Motor was one of several readers to note that a small patch recently added to the Linux kernel contains guidelines for discourse and dispute resolution within the community. It's called the "Code of Conflict." Quoting: Your code and ideas behind it will be carefully reviewed, often resulting in critique and criticism. The review will almost always require improvements to the code before it can be included in the kernel. Know that this happens because everyone involved wants to see the best possible solution for the overall success of Linux. .... If however, anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable. ... As a reviewer of code, please strive to keep things civil and focused on the technical issues involved.

An anonymous reader writes With the advent of smaller, faster ARM hardware such as the new Raspberry Pi 2 (which now has a Kali image built for it), we've been seeing more and more use of these small devices as 'throw-away computers'. While this might be a new and novel technology, there's one major drawback to this concept – and that is the confidentiality of the data stored on the device itself. Most of the setups do little to protect the sensitive information saved on the SD cards of these little computers.

An anonymous reader writes With this week's release of Chrome OS M41, there is the new Freon graphics stack to replace X11 on some platforms. Freon is a very limited graphics stack to replace Chrome OS usage of X11/X.Org by having the Chrome browser communicate directly with the Linux kernel's KMS/DRM API and OpenGL ES interfaces for drawing. This design is much simpler and yields various power and performance improvements though it's not based on Wayland nor Mir (though Chrome plans to support these display server models).

An anonymous reader writes Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser does not support slightly older versions of the Linux kernel anymore. Linux 3.17 is now the minimum requirement. According to a thread on the Debian mailing list, a kernel feature called TSYNC is what makes the difference. When a backported patch for the Debian 8 kernel was requested, there were hostile replies about not wanting to support "Google spyware."

jrepin writes The KDE student programs team is happy to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2015. This will allow students from around the world to work with mentors on KDE software projects. Successful students will receive stipends from Google. Ideas on what a student entering Google Summer of Code 2015 with KDE might work on are listed on the Community Wiki.

jones_supa writes: Ubuntu is going live with systemd, reports Martin Pitt in the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list. Next Monday, Vivid (15.04) will be switched to boot with systemd instead of UpStart. The change concerns desktop, server, and all other current flavors. Technically, this will flip around the preferred dependency of init to systemd-sysv | upstart in package management, which will affect new installs, but not upgrades. Upgrades will be switched by adding systemd-sysv to ubuntu-standard's dependencies. If you want, you can manually do the change already, but it's advisable to do an one-time boot first. Right now it is important that if you run into any trouble, file a proper bug report in Launchpad (ubuntu-bug systemd). If after some weeks it is found that there are too many or too big regressions, Ubuntu can still revert back to UpStart.

angry tapir writes Reacting to the surging popularity of the Docker virtualization technology, Red Hat has customized a version of its Linux distribution to run Docker containers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host strips away all the utilities residing in the stock distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that aren't needed to run Docker containers. Removing unneeded components saves on storage space, and reduces the time needed for updating and booting up. It also provides fewer potential entry points for attackers. (Product page is here.)

An anonymous reader writes For those wondering when the first graphics driver for the new Khronos Vulkan API will materialize and for what hardware, it looks like the first driver could very well be for Intel graphics and it might not be too far away. It turns out Valve developed an Intel Linux Vulkan driver to help ISVs bootstrap their new Vulkan code, with Valve planning to open-source this driver code. This is yet another reason to love Valve, especially as Intel graphics on Linux don't even support OpenGL 4 yet.

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes with this excerpt from a news release from the Software Freedom Conservancy: Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GPLv2, the license of Linux and many other Open Source and Free Software included in VMware's ESXi products. Serge Wroclawski points out the SFC's technical FAQ about the suit. One nugget: This case is specifically regarding a combined work that VMware allegedly created by combining their own code (“vmkernel”) with portions of Linux's code, which was licensed only under GPLv2. As such, this, to our knowledge, marks the first time an enforcement case is exclusively focused on this type of legal question relating to GPL

Nerval's Lobster writes This year is shaping up as a really good one for Linux, at least on the jobs front. According to a new report (PDF) from The Linux Foundation and Dice, nearly all surveyed hiring managers want to recruit Linux professionals within the next six months, with 44 percent of them indicating they're more likely to hire a candidate with Linux certification over one who does not. Forty-two percent of hiring managers say that experience in OpenStack and CloudStack will have a major impact on their hiring decisions, while 23 percent report security is a sought-after area of expertise and 19 percent are looking for Linux-skilled people with Software-Defined Networking skills. Ninety-seven percent of hiring managers report they will bring on Linux talent relative to other skills areas in the next six months.

An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet reports that the latest changes to the Linux kernel include the ability to apply patches without requiring a reboot. From the article: "Red Hat and SUSE both started working on their own purely open-source means of giving Linux the ability to keep running even while critical patches were being installed. Red Hat's program was named kpatch, while SUSE' is named kGraft. ... At the Linux Plumbers Conference in October 2014, the two groups got together and started work on a way to patch Linux without rebooting that combines the best of both programs. Essentially, what they ended up doing was putting both kpatch and kGraft in the 4.0 Linux kernel." Note: "Simply having the code in there is just the start. Your Linux distribution will have to support it with patches that can make use of it."

New submitter Alessandro Zarrilli writes: Linux has been able do multipath routing for a long time: it means being able to have routes with multiple gateways and to use them in a (weighted) round-robin fashion. But Linux is missing a tool to actively monitor the state of internet uplinks and change the routing accordingly. Without it, from a LAN perspective, it's like having a RAID-0: just one uplink goes down and all of your LAN-to-WAN traffic goes down too. Documentation and examples on the subject are lacking; existing solutions are few and deeply integrated in firewall/routing specific distributions. To address these issues, a new standalone tool was just released: Fault Tolerant Router. It also includes a complete (iptables + ip policy routing) configuration generator.

jones_supa writes NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in the Ubuntu Unity desktop by patching Compiz. When opening the window of a new application, it would go black or become transparent on NVIDIA hardware. There have been bug reports dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times. The problem was caused by Compiz, which had some leftover code from a port. An NVIDIA developer posted on Launchpad and said the NVIDIA team has been looking at this issue, and they also proposed a patch. "Our interpretation of the specification is that creating two GLX pixmaps pointing at the same drawable is not allowed, because it can lead to poorly defined behavior if the properties of both GLX drawables don't match. Our driver prevents this, but Compiz appears to try to do this," wrote NVIDIA's Arthur Huillet. The Compiz patch has been accepted upstream.

motang writes: After two years of hard work (and much to the dismay of naysayers who worried the project has been abandoned), the Xfce team has announced the release of Xfce 4.12. Highlights include improvements to the window switcher dialog, intelligent hiding of the panel, new wallpaper settings, better multi-monitor support, improved power settings, additions to the file manager, and a revamped task manager. Here is a quick tour, the full changelog, and the download page. I have been running it since Xubuntu 15.04 beta 1 was released two days ago. It is much improved over 4.10, and the new additions are great.

An anonymous reader writes: It's been over a year since Valve announced its Linux-based SteamOS, the biggest push yet from a huge company to bring mainstream gaming to Linux. In this article, Ars Technica takes a look at how their efforts are panning out. Game developers say making Linux ports has gotten dramatically easier: "There are great games shipping for Linux from development teams with no Linux expertise. They hit the 'export to Linux' button in the Unity editor and shipped it and it worked out alright. We didn't get flying cars, but the future is turning out OK so far."

Hardware drivers are still a problem, getting in the way of potential performance gains due to Linux's overall smaller resource footprint than Windows. And while the platform is growing, it's doing so slowly. Major publishers are still hesitant to devote time to Linux, and Valve is taking their time building for it. Their Steam Machine hardware is still in development, and some of their key features are being adopted by other gaming giants, like Microsoft. Still, Valve is sticking with it, and that's huge. It gives developers faith that they can work on supporting Linux without fear that the industry will re-fragment before their game is done.

An anonymous reader writes Following polling on Linus Torvald's Google+ page, he's decided to make the next kernel version Linux 4.0 rather than Linux 3.20. Linux 4.0 is going to bring many big improvements besides the version bump with there being live kernel patching, pNFS block server support, VirtIO 1.0, IBM z13 mainframe support, new ARM SoC support, and many new hardware drivers and general improvements. Linux 4.0 is codenamed "Hurr durr I'ma sheep."

m.alessandrini writes Children grow up, and inevitably they will start using internet and social networks, both for educational and recreational purposes. And it won't take long to them to learn to be autonomous, especially with all the smartphones and tablets around and your limited time. Unlike the years of my youth, when internet started to enter our lives gradually, now I'm afraid of the amount of inappropriate contents a child can be exposed to unprepared: porn, scammers, cyberbullies or worse, are just a click away.

For Windows many solutions claim to exist, usually in form of massive antivirus suites. What about GNU/Linux? Or Android? Several solutions rely on setting up a proxy with a whitelist of sites, or similar, but I'm afraid this approach can make internet unusable, or otherwise be easy to bypass. Have you any experiences or suggestions? Do you think software solutions are only a part of the solution, provided children can learn hacking tricks better than us, and if so, what other 'human' techniques are most effective?

jones_supa writes The record amount of security challenges in 2014 undermined the confidence many had in high quality of open source software. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, addressed the issue head-on during last week's Linux Collaboration Summit. Zemlin quoted the oft-repeated Linus' law, which states that given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. "In these cases the eyeballs weren't really looking", Zemlin said. "Modern software security is hard because modern software is very complex," he continued. Such complexity requires dedicated engineers, and thus the solution is to fund projects that need help. To date, the foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative has helped out the NTP, OpenSSL and GnuPG projects, with more likely to come. The second key initiative is the Core Infrastructure Census, which aims to find the next Heartbleed before it occurs. The census is looking to find underfunded projects and those that may not have enough eyeballs looking at the code today."

jones_supa (887896) writes "Canonical, through John Zannos, VP Cloud Alliances, has proudly announced that the first ever Microsoft Azure hosted service will be powered by Ubuntu Linux. This piece of news comes from the Strata + Hadoop World Conference, which takes place this week in California. The fact of the matter is that the news came from Microsoft who announced the preview of Azure HDInsight (an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service) on Ubuntu clusters yesterday at the said event. This is definitely great news for Canonical, as their operating system is getting recognized for being extremely reliable when handling Big Data. Ubuntu is now the leading cloud and scale-out Linux-based operating system."

alphadogg writes Now more than ever, the development of the Linux kernel is a matter for the professionals, as unpaid volunteer contributions to the project reached their lowest recorded levels in the latest "Who Writes Linux" report, which was released today. According to the report, which is compiled by the Linux Foundation, just 11.8% of kernel development last year was done by unpaid volunteers – a 19% downturn from the 2012 figure of 14.6%. The foundation says that the downward trend in volunteer contributions has been present for years. According to Linus Torvalds, the shift towards paid developers hasn’t changed much about kernel development on its own. “I think one reason it hasn't changed things all that much is that it's not so much unpaid volunteers are going away as people who start writing kernel code get hired really quickly,” he said.