It's all about the supply chain - THEN the price

Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are in a class all by themselves when it comes to the size and scope of their data center infrastructure, but hosting and cloud provider SoftLayer is no slouch, either. The company has created its own control freak and is not about to reflexively jump on the OpenStack or Open Compute bandwagons as cross-state rival Rackspace Hosting has done.

darthcamaro writes "Fedora 19, aka Schrödinger's Cat, is now out in Beta. There is a long list of new features in this release, including 3D modelling tools, improved security, federated VoIP, updated GNOME and KDE desktops and new improved virtual storage to name a few. '"Normally we have a good batch of features for everyone in a new release and this time around a lot of it is under the hood kinds of stuff," Fedora Project Leader, Robyn Bergeron, told ServerWatch.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're reading this then the chances are you use Linux. It's most likely that you use it quite a bit.

The Open Ballot this fortnight is: Do you ever see yourself switching back to Windows or Mac OS X (or BSD, Solaris, MikeOS or any other OS) and leaving Linux behind?

Are there some problems that just don't get solved? Are the problems getting worse? Or is everything just peachy as you bask in the warm glow of software freedom?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and we'll read out the best on Thursday's podcast.

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Opera’s popular  e-mail feature is to be removed from the browser and released as a standalone application, developers have announced.

The decision to remove the feature, which was first added in 2000, is part of several major changes planned for Opera 15. The next generation version of the browser, currently available for testing as ‘Opera Next’, sees Opera swap out its Presto rendering engine in favour of Google’s new Webkit-fork ‘Blink’.

But rather than ditch with the integrated e-mail client, called M2, entirely Opera developers have decided to package it up and release it as a separate, standalone product.

Not on Linux Yet – Opera Mail RC on Mac OS X

“It’s almost ready, so today we want to introduce to you, the first release candidate of Opera Mail,’ the Opera’s Adam Minchinton writes on the desktop team blog, ‘So please download it and send us your feedback.”

Now for the not so good news. Downloads of Opera Mail’s Release Candidate are currently only available for Windows and Mac OS X, though – thankfully – Opera devs have confirmed that the app will be coming to Linux.

Mail Apps

Following Mozilla’s axing of direct development on Thunderbird, and the lightweight mail app Geary failing to get funding, some users may have felt that the future of the desktop e-mail client was looking doomed.

But this news, along with that of innovative app Inky’s plans for Linux, means mail app fans need not worry just yet…

The post Standalone Opera Mail Client Coming to Linux appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Pidora 18 'remix' can reveal a Pi's IP address by flashing LEDs

Raspberry Pi users have another operation system option, after the folks behind Fedora Linux changed their recipe and issued a “remix” of the OS for the tiny computer.

Popular PC sport simulation game ‘Football Manager’ will support Linux with its next major release, games developers Sports Interactive have said.

The news means that the upcoming Football Manager 2014 will be the first official release of the series on Linux.

Thanks to Steam, the game will be available to buy on one platform, but install and play on all; you won’t need to buy it again to play it on your Macbook or Windows partition.

Furthermore, the Linux release will support “cross play”, enabling connection with/playing against Mac and PC users.

What Is Football Manager?

Football Manager is a football management simulation game. The goal (pun intended) is to buy, sell, build and train the ultimate football team, play them against others in various tournaments and cups with the aim of coming out top.

The game is made by Sports Interactive and published by Sega and is a continuation of the Championship Manager series started in 1989 by the same developers. Legal fallout from a split with publisher Edios Interactive forced the developers to change the name.

Football Manager is released annually for PC and Mac users, though PSP and XBox 360 versions have been produced in the past.

Football Manager 2014 is expected to see a release date sometime around October.

The post Football Manager 2014 Will Support Linux appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

We wondered whether it was the ‘coolest Ubuntu PC ever built’. Not wanting to downplay such a reputation, the Cirrus7 Nimbus will be fashionably late to market. 

But only just.

The German company behind the device, Cirrus7, have said that they ‘can not keep [to] the planned release date’ of late May. Instead, the Nimbus will be launched a month late, seeing release in late June,.

Unlike other small form-factor PCs on sale the Nimbus is fanless. It cools the CPU ‘passively’ by way of laser-cut aluminium layers stacked on top of one another to form a case that double up as a heatsink. No other form of cooling is used – or even needed, say the company.

Pricing, Performance & Power Use

Alongside a revised release date for the metal marvel comes the first indication of how much you can expect to pay for it.

Pricing starts at €499 for a dual-core Intel Celeron* G1610T clocked at 2.3Ghz, rising to €758 for a quad-core Intel i7-3770T clocked at 2.5 GHz. Several intermediary options, such as i3 and i5 choices, are also available.

Is this good value? For a bit of context the Intel i3-powered Lenovo Q190 retails for €400+ – a lower price, but with a far weaker processor than that offered by the cheapest Nimbus.

Price/performance ratios aside, the choice of CPU will also dictate the power on offer from the integrated graphics. The i5 and i7 options offer Intel HD 4000 (as used by Apple in the MacBook Pro); but the lower-end models are paired with far less capable offerings.

Not that super-stellar graphic performance is going to be top of the want list for anyone shopping for a low-power, small-profile PC to start with. Anyone hoping to do hardcore gaming or HD video editing on a PC like this should have a quiet word with themselves…

Later in the year the company say we can look forward to options featuring Intel’s new super performant and super power-friendly Haswell CPUs.

For more details on the specifications of the Nimbus see our previous post.

Pre-Orders

Intrigued? Cirrus7 are advising anyone interested in purchasing a Nimbus to get in touch via preorder@cirrus7.com.

Mailing, they say, does not constitute an obligation to buy but will offer up early notifications about release dates and availability.

*They may be Celeron by name, but not in performance

The post Ubuntu-Powered Cirrus 7 PC Gets Priced, Delayed appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

DeviceGuru writes "BeagleBoard.org has begun shipping its faster, cheaper BeagleBone Black SBC with a new Linux 3.8 kernel, supporting Device Tree technology for more streamlined ARM development. The $45 BeagleBone Black runs Linux or Android on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3359 SOC, doubles the RAM to 512MB of its predecessor, and adds a micro-HDMI port. The updated kernel gives the BeagleBone Black access to a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver architecture, as well as full support for the Device Tree data structure introduced to streamline ARM development in Linux 3.7. The project was hesitant to move up to such a recent kernel, but decided it was time to bite the bullet and support the Device Tree. By doing the hard work of switching to Device Tree now, BeagleBoard.org and its developer community can save a lot of configuration and maintenance headaches down the line, says BeagleBoard.org co-founder Jason Kridner. Fortunately, a modified 3.2 kernel 'coming soon' should provide the necessary bridge from the old cape driver architecture to the new one."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has released a new version of Skype, its popular VoIP program, for Linux.

Fresh on the heels of his talk on achieving total data center victory at Collaboration Summit in April, John Mark Walker, Gluster community leader at Red Hat will show us how to get there at the Gluster Workshop at LinuxCon Japan on Friday, May 31 in Tokyo. In this Q&A Walker previews the workshop and discusses the roadmap for the GlusterFS distributed file system.

Linus, Glass and the Iron Penguin have saved the day!

It is finally over.... or is it just beginning?

A video demonstrating a new set of animations for Ubuntu Touch has been posted online.

In the clip, Ubuntu designers showcase a range of visual effects for use in ‘core movements’ on Touch, including animations for switching between applications, unlocking the screen, and pressing buttons.

[Video Since Removed by Ubuntu]

Ubuntu’s Designers are calling the motion theme ‘Paper’, with the visuals created around the idea of evoking ‘…the theme of paper wherever possible.’ Eschewing traditional papery-effects like curls and folds, the team have opted for a more ‘suggestive’ approach using layers and stacking.

The video also shows a number of application designs using the new ‘Suru’ UI.

Earlier in the week Ubuntu designers also demoed a video of their new RSS reader concept called ‘Shorts‘.

The post New Interface Animations Demoed for Ubuntu Touch appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Too sexy for my (night)shirt

Since being allowed back into public places without causing the skin of those nearby to melt or for Jurassic sealife to shuffle out of the Pacific and sneeze fire at Tokyo Tower, Half Life Wife has enjoyed several evenings out at the theatre with yours truly.

The OpenStack cloud software stack went from zero to domination in less than three years. In this series we're going to learn what it is, and how to install and administer it.

TDC2013 HTML5 seen as key to open source smartphone success

You could be forgiven for thinking there's not much going on with Tizen, the Linux Foundation's open source mobile OS. It's been two years since the project was launched and there still are no Tizen devices on the market. But that's about to change – and there has been a lot happening behind the scenes, as well.

Tizen, the open-source Linux software platform aiming to power everything from smartphones to smart TVs, is seemingly coming to laptops.

Intel demoed a Tizen laptop experience at the Tizen Conference 2013 in San Francisco, USA, earlier this month. And it wasn’t demoed on any old heap of hardware, either: Intel were showing off the OS newcomer on an i7 Ivybridge Ultrabook.

The Tizen OS experience is powered by ‘Tizen Shell’ – a UI built upon GNOME-Shell.

While parts of the desktop are familiar Tizen developers have also made a number of modifications to it, including creating a set of moveable desktop widgets and introducing a HTML5 run-time for powering web-apps.

You can check out the full OS experience in the video below, taken by the folks over at Tizen Experts.

As Tizen is an open-source project all code will be published on the official website later in the year. Better yet, installable images for Ivy Bridge laptops may also be made available for download (with a suite of developer tools pre-installed) in an attempt to woo developers into using the OS for developing Tizen smartphone apps.

Tizen Time?

With Ubuntu-powered laptops beginning to increase in both availability and visibility; and with Google’s Chromebook enjoying phenomenal success, could an alternative OS find success on laptops? It just might.

Sporting industry backers like Intel and Samsung, both of whom are actively steering its development, Tizen certainly has enough clout behind it to carve a niche.

Laptops aside, this year certainly will see more of Tizen in the news as the first Tizen smartphone from Samsung is set to go on sale later this year.

Front page image credit: TizenExperts.com

The post Intel Demo GNOME-Powered Tizen OS Ultrabook appeared first on OMG! Ubuntu!.

Arduino, the Italian-based project that designs the official line of Arduino boards, has announced the Arduino Yún. The Yún ("cloud" in Chinese) is the first in a series of WiFi-enabled Arduino boards, and the first to run Linux. It's intended as a general-purpose prototyping board for any Arduino creation that requires an Internet connection.

Gnome 3.8 introduced a bundle of nifty changes like new applications for Weather, Clock, Documents and Note Taking, improved search in the Activites, Privacy Settings and so on.

Amongst those was a changes was swapping the old Application Overview categories for Category folders.

In essence the new categories folders are no different than the old categories sidebar. They categorise applications by what they do, so apps like Calculator and File Archiver go to “Utilities”; music and movie players appear under “Sound & Video”; GIMP, Inkscape and Pinta show up in “Graphics”, etc.

What makes them different is that the old Categories were shown as sidebar right of the Applications grid, whereby the new folders are displayed right in the grid itself and clicking on them invokes a popover that shows the applications themselves.

Utilities Folder in GNOME 3.8

It’s pretty swish.

But there’s only one problem: by default GNOME only provides two folders – Utilities and Sundry. Everything else is appears on the one screen, making hunting for apps by eye a little overwhelming.

Every app. Happy swimming.

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to add new folders to group applications into – and this is exactly what this article is about.

Getting your hands dirty

The first thing you need to do is fire up “dconf Editor”.

Don’t know how? Simply press the “Super key” (may have a Windows logo on it) and type “dc” into the search field. The app will pop out as you type so that you can click on it.

Search for Dconf Editor

Once Dconf is open navigate to org > gnome > shell in the sidebar. In the right pane you will see an item heading reading: app-folder-categories followed by its contents: ['Utilities', 'Sundry']

Dconf in Action

Double click on the contents field so that it becomes editable. Delete all of the text inside it and replace it with the following:

['Utilities', 'Sundry', 'Office', 'Network', 'Internet', 'Graphics', 'Multimedia', 'System', 'Development', 'Accessories', 'System Settings', 'Other']

This will automatically sort your applications into appropriate folders, like so:

Categorised Applications Overview

Which looks a tad more organised then before:

Uncategorised applications overview

Going Further

For those of you that want a wee bit more power and feel like playing a bit more you can remove some of those categories, just watch the semantic of the regular expression to be like this:

['Category1', 'Category2', 'Category3', ... 'CategoryN']

Regrettably creating custom category is not yet possible, so you are stuck with the built-in ones.

But what if I mess up?

Oh, don’t you worry about that. There is “Set to Default” button at the bottom right of DConf-Editor that will restore the selected setting to it’s default value:

“Set to Default” button in Dconf

Aligns with AWS instances, and offers the same or lower prices

Joyent, one of the upstart cloudy infrastructure providers that is taking a custom software stack to market to peddle virty server and storage, has done a major revamp of the way it carves up slices on its Joyent Compute Service cloud.

Who says you need a few million bucks to build a supercomputer? Joshua Kiepert put together a Linux-powered Beowulf cluster with Raspberry Pi computers for less than $2,000.