Showing all newswire headlines

The Gdev open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time implementation is still being actively developed while PathScale's "PSCNV" fork of the Nouveau driver hasn't seen new commit activity in months...

It's that time when many of us begin to reflect on what we've accomplished over the past year. It's also a great time to think about how others have helped us finish those projects and achieve our goals. To help say "Thank You," the opensource.com team has added several new eCards to our resource section. We hope this is an easy way to thank your open source colleagues and friends—the ones that make this community so awesome.

Software patents have long been contentious things, but patents in other areas of science are also becoming frequent subjects of editorials and court cases, with biotech and genomics making it to the Supreme Court. Now, if an editorial in Nature is to be believed, nanotechnology is set to become the latest patent battleground.

Joshua Pearce is a professor at Michigan Technological University, and he very explicitly argues for taking an open-source and open-access approach to nanotechnology research. But he also goes well beyond that, calling for a patent moratorium and a gutting of the law that governs tech transfers from government-funded university research. At stake, he argues, is the growth of a field that could be generating trillions of dollars of economic activity within a few years.

Gnome Team awakens, coffee is smelled.

Bio-Linux 7 is a full-featured, powerful, configurable and easy-to-maintain bioinformatics workstation. Bio-Linux provides more than 500 bioinformatics programs on an Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS base. There is a graphical menu for bioinformatics programs, as well as easy access to the Bio-Linux bioinformatics documentation system and sample data useful for testing programs. Bio-Linux 7 adds many improvements over previous versions, including the Galaxy analysis environment. There are also various packages to handle new generation sequence data types. You can install Bio-Linux on your machine, either as the only operating system, or as part of a dual-boot setup which allows you to use your current system and Bio-Linux on the same hardware.

Earlier this month it was decided that GNOME 3.8 would get rid of the GNOME Shell Fallback mode used for running the desktop environment in a way similar to the GNOME 2 "classic" environment while also not requiring any 3D GPU/driver configuration. Earlier today there was basically a call for forking the GNOME Classic/Fallback code so it could live on, but now it's been announced that some of the user-interface/experience elements will be brought to the GNOME 3.x world in a manner that's more easy for users to optionally enable...

In Stallman's view, the idea that society might be able to eliminate "bad patents" while keeping good ones is a kind of Jedi mind trick. Offering patents as a reward for software development—a system where the prize is a right to shut down someone else—is fatally flawed.

Last week the council revealed it was contemplating the switch when it said that its hopes and expectations for OpenOffice in 2007 were not fulfilled. Continuing to use the outdated OpenOffice 3.2.1 in combination with Microsoft Office 2000 would lead to more aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties as well as performance impairments, the council said.

The Linux Foundation's promised workaround that will allow Linux to boot on Windows 8 PCs has yet to clear Microsoft's code certification process, although the exact reason for the hold-up remains unclear. As The Reg reported previously, the Secure Boot feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) found on modern Windows 8 PCs will only allow an OS to boot if its code has been digitally signed with a key obtained from Microsoft.

But the German government has made an official statement on Secure Boot (and Trusted Computing). Since it’s just a position statement, it does not count as a legal challenge to Microsoft, but it’s s start.

Marc Espie, a senior OpenBSD developer says that upstream vendors of free and open source software are adding in changes without any thought of whether downstream users could adapt to the change. And he has warned that this would hurt smaller players by not allowing them to keep up with the changes. Basically what is happening is that numerous changes are being made to Linux and smaller projects like OpenBSD cannot keep up with the changes, all of which, are not strictly necessary.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on December 8th - 9th, 2012 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: November 21, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced volunteer awards for Anselm Lingnau of Linup Front, Weiterstadt, Germany and Michael Gisbers of Linux-Schmie.de, Oberhausen, Germany in recognition of their contributions and commitment to LPI's Linux Essentials program. The two volunteers were amongst 70 Linux professionals and 56 IT organizations and academic institutions who assisted in the exam development process for Linux Essentials (http://lpi.org/linux-certifications/introductory-programs/li...).

Mozilla has made its Web browser more social -- and more secure -- with the release of Firefox 17. The latest version of the foundation's popular browser includes a plug-in that displays notifications and instant messages from Facebook in a sidebar. The plug-in is the first implementation of the Social API introduced by Mozilla in July.

KMyMoney is a comprehensive finance-tracking application that does not require an accounting degree to use effectively. Linux provides several hearty checkbook and banking programs. Among the more well-known are GNUCash, Grisbi, Skrooge and MoneyDance. Each of these contenders for your attention have their own unique look and feel.

Blockee is a web application that lets you visualize improvements to your block. It was built as a Labs Friday project by Jesse Bounds, Nick Doiron, Serena Wales and myself. You can try it out at Blockee.org.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published RFC 6797, formally declaring the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) security mechanism for HTTPS as an Internet Standard. HSTS is designed to allow (HTTP) servers to ensure that any services offered can only be accessed via secure connections that are encrypted using mechanisms such as Transport Layer Security (TLS). From a client perspective, HSTS forces applications (User Agents) to only use encrypted connections when communicating with web sites. Sites such as the Open Web Application Security Project's describe how to implement the use of HSTS in web servers such as Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd.

In quantum physics, one of the calculations you might want to do is figure out how two or more particles may interact. This can become rather complicated and confusing once you get to more than two particles interacting, however. Also, depending on the interaction, there may be the creation and annihilation of virtual particles as part of the interaction. How can you keep all of this straight and figure out what could be happening?

Despite several attempts, the Linux Foundation's James Bottomley has not managed to get Microsoft to sign the mini bootloader for starting Linux on systems with UEFI Secure Boot. In a blog post, the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) member says that he successfully managed to use a Linux system for various preparatory bootloader signing tasks, although Microsoft stipulates that a specific Windows platform must be used. However, Bottomley said that to upload the CAB file containing the bootloader, he had to use a virtual machine with Windows 7 because this step requires Silverlight, and the open source Moonlight implementation of Silverlight didn't work.