Watch out, Android: three challengers are gunning for your app cash. Firefox OS, Tizen, and Ubuntu Touch have all made their debuts at mobile industry shindig Mobile World Congress this week. And in my opinion, Samsung and the mobile industry are backing the wrong horses. Amazing work from Ubuntu Touch, as you can see on the picture above.

Mobile phone carriers and manufacturers have grown fat on phones running Google’s Android software, but they’re keenly aware that in so doing they’re also lining Google’s pockets with money spent downloading apps, games, movies, music, and the like. The next stage in world domination for Samsung and the rest is wresting control — and income — from Google by making phones with their own software onboard.

It took almost a year for openSUSE Linux 12.2 to arrive after the launch of its predecessor, but version 12.3 of the popular Linux distribution is apparently coming along more quickly.

“The openSUSE Release Team has released RC2 to the mirrors a while ago,” wrote openSUSE community manager Jos Poortvliet in a blog post today. “This is the last opportunity to find and fix the last few bugs before the final release, so help us by downloading RC2, testing, and reporting bugs!”

Release candidates are always a nice way to get a glimpse at what’s to come, and this one makes it clear that there are a number of notable new features heading our way in the upcoming new version of this free and open source operating system.

Though it’s not intended for production use, of course, you can get a taste of this one yourself by downloading it from the project site. In the meantime, here are five key highlights.

1. ‘Secure Boot’ support

2. The E17 desktop

3. New database options

4. In the cloud

5. A raft of updates

Source: PCWorld

The first Ubuntu-powered mobile phones will be reportedly be available from October this year.

Reporting on a meeting Shuttleworth attended in New York earlier this week, Michael Hickins of the Wall Street Journal writes that the Ubuntu founder announced plans for the Phone to ship in ‘two large geographic markets’come October of this year.

October is a lot nearer than the ‘early 2014′ date previously proffered by Canonical – a date that many critics deemed to be ‘too late’ if the OS wishes to gain traction against rivals.

Mozilla will launch the first handset running their web-friendly Firefox OS in South America later this year. Other handset manufacturers, including ZTE, and over 7 major national network carriers have also announced plans to ship devices running it.

Although Shuttleworth is not reported as confirming either of the two territories targeted, he is on record as having stressed that North America is ‘a key market for Ubuntu’.

October aside, details on specifics are scant. Mark ‘declined’ to name any handset partners or network carriers.

Late February/March will see the Ubuntu Phone source code made available to developers, alongside an installable image for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset.

Would an October release suit you? 

source: Omgubuntu

A new distribution popped up on my radar last month when it was added to the Distrowatch.com database. It probably helped that its newest release was codenamed “GameOver” and featured lots and lots of games. Yesterday its team released 2.1 “Eris” Ultra.

Complete Story

source: linuxtoday

openSUSE 12.3 RC1 is a great release (even if it’s a development version) that features great and up-to-date open source software technologies, such as the newly released KDE 4.10 desktop environment and the powerful Linux kernel 3.7.6. But that???s not all, as the developers are proud to introduce a new theme for the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 operating system, which can be previewed in this first Release Candidate.

Complete Story

source: linuxtoday

Certainly that included the traditional desktop, the cumbersome machine that plugs into a wall and is anchored to a particular location within a home. But we also meant laptops and notebooks, which serve the same function as desktops just somewhat more conveniently. Probably included in the mix would be workstations, which are basically just desktops being used in business environments. What wouldn’t be included would be rack mounted servers, mainframes, supercomputers and other types of computing where Linux already dominated. From the 1990s through 2006, when we talked about our desire for Linux to get traction, we were talking about increasing the use of Linux on devices used to do word processing, surf the web, read and write email, manipulate images – all of the things we were used to doing on our personal computers. Many of us rightly felt that the elusive “year of Linux” was an inevitability, that eventually Tux would get discovered by John Q. Public. Not only was Linux the best technology, certainly superior to Windows, it’s licensing made it free. I trust I’m preaching to the choir here and don???t need to explain what I mean by software freedom.

Complete Story

source: Linux Today

GIMP 2.8.4 has been released yesterday, bringing some important bug fixes. This is the stable GIMP branch and no new features will be added in the 2.8.x releases, only bug fixes.

Here are the most important changes in GIMP 2.8.4:

• Better names for the default filters in save and export
• Make tool drawing (esp. the brush outline) much more responsive
• Remember the “maximized” state across sessions
• Simplify the splash image code a lot, makes it appear immediately again
• Allow the text tool to start on an image without layers
• Various fixes for text style attribute handling
• Set unconfigured input devices to eraser if GTK+ says they are erasers
• Make libgimp drawable combo boxes aware of layer groups
• Fix item width in GimpPageSelector (used e.g. in PDF import)
• Better default values in the Drop Shadow script
• Fixed bugs in the BMP plug-in
• Lots of bug fixes and translation updates

source: webupd8

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 4.0 today, which, according to the official announcement, 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“.

The most important changes in LibreOffice 4.0 include:

• Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents;
• Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents;
• Integration with several content and document management systems – including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText and others;
• Writer: allow different header and footer on the first page without using a separate page style;
• Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface
• Linux: GStreamer 1.0 support, and refactor existing Gstreamer code;
• New templates manager;
• PDF Import, the Presenter Console, and the Python Scripting Provider are no longer bundled extensions but core features;
• Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents.

Other minor but still interesting changes:

• Improved performance of ODS document import;
• Calc: Enhanced chart visualization – better quality rendering / print and PDF export of charts;
• Impress: much accelerated multimedia previews, and previews of embedded video on Linux;
• Base: On all non-Windows platforms a new mork driver implementation is used to access Thunderbird address book. This means that Debian/Ubuntu users can finally integrate LO with their Thunderbird address book;
• The bundled Python was upgraded from Python 2.6 to Python 3.3;
• Integration of session installer to add missing parts of LibreOffice on the fly.

For a complete list of changes in LibreOffice 4.0, see THIS page.

source: webupd8.org

Valve has released the original Half Life 1 and Counter Strike 1.6 games for Linux (and OS X). Both Half Life and Counter Strike are currently in beta and even though Linux is not yet displayed as a supported platform for these two games, you can download, install and play them on Linux, using the native Steam for Linux beta client.

Half-Life and Counter-Strike are first-person shooter games developed by Valve and Counter-Strike actually has its origins in a Half-Life modification. You can find out more on Wikipedia: Half-Life | Counter-Strike.

source: webupd8