01.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Valve recently released its Beta version of SteamOS, based on the Debian distro of Linux. Naturally, we were intrigued by its release and wanted to take the new OS for a test run. We’ve put together a guide on how to install the operating system.
-
Starbound is currently available through Steam’s Early Access program. That means the game is still in active development. It’s a beta test that you can pay to take part in. This isn’t a review of the final product, but one writer’s thoughts after playing several hours of the game in beta.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 12:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
The DarkTable open-source photography workflow software has seen a major update to end out 2013. Version 1.4 of DarkTable brings a host of new features.
-
BusyBox 1.22 is now available as the latest unstable release of “the Swiss Army Knife of the Embedded Linux.” With BusyBox 1.22 comes many changes and improvements.
-
At the start of this year I posted about eAndora, a Pandora Internet Radio client I was working on that is written in Python and Elementary. Today I’m happy to announce that eAndora is finally feature complete enough for me to stamp something as a “1.0″ release.
-
Some days ago there was an update released to VideoLAN’s libbluray Blu-ray library that began supporting BD-J Java and other new functionality. Making news now is another but separate open-source Blu-ray news.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Binary blobs like AMD’s Catalyst driver are being marginalised by Fedora, which is also starting to introduce Wayland in GNOME-based distributions
THE previous post dealt with the state of Wayland in KDE. Well, it’s not just KDE which moves in this direction. The main patron of GNOME, namely Red Hat, is leaving proprietary graphics drivers behind [1,2] (the less, the merrier) and also moving to a more manageable graphics stack. Fedora is improving GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell [3,4], which it now tied more closely to Wayland [5]. This is significant. With other work which aims to improve the desktop experience (e.g. Systemd [6]) we are bound to see many projects following, and not just direct Fedora derivatives like Korora [7]. The Fedora project is probably the biggest driver of GNU/Linux development, rivalled only by Debian, which still isn’t leaning towards Systemd [8,9]. What Fedora does affects not only RHEL, but also the world’s most used server operating system (close to Debian), CentOS [10].
Watch closely what Fedora is doing because what Red Hat decides on typically becomes a de facto standard for the rest of us. The good news is, the graphics stack in Linux seems to be repelling blobs (with root privileges), which are the most likely component to ever act as a backdoor (unless it already exists). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
Fedora 20, the newest version of the Linux-based operating system affiliated with Red Hat (RHT), has been out only for a few weeks. But it is already creating challenges for Linux users with AMD graphics hardware, which is not supported in some cases on the new release. It’s a reminder of the way that dependence on proprietary device drivers can drastically hinder open source adoption.
-
-
Fedora 20 delivers a sleek new software manager for the Gnome Shell that is perfectly user-friendly. This new software manager also takes advantage of the header bars introduced with Gnome 3.10. I have taken an extensive look at the re-designed Gnome Software Manager, and now its time to show off the goods.
-
If you’re a fan of GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell, Fedora 20 will be a welcome update. This release sees an upgrade for Fedora’s default GNOME spin, bringing the desktop to GNOME 3.10.
Fedora’s live desktop CD has used GNOME by default for many years now. Once upon a time that was completely unremarkable. However, since Ubuntu now has Unity, OpenSUSE pours its effort into KDE and Mint has worked hard to divorce Cinnamon 2.0 from GNOME 3, Fedora is, well, just about all GNOME has left these days.
-
While an X.Org Server is still used by default on Fedora 20 “Heisenbug”, Wayland has become a viable option for early adopters and developers wishing to work on Wayland software compatibility and/or testing. All the packages are needed on a Fedora 20 installation to launch a GNOME Wayland session and begin working, including support for XWayland in order to run X11-dependent games and applications.
-
Open-source developers this week achieved a pleasant late Christmas present for Fedora users of having a working system with using the in-development Linux kernel DBus implementation (KDBUS) paired with the latest systemd code can now yield a booting system.
-
-
-
-
The CentOS community developers focused on their rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 have already begun playing with the RHEL7 Beta source packages to form CentOS 7.0.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 12:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
-
-
-
-
Software-wise, my choice for this on Android is Torque, an excellent app that not only can collect all the OBD-II stats, but also graph and log them in myriad ways. (There’s also a free version, Torque Lite, that has a fair deal of the functionality of the full version.) Grab either one from the Google Play store.
-
We got to thinking, how does one analyze mobile apps? To find out, we downloaded Santoku Linux, a Linux distribution crafted specifically for mobile forensics, mobile malware analysis, and mobile security testing.
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE at 11:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An alternative to X Server is gaining traction in the world of KDE
FOR a period of time a couple of years ago Wayland made some headlines; Canonical has since then moved on to its own (with Canonical copyrights) X Server replacement, so Wayland did not make many headlines in 2013. But Wayland is making a bit of a comeback, not in Unity or GNOME (which now has version 3.11.3 in focus [1,2,3]) but in KDE.
KDE 4.12 was recently made available [4], potentially attracting many news users [5]. With the leadership of BlueSystem there is a shift towards Wayland [6], which becomes ever more real in the Qt- and Wayland-Powered Hawaii 0.2 Desktop [7,8].
Judging by where KWin development is going, Canonical is unlikely to ever revisit it (Kubuntu is no longer part of Canonical) and Wayland may be central in KDE’s future, including on Plasma-powered devices such as tablets. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
The GNOME developers announced recently yet another development release towards Eye of GNOME 3.12, the default image viewer application for the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment.
-
The GNOME developers behind the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) software have announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of version 3.11.3 of the default login manager app for the GNOME desktop environment.
-
The GNOME Project has announced a few days ago that a new development release towards the stable GNOME Software 3.12 application for the GNOME desktop environment is available for download and testing, introducing two new features and lots of bugfixes.
-
The Majority of the changes for this release can be found in the excellent selection of KDE applications. Several applications come with new features and increased stability. If you want to see the latest improvements for KDE 4.12, we have all the exciting details.
-
Popularity polls for software are questionable indicators at best. However, with KDE receiving just under a third of the votes in LinuxQuestion’s Members Choice for 2011 and 2012 and in Linux Journal’s 2013 Readers’ Choice Awards, there’s enough consistency to call KDE the most popular Linux desktop environment.
Admittedly, if you add all the choices that use GNOME technology (Cinnamon, GNOME, Mate, and Unity), then KDE loses its position. But if you consider a desktop environment as a combination of both the shell and the underlying technology, KDE’s position is unchallenged. At a time when half a dozen choices are available, KDE’s one-third is probably as close to dominance as any desktop is likely to get.
-
It’s now almost one year since I started my job at BlueSystem to work full time on KDE software. It’s a perfect time to look back and do some retrospection as well as trying to look into the future.
Of course my focus of work was on KWin, but especially over the last months I worked all over the KDE workspaces. Overall we have achieved a great result. KWin is running in near production-ready quality after the port to Qt 5 and the Plasma workspaces are also in a very good shape already. I tend to mentially compare the experience with the state of Plasma 1 six years ago which was just a few weeks before the first release. We are in a better state and there is still lots of time till we will do our Plasma 2 release.
-
-
The Maui project have released a completely new Wayland powered desktop named Hawaii 0.2, which promises to bring a new generation of desktop experience for GNU/Linux users. This desktop promises to bring a completely new out of box experience GNU experience for users and ships the latest and greatest open source software out there. The desktop environment uses Qt 5.2 as the toolkit backed by qtwayland module.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 10:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Space
-
-
It’s not Christmas yet, but Linus “Santa” Torvalds came down the chimney and announced that the fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.13 is now available for download and testing, for all you good Linux geeks out there.
-
-
-
-
-
44 years ago, somewhere in Helsinki, the capital and the largest city in Finland, was born Linus Benedict Torvalds, the founding father and the chief architect of the Linux kernel.
-
-
In this short article we want to remind everyone how Linux evolved over two decades, thanks to an infographic posted by the Linux Foundation two years ago to mark the 20th anniversary of Linux.
-
The Christmas benchmarks we have to share on Phoronix today are of testing the XFS, Btrfs, and EXT4 file-systems on the Linux 3.13 development kernel compared to Linux 3.12 from a high-performance hard drive. Earlier this month results were shared on Phoronix that indicated file-systems on a solid-state drive slowing down with this new Linux kernel, but is that also the case for HDDs?
-
Linus Torvalds has let release candidate five for version 3.13 of the Linux kernel into the wild for some festive footling.
-
Torvalds seems to be content that last week has been calmer since rc4 and he expects that things will calm down over the next week. About 40 percent of Linux 3.13-rc5 is driver related changes and updates including GPU, networking and sound; 15 percent are architecture updates specifically powerpc; 10 percent pertains to filesystems (ceph/cifs); 10 percent is about documentation; while core kernel (scheduler) and mm (numa) fixes make up the rest of the rc5.
-
Zemlin, in his report, notes that more than 1.5m Android, which is based on linux software, phone activations are happening every day. Many high-tech cars such as the Cadillac CTS sedan and the all-electric Tesla Model S run Linux.
-
While we’re mid-way through the Linux 3.13 kernel development cycle and the Linux 3.12 kernel has been out for almost two months, the Reiser4 file-system is finally available for this latest stable kernel release series.
-
-
-
Software-defined networking (SDN) emerged in 2013 to be one of the hottest trends in networking. SDN wasn’t invented in 2013, it’s a concept that has its roots in a Stanford University thesis co-authored by Martin Casado in 2005, “The Virtual Network System.” The term SDN emerged in 2009. Ironically, Casado, the man who helped to create the SDN revolution, said in a video interview earlier this year that he no longer knew what the term SDN meant, because the definition has blurred as networking vendors big and small adopt the term to fit their own definition.
-
-
-
I recognize at least 5 of the voices in the video: Jim Zemlin, Richard Stallman, Eben Upton, Mark Shuttleworth and of course Linus Torvalds.
-
Linux never fulfilled its original promise as an old-school desktop operating system. But its everywhere in 2013, driven by a vibrant community.
-
-
-
-
-
Linus Torvalds has just announced a few minutes ago, December 15, that the fourth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.13 is now available for download and testing.
-
-
-
-
That’s because all of Linux’s huge advantages – zero cost, reliability, security, customisability – are vitally important in this sector, which is about linking together things that have not hitherto been connected. Adding computational and networking capabilities to this new class of devices must be as cheap as possible, and that means Linux (and other open source components) have an unbeatable advantage here. It is therefore surely only a matter of time before Linux dominates this sector as completely as it does elsewhere.
-
-
Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 12, that the fifth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.
Even if it was released just 4 days after Linux 3.12.4, it looks like Linux kernel 3.12.5 is not as big as the previous two maintenance builds, as it only contains various updated drivers (networking, SCSI, USB, Xen), a couple of sound updates, and several ARM improvements.
Graphics Stack
-
-
-
-
There’s X.Org Server security vulnerabilities — even for vulnerabilities going back two decades — from time to time and in related components of the Linux graphics stack. Parts of the X.Org stack can be in fairly rough shape given the age of X11, but a very poor picture of it was painted at the Chaos Communication Congress. It was stated that the X.Org security is even worse than it looks.
At the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) last week in Germany, Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher who previously reported X.Org vulnerabilities, gave a presentation. Covered in the presentation at the very well known CCC conference in Germany were client-side issues and then an entire half of the presentation devoted to the X.Org Server.
-
While most of the Linux desktop world is focused around Wayland, X11, and Mir for the basis of the display technologies, DirectFB has continued marching forward and picked up many features this year and there will be another batch of features presented soon with DirectFB 1.8.
-
As an extra holiday present for Linux and open-source fans, Intel has quietly released a large batch of new programming documentation that covers their latest-generation Haswell graphics cores. The new “programmer’s reference manuals” cover the 2013 Haswell HD Graphics, Iris Graphics, and Iris Pro Graphics. This massive batch of documentation is spread across twelve volumes and does document their hardware registers.
-
-
After yesterday recapping Mesa’s development this year and LLVM’s growing development, up today are some statistics concerning Wayland and its Weston compositor this year from the Git side.
-
Last week was marked by the first Wayland/Weston 1.4 Alpha release ahead of the planned general availability in January. For those that aren’t up to date on all of the development activity, I’ve now had the time go through and highlight all of the major changes that landed in Git.
-
While Intel’s open-source OpenGL Linux driver improved a lot in 2013, sadly not advancing as much is the Intel OpenCL Linux driver for GPGPU support.
As covered by several Phoronix articles, Intel’s work to deliver (open-source) OpenCL support to the Linux desktop that can take advantage of Ivy Bridge and Haswell graphics cores is Beignet. Beignet still seems to be rather an after-thought and not a big focus of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers; most Beignet activity is still done by Intel China developers.
-
-
Going on for a while now has been the “etnaviv” driver project to create an open-source user-space graphics driver for the Vivante GC embedded GPUs. Work has slowed up to the Git repository as of late, but there still is the yet-to-be-mainlined Mesa classic driver.
-
While X.Org Server 1.15 was delayed from its September release target over having no new features at the time, the final release of X.Org Server 1.15 is now available.
-
-
Intel Broadwell support continues to be tidied up within the Intel Mesa DRI and DRM kernel drivers to hopefully make for a smooth launch of Intel’s next-generation processors within a few months time.
-
-
While Valve only advertises NVIDIA graphics driver support in the SteamOS Beta released on Friday, I already found that AMD Radeon GPUs work with Catalyst on this Debian Linux derived OS. With a simple tweak, Intel HD Graphics can also run quite fine on SteamOS.
-
-
For the ninth year in a row I am issuing year-in-review articles concerning the state of NVIDIA’s (and separately, AMD Catalyst) Linux graphics driver and the accomplishments the driver’s made in the past calendar year along with benchmarks of all notable driver releases this year. NVIDIA’s made a lot of progress on the Linux front this year, especially for any Linux gaming stakeholder, so let’s get started on our 2013 NVIDIA Linux Year-In-Review.
-
With the end of the year quickly approaching, at Phoronix I have been re-testing all of the Linux graphics drivers to see how the performance has changed in 2013 and the features added/removed over the calendar year. I’ve been doing these annual Linux driver yearly recaps going back to 2005 when Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy compared to Windows. Yesterday I started with the NVIDIA 2013 Linux Year-In-Review of their first-rate binary driver while today I have some performance tests done for Intel’s latest-generation Haswell graphics hardware.
-
-
-
Keith Packard has been working on an X.Org Server clean-up of the aging code-base and he’s managed to reduce the number of generated warnings down to zero.
With the X.Org Server code originating from the X Server code-base that’s been under development for the past 25 years, there’s lots of crufty old code still present that was written before ANSI C was even standardized. Over time, the code has gotten out of shape and doesn’t comply with today’s best practices.
Benchmarks
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Content is available under CC-BY-SA