Open Source

The development cycle of openSUSE 13.1, codenamed "Bottle," was officially kicked off today when Andres Silva announced Milestone 1. He said, "As early version, it is expected that this Milestone is not fully functional or very stable. The most prominent changes in openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 1 come from the upgrades that packages are going through." This release features Linux 3.9.0, Xorg X Server 1.14.1, GCC 4.7, GNOME 3.8.1, and KDE 4.10.2. It also ships with LibreOffice 4.0.2, Firefox 20, and GIMP 2.8.4. Future plans for 13.1 include upgrading GCC to 4.8, testing kmscom, and finish moving everything to systemd (completely removing SysVinit and initscripts). mkinitrd would then be replaced with Dracut. AppArmor will be "promoted further as a preferred security suite" and SELinux will be dusted off and oiled up. GNOME will be upgraded to 3.10 and get a green theme to display as default. KDE should be the latest 4.11.x release possible and will lose Kopete for Telepathy (so getting Phonon to support GStreamer 1.0 is also on the menu). openSUSE 13.1 Release Schedule * 2013-05-16: Milestone 1 * 2013-06-13: Milestone 2 * 2013-07-11: Milestone 3 * 2013-08-08: Milestone 4 * 2013-08-12: Stabilization Freeze * 2013-09-01: Toolchain Freeze * 2013-09-19: Beta 1 * 2013-10-07: Pre-Release Freeze * 2013-10-10: Release Candidate 1 * 2013-10-31: Release Candidate 2 * 2013-11-08: Gold Master * 2013-11-19: General Availability Get your copy of Milestone 1 at openSUSE.org. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts Linux Mint 15 Most Ambitious Release Ever (post comment) Critical Linux Exploit In The Wild (post comment) Antergos Erases Cinnarch with Inaugural Release (post comment)

The Google Developer Group (GDG) Lahore hosted their fourth event on the afternoon of April 18th with support from Plan9 (Tech Incubator) and P@SHA. The event had a variety of attendees, from early Computer Science students to soon-to-be graduates, to industry professionals and faculty members from various universities in Lahore, Pakistan. As part of the event agenda, GDG Lahore hosted a panel about Google Summer of Code where Muhammad Adnan shared his experiences from Google Summer of Code as a both a student and a mentor. Muhammad was a Google Summer of Code student in the 2010 program for phpMyAdmin and a Mentor for RTEMS in Google Summer of Code 2012 and Mentor for Google Code-in 2011 and 2012. Adnan shared his story about how he first discovered the program through Twitter and ultimately applied for the Google Summer of Code program. He motivated students who were interested in applying for Google Summer of Code and gave them tips on writing their applications. Adnan explained how Google is providing opportunities for student developers to show their skills and how to increase the chances of their proposal being accepted by the mentoring organizations involved in this year’s Google Summer of Code. The session ended with questions from attendees about Google Summer of Code and its many benefits. Historically, Google Summer of Code hasn’t had very many entries from Pakistan, possibly because many students are not familiar with Google Summer of Code here. The main purpose of this session was to let students know more about the program and encouraging students to apply. GDG Lahore plans to brings a similar session Google Summer of Code in many other universities in Lahore in the coming months. By Haris Nadeem , GDG Lahore Manager

The beat goes on in the Apple v. Motorola appeal of Judge Richard Posner's ruling dismissing both parties' claims with prejudice, saying neither was entitled to damages or an injunction. Both are appealing, but for different reasons. Motorola has now filed its redacted reply brief [PDF] in response to Apple's response and reply brief [PDF]. And as soon as Judge James Robart issued his Microsoft-friendly ruling in Microsoft v. Motorola in the Seattle litigation, Apple sent a letter to this appeals court, bringing it to the court's attention, because it supports Apple's position and calls Motorola's patents a trivial contribution to the standard. Motorola defends the value of its patents and then tells the Federal Circuit that RAND patent holders have to be able to seek injunctions against "intransigent" licensees like Apple. Otherwise, they'll take advantage, delaying by litigation any reckoning for years while benefiting from the technology without paying for it. What exactly should happen to a company that refuses to pay and won't accept an offered rate or a court-set rate? The RAND patent holder *still* can't do a thing? No injunction? Nothing? Apple began its infringement, Motorola points out, in 2007. It's now 2013, and it still hasn't paid a dime. "Motorola should have the opportunity to seek an injunction to stop Apple's six years of ill-gotten gains from stretching into a decade or more," Motorola says.

Greg Putrich With Firefox 22 now in beta Mozilla has decided not to enable its new third-party cookie-blocking feature by default. The feature, aimed at preventing cross-site tracking of browser users with cookies not originating from the sites users visit, will still be available in the next Firefox release (due  in June) but will be turned off by default. Cookies are small sets of data stored locally by the web browser, originally intended to help keep track of where a user was (his or her “state”) within a web application. They’re associated with a particular domain name and carry a set of values such as an application name, a unique identifying number or string for the user or the web session, and an expiration date. While most cookies are increasingly short-lived some can be essentially “immortal” (or last at least until a user purges them) with expiration dates far off in the future. Web sites can also query cookie data from a visiting web browser to gather analytical information about the user as well—and to target specific ads based on identity or web visit history data revealed by them. Precision strike In a blog post Mozilla Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich explained the reasons for the delay in turning on the feature (a patch submitted by Stanford computer science graduate student Jonathan Meyer) by default. He said there were still issues to be resolved in how the feature avoided both “false positives," such as blocking cookies from the companies behind sites visited by the user because they were associated with a different domain name. There’s also still an issue with “false negatives”—unwanted cookies that users pick up from sites they’ve visited that then follow them to other sites. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Adam and Andrew talk about linux containers, Docker, and dotCloud with Solomon Hykes – Founder & CEO of DotCloud and the creator of Docker. Listen to this episode on 5by5! We moved the show to 5by5! You can tune-in LIVE on Tuesday’s at 5pm CST. The post #89: Doing incredible things with linux containers and Docker with Solomon Hykes appeared first on The Changelog.

A few years ago, I gave a history of the 2.6.32 stable kernel, and mentioned the previous stable kernels as well. I'd like to apologize for not acknowledging the work of Adrian Bunk in maintaining the 2.6.16 stable kernel for 2 years after I gave up on it, allowing it to be used by many people for a very long time. I've updated the previous post with this information in it at the bottom, for the archives. Again, many apologies, I never meant to ignore the work of this developer.

Wynn posted about Sidekiq last February, briefly introducing a new way of handling background workers. For those of us who took on the challenge of switching from Resque to Sidekiq, you can probably agree with me that it brought a new set of challenges to tackle. The upside of that, though, is that tackling those quirks is well worth the payoff. To save some trouble for those of you who want to switch but haven’t yet, here’s what to look out for on the conversion. #1: Sidekiq is too darn fast It sounds ridiculous, but Sidekiq is so fast that it can run your worker before your model even finishes saving. There’s one easy solution for this: don’t use after_create or after_save, but instead use after_commit to make sure that model is done with the database. after_commit :run_expensive_hello_world, :on => :create This will solve 99% of your use-cases, but if you use something like state_machine, you won’t be able to use any of state_machine’s transitions to push out a worker. Instead, we solved it by creating an instance variable that the after_commit callback uses. attr_accessor :just_moved after_commit :tell_neighbors_hi, :if => :just_moved state_machine :status, :initial => :sitting do # ... after_transition any => :moved do |i| i.just_moved = true end end #2: You can’t see failed jobs. Well, sort of. Sidekiq is different from Resque in that once a job fails, you won’t be able to go back later and run it again after it’s fixed. The reasoning behind this design decision is that Sidekiq, unlike Resque, will retry your job at increasing intervals automatically up until about 20 days — plenty of time to see the error, assign the bug and fix it. After that, you’re out of luck… …unless you’ve heard of sidekiq-failures. #3: Sidekiq’s perform is not Resque’s self.perform Mike Perham has done a good job of making the terminology fairly similar when switching from Resque to Sidekiq. However, make note that Sidekiq’s perform method is an instance-level method, whereas Resque’s is class-level. The main takeaway from this is that in Resque, it’s not uncommon to throw the perform method on whatever object you want to use for the worker. In Sidekiq, you’ve got to watch out for initializing that new object. You might be able to get away with it if your initialize method has no arguments, but you’re better off creating a new class just for the worker. After getting accustomed to some of the differences between Resque and Sidekiq, it’s pretty easy to see that Sidekiq can shave time and money off your server and is definitely worth the switch. The post Earn a Sidekiq blackbelt by breaking a few boards appeared first on The Changelog.

After much public discussion of the issue, Mozilla has decided to postpone blocking of third-party cookies by default in the next version of Firefox. As noted in this post, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) had raised a major stink over the issue, citing "the impact the ban would have on small Internet publishers, which depend on such cookie technology to sell advertising to niche audience segments." According to Mozilla's Brendan Eich, though, Mozilla just needs more time to implement the technology. Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, writes in a blog post: "There are many conflicting claims about how this patch will affect the Internet. Why debate in theory what we can measure in practice? We are going to find out more and adjust course as needed...We have heard important feedback from concerned site owners. We are always committed to user privacy, and remain committed to shipping a version of the patch that is 'on' by default. We are mindful that this is an important change; we always knew it would take a little longer than most patches as we put it through its paces. For those who read this as Mozilla softening our stance on protecting privacy and putting users first, in a word: no." According to Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB, in a statement: “This move will not put the interest of users first. Nor does it promote transparency or ‘move the web forward’ as Mozilla claims in its announcement. It will not advance Mozilla Corporation’s objective, as stated in its bylaws, of ‘promoting choice and innovation on the internet,’ but will, instead, impede both." Mozilla had planned to release the third-party cookie blocking as "on by default" in Firefox 22, but it now looks like the scheme will take more time. In particular, Eich has pointed out that false positives and false negatives can arise when trying to determine which kinds of Internet content should be blocked. Firefox won't be the first browser to block cookies by default, once the kinks are worked out. Apple's Safari browser already does so. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software Firefox (25 alternatives, 24 reviews) Mozilla (34 alternatives, post review) cookies (add alternative, post review) Related Blog Posts Firefox 21 Arrives, Featuring Health Reports, More Social Features (post comment) New Open Source Phones: Nearly Upon Us (4 comments) Mozilla Can't Seem to Keep its Firefox OS Strategy Straight (post comment)

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Cinnamon desktop on Linux Mint 15. Linux Mint The Linux Mint project yesterday released version 15 of the increasingly popular desktop operating system, with upgrades to the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments as well as new applications for managing software and drivers. Code-named "Olivia," Linux Mint 15 is based on the most recent version of Ubuntu and will be supported until January 2014. Linux Mint also has a version based on Debian which is released on a "semi-rolling" basis while the Ubuntu-based version mirrors Ubuntu's six-month release cycle. "Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project," the Mint announcement states. "MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML5 and two new tools, 'Software Sources' and 'Driver Manager,' make their first appearance in Linux Mint." Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments