NVIDIA is working on adding HEVC/H.265 video decoding support to VDPAU.

NVIDIA developers are extending the "Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix" interfaces to allow the HEVC/H.265 requirements. The work aims to enable hardware-accelerated decoding of HEVC content under VDPAU and to provide a reference implementation for this video decoding. José Hiram Soltren, the developer that worked on this support, is also working on a HEVC decode patch for FFmpeg and MPlayer based upon the new API.

The third day of GUADEC was mostly devoted to lower level parts of the GNOME stack. There were talks on GTK+, CSS, Wayland, and WebKitGTK+, but also an annual general meeting of the GNOME Foundation.

The day started with Matthias Clasen’s talk on improvements in GTK+, especially in dialogs. Matthias demoed the changes for the whole time of the talk, switching between the code that was behind the dialogs and dialogs themselves. Matthias also showed how dialogs adapt to the environment they’re running in. GTK+ developers have been accused that they only care about GNOME, but they actually care about how GTK+ 3 apps look in other environments and good news for users of other desktop environments is that a lot has recently been done in this direction.

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 32 Beta 1 has been released, marking the start of another branch for the famous Internet browser.

For small and medium-sized businesses looking to save money, open source applications offer an easy way to reduce expenses related to software licensing and subscriptions. In addition, many open source applications offer additional features or better usability when compared with their closed source counterparts.

This month, we've updated our list of open source software that are good options for SMBs. Many businesses have their first open source experience when they deploy a Linux-based server, and our list includes a wide variety of server software, such as operating systems, accounting, ERP and mail and groupware solutions.

In a move that will please devotees of open source cloud storage, hosting giant Rackspace (RAX) has announced it will officially support two additional types of open source MySQL databases, from MariaDB and Percona.

This is the fourth release of the 0.2 series as part of the GNU project; it is primarily a maintenance release, but does introduce a significant (preview and undocumented) feature---parameterized traits. A generic `super` method has also been added to satisfy more sophisticated subtyping that `__super` alone cannot handle.

Most Android users are by now well aware of Cyanogen and their custom operating system CyanogenMod (CM). Earlier this month CM11 M8 was finally released which brought CM users up to Android 4.4.4. However if you own a Nexus 5 you can now install CM11S.

Steam's release followed by the announcement of Steam OS was an unexpected boon for the slow growth of gaming on Linux. Both the developments were major milestones when it comes to Linux's recognition as a commercially viable gaming platform. Be it Left 4 Dead or Portal, Linux is no longer the operating system for nerds. It has truly gone mainstream.

Steam is now on the Ubuntu Software Center and more and more games being added to the catalog every week. As good as it sounds, only a few AAA titles are being released on Linux. This means that if you are a Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, or a Battlefield lover, Linux isn't ready yet for turning your PC into a full-blown gaming machine. But don't worry; there are signs that this might change. In fact, there are some upcoming games that might actually make you excited about building a new Linux-based gaming rig. So, without much ado, here are 5 exciting games soon to be available for Linux.

Ubuntu for phones is going through a rough week and no new images have been promoted, mostly because of a few nasty bugs that prevented the release of a new stable version. The developers are working to fix the problem, but it might take a while until Ubuntu Touch users get their updates.

Long story short, due to security concerns, package incompatibility issues, and being too short of time before the Debian 8.0 Jessie release, and there's some measurable resistance to adding FFmpeg back to the repository. However, others are after FFmpeg in Debian for features it has over Libav with regard to some codecs and other abilities, some programs not compiling against Libav, and other differences between it and the forked Libav project. Time will tell if/when FFmpeg will be allowed back in Debian and whether it will happen in time for the 8.0 Jessie releae.

Today in Linux news, the Kubuntu team have released ISOs with the Plasma 5 desktop for all to test. Russia has offered 3.9m roubles to anyone who can crack the Tor network. And Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a round-up of the best in Linux desktops.

For those excited about the recent working Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" Gallium3D support, a number of bug-fixes were committed in recent hours to Mesa for bettering the support for those wishing to use this open-source AMD Linux driver for their ultra high-end graphics hardware.

Open-source AMD Linux users wishing to use a Hawaii GPU will still need to utilize the patches that will not be queued up until the Linux 3.17 kernel (along with updating their Radeon microcode files) but the RadeonSI Gallium3D Mesa improvements are starting to hit the mainline tree.

Bright Computing, which helps companies manage Linux clusters, has picked up $14.5 million in Series B funding.

The funding is an indication of how much demand there is, in modern corporate computing environments, for clusters of servers that can grow to include hundreds or even thousands of nodes. That’s because of the increased popularity of Hadoop and other clustered storage technologies, which help companies store enormous quantities of often unstructured data on cheap commodity servers, rather than the more-expensive storage area networks and dedicated storage hardware that an earlier generation of data center architects preferred.

Manjaro 0.8.10, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has received a new update pack, the fourth one so far.

There's no operating system more ubiquitous than Linux. It's everywhere. It's even running in devices and computers you may not suspect—our cars, our cell phones, even our refrigerators. Linux supports businesses and organizations everywhere, and because it underpins open-source innovation, it is the platform of choice for new applications. Companies such as IBM and their work with organizations like the OpenPOWER Foundation are creating such new innovations as Big Blue's new scale-out servers running Linux and putting them in places all around us. In fact, eWEEK recently ran a slide show depicting how prevalent the operating system is in the supercomputing space. Linux has quickly become the operating system of choice in the high performance computing (HPC) market, growing from relative obscurity 15 years ago to powering 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world. But its appeal is found in more than cost or choice. This list, compiled with assistance from IBM, provides some examples of where Linux is making an impact.

The open-source CoreOS Linux operating system hit a major milestone on July 25, issuing its first stable release. CoreOS is an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that offers the promise of a highly available operating system platform that is fully integrated with the Docker container virtualization technology.

"I am really incredibly surprised that my work space is very similar to Linus' and also the working hours are almost identical," said Google+ blogger Rodolfo Saenz. In Saenz's setup, though, "the treadmill stands alone. I use it religiously every day, but I don't like to mix work with exercise. I climb on the treadmill to clean my mind, listen to music and think about many things."