Showing all newswire headlines

It's time for another bi-weekly development Wine release for running Windows binaries on Linux and other operating systems...

From a security perspective, the most interesting feature of the UEFI Setup Utility is OMG (the Online Management Guard). It is a parental control system built into the motherboard. Neat.

The Unity WebApps feature has been available in Ubuntu 12.10 for some time, but besides the Amazon and Ubuntu One Music Store webapps which are installed by default, no other webapps were available for installation. Today, the webapps that were available in the preview PPA are available in the official Ubuntu 12.10 repositories, but as separate packages so you can install only the webapps you want and use.

That's right, the long wait is finally over and a new stable release of Slackware has arrived! Since our last stable release, a lot has changed in the Linux and FOSS world.

Taking a brief break from his direct work on Wayland, Kristian Høgsberg has published his "Render Nodes" work for DRM2 following the recent DRM2 proposal...

Thanks to the Google Summer of Code, the openSUSE distribution made progress on several fronts...

Today's been quite a busy news day for a Friday, but it's not over yet. Slackware 14.0 was released today after being in development for more than one year...

The bright, shining light in open source hardware -- software-wise anyway, as the hardware ain't all that open -- has been the $35 Raspberry Pi single-board computer that runs Linux, sips power and has a great deal of the world busy crafting enclosures, fine-tuning OS images and basically geeking out. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But there will be competitors. Others that want to take the throne.

While it's been a number of days since mentioning anything on Intel's forthcoming Valley View Atom SoC, the open-source graphics driver support continues to mature...

As you hopefully recall, Aereo is the online TV service, backed by Barry Diller, that sets you up with your very own physical TV antenna on a rooftop in Brooklyn, connected to a device that will then stream to you online what that antenna picks up. This ridiculously convoluted setup is an attempt to route around the ridiculous setup of today's copyright law -- something that Oman was intimately involved in creating with the 1976 Copyright Act. The TV networks sued Aereo, but were unable to get an injunction blocking the service. Oman's amicus brief seeks to have that ruling overturned, and argues that an injunction is proper.

But he goes much further than that in his argument, even to the point of claiming that with the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress specifically intended new technologies to first apply to Congress for permission, before releasing new products on the market that might upset existing business models:

A few years ago, Jackson, while deployed in Iraq, wrote a book about Python (the programming language) called Start Programming with Python. He decided to give away the book for free, as a "thank you" to the open source community which, he notes, has provided him with tremendous value over the years. He has always made the book available for free, and linked to various sources where you can get it. At the same time, he's offered people the option to support him via donation. He also made a little bit of money via Google AdSense ads on his site.

Last week, he was contacted by a Google bot, telling him that AdSense had been disabled. Why? Because they claimed he was distributing copyrighted content illegally. The email, which I've seen, notes that his account has been disabled for the following reason:

Pat Volkerding is finally satisfied and has released his latest offering. Slackers rejoice!

However, the jury found that Samsung had not violated the patent that was the basis for the tablet injunction and Samsung argued the sales ban should be lifted. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh said she could not act because Samsung had already appealed.

Ah, life imitating art (or art accidentally imitating life). Earlier this year, we had Rob Reid post an excerpt and discuss his new novel, Year Zero, concerning aliens listening to Earth music for free, without a license... and then realizing that they've been infringing our copyrights for years, and owe the record labels more money than exists in the galaxy. Funny story, right?

Except... as Joe Betsill points out, apparently at least EMI really was afraid that aliens might listen to music without a license.

After being in beta for a while, HP's Open webOS has a new release: version 1.0...

The top utility will need little introduction to seasoned Linux users. top is a small utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It allows users to monitor the processes that are running on a system.

An alpha release of the Tizen 2.0 SDK with source-code was released this week...

The Joomla developers have released version 3.0 of their open source CMS. Many new features, and new standard templates for the web site and administrator areas that also work on mobile devices, justify the major version jump

As part of a facelift, the Nautilus file manager has gained and lost a number of features. The Boxes VM tool and the GNOME Disks utility, which are also of interest for Cinnamon and Unity users, have matured. The account manager now allows programs to access Facebook friends and Microsoft's SkyDrive

A decade of real choice - there's no app for that Open ... and Shut It's hard to believe it now, but not too long ago the web was dangerously close to being owned by one vendor: Microsoft.…