The Enlightenment Wayland Compositor wasn’t the only Wayland desktop project seeing attention at FOSDEM earlier this month, but the Qt5-based Hawaii desktop also received some stage time…
Read more at Phoronix
Growing the Linux Community
An unfortunate truth of the Linux community is that sometimes the most enthusiastic proponents of desktop Linux are the biggest hindrance to adoption on a wider scale. Nothing illustrates this point clearer than reading through the comments of posts that are either suggesting change or are simply disparaging the concept. Two such articles were recently published, David Gewirtz, writing for ZDNet lists Five reasons he would rather run Windows 8 than Linux at the end of January, and Jack Wallen suggests talking about Linux in a language we can all understand on TechRepublic, also a ZDNet site. Neither article is that interesting in itself, but the comment stream of each reveals much about the state of the community.
Read more at Ostatic
Man Converts 3D Printer Into an Air Hockey Robot
Want to practice your air hockey skills? Tinkerer Jose Julio used standard parts of a RepRap 3D printer, an Arduino controller, two discarded PC fans, and some plain old wooden slats to construct an air hockey table complete with a robot opponent.
The robot, inspired by his daughter’s love of the game, returns pucks with enough speed and precision to beat a child. “An adult with some experience… can still win [against] the robot, but I am sure that with some more small improvements it is going to be really hard to beat,” Julio writes on his blog.
Read more at The Verge
Distribution Release: gNewSense 3.1
Sam Geeraerts has announced the release of gNewSense 3.1, a minor update of the project’s Debian-based Linux distribution built strictly from free software as defined by Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation: “Hi, I’m pleased to announce the release of gNewSense 3.1. This is a minor update to the….
Read more at DistroWatch