08.12.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Based on the events of recent weeks, it very much looks like Microsoft is heading to make Windows a closed ecosystem (a la Apple). They want to make both the hardware and the OS and third-party applications can only be sold with their approval and only through their App Store (with a 30% commission to Microsoft).
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With the upcoming release of Windows 8 in October, the computer world appears to be divided in its opinion of Microsoft’s new operating system. Following the release preview of Windows 8 a few months ago, some are excited about the new interface, while others feel it was built only to be more convenient for tablet or touchscreen users. If Windows 8 turns out to be another Vista, Linux is expected to eat another inch more of Microsoft’s market share.
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Desktop
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When I initially switched to Linux from Windows, I was a Gentoo user, and I still recommend that distribution for anyone looking to learn more about how Linux actually works and is built. These days, however, I’m an Ubuntu user (12.04), simply because it mostly just works. I’m not in love with Unity, but then I’m not really a fan of any of the desktop user interfaces these days, OS X included.
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The Allwinner A10 chipset – which features an ARM Cortex-A8 processor – currently powers a number of Android devices, including the MK802 PC on a stick, the ZaReason tablet and Hackberry A10 dev board.
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I’m not a big Linux user, so I was surprised and impressed when I stumbled across StartOS today, the first Linux-based operating system from Chinese startup Ivali. StartOS is a Linux-based system that’s targeted at Chinese users and boasts simplicity and stability as its primary advantages.
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Linux computer builder ZaReason is launching a thin and light laptop called the UltraLap 430 which has all the specs you’d expect from a modern ultrabook. But what sets it apart from pretty much every other ultrabook on the market is the fact that the UltraLap 430 ships with a Linux-based operating system rather than Windows.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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My name is Linus Torvalds, and I am your god.
You don’t have to be a Linux user, or even a nerd, to love Linus Torvalds. His arrogant and irreverant sense of humor draws scores of views, shares and upvotes on almost anything he says online.
He cares very little about what others think, and will publicly lambaste anyone he deems deserving. Which to be honest, appears to be most people.
From an abundant smorgasbord, we’ve chosen 14 of our favorite smackdowns from King Linus.
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The order has come down from Paris. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has spoken and its word is final: No more leap seconds this year.
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Graphics Stack
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Continuing on from yesterday’s news about Ubuntu delaying their Wayland-based system compositor, a new Wayland LiveCD release, and a preview of where Wayland’s at today, Kristian Høgsberg confirmed his attendance for next month’s XDC2012 conference. He also added two items to the program:
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The Khronos Group has announced the availability of version 3.0 of the OpenGL ES open mobile graphics interface specification, code-named “Haiti”, at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. OpenGL ES is the most important 3D graphics interface for SoC GPUs, which can be found in tablets and smartphones, and is supported by Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and other systems. OpenGL ES 3.0 has been significantly improved compared to its predecessors but is still backwards compatible with ES 2.0.
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Applications
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The title and the following text have been stolen by me from Michael Schumacher at the GIMP Developers Mailing List and GIMP Users Mailing List.
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One of the weaknesses in Windows Explorer, OS X Finder and a myriad of Linux file managers is the fact they insist on opening two separate windows to view two different folders or drives. If you’re frequently shunting files between two locations on your hard drive, one of the best things you can do is reach for a third-party file manager that lets you open a single window with two (or more) panes allowing you to set up source and destination locations quickly and easily.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Can video games art? This is a really dumb question. Of course they are. Or rather they can be. Anyone who would say no to this is wrong. Artists can choose to express themselves in just about any medium and this includes the interactive and the digital. Dismissing one for expression as invalid and unsuited to properly conveying creative ideas is silly.
That said, if you rephrase the question and ask whether or not the modern triple A mainstream releases are art, then no they are not. Or rather they are as much art as Michael Bay’s Transformers. They are commercial products first and foremost. They trade in the same distractions as Hollywood blockbusters: guns, sex and explosions. They are made to excite, titillate and provide the player with a quick adrenaline rush. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but there is usually not much artistry involved. These games are to be consumed as entertainment, and if they do contain some deeper meaning, or give you reasons for contemplation it is usually just a nice bonus.
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Valve, the games company that is behind the Steam download platform, is set to open the distribution system up to non-gaming software.
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You know what I don’t miss? I don’t miss installing software from disks. Back in the olden tymes, when I had to walk to school barefoot and all that, software like WordPerfect would come on a stack of floppy disks and you’d have to sit there feeding them into the drive one by one for an hour. Infuriating!
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Desktop Environments
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Prior to commencing the weekend, the Enlightenment crew released a new round of alpha releases for EFL 1.7.
The updated Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) this time around include Eina, Eet, Evas, Ecore, Embryo, Edje, Efreet, E_dbus, Eeze, Expedite, Evas Generic Loaders, Eio, Emotion, Ethumb, and Elementary.
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The Open Group, the steward of the UNIX standards, has open sourced the CDE classic desktop for Unix under the LGPLv2 licence. The Common Desktop Environment and the Motif toolkit on which it is based, itself open sourced in 2000, became the de facto standard for Unix desktops in Unix’s commercial hay day in the 1990s. CDE broadened the concept of simple window managers configured by means of text files which had previously dominated the Unix world; it included a desktop offering integrated applications and graphical configuration tools.
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Competition may be good for business, but competition among Linux desktops is currently so fierce that it may end up being to everyone’s detriment in the medium-term.
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The developers at the GNOME project have published GNOME 3.5.5, the latest unstable development version of what will eventually become the stable 3.6 branch of GNOME. The new pre-release version implements more of the planned new features and goals, such as the new lock screen and new input methods for entering, for example, Japanese or Chinese characters.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Two months after the most recent update to the 4.8.x branch of the KDE Software Collection (KDE SC), the project has delivered the 4.8.5 stabilisation update to the software suite. Usually, these updates are provided at monthly intervals, but the release of KDE SC 4.9 most likely delayed the scheduled publication.
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GNOME Desktop
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There were lot of voices against the replacement of categories with pagination, and that was another controversial feature originally planned for Gnome 3.6.
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The former Google’s employee and currently Executive Director of Yorba, talks about developing with Gnome and he spots the strategies that a company should use to have profit by developing Open Source Desktop Applications.
Adam has an impressive bio in Google’s desktop projects and his company has already released 2 top quality Apps for Gnome; Shotwell and Geary.
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The GNOME project, which is facing heavy criticism over usability issues, is to build a touch-capable ‘GNOME OS’ as a way of improving the overall experience for users and developers
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There’s been plenty of excitement surrounding Firefox OS ever since Mozilla announced its first hardware partners earlier this year, but now it looks like there’s yet another open source operating system entering the scene.
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The last version (4.4) of DSL came, I guess in 2008. Hence, in my article on lightweight Linux distros, I didn’t include DSL. But, now I have to include it. DSL 4.11 is here and boy! What a lightweight OS it is! I couldn’t imagine a fully functional distro with graphical desktop taking only 18-20 MB of RAM! Incredible!
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These were reviews of Zorin OS 5 Core, Zorin OS 6 Lite and Zorin OS 6 Core. Also, there were guest posts from different authors who took part in the Zorin OS contest.
In addition to the Lite and Core versions, the Zorin team releases an Ultimate edition.
While the Core and Lite versions of Zorin OS are free as beer, Ultimate is not a free Operating System.
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New Releases
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The next edition of Bridge Linux to be released is Bridge Light. This release also features the Terminator swap, a smaller iso, the new installer, updated README, and GRUB2 along with the system-wide features of 2012.8 which can be found here.
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Patrick Volkerding received a tremendous bug reports after announcing Slackware 14.0 Beta and he compiled all those bug reports and fixed them in private along with the Core Team. When he sees it ready for public, it’s time to release thus Slackware 14 RC1 has been announced.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Red Hat Family
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The Scientific Linux (SL) project has announced the availability of version 6.3 of its Linux distribution. The new SL release is based on the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3 released six weeks ago. As usual, it therefore contains all of the features introduced in the most recent RHEL release which, in addition to bug fixes and optimisations, saw several new virtualisation features added.
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Now after three years of effort, Deltacloud has finally hit its 1.0 release. A 1.0 release is usually a major milestone signifying that an open source project is mature and ready for consumption. In Deltacloud’s case, the effort has already been deployed and integrated into Red Hat’s commercial CloudForms effort that officially launched in June.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This simple tutorial will explain how to turn off discrete card on a Ubuntu laptop with two graphic cards. Discrete graphic card takes up more energy and the processor usage. If you seldom use the discrete card, follow the steps to turn it off.
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It reports the system architecture you use, the version of popularity-contest you use and the list of packages installed on your system. For each package, popularity-contest looks at the most recently used files, and reports the filename, its last access time and last change time.
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Flavours and Variants
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I recently reviewed Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” KDE, and I was quite pleased with it. My long-term review of the Xfce edition just ended, so this one will go for another 8 days. This will be the last such long-term review of the summer, because after this I am going home and won’t be back until just before the semester starts, at which point I probably will not be able to continue this.
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After doing some research and testing for the last week I have arrived at the conclusion that Bodhi’s ARM branch will best serve our users by moving our core from Debian Wheezy ARMEL to utilize Debian Wheezy ARMHF. I’m not going to get into the technical difference between the two platforms here – just know that in general ARMHF is faster.
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Peppermint OS 3 has been released. If you aren’t familiar with it, Peppermint OS is a cloud-oriented distribution. It’s based on Ubuntu 12.04 (it’s actually a fork of Lubuntu 12.04).
Unlike most other distributions, it’s geared toward letting you use your favorite web apps as well as desktop software. Web apps such as Editor by Pixlr run in the Ice SSB framework, which makes these applications a part of your desktop rather than running them in a browser. This makes them feel like they are running locally rather than in the cloud.
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BeagleBone adopted by thousands for creative development of electronics and applications., – BeagleBone eliminates barriers with easy development on one-of-a-kind, credit-card-sized Linux computer platform based on ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor
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Extending the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins, the Gertboard by Gert Van Loo will allow RPi to sense and interact with the world around it
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Quite a co-incidence. We just published an article about managing your Nikon DSLR cameras using your Android devices, and here comes a rumor that Nikon is planning to announce Android based cameras.
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Damn Small Linux is a light-weight operating system designed to run on older computers which might not have the speedy processors, large hard drives, or vast amounts of RAM available on newer systems.
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Phones
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Android
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The majority of Android tablets and mobile phones run on embedded processors based on a core licensed for ARM Inc. However, there are a small number of tablets which also run on the MIPS processors.
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Cyanogenmod is an alternative Android firmware which can flashed to get software tweaks, performance optimizations and other additional customizations not possible with the stock Android provided with the phones.
It is extremely popular with geeks who like to tinker with Android based devices.
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When the Android-based Ouya was announced last month, founder Julie Uhrman said she wanted the system to be more than just a game console, and it now has support for apps like Twitch.TV and Vevo music streaming. The non-gaming options on the console seem set to increase, as the team behind the popular XBMC media manager have pledged to bring the program to the system.
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Since the HTC G1 introduced Android in October 2008, a multitude of vendors have shipped thousands of different smartphone models around the world. Yet only a few dozen have made a major impact. Here, I single out the 10 most significant Android smartphones in the platform’s short history. My criteria includes popularity, technological and design breakthroughs, and their debut of new Android releases. These were the phones that not only showed there were viable alternatives to the highly controlled, one-size-fits-all philosophy of the Apple iPhone – they were the phones that made people go “Wow.”
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We explain how to use use powerful open source firmware to unleash the beast in your router
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The world of data storage is changing and open source is helping (well, trying extremely hard) to shake up a few traditional technology standards.
For many years, storage has been about big boxes from big name storage vendors. Usual suspects here might include EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp, Oracle Exadata and obviously we could extend this list ad infinitum if we started to add hard drive manufacturers, big data players and database shops.
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Liferay, maker of an enterprise-class, open-source portal, has announced the public launch of Liferay Marketplace, a new marketplace that offers more than 70 enterprise tools and apps developed by Liferay.
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Both Tactic Team and Tactic Enterprise have been released as open-source software. An earlier version of this story indicated that the Enterprise version would require a paid license, but that is not the case. We regret the error.
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The Open Source Initiative and Open Source Hardware Association are apparently swinging handbags at each other over two logos which they claim are similar.
The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) has a gear logo where part of it is broken to indicate open source goodness. The Open Source Initiative has a green circle which has been broken to indicate open sauciness. We would have thought both symbols mean that open source software is broken, but apparently they are supposed to symbolise keyholes.
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Version 1.2 of the open source Instantbird instant messaging (IM) client is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The latest version has been ten months in the making; a large part of that time has been taken in moving to share code with Thunderbird 15, currently in beta, which will also offer instant messaging features. Because of this the developers note that there aren’t any major new features, but there are a large number of improvements to existing features and numerous under-the hood changes.
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TextMate, which is considered to be one of the best text editors for Mac, has gone open source. In less than 24 hours, over 500 branches/forks have already been created and many improvements are already landing into the codebase.
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Lazarus (so named because it’s an older project, reborn) is a full-featured graphical IDE for Free Pascal, an open-source implementation of Object Pascal. While the Lazarus developers politely ask that it not be called a Delphi clone… if it walks, talks, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. This should not be considered a slam. I found it because I went looking for a free or low-cost Delphi clone, because there’s a powerful market niche for one.
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Open-source software is everywhere. Chances are you use it every day in such creations as Google, Android or Mozilla Firefox. Its source code is wide open – anyone can study, improve or modify it if they like.
Among the biggest reasons to use open-source software is price: It’s usually free.
But specialized pieces of software – tools such as Photoshop – often have price tags that reflect their power. If you just want it for the occasional project, those prices can be hard to justify.
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RIM is actually working on an open-source, cross-platform gaming engine.
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Events
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But it’s also known for some amazing parties (ahem, “evening events”). The Linux community knows how to have a good time; we just try to provide the best venues possible for facilitating FUN as well as learning and networking.
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The Summit will feature more than 30 eminent panelists and speakers, including government officials, health care leaders, clinical care providers and policymakers. The event will bring together the OSEHRA community, now totaling more than 1,000 members, for the first time and provide a venue for Open Source Health IT training and educational workshops.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Only three years ago, companies were nervous about the potential security and management risks of sending critical data and services into the “cloud.” Today, the cloud-computing industry has developed so rapidly that Rackspace(RAX) has put its faith in open-source cloud technology.
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Platform-as-a-service provider dotCloud has made Hipache, its distributed HTTP and WebSocket proxy, available as open source. Based on the node-http-proxy library, the distributed proxy is designed to handle high volumes of HTTP and WebSocket traffic to large numbers of virtual hosts.
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Intel and several Chinese organizations have set up a technical community which will focus on the development and support of open-source cloudplatform OpenStack, and hopes to increase China’s contribution to the OpenStack global community.
According to a report Thursday by Sina Tech, Intel Asia-Pacific Research and Development, Chinese Internet company Sina, China Standard Software, and Shanghai Jiaotong University signed an agreement to set up the China Open Source Cloud League.
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OpenStack is a strange beast. The open-source cloud computing platform is a darling of IT vendors and some major end-users clamoring for an open cloud ecosystem, yet it generates a lot of criticism. Some folks question its governance model, while others question its technological maturity against more-established alternatives such as Amazon Web Services and VMware. So, what’s with the schizophrenia around OpenStack as the cloud’s open source savior?
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Databases
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The latest major update to Riak – Basho’s open source clustered NoSQL database – adds official support for FreeBSD and features new approaches to cluster management. In version 1.2 of the highly scalable distributed database, developers can stage and review multiple cluster changes to see how they affect the system before committing them; this is especially useful for cancelling changes or delaying them until off-peak hours.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Version 3.6.0 of LibreOffice, the fourth major iteration of The Document Foundation’s open source productivity suite, is now available to download. While the release doesn’t include any outstanding changes, it does bring with it a number of incremental improvements that result in better overall performance and interoperability, while also adding some new features.
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Bob Evans has a colorful past. He works at Oracle these days as what I would call a king’s blogger except that he isn’t doing very well even with the apparent influence of the king himself.
Bob used to write for SAP where he penned his own gems about Oracle. The watchmen at Oracle thought Bob did such a good job that they decided to hire him. Now Bob turns on his blog flame against Oracle’s critics.
Bob decided to attack me yesterday in a post he wrote. It’s an odd one about how “TechCrunch is Clueless About The Cloud.” It’s their attempt to rebuke my post last week about how Oracle will be the big loser when IT gets virtualized.
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Like it or loathe it, Oracle has been in charge of Java for two and a half years now, and things are looking good, according to the analyst house IDC
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Any industry requires a proper technology set-up to accelerate growth. Modern trend speaks out loud about the use of ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) in the corporate world for a smooth and efficient functioning of any enterprise.
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Funding
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Project Releases
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WriteType 1.3.163 is now available! WriteType is a word-processor designed to help elementary school students write better. It gives students who have a hard time writing an easier approach in putting their ideas on paper. In addition to fixing many bugs, the latest WriteType release has several new features to help students succeed.
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Openness/Sharing
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More than 5,400 developers have downloaded a new open-source operating system designed to enable digital devices to communicate with each other.
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3D printing is slowly becoming the next big thing. Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard of people making everything from blood vessels to kid-sized exoskeletons–the possibilities seem almost endless. But what if you’re too broke to buy yourself a 3D printer and too cool make yet another RepRep 3D printer? The answer is simple: cement your individuality and build yourself a Pwdr instead.
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Open Access/Content
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Though paying for tuition and housing eat up more money, textbook costs are among the most groan-inducing expenses incurred by college students. With tools like Amazon and chegg.com, only the least resourceful of freshmen are blowing $200 for a brand new textbook these days. But a new type of textbook is threatening to disrupt a $4.5 billion industry that has so far avoided the media upheavals experienced in music, movies and trade publications. Open-source textbooks, free for students to use and for professors to modify, are being developed by more companies and adopted in more classrooms. They may work hand-in-hand with the rise in free online courses to revolutionize the way we view—and pay for—higher education.
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Open Hardware
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Identifying a gap in the market has been the key to many successful open source projects. In the case of the participants in Project Hexapod, a group of robotics enthusiasts based at the Artisan Asylum makerspace in Massachusetts, they identified a clear lack of six-legged, rideable robots.
Members of Project Hexapod, which comprises three instructors, one teaching assistant, and 15 students, have launched a crowdfunding Kickstarter project to raise $65,000 to build ‘Stompy’: A arachnid-esque, six-legged, 1800kg hydraulic robot.
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The latest addition to the Arduino open source prototyping platform, the Leonardo microcontroller board is available from Rapid Electronics, writes Richard Wilson.
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Programming
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Go is a fundamental rethinking of native languages that improves greatly on C while maintaining that language’s minimalism.
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Java runtime maker Azul Systems recently made its flagship Zing Java Virtual Machine (JVM) available to open source developers for free for use in development, qualification and testing.
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Finance
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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.
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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.
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Censorship
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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
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Civil Rights
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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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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08.11.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For a lot of geeks, the Texas Instrument Scientific Calculator was their best friends during classes in high school. Not so long ago, I remember programming a Space Invader game in TI-Basic during a Maths lesson. But as a downside to growing up: a lot of us had to leave our precious TI at the bottom of a drawer. Thanks to emulation and our favorite OS, it is possible to use a TI again with nostalgia. Two programs are available for that purpose, both with their advantages.
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Desktop
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The company that introduced the Textspresso machine to the world has now released its desktop cloud texting application for Linux.
Zipwhip’s Android app, which sends text messages to and from your desktop or tablet via the cloud is now available on Ubuntu and Mint, as well as Windows and Mac.
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Acer’s disquiet over Surface betrays the tough position manufacturers find themselves in. If Microsoft is no longer a reliable partner, what are the alternatives for kit makers who want to survive the post-PC era?
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Server
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Linux operating system distributor Suse says it is gaining ground among cloud service providers as their choice platform for delivering the open source OS to customers, but at least one analyst says the market is still split between the Suse, Red Hat and Canonical’s Ubuntu.
Suse issued updated figures this week saying that it works with 20 cloud service providers (CSPs) to offer Linux OS to 15,000 enterprises. It lists major CSP customers as Amazon Web Services, Dell, Intel, Verizon and, most recently, Microsoft Azure.
“The latest addition of Microsoft Windows Azure to the Suse Cloud Program demonstrates Suse’s growing momentum as the de facto standard enterprise Linux operating system offered by cloud providers,” the company said in a press release issued this week.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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HelenOS 0.5.0 represents improvements made to this open-source operating system since March of 2011. Some of the key improvements to this original operating system are USB support (USB v1.1). a re-implemented networking stack with full TCP support, Realtek RTL8139 / Intel E1000 network drivers, read-only EXT2 and ISO9660 file-system support, read-write MINIX FS support, and some new ported applications. The ported applications to HelenOS include GNU Binutils, PCC (Portable C Compiler), and MSIM (MIPS R4000 simulator).
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The Linux Foundation is bringing Linus Torvalds to South Korea. Torvalds will be a key speaker at the inaugural Korea Linux Forum which is set to occur October 11 to 12 in Seoul, South Korea.
Linux is certainly no stranger to Asia, though the Linux Foundation seems to have had more events (and success) in Japan in recent years. The move to have an event in Korea is being driven by consumer electronics giant Samsung.
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Apple’s logo is a half-bitten apple. Windows’s logo somewhat looks like a window (at least in the beginning). So why is there a penguin as a mascot for Linux? And why is it called Tux? And where does it come from? And why is it a mascot and not a logo? And so on. Yes, we have a lot of questions about Linux, but strangely, there is a lot more about the penguin.
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The kernel driver for NVIDIA graphics chips is undergoing a major overhaul. KVM is now available for MIPS. The new “lslocks” lists locked files and displays the programs that locked them.
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Graphics Stack
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Well, there isn’t a major Mesa release happening this month as was originally planned. There also isn’t going to be a Mesa 8.1 release. Instead, Mesa 9.0 will be released in September.
Intel’s Ian Romanick began laying out these new plans last night with the other Mesa developers. This shake-up is happening in part because Intel’s planning for OpenGL ES 3.0 support in Mesa by early next year — plans they publicly announced earlier this week at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles.
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SIGGRAPH 2012 in Los Angeles is in full swing this week and beyond the usual exciting announcements — new OpenGL specifications and other Khronos announcements — the 20th anniversary of OpenGL is being celebrated from this leading industry graphics conference.
For those not at SIGGRAPH LA 2012 (unfortunately I’m not there to provide any live coverage on Phoronix), here are some Internet resources:
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The non-critical bug window for X.Org Server 1.13 is now closed and Keith Packard has announced the release of xorg-server 1.12.99.904.
The new features, like the driver re-work for PRIME DRI2 offloading and the nuking of XAA and new GLX support, is detailed in X.Org Server 1.13 RC1 Packs In Many Changes.
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NVIDIA doesn’t usually show up at the annual X.Org Developers’ Summits/Conferences, but for some reason at least one NVIDIA employee will be trekking to Germany for meeting with the open-source developers.
Earlier this week I was surprised (as shared on Twitter) when I received an automated notification that Andy Ritger signed up to be at XDC2012. Andy Ritger is a long-time NVIDIA Linux/UNIX engineer who served as the manager of the NVIDIA Linux Graphics Driver Software until Hardy Doelfel took over in late 2011.
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If you’re sad about Ubuntu delaying their Wayland System Compositor and want to take Wayland/Weston for a spin, there’s another alternative for playing with this next-generation Linux desktop technology.
For a Wayland-based LiveCD that is designed for showing off Wayland/Weston and related technologies, there is the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. The developer of this Linux OS, who says that distribution is named in honor of his favorite celebrity (Rebecca Black), released a new spin this week.
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Following the news shared today that Ubuntu’s delayed their Wayland System Compositor adoption from Ubuntu 12.10 to at least Ubuntu 13.04 there was the more positive news that there’s an updated third-party spin of an Ubuntu derivative running Wayland. This article has some more information on that new “RebeccaBlack OS” release along with screenshots that provide a glimpse of where the Wayland adoption is at today.
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The non-critical bug window for X.Org Server 1.13 is now closed and Keith Packard has announced the release of xorg-server 1.12.99.904.
The new features, like the driver re-work for PRIME DRI2 offloading and the nuking of XAA and new GLX support, is detailed in X.Org Server 1.13 RC1 Packs In Many Changes.
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More than a month ago I wrote about ARM working on Linux virtualization support via Xen. This work still hasn’t landed in the mainline Linux kernel, but it continues to move along.
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Coming out of SIGGRAPH 2012 is a new branch of Mesa from Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center that’s working on full open-source OpenGL ES 3.0 support for Intel HD hardware.
This OpenGL ES 3.0 branch of Mesa currently has “pre-alpha quality” support for OpenGL ES 3.0 for Intel HD hardware and it won’t be merged until after the Mesa 8.1 release. However, Intel hopes to have beta OpenGL ES 3.0 support officially ready and in mainline Mesa for Q1’2013.
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Applications
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Celestia is a captivating space navigator that allows you to explore and discover our known universe in three dimensions.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond our galaxy using zooming, point and go and time accelerating / freezing features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Valve’s SIGGRAPH 2012 presentation last night — about the Source Engine on Linux and their experiences with maximizing the OpenGL performance of their game engine on Linux — was a success.
More details about the presentation will be available in the coming days, including the slides. However, for those overly-excited, here’s a few photos from the Valve Linux presentation in Los Angeles. There’s also a photo of Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux, although it’s not too clear and doesn’t show (Ubuntu) Linux in the background with my photos from April when at Valve HQ being much more clear.
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Back in 1991, a computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced on a newsgroup that he was creating a “hobby OS.” That hobby was Linux, and today it’s much more than a tinkerer’s operating system, with availability on all manner of hardware and a seemingly unlimited array of flavors, or “distributions.” Maybe you’re new to Linux, or maybe you’re itching to graduate from Ubuntu to something with a little more geek cred. Whatever the case, we’re going to take the sting out of all those command prompts, using two great distros as examples.
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Games
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That’s it. No mention of past titles, “goodwill”, a lack of “positive results” or “paying the bills”. The rest was basically just an anti-Linux smear job, fabricated entirely by Walrath.
Watch it yourself if you don’t believe me. It’s quite an ordeal, though. Carmack somehow manages to talk non-stop for the full three and a half hours without so much as pausing for breath. He didn’t even move for the first hour and a half, when he eventually sat down, talked non-stop for another two hours, then took his first swig of water. If nothing else, you have to admire his sheer stamina. He had an iPad toy with him, but it seemed mainly for show, because he only glanced at it a couple of times near the end, during the Q&A session. Yes, he ad-libbed his way through the entire keynote, at high speed, and it wasn’t exactly Jobsian gibberish either, it was mostly pretty technical stuff. Impressive.
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After Doom 3 was open-sourced in November last year, efforts had been made to improve th source code and port it to different platforms. Polish developer, Krzysztof Klinikowski has ported Doom 3 to Android and the below video shows Doom 3 running on HTC Desire HD (Android).
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You pilot your humble thrust ship through tense battles with aliens and hone your piloting skills, rescue survivors, solve puzzles, blow up horrors that lurk in the darkest corners of the galaxy.
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Does piecing together a picture of your own face, your pet antelope, or your prized car sound like a fun way to waste some time?
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Until now, I have remained quite reserved about any serious Linux gaming, which seems to have gained quite some momentum thanks to Valve’s recent announcement to release game titles on the Linux platform. I should probably point out that I do wish Valve all the best and hope that their Linux games perform well for them and any future Linux games that are released on the platform by games publishers.
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John Carmack is the face of some of the most iconic games in PC and console history. Not only has he spearheaded AAA titles like Doom and Quake, he is also the motor that drives id Software, who as a team are solely responsible for the first-person-shooter niche that lives on the Linux platform.
id Software‘s decision to successively deliver each of the company’s game engines into the realm of open source has enabled small, passionate teams to develop their own visions atop the foundation of these engines. In addition to being a great enabler of free software, it has also allowed titles like Quake and Doom and their subsequent installments to exist on Linux. In fact, if you were to check the pulse of Linux gaming before the announcement of Steam for Linux, you might come to a startling realization; id Software is responsible for the majority of the AAA titles available for Linux.
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The Flight of the Maxima (TFM) is an unlikely fusion of Sci-fi, dark comedy and medieval Christianity.
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Almost two years ago I wrote an article about how the Open Source ecosystem can interact with commercial game developers.
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Unknown Horizons is a 2D realtime strategy simulation with an emphasis on economy and city building. It is basically a game heavily inspired from the popular Anno series were you have to build, sustain and lead colonies into evolution.
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Valve officially confirmed today that their Steam distribution software will go beyond just offering games and will provide applications from “creativity to productivity” software.
Valve’s new Steam will go beyond just games and offer all sorts of software while still providing the same Steamworks benefits like easy/automated installation, automatic updating, and being able to safe your work into the Steam Cloud.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME and KDE are the top desktop environment choices you come across when you are about to choose a Linux distribution. Choosing between them isn’t much of a pain if you are going straight for Ubuntu, but if you’re a bit picky about your desktop, then knowing a bit more about desktop environments becomes a must. So, what are desktop environments anyway?
A desktop environment consists mainly of the graphical user interface and a collection of tightly integrated applications blended seamlessly to provide a complete user experience. So, in a desktop environment you’ll most likely find a common set of elements like icons, menus, pointers, panels, desktop widgets, and even wallpapers. Basically, a desktop environment is what you see when you log in to your computer. An operating system on the other hand is the one that lies underneath, helping your computer to boot and manage a bunch of other processes.
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I’ve been browsing distrowatch.com lately noticing something that is happening for some time now, but maybe surprised me for the first time because it is still happening. What I am talking about is that there are more Linux distributions releasing new versions using Gnome 2.32 than Gnome 3.4!
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Like many, I read this already famous blog post about the stripped-down Nautilus with growing surprise. I won’t go into what I think it’s wrong with it as others have said enough already. I’d like to focus on the positive: the very first point made.
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What a KDE does in a Gnome blog? Normally it gets FUD, but this time we are going to praise it! I got double hit from KDE yesterday. First by the awesome news that Digia Committed to Thriving Qt Ecosystem and secondly by trying Rebecca Black.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome PackageKit, the tool that is used to install packages and apps in most distros like Fedora now supports parallelization. For developers, it means that they can now process several jobs at the same time, while for end users, it means that they can now expect a faster PackageKit.
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At the GUADEC conference in Spain, GNOME’s annual conference for developers, some of the core developers have decided to go ahead with a concept they are calling GNOME OS.
Before you start rolling your eyes, expecting Yet-Another-Linux-Distro, let me reveal that is is slightly more complicated than that.
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In my last post I described how, during this year’s GUADEC, members of the GNOME community came together to plan where the project could go in the next 18 months or so. The slides from Xan and Juanjo’s talk give some of the background to those discussions. We took copious notes during the planning sessions that were held; these will all be available online soon, so you can get a more detailed picture if you want one. In what follows I’ll try to give a bit an overview.
But first, a clarification. The idea of GNOME OS has been around for a couple of years, and there has been a fair amount of confusion about what it means. Some people seem to have assumed that GNOME OS is an effort to replace distributions, so let me be clear: that is not the case. While the creation of a standalone GNOME OS install does feature as a part of our plans, this is primarily intended as a platform for testing and development. In actual fact, all of the improvements that we hope to make through the GNOME OS initiative will directly improve what the GNOME project is able to offer distributions.
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The GNOME project, which is facing heavy criticism over usability issues, is to build a touch-capable ‘GNOME OS’ as a way of improving the overall experience for users and developers
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Developers have revealed they are working on a Gnome OS, potentially extending the reach of the open-source platform to tablets.
At the moment, Gnome is a desktop environment that sits on top of Linux OSes – but has been ditched by Ubuntu in favour of its own Unity interface.
At a Gnome conference, developers said they were working on an OS, targeting a release date of March 2014, according to their slides. However, the Gnome OS isn’t meant to replace existing distros, such as Ubuntu or Mint.
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This is a quick look to the new Lock (Screen Shield) of Gnome Shell, and the new interface of GDM, which both come to brake more the visual coherence between Gnome and Ubuntu that ships LightDM.
LightDM or GDM is just a small detail, but it’s not the only one. It’s the File Manager, the File Previewer (aka Sushi), the Scroll bars.. So even if you install GS in Ubuntu, experience will be much different from the Vanilla Gnome. Anyway.
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“If you want to make the transition easy for Windows users, you have to be talking about KDE,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. In fact, “there was even a great video a couple of years ago from ZDNet Australia where they showed people the new KDE and told them it was the new Windows,” he recalled. “Not only did folks believe it, but they said it was a much improved Windows.”
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Linux Deepin is a distribution derived from Ubuntu Desktop. The latest edition, Linux Deepin 12.06, which is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, was released on July 17, That means it was released later than expected, as the version number clearly indicates that the release date should have been in June, not July. But that is a minor issue. Better released late with major bugs quashed, than on time, but bug-ridden.
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It’s nearly impossible to tell how many people are using any given Linux distribution. Each distro probably has some internal statistics that they can use to judge relative popularity, but tracking how many people have installed a distro or use it regularly is currently not possible. However, we can look at some general trends online to get an idea of a distro’s relative popularity.
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Some time ago I made a decision not to look at LXDE-based distributions. One of the reasons for me was a lack of usability, because of keyboard layout configuration. I need to type in Russian and English both, which means I need to switch between different layouts quickly and often. None of the LXDE distributions I’ve tried had this option: Debian, Fedora, Knoppix, PCLOS, Porteus, SliTaz, Zorin OS 6 Lite.
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New Releases
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The previous CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” development images have now been replaced by some updated builds. For anyone unaware, these builds are based on Debian Wheezy sources. Wheezy is the current testing branch of Debian and therefore is likely to experience changes, bugs and breakages. These builds are not recommended for anyone who requires a stable system, or is not happy running into occasional breakages.
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The team is proud to announce the release of Snowlinux 3 “Crystal”.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the August 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Red Hat Family
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The Motley Fool’s readers have spoken, and I have heeded your cries. After months of pointing out CEO gaffes and faux pas, I’ve decided to make it a weekly tradition to also point out corporate leaders who are putting the interests of shareholders and the public first and are generally deserving of praise from investors. For reference, here is last week’s selection.
This week, I want to take a closer look at Red Hat (NYS: RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst and show you why a mixture of growth, hiring, and humility makes him a fantastic leader.
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Yesterday, 8th Aug., Connie Sieh announced the release of Scientific Linux 6.3, an enterprise-class distribution built from source package for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3: “Scientific Linux 6.3 i386/x86_64 is now available.
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Fedora
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A little over seven weeks has passed since I wrote my thoughts on Fedora 17, and finally, those little paper cuts became too much.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When I was at the Community Leadership Summit and OSCON a few weeks back I had the pleasure of meeting Masafumi Ohta who is a passionate Ubuntu user who had flown from Nerima-ku in Japan to the event. Masafumi very generously gave me a print copy of Ubunchu; thanks, Masafumi, for the kindness!
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Ubuntu App Showdown contest was introduced more than a month ago by Canonical to encourage application development for Ubuntu in a big way. And the initiative is showing results already. More than 150 applications were submitted out of which, 133 has been qualified and made it to the final list. Judges will vote on the apps and will declare the winners very soon. Meanwhile, here’s our list of top 15 apps (in no particular order) from Ubuntu App Showdown contest, which we think are the best of the lot. Read on.
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These are really interesting news that come directly from Ubuntu’s Sebastien Bacher in Launchpad Bug Tracker. Sebastian basically says that Ubuntu cannot follow Gnome upstream as Gnome lack to plan their work in advance or communicate enough with Ubuntu about their new features.
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Over in the development land of Ubuntu 12.10, a new version of the ‘new Nautilus’ has landed – bringing with it yet another feature removal.
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In a bug report on Launchpad, Ubuntu developer Sebatien Bacher has suggested that Ubuntu might ship Nautilus 3.4 with version 12.10 of the Linux distribution – currently available as a third alpha – instead of the latest upstream version of the file manager. Nautilus 3.6, which is currently in development, would be included in the repositories but not be bundled by default. This would mark a departure from recent practices where the Ubuntu developers had always shipped the latest version of Nautilus with their custom Unity desktop interface.
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Dell might be preparing to offer its XPS 13 with Ubuntu 12.04 this Fall, but Linux boutique ZaReason has beaten them to the punch by putting the UltraLap 430 up for sale. It’s the first Ultrabook on the market that’s shipping with Linux.
The $899 base price gets you a decently-specced unit. A 1.8GHz 3rd generation Intel Core i3 processor starts things off, and it’s teamed up with 4GB of DDR3 memory and a 32GB mSATA SSD. The Intel base hardware adds 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and HD 4000 graphics to the mix — as well as a pair of USB 3.0 ports. The UltraLap’s 14.1-inch display offers a native resolution of 1366 x 768, and there’s an HDMI port in case you want to output video to a secondary display.
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Ubuntu 12.10 will not be shipping with a Wayland-based system compositor as was once hoped for, but the experimental system compositor can be enabled from a PPA in a very primitive state.
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Canonical published today, August 3rd, this month’s top 10 app downloads from Ubuntu Software Center. As you can see below, the most appreciated apps are still the games from the Humble Indie Bundle V. Without further ado here they are!
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi Linux ARM branch will now move to ARMHF branch.
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Fuduntu is mentioned in several comments in my blog and that makes me want to try it. I have never used Fuduntu before and at the first glance, I thought it is just a derivative of Ubuntu with Fluxbox ( I thought the name was Fubuntu), but then I checked again and realized it is based on Fedora and the name is Fuduntu. And the perfect time has come, a friend just gave me an old laptop yesterday and I am also having some free time so I decided to download and try the newest version of Fuduntu (2012) that uses kernel 3.4.4.
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Our favourite little board is determined not to stay away from the news for long. In yet another innovation for Raspberry Pi, the low-cost, credit-card sized hobbyist board, a new add-on interface was announced.
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The Raspberry Pi mini-computer has taken the tech world by storm. If you’re one of the lucky few to get one, one of the first things you’ll need is a case. Here’s a few to choose from.
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The BeagleBoard organization recently announced the availability of over 20 new plug-in boards for its ARM-powered computer platform – which runs both Google Android 4.0 and Linux Ubuntu.
Essentially, the plug-in boards, or “capes” are designed to extend the already formidable (developer) BeagleBoard ecosystem with additional hardware, such as robot motor drivers and sensors that measure location and pressure.
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If you are looking for something similar to the Raspberry Pi Mini PC, but with a faster processor, extra memory, built in storage and wireless connectivity.
You might be interested in the new Hackberry A10 Developer Board which is now available to purchase for around $60, and is capable of running a variety of operating systems including Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux based distros.
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Phones
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Android
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Canonical had earlier announced plans to launch Ubuntu in Android based devices. Ubuntu for Android is a new initiative that will allow your high-end phone to work as a full desktop computer. In a video shown below, we can have an idea of what it will actually look like.
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Is Google preparing to do what it was rumored to do for so long, namely bring the Android mobile OS to the desktop? Today’s Android user on a smartphone may scoff at the idea but there are signs that Google might have the desktop in its sights, and it’s also clear that Chrome OS has not been the revolution on laptops or desktops that Google had hoped it woud be. Here are some of the rumblings about the possibility of Android on the desktop.
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Up until now, we have only heard rumors and seen still pictures of what Ubuntu running on an Android device will look like. Today however, a video has surfaced of the service up and running and it is exciting to see. It was promised that Ubuntu for Android “transforms your high-end phone into your productive desktop, whenever you need it.” While you might be skeptical at that claim, after watching the video your opinion might change.
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Samsung has woken up to context: the Galaxy Note 10.1 has a fast quadcore processor and twice as much memory as most rivals, but listen to Samsung’s pitch and you’d hardly know it. Instead of the usual breathless glee over hardware and technical abilities, the Note 10.1 tells you exactly what it can do with all that’s under the hood. Namely, bring the stylus back in style, and create a compellingly different approach to tableteering, distinct to what Apple’s iPad offers.
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Ballnux
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We just received confirmation that OSI’s request to be added as a signatory to the Declaration of Internet Freedom has been accepted. We endorse this Declaration and encourage authorities worldwide to embrace it and implement regulations protecting the principles it espouses.
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Open source has created a new way of mobilising communities but it has also allowed a democratic deficit to open up between developers and users. Glyn Moody offers his take on this gap and how it is being slowly closed.
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Penguinistas used to worry about the dreaded fork, especially of Linux. “What if Linux forks and becomes like Unix?” was a question often being posed in the open source media. Linus Torvalds would do his best to put those fears to rest, explaining that under the GPL forks are usually to be welcomed.
He was of the opinion that if a fork improves a product and is liked by the users, those changes will almost certainly be rolled back into the originating application. If not, and the fork is indeed a marked improvement on the original, then the fork becomes the standard bearer at the expense of the original application.
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A gear logo proposed to represent and easily identify open-source hardware has caught the eyes of the The Open Source Initiative, which believes the logo infringes its trademark.
The gear logo is backed by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), which was formally established earlier this year to promote hardware innovation and unite the fragmented community of hackers and do-it-yourselfers. The gear mark is now being increasingly used on boards and circuits to indicate that the hardware is open-source and designs can be openly shared and modified.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Earlier this year I said VMware’s virtual GPU driver was running fast for Linux — in comparison to Oracle’s VM VirtualBox 3D guest acceleration support. This continues to be the case with VMware’s OpenGL stack leading the way with superior support and performance. Recently I ran some desktop virtualization tests under VMware Fusion 4.1.3 and Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.18 from the Retina MacBook Pro with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion host. Even with the OS X host, VMware’s 3D support exposed to the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS virtualized guest was much faster.
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Aside from VMware virtualization smacking Oracle VirtualBox when it comes to the OpenGL support that’s passed through to VM guests, VMware Fusion 4 also does a nice job at outperforming VirtualBox when it comes to computational-focused workloads.
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Funding
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Project Releases
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Security
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Finance
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In yesterday’s New York Times, Ellen Ullman criticized the SEC’s suggestion that mandated software testing could prevent automated-trading catastrophes like the one that shook the market and nearly bankrupted Knight Capital at the beginning of this month. More testing won’t work, according to Ullman, for a few reasons. First, computer systems are too complex to ever “fully test,” because they comprise multiple software and hardware subsystems, some proprietary, others (like routers) containing “inaccessible” embedded code. Second, all code contains bugs, and because bugs can be caused by interactions between modules and even by attempts to fix other bugs, no code will ever be completely bug-free. And finally, it is too difficult to delineate insignificant changes to the software from those that really require testing.
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And we’re sure not going to let the Luddites have their way, so we better get used to a society with an ever-smaller number of available jobs.
* Remember bank tellers? ATMs do most of the work they used to do.
* Remember paper maps? GPSs fill that gap now.
* Newspapers? Magazines? Paper books? Electronic media is eating them all.
* Records and CDs? I don’t have to tell you what happened to those, do I?
* Media production in general? Technology does 90% of that now.
* When’s the last time you dropped off a roll of film to be developed?
* Office jobs? Sure, they’re still there in a FIRE economy. But each office gets more done with fewer heads.
* Phone operators? Radio station DJs? Most of that’s automated now.
* Fewer cops on the streets? Well, good thing we have those red-light automatic-ticket machines at every intersection, isn’t it?
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The Sensata plant in Freeport is profitable and competitive, but its majority owner, Bain Capital, has decided to ship jobs to China – and forced workers to train their overseas replacements
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Goldman Sachs Group (GS) employees have changed to red from blue.
Four years ago, employees of New York-based Goldman gave three-fourths of their campaign donations to Democratic candidates and committees, including presidential nominee Barack Obama. This time, they’re showering 70 percent of their contributions on Republicans.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A mysterious dark money group that has received Koch-connected funding called “Americans for Job Security” has dropped $689,000 on ads in Wisconsin attacking GOP Senate candidate (and billionaire hedge fund manager) Eric Hovde. It is the first major ad buy in the 2012 election cycle from the secretly-funded group, which is officially registered as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit “trade association” like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or PhRMA, but does not appear to advance the interests of any particular industry or trade.
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The American Federation for Children Action Fund Inc., a pro-school privatization group bankrolled by conservative financiers, has spent more than $113,000 supporting five Milwaukee Democrats running for State Assembly and Senate, who are facing primaries on August 14.
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Civil Rights
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I am one of the lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the president the power to hold any US citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial.
In a May hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers asserted even more extreme powers – the right to disregard entirely the judge and the law. On Monday 6 August, Obama’s lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction – a profoundly important development that, as of this writing, has been scarcely reported.
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DRM
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As of today, Tor UK, Pan Macmillan’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, has made its ebooks DRM-free and available to purchase from the Tor UK Ebookstore. In a move announced earlier this year, Tor UK has joined sister company Tor Books in New York in removing Digital Rights Management from all its titles so that once you purchase a Tor UK book, you can download it as many times as you like, on as many ereaders as you like.
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Send this to a friend
08.09.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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With all the excitement about the Sunday AM (ET) landing of the NASA Curiosity rover on Mars, I’ve felt that something has been missing.
I’ve seen multiple press releases from vendors all highlighting how their tech is helping NASA.
One of the releases I got was from Intel’s Wind River division. Wind River has a robust embedded Linux operating system offering.
However, that’s not what they sold to NASA for Curiosity.
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Desktop
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Sometimes, being right is no fun. Three years ago, I suggested that the Linux desktop was headed for a future dominated by KDE, and that GNOME would be at a disadvantage. Looking back, I conclude that I was right, if only approximately.
What I did not foresee was that GNOME 3 would not only lag behind KDE for code maturity and innovation, but fail catastrophically with users, resulting in alternative interfaces, ranging from Ubuntu’s Unity to Linux Mint’s re-creations of GNOME 2 in Cinnamon and Mate.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Standardization is the biggest issue facing the open source cloud today, says Imad Sousou, director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. Adoption of open formats and interfaces will ensure flexibility and choice for users and vendors of the cloud.
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Imagine you have a Linux kernel image for an Android phone, but you don’t have the corresponding source, nor do you have the corresponding kernel headers. Imagine that kernel has module support (fortunately), and that you’d like to build a module for it to load. There are several good reasons why you can’t just build a new kernel from source and be done with it (e.g. the resulting kernel lacks support for important hardware, like the LCD or touchscreen). With the ever-changing Linux kernel ABI, and the lack of source and headers, you’d think you’re pretty much in a dead-end.
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The Linux Foundation is partnering with Samsung to organise the first-ever Korean Linux Forum, taking place Oct. 11-12, 2012 in Seoul, Korea at the JW Marriott. The goal of this event is to increase Linux development and collaboration from the talent pool in Korea and other countries in the Asia region.
The Korea Linux Forum will feature keynotes from Samsung’s Head of Software R&D Center KiHo Kim, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, Google’s Tejun Heo, Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist Dirk Hohndel and Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
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If someone asked me “What is your favorite part of the Linux operating system?”, I would have to say the Linux kernel itself. And it’s much the same for Unix too. Having that source code of the kernel loaded up in Emacs ready
for some serious tweaking gives you a strange sense of power at your fingertips. But it’s not having that sheer power that I love, it’s simply having the ability to edit that kernel source code freely without any restrictions. But there does lie one major hurdle. Only serious and advanced Linux users and developers have the understanding and ability to configure and build kernels from source. It’s not easy and takes some time to learn the skills to really make it worthwhile and successful. But at the moment, there’s no real incentive to learn how to configure and build a custom kernel other than just curiosity itself. And that curiosity has to come from within the user.
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e are pleased to announce that Yoshiya Eto of Fujitsu is the new Vice Chair of The Linux Foundation board. He joins officers Doug Fischer (Intel), Chairman, Alan Clark (SUSE), Secretary of the Board, and Frank Fanzilli, Treasurer. All Linux Foundation Board of Directors can be seen here: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/board-members
Essential to Linux’s ongoing growth around the globe and in the industries it is transforming is collaboration across geographies. We’re seeing more participation in Linux development than ever before from companies in Japan, China, South Korea, South America and throughout Europe.
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Graphics Stack
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Having now delivered Mesa 8.1 benchmarks looking at the hardware drivers for AMD R600g, Nouveau, R300g, Intel Ivy Bridge, and Intel Sandy Bridge, here are some benchmarks when on LLVMpipe.
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Intel open-source developers continue to make changes to Mesa at the request of Valve Software’s Linux team.
Following the recent article about Valve & Intel Work On Open-Source GPU Drivers, hitting the mailing list for Mesa development today was a set of patches by Intel’s Eric Anholt with changes at the request of Valve.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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We reported recently that Valve, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, announced that they would be moving both the Steam software and their games to Linux. Some games may already be playable thanks to some software called Wine that lets you run Windows programs on. We got both Steam and the fun game Dungeons of Dredmor to install without any difficulty on Ubuntu.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The XBMC Team are hoping to bring the XBMC media center platform to the cheap, $99 Android based gaming console, Ouya. The move comes after thousands of requests from XBMC fans. Currently talks are on between the two teams, and we can hope to get some positive results.
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For years, there has been one constant for users making the switch to Linux: gaming was going to be a thing of the past.
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Despite the fact that it isn’t the first inexpensive gaming console and open gaming platform to test the market, the open source Ouya gaming platform continues to generate major buzz. Ouya is billed as “a new kind of video game console” and is already famous for drawing major crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter. In the past two weeks, the Los Angeles-based Ouya project has gained some significant backers for its Android gaming platform. Here are details.
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This Valve spam in the Linux community, this hoax perpetrated by Valve and Phoronix, has gone on long enough to rival the SCO jokes and Duke Nukem Forever urban legend.
I don’t care if there is a Steam client for Linux. I wouldn’t play the filthy piece of crap if you paid me. Valve can drop dead. Linux has games. Linux has companies like Mojang and id Software that have been much nicer to it than Valve even promises to be some day. We also have games on the Android platform, too. We even have Linux on gaming consoles themselves now. Come to think of it, Valve needs Linux far worse than Linux ever needed Valve, and Valve burned that bridge long ago.
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Desktop Environments
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This latest XFCE Mint 13 distribution is a complete Linux distro unto itself. Even more significant is that the Mint 13 development team ushered in this distribution on the heals of team Ubuntu phasing out its own XFCE Ubuntu distro, which was called “Xubuntu.” This latest version is clearly a fast and fun-filled alternative to other desktop options.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Unfortunately a small bug entered 4.9: when using an Aurorae theme moving the window through the titlebar is delayed. It’s a bug we discovered a few days after the final tagging through the work on porting Plastik to QML.
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Yes, it is true. Soon you will be able to install the awesome KDE desktop in Windows 8, thanks to the KDE Windows Initiative. Builds and setup files for KDE 4.8 on Windows XP, Vista and 7 are already available, and developers are working day and night to port it on Windows 8. The below video shows the performance of KDE in Windows 8 desktop. True, its not as responsive as Linux, but it works.
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A research team from the University of Maryland Baltimore County has launched an online study to explore the usability of KDE notifications. Participants are asked to describe a recent KDE notification experience to deepen the understanding of what makes a good or bad notification. Results from the research will help improve the usability of KDE notifications, and will make a contribution to the academic field of Human-Computer Interaction.
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Digia, the software powerhouse listed on the NASDAQ OMX Helsinki exchange (DIG1V), today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Following the acquisition Digia becomes responsible for all the Qt activities formerly carried out by Nokia. These include product development, as well as the commercial and open source licensing and service business. Following the acquisition, Digia plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms.
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GNOME Desktop
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The Linux Mint developers have have forked Nautilus and are bringing out a new file manager based on it. The move comes after Gnome developers made some controversial changes to Nautilus like removal of dual pane, compact and sidebar views, Go menu etc which some users considered important.
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The GUADEC summit is over and Gnome developers have finally made plans of what future or Gnome may look like. Gnome developer, Allan Day blogged about a new brick in the block – Gnome OS.
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The last post seemed to get some attention. I also think it has been misunderstood. So I would like to briefly reframe it.
It wasn’t a rant about GNOME Shell or about design driven development. Neither was it a dismissal of the urgency for a strong developer story. I like the fact that we take risks and innovate in design. I also think that our developer workflow is broken, and fixing it is a priority.
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I wanted to give my one cent about the GNOME project, and where I think it could be successful. It would be two cents if I were actually involved in any constructive manner, but I am not. So it is one cent.
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A couple weeks ago on an unrelated review, I remember a commenter asking if I could review a Linux distribution called Stella. It seemed interesting, but I didn’t think much of it until the last few days when its release of version 6.3 made news on several major Linux news sites. At that point I knew I should check it out, so here it is. (Also, if Tennessee Williams were alive today, I think that “A Linux Distribution Named ‘Stella’” would have made a great title for one of his plays. Yes, I really did have to make that pun, and it won’t be the last time either.)
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New Releases
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Damn Small Linux was one of my favorite distributions… back in 2005. I stopped following it closely when it’s hardware support became too outdated for my everyday machine. But they’re back with hints of a more modern version to come.
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This release of GParted fixes a failure to mount rescued file systems larger than 2 GiB or file systems that start after the initial 2 GiB of the disk device. Also includes language translations updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The bull doesn’t seem to be part of PCLinuxOS anymore, as it was in 2010 when I first started using it. The distro changes its look with each new release and nowdays the logo is something akin to a CPU usage graph. Other than that, I can’t tell you a thing about the greatest and latest version of PCLOS.
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Red Hat Family
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Back in 2009, Linux vendor Red Hat launched an ambitious project known as Deltacloud in an effort to prevent cloud server silos. With Deltacloud, many clouds can be managed and abstracted to enable operational efficiency and prevent cloud lock-in.
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Initially what I did is install it with the default options in virtualbox. Once the installation was over, I was really disappointed by the limited number of apps there and it definitely didn’t look very different from another run-of-the-mill linux distro. That too with older Linux and Gnome 2 and not 3! Then I reinstalled it again to give it a second look and there I understood my folly. Scientific Linux is for the advanced users who want to take control of the entire installation process. It gives amazing freedom to the user to customize from a rich source of apps it has within the DVD itself. Even for desktop, it gives you choice of Gnome and KDE at the installation. Below pictures show you step by step installation process.
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Scientific Linux is a stable distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux co-developed by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Its aimed at higher performance computing and can work as a server too. Along with regular upstream packages from RHEL, it also features Sun Java JDK, IceWM window manager and the R language used in statistical computing.
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Fedora
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With Fedora 18 entering its feature freeze and branching today, here’s a rundown of some of the most interesting features to be found in this next Fedora release.
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With the Alpha release date of 28th August for Fedora 18 (codenamed Spherical Cow), approaching near, the Fedora developers were able to reach a feature freeze today.
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Sometimes you learn about what’s going on in a distribution by accidentally breaking something. Such was the case for me recently with respect to Fedora.
Fedora is an RPM based GNU/Linux distribution that does focus on providing a free software license clean repository, with the one unfortunate exception of the Linux kernel itself including binary blobs, and that publicly fights against software patenting. Fedora also happens to focus on enabling community self service a lot. For this latter reason too it came to pass that I maintain some of my upstream packages directly in Fedora over two years ago, rather than having this done by an intermediary Fedora package maintainer, as more often occurs in other GNU/Linux distributions.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu for one has now reached 12.04 LTS in its server iteration (and desktop), where LTS stands for Long-Term Support. This means five years of cover for companies requiring official certification and audit compliance as well as enterprise-level security guarantees from Ubuntu’s commercial parent Canonical.
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Over the past few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that cutting-edge software availability is the leading indicator of which Linux distribution I’m going to end up with. Perhaps this is why I’ve found myself flailing into the arms of Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions recently? More often than not, I can find the software I want with a deb package or PPA ready to go.
It’s time savers like the one mentioned above that has made non-Ubuntu centric distributions not worth spending much time with. It’s not a lack of ability on my end, rather it’s a lack of wanting to spend a weekend setting up a new installation just to meet my needs. My time is valuable, so any distribution I select to meet my needs will be reflective of this.
In this article, I will be looking at distributions based on Ubuntu and/or Debian (only), then exploring what makes each spin-off unique.
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Out of 133 apps submitted in Ubuntu App Showdown contest organized by Canonical, only three made it to the finals and we have final top three apps decided by panel of judges at Ubuntu. The apps were judged on appearance, stability, platform integration, innovation and “Scratching and Itch” and Lightread, Fogger and Picsaw won Gold, Silver and Bronze prizes respectively.
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The recent controversial changes in Nautilus 3.6 have made different distribution developers to think the other ubway. While the Linux Mint team is busy developing a fork of Nautilus, Ubuntu developers are thinking to drop 3.6 series Nautilus in Quantal and use 3.4 instead. Sebastein Bacher, a software developer at Canonical posted in a bug in Launchpad that Ubuntu 12.10 may go back to use Nautilus 3.4 even though 3.6 are in the repos.
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The winners of the Ubuntu App Showdown have been officially announced. In the end, the three-week coding challenge produced 133 applications. A jury of five Ubuntu members then picked the three winners: Lightread, Fogger and Picsaw. These three applications are already installable from the Ubuntu Software Centre.
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Valve, the makers of the popular game-distribution service Steam, has announced plans to convert its software and games for the Linux operating system, specifically Ubuntu. It follows comments made by Gabe Newell, Chief Executive and co-founder of Valve, who said: “I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space”.
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Flavours and Variants
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Interesting developments are happening for Raspberry Pi everyday as new OSes get ported to it. After Debian, Arch, Fedora and KDE, it was Bodhi Linux that got an updated ARM port specially for the Raspberry Pi.
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Gentlemen, meet the Raspberry Pi.
[...]
Last night’s demo was running Debian Linux…with LXDE! Truly, they are developers after my own heart; I’m hoping this gives another big boost to the LXDE project. And the demo included the unit playing a first-person shooter video game — sorry, I’m not a gamer, so I didn’t recognize which one — with quite impressive speed.
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With all the hype surrounding Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized, low-cost developer board, little attention is being paid to the new kid on the block : Meet the Hackberry A10 Developer board.
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Phones
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Android
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Motorola has taken to Facebook to tease their next smartphone ahead of its Friday announcement. The first of 4-5 clues indicates that the handset will be 4G LTE ready. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point that we’ll be getting the Droid Razr HD’s debut later this week but we’ll still be watching closely.
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Android is like a Swiss knife. It runs on your smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, microwave ovens, cars and much more. That’s not all. There are areas where Android can do what you never before expected. One such area is controlling your DSLR cameras via your Android devices.
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As many of you know, a photo or two of an unannounced phone finding its way online is not all that uncommon. In fact, most Android devices we’ve encountered have, at some point, been treated to an “in the wild” or “blurrycam” shot. Every once in a while you get a model that stands still for an extended period of time and poses for an entire gallery. Such is the case with the yet-announced Sony Xperia T (codename: Mint).
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One of the strongest points of the older Linux, Unix systems were their support for multiple users from the very beginning. The *nix world has always been proud of the fact that this feature has been in their beloved OSes long before Windows developers thought of it.
Having said that, this is not true for Android, the OS notorious for bringing the fame and glory to the Linux world.
While it must have been an easy decision not to have multiple user support on an OS destined only for handheld mobile phones, Android has long past crossed this barrier. While still popular only on embedded devices, people have already started porting Android on x86 machines and sending patches to enable this feature since 2011 and there has never been a real need for multiple user support.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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NASA has started a rather ambitious project: to provide open-source everything. The main site is located at http://open.nasa.gov. From here, there is access to data, code and applications, among other things. This is a great launching point for anyone interested in space science and NASA work. In this article, I look at what kind of code is being made available that you might want to explore.
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Events
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LinuxCon is known for its deep technical content and unmatched networking opportunities. This year LinuxCon and CloudOpen will provide 140 sessions, 15 keynotes, nine co-located events, and three onsite Linux training opportunities.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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According to the cleverly named traffic counter outfit StatCounter, Google’s Chrome browser has long passed Internet Explorer and Firefox as the number one browser in the world, with Chrome now reaching the 33 percent mark (33.81 percent for those watching at home) for browser share.
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SaaS
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The OpenStack cloud platform hasn’t been short of powerful companies backing it, and now the OpenStack Foundation is finally heading into high gear, including preparing to hold elections to its board later this month. If you haven’t checked on how much support this promising cloud platform has, here are some details on the foundation and its structure.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6, the fourth major release of the best free office suite ever, which provides a large number of new features and incremental improvement over the previous versions. Innovations range from invisible features such as improved performance and interoperability to the more visible ones such as user interface tweaks, where theming has improved to more closely match current design best-practice. A full list with screenshots is available here: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-6-new-features-and-fixes, because a picture says more than a thousand words.
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Education
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–>
Last month, a professor at the Higher Institute of Computer Science and Management of Kairouan in Tunisia told us how implementing and customizing Fedena, an open source school management solution from Foradian, enhanced collaboration and understanding between administrators, students, and instructors. Unni Koroth, Foradian’s co-founder and CEO, was kind enough to answer our questions about Fedena—and to explain precisely what makes open source school management systems so appealing.
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Project Releases
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Guake is a new kind of terminal emulator, where instead of a new window, youu can open a drop down screen to get a terminal. The screen can be dropped down using a single key press and its really helpful if you need a distraction free desktop with command line tasks running in the background without bothering you.
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Licensing
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Joshua Gay and I were recently interviewed for an article by Bruce Byfield, “The FSF Compliance Lab Doubles.” Bruce shares our excitement in super-charging our ability to help the free software community with licensing issues. Byfield discusses how our expanded capacity means that we are better able to make use of the volunteers we have, as well as to recruit new members to our licensing team. If you would like join the licensing team and help answer community questions about free software licensing, please send an email to licensing@fsf.org.
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Openness/Sharing
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At the recent OSCON 2012 convention, Kaitlin Thaney, Manager of External Partnerships at Digital Science, shared in her talk a fresh approach to scientific research. Her views offer a way out of the stagnation of many research fields, where the rewards system (how researchers get evaluated for job positions, raises and promotions) and the economics of funding discourage researchers from openly sharing their data and tools with larger communities and the public.
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Open Data
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It seems a long while ago now, but June was a pretty hectic month in this neck of the woods, since it saw the final push to get ACTA rejected in the European Parliament. But of course, plenty of other things were happening then, and one in particular that I wanted to cover was the release of this UK Open Data White Paper entitled “Unleashing the Potential”.
It’s a measure of the glimmers of hope that the entire UK open data project emits that the document is available not only as a PDF and in Microsoft Word, but also as an .odt file – kudos to those involved for making this happen.
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An anonymous reader writes with news that The Internet Archive has started seeding about 1,400,000 torrents. In addition to over a million books, the Archive is seeding thousands and thousands of films, music tracks, and live concerts.
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Health/Nutrition
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A bill to improve reporting standards for toxic chemicals has passed out of committee to the U.S. Senate for a vote, and anti-regulatory czar Cass Sunstein has headed back to academia.
The Safe Chemicals Act (S. 847) would promote the use of safer alternatives to hazardous chemicals and put common sense limits on toxic chemicals. It has been approved by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and passed to the full Senate for a vote.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Most Americans are Christians.
But few know that the acts of our American government are leading to the persecution of Christians in numerous countries.
According to the Vatican’s official news service – Fides – and many other Christian news sources, the Syrian opposition is targeting Christians. Priests and bishops on the ground in Syria confirm these reports.
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Finance
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The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), even as a Murdoch project, ought to know and do better than its lead opinion piece on “Tax Fairness” (July 23, 2012, p. A13). The gross pandering to right-wing self-delusion accomplished there by Ari Fleischer would win any economics student a well-deserved failing grade. The piece purports to interpret a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2008 and 2009 “. The quality of the writing in such sentences as “A new Congressional Budget Office Reports (sic) shows (sic)….” reminds us that Fleischer was the press secretary for the similarly English-language-challenged former President Bush. The editing that misses such gross mistakes suggests that the WSJ would get failing grades in English as well as economics.
Fleischer’s foray into economics makes the following points explicitly: (1) rich people pay too much in taxes relative to middle class and poor people, (2) the US tax system is thus “unfair” to the rich,(3) it became more unfair over the period covered by the CBO report, 1979-2009, and (4) President Obama is a liar because he says that the unfairness runs the other way. As I can easily show, the quality of Mr Fleischer’s economics suggests that he not give up his day job to do more economics.
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Asset managers including Canyon Partners LLC, Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP and D.E. Shaw & Co., known for betting in markets such as real estate, government notes or company debentures, have been wagering on mortgage securities as potential returns narrow elsewhere, accelerating gains in housing debt. The $1 trillion market for U.S. home-loan bonds without government backing offers “probably the most upside in structured products,” though carries more risk than notes such as collateralized loan obligations tied to companies’ health, Tananbaum said.
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Czech presidential candidate Vladimir Dlouhy will end his engagement with the U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs that he started in 1997 as from end-October and he is also going to leave the Telefonica Czech Republic supervisory council, has has told Ceska pozice server.
“I will also terminate all other positions in the private sector,” economist Dlouhy, 59, industry and trade minister in the 1990s, said.
He told the server that large investment banks are not perceived so negatively in the Czech Republic like in the United States.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Global corporations like Dow Chemical, Adidas, and McDonald’s are paying upwards of $100 million USD to sponsor the 2012 London games and associate themselves with the Olympic brand — but with their brands already well-established, what do corporations get in exchange for these expensive sponsorship deals?
According to Dave Zirin, sportswriter and columnist for The Nation, the payoff comes through “corporate sin-washing.”
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker flew to DC over the weekend to thank the Americans For Prosperity astroturf group for its help with the Wisconsin recall. Walker headlined AFP’s 2012 “Defending the American Dream” Summit two months after winning his June 5 recall battle — with a $10 million assist from the organization that was founded and is funded and led by billionaire David Koch. (The $10 million spent by AFP was $3 million more than what was spent by Walker’s opponent.)
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Send this to a friend
08.07.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you’ve followed Linux for any length of time, you know that it is finding many of its biggest opportunities at the server level, in mobile devices, and in embedded Linux deployments–all of them areas that lie outside the desktop. In recent years, Linux has also had a growing impact on cars, with big backers behind Linux-based automotive initiatives. With that in mind, The Linux Foundation is hosting its Automotive Linux Summit, taking place Sept. 19-20, 2012, at the Heritage Motor Centre in Gaydon/Warwickshire in the United Kingdom. Here is what’s on tap for this global meeting on Linux and cars.
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It may not look like a penguin. It doesn’t eat fish neither does it have a blubbery outer coating (unlike me). It is however about as tall as a Gentoo penguin and it does walk a bit like a penguin. What am I talking about? It is the new love of my life with two brains (well cpu’s) and penguin powered with the Gentoo Linux operating system and I want one!!
The little friend I want is called NAO (not to be confused with Sodium Oxide) and comes from the country of love. Don’t worry, you will not have to learn French though (although the girls love it when you do…va va va vooom 
as NAO can speak several different languages, stands about 58cm high, has more sensors than the Borg, is more flexible and can dance better that I can.
You should have guessed by now that I am talking about a robot. One of the most advanced robots for public sale that I have ever seen. The company which develops and makes these little beauties is called Aldebaran Robotics (not to be confused with the planet in Star Wars). You can access the main web site here to feast your eyes on the ultimate of geeky drool inducing technology. Did I mention NAO also runs on Linux?
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Kernel Space
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Intel’s open-source hardware enablement under Linux of next year’s Haswell architecture continues. New HDMI audio patches have been published while the DisplayPort audio patches are still forthcoming.
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For the past few weeks I have been trying out the Apple’s Thunderbolt Cinema Display under Linux. While this 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display is beautiful and delivers stunning quality, it does illustrate another area where the current Linux hardware support currently comes up short. There’s both good and bad news about using a Thunderbolt-based display under your favorite Linux distribution.
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Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann is interviewed for this week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile. Bergmann shares with us his focus areas at the moment as well as some specific advice for newbies.
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Graphics Stack
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The open-source Freedreno driver — the reverse-engineered creation for supporting the Adreno-based Qualcomm’s Snapdragon graphics hardware — picked up a few more features this weekend.
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Over the weekend there was the push by Red Hat’s Ben Skeggs that effectively reworks/rewrites the Nouveau DRM kernel module for reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics under Linux.
Skeggs work rewrites a large portion of the Nouveau kernel driver code — it measures in at about 50 commits and thousands of lines of code have been changed. We knew a big Nouveau DRM rewrite was happening following minimal changes for Nouveau with the Linux 3.6 kernel but on Saturday was when the code finally landed within the Nouveau project’s kernel repository.
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Just as I reported last week would happen at SIGGRAPH and in late May first talked about OpenGL ES 3.0, today at the first day of SIGGRAPH LA 2012 the Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics API specifications.
It’s been twenty years since the release of the original OpenGL specification and this royalty-free multi-platform graphics specification keeps moving forward. New functionality provided by the OpenGL 4.3 specification includes: compute shaders leveraging GPU parallelism within the context of the graphics pipeline, shader storage buffer objects, texture parameter queries, high-quality ETC2/EAC texture compression as a standard feature, debug capabilities to receive debugging messages during application development, texture views for interpreting textures in different ways without data replication, increased memory security, and a multi-application robustness extension.
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While the OpenGL 4.3 specification was just released (along with OpenGL ES 3.0), there’s already a beta NVIDIA Linux proprietary driver supporting this latest desktop graphics API from Khronos. AMD will also soon be released a Catalyst beta with the GL 4.3 / GLSL 4.30 support. However, the open-source Mesa support will still be a ways out.
The Mesa documentation was updated today to reflect what’s left in supporting the latest revisions of the OpenGL standard. Unfortunately, there’s a lot left with officially Mesa/Gallium3D still being limited to OpenGL 3.0 compliance.
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The Khronos Group has released the latest version of its OpenGL graphics standard, 20 years after SGI first opened up the code.
The latest revision, OpenGL 4.3, adds the ability to harness the GPU for shading and draw commands, ETC2/EAC texture compression is included as standard, and an improved debugging system has been added, along with security enhancements aimed at stopping information leakage between applications.
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Applications
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MediaBox is the most simplistic media player you’ll ever use. It uses GStreamer and is able to playback all the files supported by it.
This means that you can play both music and video files using MediaBox to do it, using very little resources and a very simple way to choose the files you want to playback.
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Linux is a particularly strong platform for professionals that work within the graphic design and graphic arts industry. With low cost hardware, quality open source software, and an ounce of talent, artists can produce professional-looking computer graphics.
Designers make use of graphic design software programs. The most common software used in the graphic design industry is Abobe Creative Suite which consists of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Suite is proprietary software, and released only for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It is also very expensive software. Fortunately, there is a good range of open source software to download without charge for the Linux platform which makes it possible to do remarkable graphics work.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Urban Terror is one of the most popular multiplayer FPS games for Linux. Created by Frozen Sand studio, the game features realistic weapons, gameplay and maps based on real world environments.
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Over the past few months, some of the most disruptive news in gaming has been from Valve. The company seems to be making a baffling sharp left-turn into completely new territory. On the surface it shows a few basic components of its master plan, leaving us to only speculate on what the rest might be. The most ambitious of these revelations, is the announcement that they are planning to try and get the entire catalogue of 2500 games on Steam ported to Linux.
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I bet that behavioral economists get rather excited when they see pay-what-you-want offers going viral. Assuming the seller is collecting some basic demographic detail, the resulting statistics might deliver some interesting insights into the relative altruism (or discretionary cash reserves) of different sorts of folks.
The Humble Bundle team (responsible for the Humble Indie gaming bundles that we’ve covered before) is running a Humble Music bundle, accessible to all sorts of music fans. Featured artists include Jonathan Coulton, They Might Be Giants and MC Frontalot; a flexible portion of the purchase price goes toward not-for-profit cause groups like Child’s Play Charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE music player Amarok is getting a new UI for its context view. The new UI is written in QML that makes it fast as well as good looking.
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These updates are the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.5 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
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Following the Qt 5.0 release, developers of this open-source tool-kit will aim to issue feature updates on a six-month cycle.
Joao Abecasis reignited the discussion today concerning setting up time-based releases for Qt. “While releasing Qt 5.0.0 is an ongoing process, I think this is a good time to start planning future releases (5.0.1, 5.1.0, etc.) and, most importantly, we need to discuss *how* we’ll get them out on time. With the setup we now have we should quickly move to a strict time-based release schedule. A predictable schedule allows all interested to align with the project and contribute to make the next release the traditional Best Release Ever ™ of Qt.”
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GNOME Desktop
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Once upon a time, the GNOME Linux/Unix desktop team could do no wrong. That was a long time ago. More recently, GNOME has lost many of their Linux desktop supporters. Now the GNOME developers’ proposed changes to Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, is losing them more fans. The Linux Mint developers have started work on their own fork of Nautilus: Nemo.
Clement “Clem” Lefebvre Linux Mint’s lead developer told me, that the Mint, or more properly the Cinnamon desktop, itself a fork of the GNOME 3.x desktop, programmers reacted “to the upcoming regressions in Nautilus 3.6 (loss of the compact view, loss of some desktop icons, changes in paths hierarchy..etc,) by creating a fork in github called ‘nemo.’”
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The latest 3.5.x branch of Nautilus sports redesigned tool and menu bars but has also removed the dual pane, compact and sidebar views, the Go menu, and other features. Nemo currently includes very few visible changes from the 3.4.x branch of Nautilus, and the Linux Mint project has not yet officially announced what its plans for the new file manager entail, but it seems clear that its creation was prompted by the recent changes to Nautilus.
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After Cinnamon, Muffin and MDM, the Linux Mint team works on yet another fork: Nemo, a file manager forked from Nautilus 3.4.x.
Nautilus 3.5.x, which will become Nautilus 3.6 stable and will be a part of GNOME 3.6, has got a new toolbar and menubar, but there were also some features that were removed, like the dual pane feature, sidebar tree view and others. And this, it seems, wasn’t what the Linux Mint developers want for their users, so they’ve decided to fork Nautilus 3.4.x, which still has these features.
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Red Hater David Zeuthen in his blog introduces all the new features in Gnome Disks 3.6 and also refers to the upcoming new options for Gnome 3.8. There are some nice additions; some are just optics and some are useful tools, but in my opinion not everything is perfect and complete.
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Sometimes, human minds get stuck without a reason between two options, jumping from the one to the other, never finding exactly what they are looking for.
This is what happens to most people with today’s browsers. Almost no one completely likes Firefox and Chrome for their own personal reasons, but everyone keeps trying both when a newer version becomes available. Time to make a step towards something “greener” and give Midori a try!
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Every once in a while I try some new version of Linux, some overhauled or updated “distribution” of the operating system that supposedly improves the user experience. And inevitably I get frustrated with it because, well, it’s just not Windows.
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IPFire, the hardened Linux distribution for firewall appliances, was recently updated to IPFire 2.11 Core update 61 and along with the enhancements, the developers announced that they are ending support for the Reiser4 filesystem. Rarely found in the wild, Reiser4 is an advanced filesystem, and sequel to ReiserFS, which offers an efficient journalling system, plugin support (for metadata or encryption), disk-layout optimisation and transaction support.
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I wanted to try out some Linux distros which are not Fedora or Ubuntu based. So, in came Calculate Linux 12 Desktop version and I liked what they have done with KDE here. The KDE ISO is big (2.3 GB) and I downloaded it from the calculate linux site. Just a day before Calculate Linux, I tried out Scientific Linux – given similarity in names and a large ISO size, my expectations were really high!
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If you still remember, Todd Robinson from On-Disk.com is trying to create and release 31 different usable and complete Linux distros everyday in August 2012. Three distros have been released, they are named SING, SOHO and Debian_live_VTWM.
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New Releases
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Damn Small Linux is a experiment to fit all the necessary Linux apps and utilities in an CD image as small as possible. After a long time of being not developed, a release candidate was finally released of the upcoming 4.11 release.
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Following the MythTV 0.26 Alpha from last month, the first beta release of the MythTV 0.26 PVR/DVR open-source software is now available.
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Red Hat Family
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Intersouth’s Katrin Burt is listed as a director and Lee Congdon, chief information officer of Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), also is a board member at Adaptivity.
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For the most part using CentOS 6.3 was a pleasant experience. Installing codecs, Flash and various extras did require that I hunt down and install several additional repositories, which is a bit more work than is required from most other popular distributions. Further, some software isn’t available for CentOS, even with the extra repositories (searches for items such as the VLC media player failed to find any matches). However, when we consider CentOS isn’t aimed at the desktop crowd I feel the distro can be forgiven for the additional work required. Once the system was set up with the software and repositories I wanted it was smooth sailing from there. CentOS comes with good administrative tools, slightly aged, but still perfectly functional software and it will be supported for a good long time.
One aspect of the default install I really appreciated was the fact that both GNOME 2 and KDE 4 were available. Most distributions these days put just one desktop environment on a disc while CentOS provides two, along with a full office suite and plenty of other popular applications and they still manage to keep their live disc under 2GB. The distribution doesn’t provide excitement or new, shiny features, it is pleasantly laid back and mature. The system is fairly light and stays out of the way. It’s a good option for people who want to install their OS and forget about it for the next several years.
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Fedora
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But, Kororaa changed my view – it is definitely user friendly and offers a more complete out-of-the-box distro than Fedora with the usual smoothness that characterizes Fedora.
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Robyn Bergeron became the Fedora Project Leader earlier this year. In her tenure so far, the Beefy Miracle (aka Fedora 17) has been released. She’s also had to contend with Secure Boot and is now busy getting everything lined up for Fedora 18.
I recently got the chance to chat with Bergeron, to talk about what she’s doing. She told me that there are a lot of good things about the job of Fedora Project Leader (FPL) One of those good things is the fact that people aren’t afraid to raise the flag if you’re something is missing.
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The feature freeze and branching of Fedora 18 is scheduled to occur tomorrow. The FESCo meeting happened today where a few of the last features were approved for the Spherical Cow release.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Installer Team has released the first beta release of Debian 7 codenamed Wheezy. This is a development release for testing purposes only and not intended to be used in enterprise, business and production environments. It ships with a lot of bug fixes and new hardware support for a number of devices. The release announcement can be found here.
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Debian developers are planning to switch the default desktop environment of Debian 7 codenamed Wheezy from Gnome to XFCE. The move comes mainly to make the distro lightweight and also reduce the size of the installation image.
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Gnome developers have laid out plans to make Clocks a core application in future Gnome releases and there have been some impressive work on this app. Some screenshots:
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In the previous article you were able to find out what Ubuntu software center is capable off. Today you are going to read a bit advanced theme: System Settings.
Once when you get comfortable with Ubuntu you will want to: change desktop appearance, test sound, create accounts on your system for other people and much more.
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It was not long ago (February) when we heard a tad bit about Ubuntu for Android. It was basically a project from Canonical to bring the popular Linux system to Android smartphones. However, a video highlight for some of the system’s capabilities was filmed at the Forum Internacional Software Livre in Brazil last week. The aim was to provide us with an up-to-date look at the progress the project has been making, currently.
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Once upon a time, Linux was a small experiment running in the backrooms of NOC (Network Operations Centers) and MIT/Berkeley labs. Then came the Internet and the home computing craze and the advent of the OS for the consumer side. If Windows and macOS were the two mainstream choices you were thinking of, you’d be right. However, Canonical has changed that over the last 5 years with their OS, Ubuntu.
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Not a long time ago, we reported about the possible integration of two Linux ‘bros’- Ubuntu and Android into one device. We see the dream coming true, sooner than ever.
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Flavours and Variants
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Well folks, this is it. After many months of looking for a suitable replacement for my setup of Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora” GNOME, I have found one and have followed through with it. There were two reasons why I wanted to make this upgrade/switch: I wanted to stay up-to-date and take advantage of the support promised in the latest LTS release, and I needed to either reinstall my current OS or install something else because my present installation of Linux Mint stopped recognizing my laptop’s ethernet card when I accidentally pulled out the power adapter cord from the laptop about 2 months ago. I got by with wireless Internet, but it was painful, and it had become so painful in the last few weeks that I couldn’t stick with it for much longer. The following is a log of my experience installing and customizing Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce on my laptop. As of the moment that I write this sentence, this will simultaneously be the last post that I write with the old version of Linux Mint and the first that I write with the new version. I have to confess that I’ve become somewhat attached to the way that I’ve customized the old version (and that’s what made finding a suitable replacement so difficult), but given that it looks like I can do the same things in the new version, I eagerly anticipate having the new version installed. Follow the jump to see what happens.
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It’s been less than a year since I first wrote about Bodhi Linux 1.2.0, but already the popular, Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has reached its second major milestone.
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Sure, it costs almost twice as much, but look what you get for your $60.00!
Hackberry A10 developer board: $60 PC board with Allwinner A10 CPU
“A Hackberry A10 Developer Board with 512MB of RAM is available for $60. A 1GB model should be available soon for $65.
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Adafruit Industries has published a new Linux distribution called “Occidentalis” for hardware hacking and teaching electronics using the ARM-based Raspberry Pi mini-computer. Its developers say that they decided to create Occidentalis because Raspbian – a Debian-based distribution released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation last month – didn’t include many of the tools and software components that most hardware hackers would need.
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The credit-card sized $35 Raspberry Pi computer is gaining software support which should make it more usable by enthusiasts. As we have reported it is a device that is designed to be educational and to encourage a new generation of programmers.
These latest additions by third-party developers are not for the faint-hearted. They are meant to be challenging. The tiny inexpensive computer, which is sold uncased, has been designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation based in Cambridge U.K. The only version now available costs $35, but a a slightly lower-specified $25 model should be coming soon.
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Tactile Array turns digital barometers into opensource robot tactile senors
Freescale Semiconductor’s MPL115A2 is a tiny thing that will sit quite comfortably on the tip of your finger. It’s hard not to marvel at the engineering that went into the creation of something so small, yet so sensitive. The little metal square is minute enough to be plunked into a cell phone, offering up location pinpointing technologies that supplement GPS, gauging positions based on changes in atmospheric pressure. Harvard’s Biorobotics team was clearly impressed when it discovered the technology, devising a fascinating implementation that extends beyond the walls of the cell phone. The sensors would go on to form the core of the department’s TakkTile open-source boards capable of bringing sensitive touch sensing to robot hands.
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Following on from the release of Zing 5.2 at the end of April, Azul Systems have announced that they are making their pauseless Zing JVM freely available to open source developers and projects for use in development and testing.
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Phones
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Android
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Thursday it was announced that an unofficial port of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean CyanogenMod 10 custom ROM was available for the discontinued webOS powered HP TouchPad, with a big early thanks to XDA-Developers forum member and Android developer James Sullins, aka jcsullins.
Though it’s discontinued, and mostly a niche device, the HP TouchPad is no slouch in the hardware world. It sports a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core processor, has 1GB of RAM, and 16GB to 32GB of storage. It is still a very solid tablet.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It might have taken more than half of the year to come to fruition, but Samsung today announced the redesigned Galaxy Note 10.1. Details for the tablet include a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 10.1-inch display, 5-megapixel main camera, and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera. Since we’re talking “Note” here then you might already know this guy has the S Pen capability for note-taking, markups, drawing, and more. Rounding on the specs, the Galaxy Note comes in three storage capacities, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB, each with expandable microSD card slots.
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Samsung has taken its line of Note devices to full-fledged tablet territory, offering up the Galaxy Note 10.1. It’s a full-sized Android tablet that features both a touchscreen and a stylus for pen-assisted drawing, note-taking and input. The Galaxy Note 10.1 comes with an accelerometer, a digital compass, a light and a gyroscope.
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An Enormous Galaxy Note For Stylus-Wielding Arty TypesIf you were a fan of the original stylus-packing Galaxy Note, but always thought that 5.3-inches was just too small: good news. Samsung’s finally released the long-awaited quad-core 10.1-inch version of the Note, and you should be able to get your hands on it by the end of this month.
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The project moved to the Apache Software Foundation in 2010 and became a top level project earlier this year.
Now after three years of effort, Deltacloud has finally hit its 1.0 release. A 1.0 release is usually a major milestone signifying that an open source project is mature and ready for consumption. In Deltacloud’s case, the effort has already been deployed and integrated into Red Hat’s commercial CloudForms effort that officially launched in June.
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The stock firmware included on many broadband routers takes advantage of only a fraction of the hardware’s capabilities. We explain how to use use powerful open-source firmware to unleash the beast in your router.
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I know why you’re excited this week … you’ve seen the “Kuratas”, a 13 foot tall, 9,900-pound robot you can ride in at speeds of up to 6 miles per hour and which is equipped with a water bottle cannon and Gatling guns that can fire 6,000 BBs per minute (the operator can fire the armaments just by smiling … no, really, watch the video).
The Kuratas robot, built by Japanese artist Kogoro Kurata and marketed by Suidobashi Heavy Industry, can be controlled by the onboard operator, a remote control device, or a smartphone and runs V-Sido, a “next generation robot OS”.
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If you’re planning on getting into the design field and you have all these crazy-cool ideas, there are a few things you’ll need: A design engine, modeling software and an asset management suite. The first two are pretty easy to get your hands on, but the third can become a bit tricky, unless you decide to use TACTIC from Southpaw Technology.
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VMware has lost another high-profile employee: Dave McCrory, a senior technical marketer for the company’s open source cloud building platform, Cloud Foundry. The move comes amidst a growing number of questions around the platform, which was built to remake VMware as a cloud computing company capable of competing with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
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Businesses, across all industries, yearn for highly reliable technologies to support their IT infrastructure. However, on the software side, high upfront costs, license limitations and support often become the barriers to implementation. Thus, free and flexible software have become the choice for an increasing number of companies, regardless of size.
To cite an example of its unwavering promise, enterprises can always look at Google and RedHat as just two of the well known proponents of open source software. But considering that we are an SMB-dominated dog-eat-dog environment, what is the true value of the open source software? Are there risks to integrating open source codes to your system?
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SaaS
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OpenStack, the open source “cloud operating system,” has stirred community excitement and attracted a vendor following, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, and Red Hat. But until now one thing has been lacking: A high-profile corporate customer willing to talk about its OpenStack implementation.
Today, eBay is announcing that it’s using OpenStack to manage a high-volume dev, test, and experimentation environment where apps are created for eBay Marketplaces. According to Jean-Christophe Martin, Cloud Architect for eBay, the current OpenStack implementation is small, but eBay is looking at extending that footprint as the open source project matures.
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Healthcare
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The joint efforts of the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) to create an integrated electronic health record (iEHR) have made news over the past couple of weeks — some good, some bad.
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Business
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Funding
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Are you involved with any open source efforts focused on K-12 or university-level students? Do you happen to have involvement with any projects in the rapidly growing field of open source robotics? If so, you may be a good candidate for a Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) award. Through this annual program, Google makes grants of $5,000 to $25,000 to organizations around the world, and you can apply for a RISE grant today.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of the Canary Islands will increasingly be using open source applications. It is moving to open source for its telephony needs and will install a handful of open source applications on governmental desktop PCs. “We are strongly encouraging the use of OpenOffice.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Resistance to open data is much older than the concept of open data itself. Those who control—and/or benefit from the control of—data have traditionally resisted its open dissemination.
This resistance is being steadily eroded by government policy (see open data policies in the US, UK, and a long list of other national, state and local governments), by growing social and political movements in Europe, by technological advances such as the move to “Big Data,” and by the continued work of the broader open source, open content, open access community.
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Programming
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Shortly after the release of Cobra 2.0, the GNU/Linux Desktop (GUI Application) Testing Project (GNU LDTP) also released a new version of its Linux testing tool. LDTP 3.0 includes many of the new features that were included with the Windows version, including enhanced language support. Linux-specific additions include the ability to change the state of check boxes in Firefox and fixes to the program’s interactions with Qt and the Python-ldtp interface.
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Security
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Asset Management has been accused of causing a pension scheme client’s money to be invested in sub-prime mortgage-backed securities in mid-2007 even though it knew, at the same time, that Goldman Sachs’ proprietary trading desk was short selling MBS “on a very large scale in order to profit from falling prices”.
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Censorship
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Demonoid, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites and the largest that operates its own tracker has been missing in action for a week now. The site has been down due to a massive DDoS attack, but it seems there’s more than that to it.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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As I noted recently, net neutrality is back in the spotlight, so I thought it would be useful – and maybe entertaining – to look at an anti-net neutrality article for the insights it gives us about how the other side views things. It’s called “Pick Up On One and Let The Other One Ride”, and appears in the Huffington Post.
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Copyrights
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Seldom does a fact bear repeating as frequently as the maxim, “There is no copyright in ideas”. And despite the regularity with which this fundamental principle of copyright law is cited, its application remains a bone of contention.
Since the Statute of Anne (1710), the common antecedent of modern copyright law, this creature of statute exists exclusively for the protection of the material expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas, facts or discoveries contained in the work.
For this reason, copyright protection vests at the moment a work is recorded in physical form, and only to the extent that it is recorded. As a result, an author will hold the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute his/her novel while the ideas that inspired the storyline (the general plot, setting and timeline) may be lawfully reproduced by another.
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Send this to a friend
08.06.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I have been a Linux (Linux in this article refers to Linux based Operating System) user for a quite a number of years, actually, since I owned my first PC about four years ago. All through I have been using Fedora Linux , and it has not been an easy ride all along.
Linux users have to learn how to use text editors, and how to work their way around configuration files. Initially, the issue was that Fedora Linux ships without a number of drivers, so called proprietary drivers and software. Proprietary drivers are drivers that do not conform to open source licensing terms. This means that the operating system ships lacking support for common media formats including MP3 and will also lack firmware drivers required for the functioning of some hardware such as sound cards and graphics drivers.
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Desktop
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In “Perfect Storm Brewing: The Linux Desktop – Part One” I described some of the attributes that made for a low desktop penetration for Linux. Notice that not one of the issues was “ease of use” or “ease of porting applications”, but all had to do with installed base and volumes of systems being sold presently.
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The Raspberry Pi is already considered a hacker’s paradise. However, that assumes that owners have all the software they need to start in the first place. Adafruit wants to give the process a little nudge through its Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro. The software includes a customized distribution of Raspbian, Occidentalis, that either turns on or optimizes SSHD access,
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The future of IT clients is bright. People are loving small cheap computers, x86/amd64 PCs running GNU/Linux and, of course more servers than ever running GNU/Linux. I don’t see much possibility of this trend slowing in the near future, because fast and efficient is the right way to do IT. Any way you measure efficiency, GNU/Linux, Android/Linux and FLOSS are superior to that other OS. The world can make its own software and does not need to rely on a monopoly. The Wintel monopoly will have to change or die. A few units on ARM or smart phones won’t cut it when a better OS costs ~$0 per unit.
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Server
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Running students’ submitted programs is a security challenge for any university Computer Science department. When Harvard University contacted me about some work they are doing with the “sandbox” tool on Fedora 17, we decided it would be a great opportunity to see how they could get more out of it and share our findings with the community.
In a lot of ways, Harvard is setting up a simple PaaS (Platform as a Service). We discussed tools like OpenShift and Secure Linux Containers, but the immediate issue was that once they begin offering ‘Intro to ‘C’” courses online, the students will upload programs to a Harvard web server that will be compiled and tested. And, to no one’s surprise, they were concerned about what the students “C” applications might attempt to do.
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Having now moved to Linux, CME is looking to refresh the order entry and market data parts, as well as upgrade the exchange’s network infrastructure.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate for Linux 3.6, closing the merge window for major changes. Among the new additions is a feature called “Suspend to Both” that offers hybrid standby functionality – when hibernating, the system will preserve its memory contents both in working memory and on a system storage device. Hybrid standby usually behaves like Suspend to RAM; however, if there is a power cut during hibernation, the system can restore the main memory contents from the storage device and resume as expected.
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Graphics Stack
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Aside from the normal desktop shell for Wayland’s Weston reference compositor, open-source Intel developers have resurrected work on a tablet-oriented shell for this fledging display server.
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The X.Org Developers’ Conference 2012 is happening next month. Unfortunately, continuing to reflect the hastily-managed organization, the board has now come up with a call for presentations.
XDC2012 is happening from 19 to 21 of September in Nürnberg, Bavaria, Germany. This three-day event focused upon X.Org and FreeDesktop.org projects (including Mesa and Wayland) will take place from the Nürnberg SUSE office. It’s just another developer event following in their yearly tradition to get together to hash out plans for future X.Org Server releases, Wayland, open-source 3D drivers, etc.
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Intel’s Video Acceleration API (VA-API) has seen updates to its core library as well as to the Intel-specific VA-API Intel driver.
The libva-1.0.16 that was announced by Haihao Xiang of Intel adds API support for handling data structures for JPEG baseline decoding, clearing up another bit of the API, and adding a test case for VA-API JPEG decoding. The announcement of this generic VA-API library update can be found on the libva mailing list.
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Earlier this week the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver hit the glxgears milestone for handling AMD’s latest-generation Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards on an open-source OpenGL driver. There’s still much work left, but it’s moving bit by bit.
The pace of the open-source AMD HD 7000 series support has been disappointing, but with the very simple glxgears OpenGL test running, more milestones will hopefully be reached soon. Since the gears milestone on Monday, there’s been more RadeonSI commits to the mainline Mesa Git repository.
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For the past several months there’s been open-source driver development activities within the Linux kernel and Mesa library as it pertains to Haswell, the 2013 Intel micro-architecture to succeed this year’s successful Ivy Bridge platform. There’s xf86-video-intel DDX driver commits landing today pertaining to Haswell.
Haswell commits to the xf86-video-intel X.Org driver aren’t as exciting as the Intel DRM driver commits within the Linux kernel or the user-space 3D work for Haswell, but is important nevertheless since there’s still more than a half-year until the 2013 Intel processors ship. Aside from work on the Intel SNA architecture, not many interesting things happen these days within the Intel DDX driver since all the important bits are now handled in kernel-space by the Direct Rendering Manager and the DDX drivers are on the way out with Wayland.
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A few days back I published benchmarks showing Intel’s Ivy Bridge hardware regressing with Mesa 8.1. While those problems are still outstanding, the good news is that Intel’s previous-generation Sandy Bridge hardware appears unaffected. Overall, Sandy Bridge is performing well with the soon-to-be-released Mesa 8.1 library for open-source Linux graphics drivers.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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While id Software was known for years as being a Linux-friendly game company with providing native ports of their in-house titles with support for the id Tech engines on Linux, this is no longer the case. John Carmack, the founder of id Software, has lost his commitment to seeing Linux support.
Valve Software is doing their big things with Linux now and other game companies are looking at Linux for gaming, but id Software is doing the opposite. Previous versions of the id Tech engine had Linux support and their games up through Enemy Territory: Quake Wars had native Linux builds, but then with id Tech 5 and their premiere Rage title there wasn’t any Linux client. id Software’s “Linux guy” also left the company.
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Oliver McFadden has been working on renderer improvements to the open-source id Tech 4 engine for the Doom 3 game. This project is now going under the name Dante.
McFadden, the developer known for being involved in the early days of open-source ATI Linux graphics development with writing the Revenge reverse-engineering utility plus also toyed with the idea of writing his own video BIOS, has been playing with the open-source Doom 3 / id Tech 4 engine code in his spare time.
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After over a decade of development, version 1.0 of PCSX2, an open-source PlayStation 2 (PS2) emulator, has finally been made available for Windows and Linux. You know what to do.
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Since Valve announced their official support for Steam into Linux platform, everyone is acting crazy. Quite recently, Valve’s boss – Mr.Gabe, said that “Windows 8 will be a catastrophe for PC game makers”. The next day, Blizzard’s vice president – Mr.Newell shared his thoughts via twitter saying that “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space* – not awesome for Blizzard either”. The questions is …
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Oculus Rift is a gaming virtual reality headset that will change the gaming experience forever and affordable price !
The current prototype is intended for developers who wants to make their games compatible with Oculus Rift.
Doom3 BFG already supports Oculus Rift and when you order the prototype, you also get the game and you get to experience it like never before !
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Unigine is a cross platform, real time 3D game engine. The engine is capable of producing advanced realistic 3D effects and game physics.
Oil Rush, the first game to based on Unigine is quite popular and it runs really well on Linux. Many other Unigine based games have confirmed Linux support including a fantasy RPG, an adventure game and an MMORPG.
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Desktop Environments
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Gnome 3.6 is going to be released soon and the developers are working hard to make this the best Gnome release ever. One of the apps that desperately needed and upgrade was Gnome Disk Utility. Luckily, one may find some great changes of Gnome Disk Utility in Gnome 3.6.
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IconWe have some very good news for those of us with a love for the Common Desktop Environment. I’m a huge fan of CDE – I’ve even dedicated an article to it – so I’m excited about this. CDE has been released as open source under the LGPL, and can be downloaded as of today for Debian and Ubuntu. Motif will follow later.
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MATE, the open-source desktop environment whose name no one is sure how to pronounce, is now nearly a year old. Many of us never thought it would make it this far, but the interface has held own against competitors like Unity and GNOME Shell. But does MATE have a long-term future in the fast-evolving world of desktop Linux? Here are some thoughts.
When MATE debuted last August, it was a one-man effort by a developer who called himself Perberos to keep alive the GNOME 2 desktop environment, which the GNOME project had deprecated in favor of GNOME 3.
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I am in a very interesting situation. Some time ago, I promised myself to stay away from LXDE-based distributions. At the same time, I wrote about three of them in the last 6 weeks.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Hot on the heels of yesterday’s announcement of the availability of KDE 4.9, the software compilation has already been packaged by the hard working Kubuntu team over at Blue Systems.
This should come as a surprise to no one, as the Kubuntu team has a healthy track record of bringing packages to backports as soon as possible.
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The year of the Linux desktop may be the subject of never-ending debate, but few would deny that we currently seem to be in the midst of a week of Linux desktop news.
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There has been some debate lately about whether or not GNOME has gone off the deep end into an abyss. Whether or not that’s true is debatable. What is certain though, is that on the Linux Planet the Linux desktop is not an endangered species with no shortage of viable, sustainable options.
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GNOME Desktop
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While disk management improvements might not be the first thing you think of when it comes to a desktop environment update, the disk utility (Disks) and udev within GNOME 3.6 will offer some new features.
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Even as the prospect of a another new Windows blunder and some new OEM deals have some wondering if this might be the time people start paying attention to the Linux desktop, disruptions within Linux desktop development communities may be threatening the future of the Linux desktop.
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GNOME, the project responsible for what has been one of the open-source world’s most popular desktop interfaces for well over a decade, is teetering on the edge of crisis mode. At least, that’s what one developer suggests in a recent personal blog post ominously titled “starting into the abyss.” Does GNOME, despite its rich and influential past, really face such a dismal future? Here are some thoughts.
Personally, I’d be pretty sad to see the GNOME project die. I haven’t used the desktop environment on a daily basis since development on GNOME 2.x ended in favor of GNOME Shell, but I grew up as a Linux user with GNOME. The open-source ecosystem just wouldn’t feel the same if I knew I no longer had the option of running GNOME software.
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Sometimes, human minds get stuck without a reason between two options, jumping from the one to the other, never finding exactly what they are looking for.
This is what happens to most people with today’s browsers. Almost no one completely likes Firefox and Chrome for their own personal reasons, but everyone keeps trying both when a newer version becomes available. Time to make a step towards something “greener” and give Midori a try!
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Stresslinux is a lean, mean torture machine with 750MB of hardware-pummeling goodness for probing and load-testing your computer’s hardware. Why, you ask, would anyone want to torture their nice hardware? Perhaps “torture” isn’t the best word; think load-testing to expose defects, “burning in” a new machine, or to figure out some limits for overclocking.
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This week in Linux brought the last developmental release of openSUSE 12.2 and Fedora’s approval of the MATE desktop for version 18. But besides that Debian Wheezy progresses, Fedora is getting a new installer, and Slackware deploys new package browser online.
Debian Wheezy, or what will be Debian 7.0, is progressing forward in development. Despite nearly 600 bugs remaining on the to-do list no talk of a delay has been overheard in the hallowed halls of Debian as of yet. Of course, Debian isn’t on any kind of schedule and all we really have are educated guesses of the release date. Debian Wheeze went into new version freeze nearly a month ago. Another bit of good news out of Debian team is that the next version, Debian 8.0, will be codenamed “Jessie” after the cowgirl in Disney’s Toy Story.
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There is a wide variety of distributions for Linux, with the differences mainly depending on the users’ needs. This could cause indecisive developers and enthusiasts to have more than one distribution of Linux installed at any time. Now, there is a distribution of Linux in development that aims to have the best features of all the different popular distributions.
According to Bedrock, the new Linux distribution, “If one would like a rock-solid stable base (for example, from Debian or a RHEL clone) yet still have easy access to cutting-edge packages (from, say, Arch Linux), automate compiling packages with Gentoo’s portage, and ensure that software aimed only for the ever popular Ubuntu will run smoothly – all at the same time, in the same distribution – Bedrock Linux will provide a means to achieve this.”
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Open source lovers would love to know that a new Linux Distribution is in town with the name ‘Bedrock Linux’. It aims to get the best of all the distros and be as transparent as ever. You get to have all the mutually exclusive benefits such as a stable base from Debian or a RHEL clone, while having a hand on the Arch Linux packages. Users don’t have to worry about running their favorite Ubuntu-only software simultaneously while automating compiling packages with Gentoo’s portage. Having something as minimal as Tinycore or SliTaz and as user-friendly as Mint, does have a mass appeal. Bedrock gets you exactly that.
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Alright. Enough about that Arch Linux for a while. Let me return to my first love… Slackware, baby!
A few days ago, Pat V. announced that the Current branch of Slackware has now gone beta. Well, let me tell you how I do things. Ever since I started running Slack as my primary OS back around 10.1 or so, I always upgrade to Current from stable once it goes beta. Up until this time around, I’ve always used the standard UPGRADE.TXT method found on the servers along with an in depth perusal of the CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT. I guess you could say that’s the “Slacker Way” of doing it.
I have three production systems running Slackware as the main operating system; my main system, my home office laptop, and my workshop system out back. They were all running fully updated 13.37 at the time I started this project. Normally, I would have started with the system that was lowest priority and easiest to restore should I do something stupid… that would normally be the shop system. However, it was awfully hot out there this week. I decided to sit in the AC and upgrade the home office laptop first.
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New Releases
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ClearOS Community 6.3.0 has arrived! Along with the usual round of enhancements, this release introduces new apps focused on the mail server stack. Anchored on the Zarafa for ClearOS solution, you can now implement an on-premise or private cloud mail server using ClearOS. This release includes the following new apps: Zarafa Community for ClearOS, Mail Antivirus, Mail Antispam, Antispam Updates, Greylisting, and more.
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The Arch Linux developers have released a new installation media of Arch Linux. This media was released after a short gap of the previous media 2012.07.15 which was released in mid July.
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Red Hat Family
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echnology journalist Adrian Bridgwater says clouds are a social phenomenon. They’re not as important for what they do as for what they enable, namely closer connections among people.
This is not the way most investors see the technology. Most investors see companies involved in building clouds, like Rackspace (RAX), or developing cloud software, like Red Hat (RHT), as having more value.
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Fedora
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Let’s be realistic for a moment here. I believe that there is not a single Fedora user who doesn’t use repositories that conflict with Fedora’s policy and default selection ideology. Not even the most hardcore Fedora developers can use the completely useless system that Fedora is out of the box, without adding third party sources and pieces of proprietary software.
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No, I don’t think Ubuntu is bad, or has Linux cooties or anything. It’s a good distro if it best meets your needs. There are some really awesome people in the Ubuntu community. A few that come time mind immediately are Jorge Castro, Alan Pope, Jonathan Riddell and of course Jono Bacon. So why did I switch? Well let me start with the Fedora Core Values:
* Freedom
* Friends
* Features
* First
There is a really good write-up of the values and what makes Fedora Different on the Fedora website. If you aren’t familiar with Feodra, it’s values and what makes Fedora different, go read that…I’ll wait until you come back, and then give you my personal take on this.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When someone talked about Ubuntu from Android, it was somewhat akin to something which is rather hush hush, as very little was spoken about this particular project in February. This particular project from Canonical intends to deliver the hugely popular Linux operating system to the Android smartphone platform. Well, someone decided to come up with a demo video of Ubuntu for Android, where it will highlight a fair share of the system’s capabilities. First filmed at the Fórum Internacional Software Livre in Brazil last week, this is as up-to-date as it gets.
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One of the most beautiful and powerful feature of Ubuntu Unity is the lenses. These lenses enable instant searches in the Unity dash itself. For e.g., you can search Youtube videos straight from the dash by just typing the title of video. The main idea behind separating these kind of small features in individual lenses instead of providing in a bundle is to let the users decide to install them based on their preference and need, thus keeping the Unity dash clean and uncluttered.
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Canonical announced a couple of days ago, August 1st, that the sponsorship for the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit 2012 event is now open for submissions.
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Flavours and Variants
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I’ve been meaning to test Quelitu for quite some time. This weekend I finally got around to it. And the bottom line is, this might be the lightweight Linux I’ve been seeking for computer refurbishing…if only it had its own ready-to-run install disk.
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The initial fervor over the Raspberry Pi Linux PC has perhaps faded a bit, but that’s fine because the thing has been available long enough for master tinkerers such as Adafruit Technologies to do terrific things with it.
Adafruit has actually developed its own Linux distro for Raspberry Pi called “Occidentalis v0.1” (a play on “Rubus occidentalis”, the Latin term for “black raspberry”), which is geared for optimum hackability. The Adafruit gang loves the Raspberry Pi but felt that the latest distro from the latter (Raspian Wheezy) lacked enough features; instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, Adafruit took the good work done in Wheezy and built Occidentalis around it.
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Your new embedded design becomes a reality when the first prototype arrives. This is an exciting time in any design cycle, but it can also be the most stressful. Sleep may not come so easily for the hardware team. When you think about it, the prototype is the realization of a new schematic, a new PCB layout, and a board full of new components. The likelihood of all these new design elements coming together and working out of the box are pretty slim.
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Phones
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Android
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The Raspberry Pi foundation announced today that its popular $35 Linux computer will soon be able to run Android 4.0. Google’s mobile operating system is being ported to the device by Broadcom developer Naren Sankar.
The Raspberry Pi foundation was originally founded in 2009 with the aim of building a low-cost computer that can be used to teach computer programming to young students. The organization’s $35 computer—a bare board that is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards—has a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM. It sparked considerable demand when it launched earlier this year.
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Samsung Electronics is set to take the wraps off a sequel to its popular Galaxy Note smartphone at an event on August 29, about two weeks before the possible debut of Apple’s new iPhone.
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Even Bigger Galaxy Note Set to Launch August 29thSamsung’s updated Galaxy Note is on the way, with Samsung confirming that its Galaxy Note 2 is scheduled to be the star of its showing at this year’s IFA trade show.
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A device that we know as the Sony Xperia LT30 may be coming to market with a different name if this DLNA certificate is to be believed. The certificate lists the device as having a product name of “Sony Xperia T.”
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Your smartphone is your smartphone, your tablet is usually your tablet, but your desktop, well you probably share it sometimes with friends, family, and co-workers. That’s one of the reasons why Android, the popular Linux-based device operating system has never been seriously considered for the desktop. Without multi-user support, it’s not great for a shared computer. That may be changing. We now know that Google has been slowly introducing multi-user support into Android.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Since day one, the HP TouchPad hasn’t been treated very well by its parent company, and as always, it’s been up to the hacker community to save the day. Last month, Google open-sourced Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) for third-party modification. As such, nobody should be surprised to learn TouchPad owners can now install Jelly Bean on their tablet (albeit it’s currently a CyanogenMod 10 build).
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In other words, Chaos Monkey is a tool used to simulate failures in “cloud” services so that the operators can be better prepared for unexpected outages. By inducing failures in the system, developers are able to implement fixes and contingencies on their own terms, rather than waiting for a serious problem to develop before being able to deploy countermeasures.
Netflix claims that Chaos Monkey has been used to cause over 65,000 failures in their system over the last year, and while most went by without issue, a few of them brought issues to light which Netflix engineers were able to repair so they won’t cause outages down the road.
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Adobe has open sourced a new font family called Source Sans Pro. The font itself is now available in OTF and TTF formats. The company is also releasing the underlying source material so that the font can easily be modified and improved by third parties. Adobe is releasing the fonts under the terms of the SIL Open Font License, an OSI-approved license that broadly allows modification and redistribution.
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If I asked you to account for your energy consumption, you might list your laundry equipment on the spreadsheet. We’d see how much you spend using your dryer each month — quite a large amount. Worried by the cost, you might then opt for a clothesline in your yard. Naturally, your costs have gone down. But has your energy usage? You’re actually consuming as much energy as before, but you may decide to omit it from your spreadsheet because you’re no longer paying for it.
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Sonatype has launched Insight Application Health Check, an application component analysis designed to assess the integrity of open-source components at every phase of the software lifecycle. As a Component Lifecycle Management (CLM) player, the company says that this is a means of understanding the potential risks and opportunities associated with each component in use.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced Deltacloud 1.0, a new open-source cloud interoperability toolkit.
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If I asked you to account for your energy consumption, you might list your laundry equipment on the spreadsheet. We’d see how much you spend using your dryer each month — quite a large amount. Worried by the cost, you might then opt for a clothesline in your yard. Naturally, your costs have gone down. But has your energy usage? You’re actually consuming as much energy as before, but you may decide to omit it from your spreadsheet because you’re no longer paying for it.
This tendency to account only for the resources we pay for and to ignore the value of the resources we don’t is called “the clothesline paradox” (first coined by Peter van Dressler). It was also the subject of O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly’s well-received keynote at the recent Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore.
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Mozilla
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Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. And, just recently, we reported that Techweek Europe had posted a series of screenshots, seen here, showing Mozilla’s mobile operating system with a look and feel that Mozilla claimed was non-representative of the final OS. Now, adding credibility to sightings of the new OS in the wild, Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has posted a Flickr gallery of screenshots of what some are calling “Firefox OS.”
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Mozilla is expanding its San Francisco office and will open another one in Berlin’s new Factory tech campus, the company recently announced. The branch in San Francisco is supposed to add 125 new employees for a total staff of 275 by the beginning of next year. Mozilla has confirmed that it will be hiring in Berlin as well, but has not yet given concrete numbers for that office.
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Admit it. You are in a love-hate relationship with Firefox. Either Mozilla gets Firefox right and you are jumping up and down, or Mozilla screws up and you threaten to ditch the browser in favor of Chrome. Mozilla’s passionate user base keeps Firefox dangling between constant ups and downs, which is a good thing, as long as Mozilla is going up. Unfortunately, that is not the case right now. Mozilla’s market share has been slipping again at a significant pace. There has been some discussion and finger pointing and it seems that the rapid release process has to take the blame this time. Are we right to blame the rapid release process?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has put out their first (beta) development release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2. The 4.2 release series brings several new features to this easy-to-use virtualization platform.
Key features of VirtualBox 4.2 Beta 1 include improved support for Microsoft Windows 8, the GUI has an expert mode for wizards, support for up to 36 network cards, support for limiting network I/O bandwidth to virtual machine guests, support for starting VMs during system boot, and experimental support for drag ‘n’ drop from the host to Linux guests. Additionally, more support for guest and guest-to-host drag ‘n’ drop is planned.
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Business
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At the recent OSCON conference, the folks at O’Reilly released the results of a study, done in conjunction with the ISP Bluehost, called “Economic Impact of Open Source on Small Business: A Case Study.” It includes an extraordinary amount of data based input from over two million Bluehost customers and 4,000 survey respondents. The study makes the case that open source has had a profound impact on small businesses during these tough economic times.
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Semi-Open Source
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Open source is still a small subset of the ERP market, yet its promise of low cost and added flexibility means it merits investigation, especially for entry-level ERP deployments.
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Funding
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Openness/Sharing
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Harvard’s plan is to commercialize the software. They feel it will be useful for animators who want to print out and experiment with a physical version of the characters they create. There’s also a market for allowing anyone to create their own characters and have action figures printed and sent to them.
Clearly this software is a little ahead of its time in terms of home 3D printing. Right now you’d be able to create the models and basic joints to clip together yourself, but using metal joints and being able to apply a color coating to recreate the character perfectly are desirable. Maybe that will be possible a few 3D printer generations from now.
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Open Data
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Standards/Consortia
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The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) presented a joint statement on modern global standardsPDF in Vancouver. The paper calls for fair, consensus-based processes, transparency and access for all to the principles of modern standardisation. Standards, they say, should not be determined by a few large corporations.
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Security
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Finance
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Replacing public responsibility with private profit is a one-way bargain, and the state will shoulder the burden when it goes bad
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Virtually every day, the Obama campaign tries to cast his opponent as some type of modern day robber baron. Gov. Mitt Romney’s clear success in the private sector is a threat to President Barack Obama’s attempt to sell the American public on another four years of dismal economic performance. Yet, when it comes to raising money for his own campaign, the president doesn’t seem to blink about the source.
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Privacy
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Network equipment maker Huawei is already burdened with suspicions from some governments that it is too close to the Chinese government. Now comes another allegation
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Civil Rights
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I was stunned upon hearing a news report about a protest going on in China. Teachers, parents with their young, school-age children and pro-democracy activitists (one estimate was 90,000 people) marched in Hong Kong to government headquarters last Sunday to publicly protest a new required “Patriotism” class, to be taught in the school system starting in 2015. The protestors think that the effort of the Chinese government here is to brainwash their kids in favor of communism.
What stunned me was that this protest, in China, against the government’s upcoming policy, at the government headquarters, would not now be tolerated here in the United States of America.
Thanks to almost zero media coverage, few of us know about a law passed this past March, severely limiting our right to protest. The silence may have been due to the lack of controversy in bringing the bill to law: Only three of our federal elected officials voted against the bill’s passage. Yes, Republicans and Democrats agreed on something almost 100%.
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For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would present us with a rebirth of the old republic that was so rudely erased a few years ago by that team of judicial wreckers, Bush and Gonzales, which led, in turn, to a recent incident in Cambridge, Mass. that inspired a degree of alarm in many Americans. But what was most alarming was the plain fact that neither the president nor a “stupid” local policeman seemed to understand the rules of behavior in a new America, where we find ourselves marooned as well as guarded (is that the verb?) by armed police who have been instructed that they are indeed, once armed, the law and may not be criticized verbally or in any other way and are certainly not subject to any restrictions as to whom they arrest or otherwise torment.
This is rather worse than anyone might have predicted, even though the signs have been clear for some years that ours is now a proto-fascist nation and there appears to be no turning back; nor, indeed, much awareness on the part of our ever-alert media. Forgive me if you find my irony heavy, but I too get tired of carrying it about in “the greatest nation in the country,” as Spiro Agnew liked to say.
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When FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents raided multiple activist homes in the Northwest last week, they were in search of “anti-government or anarchist literature.”
The raids were part of a multi-state operation that targeted activists in Portland, Olympia, and Seattle. At least three people were served subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury on August 2nd in Seattle.
In addition to anarchist literature, the warrants also authorize agents to seize flags, flag-making material, cell phones, hard drives, address books, and black clothing.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Here in the rural areas of the United Kingdom we have waited patiently for broadband to reach us. We have made do with expensive satellites and community WiFi for a decade. Many homes are still on dial up, with no mobile coverage in many places.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Microsoft has dropped “Metro”, the name given to the squaretastic user interface for Windows 8 and Windows Phone, claiming it was just a code name all along.
Litigation, though, may be the real reason as it seems the word may be owned by a European company or individual that objected to its use.
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Copyrights
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Public bodies that disclose copyright-protected information in order to comply with a request under freedom of information (FOI) laws are not guilty of copyright infringement, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said.
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The Creative Commons (CC) organisation has launched a new version of its online tool for helping users choose a Creative Commons licence for their works. According to CC Software Engineer Jonathan Palecek, the tool was rebuilt because, while it was successful, the original licence chooser was considered to be too linear and resembled a registration process. “Furthermore, as the tool had been extended numerous times, its interface became more and more cluttered,” added Palecek.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
08.03.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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“It is hard to say what an ideal distro looks like because there are many important niches,” noted Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “What I need as a software developer for my laptop is very different than what I’d want to deploy my software to.” For his development laptop, he prefers Fedora. “On the server, though, I would prefer to deploy to a more conservative distro, like Debian Stable or Scientific Linux.”
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The Commodore 64 turns 30 this month. How does it compare to modern computers?
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Kernel Space
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Some Linux sever administrators found out that time was not on their side yesterday, when an errant signal from some Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers broadcast a new leap second that adversely affected many servers unprepared for the change.
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During the night of 31 July to 1 August, various servers that provide time information via NTP (Network Time Protocol) incorrectly announced that clients should apply a leap second. On Tuesday evening, Marco Marongiu pointed to this issue on one of the NTP project’s mailing lists. Now, reports from users whose systems applied a leap second at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – 2am CET – can be found in places such as a Mythtv forum, on Twitter, on Google+ and on the NTP project’s mailing lists.
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The kernel developers have added the VFIO userspace driver framework and a hybrid standby option to Linux 3.6. The 64-bit ARM code will be called “arm64″ after all. The widely used software collection util-linux has been extended to include a range of new tools.
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Kernel 3.0.39, recently released, and kernel 3.2.25, coming soon, include not only smaller changes and enhancements but also a long list of performance optimisations. This marks a change in the strategy for maintaining older kernel versions; previously, these kinds of adjustments generally weren’t made to stable and long-term kernels to avoid introducing bugs.
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Graphics Stack
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Xi Graphics, the company that once developed proprietary X Servers and graphics drivers for Linux and UNIX platforms, has faded away.
Going back to the early 90′s there was Xi Graphics Inc that specialized in creating high-performance X Servers and graphics drivers for Linux/UNIX. Their proprietary Accelerated-X product was compliant against X11R6.4 and was licensed to a range of major companies, universities, and individuals for its features and performance. They also developed their own in-house graphics drivers for different hardware (namely early ATI hardware), which they claimed to be the fastest.
Among the advertised features for their products was hardware-accelerated support for multiple displays / stretched displays, support for IBM AIX, SPARC support, and “Our ATI graphics support has been the fastest on UNIX/Linux for years. No kidding.”
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Following the success of Ivy Bridge and their continued open-source contributions, Intel graphics continue to gain market-share on the Linux desktop.
Last month I mentioned Intel Winning Over NVIDIA For Linux Enthusiasts. The trends cite the publicly-available OpenBenchmarking.org data, which largely reflects the latest happenings of Linux enthusiasts.
The auto-generated statistics for the month of July are now available and they continue to reflect Intel’s growing market-share when it comes to Linux graphics use.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Backup solutions vendor Arkeia Software has announced updated support for ten platforms. These ten platforms represent a fraction of the over 200 platforms protected by Arkeia Network Backup which include Windows, Mac, Linux, Netware, Solaris, AIX, BSD, and HP-UX operating systems and derivatives, as well as VMware, Hyper-V, and Xen virtual environments.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Alexandre Julliard announced last night, July 31st, a new development version of the Wine app, which brings assorted bugfixes and improvements, among which we can mention:
• Updated Gecko engine, now based on Mozilla Firefox 14;
• OpenGL support in the DIB engine by using the libOSMesa library;
• Direct3D off-screen rendering;
• More WMI infrastructure;
• Lots of other small bug fixes.
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Games
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If you thought Shadowrun Online was going to be just another PC remake, fusing new-school tech with an old-school concept, think again. Cliffhanger Productions plans on taking the project a step further and out of the comfort zone of PC territory and into the wild unknown of both Linux and the upcoming game console, Ouya.
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In a post on its Linux blog, the Valve team reports that the Linux port of Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) is running faster on Linux than Windows. On a high-end test system with an Intel Core i7 3930k processor, 32GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics card, Valve managed to run the Linux port of L4D2 at 315 FPS. In comparison, the Windows version managed 270.6 FPS – although Valve was able to increase this to 303.4 FPS after improving the Windows implementation of OpenGL, a side effect of their porting work.
After the porting was comple
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One factor in creating a good gaming experience is throughput. This post discusses some of what we’ve learned about the performance of our games running on Linux.
As any software developer can tell you, performance is a complicated issue. In the interests of simplicity, we’ll concern ourselves with the following high-end configuration:
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In a scary twist that reinforces Valve’s distaste for Windows 8, it turns out that the Source engine — the 3D engine that powers Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2 — runs faster on Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL than Windows 7 and DirectX/Direct3D.
The Valve Linux Team breaks it down on their shiny new blog: With an Nvidia GTX 680, Intel i7-3930k, and 32GB of RAM, Windows 7 and DirectX, Left 4 Dead 2 maxes out at 270.6 fps. With the same hardware, but different software — Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL — L4D2 scores 315 fps, almost 20% faster than Windows.
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Besides Valve Software, another Linux-friendly game company to be presenting next week at SIGGRAPH LA 2012 is another Phoronix favorite, Unigine Corp.
With SIGGRAPH just being days away where the next OpenGL and OpenGL ES specifications should be unveiled, the Unigine team is in the midst of travelling from Russia to Los Angeles for this leading event. In preparation, Unigine Corp released a new video this morning showcasing some of the latest features of their flagship Unigine Engine.
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Valve’s growing Linux team is already experiencing success in optimizing the Source Engine, and in particular their initial Left 4 Dead 2 game, for Linux. In fact, the native Linux build with the Source OpenGL renderer is faster than running the game on Windows 7 with DirectX!
We’re already known that Valve Software intends to speak at SIGGRAPH LA 2012 about how they optimized their Linux OpenGL game client — taking it from just a few frames per second to over 300 FPS. Now on Valve’s official Linux blog is a new post this evening about Faster Zombies!.
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Valve has released more information regarding its efforts to port zombie-killing shooter Left 4 Dead 2 and its Steam digital distribution platform to Linux – including the interesting fact that performance is better than under Windows.
Comparing the 32-bit build of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 to the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit release, both running on a Core i7 3930K with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 and 32GB of RAM, the results were initially slightly disappointing: where the DirectX-powered Windows version of Left 4 Dead 2 managed an average of 270.6 frames per second, the OpenGL-powered Linux version managed just six frames per second.
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Not only has Valve Software successfully ported the first-person shooter game Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux, but it actually runs faster on the open source OS than on Windows.
Using high-end hardware, a version of the game running on Ubuntu 12.04 renders at 315fps, Valve’s Linux team reports. That’s a 16 per cent improvement over the Windows version, which only clocks at 270.6fps on the same configuration.
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In the 21 years or so since its inception, Linux has gained some amazing enthusiast street cred, but failed time and again to enter the mainstream. This year, however, may afford it an opportunity it’s never had before: To gain the momentum necessary to join the big boys in the operating system world. If that happens, Linux devotees the world over – from users to developers to even Linus Torvalds himself – may have Microsoft and Windows 8 to thank.
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Leave it to Richard Stallman to pour cold water on a hot idea. The noted free software activist has come out against Steam for Linux, writing that “Nonfree game programs (like other nonfree programs) are unethical because they deny freedom to their users. (Game art is a different issue, because it isn’t software.) If you want freedom, one requisite for it is not having nonfree programs on your computer.”
It’s the argument I would have accepted from Stallman, actually. But it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right — or the best one he could have made.
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You might have already read about The KickStarter Indie Bundle which includes 9 games (some of which were kickstarter projects that didn’t reach their goal).
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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If you are a Chakra user, you will now be able to install and use the newly released KDE 4.9 release right away. The Chakra package maintainers have already packaged them and made them available at the mirrors, so all you need to do is to run an update using pacman.
As quoted from their blog:
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The KDE netbook desktop is a little-known and underappreciated alternative that is included in every KDE installation. My step-by-step guide is designed to help raise its profile
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GNOME Desktop
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Having just spent the last 36 hours with my head in Ubuntu Server 12.04 I think I have my Ubuntu radar about as fully tuned as is humanly possible right now.
Analysing Ubuntu Server 12.04 is a pleasant enough experience, the free and open source operating system’s commercial parent Canonical has clearly put lots of effort into making the form and function of this technology not only taste good, but look good too.
The application window animations are a case in point. It all runs pretty fast – and there’s the interesting part.
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I heard about this OS from couple of my readers, who left the comment on the blog posts. They mentioned this OS as the extreme light one.
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Last week Archlinux released the install media 2012.07.15. In a post on the website they told us that the most noticeable change was the fact they no longer ship their installer, the Arch Installation Framework (AIF), with it. This means, that after downloading the ISO, you will have to perform all the installation steps manually. Or, to put it in their own words, “This means a menu driven installer is no longer available and we rely more on documentation to guide new users.”
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Back in June I showed how Ubuntu 12.10 was continuing to improve the ARM Linux performance and since then showed that on TI OMAP4 hardware Ubuntu is faster than Fedora, while today I have more benchmarks to share. Up now are the latest PandaBoard ES benchmarks from a more recent Ubuntu 12.10 development build for the ARMv7 Cortex-A9 dual-core development board.
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Progress on Ubuntu Accomplishments has been moving apace. For those of you who have not been keeping score, we released 0.1 earlier this year which provided a first cut of the core system working. We then followed up with our 0.2 release which brought many refinements to the system based upon user feedback and the increased level of testing by our 600+ users. In September 2012 we plan on shipping our 0.3 release, and our goals are very clear for this release: quality, visibility, and growth.
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Space-based desktops have a special place in my heart, and this shot of space shuttle Endeavour shadowed by the Earth below it is a great one. Flickr user Michael Farquhar used this photo as the bedrock for his customized Ubuntu desktop. It’s gorgeous when you sit down, not at all distracting when it’s time to work, and well-placed widgets keep informative data around the sides of the screen.
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After introducing last week a very nice video that presented an amazing mockup of the Unity interface for Ubuntu OS, we’re now proud to announce today, August 2nd, another nice concept that looks simply marvelous.
First of all, be aware that the above mockup of Ubuntu’s Unity interface is unofficial, created by an Ubuntu user, and it has nothing to do with Canonical.
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The Gumstix Waysmall Silverlode is a tiny, low power computer designed for commercial or industrial applications. But under the hood it’s running a version of Ubuntu Linux optimized by Linaro to run on ARM-based processors. So it could also theoretically find use as an inexpensive desktop computer or media center PC.
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As for changes, this release is now utilizing Terminology as it’s default terminal emulator and PCManFM file browser has been replaced with the native EFM (Enlightenment File Manager). The issues our first image had with networking and flash drives should also be resolved with this release. Also worth noting is that the AppCenter is now configured to work by default in the Midori web browser – but the synaptic interface runs fairly slow on the Pi hardware.
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Phones
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Open webOS is marching toward its first release, but it won’t have many products to run on, because previous webOS devices will not be supported. The reason for that circumstance is the fact that the new operating system is based on the Linux 3.3 kernel and requires SoC support. In HP’s words:
“For Open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated. Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel (but of course, there is the Community Edition for those interested in improving the TouchPad).”
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Android
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Google sent out an email to its developer community with news that Google Play is undergoing policy changes to crack down on shady behavior in the Android market.
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Sprint has started pushing Android 4.0 OTA upgrade for HTC Evo 3D, EVO Design 4G. This upgrade brings Google Chrome browser, Face Unlock and other features synonym to Android 4.0. Some enhancements include:
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One day after the international RAZR HD appeared over at XDA, the U.S. version, better known as the DROID RAZR HD, has appeared via Droid Forums. We now have a confirmation on the name, thanks to a picture of the phone’s About screen – not that we were questioning it to begin with, since Motorola employees gave that up long ago. We also get a look at the backside, which is full-on kevlar, and in my opinion, much more appealing than the backside that we saw on the international version.
If you thought for a second that this wasn’t coming to Verizon, the 4G LTE logo on the backside along with “Verizon” being mentioned in the system version should help ease your mind there. On-screen navigation keys are present. The “HD” in the name clearly means the resolution of the device, so we will likely see a similar 720p Colorboost display to the one included in the Atrix HD.
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Market researchers at Canalys have published their final Q2 2012 country-level shipment estimates for smartphones, and the news is all good for Android. The firm reported that 158 million smartphones were shipped globally in the second quarter, and 100 million of those were Android phones. Android has a whopping 68.1 percent of the global market–nothing to sneeze at. Meanwhile, smartphone shipments in China are on a tear.
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PacketFence is an unobtrusive solution that works with equipment from many vendors (wired or wireless) such as Cisco, Aruba, ExtremeNetworks, Juniper Networks, Nortel/Avaya, Hewlett-Packard, Meru Networks, Foundry/Brocade, Enterasys, Accton/Edge-corE/SMC, 3Com, D-Link, Intel, Dell, Aerohive, Motorola and many more.
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The Woodlands/Houston, TX (August 1, 2012) – Imagine applying the concept of Open Source Software – where the code is published and made available to other programmers free of charge – to architecture. That is just what one Houston based multimedia development company did with a new commercial structure using upcycled cargo containers and recycled building materials. Every step of their 18 month building process is chronicled online and available for others to learn from.
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ViewCast Corporation is supporting the open source community through its partnership with KernelLabs, a coalition of like-minded Linux software engineers whose primary goal is to improve the Linux platform for audio / video applications.
ViewCast is working with KernelLabs in the development of Linux drivers for all of its latest Osprey video capture cards. Most recently, Linux drivers for the Osprey 260e, 460e and 820e capture cards were made available through the KernelLabs website. The drivers will be submitted to the next Linux kernel and then available directly in the Linux distribution thereafter.
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Video rental company Netflix has used its extensive consumption of the Amazon Web Services cloud to give something back to the open source community. The company’s Chaos Monkey system was developed to ensure that its operations were capable of self-healing (or at least continuing to run) should instances in the AWS cloud fail. This month sees the firm open source its code.
The firm’s Cory Bennett and Ariel Tseitlin have written on the Netflix techblog explaining that over the last year, “Chaos Monkey has terminated over 65,000 instances running in our production and testing environments. Most of the time nobody notices, but we continue to find surprises caused by Chaos Monkey, which allows us to isolate and resolve them so they don’t happen again.”
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Working every day in an open-source environment, there’s always one area where open-source aesthetics fall down compared to the Windows and Mac ecosystems: professionally produced fonts.
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Leawood, KS, August 03, 2012 –(PR.com)– Software Consulting Firm Keyhole Software has announced the release of version 1.1.4 of the khsSherpa framework. khsSherpa, an open source JSON endpoint framework for Mobile and HTML5 support, now boasts RESTful Service URL Mappings. Version 1.1.4 is publicly available in the Maven Public Central Repository and gitHub.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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It’s no secret that Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox–both open source browsers–have been locked in a neck-and-neck market share battle for some time now. The two browsers are on rapid release cycles, and are now tending to leapfrog each other for market share in small increments each month. Now that August is here, NetApplications is out with its updated browser share data for July, which shows that Firefox maintains a tiny share lead over Chrome, and that Chrome actually declined slightly in share during the month. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer retains more than half of the browser market.
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When Marc Andreeson created the first web browser, it was all about users simply viewing static web pages. A lot has changed over the years in the web browser world, and now with the latest Google Chrome 21 browser there is a host of new two-way interactivity options. The new features in Chrome 21 change the way that users look at browsers and the way that browsers look at us.
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SaaS
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OpenStack’s Stefano Maffulli is on the opening keynote panel at CloudOpen Wednesday morning August 29. He will be joined by Mark Hinkle from Citrix, Greg DeKoenigsberg from Eucalyptus and John Mark Walker from Red Hat on a panel titled “What is the Open Cloud: Stacks, Platforms and Open Source.” Maffulli was generous to take time out of his busy schedule as Community Manager at OpenStack to share his ideas on what is an open cloud and what’s new with his project.
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Rackspace customers can now, at long last, benefit from the open source OpenStack project. Rackspace today announced the general availability of its Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack technology.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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The Drupal team have announced a new release of Drupal, Drupal 7.15. This is a bug fix release only and no new features or security patches have been added in this release. Upgrading to this release is strongly recommended by the Drupal team. Upgrade instructions can be found on this page.
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Healthcare
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Public Services/Government
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‘Use of discriminatory technical specifications is a widespread practice within the EU’, says Open Forum Europe (OFE), an organisation advocating the use of open standards and open source.
The group examined 585 invitations to tender, published in March, April and May this year by public administrations looking for computer software products. OFE found that almost 1 in 5 of these, procurement rules are broken (17 per cent).
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Openness/Sharing
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The future of women’s health—and the health of all U.S. citizens, for that matter—has been in the spotlight lately. Health care regulation is an important issue to both President Obama and health care organizations like Planned Parenthood—both of whom argue that it’s critical to pass laws ensuring access to affordable contraception for all women, couples, and families.
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Programming
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Low latency and scalability to remove the bottlenecks commonly associated with the Java runtime
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Health/Nutrition
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In California, the battle over Proposition 37, which would require the labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food products, is heating up. In late July, pro-labeling groups obtained a flier sent out by a group opposed to the proposition containing the endorsements of three Democratic California Assemblymembers, even though the Democratic Party of California (and over 90 percent of consumers) supports GMO labeling.
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Security
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Finance
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At a time when the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us is reaching historic heights across the globe, at least $21 trillion (with a “t”) in unreported private financial wealth was recently discovered sitting in secret tax havens.
While it can be difficult to imagine sums so large, consider this: the $21 trillion alone is the amount of the U.S. and Japanese economies combined. That reflects only financial wealth, and not the holdings and investments of this monied elite in mansions, yachts, private jets, etc. According to a recent reports by the Tax Justice Network, “The Price of Offshore Revisited” and “Inequality: You Don’t Know The Half of It,” this staggering disparity is only growing worse.
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Civil Rights
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The chief war court judge has agreed to let media and civil liberties lawyers argue for openness at the start of a pre-trial hearing at Guantánamo in the death-penalty case of five alleged conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks.
A consortium of 14 media groups, including The Miami Herald, and the American Civil Liberties Union separately filed motions protesting protective orders that shield the public from access to secret information in the case.
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08.02.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Pixman 0.27.2 has been released and it offers up more features.
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While an OpenWF back-end compositor for Wayland once provided hope that more hardware would work with Wayland whereby OpenWF Display drivers were available, the OpenWF support is being dropped already from the compositor.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The new version of Minecraft, Minecraft 1.3 brings in the most awaited features like adventure mode and trading.
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GNU Project founder Richard Stallman voices his concerns about the implications of putting Steam on the open Linux platform.
Just last week, Valve announced that it’s looking to bring its popular Steam distribution service to Linux, noting that adding games to the operating system could boost its adoption in the long term.
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Valve’s growing Linux team is already experiencing success in optimizing the Source Engine, and in particular their initial Left 4 Dead 2 game, for Linux. In fact, the native Linux build with the Source OpenGL renderer is faster than running the game on Windows 7 with DirectX!
We’re already known that Valve Software intends to speak at SIGGRAPH LA 2012 about how they optimized their Linux OpenGL game client — taking it from just a few frames per second to over 300 FPS. Now on Valve’s official Linux blog is a new post this evening about Faster Zombies!.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE has announced its Version 4.9 Releases to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Development Platform, dedicated to the memory of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. The full announcement has details.
These releases got special attention to the general levels of quality and stability. In particular, there was a focus on eliminating any regressions from previous releases. Thanks to the efforts of the KDE Quality Team and its new contributors, the 4.9 Releases are the best ever.
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Developers intend to modularize KDE libraries for next version of the platform.
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GNOME Desktop
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I was recently contacted by Earl Malmrose of ZaReason, who wanted to know if I’d like to review ZaReason’s new Linux-based desktop computer, built around the new Intel 6-Core processor and quad channel memory. I told him I’d be thrilled to review it, and asked if he’d also include a snappy ATI video card so I really could push the system to the limit using one of my favorite side hobbies, namely cryptocurrencies.
I start with a review of the system itself and finish with a bit of fun—I run the numbers and see what sort of CPU and GPU-hashing power I can get from it. Whether you think cryptocurrencies are a brilliant take on alternative economics or a dumb idea that wastes electricity, I can assure you no one knows how to overclock hardware quite like a Bitcoin miner. (I don’t actually overclock this system, since I’m sure ZaReason would like it back in full working order, but I push it to the max with stock settings.)
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Changing the operating system on your computer is not like flipping a switch. It is a cultural change, too.
Different operating systems give you different degrees of freedom, different degrees of access to knowledge of “what is inside”. And, what is more important for a non-technical user, they give you different user interfaces.
Windows users are used to having a panel at the bottom of the screen, window control elements at the right side of the window, the Windows Start button and so on. If you see something like the modern design of the Unity interface, nothing is the same as Windows. It’s a steep learning curve, isn’t it?
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat makes its money from selling support subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Mostly the same bits are available entirely for free by way of the community led CentOS project that clones RHEL.
I recently chatted with Red Hat CEO about CentOS and the long story short is he’s good with CentOS.
Having CentOS out there is a good thing. It broadens our community. There are people that don’t need the things that we have in subscription and it’s great that there is an offering build off the same code base.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is making multiple strategic hires that will deepen the open source company’s work with channel partners across Linux, virtualization, storage, cloud platforms and JBoss Middleware. The evidence surfaced when The VAR Guy met Red Hat North America Channel Chief Roger Egan at CompTIA Breakaway this week. Here are the exclusive details.
First up, Egan’s role is evolving. Going forward he’ll have more of a strategic role — focusing on how Red Hat’s partner program must serve a range of company types: Resellers, VARs, integrators, cloud and telecom service providers, OEMs (like Dell, HP and IBM) and ISVs (independent service providers). The VAR Guy believes Egan still reports into Red Hat Global Channel Chief Mark Enzweiler.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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HandBrake is an open-source, cross-platform multi-threaded video transcoder for Mac, Linux and Windows. You can use it to convert to and from different media formats. The availability of presets make the conversion easier even for novice users. Just select the media device to which you want the video to be transcode to and HandBrake will manage the rest.
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The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 13.04 release.
The next UDS takes place at Bella Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark from the 29th Oct – 1st Nov. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.
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Flavours and Variants
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With the arrival of Gnome 3, Gnome 2 was discontinued in most major distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, Arch Linux etc. However, a few distros like Debian, Gentoo are still using the old desktop while Linux Mint maintained a separate repository called gnome2-frozen for older gnome builds. However, soon they will discontinue that as well.
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Phones
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Android
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‘Open is broken’, that’s what main-stream iOS developers and despondent Android developers feel. The Dead Trigger cataclysm has apparently triggered a lot of Anti-Android vibes, in and around the tech-world. Though claims that Android is giving too much liberty to the end-user in the name of “Open Source” seems a bit legitimate, claiming that it is designed for “piracy” is a bit far-flung and to some extent sophomoric and pointless. Piracy sees no platform.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced Android is coming to its tiny device. More specifically, Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is being ported over to the credit-card sized Linux computer.
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The Raspberry Pi foundation announced today that its popular $35 Linux computer will soon be able to run Android 4.0. Google’s mobile operating system is being ported to the device by Broadcom developer Naren Sankar.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Wikipad, the company developing an identically named tablet that will ship with an attachable gamepad for console-style gaming, has revealed the specifications of the device in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.
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The OLPC XO Touch tablet will be getting Neonode touchscreens, as the next model makes the leap to laptop and tablet hybrid
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Internet NZ
The organisers of the New Zealand Open Source Awards are pleased to announce that Internet New Zealand has been confirmed as a Platinum sponsor of the event which will be held in Wellington in November.
Internet New Zealand Chief Executive Vikram Kumar says the organisation is proud to be supporting the Open Source Awards, noting that the vision of a free and uncaptureable Internet depends in large measure on open source software.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Google Chrome Team have announced a new version of Google Chrome, Google Chrome 21.0.1180.57 for Mac and Linux and Google Chrome 21.0.1180.60 for Windows operating systems. This version comes with a new API for high-quality video and audio communication and some security and bug fixes.
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SaaS
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Rackspace has become the first vendor to deliver on the promise of true cloud-computing portability for businesses with Wednesday’s launch of the first commercial cloud service using OpenStack cloud technology.
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ownCloud is a baby in the cloud space, but a fast-growing and useful baby. ownCloud was born at a KDE community event in 2010, and is already an easy and flexible server for sharing and syncing files.
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Project Releases
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Version 1.0 of Pygmyfoto, a no-frills application for publishing a photo roll on the web, is now available on GitHub. The first stable release features a handful of new features and improvements added since the latest beta version of the application. The older 1.2.3 version of jQuery bundled with the beta release has been replaced with jQuery 1.7.2. The jQuery lightBox plugin has been replaced with the Lightbox2 plugin. The pygmyfoto.py script features improved handling of EXIF metadata. Pygmyfoto now integrates the +1 button which can be used to share the published photos on Google+.
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Openness/Sharing
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I know why you’re excited this week … you’ve seen the “Kuratas”, a 13 foot tall, 9,900-pound robot you can ride in at speeds of up to 6 miles per hour and which is equipped with a water bottle cannon and Gatling guns that can fire 6,000 BBs per minute (the operator can fire the armaments just by smiling … no, really, watch the video).
The Kuratas robot, built by Japanese artist Kogoro Kurata and marketed by Suidobashi Heavy Industry, can be controlled by the onboard operator, a remote control device, or a smartphone and runs V-Sido, a “next generation robot OS”.
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Security
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NVIDIA’s had a past few weeks with Linus Torvalds having harsh words for NVIDIA, the downing of their forums, and now a NVIDIA driver exploit being revealed that gives normal users the rights to super-user privileges.
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08.01.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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uring the night of 31 July to 1 August, various servers that provide time information via NTP (Network Time Protocol) incorrectly announced that clients should apply a leap second. On Tuesday evening, Marco Marongiu pointed to this issue on one of the NTP project’s mailing lists. Now, reports from users whose systems applied a leap second at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – 2am CET – can be found in places such as a Mythtv forum, on Twitter, on Google+ and on the NTP project’s mailing lists.
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Desktop
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In the 21 years or so since its inception, Linux has gained some amazing enthusiast street cred, but failed time and again to enter the mainstream. This year, however, may afford it an opportunity it’s never had before: to gain the momentum necessary to join the big boys in the operating system world. If that happens, Linux devotees the world over — from users to developers to even Linus Torvalds himself — may have Microsoft and Windows 8 to thank.
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So what does this all have to do with Linux you might ask? Well, Gabe Newell of Valve, has come out stating that his company is porting its Steam software for use on Linux and he is hoping that they will have over 2,500 games available to be playable on the Linux OS. Now while most of us are not able to play games at work, this type of exposure for Linux should do nothing but help the open source community. But again, even though his feelings are that Windows 8 will be a huge failure, we have to keep in mind that when Sony released the Playstation 3, he came out and spoke about the difficulties of working with Sony’s device, a stance that he seems to recently have gone back on.
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Linux-based operating system has proven to be more reliable and rugged for day-to-day activity especially security purposes, when placed at par with other operating system.
The Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution with the defining component – Linux kernel is generally seen by hackers as tough to crack.
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I had ordered the Apple MacBook Pro 2012 model with Retina Display after being tempted by its impressive 2880 x 1800 display and other attractive features. Unfortunately, when Linux is running bare metal on the hardware it’s not running too good at the moment. My full review of the Retina MacBook Pro with Linux will come in early August, but there’s a few tid-bits to share now for those tempted shoppers.
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Server
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System administrators at the USENIX LISA 2011 conference (LISA is a great system administration conference, by the way) in Boston in December got to hear Michael Perrone’s presentation “What Is Watson?”
Michael Perrone is the Manager of Multicore Computing from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The entire presentation (slides, video and MP3) is available on the USENIX Web site, and if you really want to understand how Watson works under the hood, take an hour to listen to Michael’s talk (and the sysadmin Q&A at the end).
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, July 30th, the immediate availability for download of the seventh maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.4 kernel series.
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In this week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile, we talk to Alan Cox. We learn how he originally got involved in Linux and why it remains important to him. He also gives us a bit of music education.
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A developer has begun working on a new audio sub-system for the Linux kernel, which he is referring to as KLANG, the Kernel Level Audio Next Generation. KLANG was conceived after the developer became frustrated by ALSA, OSS4, and PulseAudio.
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Following yesterday’s news of a massive power regression within the Linux 3.5 kernel, James Bottomley has uncovered the kernel commit causing excessive power usage.
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Graphics Stack
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While the open-source Linux graphics drivers may not be up to scratch with the proprietary Linux graphics drivers from NVIDIA and AMD in terms of features, power efficiency, and performance, Linux isn’t the only operating system with less than desirable OpenGL drivers. I’ve been surprised by the OpenGL issues under OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” with the Retina MacBook Pro.
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We’re now going into eight months since the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series “Southern Islands” graphics cards first launched. In that time the Catalyst Linux support has been stable and fine, but the open-source driver support is still unusable.
There has been the DRM/KMS support already for the Southern Island GPUs within the mainline kernel, so there is kernel mode-setting support, but not much more. There is the new RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to provide the user-space 3D/OpenGL driver support, but that isn’t yet in a working state. Getting RadeonSI up and running is the main blocker right now for usable Radeon HD 7000 series open-source support. There isn’t even 2D acceleration support yet since its using GLAMOR and so first the 3D code-paths must actually work.
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The xf86-video-intel driver has picked up thousands of lines of new code today with the integration of a BRW assembler in order to compile shader programs on the fly and to remove inefficiencies and mistakes from current Intel shaders.
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With talk of a massive power regression in the recently released Linux 3.5 kernel, yesterday I began benchmarking some different systems with varying versions of the Linux kernel looking for any new kernel power regressions on different hardware.
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It turns out that minutes after writing AMD Open-Source S.I. Botched, Hope For The Future, a number of “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver commits landed in mainline Mesa.
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The NVIDIA 304.30 Linux graphics driver is available this Monday afternoon. There’s several exciting changes to this latest NVIDIA Linux driver for the 304 series that’s still in beta.
The 304.30 beta comes less than a month after the first hefty NVIDIA 304 Linux driver beta that brought DKMS installer support, RandR improvements, and much more. However, due to the hacking of NvNews, the NvNews Linux forums being eliminated, and NVIDIA not yet putting up their own Linux forums (their developers are certainly welcome here too), this is a rather quiet release. The NVIDIA 304.30 Linux driver isn’t also yet mentioned on NVIDIA.com until later in the week, but Hardy Doelfel of the NVIDIA Linux team was kind enough to write in about today’s driver release.
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Applications
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In my entomological work I often need to compare two images of bugs side-by-side.
Comparisons are surprisingly hard to do with either of the image viewers I normally use, namely Eye of Gnome and Ristretto. First I open two instances of the viewer and adjust their window sizes and positions for easy side-by-side comparison. I then open one image in one viewer window, and the other image in the other window. If I want to zoom in or out, or pan across the images, I have to do this independently in each viewer window. If I don’t save this two-instance arrangement on a dedicated workspace using ‘Save session on exit’, I’ll have to repeat the setting-up next time.
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Dia is a diagram and chart editor. Its user interface may be less attractive than those of other applications, but the results are no less stunning, and you cannot beat the open source price — free. Its drawing canvas looks a lot like the view you see in apps such as Paint, Powerpoint, OpenOffice Impress, LibreOffice Draw and GIMP.
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Proprietary
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Blackmagic Design today announced the release of DaVinci Resolve 9 public beta, a major new update to the world?s most advanced color correction tool featuring a completely redesigned user interface to optimize workflow speed. DaVinci Resolve 9 public beta is now available for free download to existing full featured DaVinci Resolve customers, as well as the free DaVinci Resolve Lite!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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A leading PC-user rights campaigner has voiced concern about video games developer Valve’s move to sell Linux-based versions of its products.
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Valve’s plan to release “nonfree” games that include DRM in Steam on Linux is “unethical,” according to Richard Stallman, a longtime advocate for free software and founder of the Free Software Foundation.
Stallman believes that software owners should have the freedom to modify and distribute the software as they please, and he takes umbrage with Valve’s use of DRM. The Free Software Foundation offers Windows 7 and OS X as examples of “nonfree” software that limits the rights of users. Free software — like the Linux platform on which Steam will be available — is not simply free of charge, but also allows users “freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve” it.
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Valve co-founder and current managing director Gabe Newell recently made it pretty clear how much he really hates Windows 8. Two weeks ago, Valve officially announced that they would be porting their Steam distribution service to Ubuntu and would be working to natively support Valve games on Linux, starting with Left 4 Dead 2. Their drive behind the project: Newell’s belief that Windows 8 will be a “catastrophe” for PC users.
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As you might have guessed, I spend a shameful amount of money on the recent Steam sale. It happened pretty much exactly as I said it would: money left my wallet gradually in sub $10 increments over the course of the week. Like a fucking conga line made out of $5 bills, stretching from my shaking, sweaty palms to the coffers of Valve. I don’t even know if I will ever even play all of these games. But I did install and play Dead Space 2 because… Well, because you play a fucking engineer.
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Ouya the open source gaming console which has currently raised nearly $6 million over on the Kickstarter website, has revealed that on top of securing support from the OnLive gaming service. It’s now also signed a deal to bring Final Fantasy III to the console, its Kickstarter page has revealed today.
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Desktop Environments
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The MATE development team has released version 1.4 of its desktop environment, adding support for sharing files via Bluetooth and further improving the Caja file manager. This update to the fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME now allows users to open bookmarks in the Caja side pane using the enter and space keys, and, in the file conflict dialogue, a button to show the differences between files has been added; the toggle button for the text-based location bar has been restored.
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Fans of Linux in general and Linux Mint in particular are no doubt already familiar with MATE, the GNOME 2-like desktop that was first included in Linux Mint 12 as an alternative for users wary of GNOME 3.
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In the latest Update Pack to Linux Mint Debian (UP4) released in March, MATE 1.2 and Cinnamon 1.4 were made available as well as an option called “gnome2-frozen” which allowed users to stick to Gnome 2 and skip the Update Pack altogether.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Now this is one of the things that you wouldn’t expect — Years after I left KDE behind me, today I’m back using it.. and honestly I feel again at home. I guess the whole backend changes that got through KDE4 were a bit too harsh for me at the time, and I could feel the rough edges. But after staying with GNOME2, XFCE, then Cinnamon.. this seems to be the best fit for me at this point.
Why did I decide to try this again? Well, even if it doesn’t happen that often, Cinnamon tends to crash from time to time, and that’s obnoxious when you’re working on something. Then there is another matter, which is that I’m using a second external monitor together with my laptop, as I’m doing network diagrams and other things on my dayjob, and for whatever reason the lockscreen provided by gnome-screensaver no longer works reliably: sometimes the second display is kept running, other times it doesn’t resume at all and I have to type blindly (with the risk that I’m actually typing my password on a different application), and so on so forth.
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GNOME Desktop
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Following the controversial information this weekend about some viewing GNOME as fading into abyss and losing relevance on the desktop, Christian Schaller has shared his views on the future of GNOME. In general he is very optimistic about the future of GNOME.
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In a talk given at the annual GUADEC developer conference, GNOME developers Xan López and Juan José Sánchez have set ambitious goals for the open source desktop project proposing the release of GNOME 3.12 as GNOME 4.0 in March 2014 and the creation touch enabled versions of GNOME for mobile devices.
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This year’s GUADEC was one of the best that I have ever attended. I have never seen the GNOME community so energised. New contributors were more visible than ever before, and all of them were fantastically enthusiastic and motivated. It is always a wonderful experience to see newcomers be inspired by our community. Our outreach efforts are more successful than ever.
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Today I’ll present you 5 Linux distribution focused on computer security, in this list I’ve not put 2 distro I’ve already talked about: Backtrack and Damn Vulnerable Linux.
The 5 Linux distribution are: DEFT (Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit), QubesOs, Pentoo, Lightweight Portable Security and CAINE.
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After providing benchmarks last week of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on different Amazon EC2 instance types, up today are more benchmarks from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Rather than just tossing out a lot of Amazon EC2 numbers of the different instance types to judge their performance, this article offers benchmarks of different Linux distributions on the same cloud. Tested here are Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Amazon Linux AMI 2012.03, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.
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There’s been no end in sight to the controversy over Linux desktop environments, and with new contenders including Unity, GNOME 3, and Cinnamon–to name just a few–users now face more choices than ever before.
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There is a new Linux distribution released almost every week, sometimes, even every day. The latest is one called Stella, and the first version is Stella 6.3. Stella is a desktop-focused remix of CentOS, and Stella 6.3 is based on CentOS 6.3.
If you are familiar with CentOS, you know that out of the box, it is not really designed as a desktop distribution. Stella changes all that, as it is primarily aimed at desktop users, while retaining the core enterprise features and capabilities of CentOS.
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Programs bundled with Stella include Firefox and Thunderbird ESR 10.0.6, the Pidgin IM client, version 2.6.9 of the GIMP image editor, LibreOffice 3.4.5 and the Transmission BitTorrent client. Stella includes additional third-party repositories such as Fedora’s Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) and the ELRepo RPM repository for Enterprise Linux packages. Two repositories – nux-dextop and nux-libreoffice – contain the additional desktop components, applications and the LibreOffice productivity suite that have been added to Stella.
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New Releases
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The Pentoo Team has announced last evening, July 30th, the public Beta release of the Pentoo 2012 operating system based on Gentoo Linux.
Pentoo 2012 Beta comes after three years of hard work to bring you all the latest and greatest tools for your daily penetration testing tasks.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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We have 5 computers in our household. My dad, my wife, and I have a laptop each, and my mom uses a desktop that sits in my parents’ bedroom. There is also a laptop that sits connected to our living room television. With the exception of this computer, we run Linux on all our computers. My mom and my wife use Kubuntu on their computers, while my dad and I have ArchLinux/KDE. The day before yesterday I realized that I hadn’t run updates on my dad’s laptop in a while so in haste, I issue the following at the terminal:
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Red Hat Family
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The developers behind the Stella Linux operating system have announced last evening, July 30th, that version 6.3 of the Stella distribution is now available for download.
Stella 6.3 follows the release of CentOS 6.3, an open source clone of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating system, and includes all the cool new stuff found in RHEL 6.3.
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Pat Riehecky announced last evening, July 30th, that the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Scientific Linux 6.3 operating system is now available for download and testing.
Scientific Linux 6.3 RC1 comes with the LibreOffice office suite, which replaced the depricated OpenOffice.org application. Moreover, various packages were updated in this release, including yum-conf, OpenAFS 1.6.1, rpmfusion-free-release 6.1, yum-conf-rpmfusion 0.1, gtk2-immodules 2.18.9, gtk2-immodule-xim 2.18.9, ibus-gtk 1.3.4, procps 3.2.8 , and pacemaker 1.1.7.
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Fedora
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A Fedora developer has proposed adding the packages for the MATE Desktop Environment – a fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME – into the repositories for Fedora 18, which is due for release in early November. The proposal was approved at yesterday’s meeting of Fedora’s Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). This is, however, conditional on the developers involved merging the desktop components into Fedora’s package repositories on time, otherwise the MATE desktop will have to wait for a future Fedora version. Since Fedora’s rules allow new packages to be added to the update repositories, MATE – which has come to the fore primarily through Linux Mint – could find its way into all currently maintained Fedora versions.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Release Team, through Adam D. Barratt, announced a few days ago on their mailing list that the next major release of the Debian operating system will be named Jessie.
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If you’ve ever stumbled upon http://www.debian.org/trademark , you might be aware that, as a project, we’ve been working on a proper trademark policy since quite a while.
I’m happy to attach a first complete draft of such a policy, and I’m looking for comment on it.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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At the request of many Phoronix readers following the release of updated Arch Linux media, here are some new Arch Linux benchmarks. However, this is not just Arch vs. Ubuntu, but rather a larger Linux distribution performance comparison. In this article are benchmark results from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Fedora 17, Slackware 14.0 Beta, and Arch Linux.
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We started an Open Discussion section on Muktware, where readers can suggest topics for discussion (the idea is to use these discussions as base to create stories ). The second topic was about the target audience of Ubuntu. The OP (original poster) wrote about his own dilemma to pin-point the core market of Ubuntu, which generated some heat. I think that’s an important topic for various reasons. I, being a FOSS/Ubuntu advocate, often come across the same question as the OP was asking. What is the target audience of Ubuntu?
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Flavours and Variants
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If you’ve read my very recent review of Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce, you’ll know how pleased I was with it. Given that my latest long-term review of Kubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” just ended, I needed something new, so this was going to be it. Follow the jump to see what this is like over the course of 7-10 days.
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Three months on, my Raspberry Pi is still proving a delight. I have settled on the Raspbian distribution as my tinkerer’s habitat, giving me access to the floating-point unit in the glibc libraries (especially libm.so).
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A little over six weeks ago I posted a very early image of Bodhi for the RaspBerry Pi. Today I am happy to let everyone know that I have published what I consider to be a “beta” quality image:
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Phones
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It’s been an emotional journey for fans of webOS, but there was a glimmer of hope for those who owned the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, or HP Veer in the form of Open webOS.
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HP has disappointed and infuriated webOS device owners with the news that its official Open webOS platform – the open-source reincarnation of Palm’s ill-fated OS – will not run on any existing devices. The news, confirmed by the Open webOS team, means those with a TouchPad, Pre, Pixi or other Palm/HP device won’t be able to use HP’s version of webOS moving forward; the company claims that’s because of a lack of driver support for the specific hardware used.
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Android
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The power of open source is the ability to be able to see everything that was done for the operating system. A source code allows many coders to see the inner workings of programs, and eventually someone out there will be able to improve the code, or fix some bugs thanks to the open source.
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Our friends over at AndroidPolice made quite the discovery recently, and it has to do with multiple user accounts within Android. Not only would it be a great feature to have, it appears that Google might be preparing for it, as AP has found several instances within AOSP that could lead to multiple user accounts. You can check out their full post on it here, but we want to know your thoughts on this. I can think of a few scenarios in which multiple user accounts would be very useful, one being that family tablet that we all seem to share. Of course, another is the business addict that likes to separate work and home, while still using one device. And how about the little brother you have that always wants your phone? The possibilities are nearly endless.
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The A10 Media PC is small computer with an Allwinner A10 processor designed to turn any TV into a PC. It ships with Google Android 4.0 software, but thanks to the A10 chip, it should also support Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems.
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Step forward Ars Technica and a report that Near Field Comms (using ACR122U and SCL3711 card readers) have been the route to hack Google Android and Linux-based MeeGo operating systems…
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A senior official at a Linux distribution reminds us that open source isn’t just for servers and Android handsets
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Here’s some big news for fans of the diminutive Raspberry Pi devices (one is shown here): Android 4.0 (the Ice Cream Sandwich version) is headed for a port that will become available on the
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Raspberry Pi knows how to create buzz. The extremely successful Open Source project has now salivated it’s users by porting Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to this $25 device.
Raspberry Pi developer Naren is working on this port and has succeeded in smoothly running hardware-accelerated graphics and video on this device. The only missing part is the audio support.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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A slide pack allegedly showing details of Sony’s new tablet has surfaced. One of the more interesting parts of the leak is that Sony will unify its Xperia branding for both smartphones and tablets. It sounds like Sony will use the Xperia brand for all mobile technology and this new product could be the first ‘Xperia Tablet’ to be released.
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Officially announced earlier this month, the Archos 9.7 Carbon is available for purchase now both in the US, and the UK.
US customers can buy the tablet here, for only $249.99. If you’re in the UK, go here to get the device for £229.99.
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Remember that Android gaming-tablet, the Wikipad, that we talked about last May? No? I don’t blame you, I’d forgotten all about it too. But when last we heard about it, it was a 7″ glasses-free 3D enabled Android tablet that had an add-on that gave it physical controls for gaming, and it was going to be powered by cloud-gaming service Gaikai.
I was more than a bit skeptical about the Wikipad but I’m slowly coming around, based on new information and some changes in the gaming-scape.
First, on the hardware itself, yesterday VentureBeat shared some exclusive specs. The hardware of the tablet (setting aside the controller attachment) seems solid. The Wikipad is now a 10.1″ tablet with a 1280×800 IPS display. Inside is a Tegra 3 T30 chip running at 1.4 Ghz. That makes it a bit faster than the Google Nexus 7 and a bit slower than the ASUS Transformer Prime Infinity 700. The Wikipad includes a gig of RAM and at least 16 GB of storage; that last figure might be adjusted upwards before launch. The Wikipad will be lighter than the iPad 3 (560 grams vs 652 grams). It’ll run Android Jelly Bean.
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Educational initiative OLPC (One Laptop per Child), which attracted headlines in 2005 for its $100 laptop – at the time an incredibly low price – has announced the first details of its next generation of devices. The XO-4 Touch will use touchscreen technology from the Swedish company Neonode.
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Netflix has released its Chaos Monkey tool to open source. Chaos Monkey is a testing utility that randomly shuts down virtual machine instances across large systems, ensuring that system is built with a great degree of resilience. Chaos Monkey’s is built in Amazon Web Service’s system, but its design is flexible enough for it to be used with cloud providers other than Amazon and with other instance groupings, Netflix said.
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Netflix has released Chaos Monkey, which it uses internally to test the resiliency of its Amazon Web Services cloud computing architecture, making available for free one of the tools the video streaming company uses to keep its massive cloud computing architecture running.
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The first time I spoke with Kevin Fleming, was back in 2006 about a new collaboration that Asterisk built at the time with Zimbra. I had spoke with Mark Spencer, the founder of Asterisk many times before, but Fleming was the ‘new’ guy, taking on a leadership role in the open source Asterisk VoIP project.
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Launched in May, Inktank is one of the newest companies to enter the still very new open source cloud computing industry. But it’s got a great head start as the enterprise support arm of the Ceph storage system. The one-time doctoral thesis of founder Sage Weil, Ceph has been incubating as an open source project with L.A.-based web hosting company DreamHost over the last eight years.
“The founders and the community realized that in order for companies to adopt Ceph and use it, it needed to have commercial support available,” said Ross Turk, VP of community at Inktank. “The technology created a necessity for the company, instead of a company creating technology to make money.”
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We all love open source Wireshark for packet capture right?
Apparently, that isn’t always the case. Researcher Robert Deaton took the stage at Defcon to announce a new open source effort that could one day possibly unseat Wireshark.
Deaton said that every team at the Defcon CTP (Capture the Packet) contest uses Wireshark. That said he argued that in his view it’s the wrong tool for the job.
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Azavea, an award winning geospatial analysis (GIS) software development company and the Center for Security and Crime Science at Temple University announce the release of ACS Alchemist, an open source tool that enables the extraction of up to 100 variables of the American Community Survey (ACS). The data is extracted directly into a format convenient for display on maps or for use in advanced spatial analysis and modeling. The source code for ACS Alchemist is being released under the GNU General Public License and is available for download at: https://github.com/azavea/acs-alchemist.
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Azul Systems has announced a new programme for open source developers that will allow them to use its Zing JVM for development, qualification and testing of their open source applications. Zing JVM, which runs on commodity x86 servers, is a heavily optimised Java virtual machine with a high performance, pauseless garbage collection system.
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Web Browsers
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So it’s simply a matter of choosing your preferred application for this task… and this is a decision often influenced by pre-installed options on a user’s preferred choice of hardware and therefore platform.
If you don’t get on with Internet Explorer, then there’s always Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox — and even Flock, Maxthon, Deepnet Explorer and Phaseout 5.
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Chrome
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Google Chrome version 21.0.1180.60 (21.0.1180.57 for Mac and Linux) is out, fixing 15 security vulnerabilities in the search giant’s browser. Strictly from a security perspective, you should upgrade as soon as possible.
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Mozilla
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As we reported in early July, Mozilla has pulled back on further development of its long-standing Thunderbird email platform, despite the fact that it has more than 20 million users. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has a blog post up about the topic.
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SaaS
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While Hadoop is all the rage in the technology media today, it has barely scratched the surface of enterprise adoption. In fact, if anything, we are still only on the first few steps of the Big Data marathon, a race that Hadoop seems set to win despite its many shortcomings.
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Rackspace switched on its OpenStack-powered cloud on Tuesday, making the end of a two-year journey and the beginning of the long struggle for relevance to the cloud-enabled enterprise.
The availability of OpenStack-backed Cloud Databases, Cloud Servers and a Control Panel for US customers (a UK launch is slated for the 15 August), gives developers access to a range of rentable infrastructure based on the open-source OpenStack system.
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The company’s OpenStack era launches with a portfolio of cloud services. Current customers can migrate over time.
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If one of the major selling points of the cloud is that it makes data available from anywhere at anytime, it’s only natural for users to expect to be able to access it from mobile devices as well as traditional PCs. For users of ownCloud, the open source data-sharing platform, that’s now easier than ever thanks to the release of ownCloud apps for Android and iOS. Here’s the scoop and what it means for the open source channel.
The apps, which run on Android devices, iPhones and iPads, allow users to interact fully with data stored in an ownCloud-based infrastructure. Besides browsing and downloading files, they can also upload, delete and modify data. Here’s a look at the software in action:
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Databases
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Oracle is making a pitch to buy Xsigo Systems, as it continues to add products and services to its already burgeoning array of enterprise products.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The LibreOffice developers have made LibreOffice 3.6.0 RC4, the latest pre-release version of the office suite, available, after having to skip a release candidate. The last release candidate was RC2, and examining the release notes shows that RC3 wasn’t published. This was because the LibreOffice Windows build system failed and broke a number of Windows builds, making them unrunnable; a problem which was picked up by the LibreOffice Q&A teams before publication.
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CMS
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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From August 21. to 26. there is Campus Party in Berlin. I was asked beforeif I can make suggestions for good speakers from the Free Software community.That is what I did. So beside the already announced keynote speakers like Jon “maddog” Hall, MarkSurman (Mozilla Foundation), and Rainey Reitman (EFF) to following talks will take place in the Free Software track…N
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Public Services/Government
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The folks behind CONNECT, based on feedback from community members going through ONC onboarding, have made version 3.3.1 available.
CONNECT essentially uses National Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) standards and protocols for secure health information exchange. ONC issued the latest full release, that being 3.3, on March 16 of this year, with improved performance, usability, and higher exchange volume features.
Describing this week’s 3.3.1 release as a patch, the group explained that it carries two main features. The first, which was a request from the Social Security Administration, enables users to tap both PurposeOfUse and PurposeForUse, dependent on the end-point, whereas CONNECT 3.3 supported one or the other.
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Openness/Sharing
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There is no doubt that there is tremendous goodwill, not to mention countless exciting experiments, when it comes to making the world of work more deeply human—designed to promote more freedom, equity, and engagement, and passion. Why, then, can those words sound so cheap and drained of their juice when we hear them repeated over and over by leaders of all stripes? Probably because they’re spoken so much more often than they’re ever enacted.
That’s why it’s so very refreshing to spend time with a leader who is relentlessly inventive and impressively effective as a champion of the fullest expression of humanity at work. We aim too low, says Ricardo Semler, the irrepressible force behind Brazil’s Semco Group. “We constantly talk about passion—serving customers passionately, filling in forms passionately—but what if we created the conditions for people to feel exhilaration, to get involved to the point they shout ‘yes!’ and give each other high fives because they did if their way and it worked?” What if, instead of assuming passion will just show up when we invoke it, we focused on designing organizations to unleash human flourishing?
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Movim is the latest in decentralised social networks to hit the scene, the most well-known being Diaspora. It’s entirely open-source code, built using PHP, SQL, HTML5 and CSS. The main sentiment behind the project is that you should be the one who has control over your data.
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Open Data
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Fewer than half of all registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) users have contributed to the open source project’s mapping data according to a new study by researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Of the mapping platform’s 500,000 registered members, approximately 38% had contributed data at least once. The study, which examined activity of registered OSM users up to December 2011, found that more than 24,000 users (about 5% of the total) had contributed at least 1,000 edited nodes.
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The Arduino has come to define the hands-on microcontroller, for education and for practical applications. But the associated software tools are very much tied to the traditional desktop. Codebender is hoping to change that by taking Arduino development into the cloud while keeping it open source.
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Programming
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PathScale is working on a new project that is internally dubbed “DogFood”, it’s a new integrated development environment (IDE) based upon Qt Creator but with a greater focus on C++ and other new development concepts.
In response to Nokia shutting down their Brisbane office and getting rid of those developers where several key Qt components are developed, C. Bergström shared that PathScale is hiring.
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Standards/Consortia
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It doesn’t have to be that way. Scott Davis, founder of ThirstyHead, a training and consulting company, argued at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) that HTML5 Video is ready to go today.
Davis opened by saying that, unlike closed video standards, HTML5 video can play on a wide variety of devices – everything from smartphones to HDTVs. It achieves this by not supporting any single video format or container. With this multiple-choice approach, HTML5 makes a “standard” by defining a standard way to embed video in webpages using the video element.
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IT WORLD CANADA CURATED Developers can use Sencha’s Touch 2 framework to build applications that can be deployed on the Web or offered through an app store
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Health/Nutrition
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After a series of court defeats over the past few years, Monsanto and friends are trying to use Congress to make an end-run around the courts and current law. Lawsuits brought by opponents of genetically engineered (GE) crops resulted in the temporary removal of two products — Roundup Ready Alfalfa and Roundup Ready Sugarbeets — from the market. If the biotechnology industry and the legislators they support have their way, future GE crops will not suffer the same fate.
Genetically engineered crops are plants that have had genes from other species inserted into their DNA. “Roundup Ready”crops like alfalfa and sugarbeets fall in a class of GE crops called “herbicide tolerant” crops, which are engineered to survive exposure to Monsanto’s bestselling herbicide Roundup. Farmers spray their entire fields with Roundup, killing only the weeds. Monsanto profits by selling both the seeds and increased quantities of Roundup herbicide.
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n case you had any doubt that California’s Prop 37 — which would require labeling of food containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) — is a significant threat to industry, a top food lobby has now made it perfectly clear.
In a recent speech to the American Soybean Association (most soy grown in the U.S. is genetically modified), Grocery Manufacturers Association President Pamela Bailey said that defeating the initiative “is the single-highest priority for GMA this year.”
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Security
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Finance
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The Wall Street Journal has long led the struggle against freer more efficient markets. Whatever its rhetoric, its policies favor crony capitalism. The latest example is the July 23, 2012 article: by Francesco Guerrera entitled “Too Many Cops on the Bank Beat.”
He begins the article with this question, which foreshadows the alternate reality the article inhabits. Bank examiners are not nannies and bankers are not children. The metaphor demonstrates the author’s lack of seriousness.
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It’s easy for Americans to labor under the delusion that other parts of the the world have less obvious forms of corruption or its milder form, conflict of interest, than our revolving door system (one of my favorites was when the NY Fed staffer tasked to overseeing AIG left….to AIG).
And ex banking, that actually is true in most advanced economies. But as a reminder of how backs get scratched in Europe, we have Mario Draghi. The former head of the Bank of Italy, now ECB chairman, was responsible for European operations for Goldman from 2002 to 2005, and predictably has no memory of the currency swaps deal that enabled Greece to camouflage the size of its budget deficit. The new contretemps involves his membership in the Group of Thirty (aka G30), which despite its grand claims, is a bank lobbying group, even as he is serving as the head of the ECB. An alert reader pointed me to the story in Der Spiegel (German version only) and Google translate does a serviceable job.
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Civil Rights
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Isn’t it amazing that the first sentence there (“I respect the vice president”) can precede the next one (“He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not”) without any notice or controversy? I realize insincere expressions of respect are rote ritualism among American political elites, but still, McCain’s statement amounts to this pronouncement: Dick Cheney authorized torture — he is a torturer — and I respect him. How can that be an acceptable sentiment to express? Of course, it’s even more notable that political officials whom everyone knows authorized torture are walking around free, respected and prosperous, completely shielded from all criminal accountability. “Torture” has been permanently transformed from an unspeakable taboo into a garden-variety political controversy, where it shall long remain.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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n a US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling, Verizon was ordered to stop charging users an additional fee for using their 4G smartphones and tablets as Wi-Fi hotspots, aka tethering.
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