Development Release: Porteus 3.1 RC2

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November 16, 2014

Jay Flood has announced the availability of the second release candidate for Porteus 3.1, a set of small Slackware-based live CDs with a choice of KDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce desktops: “The Porteus Community is joyful to announce the candidate release of Porteus Desktop edition 3.1rc2 and Porteus….

UbuTricks 14.11.17 Released with Support for 6 New Apps, 20 Updated Apps

By

Chris7mas

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November 16, 2014

This new version adds support for six new applications and 20 apps with updated versions. The new applications are Exaile, Yarock, GNOME Commander (Trusty), SimpleAudioPlayer, Kid3 and Fotoxx (DEB).

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As Open Source Goes Mainstream, Institutions Collaborate Differently

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The Linux Foundation

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November 16, 2014

What’s driving the adoption of WordPress, Drupal, and many other open source applications is a need to “do more with less,” adopt modern technologies and development practices, and avoid more costly failures. The UK’s executive director of digital, Mike Bracken, told me in February 2014 that this approach to building digital services is “vastly cheaper,” a claim that 18F will be proving out in the years to come.

“Healthcare.gov was a watershed moment in the conversion,” said Balter. “An inflection point. Geeks in government had been saying for a long time that traditional, heavyweight large dollar, long-term enterprise projects were far less resilient than more modern, open systems. The traditional management playbook has always been to throw more money and bodies at the problem. Healthcare.gov (among other examples) show that that’s not the answer. No software is perfect, but today agencies realize that communicating more, not less, working openly, with shared tools, and shipping 0.1.”

It’s no accident that open source projects are driving innovation in multiple sectors and parts of government. The defense community has been a notable adopter of open source in many contexts, most recently in its battleships. Open source software and hardware will be core to adaptable platforms deployed to battlefields around the world. “If you can’t hack it, don’t pack it” is a mantra I’ve heard from more than one military veteran over the years, and one that’s been heard at DARPA more than once.

Bash: 10 Examples of Parameter Expansion

By

Chris7mas

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November 16, 2014

Parameter expansion is a powerful feature of Bash which will allow you to work on strings with great ease and just a little typing. Here are 10 simple examples on how to use just a bit of the power of parameter expansion to quickly modify and work on strings.

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Mint 17.1 with Cinnamon 2.4 Looks Beautiful [Overview, Screenshots, What’s New]

By

Chris7mas

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November 16, 2014

The next Linux Mint Cinnamon edition is knocking on the door and a Release Candidate was put out yesterday. This release will bear the version number 17.1, and it is codenamed “Rebecca”. In this overview I will look at the release candidate for Mint 17.1, focusing on the main new features in Cinnamon, which ships the latest bleeding edge version in Rebecca, and will accompany it with screenshots for the desktop and the new changes that went into it.

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This War of Mine Now on Steam

By

Chris7mas

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November 15, 2014

This War of Mine is a different kind of war game, where you take command of a group of civilians struggling to survive in a besieged city. The uniqueness of the game comes from the fact that rather controlling military soldiers, you will embark on protecting and keeping alive civilians in a time of war.

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Urban Terror 4.2.021 Updates the HUD, Many Bug Fixes and Enhancements

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Chris7mas

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November 15, 2014

The latest update for Urban Terror brings an updated HUD (Heads Up Display), open-sourced menu files and a big number of bug fixes.

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CyanogenMod 11 M12

By

LWN

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November 14, 2014

CyanogenMod has announced a new milestone release of the 11.0 “KitKat” branch. The announcement also looks forward to the 12.0 “Lollipop” branch. “No doubt the big news at the beginning of November was the release of the Android 5.0 Lollipop source code. AOSP began seeing the code on the 3rd, and completed the majority of the push on the 4th, with some remaining stragglers seeing code uploaded midday on the 12th. Work on CM12 began in earnest at the end of last week, and you can now successfully sync and build the work in progress against a handful of devices.“

Stable Kernel Updates

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LWN

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November 14, 2014

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released three stable kernels; 3.17.3, 3.14.24, and 3.10.60. All of them contain lots of important fixes throughout the tree.

Open Cloud Alliance Joins Growing Crowd of Cloud Standards Setters

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OStatic

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November 14, 2014

As the momentum surrounding OpenStack, CloudStack and other open cloud computing platforms accelerates, there are increasing needs at many enterprises for certification and validation of services, standards, and guarantees of interoperability. We are starting to see cloud computing reference architectures arrive from players such as HP, and interoperability labs focused on determining which cloud tools work together properly.

As these services and standards bodies take shape, the recently formed Open Cloud Alliance is an organization to watch. Created by Univention and IBM, the OCA is a network of providers, software vendors, and system integrators focused on establishing common open source standards that give companies choice in their applications and providers.