The H Roundup - Linus interviewed, Linux Mint 14 and a Popcorn Maker

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.

Featured Articles

Glyn Moody interviewed Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the recent LinuxCon Europe conference about the key moments for the Linux kernel and its community that have taken place since 1996, when Moody previously interviewed him. Meanwhile, Thorsten Leemhuis's Kernel Log looks at what Torvalds is currently managing: the filesystem and storage changes in the upcoming Linux 3.7 release.

• Interview: Linus Torvalds - I don't read code any more
• Kernel Log - Coming in 3.7 (Part 1): Filesystems & storage

Top News

After announcing Android 4.2 at the end of October, Google officially published the source for the new flavour of Jelly Bean this week concurrent with the release of new Nexus devices. The first release candidate for version 14 of Linux Mint "Nadia" arrived, Mozilla launched version 1.0 of Popcorn Maker, its web application for creating interactive videos, and a firewall-hopping lightweight web proxy called Scotty was released.

• Google open sources Android 4.2
• Linux Mint 14 approaches with release candidate
• Mozilla launches Popcorn Maker 1.0
• Scotty beams data past firewalls and filters

A Linux developer accused RisingTide Systems of breaching kernel licensing conditions in its RTS OS storage operating system, VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf outlined the process he faced when re-licensing VLC to the LGPL, and the developers at the LLVM project announced that they are seeking new code owners to help with the compiler infrastructure.

• Proprietary Linux extensions reportedly violate the GPL
• Relicensing VLC to the LGPL the hard way
• LLVM seeks new code owners

Engineers from Google's Books team published the plans for an open source book scanner and Oracle launched a public Git repository called RedPatch that has the code for all changes that Red Hat makes to its enterprise Linux distribution. This week also saw the release of a major update to the Linux version of Skype's popular closed source VoIP, video and text chat software.

• Google engineers open source book scanner design
• Oracle releases Git repository with RHEL changes
• Skype for Linux 4.1 arrives with Microsoft account support

Open Source Releases

Among the new stable releases this week were ROSA Enterprise Linux Server 2012, version 10 of the CyanogenMod alternative ROM for Android devices and the 2.1 release of the qooxdoo JavaScript library. In-development releases also appeared for Linux Mint 14, Mageia 3, Qt 5.0 and version 12.0 of the XBMC media centre software.

• ROSA Enterprise Linux Server 2012 released
• CyanogenMod 10 brings over-the-air updates
• Version 2.1 of qooxdoo JavaScript library supports IE 10
• Linux Mint 14 approaches with release candidate
• Third Mageia 3 alpha now available
• Qt 5.0 Beta 2 now available
• XBMC 12.0 "Frodo" beta has new AE audio subsystem
• Ruby update fixes hash flooding vulnerability
• Scotty beams data past firewalls and filters
• Distributed filesystem: XtreemFS 1.4 with Hadoop support
• Development of PHP 5.5 begins

Security Alerts

• Important security updates arrive for all Windows users

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.

(crve)