09.27.13
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 8:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A wide range of GNU/Linux distributions as a strength and the problem Microsoft is having with Windows XP
The “Too Many Linux Distros” debate is apparently not dead yet [1]. This piece of FUD almost vanished some years ago, but some people still try to characterise diversity as “fragmentation”. This FUD pattern was popular among Android bashers/haters some years ago. Linux Format is currently entertaining the counter-argument [2,3] and new releases for old PCs [4,5] help remind us that the wide range of distributions suits the diversity of needs. Just as we have trucks, vans, sedans, motorcycles etc. and they come in many colours, designs and so forth with free market competition, in the GNU/Linux world there is modularity which enables creating many systems, either by oneself or by a distributor who targets those in need. Some distributions, like the new Untangle [6], are very task-oriented and some new distributions even merge Chrome OS and Linux Mint [7], combining the best of two popular operating systems.
A world where there is only one GNU/Linux distribution would be a sad world. It would be like Microsoft or Apple. They advocate no choice and no diversity simply because they cannot scale to accommodate and maintain many releases (Microsoft can barely even maintain XP anymore, despite it having a large userbase [8]). They lie about it all simply because it’s simpler than admitting their weaknesses. They want a Boeing-Airbus kind of world, even where cars roam (huge diversity there). █
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Since I’ve been following Linux and FOSS (thirteen years or so by my estimation), questions regarding choice, or too much of it, have been bandied about in Linux circles. Some penguinistas point proudly to the long list of GNU/Linux distros, proclaiming choice to be wonderful and a positive aspect of life in the land of Linux. Others bemoan the sheer number of distros, saying having so many of them has made Linux confusing for newcomers and is otherwise inefficient.
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We often introduce new people to Linux, and there’s always that niggling question, what distro to start someone on. Not so long ago, the answer seemed obvious: Ubuntu. However that’s falling from grace at the moment (Ben says: I actually like Unity. Efy, Graham and Andrew disagree).
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Robert Shingledecker has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the Tiny Core 5.0 Linux operating system.
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Untangle Gateway Platform 10, a Linux-based network gateway with pluggable modules for network applications like spam blocking, web filtering, anti-virus, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention, VPN, SSL VPN, and firewall, is now available for download.
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Linux has seen a number of interesting, unique and plain off-the-wall distributions in the past, including Tinfoil Hat Linux, CSI Linux and Tiny Core Linux. Linux also continues to rise in popularity, experiencing 5 percent of the OS market share in August 2013, according to W3Schools. One particularly noteworthy distribution combines Google’s Chrome OS with the popular Linux Mint, called Cr OS. The developers call it a chrome-plated OS and are making it as stable and secure as possible.
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Enterprise businesses are not ready for continual software migrations – including the looming Windows XP retirement – and this is placing firms at risk, according to new research.
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Posted in Microsoft at 7:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: In the post-mortem of the fatally-ill Nokia it is revealed that Elop was inside Nokia in order to hand it over to Microsoft on a plate, but he already uses distraction tactics (family tales and irrelevant stories)
Elop and Hilf are both enormously hated individuals, with plenty of evidence to show it (Hilf apparently did a lot of work trying to whitewash his image in recent times by exploiting poor people for publicity). Both are moles. Elop is a mole inside Nokia and Hilf was a mole inside the Free/Open Source community (stabbing it behind its back). When Elop said he was not a Trojan horse he simply lied like Nixon did when he said he wasn’t a crook. Elop is the classic per-definition or personification of a mole [1]. These two individuals are inherently insidious. If they weren’t, they would not be in the position of they’re in.
“Elop’s present noise,” explains a reader from Finland, “reminds me a little of the distraction that Nixon did with his “Checkers speech”. He turned accusations into a discussion of how much kids like dogs. Elop, and the board of Nokia, were working for Microsoft and it looks like the contract and the coverup of its contents may prove that. Nokia is dead and it is time to move on. Any investors that lost money need to move on, too. It is time to look to Jolla. However, that is no reason to let Elop, the Nokia board, and Microsoft off the hook, even if it won’t bring Nokia back. Here’s the speech itself.”
Carlo Piana writes this:
A modest proposal: nationalise #Nokia back.
It would not achieve much. For the Finnish government to be joined by the hip to Microsoft would mean yet more Microsoft corruption in Finland. The solution right now is to put an end to the pathological entity known as Microsoft and the people who run it for industrial destruction and personal gain. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Ok, the truth is seeping out, and this is smelly shit. I apologize for the language. We have news about Elop and his incentives. Yes, Elop had a contract that would pay him 25 million dollars if he managed to sell Nokia’s handset unit to Microsoft. This is a blatant conflict of interest, and one that incentivizes Elop for destructive behavior against Nokia. I had been trying to think of a good analogy, I finally thought of one. Its like a town hires a new police chief. The new police chief is paid a salary to reduce crime. But he is then promised a bonus if he can stop the people complaining about crime. The new police chief starts systematically to kill all residents who complain about crime – including complaining about him, the police chief killing citizens. Soon the complaints end and the police chief earns his bonus. This is so silly, its like from a Monty Python sketch, except its true. Elop, just like the imaginary police chief, is now being paid a massive 25 million dollar bonus for
destroying Nokia’s profit engine and very healthy handset business unit. So lets dig in. What on earth has been happening? Lets start, as we usually do, with the facts:
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents, Red Hat at 7:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The patent bullies of Bill Gates are receiving more and more media attention, and even his lobbyists are seen publicly again
Microsoft is attacking Android/Linux using patents. It does this not just directly but also indirectly. It does this not just through practising companies but also patent trolls.
Microsoft Florian, a Microsoft lobbyist, has a new post about Microsoft’s biggest patent ally — a company called Apple, which is enormously incompetent [1]. Slashdot has this summary (probably Florian himself submitted it as it’s how he operates) and it basically says that a video of Steve Jobs helped kill a software patent in Germany — a patent which was used against Android/Linux. Both Apple and Microsoft are good at copying things, even the bad things [2]. “Somehow they all miss the obvious that software patents are invalid in Europe,” iophk pointed out. But remember that this German lobbyist, Florian Müller, is not against software patents. He defected when Microsoft and other companies started paying him.
Another Microsoft vector of attack on Android/Linux is Intellectual Ventures, which is like Microsoft's patent-trolling offshoot. As publicknowledge.org put it the other day, or in the words of Against Monopoly, “Patent Troll ‘Intellectual Ventures’ Proves Need for Patent Reform”. Here are some fragments of interest:
He sums it up, “Intellectual Ventures is giving you the good side of the story. They say that they are champions of invention and they’re quick to point out their health and medical research. Everyone else in the battle for patent reform sees the other side. The side that preys on businesses without penalty, that buys up patents to sue innovators building companies, and that ultimately keeps innovation at a standstill while raking in massive profits. Later, he writes, “Because when a company like Intellectual Ventures sits on technologies and patents, waiting for someone to independently make a product to become unintentional fodder for a lawsuit trap, there is no benefit to knowledge, consumers, or to society.” Worth a read and thought about the purpose of patents and current experience and whether we wouldn’t be better off without them.
“Intellectual Ventures” is a deceiving name. It implies that it takes intellect to engage in extortion. Red Hat’s Web site OpenSource.com currently gives the platform to a lawyer who floats contemptible notions like “the ownership of intellectual property.” Or to quote directly in context:
I cover a very niche area of law, the ownership of intellectual property.
The words “ownership”, “intellectual” and “property” are all loaded. They are designed to imply that a monopoly on an idea is somehow “intellectual” and that ideas can be owned or made the property of a person. Red Hat can do better than this. It probably ought to. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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An Alaskan airport has closed an aircraft access route because of a flaw with Apple’s Maps app.
Fairbanks International Airport told a local newspaper that in the past three weeks two motorists had driven along the taxiway and across one of its runways.
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One of those was the idea of using “Control-Alt-Delete” — initially designed to efficiently reboot a computer — as a way to log into Windows.
During a fantastic talk last week at a Harvard fundraising campaign, Gates admitted that it was a mistake to force users to use hold down “Ctrl+Alt+Del” to log into their computers.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Ubuntu at 7:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Analysis of the state of development of Mir and why it’s likely to go mainstream
Canonical has not much of a strong commitment to packages it does not use by default [1]. Ubuntu is moving to Mir, which still upsets a lot of developers outside the Ubuntu community (I am impartial and apathetic myself), and it is still somewhat buggy [2]. Canonical shows some degree of arrogance when it merely assumes that everyone will adapt to Ubuntu [3]. Mir is reluctantly mentioned by some developers [4]. If they don’t embrace it by writing code for it, then Canonical will [5]. In a way, given these recent developments, it seems likely that Mir is here to stay, with or without popular support. Since Mir is not proprietary, it’s a waste of efforts bashing it; it’s probably a case of barking up the wrong tree. Mono was a different thing because it posed patent and API domination (by Microsoft) threats. █
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Ubuntu developers are presently deciding what to do with support for the ReiserFS file-system, up to and including dropping kernel support for the aging but stable file-system.
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Canonical has confirmed that proprietary driver support will be required when the X fallback will be removed.
It’s been rather unclear what will happen after Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is released, especially because Canonical said that it would remove the X fallback support by that time.
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Canonical’s Chris Halse James Rogers who has traditionally been part of their X.Org maintenance team and recently been involved with their Mir Display Server is in the Portland (Oregon) area and was thus at this week’s XDC2013. Chris had a brief topic covering Mir but more specifically their nested X Servers and if there’s anything they can share with others — i.e. Wayland.
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Many graphics card developers consider Mir immature and refused to bring Mir support for their hardware. For example, Intel has dropped the Mir support in order to invest in Wayland, the default system compositor for Tizen, Lubuntu and many others.
Canonical does not worry about Intel decision to drop the support for their compositor, since they are open source, the Ubuntu developers themselves can optimize Mir for the Intel hardware.
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09.26.13
Posted in Security at 11:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
London Mozilla Workspace; photo by Mozilla in Europe
Summary: Mozilla keeps its Web browser (Firefox) secure from surveillance and “anyone who actively trusts Chrome is a good subject for psychological study,” says one commenter
EVER since Edward Snowden left his mark on the world’s news we have found out to what degree complicity (between corporations and the NSA) helped infringe people’s privacy. Nobody does it like Microsoft, the unbeatable champion of lies and corruption.
Several years ago Mozilla was losing its way. This drove me further away to Konqueror and Rekonq, which I still use. For similar reasons I also dumped Google Search. But Firefox changed technically and also changed its staff (e.g. not just getting rid of Microsoft folks but also hiring some privacy advocates). Nothing served as a better recruitment and advocacy tool for Firefox than the advertising ‘industry’ smearing Firefox and protesting blocking of ads, cookies, etc. It seemed like Mozilla was really fighting for us and taking the beatings from surveillance moguls. So earlier this year I returned to using Firefox.
Firefox version 24.0 is coming to Ubuntu GNU/Linux, which is said to be the first distribution to adopt it [1]. It has already been updated for security reasons [2] while versions 25 and 26 are being actively developed [3]. Given some of Mozilla’s policies in recent years, especially when it come to privacy, no wonder people trust Firefox far more than they trust Chrome [4]. Here is a good comment which is both factually correct and humourous:
I don’t trust Google as far as I could throw ‘em. As a company, it’s entirely uninterested in my security or privacy, especially if it can make money by selling my personal information.
Trusting any software completely is a bit foolish, but anyone who actively trusts Chrome is a good subject for psychological study.
Chromium too should not be trusted all that much, either. Just because it bears the “Open Source” label doesn’t mean it’s harmless. On Android devices, always install and use Firefox. It’s a solid browser for Android and it respects privacy by default. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Canonical has announced a few minutes ago, September 17, that they’ve updated the Mozilla Firefox packages to version 24.0, on all their supported Ubuntu operating systems, making Ubuntu the first Linux distribution with Firefox 24.
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The latest open-source Firefox browser release adds new user features and patches critical security vulnerabilities.
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The open-source browser effort is aimed at fixing flaws and improving security in upcoming releases of Firefox.
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About a month ago I asked Naked Security readers Which web browser do you trust? Your answer was emphatic: it’s Firefox.
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The poor showing of Internet Explorer is notable but perhaps not surprising given that it is often imposed on users as a matter of corporate policy.
What stands out at me is the difference between the Mozilla and Google products. Both browsers are well established and well known open source projects, they both run on Windows, Mac and Linux and unlike Explorer or Safari neither come bundled with an operating system.
Perhaps Chrome users are more cynical or more realistic about where they place their trust. Or perhaps people who choose Chrome are also people who don’t vote in internet polls.
We don’t know but I suspect, as the comments on our poll seem to suggest, that the reason for Chrome’s poor showing is that Google’s claim to Do No Evil is simply no longer convincing.
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Posted in Courtroom at 10:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest news regarding copyright and a perpetual war on the act of passing zeroes and ones around
COPYRIGHT infringement is illegal and that is not the question at stake. What’s at stake is our ability to share data with our peers, family, and friends. If data sharing can be suppressed, then we are left dependent on a so-called “content industry” which sells us temporary access to its so-called “content”. We become so-called “consumers” who distrust our friends and only ever go to multinational corporations for our so-called “entertainment”. A few days ago we mentioned how copyright infringement gets used to shut down medium after medium to suppress dissemination of data, be it family videos or whatever else. It seems like people nowadays choose surveillance platforms like Facebook to share such stuff (with the NSA and also perhaps with some other people who registered with the same surveillance platform).
“Sometimes a flaw needs to be treated like a given, then worked around, like an alternative business model.”The argument here is not over copyright law or copyright infringement. It’s about how far the copyright monopoly/cartel should be allowed to go and subvert our laws using the magical “copyright infringement” wand. The monopoly/cartel is already disrupting search engines [1], indoctrinating our children at our expense (taxpayers fund schools) [2], and sending people to prison for many years [3] for merely managing a service that can be used legally or illegally (depending on its users). Fortunately, however, the monopoly/cartel is losing this war. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. When I discovered that DropBox was flirting with the NSA I deleted the account (although the NSA can probably access data retroactively, even after account deletion) and moved to Mega. I never upload anything which constitutes copyright infringement, but this is a matter of principles. Enough is enough.
Next month there is going to be an event here in Manchester, organised by the Pirate Party UK. In the UK, more than in most other nations, the monopoly/cartel has been very conveniently rewriting the law to reduce online sharing, kill Web anonymity, and generally keep a digital dossier on everyone. Clearly, however, when it comes to copyright infringement the monopoly/cartel has hardly been successful. The Internet’s userbase being eavesdropped on would not suffice; people can also copy files using storage devices (some laws try to tax these under the presumption of copyright infringement), so activity associated with sharing just evolves and goes underground. DRM is the plague infecting those who try the monopoly’s “official” channels, so in a sense it has the effect of driving many people away from these channels. Some companies might feel very angry about copyright infringement. They might feel like great injustice is happening, but that in its own right is no assurance that a remedy or a solution will ever be made available. Sometimes a flaw needs to be treated like a given, then worked around, like an alternative business model. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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During the past week the MPAA has been reiterating its complaints that Google doesn’t do enough to slow down Internet piracy. However, speaking with TorrentFreak the admin of one of the world’s largest torrent sites claims that the world’s largest search engine has made numerous tweaks to its algorithms over the past 18 months that have had quite an impact on search traffic.
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Listen up children: Cheating on your homework or cribbing notes from another student is bad, but not as bad as sharing a music track with a friend, or otherwise depriving the content-industry of its well-earned profits.
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From previously being exceptionally lenient on those publishing links to copyrighted files without permission, Spain is now well on its way to cracking down on the problem. Amendments to the country’s penal code approved yesterday means that admins of sites offering links to copyrighted works without the owners’ permission could face jail sentences of up to six years. For individual file-sharers and those operating P2P software, the outlook is much better.
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Just eight months after its launch Kim Dotcom’s Mega has established itself as one of the dominant players in the secure file-storage business. The site has now earned a spot among the top 1,000 most-visited websites on the Internet, overtaking its direct competitor RapidShare. Kim Dotcom says that Mega is already 50% of Megaupload in terms of the number of files stored, and that’s just the beginning.
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But it will all be worth it if you can get down to Manchester, take a look at what is happening, and let us know what you want to do next. There is lots to do and we need people to help us do it, the more people we have the faster we can achieve our aims. Our Party is doing more, more effectively, it is managing to have an impact in local elections and we punch above our weight on the national stage, whether it’s in the press, or in meetings with OFCOM, that isn’t going to stop. The leaks from Edward Snowden over the last months show that so many of the things we do and work on are vital.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 8:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Justice can only be served if we are told the truth and for that we need a full trail leading back to the source
As software becomes more sophisticated, its methods of controlling users and giving control to developers (or their employers) become highly sophisticated as well. Restricting and observing users is important to those who wish to keep society in check (i.e. enslaved). What they want is obedient workers and consumers. Non-conformity — in their view at least — needs to be identified, caught, reprimanded or even punished for. Proprietary software is to Big Brother what fishing is to a fisherman. Proprietary software is the facilitator of social injustice through imposition. The proprietor is usually misusing code as an instrument of subjugation.
“Proprietary software is the facilitator or social injustice. The proprietor is usually misusing code as an instrument of subjugation.”Globalists have been using outsourcing as a tool for driving wages down. Minimum wages have fallen over time as in recent decades the minimal rates hardly caught up with inflation and some public services got withdrawn. Workers are trying to get a pay surge, leaping to $15 per hour in the United States [1], but they are up against executives who are essentially above the law [2] because they enjoy immunity from the police, at least here in the UK, a key part of the financial empire [3]. In this age of class war we are being distracted by politicians who use possibly false pretexts to ‘sell’ us war in Syria [4] and in Iran [5]. The state-run or corporate media, which is controlled by the globalists, helps demonise people who deal with social/domestic affairs and put on a pedestal those who take us to wars based on lies, killing foreigners for private profits [6,7]. Here in the UK we have lobbying by the rich to control our policy [8-10] and in the US too there are lobbies which serve plutocrats [11,12], including Bill Gates, who actively funds such lobbies until caught (at which point the cost of “doing business” with bribery is too great).
It is probably time to accept the fact that the biggest war in the world and the most concrete threat is class war. Many other wars are motivated by greed, are the side-effect if greed (like imperialism), or are manufactured to help distract from the real struggles.
Going back to software, if we want justice, then we are going to need transparency, which is necessary for accountability through truth. Free software is not enough through. Free access to data is also required and new developments in this area (e.g. [13,14]) are definitely noteworthy. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Wisconsin workers are joining the “Fight for Fifteen” — better wages for those at the bottom of the U.S. payscale. Three cities in Wisconsin were among 58 across the United States where thousands of low-wage fast-food workers walked off their jobs to demand a living wage, safe working conditions, and the right to unionize without being penalized. The coordinated actions on August 29 constituted the largest fast food strike in U.S. history.
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So why not those City executives? Why not the crisply-shirted bosses from City finance firms, the rich celebrities, the expensively-dressed solicitors from world-famous law firms?
What is the difference between me and other journalists arrested on conspiracy charges but never accused of actual phone-hacking, and these “respectable” businessmen from blue-chip firms?
Ever since the Independent’s excellent young reporter Tom Harper revealed SOCA’s secret list of shame several months ago, I and many others have struggled for an answer.
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I worked in multilateral negotiations in both the UN and EU and found colleagues from countries like Ireland, the Netherlands and Canada to be professional competent and influential. The Scots certainly can be all of those. Small countries contribute to policy, to peacekeeping and to humanitarian effort.
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Assad’s wrongfully blamed for Ghouta’s gas attack. Evidence shows insurgents bear full responsibility. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was clear and unequivocal, saying:
“We have the most serious grounds to believe (Ghouta’s attack) was a provocation.” Assad had nothing to do with it.
“There is no answer to a number of questions we have asked, such as where the weapon was made – at an official factory or using homemade methods,” Lavrov added.
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But an Iranian president saying Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons isn’t new–though it might seem that way to a U.S. corporate media that constantly refers to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” as if there were proof that such a thing exists.
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I have a guilty political secret. I do not detest Gordon Brown. That is such an unfashionable opinion that I don’t really expect any comments at all to agree with it. And yes, I do realise that he went along with the Iraq War and all the other horrors of the Blair era. Interestingly, I don’t remember the question of what Gordon Brown really thought about Iraq ever being discussed; he deserves condemnation for having not tried to stop it, and perhaps he was indeed an enthusiast. And I am well aware that the Private Finance Initiative is a terrible disaster, and that he oversaw creeping privatisation in the health services, and – worst of all – the introduction of tuition fees.
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ORG joins organisations working for greater government transparency and openness in the UK and around the world in an open letter to the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister about the UK’s proposed Lobbying Bill.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you the “Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill” Specifically, Part 2 of the Bill, which covers non-political party campaigning.
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Part 2 of the Lobbying Bill is a significant change and proposes regulating a broad swathe of those most active in public debate. It poses a major threat to freedom of speech and public debate, and must be considered in the most delicate manner. It has already achieved unprecedented cross-party, non-partisan agreement in opposition to its current drafting.
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A Republican-dominated committee voted Thursday to recommend a half-million-dollar grant for promoting hunting and fishing to a group with no record in outdoors training, but with plenty of lobbying experience and close ties to outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder. The group, United Sportsmen of Wisconsin, will spend most of the $500,000 in taxpayer dollars on salaries for Tea Party leaders who have long railed against government spending.
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The Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas has filed a brief with state Attorney General Greg Abbott in support of the Center for Media and Democracy’s request for records pertaining to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and further refuting ALEC’s effort to declare its communications immune from the state public records law.
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If you live in the southeastern US (aka the Bible Belt) as I do, you’ve probably been to a church revival or two (or twenty). Revival is an event intended to light a fire under the ‘faithful,’ as opposed to the newcomer. As I sat at NC Datapalooza last week, I felt that I was in a revival, without the obvious religious overtones, of course. I was amazed at how far the Raleigh area has come in terms of understanding and accepting open data principles.
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The Royal Mail has asked about new licensing approach for the ‘PAF’, or Postcode Address File. We have responded by calling for the PAF to be published as open data under an open license.
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Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: GNOME, the popular GNU/Linux suite of applications, is back in the groove
GNOME, as a desktop environment, suffered some backlash when the third branch came out. It’s similar to KDE when its fourth branch came out. But things appear to be changing for the better in GNOME [1] and a new release is fast approaching [2-6] under the leadership of Karen Sandler [7] who is a strong advocate of software freedom. GNOME Music is being introduced [8] and GNOME applications generally reach out to more environments like MATE and XFCE [9], not just KDE (through QtCurve and other bridges). Other GNOME projects [10,11] show signs of life in this age when we can easily forget GNOME or simply take it for granted, just like KDE.
Several years ago we criticised GNOME for its stance on Mono. After Miguel de Icaza had stepped down things gradually improved and GTK-based Mono-dependent applications mostly died (no longer maintained). Techrights has no opposition to GNOME or the GNOME Foundation. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Anyway, Gnome 3 shell is everyone’s favorite punching bag. For us old-timers, it certainly is unusual in its approach to work flow. But, I tried to adapt to vanilla Gnome Shell. I really did. I don’t want to live in the past.
Nope. Still don’t love the vanilla Gnome 3 experience.
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Today I installed Fedora 20 (from Nightly Build) that comes with GNOME 3.10 Beta and it (Fedora) feels amazingly stable (except the really buggy installer) for a pre-alpha release.
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GNOME Shell 3.9.92 was released this morning as the GNOME Shell 3.10 release candidate. With this latest release of the core GNOME 3 user-interface, the Wayland branch has been merged!
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GNOME 3.10 should be released this month, on September 25, and every Linux users who uses it expects the unexpected, so we thought it would be a very good idea to preview some of its upcoming features.
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Gnome 3.10 is just about a week away and the upcoming features list of version 3.12 is already forming. What are the new features that will empower and extend Gnome’s usability on the “good ten” that’s coming, and what kind of new features are seeing complete fruition on the next version?
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In Linux Format issue 176, Graham Morrison and Andrew Gregory spoke to Karen Sandler, executive director of the Gnome Foundation. We were so absorbed by what she had to say that we almost missed the free lunch in the canteen. Of the many subjects that the conversation touched upon (we’ll be putting the full interview up on TuxRadar soon), the most time-sensitive is the Gnome Outreach Programme For Women. This does pretty much what it says on the tin: it’s an initiative aimed at getting more women into free software, not just Gnome.
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Long version: In the software application we have the problem where applications have the same name and summary, but are targeted against different desktops. We know when an app targets a specific desktop from the AppStream metadata (which currently uses a heuristic from the .desktop file) so we could filter these out client side. At the moment searching for notes gives you two similarly looking results results provided by two different applications: bijiben (GNOME) and xfce4-notes (XFCE). Also, because of the shared history, a lot of the MATE applications have the same name as the GNOME ones. This makes bad UI.
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I’m nearing the end of a very busy few weeks, and getting very close to that soft pencils down date! With school starting up again this hasn’t been my most productive week on the GNOME Break Timer front, but I’m pretty happy with what’s been done.
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A upstream maintainers have contacted me about some kind of validation tool for AppData files. I’ve spent a couple of days creating and then packaging appdata-tools which includes the appdata-validate command. This returns non-zero if there are any syntax or style issues with the AppData file.
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