Gentoo’s leader of the x86 Team, and jack of all trades Jeff Horelick joins us to discuss all things Gentoo. We’ve got a batch of questions you’ve submitted, and Jeff’s the man to answer them!
Plus: Facebook buys Oculus VR, Red Hat’s CentOS plans, a first look at Gnome 3.12…
AND SO MUCH MORE!
All this week on, The Linux Action Show!
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— Show Notes: —
Gento Interview: Jeff Horelick
Brought to you by: System76
Jeff Horelick is the Leader of the x86 Team for Gentoo, a member of Gentoo’s Mozilla Team and a maintainer for many various packages.
– Picks –
Runs Linux:
Disney’s Frozen, Runs Linux
Desktop App Pick
NCurses Disk Usage
ncdu: A disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface,aimed to be run on a remote server where you don’t have an entire graphical setup, but have to do with a simple SSH connection.
ncdu aims to be fast, simple and easy to use, and should be able to run in any minimal POSIX-like environment with ncurses installed.
Weekly Spotlight
Race The Sun – An Infinite Speed Experience
— NEWS —
GNOME 3.12 Released
Automatic rating of applications indicate their quality and help you select the best ones.
Packages containing software repositories can be installed, and you can now review and remove third party repositories that are in use.GNOME 3.12 includes a reimagined Videos application. Modern in style, the new version allows you to browse videos that are on your computer, as well as online video channels. Channels in this release include Rai.tv, The Guardian Videos channel, Blip.tv and Apple Movie Trailers. Developers can easily add their own video channels, and we expect the list of channels to grow in the future. Additionally, integration with the popular Pocket service provides an easy way to watch videos that you have saved for later.
The gedit text editor has had a major update for this release. The new design incorporates all of gedit’s previous features into a more compact interface, which gives more space for your work. Use of popovers for selecting the document format and tab width is more efficient than the previous use of dialogs and menus, and consolidated sidebar controls also give more space for content while retaining the original functionality.
High-resolution display support was first introduced in 3.10. This provided high-resolution display support for much of GNOME 3. Since then, this feature has been extended to include all the key aspects of the core GNOME 3 experience, including the Activities Overview, top bar, lock screen and system dialogs.
If you dismissed GNOME 3 when it arrived, I can’t blame you, but I suggest taking another look. GNOME 3 has finally arrived, with the newly released 3.12. The only problem with GNOME 3.12? It’s a desktop in search of a Linux distro.
A useful tip shared by X.Org input expert Peter Hutterer is that with today’s GNOME 3.12 release the GNOME Display Manager is no longer writing X.Org Server logs to the file but is being stored within systemd’s journal.
Logs is a utility for viewing detailed event logs for the system, scheduled for GNOME 3.12. What it basically does is to read logs from Systemd-Journal and categorize them.
It is based on Fedora 20 using GNOME 3.12 from Copr
Facebook To Trial Btrfs Deployments
A few months ago the Linux kernel block maintainer joined Facebook along with the lead Btrfs file-system developers. Chris Mason and the other developers are continuing to work on the upstream Btrfs file-system support while at Facebook.
Chris Mason said this morning during a storage/file-system talk at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit from Napa Valley that Facebook will indeed be trying out Btrfs in some deployments at his new employer. At some time going forward, they will first be trying out the Btrfs file-system within their “web tier” at Facebook, which is the tier that’s easiest to recover from in case of any issues with their initial roll-out.
Facebook buys Oculus VR
Facebook has acquired Oculus VR, the company building the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, for $2 billion. Oculus will keep its headquarters in Irvine, California.
“We are excited to work with Mark and the Facebook team to deliver the very best virtual reality platform in the world,” Oculus co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe said in a press release. “We believe virtual reality will be heavily defined by social experiences that connect people in magical, new ways. It is a transformative and disruptive technology, that enables the world to experience the impossible, and it’s only just the beginning.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that he views the Oculus Rift as a new communication platform. Posting on Facebook:
Oculus will continue operating independently within Facebook to achieve this. But this is just the start. After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting on goggles in your home."
“We’re going to focus on helping Oculus build out their product and develop partnerships to support more games. Oculus team lists its reasons for entering into this seemingly odd partnership: "At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform. But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step.
Michael Abrash — the man largely responsible for leading Valve’s recent charge into Virtual Reality — has just joined Oculus as its Chief Scientist.
Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.
Intel Pushes XenGT For GPU Access To Virtual Machines
XenGT is a full GPU virtualization solution with mediated pass-through and on the VM side runs the system’s native graphics driver for the targeted hardware. When it comes to Intel hardware, Haswell’s Iris Graphics is their main focus along with next-generation Broadwell processors.
XenGT is designed just not for 3D graphics acceleration within guest instances but also for media acceleration and GPGPU compute acceleration.
There is sharing support – multiple VMs can access the same graphics processor due to its full virtualization.
Red Hat reveals CentOS plans
So what the newly united Red Hat and CentOS is planning on are multiple CentOS releases. This will be something like Fedora Spins. Instead of Spins, these will be called Special Interest Group (SIG) releases.
First, there will be the CentOS Core SIG. This will be the closest to the CentOS that many of you are using now on your own servers, Web hosting site. or data center. The other official SIGS are CentOS Storage, CentOS Cloud, and CentOS Virtualization.
All these start with the CentOS Core distribution. This will be built using the most recent RHEL release. However, there’s a firewall between RHEL and CentOS developers. The net effect is that CentOS will continue to lag a bit behind RHEL in releases. Even so, CentOS releases will be coming out on RHEL heels rather than weeks or months behind.
On top of that RHEL base, each CentOS SIG will decide what cutting edge software it will use.
For example, CentOS Cloud will probably include the latest OpenStack build. CentOS Virtualization will offer a variety of hypervisors, not just KVM.There’s more than a dozen SIGs in progress. Under consideration are desktop, Web hosting, and a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) servers. Other SIGs will be considered depending on the amount of developer interest.
– Feedback: –
Straw Poll: Should LAS Drop “Seasons” post Episode 300?
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