Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 7/1/2013: Arch 2013.01.04, Fuduntu 2013.1 Released





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • LWN's 2013 Predictions
    The 3.12 kernel release will happen on November 20, 2013, or, at worse, by the beginning of December. The kernel development process has become a well-tuned machine with a highly predictable cycle; the longest cycle in 2012 (3.3) was only twelve days longer than the shortest (3.5). In the absence of significant externally imposed stress, it is hard to see anything changing that in 2013.


  • 3 Predictions on Linux World for 2013
    Bangalore: It’s 2013 and the entire tech world is anticipating something new for the year. The same holds for the Linux world that did great the past year and there’s no better time to look ahead. People are predicting so much about the tech and the Linux platform, such that they have realized the fact that Linux is the real deal. With that in mind, here are 5 predictions on the Linux platform for 2013, as reported by CIO.com.


  • Desktop

    • Tribal Desktop
      Things seem to have suddenly changed in terms of my available resources thanks to some generous supporters, and now I am thinking rather seriously for the first time of producing a more supportable and sustainable desktop distro image for general use based off debian wheezy gnu/linux, xfce4, some interesting tinkering, and some of my own odd aesthetics, which would work well anywhere from an arm chromebook or raspberrypi to a netbook, laptop, or desktop, whether very old or new. This should give an idea of what I have in mind...


    • Amazon's top selling laptop doesn't run Windows or Mac OS, it runs Linux
      We all know now that Windows 8 sales have been.... disappointing. You can blame the hardware. You can blame Windows 8's mixed-up interfaces. You can blame the rise of tablets and smartphones. Whatever. The bottom line is Windows 8 PC and laptop sales have been slow. So, what, according to Amazon, in this winter of Windows 8 discontent has been the best selling laptop? It's Samsung's ARM-powered, Linux-based Chromebook.


    • Happy Sitting at the Kid's Table?


      "Why does Google refuse to reference that Android or Chromebooks are Linux-based?"

      He took a pull on his Shiner Bock and did something I didn't really expect.

      He answered me. And I'm not going to use quotes because I didn't write it down but this is awful close:

      Because Linux Users can't be trusted to behave if they are taken out into public.

      He went on to explain that the powers that be (of which he is not one but within that circle) simply don't want anything getting in the way of Google's march to their phone, tablet and computer market supremacy. Their Chromebook slayed the numbers this Christmas season and many within the marketing effort at Google believe NOT associating their brand with Linux may have helped tremendously.

      Is Linux mentioned anywhere in the Android Marketing?

      No.

      Is Linux mentioned anywhere in Chromebook Marketing?

      No.






  • Kernel Space



    • Major Network Performance Regressions In Linux
      Affecting the latest Linux kernel release, Linux 3.7, are "multiple apparently unrelated network performance issues." The major network performance problems were reported by a well-known Linux kernel developer.

      Willy Tarreau, a Linux kernel developer and the one that was the maintainer of the Linux 2.4 kernel series, wrote a new mailing list thread to kernel developers on Saturday that was entitled "Major network performance regression in 3.7." The problems also seem unresolved by the current Linux 3.8 kernel.


    • ARM CoreSight Support Published For Linux


    • Linux Kernel Still Picking Up AVX Optimizations
      Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) have been present in Intel and AMD hardware since last year with Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer processors, respectively, but their use isn't too very widespread at this point. Fortunately, the Linux kernel has been receiving some AVX1/AVX2 optimizations.


    • Intel TurboStat Can Now Read CPU Temp, Wattage
      Intel's TurboStat utility that's part of the Linux kernel is now capable of reading the wattage and temperature for modern Intel processors.

      The Turbostat utility with the Linux 3.8 kernel will be able to read CPU temperatures for hardware that has either a Digital Thermal Sensor (DTS) or Package Thermal Monitor (PTM) hardware.


    • Linux Dynticks Being Extended For Performance Wins
      Dynticks, the Dynamic Tick Timer for allowing the Linux kernel to skip ticks while idling and resume to running at full HZ when encountering load, is in the process of being extended. Developers are working on making Dynticks work even under select workloads in order to enhance the performance of CPU-intensive tasks.


    • Balance NUMA Merged For Linux 3.8 Kernel


    • Graphics Stack

      • ARM 64-Bit Support For The X.Org Server (AArch64)
        Support for AArch64, the 64-bit ARM architecture, is being prepped for the X.Org Server.

        For the AArch64 Linux enablement, support was added to the Linux 3.7 kernel, has been merged for the next release of the GCC compiler, and other GNU/Linux components are beginning to see this ARMv8 support work.


      • A Software-Based Pixman Renderer For Wayland's Weston
        There hasn't been too many new Wayland/Weston developments to report on recently, but being published this weekend for review and comments is a new Pixman renderer for Weston. This Pixman renderer allows for pure software rendering with the Weston reference compositor and adds MIT-SHM support to the X11 back-end.


      • MSAA Anti-Aliasing Finally Comes To Radeon R300g
        While the AMD Radeon "R300g" Gallium3D driver has been effectively "done" for a while, only this weekend has multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support come to this open-source graphics driver that supports the ATI Radeon X1000 (R500) GPUs and older hardware.


      • Radeon Kernel Driver Deprecates UMS Mode-Setting
        The open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack has been deprecating the user-space mode-setting (UMS) code for a while and is now finally making the kernel-space mode-setting (KMS) support the default Radeon interface for the Linux kernel.


      • TI OMAP5 Support Comes To Their DRM Driver


      • X.Org Server 1.14 Development Closed, RC1 Released


      • AMD Made OpenCL A Bit Faster This Year On Linux
        To be published on Thursday and Friday of this week is the annual "year in review" articles for the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. While those articles are looking at the OpenGL performance for all driver releases made in the past year, some OpenCL benchmarks were also conducted.


      • DRM Render Nodes Published, Better Graphics Security
        A complete but experimental implementation of "render nodes" for the open-source Linux graphics stack has been published. After being discussed in months prior for advancing the Linux graphics stack to take care of some security holes, this render node implementation is slowly but surely nearing a state for merging to mainline.




    • Benchmarks





  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments/WMs



  • Distributions



    • New Releases



    • Screenshots



    • Red Hat Family



    • Debian Family



      • Derivatives



        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu mobile: too little, far too late
            Wise words those, from the bard of Avon. They come to mind as one ponders the situation that Canonical is in, after its announcement a few days ago of a concept for a mobile running Ubuntu.

            Briefly put, the company has missed the boat. The announcement is too little. And it is far too late. Any announcement of vapourware in the mobile space at this time is a waste of time and space.


          • Ubuntu's Merry Mobile Machinations
            "The most interesting feature that Ubuntu Phone brings is the ability to plug it into a laptop dock or monitor and keyboard and run the full x86 PC version of Ubuntu," said Mobile Raptor blogger Robin Lim. "But how many people really want to run Ubuntu? Canonical has been offering this under its Ubuntu for Android project for nearly a year, and there seem to be no takers."


          • Flavours and Variants

            • Voyager 12.10 Review: Xubuntu spiced up and overkilled!
              Make no mistake, I really like Xubuntu - for it's simplicity and efficiency! But, the looks of default Xubuntu bore me a lot and most of the time I resort to making transparent panel, adding a nice conky, replacing the bottom panel with a docky, etc. to make it palatable. Functionally, though, I don't have anything to fret about and Xubuntu works as good as any other Linux distro.


            • Fuduntu 2013.1 Released
              Well, December 21 came and went with little fanfare. When the dust settled, the world didn’t end and the Fuduntu Team was told that they did, in fact, have to finish the 2013.1 release. So, after realizing that they weren’t going to get out of work, the team put their collective noses to the grindstone and are now proud to present Fuduntu 2013.1, the first quarterly release of the new year!












  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



  • Limpag: Open source for the win
    ON Christmas Eve, I cobbled together a network-attached storage (NAS) at home to enable everyone in our house to have a shared directory for school, work and personal files. This shared directory is also accessible from outside the house - like a rudimentary personal “cloud” for our family.


  • 2012 was ace!
    Last year was awesome for Linux and free software. Android grew much stronger, more people than ever understood the ideas behind open source and the Raspberry Pi helped to erase any last vestige of ‘hacker-elite’ from preconceptions of Linux...


  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.2.6 Carries Many Virtualization Fixes
      It's been two months since the last update to Oracle's cross-platform VirtualBox software but yesterday evening a new point release was made available that has a plethora of fixes and other minor improvements.




  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.1 Benchmarked Against Linux, Solaris, BSD
      While FreeBSD 9.1 has yet to be officially released, the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 9.1 "Isotope" release has already been made available this month. In this article are performance benchmarks comparing the 64-bit release of PC-BSD 9.1 against DragonFlyBSD 3.0.3, Oracle Solaris Express 11.1, CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.10, and a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.




  • Project Releases

    • e(fx)clipse leaps to 0.8.0
      In its latest release, e(fx)clipse's version number has been bumped from 0.1.1, as released in September 2012, to 0.8.0 to reflect the IDE for JavaFX's maturity and stability. The system provides an Eclipse-based development environment, tools, and runtime for JavaFX 2.x and later as a framework for building rich client applications.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Data

      • 1 million OpenStreetMappers
        OpenStreetMap has just passed 1 million users! That's a million people who have signed up on openstreetmap.org to join in with creating a free map of the world.





    • Open Hardware



      • MakerPlane: Open source takes flight in aviation
        I spoke with John Nicols at MakerPlane about their passionate team of contributors from all over the world who are designing and building a full-sized two seat Light Sport Aircraft. Their mission is to "create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them."






  • Programming

    • You Can Now Run LLVM Assembly In Your Web-Browser
      Thanks to some experimental and innovative work done on LLVM, it's now possible to parse and execute LLVM Assembly within your web-browser. This Assembly code from the LLVM compiler infrastructure is then translated to JavaScript using EmScripten.






Leftovers

  • If you tell others about this page, you owe me 1000 Dollars!
    Yes, you owe me 1000 Dollars. Please do follow and carefully read the links in the following paragraphs, otherwise it may be hard to believe that I am not making this up. It looks like some “National Newspapers of Ireland” is trying to get permission to force people who merely link to a page on a newspaper website to both get permission and pay that newspaper first, as if they had wanted to copy the actual text of that page.


  • Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing
    O’Reilly: Apple. They’re clearly on the wrong path. They file patent suits that claim that nobody else can make a device with multitouch. But they didn’t invent multitouch. They just pushed the ball forward and applied it to the phone. Now they want to say, “OK, we got value from someone else, but it stops now.” That attitude creates lockup in the industry. And I think Apple is going to lose its mojo precisely because they try to own too much.


  • Health/Nutrition

    • Food and Commerce
      Author Frederick Kaufman talked about the influence of the financial industry, large food corporations and federal policy upon how food is treated as a form of commerce.




  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CoalSwarm: A Clearinghouse for Shared Information on King Coal
      The article below was written by Ted Nace, who founded Coalswarm. Since 2008, the Center for Media and Democracy has been hosting the CoalSwarm wiki project on CMD's SourceWatch.org website. SourceWatch is a sister site of this site, PRWatch.org, and other sites of CMD, which include ALECexposed.org and Foodrightsnetwork.org.






  • Finance

    • Secret and Lies of the Bailout
      The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come


    • Inside the Hostess Bankery
      Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in 5 years if I took their offer. It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me. That $3+ per hour they steal totaled $50 million last year that they never paid us. They sold $2.5 BILLION in product last year. If they can't make this profitable without stealing my money then good riddance.

      I keep hearing how this strike forced them to liquidate. How we should just take it and be glad to have a job. What an unpatriotic view point. The reason these jobs provided me with a middle class opportunity is because people like my father in law and his father fought for my Union rights. I received that pay and those benefits because previous Union members fought for them. I won't sell them, or my coworkers, out.


    • Portugal warns EU-IMF troika to back off on austerity demands
      President Anibal Cavaco Silva called for urgent action to halt the “recessionary spiral”, warning Europe’s leaders that the current course had become “socially unsustainable”.




  • Censorship



    • To Avoid Controversy, 'Realtime' Microblogging In China Now Delayed By 7 Days


    • Chinese journalists strike after propaganda department rewrites New Year editorial
      Protests have erupted in southern China after the Guangdong propaganda department rewrote a New Year editorial for the Southern Weekend newspaper.

      The government has an escalated situation on its hands now that the publication’s journalists have gone on strike and have received support from students and netizens.


    • Kuwait Twitter 'insult' brings 2-year prison sentence
      Authorities across the Western-allied Gulf Arab states have sharply increased crackdowns on perceived dissent among bloggers and others using social media. The sentence passed Sunday in Kuwait is not the harshest in region, but is likely to bring further denunciations from international rights groups.


    • Kuwaiti gets two years for insulting emir on Twitter


    • Kuwaiti gets 2 years for insulting emir on Twitter


    • Mounting costs for the default model of trust production in American newsrooms
      The outlines of the new system are now coming into view. Accuracy and verification, fairness and intellectual honesty–traditional virtues for sure–join up with transparency, “show your work,” the re-voicing of individual journalists, fact-checking, calling BS when needed and avoiding false balance.

      [...]

      Truth telling is more important that a ritualized demonstration of viewlessness...


    • When Reporters Get Personal
      BILL GRUESKIN remembers being an editor at The Wall Street Journal in 2004 when Farnaz Fassihi’s e-mail, meant for a few friends’ eyes only, began to circle the globe. Ms. Fassihi, an Iranian-American, was a reporter for The Journal, and the exposure of her views about the deteriorating situation in Iraq, provocative and incisive, was shocking. Published outside the normal bounds of painfully balanced journalism, her missive gave readers an unfiltered blast of reality.

      [...]

      Pushing back are editors like Philip B. Corbett, The Times’s associate managing editor for standards. “I flatly reject the notion that there is no such thing as impartial, objective journalism — that it’s some kind of pretense or charade, and we should just give it up, come clean and lay out our biases,” he said. “We expect professionals in all sorts of fields to put their personal opinions aside, or keep them to themselves, when they do their work — judges, police officers, scientists, teachers. Why would we expect less of journalists?”

      [...]

      €¶The idea that “transparency is the new objectivity,” as the author David Weinberger puts it, has merit. Journalists can let readers get to know their backgrounds, their personalities and how they do their jobs. The Times has embraced that move toward transparency, through social media, Web-based chats with journalists, and even its employment of a public editor who explains the paper to readers.





  • Privacy

    • Ministry unveils plan to spy on Internet users


    • Outrage at illegal SIM card penalties
      The Consumers Federation of Kenya (Cofek) has condemned a decision by the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK) to fine subscribers KES300,000 (USD3,426) or jail them for three years for using unregistered SIM cards. CapitalFM.co.ke quotes Cofek secretary general Stephen Mutoro as suggesting that the only penalty customers should face for using unregistered SIM cards is disconnection from their service provider. Once disconnected, subscribers will have 90 days to recover their numbers, but Mutoro emphasised that the failure by providers to disconnect noncompliant customers should not be placed with the subscribers themselves.


    • There's No Avoiding Google+




  • Civil Rights

    • The Big Chill
      The Obama administration is operating amid unprecedented secrecy—while attacking journalists trying to tell the public what they need to know.



    • NDAA: The Civil Liberties We're Giving Up For This Controversial Defense Bill
      President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on December 31, 2012, ushering in the New Year with a controversial law, which may impede civil liberties in its current form. As this New York Times article points out, President Obama signed this rather reluctantly, while being aware that the non-budgetary components were not entirely constitutional, and bordered on infringing on the president's authority. I believe that that this is a pragmatic step taken by the president and while it binds his hands when it comes to closing down Guantanamo Bay (GITMO), it may have been a necessary evil to get work done. But we may be giving up more than what we had bargained for, considering the provisions of the Act in its current form.


    • New NDAA Keeps Indefinite Detention, Blocks Guantanamo Closure


    • Regulating the use of drones
      The debate will be interesting to listen to, for sure, whether or not the Legislature adopts new laws governing the use of drones. But there should be room for lawmakers to find proper balance between using drones when the technology would make police work safer and more effective and using them in an intrusive manner.



    • Drones killing our allies
      Militant commander Mullah Nazir was killed in a US drone strikes in South Waziristan, killing him is astonishing news as he was the only commander who was supporting our government’s efforts against militant groups, and he was considered the government’s biggest supporter in the area. Only weeks ago he survived a suicide attack from his rival Hakimullah Mehsud.


    • Stop the drones
      I am writing today because I am tremendously concerned about your use of remote controlled drones to kill people all over the world, depriving them of all their rights and violating every principle our great nation is founded on. It is hard to listen to you speak about the dead kids in Connecticut knowing you have killed lots of kids too. Kids who had no chance, no warning and no reason to be dead. Everybody deserves a trial and a chance to defend themselves against their accusers. It is the American way. Please stop setting such a monstrous bad example and stop the drone killings. Law enforcement follows your example and kills dangerous people rather than arresting them. You really do set the example for every chief executive in America.


    • The Booming Business of Drones


    • Emma Watson Stopped by Immigration




  • Internet/Net Neutrality



  • DRM



  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights

      • Banana Republic Justice: Behind The Scenes Of The Pirate Bay Trial
        Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a fourth unrelated person that it’s hard to get a bird’s-eye view. This trial was characterized by first deciding that the operations were criminal, then finding somebody to punish, and finally trying to determine a criminal act they could be held accountable to. In any civilized country where process of law works, the exact reverse order is followed.


      • Tom Bell on copyright reform


      • The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain
        In 2003, many of those who rely on the public domain had their hopes dashed by Eldred v. Ashcroft, the case that upheld the 20-year extension to the copyright term. (The effects of repeated term extensions are explored in more detail below.) The Constitution declares that copyrights must only be “for limited times” and that Congress can only create exclusive rights to “promote the progress” of knowledge and creativity. Despite those limitations, in Eldred, the Supreme Court held that Congress could retrospectively lengthen copyright terms – something that seemed neither “limited” nor aimed at promoting progress. (It is hard to incentivize dead authors!) But 2012 was to hold in store an even more grievous blow to the public domain. In Golan v. Holder, the Supreme Court held that Congress can remove works from the public domain without violating the Constitution. Yes, that is right – even if the public now enjoys unfettered access to a work, Congress is allowed to take that work out of the public domain and create a new legal monopoly over it. What’s more, the Court declared, Congress can do so even when it is clear that the new right “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work”!



      • Is The Copyright Industry Really Shooting Itself In The Foot?


      • ISP Walks Out of Piracy Talks: “We’re Not The Internet Police”
        A leading Australian Internet service provider has pulled out of negotiations to create a warning notice scheme aimed at reducing online piracy. iiNet, the ISP that was sued by Hollywood after refusing to help chase down alleged infringers, said that it can’t make any progress with righthsolders if they don’t make their content freely available at a reasonable price. The ISP adds that holding extra data on customers’ habits is inappropriate and not their responsibility.


      • 2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web








Recent Techrights' Posts

SoylentNews Grows Up, Registers as a Business, Site Traffic Reportedly Grows
More people realise that social control media may in fact be a passing fad
 
Richard Stallman's Talks in Switzerland This Week
We need to put an end to 'cancer culture'; it's trying to kill people and it is even swatting people
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 28, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, March 28, 2024
[Meme] EPO's New Ways of Working (NWoW), a.k.a. You Don't Even Get a Desk at Work and Cannot be Near Known Colleagues
Seems more like union-busting (divide and rule)
Hiding Microsoft's Culpability in Security Breaches and Other Major Blunders (in the United Kingdom, This May Mean You Can't Get Food)
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is vast
Giving back to the community
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 28/03/2024: Sega, Nintendo, and Bell Layoffs
Links for the day
Open letter to the ACM regarding Codes of Conduct impersonating the Code of Ethics
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
With 9 Mentions of Azure In Its Latest Blog Post, Canonical is Again Promoting Microsoft and Intel Vendor Lock-in, Surveillance, Back Doors, Considerable Power Waste, and Defects That Cannot be Fixed
Microsoft did not even have to buy Canonical (for Canonical to act like it happened)
Links 28/03/2024: GAFAM Replacing Full-Time Workers With Interns Now
Links for the day
Consent & Debian's illegitimate constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Time Our Server Host Died in a Car Accident
If Debian has internal problems, then they need to be illuminated and then tackled, at the very least in order to ensure we do not end up with "Deadian"
China's New 'IT' Rules Are a Massive Headache for Microsoft
On the issue of China we're neutral except when it comes to human rights issues
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 27, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
WeMakeFedora.org: harassment decision, victory for volunteers and Fedora Foundations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/03/2024: Terrorism Grows in Africa, Unemployment in Finland Rose Sharply in a Year, Chinese Aggression Escalates
Links for the day
Links 27/03/2024: Ericsson and Tencent Layoffs
Links for the day
Amid Online Reports of XBox Sales Collapsing, Mass Layoffs in More Teams, and Windows Making Things Worse (Admission of Losses, Rumours About XBox Canceled as a Hardware Unit)...
Windows has loads of issues, also as a gaming platform
Links 27/03/2024: BBC Resorts to CG Cruft, Akamai Blocking Blunders in Piracy Shield
Links for the day
Android Approaches 90% of the Operating Systems Market in Chad (Windows Down From 99.5% 15 Years Ago to Just 2.5% Right Now)
Windows is down to about 2% on the Web-connected client side as measured by statCounter
Sainsbury's: Let Them Eat Yoghurts (and Microsoft Downtimes When They Need Proper Food)
a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries