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Monday, February 25, 2013

Mozilla to launch Firefox OS phones in July


Mozilla to launch Firefox OS phones in July

SAN FRANCISCO: Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox internet browser, is preparing to challenge Google and Apple's grip on smartphone software.

A new Firefox operating system for mobile devices is set for a July release after winning the backing of 13 wireless service providers around the globe, including Spain's Telefonica, China Unicom and America Movil.

Mozilla is betting there's room for a software developer-friendly mobile platform alongside Apple's and Google's Android, which together power the majority of mobile devices on the planet.

The new software is based on open web standards and is capable of operating on devices with much lower hardware requirements than today's existing crop of smartphones, according to Mozilla.

Because the Firefox OS is open-source and web-based, third-party developers will be free to sell mobile applications without needing to share revenue with Apple or Google.

"There's a strategic imperative for the industry to have another OS that really is open and supports choice and competition," said Mozilla's senior vice president of products, Jay Sullivan.

Mozilla will showcase some of the first hardware devices based on that software at the Mobile World Congress, taking place in Barcelona this week. Among the brands that have signed on to make devices based on Firefox OS are South Korea's LG , China's ZTE and Huawei.

Unlike Google and Apple's operating systems, which are built from proprietary technology, Firefox OS uses the HTML5 standard that web services are built with. That means anyone familiar with web programming can create Firefox OS apps.

Whether a smartphone built on web standards can deliver the kind of performance that consumers expect remains to be seen. Facebook famously stopped using HTML5 to develop its iPhone app last year, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying the technology couldn't deliver acceptable quality and calling a decision to use HTML5 for its app one of Facebook's "biggest mistakes." 


Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/hardware/Mozilla-to-launch-Firefox-OS-phones-in-July/articleshow/18671149.cms

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Manjaro Linux, a brand-new distro on the rise


With virtually countless Linux distributions available for every taste and purpose, it's no secret that choice is a defining feature of the Linux world. What's not always apparent, though, is that the range of choices actually gets bigger every year.
New distros come onto the scene on a fairly regular basis; SolusOS and Fuduntu Linux are two I've covered over the past few months, but recently another one caught my eye as being particularly worth covering.
It's Manjaro Linux, a brand-new contender that launched last August and has already sprinted up DistroWatch's page-hit rankings to No. 15. Why all the interest? The project has released a few key updates this month. Here's a rundown of some of the distro's best features.
1. Based on Arch Linux
Arch Linux is a very popular distro among more experienced users in the Linux community, and it's renowned for its simplicity, power, and speed.
I recently covered Cinnarch, which adds the Cinnamon desktop to this longtime favorite, but now Manjaro presents another option.
“Manjaro provides all the benefits of the Arch operating system combined with a focus on user-friendliness and accessibility,” the project team explains. “Available in both 32 and 64 bit versions, Manjaro is suitable for newcomers as well as experienced Linux users.”
2. User-friendly yet powerful
Manjaro strives to preserve the power of Arch Linux for enthusiasts while also making it more accessible for newcomers to Linux.
Targeting the latter group, the distro includes a user-friendly installer and is designed to work fully “straight out of the box,” its makers say. Toward that end, it also includes preinstalled desktop environments, automatic hardware detection and driver installation, multimedia codecs, and graphical applications for installing software and updating the system.
For those on the more experienced end, however, Manjaro offers extensive customizability to suit personal taste and preference. In addition, there's also a minimalist NET-Edition stripped of any preinstalled software that can be used as a base installation on which to build your own system.
“Starting from a command line, be completely free to chose your own greeters, desktops, hardware drivers, software applications, and so on!” the project team explains.
3. Numerous desktop options
Though the lightweight Xfce desktop environment comes standard in Manjaro, the software also offers Cinnamon, KDE, and OpenBox options as well as E17, MATE, and LXDE through what it calls “Community Editions.”
4 . Rolling releases
Like Arch, Manjaro uses a rolling release development model. What that means is that users always have the most up-to-date system possible, without the hassle of having to formally install new versions. When new releases are announced, they're simply up-to-date snapshots of the latest software.
5. A world of software
As a fully Arch-compatible distro, Manjaro does offer its users access to the Arch User Repository and all the software packages contained therein.
In addition, however, Manjaro also offers its own official repositories “in order to ensure that any software packages provided (e.g. system updates and applications) have been fully tested and are completely stable before release,” it notes.


 It's available for download in the flavor of your choice. 

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/2029179/meet-manjaro-linux-a-brand-new-distro-on-the-rise.html

Ubuntu Linux Operating System Released for Google Nexus 7, Nexus 10



If you've been wishing your Google Nexus tablet could run the Ubuntu version of Linux, your wish has been granted.  A preview version of Ubuntu Touch can now be downloaded from Canonical.
Ubuntu for TabletsThere are a couple of cavets, though. First off, this version is only for the Google Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. The goal is to eventually bring support to all devices that currently run Android, but that's still quite a ways away.
Also, Canonical assumes that anyone who wants to try out an Ubuntu tablet is already running a desktop with this same operating system, and is familiar with using terminal coomands. This process is not for timid Linux newbies.
Instructions for downloading Ubuntu Touch Preview can be found on Canonical's web site.
More about Ubuntu Touch
Ubuntu Touch will run on Nexus smartphones as well as tablets, and integration across these two typpes of mobile device is one of the hallmarks of this version. Users will be able to run a tablet and an smartphone app side-by-side, and drag-and-drop content between the two.
The Nexus tablets do not have many hardware buttons, and this operating system has been designed to not need them, as the four edges of the screen are used to navigate between apps, settings, and controls.
Ubuntu Touch offers multiple secure user accounts, plus a guest account, allowing a family to share one device, or for one to be shared by employees at an office.
For the security conscious, Canonical promises that data protection is "world class" with full disk encryption, and additional encryption for personal data.
Users will be able to add a keyboard and mouse to turn their Ubuntu tablet into a laptop.
Ubuntu is able run HTML5 software as well as native apps. And Canonical says it supports remote-access over standard protocols from Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and Wyse.

SOURCE:http://www.tabletpcreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3873&news=Canonical_Ubuntu_Touch_for_Tablets_Released

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Tizen 2.0 Linux Based Smartphone And Tablet OS Source Code Released


 Developers of the Tizen 2.0 Linux based operating system designed for smartphones and tablets, has released the open source software of Tizen 2.0 together with a software developer kit.
The Tizen 2.0 operating system and SDK now includes new APIs that developers can use to access Bluetooth and NFC features on smartphones equipped with the services.


Tizen 2
 Tizen 2.0 represents a major milestone for software developers and device vendors. We encourage you to download the new SDK, and let us know what you think of it after you have installed and used it. This release includes many new features and improvements over Tizen 1.0 released in April, and Tizen 2.0 alpha in September, 2012. As a Tizen 2.0 developer, you will find strong HTML5/W3C APIs and a new native framework. 

Highlights of this release include:

- Enhanced Web framework that provides state-of-the-art HTML5/W3C API support
- Web UI framework, including full-screen and multi-window support
- Additional Tizen device APIs, such as Bluetooth and NFC support, and access to the device’s calendar, call history, and messaging subsystems
- Web Runtime framework supporting new configuration elements for specifying the required features and privileges, and providing the basic runtime environment for NPRuntime -plugins
- Native framework supporting full-featured application development and providing a variety of features such as background applications, IP Push, and TTS (Text-To-Speech)
- Core and native reference applications including Calendar, Contacts, Gallery, Phone, Settings, and Video Player
- Enhanced Web IDE providing WYSIWYG design environment, Chrome-based JavaScript inspector, and JavaScript log viewer
- Native IDE providing a project wizard, WYSIWYG design environment, unit test tool, and dynamic analyzer


Source: http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/tizen-2-0-linux-based-smartphone-and-tablet-os-source-code-released-19-02-2013/

What's new in Linux 3.8

"Unicycling Gorilla" is the code name for Linux 3.8


Graphics

In Linux 3.8, the Nouveau kernel driver will include everything that the OpenGL driver – which is part of current versions of Mesa 3D and is also called Nouveau – needs to use the 3D acceleration of all GeForce graphics chips available so far, without further configuration. This is the first time that the Nouveau developers, who use reverse engineering to get the information they need to program their drivers, have managed this feat; before this, they were still lacking standard 3D support for some newer Fermi GPUs and the Kepler graphics chips, which have been on the market since March 2012 (1, 2, 3). For many computers, however, NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver will still be a better choice, since Nouveau can't activate the faster operation modes for many of the newer GeForce chips, resulting in 3D performance that leaves something to be desired. There are also other issues, particularly when it comes to video acceleration and fan management support.
The i915 graphics driver now supports by default the graphics cores of the Haswell processors that Intel will introduce under the name Core i4000 in a few months. The developers have also included a workaround for a bug in the Intel 830 and 845 chipsets so the graphics drivers are supposed to be stable on these chipsets.


F2FS

Linux now supports F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System), a filesystem that was introduced by Samsung developers in October. It is designed for flash storage media that uses a more basic Flash Translation Layer (FTL) than SSDs for desktop PCs and servers – for example USB flash drives, memory cards and the storage media that is used in cameras, tablets and smartphones.
F2FS is a Log-structured File System (LFS) and progressively fills up storage media from the beginning; only once it has reached the end will it return to the beginning and use any areas that may have been deallocated in the meantime. Like Btrfs, F2FS uses Copy-on-Write (COW) to sequentially fill storage devices; this provides a certain robustness. Unlike Btrfs and Ext4, F2FS does not attempt to prevent data fragmentation; very short access times mean that fragmentation is not an issue with flash storage media. The userspace tools for formatting F2FS drives are available at kernel.org. 

Btrfs and Ext4

Btrfs, which continues to be classified as experimental, now includes a "replace" feature that can transfer data from one drive to another faster than before – for example, before replacing a disk (1, 2). Other Btrfs changes include some that are designed to reduce latencies and CPU loads when calling fsync or writing data via O_DIRECT; further patches allow Btrfs to better distribute loads across multiple CPUs, which is said to improve performance (1, 2).
The new Inline Data Support feature allows Ext4 to store files that only consist of a few bytes together with the inode to save storage space and accelerate access (1, 2). Ext4 now also supports the SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE lseek options that were introduced in Linux 3.1 and allow programs such as backup or copy tools to detect, and omit, empty areas in sparse files. Tmpfs now implements these lseek options as well.

Networking

The Berkeley packet filter (BPF), used by sniffer tools such as tcpdump, can now be used to filter VLAN tags. The rtl8723ae driver for the Realtek RTL8723AE PCIe WLAN chip is new (1, 2 and others). The brcmsmac WLAN driver now supports the BCM43224 Broadcom chip, while the rt2800usb RaLink driver supports the Sweex LW323 USB WLAN adapter. The cdc-mbim driver, which supports broadband modems that implement Mobile Broadband Interface Model (MBIM) 1.0, specified by the USB Implementers Forum, is also new (1, 2). MBIM is a USB protocol for connecting modems for laptops, tablets and desktop computers that provide an internet connection using GSM and CDMA-based 3G and 4G (including LTE).

Drivers

The kernel's audio drivers now support the Philips PSC724 Ultimate Edge sound card. The kernel can also handle VIA's VT1705CF HD audio codec now. Another addition is the mpt3sas "LSI MPT Fusion SAS 3.0 Device Driver" that supports 12GB SAS chips by LSI; it shares some features with the mpt2sas driver that has been put into maintenance mode. The hptiop driver can now address HighPoint RR4520 and RR4522 controllers. The kernel developers have marked the uas driver, which handles the USB Attached SCSI protocol, as broken because it causes problems and is not yet ready for the major distributions.

Infrastructure

Following a lengthy, sometimes heated dispute between various kernel developers, a number of enhancements developed under the "balancenuma" umbrella have been merged into Linux 3.8 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and others). In the ideal case, these improvements will enable the kernel to automatically maintain coherence between the processor and memory for a single process. This kind of setup is important for optimising performance on multiprocessor systems which utilise the now widely used NUMA (non-uniform memory access), as processes on NUMA systems can access memory allocated to the processor on which they are running faster than they can access memory allocated to other processors.

Architecture



To simplify maintenance and ongoing development, the kernel developers have removed support for Intel 386 CPUs and other CPUs that make use of the architecture which was extremely widespread more than 20 years ago. 486 and newer x86-32 processors will continue to be supported. It was on a 386 that Torvalds first started developing Linux, but he will not be shedding any tears for the code, commenting: "I'm not sentimental. Good riddance."

Virtualisation

A balloon driver for Hyper-V has been merged into the kernel. The Microsoft hypervisor can, at runtime, temporarily transfer memory from Linux guests running this driver to the host and subsequently return it.
Linux 3.8 more or less completes the major restructuring around user namespaces, driven forward over the last few months by Eric W. Biederman. These changes will enable non-privileged users to create an isolated space within which they will have root privileges. Within this space, however users will not be able to do anything which would require privileged actions to be taken outside of the namespace.

Resource controls

The kmem extension has been added to the memory cgroup controller (1, 2 and others, documentation). It can be used to limit the amount of memory required by the kernel for managing processes. Using appropriately configured limits, this should enable the kernel to keep the lid on fork bombs even within containers.


Sunday, January 20, 2013

OpenSUSE 12.3 beta is ready to run


Back in 2012, openSUSE, SUSE's community Linux distribution, wasn't looking so good. The project  was missing deadlines and had to be completely reorganized. Eventually, openSUSE 12.2 appearedin September, and since then openSUSE seems to have been on the right track. At the least, openSUSE is on time for the first, and only, beta of its next release, openSUSE 12.3.
OpenSUSE may not get the ink Fedora, Mint, or Ubuntu Linux do, but its parent Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is still one of the major server Linux distributions. Linux professionals know you ignore openSUSE and SUSE at your own risk.
OpenSUSE is also the one major distribution that has stayed true to the KDE desktop environment, instead of GNOME or one of the many GNOME desktop spin-offs such as Cinnamon and MATE. This beta uses the KDE 4.10 RC2 of KDE workspaces and applications.
The final release of KDE 4.10 is set for the first week of February. Thus, when openSUSE 12.3 goes final, it will ship with KDE 4.10.
It's not all KDE though. OpenSUSE is incorporating tools from other desktops as well. For example, the XFCE file manager Thunar is included. This features tab support, improved bookmark handling and a check for free space before copying starts. OpenSUSE also includes LXDE's respected PCMan file-manager.
Under the hood, openSUSE will be using the 3.7.1 Linux kernel. The most significant improvements here are in networking. 3.7 incorporates TCP Fast Open, which can speed opening up Web pages from 10 to 40%. It also includes Server Messenge Block (SMB2) protocol for Windows PC file support.
This kernel also does a great job of supporting ARM processors. This leaves the door open for easily porting openSUSE to ARM-powered systems such as the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook. Indeed there are earlier openSUSE builds for the Chromebook are already available.
As for applications, besides the KDE family, openSUSE 12.3 will ship with LibreOffice 3.6 for word processors and Firefox 18 for Web browsing.

Download OpenSUSE 12.3
http://software.opensuse.org/developer/en

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/opensuse-12-3-beta-is-ready-to-run-7000010017/

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Top 5 reasons the Ubuntu Linux phone might make it


5) Ubuntu Unity interface

Even at its very early stages Unity on the phone is the sweetest smartphone interface I'd ever seen. I've always known Ubuntu's default interface, Unity, was really meant for touch interfaces, now that I've seen it on a phone it really shows to its best advantage.
According to Bacon, you'll have the chance to install it and see it for yourself on Galaxy Nexus phones beginning in March. There have been other reports that the first Ubuntu for phones installation images will appear in February, but March is much more likely.

4) Easy Smartphone OS Upgradability

Shuttleworth pointed out to me, unlike Android, where the version you get is what you usually are stuck with for forever and a day, Ubuntu on phones, just like on the desktop, will be constantly upgraded. For frustrated Android smartphone geeks who always want the newest version they'll feel like they died and went to heaven.
Bacon added though that Ubuntu for phone won't be using same release model as Ubuntu desktop. There won't be one universal image that can be used on all phones. Each phone model will need its own image to make the best possible use of its hardware.

3) Easy Carrier Customization

At the same time, however, carriers will be able to easily customize the phone interface and add their own apps. So, how can it be both easy for end-users to upgrade to the latest version and at the same time let carriers add in their applications and particular look and feel? Easy. By keeping the carrier optimizations in user space, where it's easy to change things, and out of the core operating system itself. This could be the best of both world for end-users and carriers.

2) Linux Desktop Software Compatibility

I had been worried about getting software developers to give Ubuntu a try. I mean there's already so much money to be made in Android and iOS and there's only so many embedded programmers to go around. Bacon made me realize though that all existing Ubuntu applications—LibreOffice, Gimp, Rhythmbox, etc.--will all run on Ubuntu phones. Now getting them to display properly on the phone's interface will take some work, but that's the easy part. The core functionality of tens of thousands of Linux apps will already be available. Of course, if you use your Ubuntu smartphone to power up a PC display you won't even need that.
To make it easier for existing Linux programmers to bring their desktop apps to the phone, Bacon said Ubuntu is working on providing programmers with QML (Qt Meta Language) widgets for quick interface development. QML, along with HTML5 and OpenGL, is native to Ubuntu on phones. These, and the software development kit (SDK), said Bacon, should be out in March.
What all this means is that every Linux programmer out there can also be a smartphone programmer. Almost a thousand developers, said Bacon, are already working on Ubuntu phone apps. Bottom line: Ubuntu is going to have thousands of apps. ready to go before it ships.

1) Green Fields and High End Markets

Shuttleworth also observed that Ubuntu gives carriers two models. In the first, they can cheaply add Ubuntu to low-end phones. This may not matter much in the power-hungry first-world countries, but Shuttleworth believes this makes Ubuntu ideal for second and third-world countries.
In the second high-end model, users will be able to use top-of-the-line Ubuntu smartphones both as a phone and as a desktop. Does the idea of using a smartphone to power your desktop sound silly to you? It shouldn't.
Tablets are already doing it and, as Shawn Dubravac, CEA's Chief Economist and Senior. Director of Research observed at CES said, "65% of the time we spend on mobile phones is not communications. Even adding in e-mail, texting, and so on, smartphones are no longer about communication." Shuttleworth and company are just taking the smartphone to its next natural evolutionary step.

Source:http://www.zdnet.com/top-5-reasons-the-ubuntu-linux-phone-might-make-it-7000009721/