03.05.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Security at 12:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Bad news sells better
Summary: What the media is not really telling us about the GnuTLS vulnerability
The corporate press has shown its ignorance by characterising GNU as “Linux” and describing an already-patched flaw as the worst thing since proprietary software. Some went as far as suggesting that the NSA was behind it [1] and Muktware rebutted [2] the seminal article [3] which started a lot of the panic (at the time of writing there are dozens of articles about this, but we don’t need to feed them with links). What we have here is another case of Dan Goodin creating panic in the Microsoft-friendly Ars, just as he had done when he worked for the Microsoft-friendly The Register. The only shocking thing is the amount of press coverage this received. PGP/GPG, OpenSSH, OpenSSL etc. were previously named here for flaws that had been found (in the context of Red Hat and the NSA [1, 2, 3]). These are not so uncommon. One just needs to keep up to date (patched) — one that which Apple’s customers cannot do. They can’t even write their own patches. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Originally reported by Ars Technica, the fix was available by the time the general public was made aware of it. It’s actually fairly similar to a certain security hole that lived for a year and could have allowed for exploits to be used in the wild.
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The bug in the GnuTLS library makes it trivial for attackers to bypass secure sockets layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections available on websites that depend on the open source package. Initial estimates included in Internet discussions such as this one indicate that more than 200 different operating systems or applications rely on GnuTLS to implement crucial SSL and TLS operations, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual number is much higher. Web applications, e-mail programs, and other code that use the library are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers monitoring connections to silently decode encrypted traffic passing between end users and servers.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Android Domination in Tablets
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It’s no secret that Android has become a dominant force in the smartphone arena, with Strategy Analytics estimating that it commanded 79 percent of smartphone market share last year. Much of that success has come on Samsung devices, and so it’s notable that Gartner researchers are out with new data showing that Android has become the biggest tablet operating system with 62 percent of the market, and Samsung’s Android tablets are flourishing.
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Beating Proprietary
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The title says it all. Folks are using their Android/Linux smartphones a lot everywhere, even at work. Same with tablets. The personal computer has been redefined by consumers, employees, everyone but the sycophants of Wintel. The small cheap computers flooding the markets are computers and people, real people, love them. They are personal. Since “7″ is on borrowed time and declining while Android/Linux usage shows higher growth than M$’s other offerings, it looks like in a year or two, Android/Linux will be the top dog in a sea of “others”.
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When it comes to mobile operating systems, iOS and Android are still the frontrunners. Despite the brilliant and not-so-brilliant efforts of Microsoft to topple the two giants, the mobile market space is dominated by Cupertino and Mountain View. iOS, which made its beginnings in an era where touch-screen smartphones was a relatively new concept. With the late Steve Jobs at the helm, Apple was instrumental in starting what we now call the smartphone revolution. iOS with its brilliant and shiny design wowed many users thus catapulting the company into the role of a technology giant. As iOS was soaring at a breathtaking pace, a little-known open-source operating system was making its presence felt ever so slightly. Neither Steve Jobs nor the open-source community could guess how the mobile market space would change in the next few years.
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This is a story about ARM Holdings (ARMH), the mobile technology company.
Ballnux (Microsoft-taxed)
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Samsung Electronics came to Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress to show off its newest smartphones and smartwatches to
‘Embrace’ and ‘Extend’
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It sounds like Microsoft is working on a dual-boot smartphone strategy that would cover both Google Android and Windows Phone. Um… this strategy sounds a bit like the 1990s, when IBM launched a dual-boot initiative involving OS/2 and Windows. Anybody else remember how that story turned out?
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For those who do not know, Nokia uses its own proprietary fork of Android, rather than stock Android, in its X-series devices. It also removes all Google services and replaces them with its own. Therefore, these devices ship with Nokia Store in lieu of Google Play. However, ports have been made in both directions, i.e., Google apps on Nokia X, and Nokia Store on other Android devices.
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The end of Windows Phone?
ZDNet thinks that Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia may indicate an embrace of Android and the possible end of Windows Phone.
Deception and FUD
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Does ‘open’ mean ‘lack of security’?
According to Google, no. Instead, an open platform is the best path to take in order to make a platform as impermeable to threats as possible.
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A local site quoted Pichai as indicating that Google’s Android operating system was, to quote one reblog of the comments, “not designed to be safe, it was designed to be open.” Naturally, something of that nature caused a stir. Google admitting that Android is inherently insecure due to its core tenet of openness?
Embedded
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The aim is to integrate smartphone functions such as playing media content, phone calls, messaging and navigation with the vehicle’s control system, the ad continues. “You [will] develop one of the most significant technological innovation in the field of telematics, which should be used in all Mercedes-Benz vehicles and in all markets worldwide,” it adds.
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The module is available in an industrial temperature version. It ships with a Yocto Project-certified Linux Linux 3.12 or 3.2 BSP that offers a choice of several distributions, including Arago and Ubuntu. Board support packages are also available for Android 4.x and WEC7.
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The release of 64-bit Android will depend on Google, whose current Android 4.4 version code-named KitKat is 32-bit. But 64-bit Android adoption will be swift if software, drivers and tools are ready ahead of the OS release, said George Grey, speaking Sunday at the Linaro Connect Asia 2014 developer conference in Macau.
New Hardware
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Found on the company’s $135 S5 Android-powered smartphone (not to be confused with Samsung’s Galaxy S5), the 5.5-inch handset uses two infrared emitters, a secondary infrared camera to map a 3D image of your facial features.
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Google has published the app which turned the Android home screen into a ‘Google Search’ screen by tightly integrating search features with the search box. The feature is however not part of the base-OS, thanks to crazy patent claims by Apple.
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Under the hood Xperia Z2 tablet has a Qualcomm’s latest top of the line Snapdragon 801 2.3Ghz quad core processor with Adreno 330 GPU, making it one of the most powerful Android tablet at the moment. Along with that it contains 3GB RAM enough for multitasking and internal memory options of 16GB or 32GB. The tablet also has support for expandable storage using microSD card upto 64GB.
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Motorola believes that it will be a compromise if they try to include other OS ecosystems in their products. “We’d have to compromise if we spread across ecosystems.” When asked if they have any plans for a Windows Phone, now that they are free from Google, the reply was simple : “We are committed to Android.” Also Motorola is looking to keep the UI clean and add as less customisations as possible. “This approach allows us to create, simple, meaningful experiences – like provide software updates quicker than competitors.”
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The phablet carries a massive 5.5 inch screen, but no fancy 1080p stuff, but rather sports a respectful 720×1280 pixel resolution display. It is powered by a quad core Snapdragon processor clocked at 1.6GHz. There is 1.5GB of RAM and 8GB internal memory which is expandable upto 128GB. There’s no ultra pixel camera but HTC has managed to put in a 13 megapixel snapper, along with a decent 5 MP front camera for better selfies. The battery is non-removable and has a capacity of 2600 mAh.
Blackphone and Boeing
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With the NSA and other news of spying circling the internet, it’s making more of us give security and the protection of our personal data a second and deeper thought. It’s with this matter in the forefront that Silent Circle came up with an innovative and clever plan to counter this rising concern: the Blackphone, one of the most interesting smartphones presented at the MWC this year. We were able to shoot a short hands-on video of the high-security smartphone.
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NSA revelations of the last few months have prompted new thinking about mobile-device security. (If content from the phone of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel can be intercepted, what hope is there for yours?) Two of the more dramatic examples of this are the Blackphone, from Silent Circle and Geeksphone, which became available for preorder Feb. 21, and the Boeing Black smartphone.
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Black is based on a proprietary security architecture that Boeing calls “PureSecure.” Like Samsung’s Knox platform, it has a “trusted boot” mode that can detect and thwart any attempt to root the device—or disable it if it can’t. In addition to onboard media encryption for internal storage, the phone can be configured to inhibit certain functions based on location or the network it is connected to in order to prevent data loss. It might also be used to disable the device’s camera in secure facilities.
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Ara
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Google is in the process of selling Motorola to Lenovo, but it’s keeping Motorola’s Advanced Research and Projects (ATAP) R&D group. ATAP announced Project Ara in October, and a week ago tipped its Project Tango 3D sensing phone prototype. Now, Google has confirmed it’s moving ahead with Project Ara, and announced an Ava Developers’ Conference, along with a more details on the project and images of a phone prototype.
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Developers interested in creating their own features for Google’s Ara customizable phone project will soon get their chance: the company revealed today that developers kits and conferences are on their way.
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In the long run it may change the market dynamics and break the unibody Apple shell where even battery is locked out from user’s reach and popularize device which are user-upgradable. If I have to choose, I will definitely choose a device which can be upgraded over time unlike devices which become obsolete in 2 years just because you can’t even upgrade the RAM. Google’s approach with Ara is a complete U-turn from what Apple is trying to do with their devices.
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Google’s Project Ara promises not only to give consumers control over the features and functionality they want in a smartphone, but also to reduce the volume of e-waste dumped into landfills. A smartphone with interchangeable parts theoretically could live forever. “Like other Google moon shot projects, [its success] depends on enticing and exciting developers,” said tech analyst Charles King.
Apps
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Having a good selection of Android apps is pretty well essential: there’s so much happening in the world that it’s tough to keep up with everything without a little help.
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Infraware appears to be counting its chickens before they’re hatched. Its Polaris App Generator can turn a lot of Android eggs — um, apps — into Tizen apps, but there’s not yet a Tizen phone to use them on. At a rumored cost of $5K, the generator might be a good deal for developers once a Tizen phone actually sees the light of day, but it’s a big chunk of change to gamble on an as yet unfulfilled promise.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Civil Rights
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On The Media’s coverage of the subject started when US Customs and Border Protection detained their own producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends for hours on their way home from Canada last year. But this week’s program expanded on her experience to document, as they put it, some of the “countless stories of inhumanizing intrusions and detentions at the border that would seem to be unconstitutional anywhere else.”
Ms. Abdurrahman is far from the only journalist this has happened to in recent years. Huffington Post journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin wrote a powerful piece last month about his experiences repeatedly being detained while going over the border for the crime of having a Muslim name.
Drones
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While United States leaders lecture Russian President Vladimir Putin on respecting sovereignty and international law by not waging a war of aggression on Ukraine, the sovereignty of Yemen continues to be undermined by US drone strikes.
Reportedly, at least one drone strike, the first in over a month, occurred in Yemen early in the morning on March 3 or in the night on March 2. It killed three people, including an alleged al Qaeda fighter.
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A US drone strike was confirmed against the Shabwa Province of Yemen today, destroying a car and killing three people, wounding two others. All were labeled “terrorist suspects,” though none were identified.
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So far as we know, Al-Shami isn’t on the verge of a suicide bombing or self-immolation. If he dies in the coming weeks, it will likely be at the hand of another. Well, hand might be putting it strongly, since the hand that presses the button that looses the missile from the drone that kills him may be halfway across the globe. But if the bomb lands true, al-Shami will be the fifth American citizen assassinated by his government in the War on Terror.
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This extrajudicial killing program should make every American queasy. Based on largely secret legal standards and entirely secret evidence, our government has killed thousands of people. At least several hundred were killed far from any battlefield. Four of the dead are Americans. Astonishingly, President Obama’s Justice Department has said the courts have no role in deciding whether the killing of U.S. citizens far from any battlefield is lawful.
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Members of the Sacramento group Veterans for Peace demonstrated quietly outside the federal courthouse in downtown Sacramento this morning ahead of an arraignment hearing for Shirley Osgood of Nevada County. She is being charged with trespassing onto Beale AFB property during an anti-drone protest.
CIA and Torture
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The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.
The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.
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Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, a member of the AAP National Council, suspects his party — or its leadership at least — has connections with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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I agree with the editorial (“NYPD’s spies get a pass,” Feb. 24) about the fallacies inherent in a federal judge’s ruling, dismissing a lawsuit against the NYPD over its domestic spying operation.
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A Pakistani man known for his vocal opposition to the U.S. drone program whose kidnapping outraged activists throughout the world has been returned home after being tortured and interrogated, his lawyer announced Friday.
Kareem Khan was last seen in the early morning hours of Feb. 5 outside his home approximately nine miles from Islamabad. He is said to have been abducted by 15–20 men, some of whom were wearing police uniforms, and taken away.
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On his watch, the CIA has been permitted to keep secret a report on its own misconduct, even as misleading information was released to the public.
NSA
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You might notice the AT&T logo in the middle there. That’s not there just for show. Many years before the world knew of Ed Snowden, an AT&T technician by the name of Mark Klein literally walked in the front door of the EFF’s old offices, and revealed how the NSA was installing hardware directly on AT&T’s premises to tap directly into the internet backbone, in order to collect basically all internet traffic.
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A police department in Florida failed to tell judges about its use of a cell phone tracking tool “because the department got the device on loan and promised the manufacturer to keep it all under wraps,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a blog post today.
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The outgoing director of the National Security Agency lashed out at media organizations reporting on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations, suggesting that British authorities were right to detain David Miranda on terrorism charges and that reporters lack the ability to properly analyze the NSA’s broad surveillance powers.
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Barton Gellman, one of the few journalists that has been given access to the entire trove of documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, told the RightsCon conference Tuesday that American federal authorities have declined to provide him with a secure means to communicate with them.
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SURVEILLANCE WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden will appear before an audience via a live video link for the first time at next week’s South by Southwest (SXSW) technology conference.
Snowden will be hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and he’ll be talking with ACLU technology leader Christopher Soghoian and Ben Wizner, a First Amendment advocate and director of the ACLU speech, privacy and technology project.
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Whether the warrantless surveillance program carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) under President George W. Bush was legal is a question the United States Supreme Court is not going to answer.
In a case very similar to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against warrantless surveillance made “legal” by the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008, which the Supreme Court declined to grant “standing” in February 2013, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) announced the Court had rejected their lawsuit against Bush-era warrantless surveillance.
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President Barack Obama promised the American people the National Security Agency wasn’t reading the content of their emails.
Well, why not? Obama and NSA Chief Keith Alexander have never been deterred by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, nor by our right to privacy, as recognized by the Supreme Court.
So why isn’t the NSA tracking and recording the movements of every U.S. citizen who owns a mobile phone via cell-tower triangulation? Why isn’t it recording all our phone conversations? Why isn’t it keeping track of every Web search we make?
Why don’t government officials recruit spies from among us to report on our suspicious activities? Why don’t they generate a file on everyone they believe has a deviant political or religious philosophy? Why don’t they round them up?
Privacy in the UK
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Britain’s National Health Service is riddled with old and insecure WordPress-based websites. Many of these sites have severe flaws including being vulnerable to XSS attacks.
Russia and Ukraine
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There are many on both the left and right who see the CIA as a monolithic, all knowing, all powerful entity. Many overseas see the agency in more apocalyptic terms – an evil force capable of mind control and other flights of fancy.
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What has occurred in Ukraine was not a popular revolution, it was a carefully orchestrated coup d’état. The “demonstrators” with the metal barricades, bullet proof vest, army helmets, weapons, shield and masks were very well organized and trained. The whole affair was orchestrated by the West in an attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO and split Russia. Mr. David Shayler a former MI5 officer spoke to the Voice of Russia on the activities of the intelligence services and on what the forces behind the scenes are doing. He says President Putin is merely protecting his country and his people and is in a strong position.
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The Obama administration “plotted” and “abetted” the ouster of Ukraine’s Russian-backed president to install a “puppet regime,” a retired CIA officer and political activist says.
“Never before in my 50 years in Washington has it been so clear that the United States has plotted, has aided and abetted and tried to put in the new premier or the new prime minister of the Ukraine,” said Ray McGovern.
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Secretary of State Kerry, who voted for George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion in 2003 and wanted to bomb Syria last year, and President Obama, who’s crossed borders regularly to kill enemies, are outraged that Russia has intervened in Ukraine, a case of double-talk and double-think, says Norman Solomon.
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A leading principle of international relations theory is that the state’s highest priority is to ensure security. As Cold War strategist George F. Kennan formulated the standard view, government is created “to assure order and justice internally and to provide for the common defense.”
The proposition seems plausible, almost self-evident, until we look more closely and ask: Security for whom? For the general population? For state power itself? For dominant domestic constituencies?
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Hypocrisy seems to be massively in fashion. This from William Hague renders me speechless: “Be in no doubt, there will be consequences. The world cannot say it is OK to violate the sovereignty of other nations.”
Then today we have the British Establishment at a closed event in Westminster Abbey in memory of Nelson Mandela. Prince Harry, David Cameron, all the toffs. I was never more than a footsoldier in the anti-apartheid movement, but I trudged through the rain and handed out leaflets in Dundee and Edinburgh. I suspect very few indeed of the guests at this posh memorial service did that. David Cameron was actively involved in Conservative groups which promoted precisely the opposite cause.
Venezuela
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Violent opposition groups attacked government buildings and civilians, and clashed with police and government supporters following peaceful marches commemorating the Day of Youth.
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The latter are hoping that the recent unrest in their country signals the end of the Bolivarian process and the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late President Hugo Chavez. The protest they staged at the Embassy was to help this become so.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Success Story
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One kindergarten in Heliopolis, a suburb of the Greek capital Athens, has successfully made the switch to free and open source. Following a break-in and the theft of four PCs last summer, a parent of one of the children attending the kindergarten donated two refurbished PCs, running Ubuntu Linux. The two PCs are now used by the staff, mostly for emailing with the Ministry of Education. They are also used in the classrooms for playing music, showing photos and playing videos as part of every day activities.
Ed: Some clients of ours at work, large businesses in fact, are moving to Ubuntu as well, ditching Windows XP before April. Stories like the above are no longer rare. One thing they explicitly request, however, is removal of Amazon spyware.
Desktop/Mainline
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OMG! Ubuntu! reports that beta 1 of Kubuntu 14.04, Lubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 and Xubuntu 14.04 are available for download. Each Ubuntu spin has tweaks and new features in this release.
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The Ubuntu developers are overhauling the ‘Scopes’ feature in Ubuntu. Scopes are used in Ubuntu by the Dash to get information for the user based on what the user searches. The most common of which are scopes to get lists of programs, music, videos etc. Canonical famously attracted some controversy when they introduced an Amazon scope that sent users search queries from the Dash to the Amazon site to get related products. Many users weren’t happy with their searches going to a third party site.
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Both Mir and Unity 8, (formerly known as Unity Next), are required components for convergence and for Touch apps to run on the desktop. When Canonical’s plans for convergence were first announced, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was to use the Mir display server and the Unity 8 shell. With plans for a fully converged Ubuntu now put back to 15.04 or later, the 14.04 release will be sticking with X window server and Unity 7 for the time being.
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The archive is now in Feature Freeze as we preprare the release of 14.04 LTS in April.
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Ubuntu 13.10 was not a spectacular release as far as Ubuntu’s history of major eye-popping changes is concerned. There were many things that could have been added to Saucy. Mir, for example, was one change many Ubuntu fanatics were waiting for. But, in favor of stability, the only thing new that the release brought to the table was Smart Scopes. Also, there were a few changes here and there, but for those who were looking for a complete ‘upgrade,’ Saucy was disappointing at its best. That’s not to say that the release was bad. In fact, it set a solid foundation for the next big release, and that is Ubuntu 14.04.
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One of the things that always surprises me is how careless some folks can be when it comes to installing Ubuntu, or any distro for that matter. Usually this happens more to newer users, however this also challenges more experienced users as well.
Desktop Graphics
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This morning I wrote about Mesa 10.1 likely going into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but if you were hoping this means Ubuntu will enable VDPAU driver support for open-source hardware-accelerated video decoding, that improvement to video playback isn’t going to happen with the official Ubuntu Mesa/Gallium3D driver packages.
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What started out as quite the slow news day turned out to be deceptively interesting. OMG!Ubuntu! has picked out five of the best community submissions for Ubuntu 14.04 wallpapers and Chema Martin posted a “visual tour” of Fedora 20. Bruce Byfield looks at why proprietary software isn’t ported to Linux. Jack Wallen says Linux rules because it behaves “exactly how the user wants.” Tonight’s news also includes an announcement from the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat world’s records, and the games to look forward to in 2014!
Local Menus
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When Canonical introduced its new Ubuntu Unity interface, a major design element was a global, universal menu that all apps would use. Things have changhed. Canonical is switching back to local app menus.
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In fact, while in the last months most of the Canonical commitment to Ubuntu has been directed to the Touch form factors, the “classic” desktop has not been forgotten at all and, we’re still working hard on it, to give our users the best experience and to approach smoothly to the convergence vision that we’ll get with Unity 8.
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The move is a return of sorts to Ubuntu’s pre-Unity existence, when the Gnome desktop was Ubuntu’s primary interface. This will be the first time, however, that application menus inside the window are officially a part of Unity.
Server
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The deal was announced on Thursday and means that developers who want to run Ubuntu on Joyent’s advanced SmartOS-based infrastructure can now do with greater confidence in getting regular updates from Canonical, and performance guarantees.
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So, the basic values of of Ubuntu Server: freely available, provide developers access to the latest technology through a regular cadence of releases and optimise for cloud and scale out have been in place for years. Both adoption and revenue confirm it is the right strategy long term. Enterprises are evolving and starting to adopt Ubuntu and the model of restricting access to bits unless money is paid is now drawing to a close. Others are begrudgingly starting to accept this and trying to evolve their business models to compete with the momentum of Ubuntu.
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Oracle has done plenty to hurt the FLOSS community.
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One major reason why Ubuntu is sticking with Oracle’s MySQL is that Oracle made the effort to get MySQL 5.6 to work properly with Debian and Ubuntu. Yngve Svendsen, Oracle’s Director of MySQL Engineering Services, apologized in a blog posting for Oracle’s neglect of some Linux distributions in the past. Svendsen wrote, “We closed a gaping hole in our distribution on Linux.”
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Canonical has released an important kernel update for its still supported Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Server operating system, fixing five vulnerabilities discovered in the upstream Linux kernel 2.6.32 packages by various developers and kernel hackers.
Mobile Hardware
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CANONICAL ANNOUNCED earlier this year that the first Ubuntu smartphones will be made by BQ and Meizu. That created a wave of interest in how the open source Linux operating system (OS) distribution will look and work on a smartphone or tablet.
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Canonical announced last week that the forthcoming Ubuntu-powered phones will be manufactured by Chinese company Meizu and a Spanish phone designer and manufacturer named BQ.
The names of the two Ubuntu phones have been revealed today at MWC 2014, the BQ Aquaris and the Meizu MX3. Unfortunately, the prototype phones displayed at the Ubuntu booth in Barcelona have no operating system.
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We’ve only hit February, and it already looks like 2014 is going to be the year of the open source phone. Not only is Android continuing to dominate the smartphone space in terms of market share, but Mozilla is widening its Firefox OS phone strategy and Canonical announced this week that Spain’s bq and China’s Meizu will be the first companies to bring Ubuntu smartphones to global users.
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Jack Wallen responds to the Canonical announcement for the upcoming Ubuntu Phone.
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A little more than a year after Canonical introduced its Ubuntu Touch platform for smartphones, the free, open-source software developer announced the first signed agreements with handset-makers to ship devices running the Linux-based operating system.
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The first Ubuntu phones are the Meizu MX3 and BQ Aquaris. Check out our photos of Ubuntu software in action, as well as prototypes of the forthcoming phones.
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Mark Shuttleworth’s ambitious IndieGoGo project may have failed, but that’s not stopping Canonical from bringing its touch-friendly flavor of Linux Ubuntu to smartphones in the near future.
The company recently announced partnerships with the Chinese company Meizu and the Spanish company BQ to bring hardware devices running Ubuntu for phones. We got a quick demo of Ubuntu running on a Nexus 4 at this year’s Mobile World Congress.
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Canonical, the developer of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, has signed an agreement with a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer to soon ship Ubuntu phones to Chinese consumers.
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We’ve only hit February, and it already looks like 2014 is going to be the year of the open source phone. Not only is Android continuing to dominate the smartphone space in terms of market share, but Mozilla is widening its Firefox OS phone strategy and Canonical announced this week that Spain’s bq and China’s Meizu will be the first companies to bring Ubuntu smartphones to global users.
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Maps
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Today at Mobile World Congress we showed off Mapbox support for Ubuntu Mobile with direct Mapbox.js integration into any HTML5 Ubuntu Mobile app. Developers can design totally custom maps and integrate them into their apps in minutes and even get access to native features like the camera and the accelerometer using Cordova (previously known as PhoneGap). Across all web, mobile and desktop experiences on Ubuntu an app will look exactly the same. If you have ever added a Mapbox map to a website, you’re ready to start developing for Ubuntu Mobile using HTML5.
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AND brings its mapping and location services to Ubuntu with an easy to use mobile application providing detailed local information and high granular map data. For the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona AND developed a map viewer with the proprietary AND navigation maps of Europe to start to showing the capabilities of AND for Ubuntu on phones.
Not Just Phones
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The highly anticipated Mobile World Congress (MWC) event will start tomorrow, February 24, in Barcelona, Spain. As expected, Canonical will be there to showcase the latest version of its Ubuntu operating system for mobile devices, dubbed “Ubuntu – the human touch.”
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With just a few days left for the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event at Barcelona, Canonical is pulling out all stops to show off Ubuntu Touch to the world. MWC takes place every year in February and is the world’s largest exhibition and conference congregation for the mobile industry.
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That’s the response of Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, when quizzed over whether it’s scarier to go into space or try to launch a unified OS platform. As the first citizen of an independent African country to travel to space and the public face of ensuring the Ubuntu OS makes it onto smartphones and tablets, he should know.
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While you may not recognize the name Canonical, chances are you’ve heard of its Debian-based Linux OS called Ubuntu. We spoke to Jane Silber, CEO of the privately held UK-based company, about her transition to CEO, the company’s past, and its plans for spreading Ubuntu everywhere from the cloud to tablets to smartphones.
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Canonical just announced that the first two Ubuntu phones will be coming this year thanks to Meizu and bq. Though these phones won’t be available until later this year, the company was on hand at MWC to show off its operating system and give folks a chance to get to grips with the software that will ship on upcoming hardware from its partners. We stopped by Canonical to check it out for ourselves.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Debate
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When you install a Linux distribution, a set of programs comes along with it. It’s easy to add and delete elements of the programs that don’t fit with your needs, but what about altering the look and feel of the distribution to suit you? The key is to add a second desktop environment or window manager.
MATE
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It took the developers nearly a year but their work on the familiar, yet ambitious, MATE desktop is finally stable and available for everyone to use. MATE is a complete desktop environment that was forked from the Gnome Project (Gnome 2 to be exact) nearly 2 years ago. The decision to fork came at a time when a significant amount of Gnome 2 users were displeased with Gnome 3, the next major iteration and core of the Gnome Project.
Enlightenment
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After a fast development cycle and the 1.9 alphas just starting recently and seeing the first betas just days ago, 1.9.0 beta 2 is now available for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) core and also a second beta of Elementary.
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We are ready for our first beta release for the upcoming 1.9 release cycle. Please give it a good testing. Since alpha1 we received to many fixes to list them all. Full NEWS will be ready for the final 1.9 release.
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Just one week after the Enlightenment 1.9 alpha series surfaced, the 1.9.0-beta1 pre-release is now available for users of the lightweight Enlightenment window manager / desktop.
LXDE
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Xfce4′s panel was improved this weekend and released in its 4.11 development form but that’s not the only lightweight Linux desktop receiving some attention; LXDE’s LXPanel has also been flagged as a new development version.
Xfce
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Xfce4-panel 4.11.0 is a development release leading to Xfce 4.12 and it has an improved task-list for multi-monitor handling, fixes transparency issues with GTK3+ plug-ins, a configure flag for enabling the GTK3 mode of the Xfce4 panel library, the middle-click action is now configurable, support for time-zone selection within the Xfce4 panel clock, a calendar pop-up for the clock, and other changes.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 8:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Success Stories
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Linux is a most popular Operating System compared to Windows and Mac. Linux is everywhere even at those places where most of us have not even thought. Tiny machines to Gaint Supercomputers are powered by Linux. Linux no more remains a Geeky thing.
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Although the Head Up Display (HUD) will remain the default, Canonical will be bringing back the local menus as an option. Jack Wallen responds to this announcement.
Ivory Coast, Romania, Latvia, India
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Before Emma, the JerryClan-Ivory Coast had flirted with Ubuntu, but that was before encountering the beautiful EmmaBuntus distribution.
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The laptops are running Linux, specifically Ubuntu 13.10, along with several dozen free and open source programs. Our program is believed to be the largest open source 1:1 implementation in Pennsylvania. By using open source software exclusively, we estimate an initial cost savings of at least $360,000 on licensing fees.
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Romania’s Ministry of Education urges the country’s schools to consider switching to open source solutions such as the Ubuntu distribution. This will help the schools to avoid legal problems with using unlicensed copies of proprietary software, the ministry confirmed today.
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A former Romanian secretary of state, Constantin Teodorescu, is calling on the country’s public administrations to switch to Linux and other open source solutions. “The Romanian government should contact the budgetary heads at all public administrations and explain that they can switch everything to free software”, he writes on his blog on Friday. “Let’s get this straight, and end this tragedy”.
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The Children’s Hospital in Riga, Latvia, is using the Ubuntu Linux distribution for an increasing number of tasks. About half of the hospital’s 600 workstations are now running Ubuntu, says Juris Alins, working in the hospital’s IT department.
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National Council Of Education, Research and Training (NCERT) has released a notification on their website which promotes the use of Free and Open Source software in Indian schools. This notice is released well in time, as other schools, colleges and government institutions in India are already moving to open source software to save costs and prevent vendor locking. NCERT is responsible for maintaining standards in most government and private schools and educational institutions in India.
Chromebook
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When Google announced Chrome OS, many people scoffed at the viability of a browser-based OS. Currently, however, Chromebooks are among the most popular inexpensive computing devices today. The search giant has done a great job of making an OS that is light enough to function on entry-level Atom-based SOCs and even low-powered ARM silicon. With the launch of many new Chromebooks (click hear to find out which one we think is the best chromebook) we wanted to see if a person could survive with a Chromebook playing games, videos, word processing and more for an entire week. Read on to see how the OS fared against Windows in our seven-day challenge.
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There has been breakthroughs in sales of Chromebooks, with devices selling well in the inexpensive notebook segment in the US, and widely adopted for educational use through government procurement projects, the sources said. Chromebook shipments in 2014 are expected to increase to 4-5 million units, the sources indicated.
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Tango PC, the small form factor desktop rig that can fit in the palm of your hand, was already an impressive concept based on the fact that, despite its size, it’ll be powered by desktop hardware while also booting to traditional desktop operating systems like Windows 7 and Windows 8. On top of that though, Tango also announced that Tango PC owners will also be able to configure their miniature desktop computer to ship with alternative operating systems like Chromium OS and Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.
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Here are four Chrome extensions that make it easier to read web pages on your Chromebook. These extensions will let you skip making the font sizes of web pages larger to improve readability.
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I think computers like Chromebooks are the way of the future, but not because of their operating system – because of their hardware. Relatively low cost laptops with SSDs for storage and an insane battery life are everything I want in a computer.
Skills
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“Enterprises are increasingly describing Linux as a core part of the business,” said Shravan Goli, President of Dice. “In turn, hiring managers are turning up the dial on the incentives offered to technology talent with Linux skills. These professionals are working on projects tightly aligned with a future vision of what enterprises look like.”
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In terms of employers, Yoh’s research found that there are 8,000 employers currently hiring for IT jobs with Linux requirements. The companies with the most Linux-related job postings are: Amazon.com, 2,356 jobs; Lockheed Martin, 713; Dell, 679; Northrop Grumman, 569; and Computer Sciences Corporation, 535.
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With large firms making attempts to equip themselves better with the latest technology so as to maintain their edge over the competition; this seems to be a good time to be a technology professional. However, it’s even a better time to be into Linux system administration. How? We will see it here.
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Linux experts get higher pay checks, better opportunities as their skills are still hard-to-find
Recommending GNU/Linux to a Friend
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Based on the figures in LinuxQuestions’ Members Choice Awards, 84% of Linux desktop users prefer a classic desktop. By contrast, innovations like GNOME 3 or Ubuntu’s Unity lag far behind. Which raises the question: what accounts for the popularity of the classic desktop, and what are the implications for the design of graphical interfaces?
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Last but not least, Starks’ article is “wrong a bunch of ways,” blogger Robert Pogson told Linux Girl.
In fact, “the Linux kernel is very similar on every distro,” he explained. “If there is no driver for some hardware in a particular distro, build a kernel from kernel.org or change hardware.
“You have to get your priorities straight,” he added. “Because some manufacturer may not have provided a driver for Linux is no reason not to use Linux. On the other hand, there are dozens of benefits of using GNU/Linux.”
In all of Pogson’s years of using Linux, “I have only seen a very few pieces of hardware I could not use: two printers, a wireless thingy and that’s it,” he recounted. “I used to use the Vesa driver if I could not get a driver for some video card. Along the way I have had more than a decade of excellent use of GNU/Linux.”
In short, “I would recommend it to a friend,” he concluded. “I would recommend Debian GNU/Linux even for a newbie. I would never recommend that other OS for any purpose. It’s just too burdensome.”
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She was on her computer at home doing something or the other when suddenly things went bad for her. The menu bar and the task bar disappeared, including the “Start” button and she couldn’t close or change anything on her screen. In a panic, she called friends to try to see if she could get guidance to fix it. One friend told her that the same thing had happened to her and it turned out to be a virus. Olivia was told to turn her computer off immediately and reinstall Windows. That was the only way to proceed.
All of her family pictures and all of her files…gone. She and her friend reinstalled Windows and spent the next two days getting her computer back into shape.
When I was giving the keyboard shortcut portion of the class, I noticed Olivia holding her hands over her mouth as her eyes grew wide. I thought she was going to cry. It turns out that Olivia had accidentally hit the F11 key while she was typing. She had no controls, no cues or hints as to how to get her computer screen back to normal. She had no idea she had accidentally hit the F11 key or that hitting it again would return things to normal. When she discovered how easy this was to fix she was both relieved and angry. She even left her seat to come forward and give me a hug as she recounted the story.
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During this period in time, the most common issue I ran into was Windows malware disrupting my client’s ability to use their computer(s). After a while of fixing the same old problem, I decided I was ready for a change. During this transitional period, I became more familiar with the various popular Linux distros that were available: Red Hat, Mandrake (Mandriva), and the live Linux CDs that followed a short time later.
Flash forward to now, I use Linux on the desktop almost exclusively. For my day-to-day duties, Linux on the desktop allows me to create written content in addition to occasional video how-to tutorials. I can email, print, scan and store files on my computer in much the same way as those of you who use Windows do. The key difference is that I choose to use an operating system where the key support comes from the community, and not from some large corporation.
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Advocacy
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To conclude, my point isn’t whether or not its wise to highlight the failings of one distro compared to another. My point is simply this: Linux Advocacy in its simplest and clearest definition is not MyLinux versus YourLinux. It is simply Advocating the use of Linux.
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I noticed a huge pop in my web stats for today and wondered why. The cause was a link on Tux Machines. There was a recent change of ownership. Now Dr. Roy Schestowitz and Rianne Schestowitz seem to be the main authours. In a couple of days they produced a huge number of informative articles mostly links to diverse sites advocating FLOSS and GNU/Linux. I love it.
Pessimism
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It’s always “somewhat interesting and entertaining to see the ebb and flow of the top Linux distributions,” said 451 Research’s Jay Lyman. “One of the highlights is typically the Linux operating systems with staying power. After years of jockeying, we’ve seen Ubuntu in the top few distributions consistently for some time, which speaks to its desktop and developer popularity.”
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It’s long been the case that the world of Linux distributions offers at least one compelling choice for virtually every taste and purpose, but — much like those dissatisfied with the weather in New England — users who don’t see a distro they like need only wait a few minutes.
We’ve lost a few distros since 2013 began, but we’ve also gained some interesting fresh blood. “You win a few, you lose a few,” as the old saying goes; fortunately, the overall pool of choices remains as rich and diverse as ever.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Releases
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That’s pretty good support. I’ve had very little breakage despite the hectic pace of updates. I was taking ~30 minutes almost weekely to build a kernel with a configuration similar to that in the Debian kernel. That was a bit onerous so I did a “make localmodconfig” Create a config based on current config and loaded modules (lsmod). Disables any module option that is not needed for the loaded modules.”
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Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI) Kernel Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman this week released LTSI-3.10.
This latest version, released on Feb. 24, has brought more than 2,500 additional patches on top of the 3.10 Stable Kernel maintained by the kernel community.
kGraft
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The code, set to be released in March, doesn’t patch kernel code in-place but rather uses an ftrace-like approach to replace whole functions in the Linux kernel with fixed variants, said Pavlik. SUSE then plans to submit it to the Linux kernel community for upstream integration.
AMD
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Today AMD is expected to release a beta driver for Windows that exposes some shared memory extensions to OpenCL. Currently, AMD ships an OpenCL 1.2 implementation for Kaveri. OpenCL 1.2 standard by itself does not really expose shared memory features properly but OpenCL 2.0 will have more robust support. AMD does not have a full OpenCL 2.0 driver yet, but today they will be providing some of the 2.0 functionality as extensions in their current OpenCL 1.2 driver. I don’t have the details on the exact extensions supported, and I will update the article when I do.
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Zbigniew and Colin have now set up a new git repo with a “stable” branch where these are backported to selected versions, to share some work between the distributions which happen to stabilize on these versions.
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AMD’s Catalyst 14.2 beta drivers are now available. AMD is also making changes to the X.ORG ‘radeon’ repository.
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With the open-source graphics driver stack found in the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Mesa 10.1 + Linux 3.13), the performance of the community-developed Radeon Gallium3D driver is now close to that of the official AMD Catalyst driver for recent generations of Radeon graphics cards. In several OpenGL tests the “RadeonSI” driver can even run 80% the speed of AMD’s official Catalyst Linux driver.
Intel
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The latest work by Intel employees on Wayland is adding an RandR protocol, similar to the X RandR protocol, to the Weston compositor.
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For distribution vendors or those fortunate to have early access to Intel’s forthcoming Broadwell processors, there’s a temporary DRM kernel driver branch that provides new features and changes over what’s currently found in the upstream Linux kernel or the drm-intel development branch.
Mesa
Graphics Stack
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The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 is a great value graphics card for $120 that delivers great mid-range performance while its performance-per-Watt is exceptional. If you don’t mind using binary graphics drivers, the GTX 750 based upon NVIDIA’s new Maxwell architecture with the GM107 is worth checking out.
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The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries’ Evas canvas library now has a DRM engine for interfacing directly with the Linux kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager drivers
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The X.Org Foundation has been accepted this year by Google as a Summer of Code organization so interested student developers can contribute to the X.Org Server, Mesa, Wayland, and related projects while being paid for their summer work.
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For a while now there’s been work happening to come up with a fullscreen shell protocol for Wayland’s Weston to address some interesting use-cases. With this protocol, clients run entirely full-screen as the only client exposed to the user.
Benchmarks
Misc.
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Btrfs was tested with its default mount options from a solid-state drive and then tested separately with the following mount options (and reformatting and reinstalling the tests in-between),,,
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GNOME Core
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For developers and early adopters wishing to test the latest GNOME 3.12 packages built for Fedora 20, there’s now F20 GNOME 3.12 on Copr for those wishing to volunteer and test to ensure the stable GNOME 3.12.0 experience will be good on Fedora 20. Ankur Sinha wrote more about this on his personal blog.
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A few weeks after the rumors that RAID support will be removed from the Disks application of the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment surfaced, the GNOME Project has finally released this past weekend a first development version of the upcoming GNOME Disk Utility 3.12 software.
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Unlike the past few releases, there’s a ton of new stuff in GNOME 3.12. The highlights include a slew of new apps, a major makeover for the long-standing video player, better privacy controls, support for jump lists and quite a few other interface tweaks that make GNOME 3.12 more pleasant to use.
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The GNOME Project, through Florian Müllner, has announced that the fourth maintenance release of the stable GNOME Shell user interface for the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment is now available for download.
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First of all, we should mention that the GNOME Display Manager 3.12 Beta 1 release brings many code cleanups and fixes several memory leaks that were discovered in previous builds. Second of all, it fixes compilation issues for the FreeBSD operating system and updates numerous translations.
Wayland
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While a lot of headway has been made during the GNOME 3.10 and 3.12 development cycles for allowing the GNOME Shell and rest of the desktop run natively on Wayland without a hard dependency on X11, it was decided that enabling the Wayland support by default will not happen now until at least GNOME 3.14. GNOME 3.12 will still work as a very reasonable Wayland tech preview, but there’s some unfinished tasks to be addressed.
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Gnome developers have been debating the full support for Wayland in 3.12 for a while. They at one point even considered delaying the Gnome release to keep the development in sync with Wayland. Finally, developers have decided to keep Wayland in ‘preview’ mode as there is still a lot of work to be done.
Numix
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The Numix Project recently unveiled plans to release their own Operating System and Desktop Shell for the Linux kernel. Previously the project enjoyed success with their set of extensions for the Gnome 3 desktop. The custom desktop shell Numix has built and arranged is full of colorful and rich icons, something lacking from a default Gnome 3 instance. Collaboration with Nitrux S.A. is also in effect, propelling this interesting project forward in full force. There are some though who previously criticized the project as “yet another Gnome clone,” but it is yet to be seen the full extent of what this announcement will bring. Numix promises the unrevealed portions to be quite good, describing them as ”rad.” I must be getting old, but I digress. The desktop shell the project team is aiming for a professionally designed and clean look. Notable areas include an intellihide dock at the bottom, allowing dragging to other workspaces a breeze. Not much else is known at the moment, but updates should soon be revealed. I have doubts as to what else Numix will do to truly different itself from the pack, aside from clean looking text and icons. Regardless, I give them the benefit of the doubt until I see their final product. If the good looking mockups are any indication, we may very well see a fine looking end result.
Applications
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With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.12 there is a brand new user-interface for Gedit, GNOME’s text editor.
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Epiphany 3.12 Beta 1 revamps the title/location bar, improves the HTML-based overview page, fixes some issues with pop-up windows in multi-process mode, moves the New Tab button to the left side of the navigation toolbar, and repairs the Find toolbar.
GTK
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GTK+ 3.11.7 has been released for this week’s GNOME 3.12 Beta.
GTK+ 3.11.7 isn’t too exciting with it already being late into the 3.12 release cycle, but on the Wayland front it makes use of the new xdg-shell ping and xfg-shell focus methods.
The listing of the GTK+ tool-kit changes for this new development release can be found via this Git tag.
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Kai Willadsen had the pleasure of announcing today, February 23, that the Meld visual diff and merge tool reached version 3.11.0, a release that includes many new features and improvements.
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CloudPrint is the Google web service for users to share their printers and having a “Print to File” menu item that is basically the same as “Save to Google Drive.” This GTK+ CloudPrint support works with GNOME-Online-Accounts for gaining access to your Google account and is able to discover printers, obtain printer details, and submit print jobs.
Opinions
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Today’s newsfeeds were bountiful indeed. Muktware is running a comparison of gaming option for us Linux users. The Register tested GNOME 3.12 and says it’s looking sensible and sane. And Gary Newell has tried to answer the eternal question: “Is Linux right for me?” Today’s post also includes several extras to keep you busy through the weekend too.
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