10.18.14

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Why you should buy computers with Linux preinstalled

• Italian consumers shouldn’t have to pay for software they don’t want – Letter to Regulators

  FSFE and Italian consumer association ADUC, along with Italian group ILS, are asking regulators to take concrete steps to protect Italians from being forced to pay for software they do not want or need. Italy’s High Court ruled in September that computer vendors must reimburse customers for the price of unwanted non-free software that comes pre-installed on PCs and laptops. Today, FSFE, ADUC and ILS have sent a letter to the Italian competition authorities, calling on them to ensure that vendors will comply with the High Court’s decision, and respect the rights of their customers.

• The Advantages of Computer Hardware Designed For Linux

  When you buy a computer with Linux pre-installed, like when you buy from Apple, you can be sure that the hardware works beautifully with your chosen operating system. OK, so the hardware may not have been designed specifically to run Linux, but the computer vendor has chosen that hardware specifically because it DOES work well with Linux — any Linux!

• Desktop

  • Sager NP2740 Review – A Linux Powerhouse

    I was looking for something powerful to stream some games on, but also light enough that it was not going to feel like a brick next to my Chromebook. Since Linux is my OS of choice, having reasonable Linux support is also on my list of desires. Because of this I wanted to stay away from ATI graphics cards and nVidia cards with optimus.

• Server

  • DOCKER 1.3: SIGNED IMAGES, PROCESS INJECTION, SECURITY OPTIONS, MAC SHARED DIRECTORIES

    First up, in this release, the Docker Engine will now automatically verify the provenance and integrity of all Official Repos using digital signatures. Official Repos are Docker images curated and optimized by the Docker community to be the best building blocks for assembling distributed applications. A valid signature provides an added level of trust by indicating that the Official Repo image has not been tampered with.

  • Docker 1.3 arrives with improved security

    People love Docker’s ability to let them run more applications on a single server than any virtualization program. But, many of them are wary of Docker’s security. In this latest release, Docker 1.3 starts assuring companies that Docker application images can be deployed safely.

  • How to grant rights to users to use Docker in Fedora

• Kernel Space

  • Feature-creep will ensure that systemd stays

    Nussbaum was, no doubt, sincere in what he said. But his remedy to avoid what has become a major issue for many Debian users can only be used for so long.

  • Linus admits cocking up the Linux community

    Systemd developer Lennart Poettering recently described the Linux community as “not a friendly place to be in” with open source community mailing lists are rife with language and even stronger opinions which has descended into death threats. Torvalds, in a “fireside chat” with Intel’s Dirk Hohndel at LinuxCon Europe, insisted that “to become a kernel developer, you need to enjoy a certain amount of pain,” but also acknowledged a “metric s—load” of mistakes he wishes he could fix.

  • Video: Linux Kernel Developers Respond to Concerns About Community Culture

    Shortly after a live Q&A with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe on Wednesday, the kernel developer panel took the stage for a roundtable discussion. LWN Editor and panel moderator Jon Corbet didn’t beat around the bush; he asked the panelists to first respond to systemd developer Lennart Poettering’s controversial post in which he called the open source community “a sick place.” The developers’ responses were varied, but Linaro developer Grant Likely’s thoughts perhaps drew the most audience applause.

  • Linux developers and users should be civil while disagreeing passionately

    I’m not sure how I missed the post below by Lennart Poettering on Google+ back on October 6. Reading it as left me somewhat discombobulated since I wrote about how diverse points of view and passion make Linux stronger a few days ago. Unfortunately, I did not take into account the need for civility even in passionate disagreements, and I think I downplayed how out of hand things have gotten among some Linux developers. My apologies to my readers for not taking the issue seriously enough.

  • Graphics Stack

    • AMD’s Radeon R9 285 On Linux Offers Good OpenCL Performance

      In complementing this week’s Linux review of the AMD Radeon R9 285 and follow-up articles with some extra GPU scaling tests and Catalyst AI Linux benchmarks, here’s some more OpenCL R9 285 “Tonga” performance numbers under Ubuntu compared to what was shared in the original Linux review.

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • Corel AfterShot Pro 2.1

      Corel has updated its AfterShot Pro software to Version 2.1. Available free to registered users, the 2.1 update introduces a number of new features and enhancements including new HDR tools for Mac and Linux, support for more than 17 new raw camera profiles, an improved Highlight Recovery Tool, as well as various performance and stability enhancements. Newly supported cameras include the Canon SX50 HS, the Fujifilm X-T1, X-E1, X-E2, X-Pro1, X-M1, X100S and X20, the Nikon D4s, D3300, 1 V3, 1 J4, Coolpix P330 and Coolpix A, and the Pentax Q, 645Z and K-500.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Install PXE Server On CentOS 7

    • How to create and use Python CGI scripts

    • ffs ssl

      You search “how to set up https” on the Googs and click the first link. It takes you here which tells you how to use StartSSL, which generates the key in your browser. Whoops, your private key is now known to another server on this internet! Why do people even recommend this? It’s the worst of the worst of Javascript crypto.

  • Wine or Emulation

    • Wine 1.7.29 Gets Support for More Windows Apps and Games

      A new version of Wine (Wine is not an emulator), 1.7.29, has been made available and the developers have made a number of improvements and have added some fixes for various games and other apps.

    • Wine 1.7.29 Is Still Implementing DirectWrite

      A day after the debut of CodeWeavers CrossOver 14.0, Wine 1.7.29 is now available.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Qt 5.4 Beta Available

      I am extremely happy to announce that Qt 5.4 Beta is now available for download. There are a lot of new and interesting things in Qt 5.4 and I will try to summarize the most important highlights in this blog post.

    • KDE FRAMEWORKS 5.3 AND KDE PLASMA 5.1 FOR FEDORA ARE READY!

      Fedora KDE SIG is happy to announce that latest version of KDE Frameworks 5 have just reached stable repositories of Fedora and brand new version of KDE Plasma 5 is now available in the our Plasma 5 COPR.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • IPFire 2.15 Core 84 Firewall OS Gets Fixes for Shellshock and Other Issues

      A developer of the ipfire.org team, Michael Tremer, has announced that the IPFire 2.15 Core 84 Linux-based firewall distribution has been released and comes with a long list of fixes, some of them for the latest security issues.

  • Screenshots

    • SELKS 1.0

  • Gentoo Family

    • For Gentoo Linux Initiates, Iron Penguin May Be Too Heavy

      Gentoo Linux is very easy to use provided you do not progress beyond the live session using the most recent Iron Penguin release. If you actually proceed with installing Gentoo onto a hard drive, prepare for some steep learning curves and lots of manual labor.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat and Cloudera join forces for Hadoop-on-OpenStack

      Red Hat Inc. and Cloudera Inc. are teaming up to make it more practical for organizations to deploy Hadoop on OpenStack in a landmark partnership that takes advantage of the new capabilities included in the latest version of the open-source cloud operating system.

    • Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) And Cloudera To Initiate Big Data Alliance

    • Through Partnerships and More, Red Hat Can Compete with Tech Titans

      Just in case you thought the OpenStack cloud computing race wasn’t crowded enough, Oracle stepped up the competition recently by making its Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux distribution generally available. Based on the OpenStack Icehouse release, it allows users to control Oracle Linux and Oracle VM through OpenStack in production environments.

    • Scientific Linux 7.0 Screenshot Tour

    • Fedora

      • Right Side of History, Fedora 21 Looking Good, and KWayland

        In a bit of a slow news day today we still found out that Fedora 21 is looking good. Jim Zemlin says “Linux is on the right side of history” and The Document Foundation says, “Thanks” for the all the cool dough. In other news, Jack Wallen tries to make sense of Ubuntu release cycles and how it effects older machines. And finally today, Martin Gräßlin introduces KWayland.

      • Fedora Council, L10N Zanata, FUDCon LATAM, Taskotron, and Retrace improvements

        Last week, the Fedora Project Board unanimously approved its replacement, a new top-level leadership and governance body we’re calling the Fedora Council. Read more about it in John Rose’s announcement message, and our previous Fedora Magazine article about upcoming elections.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Leave No Trace Online or Offline with the Tails 1.2 Linux-Based OS

        Tails is, above all else, a Linux distribution and is based on Debian. It shares some of the characteristics of the Linux base, but it integrates a unique collection of applications that are available for users who want to remain anonymous.

      • Tails 1.2 has been released

        If you have a Tails USB lying on your desk somewhere it’s time to plug it in, boot to it, and upgrade it (with the built in updater of course). Yes, the team behind Tails have released version 1.2 of their incognito liveUSB distribution.

      • Elive 2.3.9 beta released

        The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.3.9

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir

          Mir was big during the space race and it’s a big part of Canonical’s unification strategy. We talk to one of its chief architects at mission control.

        • Best YouTube Players for Ubuntu

          If you’re a geek, nerd, or a programming prodigy, a command line YouTube player will give you plenty of bragging rights. MPS-Youtube is a fabulous player that lets you search and play videos from YouTube, download them, and even view comments all using just your command line. Written in Python, the text interface is used for sifting through the videos. Then, once you’ve chosen the video you want to play, the software then hooks into mplayer or mpv to show you the video. Though this won’t work on a full sans-X11 terminal, it will surely give you the thrills of doing the latest things in a cool old school sort of way.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi time-lapse camera

    We love the Raspberry Pi camera. It’s a lovely little piece of kit that is as versatile as the Pi and it doesn’t even take up any of the USB slots. We’ve done a bit of time-lapse photography in the past but that was using a proper camera attached to the Pi – now we’re doing it with just the Pi camera and a lot less code thanks to the picamera Python module.

  • HP to shutter webOS cloud services

    The company says it’s given the few owners of webOS devices three years of service since canning the software, but that “The user count has dwindled to the point where it is no longer viable to keep the services running.”

  • Phones

    • Tizen

      • Tizen Developer Summit Shanghai Device Giveaways – Intel NUC / MinnowBoard MAX / Gear 2

      • Modular smartwatch runs Tizen on Edison

        A startup is prepping a modular “Blocks ” watch that runs Tizen on an Atom-based Intel Edison module, and houses modular components in the watchband links.

        Samsung’s Tizen-based Gear S, Gear 2, and Gear 2 Neo are no longer the only Tizen-based smartwatches on the planet. A startup called Blocks, inspired by the modular smartphone concept from Phonebloks and Google’s related Project Ara , has announced a modular smartwatch that runs Tizen on an Intel Edison module. The Blocks watch houses modular components in each link of the watch wristband, which can be snapped and unsnapped using plug connectors.

    • Android

      • Android Exec Says Google Will Loosen Reins on Watches, TVs and Cars Over Time

        “It’s not some Google-way-or-the-highway kind of thing,” the company’s vice president of engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer said in an interview on Tuesday. His comments came as Google rolled out Android 5.0, a.k.a. Lollipop, which is designed to power a wide range of other devices beyond the usual phones and tablets.

      • Mobile pico projector does surround sound too

        A mobile, Android A/V robot on Kickstarter called the “Keecker” offers surround sound, a pico projector, a panoramic camera, sensors, and 1TB of storage.

      • Will Android and Chrome marry?

        The WSJ reported that “Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s vice president of engineering for its Android mobile-operating system, is now also overseeing the engineering team behind Google’s Chrome operating system.” The paper believes that is a sign that Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Android, Chrome and Apps since 2013, plans on merging the two operating systems sooner rather than later.

      • All current Nexuses, including Nexus 4 and 2012 Nexus 7, will get Lollipop

        Google’s official Android Lollipop announcement this morning originally didn’t mention some older Nexus devices—namely, the Nexus 4 and the 2012 Nexus 7. However, Google has confirmed to us that those older devices will indeed be getting Android 5.0, as will the Nexus 5, 2013 Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and the Google Play Edition devices.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source moves from accepted to expected

• 
  Lessons learned developing Lynis, an open source security auditing tool

  If you’ve been involved with information security for more than a decade, you’ve probably heard of Rootkit Hunter or rkhunter, a software whose primary goal is to discover malware and local exploits on Unix and Linux.

• Events

  • Videos: LinuxCon Europe 2014

    Here’s Linus with Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, Dirk Hohndel on the next 12 months of the Linux kernel:

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla and Telefónica Partner to Simplify Voice and Video Calls on the Web

      Mozilla is extending its relationship with Telefonica by making it easier than ever to communicate on the Web.

      Telefónica has been an invaluable partner in helping Mozilla develop and bring Firefox OS to market with 12 devices now available in 24 countries. We’re now expanding our relationship, exploring how to simplify communications over the Web by providing people with the first global communications system built directly into a browser.

    • Mozilla’s Firefox Hello Service Brings Skype-like Features to the Browser

      For months now, Mozilla has been experimenting with streaming media and video features for Firefox. The Firefox for Android Beta 33, for example, featured a send-to-device streaming scheme that allowed users to stream videos on a mobile device to a TV or second screen.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • OpenStack hooks up with Hadoop to bring big data to the cloud

    OpenStack, the open-source cloud from a who’s who list of technology companies has just released its latest version, the big data-friendly OpenStack 2014.2 dubbed Juno.

  • OpenStack Summit interview series: the road to Kilo

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Matthew Garrett joins Free Software Foundation board of directors

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the addition of Matthew Garrett to its board of directors.

  • The Free Software Foundation opens nominations for the 17th annual Free Software Awards

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today announced the opening of nominations for the 17th annual Free Software Awards. The Free Software Awards include the Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

• Public Services/Government

  • Netherlands receives Undesa award for its approach to e-government

    Undesa’s Global e-Government Forum is one of the UN initiatives to promote e-government. The international meeting was organised for the third consecutive year, the first two having taken place in Seoul, South Korea. The forum promotes smart governance. It focusses on sustainable development, open government and network society. The organisers also aim to get countries exchange ideas and experiences.

  • Dutch Parliament Urges Government to Get More Open Source and Spend Less Money

    The Dutch parliament is pushing for the use of more open source software in the country and is holding the government responsible for the failure to better implement the already existing policies.

  • Dutch Parliament urges increase of open source

    The Dutch government must increase its use of open source software, recommends the the country’s parliament. It wants to make open standards mandatory and use open source when equal to or better than proprietary solutions for all ICT projects over 5 million euro.

  • The Low Country Aims Higher

    The Netherlands, alone, has seen billions of Euros squandered each year due to failed ICT projects. It is so easy to sign a cheque and hope problems will disappear but that abstraction allows a lot of waste such as paying for permission to run computers the government owns outright. By using FLOSS a huge slice of costs is eliminated. Better management will take care of the rest but opening ICT projects to competition surely reduces costs and promotes local businesses boosting GDP and tax-revenue. ICT that is a revenue generator rather than a cost is the pot of gold for governments everywhere. ICT should not be a conveyor-belt of money flowing to M$ and “partners”. That’s not the purpose. Finding, modifying, creating and distributing information as efficiently as possible is the only valid justification for money spend on ICT.

  • Still more open source in Sweden’s Alingsås

    Strengthened by experience, the Swedish municipality of Alingsås is increasingly turning to open source solutions, announced Göran Westerlund, head of the municipal IT department. “Open source is reducing our dependence on specific ICT suppliers”, Westerlund says.

  • Open source central to e-health project Danish Syddjurs

    Open source and HL7, an open standard for healthcare IT solutions, are key elements in a tender for an e-health telemedicine project to be implemented at the Danish municipality of Syddjurs. “By using open source, we aim to encourage the development of new functionalities”, says Frederik Mølgaard Thayssen, IT project leader.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Source Women, Preinstalled Linux & the SF Giants

  • Open source drones, open source in Europe, and more

Leftovers

• Security

  • SSL, POODLE, and you

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Massive Growth in Non-Existent Crime

    It is lead news in every outlet of the mainstream media today that there is a massive increase in terrorism – as everyone can plainly see from all the bodies littering our streets.

    I can also tell you that there is a massive increase in the threat of deadly asteroids about to hit Britain and destroy us all. My unimpeachable evidence for the existence of this massive asteroid threat is my own anti-asteroid activity. I and my dedicated team have visited 268 sites this year where we thought an asteroid was about to strike. That represents a 40% increase on our activity last year and therefore the media can say a 40% increase in the asteroid threat.

• Censorship

  • Journalists turn to Google Groups for content distribution

    The new pooling mechanism will be opened to more journalists after an evaluation period has concluded, it will be interesting to see whether the new system is able to subvert censorship attempts by the current and succeeding administrations.

• Privacy

  • Tor Browser 4.0 is released

    This release also features an in-browser updater, and a completely reorganized bundle directory structure to make this updater possible. This means that simply extracting a 4.0 Tor Browser over a 3.6.6 Tor Browser will not work. Please also be aware that the security of the updater depends on the specific CA that issued the www.torproject.org HTTPS certificate (Digicert), and so it still must be activated manually through the Help (“?”) “about browser” menu option. Very soon, we will support both strong HTTPS site-specific certificate pinning (ticket #11955) and update package signatures (ticket #13379). Until then, we do not recommend using this updater if you need stronger security and normally verify GPG signatures.

  • F.B.I. Director to Call ‘Dark’ Devices a Hindrance to Crime Solving in a Policy Speech

• Civil Rights

  • Terrorism Bill: The French Senate Adopts The Law Eroding Liberties

    After two days of debate, the French Senate just passed the “Terrorism” Bill [fr] on its first and only reading. While some senators have courageously fought against the intrusive provisions led by the Minister of Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, La Quadrature du Net regrets that the truncated1 legislative debate has failed to correct the unsuitable and dangerous provisions [fr] of this text. It will be examined by a Joint Commission in the coming weeks, where it will likely be adopted without any substantial change.

  • MO ALEC Leader Says Right to Work Is Solution to Ferguson

    Yet a leader of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Missouri, House Speaker Tim Jones, says he has the solution to unrest in Ferguson: bust the unions.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • HBO goes online and it doesn’t want net neutrality

    It seems to be the beginning of the end of the cable television in the US. Yesterday entertainment giant HBO announced they will start offering Internet subscription without requiring any cable subscription.

    Today CBS, yet another leading TV network, announced their move to the Internet. The TV network launched a new video on demand and live streaming service for the CBS Television Network, called CBS All Access. The service is available immediately via a web browser, iOS or Android apps.