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08.24.12

Links 24/8/2012: Linux 3.6 RC3, Gnome Shell 3.6 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Forums Etiquette
  • Linux and Apple: Which Is the Lemon, Which Is the Lemonade?

    Think you’re going to run Linux as a second operating system on that new Retina MacBook of yours? Think again. Phoronix’s Michael Larabel has described it as a “less than ideal experience,” even after jumping through the various technological hoops necessary to make it work at all. But who’s at fault for this — Apple or Linux?

  • Desktop

    • Time to Shine: Why Desktop Linux is Taking Over

      Microsoft Windows has long been the operating system of choice for corporate level desktop PCs, but times change. There are a number of drivers that are pushing Linux into the domain of the end user device from the enterprise server space; such as tablets, smartphones and the 20 million desktop PCs and countless server installations using the free Ubuntu Linux operating system.

    • The Stark Unreality of Retail GNU/Linux in USA

      Check out Walmart.com. Look for

      * “linux” in Books – 104 results (YAY!)
      * “ubuntu” in Books – 25 results (YAY!)
      * “linux” in Computers – 2 results , online only pickup in stores a few days after ordering (BOOO!)
      * “ubuntu” in Computers – 0 results (BOOO!)

      What’s wrong with this picture? There’s obviously a great interest in GNU/Linux in Walmart’s customers. Several books about GNU/Linux are on the first page of the “best-sellers” list under Books/Computers/Operating Systems. Why don’t they sell more than a couple of models of GNU/Linux PCs (ones with a popular distro at least)?

    • 6th Grade Teacher Builds Students a Free Linux-Based Computer Lab From Scratch

      Robert Litt teaches sixth grade in Alameda County, California. Until recently, he taught at a school that lacked a functioning computer lab. For reasons that are probably clear to anyone who reads technology and nerd culture blogs, a school in 2012 not having a computer lab is a totally unacceptable thing. It occurred to Litt that if students aren’t coming out of primary education with some basic computer literacy, they’re being drastically underserved by their school system, and he wasn’t ready to let that fly. So, with no budget to speak of and in dire need of a computer lab, Litt turned to the warm embrace of free software and put together 70 computers running Ubuntu, meaning that ASCEND, the school where he teaches, now has not only a computer lab, but computers in classrooms as well.

  • Kernel Space

    • A New Collaboration Aimed at Automatically Backporting the Linux Kernel

      The Linux Foundation’s Driver Backport Workgroup is working on automatically backporting the Linux kernel, which was discussed in some detail at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in April. As a result, a new collaboration is forming between this Workgroup and the compat-drivers project.

      Ann Davis of SUSE and the Driver Backport Workgroup guest blogs today about these developments:

    • Kernel Log – Coming in 3.6 (Part 1): Filesystems and storage

      Linux 3.6 introduces quota and backup functions for Btrfs as well as security enhancements for temp directories. New interfaces enable the kernel to be made aware of changes to the sizes of used partitions.

    • Systemd To Secure Logs With “Forward Secure Sealing”

      Systemd has picked up a new feature — Forward Secure Sealing (FSS) — in an attempt to better secure system logs on the local file-system in the event a hacker penetrates the system the logs cannot be modified.

    • Linux 3.6-rc3

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa 9.0 Branching Delayed So More Features Can Land

        The code branching of the next Mesa release — what was going to be known as Mesa 8.1 but is now being called Mesa 9.0 — is being delayed by a few days to allow time for some last-minute features to land.

      • New X.Org Server 1.13 RC Bumps The ABI
      • OpenGL ES 2.0 Support Merged Into Compiz

        The OpenGL ES 2.0 support branch has been merged into mainline Compiz. This allows the once-thriving compositing window manager to run on the PandaBoard ES and various other mobile/embedded devices that only support GLES for rendering.

        Sam Spilsbury has announced via his blog that the OpenGL ES support was merged into mainline Compiz. “That means as of now, you can build lp:compiz on a platform like the pandaboard below and expect it to run as it does on the desktop…It also means that we’ll be able to deploy compiz on any other platform that implements OpenGL|ES 2.0.” This comes after KWin and GNOME Shell / Mutter have already supported OpenGL ES as a subset of OpenGL.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Gaurav Joined the Game

        There are many reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution. It is important to KDE e.V. by helping to create a predictable income. This money is used to support events that accelerate development of KDE software, enhance promotion efforts and help grow the Community. KDE contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds, so their reasons for contributing are diverse. Claudia Rauch and Jayson Rowe from the Join the Game Team asked supporting member Gaurav Chaturvedi why he joined the game.

      • Merging LightDM Log-In Manager For KDE Workspaces

        The developer behind LightDM-KDE has called for merging the log-in manager into KDE Workspaces. KDM, however, will remain the default but it will become optional with LightDM-KDE being a build-time alternative.

        David Edmundson has long been working on LightDM-KDE: a version of the LightDM catered towards KDE. With Kubuntu 12.10 planning to use LightDM-KDE (the Unity/GNOME version of Ubuntu already uses LightDM), Edmundson is looking to make LightDM-KDE more official. Currently LightDM-KDE is living within KDE’s Playground.

      • openmamba Milestone2 KDE: are you ready to use it?

        Some of my reviews are inspired by new arrivals in the families of popular Linux distributions. Others – because I am interested in one or another aspect of the distribution. There are also cases, when authors of the distribution ask me to review it.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Is GNOME Still Needed?

        When GNOME began in 1997, the project had a clear purpose. At the time, there was no other free desktop, since KDE relied on the then-proprietary Qt toolkit. But today, looking at the mounting evidence of problems within the project and the denial of many project members, I have to ask: Does free software still need GNOME? Or has it outlived its usefulness?

        The fact that such questions seem reasonable today is a bizarre reversal. Years ago, KDE became unquestionably free software. Yet the rivalry between GNOME and KDE, sometimes friendly, sometimes fiery, has long driven the development of the desktop to the benefit of all. The need for cross-compatibility, to say nothing of the hopes of equaling or surpassing each other, improved both desktop environments.

      • Gnome Shell 3.6 Beta Released

        The Gnome team has announced a beta release of Gnome Shell 3.6, the next major release of Gnome Desktop Environment Shell. Version 3.5.90 is a beta release, which means it contains all the features of the upcoming Gnome Shell Release but may contain some bugs which may effect stability of the desktop and applications.

      • GNOME Shell 3.6 Beta Has Been Released

        The GNOME Project announced earlier today, August 22nd, the immediate availability for download and testing of GNOME Shell 3.6 Beta.

      • 5 Top Features Of Gnome 3.6

        HarfBuzz is a text shaping engine that is use for implementing OpenType fonts. This has been finally merged with pango and will be avialable in Gnome 3.6.

      • A ton of Updates for Gnome components!

        It is one of those “new versions” days again were new bug fixing versions for applications, libraries and components for the Gnome desktop environment are released.

        This time it is about the stable or unstable branches of Vala, Empathy, Epiphany, gThumb, WebkitGTK+, Nautilus, Seahorse, Gdm, Eye of Gnome, File Roller, Evince, GTK3, Clutter and Mutter that will be analysed on another article and GLib.

      • Gnome 3.6 first impressions | Simply Beautiful!

        Johansson or Gnome, Gnome or Johansson? I am very sorry but I have to say it. Both are ***** beautiful! I tried Gnome 3.5.90 for about 7 hours, and I don’t really know what to write about it.

        Gnome 3.6 it’s impressive better than its predecessor. Fast, clean, simple, pretty ..slick.

        This time Gnome isn’t about the Shell. While Shell received significant changes, the rest modules of Gnome pull the attraction. Amazing things from the Gnome Team in this release. Congratulations boys ‘n’ girls of Gnome Team!

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Why Fedora 18 Will Be The Practical Choice For Vanilla Enthusiasts

          We all know about the rocky road that Gnome 3 has been travelling on since March of last year. Not since KDE 4.0 has a desktop environment been met with such community backlash and perceived exodus. I say “perceived” because that’s what it is. In the world of Linux, these things are almost impossible to measure and are almost always gauged by media reaction. These powerful media reactions almost always build the bandwagon that everyone hops onto.

        • Fedora 18 Delayed, Blame It On Bugs

          A number of outstanding bugs still present in Fedora 18 apps have delayed the release by a week. This was decided in a go/no go meeting organized by Fedora QA team this week.

          Currently numerous bugs are still unresolved in Fedora 18. These bugs have been marked as important and their resolution is necessary before Fedora 18 is released. The developers also need to solve the problem of incomplete test matrices, which are still not ready.

        • Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow” Has Been Delayed

    • Debian Family

      • File under ‘disturbing’: Debian Wheezy doesn’t ship with the Synaptic Package Manager

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10: New features, new levels of user-friendliness

            Ubuntu 12.04 brought to the table one of the most user-friendly desktop operating systems to date. With the improvements to Unity, Ubuntu took leaps forward in usability and did so in an incredibly unique way — making something radically different work more efficiently than the standard metaphor. Well, release 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) will arrive October 18, 2012 and it promises to improve upon what 12.10 had to offer. Seeing as how that is now less than two months away, I thought it time to discuss some of the feature additions that will appear in the upcoming release.

          • Ubuntu – All other versions of LINUX aspire to be this successful

            Ubuntu is innovative, forward thinking and the most likely LINUX distribution to have any hope of taking on Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS on the desktop. Ubuntu also has aspirations of taking on the mobile and tablet market dominated by Apple and Google.

            So many other distributions are derived from UBUNTU including the distribution that is competing for the honour of top dog in the LINUX world, MINT.

            Ask most people in the LINUX world which distribution they would recommend to people who are thinking of trying LINUX and UBUNTU would be the first word out of their mouths.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Pushes Sandy Bridge Further

            Recently I have shown that Intel graphics hit a high point with the Linux 3.6 kernel and that Ubuntu 12.10 is faster with Intel hardware compared to the current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release. In this article are more Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 12.10 benchmarks to highlight the performance improvements for Intel Sandy Bridge graphics that will be found in Ubuntu 12.10.

          • Ubuntu Developer Week 2012: 28th – 30th August

            Daniel Holbach from Canonical proudly announced a few minutes ago, August 22nd, the schedule of this year’s second Ubuntu Developer Week event.

            The second Ubuntu Developer Week event for 2012 will take place between August 28th and 30th, and will cover several aspects of Ubuntu development, from crash-courses in getting started with working on Ubuntu to more advanced topics.

          • Unity 4.0 Public Beta to Launch Today, Canonical Presenting at Unite 2012

            Game engine maker Unity Technologies announced at the Unite 2012 conference in Amsterdam that Unity 4.0 public beta will be available today.

          • Minor improvements coming in Ubuntu Linux update release

            Ubuntu 12.04 Linux isn’t just a very popular end-user Linux, it’s also Canonical’s Long Term Support (LTS) version. That means, besides Linux distributions’ usual constant stream of improvements, it gets updates for business users and the first one is just about here.

            Officially, August 23rd will see the first update, Ubuntu 12.04.1, to the operating system. Actually, the Ubuntu update is running a bit late. In any case, here’s what you can expect from it.

          • Gnome Online Accounts To Ship By Default In Ubuntu 12.10

            Ubuntu 12.10 is going through a massive development phase with new and exciting features being added to it everyday.

            Ubuntu developers are working hard to integrate onlines services within Unity. Webapps are great example of what kind of integration Canonical is planning for Ubuntu. Gnome Online Accounts is one such powerful and useful tool which needs a better integration within Unity. Although Ubuntu teams are doing just that. Ubuntu 12.10 will ship Gnome Online accounts by default.

          • Canonical Promoting Ubuntu Software Center To Game Devs

            With the Unity 4.0 game engine gaining native Linux support, Canonical is sponsoring a session at this week’s Unite game development conference to promote their Ubuntu Software Center to game developers of this Mono-powered proprietary game engine.

            “This week Canonical is sponsoring a developer session at Unite 2012 to share how easy hundreds of thousands of Unity developers can now bring their games to the Ubuntu Software Center. Unite is the yearly conference for the Unity community with hands-on demonstrations, educational seminars and keynotes about developing games with Unity and we are happy to be a part of it,” was said by Canonical’s David Pitkin on the Ubuntu developer blog.

          • Ubuntu Server Plans to Move Away From 32-Bit Computing

            It took a while, but the era of 32-bit computing may finally be coming to a close. At least, that’s what the Ubuntu Server Team’s decision has implied with its decision to cease providing 32-bit installation CD images for the upcoming 12.10 release of the operating system. Here’s a look at this plan, and what it reveals about hardware trends more generally.

            Like most major operating systems, Ubuntu is currently available in both 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x86_64) versions. Unless you’re a geek, you probably don’t have much reason to care about the differences between these two builds, but there are certain technical advantages to installing the 64-bit variant of Ubuntu. The catch, however, is that not all computers support 64-bit operating systems — although virtually all machines manufactured in the last few years should.

          • Canonical to release Ubuntu 12.04.1 with Calxeda ARM support

            LINUX VENDOR Canonical will release Ubuntu 12.04.1, introducing support for Calxeda’s ARM based system-on-chip (SoC).

            Canonical’s release of Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) earlier this year marked the Linux outfit’s latest push into the enterprise with an increased emphasis on servers. Now the firm has released a rare point release dubbed 12.04.1 LTS that brings support for Calxeda’s ARM SoC and the upcoming Folsom release of Openstack software.

          • Great Wall U310 packs an Ubuntu desktop PC into a keyboard

            Ever wonder why you need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and a PC case for a desktop computer? It turns out if the brains of the PC fit into a small enough space, you don’t.

            All-in-one PCs generally combine most of the components into the display case. If you want to bring your own monitor, you can always try a PC that fits inside a keyboard case, like the Great Wall U310.

          • Turn a Keyboard Into a Computer with Raspberry Pi

            Turn a Keyboard Into a Computer with Raspberry PiThe Raspberry Pi is still picking up momentum with different types of DIY projects. If you’re looking for a means to build an old-school computer-in-a-keyboard with a Raspberry Pi, the German blog Preamp shows you exactly how to do it.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon Review

              Regrettably, this is the first time I have reviewed the Cinnamon desktop which is the new shining star of the Linux Mint Project. This release is one that should not be missed for Linux Mint lovers.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google’s Mind-Blowing Big-Data Tool Grows Open Source Twin

    Mike Olson and John Schroeder shared a stage at a recent meeting of Silicon Valley’s celebrated Churchill Club, and they didn’t exactly see eye to eye.

    Olson is the CEO of a Valley startup called Cloudera, and Schroeder is the boss at MapR, a conspicuous Cloudera rival. Both outfits deal in Hadoop — a sweeping open source software platform based on data center technologies that underpinned the rise of Google’s web-dominating search engine — but in building their particular businesses, the two startups approached Hadoop from two very different directions.

  • Google Delivers Octane, An Update to Its V8 JavaScript Benchmark Suite
  • Open Source Router Platforms – Part 1: The Hardware

    A few months ago we asked a simple question – what do you use for your router, and what would you look for in a router review. Unless you’re entirely mobile, getting online these days pretty much requires the use of some kind of NAT router. Picking that hardware is often a function of what software can be tossed on top, and having a consistent and familiar set of configuration pages makes setup and maintenance much less of a nightmare than dealing with the third party alternatives. There are so many arguments for using some open source package instead of the first party software which is usually derived from the board software package the SoC vendor hands out.

  • Twisted pleasures of open source ‘sprint’ worth my weekend

    I walked into the business heart of San Francisco, tapped on the closed offices of a profitable IT business, scooted into what looked like their main conference room, sat down, and started fixing bugs. I felt a little like an accountant breaking into someone’s ledgers at night, and double-checking their book-keeping.

    I was there for the “Twisted Sprint”, which is perhaps both slightly less fun and/or painful than it sounds.

  • The Greatest Contribution To Technology In 2012: Open Source Technologies

    Open-source technology has become a common phenomenon nowadays. Despite the big number of open source technologies sprouting up around the world, there are those which are superior to the rest. Below is a list of 5 such technologies and how they have changed the world.

  • Open-Source virtualization management coming for KVM, Xen and VMware
  • ColdFusion’s open source-fueled renaissance

    Earlier mou this year, over 100 of the ColdFusion community’s most passionate and innovative members met in Dallas, to convene the second year of OpenCF Summit, a conference focused exclusively on advancing free and open source software in the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) community.

    Energized by a special video greeting from the father of ColdFusion, Jeremy Allaire, attendees spent the next 72 hours learning about the enterprise-class open source CFML engines Railo and Open BlueDragon, powerful development frameworks like ColdSpring and Mach-II, and the sophisticated Mura Content Management System. All culminating in a better understanding of how to promote this elegant and powerful language as an accessible and uniquely well-suited platform for open government and civic hacktivism.

  • Twisted pleasures of open source ‘sprint’ worth my weekend

    I walked into the business heart of San Francisco, tapped on the closed offices of a profitable IT business, scooted into what looked like their main conference room, sat down, and started fixing bugs. I felt a little like an accountant breaking into someone’s ledgers at night, and double-checking their book-keeping.

    I was there for the “Twisted Sprint”, which is perhaps both slightly less fun and/or painful than it sounds.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.1 update improves stability

      While users are awaiting the imminent publication of version 4.2 of the desktop virtualisation system, the VirtualBox developers have released version 4.1.20 with fixes that improve its overall stability and rectify various regressions. In total, the tenth update to the 4.1.x branch of Oracle’s desktop virtualisation application addresses more than twenty bugs; some of these could cause it to crash when, for example, running virtual machines (VMs) without hardware virtualisation or restoring an old snapshot.

    • New Program to Squash Key Bugs in LibreOffice
    • VirtualBox 4.1.20 Has Support for Linux Kernel 3.6

      Oracle announced a few minutes ago, August 21st, the immediate availability for download of the VirtualBox 4.1.20 virtualization software for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms.

      VirtualBox 4.1.20 comes with compile fixes for the Linux kernel 3.5 RC1 and Linux kernel 3.6 RC1, as well as for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 6.3 distributions.

    • The Future of LibreOffice – Android, iOS, fixes, and more
    • OpenOffice 3.4.1 released, includes more languages

      OpenOffice has got a point update to the now Apache managed office suite, including bug fixes, performance enhancements, and extra language support

  • CMS

    • Basic Web Design with Drupal 7

      Drupal is one of the most popular and versatile platforms for Web design. It’s free, open source and will run on Linux. Early last year, a new version was released (Drupal 7), making it even better with improvements in usability, performance and security. If you’ve looked at Drupal before, but didn’t end up using it, you may want to take another look.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Alive 2.0.0 available

      GNU Alive 2.0.0 is available. GNU Alive is a keep-alive program for internet connections. It repeatedly pings a series of user-specified hosts, thereby encouraging (one hopes) the involved networks to not disappear.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • QR Code Open Source Beer
    • Version 1.0 of openHAB home automation bus arrives

      The openHAB (open Home Automation Bus) has now reached version 1.0 after two and a half years in development. The 1.0 release takes a very different approach to the commercial home automation offerings, and not just by being GPLv3 licensed open source. Being open source though does allow it to be easily extended beyond the mainstream automation tasks of switching lights, activating plug sockets or moving blinds. Of course users will need to purchase and install the light switches, smart sockets and automated blinds themselves.

    • Crowdfunding open source 3D printing of plastic guns
    • The code for open source milk is cracked

      My son was recently put on a temporary alternative milk diet, no cow, rice, or soy milk. I panicked. My entire life my family has been a cow’s milk household—I don’t know a life without dairy products. We had been making our own yogurt, so I hoped that would help. Thank goodness, my son and my family don’t have a nut allergy. Otherwise I would panic more.

      First, I shop. Then, panic, again. Finally, I do the math. And, yes, panic. Cow’s milk is usually $2.99 (USD) or more for a gallon where I live, and almond or coconut milk is around $2.99 (US) for half that amount.

  • Programming

    • Top 5 open-source IDEs for developers

      Ever wanted to hack out some code on a IDE (Integrated development environment) without having to splash the cash? Fortunately, there are some great IDEs out there that are completely free. We look into 5 open-source IDEs and look at what they can offer to developers.

    • NAG Fortran Compiler Can Now Do OpenMP 3.0

      The Numerical Algorithms Group has released a major update to their multi-platform Fortran compiler. Beyond improving support for new versions of the Fortran language, NAG Fortran can now do OpenMP 3.0.

    • Node.js set to land on Engine Yard’s PaaS

      The addition of Node.js to Engine Yard lets customers host highly scalable web services on the platform, and helps it close its language gap with rival platform

Leftovers

  • CowboyNeal Looks Back at the SCO-Linux

    This past week, SCO filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which finally begins the end of a long saga that started over nine years ago. While their anti-IBM litigation has risen from the grave and still shambles onward, the company itself is nearly put to rest after nine years of choosing the wrong legal battle to get into. Even if it may be too early to dance on SCO’s grave, join me as I look back over the long and bumpy road to nowhere of The SCO Group.

  • Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong

    “SPEEK EENGLISH, TACO,” THE GIRL with the giant backpack yelled when Maria asked where to find a bathroom. The backpack giggled as it bounced down the hall. It had been hours since Maria began looking for a bathroom. Anger boiled inside her, but she didn’t know any English words to yell back. That was the hardest part. Back in El Salvador she’d always had something to say.

    The bell rang. A flood of shoulders and sneakers swirled around Maria, and she couldn’t see much until the sea of strangers streamed back into classrooms. Then she stood alone in the hallway.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Dems Decide Kochs Are an Election Issue: “Patriot Majority” Launches $500K Ad Buy

      A left-leaning group, Patriot Majority, has launched a $500,000 ad campaign trying to make an election issue out of conservative mega-donors David and Charles Koch, suggesting the brothers are spending big “to buy this year’s elections and advance their agenda,” with the goal of electing “politicians who will pass laws that benefit special interests but hurt the middle class.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • The Program

      It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Looking for Kids’ Books? Avoid This Propaganda

      Did you know that genetic engineering (GE) “is helping to improve the health of the Earth and the people who call it home”? A trade group funded by Monsanto wants your kids to believe it.

      The Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) has published a kids’ book on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that purports to give kids “a closer look at biotechnology. You will see that biotechnology is being used to figure out how to: 1) grow more food; 2) help the environment; and 3) grow more nutritious food that improves our health.”

    • Copyrights

      • US Government Seizes Android Piracy Websites

        The Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued orderes to seize websites that host pirated Android apps.

        In a press statement DoJ said, “The seizures are the result of a comprehensive enforcement action taken to prevent the infringement of copyrighted mobile device apps. The operation was coordinated with international law enforcement, including Dutch and French law enforcement officials.”

08.22.12

Links 22/8/2012: Linux 3.4 Longterm, PowerTOP 2.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Walt Disney’s Real Commitment To Open Source
  • Pixar software goes open source

    The mighty animation studio has decided to share its Subd evaluation code as used on its latest feature Brave. Download the software yourself for free!

  • The 2012 Google Summer of Code fruits!

    More than two months ago, we took a look on the 29 new things that this Google summer of code would bring to the Gnome desktop environment and its various components.

    Today it is the “pencils down” for everyone as we finally reached the end of this magnificent program. Interns and mentors have done a great job providing new exciting things to the Gnome users benefit.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla: IonMonkey Firefox Faster Than Chrome

        More than two years ago, Mozilla promised that it would catch up with Google’s Chrome performance in JavaScript. Today, JavaScript is not as much as a problem anymore as it was in 2010, but Mozilla has not forgotten its promise. IonMonkey is breathing down Chrome’s neck.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • New Program to Squash Key Bugs in LibreOffice

      If you’re like many of us here at OStatic, you’ve probably been using the LibreOffice suite of applications for some time now. And, without a doubt, this suite has become very impressive both in terms of its overall capabilities and in terms of the speed with which problems are addressed. New releases of the suite clean up lots of bugs, with community support behind the effort. But there is a new and aggressive program that has just been introduced to crack down further on bugs in LibreOffice. Dubbed HardHacks, it should make the suite much better–and do so quickly.

    • Oracle Closing MySQL?

      Seems Oracle is on its way to close sourcing the widely used relational database management system – MySQL. It was acquired by Oracle from Sun Microsystems in 2010 and is used in millions of websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and even Google.

    • Vagrant distances itself from Virtualbox

      Vagrant, the open source developer environment generation tool, is being re-engineered to no longer be dependent on VirtualBox, Oracle’s open source desktop virtualisation platform. Vagrant allows the creation of “boxes” which contain all the assets needed to provision a fresh virtual machine. With a single command, Vagrant can create a machine from a box and bring it up. Vagrant was designed for developers who need to bring up multiple virtual machines, repeatably and easily in a testing environment. Vagrant 1.0 appeared in March this year.

    • Oracle secrecy threatens open MySQL development

      Oracle has been accused of hiding MySQL test cases and obfuscating revision history by MariaDB VP Sergei Golubchik. In a blog post entitled “Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL become closed source”, Golubchik says they noticed that, according to the release notes, a number of bugs had been fixed in the most recent MySQL 5.5.27 release, but there were no test cases associated with any of the bug fixes – indeed, there are no tests associated with bug 61579 or 60926. When he asked on the MySQL internals mailing list, he was unable to get a response from Oracle as to whether this was new policy or an oversight.

    • LibreOffice team to focus on hard bugs

      In a new initiative, “LibreOffice HardHacks”, the LibreOffice developers are being called on to take on the harder bugs in the LibreOffice code. Bjoern Michaelsen announced the programme, which is complementary to an earlier successful project “LibreOffice Easy Hacks”, which set out to get the “low hanging fruit” bugs, the ones that would be easy to resolve and would bring new developers on board.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Yet Another Government Adopting Free Software

      Google’s translation:

      “The municipality of Vieira do Minho definitively adopted productivity software LibreOffice”.

    • Swiss open source awards for canton of Waadt and Supreme Court

      The Swiss canton of Waadt(Vaud) and the country’s Supreme Court are among this year’s winners of the CH Open Source Awards. The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open announced the awards last week Tuesday.

      The advocacy organisation writes in a statement that the ‘Portail eGov du canton de Vaud’ was awarded for its involvement in the open source community and its vision on using open source. “The price is to support the Canton of Vaud”, ch/open says, hoping it will serve as an incentive for other cantons.

      A special award was given to the Swiss Supreme Court. Ch/open chairman Matthias Günter says the court earned the award for its “pioneering of the use of open source, even as many other public administrations are increasing their use of open source, consciously or not.”

    • Government petitioned to “free the code”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Four insights to selling and marketing open source software

      Without genuinely valuable services for your customer, you have no revenue. I am aware that “value” is an overused word. Having spent many years of my career in marketing, I have been guilty of saying “what’s the value proposition?” more than a few times. But now, having been in the driver’s seat selling services for open source software applications, I can provide a more specific definition of value, particularly as it applies to application software (in contrast with infrastructure software).

    • Yeastie Boys win gold for open source beer

      New Zealand brewing company Yeastie Boys added a gold medal for design to the growing swag of international gongs they have recently won for their leftfield ales, when they were awarded gold for their open source Digital IPA in the Packaging Class at the Sutton Group Brewers Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards last week.

    • Timberlake: Iceland open-sources its constitution for modern adaptation

    • Open Data

      • Open data done well is a catalyst for change

        In March 2012 I reported in a post entitled “Open by design” a paper by Harlan Yu and David Robinson entitled “The New Ambiguity of Open Government“. A discussion of the paper has now appeared on the World Bank blog by Anupama Dokeniya entitled “Opening Government Data. But Why?” [A thank you to Jacques Raybaut at en.europa-eu-audience for the heads-up]. This is also even more relevant given the UK Public Accounts Committee report back so recently which was linked to and commented upon in Transparent e-gov.

    • Open Hardware

      • MakerPlane open source hardware airplanes

        John sez, “MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as CNC mills and 3D printers. The project will also include open source avionics software to enable state-of-the-art digital flight instruments and display capabilities. Basically we are designing an aircraft that can be built on a CNC mill at home, or at a makerspace which is easy to assemble and quick to build. The plans and instructions will be available for free to anyone that wants them!”

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Wilt Chamberlain’s Family Tries To Block Film About His College Years, Claiming ‘Publicity Rights’

    A filmmaker is trying to make a film about basketball great Wilt Chamberlain’s college years at Kansas. However, his estate appears to be threatening the filmmaker if he goes ahead, claiming such things as publicity rights over Chamberlain’s image…

  • Security

    • Systemd to secure system log information against attacks

      Systemd can now secure log information on system processes stored in its journal, using a procedure known as Forward Secure Sealing (FSS). This prevents attackers who have obtained administrator privileges from clearing traces of their activity from the journal without deleting it in its entirety. A verification key is used to secure the data and, to prevent modification, it has to be stored externally. Instead of writing the key down, users can optionally save it to a smartphone via a QR code.

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • Deep Web, Deep Privacy

      Tell someone that you know how to go off-radar on the Internet and, as a rule, they won’t believe you. They imagine shadowy intelligence agencies have state-of-the-art technology and can see everything you do. Bkut they would be wrong.

      No doubt they do have amazing technology, but it is perfectly possible to hide yourself on the Internet, to send and receive emails that nobody can intercept or read, to upload and download securely, to visit banned websites, blog anonymously, and do anything you want without being followed, profiled or analysed. Those that know how use the Deep Web.

08.20.12

Links 20/8/2012: Wine 1.5.11, Frugalware 1.7

Posted in News Roundup at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • OS4 1.0 “OpenDesktop” has been released

    oberto Dohnert has announced the release of OS4 1.0 “OpenDesktop” edition, a Xubuntu-based distribution targeting legacy 32-bit hardware, ultrabooks and netbooks: “Today we are proud to announce the general availability of OS4 OpenDesktop 1.0. OS4 OpenDesktop is a 32-bit offering that runs on all legacy 32-bit hardware as well as the newer ultrabooks and netbooks.

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 213

    · Announced Distro: AV Linux 6.0

    · Announced Distro: SolusOS 1.2

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • LanyardFS: A New Linux File-System

      A new Linux kernel file-system has been presented, LanyFS, a.k.a. the Lanyard File-System.

      From the patch announcement by Dan Luedtke, “This patch introduces the Lanyard Filesystem (LanyFS), a filesystem for highly mobile and removable storage devices.” The kernel patch then goes on to describe Lanyard FS as “The lanyard file system (LanyFS) is designed for removable storage devices, particularly those small gadgets one would carry around using a lanyard.”

    • KMSCON Is Getting Ready To Kick The Kernel Console

      KMSCON is turning out to be a successful and interesting project with high ambitions of being the leading terminal emulator for Linux while running from user-space.

      Back in March was when I first talked about KMSCON as a DRM-based terminal emulator when the developer, David Herrmann, was inspired by Jesse Barnes’ guide to hacking with EGL and KMS.

      KMSCON is built upon the Linux kernel APIs for kernel mode-setting provided by the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for frame-buffer access to all displays as well as hot-plugging support with the DRM drivers through udev.

    • Adaptive Tickless Kernel Still Being Adapted

      While in development for nearly two years without merging, the adaptive tickless Linux kernel support is still being developed.

      The adaptive tickless kernel support ended up being a big endeavour as well as getting other kernel developers to review the patches.

    • Link-Time Optimization To Speed Up The Linux Kernel

      An extensive set of patches have been published that allow the Linux kernel to be built with GCC’s LTO (Link-Time Optimization) support for generating a faster Linux kernel binary but at the cost of much greater compile times.

    • Retina display MacBook Pro does not play nicely with Linux

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

    • Play the Guitar with Rhythmbox!

      Are you sick of wasting too much time on trying to find the “correct” tablature for your favorite song? Do you want to learn how to play your favorite songs on the guitar but you have no idea of what notes stand for? Rhythmbox is the answer for you!

      Recently I discovered a fantastic 3rd party plugin for Rhythmbox that will search, download and display under a second the guitar, bass and drums tablature of the song you are listening to right now! How cool is that?

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine

    • Games

      • Humble Bundle 3 Now Available For Ubuntu Precise

        Humble Bundle is a donation based game project where users set their own price for a series of games and can decide the proportion of money to be given to charity and developers. The project is quite successful and the third series of games are now available in Ubuntu.

      • Evilot, New Puzzle/Defense Game for Linux

        Evilot is a new Puzzle/Defense game for Linux, where you play as Count Dolfus, a retired evil overlord, that just wants to spend his last days in peace.

        The problem is that the small retirement fund you’ve managed to amass, over decades of evildoing, is too tempting a prize for the heroes and adventurers running through the Kingdom of Evilot, so you’ll have prepare your defenses to withstand their fierce attack.

      • Steam to debut Big Picture beta soon, make couch potatoes of PC gamers

        Early last year, Valve mentioned it was working on something called Big Picture mode for Steam, an alternative user interface with controller support designed specifically for use on televisions. According to Gabe Newell, the distribution services’ couch-ready UI is almost upon us. “We should have both Linux and 10-foot betas out there fairly quickly,” he told Geoff Keighley in the latest episode of GTTV, noting that the interface would be available on both the current iteration of Steam and the upcoming Linux version. Newell said that Valve has been showing the interface to hardware manufacturers, but ultimately feels that the community will decide its fate. “I think customers will say ‘this is really great,’ or they’ll say it’s another interesting but not a valuable contribution, fairly quickly.” Check out the interview for yourself (and the full episode) after the break.

      • Let’s Play: Darwinia
      • Steam for Linux Beta is imminent
      • Planetary Annihilation To Have Linux Support

        Uber Entertainment have added the promise of Linux support to their Kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation, and not as a stretch goal. The funding is now at $453,000 of their $900,000 goal with 26 days to go. Platforms now confirmed are Windows, OSX and Linux. The rate of funding seems to have flattened out a bit over the past few days, so it will be interesting to see if this announcement affects it in the coming days.

      • Valve Releases New CS: Global Offensive Trailer

        The official release of Valve’s much-anticipated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive title is set to happen on the 21st of August. In anticipation of the launch, Valve has released a new CS:GO trailer.

        Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the latest game in Valve’s wildly-successful Counter-Strike franchise built atop their impressive Source Engine. CS:GO has been in beta for a number of months already while next week will mark its official release. This first person shooter is initially being released for Windows, OS X, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, but a native Linux version will very likely come once Valve begins shipping their Steam client and Source-based games for Linux.

  • Desktop Environments

    • Some Enlightenment EFL Components Hit v1.7 Beta

      Last week there was the release of some 1.7 alpha packages for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), but today there’s some beta packages.

      Eina, Eet, Evas, Ecore, Embryo, Edje, Efreet, E_dbus, Eeze, Expedite, Evas Generic Loaders, Eio, Emotion, Ethumb, and Elementary experienced the new release cycle beta releases of 1.7.0 on Friday. The announcement was made at Enlightenment.org.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE News (dot.kde.org) undergoes major upgrade

        Today, we finished upgrading one of the most visited KDE websites: KDE.News. The Dot now not only runs on drupal’s latest release (7.15), but also has a fresh new look featuring the Neverland theme.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • BlankOn 8 preview

      BlankOn is a desktop distribution based on Debian, and comes to use courtesy of some enterprising folks from Indonesia. It uses a highly-modified GNOME 3 desktop environment built with an HTML 5 and CSS 3 custom desktop shell called Manokwari.

      Because I am not particularly fond of the GNOME 3 desktop in its default state, I am always on the lookout for a distribution that takes it and makes it a lot more user-friendly. Linux Deepin is one that I like very much, but choice is good, and so I decided to download BlankOn 8, the latest edition of BlankOn, to see what it has to offer.

    • Endangered Banyumas Dialect Gets Its Own Linux OS

      The @blankonbanyumas project in Indonesia has launched its open source, Linux-based OS that’s fully localized in the Banyumas local language. It launched on Friday, aptly arriving on Indonesia’s 67th Independence Day. Wikipedia describes the tongue as “considered to be a dialect of Javanese.”

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Get to know Mageia better!

        Hmm, it is hard to address the target group of Mageia. A quick answer would be that targets to a lot of people. Yes, Mageia is one of the most popular distros around and is relatively a new one.

        Mageia isn’t for enthusiasts, isn’t about the latest packages, isn’t a LTS and it doesn’t ship any commercial support, but is user friendly. The best words I can find to describe it, would be a Community Edition of Canonical’s Ubuntu.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Applications Are Always Crashing, Biggest Problem Right Now According To Ubuntu QA
            Survey

            The Ubuntu Quality Assurance team had earlier created a survey to gather feedback from users regarding differen issues in Ubuntu operating system. The results are out, published in Ubuntu Orange Notebook blog and here are some interesting findings.

          • Here Comes The Amazing Wikipedia Lens With Previews

            Canonical has recently announced a new feature called Unity Previews and this program has got tremendous potential as shown below.

            Unity has already got tight integration with different online services, such as Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, Ask Ubuntu etc. What users do is to type in their queries in the dash and the lenses display the results from which users have to click on an item and open it on their web browser. With Previews, one can get more information of an item such as description, ratings, or maybe, even a full web page.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Peppermint LINUX 3 – The mint with no holes

              There have been a number of reviews of Peppermint 3 already so I am somewhat behind the pace with this review.

              I wrote a review about Peppermint 2 back in February but it didn’t really contain all that much information except to say that Peppermint utilises the idea of cloud computing and wraps it up to make it look like you are running a local application.

              As we have moved on a version I thought I’d have another look especially as the reviews have been mainly positive.

            • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.3

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • GGA Software launches new version 1.1 open-source chemistry toolkit, Indigo

    GGA Software Services LLC, a leading provider of outsourced scientific informatics services to the life sciences industry, has released new version 1.1 of its popular open-source organic chemistry toolkit known as Indigo. Scientists at companies and institutions around the world have used this Indigo toolkit widely to secure broad capabilities in cheminformatics.

  • Google’s Real Time Big Data Tool Cloned By Apache Drill

    Google, as you might expect, has massive amounts of data and it’s built many tools to handle it. Stuff like MapReduce and GoogleFS, which spawned the open source Apache Hadoop, and BigTable, which spawned Apache HBase.

  • SaaS

    • Cloud Computing: Moving To Open Source

      With more and more organizations moving towards the clouds for its customization, flexibility, and agility, sad to say, large cloud computing providers are not that keen to tap the open environment because doing so will be have negative effects to their financial interests. Since Linux started some 20 years ago, there is a growing demand for openness in the IT arena. Today, there is a growing demand for cloud computing to deliver open source cloud computing applications. OpenStack, a community for the development of open-sourced public and private clouds, is on the forefront with more than 180 organizations around the world as supporters.

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL patches XML flaws

      A flaw in the built-in XML functionality of PostgreSQL (CVE-2012-3488) and another in its optional XSLT handling (CVE-2012-3489) have been patched, and the developers have released updated versions of the open source database with relevant fixes. The holes being patched are related to insecure use of the widely used libxml2 and libxslt open source libraries and the PostgreSQL developers advise anyone using those libraries to check their systems for similar problems.

    • Oracle Makes More Moves To Kill Open Source MySQL

      Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.

      The issue stems back to a recent discovery that the latest MySQL release has bug fixes but without a single one having any test cases associated with it. That creates all sorts of problems for developers who have no assurance that the problem is actually fixed.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • SolusOS 1.2 Features LibreOffice 3.6.0

      Ikey Doherty proudly announced yesterday, August 17th, the immediate availability for download of the SolusOS 1.2 Linux distribution.

      SolusOS 1.2 is the second maintenance release of the 1.x branch of the SolusOS distribution, bringing better GPU, bluetooth and printer support, as well as many system-wide optimisations and fixes.

  • Healthcare

    • The Eclipse Way vs. The Android Way

      The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), an independent, nonprofit, open source organization formed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), has taken an active role in upgrading and standardizing the agency’s VistA electronic health record (EHR). Meanwhile, the role of open source developers in building the joint Department of Defense/VA EHR system is still in flux.

      Up to now, it has been difficult for the VA to introduce enterprise-wide changes in its VistA software, said Seong K. Mun, president and CEO of OSEHRA, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. The main problem is that many of the 152 VA medical centers have tweaked VistA to meet their own needs over the years.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • The UK Public Sector Finally Gets Open Source

      The use of open source technology in the UK’s public sector has historically lagged behind other European countries, most notably France and Germany, both of which have successfully embraced open source to deliver enhanced value to the taxpayer through efficiency and collaboration.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Dart: Build HTML5 Apps Fast

      Dart is a language, library, toolset, and virtual machine from Google that greatly facilitates writing fast, interactive HTML5 apps without requiring you to be a JavaScript expert.

      Dart helps developers build fast HTML5 apps for the Web. Currently in Technology Preview (with a Beta release planned for this year), this open source project is building a “batteries included” developer platform that integrates a new language, libraries, an editor, a virtual machine, and a compiler (with JavaScript output).

    • How Microsoft was forced to open Office

      In Office 2013, Microsoft was compelled to support the true ODF format as well as the PDF format. Here’s how open source won

Leftovers

  • Patton Boggs to Lobby for Facebook

    Facebook Inc. has signed on with a former U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman and other Patton Boggs lobbyists.

    Patton Boggs disclosed to Congress on Tuesday that firm partner Kevin Martin, the FCC chairman from 2005 to 2009, as well as partner Jeffrey Turner and senior public policy adviser Emanuel Rossman, are lobbying for the social network. They are focusing on matters concerning “technology and internet policy, including personal privacy, protecting children, advancing online security, and tax policy issues,” according to a lobbying registration report the law firm filed with the U.S. House of Representatives.

  • Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA

    I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It’s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don’t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has created 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf’s and pixels, he’s used DNA.

  • Why the Man Who Invented the Web Isn’t Rich

    I hadn’t realized that the World Wide Web turned 21 this week until I saw the nice birthday card that Megan Garber sent it yesterday. And it’s a good thing I did–because otherwise I would have missed a fabulous recycling opportunity!

  • Finance

    • Attorney For Goldman Sachs CEO Is Eric Holder’s ‘Best Friend’

      Last week, the Justice Department announced that it will not prosecute Goldman Sachs or any of its employees in a financial probe.

      Could that be because the attorney for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was none other than Attorney General Eric Holder’s “best friend” and former personal attorney, Reid Weingarten?

      Or because in 2008, Goldman Sachs employees donated $1,013,091 to Barack Obama?

    • Goldman, Still Playing in Bayou’s Mud

      Goldman had executed and cleared trades for Bayou, and there were questions about how well Goldman supervised the account. On July 30, Goldman paid $20.7 million to roughly 200 Bayou investors in the United States. Those investors, unsecured creditors in a separate Bayou bankruptcy case, were awarded that amount by a securities arbitration panel in June 2010.

      It was one of the few bright spots of the Bayou story, but it didn’t last. The same day Goldman paid the investors, the firm filed its own creditor’s claim for the same amount — $20.7 million — in the Bayou bankruptcy. Goldman contended that paying the award had made it, too, a Bayou creditor. If the court agrees, the investors who won their arbitration case — also unsecured creditors of Bayou — will be out of luck.

      Ross B. Intelisano, a partner at Rich, Intelisano & Katz in New York who represented the Bayou investors, said they would fight Goldman’s latest filing.

      I asked Goldman last week about the bankruptcy court filing. Michael DuVally, a spokesman, said Goldman never controlled the money at issue in the arbitration.

      “Our claim is consistent with bankruptcy law,” he said in a statement. “The arbitration panel, which was not ruling on wrongdoing, determined that money the Bayou funds deposited with us while insolvent needed to be returned to the estate to distribute to creditors. With the ruling, we became a creditor entitled to compensation along with the other victims of the fraud.”

    • Oracle settles SEC charges over secret India payments

      Oracle Corp agreed to pay a $2 million fine to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges that an India subsidiary secretly set aside money used to make unauthorized payments to phony vendors in that country.

  • Privacy

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UN body opens debate on Internet future to public after critics slam secrecy of talks

      The U.N. telecoms agency has invited the world’s more than 2 billion Internet users to join a debate about the future of the Internet.

      The Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union’s announcement Wednesday follows criticism from civil society groups who say preparations for an upcoming global conference have been shrouded in secrecy.

08.19.12

Links 19/8/2012: SolusOS Eveline 1.2 Released, Unity Favours 3-D

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Pandora: The Handheld Console for Linux Tweakers

    We here at S|A recently got a chance to interview Micheal Mrozek, one of the core members of a small company named OpenPandora, which produces the Pandora handheld gaming console. Long before Kickstarter and crowd sourced development funding became the flavor of the week, the OpenPandora team was designing and producing their own handheld gaming console based off of what their fellow forum members wanted. The idea behind the Pandora was to produce a handheld gaming console that met the needs of their highly active, but small, forum. It had to be a fully functional Linux PC, have an awesome D-pad, and be powerful enough to emulate the mass market console gaming systems that had proceeded it. It took a long time to get all of the pieces into place (read: four years of hardship and delays), but the Pandora has finally matured into the handheld console that its steadfast supporters have always hoped it would.

  • Advocating for a Linux advocate

    Ken Starks can drive me crazy sometimes.

    It’s been a while since I have spoken with him. After leaving Linux Today and working for the Linux Foundation, I found myself falling out of touch with various members of the Linux community, and unfortunately Ken was one of them.

  • Migrating to GNU/Linux

    While a perfectly planned set-piece migration appears to work for large organizations, smaller organizations may simply experience delay and greater costs doing the detailed work. The GNU/Linux desktop has evolved to the point where for a large proportion of users it can do the job with little fuss. Just backup data, install the OS and restore the data. If any problems arise they are likely to be small and manageable. With a good backup, one can always revert particular machines if a show-stopper arises. In ten years of migrating small organizations I never encountered a show-stopper that could not be simply worked around. Migrations of simple computer labs may take only an hour or two. A whole school may be about as complicated as that. Where I last worked, I walked around replacing PCs with GNU/Linux PCs. I could have installed over the network to avoid the walking but there was a matter of locked doors after hours… That’s not a show-stopper associated with the OS, just constraints on the institution.

  • MacPup LINUX – How do you like this Apple?

    During previous reviews of Puppy LINUX distributions such as Wary, Slacko and Lucid I have received comments asking “Have you tried MacPup?”. Well up until now no I haven’t.

    I downloaded the ISO for MacPup a few weeks ago but I’ve only just reached the point where I have had time to have an in depth look.

  • The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computers

    Last month, I gave a talk called “The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computing” at DEFCON, the Long Now, and Google. We’re going to have a transcript with the slides on Monday, but in the meantime, here’s a video of the Long Now version of the talk.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Download Linux Kernel 3.6 Release Candidate 2

      Linus Torvalds announced last evening, August 16th, that the second Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.6 kernel is now available for download and testing.

      Linux kernel 3.6 Release Candidate 2 brings the usual bug fixes, updated drivers, and general improvements.

    • A Power Saving Schema For The Linux Kernel Scheduler

      An Intel engineer has proposed introducing a power saving schema for CFS, the Linux kernel’s default scheduler. Code hasn’t been presented yet, but there’s lots of discussion about this topic to improve the power efficiency of the Linux kernel scheduler.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • After 4.9 there will be 4.10

        After the release of the KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9 I have read quite often in the Internet that users and also Media assume that the next release will be 5.0. This is not the case, the next release of the KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Plattform will be 4.10 to be expected at the beginning of 2013 (release schedule has not yet been finalized by the release team).

        I do not know why people assume that there would be a 5.0 release but I guess it is related to the work on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. Also some people seem to assume that after 4.9 the 5.0 has to follow due to second number being single digit, but a simple look at e.g. GNOME would show that numbers can increase as long as one likes.

      • An alternate history of KDE

        In reality, the deal makes perfect sense, and Qt is now clear of its tenure with Nokia. So how did Qt and KDE do under Nokia’s influence?

        If Digia sounds familiar, it’s because the company was already heavily involved in the Qt community. In 2011, not long after Nokia announced its intention to place its fate in the hands of Windows-based smartphones, Nokia sold the commercial Qt support business to Digia. Selling over the trademarks, copyrights, and other assets to Digia just completes a transition that started back in March of 2011.

        At the time, Nokia’s Sebastian Nyström laid out the reason for that sale, indicating that the commercial licenses sales of Qt “are not core business activities for Nokia, so since the introduction of the LGPL license for Qt in 2009 we have been actively working to grow the number of companies providing Qt services.”

      • Muon Suite 1.4.0 Released

        This is a KDE application for simple and easy package management in Debian-KDE based distros, similar to Software Center available in Ubuntu.

      • Qt 5.0 Beta Not Here Due To Difficulties

        While the Qt 5.0 Beta was supposed to be out in July, it was changed to release the Qt 5 beta in early August. We’re now half-way through August and there’s no signs of an imminent beta. It’s now been said that “some things have been a bit more difficult lately” leading to a delay in Qt5.

      • Motomic enables Qt applications on Freescale Kinetis “K” Series MCUs

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME: Seven Possible Recovery Strategies

        The conventional wisdom these days is that GNOME is faltering. GNOME 3 is unpopular, and users and distributions are abandoning it for alternatives such as Xfce or Mate.

        The project itself suffers from a lack of developers and a loss of morale, and faces new challenges as mobile devices become more common than traditional desktop environments.

        So what strategies are available for GNOME in the next few years?

        This ugly assessment of GNOME’s current condition is not just being made by outsiders. Recently, GNOME developer Benjamin Otte made the same critique in a widely discussed blog post entitled “Staring into the Abyss.”

        Many of the same subjects were even raised at GUADEC, GNOME’s annual conference. In particular, Xan Lopez and Juan Jose Sanchez gave a presentation called “A Bright Future for GNOME” that outlined the project’s challenges. Lopez and Sanchez’s presentation was supposed to be a call to arms, but, in the weeks since it was delivered, it has been used mainly as proof of just how the once mighty GNOME has fallen.

      • Jovovich reveals the new Gnome in its 15th birthday!

        It is true that Gnome scientists work secretly many meters under the ground in mysterious projects under the protection of evil and powerful Red Umbrella Corporation. They share no information about their future plans and communication is closed.

      • Gnome3 porting to FreeBSD

  • Distributions

    • ROSA Marathon Release Pack 1 brings tooltips to SimpleWelcome

      The first Release Pack of ROSA Marathon 2012 has been made available for public download. ROSA Marathon is the enterprise desktop edition of ROSA Linux, a Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux and developed by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia.

      Desktop environments supported by ROSA Linux are the K Desktop Environment (KDE), GNOME 2, and LXDE. The main edition, which received this release pack, uses KDE. Aside from an updated Kernel (from kernel 3.0.28 to 3.0.38) the main highlight of this release pack is the addition of tooltips to SimpleWelcome, the distribution’s menu application.

    • Two Rolling Release Distributions

      I am using Arch Linux and PCLinuxOS for past many years with PCLinuxOS dating back to V.92 and Arch Linux since early 2010 . I also used Sabayon Linux , ALT Linux , Chakra , Fuduntu and Unity Linux for different periods of times in past but never settled down with any of these for a daily usage due to many different reasons ranging from instability to facing many problems at different levels.

    • Crunchbang 11 20120806 Review: Minimalistic but highly functional

      If you need a cutting edge Linux OS but you have a very very low resource computer, what would you do? You download Crunchbang and your computer will start performing blazing fast and amazingly stable. Now Crunchbang 11 Waldorf is in the testing stage, based on Debian Wheezy (it’s also testing till date). I guess once Wheezy is released as a stable distribution, we will have the Crunchbang stable as well.

    • BackTrack 5 R3 review

      BackTrack is a security-focused Linux distribution that is loaded with all the best Free Software penetration testing applications available. It is based on Ubuntu Desktop. The latest edition is code-named Revolution, and the newest update-release – BackTrack 5 R3, was released just a few days ago.

      It is distribution designed for penetration testers and other security professionals, or those who want to mess with all the best security and penetration testing applications the free software community has to offer.

    • Pardus ANKA?

      Apparently, the community of Pardus is working on Pardus ANKA, the fork of Pardus. They have a logo, too!

    • Macpup 529

      Macpup is a small,light OS. It runs in ram and is very fast. It is not a striped down,bare bones,basic core OS. Macpup is a full featured systemright out of the box with apps for office,graphics,multimedia,internetand much more.And it looks really cool.

    • New Releases

      • SolusOS Eveline 1.2 Released
      • SolusOS 1.2 Arrives, Updates Eveline

        SolusOS is a newish distribution that has been getting some real good reviews since its inception. A new update was released today to update the current 1.x “Eveline” stable release. I thought it was about time to take this

      • AV Linux 6.0 Has Been Officially Released
      • 6.0: The beginning of the end for AV Linux

        Following what he calls “a very turbulent development period”, AV Linux Project Leader Glen MacArthur has released version 6.0 of his custom Linux distribution geared towards audio and video production. AV Linux is a Debian-based distribution that uses the lightweight LXDE desktop environment and includes various multimedia creation programs out of the box. While the OS is specifically aimed at multimedia content creators, MacArthur says that the “state-of-the-art release” is still well-suited for most common daily computer tasks.

      • Calculate Linux 12.0.2 released

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Get to know Mageia better!

        Hmm, it is hard to address the target group of Mageia. A quick answer would be that targets to a lot of people. Yes, Mageia is one of the most popular distros around and is relatively a new one.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo-Fu: Building KDE branches

        5

        Being a happy Gentoo user myself for about half a year, I thought I would share some tips from my personal experiences on this great distro. It’s nothing you cannot already google for; these are just some ideas/motives to further dig into for yourselves. Mayhaps I will write another post or two about Gentoo. If I ever decide to overcome my laziness :) Take it easy with this post, it’s a bit lengthy, but to quote Blaise Pascal: “I haven’t had time to make it shorter yet“.

        Gentoo being a source-based distribution allows for some very cool stuff like building from an upstream git branch. You can find ebuilds for KDE branches 4.9 and master (as of 17.08.2012), which can vastly help you with bug triaging/fixing. Bug triaging is as easy as updating your system from this branch and trying to reproduce bugs (the procedure is fully automated thanks to Portage’s Moo Powers – “emerge –moo” – and the Gentoo Developers). Bug fixing is as easy as writing a patch and applying it using Portage’s excellent patching abilities. I actually *fixed* a bug like this recently (Bug #297209), being too lazy to manually pull and compile the source code. Sure, a manual setup is way more flexible, but doesn’t come without quite some hassles.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Open Source Is Becoming a Military Necessity

        In letting just anyone use your code, that has to include the bad guys. They’re bound to find a way to compromise it, the thinking goes.

      • Becoming Red Hat: Cloudera and Hortonworks’ Big-Data death match

        In the Big Data market, Hadoop is clearly the team to beat. What is less clear is which of the Hadoop vendors will claim the spoils of that victory.

        Because open source tends to be winner-take-all, we are almost certainly going to see a “Red Hat” of Hadoop, with the second place vendor left to clean up the crumbs.

        As ever with open source, this means the Hadoop market ultimately comes down to a race for community support because, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady argues, the biggest community wins.

      • Red Hat unveils new cloud framework

        Open-source platform developer Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced on Monday that its new OpenStack cloud framework is ready for enterprises looking to build private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

        Red Hat is a major supporter and supplier of solutions based on OpenStack, the open-source framework for enterprise cloud platforms. This most recent distribution is designed to complement Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Storage and Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), according to the company.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora + Cinnamon – What gives?

          Not that long ago, I gave Fedora Beefy Miracle another spin, this time, the KDE version, and it was a decent experience overall. Not as bland as the Xfce test, not as good as the last autumn KDE edition, somewhere in between. Decent, but still very much Fedora, blood and sweat and hi-tech all combined.

          Then, a reader pinged me and suggested a marvelous idea – what about testing Cinnamon? It’s a most beautiful product. And more importantly, it worked great on Linux Mint, where it’s the default desktop. It even worked splendidly in Ubuntu Pangolin. So why not see what happens when you mate Cinnamon to Fedora? Can this lovely desktop environment turn the tide against all the geekiness and boredom that happen to infuse Fedora?

    • Debian Family

      • Debian and I

        Debian is the most influential Linux distribution ever. Of the 305 active distributions listed on Distrowatch, 147 are derived from Debian, and 87 from Ubuntu, Debian’s most famous off-shoot. In other words, 77% of the distributions being used today wouldn’t exist without Debian. That makes Debian’s nineteenth anniversary on August 16 worth a moment’s reflection, not just technologically, but socially as well.

      • Happy Birthday Debian! And memories of an old-timer…

        For Debian’s birthday, Francesca Ciceri of the Debian Publicity team suggested that developers “blog about their first experiences with Debian”. I found this a good idea so I’m going to share my own early experience. It’s quite different from what happens nowadays…

      • Month of birthdays
      • Happy Birthday, Debian!
      • Happy Birthday Debian And Gnome

        Its birthday time for some of the major players in Linux world, Gnome and Debian. While Gnome was founded on 15th August 1997, and is fifteen years old, Debian has an older history, dating back to 16th August 1993. One of the oldest surviving distro, Debian turns 19 this year.

        Debian shares its history with some of the older distros like Slackware and Mandriva. One of the major changes Debian bought in the Linux world is binary .deb packages. Previously, Linux users had to compile each of the program they wished to install, but with Debian, it was gone. This gave rise to number of package repositories and number of user friendly derivatives, like Ubuntu which show how significant Debian’s development was.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu One offers 500 mb free storage for users
          • Unity 2D dropped from Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”

            The 2D variant of Canonical’s Unity desktop user interface – introduced in Ubuntu 11.10 for systems without 3D/OpenGL hardware acceleration – will not be included in future versions of Ubuntu. The change was first discussed at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), but has only just been confirmed in a bug report that sees the removal of Unity 2D.

          • Say Hello To Unity’s Newest Feature: Previews
          • Previews, The Latest Awesome Feature Of Ubuntu 12.10
          • Unity: Dash Gets A Cool New Previews Feature [Video] – Ubuntu 12.10 Development

            A cool new feature has landed in the Unity Staging PPA, for Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal: previews in Dash.

            With the new “previews” feature, you’ll be able to right click applications or files in Dash to get a preview, along with some extra information which depends on the item you’ve right clicked.

          • Ubuntu’s Unity Has Room To Improve Performance

            Following yesterday’s news that Ubuntu 12.10 will drop the Unity 2D desktop, I carried out some quick tests comparing the latest state of the Unity desktop with Compiz against the lightweight Unity 2D desktop that’s now being removed. To not much surprise, the composited Unity desktop still has some performance shortcomings for OpenGL workloads compared to Unity 2D.

          • Canonical Comments On The Unity 2D Defenestration

            Jason Warner, the Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, acknowledges that dropping Unity 2D and going with Unity-Over-LLVMpipe may lead to some regressions and that some users will want to stick to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or switch to another desktop environment.

            Warner wrote a message on the Ubuntu development list on Friday entitled “Unity Going Forward” where he confirms yesterday’s information that Ubuntu 12.10 is dropping the Unity 2D desktop and focusing upon using Unity with LLVMpipe in cases where there is no sufficient GPU/driver for handling the composited desktop. “Unity 2D has been removed as a default option in favor of Unity 3D across the board. This is a work in progress, so bear with us as we sort out the details in the transition.”

          • After a while of using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS…

            You don’t often see post reviews / analysis of Linux distributions so I thought I would break the trend and share some of my thoughts after using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for quite some time.

            So, the great thing which I have observed with all Ubuntu LTS releases starting with 8.04 LTS is how well they work (eg lack of bugs and good support). 12.04 LTS in no exception. It is what I expect from LTS releases and what Canonical Ltd aims to deliver, a stable and working product which you can rely on.

          • New Ubuntu One Incentive Gives Twice!

            Ubuntu one, Canonical’s long running cloud storage program just got a little better today. Users are now able to invite friends and family to the program and be rewarded. Unlike most referral based rewards, this one gives twice! It works quite simply.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • New Apache project will Drill big data in near real time

    Working with big data is a lot like dealing with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: either you’re going to have a massive amount of data on hand or you’re going to be able to query that data in real time–never both.

    But now a new open source project has just been accepted as an Apache Software Foundation Incubation project that will let you do both: have your data and search it fast, too.

    Apache Drill is an ad-hoc query system based on Dremel, another big data system that, like Hadoop, was invented by Google engineers to not only manage large datasets but also perform interactive analysis in near real-time.

  • Cloud PBXes: Can Digium Asterisk Answer the Call?

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Ups Ante for Chrome Bug Hunters

        Google isn’t stopping with Chrome. The Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program continues to cover vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash as well as other well-known software such as the Linux kernel, various open-source libraries and daemons, X windows, and so on.

    • Mozilla

      • Raspberry Pi now comes in Firefox OS flavour

        The little computer that can, the Raspberry Pi, has successfully run the imminent Firefox OS, thanks to the efforts of a Nokia employee named Oleg Romashin.

        Firefox OS, also and/or formerly known as Boot to Gecko (B2G), is the Mozilla foundation’s attempt at providing an HTML-5 powered OS that will free punters from the tyranny of apps tied to mobile operating systems. The foundation sees the project as not entirely dissimilar to Google’s Chrome OS efforts, but doesn’t feel it is in competition with the text ad giant as it intends Firefox OS as a phone-only play rather than a Microsoft-on-the-lap irritant.

      • Firefox Competitive Strategy Must Focus On Privacy

        We have previously spent some time here discussing Mozilla and what the problems that are plaguing Firefox today. For a long time during the past decade, Firefox was able to successfully challenge Internet Explorer by offering a much more nimble browsing experience that was more responsive to developing user needs such as a protection against security threats. That competitive advantage slowly unraveled once Google introduced Chrome and began to spend marketing dollars promoting it, something Mozilla has done very little of.

      • Mozilla Firefox Release Schedule

        With four different versions of the Firefox web browser available at any time, plus special builds that pop up every now and then and ESR versions, it is quite difficulty to keep up with the browser’s rapid release schedule. To make matters even more complicated, some versions like the aurora or nightly versions get updated fairly often. To bring order into chaos, release schedules usually only concentrate on version increases and not all the updates that get released.

  • SaaS

    • The Battle to Become “The Linux of the Cloud”

      In the business world, money has long been the dominant success benchmark. A hundred years ago being a millionaire was enough, today it’s about being a billionaire. In open source software however, things are a bit different. Success is often defined not only by how much money is made, but instead by a company or project’s level of community contribution, involvement and participation. The gold standard for this type of success has long been the Linux Operating system.

    • Openstack Matters To Almost Everyone

      Openstack, as the name suggests, is a stack of open application for building public and private cloud. The project started with joint effort of NASA and Rackspace in July 2010. The project gained support of 3386 people/developer/contributor and 186 enterprises within 2 years of its launch. Some of its corporate supporters include Canonical, RedHat, Intel, HP, Piston Cloud and Nebula. The project code is available under Apache Licence and is hosted on Github.

  • Databases

    • Fixing things the proper way

      Looking at the bug report (opened in 2010) one can see that the bug was marked in March 2012 as ‘solved’. What was not made clear was that the solution was to disable the query cache for all partitioned tables.

      Reading the bug report comments, I get the impression that the main reason for removing the feature was that the developers looking at the issue didn’t really understand how the query cache works in detail and it was just easier to remove the feature than fixing it. (The problem was well understood but not how to fix it).

    • Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL just become closed source?
    • PostgreSQL patches XML flaws

      A flaw in the built-in XML functionality of PostgreSQL (CVE-2012-3488) and another in its optional XSLT handling (CVE-2012-3489) have been patched, and the developers have released updated versions of the open source database with relevant fixes. The holes being patched are related to insecure use of the widely used libxml2 and libxslt open source libraries and the PostgreSQL developers advise anyone using those libraries to check their systems for similar problems.

    • Time to rely less on MySQL?

      KDE software tends to require mysql as the database engine (either a hard requirement like Amarok, or recommended backend like in Akonadi) so things like these genuinely worry me:

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Celebrating ODF… and a lot of other good things.

      Simon’s point is that because of ODF, Microsoft was forced to open up its MS Office platform to open standards. And he’s right, but as I’m reading his lines I again realize that, as an old Chinese wise man once wrote, “Do turn back from time to time while on your way, and contemplate the road you’ve already travelled”. I’ve given an interview recently where I was expressing my frustration at the limits in our work towards ODF’s massive adoption. Well, that’s the other way of looking at the glass, it seems, and it has been made possible by all the ODF ecosystem and their relentless efforts to encourage and advocate ODF and open standards. Because of them, because of us, Microsoft had to actually open up, and not in a trivial way. It takes an enormous effort to achieve just that, and I’m proud to have been part of this team all along.

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Lisping Spleen & Evil in Smalltalk, GNU Know?

      Formal computer languages are lots of fun conceptually, and often provide mind-bending visions of the various shapes, curves and dimensions of textual thought. But there aren’t many interesting words, sounds, colors. I don’t really have the discipline to study linguistics (ho, ho) formally, but I get off on etymology on one hand, and the Gertrude Steinian approach to words as both colors and sounds, and “objects,” sometimes willful and mindful, with texture, temperature and taste. Creatures. But also abstractions: object-oriented programming concepts devised when Turing was in baby booties; however, with the depth and variety of real words forged from real life.

    • FSF introduce “DRM Free” logo

      The Free Software Foundation’s “Defective By Design” campaign has introduced a new “DRM Free” label. The idea behind the label is to identify products that do not have DRM protection so that they are easier for consumers to find in stores, and give those products a competitive advantage.

    • New DRM-Free Label

  • Public Services/Government

  • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Dojo 1.8′s highlight – updated documentation
    • Intel Ivy Bridge: GCC 4.8 vs. LLVM/Clang 3.2 SVN

      Kicking off the Linux benchmarks this weekend are some early numbers from the GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 development compilers when running on Intel’s latest-generation Core i7 “Ivy Bridge” processor. GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 are still months away from being formally released, but this article provides a glimpse at how the open-source compiler battle is panning out.

    • Forget LinkedIn: Companies turn to GitHub to find tech talent
    • Ever Higher Levels of Abstraction – Building the Future With Chef

      If you have been in the industry for a decade or more, you probably have a pretty good idea of what being a Unix sysadmin is all about. Load the OS? Check. Configure local user accounts? Check. Install packages, compile some from scratch? Double check. Unix has not changed all that much, so it would be easy to assume that the job you were doing ten years ago would be the same job that you can do for the foreseeable future. But, that is the trap of dinosaurs my friend, the weather has already changed, and the days of dealing with bare metal are already moving fast behind us.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Finance

    • The Port of Goldman Sachs

      Goldman Sachs has multiple longstanding interests in the Port of Oakland’s finances and business operations. Goldman Sachs is a party to at least three major areas of Port business.

      First and foremost is Goldman’s role as an underwriter or dealer for the Port’s various debt offerings. No other financial company is as important as Goldman Sachs for the Port’s numerous and complex bond and commercial paper deals

    • Did the Bounds of Cyber War Just Expand to Banks and Neutral States?

      Last week the Russian security research group Kaspersky Labs announced they had found a new computer virus infecting thousands of computers in the Middle East. Called “Gauss,” after a filename found in its codebase, the malware can capture information about the infected computer, including Internet browsing histories, user login details, and system configuration details. The existence of Gauss suggests that countries may be using cyber warfare for more than just countering imminent threats, and that, with the rules of digital engagement so ambiguous, there’s little to restrain or guide cyberwar’s development.

      Kaspersky Labs was blunt: Gauss, it says, is likely a “nation-state sponsored banking Trojan” built by the same programmers behind Stuxnet and Flame, the recent, sophisticated digital pathogens often speculated as designed by the United States and Israel. However, unlike these viruses, which both targeted Iran, Gauss appears to have a very different target: the banking system of Lebanon.

      Gauss is the latest in a line of massive malware attacks, and much like its predecessors, it appears to be so complex and sophisticated that it’s assumed to have been built by a sovereign state. Gauss uses the same platform as Flame, a “cyber espionage” program that was found in a number of locations in Iran in early 2012 and was capable of comprehensive surveillance of infected computers. Flame itself bore a strong family resemblance to Stuxnet, a 2010 virus that targeted the Iranian nuclear research program.

      Like Flame, Gauss transmits detailed records of user activity back to its central command. Like Stuxnet, it carries a special encrypted “payload” that targets machines that carry specific system configurations. Stuxnet’s payload would identify and disable nuclear research systems, but the encryption for the Gauss payload has not yet been broken, and its purpose remains unknown.

      However, unlike Flame and Stuxnet, which targeted a rogue state’s government networks, Gauss goes after the commercial sector in a country that has normalized relations with the United States. Out of more than 2,500 identified instances of Gauss, nearly two-thirds of have been found in Lebanon. And, unlike the broad spying capacity of Flame, Gauss seems designed for the narrow purpose of capturing transaction data from financial institutions and digital payment providers; specifically, Lebanese banks Fransabank, Bank of Beirut, BLOM, Credit Libanais, Byblos Bank, and EBLF, as well as siphoning data from PayPal and Citibank.

      Why Lebanon? Why banks? Stealing financial transaction data is traditionally the province of, say, shadowy underground criminal gangs. Lebanon is a small country better known for its vibrant nightlife and perpetual domestic volatility. Neither its banking sector nor the state itself are obvious targets for the U.S. or Israeli ntelligence services, which, though they haven’t been connected to Gauss, are the only groups with both the know-how and, if they truly were behind Stuxnet and Flame, the track record.

    • Why Wall Street unfriended Facebook

      When General Motors Co. said three months ago that it was pulling its paid ads from Facebook because it didn’t believe advertising on the site was effective, the move cast a sharp shadow over the company’s initial public offering. Two days later, Facebook‘s stock began trading – and then it began sinking.

  • Civil Rights

  • Copyrights

    • Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

      Anton Vickerman, 38-year old owner of the once popular link site surfthechannel.com (STC), was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday by a British judge. But the prosecutors sitting across the courtroom from him didn’t work for the Crown—they were lawyers for the movie studio trade group Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

08.17.12

Links 17/8/2012: Jolla’s MeeGo UI Arrives, WebOS is ‘Gram’

Posted in News Roundup at 6:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Is A Lemon On The Retina MacBook Pro

    If you are planning to buy one of the new Apple MacBook Pro notebooks with a Retina Display for use under Linux, hold off on your purchase. Running the Retina MacBook Pro with Linux isn’t a trouble-free experience and after using even the latest development code and jumping through various hoops, Linux on the latest Apple hardware is still less than an ideal experience. Linux support will improve for the Retina MacBook Pro in the coming months, but it’s not likely to see any proper “out of the box” experience until next year.

  • Tesla Model S Relies On Linux

    Electric cars introduce a complete fundamental paradigm shift not only with their electric drivetrain but also with software management. This is where the Open Source movement can have the most positive effect.

  • Desktop

    • HOWTO make a school computer lab for free with “broken” computers and free/open source software

      Elizabeth on ifixit tells us the heartwarming story of Robert Litt, a teacher at ASCEND, “a small arts K-8 school in the Alameda County School District.” Litt needed a computer lab. His school had no budget, So he called around to local businesses and individuals and collected all their “broken” computers (refusing anything made before 2002 or with less than 512MB of RAM) and installed Ubuntu GNU/Linux on them. What he got was a free, robust computer lab. Litt says “”Discarded computers are our most wasted educational resource,” and that we are “starving in the midst of plenty.”

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • AArch64/ARM64 Linux Kernel Work Still Ongoing

      The ARMv8 64-bit architecture enablement, officially known as AArch64, is still ongoing for the Linux kernel.

      Back in early July were the initial Linux kernel patches for AArch64. The initial code drop consisted of about 23,000 lines of code to enable this 64-bit ARMv8 support in Linux. More on the AArch64/ARMv8 Linux enablement was talked about last month at Debian’s DebConf 12.

    • ZFS File-System On Linux Moves Along

      A new release of the native ZFS file-system module implementation for the Linux kernel (not the FUSE-based ZFS) has been released by the team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

    • Linux 3.6-rc2
    • Linux 3.6-rc2
    • Linux 3.5.2
    • Linux Kernel 3.5.2 Is Available for Download

      Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, August 15th, the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.5 kernel series.

      Linux kernel 3.5.2 comes some ARM improvements, x86 and ia64 fixes, nilfs2 and EXOFS filesystems fixes, sound and networking updates, as well as new drivers.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Freedreno: Complex Fragment Shaders, VBOs

        Freedreno, the reverse-engineered open-source Linux graphics driver for Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics hardware, continues hitting new milestones.

      • Intel Graphics Hit High Point With Linux 3.6 Kernel

        Testing of the latest Linux 3.6 kernel that’s presently under development has revealed some additional OpenGL performance improvements with Intel graphics, at least concerning the latest-generation “Ivy Bridge” processors.

      • NVIDIA Releases $299 Kepler Graphics Card

        NVIDIA has announced today the release of their GeForce GTX 660 Ti “Kepler” graphics card, a new competitive NVIDIA GPU for the $299 USD price-point. The Linux binary driver from NVIDIA should be able to handle this new graphics processor while the Kepler support for Nouveau is still being raised.

        The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB graphics card features a 915MHz base clock, 980MHz boost clock, and 1.5GHz GDDR5 video memory. The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is built on the “GK104″ core — the same as the GeForce GTX 670 graphics card — and features 1344 Stream/CUDA processors, 7 SMs, 4 GPCs, 7 tesselation units, 24 ROPs, and a transistor count of around 3.54 billion. The recommended retail price at launch for the NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti is $299 USD.

      • AMD Catalyst 12.8 Driver For Linux: Not Exciting

        A Catalyst 12.8 proprietary driver release is now available for Linux, but it doesn’t pack much in the way of changes.

        As usual, members of the Phoronix Forums community have been quick to monitor AMD servers looking for new driver releases to discuss. They are now playing with Catalyst 12.8 but for Linux users there isn’t much in the way of exciting changes.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Qt stewardship baton passed from Nokia to Digia

        Computer Weekly has reported on both the highs of Nokia Qt’s developer conferences and the lows of uncertainty that have surrounded the parent company’s position regarding the cross-platform application and user interface framework.

        Nokia Qt’s SVP of strategy Sebastian Nystrom has now confirmed that Qt will cease to be used in future Nokia products due to a so-called “sharpening of strategy” — readers will also note that Nokia plans to cull up to 10,000 positions globally by the end of 2013.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME’s Ambitious OS Adventure

        “Man that’s funny! They’re bleeding out, don’t have enough devs as it is, have run off most of the community, and NOW they think they can pull off GNOME OS? … It’s over, it’s done, the fat lady is down the street eating a sandwich,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “This is just how FOSS works in that if you tick off the community and refuse to listen, they’ll just route around the damage … .”

      • GNOME – from abyss to common ground

        GNOME’s recent development has been widely criticised, from Linus Torvalds to its own contributors. Richard Hillesley looks at the background to this and the possible ways forward. Can GNOME ever be the defacto favourite desktop of Linux again?

  • Distributions

    • Everything works out of the box in Zorin!

    • New Releases

    • Debian Family

      • Debian celebrates its 19th birthday

        Debian, one of the oldest actively maintained GNU/Linux distributions, turns 19 today. Project founder Ian Murdock originally announced the project on 16 August 1993 when he released the first version of the distribution. Looking back at that email, a surprising number of Murdock’s initial goals for the project are still reflected in Debian today, despite the fact that the distribution has gone through regular leadership changes since Murdock left the project in 1996.

      • Debian Community celebrates its 19th birthday

        The Debian community is pleased to celebrate its 19th birthday since Ian Murdock’s original founding announcement. Quoting from the official project history: “The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a ‘distribution’ of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.”

        A lot has happened to the project and its community in the past nineteen years. There have been eleven releases – most recently Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” in February 2011 – and a huge amount of free software packaged. The current “unstable” branch consists of more than 37,000 binary packages for the amd64 architecture alone – over 46 GB of Free/Libre Software! Since last year’s birthday new steps to portability have been made; 11 official ports are now available, amongst which Debian/kFreeBSD deserves a special mention for successfully integrating a non-Linux kernel within the project.

      • Looking back at 16 years of dpkg history with some figures

        With Debian’s 19th anniversary approaching, I thought it would be nice to look back at dpkg’s history. After all, it’s one of the key components of any Debian system.

        The figures in this article are all based on dpkg’s git repository (as of today, commit 9a06920). While the git repository doesn’t have all the history, we tried to integrate as much as possible when we created it in 2007. We have data going back to April 1996…

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Now Invite Your Friends And Get More Free Ubuntu One Storage

            After Dropbox, its now Ubuntu One’s turn to run a referral program to increase users and give the users a chance to get more storage. Now invite your friends and family members and get 500 mB extra storage for each successful registration.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • GNOME-Ubuntu Flavor Looking At “GNObuntu”

              For the GNOME-ified Ubuntu spin they don’t want to go with the name “Gubuntu” since it could be easily confused with Goobuntu, Google’s internal re-mix of Ubuntu for its employees.

            • GNOME Ubuntu community derivative name proposed

              In a post on the GNOME mailing list, Ubuntu developer Jeremy Bicha started a discussion about the naming of an Ubuntu variant that will use GNOME as its default desktop. The need for a new GNOME derivative of Ubuntu was first discussed in May by several developers at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in California, where the group found that the traditional naming conventions for alternative flavours of Ubuntu could cause some confusion. Although discussed at UDS, the effort is not supported by Canonical.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Timesys Announces LinuxLink for i.MX6x SABRE Lite Board from element14

      The SABRE Lite board from element14 is a low-cost, high-performance development platform featuring Freescale’s i.MX 6Quad Application Processor. With LinuxLink for i.MX 6 Series, developers designing embedded Linux products around the SABRE Lite board will have access to an integrated board support package (BSP) that enables them to evaluate the i.MX 6 Series processor before committing to a custom design. The complete design solution will be available for purchase globally from element14 later this calendar year.

    • Phones

      • Jolla’s MeeGo UI is ready to go – and it’s on the hunt for mobile talent

        Finnish smartphone startup Jolla is scouting out new talent in Finland and China, where Jolla’s CEO Jussi Hurmola reckons its MeeGo OS can tap into the nation’s hunger to make a mark on mobile innovation.

      • HP Spinning Off WebOS as ‘Gram’

        WebOS just can’t let go. More than six months after HP decided to open source the mobile OS, webOS Nation has discovered that the webOS Global Business Unit (GBU) will be reborn as a new company known as Gram.

        WebOS Nation posted a memo from HP chief of staff Martin Risau in which is Gram is described as “a new brand.”

      • Android

        • Instagram 3.0 debuts on Android

          Instagram today announced a new version of their popular Android (and iOS) application which adds in a number of handy features.

        • The alleged flood of Android trojans

          However, F-Secure has, for some time, chosen a more sophisticated approach to how it analyses the pests for its statistics, such as those it presents in its quarterly Mobile Threat ReportPDF. It bases its numbers for malware distribution on malware families or variants and therefore provides a much better measurement of the real threat compared to the inflated unique samples values. So F-Secure has discovered that in the April to June period, 40 new families or variants of existing families of malware emerged, an entirely realistic number. Both AV vendors agree on one thing though; that Android is the preferred mobile platform for digital pests.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Using Open Source to Virtualize Old (Ancient) PCs

    If you’re like me, you — or your customers — have an excessive number of old PCs lying in your basement or in a storage room. Time to throw those old PCs in the recycling bin? But what if you can’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to those machines forever? Fret not: Using a few open-source tools, you can immortalize those retired PCs as virtual machines without having to hold on to the actual hardware.

  • Webinos provides open-source platform for gadget interconnectivity

  • Events

    • The LinuxCon/CloudOpen Experience

      Imagine arriving at a conference where you immediately recognize Linux kernel developers from their annual Linux Kernel Summit photo. You connect with colleagues from other companies but with whom you’re working on collaborative, open source projects. A lot of faces in the sessions are familiar and a lot are new. Your session and hallway discussions move beyond talk and you start working on advancing your projects right there at the conference. You might even start a new one. And, at night you leave the laptop in the bag and you enjoy amazing venues and great laughs. This is LinuxCon/CloudOpen.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google pledges $2 million in prizes to hackers who exploit Chrome

        Google has upped the ante in its industry-leading cash-for-security-bugs program with hefty bonuses and a hacking contest that will award up to $2 million worth of prizes to people who successfully exploit its Chrome browser.

        On Wednesday, the search giant announced plans for Pwnium 2, a contest that will pay $60,000 for hacks that fully exploit its Chrome and Chromium browsers. The competition, scheduled for October 10 at the Hack In The Box security conference in Malaysia, will award smaller amounts for Chrome attacks that rely on code not native to the browser. For instance, a “partial Chrome exploit,” such as one that combines a bug in Chrome’s native code base with a bug in Windows, will be awarded $50,000. A “non-Chrome exploit” in Adobe Flash, Windows or other app will fetch $40,000.

      • Google Doubles Value of its Bug Bounties in Chrome Pwnium Competition

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Firefox OS Has Even Shown Up on the Raspberry Pi

        Mozilla has been moving quickly ahead with its mobile operating system, which is dubbed “Firefox OS,” and photos of it have been appearing online, as seen here. It looks a lot like other graphical, mobile operating systems for smartphones, although Mozilla stresses that it is strictly built on open standards. Now, a Nokia researcher has put Firefox OS on–of all platforms–the Raspberry Pi. And, there is video to prove it.

      • Raspberry Pi gets a Firefox OS port

        The first low-cost smartphones running Mozilla’s Firefox OS won’t go on sale for quite some time yet, but Nokia engineer Oleg Romashin has already gotten an experimental version of the software up and running on his Raspberry Pi.

      • Check This Out, Firefox OS Running On Raspberry Pi

        With the Raspberry Pi, $35 has never bought you so much flexibility. It’s a Linux file or media server, it’s an Android device, it’s a Linux media player- it’s whatever you want it to be. The newest OS to make its way to the $35 mini-PC motherboard is Mozilla’s Firefox OS. For those that don’t know, Firefox OS is an HTML5 and “open web”-tech OS that is designed by Mozilla and will be targeted towards entry-level smartphones starting in 2013.

      • Comodo IceDragon 14.0 released as a secure alternative to Firefox

  • SaaS

    • Rackspace Private Cloud: Instant OpenStack

      Rackspace has released its Private Cloud software distribution as a free, installable ISO file. Enterprises can sign up for commercial support for a starting fee of $2,500 and a monthly charge of $100 per node. Private Cloud includes Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server operating system; a KVM hypervisor; Opscode Chef, which automates the installation; and OpenStack Essex’s Compute, Image Service, Identity Service and Dashboard modules. The only thing missing is OpenStack Storage, which Rackspace says will be available in the next release.

    • Newly Formed China Open Source Cloud League Connects To OpenStack

      ntel, Sina, China Standard Software, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have jointly announced the establishment of China Open Source Cloud League.

      China Open Source Cloud League will be committed to the integration of enterprise users’ demands for cloud computing infrastructure platforms. Based on the development and improvement of open-source frameworks like OpenStack, the league will promote the development of the cloud computing industry in China.

    • Rackspace delivers OpenStack “Alamo” for private clouds

      The co-creator of OpenStack has delivered a free OpenStack cloud distribution that allows customers to launch a private cloud in minutes. Will the hosting company’s embrace of an open source cloud platform ensure its survival in the hyper-competitive cloud era?

  • Databases

  • CMS

  • Education

    • Khan Academy’s new computer science program is inherently open source

      As the world demands more and more computer scientists, Khan Academy’s computer science program could not have been introduced at a better time. The new curriculum was debuted yesterday in a video featuring John Resig, Khan Academy’s Dean of Computer Science, and Sal Khan, Founder of Khan Academy.

      While the program is not explicitly labeled as “open source learning,” the lessons instill the values of open source through collaborative learning and sharing of programs. The lessons are targeted at middle school-age kids who are expanding their interests before high school. The tutorials are designed to be basic enough for even the most novice programmer to understand. This is great news for the open source community because young students using this tool are practicing the principles of open source from the start as they learn how to code.

  • Funding

  • Project Releases

    • SpringSource Tool Suite 3.0.0 released

      The Spring community and SpringSource have released a new version of their tool suite for Spring, which sees the available tools split into two separate suites. The newly released version 3.0.0 of the Spring Tool Suite and Groovy/Grails Tool Suite are now completely open source and can be deployed independently of each other. This enables Groovy/Grails developers to skip the previously time-consuming process of configuring the software with extensions for their platform.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Oracle plans to join Java hardware speed party

      Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple, Oracle is now turning to hardware acceleration to speed up Java by harnessing the emerging potential of the GPU.

      The OpenJDK project’s Hotspot group has said it will explore ways of speeding Java with a native Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that taps hardware acceleration.

    • GCC shifts internal focus to C++

      The development branch of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) now includes the major modifications that provide a C++ re-implementation of the C code that was originally accumulated when the collection was first created. Before this re-implementation, the code used in stage 1 of GCC build process was implemented in the C programming language. The code used in stages 2 and 3 of the GCC build process has been available in C++ for a while.

Leftovers

  • Chinese App Store users complain that Apple doesn’t speak their language

    Apple has become the target of complaints from some Chinese customers as searches in the localized version of the App Store are producing sometimes quizzical results, even when they include the specific name of an application.

    Sohu IT (via Mobisights) noted the “strange phenomenon” that is taking place on the App Store. Some developers are reporting that their applications aren’t showing up on the first page when the names of the software are inputted.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Finance

  • Civil Rights

    • US, UK Betray Basic Values To Get Assange At Any Cost

      Then there’s a deeply disturbing, but quite compelling, argument by Mark Weisbrot at The Guardian, that even if these things seem disconnected, it’s pretty clear that the driving force behind all of this is the plan for the US to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act for his role in Wikileaks — and this moment is particularly stunning. Historically, those who were being persecuted on human rights issues fled to the United States for asylum. Not the other way around. But here’s a case where the exact opposite is true. And while many people have gotten past the point of believing that the US is a beacon of light on human rights issues, the fact that Assange had to take this action, combined with the UK’s response, really acts as a distinct (and tremendously embarrassing) marker for a clear point in time in which the US turned from being a protector of human rights, to a persecutor against human rights.

    • Julian Assange’s right to asylum

      If one asks current or former WikiLeaks associates what their greatest fear is, almost none cites prosecution by their own country. Most trust their own nation’s justice system to recognize that they have committed no crime. The primary fear is being turned over to the US. That is the crucial context for understanding Julian Assange’s 16-month fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, a fight that led him to seek asylum, Tuesday, in the London Embassy of Ecuador.

      The evidence that the US seeks to prosecute and extradite Assange is substantial. There is no question that the Obama justice department has convened an active grand jury to investigate whether WikiLeaks violated the draconian Espionage Act of 1917. Key senators from President Obama’s party, including Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, have publicly called for his prosecution under that statute. A leaked email from the security firm Stratfor – hardly a dispositive source, but still probative – indicated that a sealed indictment has already been obtained against him. Prominent American figures in both parties have demanded Assange’s lifelong imprisonment, called him a terrorist, and even advocated his assassination.

  • DRM

    • Hachette Tells Authors And Tor To Use DRM Because It Is Awesome Or Something

      It has only been a bit over a month since Tor’s DRM-free policy went into full effect. At the time of the announcement, Tor’s president stated that the policy change was made at the request of both authors and readers who felt that DRM was a hinderance to their enjoyment of ebooks. As we know, DRM is not an effective measure against piracy. More often than not, DRM is actually harmful to paying customers as they hit restrictions that do not exist in the physical realm. Even with all these reasons against the use of DRM, there are still some publishers out there that feel that DRM is an effective means of stopping piracy.

08.16.12

Links 16/8/2012: Calligra 2.5, LibreOffice 3.5.6 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 1:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Keeping up with the Robinsons
  • From Windows to Linux Part One: The Newbie

    For almost three years, I’ve been using a HP netbook for all my computing needs. That includes surfing the net, writing emails, watching movies, blogging at GeekMom and my personal blog, and beginning my first novel. The workload was causing the little thing to die a slow and most unnatural death. There were huge lag times waiting for sites to upload or for Works to save. I use a HP Mini 110-1030NR running Windows, but I had begun to steal one of my husband’s laptops because I was so frustrated.

    One of the biggest problems I seemed to have was memory allocation. The netbook has a limited memory of 1 gig, which caused many of the problems. Once the netbook had performed a couple of tasks, it bogged down and became virtually unusable.

  • From Windows to Linux Part Two: System 76
  • Tesla CTO talks Model S, batteries and in-car Linux

    For most people who identify themselves as techies, Tesla’s Model S is something of a dream car. The all-electric vehicle accelerates fast, can maintain a high top speed, has a range of up to 300 miles, and packs a 17-inch flat panel display with a Linux-based computer system that provides access to just about every aspect of the car’s performance and entertainment system.

  • Why Linux Has Been an Attention Getter Lately

    Always a popular operating system, Linux has been getting a lot more buzz lately. All of this new news has helped to propel Linux operating systems to the public eye, and awareness of this system’s existence is now starting to spread beyond technology enthusiasts and computer coders.

  • Desktop

    • Building Computer Labs for Free

      I found an article about a teacher building a computer lab on $0. That’s mostly what I did for years refurbishing whatever PCs were in storage or not being used in schools where I taught. GNU/Linux is very flexible and installs on a wide variety of machines without concerns about drivers for the particular machine since most drivers needed to boot are part of the Linux kernel.

    • Removing Barriers for Linux Hardware

      I have squirmed in my seat while typing that reply. Free and Open Source Software doesn’t have borders. The hardware shouldn’t either.

    • Follow-up to “Pricing Hardware that Runs GNU/Linux”

      In Pricing Hardware that Runs GNU/Linux, I started what I hope will be a new practice at ZaReason — giving rebates at the end of each accounting cycle, giving back any profits that occur during that time period.

      For the last two weeks I have been cringing, literally cringing. How do I tell people that there won’t be any rebates this cycle? It was break-even.

    • ZaReason UltraLap 430 Ultrabook Ships With Linux OS Installed

      Along similar lines to what Dell has been creating within its Dell Project Sputnik, where the computer manufacturer has combined an XPS 13 Ultrabook and Linux together.

    • Dreaming of a Linux Ultrabook? Meet the New ZaReason UltraLap 430

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Display Switching Support For Apple MacBooks

      Canonical and others continue to hack on rudimentary support for graphics display switching for Apple MacBook laptops bearing multiple graphics processors.

    • New Linux drivers for old kernel versions

      The developers of the new Linux Kernel Backporting project plan to offer the drivers that come with recent Linux kernels in a form that will allow these drivers to be combined with older kernel versions. The initiative originates from compat-wireless – a project that was started by the Linux kernel’s Wi-Fi driver developers quite some time ago and has offered tar archives that allow, for example, the Wi-Fi drivers that come with Linux 3.5 to be combined with Linux 2.6.24 and above. For several months, these archives have included Ethernet and Bluetooth drivers as well as Wi-Fi drivers.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Marek Lands Radeon Gallium3D MSAA Changes

        Marek Olšák, the prolific independent contributor to Mesa/Gallium3D and the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver, has landed a number of commits today in Mesa pertaining to MSAA, a.k.a. multi-sample anti-aliasing for newer Radeon GPUs.

      • NVIDIA 304.37 Linux Driver Brings 41 Official Changes

        The first certified NVIDIA 304 series Linux graphics driver has been released. The NVIDIA 304.37 Linux x86/x86_64 graphics driver packs in 41 official changes affecting several areas of this leading proprietary graphics driver.

        The NVIDIA 304.37 Linux “certified” driver succeeds the earlier 304.22 beta and 304.30 beta drivers. As such, the 41 listed changes to this certified driver update aren’t all brand new if you used one of these earlier 304 series betas, but overall there’s some exciting stuff.

      • Wayland Support For Cursor Themes

        After several interesting news items in recent days about Wayland, the latest is that Wayland/Weston now has support for cursor themes.

      • AMD Open64 4.5.2 Supports Piledriver, Other Features

        AMD quietly released an update to their preferred compiler, Open64, last week. The AMD Open64 4.5.2 compiler supports their next-generation “Piledriver” Fusion APUs.

      • Radeon PRIME Import/Export Support For Libdrm
      • NVIDIA 304.37 released
      • Integrating Videobuf2 With DMA-BUF Still Being Done

        Aside from the ongoing DMA-BUF PRIME enablement work, Linux kernel developers are also still hacking on Videobuf2 with DMA-BUF support.

      • AMD Publishes “Southern Islands” ISA Documentation

        AMD has published their instruction set architecture (ISA) documentation for the “Southern Islands” graphics processors that are used by their Radeon HD 7000 series products.

        There’s no big press release for it or anything right now, but the Southern Islands shader ISA programming guide is available from the AMD developer web-site.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Best Educational Linux Distributions

      When it comes to using technology in education, there has been a lot of progress. These days, you see little kids doodling passionately on their iPads instead of papers. Moreover, with the use of desktops and laptops for teaching basic programming and computer essential to kids, technology has become an integral part of education.

      That said, as a FOSS enthusiast, the technology that is currently being used in schools is not the best course of action when it comes to introducing kids to computers. Not only are closed-source software and operating systems expensive, they also alienate the students from the ideals of sharing and freedom. iPads, iPhones, and iMacs do nothing except cultivate an insatiable gadget lust that further makes their parents shell out enormous amounts of cash for their kids.

    • [arch-dev-public] Migration to systemd

      Systemd has a overall better design than SysV, lots of useful administrative features and provide quicker boot up. Considering that it has been around in our repositories for some time and that it could be considered stable enough for production use, I would suggest to replace iniscript by systemd once the ‘Missing systemd units’ is over. Thus we will avoid duplicating our efforts on two init systems.

    • Arch Linux proposes switch to systemd
    • Arch migrates to SystemD ..and gets a little-bit better Gnome support!
    • The rise of the Linux hyper-distro

      Linux as a one-size-fits-all operating system may be fading into the background as new specialized distros assert themselves in consumer space.

      This is not to say that Linux is going away. Hardly. If anything, the sheer pervasiveness of Linux is what’s fueling the trend to which I refer: the rise of more specialized distributions with one or a few major objectives that stand apart from the idea of an all-in-one operating system.

    • New Lightweight Linux Distro Emmabuntüs Released

      If you have an old computer lying in your garage and would like to use it for some of your needs, here is a perfect distro for you. Emmabuntüs claims to be sleek, accessible and equitable.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Saving Mandriva

        The new management at Mandriva believes that a community-centric approach is the way to save the company from bankruptcy and rebuild lost trust. Do they have it right?

      • On life, death, and Linux

        After a rather long period without visiting the Mandriva community chat (because of an excess of work that is taking a toll on me), I learned that Eugeni Dodonov, a former Mandriva engineer, lost his life in a bike accident a month ago.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Unveils OpenStack Distribution

        Another open source vendor has tossed its hat into the OpenStack ring. A red hat, to be more precise. Now in preview release, Red Hat‘s (NYSE: RHT) own OpenStack distribution based on the open source OpenStack framework for building and management public, private and hybrid IaaS clouds.

        The news that Red Hat was planning on launching its own OpenStack distribution broke back in April when a GigaOm report let the news slip. Red Hat joining the OpenStack community seems like a case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” It’s no secret that the vendor was facing increasing competition from the OpenStack community, and now it really is official the company that helped build the Linux empire back in the good ol’ days has seen the OpenStack light.

      • Zarafa Groupware, ClearOS Linux Get Integrated
      • Installing mod_geoip for Apache2 On CentOS 6.3

        This guide explains how to set up mod_geoip with Apache2 on a CentOS 6.3 system. mod_geoip looks up the IP address of the client end user. This allows you to redirect or block users based on their country. You can also use this technology for your OpenX (formerly known as OpenAds or phpAdsNew) ad server to allow geo targeting.

      • Red Hat releases Openstack preview
      • Red Hat Plans Enterprise-Ready OpenStack Distribution
      • Will OpenStack Wearing Red Hat Give it Cred?
      • Private Clouds Get Public Boost From Red Hat

        The OpenStack project got a boost today when Red Hat released a preview version of its own version of the open source cloud software. The preview edition isn’t meant to be run in production, but will give cloud hackers a chance to tinker with the software and provide feedback ahead of Red Hat’s official release, expected next year.

      • 75% Customer Wins Replacing Legacy Systems: Red Hat

        With Microsoft recently announcing a new wholly-owned subsidiary (Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.) to allow it to engage in open source projects, analysts are busy speculating what this means for the existing open source vendors. However, Paul Cormier, Exec. VP, Products and Technologies, Red Hat, seems unperturbed by this recent turn of events and terms it a great thing. “I think in some sense it was inevitable, and it is a sign of Microsoft publicly acknowledging that open source is a part of mainstream computing environment,” he adds.

      • Red Hat to release enterprise-ready OpenStack

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 Linux Set To Package Spherical Cow Load of Features

          The clock is starting to tick down on the Fedora Linux release with the feature freeze now in place. As such, now is as good a time as any to take a look at some of the new features that are likely to land when Fedora 18 goes live at the end of the year.

        • Fedora 17 KDE Beefy Miracle: is Fedora in decline?

          There are two Linux distributions which get the attention of a wide Linux-related community with enviable periodicity. Financially stable companies support both these distributions, and they are always on the peak of innovation. These are Ubuntu and Fedora.

          The latest release of Ubuntu 12.04 happened in April 2012, and I wrote about the whole “product line” of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

    • Debian Family

      • On Debian’s Birthday, Raphaël Hertzog Looks Back at dpkg

        Debian is turning 19 and is hoping users will be celebrating all over the world. Raphaël Hertzog looks back in is own way, by looking back at the development of dpkg. August 16 is the big day for Debian, but even the birthday post suggests a bug squashing party as one idea.

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • BeagleBone gets I/O ‘capes’

      Fans of the BeagleBone single board computer, little brother to BeagleBoard, now have access to 20 plug-in boards to add a camera, LCDs, weather sensors, and other I/O, writes Steve Bush.

      Called ‘capes’ after the cloak worn by the beagle superhero BeagleBoard mascot, the boards have been designed by the open source community and will be available through www.beaglebonecapes.com.

    • ARM Cortex-A9 powers Origen 4 Quad dev board

      The Origen 4 Quad is a bare-bones dev board built around Samsung’s quad-core ARM-powered Exynos 4412 processor.

      Although the board is primarily targeted at devs who want to code and test apps, the Origen 4 Quad can also be used to power an Android or Linux based system.

    • Phones

      • TizMee brings Tizen apps to MeeGo

        Although the Tizen project has officially replaced MeeGo as the mobile operating system that Intel and the Linux Foundation are supporting, some MeeGo developers are still pushing MeeGo forward, especially as it is available on the Nokia N9 and N950. Developer Mike Sheldon has gone further than most by producing the first public release of TizMee, an application which lets Tizen apps, and other HTML5 apps, run on MeeGo-based devices.

      • Looking Back at One Year of Tizen

        The Tizen project is approaching its one-year anniversary, which makes for a good opportunity to look back at how far the project has come. The Linux Foundation announced Tizen in September of 2011 as a combination of Intel’s previous work on MeeGo and the LiMo Foundation’s handset platform. Samsung formally joined the party a bit later, bringing with it code from the company’s Linux-based Bada product line.

      • HP Spins Off webOS Into A Brand New Company Called Gram; Mission Unknown

        Ever since HP killed off webOS hardware, the fate of the webOS GBU (general business unit) was as yet unknown. But according to a flyer that has floated out of the HP office, it would seem that the webOS group, along with Enyo and Cloud services, has branched away from the mother ship to start a brand new company: Gram.

      • Android

        • Android 4.0 Hits More Tablets, Smartphones

          Android 4.0, also called Ice Cream Sandwich, is still being pushed out to smartphones and tablets far and wide. The 2011 version of Android offers significant upgrades to the system software of devices that hit the market earlier this year. Here are the latest devices blessed with the good graces of the system software update gods.

        • Songza debuts new tablet UI for Android

          Songza today announced that they have released a new version of the streaming music service which features a tablet-optimized interface.

        • Presumed Kindle Fire successor hits FCC
        • Android Is Winning

          This word comes from Gartner, a top research firm for these sorts of things. Overall, within the last quarter, Android outsold iOS devices nearly three to one while capturing 64% of the worldwide market share. Samsung was the top dog accounting for 90M handset sales.

        • Nightly Builds Of XBMC For Android Now Available
        • Android Programming with App Inventor

          MIT App Inventor, re-released as a beta service (as of March 5, 2012) by the MIT Center for Mobile Learning after taking over the project from Google, is a visual programming language for developing applications for the Android mobile computing platform. It is based on the concept of blocks, and applications are designed by fitting together blocks of code snippets. This may sound like a very childish way of programming, especially for seasoned readers of Linux Journal. But then again, App Inventor will tickle the child programmer in you and make you chuckle at the ease with which you can develop applications for your Android device. In this article, I describe how to use the camera on the Android device, develop e-mail and text-messaging-based applications and also show how to use location sensors to retrieve your current geographical location. Let’s get started.

        • Verizon adds $350 Galaxy Tab 2 (7-inch) to tablet roster

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Canonical: Making the Open Cloud Seamless for Users

        In preparation for a detailed review of Google’s recently-released Nexus 7 tablet, we’ve compiled a table summarizing the key specs of the Nexus 7 with those of the latest 7-inch Android tablets from Samsung, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Watch for our complete, in-depth Nexus 7 review to be published here soon.

      • Aakash 2 To Be Launched Soon

        The announcement of the first Aakash tablet had taken the world by storm due to its ultra-low price point. The pre-orders that followed the announcement made it pretty clear that it was going to be a commercial success. However, the poor technical specifications and the clunkiness of the actual product disappointed quite a few users.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Pixar Releases Open SubDiv On An Open Source License

    Most people can probably agree that Pixar is one of the most influential animation studios of all time. Their films have been not only critical and commercial hits, but important to the progression of animation technology as well. The technology Pixar uses in their films is some of the most impressive in the business. Now you can use it yourself for free.

  • Pixar open sources production animation code, patents

    Disney-owned Jobs-derived animation outfit Pixar has open-sourced some of its production software.

    Pixar started life as a software company and still operates a division selling its RenderMan wares, which have been pressed into service making innumerable films beyond the walls of Pixar itself.

    The code released as open source is called Open SubDiv, and “… implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures.”

  • Walt Disney Open Sources BRDF Explorer
  • Open Source Still Draws Proprietary Vendors Into the Fold

    The proprietary competition is very different when it is sitting alongside everyone else in developing, deploying or integrating with open source software. Today’s proprietary vendors talk bullishly about their integration with, contribution to, and support for open source software, which is a far cry from belittling open source as a hobby or demonizing it as not enterprise-ready.

  • One bug, millions of dollars lost: An argument for open source solutions

    On August 1, Knight Capital Group, a financial services company, lost $440 million in less than an hour because of a software bug. As I understand it, this bug could have been avoided if more thorough testing was done before release but, as the Omaha World-Herald reports, the company “rushed to develop a computer program so it could take advantage of a new Wall Street venue for trading stocks…and failed to fully work out the kinks in its system.”

  • oVirt 3.1 “narrows gap” with proprietary virtualisation

    oVirt 3.1 has become the second official release of the oVirt project. With it, the developers of the virtual datacentre management platform say they have narrowed the gap between “the open source virtualisation platform and proprietary alternatives”. In February, version 3.0 became the first official release of oVirt, and offered a range of virtualisation management components that also formed the backbone of Red Hat’s own RHEV product (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation). The oVirt project is supported by Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, SUSE and Red Hat.

  • Study shows half of all websites use jQuery
  • Cash-strapped students have access to free software

    Students heading back to school can find hundreds of free programs to download or use as online-only applications. While they might not be as feature-rich as their paid counterparts, you might be surprised at what’s available.

    Put away your wallet and take note of these freebies for personal computers.

  • Companies struggle to get past open source ‘big data’ experimentation

    Speaking at a Computer Weekly roundtable on the topic, Bob Harris, chief technology officer at Channel 4, said big data initatives will likely require organisations to adopt new technologies.

  • IU’s Suresh Marru invited to join Apache Software Foundation

    BLOOMINGTON, Ind.— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) recently asked Suresh Marru of the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) to join its exclusive membership. This honor is bestowed on IT developers whose skills have significantly contributed to the foundation’s projects.

  • TACTIC Digital Asset Management Software Goes Open Source

    TACTIC, which had been targeted at digital content creators, is being released under the Eclipse Public license, which is generally considered less restrictive than the more frequently used GPL. This allows any individual, team, department or enterprise to download the TACTIC software for free and start using it for projects. Southpaw will continue and expand its support packages and professional services, as well as offer a commercial license for any organizations that prefer or require such licenses.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS To Replace Gecko With Servo

        Mozilla’s aspirations to build its own mobile platform while its browser is losing market share and its replacement to Microsoft’s Outlook has been put on innovation hold is incouraging. It’s even more interesting when we have seen hardcore mobile companies like RIM and Nokia failing to keep up with Android and iOS. What will Firefox bring to the market is not known at the moment.

        Firefox OS, or formally known as Boot To Gecko, does sound interesting since Gecko is Mozilla’s HTML rendering engine rather than the browser itself. However very few details and explainations about this project can be found.

      • Firefox OS Now Available For Raspberry Pi

        Mozilla had announced plans to create its own mobile OS based on HTML5 technologies. Some of the builds of this OS are available but it’s yet to release on any devices. However, Oleg Romashin has successfully ported Firefox OS to run on Raspberry Pi and builds are available for download.

  • SaaS

    • CFOs See Value in Cloud Computing, Which Open Source Platforms Can Boost

      From staffers in the IT organizations at many enterprises to departmental-level workers, cloud computing deployments are a hot topic. Businesses of all sizes are managing public and private cloud deployments and apps, and gaining efficiencies from them. But how does the average CFO feel about cloud computing? Do CFOs even understand the cloud? Google recently sponsored a study of 800 CFOs to find answers to these questions. Here are the details.

    • A Quick Overview of Hadoop
    • Open Source Cloud Lifts Up Rackspace, but Weighs Down VMware
    • ownCloud 1.0.5 Desktop Client Released
    • Rackspace Delivers OpenStack-based Private Cloud Platform, with Support
    • Revealed: Limited Edition “I Fight for an Open Cloud” T-shirt

      Two weeks from today The Linux Foundation will debut CloudOpen. This is a really exciting time in cloud computing, a time when developers and open source projects are clearly leading the way in technology innovation. The building blocks are in place thanks to decades of open source software development, and everybody is looking for their edge.

      CloudOpen will provide a vendor- and project-neutral venue for collaboration and for advancing key technologies. CloudStack, Eucalyptus Systems, OpenStack, Gluster, oVirt, Chef, Puppet, Xen, KVM, OpenShift, Ceph and more will all be there, as will the vendors and users who want to understand how best to work with these projects.

    • Contributing to Apache CloudStack as a Non-Committer

      If you’re a contributor to an Apache project, it means that you can commit directly to the project’s repository. For instance, with Apache CloudStack (incubating) contributors are allowed to directly push commits into the git repository.

      Non-committers, however, have to submit patches for review. Don’t worry, it’s not an onerous process at all. The first time you submit a patch, it will take a minute or two to create an account on Review Board, but it’s a piece of cake from start to finish.

    • Intel, Sina and others launch OpenStack-friendly alliance

      Burgeoning Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) initiative OpenStack received a welcome endorsement last week when Intel teamed up with some local Chinese players to launch the China Open Source Cloud League (COSCL) – a new alliance which will accelerate development of the project in the huge domestic cloud market.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.2 nears with release candidate

      With the arrival of a first release candidate, version 4.2 of VirtualBox is past its feature freeze and is nearly complete. VirtualBox 4.2, which entered beta testing earlier this month, will be the next major update to Oracle’s open source desktop virtualisation application and will bring various improvements and new features, such as a new “expert mode” in wizards aimed at making them quicker for experienced users.

    • Announcement: VirtualBox 4.2 Release Candidate 1 released
    • LibreOffice 3.5.6 Released

      The Document Foundation today announced the latest update to their 3.5 branch of their office productivity suite. Today’s release brings important bug fixes to users of this series.

    • Download LibreOffice 3.5.6 Office Suite

      The Document Foundation has announced earlier today, August 15th, that the sixth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.5 open source office suite software is available for download.

      According to the developers, LibreOffice 3.5.6 is dedicated to more conservative users, and it is here to fix various bugs and to further improve the stability of the software. A detailed changelog can be found in the official release announcement.

    • Oracle halts open-source HPC project

      Oracle researchers are winding down development of the Fortress programming language for high-performance computing, an effort started nearly 10 years ago by Sun Microsystems.

      The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which originally funded Fortress, pulled its backing in November 2006. Work continued at Sun and Oracle, however.

  • CMS

    • Open source page reminds clients to pay

      In terms of usage, Crumbs is currently on GitHub as both a WordPress theme and static placeholder, and Fairbanks said if using the former, you should remember to deactivate widgets and plug-ins so the client’s settings are saved and can be easily reactivated later. Better, though, would be to never get to this stage, and be more businesslike. Agreeing with our news article last week on contracts, Fairbanks recommended always using a contract (he said docpool.co is another good source of information) and also refining it to close up any gaps where a non-payment could slip through.

  • Healthcare

    • Big data in healthcare: Transparency is transformative

      The healthcare industry is experiencing off-the-charts growth in data generation. Growing numbers of clinical solutions generate more data every day–including electronic medical records, communication systems, and digital image archiving. On top of that, wearable sensor networks compile information on patients’ heart rate, brain activity, sleep patterns, temperature, muscle motion, and numerous other clinically useful data points. This enhanced ability to capture data from everywhere generates massive sets of information. This information is invaluable for healthcare and modern clinical practices–as long as we can manage it properly.

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Zenoss Core 4 Advances Open Source IT Monitoring

      While Zenoss Core has long been able to monitor multiple types of network and server infrastructure components, with the new release Windows monitoring gets easier. The Zenoss Core 4 release is now able to perform remote monitoring of Windows systems without the need for additional third-party agents.

      Floyd Strimling, Technical Evangelist and VP of Marketing & Community at Zenoss, explained to EnterpriseNetworkingPlanetthat Zenoss Core 4 has a more native ability to monitor Windows. Strimling said that the system leverages WMI and perfmon to gather data from virtually any available metric via Zenoss’ native templates and collection technology.

    • Zenoss Releases Open Source Zenoss Core 4
    • Open Source IT Monitoring Scales Up with Zenoss Core 4

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU automake 1.12.3 released

      GNU Automake 1.12.3 has been released.

      This is mostly a bug-fixing release, addressing few old bugs in Yacc/Lex support, and some weaknesses in Automake’s own testsuite.

    • Gnucash On Android Hits Beta

      Gnucash is a free and open source software for maintaining personal finances. After being useful on the desktop, the developers are porting it on Android so that you can manage your finances on the move. The software was on alpha till date, and a new beta version has recently been released.

    • GCC Compiler Is Up To 7.3 Million Lines Of Code

      After providing Git stats on a number of graphics drivers, which proved to be interesting, here’s some development stats for the Free Software Foundation’s GCC. GitStats was run on the Git mirror of GCC as of 13 August to generate some rather intriguing numbers.

      The Git activity goes back to 23 November 1988 and during the course of these past 8,665 days on 7,270 of those days there were code commits made to this leading open-source compiler. In total, GCC in Git is currently up to 77,053 files amounting to 7,348,239 lines of code as of yesterday.

    • gnutls 3.1.0

      I’ve just released gnutls 3.1.0. This is release is a major feature update on gnutls 3.0.x, but is fully binary and source compatible with it. The main addition are support for the TPM module to store cryptographic keys, and simplified functions to access encrypted structures.

    • GCC 2012 Cauldron Covered Fission, Cilk, C++11, Etc

      The 2012 GCC Cauldron happened last month in Prague. The event, which was keynoted by Richard Stallman and celebrated 25 years of the GNU Compiler Collection, had a number of interesting talks. Videos and slides from the open-source compiler discussions are now available online.

      Those interested in links to the slides, videos, and other information pertaining to last month’s GCC Cauldron in the Czech Republic, see this GNU.org Wiki page. There’s also a YouTube channel.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Maximize the public benefit of federal technology by sharing government-developed software under an open source license.

      Openness: Open Sourcing ensures basic fairness and transparency by making software and related artifacts available to the citizens who provided funding, consistent with the President’s 2009 declaration that “Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”

    • Brazil at forefront of open source initiatives

      Since the workers’ party won the Brazilian Presidential election in 2003, an open source movement has continued to grow in government and public spheres. Now, the country appears to be at the forefront of open source initiatives, which isn’t news to most inside the community that, despite initial uncertainties, saw the movement growing each year. The workers’ party has without a doubt signaled that open source should be included at the top of the government’s agenda.

    • ‘Basque Country’s open source law challenges other Spanish regions’

      The new Basque Country law, to make all software developed for the government publicly available as open source, is a leading example to all other autonomous regions in Spain to adopt similar policies. Cenatic, the country’s resource centre on open source, expects the regions will take up the challenge.

  • Licensing

    • Furore over changes to licensing policy at CA/Browser Forum

      The Certification Authority Browser Forum’s (CA/Browser Forum) new licensing policyPDF has caused a furore within the very organisation meant to be responsible for guidelines and best practices for SSL certification. Prominent member organisations, including cryptography specialists RSA, BlackBerry manufacturer RIM and US carrier Verizon, are missing from the latest member list, updated in August. Entrust, a founder member of the organisation, has loudly expanded on the reasons for its withdrawal, which it explains is due to the organisation allegedly forcing members to make patented technologies available licence-free. In a posting to CA/Browser Forum’s public mailing list, certificate provider StartCom has responded by calling the allegation “a lie which I’m sure you are very well aware of”.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Willow Garage Marries Open Source and Robots, with an Eye Toward the Future

      For years now, in the field of robotics, open source platforms have been ushering in all kinds of innovation. And among the commercial companies focused on open source robotics, none is as prominent as Silicon Valley-based Willow Garage. Scott Hassan, a Google veteran, founded Willow Garage in 2006 as a well-funded robotics research shop. In addition to building innovative robots and robotics platforms, Willow Garage helped organize the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

      Recently, the folks at Willow Garage hosted members of the press for a talk on robotics. Some of the predictions made are really worth noting.

    • Mailing lists: Community or communication?
    • Kicking Off a Year of Open Source Everything

      Berlin filmmaker Sam Muirhead is attempting to live a completely open source life for one year. Here’s why.

      The phrase ‘Open Source’, to many people, means ‘software you don’t have to pay for’—but really it’s so much more than that. It’s a way of thinking and working focused on transparency and collaborating with others. It’s about sharing ideas, plans, and developments for the benefit of the commons. And it’s definitely not just software.

    • Open Source Cars? Yes it works and the cars look great

      When you think of open source, you probably think of software first and foremost, and maybe about open source devices as well. While it is linked mostly to software, Open Source is not limited to that field at all, as it is also a design philosophy. But an open source car? How would that even work?

    • Open source desert racing cars in Arizona

  • Programming

    • Vim as your IDE

      To follow this article you required basic idea of how to use Vim and its command based editing. And it focused on how to make it an IDE.

    • Jodhpur boy gets invite for Google’s ‘mentor summit’

      A boy from Jodhpur has been chosen among 50 computer experts from across the globe by the Google for its ‘Mentor Summit’ to be held at its headquarters in California on October 20-21. The objective of this summit is to bring together the mentors of the Google Summer of Code 2012, which is a global programme that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Khronos: 20 Years Of OpenGL

      Among the fun facts shared last week in celebrating the 20th birthday of OpenGL was that covering the OpenGL specification with all of its extensions is longer — in terms of lines, words, and characters — than the bible.

      Last week at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles besides releasing OpenGL ES 3.0, introducing OpenGL 4.3, and talking about Valve’s games on Linux, they were also celebrating twenty years of OpenGL.

    • New open source Calligra Suite release enhances ODF document support

      Calligra has published the second stable release of its open source suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets and a sketching program. The new version greatly improves the support of Open Document Format (ODF) documents, said one of its main developers on Tuesday.

      The Calligra Suite is an application suite for Linux that includes programs not found in traditional office suites, so the development team prefers to call it an “integrated work applications suite.”

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Oracle releases unscheduled fix for critical vulnerability
    • Google warns of using Adobe Reader – particularly on Linux

      On its August Patch Day, Adobe has fixed numerous critical memory-related bugs in Reader for Windows and Mac OS X – but has chosen to overlook Linux users. The researchers who discovered the holes now fear that potential attackers could find enough clues to build an exploit by comparing the current Windows version of Reader with the previous one. This would leave Linux users defenceless. On top of that, even the patched versions still contain a total of 16 open security holes.

    • Microsoft patches critical security holes in Windows, Office, IE

      Microsoft has fixed 26 vulnerabilities in its software products, including several considered critical, the company said on Tuesday in its monthly security patch report.

      The security holes, described in five critical and four important bulletins, affect multiple products, including Windows, Internet Explorer, Exchange, SQL Server and Office. In the worst-case scenarios, exploits could give attackers control of affected systems.

    • Insightful Comment on “8″

      This comment came in response to the announcement of a bunch of vulnerabilities fixed in that other OS and Adobe’s software for that other OS. On top of all that “normal” angst, the radical change in UI is unwelcome by many. M$ has clearly over-reached. They have cowed most OEMs and retailers for decades and now they are attempting to add more burdens to the end users in order to bypass the grumbling loyal OEMs, ISVs and retailers who have supported M$ for so long. The dam holding back FLOSS on retail shelves is crumbling. Breakage will be great but a better world awaits. Enlightenment has its costs but no one wants to return to the Dark Ages of IT.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • U.S.-Funded War in El Salvador Casts Shadow over Romney/Ryan Campaign

      Amidst reports that Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital with funds from investors tied to 1980s Salvadoran death squads, his new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is getting foreign policy briefings from a man who actively covered-up some of the worst atrocities committed by those same death squads. The GOP’s vice-presidential candidate also earned his political stripes working under neoconservative Republicans who funneled billions in U.S. aid to those military hitmen. Though the war in El Salvador was just one chapter in history, Romney and Ryan’s relationship with that war may provide a snapshot into their worldview.

  • Finance

    • Choosing Ryan, Embracing Austerity

      Whatever electoral calculations drove Mitt Romney to choose Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate, the choice also has a deeper meaning. Ryan’s arrival at the top of the Republican Party represents the rise of the most vocal and visible proponent of austerity in US politics today. Ryan represents the US parallel to the regimes now controlling, for example, Greece, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Their shared strategy is simple. First, deliver austerity policies to the biggest corporations and the richest 5 percent of the citizens. Second, in return, those two groups’ money will reduce political opposition to the austerity pushers and win them re-election with overwhelming legal and illegal funding.

    • Goldman Sachs Free to Keep Stealing

      Goldman again got off scot-free. On August 9, the Justice Department dropped criminal fraud charges. Evidence the equivalent of enough firepower to sink a carrier battle group was buried and forgotten. More on what happened below.

      Black’s Law Dictionary says:

      “Fraud consists of some deceitful practice or willful device, resorted to with intent to deprive another of his right, or in some manner to do him an injury.”

      It includes “all acts, omissions, and concealments which involve a breach of legal or equitable duty, trust, or confidence justly reposed, and are injurious to another, or by which an undue and unconscientious advantage is taken of another.”

    • Five Reasons Why Crisis Persists

      It is difficult to imagine and impossible to count all the costs of this persistence. Consider, just for examples, (1) damaged physical and mental health of the unemployed, (2) rising anxiety about increasingly insecure jobs and benefits, (3) strained and destroyed relationships, (4) interrupted or aborted educations and (5) lost skills and job connections. Consider, too, the gross inefficiencies (tens of millions of unemployed alongside trillions in unused raw materials, tools, equipment, offices, factories and stores; millions of empty homes alongside millions of people rendered homeless by the crisis).

    • Senator Carl Levin is Very Pissed Off: No Prosecution of Goldman Sachs

      Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., issued the following statement on the Department of Justice’s announcement regarding Goldman Sachs:

    • Sen. Levin Statement on DOJ Announcement on Goldman Sachs

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Flashback: U.S. propaganda in the run up to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    • Stars Earn Stripes, NBC’s New “War-Musement” TV Show, Panned by Nobel Peace Laureates, Veterans, and Others

      Nine winners of the Nobel prize for peace are calling on NBC to cancel its new TV series, “Stars Earn Stripes” (S-E-S).

      The network unabashedly used its monopoly on the U.S. broadcast of the summer Olympic games to promote this new “reality” series, which debuted this week.

      The show features eight celebrities competing in what NBC calls “missions inspired by real military” activities — such as firing missiles and other simulated deadly weapons — alongside teammates and trainers who served in the military or did other related work.

      The Laureates’ letter notes that “war isn’t entertainment,” and they call the show “a massive disservice to those who live and die in armed conflict and suffer its consequences long after the guns of war fall silent.” (A pdf of the letter can be downloaded below.)

    • An anonymous group goes on a PR rampage to defame Uber in Boston

      Uber has been having a bit of a rough go of things in Boston the past few days. First a cease and desist order was given to the company after one of its drivers was caught in what played out as nothing less than a sting operation by the Keystone Cops. The city caught major pushback and relented, but today the plot thickens. It seems that someone in Boston is taking the abusive spouse role, promising that they’re only beating on the service because they care.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • The new totalitarianism of surveillance technology

      A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.

  • Civil Rights

    • ECUADOR SHOCK AT THREATS FROM BRITISH GOVERNMENT

      An Ecuadorian government spokesperson commenting on the threats by the British Government to enter the Embassy said:

      “We are deeply shocked by British government’s threats against the sovereignty of the Ecuadorian Embassy and their suggestion that they may forcibly enter the embassy.

      This is a clear breach of international law and the protocols set out in the Vienna Convention.

    • Julian Assange: UK issues ‘threat’ to arrest Wikileaks founder

      Ecuador has accused the UK of making a “threat” to enter its embassy in London to arrest Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.

    • Julian Assange can be arrested in embassy, UK warns Ecuador

      The diplomatic and political minefield that is the fate of Julian Assange is expected to come a step closer to being traversed when Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, gives his decision on whether his country will grant the WikiLeaks’ founder asylum around lunchtime on Thursday.

    • Julian Assange asylum: Ecuador is right to stand up to the US

      Ecuador has now made its decision: to grant political asylum to Julian Assange. This comes in the wake of an incident that should dispel remaining doubts about the motives behind the UK/Swedish attempts to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. On Wednesday, the UK government made an unprecedented threat to invade Ecuador’s embassy if Assange is not handed over. Such an assault would be so extreme in violating international law and diplomatic conventions that it is difficult to even find an example of a democratic government even making such a threat, let alone carrying it out.

    • Peruvians rally to change course of Computer Crimes Bill

      In a wave of civic action, Peruvian citizens have sent over 5,000 letters to their representatives in Congress using Access’ speakout platform in response to the Computer Crimes Bill being quietly fast-tracked through the legislative process.

      The bill could be called up for a final vote in the Plenary Assembly at any time, though legislators have yet to publicize a schedule. The vote is expected to occur as soon as new commission assignments are finalized, but a new president of the Commission of Justice and Human Rights, could move the bill back to committee for further debate and consultation with affected stakeholders.

08.14.12

Links 14/8/2012: Red Hat Embraces OpenStack, Calligra 2.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Top 3: SUSE Secures Boot, Ubuntu Boots Wayland, Slackware 14 Boots Up

    Every Linux distro in one way or another is trying to come to grips with the upcoming Secure Boot problem that Microsoft is unleashing on the hardware world with Windows 8. Red Hat has outlined its plans, which are to acquire a key and then to essentially ‘play along’ with the Microsoft Secure Boot.

  • Linux and Open Source news for Week 32 of 2012

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • We Interview Leann Ogasawara, Canonical Kernel Team Manager, Marathoner and Mother

      I first met Leann Ogasawara at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, California back in May of this year and ever since hearing her talk about the various projects she works on I wanted to get a interview in.

    • Linux Benchmarks This Weekend: Btrfs, VMware, Cloud
    • Qualcomm Atheros Publishes New Network Driver

      While Atheros network adapters were once notorious under Linux, their wired and wireless network adapters in recent years have been backed by permissively-licensed open-source drivers from the company. This work continues with Qualcomm Atheros announcing this week the release of a new ALX network driver.

    • Experience the Next Automotive Revolution

      There are many significant milestones marking the path of automotive history from the early beginnings in the 19th Century to the era of modern transportation technology today. However, there are only a few revolutions that caused a paradigm shift within the entire industry.

    • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: John Linville

    • Graphics Stack

      • NVIDIA Employee To Meet With X.Org Developers In X.Org Developers Conference

        It seems that NVIDIA is trying its best to engage better with Linux developers, thanks to comments by Linus Torvalds and Valve’s interest in steam for Linux. After a NVIDIA employee tried to open up in Linux kernel mailing list, its time for them to meet up and engage with other developers in X.Org Developers conference to be held next month.

      • A Look At OpenGL ES 3.0: Lots Of Good Stuff

        The OpenGL ES 3.0 specification was released earlier this week at SIGGRAPH 2012. The slides from the OpenGL ES BoF session have now surfaced with more perspective on this latest Khronos standard targeting OpenGL on mobile devices.

      • ETC2 Texture Compression Looks Good For OpenGL

        With OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3 there is now mandatory texture compression support in the form of ETC2, the Ericsson Texture Compression method.

        The slides pertaining to the mandated ETC2 support in the latest GL standards from SIGGRAPH 2012 have now been uploaded. ETC1/ETC2 was designed by Ericsson Research and this means of texture compression is quite interesting. ETC2 also isn’t covered by patents like the notorious for open-source but widely-used S3TC texture compression.

      • Rootbeer: A High-Performance GPU Compiler For Java

        In recent months there has been an initiative underway called Rootbeer, which is a GPU compiler for Java code. Rootbeer claims to be more advanced than CUDA or OpenCL bindings for Java as it does static code analysis of the Java Bytecode and takes it automatically to the GPU.

      • Wayland Support For Cursor Themes

        After several interesting news items in recent days about Wayland, the latest is that Wayland/Weston now has support for cursor themes.

      • R300 Gallium3D Performance Is Topping Out

        Recently I showed benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D driver for a mature Radeon HD 4870 graphics card over the past two years to look at the performance improvements made to this open-source Linux graphics driver. Up today are benchmarks of an old Radeon X1950PRO (R500 class) ATI graphics card when using the original “R300g” Gallium3D driver and testing every major Mesa release going back to Mesa 7.8 with the classic R300 driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Support the 2012 KDE Randa Meetings: Inspired and Intense

        The KDE Randa Meetings are a small gathering of KDE contributors in the village of Randa, Switzerland. For the fourth year, the intense Randa sprints will include key KDE projects and top developers, all collaborating concurrently under one roof, isolated from noise and distractions. Funds are being raised to support the meetings.

      • Digia Sends Open Letter To The KDE Community, Promises Commitment To The Qt Ecosystem
      • Amarok Now Supports StatsSyncing With Last.FM

        Finally the feature we all have been waiting is here. Amarok will now support StatSyncing with Last.FM, the largest music social network in this planet. In short, it now means stuff from Amarok like rating of song, First Played and Last Played timings, tags etc will be available in Last.FM and vice versa.

      • Calligra 2.5 Released

        Words, the word processor has improved tables editing support. Sheets has a stand alone docker that help to preserve space and also makes data entry easier. Stage, the presentation program has several fixes to stabilize the program and make it more usable. Kexi, the database application now offers a full screen mode through F11.

      • Calligra 2.5
      • Krita 2.5 Comes With Enhanced Brushes

        Krita is a KDE based art creation suite that aims to make digital painting easier. A new version of Krita, Krita 2.5 specially comes with several enhancements in brushes that make the paintings more realistic.

      • Qt’s Move Gives FOSS the Jitters

        “I think this is a great development,” opined Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “First, it gives Qt the stability of support by a company, which should give it the resources to move forward. Second, Digia made a point of reaching out to the KDE community when they made the purchase. At a time when KDE is moving into a dominant position, this stability is important.”

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME Commit-Digest Issue 201
      • GNOME opts for pristine GNOME OS dev environment

        The GNOME Project is coming away from its annual GUADEC conference with a new goal for itself: creating a new operating system on which to develop apps. But is GNOME OS an indictment against current Linux application development practices?

        The new project, GNOME OS, is emphatically not meant to be a replacement Linux distribution to challenge the likes of Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora.

      • Preview of GNOME 3.5.5

        Matthias Clasen gave readers of his blog another one of his release previews this Saturday of the upcoming GNOME 3.5.5. The big feature this release is the “new screen lock implementation.” Beyond that, various applications and System Settings received some improvements as well.

  • Distributions

    • Snowlinux 3 Crystal Review: With LTS Linux Kernel and Gnome 2 desktop

      True that Linux world is going through a rapid change. There are three types of Gnome based distros I see:

      1. Distros which are using Gnome 3 as such
      2. Distros which have Gnome 3 but have their own modification as well, like Unity in Ubuntu, Cinnamon in Linux Mint, etc.
      3. Distros which still prefer Gnome 2 or Gnome 2 derivative like Linux Mint Mate, Scientific Linux.

    • Reviews: Hello, Peppermint Three

      When I first started using Peppermint OS I found there were little things that put me off, not technical problems, but a simple case of habit and user preference. For example, I like to know which application I’m launching and I might have different image editors or text editors for different tasks. Peppermint’s approach of labeling items by task rather than by program name took a little adjusting. However, I have to admit newcomers to Linux will probably prefer the Peppermint way of doing things as they will not recognize specific program names. That comes with time. I also found trying to tell web services apart from locally installed applications was a trial and error process. There doesn’t appear to be a clear cut way to tell them apart. Otherwise, I think I like the way Peppermint provides some basic software on a very tight platform and lets users customize from the ground up. It does make for a good deal of gathering software post-install, but the performance and lack of unwanted items in the menus more than make up for it.

      The above were my personal desires compared to what I found in Peppermint and that’s not really a fair way to judge an operating system. A better evaluation would compare what Peppermint does with what the project’s goals are. The Peppermint website claims to offer a fast, lightweight distribution with a focus on providing web apps and services. These goals are all accomplished and both the setup of the OS and navigation of the user environment are made easy. I suspect users, especially those new to Linux, will be able to dive into Peppermint without much difficulty. This little distribution is a fairly niche product, aimed at people who want a platform for web services and/or want a low-resource base. In being focused Peppermint is able to provide a simple, polished distribution to suit its target audience.

    • MacPup LINUX – How do you like this Apple?

      During previous reviews of Puppy LINUX distributions such as Wary, Slacko and Lucid I have received comments asking “Have you tried MacPup?”. Well up until now no I haven’t.

      I downloaded the ISO for MacPup a few weeks ago but I’ve only just reached the point where I have had time to have an in depth look.

    • New Releases

      • First release candidate for Slackware 14

        The first release candidate for Slackware 14 has been released. The new version contains many refreshed packages compared to the current version 13.37 (code-named “Leet”) which was released in April of last year. The updated packages include a current long-term kernel based on Linux 3.2, GCC 4.7, version 2.15 of GLIBC, version 1.12.1 of X.org, and Perl 5.16.0. The Xfce and KDE desktops have also been updated to the latest stable versions.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia 2 GNOME: not that good

        Mageia is a distribution forked from Mandriva some time ago. That’s not a secret. Also, it’s not a secret that Mandriva’s preferred desktop environment was KDE. Even the fact that the latest version Mandriva 2011 has only a KDE option proves that position.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Announces Preview Version of Enterprise-Ready OpenStack Distribution

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the immediate availability of the preview release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution based on the popular open source OpenStack framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. With this, Red Hat delivers the next step in its plans for the industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution with Red Hat’s award-winning commercial support, certified ecosystem of hardware and application vendors and leadership in delivering trusted open source clouds for organizations worldwide requiring enterprise-grade solutions and support.

      • Red Hat finally commits to OpenStack for the cloud

        Red Hat has long supported OpenStack cloud software… in theory. In practice though the Linux giant wouldn’t commit to OpenStack until now.

        On August 13, Red Hat, announced the immediate availability of the preview release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution. This test release is based on the Essex version of popular open source OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud framework.

      • Red Hat offers up OpenStack preview, supported version planned for ’13
      • Red Hat Prepares Enterprise-Focused OpenStack Distribution
      • Red Hat Releases Open Source OpenStack Cloud Preview

        Red Hat is out today with the first public preview release for its Enterprise OpenStack cloud distribution.

        The preview release is the first milestone on the path to what will become Red Hat’s Enterprise OpenStack commercially supported release at some point in 2013. OpenStack is one of the leading open source cloud platforms and has the support of major IT vendors like Dell, HP, IBM, Cisco, AT&T and Rackspace.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian changes default desktop environment from GNOME to Xfce

        Almost in silence, Debian oldtimer Joey Hess made a commit that will switch default desktop task from GNOME to Xfce in Debian’s forthcoming 7.0 Wheezy release. And that was an excellent choice, if I may add!

        Xfce is full featured, but lightweight desktop environemnt whose best days are yet to come. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly. And those are all good reasons for Joey to make it the default, so a desktop environment can fit on Debian installer’s CD#1, which GNOME currently does not.

      • Organize a Debian Birthday party in your city

        On August 16, the Debian community will celebrate its 19th birthday since Ian Murdock’s original founding announcement. As is tradition, the Debian communities all around the world will gather to celebrate it with Debian Birthday parties.

        A Debian Birthday party is a fun event, globally marking the appreciation and the joy of being part of our community and could consist of workshops, talks, or bug squashing parties both virtual and in real life. Check if there is one in your area, and if not, it’s not too late to organize one and mark the event in the wiki!

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • OSI Signs Declaration of Internet Freedom

    Declaration of Internet Freedom is an initiative to make the Intenet as free and open. It aims to defend the rights of netizens in having access to the content on the Intenet in a transparent manner while protecting everyone’s privacy.

    OSI, a community non-profit organisation which promotes awareness of non-propreitary software and approvers of open-source conformant licesnses, has recently posted that they have been added as a signatory to the Declaration of Internet Freedom movement.

  • The open source technology behind Twitter

    Without open source, Twitter wouldn’t exist. Every Tweet you send and receive touches open source software on its journey between computers and mobile devices. We were curious about how much open source is used at Twitter. Beyond that, we wanted to discover how open source may influence the culture at Twitter, Inc.

  • Does Open Source Threaten American Software?

    After all, critics of open source will note, “Intellectual Property” (a lawyer’s term for patent, copyright and trademark rights) is America’s key advantage in global competition. Open source throws that away. Might as well turn over the keys of American exceptionalism to China and turn out the lights, goes the implication.

  • Web Browsers

  • Project Releases

    • coreutils-8.18 released [stable]

      Executive summary: 8.18 removes the su program, fixes an 8.17 regression in ls –color and tweaks sort’s memory constraints. All other fixes are for old (present since “the beginning”) and relatively obscure bugs.

  • Public Services/Government

    • The Government of Extremadura launches public consultation on the Regional Digital Agenda

      The Government of Extremadura opens up public consultation for the participation in the development of the Digital Agenda of Extremadura; an integrating, sustainable and intelligent project of all actions projected on Information Technology and Communication matters into the region, involving all stakeholders and tied agents in the ICT sector in Extremadura.

  • Programming

    • GCC Moves Forward With Conversion To C++

      The GCC initiative to convert more of the code-base from C to C++ as the implementation language for this leading open-source compiler is nearing fruition. On Sunday, Google’s Diego Novillo published a set of GCC patches for merging the C++ conversion into trunk.

      The set of six patches so far implement the changes made within GCC’s cxx-conversion branch and change the default boot-strap process so that stage one of the compiler build always happens with a C++ compiler. It’s possible the cxx-conversion branch could be merged for GCC 4.8, which will be released in 2013. Back in April I wrote about the aim for the C++ switch being GCC 4.8.

    • Java for graphics cards

      Phil Pratt-Szeliga, a postgraduate at Syracuse University in New York, has released the source code of his Rootbeer GPU compiler on Github. The developer presented the software at the High Performance Computing and Communication conference in Liverpool in June. The slides from this presentation can be found in the documentation section of the Github directory.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Finance

    • ‘Are you kidding me?’ — Eliot Spitzer reacts to Goldman Sachs getting off ‘scot-free’

      So how do we make sense of this? Goldman Sachs emails call their own investments junk and crap, and Goldman Sachs salespeople refer to clients as Muppets and elephants, yet the Justice Department says there’s not enough evidence to bring a case on behalf of Goldman Sachs investors who lost vast sums of money.

    • Government won’t prosecute Goldman Sachs in fraud probe

      It’s at the discretion of the prosecutor whether to prosecute.

      Some prosecutors — for example, in cases involving petty (brown-skinned) street crime — need only something approximating the possibility of a conviction, or near enough, so long as they have a single shaky witness from blocks away who might even look credible if cleaned up (or “coached”).

      Other prosecutors — for example, in cases involving Jon Corzine or others of Our Betters — need no less than a “smoking gun” plus crime scene photos of the perp as the bullet leaves the chamber — without which, they say, they just don’t have enough to go to trial (do click, my characterization isn’t far off; and yes, that’s our hero Pat Fitzgerald talking).

  • Civil Rights

    • Google, Salesforce were allegedly offered ‘TrapWire’ spy tool

      Now approaching its 10th day of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, WikiLeaks has released information about a video-surveillance program that is possibly being used by the US government and large organisations, such as Salesforce and Google.

      The program, called TrapWire, was developed by US-based Abraxas Corporation, which is alleged to be staffed by many former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents. TrapWire is meant to identify terrorists who approach a facility multiple times as they conduct their surveillance. According to Abraxas’ documentation on TrapWire, it is able to correlate video surveillance with other data, such as watch lists. It can, for example, identify suspected terrorists using facial recognition or stolen vehicles by reading number plates, and then correlate this information with other event data that it already has.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • The Humble Music Bundle

        Hi everybody. Well, this comes too late. This bundle is already over… I’m sorry for that. Anyway, i’d like to introduce to you a new bundle concept by the Humble Bundle team. This time, there were not games, but music albums from some famous internet’s musicians. These albums also came all in FLAC and MP3 high quality files!
        Let’s take a look in detail:

      • LendInks, Mob Mentality and the DMCA

        Every day, people are gunned down when they leave the relatively safe main streets of Reddit, Facebook or Twitter to wander into bad neighborhood forums where they’re not known. The usual weapons are words and the common advice is to grow thick skin for protection. Consequences are usually low; feelings are about all that ever get hurt.

        Sometimes, however, mobs form. Posses meet up outside a hated website and hit the owners with barrages of venomous email. If a site has a forum or a Facebook page, they try to take over. If it’s supported by ad money, they might launch a campaign against the advertisers, as happened in 2010 with Cooks Source Magazine–a New England site brought down by web users for cavalierly stealing content.

        If all of this fails to satisfy the mob’s thirst for blood, they might take their anger directly to the website’s landlord, the hosting company, with burlap bags filled with DMCA take-down notices the host can’t afford to ignore.

08.12.12

Links 12/8/2012: CDE Open-Sourced, Wikileaks Exposes TrapWire

Posted in News Roundup at 10:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Levin: Decision not to prosecute Goldman Sachs shows weakness

      The U.S. Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute Goldman Sachs Group Inc for its subprime mortgage trades resulted from either “weak laws or weak enforcement,” the senator who asked for a criminal investigation of the firm said on Friday.

    • Yesterday Was “Relieve Goldman Sachs of Their Legal Exposure” Day

      I mentioned yesterday that Goldman Sachs got a rare “reverse Wells notice” from the SEC, when they were told that a mortgage-backed securities deal which they earlier heard they would face prosecution for would not net them any civil enforcement. But that was just the beginning. Later in the day, they learned they would not face any prosecution from the Justice Department for the misdealings brought to light in a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report a year ago.

  • Censorship

    • Australian Gov’t Drops Plan To Snoop On Internet Use — For Now

      Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has been forced to back down on her government’s unpopular plan to force ISPs to store the web history and social networking of all Australians for two years. The plan has been deeply unpopular with the public, with hackers attacking the government’s spy agency

  • Civil Rights

    • Confirmed: New Nationwide “Trapwire” Surveillance System Is Actively Recording, Monitoring Everything

      If you didn’t believe that everything you do is monitored before today, this latest confirmation should seal the deal. The information, of course, was not officially released, but when hackers gained access to highly secure emails at global analysis firm Stratfor earlier this year the cat came out of the bag.

      With New York recently launching an all-seeing domestic awareness system, many Americans who don’t live in Mayor Bloomberg’s police state believe they are safe from the watchful eye of Big Brother.

    • Wikileaks: CIA-connected private intelligence firm TrapWire watching Americans

      The latest WikiLeaks release has shone a spotlight on an alleged domestic and foreign surveillance program run with cloud-based software provided by Virginia company TrapWire, many of whose top leaders and employees are former members of three-letter American intelligence agencies.

    • WIKILEAKS: Surveillance Cameras Around The Country Are Being Used In A Huge Spy Network

      The U.S. cable networks won’t be covering this one tonight (not accurately, anyway), but Trapwire is making the rounds on social media today—it reportedly became a Trending hashtag on Twitter earlier in the day.
      Trapwire is the name of a program revealed in the latest Wikileaks bonanza—it is the mother of all leaks, by the way. Trapwire would make something like disclosure of UFO contact or imminent failure of a major U.S. bank fairly boring news by comparison.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • How YouTube lets content companies “claim” NASA Mars videos

        Lon Seidman knew he wasn’t going to get rich from his three-hour video discussion of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars. The local media entrepreneur did a live Google+ Hangout about the event and posted the resulting video to YouTube, expecting it would earn him a few bucks and attract some new readers to his site, CT Tech Junkie. During the discussion, Seidman played a number of NASA videos about the Curiosity mission. He knew he was on safe ground because works of the federal government are automatically in the public domain.

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