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Current [$]: GStreamer's road ahead • Secure boot • Funding development • Kernel Summit • Secure containers • Ubuntu app uploads • ...

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[$] LinuxCon: funding development
[Front] Posted Sep 6, 2012 17:09 UTC (Thu) by n8willis

At LinuxCon 2012, Bradley Kuhn, executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), presented a session on funding free software development. SFC's primary mission is to provide organizational and legal support to free software projects, but it has also been successful at raising funds to support development time — a task that many projects find difficult.

Full Story (comments: 6)

[$] Improving Ubuntu's application upload process
[Distributions] Posted Sep 5, 2012 18:07 UTC (Wed) by corbet

There has been a surplus of articles recently on how Linux "lost" the desktop. Fingers have been pointed in all directions, from the Windows monopoly to competing desktop projects to Linus Torvalds's management style. Over in the Ubuntu camp, though, there does not appear to be any sense that the desktop has been lost; they are still working hard to win it. Ubuntu's recently-proposed new application upload process highlights its vision of the desktop and what they think needs to be done to make things happen there.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

Full Story (comments: 37)

Look and feel lawsuits, the second time around
[Front] Posted Aug 28, 2012 17:47 UTC (Tue) by corbet

The thicket of lawsuits surrounding the mobile industry has grown to the point that it is hard for any individual action to stand out. If any case has managed to make itself visible in that crowd anyway, it is the battle between Apple and Samsung currently being fought in the US. The first stage of that battle has just been resolved, heavily in Apple's favor. It will be some time before this story truly reaches its end, but some of the more interesting implications for the industry, and for free software, can already be seen.

Full Story (comments: 155)

Mobile patent wars: Google goes on the attack
[Front] Posted Aug 22, 2012 18:19 UTC (Wed) by corbet

Whenever one looks at the mobile patent wars, it is natural to conclude that everybody is suing everybody else. Thus far, though, that has not actually been true. Google has been on the receiving end of a number of lawsuits, either directly or indirectly via attacks on manufacturers shipping Android devices, but Google has not, itself, launched patent attacks against others. That situation has just changed, though, with the report that Google has filed a case against Apple with the US International Trade Commission.

Full Story (comments: 69)

Link-time optimization for the kernel
[Kernel] Posted Aug 21, 2012 14:16 UTC (Tue) by corbet

The kernel tends to place an upper limit on how quickly any given workload can run, so it is unsurprising that kernel developers are always on the lookout for ways to make the system go faster. Significant amounts of work can be put into optimizations that, on the surface, seem small. So when the opportunity comes to make the kernel go faster without the need to rewrite any performance-critical code paths, there will naturally be a fair amount of interest. Whether the "link-time optimization" (LTO) feature supported by recent versions of GCC is such an opportunity or not is yet to be proved, but Andi Kleen is determined to find out.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full story from this week's Kernel Page.

Full Story (comments: 44)

The Linux digital audio workstation - Part 2
[Development] Posted Aug 15, 2012 18:51 UTC (Wed) by jake

spacer This is part 2 of Dave Phillips's tour through Linux digital audio workstations (DAWs). Take a peek at part 1 for some background and the first five DAWs. These are good times for Linux as a platform for audio production, and great work is going on in Linux audio development. Let's look at some more of that work.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

Full Story (comments: 13)

The GNOME project at 15
[Front] Posted Aug 14, 2012 21:23 UTC (Tue) by corbet

On August 15, 1997, Miguel de Icaza announced the launch of the GNOME project. In the following years, GNOME has seen more than its share of ups and downs; it must be considered one of the community's most successful and most controversial projects. This is a moderately significant anniversary, so it makes some sense to have a look at where GNOME came from and speculate on where the project may be heading. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

Full Story (comments: 207)

Adobe ventures into open fonts
[Front] Posted Aug 7, 2012 20:09 UTC (Tue) by n8willis

Adobe surprised many in open source circles with its August 2 release of Source Sans Pro, an open font made available under the standard SIL Open Font License (OFL). The font covers a range of languages and includes some uncommon features, but its greatest impact may be the company's interest in engaging with the open source community.

Full Story (comments: 26)

Testing for kernel performance regressions
[Kernel] Posted Aug 3, 2012 21:22 UTC (Fri) by corbet

It is not uncommon for software projects β€” free or otherwise β€” to include a set of tests intended to detect regressions before they create problems for users. The kernel lacks such a set of tests. Recently, though, we have seen the publication of some results from tests intended to highlight memory management regressions; they paint an interesting picture of where kernel development is going.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full article from next week's Kernel Page.

Full Story (comments: 39)

TCP Fast Open: expediting web services
[Kernel] Posted Aug 1, 2012 21:07 UTC (Wed) by mkerrisk

The upcoming 3.6 kernel will contain client-side support for the TCP "fast open" protocol extension. This work, contributed by Google, was first covered in LWN almost one year ago; now we have a detailed overview of what fast open is, why it matters, and how it works.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full article by Michael Kerrisk.

Full Story (comments: 47)

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Current news

Rodriguez: All 48 Liberated Pixel Cup entries reviewed
[Development] Posted Sep 7, 2012 22:42 UTC (Fri) by n8willis

On his blog, Juan "Nushio" Rodriguez has been systematically reviewing all of the entries in the OpenGameArt project's Liberated Pixel Cup (LPC) free software game contest in recent weeks. Reviews of all 48 games are now available. Note that these are personal assessments, not the results of LPC's official judges. Note also that Rodriguez is an LPC contestant, so he had someone else review his own entry, presumably to add a bit more suspense.

Comments (none posted)

Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Beta 1 Released
[Distributions] Posted Sep 7, 2012 19:15 UTC (Fri) by n8willis

The first beta release of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" is now available. Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core images are available, but this release does do away with the separate CD, DVD, and "alternate" desktop images provided for previous releases, in favor of a single consolidated ISO. Updated packages include xserver 1.13, Python 3, and KDE 4.9.

Full Story (comments: 5)

Friday's security updates
[Security] Posted Sep 7, 2012 18:05 UTC (Fri) by n8willis

Fedora has updated GraphicsMagick (F16, F17; denial of service), seamonkey (F16, F17; multiple vulnerabilities), and trousers (F17; denial of service).

OpenSUSE has updated gimp (code execution).

Red Hat has updated java-1.4.2-ibm (multiple vulnerabilities) and java-1.5.0-ibm (multiple vulnerabilities) .

SUSE has updated PHP5 (insecure defaults) and Xen (multiple vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated linux (11.04; denial of service), kernel-ec2 (10.04 LTS; multiple vulnerabilities), and linux-ti-omap4 (11.10; denial of service).

Comments (none posted)

Tinnes: Introducing Chrome's next-generation Linux sandbox
[Security] Posted Sep 7, 2012 13:28 UTC (Fri) by corbet

Julien Tinnes describes the new sandbox mechanism for the Chrome browser under Linux. "In a similar, but very limited, fashion, this is what we have now in Chrome: we stacked the seccomp-bpf sandbox on top of the setuid sandbox. The setuid sandbox gives a few easy to understand semantic properties: no file system access, no process access outside of the sandbox, no network access. It makes it much easier to layer a seccomp-bpf sandbox on top."

Comments (2 posted)

Study for US Congress outlines options against patent trolls (The H)
[Development] Posted Sep 7, 2012 13:27 UTC (Fri) by n8willis

The H takes a look at a report from the US Congressional Research Service about patent trolling and potential fixes to the system. "According to the researchers, it is worth considering whether to generally shorten the periods of protection for software patents because the trolls file most of their litigation claims in the last three years of the 20-year term. A patent could also be invalidated if it hasn't been practised for a number of years, they added."

Comments (10 posted)

Security updates for Thursday
[Security] Posted Sep 6, 2012 18:00 UTC (Thu) by jake

CentOS has updated xen (C5: privilege escalation), kvm (C5: privilege escalation), and qemu-kvm (C6: privilege escalation).

Debian has updated moin (privilege escalation) and zabbix (SQL injection).

openSUSE has updated mesa (12.2: code execution), gnome-keyring (12.2: password caching), opera (12.2: dialog spoofing), icinga, nagios (12.2: unspecified), and roundcubemail (12.2: two cross-site scripting flaws).

Oracle has updated xen (OL5: privilege escalation), qemu-kvm (OL6: privilege escalation), and kvm (OL5: privilege escalation).

Red Hat has updated java-1.6.0-ibm (multiple vulnerabilities).

Scientific Linux has updated qemu-kvm (SL6: privilege escalation), kvm (SL5: privilege escalation), and xen (SL5: privilege escalation).

Comments (none posted)

QEMU 1.2 released
[Development] Posted Sep 6, 2012 14:20 UTC (Thu) by jake

Version 1.2 of the QEMU processor emulator has been released. "Even though this was the shortest release cycle in QEMU's history, it contains an impressive 1400 changesets from 180 unique authors." New features include support for LPAE (large physical address extensions) on the ARM Cortex A-15, a new ARM i.MX31 machine type, a way to produce ELF dumps of guest memory, support for PowerPC e5500 cores, better device tree support for PowerPC, and more. See the change log for all the details.

Comments (8 posted)

Garrett: UEFI Secure boot in Fedora: status update
[Distributions] Posted Sep 5, 2012 20:36 UTC (Wed) by ris

Matthew Garrett has a progress report on implementing secure boot in Fedora. "The infrastructure for signing the bootloader binaries is now implemented. pesign is in the archive and being used to sign shim, grub2 and the kernel. At the moment they're all being signed by test keys, and the private key is actually in the pesign package. This is, obviously, not intended for production use - it's just to ensure that we can build correctly signed images. We've proof-of-concepted signing via cryptographic hardware and will shortly be deploying new build systems dedicated to building the signed binaries. These won't be general access systems and will have a lightly modified mock configuration to ensure that the crypto hardware is available to the build chroots, but otherwise there's nothing special about them."

Comments (18 posted)

Wednesday's security advisories
[Security] Posted Sep 5, 2012 17:43 UTC (Wed) by ris

Fedora has updated keepalived (F17; F16: denial of service), F17: gnome-keyring (improper caching of passwords/passphrase) and F17: libvirt (remote denial of service).

Gentoo has updated adobe-flash (multiple vulnerabilities).

Mageia has updated libreoffice (multiple code execution vulnerabilities), torque (remote code execution) and bugzilla (multiple vulnerabilities).

Oracle has updated java-1.6.0-openjdk (multiple vulnerabilities).

Red Hat has updated qemu-kvm (privilege escalation), kvm (privilege escalation) and xen (privilege escalation).

Ubuntu has updated kernel (11.10; 10.04 LTS: denial of service).

Comments (none posted)

openSUSE 12.2 released
[Distributions] Posted Sep 5, 2012 14:18 UTC (Wed) by corbet

The openSUSE 12.2 release is now available. "The latest release of the world’s most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution brings you speed-ups across the board with a faster storage layer in Linux 3.4 and accelerated functions in glibc and Qt, giving a more fluid and responsive desktop. The infrastructure below openSUSE has evolved, bringing in mature new technologies like GRUB2 and Plymouth and the first steps in the direction of a revised and simplified UNIX file system hierarchy. Users will also notice the added polish to existing features bringing an improved user experience all over. The novel Btrfs file system comes with improved error handling and recovery tools, GNOME 3.4, developing rapidly, brings smooth scrolling to all applications and features a reworked System Settings and Contacts manager while XFCE has an enhanced application finder."

Comments (14 posted)

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