"Apple is now offering upgrades to the latest version of OS X for
free. When Linux inventor Linus Torvalds was asked whether this
threatened Linux (presumably by someone who had only a passing
knowledge of all the things 'free' can mean when applied to software)
it gave him an opportunity for a passionate defense of open source.
Torvalds also says that he'll keep programming until it gets 'not
interesting,' which hasn't happened yet."
-- source: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/10/24/1324234
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"The open source PHP project site was compromised earlier today. The
site appears to have been compromised and had some of its Javascript
altered to exploit vulnerable systems visiting the website. Google's
stop-badware system caught this as well and flagged php.net as
distributing malware, warning users whose browsers support it not to
visit the site. The comment by a Google employee over the hacker news
thread (official Google webmaster forum thread) seems to suggest that
php.net wasn't incorrectly flagged."
-- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/10/24/1858200
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"Linus Torvalds has welcomed the arrival of Valve's Linux-based
platform, SteamOS, and said it could boost Linux on desktops. The
Linux creator praised Valve's 'vision' and suggested its momentum
would force other manufacturers to take Linux seriously — especially
if game developers start to ditch Windows. Should SteamOS gain
traction among gamers and developers, that could force more hardware
manufacturers to extend driver support beyond Windows. That's a sore
point for Torvalds, who slammed Nvidia last year for failing to
support open-source driver development for its graphics chips. Now
that SteamOS is on the way, Nvidia has opened up to the Linux
community, something Torvalds predicts is a sign of things to come.
'I'm not just saying it'll help us get traction with the graphics
guys,' he said. 'It'll also force different distributors to realize if
this is how Steam is going, they need to do the same thing because
they can't afford to be different in this respect. They want people to
play games on their platform too.'"
-- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/10/23/184236
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"I installed Ubuntu Touch "1.0" on my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet
and have been using it as my main tablet system for the last four
days. Here's how it went. First off, the installation was surprisingly
painless. I followed the official instructions and didn't encounter a
single problem. That being said, the installation is really geared
toward software developers, power users or people already comfortable
on a Linux command line. If you're not in one of those categories, I
recommend holding off for the time being. Once installed, Ubuntu Touch
booted up rather quickly — in only just a few seconds (a fair bit
faster than Android 4.x on the same tablet). And, immediately, I was
presented with a short tutorial that appears the first time the system
is booted, which, I might add, has got to be one of the slickest,
least annoying tutorials I've seen. But... there were problems. The
battery life was, to put it mildly, terrible. Performance has been
mixed, and the OS was prone to what I call 'The Pulsating Seizure
Feature' a few dozen times over the weekend. In a nutshell: launching
apps (and, occasionally, moving between apps) can cause the device to
freeze and begin flashing the screen rapidly."
-- source: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/10/22/1344209
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
Been trying to update my #! laptop and it continuously failed doing
so. Then I found out that #! has been hit by a DDoS attack,
unfortunately:
"DDoS Attack 2013-10-17 (ongoing)
It saddens me to report that the repo and torrent server are
experiencing another DDoS attack. As with the previous attack, I do
not have much information to share, but I will try and keep everyone
informed as to what is happening. When I find out, you'll find out.
Apologies for the disruption."
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=29646
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"When the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) puts to sea later this year, it will
be different from any other ship in the Navy's fleet in many ways. The
$3.5 billon ship is designed for stealth, survivability, and
firepower, and it's packed with advanced technology. And at the heart
of its operations is a virtual data center powered by off-the-shelf
server hardware, various flavors of Linux, and over 6 million lines of
software code."
-- source: http://bit.ly/1aX0Ktb
I always have mixed feelings when FLOSS is used by the military...
Cheers, Peer
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"As I speak, more than 22,000 people signed up for a petition,
desperately wanting to have an official native Linux client for Google
Drive, and yet their voice is still being ignored by Google. Perhaps
when it comes to boosting their bottom line, Linux desktop market is
not a priority for Google.
They can ignore Linux desktop market all they want, but they cannot
ignore the power of FOSS. Faced with the frustration, the open-source
community responded, producing unofficial Google Drive clients such as
Grive or SyncDrive. These clients are file synchronization tools which
sync files and folders between local file system and remote Google
Drive. As such, you cannot mount Google Drive using these tools.
If you want to mount Google Drive on Linux, you can try
google-drive-ocamlfuse, which is a FUSE-based file system backed by
Google Drive. Using this user-space file system, you can mount your
Google Drive account on Linux, and have full read/write access to
files/folders in Google Drive as if they were local files/folders."
-- source: http://xmodulo.com/2013/10/mount-google-drive-linux.html
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"NFTables is queued up for merging into the Linux 3.13 kernel.
NFTables is a four-year-old project by the creators of Netfilter to
write a new packet filtering / firewall engine for the Linux kernel to
deprecate iptables (though it now offers an iptables compatibility
layer too). NFTables promises to be more powerful, simpler, reduce
code complication, improve error reporting, and provide more efficient
handling of packet filter rules. The code was merged into net-next for
the Linux 3.13 kernel. Iptables will still be present until NFTables
is finished, but it is possible to try it out now. LWN also has a
writeup on NFTables."
-- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/10/19/2118247
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
