ciaran_o_riordan writes "Tomorrow, a German court will hear the case of AVM, a distributor of Linux-based routers, which seeks to block Cybits from distributing software that modifies the routers' software to add content-filtering functionality. Free Software Foundation Europe explains: 'AVM justified its position using three arguments. First, they stated that their whole product software must be regarded as an entity under AVM copyright, and that this entity must not be modified. The position Mr. Welte [founder of gpl-violations.org and copyright holder of several parts of the Linux kernel] took was that the whole product software would in that case be a derivative work according to the GPL, and thus the whole product software should be licensed under the GNU GPL. AVM then switched to a second argument: that the software embedded on its DSL terminals consisted of several parts. According to Mr. Welte, AVM could then not prohibit anyone from modifying or distributing the GPL licensed software parts. The final argument by AVM was that the software on their DSL terminals is a composition of several different programs, which, due to the creative process, would be a protected compilation and thus under the copyright of AVM and not affected by the copyleft of the GPL.'"

dvdkhlng writes "Even though completely copyleft, the NanoNote hand-held platform failed to get the attention of many due to its low specs and the lack of wireless connectivity. The objective to keep things open had its price, and wireless technology is a mine-field of patents and NDAs. Now, a few gifted hackers designed an add-on card to bring wireless to the NanoNote. It's not what you would expect; WLAN compatibility was sacrificed, going for the less encumbered IPv6 over the 802.15.4 standard instead. The resulting dongles won't win a prize for the highest bandwidth, but excel at simplicity, energy efficiency and manufacturability. Want to see the ugly details? Designs, source code and production documentation are published under open source licenses."

An anonymous reader writes "I have been using Gentoo Linux for a long time now and have always been satisfied with one of its many disk encryption tools: cryptsetup (dm-crypt and LUKS). However, I recently gave FreeBSD a try and, although I concluded BSD is not for me, I was amazed at geli(8), FreeBSD's disk encryption tool. It happens this tool also provides what it calls an 'authentication mode.' Besides encrypting the disk sector-by-sector, it also stores checksums (sha256 in my case) in it on every write. On reads, if the checksum mismatchs, it propagates the error up, resulting in, say, a read() error. Thus I do not have to trust my disk (except of course for the boot partition) any longer: any data inconsistency will be detected before the data is used. Having searched for a long time without answers, I want to ask: is there something similar to this in Linux? Note: Using Btrfs is a valid solution, but is far from stable (got a few oopses during my tests)."

Glyn Moody writes "Linus is widely recognised for initiating two major developments: Linux and Git (it's an interesting discussion which of the two in the long term will be regarded as more important). But there's a third, which people tend to overlook: he also pioneered the key ideas behind what later came to be called open innovation. As more and more companies open up to embrace customer-generated ideas, and the idea spreads to other areas like open government, perhaps it's time to add open innovation to the list of Linus' achievements."

jbrodkin writes "Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth is a big fan of Google Chrome, and says the browser could replace the standard Firefox in future versions of Ubuntu Linux. 'We looked at it closely in the last cycle and the decision was to stick with Firefox,' he says. But the work that Google is doing with Chrome OS — essentially the Chrome browser on top of Linux — is potentially leading to a future in which 'Chrome on Ubuntu and Chrome on Linux is a better experience than Chrome on any other platform [i.e. Windows and Mac].' In a wide-ranging interview, Shuttleworth also discussed why he spent $20 million to become a space tourist but doesn't own a smartphone, controversies over Linux and Unity, the future of Ubuntu tablets, and says the move toward putting personal data in the cloud is 'a little scary.'"

An anonymous reader links to an exhaustive look at the latest Ubuntu, running at Tom's Hardware. "The new Unity interface is broken down into its individual elements and explained ad nauseam. Overall the article is objectively balanced, the author does a good job of pointing out specific design flaws and shortcomings instead of complaining about how Unity doesn't work for him specifically. The walkthrough of the uTouch gesture language is exciting (wish I had multi-touch), though a full listing of keyboard and mouse shortcuts come in handy, too. Towards the end of the article there are benchmarks between Lucid, Natty with Unity, and Natty with the Classic interface. The performance of the Unity interface isn't bad at all, but that kernel power issue does rear its ugly head."

An anonymous reader writes "I study Computer Science at a university in Melbourne, Australia. I recently went to a 'Directions of IT' seminar run by our central IT department, where students were invited to discuss issues with the senior management of IT. During discussion about proposed changes to our campus-wide wireless network, I asked if the new system would support Macs, Linux and other Operating Systems. Several of the managers laughed at this question, and one exclaimed 'Linux!' as if it was the punchline to a joke. The head of IT at least treated my question seriously, but I didn't get a concrete answer. So, I would like to ask Slashdot: Does your university/college provide support for Linux/BSD/etc users to connect to the on-campus wireless? How does IT support Linux users generally? Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?"

dkd903 writes "According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple switch' — it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users."

An anonymous reader writes "Asus has announced that three Eee PCs will ship with Ubuntu Linux. Three 2011 models — the 1001PXD, 1011PX, and 1015PX — are immediately available, though no retailers seem to stock them yet. A Canonical exec had this to say about the new netbooks: 'There are a number of factors that make Ubuntu an attractive proposition for ASUS and its customers. Ubuntu continues to set the standard for slick design, ease of use and security, it is the world's third most popular operating system, and [it] has the most number of users in Linux. We [Canonical] were looking at publicly available data on the operating systems accessing Wikipedia last week and found the web site serves more pages to Ubuntu PCs than to iPads — there are a lot of users out there.' It might not be the same as Asus launching three flagship netbooks all running Ubuntu instead of Windows, but it's definitely a start. Asus says there are more Ubuntu netbooks to come later this year, too — hopefully they'll run Ubuntu 11.04."

GPLHost-Thomas writes "The very last components that were needed to run Xen as a dom0 have finally reached kernel.org. The Xen block backend was one major feature missing from 2.6.39 dom0 support, and it's now included. Posts on the Xen blog, at Oracle and at Citrix celebrate this achievement."

An anonymous reader writes "Given that this year marks the 20th Anniversary of the Linux kernel, it is hardly surprising that anyone digging into their media collection might pull out something interesting, such as video tutorials on how to install early version of now popular distributions, like Slackware or Red Hat"

An anonymous reader writes "According to recent benchmarks by Phoronix, using the GNOME Shell will cause a large performance hit when running OpenGL games on Linux. Using Unity and GNOME Shell are also hitting various bugs in the open-source drivers."

An anonymous reader writes "Kororaa is based on Fedora 14. Users have a choice between a KDE 4.6.3 or GNOME 2.32 Live DVD in 32-bit and 64-bit versions." The original Kororaa, back in 2006 and earlier, was based on Gentoo. Development stopped for several years, but has resumed -- but with Fedora, not Gentoo, as the base distribution.

siliconbits writes "You may recall a little group of Linux-loving chums called Linaro, which was formed almost a year ago in the hopes of speeding up Linux development. Today at Computex, the company's taking it one step further with the announcement of the Origen development board. Based on Samsung's beefy Exynos 4210 dual core chipset, the kit packs all the essential ports — including HDMI, USB 2.0 host, SD slot, etc. — for keen developers to get their hands dirty on, and its base board is also removable to accommodate future chipsets. Potential buyers are told to keep an eye on Insignal, which will soon be offering the basic Origen package for $199, along with optional parts at an extra cost."

An anonymous reader writes "Linus just released the first -rc of the next kernel series, but rather than continuing development as the Linux 2.6.40 kernel, he has renamed it to be the Linux 3.0 kernel." And he's tacked on a second dot and another zero (3.0.0), at least for now, because many scripts expect and rely on a three-part kernel version.

An anonymous reader writes "From the MeeGo SF2011 conference this week it was disclosed that MeeGo may ship the Wayland Server with the tablet version of the MeeGo 1.3 operating system for release in October." A reasonably annotated version of the presentation slides. Unfortunately video of the talk is not yet available.

DrKnark writes "I am not an IT professional, even so I am one of the more knowledgeable in such matters at my department. We are now planning to build a new cluster (smallish, ~128 cores). The old cluster (built before my time) used Redhat Fedora, and this is also used in the larger centralized clusters around here. As such, most people here have some experience using that. My question is, are there better choices? Why are they better? What would be recommended if we need it to fairly user friendly? It has to have an X-windows server since we use that remotely from our Windows (yeah, yeah, I know) workstations."

dotancohen writes "Sharing users between Fedora and Debian-based distros just got a little easier. Beginning with Fedora 16, the Red-Hat based distro will number its human user UIDs starting from 1000, as opposed to the old 500. Though this change is intended to facilitate interoperability with other distros, it risks breaking backward compatibility with older Fedora releases including the newly released Fedora 15."

halfline writes "Fedora 15 was released today. It features GNOME 3 (with its substantially redone UI) and the systemd init system by default." The release also brings the latest KDE and XFCE versions, improved Btrfs support, amd a switch from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice. Installation images are available from the usual sources.

jfruhlinger writes "Google's refusal to not release Honeycomb source code is kosher because the code in question is released under the Apache license. But the kernel at the heart of Android is GPL'd, which means that code must be released. Google has actually been a good citizen in this regard — but many third-party Android vendors, not so much. While Asus has released their code, there are a host of companies that seem to have not done so, and Matthew Garrett is maintaining a list."