open-slx Weekly News

Sascha Manns, Editor in Chief Christian Wansart, Editorial Staff Reiner Thiery, Proofreading/Editorial Staff Ferdinand Thiessen, Proofreading/Editorial Staff Keith Huntsman, Proofreading
Copyright 2011 2012 open-slx GmbH (http://community.open-slx.de). All rights reserved. 2012-12-05 Abstract We are pleased to announce the release of issue 40 of open-slx Weekly News. This week's highlights: KDE Gets a Homerun FreeBSD Open Source OS Breached. Should We Be Worried? Kernel Log - Coming in 3.7 (Part 2): Networking and more ... Enjoy reading :-)

open-slx Weekly News

Table of Contents

Internal News ....................................................................................................................................................... open-slx Weekly News Team .......................................................................................................................... Plasma Active ....................................................................................................................................................... Announcements ............................................................................................................................................ open-slx Portal ...................................................................................................................................................... New articles in the knowledgebase ................................................................................................................. In the Community ................................................................................................................................................. News from the blogosphere ........................................................................................................................... Audio version of the Weekly News .................................................................................................................. About Linux .......................................................................................................................................................... Announcements ............................................................................................................................................ Google Summer of Code & Google Code-In ............................................................................................................. Open Mind to Open Source ........................................................................................................................... Kernel Review ....................................................................................................................................................... Kernel Log Coming in 3.7 (Part 5): CPU and platform code ............................................................................. Games Corner ....................................................................................................................................................... 5 New Games Coming To Linux On Steam ....................................................................................................... Feedback ............................................................................................................................................................. Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................... Legal Notice .........................................................................................................................................................

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Internal News
In this section you can ind news and announcements from the open-slx Weekly News Team.

open-slx Weekly News Team

We are hiring!
The open-slx Weekly News Team is looking for people who would like to participate. If you like our news you are welcome to join and contribute. If you already know some XML and Docbook, you can write your own articles for inclusion in the publications. Otherwise, you may proofread or gather interesting news to submit for publication. We can not monitor the whole internet. ;-) For more information please email us: <newsteam@open-slx.de>.

Plasma Active
The open-slx project founding members have supported the Plasma Active Project since it's creation. News about the Plasma Active Project can be found here.

Announcements
Plasma Active Handbook in english available now
I'm pleased to announce a english version of my Plasma Active Handbook. :-) While the Google Code-In the book was part of that event. For that event i've prepared an english version of the book and a student has proofread it. So i would like to thank Casey Takahashi for her great contribute to the book. The present status of the handbook you can download there: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pactivehandbook/iles/PDF/ If you want to contribute too, maybe for writing sections or articles you're welcome. Just drop a mail to Sascha.Manns@open-slx.com.

open-slx Weekly News Source: Sascha Manns ,

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Muktware

open-slx Screencast2: How to read texts in Plasma Active?

A few weeks ago the new Plasma Active 3 was released . Time for us to publish a new Screencast. This time we're showing you how to read texts in Plasma Active. Watch there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDjXDJUYsas Source: community.open-slx.com
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open-slx Portal
This section contains news from the open-slx forums and new articles from the knowledgebase.

New articles in the knowledgebase

Playing Music and Videoiles in Plasma Active
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In the Community
News from the blogosphere
Fallback mode in KDE Plasma Workspaces
Recently there has been a lot of buzz about non-composited fallback modes in various Desktop Shells and of course I have been asked several times about the fallback modes in KDE Plasma workspaces and whether they would be removed, too. Now instead of answering the same question again and again I decided to write a blog post to discuss the situation in more detail. The irst thing to notice is that KDE Plasma workspaces do not have a non-composited fallback mode in the way GNOME Shell or Unity used to have. The main difference is that our window manager (KWin) is able to act as a non-composited, XRender based compositor and OpenGL (ES) based compositor. This means that we do not have to maintain two window managers in order to provide non-composited setups. The second major difference is that the Desktop Shell (either KDE Plasma Desktop, KDE Plasma Netbook or KDE Plasma Active) is not a plugin to the compositor but a separate application running in an own process. This allows to use a completely different window manager together with the Desktop Shell. Some years ago it was not that uncommon to use Compiz together with Plasma, though we see less and less such usage patterns (mostly caused by Compiz no longer being available in most major distributions except Ubuntu). This is a design decision which served us well and we do not plan to change it. Some time ago I brought up the topic, but more experienced developers (mainly Aaron) illustrated nicely the advantages of our design choices. Source: Martin Grlin , Muktware
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1 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/homelinux/opensuse-blog/~3/7nNHz-I_6Ik/plasma-active-handbook-in-english-available-now 2 http://www.muktware.com/4908/english-version-plasma-active-handbook-now-available 3 http://community.open-slx.com/news-80-plasma-active-documentation-available.html 4 http://community.open-slx.com/news-85-open-slx-screencast2-how-to-read-texts-in-plasma-active.html 5 http://community.open-slx.com/articles.php?article_id=473 6 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/12/microsoft_suing_google/ 7 http://www.muktware.com/4894/kde-plasma-should-be-your-primary-choice-linux-gaming

open-slx Weekly News

Why Open Source Software is More Secure than Proprietary Software

If you see the immense success that Linux , Firefox, Android and other software have achieved over the years, its all thanks to the power of open source. What makes open-source software so great is that it is a result of selless work of thousands of developers from around the world, who, in their free time, volunteer to create or help build their favorite applications. Open-source software gives developers and users alike the ability to browse, modify, and redistribute the source code thus leading to more transparency. So, if a person X creates a particular software and he or she couldnt manage to ix a bug, then someone from halfway round the world might spot that bug and help this developer. This is why a lot of people think that going the open-source way makes the software more reliable and secure. Here are some of the main reasons why we think open source software is better than proprietary ones in terms of security: Source: Techsource
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Audio version of the Weekly News

We currently produce only a German version of open-slx Weekly News. You can ind it here: http://saigkill.homelinux.net/ podcast.

About Linux
Announcements
Qt 5.0 on the home stretch
Qt lead developer Lars Knoll has announced the release schedule for version 5.0 of the C++ GUI framework. According to this schedule, Qt 5.0 is due to arrive before the end of the year. The irst "major" release in eight years was original12 13 ly planned to be released in summer 2012, but its arrival has been delayed by the main developers' move from Nokia to Digia. As a irst preparatory measure for the inal release, the developers will now split the Qt repositories into three branches. The current master branch will be declared transitional and in approximately a week's time will be closed and merged into the dev branch, which is then planned to contain the repository that is to be the basis for the ongoing development of Qt 5.1. [...] Sources: h-online
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KDE 4.10 Brings Better, Smarter Dolphin

Dolphin is one of the most advanced ile managers around. While its extremely simply and pleasant at the front-end it has 15 an extremely powerful and customizable back-end which give you full control in a user's hand. With KDE 4.10 shaping up 16 it's time to have a look at what's cooking in this ile manager.
8 http://www.junauza.com/2012/09/why-linux-is-good-for-business.html 9 http://www.junauza.com/2012/11/why-open-source-software-is-more-secure-than-proprietary-software.html 10 http://qt-project.org/ 11 http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2012-November/008168.html 12 http://www.h-online.com/news/item/Qt-5-to-arrive-in-2012-1240164.html 13 http://www.h-online.com/news/item/Digia-buys-Qt-Update-1663753.html 14 http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Replicant-4-0-integrates-Android-4-0-features-1755057.html 15 http://www.muktware.com/articles/3518/kde-voted-most-popular-desktop-environment 16 http://freininghaus.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/on-the-way-to-dolphin-2-2/

open-slx Weekly News And I have some good news for longtime Dolphin users. Dude I Can Resize The Icons If you are someone like me who missed the icon resize feature you can rejoice as the feature is "coming back" with Dolphin 2.2. Well, it's not coming back in sense the way it was but the developers are adding an option to the context menu of Places Panel, similar to the one found in the context menu of tool bar where you can resize the icon. So, while icons in the side panel won't resize automatically, you can use the context menu to manually resize them. Android
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Can Talk To KDE

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Another notable improvement coming for Dolphin is the support for Android 's MTP which was introduced with version 20 3.x. The support for MTP was broken under Linux and companies like Canonical did nothing to cater to user's needs. KDE developers stepped in with a working solution and now you can get full support for MPT under KDE. With Dolphin 2.2 you will be able to mount your Android 4.x device in Dolphin. [...] Source:: Muktware
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Google Summer of Code & Google Code-In

Open Mind to Open Source
Heya, my names Kyle Morris. Im currently a proud Canadian, 16 years of age who enjoys topics along computer science and business development. During November 2012, I was guided to an opportunity known as Google Code-In, which was said to introduce students to the world of open source development. This was deinitely the case. I spent a brief time deciding which organization to develop for, based on the 10 groups available. KDE quickly jumped out as an option due to the diversity within its components. My registration form was sent and accepted within 12 hours. This began one of the most beneicial experiences of my life. KDE is a massive project comprised of many branches along with their contents. It was not easy selecting the irst oficial task to work on, however I decided to push myself by attempting image design. My attempt failed horribly upon reaching the shocking conclusion Im terrible at this!. [...] Quelle: codeinkyle
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Kernel Review
Kernel Log Coming in 3.7 (Part 5): CPU and platform code
Linux 3.7 supports ARM64, the processor used in the Raspberry Pi, and Intel's SMAP security feature. The next kernel release will also include new tools for tracing processes and improved collaboration with Microsoft's hypervisor.

17 http://www.muktware.com/distros/android 18 http://www.muktware.com/articles/3518/kde-voted-most-popular-desktop-environment 19 http://www.muktware.com/distros/android 20 http://www.base.muktware.com/content/canonical-ltd 21 http://www.muktware.com/4873/kde-410-brings-better-smarter-dolphin 22 http://codeinkyle.blogspot.ca/2012/12/open-mind-to-open-source.html

open-slx Weekly News Reading between the lines in the release email for Linux 3.7-rc6, it seemed that everything was pointing to a release date 24 for Linux 3.7 around the irst weekend in December. The release email for the seventh pre-release version , by contrast, suggested that there perhaps might be a further release candidate after all. Each RC usually puts the inal release date back by about a week, with further delays likely only if the kernel developers need to undertake extensive bugix changes requiring a lengthy test phase. The description of changes to the processor and platform code which follows, concludes our "Coming in 3.7" Kernel Log 25 series. The irst four articles in the series looked at changes merged into Linux 3.7 in the areas of ilesystems and storage , net26 27 28 working ,infrastructure and drivers . [...] Sources:: h-online
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Games Corner
This Section contains information about Linux games or games that run under Linux.

5 New Games Coming To Linux On Steam

Steam Greenlight is the entry point for new games to be released on Steam. Steam Greenlight is a system that enlists the communitys help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Developers can post information, screenshots, and video for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Source: Muktware
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Feedback
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23 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1395793 24 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1400265 25 http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-3-7-Part-1-Filesystems-storage-1750000.html 26 http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-3-7-Part-2-Networking-1752099.html 27 http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-3-7-Part-3-Infrastructure-1755953.html 28 http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-3-7-Part-4-Drivers-1757358.html 29 http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-3-7-Part-5-CPU-and-platform-code-1758293.html 30 http://www.muktware.com/4910/5-new-games-coming-linux-steam 31 http://community.open-slx.com/forum.html 32 https://www.ohloh.net/p/openslxwn 33 https://plus.google.com/b/103970156971219540533/ 34 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Open-slx-GmbH/185488471485640?ref=hl
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following organizations that help make the open-slx Weekly News project possible: Ubuntuusers.de
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RenderX XEP , PDF Creation and Rendering SyncRO Soft Ltd. , Oxygen XML Editing
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Legal Notice
The open-slx Weekly News is a community project and is published under the Creative Commons attribution-ShareAlike 38 3.0 Unported License . Responsible for the German 6 Teledienstegesetz (TDG) and 10 Mediendienste-Staatsvertrag (MDStV), operator of the internetpage, editorial, community, content page/streams: Dr.-Ing. Stefan Werden, Einsteinring 7, 90453 Nuremberg/Ger39 many, tel. +49 911 89460330, fax +49 911 89460304, email: Stefan.Werden@open-slx.com . Ust-IdNr. DE267619018 - HR-Number 25786 at Amtsgericht B Nuremberg The Weekly News is protected by the german copyright law.

35 http://ikhaya.ubuntuusers.de 36 http://www.renderx.com 37 http://www.oxygenxml.com 38 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ 39 mailto:Stefan.Werden@open-slx.com