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LXer Feature: 22-Jun-2014

In this week's LXWR we have 5 reasons you should switch from Windows XP to Lubuntu, Anazon launches a new smartphone called "Fire", Debian switches back to GLIBC, 7 improvements the Linux desktop could use, creating Space Invaders with the Raspbessy Pi and Carla Schroder wonders whatever happened to all those red hot Linux distros. Enjoy!

Arguments in favour of the use of non-free plug-ins in GCC have again been raised on GCC mailing-lists, but are trumped by the arguments for GCC as a vehicle for free software development. Once again, Gcc and its lack of modularity has been raised as an issue and contrasted with LLVm, the new compiler on the block. GCC is huge and venerable: 5 million lines, 30 years, and growing. LLVM, in contrast, is relatively youthful and modular and allows free and proprietary languages to be added as modules.

We had great fun creating our basic Space Invaders clone, Pivaders. One of the key challenges with the project was keeping it to a manageable size – just 300 lines of Python. Without the use of Pygame’s strong set of features, that goal would likely have been overshot at least twofold. Pygame’s ability to group, manage and detect collisions thanks to the Sprite class really made a great difference to our project, not just in terms of length but in simplicity. If you missed the first part of the project, you can find the v0.1 code listing on GitHub, while you can find version v0.2 of the code, including all the images, music and sound effects in the same repo, as well as on this month’s cover disc.

In this week's edition of our open source games news roundup, we spend all of our extra cash on the Steam Summer Sale, and then punish ourselves for it by playing the original X-COM with the OpenXcom interface.

There is always a delay between the release of the Linux Mint Cinnamon/MATE distributions and the KDE/Xfce distributions, but for those who have been waiting patiently (or perhaps a bit anxiously), the wait is almost over. The 'Release Candidates' for both KDE and Xfce are avaiable now, so the final releases should be out soon. I decided to take a brief look at each of them, and in the process of doing that I got into the new kernel management system, so I will add a few notes here about that as well.

The mass migration of big-name triple-A games to Linux continues, as publishers rush to have top titles available for the 2015 launch of Valve's SteamOS operating system. On Thursday, Feral Interactive announced that the blockbuster XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now available for Linux, as is all of its add-on content—including the large XCOM: Enemy Within expansion.

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a portable Wi-Fi streaming radio. There are thousands of free radio stations on the internet, and with this project you can listen to all of them from one tiny little box. So let’s build our streaming radio using a Raspberry Pi, a speaker and a few odds and ends…

What can you learn numbers alone? That is the question many in the open source community have grappled with when looking at comparative values of commits, committers, community sizes, and more between projects.

While many researchers encounter no privacy-based barriers to releasing data, those working with human participants, such as doctors, psychologists, and geneticists, have a difficult problem to surmount. How do they reconcile their desire to share data, allowing their analyses and conclusions to be verified, with the need to protect participant privacy? It's a dilemma we've talked about before on the blog (see: Open Data and IRBs, Privacy and Open Data). A new project, Open Humans, seeks to resolve the issue by finding patients who are willing—even eager—to share their personal data. read more

GS4 unveiled an autonomous, Linux-based robot security guard called Bob, based on a MetraLabs “Scitos A5? robot programmed by the University of Birmingham. U.K.-based security firm GS4 Technology has launched a three week trial at its Gloucestershire headquarters of a robot called Bob that was designed by the University of Birmingham School of Computer Science. GS4 will evaluate Bob’s performance as a trainee security officer. Bob is part of a £7.2 million ($12.2 million) project called STRANDS, hosted by the University of Birmingham, with an aim of expanding the role of robots in the workplace.

The subsequent rules of thumb arose during the development of the Empirical Gramian Framework (emgr), a young open source software project in the Workgroup for Numerical Analysis & Scientific Computing at the University of Münster which targets algorithmic model order reduction for control systems. emgr is written in the often—and wrongfully—belittled MATLAB programming language, which, by its almost pseudo-code like syntax, is easily understandable and yet performs very well. The following guidelines, many of which are related to the Science Code Manifesto, are given from a MATLAB perspective, but they apply to other programming languages and environments as well.

Installing Virtualizor on CentOS 6.5 with RAID1 This guide covers installing the Virtualizor control panel on CentOS 6.5 with RAID1.

Interest in software defined networking continues to grow, and for many, OpenStack and OpenDaylight are the natural tools for transitioning data centers to this new paradigm in network communications. Both are active and growing open source projects backed by a large community of companies and individual developers.

FTP or File Transfer Protocol is one of the widely used services on the Internet, mainly for transferring files from one host to other. FTP itself was not designed as a secure protocol, and as such, the classic FTP service is vulnerable to common attacks such as man in the middle and brute force attacks. […]Continue reading... The post How to set up a secure FTP service with vsftpd on Linux appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to set up a secure SFTP server in Linux How to set up a secure Apache webserver on Ubuntu How to secure a mail server using encryption How to create a secure incremental offsite backup in Linux with Duplicity How to set up HTTPS in Apache web Server on CentOS

First and foremost we would like to thank everybody that already supported the Randa Meetings fundraising. We have reached almost 1/3 of the our goal. Please help more and spread the word. If we reach our goal we can have an even more stable Kdenlive, more applications ported to KDE Frameworks 5, further progress on Phonon, a look at Amarok 3, even better KDE educational applications, a finished port of GCompris to Qt and KDE technologies, an updated KDE Book, more work on Gluon and a new and amazing KDE SDK!

Advantech unveiled a pair of carrier boards that merge with COM Express modules to form sandwich-style SBCs that offer a range of features and performance. Advantech’s 3.5-inch style SOM-AB5810 and Mini-ITX style SOM-AB5510 carrier boards are quite different in form-factors and specs. However, as their similar names suggest, they share a few traits: in particular, the ability to accept various COM Express computer-on-modules resulting in a sandwich-style SBC design. Other common features include compatibility with ATX power supplies and support for Mini-PCIe expansion, among other similarities.

High-performance computing (HPC) for the past ten years has been dominated by thousands of Linux servers connected by a uniform networking infrastructure. The defining theme for an HPC cluster lies in the uniformity of the cluster. This uniformity is most important at the application level: communication between all systems in the cluster must be the same, the hardware must be the same, and the operating system must be the same. Any differences in any of these features must be presented as a choice to the user. The uniformity and consistency of running software on an HPC cluster is of utmost importance and separates HPC clusters from other Linux clusters.

Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems (and it is based on the Linux kernel too.) However, diving into developing apps for Android can appear to be a bit daunting at first. The following how-to runs you through the basics of setting up an Android development environment on your Fedora machine. The basic workflow is to download the Android SDK, use the SDK to generate a quick first “hello world” application, then test out that application with either a physical Android device or the Android emulator.

IBM Power Virtualization Center Express Edition (PowerVC) is an IaaS cloud solution designed to make it easier to build and manage virtual resources in a Power Systems Software Defined Environment or a cloud infrastructure. It is primarily based on OpenStack® and includes OpenStack industry-standard application programming interfaces. Learn about the APIs for each OpenStack component and the tasks they will help you complete.

If you haven’t heard, science has been experiencing some issues. Though most scientists believe in the ideals of openness, transparency, and reproducibility, the reality is that the incentive structure of academic research encourages exactly the opposite. So, scientists have a stronger professional incentive to get results published than to get them right. To make things worse, many scientists are stuck with outdated and closed source tools that aren’t up to the task of managing their increasingly complicated workflows.