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Kristian Høgsberg has now branched the Wayland and Weston code-bases for the 1.0 series...

Did you know you can make Google Translate talk? Preview Unicode characters on the command line? Generate entropy with the ls command? Use md5sum hashes to find duplicate files, regardless of their names? Test speakers? Fix roaming wifi? If you didn't before, you will after you read this article.

From the 'Open Source Goodness' files:

I remember well when I wrote about Firefox 1.0, which was officially released on November 9th, 2004. It was a very different time - and it was 8 years ago.

Well, as of right now more than 60,000 people have signed up to test out the beta. Not all of them have been accepted yet, but in true Linux fashion some of the ones who haven't been accepted have figured out how to get in anyway (which may or may not violate Valve's terms of service).

Tony Atkinson’s technical expertise runs deep as a Linux systems administrator for a telecommunications company in Essex, England. He works with the Asterisk PBX (private branch exchange) and communications server and Nagios notification system, writing and maintaining bespoke PHP and shell scripts to control and coordinate phone and SMS services and other general operations in the U.K., U.S.A. and Australia.

Ext4 (the fourth extended file system) has been the gold standard for the Linux kernel ever since it was declared "stable" in October 2008. It was the direct descendant of ext3 (released November 2001) which introduced journaling to the previously unjournaled ext2 file system that has been with us since 1993. Ever since its release into the wild, ext4 has proven to be fast and reliable. I've installed it onto more computers than I can count, and never had any reason to complain about it...until recently. But a serious bug has crept into the ext4 stable release, causing data corruption on some computers running Linux kernels 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6.

Over the past year I have looked at two distributions (Liberté and LPS) which have a strong focus on security. Staying secure and anonymous on-line is a popular topic these days as many people are concerned about freedom of speech and monitored communications. Many of us are concerned about our privacy and, with that in mind, I would like to introduce our readers to a Linux distribution called Tails.

This is a nagios plugin to check an OCSP server. It does so by having a PEM encoded certificate in the code, and the PEM encoded certificate of the issuer. This is sent to the OCSP server and the response is then parsed to give the correct nagios result. It is targeted at administrators who have their own OCSP and need to know when it is not working. The certificate is in the code because this saves going to a website and getting the certificate, the issuers certificate and then sending that to the OCSP server. It also can be used for certificates which are not public.

In the week ending 10 November - AMD laid off Linux developers, Linus Torvalds talked about kernel development, Android turned 5 and an E17 alpha arrived. Also, detecting CSRF vulnerabilities and DIY biology

The UN's Internet Governance Forum had a gathering to discuss rethinking copyright, in which WIPO made the case that it should lead "multi-stakeholder" discussions on how to reform copyright. WIPO, of course, has a history of having a rather one-sided view of copyright and who the "stakeholders" are.

Zurich, Switzerland - November 9, 2012 - CloudSigma, an international, customer-centric, pure-cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, today announced that it has joined The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux.

This post is more like a "note to self" for certain TCP parameters which I usually modify (or plan to modify) on production servers.

Facebook has open sourced its Corona scheduling component for Hadoop, which the company calls "the next version of Map-Reduce". Facebook is using its own fork of Apache Hadoop which is optimised for the massive scale of its operations.

In the latest beta release of its Chrome web browser, Google has added a number of new features aimed at developers. The first of these is expanded datalist support – now, developers can set specific dates and times for input elements. As pointed out by Google Software Engineer Peter Beverloo, arbitrary dates and times can still be entered.

While many Linux users are rightfully quite mad over AMD laying off many Linux kernel developers and shutting down their Operating System Research Center, not all hope is lost for future AMD CPU products being well supported under Linux. AMD's (few) graphics driver developers working on the open-source Radeon stack were unaffected by the recent layoffs and OSRC closure, while those Linux developers working on future CPU product enablement, compiler optimizations, enhancing Linux virtualization support, and other areas were the ones hit very hard.

DIY biology is a hot topic and has piqued the interest of the Wellcome Trust and NESTA in the UK and the FBI in the US. What has it got to do with open source and hacking? Quite a lot as it happens and those curious could get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking, at a series of workshops held in Manchester over the weekend of 3 and 4 November 2012.

Release pushed back until 2013 Delays continue to plague development of the popular Fedora Linux distribution, with Fedora 18's original November ship date now pushed back to January 2013 at the earliest.…

Microsoft has added several vendors to the list of electronics manufacturers that are paying it licensing fees for using Google's Android operating system and/or Linux in their products. The company has long-claimed that Linux and Android, a Linux derivative, violates Windows patents, and in the past has threatened to sue alleged infringers that don't pay up.

Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth - a friend and my former boss at Canonical - has never had much love for rival Linux vendor Red Hat. So when he labelled Red Hat Enterprise Linux "legacy" technology during his keynote at LinuxCon in Barcelona, Spain, this week, aligning it with Solaris' faded glory, it was perhaps not surprising.

So it's been a while since I personally did a question time with anyone, this week the developers behind the Interstellar Marines are up! Interstellar Marines is an in development FPS for Linux, Mac and Windows currently on Kickstarter.