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Links 17/5/2013: 0.9 Billion Android Activations, New Devices, Android Studio





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Linux Is Everywhere – 12 Awesome Devices Powered By Linux
    Besides well known devices like Google’s Android, Amazon’s Kindle etc, Linux is powering some of the most amazing devices around the globe and in the sky.


  • Google Demos Linux Running on Hacked Glass
    Although Google is offering a limited set of developer tools for Glass — and more are on the way — the company doesn’t want to stop hackers from tinkering even further.


  • Google Glass rooted and hacked to run Ubuntu live at Google I/O


  • Google Glass Hacked To Run Ubuntu At Google I/O


  • New tablet boots Ubuntu Linux, Android, and Windows
    We've seen several Linux tablets emerge over the past year or so, but examples with triple-boot capabilities are much less common.


  • Ekoore tablet can be used to run Android, Windows and Linux


  • This tablet boots Android, Windows 8 and Ubuntu


  • Server



  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 5 Episode 8
      In this episode: There's a critical vulnerability in the kernel. But relax, it's been fixed. The International Space Station is switching from Windows to Debian. But not Debian 7, which has just been released. The beginner's programming environment, Scratch 2.0, is out and the Raspberry Pi gets a super-light camera module. As always, hear our discoveries, our reports on the challenge and your own opinions in the Open Ballot.






  • Kernel Space

    • The Iron Penguin, Part 2
      Linus, has dived in to save the day. Where did the robot come from? What is it's purpose? Can the Iron Penguin stand against it?

      Find out next time. Same penguin-time, same penguin-channel.




  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments/WMs



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • The apps of KDE 4.10 Part V: Kopete
        What does KDE offer for instant communication with your co-workers and friends? Kopete steps up to be your all-in-one IM solution.


      • Porting Krita to OpenGL 3.1/ES2.0


      • Amarok 2.7.1 Released!
        Hi there, while we've been working very hard on the next Amarok feature release, the 2.8, we also haven't forgot the majority of our users using the stable versions.


      • Calligra 2.6.3 Released
        The Calligra team has released version 2.6.3, another bugfix release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active. This release contains a number of important bug fixes to 2.6.2 and we recommend everybody to update.


      • Return of the bird, Colibri 0.3.0


      • digiKam Software Collection 3.2.0 is out..
        digiKam team is proud to announce the 3.2.0 release of digiKam Software Collection. This version include a new album interface display mode named list-view. Icon view can be switched to a flat item list, where items can be sorted by properties columns as in a simple file manager. Columns can be customized to show file, image, metadata, or digiKam properties.


      • Qt 5.1 enters beta
        The Qt developers at Digia are moving at a pace – just over a month after releasing the Qt 5.1 alpha, they have announced the first beta of Qt 5.1. Mostly, the beta continues to deliver the features of the alpha – Qt Quick Controls, Qt Quick Layouts, a serial port module for hardware and virtual serial posts, an updated Qt Creator, support for static Qt builds, and official support for the Qt sensors module. The Android (Qt Quick 1 and 2) and iOS (Qt Quick 1 only) support has been refined in the beta release, though it is still at the level of a technology preview.


      • KWin running in Weston
        This week I decided to do some research for the Wayland porting of the KDE Plasma workspaces. One of the features we will need in future is a Wayland session compositor which runs nested on a Wayland system compositor. Of course one could think of setups without a system compositor, but overall I think that a nested compositor simplifies the setup and allows to have all the low level technologies in one place without duplication in all the various compositors. +1 for working together.




    • GNOME Desktop/GTK





  • Distributions



    • Screenshots



    • Red Hat Family



    • Debian Family



      • Derivatives



        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Still Figuring Out How To Handle Hybrid Graphics
            While NVIDIA Optimus and other multi-GPU/hybrid laptop graphics systems have been available for years, in the Linux world support for these capabilities is still in the early stages.


          • Unity 7, Compiz To Be Polished For Ubuntu 13.10
            As mentioned already this morning, the plan with Ubuntu 13.10 is to have an experimental Unity 8 desktop powered by Mir for those wishing to toy around with Canonical's next-generation work. The default, however, will be Unity 7 in an X.Org environment. Even so, the Unity 7 desktop along with the Compiz window manager will receive some refinements for the next Ubuntu release.

            Discussed just now during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit were bug-fixes and enhancements for the desktop Unity version in Ubuntu 13.10. Unity 7 improvements being planned for the October release include presenting new Unity indicators, more Unity scopes, the in-dash payments method, and selected design bugs will be addressed.


          • Asus 1015E 10 inch notebook with Ubuntu coming soon for around $215


          • Ubuntu Linux Community: Canonical to Close 'Brainstorm' Web Portal?
            A few days ago, Canonical reiterated its commitment to restoring the Ubuntu "community" Web portal to front-and-center of official Ubuntu websites. At almost the same moment, news hit that the Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to discontinue the Ubuntu Brainstorm site, another part of ubuntu.com that has served in the past as a vector between developers and community members. Bad timing or cognitive dissonance? Here's a look at the details.


          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 15 Most Ambitious Release Ever
              Clement Lefebvre, Mint founder and lead, recently announced the public release of Linux Mint 15 Release Candidate. Mint 15 brings lots of fixes, two new tools, and several new features. In fact, Clem said, "Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project."


            • Linux Mint 15 "Olivia" gets release candidate
              The Linux Mint developers have announced a release candidate for the upcoming version of their distribution, Linux Mint 15. The release, which is code-named "Olivia", is being built on Ubuntu 13.04 and is billed by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre as "the most ambitious release since the start of the project."


            • Tea and cookies for your new team members
              What does every development team want? New contributors!












  • Devices/Embedded

    • Hackable SODIMM-style ARM9 COM has onboard display
      Crystalfontz America has announced availability of an SODIMM-style COM (computer-on-module) with an optional onboard 128 x 32-pixel OLED display. The tiny CFA10036x module is built around Freescale’s 454MHz ARM9-based i.MX28x SOC (system-on-chip), includes 128MB or 256MB of RAM, and houses its open-source embedded Linux OS in a microSD slot.


    • Phones



      • Android

        • Android Studio opens its doors
          Few of the announcements at Google's I/O conference have involved open source software, but one announcement did: Android Studio, a new IDE environment for Android application development. Although Android Studio is only an early preview at the moment, Google is looking at it to eventually become the default development environment for Android applications, replacing the current solution of the Eclipse IDE and ADT Plugin.


        • Why There Was No New Hardware At Google I/O
          The challenge with a conference like Google I/O, where the announcements arrive one after another, is to see both forest and trees. Analysis of individual announcements – such as Google’s new Pandora/Rdio/Spotify competitor All Access, or the granular pricing for its compute infrastructure – is relatively straightforward. What’s more important, however, is perceiving the larger pattern.


        • Google says it has 900 million Android activations
          The company also launches new APIs to improve Android apps


        • Making Linux and Android Get Along (It's Not as Hard as It Sounds)


        • Sonic the Hedgehog Arrives on Android & iOS!


        • White Nexus 4 and Android 4.3 coming June 10th
          Rumors suggested that a white Nexus 4 might appear at Google IO, and they were right. We obtained the elusive white Nexus 4 and we can confirm it’s a carbon copy of the previous Nexus 4, just with a different color casing. That might not be the most exciting news, but we also learned the white Nexus 4 would hit the Google Play store on June 10th and it would be accompanied with Android 4.3.


        • Archos intros 3G-ready 80 Xenon tablet
          Archos has announced its latest Android tablet, the 80 Xenon, will be available in June with a $199 price tag. The 8-inch tablet is 3G-ready (SIM unlocked HSPA), runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and features the gull Google Play Store experience.






    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • XO Tablet Supposedly Becomes Available on June 1
        Three weeks ago I mentioned that OLPC Association has been remarkably quiet about the Android-based Walmart XO Tablet which it had introduced at CES 2013 in early January. Since then things have progressed a little bit with the Web site receiving a bit of a facelift.








Free Software/Open Source



  • Events

    • Open Cloud Take Two: The CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013
      The last year has been a whirlwind of activity for Apache CloudStack. Citrix proposed CloudStack for the Apache Incubator in April of 2012, and just over a year later we're gearing up for a second collaboration conference – this time in Santa Clara, CA, from June 23-25.




  • Web Browsers

    • Opera quietly settles lawsuit


    • Opera and ex-employee settle €£2.2m lawsuit
      NORWEGIAN SOFTWARE COMPANY Opera has settled the €£2.2m lawsuit against ex-employee Trond Werner Hansen.


    • Chrome

      • Google Touts Big Share for Chrome, and New Voice Search Plans
        At this week's Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, announced that Chrome has reached the milestone of 750 million monthly users. This number is being misinterpreted by some to mean that 750 million people are using the Chrome browser on desktop computers.




    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox
        Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."

        The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.


      • Ubuntu 13.10 may ditch Firefox for Chromium
        For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.


      • Ubuntu 13.10 may ditch Firefox for Chromium
        For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.


      • Mozilla Plans to Renumbers Open Source Firefox Security Updates
        Ok, I know... the 'E' in Firefox ESR does not stand for 'Enterprise', but it should. The ESR - Extended Support Release is an effort to help organizations stay with a secure version of Firefox for longer period of times than the current fast track six-week release cycle of Firefox.

        I rely on Firefox ESR and I recommend it to lots of people because it's a much safer version of Firefox to use with custom apps that sometimes - break - with the fast release cycle of Firefox.

        The most recent Firefox mainline release is version 21, while the current Firefox ESR is 17. The next Firefox ESR is currently schedule to coincide with the Firefox 24 mainline release.






  • Business

    • Colosa Announces ProcessMaker 2.5 Open Source BPM Software
      Back in April, during SugarCRM's annual SugarCon Conference, the company announced it would integrate ProcessMaker into it's suite of cloud-based services, allowing seamless use of business process management tools directly from the Salesforce interface. About the same time the company also announced the new SugarCRM mobile application powered by HTML5 and offering a fast, easy way to access SugarCRM's powerful features on mobile devices.


    • Open Source Workflow Platform ProcessMaker Unveils New Features


    • VIDEO: ONF Chief on the Future of OpenFlow SDN
      The OpenFlow protocol stands at the center of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) revolution, and at the center of OpenFlow stands the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). As the revolution progresses, however, vendors are attempting to look beyond OpenFlow. Where does that leave the ONF?




    • Semi-Open Source

      • Talend 5.3 focused on Hadoop usability
        Talend's data integration platform is being aimed at solving the complexity issues that surround deployment of Apache-Hadoop-based solutions. The developers have been focusing on creating Apache Pig developer tools and creating code in Pig Latin, which is said to remove the need to learn about MapReduce, the fundamental architectural element behind Hadoop. Users work with Talend's Big Data graphical tools and that generates Pig Latin code which is then run on the Hadoop cluster; to optimise its running, a graphical mapper can be used to rework the data flow and mapping within the cluster.






  • Funding



  • Project Releases



  • Public Services/Government

    • Fraunhofer FOKUS institute releases Fuzzino fuzzing library
      Researchers from FOKUS (Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems) in Germany have released the Fuzzino data fuzzing library as open source software. The library allows existing test tools to be prepared for fuzzing and aims to make the development of new fuzzing tools unnecessary. Fuzzing is the process of testing a system for hidden weaknesses by presenting the system with random and sometimes erroneous input data.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Data

      • A directory for open data projects
        Open (government) data as it is understood nowadays can still be considered a new concept. It started to gain traction worldwide since the Obama memo in early 2009 and the launch of data.gov a few months later. Following successful leading examples of the US and UK governments we have seen open data flourishing all over the world over the last three years. About three hundred open data catalogues have been identified so far.


      • Location, location, location
        The rapid rise in the number of mobile devices has led to a concomitant rise in the amount of location data available. Proprietary services are emerging to take advantage of that data, but open source has a strong foothold in the form of OpenStreetMap.






  • Programming

    • Google previews PHP on App Engine
      PHP is the latest addition to the range of languages supported on Google's App Engine. The PaaS (Platform as a Service) already supports Python, Java and Go and, like the languages before it, PHP is being introduced first as a limited preview experimental feature.




  • Standards/Consortia

    • Google pushing for quick adoption of their new open source VP9 video codec
      VP9 is an open source and royalty free video compression technology under active development by Google with which they hope to replace the popular H.264 standard. The development of VP9 begain in late 2011 with two goals in mind, to provide a 50% reduced bit rate compared to the older VP8 codec while maintaining the video quality, and also optimizing it to the point that it becomes superior to the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (H.264) standard as well. We have to keep in mind that H.264 is pretty old now and the same standard is getting an update to H.265 which as much as doubles the data compression rate compared to the older H.264 standard.


    • Google's open video proposal closes door on software freedom
      Google/MPEG-LA deal showed promise, but Google's requirement for user licenses may bring a backlash






Leftovers



  • Health/Nutrition



  • Security



    • RIPE: Attacks on domain name systems are on the increase
      30 million open resolvers in the domain name system and a 200 per cent increase in the number of attacks in 2012 – these alarming figures were discussed by administrators at the 66th meeting of the RIPE IP address registry in Dublin this week. A panel discussion revolved around how to motivate the black sheep to implement long overdue security measures before large-scale attacks call the regulators to action.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Stephen Harper's administration has increased spend from $9m to $16.5m in the last year
      Canadian government doubles advertising spend on tar sands


    • Scientists Agree (Again): Climate Change Is Happening
      Public opinion on the topic of climate change is notoriously fickle, changing -- quite literally sometimes -- with the weather. The latest bit of evidence on this: Yale's April 2013 climate change survey, which found, among other things, that Americans' conviction that global warming is happening had dropped by seven points, to 63 percent, over the preceding six months. The decline, the authors surmised, was most likely due to "the cold winter of 2012-13 and an unusually cold March just before the survey was conducted."




  • Censorship



  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights

    • America’s greatest threat: Unsafe work conditions
      If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11′s worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?


    • We made it! - Global Breakthrough as Retail Brands sign up to Bangladesh Factory Safety Deal
      Geneva 16 May 2013 – The world’s leading retail labels commit to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh before the midnight deadline. The Accord now covers more than 1000 Bangladeshi garment factories. Implementation starts now!


    • CCC calls for action after another deadly collapse
      Clean Clothes Campaign is calling for immediate action from all international brands following today's collapse of the Wing Star Shoes factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The collapse of the ceiling cost the lives of at least two people, and injured seven. The workers were stitching sneakers for sportsbrand Asics when the ceiling caved in on top of them.


    • Lead the World on Internet Rights, Web Inventor urges Brazil
      Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, addressed a press conference on 16 May 2013 at the WWW Conference in Rio de Janeiro. Berners-Lee used his address to state his support for the Marco Civil da Internet, (Marco Civil) a landmark draft Bill in Brazil that many have called ‘a Constitution for the Internet’.


    • Tipping law enforcement to possible terrorist activity is purpose of 13-county program
      Sheriffs in 13 Northeast Florida counties announced an online system Thursday for residents to report suspicious activity they think may be terrorism-related.




  • DRM

    • One Step Closer to the Open eBook Tipping Point: O’Reilly Joins the EPUB 3.0 Ecosystem
      Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries: most obviously, Amazon, with its Kindle line, Barnes & Noble with its Nook devices, and Apple with its iPads and iPhones. But there are many non-content vendors that would love to sell you an eReader as well, such as Kobo, and Pocketbook, not to mention the smartphone vendors that would be happy to have you use their devices as eReaders, too.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • IsoHunt Will Take DMCA Safe Harbor Fight to the Supreme Court
        In March, the Ninth Circuit declared that Canada-based BitTorrent search engine isoHunt is not entitled to protection under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA due to its conduct many years ago. IsoHunt filed a petition for a rehearing before a jury, but yesterday a Ninth Circuit panel unanimously rejected it. Isohunt lawyer Ira Rothken informs TorrentFreak that the right to a jury trial is protected by the constitution and isoHunt is now in the process of requesting a Supreme Court review.


      • Why are Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle Backing the Fight *Against* the Blind?
        One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in formats like Braille. The thinking seems to be that it's more important to preserve copyright "inviolate" than to alleviate the suffering of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

        You can read the disgusting details of how publishers have fought against the "proposed international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities" for *30* years in an column I wrote back in 2011.








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