Pipelight is a new project that aims to bring Netflix in the web browser to Linux systems.

Right now they are focusing on Ubuntu (there's a PPA) and Arch, though you can build it from source if you fly that way.

I never could get the other Netflix-on-Linux project to work in Fedora, though I did get it to run in Debian (and was somewhat amazed that I could bring an Ubuntu PPA into Debian without breakage).

But I also dropped Netflix and for the time being stopped caring about running it at all.

Maybe I'll change my mind in future, but for now consider this a public service announcement for those of you who still subscribe to Netflix and want to watch it in Linux. (In case you were wondering, yes, Netflix should support this out of the box and shouldn't require Windows or OS X in order to view the content you paid for.)

Possibly (and in all likelihood probably) because of an error in the RPM Fusion package, when the 13.8 beta of the AMD Catalyst video driver for Linux replaced version 13.6 beta on my Fedora 19 system, it pretty much broke video and led me to remove kmod-catalyst and its associates and go back to the open Radeon driver.

X was dying when I ran most apps. That's bad.

So I waited for an updated Catalyst driver from RPM Fusion, and one finally arrived.

I installed the new 13.8 beta via the RPM Fusion package, and while video does work again, suspend/resume does not. This all worked on my AMD Radeon HD 7420g video chip in the 13.6 beta.

At least I have 3D acceleration back. Here's hoping for the return of working suspend/resume in the next Catalyst-for-Linux release from AMD. Better than that would be working 3D and suspend/resume from the free-software driver that ships with Fedora (and every damn other version of Linux).

But a working proprietary driver is better than nothing, so I'll take it.

It's short on specifics, long on other things, but Ellen Huerta's "Why I Left Google" is worth reading if only to illustrate how it's possible to be unhappy at Google, especially if you're in your 20s.

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It's not just you.

I'm doing it, too.

It's annoying. I'm annoying when I look at Twitter multiple times per day on my phone.

Are you doing it? You could very well be an annoying pain in the ass.

The fix is easy. Are you with me on this?

So I finally get working 3D acceleration and suspend/resume and get rid of artifacts in Fedora 19 on my HP Pavilion g6 laptop (AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics) with the 13.6 beta version of the AMD Catalyst driver for Linux.

Except that the 13.8 beta driver was released about a week ago, and it finally came into my system via RPM Fusion.

And it broke X. Login is fine, but most applications -- including Firefox -- cause X to quit and send me back to the login prompt.

Not good at all.

I had to rip out kmod-catalyst and all associated packages and return to the open-source Radeon driver, which works great -- except for the aforementioned artifacts, lack of working 3D acceleration and refusal to resume after suspend.

No dependency hell here. RPM and the Yum package manager (which I'm using via the Yumex graphical front end) have performed admirably. But it's pretty hard to revert to 13.6 due to all the other related packages that have been upgraded to 13.8.

I haven't filed a bug on the driver just yet, and the consensus seems to be that AMD developers generally ignore such efforts. There is an "unofficial" Bugzilla instance, and Phoronix readers are discussing 13.8 as well.

So now I wait for the next build of the Catalyst driver to see if my system will like it.

Hostgator is usually plenty reliable. I don't remember the last bout with downtime.

But we had one today. All of my Hostgator-hosted sites were down for what seemed like an hour.

The sites -- including this one -- are back now.

Hostgator says a networking issue at its Provo data center is responsible for the outage. They are working on resolving the issue, according to the forum thread.

Mashable has a story about how the Provo problem is affecting Hostgator, Bluehost and HostMonster, which are all owned by parent company Endurance International Group.

While I've been pretty lucky in terms of the amount of downtime I've experienced from this outage, others in the Mashable thread report up to nine hours of downtime for their sites.

At least one commenter says that ever since Hostgator upgraded the hardware on his/her account, service has been spotty. My account's server has been upgraded, and all I've noticed until today have been performance improvements.

Here's hoping that Hostgator gets this together and we can all go back to not worrying about site availability.

Given that releases seem to happen about every two months, I pegged July 28-31, 2013, as the time when AMD would release a new Catalyst video driver for Linux.

On Aug. 1, 2013, AMD did release a new driver, version 13.8.

The most notable changes, from my perspective anyway, are support for the 3.10 Linux kernel.

So that's why there have been no kmod-catalyst updates from RPM Fusion for Fedora. Hopefully we will see one soon (and if it happens in the next few days, my faith in humanity, Fedora and RPM Fusion will be restored).

Keep an eye on this RPM Fusion page for a new kmod-catalyst driver.

Other than fixes of bugs I don't understand, and besides support for the 3.10 kernel, the most notable change is the removal of the "Testing use only" watermark from the lower right corner of the screen. Annoying, that watermark is.

Here's looking forward to a stable release of the AMD Catalyst driver that supports my newish AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.

Is my problem with Catalyst or other? I am having one issue with suspend-resume, which only works at all, by the way, with the Catalyst driver: Everything seems fine when I resume, except that the system doesn't think I have an optical drive any more. The output of cd-drive in the terminal shows no drives available. When I reboot, the drive returns to the ranks of living peripherals.

This is the problem I'm having, except it's in Fedora, not Slackware:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/no-dev-sr0-dvd-cdrom-detected-after-resume-from-suspension-4175452609/

Basically, I have no problem with the optical drive during normal operation. But once I suspend and then resume, it's gone.

Here is the output of cd-drive:

[steven@shr ~]$ cd-drive
cd-drive version 0.90 x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu
Copyright (c) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012 R. Bernstein
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
No loaded CD-ROM device accessible.
Drivers available...
  GNU/Linux ioctl and MMC driver     
  cdrdao (TOC) disk image driver     
  bin/cuesheet disk image driver     
  Nero NRG disk image driver

If anybody has any ideas on how to "resurrect" the DVD drive after a resume, I'm ready to try 'em.

I was saddened today to learn that The H, the English-language arm of Heise, is closing down. The reason given is the usual one: lack of revenue from advertising. It's hard to sustain an online news site with any kind of staff -- that much I know.

Caught in the middle of this is Fabian A. Scherschel, aka @fabsh (or just Fab), co-host of Linux Outlaws, who had been working for The H for about a year and a half. He already wrote his farewell to the site.

Becoming a working journalist really sharpened up Fab's patter on LO, and I hope he is able to continue in tech journalism, even if it's for the German-language Heise.

I'd like to take this opportunity to let you know that journalism, as an enterprise and a career, is pretty damn precarious these days. The pay-to-read model, in its current incarnations, is mostly a non-starter (though I really hope it's working for LWN), and it's hard to make money from traditional display or text advertising unless you have massive scale in terms of traffic and minimum cost in terms of staff.

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I've spent plenty of time generating RSS feeds as part of my day job, but I spent very little time consuming them.

I never used the now-dead Google Reader.

But all of the news of its demise led me to look into the idea of an RSS reader and what it could do to make the web more manageable.

That happened. I took the easiest route as a Linux desktop user and installed Liferea.

It's a great application. I've pumped in about 30 feeds of varying heft, and I can confirm that an RSS reader is a great way to read the web.