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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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
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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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Send this to a friend
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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07.31.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Security researcher Zachary Cutlip (my pic left) took the stage at both Black Hat and Defcon conferences this weekend.
His talk was about doing SQL Injection on MIPS Powered SOHO routers – and in particular he aimed at the Linux powered Netgear WNDR3700.
After sitting through an hour of this guy’s presentation at Black Hat (I didn’t bother to see it a second time at Defcon) the answer is:
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There are some people that don’t believe the Linux Desktop is relevant.
I’m not one of them, and apparently neither are hordes of security professionals that were at the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas (including me).
The show itself doesn’t calculate who uses what..but Aruba Networks (they have a Linux powered set of wireless routers) does measure.
For desktop OS users of the Wi-Fi network, the top desktop OS was…
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Kernel Space
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Quite honestly, one of the last things people look at is which file system is being used. Windows and Mac OS X users have even less reason to look, because they really have only one choice for their system – NTFS and HFS+, respectively. Linux, on the other hand, has plenty of different file system options, with the current default being ext4.
However, there’s been another push to change the file system to something called btrfs. But what makes btrfs better, and when will we see distributions making the change?
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The Linux Foundation announced that Antelink, Calxeda and Reaktor have joined the organization supporting the growth and adoption of Linux.
The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting Linux, has announced that three new companies are joining the organization: Antelink, Calxeda and Reaktor.
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For at least some hardware, it looks like the Linux 3.5 kernel has regressed and is burning through noticeably more power than its predecessor.
Over the weekend a new mailing list thread began that was entitled “Massive power regression going 3.4->3.5″ pertaining to a power problem in this most recent Linux kernel release. This just wasn’t a random user complaining of a “massive power regression” but James Bottomley, a Linux kernel developer veteran.
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Graphics Stack
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In recent days there have been updated Mesa 8.1 development benchmarks put out looking at the R600 Gallium3D, R300 Gallium3D, and Nouveau Gallium3D open-source drivers. Those results for the different drivers show that Mesa 8.1 is generally faster than the current Mesa 8.0 stable series, but that does not appear to be the case for Intel at the moment. It looks like there are some active regressions that are lowering the Intel Ivy Bridge graphics performance with their Mesa 8.1-devel driver.
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Applications
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The TorqueBox project’s leader, Bob McWhirter, has stepped down from leading the development of the platform designed to run Ruby on Rails applications on JBoss’s Application Server. McWhirter has led the project for the past four years, but has now become “Director of Polyglot for JBoss”, a role that gives him more responsibilities within Red Hat. His place will be taken by Ben Browning, an existing core contributor to the project; Browning is said to have been unofficially driving the project for the last few months and “now – it’s just official”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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While many open sourcers have welcomed the news that the games company Steam might be making thousands of games available for Linux, Free Software Guru Richard Stallman is not impressed.
Writing from his bog, Stallman said that while the availability of popular nonfree programs on GNU/Linux can boost adoption of the system, it may not bring enough freedom.
He said that nonfree games were unethical because they deny freedom to their users. So if users want freedom the only way they can do that is to only have free software on their computer.
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Valve recently announced plans to bring its Steam game distribution service to the Linux platform. The company has also ported its Source game engine and the popular title Left 4 Dead 2. In a recent interview, Valve’s Gabe Newell said that the move was partly influenced by concerns about the increasingly closed nature of the Windows platform.
The Linux desktop has historically been ignored by major commercial software developers due to the relatively small audience and technical issues like fragmentation. Steam’s arrival on Linux has largely been welcomed by Linux enthusiasts who recognize it as a big step towards legitimizing the Linux desktop as a consumer platform.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME 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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Gnome-schedule is a graphical user interface that leverages the power of vixie-cron, dcron and at to manage your crontab file and provide an easy way to schedule tasks on your computer. It supports recurrent (periodical) tasks and tasks that happen only once in the future. It is written in Python using pygtk, and has been developed, tested and packaged for various Linux distributions.
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A leading GNOME developer thinks the once popular Linux/Unix desktop interface has lost its way.
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We knew that a certain segment of the Linux population was still unhappy with GNOME, but I thought most of issues were behind us; that most have adapted or moved on. But apparently, a wave of articles today suggests otherwise. Of course, an insider’s blog post set off this campfire.
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Last week Benjamin Otte shared some thoughts about GNOME that were pretty stark. It gathered some steam and hit Slashdot and this all happened the week GUADEC was taking place in A Coruña. I wasn’t at GUADEC 
but I can imagine there was some fervent discussion about the blog entry.
The gist of Benjamin’s blog was that people are leaving GNOME, that the project is understaffed, and arguably the reason for this is that GNOME has lost its direction and Red Hat have overtaken the project as the primary contributor-base. Of course I am summarizing, but check out the original post if you feel I am not representing Benjamin’s views fairly.
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In open source software communities, few events are as exciting as the release of a new operating system. Community members may wait for months—even years—as fresh versions of their favorite Linux distributions are collectively and meticulously prepared, debugged, and packaged for the world.
Next month, Todd Robinson will release a Linux-based desktop operating system in a single day. Thirty-one times in a row.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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What are Red Hat‘s top four priorities for its fiscal year 2013? Sure, driving adoption of key technologies (virtualization, cloud and storage) is one top priority. But what are the other “big three” focus areas? And where do channel partners fit into the Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) conversation? Here are some clues, plus questions The VAR Guy will ask Channel Chief Roger Egan during CompTIA Breakaway (July 30-Aug. 2) in Las Vegas.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Were you ever stuck in a moment when you needed some application and you couldn’t access the whole version just bunch of trials? Did you perhaps tried to use some alternative open source applications by now? If not don’t worry. If yes, comment which ones because your suggestion might help someone who is in a search for some application but has no luck finding it.
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Canonical just announced earlier today that the next UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) event for the Ubuntu 13.04 operating system will take place, Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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Fighting sluggish sales numbers and competing in a locally-dominated smartphone market, HTC has closed its South Korean office doors.
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ZTE recently announced the Grand X for Europe and the Asia Pacific in the third quarter, but it looks like they have something else up their sleeve for the U.S. in the 4th quarter. The ZTE Flash will debut on Sprint this October and it sports some pretty decent specs such as a 4.5-inch IPS 720p (1280 x 720) display, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 12.6MP rear camera, 1MP front facing camera, 8GB of internal storage, microSDXC slot, 1780mAh battery, Bluetooth 4.0, LTE, Gorilla Glass, and Android 4.0.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Google’s Nexus 7 is all the rage. The tablet is so popular that Google ran out of stock and the orders are on halt for a while. The tablet is getting praise even from staunch Apple fans like MG Seigler. The most notable praise came from none other than the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, who is a great critic and seems to have a hold of what a user wants.
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Many Samsung fans always wondered that despite being the world’s #1 display manufacturer and lead supplier of Apple’s retina display why is Samsung now offering the same high resolution display for its phones or tablets. Well, Samsung Galaxy Nexus and S3 do have an extremely high resolution display but tablets are still a different animal. It seems Samsung is working on a high resolution tablet with a bit bigger screen size.
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In information technology (IT) and software development fields, there are a few fairly common misconceptions about the use of open source software. These misconceptions were debunked in a discussion at POSSE RIT 2012, and we’d like to share (and spread) that conversation.
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I heard the comments a few times at the 14th OSCON: The conference has lost its edge. The comments resonated with my own experience — a shift in demeanor, a more purposeful, optimistic attitude, less itching for a fight. Yes, the conference has lost its edge, it doesn’t need one anymore.
Open source won. It’s not that an enemy has been vanquished or that proprietary software is dead, there’s not much regarding adopting open source to argue about anymore. After more than a decade of the low-cost, lean startup culture successfully developing on open source tools, it’s clearly a legitimate, mainstream option for technology tools and innovation.
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As we all know, Android has Linux at the heart of it, with a litigious Java platform, which means that it is the powerhouse driving the adoption of free software — although many would argue that it’s not really free.
From my own very small web design corner of the universe I can see the inexorable rise of free software. Of my last eight contract roles, four of them were working on either the WordPress or Drupal content management systems.
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The other day, when my friend’s laptop spit-up a warning from ZoneAlarm that she was no longer protected, I stood over her shoulder and instructed her to update the firewall. The warning was basically a scare tactic, of course. Without the update she would still be protected, just as protected as she had been the day before. She just wouldn’t have any new whiz-bang features included in the update, nor would she be able to take advantage of any new security enhancements.
We ran the default install. This was Windows, so there had to be a reboot. After that, we opened the browser to find that the homepage had been reset to a ZoneAlarm themed Google search page. We had not opted-in to any such change; the ZoneAlarm folks had just taken it on themselves to hijack Firefox’s revenue, which I didn’t think cricket.
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Events
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Texas Linux Fest begins this Friday, August 3rd, and there’s still plenty of time to register. Or, you can enter to win one of five free passes. You have until 3pm tomorrow, July 31 to enter, so hurry! We’ll post the winners tomorrow afternoon, so you’ll still have time to register if you don’t win.
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Throughout its existence, Google has been very dedicated to enlisting developers all around the world to embrace its projects and become contributors. And, the company’s Google I/O conference remains its biggest annual event focused on outreach to developers. Google recently held the I/O 2012 conference, and ever since then has been steadily posting videos of keynote addresses and complete videos of the sessions. Some of these are very much worth watching–even if you’re not a developer.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Recently the Mozilla Foundation announced a new orientation for their email client, Thunderbird. It caused quite a bit of discussion, and we, at the Document Foundation, received quite a lot of public and private feedback on this mostly in the form of: “Now that Mozilla is getting rid of Thunderbird, The Document Foundation should take on its maintenance and development”. Much of this crazy rumor has ended being disproved by Mozilla itself and what seems to be going on is that Mozilla will in fact enable a real community-led development style on Thunderbird (contrary to the development model of Firefox) but has to intention of dumping it anywhere. That didn’t stop the rumor to spread anyway and this article by Brian Profitt caught my eye: “Will Open Source Office Suites go the way of Thunderbird?”.
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SaaS
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Days after opening its nomination process for Individual Member elections, the OpenStack Foundation is investigating allegations that an executive within one of the Foundation’s corporate member companies may have pressured an Individual Member candidate to withdraw her nomination for a board position.
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Databases
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As it prepares to release its Windows-enhanced MySQL 5.6 database, Oracle announced late last week a number of downloadable migration tools to ease the process of converting from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, including data conversion, Excel and Windows installer tools.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Productivity enhancements plus FindBugs, an open source Java-based static analysis tool
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The Document Foundation has announced last evening, July 29th, that the fourth and final Release Candidate version of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.6 office suite is available for download and testing.
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Business
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The do-it-yourself (DIY), open-source drone movement is turning into a real business that could disrupt the commercial and military drone industry. It’s another case of how exploiting the curiosity of hackers can turn into a commercial opportunity.
That’s the view of Chris Anderson (pictured), editor of Wired magazine and a drone hobbyist and businessman on the side. He spoke about this DIY trend and his own efforts to lead it in a talk at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas today.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has voiced concerns about what could happen to source code distributed under free software licences if the company providing the software goes bankrupt and enters insolvency proceedings. Especially in Germany, the current rules in this area of law are not well explored. Speaking to The H’s associates at heise open, Matthias Kirschner, who coordinates German matters for the foundation, explained that a bankruptcy court in Germany could currently rescind the free software licence and all rights granted by it after the fact.
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First of all, seriously? Tape delay to the West Coast? You lock down coverage in order to take advantage of prime time and try to pass it off as some sort of “value added” service. Pay no mind to all the twittering and live blogging willing to fill in the gaps, while you do some sort of production magic behind the scenes. Live events don’t need windows and real life shouldn’t need **spoiler** warnings.
Even worse is the fact that the opening ceremonies weren’t even streamed live on the internet, where time and distance aren’t factors. And you know it, too, because your official Twitter accounts were posting updates live, giving Americans the dusty old feeling that they’re listening to a local broadcaster read off the ticker feed from a title match. So close, but so far.
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Hardware
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Update: according to the english version of the article, the 350ppi was achieved “in the lab”, so it’s not clear how close this is to commercialization. The article also suggests that Samsung is indeed moving away from LITI…
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Security
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Finance
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The banks brought us the financial crisis which resulted in zero interest rates. Now the banks are improperly benefiting from those rates through contracts they made with cities BEFORE they blew up the financial system.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Now that the ACTA treaty has been rejected by the European Parliament, a period opens during which it will be possible to push for a new regulatory and policy framework adapted to the digital era. Many citizens and MEPs support the idea of reforming copyright in order to make possible for all to draw the benefits of the digital environment, engage into creative and expressive activities and share in their results. In the coming months and years, the key questions will be: What are the real challenges that this reform should address? How can we address them?
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Contrary to the endless lobbying and subsequent defending of the now-dead SOPA and PIPA frameworks, a leaked report shows that earlier this year the RIAA’s Deputy General Counsel admitted that the legislation was “not likely to have been effective tool” for dealing with music piracy. All efforts are now being put behind the “six strikes” plan – but could disconnections for repeat infringers still be on the agenda?
“These illicit sites are among the culprits behind the music industry’s more than 50 percent decline in revenues during the last decade, resulting in 15,000 layoffs and fewer resources to invest in new bands,” wrote RIAA CEO Cary Sherman in a New York Times piece last year.
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07.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Another week has come and gone and much more has happened than what I can cover in my regularly scheduled slots. So, let’s have a look at some of the other developments this week in Linux. The Ubuntu family got a new developmental release, Zorin OS continues to get rave reviews, and Bodhi Linux 2.0 was released.
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The Chrome OS developers announced today, July 27th, the immediate availability for download of the Chrome OS 2.1.1145 Live CD Linux operating system, which brings a lot of fresh software.
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I’ve been working with Windows 8 for months. Even after Microsoft dished out the release candidate to application developers, I’m still finding Windows 8 to be the worst Windows version to date.
Yes, worse than Vista, worse than Windows Millennium Edition (Me), and the only reason I’m not saying its worse than Windows Bob, is that Bob was just a user interface for Windows 95 and NT and not an operating system in and of itself.
Now, though even some of Microsoft strongest fans are beginning to back off from praising Windows 8.
[...]
2: Go with desktop Linux
I’ve been telling you for ages that desktop Linux works great. It’s far more secure than Windows will ever be, and is more stable to boot. I’m not going to repeat myself here. I will say, though, that Mint 13 is a really great Linux desktop that any XP user will quickly feel at home using. I’ll also point out that anyone — and I mean anyone — can use Ubuntu Unity. I can also point out that Valve is bringing its Steam gaming platform to desktop Linux.
Finally, I’ll add that you can buy PCs with pre-installed Linux from many smaller vendors and that Dell is recommitting to the Linux desktop. Dell has just released new high-end laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will soon be releasing a developer’s Ubuntu laptop.
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On July 16, game publisher Valve created Steam’d Penguins and formally announced their entry into development and promotion of the gaming scene for Linux.
For years there have been feverish rumours of such a move based on job postings which explicitly asked for Linux experience in the job description.
Without trying to play down the importance of the announcement and the excitement generated in the Linux community, there are still many unanswered questions about whether the games will be native ports or bundling of emulators, how open source friendly the underlying distribution platform Steam will be and which flagship titles will make the Linux leap.
As a long-time Linux user but not really much of a gamer, I applauded Valve for looking at my operating system of choice more seriously and building a Linux capability even if I am not in their intended audience.
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Linux has lately had a flurry of indie games released for it which has made the community richer and widened the audience which in turn helps break some of our more insular perceptions.
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You might not have noticed, but there’s more than one Linux distribution out there. In fact, there are hundreds, and the list is growing weekly.
Okay, you probably did notice, but the fact remains that the free software world is, primarily, one of choice, and that means developers can – and often do – scratch their own itches.
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Desktop
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Computer game platform maker Valve is to port its Steam gaming and distribution platform to Ubuntu Linux in a move intended to protect the company from the impending “catastrophe” of Windows 8.
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There are countless users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system who become Linux users each year–an important part of the engine that drives the popularity of Linux. In some cases, these migrating users want to escape the malware storm that afflicts the Windows ecosystem; in some cases they want to run Linux alongside Windows (a dual-OS strategy that has its advantages); and in some cases they want to use specific applications that are available for Linux.
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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.
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Kernel Space
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I’ve been writing an occasional “Ask a kernel maintainer” column on the lwn.net weekly kernel page. It’s been a while since I last wrote one, so I figured it’s time to start it up again.
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The in-development Linux 3.6 kernel introduces an EFI handover protocol, which will ultimately lead to faster boot-ups and simpler EFI boot-loaders.
Right now EFI boot-loaders and the EFI boot stub in the Linux kernel carry the same initialization code to setup an EFI machine for booting the kernel. However, with this EFI handover protocol support, this redundant code could be eliminated. Intel and others want to have the initialization and booting of the kernel just within the kernel’s EFI boot stuff than also copied within the boot-loader.
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VMware is preparing to push VMCI support into the mainline Linux kernel.
Back in May I mentioned VMware was working on the Virtual Machine Communication Interface for Linux and back then their kernel patches were in a “Request For Comments” state. The patches have been revised and now VMware is lining up the VMCI support to enter the mainline kernel, hopefully for the Linux 3.6 kernel.
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Another one of the pulls going into the Linux 3.6 kernel this week is the ACPI and power management updates courtesy of Intel. The two prominent changes for this next Linux kernel release is a rewrite of the “turbostat” tool and the “intel_idle” CPU idle driver now supports Ivy Bridge processors.
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Seth Jennings of IBM proposed that ZCache be moved out of the Linux kernel’s staging area and be accepted officially into the mainline tree. However, that proposal is being criticized by an Oracle engineers as they have evidently “completely rewritten zcache” and will share it soon but still doesn’t see a reason for the memory compression code to leave staging.
On Friday was the kernel message by Jennings that proposes zcache to leave the kernel’s staging area, with the email being accompanied by four patches to make that happen. His justification for the code leaving staging is that “Based on the level of activity and contributions we’re seeing from a diverse set of people and interests, I think zcache has matured to the point where it makes sense to promote this out of staging.”
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Hitting OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend are some interesting benchmarks comparing performance of AHCI vs. IDE modes under Linux from an AMD Fusion system.
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Graphics Stack
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There was exciting OpenGL 3/4 news yesterday for Mesa when it came to early but yet-to-be-merged support for OpenGL geometry shaders, but that’s not all the new Mesa GL news this week. Patches were also published to provide support for OpenGL Core contexts for OpenGL 3.1 and newer.
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A patch to mainline Mesa yesterday from Intel has resulted in a ~7% performance boost for Sandy Bridge “GT2″ graphics when running the video stress test for Valve’s Counter-Strike: Source.
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Intel has released a new open-source X.Org driver for their Intel graphics since it was only just discovered that the Ivy Bridge GT1 “HD 2500″ graphics were busted.
Just days after releasing xf86-video-intel 2.20.1, which came just a week after the big 2.20 release, Chris Wilson has released a third update. The xf86-video-intel 2.20.2 driver takes care of a critical Intel Ivy Bridge issue while also packing more SNA acceleration architecture improvements.
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Due to the extreme pace at which Chris Wilson has been releasing SNA architecture updates for Intel’s open-source X.Org driver, here are another set of benchmarks of Intel Sandy Bridge HD 3000 graphics when comparing UXA and SNA using yesterday’s Git code following the xf86-video-intel 2.20.2 driver release.
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For those that didn’t notice, this week AMD released a new header that defines the AMD ACPI interface used for laptops, PowerXpress, and chipset-specific functionality.
This new header defines four ACPI control methods used by AMD graphics hardware and then related functionality to them. The four AMD ACPI methods are ATIF, ATPX, ATRM, and ATCS.
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Haiku OS, the open-source operating system that’s a re-implementation of BeOS, is continuing to look at leveraging more of Mesa for its 3D/OpenGL rendering.
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With the Radeon driver now supporting GLAMOR acceleration — it works for all hardware, but for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer its the only way of 2D HW acceleration — this 2D-over-OpenGL architecture became more interesting.
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Freedreno, the reverse-engineered open-source Qualcomm Snapdragon graphics driver, continues to advance. The latest accomplishment of the Freedreno Linux driver is that it now has its own working shader assembler, which means Freedreno can now work without any binary blob dependence.
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Applications
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Gamecaster is a graphical user interface for open source project glc. It can capture real time footage of any Linux game that uses ALSA for sound and OpenGL for drawing.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Now, you won’t need a television to view the latest action of London Olympics 2012. With great software available in Linux today, you can stream it directly from Internet and watch high quality video for free. Miro is a great video player and bittorent client, which supports streaming and podcasts.
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Wine
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Wine is a popular software that lets you run Windows apps and Games under Linux. If you need some Windows software often, you may use Wine to run some of the most popular software without the need of a virtual machine or dual booting.
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Games
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The development team of Warsow has announced the release of Warsow 1.0. This release makes Warsow stable and to come out of beta testing.
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The dhewm3 engine, which is one of the open-source forks of the id Tech 4 engine similar to ioDoom3, is now working on Wayland.
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It looks like Blizzard agrees with Valve: Microsoft Windows 8 is a wreck. But will Blizzard be bringing their games natively to Linux?
Following the very public and widespread news this week that Gabe Newell thinks Windows 8 is crap — which is actually a repeat of what I exclusively reported back in April — there’s been a lot of interesting comments and prospects raised about the future of Linux gaming.
Following Newell’s negative statements towards Windows 8, there was an interesting tweet by Rob Pardo, the Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment. “nice interview with Gabe Newell – “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space* – not awesome for Blizzard either”
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- I suppose that availability of popular nonfree programs on GNU/Linux can boost adoption of the system. However, our goal goes beyond making this system a “success”; its purpose is to bring freedom to the users. Thus, the question is how this development affects users’ freedom.
- In the eyes of RMS, non-free games are unethical because they deny freedom to their users.
- On the plus side, if you’re going to play these non-free games anyways, it’s good you’re using Linux. Microsoft Windows only causes more harm.
- Thus, in direct practical terms, this development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux. My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?
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Desktop Environments
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The Chrome OS developers announced today, July 27th, the immediate availability for download of the Chrome OS 2.1.1145 Live CD Linux operating system, which brings a lot of fresh software.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This week members of the Kolab Community met in Berlin for some very productive face to face work on the upcoming release of Kolab 3.0 alpha. Developers from ownCloud, Roundcube, KDE, Cyrus IMAP, Fedora, and of course Kolab sat together for one week, discussed, hacked and celebrated. Employees of Kolab Systems used the opportunity to meet with several business partners and a usability expert provided same valuable input that will be used to make Kolab clients more user friendly.
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Calligra Words, a KDE word-processing software, will soon support EPUB formats. This support will make it possible for the user to create high quality and portable ebooks compatible with PCs, netbooks, tablets and mobile devices.
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Implementing a new window decoration for KWin is not the easiest thing to do. While the API has hardly changed since early 3.x releases it is not very Qt like and requires a strong understanding of how the window decoration in KWin works. To design a window decoration you basically have three options which come with KWin…
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If you use Fedora and are a great fan of KDE, you can enable the KDE unstable repository to have latest and bleeding edge KDE software.
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GNOME Desktop
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I suppose I can’t just leave my last post standing there as-is. I’ll start by listing a bunch of things I consider facts about the GNOME project. I don’t want to talk about solutions here, I just want to list them, because I don’t think they are common knowledge. People certainly don’t seem to talk about them a lot.
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While some GNOME developers and users see the once fledging desktop environment fading into abyss, other GNOME developers see nothing but GNOME getting better with the best yet to come. It’s been called for this week from GUADEC that GNOME 4.0 to be released in March of 2014 along with GNOME OS. That’s not all of their ambitious plans but they think they can gain a 20% market-share by 2020 and they also have some other plans on their agenda.
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From time to time, the GNOME Desktop Project blows up, with one developer or another indulging in soul-searching and realising that the project lacks direction. Or people. Or something else.
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According to some within the GNOME team, the team and the GNOME product are falling apart. By alienating the people that were loyal dedicated users they have begun a downward spiral into the abyss. What was once a respectable, reputable product now a garbage salad that no one wants and no-one uses.
Many projects are reacting to GTK3 with proverbial “meh” including Inkscape, Mozilla, GIMP, and LibreOffice. GNOME is bleeding developers, and it is being dropped like an anchor from multiple distributions.
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This is a simple guide on how you can hack your Gnome Shell (just a bit!) and make one unique theme just for you.
I used Adwaita as base because everyone has this (but you can do this in every theme), and I also used some Marvel images that you can replace with anything you like.
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Some days ago I had posted about the new upcoming Gnome mail application and a reader let a comment about Geary. What is Geary? A mail client app, written in Vala which seems to share many common design goals with Gnome Mail.
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Linux never ceases to amaze me – particularly the light-weight distros aimed for low powered PCs! There are so many options and depending on your need and suitability you can pick and choose which one to use. Plus, it brings your old machine back to life without compromising on the security and with the state-of-the-art applications! You can’t ever think of that with any other operating system, for sure.
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Before I start I’d like to say this is not supposed to be an in depth review of Puppy Arcade. It is a post which explains what Puppy Arcade is and how I think it can be improved.
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Another Ubuntu-based distribution featuring a customised Gnome 3 desktop with Gnome Shell has been released today and it is time for another distro review here on worldofgnome.org.
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New Releases
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The Zorin OS group have released the Education and gaming editions of Zorin OS 6. This release comes after Zorin OS 6 Core, Ultimate, Business and Multimedia editions. Like other editions, Education and Gaming editions feature the unique Zorin desktop. This desktop environment resembles much like Windows and made specially keeping in mind the needs of a Windows users switching to Linux.
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You are welcome to choose between several flavours: Calculate Directory Server (CDS) if you need a server option; Calculate Linux Desktop featuring a KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) or XFCE (CLDX) desktop; Calculate Media Center (CMC) if a media center is what you want; or, if you would rather prefer a scratch distribution, either Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) or Calculate Scratch Server (CSS).
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Red Hat Family
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Our Red Hat tour guide turns on a light in a corner conference room – onto walls that are, not surprisingly, colored red.
“You can’t appreciate it yet,” Craig Yost, senior director of global facilities and real estate says, “but when we’ve opened all the floors, you’ll see something.”
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Within the software industry, Red Hat specializes in open source software solutions and applications. It is one of the less known mid-cap firms in the space, but has gained respect as a momentum play. As data demand takes off against rising consumer interest and emerging market growth, Red Hat will continue to be a prime beneficiary. Over the last 5 years going through the Great Recession, the stock more than doubled – appreciating by 133.7%. But, at this point, I don’t believe the fundamentals and earnings power is not enough to justify the valuation.
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What are Red Hat‘s top four priorities for its fiscal year 2013? Sure, driving adoption of key technologies (virtualization, cloud and storage) is one top priority. But what are the other “big three” focus areas? And where do channel partners fit into the Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) conversation? Here are some clues, plus questions The VAR Guy will ask Channel Chief Roger Egan during CompTIA Breakaway (July 30-Aug. 2) in Las Vegas.
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If you’re already perfectly happy with your RHEL or CentOS Linux install, Oracle Linux is a hard sell, even at the price of free. After toying about with the system, I’d say it’s at least worth a hard look. As it is, you get the benefits of CentOS or Scientific Linux, with Oracle’s own stuff bolted on, and their enhancements, even minus Ksplice, make a compelling argument to use Oracle Linux. If you are setting up a machine to use Oracle’s database software, Oracle Linux is the best choice, since it’s been designed to support Oracle DB, and is the same Linux that Oracle uses in-house. While Oracle’s premier support contract is cheaper than the RHEL alternative, the actual cost of switching from RHEL to Oracle in a given case may not be. While this release is a good first step for Oracle, more options, like free Ksplice Uptrack, or even a Ksplice Uptrack subscription, would make it an easier sell.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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One of Linux’s most popular distros, Ubuntu, will be getting some new UI and web integration with its latest LTS (Long Term Support) version, Ubuntu 12.20.
In a recent presentation at Oscon 2012, founder Mark Shuttleworth said that Linux now comes pre-installed on five percent of PCs globally.
With regards to the next version, 12.10, Shuttleworth mentioned that the next iteration would offer font, search and menu innovations.
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There’s this thing about students: they take technology for granted. It’s nothing too disheartening, except for the tech-savvy ones who seem that technology is more than a commodity. The 21st century endowed us a new way to access information, and to do so, it shouldn’t be just endlessly chatting with a friend through facebook or ceaselessly playing games on the iphone, hungry for more. Insatiable appetite is a byproduct of the consumer world. Why not change that?
Today, during lunch, I had the honor of meeting David Montes, a senior and the school’s computer guru, to talk about something quite drastic. Two days ago, I had a facebook chat with him about the idea of Ubuntu running on all the systems within the school, from student cart laptops to the school administration servers. Although we saw some implications, we reached a stunning conclusion, that it actually should be done if we want to take learning about computers to a whole new and exciting level.
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Ubuntu App Developer Showdown is an online event hosted by Canonical where new developers learn about creating apps with Ubuntu technologies and get a chance to host them in Ubuntu Software Center.
This year, the event ran full three weeks, at the end of which developers submitted 140 applications. The event is accompanied by video tutorials and interactive Google+ hangouts where developers can ask and interact with lead Ubuntu devs and get their doubts cleared.
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Softpedia is the first to announce today, July 26th, that the third Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system is now available for download. As usual, we’ve grabbed a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 12.10 development.
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Britt Yazel posted a couple of days ago on the unity-design team mailing list an interesting link to a YouTube video showing a mockup of Unity in Ubuntu 12.10. The video was originally posted on February, but it is a very good example of how Unity should be.
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Flavours and Variants
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Alongside the launch of a new web site, the developers at the Bodhi Linux project have published the second major release of their minimal Linux distribution with an Enlightenment-based desktop. As previously described by lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of version 2.0 of Bodhi Linux was not to “introduce ground breaking new features” to the distribution, but rather to smoothly transition to a new version of its underlying operating system.
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Canonical published yesterday, July 26th, the third and last Alpha release of the upcoming Lubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.
Lubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 comes with a new version of the session manager, a new version of PCManFM, xfce4-notifyd replaced notification-daemon for default notification system, added Catfish searching utility, and updated the artwork (including the wallpaper and GTK themes).
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Phones
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Hewlett-Packard’s Enyo 2 open-source cross-platform object-oriented JavaScript application development framework has finally left its beta stage of development and is now classed a production ready.
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Android
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Android is facing renewed criticism for its app distribution policies, which developers are calling “designed for piracy.” Is this something that Google could have avoided a long time ago?
The hubbub is grounded in a story that hit the wires earlier this week about game publisher Madfinger Games having to drop the price of the game Dead Trigger from $.99 to free due to what they called “unbelievably high” piracy rates on Android.
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And here comes another yet-unannounced Android smartphone for MetroPCS, this time known as the Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G (model number SCH-R940). Images of the device were leaked on Howard Forums, along with some of its hardware specifications and features. Does the device look familiar? Don’t be surprised as the Lightray 4G shares a whole lot of similarities with the Samsung DROID Charge for Verizon, both in terms of looks and specs.
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One of the reasons I love Nexus devices is that Google itself takes care of updates. Another advantage is access to factory images which allows me to go back to ‘as I bought it’ condition.
Google has now released the factory images for Android 4.1 aka Jelly Bean. So, if you messed up your system by using custom ROMs you can easily go back to stock Android.
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Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices has gained significant traction in the market. Will Google follow this success up by pushing the OS into more sophisticated computing devices? Or will it use its browser based-OS Chrome to take on Apple and Microsoft in the PC software market?
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IDC and Appcelerator have announced the results of 2Q 2012 Mobile Developer Survey, a new joint survey of more than 3,500 Appcelerator developers. And the most significant finding in survey is Apple opening a dramatic 16% lead over Google’s Android when it comes to which operating system will win in the enterprise marketplace.
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Smarter Apps, an established mobile app development company in Australia, has announced that it will be bringing in more feature-packed products and services to its clients, in line with new reports stating that Google’s Android OS has come out with a new Jelly Bean source code for its Open Source Project.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Google launched Android 4.1 on the Asus-developed (but Google branded) Nexus 7 in part to reassure OEMs that they will be treated equally in the aftermath of its Motorola Mobility purchase. Maybe Google really did spend $12 plus billion for the Motorola patents, but users are still awaiting the more full featured iPad2 killer from Google. Will it be Jelly Bean on Motorola’s Xoom?.
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Tablet owners have so far had to opt for keyboard docks to take their typing physical. However, that may be about to change after recently published Lenovo patents revealed an interesting clip-on.
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Casio announced today the release of the V-T500-GE and V-T500E business tablets. Based on a product concept of Smart and Tough, these new tablets offer rugged, dependable performance and a full range of features to suit various work styles. The new Casio tablets run Android 4.0 and are equipped with an OMAP4460 1.5 GHz dual cores CPU. The V-T500-GE and V-T500-E are equipped with a large 10.1-inch screen with LED backlight for outstanding readability. The 10.1-inch screen offers excellent readability indoors and out, and offer multi-finger touch control as well as digitizer pen input (sold separately) for ease of use. The new tablets deliver tough, robust security, coming with an NFC Reader/Writer that can authenticate user login using a non-contact IC card, and they have a Secure Access Module (SAM) slot for applications where even higher security is required.
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You seldom hear about it, but Hewlett-Packard has long been a supporter of open source. The company contributes to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and has hired several people who were formerly leaders of the Debian Project, including the redoubtable Bdale Garbee. HP also participates in many smaller projects and invests plenty of effort in governance and community activities. Despite its work engaging the community and ensuring HP printers are usable from Linux, open source seems to have made little impact on HP’s software portfolio (alas, poor WebOS).
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Google has released a new software framework that aims to give programmers the ability to create interactive experiences in physical spaces. It could potentially be used to build interactive art installations or games that involve physical interaction.
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Obsidian Systems has further entrenched its position as a leading provider of enterprise open source in southern Africa by joining the Open Virtualisation Alliance (OVA), a global collection of platform and system providers dedicated to promoting open virtualisation as an alternative to proprietary solutions.
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Though its work is somewhat behind the scenes, most travelers know they depend on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ensure safe air travel. In the past, the organization has often scrabbled with technology and change. In fact, many of its systems have a lot of mileage on them and are difficult to modernize.
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Do you contribute to open source? A great way to get started is to attend a conference, and there are four fine choices available to you this August-October.
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As the resident open source zealot, I thought it might be nice to have a quick rundown of some of the best apps that are free, open source, and cross-platform available to our readers. Experienced users may find fault with me for leaving out their favorite app, but hopefully they will agree that the ones I’ve picked here are deserving of recognition. I especially hope this is useful to those that are unaware of the existence of these applications due to the long shadows cast by the proprietary icons of their respective categories. If you feel I did miss an important app, please let us know in the comments and share your favorites with everyone.
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IT organizations today are more dependent on open source code than ever; they’re just not always sure where it came from, whether they can legally use it or how secure it is.
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Google this week announced it is opening code for building interactive experiences in physical spaces. The Monday posting on its open-source blog site, which carries news about its open source projects, announced the release of Interactive Spaces. As such, Google has a special invitation for developers: “Make a room come alive,” using this framework for creating interactive spaces. The release is described as a new API and runtime that allows developers to build interactive applications for physical spaces.
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Events
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When the deal aggregator Mydala was planning its portal, CTO Ashish Bhatnagar was convinced that the business was likely to take off in a big way and that they would be reaching a scale where, in a day, they would be catering to nearly 8 mn subscribers and running over 1.5 lakh deals across 93 cities.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Firefox is everyone’s favorite browser because of its large collection of add-ons. These add-ons allow you to customize your browser the way you like. You can change personas, themes and more to make your browser stand out from others. And there are some tools like Adblock and NoScript that make your browsing safer and ad free.
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We are excited to announce that we just crossed more than 3 billion downloads* of Firefox Add-ons! That’s almost half of the world’s population and more than the number of people on the Internet today.
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SaaS
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It’s easy enough to find rosy predictions for the cloud from the vendors of related products and services, but when CIOs speak out in favor of the technology, it’s hard not to sit up and take notice.
Such, in fact, is just what came out of a recent survey of IT executives from Host Analytics and Dimensional Research.
Whereas a few years ago we were still hearing considerable concern from CIOs on a number of fronts — security and control perhaps foremost among them — this new research suggests that these executives are increasingly optimistic about cloud computing’s many benefits.
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Education
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I was browsing this morning and came upon an advertisement for system administrator for a small northern Canadian school division. I was surprised to see that there was not a single mention of a GNU/Linux product involved, not even on servers. They were locked in securely to the Wintel world, even in their virtual machines.
I have worked in places like that a decade ago, but thought them totally obsolete by now. Even the most staid organizations see that GNU/Linux has its place, particularly in servers. I was working in one such place and was encouraged to give a presentation to all the IT people about rolling out a GNU/Linux server in each school. That was 2004. Eight years later, to still find M$-only shops still exist is surprising.
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Business
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Funding
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If you’ve been following my column for the last year or two, you already know that “Lunatics” is the free-culture animated science-fiction series that we are creating with free-software applications like Blender, Synfig, Audacity, Inkscape, Gimp, and Krita. We are finally crowd-funding for our pilot episode “No Children in Space” on Kickstarter. If we get funded, this will be a major step forward for free-culture and free-software in the media industry. Come check it out, tell everybody you know, and/or get a copy on DVD or other cool stuff from the project!
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Meteor Development Group (MDG) raises $11.2 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others to fund development around the open-source Meteor Web app development platform.
Meteor Development Group (MDG), the company behind the Meteor open-source project, which produces a platform for building software applications, has announced $11.2 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.
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Money can’t buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community.
Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it “will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings.”
Is that so? Who knew all you needed for an open-source community was $11.2m in venture funding?
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Public Services/Government
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In 2009, under the leadership of the vice-mayor, the administration of the city of Miskolc in Hungary started a transition to open source software and open standards. The primary goals were to reduce costs and find alternative solutions for IT services.
At the start, under the control of service provider Open SKM (in Hungarian), there were no project-like qualities attached to this transition: it had no roadmap, no stages and no milestones.
According to Dr. János Kovács, head of the Miskolc IT department, the plan also included some bad ideas, like converting document formats from .doc and .xls to .odt and .ods, respectively, as part of the move from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. The original plan was to process as many as 600,000 existing documents to free the city from its data lock-in. However, important questions concerning the rationale and cost of this conversion were not considered.
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When the Defense Information Systems Agency made forge.mil operational in 2009, it appeared a revolutionary step forward in Defense Department adoption of open source software.
The site would be a repository for code and an online gathering point for a collaborative community of defense open source coders, DISA officials said at the time.
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Openness/Sharing
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There has been a lot of news related to the UK and the availability of EV chargers lately. The Olympics surely are linked to this! Every provider wants to benefit from the fact the spotlight is on the UK to get their word out.
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Vltor has developed a fast-attach locking system for firearm accessories called the KeyMod system. Not necessarily the first of its kind, KeyMod is different in one major way: it’s free. Vltor is making the specifications open to anyone who wishes to incorporate the standard into their firearm furniture and accessories.
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Programming
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Sonatype, a provider of so-called Component Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions, on Wednesday launched a new on-demand service that analyzes the open-source components that increasingly comprise enterprise Java applications for security, licensing and quality problems.
The company is billing its Insight Application Health Check as a service that allows users to “pull back the curtain on the true contents of their applications.”
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Standards/Consortia
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The lead author and editor of the OAuth 2.0 network authorization standard has stepped down from his role, withdrawn his name from the specification, and quit the working group, describing the current version of the spec as “the biggest professional disappointment of my career.”
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Facts from these data that please me are
* that other OS has a proper share and no more,
* FireFox, a FLOSS web-browser rules, even though I am partial to Chrome,
* there are a lot of comments per post, thanks to readers, and
* Internet Exploder has a tiny share, probably still more than a tool of anti-competition deserves.
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Security
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LAS VEGAS.Security researcher Zachary Cutlip (my pic left) took the stage at both Black Hat and Defcon conferences this weekend.
His talk was about doing SQL Injection on MIPS Powered SOHO routers – and in particular he aimed at the Linux powered Netgear WNDR3700.
After sitting through an hour of this guy’s presentation at Black Hat (i didn’t both to see it a second time at Defcon) the answer is:
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Finance
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As the Global Financial Crisis rumbles along in its fifth year, we read the latest revelations of bankster fraud, the LIBOR scandal. This follows the muni bond fixing scam detailed a couple of weeks ago, as well as the J.P. Morgan trading fiasco and the Corzine-MF Global collapse and any number of other scandals in recent months. In every case it was traders run amuck, fixing “markets” to make an easy buck at someone’s expense. In times like these, I always recall Robert Sherrill’s 1990 statement about the S&L crisis that “thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about.”
After 1990 we removed what was left of financial regulations following the flurry of deregulation of the early 1980s that had freed the thrifts so that they could self-destruct. And we are shocked, SHOCKED!, that thieves took over the financial system.
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A powerful new voice for financial reform emerged this week – Sarah Bloom Raskin, a governor of the Federal Reserve System. In a speech on Tuesday, she laid out a clear and compelling vision for why the financial system should focus on providing old-fashioned but essential intermediation between savers and borrowers in the nonfinancial sector.
Sadly, she also explained that she is a dissenting voice within the Board of Governors on an essential piece of financial reform, the Volcker Rule. Her colleagues, according to Ms. Raskin, supported a proposed rule that is weaker, i.e., more favorable to the banks; she voted against it in October.
At least on this dimension, financial reform is not fully on track.
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DRM
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We’ve just finished a major update of the Guide to DRM-free Living with dozens of new places to get ebooks, movies, and music without DRM and a page of worst-offenders. There have been some exciting developments in the realm of DRM opposition on ebooks, like Tor/Forge dropping DRM on ebooks, and we wanted to spruce up the guide to reflect all the progress that’s been made. The suggested additions came from the LibrePlanet Wiki where you can submit new items for the guide for us to review. With so many new additions, we’ve also had to reorganize the guide into more sections that should make it easy to find what you need.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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How many of you have utilized the four million Creative Commons videos on YouTube? Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons, recently shared a guest post on YouTube’s blog, reflecting on the first year of YouTube’s Creative Commons video library. According to Casserly, this library is larger than any other in the world.
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Last week I wrote about the extremely short consultation period for aspects of implementing the Digital Economy Act. Time is running out – the consultation closes tomorrow at 5pm, so I urge you to submit something soon. It doesn’t have to be very long. Here, for example, is what I am sending – short, but maybe not so sweet….
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Send this to a friend
07.27.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Something dawned on me just yesterday. When using a slim and clean-lined theme or skin on GUI based software, the user can be easily convinced that the system is actually running faster and much lighter on resources. Or at least that’s how I see it. It is a psychological case, whether this affects only a small percentage of users or is within our nature to believe so, I am unsure. Read on and let me explain.
The thought came about yesterday when I updated VLC Media Player on my Linux system. I was not only starting to get bored with the default GTK interface used by VLC, but it also doesn’t fit into my IceWM theme. It sort of looks out of place, considering VLC is an application that is open almost all of the time. So I checked out some VLC skins. I decided to install the hx_milky skin.
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I have believed, with good reason, that GNU/Linux has “arrived” just about everywhere in IT except in some business desktops and gaming for some time. Certainly, no one needs that other OS to do everything.
I have been dismissive of gaming as a barrier to GNU/Linux but spotted it as one of three evidences that GNU/Linux has arrived:“Valve has decided to support GNU/Linux with its Steam platform to hedge its bets in case Windows 8 fails”. It used to be that some would do nothing by taking a risk on anything else but now some see that other OS as a risk to the business.
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There’s the word of Linux too, with Linux.com showcasing the “The 2012 top 7 best Linux distributions for you”, where the desktop Linux winner isn’t Ubuntu, but Linux Mint 13, just released in two versions, Linux Mint 13 “Maya” on last Saturday on the 21st of July, and the “KDE” version released on Monday the 23rd.
There’s also the aforementioned Ubuntu Linux distribution, www.ubuntu.com with the 12.04 LTS (long term support) release having arrived on April 26 2012, and the 12.10 release due on the 18th of October 2012, 8 days before Microsoft releases Windows 8 to GA or “general availability” on retail computers, for online download and through retail boxed purchase.
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Server
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Strictly speaking it is not a single hole, but fourteen holes in the parsing of certain types of tile. The affected file formats are .VSD, .WSD, .JP2, .DOC, .SXD, .LWP, .PCX, .SXI, .DPT, .PDF, .SAM, .ODG and .CDR. A program that opens a specially crafted file with the Oracle libraries is fundamentally compromised. A range of server services are affected, including anti-virus scanners like McAfee GroupShield, but also specific desktop applications that need to handle different file types, such as the Guidance EnCase Forensic toolkit.
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Kernel Space
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While the NFL season prepares to get underway there is an ongoing, intensive draft for Linux talent taking place right now.
We hear this from companies large and small, universities from all over the world and from the Linux kernel community, but we also know demand is high for Linux professionals based on our Linux Jobs Report issued this year (produced in partnership with Dice.com). Eighty-one percent of the hiring managers surveyed for the report said that hiring Linux talent this year is a priority. Sixty-three percent are seeking more Linux professionals relative to other hires. But 85 percent said finding Linux talent is difficult.
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In the latest of our LinuxCon and CloudOpen keynote Q&A series we talk to SUSE’s Vice President of Global Alliances Michael Miller. Miller will be talking in his keynote at the events about how service-oriented clouds are bridging the divide between IT and lines of businesses. He also hinted twice during our conversatoin about a big announcement coming.
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Earlier this year VIA launched a $49 Android PC and now finally they are releasing the source-code to its boot-loader and kernel.
VIA still isn’t engaging in anything in terms of open-source graphics following their failed strategy, but at least when it comes to VIA’s APC Android PC, they have now opened up a bit more.
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The Btrfs file-system update for the Linux 3.6 kernel is “a large btrfs update” with new features introduced to this next-generation file-system.
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Applications
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Keeping an eye on your disk is always very important, especially today when dealing with huge quantity of data. Take a look at your personal files and programs, and you will be surprised by how much disk space you consume. Baobab is a Graphical User Interface software to analyze a disk usage. Hopefully, Baobab can help you manage that, straight out of the box, and with very little installation required.
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London-based Petr Nejedly has released the first stable version of his DLNA media server app for Windows, Mac and Linux. Serviio 1.0 exits beta by introducing both free and Pro versions, with all functionality present during the beta testing kept free as promised by the author.
Serviio 1.0, which can be installed on Linux-based NAS drives as well as PC and Mac, allows users to stream video, music and photos from the host device to any other DLNA-ready device, including Smart TVs, mobile devices and other computers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Rich Geldreich of Valve Software will be presenting on “Left 4 Dead 2 Linux: From 6 to 300 FPS in OpenGL.” As far as a talk description, “The talk will primarily focus on the many lessons learned and the custom profiling and visualization tools created while optimizing Left 4 Dead 2 to run well under Linux using OpenGL.”
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Amarok has the ability to connect with Last.FM and submit your tracks listened, recommend you music, show your top artists and more. Soon Amarok will be able to sync your stats and ratings as well. Say you listen music from a number of devices, your iPod, phone, PC etc. Now all of them are connected with Last.FM. As the music gets scrobbled, Amarok will submit your ratings (stars), the last played time, track added time etc to Last.FM. So next time you listen music from any other device which supports StatsSyncing, you will be able to get data submitted via Amarok (eg stars, labels, last played date etc) on that device as well!
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KDE is becoming more social and developers are working to include Internet and social network sites right into the KDE desktop. A student developer, Marty, has created an KDE plasma widget as his GSoc project, which allows you to interact with Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca from your KDE desktop.
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GNOME Desktop
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Flickr is maybe the most popular image hosting website in the world, helping millions of users to manage their photos online, and to easily share them on any of the widely used social networks.
Frogr is a smart and very useful little application that allows you the easier pre-set and upload of your photographs on Flickr straight from your Gnome desktop!
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The Reglue project was, as many were, caught off guard when both Gnome and Canonical simultaneously lost their minds. With their eyes solidly focused on the mobile market, each moved swiftly to develop an environment that would be both friendly and useful on tablets and phones.
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We have been using Zorin OS since version 3.0 in our business and on our personal computers. I purchased several copies of Ultimate to support Zorin and because of the value added software on the Ultimate DVD. The look changer and splash screen themer are what I call value added. Also, the fact that we can configure our wireless without a wired connection has changed the way we use Linux.
If the Zorin Team can think of “value added” programs to add to the Zorin DVD, I am convinced they will sell more DVD’s and that would help fund Zorin OS.
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New Releases
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Bodhi Linux is proud to present it’s second major release! Bodhi Linux 2.0 is now available for download!
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Jeff Hoogland has announced the release of Bodhi Linux version 2.00. This stable release comes after two months of hard work and bug fixing, followed by a Bodhi Linux 2.00 Release Candidate.
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Alongside the launch of a new web site, the developers at the Bodhi Linux project have published the second major release of their minimal Linux distribution with an Enlightenment-based desktop. As previously described by lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of version 2.0 of Bodhi Linux was not to “introduce ground breaking new features” to the distribution, but rather to smoothly transition to a new version of its underlying operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva will be present at 13th FISL (International Free Software Forum – Brazil), taking place July 25th-28th in Events Center of PUCRS, Porto Alegre. FISL is the most important meeting of the Free Software Communities of Latin America and their 13 years of history have seen many creative and innovative people who encouraged, and believe in the strenght of free software, inside and outside Brazil.
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Gentoo Family
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Gentoo Hardened is thriving and going forward. For those that don’t exactly know what Gentoo Hardened is – it is a Gentoo project dedicated to bring Gentoo in a shape ready for highly secure, high stability production server environments. This is what we live by, and why we do what we do. To accomplish this goal, we use a great community of developers & users that work on several subprojects: the implementation of kernel hardening features such as grSecurity, memory-based protection schemes such as PaX, toolchain updates to harden against buffer overflows and memory attacks, mandatory access control schemes such as SELinux and RSBAC.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) is a growth stock that provides a variant of the Linux operating system family, which is formally known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (If you haven’t heard of Linux, take your IT guy or IT gal out for a cup of coffee.) Unfortunately, Red Hat trades at very high valuation multiples. When compared to its peers, it is readily apparent that investors should stay away from RHT shares at current price levels, even after considering growth projections. RHT high price multiples should dissuade investors from buying at current prices until its valuations descend closer to those of its peers.
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Fedora
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Fedora is one of the most successful community driven open-source project. Its community is most active, helpful, skilled and diverse. You will find people helping in forums, writing documentation in wiki, maintaining the website, doing artwork, packaging software, coding and more.
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Get a Raspberry Pi for contributing to Fedora this Summer, along with other open hardware in the Summer of Hardware and Fun
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Debian Family
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I want preface this blog post by stating I am a Debian Linux fan. I think when set up properly, Debian can be almost unbreakable. It can run light and fast and cool, but first you have to get it installed.
I’ve installed numerous Debian forks and had few if any issues with them, distributions like SolusOS, Linux Mint debian, SalineOS, and Mepis. All were very solid Linux distributions and relatively easy to install. Not so with vanilla Debian.
My goal was to install Debian to a 16 gig usb stick, essentially installing Debian to an external hard drive. To start with, Debian is not as easy to find and download as say, Ubuntu. You don’t go to the home page and click on the “install” button, you have to search through directories to find what you need. I began with what should have been the easiest way, the Debian Live page and Stable release. I downloaded the KDE image and burned it to a usb stick with Unetbootin and booted up the operating system. So far so good, I had a wired Internet connection that was working and the KDE desktop looked good. So I click on “install”.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I was delighted to read the news of Unity entering Fedora. Although many associate Unity with Ubuntu, we would like to encourage the wider adoption of Unity in other Linux distributions and projects. Unity is a desktop that is designed to provide a unified experience not only on your desktop for GNOME, KDE and other apps, but also across different devices and screens.
With Unity getting more eyeballs from Fedora and other distributions, we would like to welcome you folks into the upstream community. If you would like to participate in programming, design, testing, support or other ways of contributing, you are more than welcome! You can find out more here and feel free to post questions of how to participate to the Unity development mailing list or the Unity design mailing list. You can also join our IRC channel at #ubuntu-unity on freenode.
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The third alpha release in the Ubuntu 12.10 development cycle has been made available for download.
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The Ubuntu developers have released the third alpha of Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”, the final release of which is scheduled for 18 October. This development release includes several changes over Alpha 2, which was released a month ago. These changes include a reworked session menu, improvements to the update manager and removal of the third party driver installation tool. Upstream changes to the Nautilus file manager have caused theming issues with the default Ubuntu theme, but the developers expect to have these fixed by the time the first beta release of 12.10 arrives at the beginning of September.
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Smartenit, a home and building automation solutions provider, has added the popular Raspberry Pi board to their repertoire of Linux platforms that run its XML-socket based ZigBee and INSTEON automation package.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony is in the midst of sending out invitations for a press gathering on the eve of the annual IFA conference which takes place in Berlin this August. As to what they will be announcing is not official, however there’s plenty of speculation. Rumored smartphones include such models as the LT29i Hayabusa, the Xperia J, and the Xperia SL. Also potentially on the agenda – the LT30p Mint.
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Facebook Inc. (FB), owner of the largest social network, is working with HTC Corp. to build its own smartphone for release as soon as mid-2013, people with knowledge of the matter said.
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Intel has confirmed that it will be working with Google on porting the Android 4.1 operating system, known as Jelly Bean, to work on smartphones and tablets using low-power Atom processors.
The company did not provide a time frame about when the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean port would be realised, though it is expected to be complete in the next few months.
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In January I attended the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo. In addition to speaking and running the Ubuntu booth, I had an opportunity to talk to other sysadmins about everything from selection of distribution to the latest in configuration management tools and virtualization technology.
I ended up in a conversation with a fellow sysadmin who was using a proprietary virtualization technology on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not only did he have surprising misconceptions about the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) virtualization tools available, he assumed that some of the features he was paying extra for (or not, as the case may be) wouldn’t be in the FOSS versions of the software available.
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It took Instagram a good amount of time to build a mobile photo-sharing app that could scale to 50 million users — and its efforts were obviously recognized by others when it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion earlier this year. But Parse, the startup that launched out of Y Combinator last summer and provides backend-as-a-service tools for mobile app developers, says that making such services should not take so much time and money anymore, because Parse’s tools make it much easier and faster to build really scalable mobile apps.
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We are happy to announce Version 2.0 of Apache OpenMeetings Incubating!
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Open source doesn’t have to mean free of cost, but thanks to the generosity of open source developers many thousands of great applications are free. Why spend money when you don’t have to? Though if you like and depend on an app, nothing says thanks like clicking the “Donate” button.
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Two weeks ago, Amy Clark wrote that an open-source model can — and should — be applied to scientific research in the pharmaceutical industry. Using insights from Ashoka Fellow Stephen Friend, she showed that open-source science would eliminate redundant efforts and fast-track lifesaving drugs.
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Events
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During LinuxCon this year one of the lead Linux kernel developers, Alan Cox, pointed at the challenge the community is facing in terms of gender gap. Unlike other areas where women are in leadership positions open source is an exception. So, we are starting an interview series on Muktware ‘Woman Force In Open Source’ where we will feature one female developer/executive every week. We are starting this series with Elizabeth Krumbach, the winner of the O’Reilly Open Source Award.
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Web Browsers
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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. We’ve previously covered the company’s Boot to Gecko platform — an open, web-centric operating environment centered on the Gecko rendering engine — which is part of the effort. And since February, Mozilla’s mobile operating system has moved ahead rapidly. Now, there are new pictures emerging of what some are calling “Firefox OS.”
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SaaS
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This week’s top open source cloud news features VMware’s acquisition of Nicira; a Q&A with Citrix’s Mark Hinkle; the pros and cons of open source cloud platforms for IT managers; and insider news that Nebula has enticed some Rackspace developers away.
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Databases
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Microsoft SQL users will now be able to migrate data from proprietary MS SQL databases to free MySQL databases, thanks to the new migration tool unveiled by Oracle. By switching to a free and open-source RDBMS, companies and individuals will be able to easily save ownership costs by 90%.
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Funding
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Health/Nutrition
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A Massachusetts college student with diabetes is facing a tough situation: Either she stops going to college full-time to qualify for the insurance she’s currently using, or she opts for help from the state that isn’t going to give her the quality of life she’s used to. So what’s a student trying to get ahead in life to do — try to get an education on a part-time basis or get along without the insulin pump that helps her treat her diabetes?
Katie’s had diabetes since she was 9, reports CBS Boston, and her mom has been grateful to qualify for MassHealth. That coverage has allowed Katie to use an insulin pump to regulate her blood sugar, something that at $1,000 a month, her single mother couldn’t afford otherwise.
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Finance
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Thus the collision course was set between Mr. Barofsky and a crew of complacent, bank-friendly Treasury officials. He soon discovered that the department’s natural stance of marching in lock step with the banks meant that he had to question its policies and programs repeatedly to ensure that taxpayers weren’t at risk for fraud and abuse.
“The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”
To be sure, Mr. Barofsky and his team were up against a powerful status quo. And that meant that they ran into plenty of brick walls.
“Bailout” covers a lot of ground, running through attempts of the inspector general’s office to ensure that additional rescue programs suggested by the Treasury had safeguards in place to avoid conflicts of interest, collusion and fraud. One battle involved the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to get troubled mortgages off banks’ balance sheets by encouraging private investors to buy them using mostly taxpayer dollars. When the inspector general’s office recommended ways to protect against fraud and to fix other flaws in the program, Mr. Barofsky writes, the Treasury rejected the suggestions, maintaining that they would gut the programs and reduce participation.
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n a stunning reversal, a former big bank CEO who crusaded for policies that helped create the so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks now says we need to break up the banks.
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Privacy
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It stands to reason that Microsoft would be extremely interested in SMB opinions about cloud privacy, given its big push into the cloud with Office 365 and its associated services, like Lync Onine.
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