Yesterday there was a guest post by a reader on Phoronix about the troubles in using the AMD Catalyst driver on Fedora Linux. While it involves more steps than most users would like, another Phoronix reader has written in this morning with the approach for getting the Catalyst 14.4 driver to work on Fedora 20 — even with the Linux 3.14 kernel where the Catalyst driver doesn’t yet have any mainline support…
FLOSS Manuals Offers Guide for GIMP Graphics, and More Documentation
On a regular baisis here at OStatic, we’re committed to compiling documentation and guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications. After all, one of the most common critcisms of open source creations is the lack of official project documentation. One of the best ongoing projects for producing free open source-related documentation is FLOSS Manuals. It’s an ongoing and ambitious effort to build online guides for open source software. Recently, the site has added useful documentation for some projects that may interest you, including the great open source graphics editing application GIMP. Here is how to get the latest guides from FLOSS Manuals.
GIMP for Graphics. If you work with graphics, or if you want to start doing so, you may already use GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications, or you have it on your radar. GIMP is so powerful that it can be daunting for new users, and FLOSS Manuals has an excellent getting started guide available for it, here. Once you’ve mastered your GIMP basics, you can find even more guidance in the free online guide in Grokking the GIMP.
A Tutorial on How to openSUSEfy Gnome 3
Customize Gnome in openSUSE to match the openSUSE green pastures with a little help from artwork provided by the Moka Project.
Wayland and Weston 1.5.0 Released
The 1.5.0 releases of the Wayland display manager and Weston compositor are available. It has been a relatively quiet cycle, especially on the Wayland side, but there are still numerous improvements, including a transition to the new Xwayland server. “The Xwayland code was refactored to be its own X server in the Xorg tree, similar to how Xwin and Xquartz and Xnest work. A lot of the complexity and hacks in the old Xorg based Xwayland was about fighting Xorg trying to be a native display server, discovering input devices and driving the outputs. The goal was to be able to reuse the 2D acceleration code from the various Xorg DDX drivers. With glamor becoming a credible acceleration architecture, we no longer need to jump through those hoops and the new code base is much simpler and cleaner as a result.” There is also a change in the maintainer model, with Kristian Høgsberg giving commit privileges to a number of top-level developers.
Distribution Release: Robolinux 7.5.2
John Martinson has announced the release of Robolinux 7.5.2, the latest update of the project’s Debian-based distribution featuring a pre-configured VirtualBox for running Windows as a “guest” operating system. What’s new in version 7.5.2? “We added Firefox 29 to Robolinux as our users did not like Iceweasel….”
Silent Circle Secures $30 Million in Funding to Expand Blackphone Production
Private communications firm Silent Circle has secured $30 million in funding to cope with demand for the privacy-based Blackphone, as well as expand operations globally.
Arduino TRE Beta Program Opens fo 50 Developers
Arduino launches an amazing beta program for Arduino TRE developers. Giving the novelty of the board and of the approach I think it’s a great opportunity for you to experiment and give feedback! We are excited to announce that starting today a limited batch of 50 Arduino TRE Developer Edition boards is available in the Arduino […]
Development Release: Android-x86 4.4 RC2
Chih-Wei Huang has announced the availability of the second release candidate for Android-x86 4.4, an unofficial port of Google’s Android mobile operating system to Intel and AMD x86 processors: “Android-x86.org is happy to announce the 4.4-RC2 release. This is the second candidate of Android-x86 4.4 stable release….”
Git 2.0 Is Nearly Ready For Release
Junio Hamano has announced the fourth Git 2.0.0 release candidate with an expectation of shipping the final version quite soon with no more development releases planned…
Distribution Release: openSUSE 13.1.1 “Edu Li-f-e MATE”
Lars Vogdt has announced the release of openSUSE 13.1.1 “Edu Li-f-e MATE” edition, a variant of openSUSE 13.1 designed for schools and featuring the MATE desktop environment: “The openSUSE-Education team is proud to present a special, 64-bit edition of openSUSE Edu Li-f-e with the MATE desktop environment. Li-f-e….