03.20.14
Posted in News Roundup at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Last year, I provided a look at the top legal issues from the year before. Continuing with this tradition, here is my take on the top ten legal developments in FOSS during 2013.
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The licences page breaks down a number of popular options, including MIT, Apache and GPL. Each is explained in the form of Required / Permitted / Forbidden, so it’s clear what others can and can’t do with your work.
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Creative Commons and the GPL are legal tools to facilitate sharing, and in their domains they are analogous to peer review and publication in scientific journals for scientists. However, like the conflict between free and proprietary software, there is a conflict between open access and proprietary access to scientific publications, a conflict Aaron Swartz became aware of as an activist.
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Earlier today I was looking at a source file for the OpenStack Ceilometer docs and noticed that there’s a copyright statement at the top. Now, in no way do I want to pick on Nicholas. There are hundreds of such copyright statements in the OpenStack docs and code, and this is just the example I happened to be looking at.
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The open source license you choose for your project, or for the projects you choose to contribute to, can have significant effects on how what you contribute is used. One question that has garnered quite a bit of interest recently is the fall in popularity of copyleft licenses in favor of permissive licenses. An article last year looked at the issue of large number of projects on GitHub that have no explicit license and posited the question about whether we live in a ‘post open source software’ world, where seemingly open source software has no license. After some time, GitHub agreed that licensing is important and worked to improve the situation with a license chooser.
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When I first started writing my little software programs, I borrowed some code from my chum Mike Field (a.k.a. The Mighty Hamster) who is based in New Zealand. At that time, I noticed that in the comments to his code, Mike had the line “// License: GPLv3″ (this refers to the GNU General Public License).
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Cooper has seen the benefits of open source collaboration first hand — and has learned the hard way what happens when developers don’t share code when they should. At Apple, she managed a team that developed a video chat program based on Apple’s QuickTime video format, and the code behind Quicktime wasn’t even shared with everyone inside the company. “There were some people in my group that helped write Quicktime, but because of an internal licensing struggle at the time, the QuickTime team shut them out of their own code tree,” she says. “It was really inefficient, and it really pissed me off.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Linux System is much secured than any of its counterpart. One of the way to implement security in Linux is the user management policy and user permission. normal users are not authorized to perform any system operations.
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Controlling Amarok from a terminal may come in handy in various situations, and can also be a way of using scripts or aliases to give commands directly to Amarok, without having to even keep the window opened, instead leaving it running in the system tray.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Ever since Valve’s announcement of the Source Engine’s Linux support back in 2012 with Team Fortress 2, gamers on the Linux platform all around the world have been asking for an ETA on a Linux version of Portal 2. Valve obliged the requests of the gamers last month by releasing a Linux port of Portal 2. The initial release of the game was plagued by an issue, wherein the game would cause a segmentation issue with Linux distributions that had SELinux enabled. But Valve has come up with a solution in the form of a fix that fixes the issue and makes the game playable on SELinux enabled platforms.
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So, this is massive news and yet another reason why games not having a Linux version should become a thing of the past. Epic Games has announced Unreal Engine 4 with Linux support and not just in exporting, the toolkit will be native too.
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If you’ve been following the news lately, it’ll come as no surprise that Crytek is working on a Linux port of its game engine. At GDC today, I had a first-hand look at CryEngine running on Linux, and I was able to get some extra details from the Crytek folks on the scene.
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Alienware is collaborating with leading independent game developer and publisher, Crytek, to create a more immersive gaming experience for its customers. Crytek will integrate the Alienware AlienFX lighting control software with its state-of-the-art CRYENGINE development solution. In addition, Alienware also provided Crytek with Alienware systems for the development and promotion of CRYENGINE with full native Linux support.
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In terms of gaming, Linux is on a roll lately. The latest company to throw its weight behind the open source platform is GOG.com, which says it’s been working on bringing Linux games to its service for the past few months. There’s still work to be done, buy by this fall, GOG.com plans to launch at least 100 classic titles on Linux.
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GOG.com, a site that specializes in selling classic PC games for modern computers, has decided to support Linux after all.
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GOG.com, the DRM-free PC game store will begin offering games for the Linux operating system starting this fall.
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GOG releases on Linux this Autumn with the digital distributor testing a selection of their titles on Ubuntu and Linux Mint
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Gmusicbrowser is a music player and audio collection manager for GNOME written in Perl and GTK2, built to handle large collections, highly configurable, with integrated music library, plugin support, many view modes, lyrics and Wikipedia info integration, as well as equalizer.
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03.19.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Open Source”
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Earlier this year, Qualcomm wowed technology industry executives and analysts with a tour of its smart connected home at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The tour demonstrated how the Linux-based home automation platform AllJoyn connects all of the various in-home devices from appliances and lighting to TVs and talking teddy bears.
“As they walked through the home, you could see the executives truly understand the power of various devices across brands and verticals and visualize the potential for collaboration,” says Liat Ben-Zur, senior director at Qualcomm Connected Experiences and chairperson of the AllSeen Alliance, in the interview below.
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Have you ever watched a TED talk and thought, “That should be a company!” Well, that’s happened a few times, I’m sure, and one of them is right here in Silicon Valley. Years ago, wordsmith Erin McKean delivered a TED talk on her vision around the lexicography and meaning of words. This particular talk struck a chord with an investor named Roger McNamee, who in turn encouraged the team to build a company around this. Hence, Reverb Technologies was born.
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The patent system. Online privacy law. Bitcoin regulations. Net neutrality rules. In the coming years, policy makers may have as much influence on technology as the world’s hackers do — if not more. So it should come as little surprise that a hacker is running for Congress.
Twenty-eight-year-old software developer David Cole spent over two years working for the White House as the deputy director of new media, where he helped build the White House website, and now, he wants to make the switch from crafting code for the government to crafting policy. He’s seeking the Democratic nomination for his home district in New Jersey, which includes Atlantic City. If he wins, he’ll challenge the incumbent Republican, Frank LoBiondo, who has represented the district since 1995 — and is not a hacker.
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Is Linux a success? Certainly. The Apache Web server? You betcha. Firefox, sure. But, what about smaller or newer open source projects? How can you tell if they’re on the right path or if they’re slowly spiraling into failure? This is a subject that was discussed at great length at the recent OpenDaylight Summit in Santa Clara, California.
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It is also the time when skeptics started sharing their doubts on the success of the open source model, stating that the security vulnerabilities that come from community contributions are a barrier for the project’s reliability. Some were and still are even more pessimistic and claim that financial institutions cannot assume the potential risks that come with adopting an open source solution for critical parts of their business.
Beehive
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Open source projects garner the attention of the tech community because the passionate people behind these developments occasionally cause major disruption and create opportunities to change industries, as Android and Linux did.
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Tristan writes, “The Open Source Beehives project is a partnership between the Open Tech Collaborative and Fab Lab Barcelona crowd-sourcing a solution to the bee colony collapse issue.
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Neuroscience
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Today’s neuroscientists need expertise in more than just the human brain. They must also be accomplished hardware engineers, capable of building new tools for analyzing the brain and collecting data from it.
Video Editing
Events
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The first enterprise forum about open source ever held in Sri Lanka, ‘Open Source Forum Sri Lanka 2014’ took place at Hotel Galadari, Colombo recently. Participants included top executives and corporate leaders from Sri Lanka’s business community and the Government sector. The objective of the event was to maximise the value of big data, cloud computing, virtualization, content management systems and business intelligence through the adaptation of open source. This is aimed at bringing in affordability, control and openness.
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Do you ever wish the free software was just a little bit better? As a longtime free software advocate, I certainly have had this thought many times. Sometimes nothing can be done because a particular feature is patent-encumbered, but sometimes clear user feedback is all that’s needed. Enter SpinachCon — it’s a hackfest for users. The idea is that sometimes free software “has a little spinach in it’s teeth” and it needs it’s friends to let it know in a friendly way. People try the software, answer a few questions and get a free lunch in return.
Services/Fog Computing
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Last weekend Daniel, Arthur, Morris and me were in Chemnitz where the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2014 took place. We drove a booth during the two days, the CLT host around 60 boothes of companies and FOSS projects. I like to go to the CLT because it is perfectly organized with great enthusiasm of everybody involved from the organisation team. Food, schedules, the venue, everything is perfect.
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This isn’t too surprising. Ubuntu has made a point of working closely with OpenStack. Although most people think of Ubuntu as just a desktop operating system with designs on becoming a smartphone power, it has also long been a major cloud player.
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For the database piece, Cloudinary is using the open-source MySQL database technology.
“We are very knowledgeable in the NoSQL area but we’ve had a lot of discussion about our database use and for us MySQL is the answer,” Lahan said.
For the image manipulation piece, Cloudinary leverages multiple technologies, including the open-source ImageMafhbj project.
All of Cloudinary’s client integration libraries are open-source and available on the company’s Github site.
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The educational ecosystem for providing training in Linux, OpenStack and other open source software continues to grow. The latest momentum comes from Mirantis, which has announced a new milestone with more than 200 organizations now adopting the company’s training and certification program for OpenStack that launched in late 2013.
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OpenStack, the very hot open source cloud platform, is emerging as a generator of a lot of top tech jobs, and, as we’ve reported, open source skills in general are highly valued in the current job market. In answer to that, a lot of OpenStack certification programs have been on the rise, and Mirantis announced an interesting platform-agnostic program in December of last year. Today, the company has announced that more than 200 companies and organizations around the world have turned to the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on multiple platforms.
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OwnCloud, the company behind the open-source ownCloud Community Edition, announced on March 11 what the business claims is the “only fully self-hosted enterprise-ready file sync and share software, ownCloud 6 Enterprise Edition.”
Databases
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When I started teaching PostgreSQL education courses in 2001, PostgreSQL was the ugly one in the data center. Many of the people who were learning how to work with it were doing so grudgingly because of some specific requirement. They had inherited a PostgreSQL database, for example. As a result, many of them tried to learn just enough to do what they needed to do. The other population of students were serious technologists, die-hard open source devotees who wanted to use only open source solutions and were learning PostgreSQL because they needed a relational database for their operations.
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PostgreSQL has picked up a new feature of logical decoding.
This new PostgreSQL database feature adds over ten thousand lines of new code to the open-source server and allows the write-ahead log stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes, per this commit.
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“Development is slower because we do not take shortcuts, but over the years, we have made a name for the [PostgreSQL] database as a product that is reliable and is backed by communities and companies that felt strongly about the value they were providing its users. … We have played the long game in not taking shortcuts and focusing on making the best database possible.”
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Amazon Web Services is a juggernaut in the infrastructure as a service market, but GoGrid, a midsize IaaS competitor that aims to be the cloud for big data, says it wants to offer an alternative to AWS’s platform. And it’s hoping to do so through open source databases.
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Desktop Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (23.59%)
Server Distribution of the Year – Slackware (31.83%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year – Android (59.15%)
Database of the Year – MariaDB (36.41%)
NoSQL Database of the Year – MongoDB (46.15%)
Office Suite of the Year – LibreOffice (85.50%)
Browser of the Year – Firefox (63.54%)
Desktop Environment of the Year – KDE (35.77%)
Window Manager of the Year – Openbox (18.88%)
Messaghng Application of the Year – Pidgin (47.83%)
VoIP Application of the Year – Skype (44.95%)
Virtualization Product of the Year – VirtualBox (54.38%)
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The company offers a community edition of VoltDB under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3, but it omits a number of features found in the commercial version.
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The open-source MariaDB database has emerged in recent years to be a real competitor to MySQL from which it was forked. Now at long last there is a generally available version of MariaDB Enterprise edition.
Collaboration
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Zimbra has rolled out a new version of its cloud-friendly groupware collaboration software. Titled Zimbra Community 8.0, the release introduces a free edition of the platform, which the company is offering to businesses and individuals alongside the standard and professional editions it traditionally provided.
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Diaspora really could be the answer. It’s open source, it’s decentralized and it has Aaron Swartz in its DNA. Its security people are answerable only to the community. Because it’s decentralized, there’s a node or “pod” element. Different servers offer users slightly different experiences, sort of like neighborhoods within a city. This is much different from Facebook where everything is the downtown business district.
Content Management
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It’s the age old question when considering a content management system (CMS) for your new or renewed website: Is it best to go with open source or proprietary software? David Hartstein, writing for WiredImpact, suggests that the right answer is pretty obvious. (If you want some basic definitions of the terms “CMS,” “open source,” and “proprietary,” please consult his article directly.)
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Joomla! has been known for Joomla! Platform and Joomla! Content Managment System (CMS). The newest addition to the mix late last year was Joomla! Framework. Many say it’s an exciting project with innovative development, so we interviewed our own Don Gilbert, who has been coordinating the project’s efforts, to find out how it’s going and what’s new with the project.
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Attackers have abused the WordPress pingback feature, which allows sites to cross-reference blog posts, to launch a large-scale, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to researchers from Web security firm Sucuri.
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Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is under going a major leadership change this week.
Company founder Matt Mullenweg is stepping up to the role of chief executive officer, replacing Toni Schneider.
Funding
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Bethesda-based Spree, which this week raised a $5 million Series A round led by Thrive Capital, is simultaneously a startup and a popular open-source project. But open-source projects — on their own, at least — don’t pay the bills.
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At first glance, open source and crowdfunding seem an inevitable match. After all, what could be more natural than software that nobody owns being funded by popularity? In theory, crowdfunding should allow developers to concentrate on what interests them, freeing them from the need to make a living or answer to an employer.
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Chances are free and open source projects have made their way into your workflow, your entertainment, your communications. Why not set 2014 off by vowing to give back to those projects which enrich your life?
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News is a bit slow in these last remaining days of what many consider the holiday season, but some headlines stood out today. Our old friend Jack Wallen is back with another top 10 list. iTWire’s David Williams resolves to donate to Linux and Open Source projects this year and opensource.com has suggestions for others way to help out in this new year.
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George Church created the Personal Genome Project, a big plan to sequence more than 100,000 human genomes in the U.S. Now the database he’s been using to store all that information has become the basis for a new startup.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Software Freedom
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Tonight, Dr. Richard Stallman is presenting a talk titled A Free Digital Society. Dr. Stallman will address the many threats to freedom in our digital society. He’ll focus on issues of digital surveillance that undermine the foundations of democracy, including massive surveillance, censorship, digital handcuffs, non-free software that controls users, and the ‘War on Sharing’.
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In September 1983, the GNU Project was born. GNU was to be a new kind of operating system: the first one with an explicit ethical goal.
Perhaps a little background is needed. GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Unix was an operating system (OS) that was in common use at the time, and the recursive acronym is a bit of programmers’ humour. The project emerged from the hacker culture at MIT, which had collapsed at the end of the 1970s when a technology company hired all but a few of the programmers.
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Last week, I was writing about MediaGoblin when I was struck by a sudden realization: the project was not about code for its own sake. Instead it was about the sort of vision that seems to be disappearing recently from free and open source software (FOSS).
What makes MediaGoblin stand out is not just the idea of an all-in-one file-sharer, as convenient as that might be. Rather, the code is an explicit critique of centralized web services like Instagram, which require users to communicate through a single web site rather than directly with each other. As events of the past few years have proved, such centralization threatens privacy and makes surveillance all too easy.
FSF Internal
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The Free Software Foundation, a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a Boston-based individual to be its full-time Web Developer.
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The theme of “Free Software, Free Society” will be explored at the LibrePlanet 2014 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Stata Center at MIT on March 22 and 23, 2014, by the Free Software Foundation in collaboration with MIT’s Student Information Processing Board.
GNU GPL
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In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Roman Telezhinsky, the lead developer of Valentina, a free software pattern making program, which is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 (or any later version).
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The Free Software Foundation will be providing a half-day legal seminar titled “GPL Enforcement and Legal Ethics”, taking place on Monday, March 24 at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Anyone can register to attend the seminar, though it is aimed particularly at practicing lawyers and law students. For practicing lawyers in the US, continuing legal education (CLE) credits are expected to be available for many states.
Popular GNU Programs
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The GNU Guix package manager / distribution system is still active in development and the developers have planned a road-map to reaching version 1.0.
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As some other good news for GNU Hurd, around 79% of the Debian archive is now building for GNU Hurd, including the Xfce desktop and Firefox web-browser. Future work planned for this GNU project is Xen PVH support, working x86_64 support, language bindings for translators, read-ahead, HDD/Sound/USB DDE support, and having a full GNU system with Hurd.
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That would be the oddly-named GIMP (acronym for: GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source, high-end image editing and creation alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop and its now open-ended, monthly wallet-siphoning distribution mode for tasks like photo retouching, image editing and composition, and image authoring.
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The split was the result of GIMP’s concern over policies at SourceForge, primarily SourceForge’s use of DevShare, an installer for Windows that bundles third party software offers with FOSS downloads. In addition, the GIMP folks had reservations about potentially deceptive “download here” buttons on ads being served by the likes of Google’s AdSense.
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Out this Sunday is a major update to GNU ease.js, which relicenses this JavaScript framework to the GPLv3 and has several other changes. GNU ease.js helps the Free Software Foundation’s case for the “importance of free JavaScript” on the web.
Compilers
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For any students looking to get involved with this year’s Google Summer of Code, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has several interesting projects that are looking to be tackled.
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While GCC 4.9 is running behind schedule compared to where GCC 4.8 was at this time last year, open-source developers banding together still might get out the GNU Compiler Collection 4.9 release in early April with its many new compiler features.
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Samsung is still working towards bringing OpenACC support to GCC. We’ve seen Samsung developers working on OpenACC for GCC over the past several months — along with other OpenACC initiatives out of CodeSourcery, etc — and now there’s some new OpenACC GCC Fortran patches.
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This testing is quite simple and straightforward as it’s intended to just complement the AMD A10-7850K compiler benchmarks of the previous days. The processor being used this time around was the Intel Core i5 4670 that is a true quad-core CPU with a 3.4GHz base frequency and 3.8GHz Turbo Frequency. Being a Haswell CPU, it supports SSE 4.2, AVX 2.0, and all of the other latest-generation Intel extensions.
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Renato Golin of Linaro volleyed an interesting message to the GCC mailing list on Friday about “LLVM collaboration?” While controversial, he suggested LLVM and GCC developers begin collaborating due to an “unnecessary fence” between the competing compilers and decisions that need to be shared. He acknowledges while there’s licensing differences (GPL vs. UIUC / BSD) there’s differences between the compilers and their stacks that really shouldn’t exist as it hinders the users and developers.
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Most people know I’m a fan of RMS’ writing about Free Software and I agree with most (but not all) of his beliefs about software freedom politics and strategy. I was delighted to read RMS’ post about LLVM on the GCC mailing list on Friday. It’s clear and concise, and, as usual, I agree with most (but not all) of it, and I encourage people to read it. Meanwhile, upon reading comments on LWN on this post, I felt the need to add a few points to the discussion.
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Intel’s Beignet open-source OpenCL implementation for their Linux graphics driver now switches to LLVM/Clang 3.5 as its preferred version.
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Hardware
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the TAZ 3, the fifth model in the LulzBot line of 3D printers by Aleph Objects, Inc. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy.
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Lenovo’s X230 is an “ultraportable business laptop” with 12.5-inch display, 2.96lb weight, and other modern features while boasting an Intel Core i5 series processor.
Privacy
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As consumers living in a post-Edward Snowden world, we should remain aware of what cryptography applications are out there, and how we can utilize them to keep our information (and thus, ourselves) safer. This article is intended to discuss some of the more practical usages of cryptography in modern computing, including PGP/GPG encryption, encrypted chat programs such as Cryptocat, the anonymous Tor browser, and will touch on a major buzz item of 2013, Bitcoin.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Linux 3.14
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Linux 3.13 was released on Sunday January 19th 2014. Please read What is in Linux 3.13. 3.14-rc5 was released on March 2 2014. Based on the rc release progress so far, it is looking very likely that the Linux 3.14 release will be out before the end of March 2014.
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Now, things might change, and maybe next week ends up being another ugly week, but with some luck that won’t happen and this is the last rc.
Go out and test. It all looks good..
Linus
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In talking about the Linux 3.14 kernel on pretty much a daily basis now for the past few months and already having run dozens of benchmarks from Linux 3.14 in its Git state, here’s a recap of some of the most exciting work for this new kernel:
Linux 3.15
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David Herrmann sent in a patch on early Sunday (along with some other patches to be covered in another article) for enabling support for DRM render-nodes by default with the next Linux kernel cycle.
Community/Events
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The Linux kernel developer panel at Collaboration Summit in Napa, Calif. next week is our first opportunity this year to hear directly from Linux kernel developers about which issues and features are top-of-mind for the kernel community now and in the year ahead. Kernel developers Jens Axboe, Matthew Garrett, Mel Gorman, Greg Koah-Hartman, and Dave Chinner will take the stage for a technical discussion moderated by Jon Corbet. Here, the panelists have answered a few of Corbet’s preliminary questions to get the conversation started.
Graphics Drivers/Cards
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With the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr” right around the corner we have out today some new benchmarks of various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards when testing them with the latest Linux GPU drivers on Ubuntu 14.04 at 4K (3840 x 2160).
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AMD has released a new Windows and Linux Catalyst proprietary graphics driver. The Catalyst 14.3 Beta for Linux doesn’t advertise any new features, but it comes with some bug-fixes.
Weston
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The full-screen shell protocol for Wayland’s Weston compositor will allow for features like splash screens and terminal emulators as simple full-screen clients, but the code is still being revised ahead of its hopeful merger.
X.Org
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Eric Anholt’s big Intel patch-set to the GLAMOR acceleration architecture has now been merged for the mainline X.Org Server.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GNOME
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One of the nice things about popovers is that they are just normal containers – you can put any widget into them, and keyboard navigation and input works like everywhere else. This is a marked contrast to menus, which are very specialized. Attempts to put entries, sliders or buttons into menus usually end badly.
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As a quick update to the HiDPI support on top of yesterday’s article about GNOME Shell 3.12 getting last minute HiDPI improvements, more work has landed today for supporting high-resolution Retina displays within this next GNOME desktop environment update.
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Here comes the 3.11.92 release candidate, last stop before 3.12. Tarballs are expected on Monday, this is the last chance to get your fixes in, we will then enter the hard code freeze, and you will need a big bunch of approvals to get changes in. Let’s repeat, tarballs are due on 2014-03-17 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.11.92 rc release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.11.92.
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GNOME has been moving away from hierarchical menus for applications. It is problematic for many reasons. One problem is the need for a global, hierarchical classification (‘categories’) – the world is just not that simple, and applications don’t always fit into these predefined categories. Another problem is that menus don’t really scale beyond a single level of submenus or beyond more than 10-15 items per menu. Not to mention that menus are hard to use on touch devices.
KDE
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Last week at CeBIT, KDE won the Linux New Media Readers Choice Award 2014 (link to German language Linux Magazine) for the best Linux Desktop Environment. 46% of the readers of Linux New Media’s global publications voted for KDE. Runner-ups were GNOME with 18% and XFCE with 13%. Other awards went to CyanogenMod, Raspberry Pi, Bitcoin, Puppet, Tor and Git.
Cornelius Schumacher, President of KDE e.V. received the award on behalf of the KDE Community from Mathias Huber, Editor at Linux Magazine. The video of the award ceremony will be available on the Linux Magazine web site later.
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The KDE community today released the second beta of Applications and Development Platform 4.13. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. We kindly request your assistance with finding and fixing issues.
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In the Plasma team, we’re working frantically towards the next release of the Plasma workspaces, code-named “Plasma Next”. With the architectural work well in place, we’ve been filling in missing bits and pieces in the past months, and are now really close to the intended feature set for the first stable release. A good time to give you an impression of what it’s looking like right now. Keep in mind that we’re talking Alpha software here, and that we still have almost three months to iron out problems. I’m sure you’ll be able to observe something broken, but also something new and shiny.
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Some of your existing data will need to be migrated from the current Nepomuk backend to the new ‘Baloo’ backend. Running the nepomukbaloomigrator should take care of that. The old Nepomuk support is considered “legacy” (but it is still provided). The programs that have not yet been ported to the new architecture have Nepomuk integration disabled. One significant regression is file-activity linking, which will not work until KDE Applications and Platform 4.14. If you rely on this feature, we recommend not upgrading at this time. For the final release, distributions might choose to optionally have the old search (Nepomuk) available.
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The initial release of KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma Next will likely not have perfected Wayland support but many components should be usable within Weston and other improvements — including KWin as its own Wayland compositor — will come with time.
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Here at MyKolab.com we are often surprised when companies flaunt having turned to green energy to power their services. We always considered this the lowest bar of sustainability everyone should meet. After all, this is the 21st century and we have known for decades the damages and risks of fossil and nuclear energy. That’s why for all of MyKolab.com’s history, every server and all of Kolab Systems have run on green energy. Our energy mix is mostly hydroelectric, some solar, and a little bit of wind, due to the geographic conditions in Switzerland.
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Kate (the KDE Advanced Text Editor) is the well know, powerful text editor that ships by default in KDE, and has plenty of powerful features for both simple text editing as well as programmers. Some of the well-known functions that it offers include indentation, syntax highlighting for hundreds of programming languages, block-selection mode or check-spelling.
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KWin5 will feature a new configuration module to control Desktop effects. KWin5 will be a part of the upcoming Plasma Next Workspace. The control module is rewritten with QtQuick controls.The focus of the control module will be on Desktop Effects.
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Enlightenment
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Most folks who have been around Linux and/or open source software for awhile are aware of what GTK and QT are – tool kits for building applications. Something that not as many may be aware of is that there is another open source tool kit out there – the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. These serve as the building blocks not only for the Enlightenment desktop, but also for a growing number of applications.
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