• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

2014: The year of the Linux car?

You read that right: Not the year of the Linux desktop, the year of the Linux car. Major automotive companies are investing in making Linux their cars’ operating system of choice.

Server

• Intel launches ‘open’ Linux based SDN switch and server

  CHIPMAKER Intel announced two reference server designs for the fast growing software defined networking (SDN) market, sporting both its own silicon and its Wind River Linux distribution.

  Server vendors and their associated component vendors are all jumping into the SDN market as a new source of revenue from the datacentre as enterprises look to ditch expensive specialist network infrastructure hardware provided by firms such as Cisco, Extreme Networks and Juniper. Now Intel has joined the party, providing two reference server designs that include its Xeon processors, chipsets and network interface cards as well as its own Wind River Linux distribution.

Kernel Space

• Inside Secure NFC controller gets Linux kernel support

  Inside Secure has announced its MicroRead NFC controller chip is supported in the new 3.9 branch of the Linux kernel, speeding up integration of the chip into a range of Linux based TVs, set-top boxes, GPS devices and industrial machines.

• Linux in 2013: ‘Freakishly awesome’ – and who needs a fork?

  If there was a theme for Day One of the Linux Foundation’s seventh annual Linux Collaboration Summit, taking place this week in San Francisco, it was that the Linux community has moved way, way past wondering whether the open source OS will be successful and competitive.

  “Today I wanted to talk about the state of Linux,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, began his opening keynote on Monday. “I’m just going to save everybody 30 minutes. The state of Linux is freakishly awesome.”

• PKSM: A New Data De-Duplication Method For Linux

  PKSM is a new system memory de-duplication method for the Linux kernel that was developed after seeing the current KSM and UKSM approaches as being ineffective.

• Graphics Stack

  • Benchmarking The Intel Ivy Bridge Gallium3D Driver

    While Intel only supports their classic Mesa DRI driver when it comes to their open-source 3D driver on Linux, developed independently is also a Gallium3D driver for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge generations of Intel graphics processors. In this article are benchmarks of the new Intel (i965) Gallium3D driver with Ivy Bridge HD 4000 hardware.

    There was an unofficial i965 Gallium3D driver in the past, but it was ultimately removed when the code fell into bit rot and really didn’t have any users. There’s also the i915 Gallium3D driver that is still maintained independently for supporting old i915 and i945 graphics hardware, but Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers only officially support their classic Mesa drivers.

  • Radeon UVD Support Merged Into Mesa

    After having gone through five public code revisions, AMD has finally committed their open-source Unified Video Decoder (UVD) support for accelerated video decoding over VDPAU into the Mesa Git repository.

  • Nouveau NVC0 Gets Multi-Sample Textures

    The most notable commit this morning is perhaps the Nouveau NVC0 (Fermi+) driver supporting OpenGL multi-sample textures, thanks to work done by Christoph Bumiller with this commit.

  • Nouveau NVC0 Gets Multi-Sample Textures

    A NVIDIA engineer has code dropped over 2,500 lines of new open-source code that enables application-level support for host1x hardware through a new Stream library.

    The “host1x” is found with NVIDIA Tegra SoCs and this new patch-set by NVIDIA’s Arto Merilainen allows accessing the host1x hardware from user-space. There’s already been 2D acceleration for NVIDIA Tegra hardware that’s been done using host1x. The new patches on Friday are in their second revised form.

  • Mesa To Expose AMD Performance Monitor Extension

    While Mesa has some level of support for GL_ARB_debug_output, Intel developers are implementing support within Mesa for AMD’s OpenGL performance monitor extension to assist game developers and others with monitoring the performance of their software.

  • Mir Display Server Now Supports VT Switching

    While there was the video of Unity Next running on Mir with a Google Nexus 4 hand-held, in terms of the overall feature completeness of the Mir Display Server, there is still much work ahead. Only on Friday did Mir even gain support for switching to virtual terminals.

    For those not closely following Mir’s Bazaar repository, it was only on Friday with revision 585 that support for VT switching was committed.

  • DRI3000 Still Being Developed For New X.Org DRI

    While there hasn’t been too much news on the work recently, DRI3000 (DRI3) is still being developed.

    Keith Packard has been the one large spearheading the development of this next-generation Direct Rendering Infrastructure update that seeks to overcome some of the shortcomings of DRI2. For those unfamiliar with what this planned DRI update is about, see the earlier articles on the topic.

  • Mesa 9.2 Brings Better Performance To Intel Ivy Bridge

    Following on from our earlier Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks of Mesa 9.2-devel earlier this week, for our first benchmarks this Saturday we have tests of Intel HD 4000 “Ivy Bridge” graphics when running Mesa 9.2-devel and compared to the Git branches of Mesa 9.1 and 9.0. Overall, there’s some more open-source Intel graphics performance improvements to look forward to with this next Mesa release.

  • Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe Driver Is Now Much Faster

    The Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver that’s commonly used as the fallback software rasterizer on Linux desktop systems when no GPU hardware driver is present, is a heck of a lot faster with the current Mesa development code. The gains are surprising and quite remarkable.

  • Nouveau Queues Up More Changes For Linux 3.10

    The developers behind the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware are still hard at work on preparing new changes for introduction with the Linux 3.10 kernel.

  • Intel Makes First Release Of Linux OpenCL Project

    While Intel has previously shipped its OpenCL SDK for Linux and Windows, this SDK is closed-source and on Linux was limited to compute support only on the processor rather than any graphics support with Ivy Bridge and newer hardware. Fortunately, Intel has finally managed to put out a first release of Beignet, an open-source Linux project that supports OpenCL.

• Benchmarks

  • Phoronix Test Suite 4.6-Utsira Milestone 1 Released

  • Liquorix 3.8 Kernel Has Some Performance Wins Over Linux

    The Liquorix kernel is a modified version of the Linux kernel with out-of-tree patches and a kernel configuration that is highly-optimized for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads. It’s been one year since last benchmarking the Liquorix kernel against a vanilla Linux kernel, but now we have some benchmarks of the Liquorix 3.8 kernel compared to the latest stable Linux kernel.

Applications

• Refactoring in a Multimedia Project with Inkscape, Blender, and Audacity

  One of the special problems with managing a multimedia project (versus a text-based software project), is that there are often links to external data files which can get broken when you try to move the files around — such as you might do when re-factoring the source code to make it more navigable. Three programs that we use extensively in the Lunatics project present this problem, and each requires slightly different handling. These are Inkscape, Blender, and Audacity. I have never found a compact guide to keeping the links straight in these programs, so I’m going to write one here.

• IMPROVE POWER USAGE / BATTERY LIFE IN LINUX WITH TLP

• More Details On The HHVM Virtual Machine Design

  After earlier this week delivering benchmarks showing Facebook’s HipHop 2.0 Virtual Machine is very fast, a Facebook engineer commented in our forums about some of the design choices that were made.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Introduction

  • Maintaining A Publicly Available Blacklist – Mechanisms And Principles

  • Arpwatch Tool to Monitor Ethernet Activity in Linux

  • Improve Power Usage / Battery Life In Linux With TLP

  • LPI Launches Linux Essentials at “Tech Learning Day” in Spain

  • Creating a Redhat package repository

  • Mastering the Linux Shell : Killing Processes and Dire Warnings

  • Download youtube videos on Linux

  • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.4

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine 1.5.28 Improves PostScript Driver, Mac Driver

    It’s time for another bi-weekly development release of Wine.

    New to this latest release, Wine 1.5.28, are the following official changes:

• Games

  • Little Inferno release for Mac, Linux version nears testing phase

  • Anomaly 2 Multiplayer beta keys up for grabs!

    Anomaly 2, the sequel to the award-winning strategy game Anomaly Warzone Earth that we told you about back in Feb now has keys available for you to test the Multiplayer on Steam.

  • Death Inc. Alpha now available after failed Kickstarter!

  • Unigine OIlRush 1.34 Released, Now On Steam

    Unigine Corp has finally brought their in-house OilRush game to Valve’s Steam Linux client. The debut on Steam came as part of the game’s v1.34 update.

  • X3: Terran Conflict Hits Steam On Linux

    It appears that the X3: Terran Conflict space training and combat simulator game has finally reached Linux, nearly five years after it premiered for Windows and OS X.

  • Ouya Game Console Performance Is Disappointing

    The gaming performance for Ouya, the successful Kickstarter project to develop a low-cost Android-powered open game console, is rather poor.

    Right now only shipping are the Ouya pre-order and developer consoles while the game consoles en mass aren’t expected until the summer for the general public, but already the performance really isn’t competitive.

    The first-generation Ouya is based upon a NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC with a 1.7GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and NVIDIA GeForce ULP graphics. The Tegra 4 is already much faster and any Cortex-A15 SoC can do laps around the older A9s. The graphics performance out of the Tegra 4 and other newer SoCs are also a lot better than what’s found in the Tegra 3.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 24th February 2013

  • KLyDE: A New Lightweight KDE Project Started

  • A Lightweight KDE desktop on the way
    

    KDE is an extensive desktop environment which features a large number of applications, widgets and components. It’s not bloated by default, but most distributions ship extra features and apps in KDE that are not needed by most of the users. KDE developer Will Stephenson has recognized this shortcoming, and is currently developing a slimmed down version of KDE, codenamed KlyDE, or K Lightweight Desktop Environment.

  • Report from the freedesktop summit

    During the week of 8 April 2013, developers from the KDE, GNOME, Unity and Razor-qt projects met at the SUSE offices in Nürnberg to improve collaboration between the projects by discussing specifications. A wide range of topics was covered.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3 and Unity Alternatives: Cinnamon vs. Mate

    If you want a GNOME 2-like desktop, the leading contenders are both developed by Linux Mint. Users can choose between Cinnamon, which is built on top of GNOME 3, and Mate, a direct fork of GNOME 2.

    Mate and Cinnamon are the default alternatives offered in Linux Mint 14, the current release. Both are highly successful attempts to provide a GNOME 2-like desktop in response to widespread user dissatisfaction with GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity.

Distributions

• Six good reasons to try Manjaro Linux 0.8.5

  Monday may have brought the disappointing news that Fuduntu Linux will soon close its doors, but another young, up-and-coming Linux distribution appears to be continuing along its upward path without interruption.

  Manjaro Linux, a distro I first covered only a few months ago, just released a fresh update, and it’s particularly notable for the addition of a graphical installer and other beginner-friendly features.

• Fuduntu Linux is closing its doors

• Fuduntu Linux discontinued, team plans to move onto a new distro

  Fuduntu is a Linux-based operating system designed to offer the ease-of-use of Ubuntu and the stability of Fedora. The operating system has been around for a few years, and gained a bit of attention recently by adding support for Steam games and Netflix video. Fuduntu has also long been available in netbook-friendly flavors.

• Review: Manjaro Linux 0.8.5 Xfce

  That is where my time with Manjaro Linux ended. Overall, my experience with it was much more positive than last time; I partly expected this as last time, this distribution was still very young, whereas it has had a lot more time to mature since then. Anyway, it may be almost at the point that it is suitable for newbies, but maybe not quite yet; in any case, though, I can definitely recommend it to Linux beginners who want to experiment with distributions other than Ubuntu.

  You can get it here, though note that if you want to get the Cinnamon edition, the one that was released in the past week is the last one for the foreseeable future; this is because apparently the current version of Cinnamon conflicts with GNOME 3.8, so the Arch developers have stopped shipping Cinnamon altogether (or something like that).

• New Releases

  • OpenELEC 3.0.1 released

  • ALT 6.9.0-20130416

• Screenshots

  • REMnux 4.0

• Slackware Family

  • Slackware-Current Maybe Too Current

    If you have been following discussions on LQ, then you might have seen this thread where the original poster was Patrick himself. He basically asked for opinion about the future of -Current for this development cycle which will end up with Slackware 14.1 in the end.

    Although things has been working pretty well in -Current as of now (at least in most systems looking at the comments there), but there are some considerations by Patrick in three parts of the system: kernel, GCC, and XOrg. They are critical components for most Linux distributions.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat, Hortonworks prep OpenStack for Hadoop

    Merging the worlds of big data and cloud computing, Red Hat, Hortonworks and Hadoop integrator Mirantis are jointly building a software program, called Savanna, that will make it easier to deploy Apache Hadoop on an OpenStack cloud service.

    The software will “allow Hadoop to take advantage of the scale-out storage architecture that OpenStack offers,” said Adrian Ionel Mirantis CEO. “Enterprises will have a much easier way to deploy and use Hadoop at scale.”

    Mirantis launched the project earlier this month, donating the code to the OpenStack Foundation. OpenStack is a collection of open source software designed to offer shared compute, storage and networking services on an on-demand basis. And Apache Hadoop is a data processing framework for analyzing large amounts of data across multiple servers in a cluster. Both sets of software are increasingly being tested and deployed by organizations.

  • Red Hat releases community OpenStack distribution

  • Red Hat pushes open source cloud with OpenStack distro

    Linux software giant Red Hat has launched a community-led distribution of the OpenStack open source cloud platform.

    RDO — announced at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, USA, on Monday — is a free community-supported distro of OpenStack that will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora and their derivatives.

    OpenStack is an assortment of open source software designed to offer on-demand compute, storage and networking services, often referred to as infrastructure as a service.

  • Red Hat emulates Fedora Linux project with RDO OpenStack community

    OpenStack is sometimes called the Linux for clouds, and Red Hat, the dominant Linux distributor, seems to be all over that. The firm is now working to bring its Red Hat OpenStack distribution into the ever-crowding field of companies that want to peddle supported distributions of this cloud control freak. Red Hat Open Stack, or RHOS, is not ready for primetime, but a new RDO community – Red Hat is not saying what it stands for – is getting a Fedora-like early adopter community together running OpenStack on top of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and KVM hypervisor.

  • Red Hat Announces $300 Million Stock Repurchase Program

    The new program replaces the previous $300 million repurchase program, the final $179 million of which was completed since February 28, 2013 at an average price of $49.15 per share, inclusive of commissions, for a total of 3.6 million shares. “Over the last 13 months we have repurchased $300 million or 5.9 million shares of Red Hat common stock under the current program, equivalent to 3% of our shares outstanding as of February 28, 2013,” stated Charlie Peters, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Red Hat. “Our management team and Board of Directors have a strong conviction in our long-term growth prospects and our ability to generate profits and cash flow. We believe that stock repurchases demonstrate our commitment to building shareholder value as well as confidence in achieving long-term growth.”

  • Red Hat to repurchase another $300M of its own stock

    Pioneering open-source solution vendor Red Hat (RHT) announced today that its board has authorized a $300 million stock buyback program.

  • Red Hat Unveils Partner Network for Cloud Infrastructure Solutions by OpenStock

  • eCube Systems Announces NXTera 6.3 Support for Linux Redhat Enterprise 5

    eCube Systems, a leading provider of middleware modernization, integration, and management solutions, announced the immediate availability of a new version of NXTera 6.3 High Performance RPC Middleware with support for Linux Redhat Enterprise 5.

  • Hortonworks, Mirantis and Red Hat Partner on Project Savanna

    Two of the biggest players in the OpenStack community and a top Hadoop provider announced plans yesterday to join forces to advance the “Hadoop on OpenStack” project known as Savanna. OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis Inc., the company that started Project Savanna, will be working with Hortonworks Inc., the top commercial distributor of Apache Hadoop, and Red Hat Inc., the current leading OpenStack contributor, the three companies said today.

  • Red Hat builds on OpenStack

    Following its preview of an OpenStack distribution, Red Hat is now offering an updated version of the software as part of an “early adopter program”. The company has also initiated the RDO community project, which offers up-to-date OpenStack versions for Linux distributions within the Red Hat ecosystem. The Linux distributor announced the news at the ongoing OpenStack Summit Portland 2013.

  • Red Hat Announces “RDO” OpenStack Distribution

    From the OpenStack event taking place this week, Red Hat has announced RDO, which will serve as a new community-supported OpenStack distribution.

    RDO will serve as a new open-source community-based OpenStack distribution for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (along with other “EL” derivatives). Effectively, Red Hat RDO is a new proving grounds for Red Hat prior to introducing new OpenStack functionality within their commercial products. In the OpenStack world, RDO is to Red Hat OpenStack as is Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  • Fedora

    • Benchmarking Fedora 18 Updates

      With Fedora’s more liberal updating of packages in their supported Linux releases, here’s a look at benchmarks of Fedora 18 in its stock configuration versus where it’s at today with all stable updates.

      While Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions tend to stick to the same kernel version and other key package versions for the entire release’s lifetime, Fedora releases generally follow more closely the latest upstream releases. Fedora 18 shipped with the Linux 3.6 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.6.2, X.Org Server 1.13.0, and Mesa 9.0.1. These package versions with Fedora 18 updates are now at the stable Linux 3.8 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.6.3, X.Org Server 1.13.3, and Mesa 9.1. Many other packages are also at new versions.

• Debian Family

  • Linux Mint Debian Edition 201303

    I’m often asked what my “favorite” Linux distro is by readers. Well, if I have one, it has to be Linux Mint Debian Edition. LMDE has so much to offer Linux users since it combines the power of Debian with the elegance of Linux Mint. There really is something for everyone to love in LMDE.

    Linux Mint Debian was upgraded recently so it’s time to take another look at it. I downloaded the Cinnamon version for this review. You can also opt for the MATE version if you prefer that to Cinnamon.

  • Debian… The daddy of all distros?

    A couple of weeks ago I wrote a review of OpenSUSE. As one of the bigger distributions I asked the question whether OpenSUSE is a real alternative to Ubuntu.

  • Derivatives

    • Knoppix Pulls a Lot More Than Its Own Weight

      Like Puppy Linux, Knoppix is the Little Distro That Could. It’s a handy, user-friendly product that can boot from a disc or USB drive. However, don’t let that fool you into thinking it doesn’t have a full contingent of features and abilities. Knoppix covers all the basis and then some. Occasional boot stalls and restricted virtual workplace access keep Knoppix from achieving full Linux nirvana, but it gets you close.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Touch set to get Apps Collection, add yours now

        What is Ubuntu Touch, you ask? Touch is a super ambitious project sponsered by Canonical to get Ubuntu on mobile devices–you know–the phones and tablets kind. It’s the OS that will power the upcoming Ubuntu Phone. If you haven’t already, watch this longish viral video on Ubuntu Phone, explained in detailed by Mark Shuttleworth himself. Ubuntu Touch’s first installable preview was released was released on 21st February, and is up for grabs to be installed on a limited set of devices. Ubuntu Touch is slated for an end-2013 or early-2014 release.

      • Community Leadership Summit, Training, and Talks

        I just wanted to talk about a busy week of community management and leadership related content I will be involved in in July 2013 in Portland, Oregon.

      • Ubuntu’s Magical Approach to OpenStack [Video]

        Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth was among the earliest backers of the open source OpenStack cloud platform. The early OpenStack releases relied on Ubuntu as its reference Linux distribution and Ubuntu has been packaging OpenStack since its 11.04 Natty Narwal release in 2011.

        In an exclusive interview with Datamation at the OpenStack Summit, Shuttleworth talks about OpenStack in production environments and why a little magic known as Juju is a pivotal part of it all.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Oh No! Fuduntu Calls it Quits

          I can’t believe my eyes. Just as Fuduntu was getting rave reviews and moving up the charts, just a week after announcing their latest release the Fuduntu project “voted to end-of-life Fuduntu Linux.” It seems developmental issues are forcing this decision, and signals a time when ultimately all GNOME 2 users will end up having to move on.

        • The end of the road for Fuduntu

Devices/Embedded

• Open Atom SBC running Angstrom Linux nears production

  The MinnowBoard, an open single-board computer (SBC) design based on a 1GHz Intel Atom E640 processor and running Angstrom embedded Linux, is swimming swiftly toward first production. The Intel-assisted community project aims to equip both professional developers and the maker community with an open hardware/software design that’s readily adaptable to a wide variety of projects and products.

• Kontron spins SMARC COMs for Sitara, i.MX6, Tegra 3 SOCs

  Kontron launched a “SMARC Starterkit” featuring a carrier board and seven-inch touchscreen for three new ARM modules adhering to the SMARC standard. The three supported COMs are built around TI’s 800MHz Sitara AM3874, Freescale’s 1.2GHz multicore i.MX6, and Nvidia’s 1.2GHz quadcore Tegra 3 SOCs, and they’re all backed by embedded Linux and Android support.

• Power of Arduino and Raspberry Pi combined in $99 Android/Linux PC

• Parallella: a Linux-based parallel-processing supercomputer for $99

• Tiny Pico-ITX SBC offers choice of dual-core Atom CPUs

  Axiomtek announced a Pico-ITX single-board computer (SBC) that supports dual-core Intel Atom N2800 and N2600 processors, clocked at 1.86GHz and 1.6GHz respectively. The PICO831 supports up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, provides full-size and half-size PCI Express Mini slots, and features an optional 16GB SATA SSD.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Eric Schmidt teases new Motorola devices as Android activations eclipse 1.5 million daily

    • Logitech Harmony Makes Home Entertainment Personal with Two New Universal Remotes

      Logitech Harmony Smart Control also transforms your iOS or Android phone into your new universal remote…

    • Motorola Plans Stock Android Phones, Sized ‘Just Right’

      Motorola might be building my dream phone. Jim Wicks, Motorola’s design chief, said the company’s first round of products designed after Google’s purchase of the company will follow a philosophy of “better is better” rather than “bigger is better,” and that’s music to my ears.

      The original mobile phone maker’s fate under Google’s thumb has been under question since Google completed its acquisition of Motorola last May. Last fall, Motorola came out with a well-reviewed new line of Razr smartphones, but Google execs emphasized that those were built without their input – and even said they lacked “wow.” Pundits speculated that Google bought Motorola solely for its huge library of critical wireless patents.

    • Report: Android OS Originally Intended to Power Cameras

    • Pre Orders Start For $89 MK809 III Quad-core Android TV Stick

      Time to turn your TV into a smart TV. W2Comp has started taking pre order requests for MK809 III, the Android based TV stick. The stick comes pre-loaded with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and has a powerful Quad core processor to power itself. With 2 gB RAM and bundled with 8 gB storage and ARM Mali-400 graphics, the device costs just $89.

    • Amazon AppStore for Android to target 200 countries

      Amazon released, 2 years back, its AppStore to Android users in the US. That gave Android users another reliable source of apps apart from the ubiquitous (read “official”) Android Market. Since then, Amazon’s AppStore has been limited to a very small set of geographies, even though they were targetting, through Android support, a whole larger bunch of users apart from the ones tied to their own ecosystem through devices like Kindle Fire and Kindle HD.

    • Google’s Eric Schmidt On Facebook Home-Style Android Modification: “I Think It’s Fantastic”

    • Android was once poised to be an operating system for cameras

      Android co-founder Andy Rubin disclosed that Android was once considered as an operating system for cameras. “The exact same platform, the exact same operating system we built for cameras, that became Android for cellphones,” said Rubin, speaking at the Japan New Economy Summit in Tokyo.

Samsung flexes its open source muscles where you might not expect

When you think of open source, you probably think of Linux, engines such as the WebKit browser engine and the Java language and virtual machine, and open source software such as LibreOffice, Firefox, Apache HTTP server, Git, Asterisk, and MySQL. You may not think of appliances, TVs, and cameras — but that’s exactly where consumer electronics giant Samsung uses open source software.

Metasploit 4.6 Open Source Pen Testing Restores Webcam Exploits

In the core Metasploit 4.6 open source framework, 138 new penetration testing modules have been included, enabling at least 80 new exploits. One of the exploits that Metasploit 4.6 includes is a webcam activation module. The basic idea behind the module is that it could enable a security researcher to gain access to webcams and microphones at a vulnerable location.

Contributing to open source projects from 9 to 5, and beyond

Luis Ibanez was recently awarded a People’s Choice Award by our readers for his contributions to the site. It’s no wonder he has so much to say and impart on open source projects—he works on them fulltime!

In this Community Spotlight, Luis sheds light on what projects he contributes to, why he believes it is important we all give back at some point, and what open source tools he can’t live without.

Events

• 5 Favorite Sessions from Collaboration Summit Attendees

• Collaboration Summit 2013 Day Two, Technical Presentations and the Hallway Track

• Talks by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Adapteva Underscore Industry Trend Toward Collaboration

  The Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin sees a new trend in the technology industry toward a collaborative development model. Companies are focusing their research and development efforts outward and participating more in open source projects to accelerate innovation and progress, he said in his opening remarks at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.

• Jon Corbet’s Linux Forecast, Netflix and More from Collaboration Summit

Web Browsers

• Clutter Providing Acceleration For WebKitGTK+

  A Clutter back-end for WebKitGTK+ is providing for hardware acceleration of some web content effects.

  The change to WebKitGTK+ actually happened a couple weeks ago but the Planet GNOME RSS feed has been a bit wonky lately so the news is only coming out today. Joone Hur, a Korean Linux developer working at Intel and specializing on WebKit development, added an experimental Clutter back-end to WebKitGTK+.

• Chrome

  • Adobe says it will contribute to Google’s Blink

    Adobe’s director of engineering for the Web Platform, Vincent Hardy, has confirmed that the company is not taking sides in the WebKit/Blink web rendering engine fork and will be contributing to both WebKit and Blink as they are open source. In a blog posting, Hardy pointed out that “Adobe actively contribute to Web standards and browser implementations” – mostly WebKit and Chromium, but the company also has some Gecko contributions to its name.

  • Adobe To Contribute To Blink Rendering Engine

    Earlier this month Google announced the Blink rendering engine as a fork of the WebKit project. After announcing their WebKit fork, Opera confirmed their plans of moving to the Blink engine too. Two weeks later, Adobe is now saying they will contribute to Blink.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Sets Sights on New Mobile Experiences

    You’ve probably heard the refrain before: “All of the great ideas have already been thought of.” That proposition, of course, has no business in the lexicon of thriving open source projects, and Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs made very clear in comments at the All Things D: Dive Into Mobile conference that he thinks there are lots more good ideas to come on the mobile technology front. As quoted by ABC News, Kovacs said, “We haven’t done a great job [on mobile browsing]. I’m expecting someone will do an Apple on the whole browsing experience.”

  • Mozilla Is Talking Firefox OS, and the First Five Countries to Get It

    As I noted yesterday, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs (who will be leaving his CEO post this year) made very clear in comments at the All Things D: Dive Into Mobile conference that Mozilla has very ambitious plans for its new Firefox OS mobile operating system. Specifically, he sees it as an innovation-centric platform. As quoted by ABC News, Kovacs said, “We haven’t done a great job [on mobile browsing]. I’m expecting someone will do an Apple on the whole browsing experience.”

SaaS/Big Data

• Tops Dogs Team Up for Project Savana : Hadoop Simplified for OpenStack

• OpenStack Summit: SDN Switches Become Low Cost Linux Boxes?

  The VAR Guy is at OpenStack Summit and he’s starting to drink the Kool-Aid. Customers like Best Buy, Comcast and Hubspot say they are deploying the cloud computing platform. But now, the conversation is shifting to networking in the cloud — a software defined networking (SDN) primer. Leading the conversation: Ben Cherian, chief strategy officer at Midokura, a startup focused on network virtualization. His key point: SDN (using Overlay Solutions) will allow switches to be far more like commodity Linux servers — giving customers the ability to scale and manage their networks far more effectively.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Updated for Open Source Document Creation

  Version 3.6.6 is notable for speed increases to many operations, more than 50 bug fixes and various tweaks to the applications. For example, Impress, the presentation program, now supports widescreen formats for slideshows and comes with 10 new master pages. The Writer word processor’s RTF/DOCX import/export now handles document zoom settings. The program also provides support for contextual spacing and can import Office SmartArt. Exported PDF files can now be given watermarks and an import filter for CorelDRAW documents has been added. A complete list of the new functionality is available here.

Business

• Magento Open-Source Ecommerce Platform Gains Strong Momentum

  Magento, the ecommerce platform owned by eBay that is at the center of several recent major partnerships and endorsements, is enjoying success. And that success could have a far-reaching impact beyond Magento’s immediate niche by influencing the future of open source, the cloud and integrated hosting solutions.

• Nivis Announces Open Source Availability for ISA100.11a and WirelessHART

• Financial Market IT goes “Open Source”

• Open Networking Foundation Launches Industry’s First Open-Source “OpenFlow(TM) Driver” Contest

Funding

• Google Summer of Code 2013 Ideas

  GNUnet is participating in this years Google Summer of Code under the GNU umbrella. Here an overview over GNUnet’s project ideas.

BSD

• AMD Kernel Mode-Setting Continues On FreeBSD

  For being a project that’s just a few months old and up until recently wasn’t touched by BSD developers, the port of the open-source AMD Radeon kernel mode-setting driver from the Linux kernel to FreeBSD kernel is progressing nicely.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• An updated GNUnet Java tutorial for developers is available

  Thanks to Florian Dold, an updated version of the GNUnet Java tutorial is available. Developers starting to hack on GNUnet using Java are strongly encouraged to have a look there. It covers basic installation, writing services, APIs and clients.

Project Releases

• WebKitGTK+ 2.0.0 Released With Many New Features

  After being in development for the past two years, WebKitGTK+ 2.0.0 has been released and it defaults to their new WebKit2GTK+ API.

  The WebKit2 GTK+ API is centered around the upstream WebKit2 interfaces, which is a new API supporting a split-process model and other incompatible improvements over the original WebKit API.

• ALSA 1.0.27 Released With Audio Improvements

Openness/Sharing

• DOE supports truSolar’s efforts to develop open source risk scoring standards and rating criteria for solar projects

  The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) extend their support for the truSolar® Working Group’s efforts to develop uniform open source risk scoring standards and rating criteria for solar projects that will facilitate lower transaction and capital costs, and improve project finance liquidity within the commercial and industrial solar segment.

• Open Data

  • Open your data to the world

    When Neil Fantom, a manager at the World Bank, sat down with the organisation’s technology team in 2010 to talk about opening up the bank’s data to the world at large, he encountered a bit of unfamiliar terminology. “At that time I didn’t even know what ‘API’ meant,” says Fantom.

    As head of the bank’s Open Data Initiative, announced in April 2010, Fantom was in charge of taking the group’s vast trove of information, which previously had been available only by subscription, and making it available to anyone who wanted it. The method of doing that, he would learn, would be an application programming interface.

• Open Access/Content

  • For Those Who Like Things Open – Check Out OpenCourseware ~mw

    Our readers are a curious bunch, and I never cease to be amazed at the knowledge they possess. Still, I suspect most of you are life-long learners. Although you may already be aware of it, you now have the opportunity to take college level courses on a vast array of subjects. There is no course credit, but you also don’t have to pay for the courses.

Programming

• LLVM Powers C++ AMP To OpenCL On NVIDIA

  An independent developer has made improvements to the LLVM infrastructure and Clang compiler for supporting the compiling of C++ AMP code into OpenCL code with support for the NVPTX back-end so that this multi-threaded C++ code can be executed on NVIDIA GPUs.

• LLVM Advances Tool To Auto-Convert Code To C++11

Standards/Consortia

• Netflix To Possibly Use HTML5 Video Instead of Microsoft Silverlight

  If you longed to watch Netflix on your Linux computer, here is some good news for you. According to a blog post by Netflix’s Anthony Park and Mark Watson, they are planning to test HTML5 video and to switch from proprietary Microsoft Silverlight for video streaming. Modern mobile browsers have problems in running Microsoft Silverlight extensions and they want a more reliable solution so as to stream Netflix in all platforms without hurdles. Also, Silverlight has been discontinued by Microsoft since 2001 and they want a more future proof solution.

• Netflix plans to dump Silverlight for HTML5 streaming

Health/Nutrition

• Enough non-GM soy to fulfil Europe’s animal feed needs

  What’s needed is for advance purchase contracts to be in place so that farmers know that they have an assured market for their non-GM crop. Evidently the UK supermarkets listed above have consistently failed to tell their suppliers to do this. Instead their suppliers are relying on “spot” purchase, when the crop actually comes onto the market. That way, they are more likely to get the soy cheaper. Unfortunately in this game of greed and competition, the consumers – and the farm animals – are the losers.

Security

• Old tricks are new again: Dangerous copy & paste

  Copying and pasting something does not necessarily mean the user will get what they think they are getting. With a little bit of HTML magic, one can even trick unwitting web site visitors into executing shell commands without their knowledge. The trick is by no means new, but it is currently being demonstrated again on several web sites which means Linux users especially have to be careful what they copy and paste.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Greece urged to ‘take action’ on neo-Nazi party

• Europe rights chief says Greece can ban neo-Nazi party

• Council of Europe Urges Greece to Ban Neo-Nazi Party

  The report describes Golden Dawn as a “neo-Nazi and violent political party” that should be isolated under legally binding international human rights conventions signed by Greece.

  The Greek Reporter has reminded that Golden Dawn is led by Nikolaos Michaloliakos, who delivers fiery speeches denouncing immigrants and the government for supporting austerity measures. Michaloliakos has also espoused anti-Semitic, homophobic and ultra-religious stances.

• Former CIA Terrorism Analyst On Boston Bombs: That Type Of Explosive “Has Been A Hallmark Of Al Qaeda”

• Former CIA Terrorism Director To Matthews: Boston Bombs Bear The ‘Hallmark Of Al Qaeda’

• Bill would bar CIA from fake IDs

  Lawmakers moved Tuesday to block the Central Intelligence Agency from utilizing a Washington state program that has issued hundreds of fake driver’s licenses to government agencies.

• Report: State’s DOL issued ‘big number’ of fake licenses to CIA

• State DOL issued most undercover licenses to CIA

• Wash. lawmakers may block CIA from fake licenses

  Washington lawmakers are looking to block the Central Intelligence Agency from using a state program to get fake driver’s licenses.

• US drone strike kills five in South Waziristan

  A US drone fired two missiles into a Taliban training camp in South Waziristan on Wednesday, destroying the compound and killing at least five suspected militants, local officials said.
  The attack took place in the Baber Ghar area of the South Waziristan tribal district on the Afghan border, a stronghold of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Hakimullah Mehsud, where the faction runs several camps.

• US drone attack destroys Taliban base in Pakistan, kills five

• US drone strike in South Waziristan kills five

• Targeted Killings in the Drone War – Illegal and Unconstitutional

  In a society that still has some semblance of freedom, often the truth eventually comes out. Unfortunately, it is often too late to do much about unconstitutional and just plain bad policies. One of the biggest mistakes President Obama has made so far is not only failing to investigate the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional behavior, but actually continuing, and in some cases, expanding its policies.

• Steve Emerson Gets It Wrong–Again

  But why was he considered a suspect? It seems like the mere fact that he was Saudi Arabian…

Cablegate

• Bhopal NGOs reveal Wikileaks’ cables on Dow Chemicals

  Five non-government organisations (NGOs) working in the interest of Bhopal gas survivors today revealed few Wikileaks documents and have alleged Government of India of kowtowing to US Government pressure to serve the interests of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical in Bhopal. The Bhopal gas tragedy happened on 2 December 1984 claimed thousands of lives and left several injured. Hundreds of people are still suffering even after 28 years of the tragedy.

• Wikileaks: Indira Gandhi ‘didn’t believe’ Richard Nixon was supporting Pakistan

Finance

• Cooperatives and Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises

• Goldman Sachs’ move to trim compensation ratio seen as bid to placate shareholders

  Goldman Sachs revealed a cut in its closely watched compensation ratio when it reported first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, and in doing so sent a message to shareholders about the new economic and regulatory realities.

  “What the firm is saying is that we are still in the process of repricing parts of our business,” said Brad Hintz, analyst at AllianceBernstein.

• Europe austerity measures are impacting on healthcare and increasing xenophobia

  “Rising unemployment and poverty across Europe have generated extreme-right statements stigmatising migrants” stated the Doctors of the World 2012 report ‘Access to healthcare in Europe in times of crisis and rising xenophobia’.

  The report, reported in the online newspaper EurActiv, shows a rise in xenophobic acts and regulations in Greece and Spain as well as other European countries.

  Dr Nikitas Kanakis from Doctors of the World Greece said “xenophobia and healthcare always go together”. He added “it’s about dignity and to live safely without fear”.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• USA Today: Venezuelans Voted for High Unemployment and Food Shortages

  Sunday’s election in Venezuela saw Vice President (or “Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor,” as he’s known to many in the corporate media) Nicolas Maduro narrowly defeat opposition candidate Henrique Capriles.

• ‘Terror Returns’–but When Did It Go Away?

  But what happened in Boston that hasn’t happened since September 11? All we really can say with confidence so far is that somebody tried to kill a large group of people; as USA Today (12/19/12) itself has reported, such mass slayings are alarmingly common in the United States, with 774 people killed in 156 incidents between 2006 and 2010. “Mass Killings Occur in USA Once Every Two Weeks,” the headline pointed out.

• Wisconsin Ethics Board Fails to Curb ALEC Shell Game

  In theory, Wisconsin has some of the strongest ethics and lobbying laws in the country — legislators cannot accept even a cup of coffee from lobbyists or others who have an interest in the outcome of legislation — but these laws are meaningless if the state ethics board does not take action to enforce them.

  Last week, Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board issued an ill-conceived decision in response to the Center for Media and Democracy’s complaint about an American Legislative Exchange Council “scholarship” program that allows corporate lobbyists to provide gifts of travel and perks to state legislators. The GAB agreed that some Wisconsin politicians had improperly attended corporate-sponsored events and failed to properly disclose receipt of ALEC “scholarships,” but failed to recognize that the corporate-funded “scholarships” themselves are improper and should be barred.

Censorship

• Japanese court orders Google to censor autocomplete, pay damages

  A Japanese court has ordered Google to delete search terms related to a Japanese man who claimed that searches for his name autocompleted to include defamatory phrases.

  The ruling comes a year after Google rejected the court’s initial demands to censor its autocomplete function in 2012, in part arguing that it wasn’t subject to Japanese regulations.

Privacy

• The Boston bombing privacy lesson

  The surveillance state thrives on acts of terror. All the more reason why we need more protections for our rights

• Peeping Tom – Why you may think twice about a visit to the cinema

  Apparently in order to stop “caming” films, here in the UK there’s staff watching the cinema audiences for evidence of recording devices. Better yet? They are doing it in the dark whilst you are distracted with the film you paid for. To my knowledge, there’s not even security checks or any sort of suitability test for the staff who are watching you and your family in the dark.

• Building new US “cybersecurity” center raises concerns

• s the NSA building a $800million data center to spy on Americans? Utah desert facility code-named Bumblehive ‘will monitor emails of U.S. citizens’

• US denies building email monitoring database

• Obama Threatens Veto Against CISPA Unless Changed

  Online privacy advocates finally got what they’ve been asking for when President Obama yesterday threatened to veto the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) if congress doesn’t amend it to include more protections of privacy and civil liberties. The administration began signalling displeasure with the bill last Thursday when Caitlin Hayden, of the National Security Council, indicated the President might not support the measure as worded, after it was approved by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee.

Civil Rights

• A Law to Nullify the NDAA?

  A state bill sponsored by Republican Tim Donnelly would guarantee Californians protection from the threat of indefinite detention made possible by the National Defense Authorization Act.

  The bill is called the California Liberty Preservation Act. If enacted, it would retain several fundamental civil liberties enshrined by the Constitution, “including the right of habeas corpus, the right to due process, the right to a speedy and public trial, and the right to be informed of criminal charges brought against him or her.”

• Bipartisan testimony backs N.H. bill opposing indefinite detention of suspected terrorists

  Republicans and Democrats alike urged a Senate committee yesterday to support legislation that would forbid New Hampshire officials from helping the U.S. military detain suspected terrorists indefinitely without trial.

• Hunger Strikes Put Guantanamo Back in the Spotlight

  Public debate here over the military prison at Guantanamo Bay heated up again following Monday’s surprise publication of a highly charged article by an inmate at the prison, one of dozens currently engaged in a months-long hunger strike over detainees’ “indefinite detention”.

• Obama, is it time for martial law?

  Last week the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Ala., issued a report to United States Attorney Eric Holder that said an alarming number of Americans are turning violently against their government.

  [...]

  Last year, Congress, through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), authorized the president under section 1031 to declare the United States or certain sections of it, under certain circumstances, as a battlefield and authorize the military to make arrests and detain Americans without bringing criminal charges against them or bringing them to trial.

• Oh, Please

  The Babbler calls the police-state currently tyrannizing Americans an “open society.”

• Paid Sick Days Defeat in Philadelphia Followed Familiar Script

  When the Philadelphia City Council passed a paid sick days bill on March 14, it was the second of three wins in a two week period for the movement to let workers take a sick day without losing pay or their jobs. But the Council then fell one vote short of overriding a mayoral veto, providing a case study in how special interests aligned with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) work to oppose these common-sense bills.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Chromebook Pixel LTE arriving today

The first customers will start getting the Chromebook Pixel LTE today, several weeks after the Wi-Fi-only version was available.

You’re Invited: Design the Future of Automotive Infotainment

Like many of us you are probably using your car almost every single day: commute to work, take the kids to school, run errands, go shopping, or just for fun. You name it. And while spending all this time on the road you may be using the in-vehicle infotainment system built into your ride for navigation, listening to music from the radio, accessing content stored on my mobile device, making phone calls, getting traffic updates and much more. And whether or not you are entirely happy with the solution that the maker has built into your car you may have the one or other idea on how things can be improved. Or maybe you think this is all lame and you can do a much better job. Well, here is your opportunity.

Tux moves house… again!

I’ve written about this already, when I first changed the HDD in my laptop. I moved the same HDD from an HP Compaq C300 to a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 1505. The HDD had 4 operating systems installed: Windows XP, Mageia 1 KDE, Linux Mint XFCE and Debian Squeeze. I made a conclusion at that time that WinXP survived the move the best.

Resilient OS v Clunker

I’m often told by trolls that other OS has better hardware support. Well here’s a comparison where a supported version of that other OS could not survive a hard drive transplant while GNU/Linux laughed.

Don’t forget to blame the little guy for screwing Linux over.

Everyone in the industry and particularly home users like to blame the obvious large targets for Linux never (at least at the time of this writing) quite making it to the average users Desktop in the masses. Many blame Microsoft, Apple, Patents or just anything proprietary in nature.

However I feel that there is one particular reason, made up of millions of small contributors, of why Linux has truly never landed on the Desktop. Who or what is it you ask? Your local PC shop is just as guilty and equally damaging as any of the large proprietary companies conspiring to hold Linux down.

They purposely keep Linux off the desktop and out of the picture for end users simply because the “Windows Virus, Adware, Spyware, Malware, Trojan and general shittyness repair money” is just to great, soo… a stable, working, capable, compatible, computer for the masses, is just out of the question.

Linux Top 3: Debian’s New Leader, Linux 3.9 and Xen

Server

• Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer

  Move over Raspberry Pi, here comes Adapteva’s Parallella, a low-cost parallel chip board for Linux supercomputing.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 306 – Game of Thongs

Kernel Space

• INSIDE Secure NFC Solution Supported In Linux Kernel 3.9 Release

• QXL KMS Driver To Be Merged For Linux 3.10 Kernel

  David Airlie of Red Hat has pulled in his own QXL KMS/DRM driver into his drm-next Git tree, which means this para-virtual graphics hardware with TTM/GEM support will premiere in the Linux 3.10 kernel.

• “Very Disruptive” Change Hurts ARM Linux Support

  The Linux kernel is having to remove support for NWFPE and VFP emulation code due to a licensing conflict. Removing NWFPE and VFP from the kernel will effectively render older ARM hardware on Linux useless until a solution is determined.

  Russell King, the maintainer of the ARM code for the Linux kernel, announced this removal on the linux-arm-kernel mailing list. The NWFPE (NetWinder Floating Point Emulator) and VFP (Vector Floating Point) code is for emulating floating-point operations within the kernel. While this code is critical to ARM hardware without hardware floating-point support, the code needs to be dropped due to a licensing conflict.

• NFC Solution Supported In Linux Kernel 3.9 Release

• Hisense Mobile, Solarflare and Thomas-Krenn Join Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Hisense Mobile, Solarflare and Thomas-Krenn.AG are joining the organization.

• Welcome Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

  The Xen Project is 10 years-old this week, and its contributors have doubled in the last few years. Xen usage continues to grow and today the project is being deployed in public IaaS environments by some of the world’s largest companies.

  Additionally, the Xen Project has adopted mainline kernel development practices and is progressing ever closer to the mainline kernel community. As of Linux kernel version 3.0, Linux can run unmodified as a Xen host or guest

• Xen become a Linux Foundation collaborative project

  The Linux Foundation has taken over the development of Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Now Xen will be independently funded and will benefit from the collaborative development which will engage some of the biggest names in the IT world.

• Citrix bequeaths Xen to the Linux Foundation

  In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.

• Linux Foundation takes over Xen, enlists Amazon in war to rule the cloud

• Citrix bequeaths Xen to the Linux Foundation

  In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.

  Citrix announced the donation Monday at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, being held this week in San Francisco.

• Citrix and Industry Leaders Usher in New Era for Open Source Xen

• Linux Collaboration Summit keynotes stream live

  The Linux Foundation is offering live video streaming of all of the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions to be held Monday, April 15. Day 1 keynotes feature presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Intel, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.

• Xen becomes a Linux Foundation project

  Xen, Citrix’s popular open-source hypervisor, is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project with the backing of such major technology powers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Intel.

• Talks by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Adapteva Underscore Industry Trend Toward Collaboration

  The Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin sees a new trend in the technology industry toward a collaborative development model. Companies are focusing their research and development efforts outward and participating more in open source projects to accelerate innovation and progress, he said in his opening remarks at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.

  It’s no coincidence, then, that the conference kicked off this morning with a warm welcome to the Xen Project, the foundation’s newest collaborative project, which is also celebrating its 10-year anniversary today as a virtualization platform. The announcement comes on the heels of last week’s OpenDaylight software-defined networking project launch.

• Jon Corbet’s Linux Forecast, Netflix and More from Collaboration Summit

• 5 Great Quotes of the Day from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

  Keynote presenters had some interesting things to say at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco on Monday. Here are some top quotes. What did you take away from the sessions? Please share your favorite quotes and moments in the comments, below.

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel OpenGL Performance On The Linux 3.9 Kernel

    Our latest benchmarks at Phoronix of the Linux 3.9 kernel are looking at the performance of the Intel DRM driver when handling an Intel Core i7 “Ivy Bridge” processor with HD 4000 graphics. The Intel OpenGL Linux graphics performance with this forthcoming kernel was compared to the earlier Linux 3.8, 3.7, 3.6, and 3.5 kernel releases.

  • Intel Mesa Driver Gets HiZ Support For Haswell

    If running the latest stable components powering the Intel Linux graphics driver (namely the Linux kernel, Mesa, and xf86-video-intel), the open-source graphics support for the forthcoming Haswell processors should be in fairly good shape. However, like Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, it will take some time before the Linux graphics driver is fully-optimized. Fortunately, there’s another newly-enabled Haswell feature to report within Mesa.

  • New AMD Catalyst Beta Supports Linux 3.8, TF2 Fixes

    AMD has released a new Catalyst Linux graphics driver, which supports modern Linux kernel releases while having various other fixes in store too. Some of the OpenGL fixes will help those playing some Linux Steam client games.

  • Bitcoin Mining Comes To Radeon Open-Source OpenCL

    With the increasing popularity as of late with the Bitcoin virtual currency, the open-source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack has advanced to support Bitcoin mining.

    Tom Stellard of AMD has spent the past few days working on getting the Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack in a state where it works to run the “bfgminer” Bitcoin mining application running on the open-source Radeon HD driver. After a few days, he has it working with some new code, but the performance isn’t all that great.

• Benchmarks

  • Tuning Btrfs vs. F2FS, EXT4, XFS File-Systems

    When earlier this week delivering Btrfs benchmarks with various mount options for tuning the next-generation Linux file-system, some Linux users were hoping to see other file-systems tossed into the test mix too for reference. Here’s those numbers.

Applications

• The funny side of Linux command line

• Proxmox Virtual Environment Celebrates 5th Anniversary

  I’ve received this news from proxmox press office, I really like their effort and their product and so I’ve decided to post their press release that celebrate their 5th anniversary:

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install arno firewall with psad – iptables on steroids

  • Linux shell: take screenshots with scrot

  • Quick Image Editing With Gwenview

  • Linux Umask : Permission Set When New File / Folder Created

  • How to Install Apache Solr with Tomcat on Linux

  • How to Setup OwnCloud Server 5 with SSL Connection

  • Encrypt Your Data With EncFS (OpenSUSE 12.3)

  • KeePassX + TrueCrypt + Dropbox: a secure and portable password management solution

  • Some tips to use the command line faster

• Games

  • Minecraft to get a new more useful launcher for the 1.6 release

    Ah Minecraft the massively popular sandbox building/survival game from Mojang, it’s still going strong and still getting big updates too, next up is 1.6!

  • Grimlands To Support Linux, Mac

  • Attractio an FPS Puzzle game from GameCoder Studios

  • Win a 2-Pack of Don’t Starve on Steam!

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 17th February 2013

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 3.8 Classic for openSUSE 12.3

  • Trying KDE’s File Manager -Dolphin- in GNOME 3.8

    It was a time when the first letter of many programs in Linux was “g” or “k”, to declare if something was made for GNOME or KDE. Back then, KDE programs (made of Qt) was looking awful under GNOME (made of GTK) and vice versa.

    Nowadays with the very improved theming you can hardly understand if an application is written in Qt or GTK or even in another toolkit like Java. I remember when Mark Shuttleworth had talked 3-4 years ago for the development of a common environment in Ubuntu that could genuine run GTK or QT Apps, toolkit-invisible to users.

  • Gnome 3.8 Review… Still Shit!

  • GNOME Photos 3.8.0

    After a year of development, I am happy to announce GNOME Photos 3.8.0. This completes the last unfinished GNOME 3.8 feature – Photos is now the latest in the set of Finding & Reminding applications for GNOME 3.

Distributions

• Specialized Gaming Distros Down and Out?

  Gaming on Linux is fun. A bit geeky, but fun. There is no dearth of free and open-source games for Linux. Some are plain awesome, some come handy when you want to kill time, and some exist just for the purpose of showing to the world that a geek in one corner of the world can build games on their own. The gaming universe is not as large on Linux as what it is on Windows, of course, but we’re getting there, one step at a time.

• 10 Top Widely Used Linux Distributions of 2012

  Linux is one of the powerful and standard operating system which at present is growing faster and faster in computer operating system planet. It offers excellent performance and speed. Linux is very stable and reliable in terms of usage. It also provides several administrative tools and utilities that help you to manage your system effectively.

• New Releases

  • [pfSense] 2.0.3 Release Now Available!

    I’m happy to announce the release of pfSense 2.0.3. This is a maintenance release with some bug and security fixes since 2.0.2 release. You can upgrade from any previous release to 2.0.3.

• Screenshots

  • Pardus 2013 Community

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Good bye, PLF

• Arch Family

  • The Road Not Well Traveled: Two Developers Think Outside the Box

    CinnArch is no more as the work necessary to move to systemd was simply prohibitive and an announcement was made to close their doors.

• Red Hat Family

  • Bring in the clones – CentOS and Scientific Linux

    In March 2013 two projects, CentOS and Scientific Linux, released updates to their respective distributions. Both projects provide clones of Enterprise Linux free of cost. As such both projects are important to the Linux ecosystem as they provide a means for users to take advantage of stable, high quality software without the high cost associated with enterprise quality products. While both projects released clones of Enterprise Linux 6.4 and while both projects maintain binary compatibility with their upstream software provider, these projects do carry subtle differences. They may be binary compatible with each other, but each project takes a slightly different approach in their presentation and configuration. With this in mind I would like to talk about what it is like to set up both CentOS and Scientific Linux.

  • Red Hat Launches Open Source OpenStack RDO

    Red Hat is accelerating its involvement with the open source OpenStack cloud platform project with a new community distribution of OpenStack.

  • Red Hat Advances Enterprise OpenStack Distro to Early Adopter Program

    OpenStack is an open source framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. RDO, the name for Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution (which stands for Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack), may not have a name as catchy as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, but its function will be similar.

    The Fedora community adds new features upstream before they become incorporated in the Linux-based operating system and eventually make their way into Red Hat’s commercially available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RDO will be a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on RHEL, Fedora and their derivatives and offers a pure upstream OpenStack experience.

  • JBoss Data Grid 6.1: High Availability, Faster Recovery

    Red Hat this week unveiled JBoss Data Grid 6.1, an update to its in-memory database, with significant new functionality for high availability and disaster recovery. Its first update in nearly a year, Red Hat’s database for large-scale enterprise applications now supports data-center replication across geographically dispersed clusters as well as the ability to perform rolling upgrades without interrupting service.

• Debian Family

  • Lucas Nussbaum is new Debian leader

    Lucas Nussbaum, an assistant professor of computer science from Universite de Lorraine, is the new leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project.

  • DPL election is over, congratulations Lucas Nussbaum!

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS vs. Ubuntu 13.04 Benchmarks

        For those that may be currently running Ubuntu 12.04.2 as the latest Ubuntu Linux Long-Term Support release but are considering upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 for better performance, here are benchmarks comparing the two Ubuntu Linux releases when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad. Overall, there’s a few areas where the new Ubuntu Linux release delivers worthwhile performance improvements over the year-old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

      • Enable Different Wallpapers for Each Workspace in Ubuntu 13.04

      • 7 Subtle Unity Changes You Might Not Notice in 13.04

        Ubuntu 13.04 will be released later this month, and whilst many will be focusing on the big bang-whizz changes – like new animation effects, features and app changes, few will give much attention to the subtler changes.

      • The good and bad of Ubuntu 13.04 beta 2

      • No Official pre-press Ubuntu 13.04 CD/DVD will be distributed by Canonical

        But starting from Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), pre-pressed Ubuntu CD/DVD will only be made available only for LTS release (the next one will be 14.04 LTS ) from this point forward. This is in-line with Canonical policy to only concentrate on supporting Ubuntu LTS.

      • Easily Sign The Ubuntu Code Of Conduct With CoC Signing Assistant

        Signing the Ubuntu Code of Conduct may seem difficult, especially for relatively new Linux users so to make things easier, Marten de Vries has created an application called Code of Conduct Signing Assistant which should make make it easier to sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.

      • Ubuntu Software Center Explored

        Over the years, the methods of installing new software onto Linux systems has evolved a great deal. These days, modern distributions use tools like the Ubuntu Software Center to make software installation as simple as point-and-click.

        In this article, I’ll explore the Ubuntu Software Center, it’s earliest beginnings, how the back-end works and where it still needs some fine-tuning for the future.

      • App Ecosystem for Ubuntu Mobile Growing Steadily

      • Flavours and Variants

        • 10 Reasons to Love Lubuntu 12.10

        • The Other Shoe Drops: Founder Announces Retirement, Fuduntu End of Life

          Sadly, following on the heels of that story, Founder +Andrew Wyatt made a formal announcement this morning regarding his planned retirement from active work on and end of life for the Fuduntu project.

        • Fuduntu Linux is closing its doors

          Fuduntu’s last release will be version 2013.3, he added. September 30 will be the last official day of Fuduntu Linux.

        • Fuduntu Team meeting held on April 14, 2013

          On Sunday, April 14, the Fuduntu team held a public meeting on IRC. Many things were discussed, including some issues that have major implications for both the team and community. Among the things discussed were introduction of team members, status of various teams, and the future of Fuduntu.
          The biggest topic discussed was the future of Fuduntu. The team has been striving to bring a stable system to the community and we believe we’ve been able to do that. One of the key aspects of that was using GNOME 2. However, as time has gone by, support for GTK2 has decreased dramatically. With this, apps using GTK2 have been moved to GTK3 and old versions are no longer being maintained for either bugs or security flaws.

        • Fuduntu Linux pivoting to rebase project

          The Fuduntu developers have decided that their current path of producing a GNOME 2 desktop with a Fedora based distribution as a rolling release is becoming technically problematic and have “voted to end-of-life Fuduntu Linux”. Fuduntu originally appeared in 2010 as a fork of Fedora designed for netbooks with power management applets and various optimisations for running on portable devices.The most recent release, Fuduntu 2013.2, appeared on 8 April.

Devices/Embedded

• Dedoimedo reviews OpenPandora – Chapter one!

  I rarely review hardware, mostly my own purchases, which usually come in the form of this or that laptop, some desktops, plus an odd phone here and there. Approx. a month back, I was contacted by Michael Mrozek, the CEO of OpenPandora GmbH, and asked to review their Pandora product, the world’s smallest, most powerful micro-gaming computer.

• ARM-based device developers get SMARC COMs

• Tiny COM runs Linux, Android on quad-core i.MX6

  CompuLab is shipping a Linux- and Android-ready COM built around the 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 processor, giving developers a choice of one, two, or four ARM Cortex-A9 cores. The CM-FX6 measures 75×65 mm, offers up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and uses dual 140-pin connectors to supply interfaces like I2C, CAN, SATA, and HDMI.

• Interesting embedded device opportunity: mobile ALPRs

• Raspberry Pi Tops 1 Million In Sales

  Raspberry Pi is racking up some major sales. The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced last week that more than one million of the popular Linux-based devices have been sold to date.

  Posting on the company’s blog, the team at Raspberry also announced that it has greatly scaled up production for the devices.

• Phones

  • Tizen DevCon issues 2013 presentations list v1

    After reviewing more than 160 session proposals, the program committee of Tizen Developers Conference 2013 has published the event’s preliminary list of 45 presentations. The sessions will be organized in three tracks: Tizen project, process, and progress; app development and deployment; and platform and device development.

  • What’s Up Dock?

    If you have followed my column during the past few years, you’ll know that I am a big fan of having a portable Linux environment with me wherever I go. For years, this took the form of small laptops (like the Fujitsu P series) and most recently the Nokia N900, which took the form factor down to pocket size.

    When I got the N900, I thought technology finally had caught up to a dream of mine: the ability to carry my computer in my pocket and, when I’m out walking around, interface with it via the small keyboard and touchscreen. When I get home, I can dock it, and it will expand to a larger display with a proper keyboard and mouse and become my regular computer. The big advantage of this idea is that I can keep my files and environment with me wherever I go.

  • Ballnux

    • Android 4.1 launches for Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket

      The Jelly Bean version of Android is now available for AT&T subscribers who own the Samsung phone.

    • Weekend Special: Samsung ”worried” about their build quality, Galaxy Note III to have a new design

  • Android

    • Best Download Managers For Linux

      Downloading huge amount of files using your web browser can be quite tedious. Many times downloads are interrupted and sometimes, you’ll find that they are slower than usual. One of the worst things, however, when it comes to downloading files using web browsers is that the moment you close the browser or lose the connection, all your downloaded effort goes to waste. This is where download managers come in handy. These small applications are responsible for ensuring that you have an uninterrupted download that can be resumed anytime you want. Moreover, apart from giving you the core features, these tools also let you download your favorite content via proxy and FTP as well.

    • Android phones to top 1B by year-end, Eric Schmidt says

    • Facebook Home And The Promise Of Android

      If you’re an iPhone user, you might be feeling a little left behind, because Facebook launched an application called Facebook Home, touted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “next version of Facebook.” In fact, you might be feeling this way if you’re an Android user, too. For now, only a handful of select devices can even run Home (officially) — notably missing from the lineup is Google’s Nexus 4, the latest in the lineup of Nexus-branded flagship Android phones — devices that users adopt in particular to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new app releases.

      But Facebook promised that more handsets will be supported in time, as will tablets. Well, only Android ones, that is.

      It’s too soon to say whether Facebook Home will live up to the company’s claims and expectations of becoming the new way people interact with the social network, or whether it will go down only as a notable experiment on the social network’s part. If the latter, it won’t be a major loss to the company, as Facebook will continue to have access to data from a core group of heavy Facebook enthusiasts. It will learn what keeps users engaged, what posts and images catch their eye and their clicks, and, eventually, which advertisements do, too.

    • UDOO Mini PC Single Board Android, Linux, Arduino System Unveiled (video)

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • EOMA-68 cards could lead to upgradeable tablets (and other computers)

    You know how you can upgrade some components in your computer when they start to feel stale instead of going out and buying a whole new PC? That’s a lot harder to do with a laptop than a desktop, and the only “upgrade” most mobile tablets offer is the option to add a microSD card.

    Rhombus Tech wants to change that by developing a platform that lets you swap out the CPU, memory, and other vital components of a tablet (or laptop, or desktop) when you want to upgrade — without requiring you to buy a new display, case, or other components.

  • Windows tablets don’t even rate a blip in the $64 billion tablet market, say report

    The ABI Research report says that an estimated 150 million tablets will ship in 2013, worth an estimated $64 billion. The total number of tablets will grow by a projected 38% over 2012, and the total revenue will grow a projected 28%.

You Use Open Source Tools? The Robot Recruiters Know It — and Like It

As we’ve reported, the rise of the cloud and Big Data tools is also giving rise to a need for expertise in using these tools. Jobs for people with Linux and Big Data skills are readily available around the world.

In an interesting spin on this trend, though, there are also some signs emerging that Big Data analysis tools could even match skilled workers up with their ideal jobs in ways that human recruiters can’t. And, these tools may put special emphasis on how savvy job seekers are with open source technology and general computing knowledge.

OSI Open Source Community Summit

The License Clinic for US Federal Agencies is not the only new departure for the Open Source Initiative this May. OSI is also reaching out to a wide spectrum of open source communities with its Open Source Community Summit in Washington DC on May 10 2013, where we’ll be able to gain a much fuller idea of the needs of those communities. Sponsored by Google, Red Hat and Eclipse, and chaired by OSI President Simon Phipps, this is OSI’s first Community Summit.

BCS aims to promote open source awareness for females

BCSWomen is working with BCS Open Source specialist group and Flossie to host a number of one-day career workshops to promote open source development as a second career opportunity.

These events are part of the organisation’s campaign to advise more women to take up or return to careers in IT, with modern estimates claiming that women account for less than a fifth of ICT managers and 21 per cent of computer analysts.

Increasing participation of women in Free and Open Source Software

Few women have been historically applying for Google Summer of Code, a program in which Google provides stipends for students to work for three months on FOSS projects. Last year, after many efforts by both the Google team and the community to increase the diversity in the program, about 100 of 1200 participants or 8.3% were women, which was a highest level of participation by women yet.

BCSWomen & Flossie team to bolster open source female job roles

Open-Source Software Maker Races to Funding Deadline

In a bold experiment, nonprofit Mission software developer Yorba Foundation is bidding for sustainable support through crowdfunding for its open-source email program, Geary.

Founded in 2009 by Google alumnus Adam Dingle, the Capp Street nonprofit aims to raise $100,000 in the next nine days via a campaign on the funding platform Indiegogo. If the plan works, Yorba’s strategy could blaze a trail for other open-source companies to support the creation of free software.

“We want to be able to say, ‘Yeah this worked for us, and you should give it a try,’” said Jim Nelson, Yorba’s executive director. “This might be a way for other companies to raise money and keep going.” For now, Yorba gets its financial backing from Dingle.

New Open Source Engine on its Way!

Open Source Music Streaming Service Napster.fm Released

When the MP3 format was unleashed onto the relatively young Internet, it was an absolute game changer. It finally made audio files small enough to practically distribute over the Internet, as high-speed connections were still a luxury item for the majority of Internet users. But while it was the MP3 format that made it possible, it was undeniably Napster that brought it to the mass media.

In 1999, Napster completely changed the way people shared and listened to music; it helped start the trend of abandoning physical media for digital. Unfortunately, it also brought the wrath of the recording industry, and Napster was sued into oblivion after only 2 years.

Operating System Features I’d Like to See

FOSS operating systems are great and I enjoy using and adapting them, but they are missing certain features which could make them even better.

One issue with FOSS operating systems is the plethora of package managers. Fedora even has two different package managers: apt-get and yum. Slackware has their own version of apt-get that they call slapt-get. The three BSDs use pkgsrc and the Sharp Zaurus used a similar package manager called ipkg. If you use KDE you are probably familiar with kpackage.

Events

• Linux Collaboration Summit keynote videos now available

  Videos from the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions, recorded on April 15, are now available for on-demand streaming. The videos include presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome OS devices get security updates

    Google Chromebook users running the stable channel of the Chrome OS are getting an update 26.0.1410.57. This update brings some security improvements. But since Chromebooks gets update automatically, you don’t have to do anything. Just keep an eye on the notification bubble and if there is one, restart your machine to keep it updated.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Shows Off TowTruck, for Browser-based Collaboration

    Over at Mozilla, they continue to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Mozilla Labs is out with an early alpha version of TowTruck, a project designed to facilitate Skype-style collaboration online, leveraging new features found in the Firefox and Chrome browsers. In a post announcing the experiment, Mozilla Labs warns that the technology is experimental at this point, but it looks like a very easy way to incorporate real-time collaboration into any website.

SaaS/Big Data

• Rackspace attacks Amazon with new cloudy clones

  Look out, Amazon Web Services. Rackspace is cloning its own cloudy service – and to quote Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady, it’s “comin’ to getcha.”

  Way back when, Rackspace Hosting teamed up with NASA to create the OpenStack community precisely to leverage the smarts and excitement of the open source community to take on the closed and controlled AWS cloud. Now Rackspace will take OpenStack and leverage its own experience in building custom infrastructure to house OpenStack clouds, and deliver it as a service to telecommunication and service provider customers.

• Rackspace to offer OpenStack deployments for service providers

• 9 Key Value Stores for Big Data

• NetApp Unveils a File-Share Service Proposal at OpenStack Summit

• Who Wrote OpenStack Grizzly

  The open source OpenStack Grizzly cloud platform release debuted the first week of April benefiting from over 480 contributors making over 7,600 updates.

  While the base of contribution is broad, one vendor stands at the top of the list, in terms of number of code commits made. While the initial releases of OpenStack were dominated by code commits from Rackspace and Nebula, for Grizzly, Red Hat now leads the list.

  Red Hat made 836 commits across core OpenStack projects and 1,854 commits across all OpenStack projects. Red Hat developers added 121,632 lines code and remove 87,145 lines of code.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice update fixes more than 50 bugs

Education

• Teaching children how to code

  Coding is the language of the future, with the power to create and modify the computer programs and websites that increasingly shape our day-to-day lives. While millions of people in the United States spend hours each day engaged with interactive technologies, relatively few truly understand how they work; and fewer take an active role in developing software and websites.

  Still, some organizations are advocating more be done to teach young people about computer programing and coding. It is no secret that younger generations, born into an age of smartphone apps and near-ubiquitous Internet access, tend to be more enthusiastic and adept at using new technologies than their parents and grandparents. The key word here is “using” technology, as opposed to creating new programs and reimagining existing processes.

• Lessons from Koha in open source project ownership

  While compiling OSS Watch’s list of Open Source Options for Education, I discovered Koha, an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). I discovered, with some confusion, that there seemed to be several ILS systems called Koha. Investigation into the reason for this uncovered a story which provides valuable lessons for open source project ownership, including branding, trademarks, and conflict resolution.

  Koha started its life in New Zealand (reflected in the name, which is a Māori word meaning reciprocal gift, or a gift with expectations). It was originally commissioned by the Horowhenua Library Trust (HLT), written by Katipo Communications Ltd, and released under the GPL. Crucially, Katipo held the copyright on the Koha code.

Business

• Luxoft Extends its Open Source Test Automation Platform to Support OpenFlow 1.3

  Luxoft unveiled the new OpenFlow 1.3 module for its open source test automation platform, Twister. With over 200 test cases available, Twister helps equipment vendors thoroughly test and verify the conformance of their software-defined networking (SDN) products with the OpenFlow 1.3 standard.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Epiphany SDK Insights and Future

  The Epiphany SDK started life as a prototype binutils & GCC port by Alan Lehotsky, which would run code on a Verilator model of the Epiphany chip.

  Embecosm became involved in March 2009, initially providing an implementation of the GNU Debugger. Then over a period of 6 weeks starting that September we upgraded GCC to a commercially robust implementation, eliminating all regression test failures from the C and C++ compilers. This was still before the first silicon had been spun, and with testing against a Verilator model.

• Stallman Spake

  It’s too much for ordinary consumers, the vast majority of users of IT, to deal with a pile of such issues when moving to Free Software. Over time more manufacturers are supplying drivers for Linux so this issue may well disappear, but in the meantime some compromise must be made in practice. There’s nothing wrong with the principles however. It’s the right way to do IT with shared, re-used, redistributable software because it’s the best quality at the lowest price and it respects the freedom of the users.

• GNU/Linux is difficult?

  GNU/Linux emerges thanks to the free software ideology, but independently of this ideology, we have a great freedom of choice and decision. For example, customized our operating system according to our preferences, tastes or needs. In Windows we can customize it partially through skins or themes, we can change the window color, transparency, change the login screen, boot screen among other little things. But you set out to change some other aspect in particular? Suppose the taskbar makes you ugly, annoying or maybe want to add some extra functionality. It will be difficult get this directly, that is, that it allows Windows you do beforehand, maybe we can use external programs, most of which are pay and usually, the result only partially mitigates the need that we had. In GNU / Linux this is possible and more so, if you do not like what you see can change completely, if you already bored as seen Gnome you can exchange it for KDE, If KDE does not fill your expectations can change for XFCE. If specific application has not simply what you expect you replace the other. Want to try another version of GNU/Linux? Just download and try it!

• Boston Marathon bombings

  Thank you to everyone for thinking of us at the Free Software Foundation office in downtown Boston as yesterday’s terrible news unfolded. We appreciate all the concerned emails and queries.

Project Releases

• Roundcube Webmail: Stable version 0.9.0 released

Public Services/Government

• Cabinet Office appoints Open Standards Board to drive open source use

  The Cabinet Office has announced the appointment of an Open Standards Board to oversee the development of a level playing field for open source and proprietary software providers in government.

  Since November, departments have been required to ensure all new IT contracts with software suppliers abide by open standards principles, allowing interoperability and data and document format interoperability. The Cabinet Office central spend and control process is responsible for ensuring departments adhere to the policy when procuring software.

Licensing

• A Dual Model of Open Source License Growth

  Every open source project needs to decide on an open source license. This decision is of high economic relevance: Just which license is the best one to help the project grow and attract a community? The most common question is: Should the project choose a restrictive (reciprocal) license or a more permissive one? As an important step towards answering this question, this paper analyses actual license choice and correlated project growth from ten years of open source projects. It provides closed analytical models and finds that around 2001 a reversal in license choice occurred from restrictive towards

• Open source cola and the ‘Napster moment’ for the food business

Openness/Sharing

• Open-Source Food

• Napster.fm Is An Open Source Social Music Player That Can Be Hosted By Anyone In Case Of Shutdown

  Anyone who has had a computer and a connection to the Internet in 1999 quickly knew what it felt like to find any song that you wanted, and then listen to it almost immediately. Well, the immediate part wasn’t true, since you had to download the MP3s, which usually took quite a bit of time on a dialup connection.

• Italy’s Great Leap Forward for Openness?

  Different countries are moving at different speeds in terms of governmental adoption of free software, open data and openness in general. I wrote a year ago about Iceland, which seemed to be making particularly rapid progress at the time. Now it looks like it’s Italy’s turn.

• Open-source RF boards available from Richardson RFPD

  The open-source RF design initiative, dubbed Myriad, has the support of US-based distributor Richardson RFPD.

  Richardson RFPD will begin stocking and selling the Myriad-RF-1 board to customers around the world via its website immediately.

• Open Hardware

  • 3D Robotics for open source drones- your plastic flying robot buddy – making drones easy – the super-easy, super-cheap drone revolution is coming

  • 3D Robotics for open source drones- your plastic flying robot buddy – making drones easy – the super-easy, super-cheap drone revolution is coming

  • HexBright Flex Programmable Flashlight: Open Source of Light

Programming

• Funf 0.4 brings under the hood changes to sensor framework

  The developers of the Funf open source Java-based sensor framework for mobile phones have released version 0.4 of their software. Most changes in this version, the developers say, are under the hood and affect the architecture of the framework. Changes include a new pipeline interface, a redesigned configuration process, and changes that mean that Funf now runs as a single service instead of spawning a service for each sensor probe.

• Benchmarking PHP 5.5 Beta 3: Not Too Much Over 5.4

  PHP 5.5 Beta 3 was released today wotj a few bug-fixes and other minor changes. To complement the PHP benchmarks earlier this week, here are some benchmarks of the forthcoming PHP 5.5.

• RunRev’s Open Source LiveCode

  RunRev is launching an open source version of its LiveCode application development software. The finance was raised by a Kickstarter campaign earlier in the year.

  LiveCode has achieved a certain amount of success as a paid-for product designed for cross-platform application design, but RunRev wanted more users, so raised $750,000 in a Kickstarter campaign.

• Generating Reports With Code

  Last week I was running load tests against a new server and needed to produce reports from the results. I wanted to have graphs to show the response time as the test progressed, and thought this would be a good time to try a couple of different methods of creating the reports. The first report was generated with Microsoft Word and Excel, and as I struggled with Excel’s insane copy and paste, and Word’s inane auto layout decisions, the one thought that kept occurring to me was “why does anyone put up with this?” The next step was to break out the power tools with Python and LaTeX.

  I used siege for the load testing, and redirected the output to a file. The siege output gives me a nice baseline to work from, but simply redirecting the output also gives some cruft that needs to be cleaned up. During the first go around with Excel, I needed to open up each file in Vim to clean it up before I could import the data. In the process of cleaning up the files, of course the thought occurred to me that I should automate that task, but I try to avoid unnecessary scripting when I can. Once the graphs were created, they needed to be copied and pasted into the Word document, which I then spent ten minutes trying to get each graph to look uniform. Admitted, I’m not a Word or Excel expert, but I do know that repetitive tasks and document layout are two things that computers do well. I should let them do it.

Standards/Consortia

• Intel touts free HTML5 development environment

  Intel launched a free HTML5 Development Environment at IDF in Beijing last week. The tool is said to enable cross-platform development, test, and deployment of apps that can run on multiple device types and operating systems, and which can be distributed through multiple application stores.

  Intel says it’s investing in HTML5 “to help mobile application developers lower total costs and improve time-to-market for cross-platform app development and deployment.”

Mystery ‘Man on the Roof’ Sparks Boston Marathon Chatter

Photos taken of the Boston Marathon explosion carnage showed horrific images of smeared blood on the sidewalk, blown out windows and bystanders rushing to aid multiple people who had lost limbs and suffered other severe injuries.

Dell signs a deal with Carl Icahn to limit his stake

CORPORATE RAIDER Carl Icahn has agreed not to buy more than a 10 percent stake in Dell as arguments surrounding the firm’s attempted leveraged buyout continue.
Michael Dell, co-founder and CEO of Dell, announced a leveraged buyout deal for the company with Silver Lake Partners earlier this year that valued the firm at $24.4bn. However Icahn in particular has emerged as a fly in Michael Dell’s ointment, making a counteroffer that values the firm higher.

Dell avoids hostile takeover planned by corporate raider Carl Icahn

The company has succeeded in diverting the takeover by signing an agreement with Icahn. Under this agreement, Icahn and affiliated entities have agreed not to make purchases that would cause them to own more than 10% of Dell’s shares or enter into agreements with other shareholders who, together with the Icahn entities, would collectively own in excess of 15% of Dell’s shares.

Health/Nutrition

• Letter to UK Supermarkets on Use of non-GM Feed

  As you may have read, by an amazing coincidence, most of the UK leading supermarkets have simultaneously announced that they will no longer use non-GM feed (I’m sure there was no collusion whatsoever…). The stated reason is that, much as they’d like to, they just can’t find non-GM feed anymore. Ain’t that a pity?

  Oddly, though, ABRANGE, the Brazilian Association for Producers of Non-GMO Soy, has just released a statement saying there’s no shortage, just a queue of ships waiting to load goods at Brazilian docks.

• BMJ: the end of England’s NHS?

  A consultant radiologist looks at some of practical dangers of the Coalition’s privatisation of NHS services, described by the BMJ as potentially the end of England’s NHS, and urges peers to vote against the privatisation regulations.

Security

• WordPress website targeted by hackers

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Less Than Four Hours After Boston Bombings, There’s a Theory For Whatever You Want

  2013, when all the news can fit your views.

• The Orwellian Paradigm: Killing You for Your Own Safety

  It makes peace synonymous with a state of warfare.

• Authoritarian Allies & the Myth of U.S. ‘Leverage’

  The record of the U.S. government’s support for authoritarian, corrupt and/or murderous regimes is not really up for debate. The only question is whether one believes that the U.S. continuously suspends its its deep-seated preference for democratic rule and human rights in order to pursue certain policy goals, or whether the historic record suggests that there is little such preference at all.

• CIA tortured prisoners in wake of 9/11 – report

• CIA Obtains False IDs From Washington Dept. Of Licensing

  In recent years, the state of Washington has issued nearly 300 fictitious driver licenses to the CIA. That’s according to public records initially disclosed, but now withheld, by state officials. The state’s cooperation with the nation’s premier spy agency has been a secret for years — unknown to lawmakers and even the governor.

• CIA, DEFENSE DEPARTMENT AMONG AGENCIES USING WASHINGTON’S UNDERCOVER LICENSES

  In crafting legislation motivated by a Kitsap Sun public records request, the Department of Licensing, or DOL, acknowledged for the first time in about three decades it was issuing fake IDs to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies for undercover investigations. Not even former two-term Gov. Chris Gregoire, also once the state attorney general, knew about the program, a spokesman for Gregoire confirmed Monday.

• ACLU appeals for greater transparency on drone killings

  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is appealing a January decision that allowed the CIA to withhold details of its drone targeted killing program. In a statement given to Wired, Hina Shamsi, the ACLU National Security Project director explained that “the targeted killing program raises serious questions about government power in a constitutional democracy.”

• ACLU Appeals Ruling Allowing Feds to Stay Mum on Drone Targeted Killings

  The American Civil Liberties Union today appealed a judge’s ruling allowing the President Barack Obama administration to keep mum on its legal basis for its drone targeted killing program, including information connected to the killing of Americans via drones.

  The appeal concerns an “Alice in Wonderland” decision by U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon of New York, who in January ruled that she was trapped in a “paradoxical situation” of allowing the administration to claim it was legal to kill enemies outside traditional combat zones while keeping the legal rationale secret.

• Four killed in NWA drone attack

  US drones fired two missiles and struck a house in the Dattakhel area of North Waziristan tribal region, killing four people on Sunday evening.Local villagers said two rooms and a double-cabin pick-up truck were damaged in the missile strikes.

  The villagers said the drone fired two missiles when a double-cabin pick-up truck entered the house at Dattakhel, 50 kilometres west of North Waziristan’s headquarters Miranshah. “Four bodies were later recovered from debris of the house when two drones flying over the area disappeared,” said a local tribesman.

• Remote and “Cost Effective” Killing Machines: Fighting Drone Wars without Incurring US-NATO Casualties

  RAF Waddington will soon be the control centre for British drone warfare. It may already be, we can’t be sure.

  The fact we don’t know testifies to the secrecy that surrounds the operation of these remote control killing machines. Drones embody the sinister shift that has been taken in the West’s wars post Iraq.

  They blur the distinction between war and state execution, with no chance for public scrutiny.

• Black Monday in Iraq: 55 killed, almost 300 injured in series of attacks

  A string of bombings across Iraq has claimed at least 55 lives, injuring 300 more, on Monday. The surge in violence comes barely a week ahead of Iraq hosting elections for the first time since US withdrawal from the country.

  Officials said bombings hit 12 different areas, leaving 55 people dead and making Monday the country’s deadliest day since March 19, AFP reported.

• Iraq 10 years on: ‘Roadblocks, checkpoints, blasts and constant danger’

Cablegate

• UK refuses to admit US embassy cables obtained by WikiLeaks are genuine

  High court hears government will not confirm or deny that documents are authentic in Chagos Islands case

• Cable ties: Wikileaks and South Africa

  When Wikileaks released its latest batch of diplomatic documents earlier this month, it brought its holdings up to a total of 2 million records. What Wikileaks calls the ‘Public Library of US Diplomacy’ now consists of the original 250,000 US diplomatic cables – known as ‘Cablegate’ – and the 1,7 million new ‘Kissinger Cables’. REBECCA DAVIS trawled through the archive to see what US diplomats had to say about South Africa and its politicians.

• It’s time to wrap up the WikiLeaks whistle-blower case

  Even if Manning was engaged in principled civil disobedience, he must face the consequences that await anyone who violates the law in a supposedly higher cause. But the current charges against him go too far.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Hundreds feared dead as ‘biggest quake in 40 years’ hits near Iran’s border with Pakistan

• TransCanada minister preaches the gospel of crude oil

  Myron Stafford may look like a man of faith, but he’s also a professional advocate for the Keystone XL pipeline

Finance

• If Thatcher’s revolution had truly saved us, why is Britain in such a mess today?

  The claims made for Mrs Thatcher’s transformative powers are grossly exaggerated

• Did cocaine use by bankers cause the global financial crisis?

  Coked-up bankers caused the credit crunch, according to the former drug tsar David Nutt. One former City worker can well believe it

• Tax Day Repurposed To “Illuminate” Corporate Tax Evaders

  With President Obama fielding cynical cuts to Social Security to appease the Fix the Debt crowd and reach a budget deal, groups are teaming up to point out that there would be a lot less concern about the budget deficit if corporate America did what average Americans have to do and actually pay taxes. Taking advantage of loopholes, tricks and deductions, many U.S. companies pay far below the required 35% tax rate, and some, like General Electric have a negative tax rate. New web resources are shining a light on the firms and individuals that manipulate the U.S. tax system to their benefit, putting more of the burden on America’s middle class.

• Inflation sticks at highest level since May 2012

  The annual rate of consumer price inflation held at 2.8%, according to official data. That is the highest since last May and in line with economists’ forecasts.

  The Office for National Statistics said the biggest upward pressures last month came from price rises for newspapers, books and digital cameras – including the effect of dearer ebooks, a new item in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. There was only muted relief from fuel prices which rose by less than a year ago and some easing in food price inflaiton.

• Cash bonanza anticipated for Goldmans workers as firm sets aside £2.75bn pay and bonus pot

  Bankers at Goldman Sachs – including its 6,000 London staff – are in line for another bumper year as results this week are forecast to show average pay packets of £85,000 for the first quarter alone.

• Website Shines a Light on CEO Pay and Fix the Debt Hypocrisy

  Do you know how much the average CEO in the United States makes in comparison to the average worker? Do they make 40 times what workers make? Not even close, the ratio hasn’t been that low since 1982. 200 times as much? Not since 1992.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Darden Restaurants Dumps ALEC in Favor of ALEC-Affiliated Group

  A spokesperson for Darden Restaurants, which operates Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and other chain restaurants, contacted the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) to ask that a recent article be corrected to reflect that the company has dropped its membership in American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

  Rich Jeffers, Director of Media Relations at Darden, told CMD that the company had not renewed its ALEC membership since January 2010 because it “felt that different organizations like the National Restaurant Association would . . . serve us best.” The call indicates that the company is sensitive to being linked to the controversial ALEC agenda, which has generated recent negative press attention on the fight against paid sick days, controversial “ag gag” bills, “Stand Your Ground” gun laws, and voter suppression proposals.

• Cutting Social Security on PBS–From Left to Right

  Even on PBS, the left and right agree that cutting Social Security is brave; I guess that makes the public a bunch of wimps.

• Standing up to big business lobbies: ALTER-EU’s annual assembly and public debate

  Corporate Europe Observatory, as a steering committee member of the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER-EU), was delighted to be involved in the ALTER-EU annual assembly last week, “Standing up to big business lobbies: Reclaiming Europe for the public interest ”. As part of this, CEO took part in a high-level public debate in Brussels, “Lessons from a Lobbycracy: Transformation for Transparency and Rules for Revolving Door ”, alongside Members of European Parliament (MEPs) and representatives of the European Commission, to discuss the upcoming reviews of the revolving-door rules for EU staff and of the EU’s voluntary lobby register. We also led the first-ever Dalligate lobby tour.

Censorship

• The Copyright Monopoly Was Always Intended To Prevent Freedom Of Expression

• BBC plans to censor ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ — a sudden hit after Thatcher’s death

• Margaret Thatcher funeral: Galloway attacks ‘canonisation of wicked woman’

  Respect MP aims to block proposal to suspend parliament during funeral, and attacks ‘tidal wave of guff’ about former PM

• Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead belonged on Newsnight, not the charts

  After Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead rose to No 2 in the UK charts following support from anti-Thatcher protesters, Neil McCormick wonders how many over-forties tuned in to the chart show for the first time in decades.

Privacy

• Thatcher’s data protection legacy: Just fill out this 16-page form

  Successive UK governments have seen data protection more as a cost overhead to be minimised than as an essential protection for the individual in an electronic age. This view started with Margaret Thatcher’s first government and has endured for over three decades.

• Online privacy: nothing to fear

  We need to defend ourselves and get control of our personal data amassed by private companies and government agencies

• If you’re not paying, you’re the product

• NSA claims its huge datacentre won’t snoop on US citizens’ email

• U.S. agency denies data center to monitor citizens’ emails

• Lockheed to host cyber defense exercise

• Money can’t buy privacy in Google Play store, study shows

  Both paid and free apps in the Google Play store harvest the same amount of private information from Android phones, a researcher discovered

Civil Rights

• ORGConNorth: Reporting back from Manchester’s digital rights conference

  The panel on Data Protection focused on the corporate lobbying to water down new European legislation. We looked at the key issues at stake, including the right to control your data through stronger consent, data ‘portability’ and the right to delete your data. ORG is heavily involved in a joint campaign to ensure the European Parliament sides with citizens in the forthcoming votes. (We’ve produced a short briefing on the Regulation.)

• California Bill Would Nullify NDAA, Protect Citizens From Indefinite Detention

• Vet’s Rights Hijacked … It’s the American Way

  Investigations by the United States Justice Foundation (USJF) into the plight of our military veterans and the assault on their Second and Fifth Amendment rights continues to uncover a disturbing pattern that confirms the VA is violating the Constitutional rights of America’s heroes on a daily basis.

  The investigation included two separate requests to the VA under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). USJF asked for the criteria used for appointing a fiduciary for veterans to handle their financial affairs and for information on the criteria for adding such veterans to the list of Americans ineligible to buy firearms. The legal deadline for a response from the VA has passed and requests have been totally ignored.

• Alaska Legislature Passes Bill to Nullify Federal Gun Grab

  Lawmakers in the Last Frontier have passed a bill protecting the right of their citizens to keep and bear arms from federal infringement. Both houses of the Alaska state legislature approved HB 69 and the act now only lacks the governor’s signature before it becomes state law.

  Although part of the measure was amended somewhat by the state senate — a provision that would have charged federal agents with a felony if they attempted to enforce federal gun grabs within state borders — the bill remains a bold statement of state sovereignty and resistance to federal plans to disarm civilians.

• U.S. Funding Unsustainable Projects — and Its Own Enemies — in Afghanistan

  When it is not simply being wasted, U.S. aid to Afghanistan is being spent on projects that the Afghan government does not have the capacity to sustain, and “millions” of taxpayer dollars could be ending up in the hands of the enemy, according to Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko.

• Power hungry politicians put stress on Constitution

  Today, that reality can be seen more clearly than ever due to police checkpoints, the PATRIOT Act, the National Defense Authorization Act and drone strikes perpetrated against American citizens.

• Idaho Supports Fourth Amendment, Enacts Drone Restrictions

  Another state is stepping in and shielding its citizens from constant surveillance by the government or law enforcement.

• Letter: An affront to freedom

  Congress has empowered the military to seize us and hold us indefinitely without access to the courts and a trial by jury.

• US torture of prisoners is ‘indisputable’, independent report finds

Intellectual Monopolies

• Event: What role for intellectual Property Rights in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership?

  Both the EU and the US have expressed their intent to include an IPR chapter in TTIP, though its final scope will be subject of negotiations. Given the vast economic potential of TTIP and the huge volume of trade in goods and services an IPR chapter seems unavoidable.

• Copyrights

  • Massive BitTorrent and Cyberlocker Domain Crackdown Underway

  • Large Piracy ‘Topsite’ Trial Ends in Suspended Sentences, ‘Disappointing’ Damages

  • Obsessed With Google, Copyright Holders Ignore The Actual Pirated Content

  • Copyright: EU Commission Invokes Crisis to Stick to Repression

    The EU Commission is not yet ready to change course on copyright policy. With the release of two new roadmap documents1 on copyright, patent and trademark policy, the EU body who negotiated ACTA decides to stick to the status quo. And ironically invokes the crisis to urge for more of the same broken policies.

  • Pirate Bay Founder Charged With Hacking Companies and a Bank