jrepin - Slashdot User

Submission + - Perl 6 for 2015 (fosdem.org)

Submitted by eneville on Friday November 07, 2014 @10:54AM

eneville writes: The last pieces are finally falling into place. After years of design and implementation, 2015 will be the year that Perl 6 officially launches for production use.

In this talk, the creator of Perl reflects on the history of the effort, how the team got some things right, and how it learned from its mistakes when it got them wrong. But mostly how a bunch of stubbornly fun-loving people outlasted the naysayers to accomplish the extraordinary task of implementing a language that was so ambitious, even its designers said it was impossible. Prepare to be delightfully surprised.

Submission + - KDE End of Year Fundraiser raises 12000€ in less than a month (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Albert Astals Cid on Friday November 07, 2014 @05:51AM

Albert Astals Cid writes: Valorie Zimmerman reports that the KDE End of Year fundraiser has raised more than 12000€ from over 400 people in less than a month. Donations are still open till the beginning of next year.

Submission + - ZDNet: Red Hat Storage Server three: Not your usual software-defined storage - o (owncloud.com)

Submitted by carzdonley27 on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @07:21PM

carzdonley27 writes: carzdonley27

Submission + - Meet the 36 people who run Wikipedia (medium.com)

Submitted by blastboy on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @12:13PM

blastboy writes: By pretty much any logic, Wikipedia shouldn't work: A vast website, built on the labor of volunteers, with very few tangible rewards and a fairly weird hierarchy. So why is it so successful? The site's top-ranking users explain what makes them tick.

Submission + - Android 5.0 Makes SD Cards Great Again (androidpolice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @09:32AM

An anonymous reader writes: Over the past couple of years, Google has implemented some changes to how Android handles SD cards that aren't very beneficial to users or developers. After listening to many rounds of complaints, this seems to have changed in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Google's Jeff Sharkey wrote, "[I]n Lollipop we added the new ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE intent. Apps can launch this intent to pick and return a directory from any supported DocumentProvider, including any of the shared storage supported by the device. Apps can then create, update, and delete files and directories anywhere under the picked tree without any additional user interaction. Just like the other document intents, apps can persist this access across reboots." Android Police adds, "All put together, this should be enough to alleviate most of the stress related to SD cards after the release of KitKat. Power users will no longer have to deal with crippled file managers, media apps will have convenient access to everything they should regardless of storage location, and developers won't have to rely on messy hacks to work around the restrictions."

Submission + - openSUSE 13.2 review (linuxveda.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @01:47PM

sfcrazy writes: In a nutshell openSUSE 13.2 is an impressive release with many new features, such as Snapshots, systemd and Btrfs, for users. openSUSE has become such a reliable distribution that it is hard to find any flaw in it. It continues to get better, more polished with each release.

Submission + - MIAOW: BSD-Licensed FPGA GPU Based On AMD's "SI" GPUs (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29, 2014 @11:08AM

An anonymous reader writes: A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate class created an open-source GPU design based on AMD's Southern Islands instruction set architecture. AMD previously published their Southern Islands ISA as they do for each GPU generation and so the class took to designing their FPGA-based GPU design around the AMD instruction set. The GPU design is open-source as the MIAOW GPU and available under a three-clause BSD license though having it be a full-fledged FPGA GPU will require more work.

Submission + - Raging debate over systemd exposes the two factions tugging at modern-day Linux (infoworld.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd on Monday October 27, 2014 @06:54PM

walterbyrd writes: In discussions around the Web in the past few months, I've seen an overwhelming level of support of systemd from Linux users who run Linux on their laptops and maybe a VPS or home server. I've also seen a large backlash against systemd from Linux system administrators who are responsible for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of Linux servers, physical and virtual.

Submission + - Firefox OS is Coming to Raspberry Pi (mozilla.org)

Submitted by ControlsGeek on Monday October 27, 2014 @01:14PM

ControlsGeek writes: Mozilla plans to build a version of it's FxOs operating system for use in the Raspberry Pi. Plans are afoot to build a version capable of (1) being run on the Pi hardware and (2) eventuality achieve parity with Raspbian and (3) World domination.

Submission + - Stop PulseAudio from changing sound settings ? 3

Submitted by cgdae on Friday October 17, 2014 @09:09PM

cgdae writes: Does anyone know how to stop PulseAudio/Pavucontrol from changing sound settings whenever there is a hardware change such as headphones being plugged in/out or docking/undocking my laptop ?

I recently had to install PulseAudio on my Debian system because the Linux version of Skype started to require it. Ever since, whenever i dock/undock or use/stop using headphones, all sound disappears, and i have to go to Pavucontrol and make random changes to its 'Output Devices' or 'Speakers' or 'Headphones' tab, or mute/unmute things, or drag a volume slider which has inexplicably moved to nearly zero, until sound magically comes back again.

I've tried creating empty PulseAudio config files in my home directory, and/or disabling the loading of various PulseAudio modules in /etc/pulse/*.conf, but i cannot stop PulseAudio from messing things up whenever there's a hardware change.

It's really frustrating that something like PulseAudio doesn't have an easy-to-find way of preventing it from trying (and failing) to be clever.

[In case it's relevant, my system is a Lenovo X220 laptop, with Debian jessie, kernel 3.14-2-amd64. I run fvwm with an ancient config.]

Thanks for any suggestions,

- Julian

Submission + - Debian - preserve freedom of choice of init systems (debian.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, 2014 @10:52AM

An anonymous reader writes: "Debian has decided (via the technical committee) to change its
default init system for the next release. The technical committee
decided not to decide about the question of "coupling" i.e. whether
other packages in Debian may depend on a particular init system.

This GR seeks to preserve the freedom of our users now to select an
init system of their choice, and the project's freedom to select a
different init system in the future. It will avoid Debian becoming
accidentally locked in to a particular init system (for example,
because so much unrelated software has ended up depending on a
particular init system that the burden of effort required to change
init system becomes too great). A number of init systems exist, and
it is clear that there is not yet broad consensus as to what the
best init system might look like."

Submission + - Debian talks about systemd begins once again (debian.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, 2014 @06:13AM

An anonymous reader writes: A couple of months ago the TC of Debian decided for systemd. This is now subject for discussion once again and Ian Jackson has stated that he wants a general resolution, so every developer within the Debian project can decide. After a short time the required amount of supportes has been reached and the discussion can start once again.

Submission + - KDE Releases Plasma 5.1 (kde.org) 1

Submitted by jrepin on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @07:23AM

jrepin writes: KDE Plasma 5.1 sports a wide variety of improvements, leading to greater stability, better performance and new and improved features. Thanks to the feedback of the community, KDE developers were able to package a large number of fixes and enhancements into this release, among which more complete and higher quality artwork following the new-in-5.0 Breeze style, re-addition of popular features such as the Icon Tasks taskswitcher and improved stability and performance.

Those travelling regularly will enjoy better support for time zones in the panel's clock, while those staying at home a revamped clipboard manager, allowing you to easily get at your past clipboard's content. The Breeze widget style is now also available for Qt4-based applications, leading to greater consistency across applications. The work to support Wayland as display server for Plasma is still ongoing, with improved, but not complete support in 5.1. Changes throughout many default components improve accessibility for visually impaired users by adding support for screenreaders and improved keyboard navigation.

Aside from the visual improvements and the work on features, the focus of this release lies also on stability and performance improvements, with over 180 bugs resolved since 5.0 in the shell alone.

Submission + - Systemd Adding Its Own Console To Linux Systems (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @06:50AM

An anonymous reader writes: The next version of systemd is poised to introduce an experimental "systemd-consoled" that serves as a user-space console daemon. The consoled furthers the Linux developers' goal of eventually deprecating the VT subsystem found within the Linux kernel in favor of a user-space driven terminal that supports better localization, increased security, and greater robustness of the kernel's seldom touched and hairy CONFIG_VT'ed code.

Submission + - The city of Torino decides to switche to Linux to save 6 M€ (insaneitskills.com)

Submitted by insaneitskills on Tuesday September 30, 2014 @06:08PM

insaneitskills writes: Goodbye Windows, Office and Explorer, welcome to Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Mozilla . This is what has decided the Italian city of Turin which has decided to make a saving of 6 million euros (6 M€) over five years.
After Munich and Toulouse converted to Linux and to OpenOffice and LibreOffice, the fever Open Source wins Italy. It is the turn of Turin wanting to free itself from the tyranny of proprietary software , as the site Torino.repubblica.it says.

It seems to be the stopping of Microsoft to support Windows XP that has let the city deciding to switch to Linux, in this case to the Ubuntu distribution for substantial savings of € 6 million in five years. The calculations included a gain of EUR 300 on 8300 PC for the licenses of Windows and Office ,wheither € 2.5 million which will be increased by the licensing renewal proceedings over the years, says the Italian IT website by quoting Gianmarco Montanari, administrative officer of the city and Sandro Golzio the Director of Information Systems.

The migration to Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Mozilla will begin this autumn and will last a year and half to make Turin the first Open Source city. It will remain to train users and make them adopt the new tools, which is not necessarily the easiest part. We learned this summer that the city of Munich could return to Microsoft. If migration to Linux has been considered a success by officials who had committed the municipal team that succeeded it last March ensures that a portion of users would still struggling to adapt to the new software.

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