Slashdot Mirror

storkus writes: The release of Haswell-E and a price drop on Devil's Canyon has made me itch for a PC upgrade. However, looking around I discovered a pair of horror stories on Phoronix about the difficulties of using Linux on a multitude of motherboards. My question: if MSI, Gigabyte, Asus (and by extension Asrock) are out, who's left and are they any good? I'd like to build a (probably dual-boot, but don't know for sure) gaming and 'other' high-end machine with one of the above chips, so we're talking Z97 or X99; however, these stories seem to point to the problems being Windows-isms in the BIOS/UEFI structures rather than actual hardware incompatibility, combined with a lousy attitude (despite the Steam Linux distro being under development).

storkus writes: The release of Haswell-E and a price drop on Devil's Canyon has made me itch for a PC upgrade. However, looking around I discovered a pair of horror stories on Phoronix about the difficulties of using Linux on a multitude of motherboards. My question: if MSI, Gigabyte, Asus (and by extension Asrock) are out, who's left and are they any good? I'd like to build a (probably dual-boot, but don't know for sure) gaming and 'other' high-end machine with one of the above chips, so we're talking Z97 or X99; however, these stories seem to point to the problems being Windows-isms in the BIOS/UEFI structures rather than actual hardware incompatibility, combined with a lousy attitude (despite the Steam Linux distro being under development).

jones_supa (887896) writes "Apart from minor editorial tweaks, the ISO C++14 standard can be considered completed. Implementations are already shipping by major suppliers. C++14 is mostly an incremental update over C++11 with some new features like function return type deduction, variable templates, binary literals, generic lambdas, and so on. The official C++14 specification release will arrive later in the year, but for now Wikipedia serves as a good overview of the feature set."

An anonymous reader writes "Beginning with the Chrome 38 Beta it's now possible to watch Netflix without any Wine/Silverlight plug-ins but will work natively using Chrome's DRM-HTML5 video capabilities with Netflix. The steps just involve using the latest beta of Chrome and an HTTP user-agent switcher to tell Netflix you're a Windows Chrome user, due to Netflix arbitrarily blocking the Linux build."

An anonymous reader writes: Updates to the open-source libbluray, libaacs, and libbdplus libraries have improved the open-source Blu-ray disc support to now enable the Blu-ray Java interactivity layer (BD-J). The Blu-ray Java code is in turn executed by OpenJDK or the Oracle JDK and is working well enough to play a Blu-ray disc on the Raspberry Pi when paired with the VLC media player."

An anonymous reader writes VolksPC who developed MicroXwin as a lightweight X Window Server has come up with their own Linux distribution. Setting apart VolksPC's distribution from others is that it's based on both Debian and Android and has the capability to run Debian/Ubuntu/Android apps together in a native ARM experience. The implementation doesn't depend on VNC or other similar solutions of the past that have tried to join desktop apps with mobile Android apps. This distribution is also reportedly compatible with all Android applications. The distribution is expected to begin shipping on an ARM mini-PC stick.

An anonymous reader writes The much anticipated Xorg Server 1.16 release is now available. The X.Org "Marionberry Pie" release features XWayland integration, GLAMOR support, systemd support, and many other features. XWayland support allows for legacy X11 support in Wayland environments via GL acceleration, GLAMOR provides generic 2D acceleration, non-PCI GPU device improvements, and countless other changes. The systemd integration finally allows the X server to run without root privileges, something in the works for a very long time. The non-PCI device improvements mean System-on-a-Chip graphics will work more smoothly, auto-enumerating just like PCI graphics devices do. As covered previously, GLAMOR (the pure OpenGL acceleration backend) has seen quite a bit of improvement, and now works with Xephyr and XWayland.

An anonymous reader writes Release Candidate One of OpenWRT 14.07 "Barrier Breaker" is released. Big for this tiny embedded Linux distribution for routers in 14.07 is native IPv6 support and the procd init system integration. The native IPv6 support is with the RA and DHCPv6+PD client and server support plus other changes. Procd is OpenWRT's new preinit, init, hotplug, and event system. Perhaps not too exciting is support for upgrading on devices with NAND, and file system snapshot/restore so you can experiment without fear of leaving your network broken. There's also experimental support for the musl standard C library.

An anonymous reader writes Qualcomm has forced GitHub to remove over 100 repositories due to "unauthorized publication, disclosure, and copying of highly sensitive, confidential, trade secret, and copyright-protected documents." Among the repositories taken down were for CyanogenMod and Sony Xperia. The issue though is that these "highly sensitive" and "confidential" files are Linux kernel code and reference/sample code files that can be easily found elsewhere, including the Android kernel, but GitHub has complied with Qualcomm's DMCA request.

An anonymous reader writes "With the Linux 3.16 kernel the Nouveau driver now supports re-clocking for letting the NVIDIA GPU cores and video memory on this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver run at their designed frequencies. Up to now the Nouveau driver has been handicapped to running at whatever (generally low) clock frequencies the video BIOS programmed the hardware to at boot time, but with Linux 3.16 is experimental support for up-clocking to the hardware-rated speeds. The results show the open-source NVIDIA driver running multiple times faster, but it doesn't work for all NVIDIA hardware, causes lock-ups for some GPUs at some frequencies, and isn't yet dynamically controlled. However, it appears to be the biggest break-through in years for this open-source NVIDIA driver that up to now has been too slow for most Linux games."

An anonymous reader writes "With the Linux 3.16 kernel the Nouveau driver now supports re-clocking for letting the NVIDIA GPU cores and video memory on this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver run at their designed frequencies. Up to now the Nouveau driver has been handicapped to running at whatever (generally low) clock frequencies the video BIOS programmed the hardware to at boot time, but with Linux 3.16 is experimental support for up-clocking to the hardware-rated speeds. The results show the open-source NVIDIA driver running multiple times faster, but it doesn't work for all NVIDIA hardware, causes lock-ups for some GPUs at some frequencies, and isn't yet dynamically controlled. However, it appears to be the biggest break-through in years for this open-source NVIDIA driver that up to now has been too slow for most Linux games."

An anonymous reader writes Developed as part of a university master thesis is this "truly 3D" windowing system environment. The 3D desktop was developed as a Qt Wayland compositor and output to an Oculus Rift display and then controlled using a high-precision Razer mouse. Overall, it's interesting research for bringing 2D windows into a 3D workspace using Wayland and the Oculus Rift. The code is hosted as the Motorcar Compositor. A video demonstration is on YouTube.

An anonymous reader writes "One of the oldest pieces of the Linux desktop stack still widely in use today is the X Window System that today is commonly referred to as X11 or in recent years the X.Org Server. The X Window System predates the Linux kernel, the Free Software Foundation, GCC, and other key pieces of the Linux infrastructure — or most software widely-used in general. Today marks 30 years since the announcement of X at MIT when it was introduced to Project Athena." X wasn't new when I first saw it, on Sun workstations the summer before I started college. When did you first encounter it?

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix last week tested 65 graphics cards on open source drivers under Linux and the best result was generally with the open source AMD Radeon drivers. This week they put out a 35-graphics-card comparison using the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA drivers (with the other 30 cards being too old for the latest main drivers) under Ubuntu 14.04. The winner for proprietary GPU driver support on Linux was NVIDIA, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise given that Valve and other Linux game developers are frequently recommending NVIDIA graphics for their game titles while AMD Catalyst support doesn't usually come to games until later. The Radeon OpenGL performance with Catalyst had some problems, but at least its performance per Watt was respectable. Open-source fans are encouraged to use AMD hardware on Linux while those just wanting the best performance and overall experience should see NVIDIA with their binary driver."

An anonymous reader writes "Mesa 10.2 was introduced this week as the new shining example of what open source graphics (and open source projects in general) are capable of achieving. The latest release of this often underrepresented open source graphics driver project has many new OpenGL and driver features including a number of new OpenGL 4 extensions. The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver now poses serious competition to Qualcomm's Adreno driver, an OpenMAX implementation was added for Radeon video encoding support, Intel Broadwell support now works better, the software rasterizer supports OpenGL 3.3, and many other changes are present."

An anonymous reader writes "Mesa 10.2 was introduced this week as the new shining example of what open source graphics (and open source projects in general) are capable of achieving. The latest release of this often underrepresented open source graphics driver project has many new OpenGL and driver features including a number of new OpenGL 4 extensions. The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver now poses serious competition to Qualcomm's Adreno driver, an OpenMAX implementation was added for Radeon video encoding support, Intel Broadwell support now works better, the software rasterizer supports OpenGL 3.3, and many other changes are present."

An anonymous reader writes "The original games developed by John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack at Softdisk, where the legendary programmers originally met and went on to start id Software, have been open-sourced under the GPLv2. The games are now owned by Flat Rock Software and the open-source titles available are Catacomb, The Catacomb, Catacomb 3D, Catacomb Abyss, and Hovertank3D. The oldest of these games are written in Borland Turbo Pascal while the others are in Borland C++. The source-code can be downloaded from GitHub."

An anonymous reader writes "How good are open source graphics drivers in 2014 given all the Linux gaming and desktop attention? Phoronix has tested 65 different GPUs using the latest open source drivers covering Intel HD Graphics, NVIDIA GeForce, AMD Radeon, and AMD FirePro hardware. Of the 65 GPUs tested, only 50 of them had good enough open source driver support for running OpenGL games and benchmarks. Across the NVIDIA and AMD hardware were several pages of caveats with different driver issues encountered on Linux 3.15 and Mesa 10.3 loaded on Ubuntu 14.04. Intel graphics on Linux were reliable but slow while AMD's open-source Linux support was recommended over the NVIDIA support that doesn't currently allow for suitable graphics card re-clocking. Similar tests are now being done with the proprietary Linux drivers."

An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA's latest rare open-source contribution is adding Gallium3D support for the Tegra K1 SoC to the Nouveau Mesa driver. After they added support for the Tegra K1's 'GK20A' Kepler GPU to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver, it was just a small step to get it working with the Gallium3D user-space code as it builds upon work done by the Nouveau developers earlier with reverse-engineering the existing Kepler GeForce graphics cards. When it comes to desktop graphics, NVIDIA is still predominantly pushing their proprietary Linux driver but they have begun contributing hardware and information to Nouveau developers."

An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA's latest rare open-source contribution is adding Gallium3D support for the Tegra K1 SoC to the Nouveau Mesa driver. After they added support for the Tegra K1's 'GK20A' Kepler GPU to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver, it was just a small step to get it working with the Gallium3D user-space code as it builds upon work done by the Nouveau developers earlier with reverse-engineering the existing Kepler GeForce graphics cards. When it comes to desktop graphics, NVIDIA is still predominantly pushing their proprietary Linux driver but they have begun contributing hardware and information to Nouveau developers."

Via Phoronix comes news that Mesa 10.2 will be released in a few days with several interesting new features. Highlights include OpenGL 2.1 support for Freedreno (the driver for the Qualcomm graphics chips), video encoding and decoding on GCN Radeons using the new OpenMAX state tracker, and initial support for Intel's upcoming Cherryview Atom SoC. Progress is being made toward OpenGL 4 support, and the llvmpipe software rasterizer finally supports OpenGL 3.2. The release won't feature a few things: the Intel Sandybridge driver still does not support OpenGL 3.3, the R9 290 Radeons are still not working (despite claims by AMD a couple of years ago that cards starting with the Radeon 8000 series would be supported by the Free Software driver at hardware release time), and OpenCL support is still experimental.

Via Phoronix comes news that Mesa 10.2 will be released in a few days with several interesting new features. Highlights include OpenGL 2.1 support for Freedreno (the driver for the Qualcomm graphics chips), video encoding and decoding on GCN Radeons using the new OpenMAX state tracker, and initial support for Intel's upcoming Cherryview Atom SoC. Progress is being made toward OpenGL 4 support, and the llvmpipe software rasterizer finally supports OpenGL 3.2. The release won't feature a few things: the Intel Sandybridge driver still does not support OpenGL 3.3, the R9 290 Radeons are still not working (despite claims by AMD a couple of years ago that cards starting with the Radeon 8000 series would be supported by the Free Software driver at hardware release time), and OpenCL support is still experimental.

As reported by Phoronix, the Haiku operating system "has added (untested) support for the newest AMD Radeon graphics cards to its open-source driver for the BeOS-compatible operating system." (Specifically, that support is for the "Mullins" and "Hawaii" graphics processors.) Impressive that this project keeps the BeOS flag raised and continues to modernize; Haiku has been around since 2001 — years longer than Be, Inc. itself lasted.

An anonymous reader writes "Wayland 1.5 has been released, along with Weston Compositor 1.5. Wayland/Weston 1.5 carry many new user features, with a new libinput back-end, XWayland support, a full-screen shell, and many other changes. This release is particularly important as Fedora 21 will run on GNOME Wayland and X.Org Server 1.16 will be released this summer with integrated XWayland support."

An anonymous reader writes "Wayland 1.5 has been released, along with Weston Compositor 1.5. Wayland/Weston 1.5 carry many new user features, with a new libinput back-end, XWayland support, a full-screen shell, and many other changes. This release is particularly important as Fedora 21 will run on GNOME Wayland and X.Org Server 1.16 will be released this summer with integrated XWayland support."

An anonymous reader writes "The Tux3 file-system that's been in development since 2008 as the public replacement to the patent-blocked Tux2 file-system is now under review for inclusion into the Linux kernel. Tux3 tries to act as a 'light, tight, modern file-system. We offer a fresh approach to some ancient problems,' according to its lead developer, Daniel Phillips. Tux3 strives for minimal resource consumption but lacks enterprise-grade reliability at this point. Tux3, at the end of the day, tries to be 'robust, fast, and simple' with the Linux FS reportedly being as fast as other well known file-systems. Details on the project are at Tux3.org."

An anonymous reader writes "Game studios now seem to be forming a habit out of opening up their debugger / development utilities. After Valve's notable VOGL debugger, Crytek has now decided to open source their Renderdoc debugger. Renderdoc had been available for free use since earlier in the year but now they have posted an MIT-licensed version of the code to GitHub. Renderdoc builds on both Windows and Linux but for now just targets the Direct3D 11 graphics API while OpenGL support is being expected later."

An anonymous reader writes "Valve Software has sponsored some interesting improvements developed by LunarG for the Mesa OpenGL library on Linux for deferred and threaded GLSL shader compilation. What these changes mean for users of the open-source Linux graphics drivers when running their favorite games is that OpenGL games now load a lot faster. As an example, the time from starting Dota 2 until the time actually being within the game is reduced by about 20 seconds on an Intel system. While Direct3D has offered similar functionality for a while, OpenGL has not, which has given it a bad reputation with regard to game load times until all shaders are compiled and cached — fortunately it's now addressed for OpenGL if using the Mesa Linux graphics drivers on a supported game."

jones_supa (887896) writes "The PC-BSD project is developing a new open source (BSD license) desktop environment from scratch. The name of the project is Lumina and it will be based around the Qt toolkit. The ultimate goal is to replace KDE as the default desktop of PC-BSD. Lumina aims to be lightweight, stable, fast-running, and FreeDesktop.org/XDG compliant. Most of the Lumina work is being done by PC-BSD's Ken Moore. Even though Lumina is still in its early stages, it can be built and run successfully, and an alpha version can already be obtained from PC-BSD's ports/package repositories."

An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME Foundation is running out of money. The foundation no longer has any cash reserves so they have voted to freeze non-essential funding for running the foundation. They are also hunting down sponsors and unpaid invoices to regain some delayed revenue. Those wishing to support the GNOME Foundation can become a friend of GNOME."

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux 3.15 kernel now in its early life will be able to suspend and resume much faster than previous versions of the Linux kernel. A few days ago we saw ACPI and Power Management updates that enable asynchronous threads for more suspend and resume callbacks. Carrying out more async operations leads to reduced time for the system suspend and then resuming. According to one developer, it was about an 80% time savings within one of the phases. On Friday, work was merged that ensured the kernel is no longer blocked by waiting for ATA devices to resume. Multiple ATA devices can be woken up simultaneously, and any ATA commands for the device(s) will be queued until they have powered up. According to an 01.org blog post on the ATA/SCSI resume optimization patches, when tested on three Intel Linux systems the resume time was between 7x and 12x faster (not including the latest ACPI/PM S&R optimizations)."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developers are currently evaluating the possibility of using QR codes to display kernel oops/panic messages. Right now a lot of text is dumped to the screen when a kernel oops occurs, most of which isn't easily archivable by normal Linux end-users. With QR codes as Linux oops messages, a smart-phone could capture the display and either report the error string or redirect them to an error page on Kernel.org. The idea of using QR codes within the Linux kernel is still being discussed by upstream developers."

noahfecks (2379422) writes "Version 10 of the most famous fork of MySQL MariaDB has been released. Its developers said that is many times faster than MySQL, also claiming that its replications slaves are crash free. More details of this release can be found on the blog."

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux 3.14 "Shuffling Zombie Juror" kernel has been released. Significant improvements to Linux 3.14 include the mainlining of SCHED_DEADLINE, stable support for Intel Broadwell CPU graphics, Xen PVH support, stable support for ZRAM, and many other additions. There's also a tentative feature list on KernelNewbies.org."

An anonymous reader writes "After hiring the lead Btrfs developers and Linux kernel block maintainers last year, Facebook is beginning trial deployments of Btrfs. Facebook will start using the next-generation file-system within their web-tier and they will be among the first major public deployments of Btrfs."

An anonymous reader writes that XWayland is nearly ready to be merged into the main X.org tree "X.Org Server 1.16 this summer should support XWayland, the means of allowing X11 applications to run atop Wayland-based compositors without the need for any application/game changes. With the revised design, XWayland has generic 2D acceleration over OpenGL and a cleaner design compared to earlier revisions. With GNOME 3.12 having better Wayland support and Plasma Next around the corner, it looks like 2014 could be the year of Wayland's take-off!" The patch series emails have more details. The big news here is that XWayland is ditching its old DDX model for one based on Glamor. eliminating the need for any X.org drivers to be written to support X11 on Wayland: "Finally, the last patch adds the Xwayland DDX. Initially Xwayland was an Xorg module that exposed an API for Xorg video drivers to hook into so that we could reuse the native 2D acceleration. Now that glamor is credible and still improving, a much better approach is to make Xwayland its own DDX and use glamor for acceleration. A lot of the code in the Xorg approach was busy preventing Xorg being Xorg, eg, preventing VT access, preventing input driver loading, preventing drivers doing modesetting. The new DDX in contrast is straight-forward, clean code, only 2500 lines of code and neatly self-contained." It does not yet have direct rendering or any acceleration, but those patches should come soon.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD privately shared with Phoronix during GDC2014 that they're developing a new Linux driver model. While there will still be an open (Gallium3D) and closed-source (Catalyst) driver, the Catalyst driver will be much smaller. AMD developers are trying to isolate the closed-source portion of the driver to just user-space while the kernel driver that's in the mainline Linux kernel would also be used by Catalyst. It's not clear if this will ultimately work but they hope it will for reducing code duplication, eliminating fragmentation with different kernels, and allowing open and closed-source driver developers to better collaborate over the AMD Radeon Linux kernel driver."

An anonymous reader writes "OpenSUSE has shared features coming to their 13.2 release in November. The big feature is using Btrfs by default instead of EXT4. OpenSUSE is committed to Btrfs and, surprisingly, they are the first major Linux distribution to use it by default. But then again, they were also big ReiserFS fans. Other planned OpenSUSE 13.2 features are Wayland 1.4, KDE Frameworks 5, and a new Qt5 front-end to YaST."

An anonymous reader writes "Full Wayland support has been added to Enlightenment 0.19. Building upon earlier Wayland support, Enlightenment can now act as its own Wayland compositor by communicating directly with the kernel's DRM drivers instead of having to rely upon Weston. The Wayland support is still considered experimental but it's now the first Linux desktop with full Wayland support." Quick README on building and using it.

jones_supa writes "Delays keep piling up for the Mir display server on the Ubuntu desktop. After already being postponed multiple times, Mir might not be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Linux desktop until the 16.04 LTS release — in two years time! This was the estimate by Mark Shuttleworth in a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. Using Mir, Mark says, will lead to supporting more hardware, obtaining better performance, and 'do some great things' with the technology. He expects some users will start using Mir on the desktop over the next year. Mir is already packaged as an experimental option, along with an experimental Unity 8 desktop session."

An anonymous reader writes "Developers of the Free Software Foundation-endorsed Replicant OS have uncovered a backdoor through Android on Samsung Galaxy devices and the Nexus S. The research indicates the proprietary Android versions have a blob handling communication with the modem using Samsung's IPC protocol and in turn there's a set of commands that allow the modem to do remote I/O operations on the phone's storage. Replicant's open-source version of Android does away with the Samsung library to fend off the potential backdoor issue."

An anonymous reader writes "The Fedora Project is now going to enforce a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for contributors. What the project's engineering committee is asking their members to conceal is a contributor's nationality, country of origin, or area of residence. There's growing concern about software development contributions coming from export restricted countries by the US (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria) with Red Hat being based out of North Carolina, but should these governmental restrictions apply to an open-source software project?"

An anonymous reader writes "Months after Intel ported the Chromium open-source web browser to Wayland, Chromium is now running on Ubuntu's Mir. The Mir display server port ended up being based on Wayland's Chromium code for interfacing with Google's Ozone abstraction framework. The Ubuntu developer responsible for this work makes claims that they will be trying to better collaborate with Wayland developers over this code." Grab the code hot off the press.

An anonymous reader writes "Citing 'code we consider to be permanently "experimental" or "beta,"' Google Chrome engineers have no plans on enabling video acceleration in the Chrome/Chromium web browser. Code has been written but is permanently disabled by default because 'supporting GPU features on Linux is a nightmare' due to the reported sub-par quality of Linux GPU drivers and many different Linux distributions. Even coming up with a Linux GPU video acceleration white-list has been shot down over fear of the Linux video acceleration code causing stability issues and problems for Chrome developers. What have been your recent experiences with Linux GPU drivers?"

An anonymous reader writes "GNOME 3.12 was going to have official Wayland support as one of its main features for the upcoming desktop release. The developers have now decided to delay the official Wayland support until at least GNOME 3.14 while the support found there will be shipped as a preview. Missing features like drag 'n' drop and clipboard support are still missing from GNOME's Wayland code, which made them decide another six months of development work is needed. Other GNOME 3.12 features are mentioned on the GNOME Wiki."

Via Phoronix comes news that Debian has been ported to the OpenRISC architecture by Christian Svensson. Quoting his mailing list post: "Some people know that I've been working on porting Glibc and doing some toolchain work. My evil master plan was to make a Debian port, and today I'm a happy hacker indeed! ... If anyone want to try this on real hardware (would be very cool to see how this runs IRL), ping me on IRC [#openrisc on freenode] and I'll set you up with instructions how to use debootstrap - just point to a repo with the debs and you're all set, the wonders of binary distributions." For those who don't know, OpenRISC is the completely open source RISC processor intended as the crown jewel of the Opencores project. A working port of glibc and a GNU/Linux distribution is a huge step toward making use of OpenRISC practical. There's a screencast of the system in action, and source on Github (at posting time, it was a month out of date from the looks of it). Christian Svensson's Github account also has repos for the rest of the toolchain.

An anonymous reader writes "A VP9 video decoder written for FFmpeg, FFvp9, now holds the title of being the world's fastest VP9 video decoder. FFvp9 is faster than Google's de facto VP9 decoder found in libvpx, but this doesn't come as too much of a surprise given that FFmpeg also produced a faster VP8 video decoder than Google a few years back with both single and multi-threaded performance."

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth just had a conference call with the press where he announced Canonical has partnered with BQ in Europe and Meizu in China to manufacture Ubuntu phones that will ship in 2014. By the time devices ship, the hope is to have ports of the top 50 Android and iOS apps available on Ubuntu." Mark Shuttleworth notes "The mobile industry has long been looking for a viable alternative to those that reign today. Ubuntu puts the control back into the hands of our partners and presents an exciting platform for consumers, delivering an experience which departs from the tired app icon grid of Android and iOS and provides a fluid, content-rich experience for all."

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth just had a conference call with the press where he announced Canonical has partnered with BQ in Europe and Meizu in China to manufacture Ubuntu phones that will ship in 2014. By the time devices ship, the hope is to have ports of the top 50 Android and iOS apps available on Ubuntu." Mark Shuttleworth notes "The mobile industry has long been looking for a viable alternative to those that reign today. Ubuntu puts the control back into the hands of our partners and presents an exciting platform for consumers, delivering an experience which departs from the tired app icon grid of Android and iOS and provides a fluid, content-rich experience for all."

An anonymous reader writes "While it took over a decade for E17 to come out, Enlightenment E19 is being readied for release just two months after E18's debut. The Enlightenment DR 0.19 update has a rewritten compositor that can fully act as its own Wayland compositor (not dependent upon Weston). The update integrates OpenGL canvas filters support, contains many bug-fixes, and has other improvements for both X11 and Wayland users. The 1.9.0 alpha1 pre-release was issued today as the initial testing version of the new window manager."