Distribution Release: Netrunner 2016.01 “Rolling”

By

-

February 29, 2016

netrunner-small Clemens Toennies has announced the release Netrunner 2016.01 “Rolling” edition, the latest version of the project’s Manjaro-based rolling-release distribution featuring the KDE Plasma desktop: “Three months in the making, we are happy to announce the release of Netrunner Rolling 2016.01, 64-bit edition. Despite the version number, 2016.01 comes with the latest KDE, including Plasma 5.5.4 and KDE Applications 15.12.2. This release marks one change from previously released pre-packaged ISO image – we’ve decided not to ship Akonadi and the KDE PIM suite with this release, favouring more lightweight alternatives instead.

SSD Reliability in the Real World: Google’s Experience

By

ZDNet

-

February 29, 2016

Using data from millions of drive days in Google datacenters, a new paper offers production lifecycle data on SSD reliability. Surprise! SSDs fail differently than disks – and in a dangerous way. Here’s what you need to know.

SSDs are a new phenomenon in the datacenter. We have theories about how they should perform, but until now, little data. That’s just changed.

The FAST 2016 paper Flash Reliability in Production: The Expected and the Unexpected, (the paper is not available online until Friday) by Professor Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto, and Raghav Lagisetty and Arif Merchant of Google, covers:

Millions of drive days over 6 years
10 different drive models
3 different flash types: MLC, eMLC and SLC
Enterprise and consumer drives

Spring RTS Open Source Engine 101.0 Released

By

Phoronix

-

February 29, 2016

Spring RTS 101.0 has been released with performance improvements, bug fixes, and new features.

Spring RTS 101.0 brings support for custom shaders and map drawing via Lua scripting, line of sight refactoring, refactoring of transports, an internal pr-downloader, and a ton of fixes.

Encryption Still a Low Priority for Too Many Cloud Users

By

ZDNet

-

February 29, 2016

The vast majority of businesses will be using cloud to store confidential information by 2018 – but almost half have no plans to encrypt it.

The vast majority of organisations plan to store confidential or sensitive data in the cloud by 2018, but despite that being just two years away, only a third have already set out an encryption plan which can be described as consistently applied across the entirety of the enterprise.

According to the 2016 Global Encryption and Key Management Trends Study, more than half of global organisations are already transferring sensitive or confidential information to the cloud, with 56 percent of respondents stating that this already forms part of their data storage strategy, whether or not that data is encrypted or made unreadable via some other mechanism.

Anyone Can Now Port Ubuntu Linux for Raspberry Pi 3 with Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker

By

Softpedia

-

February 29, 2016

linux-for-raspberry-pi-3 We believe that you already know about the surprise launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computer today, February 29, 2016, and it appears that developers had early access to the board.

Martin Wimpress, the leader of the Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system, had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia just a few minutes ago that he updated the Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker tool introduced by us in December 2015 to support porting of Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Server OSes for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

Raspberry Pi 3 Has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 64-Bit Chip, Still Just $35

By

ArsTechnica

-

February 29, 2016

The third major version of the Raspberry Pi will go on sale Monday, with the $35/Â£30 credit card-sized Raspberry Pi 3 Model B now sporting a 64-bit processor and embedded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. In previous versions, the Pi needed USB adapters to get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. Raspberry Pi 3 supports 802.11n Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only) and Bluetooth 4.0 without an adapter, freeing up its four USB ports for other purposes.

While the Raspberry Pi 2 released a year ago used a Broadcom system-on-chip with a 32-bit, 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex A7, the Raspberry Pi 3 upgrades to a 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 thatâ€™s also quad-core and is clocked at 1.2GHz.

Wireshark 2.0.2 Is a Major Release of the World’s Most Popular Network Scanner

By

Softpedia

-

February 29, 2016

wireshark-2-0-2 The world’s most popular network protocol analyzer, Wireshark, which security experts can use for development, analysis, troubleshooting, or education purposes, has reached version 2.0.2.

Wireshark 2.0.2 is a major release that patches a significant amount of security issues discovered since the first maintenance release, such as a DLL hijacking vulnerability, a DNP dissector infinite loop, and a SPICE dissector large loop. Additionally, multiple crashes have been addressed, in particular for the X.509AF, ASN.1 BER, HTTP/2, HiQnet, LBMC, RSL, LLRP, IEEE 802.11, GSM A-bis OML, SPICE, and NFS dissectors.

SCO vs. IBM Looks Like It’s Over For Good

By

The Register

-

February 29, 2016

And the winner is IBM…. And the lawyers milking the case for 13 long years. A new filing (PDF) scooped up by the good folks at Groklaw sees both SCO and IBM agree to sign off on two recent decisions in which SCO’s arguments advancing its claims to own parts of Unix were slapped down by the US District Court.

As The Register reads the PDF we’ve linked to above, and our informal legal counsel concurs, the new document describes IBM and SCO both signing off on the recent court orders. Those orders left SCO without a legal argument to stand on. The new filing also points out that SCO remains bankrupt and has â€œhas de minimis financial resources beyond the value of the claims on which the Court has granted summary judgment for IBM.â€

Linus Torvalds Announces Linux Kernel 4.5 RC6, Final Release Launches March 2016

By

Softpedia

-

February 29, 2016

Yes, it happened again, Linus Torvalds has made yet another early Sunday announcement for the next RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel branch.

We were expecting to see the Linux kernel 4.5 Release Candidate 6 build later tonight, February 28, 2016, but it looks like we are lucky again to get it for a spin a bit earlier, that, of course, in case you have nothing else better to do Sunday afternoon. According to Mr. Torvalds, the sixth Release Candidate (RC) build of Linux kernel 4.5 consists of a big patch to one of the network driver header files, which is approximately 40 percent of the entire changes for this release….

LinuxLink 5.0 Adds Full Yocto Project Compatibility

By

LinuxGizmos

-

February 29, 2016

Timesys released v5.0 of its LinuxLink embedded Linux distribution, adding full Yocto Project compatibility backed by a “Bakery” setup wizard. In recent years, Timesys has aligned its LinuxLink platform with Yocto Project code. Now, LinuxLink 5.0 promises full compatibility, bringing it in line with other major embedded distros.

LinuxLink, which is available in free and commercial versions, now provides a “Bakery” web wizard UI to ease Yocto Project development for newbies starting from a semiconductor backed reference BSP. Bakery helps users “quickly configure a custom Yocto Project image, create and download a Yocto Project installer and set up the development environment,” says Timesys.