The key question is: "What do you want to use Linux for?" Once you know that, everything else is easy.
For those of you who haven't met me before. I've been using Linux as a desktop operating system since 1993, two years after Linux was created. Since then I've used dozens of different Linux distribution and I used to run a website called Desktop Linux. Today, I use three different Linux desktops on a regular basis. In short, I know the Linux desktop.
So, let's get started shall we?
However, there's another operating system you might want to know about. It's called Linux and it's been around for a long time. In fact, it runs a large chunk of the world's servers and embedded computers. Android is based on it, and OS X is based on an offshoot of Linux's predecessor. So, what does that have to do with you?
A few good things about Linux are that it's free, most of the software for it is free, and it's very secure. There are also dozens of versions around targeted toward certain audiences. Linux Mint is one we've talked about before that's a good Windows replacement.
However, Linux Mint still has a learning curve for new users, and the default version requires newer hardware to run well. For older hardware, or a more streamlined experience, you might try a Linux version called elementary OS.
Elementary OS is visually more similar to OS X than Windows, but it's simple enough for anyone to use. It's also very lightweight, which means it runs great on older hardware, even low-end hardware from the mid-2000s.
Apple vice-president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller has been soundly criticised on a few websites — including iTWire — for some of his comments at the product launch on Monday, US time.
Schiller (seen above during his presentation) has been slammed as being insensitive, out of touch with reality and elitist. Of course, given that we have thousands of social justice warriors lurking on Twitter, such statements as his get needlessly magnified. People who have nothing to do but find offence will always find plenty of things about which to get offended.
Aaron Swartz, who helped establish the Archive’s Open Library project, is among those with a terracotta statue.
Startup ContainerX is fervently working toward to make its enterprise-focused container management platform generally available by early June.
The San Jose-based company came out of stealth at DockerCon Barcelona in November and has since been releasing a beta a month.
Hedvig says the time is now for resellers to deliver solutions that replace legacy storage solutions with software-defined alternatives. Toward that end, the company has launched a new partner program, CloudScale, for its software-defined storage (SDS) platform.
Announced Wednesday, CloudScale features training, discounts and access to additional partnership opportunities for resellers who use it to deploy Hedvig's SDS platform, which abstracts physical data storage servers into a cloud-friendly, software-defined environment.
Software-defined networking. Network functions virtualization. Virtual storage. These are the new buzzwords of the channel today. But are these trends actually as novel as they seem? Viewed from an historical perspective, not really.
The Linux Foundation-backed R Consortium, created to support the math-and-statistics-centric R language, will soon put its money where its mouth is.
The consortium is prepping several new projects designed to advance the language, its implementations, and the culture of development around it. In addition to defining standards and practices for R, this includes funding R-related projects the consortium believes will be a boon to the community.
ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.6 has been released as the newest version of this open-source file-system support for the Linux kernel.
The ZOL v0.6.5.5 release from two weeks back added Linux 4.5 kernel compatibility while this newest release continues to mature that Linux 4.5 kernel support. ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.6 also adds s390/s390x architecture support, various bug fixes, support for asynchronous zvol minor operations, and other small corrections.
The developers behind the ZFS for Linux (ZoL) project were proud to announce yet another stable release of the native ZFS implementation for GNU/Linux operating systems.
There are already many new features for the Linux 4.6 kernel but with the two week merge window not being over yet, new pull requests are still trickling in.
The Linux Foundation and Dice.com have partnered again on our annual jobs survey and invite all open source professionals and their employers to participate. By taking the survey, you will help the entire industry better understand the state of open source jobs and the nature of recruiting and retaining the best open source talent.
Now that everything has been mainlined concerning the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" support in the open-source Nouveau driver, it's relatively easy getting the hardware acceleration with OpenGL support running on this community-based, reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver.
I'm currently working on some Mesa 11.3-dev + Linux 4.6 Git benchmarks comparing the GeForce GTX 900 line-up on the open-source driver code to that of the NVIDIA 364 beta driver series. Those results should be here in a few days while this article is a quick guide covering how to get all the necessary bits in place.
One week after the surprise of delivering a beta of their new hybrid "PRO" driver stack, here's another big surprise: AMD has just published the initial open-source code for driver support with their upcoming "Polaris" graphics processors!
Looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver or another proprietary HTML/CSS editor? Let's round up some of your options.
Not all that many years ago, pretty much every webpage on the Internet was, at some level, designed painstakingly by hand. It was tough, and before CSS really took hold and became well supported across most common browsers, it often involved hacking a layout together by using HTML tables in a way that they were never really envisioned to support.
While some designers developed workflows completely based around manual editing of raw HTML files, the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor began to emerge as a tool of empowerment to millions of amateur and professional designers who didn't know, or at least hadn't mastered, the art of hypertext markup.
For quite some time I maintain set of scripts to convert some freely available dictionaries to StarDict format. I think it's time to make it easily available to others as well, so it has seen first release on PyPI after the code is almost 10 years old.
This is the biggest release ever with contributions from over 50 people only for this release: we’re happy to announce that coala 0.5 is out of the door! Static code analysis in one interface for all languages. You can stop learning new tools now :)
Even though the percentage of users went down, the overall number of users rose over the course of the last year, as 0.91 percent of 125 million means that there are at least 1.13 million gamers on the Linux platform. Moreover, Valve did not account for SteamOS machines, and while the platform is still in its nascent stages, it is slowly gaining momentum.
Looks like Linux is about to get its first Stardock Entertainment published game in the form of Offworld Trading Company.
Developer Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise is officially heading to Linux, publisher Feral Interactive confirmed today.
Feral Interactive, who has been responsible for porting titles such as Alien: Isolation and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor to Linux, has revealed that Tomb Raider will be targeting a release window for this spring.
I recently happened to notice that there was a new point-release (4.12) of the i3 Window Manager. In keeping with what seems to be their general approach, the release was extremely low-key; I only noticed it because I check their home page from time to time.
In March, the yearly meeting of KDE's Plasma team was held in Geneva, kindly hosted by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN). In-person meetings provide unique opportunities to work together face-to-face, at high bandwidth to tackle problems together and plan for the future. As there were some other groups present during this meeting, notably the visual design group and the Wiki cleanup team, there was ample opportunity to think outside of the Plasma box.
On March 22, 2016, GNOME developer Andre Klapper published a draft release schedule for the next major version of the GNOME desktop environment, version 3.22.
The release schedule has been posted a day before the launch of GNOME 3.20, which hit the streets on March 23, as expected, bringing dozens of goodies for fans of the open-source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems. GNOME 3.20 will make its way into the software repositories of various distributions in the coming weeks or months.
Time has passed and we finally made it: GNOME 3.20 just got released. I’m writing this post in a full GNOME 3.20 + Wayland session (thanks Arch folks, [gnome-unstable] is amazing).
I’d like to take some time to reflect about this release, what happened and what didn’t happen.
It’s a feature that many users were waiting for: proper GNOME support in GuixSD. Good news: the forthcoming Guix and GuixSD release will give you exactly that! Don’t miss the obligatory screenshot!
You would think adding GNOME is routine distro work involving a lot of packaging and bits of plumbing that’s already been done a hundred times, which is probably true! Yet, adding GNOME support turned out to be interesting in many ways: it’s a good test for GuixSD’s declarative operating system configuration framework, it’s a way to formalize how this whole software stack fits together, and it’s been an insightful journey into GNU/Linux desktop plumbing!
After the usual 6-month development cycle, GNOME 3.20 was released today and it includes changes such as updated Software app, which can now handle operating system upgrades, image editing capabilities for the Photos app, a new shortcuts window which displays the available keyboard shortcuts in most GNOME apps, and much more.
Yep, a brand new version of (arguably) the most popular Linux desktop environment there is, is ready for you to poke, prod and peruse for your pleasure (assuming you’re running a distro that plans to add it).
We are excited to announce the release of GNOME 3.20. This latest version of GNOME 3 is the result of six months of development and includes 28,933 changes, made by approximately 870 contributors.
3.20 has been named “Delhi” in recognition of this year’s GNOME.Asia organizing team. GNOME.Asia is an important annual GNOME event, and is only possible due to the hard work of local volunteers. This year it will be held in Delhi, India between the 21st and 24th of April.
The top story today was the release of GNOME 3.20, sure to be the next default desktop in several distributions. Elsewhere, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a new project for "activism and organizing" and Red Hat stock slips today. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols offered some tip for choosing the right desktop and Bruce Byfield released his new LibreOffice book.
Gnome has emitted its first major upgrade in six months with the release of Gnome 3.20.
The biggest change, the group reckons, is in software upgrade handling: for the first time, Gnome users can run major operating system upgrades from the GUI, without having to drop down to the command line.
While that's the sort of thing that fills greybeards' cups with bitter tears, it's a big step forward in usability. Upgrades, once downloaded, are installed when the system's not running, which also makes life easier for non-sysadmins.
One of the great things about Linux-based operating systems is the ability to change the user interface by way of desktop environment. If you like Ubuntu, for instance, but don't like Unity, you can choose an alternative such as KDE, Xfce, or GNOME, to name a few.
While GNOME 3x was initially quite controversial for its abrupt design change from 2x, it has evolved into something quite remarkable -- my favorite such DE. Actually, GNOME 3 is much more than a pretty UI -- it is a design philosophy and suite of useful programs. Today, it reaches a major milestone with 3.20. It features many enhancements, such as improved Wayland support.
In a recent post, I showcased a build of GNOME from scratch. This was created using the ybd build tool to build GNOME from Baserock YAML definitions.
The Cub Linux (previously Chromixium OS) developers have just announced on their Twitter account that the RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming 1.0 version of the operating system is available for download.
Before we tell you what goodies have been shipped with the first Release Candidate builds of Cub Linux 1.0, we would like to remind those of you who are not in the loop that, earlier this year, the team announced the rename of the project to Cub Linux from Chromixium OS at the request of Google’s Trademark Enforcement Team.
Softpedia has been informed today, March 23, 2016, by Roberto J. Dohnert, CEO of Black Lab Software, about the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Alpha build of Black Lab Linux 8 "Onyx."
I used to watch the Linux Help Guy videos on Youtube before he had to rename his channel for having a slightly racy background image in one of his video tutorials.
He swore by Manjaro Linux and after using it I can totally understand why. I am no big fan of KDE but this is really very very usable, to the point I will be entrusting this to my main machine over the top of Linux Mint.
Is it for everybody? You probably need to learn a little bit of command line, especially the inner workings of Yaourt and PacMan but other than that you should be golden.
This is the best Linux distribution I have used in quite some time.
Today, March 23, 2016, the maintainer of the LXDE and LXQt community editions of the Arch Linux-based Manjaro has proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of Manjaro Linux LXDE 16.03.
The Manjaro Community is proud to present our new Lxde Edition. Manjaro-Lxde aims to be light, fast and resource friendly, yet at the same time complete and ready to use for all typical everyday office- and multimedia-needs.
As commercial open source companies have proliferated, it's become a given that folks anticipate multi-billion dollar firms focused exclusively on open source. And back in 2012, Red Hat emerged as an illustration of this fact, as it reported that for its fiscal year 2012, total revenue was $1.13 billion--nothing to shake a stick at.
One of the S&P 500’s big losers for Wednesday March 23 was Red Hat Inc. (RHT). The company’s stock fell 4.19% to $72.54 on volume of 3.6 million shares.
Red Hat Inc. (RHT) experienced unusually high volume on Mar. 22, as the stock gained 1.08% to a closing price of $75.71. The stock saw 3.11 million shares trade hands over the course of the day on 25,321 trades. Given that the stock’s average daily volume over the last month has been 1.75 million shares a day, this represents a pretty substantial spike over the norm.
Red Hat is the world’s largest open source company. Run as a for profit company, it manages to give every line of code away and still rake in a cozy 1.5 to 2 billion US dollars a year. So, quite provably, Red Hat knows how to run an open source business. Despite being a software company, as a corporation, Red Hat has hopes for the future of open hardware, and they put their money where their ethos is.
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Red Hat’s first interest is that anyone who uses their software to run a 3D printer or interacts with the files involved has an easy time of it in Linux. To that end Tom regularly tests the latest versions of the software we regularly use. He makes sure that the software is nicely packaged for Red Hat. On top of that he also contributes to the projects themselves. He has submitted patches for Cura and Slic3r to name a few.
Approaches like this make cyber-risk feel like it’s a shared effort. We have standard processes for risk assessment as well as a subcommittee that includes our CSO and other top executives and focuses on reviewing security issues that are escalated to them. We have Finance involved as a sponsor in initiatives around protection of payments information. And we increasingly partner with the business to ensure that risk prevention doesn’t become revenue prevention. The last thing you want today is for security to be an, "IT, go and implement this" effort. For information security programs to really succeed today, it’s got to be an all-in approach and a way of life.
While Verizon (NYSE: VZ) revealed last year that it is working with Cisco Systems, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC), Juniper Networks and Nokia Networks (NYSE:NOK) to develop its software-based solutions and strategies, it's also working with Dell, Big Switch Networks and Red Hat, a Verizon spokesman confirmed.
Red Hat has become the icon for other companies to follow: they established that you can make money from open source. And they do it the old fashioned way, selling subscription and support.
Red Hat announced its fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2016 financial results on March 22, becoming the first pure-play open-source vendor to generate over $2 billion in annual revenue.
Quarterly revenue for stood at $544 million (€£384m), a 17 percent year-over-year increase. Subscription revenue hit $480 million (€£338m), up 18 percent year-over-year, accounting for around 88 percent of Red Hat’s total revenue.
The drop in Red Hat (RHT - Get Report) shares seems inexplicable to some investors. Red hat is down 4.5% on Wednesday despite the company topping earnings per share and revenue estimates and providing better-than-expected guidance.
Konstantinidis first became involved in the Fedora community in December 2009. At the age of fourteen, he became a Fedora Ambassador. Giannis said, “It’s exciting to be one of the youngest people to have ever joined the project, and especially the Ambassadors.” Giannis represents the Fedora community at events and conferences both domestically and abroad. He gives presentations, runs workshops, and organizes event booths. His focus is on community building in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region with a focus on the Balkans region.
Earlier today, March 23, 2016, Fedora's Program Manager Jan Kurik announced that the Alpha build of the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system has been approved for landing and will arrive next Tuesday, March 29.
The decision was taken during the second Fedora 24 Alpha Go/No-Go meeting that took place on March 23, where Fedora's QA, Release Engineering and Development teams all agreed to go live with the Fedora 24 Alpha on March 29.
"Fedora 24 Alpha will be publicly available on March 29, 2016. The official release time has been agreed on F24 Alpha Readiness meeting to be 14:00 UTC," said Jan Kurik, Fedora program manager at Red Hat in today's announcement.
“I contributed!” is a special series on the Fedora Community Blog which helps Fedora contributors understand and get a feel of the activity happening in different areas in Fedora, especially areas other than what they personally participate in. These visualizations for 2015 are made using Gource videos generated by threebean using fedmsg2gource – a CLI tool used to generate Gource videos from fedmsg history,
It is with great pleasure that we do hereby announce, that this seat has been filled by long-time Fedora contributor María “tatica” Leandro!
The DebConf Content team is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for the DebConf16 conference, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa from 2 through 9 July 2016.
If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please check out the battery-stats in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from github. As always, patches are very welcome.
Replacing Skype, Viber and WhatsApp is a big task, however, it is quite achievable by breaking it down into small chunks of work. I've been cataloguing many of the key improvements needed to make Free RTC products work together. Many of these chunks are within the scope of a GSoC project.
The developers of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux operating system briefly announced this morning, March 23, 2016, on their Twitter account, a few juicy details about the next major release of the distribution.
BQ, the Spanish brand of smartphones, tablets, and electronic readers, has announced today, March 23, 2016, on their Twitter account that the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet will be available for pre-order next week, March 28.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is codenamed ‘Xenial Xerus‘. In a massive shock€¹ I can reveal that the animal logo for the upcoming Ubuntu release is …also of a Xerus (which is the posh name given to a type of ground squirrel).
Some members of the BSD community have announced an Ubuntu-based version of BSD called UbuntuBSD.
UbuntuBSD is based on the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel that’s used in the main Ubuntu. It’s using the FreeBSD 10.1 kernel and is based on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.
UbuntuBSD uses the ZFS file system and comes with the lightweight Xfce desktop. Installing UbuntuBSD is quite easy, though it’s using text installer that you see in Debian or Ubuntu server.
BSD -- the open source, Unix-like operating system kernel that lives in Linux's shadow -- is now coming to the Ubuntu world, thanks to a new open source project called UbuntuBSD.
For the uninitiated, here's the BSD back story: Created starting in the late 1970s (originally as an enhanced version of AT&T's Unix operating system, then as a complete replacement for it) at the University of California, Berkeley, BSD was one of the first freely redistributable operating systems. Then, in the 1990s, for various complicated reasons -- largely but not solely related to legal challenges -- BSD took a back seat to other free operating systems that were based on GNU software and the then-new Linux kernel.
Last November I wrote a short tour of the UX principles of the Ubuntu operating systems for phones. In this article I will focus on specific UI elements, based on the official style guide provided by Canonical. Time to begin!
Another week, another newsletter from the Ubuntu Kernel Team, as announced by Joseph Salisbury from Canonical on March 23, 2016, on one of the project's mailing lists.
Yesterday, the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system had another kernel update, and this time, it was rebased on the latest stable, long-term supported Linux 4.4.6 kernel, just in time for the Final Beta launch on March 24, 2016 (later today).
Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak informed the Ubuntu Touch community today, March 24, 2016, about the latest landings that happened this week for the upcoming OTA-10 software update.
Despite the different branding schemes, the “economical” Boxer-6638U is said to be the follow-on to Aaeon’s similarly stripped down, 4th Generation “Haswell” based AEC-6638 box-PC. Not only does the new system run Fedora Linux or Windows on a faster, 14nm 5th Generation Intel Core “Broadwell” chip, but it’s 30 percent smaller (197 x 143 x 55mm), offers a wider -20 to 60€°C temperature range, and supports a wider power range of 9-24V.
AMD's HuskyBoard still isn't shipping even though it was originally supposed to launch last year as a developer board powered by their ARMv8-based Opteron SoC. While the LeMaker Cello is moving forward as an ARM developer board using the Opteron A1100, 96Boards recently updated their web-site with new Enterprise Edition (EE) board details.
A Phoronix reader pointed out that the HuskyBoard is back to appearing on the 96Boards web-site, the Linaro initiative to drive more standardization into the prolific number of ARM developer boards appearing. With the HuskyBoard not out yet, the LeMaker Cello is the first board complying with the 96Boards Enterprise Edition specification.
Some news that our Tizen TV applications developers might be Interested in. TOAST, a free & open source platform, has now been updated to version 1.1.0 and is available on Github right now. Toast attempts to reduce the overhead time associated with app development and also makes your TV app available across multiple platforms.
Samsung, working in collaboration with motocross star Edo Mossi and YouTube influencer Cane Secco, have developed a prototype motorcycle windscreen. The device connects with your Smartphone to project information about messages, emails, calls, as well as directions for navigation, straight onto the Windshield Normally we would expect the connection to be completed by Bluetooth but it appears that WiFi is being used here. You are also able to reply to certain types of messages using a predefined message, something like “I’m riding my bike and I’ll get in touch soon”.
In terms of software, the Pixel C is the best Android tablet available, and the updates in the pipeline as Android N reaches general availability make the future of both this tablet and the Android tablet experience across the board a bright one. Aesthetically, the only potential competitor is the Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet. Owing to Sony's reputation for updates, this too will receive an update to N upon general availability. As for hardware features, if the inclusion of microSD or LTE is a must-have, the Z4 is probably the better bet.
The well-reviewed ZenWatch 2 is available in curvy, but not round, 1.63- and 1.45-inch versions. It has multiple faces, a pedometer, a fast charger, IP67, and a mic. Selling for as low as $150, the ZenWatch is still the Android Wear price leader.
In late December after weeks of testing Motorola announced the official Android 6.0 Marshmallow update for the 2015 Moto X Pure Edition in the US. Motorola was one of the fastest to Android 6.0 stateside, but users in other regions and different Moto X models haven’t been as lucky, until now.
It seems open source solutions are everywhere you look these days, and the promise of easily accessible and public code has become an attractive prospect to both individual developers and big companies like Microsoft (MSFT). You may consider yourself a GNU/Linux expert, but here are some facts you probably didn't know about the world of open source.
A document management system developed by COI, a government IT think tank, can be made available under an open source licence, the organisation says. “We are ready to implement this model”, a COI spokesperson said in an email.
In a 2013 survey, 11% of contributors to free and open source software identified as women. But perhaps the future looks brighter? We can answer this question by examining the participation of women in Google Summer of Code, a program that provides a stipend for post-secondary school students to contribute to open source software for a summer. From 2011 to 2015, the program consisted of about 7-10% female participants. This is an extremely low percentage and does not bode well for the future of diversity in open source.
Open source technologies like OpenStack are playing a very important role in this transformation. AT&T is working with open source project like OPNFV, OpenDaylight, Open Contrail, ON.Lab, the Open Container Initiative, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Open Compute Project and many others.
AT&T is often referenced as the gold standard among domestic carriers as well as one of the global leaders in terms of its dedication towards virtualization. AT&T in late 2014 announced plans to control 75% of its network resources using virtualization technologies by 2020, and that at the end of 2015 the carrier had reached 5.7% control, which was ahead of its 5% target.
The rise of financial firms' adoption of open source could force vendors to make an adjustment.
The level of Containers excitement has increased even further this year, with much interplay between Docker, Kubernetes, Rkt, CoreOS, Mesos, LXC, LXD, OpenVZ, systemd, and much else besides. This excitement has led to some interesting new use cases, including even the use of containers on Android.
Some of these use cases in turn require some interesting new changes to the Linux plumbing, including mounts in unprivileged containers, improvements to cgroups resource management, ever-present security concerns, and interoperability between various sets of tools.
At the Open Networking Summit (ONS) this week, vendors big and small are talking about the success and direction of the open networking movement, including Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and whitebox hardware. There's much reason for optimism, but there are a number of key challenges, too.
Russian Fedora Chromium users of both architectures (32 e 64 bit), release 49.0.2623.87 is available for testing now!
There have been some changes in the last 3-4 releases and ffmpeg now has been included and patched differently to the older versions. Also, vaapi and pdf support have been disabled and the build is done with clang again, as gcc 6 was the reason why chromium began to crash. GTK3 support has been enabled.
Chrome exists in a weird place between a desktop app and an operating system. While the Chrome app launcher makes sense on a Chromebook, it’s weird on other desktops. So Google’s removing it.
Also I have now released my first Rust crate, that provide a Rust API to Exempi: exempi-rs. Short of rewriting the whole parsing in Rust for safety — the core of Exempi is Adobe official XMP SDK written in C++ —, this will do.
Mozilla has announced that the Internet of Things (IoT) will be the next big opportunity for its open source software platform. "The Internet of Things is changing the world around us, with new use cases, experiences and technologies emerging every day," wrote officials in a post. "As we continue to experiment in this space, we wanted to take a moment to share more details around our approach, process and current projects we’re testing."
Mozilla's Senior Vice President for Connected Devices, Ari Jaaski, announced that the open source firm wants to "develop, test and evaluate" four IoT software projects. They include Project Link, Project Sensor Web, Project Smart Home and Project Vaani.
In April, Nantes Métropole, France’s 6th largest city, will complete its transition to LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity tools. The city has budgeted EUR 200,000 for bug fixes and new features, specifying that all improvements are to be submitted for inclusion in the LibreOffice project.
As one of the points we had to revive the Phnom Penh Linux User Group again, was to really do activities on Software-, Hardware- and Document Freedom Day and coming to a regularly meeting, which we have now each first Tuesday in the month at the iCafe. As it is the time for Document Freedom Day (DFD) we will have at our next meeting of course, a topic that fits to it. I will be showing how easily it can be done to use Inkscape for presentation slides, to bring the people to use this instead of flash, pdf or more evil prezi.
Usually, I write about the news, not make it. Today, though, I am making a small exception. Today, I am releasing my new book, "Designing with LibreOffice," under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, with a free download and a for-sale trade paperback.
Why bother, when LibreOffice already has some of the best documentation in free software?
Nearly five years ago, my team at GeorgiaGov Interactive began a journey to migrate our enterprise web platform (hosting over 50 state agency websites at the time) away from a self-hosted model with a proprietary content management system to Drupal 7 and a cloud hosted environment. We were the first state to make such a bold shift, but we weren't the last.
Boston-based open source company Acquia has announced that it will provide US$500,000 to the community around the content management system Drupal, in order to help in the development of modules that add additional functionality.
Drupal is free software developed originally by Belgian Dries Buytaert (seen above) and released under the GNU General Public Licence. The Acquia move has been prompted by the rapid take-up of version 8 of Drupal and the funding will go towards modules for this version.
Open source is a two-way win. You have to invest in the open source community, but the value you get back for doing that is too great not to pursue this strategy.
GNUstep's ProjectCenter debugger module - something which was initiated by Greg and has always been quite experimental and unfinished - was based on running GDB via a virtual terminal by using openpty(). Sadly openpty() is not very portable and also.
Europe’s two main free software advocacy groups, April and the FSFE, argue that software specifically developed for or by the public sector should be made available as free software. The two NGO’s will continue to push Europe’s public administrations to increase the use of free and open source software.
A one year pilot project on standards for waste management services in the UK’s local authorities is making available its code and documentation under an open source software licence. The project has delivered its final business case report this month, estimating that waste data standards could drive millions of savings for local authorities.
Ryan Nagle, lead developer at the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), presented on tools he and INN staffers build to help other nonprofit news organizations. During the session, he previewed tools INN uses during the development process. You can view the code for these tools here, including the Largo project - a framework for building WordPress sites for nonprofit news organizations - as well as tons of WordPress plugins for creating roundup newsletters, quizzes, deployment tools and more.
As the New York Times article points out, 10,000 exomes -- essentially, the 1% of the genome that contains the instructions for building the body's proteins -- is not a huge number, but Ambry Genetics hopes to add data from as many as 200,000 customers a year to the database. So far it has spent $20 million on the project. In part, it has been able to bear that cost because of the key Supreme Court decision which struck down Myriad Genetics' patents on genetic testing. That cleared the way for other companies to make money by offering the tests -- including Ambry Genetics.
The Metro Ethernet Forum, the standards body for the adoption of carrier Ethernet, has announced two new initiatives that will focus on open source software and open specification hardware for MEF-defined services.
Koçulu yanked his source code because, we're told, one of the modules was called Kik and that apparently attracted the attention of lawyers representing the instant-messaging app of the same name.
Unless you’ve studied computer science, you probably won’t have heard of ALGOL. It was designed by a committee of scientists, half from the US Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and half from the German Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (GAMM). They met in Zurich in 1958, with the grand intention of designing a universal computing language. The preliminary post-meeting report called this language IAL (International Algebraic Language); it was officially renamed ALGOL about a year later. The first ALGOL 58 compiler was implemented by the end of 1958.
Google has added support for Node.js on its marmitey App Engine on a managed VM beta basis.
JavaScript devs have been offered the chance to use the Chocolate Factory's cloud service to tend to their web and mobile apps.
The far-from-universally adored App Engine intends to offer an easy service for developers to "build, deploy, manage and automatically scale services" on Wonka's infrastructure.
The latest iteration of Apple's open-source programming language Swift has taken its first major step towards Linux support.
The release of Swift 2.2 landed on March 21, and includes its first Linux port in the form of binaries for Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.10.
As Neowin notes, now that there's a Linux build, "it won't be long before it unofficially arrives" on other distributions.
Realising the limitations of Moore’s Law and its 24 months timeframe to double the processing speed, Intel has decided to fundamentally change its manufacturing process. Ditching the ‘tick-tock’ model, Intel has now adopted ‘process, architecture, optimization’ model that follows a new 30 months schedule.
Starting with an upcoming 14nm “Kaby Lake” CPU, Intel will shift to three Core generations per fab process step, instead of two.
In a blog post on Monday, Google software engineer Christian Blichmann said the software, a creation of zynamics -- which was acquired by Google in 2011 -- is now a free addition for security researcher toolkits.
There is a new branded security vulnerability known as Badlock on the horizon, complete with its own Website and logo. Badlock is a currently unknown vulnerability in the open-source Samba project that enables interoperability for file and folder sharing between Linux and Windows environments. Full disclosure and a patch on the Badlock vulnerability is currently scheduled for April 12.
Two-factor authentication (2FA) should be the cornerstone of today’s online security and yet the vast majority of users continue to rely on old-fashioned usernames and passwords despite ample evidence that this is now wide open to attack. In anticipation of the day the technology catches on, the UK Government some time ago decided to add 2FA authentication into its flagship GOV.UK Verify service, a new and more secure way for citizens to access services such as tax self-assessment, passport applications and driving license renewal.
A newsletter circulated after Islamic State’s November massacre in Paris sheds light on what the group believes yesterday’s deadly attack in Brussels will accomplish, including weakening unity on the continent and exhausting European states economically.
When a series of bombs went off at the Brussels airport and in a subway station yesterday, killing 31 people and injuring more than 200, the reaction of the US press was immediate and overwhelming. Every major news outlet turned its website over to coverage of the suicide attacks, often accompanied by live tickers and infographics. “Brussels Attacks Shake European Security” reads the banner headline on today’s New York Times’ front page (3/23/16); the Washington Post (3/22/16) worried that the bombings “made clear that European capitals remain perilously vulnerable despite attempts to dismantle the militant network that perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Paris in generations last November.”
It was a curious statement, given that just nine days earlier, another European nation’s capital had been the site of a remarkably similar suicide bombing. On March 13, a car bomb went off in Ankara, Turkey, killing 34 people and injuring 125. As in Brussels, the Ankara bombing, carried out by a Kurdish group opposed to Turkey’s military actions in Kurdish regions of Syria, targeted a transit hub—there a heavily trafficked bus stop—and the victims were likewise unsuspecting civilians going about their lives, including the father of international soccer star Umut Bulut (Guardian, 3/14/16), who was on his way back from one of his son’s matches.
Well, the most important thing is, don’t panic. Given how easy it is to kill people physically, the important thing is how extremely difficult it is to do it mentally. In fact terrorism is vanishingly rare. It is so rare there has only been one person killed by terrorists in the mainland United Kingdom in the last decade.
An event like that in Brussels today horrifies and terrifies. But remember, that the same number of people murdered today are killed in Belgium less than every three weeks in traffic accidents, and have been killed at that rate or greater in traffic accidents for over four decades. Over 700 people a year die in traffic accidents in Belgium; twenty times more than have just been killed by terrorists. Of course, the terrorist incident is a big single death toll and more stark because it is a deliberate act of evil. But if you’ve just been mown down by a car, that also is not pretty and you are just as dead.
So panic must be avoided. There is no sense in which the tiny threat of terrorism is a genuine threat to western civilisation – unless we grossly overreact. Old fashioned intelligence work is the best way to counter active intelligence cells. This would be much more effective if it were targeted. The pool of intelligence is far too contaminated with tens of millions of intercepts of harmless people from mass surveillance, and all kinds of dross intelligence fed to us from torture chambers around the world.
[...]
Any response that tries simply to increase physical security and surveillance will entirely miss the point.
How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.
In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make "the world free from nuclear weapons". People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was all fake. He was lying.
The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and the governor of Okinawa Takeshi Onaga agreed in early March to take a dispute over the future of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma (seen above) out of the courts and back offline to the negotiating table.
Abe “accepted” a freeze on construction work at a contentious new location planned for the base as part of the agreement, though work had already been put on hold while Tokyo and Okinawa fought a legal battle over the site.
In the decades since the draft ended in 1973, a strange new military has emerged in the United States. Think of it, if you will, as a post-democratic force that prides itself on its warrior ethos rather than the old-fashioned citizen-soldier ideal. As such, it’s a military increasingly divorced from the people, with a way of life ever more foreign to most Americans (adulatory as they may feel toward its troops). Abroad, it’s now regularly put to purposes foreign to any traditional idea of national defense. In Washington, it has become a force unto itself, following its own priorities, pursuing its own agendas, increasingly unaccountable to either the president or Congress.
Three areas highlight the post-democratic transformation of this military with striking clarity: the blending of military professionals with privatized mercenaries in prosecuting unending “limited” wars; the way senior military commanders are cashing in on retirement; and finally the emergence of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as a quasi-missionary imperial force with a presence in at least 135 countries a year (and counting).
Last month, the Spanish government updated its Code on Electronic Administration. The Code now includes a chapter specifically on Transparency and Access to Public Information. The chapter addresses Law 19/2013 of 9 December about transparency, access to public information and good governance.
"Around 450 people took part in the ten sessions that took place during this six-day event," says Larisa Panait, member of the Romanian OGP Coordination Unit and Advisor to the Chancellery of the Prime-Minister. "They were representatives of public institutions and local authorities, civil society members, students, open data activists, journalists, participants from the government internship program, academia, Members of Parliament, and representatives of the private sector."""
In a prepared statement, he added: "The expected beneficial effect is to enhance both transparency and participation, and to create new opportunities for actors of civil society and start-ups, to provide value-added services, using the open data available to public bodies."
Facing a future where competition is rampant, customers pay less money, and solar users actually get paid for driving power back to the grid gives any entrenched utility executive heartburn. Fortunately for them, we live in an era where buying state law and tricking consumers into rooting against their own best self interests is easier than ever before. Florida (where air conditioning drives the second highest energy consumption nationally) is quickly becoming the poster child for how utilities are using ethically incontinent lawmakers and a gullible populace to prevent solar power technology from reaching critical mass.
The Rockefeller Family Fund said on Wednesday it will divest from fossil fuels as quickly as possible and "eliminate holdings" of Exxon Mobil, chiding the oil company for allegedly misleading the public about the threat of climate change.
The move by the U.S. based charity, which will also include coal and Canadian oil sands holdings, is especially notable because a century ago John D. Rockefeller Sr. made a fortune running Standard Oil, a precursor to Exxon Mobil.
Why will Trump be like Carter? Because “since World War II, only Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have left office with high approval numbers.” Well, OK then!
Last week, a UC Regents working group released a proposed set of Principles Against Intolerance, created in response to a series of anti-Semitic incidents on UC campuses. On March 23, the Regents will vote on whether to officially adopt those principles. Controversially, the document not only condemns anti-Semitism, but also anti-Zionism.
Facebook happily hosts Kim Kardashian’s cleavage, but suspended users posting images of topless Aboriginal women for ‘violating community standards’. Leigh Alexander wonders, just whose standards are we talking about?
Just recently, we were writing about the increasingly-desperate assault on Popcorn Time in Norway, where even linking to sites that offer the software is enough for the authorities to seize a domain name. Now the Russian anti-piracy group Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPO) wants to take its own fight up a notch in an equally vain attempt to stop people finding out how to circumvent blocklists using proxies, VPNs and Tor.
Apparently the book was obliterated (this seems to be an accurate description of the publisher’s actions) because, like a biology text that describes the established facts of evolution, Global Politics offered a “lens to view the world” that was judged blasphemous by a powerful, influential and ideologically driven element of the community. Of course, that is not how McGraw-Hill rationalized its action. Instead, the publisher claimed that a serious inaccuracy in the text was belatedly discovered. This took the form of a series of four maps that show “Palestinian loss of land from 1946 to 2000.”
The Indonesian Film Censorship Board (LSF) currently gets to take a look at every film that distributors want to show at commercial theaters in order to edit out any parts that don’t fit with their conservative agenda, including not just nudity and excessive violence but also elements such as storylines involving LGBT characters.
Due to this censorship, the only bastion of freedom for many filmmakers in Indonesia is film festivals and non-commercial screenings, which have been considered to fall outside of LSF’s jurisdiction. This has been one of the only avenues for people to watch local and international films that include mature elements that Indonesian censors don’t think local audiences are sophisticated enough to handle.
Set in an unidentified American city, the play takes place in a room in which the audience is watching a presentation by two agents of the National Security Agency offering surveillance tapes and advice to members of two couples.
“Their talk is a promotional effort to make the NSA seem more warm and cuddly,” actor Scott Douglas Wilson said.
Wilson plays Tom, a gung-ho agent.
Today, two representatives from the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee sent a letter (PDF) to Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), asking him to discontinue any plans to expand the list of who the NSA shares certain information with.
A bipartisan pair of House lawmakers warned NSA Director Michael S. Rogers Monday not to step over the demarcation line between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement with a reported plan to share intelligence data, a “radical policy shift” they called dangerous and unconstitutional.
So now that there's been a little time to process the Justice Department's last minute decision to bail out on the hearing in the San Bernardino case, claiming it was because some mysterious third party had demonstrated a way to hack into Syed Farook's iPhone, it's becoming increasingly clear that (1) the DOJ almost certainly lied at some point in this case and (2) this move was almost entirely about running away from a public relations battle that it was almost certainly losing (while also recognizing that it had a half-decent chance of also losing the court case). Just replace "Sir Robin" with "the DOJ" in the following video.
PARKING near GCHQ is continuing to cause headaches for residents in the Benhall area of Cheltenham.
Now a Cheltenham Borough councillor in the area has added her concerns to the growing issue.
The news that the new National Cyber Security centre, which was announced in November by Chancellor George Osborne standing inside the top secret building at GCHQ in Cheltenham, will be placed in London has come as a disappointment to some in Cheltenham.
Adobe has announced what it calls "cross-device co-operation" at its Summit digital marketing event under way in Las Vegas.
The goal, said Adobe Target Director Kevin Lindsay, is to "provide the ability, through all our marketing solutions, for marketers to be able to market to their consumers as people rather than as separate devices. Typically this is viewed as a cross-device problem. How do I take this group of devices and treat them as the person they actually represent?”
This task is easy for large firms such as Google and Facebook, since users are generally logged in across all their devices, but not so much for those using other marketing channels.
Another terrorist attack somewhere in the world* has provoked another round of punditry from former government officials on how to protect America from future attacks. Over the coming weeks, there will be no shortage of stupid ideas, useless ideas and pointless discussions about "heightened security" at any place people gather.
*"World" = Western Europe only
None of it will matter. Security has never really been scaled back anywhere since the 9/11 attacks -- certainly not to the levels seen prior to September 2001. There's only so much security anyone can actually provide but endless off-Broadway productions of security theater to be explored.
US President Barack Obama landed in Havana Sunday to great fanfare, both in Cuba and stateside. His visit marks a significant shift of the United States’ approach towards the socialist state, and the possibility of cooperation after decades of hostility. US media generally struck a hopeful tone, with a surprisingly nuanced mix of positive and critical stories about Cuba.
Some Cold War hold-outs in the media just weren’t having it, though, taking the occasion to feign outrage that Obama could visit a country with such a terrible human rights record. While American human-rights hypocrisy is nothing new, a string of Bush-era, pro-torture, pro-Guantánamo pundits expressing indignation at Cuba’s human rights failings was still remarkable.
Cybersecurity is a crowded field. Not every competitor will make it. That's inevitable. Tiversa is one of the also-rans.
Tiversa is helmed by Robert Boback. Back in 2009, Boback was already well-versed in the cybersecurity hard sell. Here's what he had to say about P2P software in front of a Congressional audience -- an audience well-versed in the art of selling fear to fund additional government products.
More than a year after San Francisco police officers arrested public defender Jami Tillotson for doing her job, the city's Office of Citizen Complaints has issued its report. It clears Tillotson of any wrongdoing and lays the blame solely at the feet of the San Francisco PD.
First, a quick refresher, since we're discussing something that happened last January: Tillotson's clients were approached by police officers in a courthouse hallway. The officers began asking her clients questions and photographing them for a photo array. She inserted herself between the officers and the men and demanded the officers stop questioning them/photographing them without running it through her. The officers responded in the only way they knew how: they arrested her for resisting arrest -- an arrest in which she cooperated fully with no amount of resistance. (It seems like circular reasoning, but "resisting arrest" is a catch-all for other sorts of interference with police work, rather than simply resisting an arrest.)
Last week, New York City police officers arrested four well-known activists for filming them. Copwatchers—people who regularly film and document police activity—have often been targeted by cops who don’t want to be recorded, despite reminders that recording police interactions is legal in the city. While legal protections for filming police are still unclear in some parts of the country, the invaluable role that copwatchers play as journalists—acting as the eyes, ears and media of the streets—deserves to be recognized.
LAST MONDAY, Bahraini security forces arrested prominent human rights activist Zainab al-Khawaja and her 15-month-old son. The arrest came on the fifth anniversary of a Saudi military intervention that crushed an uprising by Bahrain’s Shiite majority and marked a grim milestone in the country’s crackdown on dissidents.
Al-Khawaja was taken into custody to serve a prison term that could run between one and three years after being found guilty in 2014 of charges related to the uprising. The main charge against her relates to an incident in which she insulted the country’s monarch by tearing up one of his ubiquitous portraits, a criminal offense in Bahrain. Her arrest this week, along with her infant son, signaled the government’s intention to enforce the sentence. According to her family, her son will remain incarcerated with her until he reaches the age of 2.
As voters head to the polls in Arizona, we continue our conversation with Jacinta González, who was transferred to immigration custody, despite being a U.S. citizen, after her arrest for helping block a highway leading to a Donald Trump rally Saturday. González says an immigration agent called her a "pain-in-the-ass illegal" after she invoked her constitutional right to remain silent. "The racial profiling that I underwent is just indicative of larger systematic problems with how ICE is going into jails, how ICE is profiling people in the streets," González says. González also talks about using the gender-neutral term "Latinx," and the importance of building community power beyond the 2016 elections.
We're excited to announce the formation of a new grassroots network, the Electronic Frontier Alliance. Bringing together community and campus organizations across the U.S., the Alliance will serve as an increasingly vital hub for activism and organizing addressing a spectrum of civil liberties and digital rights issues.
Just a quick reminder of our project to remind EU regulators not to wreck the internet with short-sighted regulations, where you can sign on to a letter that will be sent out early next week. The issue is that EU regulators have taken what seems like a good idea (removing geographic restrictions on the internet in Europe) and turned it into an excuse to try to cram in a bunch of bad internet regulations, mostly focused on removing or weakening intermediary liability protections. It appears that some in the EU Commission think that by forcing Google and Facebook to monitor communications and be forced to more proactively delete content that it will somehow (1) stop bad stuff from happening online and (2) hold back those two companies from continuing to dominate the European market.
We've noted a few times that Tennessee is one of numerous states that have literally let incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast write state telecom law. Most notably, around 20 states have now blocked towns and cities from building their own broadband networks -- or striking public/private partnerships -- even in cases where the market has clearly failed. It's protectionism pure and simple, and when the FCC voted last year to try and gut these laws in Tennessee and North Carolina, ISP allies in Congress were quick to assail the FCC for "violating states rights" (to let incumbent ISPs dictate all telecom policy, apparently).
Tennessee's law prevents a popular Chattanooga-based utility-run ISP, EPB, from expanding its up to 10 Gbps offerings. Tennessee Rep. Kevin Brooks recently tried to pass a bill that would have dismantled the state's restriction, but his effort ran face-first into a lobbying wall constructed by companies like AT&T and Comcast. He then recently tried to strip down the measure so it simply let EPB expand near its headquarters and to one neighboring county, but that provision was also shot down 5-3, with one of the nay votes being that of Rep. Patsy Hazlewood, a former AT&T executive.
As a winter storm bears down on Cambridge, a hundred or so protesters have congregated outside MIT’s Ray and Maria Stata Center with handlettered signs that read “Stop DRM” and “DRM is bad for education.” But a disagreement has broken out: A splinter group, wearing Guy Fawkes masks, want to march upstairs to confront the members of the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization that recommends standards for the software that runs the internet.
Heated words are exchanged, but then someone appeals to a higher authority: Richard Stallman, the storied programmer, who’s attending tonight’s protest with an overstuffed laptop bag in hand.
Not satisfied with releasing a director's cut, filmmakers want the next generation of High Dynamic Range movies to override your picture settings to preserve their artistic vision.
Some people are perfectly happy to leave their television on the default factory settings, but if you're fussy about picture quality and you're spending top-dollar then you'll want to dip into the picture settings and tweak them to taste.
“I’m not saying the IP system is without its criticism,” he said. “It must be periodically reviewed. I don’t think it is being reviewed in South African law.”
Alan Park, senior legal counsel for the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), gave a presentation to the Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (ITMA) Spring conference in London last week. The conference had a theme of history and heritage and featured presentations about Scotch Whisky and Harris Tweed.
When I wrote about the monumentally silly trademark dispute between the San Diego Comic-Con and the Salt Lake City Comic Con, I didn't appreciate the simple nature of that trademark dispute. Sure, the idea that the phrase comic-con, or comic con, could be trademarked seemed wrong. The phrase is arguably both generic and descriptive, after all. But at least the dispute was simple.
As a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software and music, the Internet Archive has a keen interest in copyright law. In a submission to the U.S. Copyright Office the Archive says since the major studios often send invalid notices, they're suggesting a change in the law to allow content to remain up while disputes are settled.