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Submission + - GNU Guix 0.7 released (gnu.org)

Submitted by davexunit
davexunit writes: GNU Guix, the purely functional package manager and distribution of the GNU operating system, has made a new alpha release. This release features an installation disk image of the GNU system for i686 and x86_64 platforms, 130 new packages, and an improved developer's API.

A description of Guix is provided in the full release notes:

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. It also offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management. Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, with Guile Scheme programming interfaces.

Submission + - U.K. Cabinet Office Adopts ODF as Exclusive Standard for Sharable Documents (consortiuminfo.org)

Submitted by Andy Updegrove
Andy Updegrove writes: The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for viewable government documents. The decision follows a long process that invited, and received, very extensive public input – over 500 comments in all.

Submission + - Inside Linux creator Linus Torvalds' home office (linux.com)

Submitted by LibbyMC
LibbyMC writes: Linux creator Linus Torvalds has given a personal video tour of his workspace, filmed by the Linux Foundation. It also includes behind the scenes laughs and footage, as well as a closer look at what he keeps on his desk and what he does between kernel releases.

Submission + - X.Org Server 1.16 Brings XWayland, GLAMOR, Systemd Integration (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The much anticipated Xorg Server 1.16 release is now available. The X.Org "Marionberry Pie" release features XWayland integration, GLAMOR support, systemd support, and many other features. XWayland support allows for legacy X11 support in Wayland environments via GL acceleration, GLAMOR provides generic 2D acceleration, non-PCI GPU device improvements, and countless other changes.

Submission + - Dropbox switches to Qt for Linux client (themukt.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: A Dropbox user Nicholas v. pointed it out on the forums: "Very excited about the rewrite for linux. It’s been a long time coming. Hopefully we’ll end up getting some of the glitz and glamour of the other platforms as a result. (Oh – and also very excited that it’s Qt!)" I checked it out on my Plasma system and it really looks far better than earlier.
KDE

KDE Releases Plasma 5 108

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the wobblier-windows dept.
KDE Community (3396057) writes "KDE proudly announces the immediate availability of Plasma 5.0, providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE's workspace offering. The new Breeze artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability. Central work-flows have been streamlined, while well-known overarching interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5." sfcrazy reviewed the new desktop experience. It would appear the semantic desktop search features finally work even if you don't have an 8-core machine with an SSD.

Submission + - NSA Admits Retaining Snowden Emails, no FOIA for US press (matthewkeys.net)

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: The http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net... reports on a FOIA request covering "... all e-mails sent by Edward Snowden"
Remember how Snowden should have raised his concerns with his superiors within the NSA?
Remember how no such communication could be found?
Remember how one such communication was released but did not seem to be raising direct concerns?
Well some record of e-mail communications seems to exist but they are exempt from public disclosure under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Submission + - The Q Platform uses Linux/OpenWRT to Control LED Light Bulbs and Stream Audio 1

Submitted by dmtaub
dmtaub writes: The Q is the only Open Source platform for music and light control on the market. In addition to using a smartphone to play music, set alarms/alerts, and trigger scenes, the Q will have a scripting IDE on the router configuration web page for aspiring programmers to play with light and sound.
There are only a few days left on the Kickstarter ( http://kck.st/1pCusil ) so now's the time to show support for a hackable smart-home platform that integrates music with colorful LED light bulbs.

Full disclosure: I am one of the co founders. Even though I am not working for them anymore, I still really want to see open-source, hackable LED lighting make its way to the masses.

Submission + - New Project to Get a Linux Distribution to run under Google's NaCl Sandbox (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Currently there is several challenges to getting Linux to run in the NaCl Sandbox inside Chrome.
I decided to approach an Google NaCl engineer with the idea. To say the least they are very interested in getting the broader community to work on fixing the following problems: Currently NaCl doesn't support pipes, most signals, nor symbolic links. Also supporting traditional fork is not currently possible in an efficient way. A custom spawn call is used. Forking and vFork are also are open ended issues. I think this would make for several great topics of master's thesis but have not found any place anywhere where one can submit ideas to that gets the attention the idea deserves. I have created a project here https://sourceforge.net/but have gotten no traffic on the idea at all. Slashdot users, how would you gather contributors to a really cool open source project?

Submission + - UK government to rush in emergency surveillance laws (theguardian.com) 2

Submitted by beaker_72
beaker_72 writes: The Guardian reports that the UK government has unveiled plans to introduce emergency surveillance laws into the UK parliament at the beginning of next week. These are aimed at reinforcing the powers of security services in the UK to force service providers to retain records of their customers phone calls and emails. The laws, which have been introduced after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that existing laws invaded individual privacy, will receive cross-party support and so will not be subjected to scrutiny or challenged in Parliament before entering the statute books. But as Tom Watson (Labour backbench MP and one of few dissenting voices) has pointed out, the ECJ ruling was six weeks ago, so why has the government waited until now to railroad something through. Unless of course they don't want it scrutinised too closely.

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