89286863
submission
prisoninmate writes:
A year ago, we told you that, after ten long years, the Debian Project finally found a way to switch their rebranded Iceweasel web browser back to Mozilla Firefox, both the ESR (Extended Support Release) and normal versions, but one question remained: what about the Mozilla Thunderbird email, news, and calendar client? Well, that question has an official answer today, as the Mozilla Thunderbird packages appear to have landed in the Debian repositories as a replacement for Icedove, the rebranded version that Debian Project was forced to use for more than ten years do to trademark issues. Make sure you read the entire article to find out what steps you need to take if you want to migrate from Icedove to Mozilla Thunderbird.
89085659
submission
prisoninmate writes:
Linux kernel 3.18.48 LTS is here and it's the last in the series, which was marked for a January 2017 extinction since mid-April last year. The new patch changes a total of 50 files, with 159 insertions and 351 deletions. It brings an updated networking stack with Bluetooth, Bridge, IPv4, IPv6, CAIF, and Netfilter improvements, a couple of x86 fixes, and a bunch of updated USB, SCSI, ATA, media, GPU, ATM, HID, MTD, SPI, and networking (Ethernet and Wireless) drivers. Of course, this being the last maintenance update in the series, you are urged to move to a newer LTS branch, such as Linux kernel 4.9 or 4.4, which are far more secure and performant than Linux 3.18 was. But Linux 3.18 appears to be used by Google and other vendors on a bunch of Android-powered devices, and even some Chromebooks use Linux kernel 3.18 on Chrome OS, so here's what the kernel developer suggests you do if you can't upgrade.
"If you are _stuck_ on 3.18 (/me eyes his new phone), well, I might have a plan for you, that first involves you yelling very loudly at your hardware vendor and refusing to buy from them again unless they cut this crap out. After you properly vent to them, drop me an email and let's see what we can come up with, you aren't in this sinking ship alone, and it's obvious your vendor isn't going to help out," said Greg Kroah-Hartman in the mailing list announcement.
88924989
submission
prisoninmate writes:
The Document Foundation, a non-profit organization established to promote and advance the development of the open-source LibreOffice office suite, announced the general availability of LibreOffice 5.3. Probably the most important feature of LibreOffice 5.3 is its new user-friendly and flexible user interface concept called MUFFIN (My User Friendly & Flexible INterface), which many reported last year as a Microsoft Office-like Ribbon UI. In fact, the tasty new UI concept is a "personal" user interface capable of adapting to your needs and the device's screen you're currently using for editing LibreOffice documents.
While still experimental, MUFFIN is the big LibreOffice interface change that users requested for so long, providing a total of four different UI styles that will change depending on whether you're deploying the office suite on a laptop or desktop computer. These include the default look with toolbars, the Single Toolbar UI, the Sidebar UI with a Single Toolbar, and a new Notebook Bar UI. The LibreOffice Writer received a new "Go to Page" dialog so you can easily jump to another page of a lengthy document. Table Styles have been implemented as well with support for importing and exporting ODF table styles. New Arrows toolbox provides a bunch of drawing tools that were previously available only for LibreOffice Draw and Impress, borderless padding is now displayed by default, and you can now set the small capitals character property.
87955675
submission
prisoninmate writes:
It happened faster than we thought, and while some of you are probably already downloading the final release of the Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" Cinnamon and MATE editions, they've now been officially announced, which also means that the upgrade path from Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" is in place. Based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Linux Mint 18.1 has been dubbed Serena, and it ships in two officially supported flavors, with the Cinnamon 3.2 and MATE 1.16 desktop environments. It's powered by Ubuntu's long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, and includes improved X-Apps, Update Manager, and Software Sources components.
87845987
submission
prisoninmate writes:
Linux kernel 4.9 entered development in mid-October, on the 15th, when Linus Torvalds decided to cut the merge window short by a day just to keep people on their toes, but also to prevent them from sending last-minute pull requests that might cause issues like it happened with the release of Linux kernel 4.8, which landed just two weeks before first RC of Linux 4.9 hit the streets. There are many great new features implemented in Linux kernel 4.9, but by far the most exciting one is the experimental support for older AMD Radeon graphics cards from the Southern Islands (SI) / GCN 1.0 family, which was injected to the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver. This means that it needs to be enabled at compile time, and you'll need X.Org Server 1.19.0 and xf86-video-amdgpu 1.2.0 too. There are also various interesting improvements for modern AMD Radeon GPUs, such as virtual display support and better reset support, both of which are implemented in the AMDGPU driver. For Intel GPU users, there's DMA-BUF implicit fencing, and some Intel Atom processors got a P-State performance boost. Intel Skylake improvements are also present in Linux kernel 4.9.
87750361
submission
prisoninmate writes:
After being in development for the past six months, Collabora Online 2.0 is finally here as the powerful cloud-based office suite that promises to protect users' privacy and freedom of expression while editing various documents formats online. Collabora Online is mainly targeted at the enterprise world, hosting and cloud businesses. With features like collaborative editing, Collabora Online 2.0 users to always be in control of their sensitive corporate data. It's suitable for large scale deployment, supports viewing and editing of text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the ODT, DOCX, DOC, ODS, XLSX, XLS, ODP, PPTX, and PPT file formats. Enterprises interested in implementing the LibreOffice-based Collabora Online 2.0 office suite on their infrastructure are invited to take a tour and check out the demos at www.collaboraoffice.com.
87196885
submission
prisoninmate writes:
After two successful major releases, budgie-remix has finally been accepted as an official Ubuntu flavor, earlier today during a meeting where four Canonical technicians voted positive. As such, we're extremely happy to inform our readers that the new Ubuntu flavor is called Ubuntu Budgie. In April this year, when budgie-remix hit the road towards its first major release, versioned 16.04, we reported you that David Mohammed was kind enough to inform Softpedia about the fact that he got in touch with Ubuntu MATE leader Martin Wimpress, who urged the developer to target Ubuntu 16.10 for an official status. budgie-remix 16.10 arrived as well this fall shortly after the release of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), and the dream of becoming an official Ubuntu flavor is now a reality. Re-branding of the official website and the entire distribution is ongoing.
87132021
submission
prisoninmate writes:
The team behind the Mythbuntu GNU/Linux distribution sadly announced this morning that the project has been discontinued, effective immediately, and no new releases will be made. Mythbuntu was an operating system based on the widely-used Ubuntu Linux distro and built around the MythTV free and open source digital video recorder (DVR) project. The first release of the OS was back when Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was announced, and the last one was Mythbuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus). From this point, no new releases of the Mythbuntu Linux operating system will be created, which means that there will be no new ISO images anymore. Also, the mythbuntu-desktop and Mythbuntu-Control-Centre packages are now discontinued and won't be available from the Ubuntu repositories anymore. However, users will still be able to install the MythTV software and configure it as they see fit. The Mythbuntu team recommends users who want to use "Mythbuntu" to install the latest release of the Xubuntu Linux operating system and then add the Mythbuntu PPA (Personal Package Archive), which will continue to provide the latest MythTV releases and other related packages.
86909145
submission
prisoninmate writes:
The Linux 4.7 kernel branch officially reached end of life, and it has already been marked as EOL on the kernel.org website, which means that the Linux kernel 4.7.10 maintenance update is the last one that will be released for this branch. It also means that you need to either update your system to the Linux 4.7.10 kernel release or move to a more recent kernel branch, such as Linux 4.8. In related news, Linux kernel 4.8.4 is now the latest stable and most advanced kernel version, which is already available for users of the Solus and Arch Linux operating systems, and it's coming soon to other GNU/Linux distributions powered by a kernel from the Linux 4.8 series. Users are urged to update their systems as soon as possible.
86725633
submission
prisoninmate writes:
Can you believe it's been 20 years since the KDE (Kool Desktop Environment) was announced on the 14th of October, 1996, by project founder Matthias Ettrich? Well, it has, and today we'd like to say a happy 20th birthday to KDE!
"On October 14, KDE celebrates its 20th birthday. The project that started as a desktop environment for Unix systems, today is a community that incubates ideas and projects which go far beyond desktop technologies. Your support is very important for our community to remain active and strong." reads the timeline page prepared by the KDE project for this event.
86716285
submission
prisoninmate writes:
Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) has been in development for the past six months, like any other Ubuntu release, and it's now officially available for download for those who want to use the latest software releases and GNU/Linux technologies on their personal computers, or in the cloud. However, it is not an exciting release for fans of the open source operating system. Probably the most important feature of Yakkety Yak is Linux kernel 4.8, which brings support for the latest hardware, but other than that you'll get some updated components that are mostly based on the GNOME 3.20 Stack. An experimental Unity 8 session is provided as well for testing purposes. Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) will be supported for nine months, until July 2017 when the distro reaches end of life (EOL) and will no longer receive software and security updates, which means that most of you out there won't even bother upgrading from the long-term supported and very stable Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) release. Ubuntu 16.10 is now available for download from the official website for desktop, server, and cloud. Official spins like Ubuntu MATE 16.10, Ubuntu GNOME 16.10, Xubuntu 16.10, Lubuntu 16.10, Ubuntu Kylin 16.10, Ubuntu Studio 16.10, or Kubuntu 16.10 have been released as well today.
86671935
submission
prisoninmate writes:
Fedora Project released of the Beta milestone of the upcoming Fedora 25 Linux operating system, due for release in mid-November. Powered by Linux kernel 4.8.1, the Fedora 25 Beta is shipping with the recently released GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, which is enabled by default on top of a Wayland 1.12 session for the Workstation Edition). Of course, you'll also find the latest software versions, including the LibreOffice 5.2.2 office suite, Flatpak 0.6.12, Mozilla Firefox 49.0 web browser, and LibVirt 2.2.0. Additionally, users will find the Mesa 12.0.3 3D Graphics Library for better and faster graphics support, OpenSSH 7.3p1 and OpenSSL 1.0.2j for improved security, Python 3.5.2, Samba 4.5.0, systemd 231, TigerVNC 1.7.0, and the latest Git snapshot of the upcoming X.Org Server 1.19.0 display server. Fedora 25 Beta Workstation is available for download now.
86560493
submission
prisoninmate writes:
Softpedia reports that there's a new project on GitHub, called alwsl, which promises to let you install the Arch Linux operating system on Windows 10's new WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) feature, which allows users to run native Linux command-line tools directly on the Windows operating system alongside their modern desktop and apps. For example, Canonical and Microsoft brought Bash on Ubuntu on Windows using the new WSL functionality. For now, the alwsl project, which is developed by a group of German developers that call themselves "Turbo Developers," offers a .bat file that you can use to install Arch Linux on a WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) host, but the software is in developer preview stage. The first stable release, alwsl 1.0 will be able not only to install Arch Linux on the Windows Subsystem for Linux host in Windows 10 editions that support it, but also to create and manage users and snapshots. Also, it looks like it will get rolling upgrades just like a normal Arch Linux installation gets. The final release is expected to launch on December 2016, and you can monitor its development progress on GitHub.
86534267
submission
prisoninmate writes:
KDE will celebrate 20 years of activity on October 14, 2016, and they've just released the first LTS (Long Term Support) version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Prominent new features of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS include support for desktop widgets, a new system-wide search functionality that promises to let users easily search their KDE desktops for everything they want, including apps, music, videos, files, folders, etc., a new tool to get hot new stuff for your KDE Plasma desktop, such as wallpapers, widgets, desktop effects, or window styles, and infinite customization possibilities. Moreover, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS comes with a unified look for the default Breeze theme so that, no matter what type of application you're using (Qt4, GTK2, GTK3, or Qt5), it will look the same, mobile phone notifications, along with the ability to use your smartphone as a PC remote, transfer files or mute music during calls, all with the new KDE Connect plasmoid. There 's also Right-to-Left (RTL) language support, simplified global shortcuts, improvements to many applets, and much better Wayland support. KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will receive nine point releases until 2018.
86498479
submission
prisoninmate writes:
From a Softpedia report: Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux kernel 4.8 on October 2, 2016. Linux kernel 4.8 has been in development for the past two months, during which it received no less than eight Release Candidate (RC) testing versions that early adopters were able to compile and install on their GNU/Linux operating system to test various hardware and report bugs. There are several interesting new features implemented in the Linux 4.8 kernel, and Microsoft Surface 3 touchscreen support is one that should get a mention. Phoronix also reports that Linux kernel 4.8 adds AMDGPU OverDrive support, initial NVIDIA Pascal support, Raspberry Pi 3 SoC support, Btrfs ENOSPC rework, and various security improvements.
