Fedora 19 alpha offers a peek at what’s coming
It's been about three months since the release of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow," but this week afforded the first glimpse at the next version of the popular Linux distribution.
Arriving just a week behind schedule, the alpha version of Fedora 19, code-named "Schrödinger's Cat," comes packed with several new features as well as an assortment of updated packages.
It's not intended for production use, of course. Rather, the alpha software is available purely for testing purposes. Still, if you want to take it for a whirl to see what's coming in the final release due in July, it's now available as a free download. Here are some of the highlights of what you'll find. Read more...
Gnome cofounder: Desktop Linux is a CHERNOBYL of FAIL
Gnome project cofounder and current Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza says he's done wrestling with Linux on the desktop, and that he now uses Apple kit exclusively for all of his workstation needs.
De Icaza is well known in the open source community for developing a number of client-side technologies for Linux, including the Midnight Commander file shell, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Mono project.
But in a blog post on Tuesday, de Icaza wrote that not only does he no longer use Linux for his day-to-day computing needs, but he hasn't actually booted his Linux workstation since October 2012. In fact, he says, he hasn't even bothered to plug it in. Read more...
Canonical announces Mir display server to replace X Windows
Canonical has announced plans to develop new, open source Linux display-server software called Mir, in a move that it says will help further its goal of offering a unified Ubuntu user experience across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Traditionally, desktop Linux distributions have rendered their GUIs using software derived from the X Window System – X, for short – a venerable graphics layer that was developed for Unix by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.
But many Linux developers think X is showing its age, and that it makes it too cumbersome to create the kinds of sophisticated graphical effects that modern desktop users have come to expect. Read more...
Oracle ports DTrace to Oracle Linux
Oracle has ported one of its most coveted Solaris tools to the Linux platform, a real-time debugging tool called DTrace, though the company has made it officially available only for its own Oracle Linux distribution.
With the release of Oracle Linux 6.4, Oracle announced that participants in its Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) -- available with a paid Oracle support license -- can download a copy of DTrace for Linux.
Many Linux developers and administrators have pined for a version of DTrace to run on Linux, a few even citing DTrace -- along with the ZFS (Zettabyte File System) -- as a major reason for not moving from Solaris to Linux. Red Hat's SystemTap, among other alternatives, duplicates some of DTrace's functionality for Linux, but doesn't offer the same level of granularity. Read more...
Oracle Linux honcho ‘personally hurt’ by Red Hat clone claims
Oracle has taken its share of knocks for marketing a version of Linux that's package-for-package compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but according to Oracle senior engineering veep Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Linux's reputation as a copycat is entirely undeserved.
"I often read things on Slashdot or blogs where folks think that we're proprietary and we just take the code and don't contribute back," Coekaerts said during an Oracle OpenWorld conference session in San Francisco on Tuesday. "It really hurts me personally, because we actually do a lot of really good stuff. All the work we do goes back to Linux. We're really in it to make Linux better and not just copy."
Coekaerts argued that although Red Hat markets a Linux distribution that's put together a specific way, it has no exclusive rights to the code for the various software packages that make up that distribution. Read more...
Edgy penguins test-fly Ubuntu’s Quantal Quetzal
Forget colourful foliage and dropping temperatures, nothing says autumn for Linux nerds like the arrival of an Ubuntu beta. This season includes twice the fun, with Canonical plotting not one, but two betas for the coming Quantal Quetzal, or Ubuntu 12.10. The first arrived on Thursday.
Quantal Quetzal comes hot on the heels of the 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release earlier this year and – at least for more conservative users – is unlikely to be a high priority upgrade. LTS editions of Ubuntu are delivered every two years and have extended support from Canonical.
Still, for those that don't mind living on the edge, the first beta is now available for testing. Read more...
Twitter joins Linux foundation
A week after it rocked its developer base with a new set of API rules, Twitter has become a Silver-level member of the Linux foundation, assuring the open source world that it’s “fundamental” to Twitter’s success.
The microblog already had a keynote slot at the upcoming LinuxCon in San Diego, with its open source manager Chris Aniszczyk to take the stage and describe the company’s use of open source technology.
In explaining its sponsorship decision, Twitter rolled out a nostrum about how Linux’s capacity to be “extensively tweaked” made it important to the microblogging service – without somehow mentioning that the extent of “tweaking” allowable via Twitter’s API is progressively shrinking. Read more...
Dell offers new laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Dell is expanding the range of laptops with Linux, with its new Precision mobile workstations being offered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 OS as an option.
The company announced two models, the Precision M4700, which has a 15.6-inch screen, and the Precision M6700, which has a 17.3-inch screen. Dell will offer Windows 7, but is also offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for specific regions. Dell did not provide information on the countries in which RHEL would be available.
The company over the last few years had scaled down its Linux offerings on laptops, saying the OS is targeted at specialist users. But Linux is staging a comeback on Dell's laptop, with the company planning to offer the XPS 13 thin-and-light laptop with Ubuntu 12.04, code-named Precise Pangolin, later this year. Dell is also pushing Linux to companies moving away from legacy Unix servers to industry standard servers. Read more...
Facebook, Last.fm and pals to reach deep into Ubuntu
Websites will be able to hook into the Ubuntu desktop in the Linux distro's next release - allowing, for example, users to receive "new message" pings from webmail services.
Canonical boss and spaceman Mark Shuttleworth announced the availability of "web apps" in Ubuntu 12.10, due in October, at OSCON, Canonical marketing veep Steve George blogged. The new feature will make it possible for users to quickly jump to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, eBay and GMail from the desktop, he added.
To access a web app, visit a website participating in Canonical's project, click on a link and an icon is added to Ubuntu's left-hand launcher. Clicking on the icon will either take you to a tab in your browser where the site is already running, or open a new browser instance. This is roughly akin to pinning websites to the task bar in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to easily access sites. Read more...
Red Hat pumps up Enterprise Linux to 6.3
Ahead of its Red Hat Summit in Boston next week and the reporting of its financial results for fiscal Q1 yesterday, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is pushing out its next iteration of the Enterprise Linux operating system for servers and workstations.
RHEL 6.0 launched in November 2010, and it was a major update, with more than 2,058 programs (twice as many as in RHEL 5) and a move to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. With the RHEL 6.3 release available today, a big focus is the usual updating in the kernel and in the driver stack to take advantage of new hardware that has come to market in the past six months.
"Hardware enablement is a big piece of every release," Tim Burke, vice president of Linux engineering, tells El Reg. In this case, there are a number of optimizations that have been made explicitly for Intel's new Xeon E5-2400, E5-2600, and E5-4600 processors, which came out in March and April, as well as Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron 6200s, which launched last November. Read more...
Microsoft makes Top 20 list of Linux kernel contributors
The Linux Foundation has released its annual report on the state of the software, and reports that Microsoft has made it into the Top 20 of companies that sponsor development of the Linux kernel – quite a change for the operating system Steve Ballmer used to dismiss as a cancer.
For contributions made to the kernel since version 2.6.36, Microsoft ranks 17th, with Redmond's contribution estimated at 1 per cent of the whole. The top contributing companies were Red Hat, Intel, and Novell. Samsung and Texas Instruments were also named as fast-growing contributors, reflecting an increase in interest in Linux for mobile and embedded systems. Read more...
Mobile Linux: It’s not just Android anymore
The mobile world has been good to Linux, whose Android derivative has enjoyed a success that few could have predicted just a few short years ago.
And indeed, until very recently, Android was Linux's main contender in the mobile world. Yes, there have been others coming and going -- LiMo, Maemo, Moblin, and MeeGo, for example -- but none of them have even approached Android in terms of traction.
That's why this year's Mobile World Congress has been so striking. Announcements coming out of the show have made it perfectly clear that mobile Linux's days of being more or less completely dominated by Android are coming to an end. Read more...
Oracle extends Linux support to 10 years
Oracle has reaffirmed that it's in the Linux business to stay by extending the support lifecycle of its own-brand build to ten years, and tempting Red Hat users with a trial offer of its Ksplice patching system.
While the extended lifecycle may provide enough reassurance to win over a few customers, Oracle hopes the 30-day free trial of Ksplice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (release 5.4 on) and Linux 6 users will prove more of an enticement. Ksplice, which Oracle bought last year, allows Linux kernel patching without the tiresome necessity of a reboot. Oracle Linux Premier Support customers will now get Ksplice as a standard part of their packages, and Fedora and Ubuntu Linux users get it for free. Read more...
Adobe to Linux users: Get Chrome or forget Flash
Adobe today said that it would stop offering direct downloads of Flash Player for Linux, telling users to move to Google's Chrome browser, which bundles Flash with its updates.
Today's demotion of Flash Player on Linux to Chrome-only was the second time in the last three months that Adobe has withdrawn some or all support from a version of the popular media software: In November, Adobe announced it was abandoning development of Flash for mobile browsers, including the new Chrome for Android .
In a roadmap for Flash Player (download PDF), Adobe unveiled its plans through 2012 and into 2013.
The last version of a separate Flash Player for Linux, 11.2, will be released this quarter, Adobe announced in the roadmap document. After that, Linux users who require browser-based Flash must switch to Chrome, Google's three-year-old browser. Read more...