The H Roundup - GNOME 3.8, Firefox 20 and Darkleech

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item. This week, new releases from GNOME and KDE, ZFS on Linux is considered ready, Firefox 20 arrives, Mozilla celebrates 15 years, and Andrew Hutchings looks at the history of the MySQL project and its forks.

Features

Andrew Hutchings looks at the long and storied history of the MySQL project and the forks that have sprung up around it since Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle. For the practically code-minded, Golo Roden looks at unit testing with the Node.js framework using Mocha.

• MySQL and the forks in the road
• Unit testing with Node.js
  

Top News

In the past week, the GNOME developers released the latest version of their desktop environment, which includes a new Classic Mode session based on extensions to the GNOME Shell, and the maintainers of ZFS on Linux have said that they consider their filesystem ready for general use. Firefox 20 was released with a privacy mode that works per window and a new version of Linux Video Disk Recorder is shipping with a Star-Trek-inspired user interface.

• GNOME 3.8 brings polish and new Classic Mode
• ZFS on Linux is "ready for wide scale deployment"
• Firefox 20 has per-window privacy and fixes three critical bugs
• New major release of Linux Video Disk Recorder

Meanwhile, malware from Russia has been spying on bank customers in the US, the mysterious Darkleech trojan infected Apache web servers, and a serious security problem caused the PostgreSQL developers to lock down their source code repositories. Later in the week, The H learned what bugs had caused PostgreSQL's problems.

• Russian malware spies on US ATMs
• Darkleech infects scores of Apache servers
• Security fix leads to PostgreSQL lock down
• PostgreSQL critical security fix now available
  

The Mozilla Project celebrated 15 years of its mission to fight for the open web this week, and it was also announced that three Ubuntu versions will reach their end of life soon. Earlier in the week, The H's Open Recall looked at the open source releases that happened over the long Easter weekend.

• Mozilla Project celebrates 15 years
• End of life for three Ubuntu editions on 9 May
• Open Recall: Bodhi Linux, Scientific Linux and Mageia Beta

Open Source Releases

This week saw, among others, new releases of Adobe's Brackets editor, a whole font made from blank characters, a new KDE version, and two Star Wars games open sourced by Raven Software in honour of the soon-to-be-closed LucasArts.

• Brackets Sprint 22 adds word wrap and community commits
• Apache Bloodhound sniffs out top level project status
• Adobe open sources Blank font
• KDE releases April stabilisation update
• Heroku launches Helios backend for iOS applications
• Raven Software open sources Jedi Knight games
• OpenStack goes Grizzly with seventh release
• Acquia open sources Drupal iOS app

The Ubuntu developers released the first and final beta of the next version of their distribution.

• Ubuntu 13.04's "Final Beta" arrives

Security Alerts

Security alerts this week affected the ownCloud personal cloud storage software and Sophos' Web Protection Appliance.

• Security updates break ownCloud installations
• Update for Sophos Web Protection Appliance

For everything The H has published in the last week, check out the last seven days of news. To keep up with The H, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow honlinenews on Twitter. You can follow The H's own tweeting on Twitter as honline.

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