An anonymous reader writes "In clearing up common misconceptions about Wayland (e.g. it breaking compatibility with the Linux desktop and it not supporting remote desktops like X), Eric Griffith (a Linux developer) and Daniel Stone (a veteran X.Org developer) have written The Wayland Situation in which they clearly explain the facts about the shortcomings of X, the corrections made by Wayland, and the advantages to this alternative to Canonical's in-development Mir."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unity’s much-delayed Smart Scopes Service has arrived in the development builds of Ubuntu 13.10.

The feature aims to add a more comprehensive and relevant search experience to the Ubuntu desktop. Over 50 new ‘Scopes’ – a data-specific search backend – will come installed by default. Some of these deliver results from popular websites like Wikipedia, Yahoo!, and Google; others deliver data from locally installed applications, like music players and installed apps.

It’s Like Source City in the Unity Dash

Each of these scopes can be disabled individually by right-clicking on it:

Disable a Smart Scope in Unity

Smart Scopes Now Smarter

The Smart Scopes feature was originally intended to debut in Ubuntu 13.04, but was eventually considered ‘not mature enough’. Whilst this was a shame, it was necessary. The version debuting in 13.10 is, I’m pleased to say, is faster, more intelligent, and more featured than that targeted for 13.04.

Admittedly many remain suspicious about how useful it will be. Over the coming months eager testers will get to find out. But, if you found yourself aggrieved by the “irrelevancy” of Amazon shopping results when looking for a local file or application, prepare for much of the same – just on a larger scale:

Searching for a locally installed app returns all this…

As bad as the image above might look to some the Dash is doing what it’s meant to. Empathy, the app I was searching for, is in top spot. I don’t have to scroll or wade through to find it.

For source specific searches you can use modifiers. Want to quickly search Wikipedia? Prefix ‘wiki:query’.

It’s Possible to Search A Specific Service

Modifiers are great, but they are a power-users tool. Do you use them on Google? I don’t. And that means that for me the “default” set of results returned will be more important.

That’s where the “smart” in ‘Smart Scopes Service’ will come in. The relevancy of results will be determined by people like us. As we search and click on results the ‘smart scopes server’ that delivers the results will learn which types of results are more relevant for which terms.

Given that the feature has only just landed in 13.10 the results are not as finely tuned as they should be by October. So if you’re using Saucy already keep that in mind when using it.

Other than that, the feature adds an insane amount of potential to the Unity desktop. A world of results, and the ability to interact with them, will be only the tap of a Super key away…

The post Unity Smart Scopes Feature Arrives in Ubuntu 13.10 appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Canonical’s Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon has shown off the latest progress to Ubuntu Touch as of this month.

If you haven’t seen much of Ubuntu Touch since the earlier releases back in January and February, then you’ll be surprised at how fast progress is happening.

The network and Messaging menus now work; much of the dummy data included on earlier builds has been removed; and there are a handful of functioning apps available for Ubuntu Touch, albeit still rough around the edges.

All “core features” of the phone are working – calling, SMS, and data over 3G.

While not a single handset manufacturer or mobile carrier has yet publically committed to shipping Ubuntu Phone, Canonical remain confident that the first Ubuntu Touch devices will ship in ‘early 2014′, with Ubuntu Touch tablets following in the months thereafter.

Thanks to Patrick Quinn

The post How’s Ubuntu Touch for Phones Shaping Up? Pretty Well Judging By This Video… appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Ultrabook by name, tablet by nature

Acer's recent tablet bash in London not only showcased its latest A1 Iconia Android fondleslab but also on display was its forthcoming Aspire P3 Windows 8 slate.

As an IT manager for the Mt. Lebanon Municipality near Pittsburgh, PA, Nick Schalles recently faced a familiar but difficult problem for those maintaining public infrastructure.  How could they update an old system to meet the new demands of the digital age and stay within a public agency budget?

An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Gallagher, Security Software Engineer at Red Hat, has completed his week-long experiment running GNOME 3 Classic. Stephen writes: 'While I was never as much in love with GNOME 2 as I was with KDE 3, I found it to be a good fit for my workflow. It was clean and largely uncluttered and generally got out of my way. Now that Fedora 19 is in beta and GNOME Classic mode is basically ready, I decided that it was my duty to the open-source community to explore this new variant, give it a complete investigation and document my experiences each day.' I'll leave Stephen's opinion on the new Classic Mode to the Slashdot reader to discover, but I will say that it does touch on the much debated GNOME Shell Activities Overview, and the gnome-2-like Classic mode's Windows List on the taskbar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are you ready to try out a Linux distribution for the first time? In this introductory Linux training video tutorial, Darren Siaw walks you through step by step in installing Ubuntu Linux in a virtual machine using VirtualBox. 

NOOBS tool simplifies setup process for non-techies

The Raspberry Pi was conceived of as a device so cheap that anyone could buy one, but also just raw enough that putting the computer to work would require users to learn a little about topics like installing operating systems and confronting BIOS settings.

'Goliath beat me up,' says David. 'What did you expect,' says world

Big Switch Networks, a startup with everything to gain from adoption of its software defined networking (SDN) technology, has left an SDN group dominated by traditional OEMs who had much to lose, after the group went with Cisco's tech over Big Switch's as the base of an SDN spec.

Big Blue pulls MongoDB JSON-querying into DB2, WebSphere

IBM developers can now write apps using MongoDB's query language to interact with data stored in DB2 and WebSphere, and vice versa, giving IBM's tech greater use and relevance in an age dominated by cheap or free solutions.

coop0030 writes "Thanks to the affordable Raspberry Pi and some clever software, anyone can re-create the classic arcade experience at home. Adafruit brings the genuine 'clicky' arcade controls, you bring the game files and a little crafting skill to build it. Classic game emulation used to require a well-specced PC and specialized adapters for the controls, so it's exciting to see this trickle down to a $40 system. Also, a video of the game system is on YouTube."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP is getting to Kyoto ahead of AMD's SeaMicro biz

Hewlett-Packard is making no promises about when it will be delivered, but the company is showing off a multiple-node server cartridge for its "Redstone" Moonshot 1500 chassis using the "Kyoto" Opteron X processor from Advanced Micro Devices.

It’s been a few months since I last checked in on the progress of Australis, the new Firefox interface coming to Windows, Mac and, of course, Linux.

Australis is designed to create a consistent interface across desktop and mobile versions of Firefox, whilst also remaining “native looking” to the system it’s on.

Since my last look in March a new menu has been implemented. It doesn’t sit to the left of the tab-strip as in current Firefox builds but on the far right, behind a ‘hotdog’ icon.

WYSIWYG Editor

It’s easy to shout ‘Chrome Clone’ at this icon but the menu that sits behind it is anything but. There us no long-winded list of options. Instead Firefox offers up a curated set of icons for easy clicking (and, one assumes, ‘tapping’).

In a neat touch, both the popover menu, and virtually every other interface element, can be rearranged in a new WYSIWYG editor.

The new look is expected to debut in Firefox 25, due later this year.

In the meantime, if you want to have a poke around with it you can find the latest UX Nightly behind the link below.

Firefox Nightly UX Builds

The post Firefox’s New Interface Is Already Looking Good on Linux appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Agile development, DevOps and the ability to trial new application concepts by spinning them up in the cloud are speeding the trend for in-house development. Customization and innovation in business processes and the software that underlies them, are now core areas of competitive advantage. For the developer, this means that the joy of working with other people’s code is becoming an almost unavoidable part of the job. But for many of us, maintaining our own, long-forgotten code can be painful enough. Inheriting someone else's can be downright agony.

WiSee & Ubuntu Grace BBC News Front Page

It’s always interesting to see Ubuntu grace the pages of the  popular press – even when it’s not referenced directly.

An article on the BBC News website today, June 5th, is one such occurrence.

The piece concerns gesture-controlled tech able to read movements based on disruptions to Wi-Fi signals. The main post image of the piece is a screenshot of the tech being run on Ubuntu. That grab is also currently showing up on the BBC News front page, too.

“Joey!”, some of you may be thinking, “Surely the news is that the WiSee team are using Ubuntu, and not that it’s on the BBC website!”

That’s certainly true. It is great to see Ubuntu being used in the building of tomorrow’s technology. But hey – a guy needs an angle!

WiSee

In the following video put together by the research team you can see Ubuntu in use several times. The application itself looks as though it’s written in Java.

Now before anyone gets too excited it’s worth pointing out that the tech the team used to “read” gestures via WiFi signals isn’t your standard discount Belkin router. In fact, the BBC report that the researcher’s kit costs ‘about 10 times the price of Microsoft’s Kinect.’

So don’t expect Ubuntu Wave to arrive anytime soon! ;)

For more information on the WiSee, the team behind it and its potential uses head over to the BBC News article or the University of Washington webpage.

Wisee BBC News Article

WiSee Post on Washington.edu Website

The post Wi-fi Gesture Controller ‘WiSee’ Built on Ubuntu, Pimped on the BBC appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Review Trevor scripts up some GUI admin tools

We recently had a good look at what it takes to get a Hyper-V failover cluster up and running using PowerShell. It isn't quite as scary as it is often made out to be, but like many command line interfaces it is the stuff of laminated cheat sheets for administrators who don't use those commands every day.

Computex 2013 Merrifield brain talks the talk ...

Intel has been doing its best to convince anyone who’ll listen this week that its new Silvermont-based processors are a viable alternative to ARM's mobile-friendly cores.

Intrusion 2

Four more games have been added to the Humble Indie Bundle 8.

The pay-what-you-want offer now boasts an impressive collection of 11 gaming titles, all of which are available for Linux.

So far the Humble Indie Bundle 8 has raised over $1.8 million in sales of this bundle, with Linux users once again paying, on average, more than their Windows and Mac counterparts.

New Titles

The additional four games are automatically available to anyone who has already bought this bundle. Check your receipt page for the appropriate links.

If you haven’t yet parted with your cash then you’ll need to beat the ‘average price’ – $5.72 at the time of writing – to get all eleven titles. But since this bundle would cost over $150 normally, it’s hardly a big ask.

The new games are:

• Naval strategy game Oil Rush
• Physics-based platformer Tiny & Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers
• Geometric puzzler English Country Tune
• Side-scrolling shooter Intrusion 2

Humble Indie Bundle Website

The post 4 More Games, Including Oilrush, Added to Latest Humble Bundle appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

A cookie, a box, a stick and a string can trap attackers

One of the most common forms of attack is the SQL injection, and although the vector is ancient and well-understood, it's notoriously difficult to defend against.

PureStack spots drooping apps

Compuware has developed an app monitoring tech to help admins with performance anxiety spot problems in their infrastructure.