alphadogg writes "Linux developers will soon have a chance to compete for prizes of laptops and smartphones, thanks to Canonical's announcement this week of the Ubuntu App Showdown contest. Developers will have from June 18 until July 9 — a total of three weeks — to create an app using Canonical's Quickly development tool, which combines Python and GTK into a single Ubuntu-centric package. The resulting apps will be judged by a five-member panel, with the developers of the top three receiving new Nokia N9 smartphones."

New submitter beefsack writes "Thanks to the strong ARM support in the Ubuntu repositories, Ubuntu, along with Lubuntu and others have been ported to work on the new MK802 mini PC. Performance is very impressive, especially given that Mali GPU driver support in Linux is still lacking features such as hardware video decoding."

snydeq writes "After years of battling Linux as a competitive threat, Microsoft is now offering Linux-based operating systems on its Windows Azure cloud service. The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery and be charged on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis."

sfcrazy writes "Red Hat's Tim Burke has clarified Fedora/Red Hat's solution to Microsoft's secure boot implementation. He said, 'Some conspiracy theorists bristle at the thought of Red Hat and other Linux distributions using a Microsoft initiated key registration scheme. Suffice it to say that Red Hat would not have endorsed this model if we were not comfortable that it is a good-faith initiative.'" Color me unimpressed, and certainly concerned: "A healthy dynamic of the Linux open source development model is the ability to roll-your-own. For example, users take Fedora and rebuild custom variants to meet personal interest or experiment in new innovations. Such creative individuals can also participate by simply enrolling in the $99 one time fee to license UEFI. For users performing local customization, they will have the ability to self-register their own trusted keys on their own systems at no cost." From what I can tell, the worst fears of the trusted computing initiative are coming true despite any justifications from Red Hat here. Note that the ability to install your owns keys is certainly not a guaranteed right.

New submitter Liberum Vir writes "Many of the people that I talk with who use Solaris-like systems mention ZFS and DTrace as the reasons they simply cannot move to Linux. So, I set out to discover how to make these two technologies work on the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. It turned out to be much easier than I expected. The ports of these technologies have come a long way. If you or someone you know is addicted to a Solaris-like system because of ZFS and DTrace, please, inquire within."

New submitter Splintercat writes "The Humble Indie Bundle V has just been released, featuring Psychonauts, LIMBO, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, and Bastion for Windows, OSX and Linux. Ubuntu software center support has also been added as a method of downloading."

New submitter OceanMan7 writes "Linux Mint 13 (Maya) has just been released. DVDs come in four flavors — MATE (with and without codecs) and Cinnamon (with and without codecs) — in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The codec-free versions comply with U.S. and Japanese IP regulations. MATE 1.2 is Linux Mint's community-powered extension of Gnome 2. Cinnamon 1.4 is built upon Gnome 3, but has a more traditional look and feel. As with Ubuntu 12.04, upon which Linux Mint draws, all editions come with Long-term support (LTS) until April, 2017. The release notes provide a list of changes.

An anonymous reader writes "It looks simple. I've got a laptop and a USB HDD for backups. With rsync, I only move changes to the USB HDD for subsequent backups. I'd like to move these changes to a more portable USB stick when I'm away, then sync again to the USB HDD when I get home. I figured with the normality of the pieces and the situation, there'd be an app for that, but no luck yet. I'm guessing one could make a hardlink parallel-backup on the laptop at the same time as the USB HDD backup. Then use find to detect changes between it and the actual filesystem when it's time to backup to the USB stick. But there would need to be a way to preserve paths, and a way communicate deletions. So how about it? I'm joe-user with Ubuntu. I even use grsync for rsync. After several evenings of trying to figure this out, all I've got is a much better understanding of what hardlinks are and are not. What do the smart kids do? Three common pieces of hardware, and a simple-looking task."

itwbennett writes "Geek advocate Wil Wheaton has written a blog post on the (legal) usefulness of BitTorrent, saying that the speed of his recent download of Ubuntu 12.04 should serve as a reminder that BitTorrent fills an important niche. Wheaton compares blocking BitTorrent to closing freeways because bank robbers could get away."

donadony writes "LinuxMint13 RC is available for testing. This release comes with two versions on separate DVDs: Mate and Cinnamon. LinuxMint13 Cinnamon is very light and offers some customization, integration of new applets, extensions and themes that can be found on the official website."

dartttt writes "There was a very interesting session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit by Google developer Thomas Bushnell. He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google's customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers. He starts by saying 'Precise Rocks,' and that many Google employees use Ubuntu — including managers, software engineers, translators, people who wrote the original Unix, and people who have no clue about Unix. Many developers working on Chrome and Android use Ubuntu. Ubuntu systems at Google are upgraded every LTS release. The entire process of upgrading can take as much as four months, and it is also quite expensive, as one reboot or a small change can cost them as much as a million dollars across the company." Bushnell also mentions that Google Drive will soon be available for Linux. Other news out of UDS: there was discussion of a GNOME flavor of 12.10, Electronic Arts reaffirmed that they "won't delay their Windows work for Linux," and Unity 2D is likely to disappear in 12.10.

dartttt writes "Florian Echtler has developed an open-source driver for the Microsoft Surface 2.0 touch screen. According to him, the open source implementation works surprisingly well on Ubuntu 11.10. The process requires you to boot Linux on your Surface 2.0 in the first place. However, it can be done by just booting Ubuntu from a USB hard disk without modify anything on the original Win7 installation."

jones_supa writes "Barton George, director of marketing for Dell's Web vertical reveals information about 'Project Sputnik', a laptop tailored for developer needs in web companies. 'We want to find ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible. And what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish, running the 12.04 LTS release of Ubuntu Linux,' George ponders. He also gives a quick list of packages that the default installation could include. The machine will base on the XPS13, assessing a couple of its main hardware deficiencies along the way." According to the article, this is a "6 month project to investigate an Ubuntu laptop. If successful, we have big plans for the effort." It's unclear how closely they are working with upstream, but there's mention of Canonical as a commercial partner so this may mean Dell is working to ensure some of their hardware Just Works (tm) with Ubuntu. The software side is so far just a customized install with developer tools preinstalled. Ars remains skeptical about Dell's strategy for GNU/Linux support, which may be warranted given their track record.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Phoronix: "Chris Kenyon, the VP of sales and business development for Canonical, just spoke this afternoon at the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit about what Canonical does with OEMs and ODMs. He also tossed out some rather interesting numbers about the adoption of Ubuntu Linux. Namely, Ubuntu will ship on 5% of worldwide PC sales with a number of 18 million units annually."

Volanin writes "Currently I use a triple boot system on my Macbook, including MacOS Lion, Windows 7, and Ubuntu Precise (on which I spend the great majority of my time). To share files between these systems, I have created a huge HFS+ home partition (the MacOS native format, which can also be read in Linux, and in Windows with Paragon HFS). But last week, while working on Ubuntu, my battery ran out and the computer suddenly powered off. When I powered it on again, the filesystem integrity was OK (after a scandisk by MacOS), but a lot of my files' contents were silently corrupted (and my last backup was from August...). Mostly, these files are JPGs, MP3s, and MPG/MOV videos, with a few PDFs scattered around. I want to get rid of the corrupted files, since they waste space uselessly, but the only way I have to check for corruption is opening them up one by one. Is there a good set of tools to verify the integrity by filetype, so I can detect (and delete) my bad files?"

An anonymous reader writes with this enthusiastic review of the latest from Canonical: "So how does Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04) fare? I will say exceptionally well. Unity is not the same ugly duckling it was made out to be. In Ubuntu 12.04, it has transformed into a beautiful swan. As Ubuntu 12.04 is a long term release, the Ubuntu team has pulled all stops to make sure the user experience is positive. Ubuntu 12.04 aka Precise Pangolin is definitely worthy of running on your machine."

benfrog writes "In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth announced some changes for Ubuntu 12.10 (due in October), including the code name (Quantal Quetzal — no, really) and a theme update. He said, 'That will kick off with a project on typography to make sure we are expressing ourselves with crystal clarity – making the most of Ubuntu’s Light and Medium font weights for a start. And a project on iconography, with the University of Reading, to refine the look of apps and interfaces throughout the platform. It’s amazing how quaint the early releases of Ubuntu look compared to the current style. And we’re only just getting started! In our artistic explorations we want to embrace tessellation as an expression of the part-digital, part-organic nature of Ubuntu.' Some other more meaningful announcements include a focus on the cloud in the server version and the lack of a transition from Upstart to systemd."

An anonymous reader writes with this dose of nice news (untranslated from the PR-ese) on the Linux-in-business front: "Mark Shuttleworth has announced at the OpenStack conference that Canonical has received a ringing endorsement from HP in the form of certification for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on the ProLiant server systems. Responding to customer demand, HP has decided to officially support the popular flavor of Linux giving sysadmins another flexible software option to leverage their current and future hardware."

New submitter waferthinmint asks "What is the best book for my son to use to teach himself to program? He wants to study on his own but everything seems to assume an instructor or a working theoretical knowledge. He's a bright kid but the right guide can make all the difference. Also, what language should he start with? When I was in HS, it was Basic or Pascal. Now, I guess, C? He has access to an Ubuntu box and an older MacBook Pro. Help me Slashdot; you're our only hope."

JRiddell writes "Kubuntu, the KDE flavour from Ubuntu, has found a new sponsor in Blue Systems. They will be providing more resources than were available by previous sponsor Canonical. The project will remain much the same: community led, KDE focused, Ubuntu flavour. With the new independence it can branch out into new markets such as a Kubuntu Active flavour for tablets."