The H Roundup - Mir divides Ubuntu, Java flaws, and puppies

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, Canonical's Mir divides the Ubuntu community, the Dell Sputnik arrives in Europe, more Java flaws, LibreOffice 4.0.1, Puppy Linux releases, Zopfli, and OpenOffice reaches 40 million downloads.

Top News

This week was a busy one in the Ubuntu community as Canonical unveiled its plans for Mir, a new display stack for the distribution. This revelation was followed by many community members publicly voicing their disapproval of how the development of the new software was handled, prompting Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth to address the issue on his blog. In the meantime, Dell readied its developer laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu for sale in Europe.

• Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server
• Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu releases: "the sky is not falling"
• Dell Sputnik now being sold in Europe

On the security front, a web site appeared which demonstrated the ability to fill a user's hard drive thanks to the power of HTML5, Java was attacked yet again, and researchers discovered a flaw that would allow an attacker to bypass sudo's security under certain circumstances.

• Web page fills up hard disk
• New attack on current Java version
• Security vulnerability in sudo allows privilege escalation

The first update to LibreOffice 4 was released, bringing the Android remote control for Impress to all versions of the open source office suite, and Barry Kauler, herder of puppies at Puppy Linux, released three different versions of his distribution. Google released a new compression algorithm and Apache OpenOffice celebrated 40 million downloads of a single one of their releases.

• LibreOffice 4.0.1 delivers Android remote for all
• A fresh litter of Puppy Linux releases: Wary, Racy and Quirky
• Zopfli: New compression library from Google
• Apache OpenOffice reaches 40 million download milestone

Open Source Releases

Among other open source releases this week, Eclipse Orion 2.0 was released, MariaDB Galera Cluster graduated to being production ready, the KDE developers released their monthly maintenance update, and systemd 198 arrived.

• Projects plugin debuts in new Eclipse Orion 2.0
• MariaDB Galera Cluster ready for production use
• KDE 4.10.1 corrects over one hundred errors
• Plasmate SDK for Plasma Workspaces hits 1.0
• X.org releases X Server 1.14
• Qt previews iOS version of toolkit
• Rackspace rolls out improved Private Cloud
• Systemd 198 supports specification for improved multi-boot operation

Development releases saw the second release candidate for the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 and the beta release of Chrome for Android 26 arrive.

• Second RC for openSUSE 12.3 brings bigger-than-CD live images
• Chrome for Android Beta has SPDY proxying

Security Alerts

The only security alert this week concerns Java, which had another critical hole closed.

• Oracle plugs critical Java vulnerability it knew of in February

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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