Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google has been forced to temporarily deactivate a security feature in Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) intended to make it harder to pirate paid-for apps. The feature resulted in some purchased apps no longer working after devices on which they were installed on were restarted, requiring the user to reconfigure or even reinstall them. According to a bug report on Google Code, affected apps include several live wallpapers and applications with widgets or access to Google's account system.

The feature freeze and branching of Fedora 18 is scheduled to occur tomorrow. The FESCo meeting happened today where a few of the last features were approved for the Spherical Cow release...

The Khronos Group has released the latest version of its OpenGL graphics standard, 20 years after SGI first opened up the code. The latest revision, OpenGL 4.3, adds the ability to harness the GPU for shading and draw commands, ETC2/EAC texture compression is included as standard, and an improved debugging system has been added, along with security enhancements aimed at stopping information leakage between applications.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.5 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

After almost four years, the Damn Small Linux project is back with the release of Damn Small Linux 4.11 RC1. Being just over 50MB in size, the release candidate is still as little as ever.

Between the arrival of both MATE 1.4 and KDE 4.9 and the emergence of SolusOS' brand-new GNOME Classic on the scene, there's no denying it's been an exciting few weeks here in the world of Linux desktops. That, in turn, has made it all the more difficult to witness the identity crisis that has apparently befallen GNOME itself.

Days ago benchmarks were shared from OpenBenchmarking.org that compared AHCI and IDE modes under Linux when it came to the resulting disk performance. There was a fair amount of interest generated out of that so some AHCI vs. IDE mode comparisons from a Serial ATA 3.0 SSD on an Ubuntu Linux host were benchmarked at Phoronix.

There has been some debate lately about whether or not GNOME has gone off the deep end into an abyss. Whether or not that's true is debatable. What is certain though, is that on the Linux Planet the Linux desktop is not an endangered species with no shortage of viable, sustainable options.

Adobe has announced Source Sans Pro, a new and free open source type family, which is the first of its kind from the software provider. The Source Sans Pro family currently includes six weights, from ExtraLight to Black, in upright and italic styles. Adobe is also offering language support for Latin script (including Western and Eastern European languages), Vietnamese, the pinyin Romanization of Chinese, and Navajo.

While disk management improvements might not be the first thing you think of when it comes to a desktop environment update, the disk utility (Disks) and udev within GNOME 3.6 will offer some new features...

Not only has Valve Software successfully ported the first-person shooter game Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux, but it actually runs faster on the open source OS than on Windows. Using high-end hardware, a version of the game running on Ubuntu 12.04 renders at 315fps, Valve's Linux team reports. That's a 16 per cent improvement over the Windows version, which only clocks at 270.6fps on the same configuration.

Valve's growing Linux team is already experiencing success in optimizing the Source Engine, and in particular their initial Left 4 Dead 2 game, for Linux. In fact, the native Linux build with the Source OpenGL renderer is faster than running the game on Windows 7 with DirectX!

On July 20, Adobe unveiled version 2.0 of the open source PhoneGap, a leader among the growing crowd of cross-platform, Android-compatible, mobile app frameworks. Open source developers welcomed new PhoneGap features such as a "Cordova WebView" function that enables developers to integrate code into larger native applications.

KDE has announced its Version 4.9 Releases to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Development Platform, dedicated to the memory of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. The full announcement has details. These releases got special attention to the general levels of quality and stability. In particular, there was a focus on eliminating any regressions from previous releases. Thanks to the efforts of the KDE Quality Team and its new contributors, the 4.9 Releases are the best ever.

Linux do(es) crash. It is not so frequent, but it happens. You know what to do when an application refuses to obey, but if everything fails, the last solution is using the supreme power on Linux: the magic SysRq key. By using this key with a combination of “Alt” and another letter, you will be able to make your computer respond no matter what. It was already evoked, but a little explanation does not hurt, and the more you know, the more prepared you will be when facing a real problem. Also, understanding the individual effect is always better than just repeating a combo learned by heart.

While word crept out last night that Nokia would be closing down their Brisbane office where several of the Qt components are maintained and developed, it looks like the Qt infliction is going much further. Nokia's now reportedly trying to offload Qt entirely.

July has turned out to be a pretty packed month. The Community Edition has been extremely well received in the community. Developers have already created some very interesting modifications to LunaSysMgr that have enhanced the user experience on TouchPads. We also officially announced the release of Enyo 2.0 at OSCON and have been picked up by xTuple to be their front end framework. The Developer relations team attended Open Web Camp in San Jose, Throne of JS in Toronto and GothamJS in NY. Head on over to our developer blog to read more about these events.

Launched in May, Inktank is one of the newest companies to enter the still very new open source cloud computing industry. But it’s got a great head start as the enterprise support arm of the Ceph storage system. The one-time doctoral thesis of founder Sage Weil, Ceph has been incubating as an open source project with L.A.-based web hosting company DreamHost over the last eight years.

As we reported in early July, Mozilla has pulled back on further development of its long-standing Thunderbird email platform, despite the fact that it has more than 20 million users. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has a blog post up about the topic.

Fewer than half of all registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) users have contributed to the open source project's mapping data according to a new study by researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Of the mapping platform's 500,000 registered members, approximately 38% had contributed data at least once. The study, which examined activity of registered OSM users up to December 2011, found that more than 24,000 users (about 5% of the total) had contributed at least 1,000 edited nodes.