News

From the Libre dept.:
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.

LibreOffice 4.0: a community on fire

In less than 30 months, LibreOffice has grown dramatically to become the largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop productivity. TDF inclusive governance and the copyleft license have been instrumental in attracting more than 500 developers – three quarters of them being independent volunteers – capable of contributing over 50,000 commits.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Friday, February 22, 2013 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today is proud to announce the winner of the first Liberated Pixel Cup, a design competition of free software video games using only freely licensed art and media.

The cup has been awarded to Lurking Patrol Comrades, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) featuring a vast world with plenty of characters and both a melee and a magic-based battle system.

Chris Webber, co-organizer along with Bart Kelsey of OpenGameArt, said, "Liberated Pixel Cup was a bigger success than our wildest imaginings when initially planning the project. We hoped to create a standard, useful base and style of artwork and get a few submissions of art and games. Instead, we got nearly one hundred entries of games and artwork, most of them excellent. In the process we've proven the interest and potential for free software and free culture in gaming. We've also shown that with careful planning, we can have collaboration in this area that helps everyone. And, of course, we've had a lot of fun! Congratulations to everyone who participated in the contest!"

"The FSF was happy to support the Liberated Pixel Cup, and we are excited about this new model to facilitate the production of free games. Games are one area that make it hard for people to leave proprietary operating systems behind. The Liberated Pixel Cup model is not only an innovative way to address this by encouraging collaborative game development, it's just plain fun," said Libby Reinish, campaigns manager at the FSF.

The LPC was sponsored by the FSF, which collected donations to fund the prizes, Mozilla, Creative Commons and OpenGameArt. The competition attracted significant attention in the free software community, and in fact the number of submissions overwhelmed the judges, causing a delay in the announcement of the the winners.

More information about the prize-winning games is at http://lpc.opengameart.org/content/code-judging-is-in. The winners of the earlier art-only phase of the competition are announced at http://lpc.opengameart.org/content/liberated-pixel-cup-art-winners-announced.

Discussions are in the works for a possible follow-up competition. In the meantime, people interested in the area of free software gaming might also want to get involved in the LibrePlanet Gaming Collective.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Media Contacts

Libby Reinish
Campaigns Manager
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns@fsf.org

###

Linux leader Red Hat has shipped another minor update to its 6 enterprise line to better equip its distribution for massive scale out, big data environments. Along the same lines, the company also announced this week it will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop project

Great news for Linux pros and bad news for hiring managers. A survey says companies are desperate for Linux pros in the next six months. Plus, the salaries for Linux staffers are on the rise.

From the Production dept.:
MySQL 5.6.10 has been released, marking the General Availability of version 5.6 for production."
Here's more on the features of 5.6. Of possible interest to MySQL users, too, is this look at how MySQL spinoff MariaDB (from Monty, one of the three creators of MySQL) is making inroads into the MySQL market, including (as we've mentioned before) as default database system in some Linux distributions.

From the dept.:
DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has awarded $3 million to software provider Continuum Analytics to help fund the development of Python's data processing and visualization capabilities for big data jobs.

The money will go toward developing new techniques for data analysis and for visually portraying large, multi-dimensional data sets. The work aims to extend beyond the capabilities offered by the NumPy and SciPy Python libraries, which are widely used by programmers for mathematical and scientific calculations, respectively.

Red Hat spells out its big data plans, which includes more Hadoop integration.

From the What Is it Good For? dept.:
"The cyber war has been under way in the private sector for the past year," says Israel Martinez, a board member of the U.S. National Cyber Security Council, a nonprofit group composed of federal government and private sector executives.

"We're finding espionage, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and other malware sitting in networks, often for more than a year before it's ever detected," Martinez says. He says U.S. entities are being targeted on multiple fronts by China and Iran for espionage and intellectual property theft, by interests in Russia and Eastern Europe for syndicated crime such stealing cash and identities, by social-agenda "hacktivist" groups such as Anonymous, and by increasingly skilled individual criminal hackers.

As expected, Canonical has announced their plans for Ubuntu on tablets as well as the signing of a deal with a major mobile silicon provider to provide Ubuntu smartphone and tablet chips.

In addition to upgrading its Sputnik Ubuntu Linux laptop for developers, Dell is also making it available in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Not everyone thinks Canonical can create a unified Ubuntu for PCs, smartphones, tablets and TVs. But Mark Shuttleworth has an answer for them.

Dump Microsoft Office, with its new licensing restrictions, and get LibreOffice instead.

From the ExBeta dept.:
fuse-exfat, a GPLv3 implementation of the exFAT file system for Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X, has reached 1.0 status, according to an announcement from Andrew Nayenko, the primary developer. exFAT is a file system designed for sneaker-netting terabyte-scale files and groups of files on flash drives and memory cards between and among Windows, OS X, and consumer electronics devices. It was introduced by Microsoft in late 2006.

Once again, a Microsoft partner claims that Linux is less secure than Windows. What else would they say?

So, ready to start playing Steam-based games on your Ubuntu system? Well, follow-along with me and away we'll go!

Ubuntu Linux for the smartphone is taking a big step forward. The developer preview will be available next week for Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones

NC353L series camera modules:

NC353L
→ + USB, SATA, Serial & Sync ports → + Compass read more

NC353L series camera modules:

NC353L → + USB, SATA, Serial & Sync ports → + Compass + GPS receiver
read more

NC353L series camera modules:

NC353L → + USB, SATA, Serial & Sync ports → + Compass + GPS receiver
read more

No longer a pipe-dream or a beta, the Steam gaming client is now available for Ubuntu. What was that about there not being any games for Linux?