. I’ve used it on and off for years but it’s monumentally slow, buggy and unstable. Whenever I try Gwibber it hangs and I get the classic Compiz grey window while I wait for the machine to stop having a panic attack. All I’m trying to do is refresh my messages. Out of frustration and purely by chance I stumbled across the answer, Turpial. A lightweight Python app for the Linux desktop. Finally I can take Gwibber out the back and shoot it.

Oracle has released a large package of security updates for Java which addresses 50 vulnerabilities in Java both in the browser and in the server. The "Critical Patch Update February 2013" (CPU) for Java had been scheduled, says Oracle, for 19 February, but due to one of the vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, the company brought the release forward. Oracle advise users to install the update as soon as possible because of "the threat posed by a successful attack". This probably explains why Apple disabled Java at the end of the week, as they most likely knew the update was arriving early.

It's déjà vu all over again for Microsoft, as Black Duck Software has named Redmond's TypeScript project among its 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year - despite Microsoft spending nearly a decade trying to figure out this crazy communist software manifesto. Back in 2001, Microsoft labeled open source a "cancer," "un-American," and a threat to rich software capitalists everywhere. By 2003, however, it was limping along the right track with the introduction of its Shared Source Initiative, and not long after started releasing open-source code of its own and creating its own open-source software lab. So why is Microsoft still considered an open-source rookie in 2013, 10 years later?

One of the first high-quality raw photo editors available for Linux desktops was LightZone, but although it was (initially) free of charge, it was a proprietary product. Unfortunately the small company behind it eventually folded, and both the free and paid versions went away, as did the updates required to support newer cameras. The company shut its doors for good in 2011, but the software has made a sudden—and unexpected—comeback as an open source project. Fans of the original will be pleased, but the nascent effort still has considerable work ahead before it grows into a self-sustaining community project.

Psychonauts from Double Fine is now available for Linux DRM-Free via their web store.

The OUYA (a $99 game console based on Google Android) could take the best of the mobile gaming model and move it into U.S. living rooms. Can traditional business software developers learn from this strategy? Absolutely yes. Here's why.

This obviously isn't a new question for us here at Techdirt. It's been a point of logical frustration for consumers that content producers often seem to want their output treated like property when it suits them, but as a service or license when it does not. This leads to, at the very least, the appearance of double-dipping on the part of content producers. For gamers, where used games are such an intregal part of the marketplace, the frustration often boils over. In my estimation, it's quite difficult to draw up a logical proof for limiting the rights to a product for the consumer while strengthening the rights for the producer. Such an arrangement is simply too one-sided in who is giving up whose rights.

The best Gnome 3 experience on BSD can be found where you'd least expect it. It is no secret that I am becoming quite fond of PC-BSD: it is stabilizing nicely and offers a feature-rich BSD at one end and an amazing selection of window managers at the other. One thing it's missing however is Gnome 3. Love it or hate it, Gnome 3 is boldly exploring "modern" desktop territory with the Gnome Shell which aggressively provides both elegant eye candy and swift navigation. Surprisingly, the best place to experience Gnome 3 on BSD is perhaps where you would least expect it: OpenBSD

I’m testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn’t do an install, though I’m certainly thinking about it. In this release’s GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications — all from GNOME proper — like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the “global” menu that pops down from the app’s icon in the upper panel. While not catastrophic, it is problematic.

The Cave is a new adventure game from Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert, and Double Fine Productions, the award-winning studio behind Psychonauts and Brütal Legend. The Linux release has been delayed for a week.

A wireless shutter trigger for a DSLR camera can come in handy in many situations. And if you already own an Android device, you don’t have to splurge on a dedicated remote trigger.

Matthew Garrett has written a new article summarizing the state of UEFI/SecureBoot on Linux. Overall, the situation isn't good if you're using hardware from one of three major vendors...

Bonding allows you to aggregate multiple ports, providing redundancy, fault tolerance and load balancing. There are various types of bonding available but i will show how to bond in mode 1 which is active-backup. If your interested in the other available types please refer to the documentation. In this setup i have two connections to different switches in case one fails the other takes over and services are not disrupted.

In December 2012, a number of vulnerabilities in MySQL and its clones were revealed. Two of the issues were dealt with by the MariaDB developers almost immediately, while others were left outstanding. Now, MariaDB developers have released updates which address the other issues.

PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE-MiniME 2013.02 are now available for download. These are 32-bit quarterly update ISO images which can also be installed on 64-bit computers. With respect to the previous KDE editions these ISO images have the following changes and additions: KDE 4.9.5, Linux kernel 3.2.1; latest full set of NVIDIA drivers; Konsole with additional root profile. KDE 2013.02 has all the additions from MiniME above and was built to provide a general purpose KDE desktop computing environment. The DVD includes popular tools for office, audio, video, graphics, and Internet applications (LibreOffice, GIMP, Skype, TeamViewer, Dropbox, VirtualBox, etc.), as well as additional drivers and tools to set up your hardware.

This is the second post in my series on developing GUI applications in Elementary using Python. Today we are going to continue building on the Hello Elementary example I started in the first tutorial.

Microsoft is once again trying to show it will play nice with open source by adding support to Git in the next TFS update

I’ve been quiet for a while, so it’s time to give an update about what’s happening with the Linux Foundation secure boot loader (Especially as this has recently been presented at LCA2013 [slides]).