Raspberry Pi Passes 10M Sales Mark

An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi has sold 10 million units — continuing its success as the most popular British computer ever. The computer, about the same size as a credit card, was first released in 2012 and is widely used as an educational tool for programming. However, it can also be used for many practical purposes such as streaming music to several devices in a house. A new starter kit for Raspberry Pi, including a keyboard and mouse, has been released to celebrate the success. The kit also includes an SD storage card, official case, power supply, HDMI cable, mouse, keyboard and guidebook — it costs $130 and will be available in the coming weeks. The Pi, which is manufactured in Wales, has been adopted by pupils, programmers and inventors around the world. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Raspberry Pi Passes 10M Sales Mark

Microsoft PowerShell Goes Open Source and Lands On Linux and Mac

Microsoft announced on Thursday that it is open sourcing PowerShell, its system administration, scripting, and configuration management tool that has been a default part of Windows for several years. The company says it will soon release PowerShell on Mac and Linux platforms. PCWorld reports: The company is also releasing alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Ubuntu, Centos and Redhat) and Mac OS X. A new PowerShell GitHub page gives people the ability to download binaries of the software, as well as access to the app’s source code. PowerShell on Linux and Mac will let people who have already built proficiency with Microsoft’s scripting language take those skills and bring them to new platforms. Meanwhile, people who are used to working on those platforms will have access to a new and very powerful tool for getting work done. It’s part of Microsoft’s ongoing moves to open up products that the company has previously kept locked to platforms that it owned. The company’s open sourcing of its .NET programming frameworks in 2014 paved the way for this launch, by making the building blocks of PowerShell available on Linux and OS X. By making PowerShell available on Linux, Microsoft has taken the skills of Windows administrators who are already used to the software, and made them more marketable. It has also made it possible for hardcore Linux users to get access to an additional set of tools that they can use to manage a variety of systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft PowerShell Goes Open Source and Lands On Linux and Mac

12 Things You Can Now Do With Windows 10 After the Anniversary Update

It’s Windows 10 update time! The so-called “Anniversary Update” marks a year since the OS officially made it out of Redmond and it’s the biggest update yet. We’ve already posted our initial impressions of the update, but with the hefty patch now rolling out for everybody, here are 12 new tricks to try on your Windows 10 machine. Read more…

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12 Things You Can Now Do With Windows 10 After the Anniversary Update

London’s Metropolitan Police Still Running 27,000 Windows XP Desktops

An anonymous reader writes: London’s Met Police has missed its deadline for abandoning the out-of-date operating system Windows XP, as findings reveal 27, 000 computers still run on the software two years after official support ended. Microsoft stopped issuing updates and patches for Windows XP in Spring 2014, meaning that any new bugs and flaws in the operating system are left open to attack. A particularly risky status for the UK capital’s police force – itself running operations against hacking and other cybercrime activity. The figures were disclosed by Conservative politician Andrew Boff. The Greater London Assembly member said: ‘The Met should have stopped using Windows XP in 2014 when extended support ended, and to hear that 27, 000 computers are still using it is worrying.’ As in similar cases across civil departments, the core problem is bespoke system development, and the costs and time associated with integrating a new OS with customized systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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London’s Metropolitan Police Still Running 27,000 Windows XP Desktops

Mint 18 review: “Just works” Linux doesn’t get any better than this

We tested the latest Mint on this beauty: Dell’s XPS 13 Developer’s Edition (2016). (credit: Scott Gilbertson) The newly released Mint 18 is a major upgrade. Not only has the Linux Mint project improved Mint’s dueling desktops (Cinnamon and MATE), but the group’s latest work impacts all  underlying systems. With Mint 18, Linux Mint has finally moved its base software system from Ubuntu 14.04 to the new Ubuntu 16.04 . Upgrading to the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu means, as with the Mint 17.x series, the Mint 18.x release cycle is now locked to its base for two years. Rather than tracking alongside Ubuntu, Mint 18 and all subsequent releases will stick with Ubuntu 16.04. Mint won’t necessarily get as out of date as Ubuntu LTS releases tend to by the end of their two-year cycle, but this setup does mean nothing major is going to change for quite a while. If the Mint 17.x release series is anything to judge by, that’s a good thing. Stability allows Mint to focus on its own projects rather than spending development time creating patches for every Ubuntu update. That should be especially good news for the 18.x series since Ubuntu plans to make some major changes in the next two years: moving to a new display server (Mir) and updating its own Unity desktop to Unity 8 are chief among the priorities. Many of those initiatives will impact components that affect downstream users like Mint. Read 40 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mint 18 review: “Just works” Linux doesn’t get any better than this

Linux Kernel 4.7 Officially Released

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The Linux 4.7 kernel made its official debut today with Linus Torvalds announcing, “after a slight delay due to my travels, I’m back, and 4.7 is out. Despite it being two weeks since rc7, the final patch wasn’t all that big, and much of it is trivial one- and few-liners.” Linux 4.7 ships with open-source AMD Polaris (RX 480) support, Intel Kabylake graphics improvements, new ARM platform/board support, Xbox One Elite Controller support, and a variety of other new features. Slashdot reader prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: The biggest new features of Linux kernel 4.7 are support for the recently announced Radeon RX 480 GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) from AMD, which, of course, has been implemented directly into the AMDGPU video driver, a brand-new security module, called LoadPin, that makes sure the modules loaded by the kernel all originate from the same file system, and support for generating virtual USB Device Controllers in USB/IP. Furthermore, Linux kernel 4.7 is the first one to ensure the production-ready status of the sync_file fencing mechanism used in the Android mobile operating system, allow Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) programs to attach to tracepoints, as well as to introduce the long-anticipated “schedutil” frequency governor to the cpufreq dynamic frequency scaling subsystem, which promises to be faster and more accurate than existing ones. Linus’s announcement includes the shortlog, calling this release “fairly calm, ” though “There’s a couple of network drivers that got a bit more loving.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.7 Officially Released

How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive

FreeDOS was originally created in response to Microsoft’s announcement that after Windows 95, DOS would no longer be developed as a standalone operating system, according to a new interview about how (and why) Jim Hall keeps FreeDOS alive. For its newest version, Hall originally imagined “what ‘DOS’ would be like in 2015 or 2016 if Microsoft hadn’t stopped working on MS-DOS in favor of Windows” — before he decided there’s just no such thing as “modern DOS”. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: No major changes are planned in the next version. “The next version of FreeDOS won’t be multitasking, it won’t be 32-bit, it won’t run on ARM, ” Hall said. “FreeDOS is still intended for Intel and Intel-compatible computers. You should still be able to run FreeDOS on your old 486 or old Pentium PC to play classic DOS games, run legacy business programs, and support embedded development.” By day, Hall is the CIO for a county in Minnesota, and he’s also a member of the board of directors for GNOME (and contributes to other open source projects) — but he still remembers using DOS’s built-in BASIC system to write simple computer programs. “Many of us older computer nerds probably used DOS very early, on our first home computer…” he tells ComputerWorld. Even without John Romero’s new Doom level, “The popularity of DOS games and DOS shareware applications probably contributes in a big way to FreeDOS’s continued success.” I’d be curious how many Slashdot readers have some fond memories about downloading DOS shareware applications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive

Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment can run in Windows

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: “This is one of the coolest tickets I’ve seen on GitHub, ” writes Ubuntu developer Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, adding “this kind of surreal compatibility between platforms is now enabled…the fact that you can execute and use Linux window managers there, without virtual machines, is simply mind-blowing.” “The Windows 10 Anniversary Update coming in August includes an unusual feature aimed at developers: an Ubuntu sub-system that lets you run Linux software using a command-line interface, ” explains Liliputing.com “Preview versions have been available since April, and while Microsoft and Canonical worked together to bring support for the Bash terminal to Windows 10, it didn’t take long for some users to figure out that they could get some desktop Linux apps to run in Windows. Now it looks like you can even load Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment, making windows 10 look like Ubuntu. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment can run in Windows

VLC 3.0 nightlies arrive with (sort of working) Chromecast support

Grab the latest build of VLC and you’ll see a “Render Output” option in the “Tools” menu. 6 more images in gallery Streaming online content to a Chromecast is fast and easy, but what if you have local files on your desktop that you want to get on the big screen? There are a few niche apps out there that will serve, but one of the biggest media players, VLC, is working on built-in support for Google’s Chromecast. Recently the nightly build servers started pumping out early, unstable builds of VLC with Chromecast support, so I gave it a try. You won’t find the familiar “cast” button that you see in many apps in this VLC build. Instead, the “Tools” menu has a new option called “Render Output”—this screen is for playing media on something other than the computer screen in front of you. It will detect and display Chromecasts on your local network, and the detection process seems to work great. You just pick the device you want to use and hit “OK.” If you’re playing media you’ll need to stop it, and then once you hit play the casting process should start. I got an “unknown certificate” error at first, but, after accepting it, the usual Chromecast stuff started to happen. My TV turned on and switched to the right input. A Chromecast logo appeared, the loading bar popped up—and then it failed. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VLC 3.0 nightlies arrive with (sort of working) Chromecast support

Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14361 Released

An anonymous reader writes from a report via BetaNews: Windows Insider chief Dona Sarkar announced in a blog post that they are releasing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14361 for both PC and Mobile to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. This new release includes new features, some improvements to existing features, and various bug fixes that the company hopes to iron out before the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. A LastPass extension for the Microsoft Edge browser, and Hyper-V Container, which will let you use Docker natively on Windows 10, has been added. A series of improvements have been made to Windows Ink, and the Settings app, which includes changes to the colors so it’s more obvious where you are. The Blu-ray icon and Network Quick Action icon have also been updated. You can read the full list of improvements and fixes for PC here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14361 Released