Important Linux News

The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project's rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.

LibreOffice is a community-driven fork of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The project started after Oracle's acquisition of Sun with the aim of offering a better governance model and a more inclusive environment than OOo. LibreOffice quickly attracted the support of the major Linux distributors and a large number of independent developers.

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An anonymous reader writes "Enterprise Storage Forum's long-awaited Linux file system Fsck testing is finally complete. Find out just how bad the Linux file system scaling problem really is."

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Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

The project is part of Mozilla's broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilities of native applications. Introducing support for push notifications will help to close the gap, because the feature is one of the major advantages that native mobile clients have historically offered over the browser for accessing Web services.

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In October 2010, Microsoft started working toward making the OpenStack open source project compatible with Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software. The project now seems to be hitting a snag—much as Microsoft's submission of Hyper-V drivers to the Linux kernel once did—but Microsoft says it is committed to making good on its OpenStack promises just as it did with Hyper-V and Linux.

OpenStack, a framework for creating infrastructure-as-a-service cloud networks from pools of virtual servers, is backed by Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Dell, AMD, Intel, and others. The project attempts to support multiple hypervisors, including VMware and Xen, but one developer handling release management for OpenStack recently suggested removing Hyper-V code, calling it "broken and unmaintained."

Microsoft, however, said it is "committed to working with the community to resolve the current issues with Hyper-V and OpenStack," according to an IDG News Service article published yesterday. The situation is reminiscent of Microsoft's long project to get Hyper-V drivers into the Linux kernel itself. Microsoft submitted the drivers in 2009 after it was revealed that its use of open source components in a Hyper-V driver violated the GPL free software license. While that project stalled a couple of times, we were just told by Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman this week that the Hyper-V/Linux integration is in good shape.

The same thing could very well happen with OpenStack, although it's not clear Microsoft has as much incentive to shape up its code this time around. OpenStack can give service providers the tools to build services that compete against Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, or it can give enterprise customers alternatives to VMware's management tools or even Microsoft's own virtualization and private cloud management tools. But even if the Hyper-V/OpenStack integration was perfect, it might not gain a huge audience. CEO Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud Computing, an OpenStack vendor, told the IDG News Service that he's not aware of any production deployments of Hyper-V with OpenStack.

When it comes to making money, it's probably far more important for Microsoft to provide a credible alternative to VMware while also supporting data centers that use both VMware and Hyper-V. And Microsoft is already doing that with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager product, which manages Hyper-V and VMware deployments from the same piece of software.

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An anonymous reader writes "The CEO of the once fledging Linux Game Publishing, Michael Simms, has announced his resignation. Simms attributes his resignation from the Linux game porting company he founded more than a decade ago to being burned out and having little success as of late in his work." In his place, Clive Crouse will be taking the helm.

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New submitter udas writes "Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel's stable branch, has left his job with SUSE Linux. He is now a fellow at the Linux Foundation. 'There were no direct conflicts working for SUSE, as the people there understand how important the individual developer, and their voice, is in the Linux community,' Kroah-Hartman told Ars this week in an e-mail interview. 'But, working in a vendor-neutral environment like the Linux Foundation allows me to spend a larger amount of time interacting with other companies and vendors, as well as helping Linux out in environments that were not necessarily the focus of my previous employer.'"

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While id Software may have recently lost its main Linux game developer (Timothee Bessett), they haven't abandoned their open-source ways. This afternoon John Carmack had an interesting tweet...

While id Software may have recently lost its main Linux game developer (Timothee Bessett), they haven't abandoned their open-source ways. This afternoon John Carmack had an interesting tweet...

 

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Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel's stable branch and the Linux driver project, is leaving his position with SUSE to join the Linux Foundation in a full-time fellowship role. Kroah-Hartman will now have more time to oversee kernel development and work with the Linux community, while leaving aside the responsibility of working for a vendor. (The SUSE Linux project was owned by Novell, and now Attachmate.)

"There were no direct conflicts working for SUSE, as the people there understand how important the individual developer, and their voice, is in the Linux community," Kroah-Hartman told Ars this week in an e-mail interview. "But, working in a vendor-neutral environment like the Linux Foundation allows me to spend a larger amount of time interacting with other companies and vendors, as well as helping Linux out in environments that were not necessarily the focus of my previous employer."

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jfruh writes "Mandriva, a venerable Linux distro, is on the verge of shutting down. One of its main problems is that it never grew into more than just an OS vendor. The big players in the commercial Linux space — Red Hat, SuSE, Canonical — all built Linux into their larger computing visions. Is there any room in the marketplace for just a straight-up Linux distro anymore?"

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Mozilla has officially released Firefox 10. The new version of the open source Web browser includes a handful of improvements and new features. The browser's built-in tools for Web developers got a particularly significant boost in this release. The new version also offers better support for a number of Web standards.

Firefox's developers decided last year to transition the browser to a time-based, six-week release cycle. The new release management strategy ensures that performance improvements and support for new Web standards reach users as soon as possible. The faster release cycle posed challenges, however, for enterprise adopters and other users who require a longer a longer support period. In order to address that issue, Mozilla has decided to offer an annual extended support release with a full year of updates. Firefox 10 is the first official extended support release.

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Color management has historically been a weak area for the Linux desktop, but the situation is rapidly improving. Support for desktop-wide color management is being facilitated by projects like KDE's Oyranos and the GNOME Color Manager.

Red Hat developer Richard Hughes, who started implementing the GNOME Color Manager in 2009, launched a small company last year to sell an open source colorimeter--a hardware device that is used to perform color calibration. The Linux-compatible device, which is called the ColorHug, will retail for £60 (early adopters can currently order it at a sale price of £48). He has already received a few hundred orders and is building more units to meet the unexpected demand.

Unlike existing colorimeters, the ColorHug is an open hardware design with open drivers and open firmware. The source code and hardware schematics have all been published on Gitorious. In a detailed interview that Banu published this week, Hughes described the project in detail and discussed some aspects of the hardware design.

"The ColorHug is an open source colorimeter. It's designed from scratch, and every part is 100% open source. All the other colorimeters you can buy in shops have proprietary code that means we have to reverse engineer the hardware to make it work on Linux, and then we can't modify the hardware to do something else, or fix bugs and add features like you can with open source hardware," he said.

You can find more details at the ColorHug website. The ColorHug is currently backordered, but purchasing information can be found here.

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Major e-mail providers, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are teaming up with PayPal, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more, to implement a new system for authenticating e-mail senders to try to prevent the sending of fradulent spam and phishing messages.

The protocol that powers e-mail, SMTP, dates back to a more trusting era; a time when the only people who sent you e-mails were people you wanted to send you e-mails. SMTP servers are willing to accept pretty much any e-mail destined for a mailbox they know about (which is, admittedly, an improvement on how things used to be, when they'd accept e-mails even for mailboxes they didn't know about), a fact which spammers and phishers exploit daily.

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mpol writes "KDE's Plasma Active introduced last Saturday its own 7" tablet. According to Aaron J. Seigo, 'It's the first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed.' The Spark, with its 7" screen, is built around a Cortex A9 with a Mali-400-gpu, 512MB RAM and an SD-card slot. It will have a 800x480 screen resolution and will cost around 200 Euro. It is actually a rebrand of the Zenithink ZT-180 C71, which comes with Android by default. On a personal note, Aaron J. Seigo will no longer be sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks to work on Qt and KDE. He will, however, stay involved with KDE and Free Software, he says."

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As Flash's ubiquity begins to erode, standards-based Web technologies are going to become the path forward for developers who want to offer a user experience that works across all screens. The HTML5 video element is already widely supported in modern Web browsers, but the capabilities and codecs that are available differ between implementations.

A new State of HTML5 Video document offers some clarity by painting a clear picture of the current status of standards-based video across the spectrum of browsers and mobile environments. The document was authored by LongTail Video, the company behind JW Player, a very popular video playback framework that supports Flash and HTML5.

Based on statistics from various browser marketshare trackers, LongTail says that two thirds of Internet users are running browsers that support HTML5. Support for standard HTML video element attributes is relatively consistent, though there are gaps: Android and iOS both lack support for the preload and autoplay attributes, for example.

Fullscreen playback and support for adaptive streaming are still highly limited. The latter will likely be remedied in the future as MPEG's DASH standard sees adoption. Codec compatibility is still a tricky issue—some browser vendors are standing behind H.264 while others favor Google's WebM.

LongTail says it will keep the document updated as the status of Web video evolves.

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The developers behind the KDE project have released version 4.8 of the open source desktop environment. The minor release brings a number of new features and technical improvements to the KDE platform, desktop shell, and application stack.

The Plasma Workspace has been undergoing an overhaul to take advantage of QML, a declarative user interface development framework that is part of Nokia's open source Qt toolkit. Several parts of the Plasma environment, such as the device status notification system and the splash screen, have been updated to use QML.

QML has also been adopted to power some new features in KWin, such as the much-improved keyboard window switcher, which is now configurable and supports several visual styles. The KDE developers are building a specialized Qt Quick Components widget set for Plasma, which was introduced in this release and will make it easier for Plasmoid creators to adopt QML.

A number of programs in the KDE application stack also got noteworthy improvements. KMail got an architectural overhaul and Dolphin has a new display engine that is said to be more efficient.

On the platform side of the KDE software collection, there's a new password management framework called KSecretService that is designed to conform with the Secret Service API, a new cross-desktop password management standard that was drafted through FreeDesktop.org. This means that GNOME and KDE are finally on a path towards having fully interoperable password managers.

Kubuntu 11.10 users who want to get their hands on 4.8 can obtain it from the backports PPA.

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The more I use AutoKey, the more I believe it to be an essential piece of software for the Linux desktop. If you happened to miss my last article about it, AutoKey is a system-wide service that allows you to easily set scripts to run when certain key combinations are pressed. AutoKey also lets you set text shortcuts for longer words or phrases.

The more I use AutoKey, the more I believe it to be an essential piece of software for the Linux desktop. If you happened to miss my last article about it, AutoKey is a system-wide service that allows you to easily set scripts to run when certain key combinations are pressed. AutoKey also lets you set text shortcuts for longer words or phrases.

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation is building a low-cost Linux computer with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU. The board, which is roughly the size of a pack of playing cards, entered the manufacturing stage last month. There will be two models, priced at $25 and $35, with different specifications.

The board is built around the Broadcom BCM2835 chipset, which is designed to handle intensive multimedia. In a recent interview, Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton claimed that the Broadcom graphics hardware in the Raspberry Pi offers twice the performance of the iPhone 4S GPU and soundly beats NVIDIA's Tegra 2. Upton worked for Broadcom on the team that developed the hardware.

At the SCALE 10x conference this month, developers from the XBMC project demonstrated their software running on a Raspberry Pi board. XBMC is a popular open source media center application that has advanced library management features and support for playing video in numerous formats. The XBMC developers ported the media center to the Raspberry Pi using a developer hardware unit supplied by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The demo, which can be viewed in a YouTube video, shows that XBMC runs reasonably well on the Raspberry Pi hardware and is relatively responsive. It was able to smoothly play an H.264-encoded 1080p video. Another video that was published this month shows Nokia's open source Qt toolkit running on the Raspberry Pi, demonstrating the use of OpenGL shaders in Qt's declarative QML user interface framework.

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HP has published the code of Enyo, the underlying JavaScript framework of the webOS platform. It is available from a public repository on GitHub and is distributed as open source software under the permissive Apache license. The release of Enyo is the first step in HP's plan to completely open the webOS mobile platform.

The webOS platform is built on top of Linux, but has a proprietary application stack that is made with HTML and JavaScript. HP obtained the platform in its 2010 acquisition of failing device manufacturer Palm. At the time, HP said it intended to ship the webOS software environment on a wide range of products, including tablets, printers, and desktop computers.

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angry tapir writes "Linux vendors are rushing to patch a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel that can be exploited by local attackers to gain root access on the system. The vulnerability, which is identified as CVE-2012-0056, was discovered by Jüri Aedla and is caused by a failure of the Linux kernel to properly restrict access to the '/proc//mem' file."

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jrepin writes "The KDE community has released version 4.8 of their Free and open source software bundle. The new version provides many new features, improved stability, and increased performance. Highlights for Plasma Workspaces include window manager optimizations, the redesign of power management, and integration with Activities. The first Qt Quick-based Plasma widgets have entered the default installation of Plasma Desktop, with more to follow in future releases. KDE applications released today include Dolphin file manager with its new display engine, ..., and KDE Telepathy reaching its first beta milestone. New features for Marble virtual globe keep arriving, among these are: Elevation Profile, satellite tracking, and Krunner integration. The KDE Platform provides the foundation for KDE software. KDE software is more stable than ever before. In addition to stability improvements and bugfixes, Platform 4.8 provides better tools for building fluid and touch-friendly user interfaces, integrates with other systems' password saving mechanisms and lays the base for more powerful interaction with other people using the new KDE Telepathy framework."

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