Open Recall: Open source RSS readers, HiDPI in GNOME, Samba 4.0.7

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition of Open Recall: HiDPI support is coming to GNOME, open source Google Reader alternatives, Samba 4.0.7 is released, make your own animated GIFs, and ALT Linux 7.0 arrives for the enterprise.

• HiDPI in GNOME – GNOME developer Alexander Larsson is working on HiDPI support for the desktop environment. To support displays with high pixel densities (also often referred to as "Retina displays" after Apple's name for them) changes need to take place in several layers of the GNOME display stack, including the Wayland display server, the Cairo rendering engine, and the GNOME icon theme itself. The effort is still a work in progress, but Larsson hopes to have complete support ready for his talk at the GUADEC conference at the start of August.

• Open source Google Reader alternatives – With the recent demise of Google Reader, many former users of the service are still on the search for alternatives. Two open source options are Freader, which uses Node.js and the AngularJS framework, and Go Read, which is "designed to be as useful as Google Reader", also uses AngularJS and is designed to be run on Google's App Engine service. A third alternative, BazQux Reader, is written in Haskell and will, according to its author, be open sourced at a later date. These are among the reader applications that have arrived since The H feature – Replacing Google Reader – was published.
  

• Samba 4.0.7 – The Samba developers have released the latest stable version of their free software implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Samba 4.0.7 includes three major bug fixes and a number of smaller improvements. A crashing bug triggered when searching for mail in Thunderbird has been fixed, along with a use-after-free problem, and a core-dump bug when interacting with certain Microsoft files. A complete list of all enhancements is available in the change log.
  

• Make your own animated GIFs – Horia Dragomir's facetogif is an HTML5 and JavaScript web application that allows users to record their own animated GIFs with their web cam and then download them or optionally upload them to the imgur service. The application is open source and runs completely within the browser.
  

• ALT Linux 7.0 – The ALT Linux team has announced the release of version 7.0 of the Centaurus and Simply editions of its distribution. The enterprise variant, Centaurus, uses MATE 1.6.0 (which the installer calls "GNOME") and the Simply edition features Xfce 4.10 as its desktop. More information about the release is available at Distrowatch.
  

(fab)