For The Linux Foundation, April is not the cruelest month: it's one of the busiest. Every year, we hold our Collaboration Summit in mid-April to bring together our members, Linux and open source community developers, open source legal minds, and large scale Linux and open source users in an intimate setting. Even as The Linux Foundation has expanded its event lineup to include LinuxCon, CloudOpen, Automotive Linux Summits, and more throughout the world, this remains our original event, and because of that, as well as it's small size and unique format, it's special to many of us in the community.As we prepare I wanted to share some of my top picks for speakers and sessions, as well as remind everyone who can't join us this year that you can watch the day 1 keynotes for free via live video stream. Just sign up on the Events website.My picks include:* Automotive crowd sourcing, presented by Jaguar Land Rover's Matt Jones. Not...

A new version of VLC is available for download.

Videolan, the team behind the app, say VLC 2.0.6 is an ‘important update‘ to the 2.x series of the popular media player.

Amongst the fixes and feature improvements users will find:

• Support for Matroska V4 files
• Improved DBus and MPRIS interfaces
• Misc fixes for MKV, Ogg, AVI, WMV file formats
• HTML Srt Subtitles no longer cause a crash
• HTTPS playback fixes

A full list of changes can be found @ videolan.org/developers/vlc-branch/NEWS

Installing VLC 2.0.6

The latest stable releases of VLC are available to install on Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04 from the Videolan Stable Daily PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install vlc

VLC 2.0.6 Released With Boatload of Bug Fixes OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

Hooks UCS servers into Systems Center, fast-tracks Windows infrastructure clouds

Upstart server-maker Cisco is bounding around the Microsoft Management Summit this week in Las Vegas to talk about how it is plugging its technologies into Redmond's cloud stack.

Here’s an update to file under ‘little things that matter’: Unity quicklists in 13.04 now denote the state of a focused window.

What does that mean in more intelligible terms?

Say you have two Firefox windows open, and you want to switch to the one you didn’t look at last using the Quicklist.

Previously the quicklist would list open windows but not indicate which one was ‘in focus’.

But recent updates to Unity in Raring fixes this by adding a ’dot’ next to the window you’re currently looking at.

Minor change? Certainly. Useful? Likely.

 

Focus Pip Added to Unity Quicklists OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

The Linux terminal is a friendly, colorful place full of fast, lightweight and useful applications like dstat, Calcurse, Petris, and Siege.

Listening to Tony Awtrey sing Pie Jesu from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem is awe inspiring. The classically trained tenor has a euphonious voice capable of taking your breath away. He’s also a Linux developer and Chief Scientist in the defense industry.

hypnosec writes "The open-source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack has been modified to support Bitcoin mining through the use of mining application 'bfgminer.' To mine Bitcoins using the open source GPU driver, one must use Tom Stellard's non-stock branches of Mesa, LLVM and libclc OpenCL library. Further, bfgminer must be patched as well. Once the patches are applied and modified code of the stack is used, users will be able to mine Bitcoins using the Radeon HD 5000 and Radeon HD 6000 graphics cards; however the cards have to be pre-HD6900 Cayman in case of the HD 6000 series."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Poor WUBI – things just continue to look bleaker for the once-innovative installer.

A week or so after being thrown off of the default Ubuntu 13.04 disc image the Ubuntu website is now also warning users not to use WUBI to try Ubuntu 12.10.

When clicking the ”Install from Windows’ link on the Ubuntu download page the following banner appears, advising against using the WUBI tool with Windows 8 or UEFI hardware.

Instead, Ubuntu recommends installing Ubuntu 12.10 64bit on its own dedicated partition – a task that is made easy with Ubuntu’s installer, but not entirely without risk.

WUBI Warning on Ubuntu Website

The warning appears following reports of stability and potential data-loss encountered by WUBI users on Windows 8.

Canonical’s Robert Bruce Park recently said of WUBI:

“[It] needs to die a quick and painless death so we can get on with providing positive experiences to new users of Ubuntu.”

Ouch!

You can see the new WUBI warning in all its lemon-coloured glory for yourself by hitting the link below.

Ubuntu WUBI Page

Via Jonathan Almeida

Ubuntu Website Warns Windows 8 Users: Don’t Use WUBI OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

Automation takes over the data centre

Software-defined networking (SDN) represents a revolutionary tide flowing through the fusty, slow-moving halls of data-centre networking, bringing speed and dynamism to network connectivity management..

Stripped-down Linux storage box for biz types

BizNAS is Tandberg Data's latest offering - a small business NAS box with iSCSI block access and integrated Dropbox support plus backup to removable disk.

Review In 8GB of RAM and 256GB flash. And don't mention the Bluetooth

Want a laptop running Linux? You could do worse than Dell's XPS 13.

Oracle virtualisation, Linux and apps coming to rivals' stack-in-a-box

A couple of weeks back, Gartner told The Reg that Oracle has more room for growth in virtualisation than just about any other player, perhaps including Microsoft.

Talks up zippier Oracle apps – and new apps – tuned for Exadata engineered systems

It is hard to imagine a rack of servers and switches being too much of a machine for a pilot Hadoop system, but that is exactly what prospective customers have been telling Oracle. And so it is offering a cut-down "starter" version of its Big Data Appliance with a much lower price point.

Java creator and Liquid Robotics' Chief Software Architect James Gosling discusses the company's latest "Wave Glider" autonomous aquatic craft. In addition to its energy harvesting marvels, the 9.5-foot, Wave Glider SV3 is also notable for being the first Linux-powered Wave Glider. With its Linux- and Java-based Regulus operating system, the floating robot is far more adept at autonomous navigation than the Wave Glider SV2, and can now coordinate with its siblings in fleet operations.

There seems to be no end in sight to the uncertainty and debate over what, exactly, constitutes an open source cloud. What's far more clear, however, is that the concept is rapidly gaining ground. Here are just a few pieces of evidence from the past few weeks that suggest the open cloud is on the rise.

Gwibber needs little in-way of introduction. The social networking client has been a default app in Ubuntu since 10.04, but was popular with users long before then too.

But anyone booting into the new-fangled Ubuntu 13.04 desktop later this month will notice that it’s missing; Gwibber does not come pre-installed on Ubuntu any longer.

So what’s going on?

Making Friends with Gwibber

To best understand we have to go back a few months to the launch/announcement of Ubuntu Touch. its unveiling created a storm of interest and opportunity for existing and new Ubuntu developers, not least because it promoted the use of a new, flexible ‘toolkit’ for developing apps – Qt/QML.

Gwibber had been in need of some due love and attention for a while, so its developer, Ken VanDine, took the opportunity to rewrite the app using these newly recommended technologies.

And so this was born:

Friends-App – The Next Generation Gwibber

But an app is nothing without its data. Alongside the rewritten, recoded and revamped ‘client’, work was also happening on the ‘backend’ to make it leaner, more performant and more reliable than that used by Gwibber in the past.

This new backend, dubbed ‘Friends’, fetches, delivers, and dispatches data to and from the app itself. You can’t see it, but it’s an integral part of the process.

Supports Many Social Networks – Including Facebook

A Fresh Start

With Friends (the backend) up and running, the Qml Gwibber hooked up to it, and users starting to test it, things began to get a bit confusing for the developers – as Ken explained to me:

“With the rewrite of the gwibber client to QML and the new friends backend, I still saw lots of comments online about gwibber and past experiences.  And as users started filing bugs against the client, it was difficult to distinguish which code base the user was using.”

The solution? A new name.

“Considering it was a completely new code base, even new branding with the awesome new logo, we felt it made sense to start off with a new LP project as well.  And now we have friends-app”

Friends App – So Far

So what’s the ‘new’ client like? It’s okay. It’s clearly not a finished piece of work by any stretch, but the features and functions included all work as they should.

Ken suggests that we view it as being somewhere between a ‘preview’ and a ‘stable’ release, erring against the latter because of a lack of wider testing.

On to how the app runs.

As this is an app made for touch there are features like inline-replying, large action buttons, and ‘drag to refresh’:

Pull To Refresh

Unlike Gwibber past there is now only one column called ‘Timeline’. This displays all statuses, mentions, tweets, etc in on vertical list.

If you think that sounds confusing – and it can be – each status is badged with the network it came from and, for things like mentions, avatars are badged to differentiate them from the rest of the stream:

All Updates, Mentions, Etc Appear in One Column

Ken hopes to re-introduce multi-column views at a later date. ‘Most likely something along the lines of automatically detecting the best layout based on form-factor,‘ he explains.

For portrait/single column users a “tabbed view” will also be introduced, letting you swipe through columns.

“I’ve played with these concepts a bit already, and it is pretty easy to implement in QML and the Ubuntu SDK,’ Ken says, ’I just didn’t want to rush and re-factor all that right as we were landing it in 13.04.”

The client and its new backend don’t support as many services as older versions did but all of the main networks are covered, including Facebook:

inline replying in friends-app

The compose window lets you choose which network an update is posted to:

Status Updating in Friends

Notable features missing at present, but pegged for inclusion in later versions:

• Username autocomplete
• Status management (deleting a tweet, etc)
• Twitter searching/filtering
• Locations
• Rich media views 

Going Forward

While sexy new Friends client isn’t included in Ubuntu (due to some last minute dependency security issues) all is not lost for social-fiends.

Firstly, Friends is available to install straight from the Ubuntu Software Center, so it’s still pretty much at your fingertips.

Click to Install Friends in Ubuntu 13.04

Secondly, Unity has a social lens installed by default in Raring. While you can’t tweet from it you can view statuses, mentions, messages, etc.

Unity Lens Friends

Where’d Gwibber Go in Ubuntu 13.04? And What’s Friends? OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

Cisco man says certification courses and content may be gratis, exams won't

The popularity of massive online open courses (MOOCs) could significantly disrupt vendors' certification models, to the point at which it is no longer possible to charge for education.

An anonymous reader writes "Nearly one year after Linux creator Linux Torvalds publicly bashed NVIDIA and several years after their multi-GPU mobile technology premiered, the graphics vendor has finally delivered an Optimus-supported Linux driver. NVIDIA released the 319.12 Beta Linux driver that brings support for 'RandR 1.4 GPU provider objects' that basically allows for Optimus-like functionality when using the latest X Server, Linux kernel, and XRandR. The 319.12 beta also has many other features including better UEFI support, installer improvements, new pages on their settings panel, and new GPU support."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Puts out Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 as bait

Many of the core OpenStack developers who worked on the Nebula cloud at NASA ended up at cloud controller appliance maker Nebula or at Rackspace Hosting, the other initial collaborator for the OpenStack project. But more than a few of them ended up at Piston Cloud, which has come up with its own twist on the OpenStack cloud controller and is revving up to 2.0 on Tuesday.

Forget hardware nannying, we're all about software-defined everything

With new sheriff Pat Gelsinger now running the company for the past six months, VMware is getting more focused on its software-defined data center product line, extending up from basic server virtualization to the heavens, and is spinning off anything that is not directly supportive of its goals for virtualized data center and endpoint computing. Thus, the patch management software from Shavlik went on the block, and LANDesk, itself a spinout from Intel, snapped it up.