The company announced today that it is acquiring RakNet, which specializes in a software-development engine for connecting games across an online network. RakNet, which is also the name of the technology, enables studios to quickly add voice chat, network patching, and secure connections to their products. Oculus VR, which is building its Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, notes that thousands of indie developers and major companies like Everquest developer Sony Online Entertainment and Minecraft studio Mojang licensed the tech for their games. Oculus isn’t just purchasing RakNet, it is also making it open source, which means other developers can see the code, add to it, and use it for free.

“We’ve known Kevin Jenkins, founder of Jenkins Software and lead engineer on RakNet, for years, and we’ve used RakNet internally at Oculus for various networked systems and tools,” reads a blog on Oculus VR’s website. “After working with Kevin for a few months, we were all excited by the idea of open-sourcing RakNet to the community.”

Canonical's Mir display server for Ubuntu Linux has cleared Mir 0.4.0 for Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic" while Mir 0.5 is immediately under development.

Mir 0.3 was released just a few weeks ago while Canonical developers are already out with the latest release. Mir 0.4.0 brings several new features including a surface attribute for visibility, a surface orientation API, and a number of changes to the Mir Server code. Both the Mir client and server ABIs were bumped by v0.4.0. More details on the 0.4 release can be found via Mir on Launchpad.

KDE Frameworks 5 is due out today, the most exciting clean-up of libraries KDE has seen in years. Use KDE classes without brining in the rest of kdelibs. Packaging for Kubuntu is almost all green and Rohan should be uploading it to Utopic this week.

Generally speaking, I enjoyed my time with LXLE. The distribution got off to a good start with a smooth installation process and the project features clear documentation and release notes, letting people know exactly what to expect from the distribution. I like the LXDE desktop as I feel it does an excellent job of balancing user friendliness, performance and features. The LXLE feature which allows us to change the look of our desktop session is a nice bonus and may make it easier for Linux newcomers to navigate the LXDE interface. The distribution ships with a lot of great desktop applications, almost all of them worked well for me. I feel that most people will be able to sit down and just start using this distribution without worrying about configuring software or downloading additional applications. The interface was responsive, the distribution doesn't use a lot of memory (even with preload enabled) and all of my hardware was handled properly.

The Deepin Desktop Environment is written using Google's Go language and makes use of heavy HTML5. DDE also uses Compiz as its compositing window manager. As in the past some desktop environments / window managers have impaired the full-screen Linux gaming performance, I ran some simple Linux gaming benchmarks on Sunday to see if the Deepin 2014 performance differed at all from upstream Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu 14.04 was tested with the stock Unity 7.2 desktop using Compiz, GNOME Shell 3.10.4, and Xfce 4.10 all from the stock Trusty Tahr archive.

The last animations has been finished and I can now render out a full-fledged video about GNOME’s documentation efforts.

Samuli Suominen of Gentoo expressed some hesitation about this change, "I'd really hate to be forced to fork (or carry huge patchset) unnecessarily (I'm not a systemd hater, I'm not a eudev lover, I'm simply working on what is provided to me by *you*, udev upstream)." Lennart countered, "Oh god. You know, if you come me like this as blame me that I would 'force' you to do something, then you just piss me off and make me ignore you. Anyway, as soon as kdbus is merged this i how we will maintain udev, you have ample time to figure out some solution that works for you, but we will not support the udev-on-netlink case anymore. I see three options: a) fork things, live with systemd, c) if hate systemd that much, but love udev so much, then implement an alternative userspace for kdbus to do initialiuzation/policy/activation. Also note that this will not be a change that is just internal between udev and libudev. We expect that clients will soonishly just start doing normal bus calls to the new udev, like they'd do them to any other system service instead of using libudev. Good luck."

“I'm going to be maintaining the 3.14 kernel as a ‘longterm’ kernel for the next two years, so mention that on the kernel.org site,” Greg Kroah-Hartman said in a short email on July 3, 2014...

Trust in government is not exactly at an all-time high. Sure, there are oppressive governments such as Iran and China that filter and block web content, but even the USA has a spotty record. With all the news of PRISM and other spying programs, it is hard to tell which way is up anymore.

One way to solve this dilemma is through transparency and honesty. Unfortunately, as long as governments use closed-source software, it is hard to audit and trust the actions. Today, Canonical announces that not only has Munich taken an open approach to computing with Ubuntu, but the city is saving millions of euros too. Using open-source software and saving money? Hell, maybe all governments should make the switch to Linux.

A Linux kernel developer is working on porting FreeBSD's CAPSICUM security framework over to the Linux kernel.

In announcing his work at the end of June that's now being discussed amongst kernel stakeholders, David Drysdale wrote, "The last couple of versions of FreeBSD (9.x/10.x) have included the Capsicum security framework, which allows security-aware applications to sandbox themselves in a very fine-grained way. For example, OpenSSH now uses Capsicum in its FreeBSD version to restrict sshd's credentials checking process, to reduce the chances of credential leakage. It would be good to have equivalent functionality in Linux, so I've been working on getting the Capsicum framework running in the kernel, and I'd appreciate some feedback/opinions on the general design approach."

Recent reports from Facebook and Google confirmed what we’ve known all along: the giants of tech have a diversity problem. But in the world of open source, the problem is even worse.

According to a survey conducted last year, only about 11 percent of open source contributors are women. Meanwhile, women account for 23 percent of all computer programmers and 39.5 percent of web developers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There is no questioning the power of Unreal Engine 4, but Linux users so far had nothing official to test this awesome engine.

However, the wait is finally over, as Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 has officially received its first batch of demos for the users of Linux.

The demos introduced to the operating system include the Elemental Demo, Effects Cave Demo, Realistic Rendering Demo, Reflections Subway Demo, Mobile Temple Demo, Sci-Fi Hallway Demo, Stylized Demo and Blueprint Examples Demo.

Also: Crytek In Trouble, Could Be Bad News For Homefront On Linux

Dubbed Ultimate Edition 4.2 Lite, the brand new release of this Linux-based operating system is now derived from the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) distribution and uses MATE 1.8.0 as its default desktop environment.

The good news is that Ultimate Edition 4.2 is now an LTS (Long Term Support) release and will be supported with security patches and software updates until year 2019.

Zbigniew Konojacki announced the stable release of the 4MLinux 9.0 Allinone Edition operating system, which includes the 4MLinux 9.0 Media Edition, 4MLinux 9.0 Game Edition, 4MLinux 9.0 Rescue Edition, and 4MLinux 9.0 Server Edition distributions.

For Karen Sandler, software freedom isn't simply a technical matter. Nor is it a purely ideological one.

It's a matter of life and death.

Sandler, Executive Director of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy, says software freedom became personal when she realized her pacemaker/defibrillator was running code she couldn't analyze. For nearly a decade—first at the Software Feedom Law Center, then at the GNOME Foundation before Conservancy—she's been an advocate for the right to examine the software on which our lives depend.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the immediate availability for download of the Linux 3.10.47 LTS (Long Term Support) kernel, along with the Linux kernels 3.4.97 LTS, 3.14.11 LTS and 3.15.4.

Now this is definitely an interesting statistic no matter how you look at it – Ubuntu Touch, a mobile operating system platform that is ready, technically speaking, for a commercial release, has already hit the 100,000 app downloads mark. While this is far too small compared to the 1 billion downloads that Temple Run has achieved earlier this year, one ought to take into consideration that Ubuntu Touch itself has yet to ship on any other devices to date.

The third RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available
on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and
sparc64 architectures.

This is expected to be the final RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

It has barely been two weeks since I/O and L’s official introduction and we have seen a crazy influx of ported L features. Today though we are able to bring you the very first (that we know of) working prototype of L. This was created by some of the developers over at xda and (as of print) seems to be on the whole working to a good degree.

Also: Android L Theme available for CM11 and PA users on Play Store

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced yesterday, July 6, that a new maintenance release for the Long Term Support 3.4.97 Linux kernel branch of the Linux kernel is available for download, urging users to upgrade to it as soon as possible.