Garrett: Default Offerings, Target Audiences, and the Future of Fedora

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August 22, 2013

Matthew Garrett argues for a clearer focus for the Fedora project. “Bluntly, if you have a well-defined goal, people are more likely to either work towards that goal or go and do something else. If you don’t, people will just do whatever they want. The risk of defining that goal is that you’ll lose some of your existing contributors, but the benefit is that the existing contributors will be more likely to work together rather than heading off in several different directions.“

Sarah Sharp: Linux May Have Been Causing USB Disconnects All Along

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The Linux Foundation

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August 22, 2013

Pretty much for my entire career in Linux USB (eight years now?), we’ve been complaining about how USB device power management just sucks. We enable auto-suspend for a USB device driver, and find dozens of different USB devices that simply disconnect from the bus when auto-suspend is enabled.

For years, we’ve blamed those devices for being cheap, crappy, and broken. We talked about blacklists in the kernel, and ripped those out when they got too big. We’ve talked about whitelists in userspace, but not many distros have time to cultivate such lists.

See Sarah Sharp’s full Google+ post or read about the resulting patch on the Linux-USB mailing list post.

ZTE Open Firefox OS Phones Sell Out Quickly in U.S. and U.K.

By

OStatic

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August 22, 2013

In a milestone for Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile phone platform, the ZTE Open Firefox OS phone recently started selling via eBay in the U.S. and U.K. Mozilla officials confirmed the news with some fanfare only a few days ago, noting that unlocked phones would sell for $79.99 and users could easily pick their own carriers. Now, the phones have sold out in both the U.S.. and U.K., causing some observers to wonder if these phones might be a hit outside the emerging markets that they were originally delivered in.

Before fans of these phones get carried away, let’s put the sales in perspective. You can track the sales in the U.S. and U.K. on eBay, and there were 990 phones sold in the U.K. and 985 sold in the U.S. Those are not huge numbers for low cost phones. Still, these phones had arrived previously in smaller markets, including several in Latin America. They clearly made a splash with users outside those markets.

Onwards and Upwards with Free Software Convergence

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Jono Bacon

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August 22, 2013

As many of you will have seen, unfortunately the Ubuntu Edge campaign did not reach our goal of $32million. The final total reached was $12,812,776. I am hugely proud and thankful to everyone who pledged, supported the campaign, wrote about it, and helped to spread the word.

Some have described us not meeting the goal as a “failure”. I don’t see it that way. Let’s be honest: $32million was always an incredibly ambitious target. We would have liked to have done it for less money, but building a F1 superphone doesn’t come cheap (and remember that the $32million didn’t include any costs for software engineering and project management…Canonical were providing that for free). It was an ambitious target, but disrupting an industry is ambitious in itself, and we gave the crowd-funding campaign our best shot. The story does not end here though.

Ubuntu Edge: Founder Says Failure Isn’t the End of the Dream (Guardian)

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LWN

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August 22, 2013

The Guardian talks with Mark Shuttleworth about the Ubuntu Edge campaign, which failed to reach its $32 million goal. “The impression we have from conversations with manufacturers is that they are open to an alternative to Android. And end-users don’t seem emotionally attached to Android. There’s no network effect from using Android like there was with Windows in the 1990s, where if some businesses starting using Windows then others had to follow. It’s not like that on mobile. They all interoperate. Every Ubuntu device would be additive to the whole ecosystem of devices.“

Linux x32 Support Brewing For Clang/Compiler-RT

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Phoronix

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August 22, 2013

Improvements for LLVM’s support of the Linux x32 ABI is set to improve with some work-in-progress patches for the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and Compiler-RT runtime library…

XMir Has A Big Security Problem With VT Switching

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Phoronix

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August 22, 2013

A rather glaring security issue has been present in Canonical’s XMir component for its new Mir display server, but there’s been very little action in addressing the problem…

Linux Lite 1.0.6 an Ubuntu LTS Based Operating System for Linux Newbies – Full Review

By

Tecmint

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August 22, 2013

Linux Lite 1.0.6 codename ‘Amethyst‘ with PAE support has been released recently. Linux Lite is a Linux Operating System which is freely available to download, use and share with everyone. Linux Lite is released based on Ubuntu LTS series, LTS stands for ‘Long Term Support‘….

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Development Release: Skolelinux 7.1 Beta 1

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DistroWatch

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August 22, 2013

Petter Reinholdtsen has announced the second beta of Skolelinux 7.1, a distribution also known as “Debian Edu”: “The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows integration fixes. This is the sixth test release….

Distribution Release: Antergos 2013.08.20

By

DistroWatch

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August 22, 2013

Antergos (previously known as Cinnarch) is an Arch based distribution that previously focused on the Cinnamon desktop but now provides multiple choices on desktop environments. Antergos 2013.08.20 has been released: “We are glad to announce the release of Antergos 2013.08.20 with a lot of improvements in the installation….