Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Turning to Linux: A guide for SMBs

  A partial Linux solution could solve Windows 8 woes

• What Linux Taught Me About Productivity

  I’ve spent the past two years interviewing people about their desktop Linux setups, asking them about the Linux distributions they chose, the desktop environments they use, and the software upon which they rely. Over the past 73 interviews, a number of common lessons have emerged. Most of these apply to anyone who relies on a computer to do their work, Linux user or not. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from these interviews:

• Five apps to make the Linux desktop business-ready

  It used to be quite the challenge to make a Linux desktop business-ready. Most every business depended upon niche, proprietary software that simply could not be run on anything but Windows. However, times have changed and so much of business is now handled through a web browser. Add to that how much the Linux platform has matured and you have the makings for a big win on the open source front.

• One Window Successfully Shut; budding authouress Daughter Sarah’s voluntary testimonial

  Being a broke university student who couldn’t afford a technician’s fee, a client of this new ISP’s (and hardly servile at that), and with no other ISP options due to the grand monopolization of the region and who knows, maybe price fixing, I looked to my father and brother for advice. Brother recommended reinstalling Windows XP. Father recommended Debian GNU/Linux.

  And so it was. I didn’t want to deal with virus scanners and paying heed to time allocated to ensuring my shit was safe, so I went Father’s way with a free disk from Brother.

  The first few times I ran Ubuntu GNU/Linux (my brother deviated from Debian), the new ISP couldn’t give me a connection, leaving me to call their tech people yet-a-friggin’-gain. Since I changed network names and passwords, there’ve been no issues in that regard, though I am still using their provided modem.

• Desktop

  • Availability Of Dell’s Linux Laptop Confusing US Buyers

    Trying to buy Dell’s developer-orientated Ubuntu laptop – the XPS 13 – is a confusing affair at present.

    Several readers have contacted us to say that the device is no longer being offered for sale on the Dell US website.

  • System76 Unveil New Haswell-Powered Ultra-Thin Ubuntu Laptop

    The world’s first ultra-thin laptop to use Intel’s Iris Pro graphics has today been unveiled by Ubuntu-dedicated hardware company System76.

• Server

  • The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

  • IBM unveils two new power systems linux centers

    At the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston, IBM, the giant international computer and server company, has announced its plan to expand the adoption of Linux accross its enterprise. There will be two new Power Systems Linux Centers in Austin and New York and support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) will be extended to its Power Systems portfolio of server products.

    In July, the two first North American IBM Power Systems Linux Centers will be opened, in Austin, Texas and in New York. With these centers, software developers will find it easier to develop and deploy new softwares for big data, cloud, mobile and social business computing on open-sourced technology building blocks using the latest IMP processor technology and Linux.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Podcast Season 5 Episode 10

    In this episode: It looks like Rockwell was right – somebody was watching him (and us). There’s a great new Raspberry Pi installer called NOOBS and the President of the US promises action against patent trolls. Ubuntu’s ‘bug one’ has been fixed and the EFF objects to DRM in HTML 5. As ever, hear our discoveries and your opinions in this epic length podcast.

• Kernel Space

  • IBM Announces New Initiatives to Support Adoption of Linux OS Across Enterprise

    IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced new initiatives to further support and speed up the adoption of the Linux operating system across the enterprise. These include two new Power Systems Linux Centers and plans to extend support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology to its Power Systems portfolio of server products.

  • International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) News: Linux KVM Virtualization, Brain-Simulating Supercomputer, DevOps & More

  • Graphics Stack

    • Intel Gallium3D Driver Now Supports GLSL 1.40

      The “Ilo” open-source driver that provides unofficial Intel Gallium3D graphics support for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics cores on Linux now is advertising GLSL 1.40 compliance. The GL Shading Language update comes after landing UBO and TBO support.

  • Benchmarks

    • Gallium3D LLVMpipe Benchmarks From Intel Haswell

      Being published this afternoon are benchmarks of the Gallium3D LLVMpipe software driver compared to Intel HD 4600 graphics on Mesa 9.2 Git when using an Intel Core i7 4770K. While this Intel “Haswell” CPU is faster than previous generations, it’s still obviously best not relying upon LLVMpipe.

• Applications

  • It’s Official, Liferea 1.10 RC4 Can Import Google Reader Subscriptions

    Liferea, a free news aggregator capable to store articles for offline reading and with full synchronization with Google Reader and TinyTinyRSS, is now at version 1.10 RC4.

  • Ardour 3.2 adds video support

    Ardour lead developer Paul Davis has announced the release of version 3.2 of the open source digital audio workstation (DAW). The biggest new addition in this version is video support, a feature on which developer Robin Gareus “has worked for a couple of years”, according to Davis. Video support allows users of the DAW to easily extract, edit and mix audio tracks associated with video while being able to see the video in a preview.

  • Retroshare: A Next Generation Secure Communication and File Sharing Platform

    Retroshare is the next generation of peer to peer sharing networks. Unlike classic peer to peer software, it only connects to trusted friends and not just anyone.

  • Top Free Android SSH Clients

  • Glances – CLI curses based monitoring tool for GNU/Linux

    Glances is a CLI curses based monitoring tool for GNU/Linux and BSD OS.Glances uses the PsUtil library to get information from your system.It is developed in Python.

  • Proprietary

    • LinMin™ Introduces LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.0 for Linux® Systems and Virtual Machines

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Change System Language in Ubuntu

    • Short Tip: Remove guest account in Ubuntu

    • The Power of Linux “History Command” in Bash Shell

    • PAC Manager Replacement of Secure CRT / Putty on Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

    • Using RoundCube Webmail With ISPConfig 3 On Debian Wheezy (Apache2)

    • Reporting A Bug Against the Xen Hypervisor

    • How to use a Playstation 2 joypad with Linux

    • Setup Your Own YouTube Like Website Using ClipBucket

    • 4 different ways to print file content reversely

    • NAS Storage Performance Testing Using DD Command

  • Wine or Emulation

    • Wine 1.6 Release Candidate 2 Is Out There

  • Games

    • Linux International boss: Lack of games harmed desktop adoption

      Linux has struggled to earn its gaming stripes across the years in the face of stiff competiton from Windows and, in recent times, OS X.

      That began to change when Valve launched its Steam gaming service on Ubuntu-flavoured desktops earlier this year, with some hailing its arrival as a turning point for the operating system.

      Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, told TechRadar: “Quite frankly, the lack of games is one of the big reasons why Linux hasn’t made it onto [more] desktops.”

      Hall continued: “Even people who are 50 years old are going to say they have to have a particular game, so they have to have to do a dual boot and stick with Windows.

      “Of course, developers look for the largest install base possible, which is typically Windows, and then Apple. They don’t take it to the third platform as that would take away engineering resources for making new additions and features.”

    • Paranautical Activity is on IndieGameStand (PWYW) and the dark side of Greenlight

      They were originally on Steam’s Greenlight, found a publisher who was supposed to get them onto Steam normally, Steam then blocked it to “send a message” and so they had to do it all again.

    • The Cheapskate’s Corner 5 (Jun 13th-19th) (UPDATED)

    • Lost Sky Tactical J-RPG [PyGame]

    • Folk Tale a sandbox fantasy city builder heading to Linux on Steam!

    • Scraps vehicle combat game has a Linux release!

      Scraps is a bit like the multiplayer melee mode in Interstate ’76, except you build your vehicle from the chassis up instead of just bolting on weapons and armour. It’s kind of like how you put stuff together in Stratosphere: Conquest Of The Skies except that it’s a vehicle instead of a floating platform.

    • Paranautical Activity is on IndieGameStand (PWYW) and the dark side of Greenlight

      Paranautical Activity combines the classic FPS action of games like Doom and Quake, with the randomness and difficulty of modern roguelikes like Binding of Isaac and Spelunky. I don’t usually shout out sales since our sales page, but these guys really need it…

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Improve Your Xfce Desktop with the Zen Suite 0.11.3 Theme

    Zen suite, a theme compatible with GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3.x that aims to be simple, consistent and visually appealing, is now at version 0.11.3.

  • If You Hate Flat Themes and Icons, You Are Going to Love Sphere 1.2.5

    A lot of users have turned to the flat model for their themes, but if you don’t like this type of embellishments, you can go the other way and install spherical icons.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Mir Still Causing Concerns By Ubuntu Derivatives

      With Canonical’s planned adoption of their in-house Mir Display Server over the next year rather than using an X.Org Server or Wayland, derivatives such as KDE-based Kubuntu continue to fear the change and what exactly the options will be.

      KDE will not support Mir as long as it remains a one-distribution solution. With KDE not coming to Mir for the foreseeable future, Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu started a new technical discussion about non-Unity flavors and Mir.

    • Fanboys in Free Software

      Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it’s against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community.

      But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.

      When one starts to have a blog in free software one learns the hard way that being a relatively good developer means that you get hated. If you achieve something you get attacked, you get insulted, you get called a dictator [1], you get compared to Hitler [2], etc. etc. People say that you need a thick skin if you want to work in free software. I disagree. There shouldn’t be a need to have a thick skin. We are improving the world, we donated lots of our spare time to work on free software, we donate the source code we write for the public good and we are thanked by insults. This is not acceptable! Even if people dislike some specific software or are a great supporter of another software there is no reason to insult the people or the products. It never is! Not even if it is Microsoft or Apple or Google. There is no reason to attack them.

      [...]

      Final remark: please don’t come and tell me that I’m the same by criticizing Mir. It’s not the same. Criticizing decisions and having discussions is important, but of course critic has to be constructive. I have never attacked any of the Mir developers or have attacked the software in any way. I criticized the decision and the reasoning and pointed out the problems it causes for us, but I have in no way attacked Canonical, Ubuntu or Mir.

    • New Krita Web-shop!

    • KDE Ships First Beta of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.11

      Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

    • KDE 4.11 Beta Released, Works On Wayland

    • Choqok Twitter client handed over to community

      Mehrdad Momeny, the developer of the KDE microblogging client Choqok, has announced that he plans to hand development of the application over to the community. Momeny had previously apologised for not finding a maintainer to take over the project after admitting that personal circumstances did not leave him enough time and energy to continue development.

    • Disabling semantic-desktop at runtime

      Today we bumped KDE SC 4.11 beta 1 (4.10.80) in the gentoo kde overlay. The semantic-desktop use flag is dropped in >=kde-base/4.10.80, as you may already noticed or read in dilfridges blog post. So if your hardware is not powerful enough or you just don’t want to use the feature you can easily disable it at runtime.

    • Status and plans for plasma-nm

    • SFLPhone-KDE 1.2.3 released!

      SFLPhone-KDE 1.2.3 have been released today as a bug fix release 6 months after 1.2.2. This version is (hopefully) the last in the 1.2.* serie. The next generation (1.3) is under heavy development since the last release. According to git diff –stat, 1.3 branch have a massive 16000 lines of changes. It is also 10x faster, less memory hungry and usable (more on that in an upcoming blog post(s)). As for 1.2.3, the new features include macro support, new command line options and being able to be invoked from KaddressBook. Important bug fixes include compilation fix on Fedora 19 beta, prevent race condition when launching SFLPhone-KDE in autostart. On the daemon side, many bugs have been fixed there too. Overall, this release should be quite stable.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME 3, Windows 95 Disconnected

      About a week and a half ago, I was nearly taken-in when an item appeared on The Register that tied recent Linux desktop woes to behind the scenes moves by Microsoft to enforce patents against GNOME. Supposedly, GNOME was violating Redmond’s patented designs of the Windows 95 desktop, most specifically the Start Menu and the Start button. According to the story painted by reporter Liam Proven, KDE was also guilty of violating the same patents, but got a pass as they benefited from the famous Novel/Microsoft patent swap deal, being they were the default desktop in SUSE.

    • Who’s birthday is it today?

      Users today have countless ways of knowing or getting notified when their friends and family have birthdays. The most popular way comes from social networking where such data is shared publicly, but is there a way to get Gnome Shell notifications about this?

• Distributions

  • Divergence in the distros: how the Linux community is splitting into a two-tier system

    Look at any major service provider: Heroku, Google, Amazon, Apple. All of them offer different levels of access to what they offer, usually at different prices. There’s even an established route to enticing customers towards the paid plans, via the well-worn ‘freemium’ model.

    Let’s be clear about this: Linux isn’t dividing into paid and unpaid. It’s not going the freemium route (although the cynical will suggest that Canonical might be thinking about it). What we’re seeing, though, is the development of a clear split. A kind of meiosis.

  • New Releases

    • ArchBang 14.06.2013

    • Bridge 2013.06

    • Parted Magic 2013_06_14

    • Peppermint OS 4 out now

      The lightweight, cloud connected distro gets its first update in a year, and ditches Openbox in favour of Xfwm4

  • Screenshots

    • UberStudent 3.0 Screenshot Tour

    • ROSA 2012 R1 Screenshot Tour

    • Zorin OS 7 Screenshot Tour

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva releases Pulse2 1.4.2 with additional features and improved stability

  • Gentoo Family

    • News from the 2013/05 Gentoo KDE team meeting

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Honors Rafael Guimaraes as 2013 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year

    • Red Hat Announces Red Hat Storage Integration with Red Hat OpenStack

    • Where Is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7?

      In a standing room-only set of sessions at the Red Hat Summit here this week, the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was revealed.

      Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the Linux vendor’s core platform, had its last major release with the debut of RHEL 6 in November of 2010. Red Hat has been releasing major new RHEL platforms every two to three years, and at its 2012 Summit event the company had hinted that 2013 could be the year in which RHEL 7 might be released.

    • Red Hat bets its cloud future on OpenStack

      The message coming out of Red Hat’s annual Red Hat Summit is that while Linux is Red Hat’s foundation, OpenStack is its future.

    • Red Hat Launches New Initiative to Help Enterprises Chart Course to Open Source Middleware

      As more enterprises develop technology-dependent products and services, interest in robust and reliable middleware continues to grow. These enterprises are reconsidering existing investments in middleware as they look at open hybrid clouds, yet may find themselves unable to proceed as easily as they would like with proprietary middleware solutions because of “cloud unfriendly” features and practices, including rigid architectures, prohibitive license structures, and lack of portability. In addition, the technical complexity and mission-critical nature of enterprise applications present numerous migration challenges when the time comes to change platforms.

    • Red Hat + Hortonworks Tag-Team Open Source Big Data Storage on Apache Hadoop

      At the Red had Summit 2013 yesterday, Hortonworks and Red Hat announced an engineering collaboration to advance open source big data community projects. The engineering partnership will be a collaboration effort on enabling more storage file systems to work with Apache Hadoop. In order to accelerate the enablement of the broader file system ecosystem being used with Apache Hadoop, the engineering teams at Hortonworks and Red Hat will be working directly with the Apache Hadoop Community.

    • Red Hat launches new initiative to help enterprises chart course to open source middleware

      Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for southern Africa and an authorised distributor in southern Africa for Red Hat, today announced the latter’s new community resources designed to help enterprises migrate to open source middleware technologies, including a community-driven JBoss Migration Centre and new tooling to ease the process of migrating from proprietary application server technologies to the open source JBoss platform.

    • Red Hat Summit: Open source trends, cloud outlook, innovation and more

    • Red Hat updates virtualisation and OpenStack products

      Full Storage Live Migration support and a framework for plugins are two of the new features included in the now available version 3.2 of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV). Storage Live Migration allows the storage media that is used by virtual machines to be migrated from one storage domain to another at runtime. The new plugin framework enables programs to access the management interface of Red Hat’s virtualisation platform and offer additional interface features to administrators; companies such as HP, NetApp and Symantec plan to use it to provide maintenance and operational features for their products this way.

    • Cisco and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

      Cisco has over 10,000 RHEL instances.

    • What Do You Want to Ask a Linux Journalist?

      This morning I was on a panel at the Red Hat Summit with Scott Merrill from TechCrunch and Jon Brodkin from Ars Technica with moderation from 451 Groups John Abbot.

      Officially the session was titled, “Hot Off the Press: Top Journalists on Today’s Tech Trends” but it really could have just been called – What Do You Want to Ask a Linux Journalist?

      We had about 60 people or so in the room and the primary topic of discussion – not surprisingly – was cloud . Also not surprising is the fact that no one in the audience had actually deployed an OpenStack cloud. Considering that this is a Red Hat conference, that’s not terribly surprising either – since Red Hat’s full product is not yet available.

    • Red Hat Virtualization 3.2 announced, available world wide

      New features in Red Hat Virtualization include Storage Live Migration, new third-party plug-in framework and support for new AMD and Intel chips

  • Debian Family

    • Users warned to remove Debian Multimedia repository

      The Debian project is warning users that the unofficial Debian Multimedia repository now has to be considered unsafe. According to the Debian maintainers, the debian-multimedia.org domain is not being used by the maintainers of the unofficial repository any more and is now registered to a party unknown to the Debian project. This means that the repository is no longer safe to use and users should remove it from their sources.list file as soon as possible.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • System76 launches high-end Ubuntu-powered laptops

          Galago UltraPro and Gazelle Professional combine Linux smarts with ultrabook style

        • The Ubuntu App Developer Cookbook Announced

          In recent months we have been seeing tremendous growth and interest in the Ubuntu SDK that is at the heart of building applications for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs. The SDK provides the ability to build rich native applications in QML/Qt that hook right into the system, platform services, messaging, social media and more. We will also be providing support for HTML5 apps soon (with deep platform integration), and for OpenGL apps too.

        • Printed Certificates for Ubuntu Members

          The Ubuntu community is a core part of what makes us what we are, and right at the center of that are our Ubuntu Members. Ubuntu Members provide significant and sustained contributions over a wide range of areas such as packaging, documentation, programming, translations, advocacy, support, and more. We always want to do our best to recognize and appreciate our many members in the Ubuntu family, across these many different teams and our flavors.

        • The sorry state of services in Ubuntu

          Read the post How do I choose which way to enable/disable, start/stop, or check the status of a service?. Compare that with systemctl enable/disable/start/stop/status service and tell me, for a user, which is easier?

        • Ubuntu Desktop Convergence

          This is where it starts to get exciting, folks. The future starts now.

          Ubuntu is an operating system for the server, the cloud, the desktop, and the mobile device. One single OS. That makes it different from Apple’s OSes (Mac OS X on the desktop, iOS on the mobile) and Microsoft’s current OSes (Windows 8 on the desktop, Windows RT on the mobile, and Windows Server 2012 on the server and in the cloud).

        • Canonical: OpenStack Cloud Computing Platform Ready for Prime Time

          Has OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, come into its own? Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux—which happens to be the most popular OS for OpenStack deployments—is saying so this week as it touts the rapid maturity of the software. Now, the question becomes: Does the channel agree?

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Review: Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” Cinnamon + MATE

            It’s that time of the year again. Linux Mint has just released the latest version of its distribution, and I’m going to review it.

          • Best Newbie Distro? You Say Linux Mint.

            According to our “Newbie” Distro Poll, someone considering moving from Windows or Mac to Linux should consider taking Linux Mint for a spin. The poll asked the question, “What Linux distro would you be most likely to recommend to a new Linux user?” Evidently this was a subject that interested many of you, because a whopping 1,339 votes were cast in this poll, making it the most number of votes one of our polls has ever received.

• Devices/Embedded

  • COM Express modules surf Intel’s Haswell wave

  • Meet the cloud platform made of Raspberry Pi and Lego: The cloud you can carry in your hand

  • Glassgow University built a cloud platform from Raspberry Pi’s and Lego

  • RS welcomes open-source projects on DesignSpark

    RS Components has introduced an open-source software area as part of its DesignSpark website aimed at design engineers.

    It will include details of how design projects can be developed with resources such as PCB schematics and layout files for DesignSpark PCB, for example, along with mechanical blueprints, software code and/or machine code, mechanical drawings and CAD files.

  • Review: Beagleboard Beaglebone Black

  • Phones

    • The end of Symbian: Nokia ships last handset with the mobile OS

      This week, Finnish smartphone creator Nokia announced that it had shipped its final handset running the Symbian operating system. As the last company in the world building phones using the Symbian OS, Nokia’s withdrawal from the platform means Symbian is now completely defunct.

    • Selling Palm to HP was a waste

      webOS and the mobile devices that it powered made Palm (remember that company) a media darling. webOS was going to be another successful mobile Linux distribution (after Android). But it was all a dream that never came true. Palm was sold to HP. At some point, HP abandoned webOS, deciding that it was better to sell Android devices.

    • Android

      • ANDROID: Steel Commanders – SciFi card battling!

      • Cupertino’s photocopiers: What iOS 7 borrowed from Android

        Reactions to yesterday’s iOS 7 reveal were largely positive, but one current of criticism kept flowing: that Apple may have relied a little too hard on copying other operating systems—in particular, Google’s Android (though the stark flatness of Windows Phone 8 got cited, too).

      • Acer’s Android Smart Display Pushes Desktop Boundaries

        The Smart Display DA220HQL touchscreen is an impressive piece of hardware that performs extremely well. It looks like a really big tablet; however, this all-in-one device packs enough power to make it a viable second desktop computer or PC replacement. Typing on its wireless full-sized QWERTY keyboard — minus number pad — is an absolute pleasure.

      • The rumored HTC One Mini makes a great companion to a small tablet

        More details of the rumored HTC One Mini appeared yesterday. Samsung is releasing the Galaxy S4 Mini and I wonder if we are starting to see a trend towards smaller smartphones.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Root 101 is an open source Android tablet

      The Root 101 is an open source tablet loaded with a completely stock version of Android (Jelly Bean 4.2) with no bloatware apps and no ugly skinned version of Android. Root access is default, so you can install any app and even custom ROMs.

    • For Android Tablets, Big is Back

      The Computex show in Taiwan is still a PC show, but it’s increasingly known for debuting tablets and tablet reference designs. There have been some misfires over the years, like the thick, Atom-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) shown in 2008, the “Smartbooks” of 2009, and the flawed “Honeycomb” Android tablets of 2011. Things have looked up since then, however, with the 2012 event showcasing numerous high-octane Android 4.x slates that have gone on to collectively overtake the iPad and threaten the PC market.

Free Software/Open Source

• Coping with Loss (in Open Source)

• FLAG to discuss the Open Source landscape – Lawyer Monthly Magazine

• Apps & the City from London-based app developer

  London-based software development company AppShed has detailed plans to migrate its app development platform towards an Open Source footing.

• The Open Source Internet of Things has some big aspirations

  Internet of Things (IOT) advocate Michael Koster fixated makers and hackers at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, a few weeks ago. Standing in front of samples of many versions of Arduino, Rasberry Pi, and sensors, he spoke of an open source horizontal platform that will unify the IOT. He changed people’s perspectives from looking up from a small control circuit of dedicated sensors and actuators to seeing the unique value that will be created by looking down at a unified world of horizontally interconnected sensors.

• Open-source game developers have the power to sink mega conferences like E3

  Contrary to popular belief, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, was alive and well, this year. But the rise of Ouya, Steam Box, and GamePop later this year could mark the end of an era. With relatively small revenue generated by a typical open-source game, indie developers simply won’t be able to afford to go.

  At the same time, there’s going to be more and more of them, playing a huge part in the gaming ecosystem.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • The end for Google’s Chrome Frame

      Google has announced that Chrome Frame will no longer be supported or updated from January 2014. The plugin adds a Chrome engine to versions 6 to 9 of Internet Explorer. When a requested web page sends a special header, Internet Explorer will implicitly switch to the Chrome-driven display mode.

    • Chromium to be default browser in Ubuntu 13.10?

      Canonical are discussing the possibility of replacing Firefox with Chromium in the next version of Ubuntu

  • Mozilla

    • Make something amazing on the web during Mozilla’s 2013 Maker Party

      Think back to the first thing you created on the web. For me, it was making a Geocities homepage when I was a teenager (Hollywood, represent). I was amazed that by writing HTML, I could make images of the Green Bay Packers and my favorite PEZ dispensers appear on a web site with my witty commentary.

    • Introducing the Mozilla Science Lab

• SaaS/Big Data

  • NoSQL, Hadoop Power NSA PRISM, Big Data War on Terror?

    The National Security Agency (NSA) apparently uses Hadoop, NoSQL and other open source software to wage its Big Data war against terrorism, according to anecdotal evidence and industry pundits who spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

  • SolidFire, Red Hat: SSD Storage for OpenStack Cloud

    It’s been a big week for solid-state device (SSD) storage and the channel. Earlier this week, Intel (INTC) unveiled a new line of SSD hardware for the cloud and Big Data. Then, a day later, SolidFire, which provides SSD storage infrastructure for cloud hosts, announced a partnership with Red Hat (RHT) that will integrate the company into Red Hat’s OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. Here are the details on this latest news.

  • Cray Rolls Out Hadoop Cluster Solution

• Databases

  • Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB

    Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released.

  • RethinkDB 1.6 gets regex and array functions

    The open source JSON document database RethinkDB has gained fourteen new array operations and the ability to match regular expressions within stored documents in its latest version, RethinkDB 1.6 code-named “Fargo”. RethinkDB is a rapidly developing database which works with Python, Ruby, or JavaScript in Node.js and supports clustering, sharding and replication. The developers compare it to MongoDB.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice 4.1 will shine cleaner!

    Maybe the most important thing about LibreOffice’s 4.0 release was the work done in cleaning the code and making it more efficient, while also doing the biggest API cleanup that has ever occurred since the beginning of the project. This would theoretically help boost the project’s development tempo and make things easier for contributors.

  • Try The New LibreOffice Flat Icon Set

    It looks like LibreOffice will get a new set of flat icons, based on Gnome’s symbolic icons. The icon set isn’t completed yet, but you can try it already – below you’ll find instructions on how to easily try the new icons.

  • Libre Office Version 4 – Tantalizingly Close

    Some of the Linux faithful will look at this and say: “There he goes again, bashing open-source. He’s just a Microsoft shill.” They will use the fact I am an MCSE as ‘proof’ of their opinion.

  • LibreOffice Gets More Code Clean-up for 4.1.0

    LibreOffice 4.1.0 is right around the corner and developers are busy as beavers getting it ready. One of the things featured this release might be hard for ordinary users to see, but is every bit as important. Continued code refinement and clean-up will make LibreOffice 4.1.0 more efficient, smaller, and easier to contribute to and compile.

  • Java EE 7 melds HTML5 with enterprise apps

    Oracle has announced public availability of Java EE 7, the first major release of the enterprise formulation of Java since the database giant took control of the platform in 2010. The last version shipped way back in 2009.

• Public Services/Government

  • European Parliament adopts open data strategy

    EU flag On Thursday, the European Parliament approved new rules, introduced by the European Commission, for re-using public sector information. These changes will require that administrative data is published according to open data principles. When implemented, all documents made accessible by public organisations will be re-usable for any purpose, unless they are protected by third party copyright.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Open Data: Government Responds to Shakespeare’s Review

      The government has responded to the independent review of Public Sector Information (PSI) carried out by Stephan Shakespeare, chair of the Data Strategy Board. Here are our first impressions.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Like a good student, edX finishes open source project ahead of schedule

      Good university students finish projects by their assigned deadlines. The best ones submit their finished work in advance.

• Programming

  • Google App Engine gets git push support

    The latest version of Google’s App Engine, version 1.8.1, adds the ability to git push deployments of Python and PHP applications to its PaaS (Platform as a Service). Once developers have enabled “Push-to-Deploy” in their applications, they will then be able to clone a repository from the project. After making changes locally, they can then deploy the changed application with the command git push appengine master.

  • Eclipse faces challenges with adoption and popularity

    The latest Eclipse Community Survey results highlight some challenges for the Java IDE. For example, new version adoption for the annually updated IDE has slumped: in 2012, 76.9% of users were using the then current release Eclipse 3.7, but in 2013, only 56% are using Eclipse 4.2. Ian Skerrett, Marketing Director at the Eclipse Foundation, believes that this is most likely “the result of the performance issues found in Eclipse 4.2″. He notes in a blog post that overall satisfaction with Eclipse has dropped from last year’s 90% to only 81% being satisfied or very satisfied this year. This is something Skerrett hopes will be addressed “as the Eclipse 4.x platform continues to mature,” but, as it stands, it isn’t very good news.

Leftovers

• Hardware

  • Notebook ODMs bracing for price war

    Notebook brand vendors have recently started the request-for-quotation (RFQ) process for 2014 orders. But because of the notebook industry’s weak shipments and Lenovo increasing in-house production, competition between ODMs are expected to be fierce. Upstream suppliers may also see gross margins fall, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

• Security

  • Snowden: US has been hacking Hong Kong and China for years

    NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has prompted a change of direction in the debate that has been going on for months around China’s alleged hacker attacks on the US. The former Booz Allen Hamilton employee and contractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA) told Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper that the intelligence agency has been launching hacking attacks on targets in Hong Kong as well as mainland China.

  • There Are Reasons M$ Is Losing The Web, Besides The Horrific Costs

    Folks who are comfortable with the cost, complexity and vulnerability of M$’s OS have not experienced the joy of IT that works, works for the user instead of for M$. M$ is all about “getting value” from its OS above all else. It is an OS designed by salesmen who love to sell more cost and complexity as “new features”. Unfortunately for the world, that brings vulnerabilities galore. Fortunately for the world, there is an alternative Debian GNU/Linux and other distributions of Free Software.

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Preparing to Bomb Syria

    Quite simply I do not believe the US, UK and French government’s assertion that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against rebels “multiple times in small quantities”. Why on earth would they do that? The claim that “up to 150 people have died” spread over a number of incidents makes no sense at all. In a civil war when tens of thousands of people have died, where all sides have been guilty of massacres of scores at a time, I cannot conceive of any motive for killing a dozen or so at any one time with the odd chemical shell. It makes no military sense – chemical weapons are designed for use against population centres and massed armies. They are not precision weapons for deployment against small groups.

  • Syria and Chemical Weapons: What Do We Know?

    abc-assad-chemIf you watched ABC World News last night (6/13/13), the story of Syria and the use of chemical weapons had shifted pretty dramatically. Anchor David Muir declared at the top of the show: “The White House now confirming Syria’s president has in fact used chemical weapons to kill.”

  • The Forbidden Truth: The U.S. is Channeling Chemical Weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria, Obama is a Liar and a Terrorist

    Who has Crossed the “Red Line”? Barack Obama and John Kerry are Supporting a Terrorist Organization on the State Department List

• Finance

  • Banks Manipulating Trades and Rigging Benchmarks in Foreign Exchange Markets

  • Traders Said to Rig Currency Rates to Profit Off Clients

    Traders at some of the world’s biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice.

• Censorship

  • Website filtering problems are a “load of cock”

    On Tuesday, I spoke at an event organised by the Sunday Times and Policy Exchange about online pornography and child protection. This was in the run-up to the opposition debate that took place in Parliament on Wednesday on these topics.

• Privacy

  • Edward Snowden: change you can believe in

    I voted for Barack Obama in his first term. I had seri­ous doubts about him even then, and today I wish I hadn’t done it, but I did vote for him. I wouldn’t say I com­pletely fell for the “change you can believe in” baloney, but I decided to give the guy the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

  • Government Built Spy-Access Into Most Popular Consumer Program Before 9/11

    In researching the stunning pervasiveness of spying by the government (it’s much more wide spread than you’ve heard even now), we ran across the fact that the FBI wants software programmers to install a backdoor in all software.

  • The fight against the snoopers charter rages on

    It seems that the fight against the ‘snoopers charter’ rages on. In a letter to The Times, signed by Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Alan Johnson, Lord Baker, Lord King and Lord Carlile, called for the ‘snoopers charter’ to be revived. The intention of the letter seems to be to put increasing pressure on Nick Clegg to drop his opposition to the draft Bill

    In the letter, the group state that “coalition niceties must not get in the way of giving our security services the capabilities they need to stay one step ahead of those that seek to destroy our society”.

  • You do have the right to record council meetings

    In positive step towards transparency Eric Pickles MP, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, has published new guidance which explicitly states that Councils should allow the public to overly film and council meetings.

    DCLG was forced to publish the guidance after a string of councils had prevented individuals from recording council meetings on health and safety and legal grounds. The guidance will only apply to English councils, but it certainly creates a serious precedent for councils in Wales.

    Public access to meetings is a key part of holding local councils and public bodies to account and it’s wholly wrong for people not being able to film or tweet in public meetings for spurious legal reasons.

  • Beat the CIA

    The World Wide Web is the greatest system for sharing information ever created – but how do you stop it sharing too much? Ben Everard investigates.

  • Baroness Ludford’s proposals take away your privacy choices

    Many amendments proposed by Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford to the Data Protection Regulation would leave us with less control of our personal information. In this post, we focus on consent and loopholes.

    Yesterday we wrote about Baroness Ludford’s amendment to the Data Protection Regulation (amendment number 1210) that would mean your data could be transferred to a third country or international organisation without you being told. In the light of the PRISM revelations, we suggested this amendment should be withdrawn.

  • EU Commission caved to US demands to drop anti-PRISM privacy clause

    Reports this week revealed that the US successfully pressed the European Commission to drop sections of the Data Protection Regulation that would, as the Financial Times explains, “have nullified any US request for technology and telecoms companies to hand over data on EU citizens.

    The article, (as you can read below), would have prohibited transfers of personal information to a third country under a legal request, for example the one used by the NSA for their PRISM programme, unless “expressly authorized by an international agreement or provided for by mutual legal assistance treaties or approved by a supervisory authority.”

  • Has the NSA “poisoned the well” for responsible disclosure?

    Revelations about the PRISM project involve US tech companies have been compelled to provide special assistance to US intelligence agencies. This has also drawn fresh attention to “responsible disclosure” systems regarding information about security vulnerabilities in those companies’ products.

  • How to break out of PRISM

    NSA scandal has exploded fears of being watched on the Internet, but a new website lists ways to escape the Panopticon

  • Tech companies working with the NSA are making a Faustian bargain

    Whatever the details might be, it seems clear that dozens of technology companies — and perhaps even more — have co-operated with the NSA on its surveillance program. And they could pay a high price for doing so.

• Civil Rights

  • Mandatory Ultrasound Bill Moves from Conception to Passage in Just Ten Days

    In ten short days, Wisconsin Republicans steamrolled a radical abortion bill through the state legislature to mandate ultrasounds and close abortion clinics, despite passionate opposition from Democratic Assemblywomen. The debate had many dramatic moments and video of the Senate President furiously gaveling down the opposition made national news.

  • PRISM, Free speech and creativity: Looking back on ORGCon2013

    Open Rights Group’s third national conference took place last weekend at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, with a fantastic set of speakers and hundreds of attendees.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • The EU, safeguarding the open internet for all

    Thank you for inviting me to speak. Net neutrality can be a polarising debate. But I often find there is much we agree on. We agree that the internet is a great place to exercise and enjoy liberty. A great place to innovate, and implement new ideas without having to ask permission. And an open forum for all kinds of activity.sentence

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Anti-Counterfeiting ACTA Bill Referred to Industry Committee

      Bill C-56, the anti-counterfeiting bill that opens the door the Canadian implementation of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, has been referred to the Industry Committee for review.