10.26.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Much has been said about the look and feel of Microsoft’s new Metro interface and how the operating system that sits on 90-plus percent of the world’s desktops is now getting an upgrade that would be better suited for tablets and touch screens.
That interface, and the direction that personal computing seems to be heading, represents a big opportunity for Linux… but perhaps not the one you’re thinking of.
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Intel had to find a way to get into the tablet market, but people only want to buy iPads and Android-powered ones. So Intel surrendered the consumer market altogether in favor of enterprise “solutions”, like its new Intel learning series “solution” for education, which relies on tablets nobody heard of with operating systems nobody heard of running proprietary education software nobody heard of. To sell those, Intel was looking for suckers, and in minister Nicolas Sehnaoui, it found the perfect sucker.
Students in America are getting iPads, students in Africa are getting Kindles, but students in Lebanon will be getting MANDRIVAs.
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Google’s Android OS only accounted for a 3.9% share of the smart phone market in 2009 (according to Gartner Group); last year that rose to 64% of the smartphone market. In 2011, smartphones for the first time outsold PCs (including tablets.) With hundreds of millions of those smart phones running Android, the consumer market is fully accustomed to Linux-based software.
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If Microsoft has reinvented and reengineered itself to be able to position its OS to serve not just the desktop WIMP space, but also now the touch-enabled search-centric mobile-first always-on cloud-driven market — then this is a reinvention that was never going to happen without the firm facing a little criticism.
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Desktop
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Konstantin Kochereshkin has announced yesterday, October 24th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release of the upcoming Rosa Desktop 2012 Linux operating system.
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Last month, I suggested that the transition to Windows RT bares the same hurdles as transitioning to Linux. Many obstacles blocking our path, like Adobe and PC gaming, are considering Linux; the rest have good reason to follow.
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Consumers who bought Vista or “7″ believing what they were told are justified in thinking “8″ is unnecessary. After all their current hardware idles all the time and it’s choked with RAM and storage. What could anyone possibly want from “8″? A new PC? Nope. They might buy a tablet this year however it won’t be running that other OS because all their friends don’t have that.
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Server
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Parallella is an attempt to make Linux parallel computing easier and is advertised as a “supercomputer for everyone”, but will it come to fruition?
Parallella is designed to be “a truly open, high-performance computing platform that will close the knowledge gap in parallel programing.” The Parallella computing board is built around Epiphany multi-core chips out of the Cambridge-based Adapteva semiconductor company.
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Kernel Space
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In the discussion that followed when it was found a nasty EXT4 file-system corruption bug hit recent Linux kernel stable releases, one user proposed that EXT4 be put in a feature-freeze mode and future work then be put towards an “EXT5″ file-system, to which Ted Ts’o did respond.
In the Phoronix Forums discussion about the EXT4 corruption bug hitting the Linux 3.4/3.5/3.6 kernels, Ted Ts’o, the EXT4 file-system maintainer, ultimately jumped in on the discussion to respond to the numerous and polarized opinions of Phoronix readers.
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Within the forthcoming Linux 3.7 kernel there is support for Xen virtualization support on ARM when using a Cortex-A15 SoC. While not yet merged to mainline, KVM virtualization support for the ARM architecture is also coming about.
Patches are now up to their third revision that enable KVM/QEMU support on ARM when using Cortex-A15 hardware. There’s kernel patches still needed to go upstream, which one would hope will happen for the Linux 3.8 kernel.
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The latest Phoronix benchmarks to share of the AMD FX-8350 “Vishera” processor are performance-per-Watt results for the Piledriver eight-core processor compared to the previous-generation Bulldozer FX-8150. Tests were conducted when running at stock speeds as well as overclocked settings.
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Graphics Stack
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Rob Clark has provided a status update on Freedreno, his reverse-engineered ARM open-source graphics driver for the Qualcomm Snapdragon / Adreno hardware.
The latest update on Freedreno came on Tuesday via his blog. Aside from getting the stencil buffer working and fixing batching problems in the 2D driver, Rob has also begun eyeing a Gallium3D-based driver and he’s already implemented DRI2 support within the xf86-video-freedreno DDX driver.
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Applications
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Astronomy is a branch of science that deals with the study of celestial objects (including stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, meteor showers, nebulae, star clusters, galaxies) and other phenomena such as gamma ray bursts and supernovae.
Astronomy is particularly well suited to the layperson. It is a wonderful hobby which has almost no age limits, it is open to individuals of all financial means, and there is always the potential for an amateur to discover something that has eluded professional astronomers, or to help monitor stars and track asteroids. Professional astronomers are in a very fortunate profession. They have the opportunity to continue their love of astronomy, travel the world, make significant discoveries, and get paid at the same time.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Gentoo Family
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A couple of days ago, Tomas and I, gave a presentation at the Gentoo Miniconf. The subject of the presentation was to give an overview of the current recruitment process, how are we performing compared to the previous years and what other ways there are for users to help us improve our beloved distribution. In this blog post I am gonna get into some details that I did not have the time to address during the presentation regarding our recruitment process.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As Canonical looks to recoup some of its investment in the Ubuntu Linux project it was widely thought that the firm would follow Red Hat’s route of offering paid product support, but instead Ubuntu 12.10 is the first glimpse of how Canonical apparently wants to recoup its investment. The firm’s decision to release Ubuntu 12.10 with Amazon adverts has added a sour taste to what still remains an accomplished desktop Linux distribution.
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Last week marked eight years since Ubuntu made its appearance on the GNU/Linux scene. Since October 2004, there has been a release of this distribution every six months, the initial buzz being very loud and then gradually fading away.
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With the release of version 1.3, the team at the Yocto Project has added a number of developer-visible features to its embedded distribution builder. First announced in October 2010, the open source collaboration project (a Linux Foundation workgroup) is aimed at device builders. It provides templates, tools and methods for developers to create Linux-based systems for various embedded systems and processor architectures such as ARM, MIPS, PPC or x86.
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Phones
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It was in 2003, IRCTC felt the need of a high-performance and high-availability system to handle the high load of its operations and partnered with open source-based solution provider Red Hat to run its IT infrastructure, in order to automate and streamline its processes.
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The Chromebook has inserted itself into my life in a way I never expected. Sorry, MacBook Pro — I just don’t need you right now
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CMS
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Acquia, a provider of paid cloud services specifically designed to support the Drupal open source web content management platform, is introducing a new concept it calls “Open Web Experience Management” or OpenWEM. It looks like digital marketing has officially come to Drupal.
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Healthcare
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The Department of Veterans Affairs has laid out a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA EHR system, with a version that’s being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community.
The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit organization, manages a public/private community formed to modernize VistA for open source and to contribute to the VA-Defense Department’s integrated electronic health record (iEHR).
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Public Services/Government
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Aidan O’Riordan, systems analyst with Cork City Council’s IS operations, confirmed that the council is undertaking the projects in a way that will be compatible with open source work that will be carried out by the LGMA and the Local Government Efficiency Review Group.
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Cork City Council already uses some existing open source applications and servers and is looking to build on that. To date, open source at the council had been restricted to operational applications, like network monitoring solutions or list servers rather than end-user applications, O’Riordan said.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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For a high school French teacher looking for a creative approach to verb conjugation, new lesson plans are only a website away. The same is true for a biology teacher covering a unit on mammals, or a history teacher trying to spice up a lesson on the Gettysburg Address.
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Programming
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I’ll be honest about my viewpoint to start this piece: I hate geo-restrictions, particularly on digital goods. I simply cannot see how they benefit anyone. Customers are blocked or pay different prices for like goods, often times angering them (not something you typically want to do to customers). Companies feel the brunt of this anger, or else at least feel the impact of the a restricted customer base through their own unwillingness to deal fairly in a global marketplace. Perhaps most importantly, for savvy customers, there are tools to simply get around the artificial barriers these companies erect, making them just more useless DRM-like nonsense.
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Security
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Security flaws in airline boarding passes could allow would-be terrorists or smugglers to know in advance whether they will be subject to certain security measures, and perhaps even permit them to modify the designated measures, security researchers have warned.
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Perhaps “hacked” is the wrong word, because it can imply both criminality and lawful exploration. But we’ll stick with “hacked” here, in the sense of “some reverse engineers have figured out how you can adapt, or jailbreak, your PS3 to make it interoperable with software of your own choice.”
The PS3 has been hacked before, but Sony was able to inhibit the hack with an update to its own firmware. This is much like the history of jailbreaking on Apple’s iOS, where hackers typically uncover a security vulnerability and exploit it, whereupon Apple patches the hole and suppresses the jailbreak.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Political cycles present the obvious opportunity for prognostication. Polling is happening daily. Rather than present another poll, let us take this opportunity to make a simple prediction.
There will be no pre-election BP Deepwater Horizon settlement despite an $18 billion deal being on the table last month and a rumored $21 billion settlement this past Friday, October 19.
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Documents obtained by Greenpeace show officials controlling information about wildlife affected by the disaster
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Finance
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As I reported in this week’s The Nation magazine cover story “Mitt Romney’s Bail-out Bonanza,” the Romneys are in a special partnership with the vulture fund that bought Delphi, the former GM auto parts division.
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The United States filed a fraud lawsuit against Bank of America Corp, accusing it of causing taxpayers more than $1 billion of losses by selling thousands of toxic mortgage loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
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Censorship
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I remember when Wen Jiaao first became prime minister. There were such high hopes, and they’ve never really abated: Wen has always been seen as “the good CCP leader.” As if by magic, he was always on the scene as tragedies struck, be they earthquakes or floods or winter storms in Guangzhou at Chinese New Year time or high-speed rail crashes. And there was something genuine about the Man of the People, the one who cared about China’s disenfranchised. And maybe he really does care. He would have to be a damned good actor if he didn’t.
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Privacy
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Debate has once again surrounded social media and the topic of whether individual’s should be able to post anonymously and give false details when creating a social media account. Andy Smith, head of security at the Public Sector Technical Services Authority, caused controversy by advising internet users that giving false details to social networking sites was a “very sensible thing to do”.
In an age where our personal information is becoming more and more valuable as a commodity, it is clearly sensible that people don’t share data unless it is absolutely necessary. The answer to the problem is that internet services need to reassess how much personal information they request from a user, for instance is it really necessary for a social network site to ask for your full birthday and gender?
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Civil Rights
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Ankara is pursuing a systematic campaign of intimidation against the Turkish media, including the prosecution and jailing of writers, and demands for those who challenge government policies or actions to be sacked, two independent investigations have concluded.
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On 23 October, a vote will take place in the European Parliament on the ACAA (Conformity Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products) protocol attached to the European Union-Israel Association Agreement. The ACAA protocol must be rejected because Israel openly and knowingly violates international human rights law. Members of the European Parliament must vote no to ACAA and choose to stand for human rights in Palestine and worldwide.
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Allegations bordering on surreal often focus on an elite paedophile network linked to the establishment, and a question by respected MP Tom Watson in Parliament on Wednesday about a “powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10″ raised a small possibility that some of these theories may be based on fact.
Whether or not abuse is linked to powerful individuals shouldn’t in fact matter. More pressing is the fact that children are being abused in care, as the recent Rochdale “grooming” case and historical scandals like the massive North Wales homes scandal uncovered in the 1990s goes to show.
The lack of data on missing children is crucial to monitoring this problem. The most horrific (unsubstantiated) allegations mooted online involve the abuse and ultimate murder of children in care.
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Russia’s lower house of parliament has overwhelmingly approved a new bill widening the definition of high treason in what critics say is part of the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.
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Free speech is dying in the Western world. While most people still enjoy considerable freedom of expression, this right, once a near-absolute, has become less defined and less dependable for those espousing controversial social, political or religious views. The decline of free speech has come not from any single blow but rather from thousands of paper cuts of well-intentioned exceptions designed to maintain social harmony.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In a stunning development, following an obscure vote of Heads of State at the Africa Union in 2007 (Assembly Council/AU/Dec. 138(VIII)), the AU Scientific, Technical, and Research Commission has proposed a draft statute to establish the Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization (PAIPO). This proposed legislation will be presented to a meeting of the African Ministers in charge of Science and Technology on 6-12 November 2012 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The statute, drafted by true believers of IP-maximalist ideology, proposes to establish a region-wide intellectual property organization with the sole agenda of expanding IP rights, strengthening enforcement, harmonizing regional legislation, and eventually facilitating the granting of IP monopolies by a central granting authority that may well be legally binding on Member States.
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In the near future, human development can potentially be dictated by corporate America, through the Bill & Malinda [sic] Gates Foundation and their $8.3 U.C. Davis grant.
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Skimming the Agricultural Development section of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site is a feel-good experience: African farmers smile in a bright slide show of images amid descriptions of the foundation’s fight against poverty and hunger. But biosafety activists in South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates Foundation a “Trojan horse” to open the door for private agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, including a drought-resistant corn that Monsanto hopes to have approved in the United States and abroad.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has approved $20 million in new monies toward the development of “golden rice” — an untested, highly controversial GE (genetically engineered) crop that threatens biodiversity and risks bringing economic and ecological disaster to Asia’s farms.
The leader of the Golden Rice project is Gerald Barry, previously director of research at Monsanto.
Sarojeni V. Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), has called the rice a “Trojan horse.” According to Rengam, the rice is “… a public relations stunt pulled by the agri-business corporations to garner acceptance of GE crops and food. The whole idea of GE seeds is to make money.”
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Copyrights
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The demonization of file sharing by copyright maximalists blinds many companies to the fact that it is marketing in its purest form. That’s because people naturally only share stuff they think is good, and thus everything on file sharing networks comes with an implicit recommendation from someone. Not only that, but those works that appear on file sharing networks the most are, again by definition, those that are regarded mostly highly by the filesharing public as a whole, many of whom are young people, a key target demographic for most media companies.
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The rather long list of “People Most Hated By The Internet” — that guy who sued the Oatmeal, RIAA, Hunter Moore, Julia Allison, Violentacrez… — would be incomplete were it not to include John Steele. Steele is a lawyer who has partnered with the pornography industry to go after “pirates” who download their XXX films without paying for them. He has filed over 350 of these suits, and says he is currently suing approximately 20,000 people.
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The U.S. Government has just submitted its objections to Megaupload’s motion to temporarily dismiss the criminal indictment against the company. Megaupload’s lawyers had argued that a dismissal would allow the cyberlocker to rehabilitate itself, but the U.S. believes this can’t happen as Dotcom has sworn that the old Megaupload won’t return. According to Kim Dotcom the DoJ’s opposition is “full of frustration.” “Their bluff case is falling apart,” he says.
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Hollywood-backed anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won a landmark case against XS Networks, the former hosting provider of torrent site SumoTorrent. The Court of The Hague ruled that the provider is responsible for damages copyright holders suffered through the torrent site’s activities. The Dutch verdict has far-reaching implications for the liability of hosting providers for the conduct of their clients.
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10.25.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Cape Town – Linux Ubuntu is a viable alternative to users who don’t feel comfortable with Microsoft’s latest version of Windows.
The software giant has launched its latest version of its iconic operating system and has targeted mobile devices like tablets, but many have criticised the company, saying the OS is a departure from what users expect of a desktop operating system.
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Desktop
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The ROSA development team has released a beta version of ROSA Desktop 2012, its Mandriva-Linux-based operating system aimed at desktop users. The beta of the next major release of the Russian firm’s distribution, also known as Marathon, addresses various compatibility issues and brings with it several changes and new features, such as a new boot menu option.
The new “Install in basic mode” option has been added to allow users to run the ROSA Desktop 2012 installer on lower-spec hardware. Aimed at testers and developers, the release also sees the inclusion of full support for EFI/UEFI; basic support for UEFI was added in the in the second alpha as an experimental option, but is now fully integrated into the main system.
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The ROSA team has announced the release of ROSA 2012 Beta saying only two more steps until final. This release represents lots of work behind the scenes as well as several key improvements to ROSA. Now is the time to test and report bugs.
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Microsoft has a big launch event today in New York City for Windows 8. Surprisingly I got invited, but no I won’t be there. Linux users like myself however really should thank Microsoft though, Window 8 is truly a great gift.
Unlike Windows 7, which provided Microsoft’s large user base with an evolutionary path forward from Windows XP, with a look, feel and overall experience that was better – Windows 8 is a different beast.
I’ve had to support a couple of Windows 8 (preview) users for a few months now and the experience has taught me one thing – Windows 8 is unlike other Windows and it’s not something that most users will like. In my case, the users wanted Windows (but they wanted it for free) so I said ‘hey you can try Windows 8. Windows 8 takes an app-centric view of the desktop, which might work for tablets, but deskop users aren’t used to that. In fact, in my users’ experience the most often clicked app was ‘desktop’ because all they wanted to do was get the ‘regular’ Windows experience.
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The Asus VivoBook X202 is a notebook with an 11.6 inch display, Intel Core i3 Ivy Bridge processor, and a starting price of $599. It’s expected launch with Windows 8 on October 26th.
Asus will also offer a cheaper model with Ubuntu Linux soon, but I haven’t been able to get US pricing for that model just yet.
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Server
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Dell has donated an ARM-based concept server to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The company provided the server, which uses Calxeda’s EnergyCore processor architecture, to the ASF so that it can test and optimise its software for ARM server deployment. The Apache web server, Hadoop and the Cassandra NoSQL database are of particular interest to Dell customers, according to the company.
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Dell has donated an ARM server concept to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), in the belief that the open source community will help develop and promote the model.
Servers based on ARM chips are gaining some traction, although still are miles away from challenging Intel’s x86 architecture, which dominates data centres across the globe.
Yet ARM server designs, due to their low-power and high-efficiency attributes, have caught the attention of a host of tech giants, including HP and Dell. Customers are looking at them for hyperscale deployments, or Big Data projects, where lots of parallel processes are run across numerous servers.
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Commercial PHP vendor Zend today took the wraps off a trio of new initiatives designed to enable developers for the new world of mobile and cloud development.
The new Zend Studio 10 IDE provides new visual development options for mobile developers while the update Zend Server 6 and Zend Gateway products provide enhanced cloud capabilities.
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A rack of Facebook servers in a third-party data center in Virginia, adapted to work with Open Compute designs normally used in Facebook’s company-built facilities. (Photo: Open Compute Project)
We’ve been closely tracking the progress of the Open Compute Project, wondering if these uber-efficient open source hardware designs would ever be available at your local colocation center. Facebook has now shared details of its first use of Open Compute hardware in its third-party colo space.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While the ultimate future of Texas Instruments’ OMAP division remains uncertain, their software engineers continue to work on maturing the OMAP5 Linux support.
Rumours began circulating back in September that Texas Instruments would begin winding down their OMAP operations as it pertains to producing ARM SoCs targeting smartphones and tablets, in order to put more emphasis on embedded devices where they have more power to succeed compared to the extremely competitive smartphone/tablet market. There have also been rumours that Amazon might even acquire TI’s OMAP division since they have the resources to do so, they already use OMAP4 chips within their Kindle tablets, and would put them at a greater competitive advantage over some of the other tablet vendors.
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Graphics Stack
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While Wayland is sitting in the public limelight, DirectFB continues to exist as another means of handling Linux displays and input. DirectFB continues to quietly march on with new capabilities.
DirectFB 1.6 was released in June after being set back by delays but it did bring several features. DirectFB 1.6 brought a new core architecture, dynamic registration of window managers / compositors, support for new image providers, Xine/VDPAU acceleration, improved video drivers, better performance, initial Android support, and much more.
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Ryan Gordon, the well-known Linux game porter and developer of SDL and other open-source projects, along with Sam Lantinga, another key SDL developer and recent hire for Valve’s Linux team, have proposed a window manager change to work out the full-screen X11 window mess.
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Last week I began delivering benchmarks of the low-power yet massively scalable Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 ARM Server and followed the initial tests with some ARM compiler benchmarks and other benchmarks from this 5-Watt Linux Server. In this article is what many Phoronix readers have been waiting for: comparing Calxeda’s quad-core Cortex-A9 ARMv7 performance against a dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES and then an Intel Atom processor.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The man behind Haunts: The Manse Macabre says the collapsed Kickstarter has a new lease on life.
Haunts: The Manse Macabre got a lot of press last week as a cautionary Kickstarter tale when project mastermind Rick Dakan revealed that despite being successfully funded to the tune of nearly $29,000, it had effectively collapsed after the two programmers on the project left to do other things. But now it appears that the game may have some life left in it after all.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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While not as traditional as the annual KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück near the beginning of each year, a second meeting around October/November is starting to become a tradition of its own. Similar to last year and in contrast to the Osnabrück meetings—which usually focuses on discussing ideas and planning—this year’s October sprint again concentrated on improvements to existing features.
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GNOME Desktop
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deviantART is the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 19 million registered members, attracting 45 million unique visitors per month.
dA hosts the best Gnome Shell, GTK and Icons themes, but also has many enthusiasts that come up with extremely designs how a desktop should look like. If you think that Gnome Shell can’t be customized, think again 
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Many Linux users really love Ubuntu because of its huge software repositories, its familiar system, the community … But when the guys in Canonical decided to use Unity on Ubuntu, it caused a discontentment to many users and that created an opportunity to thrive for other Ubuntu-based distros that still have the advantages of Ubuntu but dont use Unity.
Pear Linux was first created just right after Ubuntu totally switched to Unity. But unlike Linux Mint that aims for the users who love the traditionally-featured desktop, the aim of Pear Linux is to created a Linux distro that has the nice features of Ubuntu and looks and behaves similarly to MacOS.
Pear Linux 6 was released some days ago. It is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with several new and nice features.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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After starting a small web consultancy building Drupal sites as a high school student in Connecticut, he dabbled in systems administration for Drupal, worked in hosting engineering at Acquia, then joined mobile payment startup Venmo as a one-man systems engineering group where he worked on scaling up their data stores and performance tuning.
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Earlier this year ARM announced its ARMv8 architecture that delivers 64-bit capability, something that is seen as vital for server deployment. Now Red Hat will sponsor a port of OpenJDK, an open source Java distribution, to the ARM64 architecture.
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Red Hat developers are porting OpenJDK to ARMv8, the 64-bit ARM architecture (also known as A64). According to a blog post by Andrew Haley of Red Hat, the development is taking place because “the current OpenJDK ARM situation is rather unsatisfactory, and we want to do better with A64″. As ARM created a new instruction set for 64-bit, rather than just extending the 32-bit instruction set, this means that “to take advantage of the A64, we’re going to need new compilers and Java virtual machines”.
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Fedora
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Fedora has many different (and increasing all the time) ways to see whats going on and follow changes. Since there are so many of them these days, I figured I do a series of short blog posts highlighting some of information channels available for any folks that might want to use them.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu developers will be discussing this week about how they can rapidly bring-up support for new hardware within the Linux distribution.
One of the many discussions to be had next week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen aside from ridding old GNOME code, pushing Ubuntu as a gaming platform, looking at Ubuntu TV, XZ packages by default, porting Ubuntu to the Nexus 7, and listening to Valve talk about Linux will be a session about rapidly bring-up Ubuntu on new hardware.
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Flavours and Variants
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Most recent buzz in the Ubuntu world has centered around the mobile and business markets, not education. But the team behind Edubuntu, an official variant of Ubuntu designed for use in the classroom, has been quietly at work shaping future versions of that platform. Here’s what they’re hoping to bring to the open source channel in upcoming releases.
Although Canonical endorses Edubuntu as an official Ubuntu spinoff, and not merely a community-based variant, the education-oriented face of Ubuntu remains a much more low-key, grassroots affair than its more commercial cousins, including Ubuntu Business Remix. Its core development team includes only a handful of programmers who in some months exchange no development-related emails at all.
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After Ubuntu and related distros released a new edition last week, Ubuntu Studio developers have released a new version of their OS which is based on Ubuntu Quantal. Ubuntu Studio is mainly focused on content creation and ships with a low latency kernel by default. You can download the DVD image and burn it to a USB stick or disk.
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We’ve known for some time that a “pure GNOME” version of Ubuntu Linux was in the works, and following last week’s release of Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal,” the first GNOME Remix of the software has now made its debut as well.
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It’s vitally important to get young people interested in science and engineering if we hope to continue innovating and developing new technologies in the coming decades. But unfortunately, it can be very difficult to present this information to children as there is a dangerous mentality that those kind of topics are “for nerds”.
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It’s only been a year or so since the world first started salivating over the Raspberry Pi. Not only over the potential of the Pi, but the value as well. We have seen plenty of clones since, but this device is the first one to really outshine the Pi is every way conceivable.
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Phones
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Android
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Google didn’t made any significant dent in the market with its own hardware or consumer services until Nexus 7 happened. Nexus 7 and $249 Chromebook show that Google is seriously looked at taking its hardware to the masses and also focusing more on services or content it offers.
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Until recently, most Android-based TV products have used the Google TV platform. But lately we’ve seen an explosion of low-cost media players designed to access the web and run Android apps on TV with plain old Android.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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With 10-inch Android tablets going for around twice the price of 7-inch devices, there ought to be a market opportunity for midsized tablets, positioned halfway between typical 7- and 10-inch tablet pricepoints, and offering most of the features of the 10-inch models. This appears to be the target of Lenovo’s new IdeaPad A2109, a 9-inch tablet running Android 4.0. Does it hit the mark?
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Just like pictures of LG Nexus 4 surfaced on the internet few weeks ago, Nexus 10 is now having its share of leaks. Pictures of Quick Start Guide of Nexus 10 are here to provide some solid info about the upcoming Nexus 10.
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Once again, M$ with its tens of thousands of employees have been unable to compete with FLOSS, a cooperative project of the world to produce software that works. When will they learn? When will markets realize the emperor has no clothes?
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The Code for America Brigade recently launched Race for Reuse. It’s a different kind of contest that aims to increase adoption of existing open source projects with real dollars. The goal isn’t to build something brand new—it’s to encourage volunteer teams (called “brigades”) across the U.S. to stand up and support existing open source projects. Because one of the more difficult parts of deploying open source apps is building the user community around the projects and getting citizens engaged.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Scientists at the University of Waterloo have released an intriguing case study about the “secret life” of Firefox patches.
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SaaS
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Cloudera’s Apache-licensed, open-source query engine, Cloudera Impala, is specifically designed for real-time query of data stored in a Hadoop Distributed File System, or HDFS, and in HBase, a non-relational distributed database, and the company said it is the result of two years of in-house development. The queries for Impala can be expressed as SQL.
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Databases
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Semi-Open Source
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Sangoma Technologies, a provider of hardware and software components for IP communications systems for both voice and data, today launched the Sangoma Answering Machine Detection (AMD) for Asterisk software solution.
The solution is backward-compatible to Asterisk 1.4 and delivers all of the features of other sophisticated dialer analytics packages at a price-point aligned with the open source marketplace. AMD for Asterisk is available immediately to select early-adopters, and Sangoma anticipates a general availability release before the end of the year.
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The Tine 2.0 developers have released another major update to their open source groupware and customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Version 2012.10 of the software, code-named “Joey”, includes a new human resources management module, security guidelines for ActiveSync, PostgreSQL support and improvements to the calendar features.
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I recently published an article that looked at using GNUCash for personal budgeting on Linux. The comment thread made for a fascinating read – it seems that many people feel that personal Linux accounting is just too painful right now, and opt for Quicken (using Wine front-end PlayOnLinux). One product that was given honourable mention, however, was xTuple’s PostBooks-based ERP system. What’s it about?
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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“Today visitors to the primary Windows 8 launch event were greeted by an unexpected and uninvited visitor—a gnu.”
Thus began a Free Software Foundation (FSF) press release I read today that I just couldn’t resist sharing with you. Partly because, hey, it involves a gnu walking the streets of New York City (see press release for the photo), and partly because of the reason why a gnu was at the Windows 8 event.
“Activists, one dressed as the free software movement’s buffalo-like mascot, converged on Microsoft’s event to distribute pamphlets about the hidden dangers of Microsoft’s latest proprietary creation,” the press release explained. “The Halloween-themed action included plastic pumpkin buckets full of DVDs loaded with Trisquel, a free software distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.”
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Microsoft has shelled out a mind-boggling $1.8 billion to convince the public that it needs Windows 8. Why the record-breaking marketing deluge? Because a slick ad campaign is Microsoft’s best shot at hiding what Windows 8 really is; a faulty product that restricts your freedom, invades your privacy, and controls your data.
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New York, New York, USA — Thursday, October 25th, 2012 — Today visitors to the primary Windows 8 launch event were greeted by an unexpected and uninvited visitor — a gnu. Activists, one dressed as the free software movement’s buffalo-like mascot, converged on Microsoft’s event to distribute pamphlets about the hidden dangers of Microsoft’s latest proprietary creation. The Halloween-themed action included plastic pumpkin buckets full of DVDs loaded with Trisquel, a free software distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.
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Public Services/Government
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new narrative is emerging in government innovation and it goes something like this: Truly great leaps in innovation are almost never possible with monolithic, proprietary approaches to software development, and many small innovations, when taken together, often lead to large, game-changing paradigms.
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PreviousNext, an Australian website strategy, design and development firm, has launched a free Drupal CMS platform specifically designed to meet Australian Government mandatory web requirements.
It says aGov is a free open source platform that ensures all government sites are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) compliant, and provides a full set of common website features delivered via a responsive mobile device interface.
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United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44 observers from its human rights office around the country on Election Day to monitor an array of activities, including potential disputes at polling places. It’s part of a broader observation mission that will send out an additional 80 to 90 members of parliament from nearly 30 countries.
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Yesterday, Monday, October 22nd, Florida attorney Kathleen Kirwin filed an emergency complaint on behlf of Dr. Jill Stein requesting an injunction against the bipartisan presidential “debate” sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), Lynn University, the Democratic and Republican national committees, and approved by the Federal Election Commission. The injunction request was denied, and the bipartisan campaign event was allowed to proceed.
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It’s a cliché that we live in a world increasingly awash with digital data. Even though it all comes down to 1s and 0s, not all data is equally important or valuable. Data about clinical trials, for example, is literally a matter of life and death, since it is used to determine whether new drugs should be approved and how they should be used. That gives clinical data a critical role in the approval process: results that support the use of a new drug can lead to big profits, while negative results can mean years of expensive research and development have to be discarded.
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Health/Nutrition
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California Proposition 37 to label foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is up for a vote on Tuesday, November 6. It enjoyed broad popular support as of September, with a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll showing support by 61 percent of registered voters.
But in the two weeks following that poll, support dropped to 48 percent, according to a poll done by Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and the California Business Roundtable.
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Security
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OTTAWA – The federal government has been slow to boot up an effective response to the rapidly growing threat of cyber-attacks on crucial systems, says Canada’s auditor general.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Tensions among ranchers and farmers might lead the nation’s largest farm lobby to alter its position on the federal biofuel mandate.
The American Farm Bureau Federation has been a staunch supporter of the renewable fuel standard (RFS), a mandate for blending biofuels — currently, mostly corn-based ethanol — into traditional fuel. The rule has been a boon for the nation’s corn-growers, who have a guaranteed customer for 40 percent of their crop.
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Finance
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The Justice Department is seeking $1 billion from Bank of America, alleging the bank committed fraud by selling defective mortgages from a program it says was known within the bank as “the Hustle.”
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A former Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble board member once widely respected worldwide for his business smarts was sentenced Wednesday to 2 years in prison for feeding inside information about board dealings with a billionaire hedge fund owner who was his friend.
Rajat Gupta, 63, of Westport, Conn., was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, who also ordered him to pay a $5 million fine. The Harvard-educated businessman long respected on Wall Street was one of the biggest catches yet for the federal government in its five-year crackdown on insider trading that has so far resulted in 69 convictions.
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Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, defended JPMorgan on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” Wednesday, calling the recent lawsuit brought against the bank for alleged fraud at Bear Stearns a dangerous precedent.
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Moves towards a global water commodities market must be stopped. It will push the price of food far beyond the peaks of the past five years, warns Frederick Kaufman.
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Smith’s sin seems to be that he’s an insider from an uber prestigious, connected firm who dared say something bad about his former employer. The “don’t rock the boat” attitude is so deeply ingrained in America that it’s considered reckless to be candid about why you are quitting a job in an exit interview. And it’s not a stretch to call the reaction totalitarian when it’s Wall Street that is on the receiving end of criticism. Look how, despite running again and again to Wall Street’s aid, Obama is an official enemy for a mere “fat cats” remark. Similarly, the industry depicts Elizabeth Warren as a power-mad Commie bank serial killer, when her fault-finding is based on clear eyed analysis of how deceptive and predatory practices hurt consumers.
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Censorship
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What is it with hosting companies who are quick on the trigger to take down entire sites in a kneejerk response to legal threats, going way, way beyond their legal obligations? We recently wrote about hosting firm ServerBeach taking down 1.5 million blogs over a single copyright claim (when to keep their DMCA safe harbors, they only needed to take down the one bit of content highlighted). Now another hosting company, PhoenixNAP, has done something even more ridiculous. In response to a takedown notice (pdf) sent by Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed’s lawyers, PhoenixNAP took the entire gossip site LipstickAlley offline without any notice to the site owner.
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Following the recent controversy surrounding the use of a frame from the satirical cartoon strip Jesus & Mo by the atheist student society at University College London, it has now emerged that the cartoons are at the centre of a similar dispute at the London School of Economics.
The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society at LSE (LSEU ASH) reproduced the Jesus & Mo cartoons on their Facebook page following news of the controversy at UCL, and were yesterday instructed by their student union (LSEU) to remove them. In a statement released on the union website,
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Privacy
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Whether or not you believe that CCTV surveillance makes the world a safer place, there’s a big problem with deploying it more widely: you still need someone to look at that footage and pick out the things of interest, and it’s much harder adding new personnel than adding new cameras.
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The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed an amicus brief in what will be the first case in the country to address the constitutional implications of a so-called “stingray,” a little known device that can be used to track a suspect’s location and engage in other types of surveillance. We argue that if the government wants to use invasive surveillance technology like this, it must explain the technology to the courts so they can perform their judicial oversight function as required by the Constitution.
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Civil Rights
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A former Central Intelligence Agency officer is expected to spend 2 1/2 years in prison for telling a journalist the name of a covert agent, marking the first time in 27 years that someone will go to prison for blowing the cover of a CIA agent.
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An informant recruited by the New York Police Department to collect information on suspected Islamic militants has quit and denounced his police handlers, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the case.
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Reflecting the Obama legacy and US culture, the Time columnist says: “the bottom line is: ‘whose 4-year-olds get killed?’”
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Suspects are being needlessly remanded in custody and denied a fair trial because of a severe shortage of qualified court interpreters, a Commons select committee has been told. An investigation into the privatised monopoly awarded to Applied Language Solutions (ALS) covering all courts in England and Wales heard the main professional bodies describe the agreement as “unsalvageable”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Kickstarter provides a way for creators to route around the strictures of traditional publishing industries for a variety of reasons. We’ve seen Double Fine break the bank on Kickstarter, after getting a lot of blank stares from publishers who didn’t think there was a market for point-and-click adventure games. We’ve seen top Hollywood talent fund a film on Kickstarter to ensure no studio execs would be meddling with their movie. Now, in what I think is a first, we’ve got a parody author turning to Kickstarter after his publisher dropped the project, citing fear of a legal backlash.
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A photo agency is demanding $1.3 million from BuzzFeed after the viral news site published photos of singer Katy Perry and actress Kathy Griffin. The case comes at a time when online media is increasingly image-based, and raises questions about whether current copyright law is still working.
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Send this to a friend
10.24.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Kernel Space
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To OpenBenchmarking.org today I uploaded more results beyond all of the data offered in the comparison of my AMD FX-8350 Linux CPU review.
While in that review I compared the FX-8350 Eight-Core processor to several different Intel and AMD CPUs, these new results uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org are just some standalone numbers. However, there’s more than 100 new Linux benchmark results from this Piledriver-based AMD processor.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has updated his USBView program, a user-space utility he started more than one decade ago for displaying USB device information under Linux.
USBView is a small program for showing the device tree of the USB bus and then displaying information about connected devices on the bus.
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Lennart Poettering has announced the release of the latest version of the open source startup daemon systemd. With version 195, the tool, which is being used by Fedora, openSUSE and several other Linux distributions, has received what Poettering calls a “non-trivial amount of cool new features”.
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As a warning for those who are normally quick to upgrade to the latest stable vanilla kernel releases, a serious EXT4 data corruption bug worked its way into the stable Linux 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 kernel series.
Being discussed recently on the Linux kernel mailing list was an “apparent serious progressive ext4 data corruption bug in 3.6.3.” Theodore Ts’o was able to successfully bisect the kernel and found the serious bug, which first appeared within the Linux 3.6.2 kernel and was since back-ported to older stable kernels.
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Linux kernel developer Theodore “Ted” Ts’o has released a series of patches for what he has called “a Lance Armstrong bug” in the kernel, meaning behaviour that does not trip up tests but also makes the kernel work differently than intended. A user had reported a problem that caused them to lose data; the kernel developers quickly narrowed this down to a fault in the ext4 implementation that was introduced with the release of Linux 3.6.2, just over a week ago. Apparently, the data corruption bug was hard to track down as it only manifests itself if a system is rebooted twice in a relatively short period of time.
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With this week’s unveiling of the FX-8350 eight-core processor being based on AMD’s new Piledriver architecture, in this article are benchmarks when testing out the Piledriver “bdver2″ optimizations within AMD’s own Open64 compiler.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD Catalyst 12.10 for Linux was only officially released two days ago, but already there’s a Catalyst 12.11 beta for Tux.
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Maarten Lankhorst released a stable xf86-video-nouveau X.Org graphics driver update today for the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA support.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Many Phoronix readers have been writing in over the past day getting excited that it looks like Team Fortress 2 is coming to Linux.
Yes, the Team Fortress 2 Beta is coming to Linux. An update was pushed out on Monday with changes being made as the Linux client of the Valve game nears reality. There’s some launcher changes and other alterations needed specifically for the Linux client.
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If you love RPG (role-playing games) and you think there’s no future for these games on Linux, this post is for you. I’ll show you five new RPG games developed from scratch that run on Penguin: Questverse, Hale, Dawn, Flare and Arakion.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Kevin Ottens recently blogged about the shiny new KDE Manifesto. He does a great job of explaining the motivations behind such a document. As he noted, I gave a keynote at Akademy six years ago on this very topic. Evidently it’s something that has been on my mind for a while, and the reason has to do with sustainability of the KDE community.
By the time I wrote that keynote, KDE already had very clear social principles, agreements and mechanisms. They are reflected in the new Manifesto, so there is in one sense nothing really new there. What is new is that those principles are being stated openly and clearly. Not everyone felt they needed to be, and so I’d like to address the reasons why this is such an important step for KDE.
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I first learned about Plasma Active on a KDE User Experience sprint in April 2011. Sebastian Kügler was talking about their new project called Plasma Active, which aimed to bring the KDE experience to devices other than desktops, laptops and netbooks. It would provide a framework for application creators to easily adapt their UIs to different from factors, pixel densities and input methods.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome University is an effort from Christian Hergert to help people to learn C, involve with Gnome Programming and push the project further. I had referred how nice this project is, some time ago at its initial starting. So I will skip this.
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Puppy Linux project founder and lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the first release of a new edition of his independent Linux distribution, code-named “Precise”. Based on binary packages from Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS “Precise Pangolin” and built using the Woof build tool, Precise Puppy represents the latest version of the Ubuntu-based flavour of Puppy Linux 5.4 and includes access to Ubuntu’s package repositories.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 12.10 reviews are reeling in as the upgrade for server and desktop variants are now available for the users. Canonical Ltd., which provides access to the Ubuntu releases announced the Ubuntu 12.10 upgrade in April 2012. The recent update of the open source operating system, Linux 12.10 was named as Quantal Quetzal.
Ubuntu 12.10 release marked the final update of the Linux software this year with the first installment coming in April 2012 which was named as Precise Pangolin. Ubuntu 12.10 server provides administrators with an enhanced platform for cloud deployment by integrating the Folsom feature with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC).
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Cairo-Dock in action Zoom
Source: Cairo-Dock The developers of Cairo-Dock, a feature-rich and extensively configurable Mac OS X-style dock for Linux desktops, have released version 3.1 of their open source application switcher. Cairo-Dock 3.1 features integration improvements for Ubuntu’s Unity desktop: for example, like the Unity launcher, icons in the dock can now display progress bars for actions that take time to complete. New indicators have been added, including for the Sync, Print and Messaging menus. The developers have also improved the configuration window and updated the Recent Event applets.
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Puppy Linux project founder and lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the first release of a new edition of his independent Linux distribution, code-named “Precise”. Based on binary packages from Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS “Precise Pangolin” and built using the Woof build tool, Precise Puppy represents the latest version of the Ubuntu-based flavour of Puppy Linux 5.4 and includes access to Ubuntu’s package repositories.
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on24Oct
Wind River has launched its Intelligent Network Platform, a software platform for the development of sophisticated network equipment that can accelerate and secure the flood of traffic for current and future networks.
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Without a doubt, the Raspberry Pi has grabbed the most headlines as a tiny, ultra-inexpensive, pocketable computer running an open source operating system, but it’s actually only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new “Linux punk ethic.” Several others, such as the Cotton Candy device, have warranted attention as well.
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The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced the open sourcing of its VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM chips. The foundation has chose a more permissive 3-Clause BSD licence for the driver code. The source is available from the foundation’s new userland repository on GitHub.
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The popular budget-friendly Raspberry Pi ARM development board now has a fully open-source graphics stack — the user-space graphics drivers for the Broadcom VideoCore included!
Since July of this year I had been exclusively hinting that a major open-source announcement was coming… In that article for the clued Phoronix readers it was made sort of apparent it was about ARM graphics drivers and the Raspberry Pi. Well, today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is finally able to announce they have a fully open-source graphics driver stack for their low-cost development board!
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TINY COMPUTER MAKER the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that the system-on-chip (SoC) used in the credit card sized computer now has open source drivers.
While the Raspberry Pi Foundation has promoted the Raspberry Pi computer as a device to teach programming, it has become a hit with hobbyists and developers due to its low cost and Linux support. Now the foundation has announced that all drivers for the Broadcom BCM2835 used in the device has been open sourced.
The foundation’s announcement means that all the components of the BCM2835 SoC have open source drivers that are provided by Broadcom rather than reverse engineered like the open source Nouveau graphics driver that attempts to work around Nvidia’s decision not to disclose specifications for its chips. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said that all of the Videocore driver code has been released under a three clause BSD license and is available from its userland repository.
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Phones
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First, I’m going to correct you. We actually have stopped referring to our conference as a developers’ conference. We now call it the Open Solutions Conference, and the reason this matters is that we have seen over time that the nature of who attends our events has changed. It’s not just developers. It’s a conference where we tend to invite partners from our ecosystem. And by ecosystem, I mean everything from people that we buy services and products from like HTC or Samsung or Ericsson and Synniverse. They are part of our consortium, but we also have people like individual developers and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. And we also have opened up and welcomed people from different industries that are not necessarily part of the wireless industry, such as banking and advertising.
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Android
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Apple unveiled the long rumored iPad Mini in San Fransisco this afternoon, and it turns out to be a 7.9 inch device with internal similar to iPad 2. Apple is very much aware of the tough competition that iPad Mini will face in this segment from the highly successful Google Nexus 7. At the launch event, Apple’s Phil Schiller tried his best to defame the Nexus 7 when comparing it to the iPad Mini and how was the new Apple’s new device superior to the Nexus 7.
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I have to say I was impressed. The new iPad with its extremely fast A6X chip looks great, pity it just instantly obsoleted every iPad 3 out there, but… oh wait. That”s the new iPad 4. That’s not what Apple is running up against the Nexus 7. Instead, they’re putting out the iPad Mini. Seriously? That’s just sad.
True, Apple senior vice president for marketing Phil Schiller may say that the Nexus 7 is an example of how “Others have tried to make smaller tablets, but they’ve failed”, but that’s just showing that the Apple reality distortion field is still at work within Apple’s halls. The truth, as everyone knows who’ve used the Nexus 7, is that it’s a great tablet. Heck, without it and its relatives such as the Nook and Kindle, Apple never would have produced a 7″ tablet.
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Yet somehow, against this hostile background, FOSS feminism has managed to survive and expand. Today we see many obvious signs of the growing influence of FOSS feminism: greater reporting of incidents of sexism, networking and teaching opportunities for women, the availability of related resources, women speakers at conferences and the adoption of anti-harassment policies or codes of conduct.
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The AITEC East Africa ICT Summit, officially opened by Hon. Samuel Poghisio, Minister for Information and Communication, is drafting a first ever map of ways in which Open Source Software (OSS), which is frequently free, can be used to drive regional economic development.
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Are you interested in software usability and open source? If so, my friend Jim would like your help. He is doing a study of usability in Open Source software. I’ll post his entire request below along with a link to his blog. Also, he’ll probably be doing some other interent based interolocution about this; I’ll pass on to you whatever he passes on to me.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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The OpenNebula Project has released version 3.8 of its open source cloud computing toolkit. OpenNebula 3.8, nicknamed “Twin Jet” after the M2-9 planetary nebula, offers better integration with KVM and VMware hypervisors, a new virtual routing appliance and a better Amazon EC2 interface than the previous version. The OpenNebula toolkit, which is used by organisations such as the European Space Agency, Fermilab, CERN and China Mobile, provides management for virtual infrastructure in data centres.
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The networking giant isn’t just contributing financially but is also building its own OpenStack cloud platform edition as well as being actively involved in code development. OpenStack is a multi-stakeholder effort to build a cloud platform and initially started out with the Nova compute and Swift storage components. Thanks in part to Cisco’s efforts, OpenStack recently included the new Quantum networking project as part of the core OpenStack release.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The promotion of Apache OpenOffice to top-level project status within the Apache Software Foundation is good news for the open source office suite project, but it also means that it’s time to put up or shut up for OpenOffice innovation.
Much has been said about the “innovation gap” that exists between OpenOffice and the two-year old forked offshoot LibreOffice. To be honest, much of what’s said is coming out of the stewards of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation. And while they’re not wrong – to date, only one big release of OpenOffice, v 3.4, has come out since the code was donated to the ASF by Oracle – it’s not been entirely fair to the OpenOffice team to smack them around about it.
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Healthcare
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The Veterans Affairs Department is preparing a roadmap toward meaningful use certification of its VistA electronic health record version that is being updated and improved in the OSEHRA open source community.
The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit organization, manages a public/private community formed to modernize VistA for open source and to contribute to the VA-Defense Department’s integrated electronic health record (iEHR).
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Antenna, the platform used to develop the app, was also created in iQ Labs. This open-source platform helps event organisers to manage, publish and mobilise event content, providing a CakePHP-based development framework to quickly create event publications.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Since 2010 I’ve been representing FSFE in France. This involves getting involved in events and conferences, and occasionally acting as an interface between various organisations and FSFE — some very local, and some national. There is a very strong and organised Free Software community in France — for instance with the yearly conference RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) — so one of my ongoing jobs is to show a face for FSFE, make a personal connection and explain what we do and why we exist. Then on further levels, it sometimes gets into collaboration on campaigns or issues. For instance, one of my main area of activities in Free Software is legal and public affairs.
At the moment I’m mainly working on setting up our Free Your Android campaign in France, with phone liberation workshops. I really believe in this project: I think mobile devices are becoming more and more important, and having control over them, and more importantly over the services that we run them with, is becoming more important too.
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Public Services/Government
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Entando, Jaspersoft, Infobright, Green Vulcano and Red Hat have announced a joint product offering for public sector organisations called OpenITGov.
OpenITGov is intended to provide public sector organisations with a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all the open source software and support needed to build IT systems to be able to offer online services to citizens.
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Openness/Sharing
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So if you live in Salt Lake City and want to maybe see the show for free, go get your tickets now. And then tell everyone you know to get tickets too, and maybe you’ll get to see the show for free. Or not! Could be a disaster! Exciting! Honestly I have no idea if this is going to work, but as you know, I am a scientist. I like to watch what happens.
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Open Data
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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The GitLab development team has released version 3.0 of its open source repository management software for the Git version control system. Used for self-hosted repositories, GitLab is based on Ruby on Rails and Gitolite, and is described as a “fast, secure and stable solution” by its developers. It includes the same features as those offered by the GitHub project hosting service, which also appears to be the inspiration for GitLab’s user interface.
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A couple of weeks ago, a bunch of oil appeared on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. BP was all, “Hm? What’s this about oil?” Then the government said, yeah, it’s from the Deepwater Horizon spill. And BP was all, “Hm? Oh, that? Yeah, I guess.” And the government suggested that maybe BP try and figure out what’s happening? Maybe make sure the broken well isn’t leaking again? And BP sighed heavily and whined about how none of its friends had to do chores and how it had all this homework and blah blah blah so the Coast Guard decided to just check for itself. BP, pleased, put its headphones back on and mumbled under its breath about what dicks these government dudes are.
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Finance
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It’s Food Day, so let’s put Paul Ryan’s soup kitchen stunt aside for the moment and take a serious look at what a Romney/Ryan budget might mean for the future of eating. Today, the number of Americans receiving food stamps has reached nearly 15 percent of the population, and 17 million American households experience hunger. Despite such indications of growing domestic food insecurity, Paul Ryan has proposed a $133 billion cut to nutrition assistance, an evisceration that would add 10 million more Americans to the 50 million who already are missing meals.
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On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney wants to have his cake and eat it too. “Governments do not create jobs,” a stern Romney told CNN’s Candy Crowley twice during the second debate. Here in Wisconsin, however, he is running ads promising to “crack down on China” and create 12 million new jobs.
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When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to finance his campaign than Goldman Sachs. This election, none has done more to help defeat him.
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Censorship
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While the European Commission sets out an action plan for online gambling, La Quadrature du Net warns about the risk of Internet content censorship, and urges Member States’s governments to refuse the instrumentalisation of child protection for unacceptable measures.
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Calls for evidence-based policy-making in the copyright domain are increasing on both sides of the Atlantic. How do we best regulate the fair remuneration of artists? How do we enforce it? Evidence based on sound methodologies and research is slowly but surely appearing. Now the highly respected Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam joins the league of evidence-givers with a new report, Filesharing 2©12, Downloading in The Netherlands, about how blocking websites is not a worthwhile remedy (The report is in Dutch, but the executive summary is translated. It was an initiative by the IViR itself and was partly financed by the Ministry of Culture, Education and Research, some ISP’s, Dutch society for professionals in the book industry and done in collaboration with several other institutes. Small disclaimer: I did my masters at this institute).
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Civil Rights
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The episode left Hicks scrambling to figure out how he’d get home from Hawaii without being able to fly. Then he was abruptly removed from the list on Thursday with no explanation.
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Back in August, Mike wrote about some questionable sharing of license plate information between the US Border Patrol and various insurance companies. While the stated aim of tracking stolen vehicles might seem to make this sharing justified, the fact that this is going on with no oversight or accountability is cause for alarm.
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Later this month, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could define the government’s ability to monitor innocent Americans’ international communications without a warrant. The lawsuit, Amnesty International v. Clapper, argues that the Constitution bars the National Security Agency from listening to or reading Americans’ international conversations and emails without court oversight, even if Congress blesses the NSA’s actions.
Unfortunately, the government has tried to block the courts from ever reaching that constitutional issue, arguing that unless the plaintiffs can prove they will be monitored (which is impossible, since the list of who is monitored is classified), they cannot sue. Now that threshold question has reached the Supreme Court. Based on our combined six-plus decades of experience working at the NSA, we are sure there is only one just outcome: The justices should let this case proceed, giving the courts the opportunity to determine whether the executive and legislative branches have gone too far.
Part of the Defense Department, the NSA was created to listen to and analyze foreign communications to protect our nation from threats outside our borders. Today, it is bigger than the CIA and FBI combined. For decades, those of us inside the NSA prided ourselves on our respect for the Constitution. Our touchstone was the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and its guarantee that warrants could be issued only with probable cause and against specific targets. Whenever we suspected that an American abroad or someone inside the United States might be involved in terrorism or espionage, we carefully gathered the evidence and presented it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret to protect classified information. Only if that court gave us permission would we monitor an American’s communications.
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Recently, Tim noted that, for some strange reason, politicians don’t like having the same level of surveillance applied to them as they wish to inflict on the public. Here’s a nice case from the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, found via Evgeny Morozov, where politicians aren’t being given any choice:
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DRM
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Earlier this week, we talked about how publishing giant Random House had very explicitly stated that when libraries buy their ebooks, the libraries “own” those ebooks, rather than license them. They left no doubt about it. Skip Dye, Random House’s VP of library & academic marketing and sales was explict: “when libraries buy their RH, Inc. ebooks from authorized library wholesalers, it is our position that they own them… this purchase constitutes ownership of the book by the library. It is not a license.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Thousands of students participated in a march in San José on Tuesday, October 9, 2012, protesting for their right to photocopy textbooks for educational purposes. The unrest was caused by President Chinchilla vetoing Bill 17342 (known as the ‘Photocopying Law’) which seeks to amend Law No 8039 on Procedures for Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, on the grounds that it removes protection of the work and intellectual property in the artistic, literary and technological areas.
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Universities are and have always been vast copy machines. Evolved from medieval monasteries and their vast libraries and scriptoria, universities have always had as central functions of their mission the copying, transforming, and preserving works of art, thought, and science and making them available to their patrons.
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In 2011 and 2012, European citizens took to the streets to protest against secret negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that threatened their fundamental freedoms. This led to a massive rejection of the agreement in the European Parliament in last July. The message was clear: no repressive measures without a democratic debate by our elected representatives.
Nevertheless, the European Comission and the Member States are still trying to force the adoption of repressive measures that undermine fundamental freedoms, under the cover of trade agreements kept secret. The Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), the India-EU, Thailand-EU, Moldavia-EU Free Trade Agreements, etc.: all these agreements might include dispositions harmful for Internet users’s rights, access to essential drugs or the use of free software.
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We’re rapidly approaching the time in which perpetual copyright hits its existing statutory limits — so I’ve fully been expecting an increase in arguments for why copyright needs to be extended again. Of course, the actual economic evidence doesn’t support this at all. Instead, the evidence suggests there’s tremendous value in a broader public domain. So how will maximalists argue for copyright extension? If a recent paper from economist Stan Liebowitz is any indication, it will be through strawmen and the argument that we should ignore the economics. Seriously.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Besides bringing new features and bug-fixes, this SysVinit replacement is also now at the version intended for Fedora 18. Systemd 195 will be borught into Fedora 18 while anything from here will just be back-ported fixes. Systemd 196 is what will then begin the Fedora 19 development cycle.
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When Linus Torvalds visited Aalto University in June, the visit resulted in the Linux pioneer giving Nvidia the finger — an outburst that became the university’s most watched YouTube clip. Torvalds made a follow-up visit on Tuesday, but promised students there would be “no fingers this time”.
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Graphics Stack
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Just minutes after writing about how Intel keeps releasing open-source Linux code for Haswell, their next-generation hardware for 2013, they ended up pushing out their initial video acceleration (VA-API) support code.
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Applications
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One area of physics that is hard to wrap your head around is relativity. Basically, relativity breaks down into general and special relativity. General relativity deals with large masses and high energies, and it describes how space-time is warped by these. Special relativity deals with what happens during high velocities. Many odd and counter-intuitive effects happen when speeds get close to the speed of light, or c. The problem is that these types of conditions are quite far outside normal experience, so people don’t have any frame of reference as to what these effects would look like—enter Lightspeed.
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Proprietary
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For those that do any sort of video editing, you’ve probably heard of LightWorks. LightWorks has been the editing software of choice for films such as 28 Days Later, Hugo, The King’s Speech, Pulp Fiction, and tons more. There’s a reason why — LightWorks was designed by editors, for editors.
But pimping this software title isn’t what this article is about. What I wanted to highlight was how the developers have been working to bring this software title to the open source flagship platform.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A software engineer from Valve will be speaking next week in Copenhagen about the Valve Linux efforts during the Ubuntu Developer Summit.
Andrew Bliss is the Valve employee who was just slotted into the UDS-R schedule to speak on Monday afternoon in Copenhagen. The talk can be found here, but there’s no details beyond stating “Drew Bliss – Valve.”
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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As we saw last week, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth envisions the advent of Ubuntu phones, tablets and TVs in the near future. But the open source world’s best hope for conquering emerging hardware arguably lies in Plasma Active, a young project which has quietly been making huge progress lately in the world of mobile platforms. Will it beat Ubuntu?
It’s pretty likely that Canonical’s efforts for bringing Ubuntu to mobile hardware will involve Unity, the company’s homegrown interface designed to work well on traditional and mobile screens alike. And if it creates a version of Ubuntu targeted at mobile devices, the platform will almost certainly be a spin of the standard Ubuntu flavor, not a new operating system built from the ground up.
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Less than one day after the official release of Wayland 1.0 there is a new Wayland compositor that emerges. This new compositor for Wayland is dubbed “Green Island” and leverages Qt, QtQuick, and QML for creating a new and unique Linux desktop experience.
Pier Luigi announced Green Island this morning on the wayland-devel list. “I would like to share with you my work on a Wayland compositor and desktop shell made with QtQuick and QtCompositor and is using a set of components for QML to draw panels and widgets.”
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KDevelop 4.4.0 was released today as the latest version of the KDE-focused integrated development environment (IDE), but it’s hardly worth getting excited over.
The new feature to KDevelop 4.4.0 is a QML/Plasma-based welcome screen. The welcome screen should help newcomers, but isn’t any revolutionary new feature for KDevelop. Beyond the welcome screen, there isn’t much else.
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GNOME Desktop
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There’s a silly sentence. I am projecting what I feel ought to be true, like so many other bloggers out there, except that I am neither a blogger, nor wrong. The thing is, I want to talk to you about where the Linux desktop, I repeat desktop, is heading in the coming few years. A hunch, based on years of being absolutely right on everything. Read my past articles, and thou shalt be convinced utterly.
So what now? All right. In 2011 or so, more or less, the Linux world suffered a split, with the Gnome 2 desktop being torn apart and replaced with a mutation called Gnome 3. This led to much dissatisfaction in the community, and two alternative projects were born, one called Cinnamon, the other MATE. The former uses the Gnome 3 technology, but makes it more presentable and usable, while the latter is Gnome 2 reincarnated. The Pauli exclusion principle tells us you cannot have so many desktops around. So which one will survive into the next decade?
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The GNOME Project has released the first update to version 3.6 of its open source Linux and Unix desktop environment. GNOME 3.6.1 is a maintenance update that includes a variety of minor changes, improvements and translation updates.
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New Releases
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Today we are happy to announce the last DEFT release: the 7.2. This is the last 32bit release but we will support bugfix until 2020.
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Red Hat Family
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LINUX VENDOR Red Hat knows that most of its customers do not care whether their operating system software is open source but instead simply look for the best bang for the buck.
Red Hat has a significant chunk of the enterprise Linux market and while the firm challenges Microsoft and proprietary Unix operating systems in the enterprise market, it also supports a number of open source projects. While open source software has several benefits, Red Hat says most of its customers are not interested in whether the source code is available for inspection.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Starting with this article, we’re going to introduce you guys to a lot of Web Apps for the recently released Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.
As you already know, in the past we’ve introduced lots of Unity Lens and Unity Scopes for the Ubuntu Linux distributions, since Canonical invented the Unity interface.
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Samsung introduced the latest generation Chromebook just a few days back. This is the ARM-based model, or more than likely — the one people know as the one that is selling for $249. Of course, given the price, the Chromebook is more than tempting. But low price aside, we realize that Chrome OS is not going to work for everyone. Me personally, I am still rocking a Cr-48 with Chrome OS and loving it.
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Flavours and Variants
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There are a wide variety of Linux distributions, but there are also a wide variety of distributions based on other Linux distributions. The official Ubuntu release with the Unity desktop is only one of many possible ways to use Ubuntu.
Most of these Ubuntu derivatives are officially supported by Ubuntu. Some, like the Ubuntu GNOME Remix and Linux Mint, aren’t official. Each includes different desktop environments with different software, but the base system is the same (except with Linux Mint.)
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This is my fourth review of the Quantal series with Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu already reviewed. Lubuntu, the fastest of them all but the one with the most boring look. Nope! Like the other three, in my article, I’ll compare the latest release with Lubuntu 12.04 (no there was no 12.04.1 like others!). However, a reminder – the previous release was not a Long Term Release (with 3-5 years of support). Support is for 18 months in both and it makes sense here to upgrade to the latest distro, possibly.
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Lubuntu, an official Ubuntu flavour starting with version 11.10 which uses LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment by default, has reached version 12.10.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Bringing the Chinese technology community around to the philosophy that software licenses should be honored will take time, said Cedric Thomas, CEO of OW2. “Building an awareness for open source in China is the initial goal. Piracy is a way to obtain software. That’s the way the Chinese see it. So we are trying to show them a way to use free software in business as a legal activity.”
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West Virginia: a state made up entirely of the Appalachian Mountain range. Whether you’re there to experience the beautiful New River Gorge, or to watch the Mountaineers play at home, the mountainous theme never subsides. The Appalachian region has the Most Beautiful award locked down, however its height and elevation face a slightly different opponent. Towering over the city of Morgantown, WV, home to West Virginia University and the Mountaineers, stands a fierce competitor. An engineering marvel, over ten stories tall. The Engineering Science Building!
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Coinciding with today’s opening of EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich has welcomed Google as a new strategic member of the open source organisation. The Foundation is responsible for operating the open source Eclipse development environment and various associated projects. As a strategic member, Google will provide the organisation with eight full-time developers to work on Eclipse technology and donate $250,000 per year.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Platfora, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed “big data” startup, unveiled the product it has been baking for over a year at the Strata conference.
The Silicon Valley-based company publicly launched its technology that crunches raw data in Hadoop, the open source framework, and turns it into intelligence for business users.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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OpenOffice’s graduation to a top-level project at Apache now clears he way for faster cloud innovation, especially as Microsoft Office 365′s debut nears. Plans for “Cloud Apache OpenOffice” will be discussed at ApacheCon Europe in weeks
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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SunGard’s Infinity Process Platform is now available from the Eclipse Stardust project, an open source business process management (BPM) suite designed to help improve the infrastructure behind many of the finance industry’s key operations.
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Project Releases
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Nearly eight months after being feature frozen, version 2.6.0 of key-value store database Redis is now available and brings with it several new features such as support for Lua scripting. Written in ANSI C, Redis is an open source RAM-based, persistent, data structure server that can be networked in a master-slave configuration to replicate data.
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Public Services/Government
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Open source can provide schools with high quality, well-functioning IT solutions at low cost, according to a case study done by VTT, a Finnish government research institute. The researchers looked at the use of Linux and other open source applications by the Kasavuoren Secondary School in Kauniainen, a municipality near Helsinki.
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U.S. government agencies have long used open-source software. Now, some agencies are embracing the collaborative development model of open-source software development and are releasing code back to the wider community.
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Openness/Sharing
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Iceland residents voted overwhelmingly in favour of a new Constitution written by a Constitutional Council of 25 citizens who gathered feedback through social media.
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Open Hardware
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Today marks the official release of the long-awaited Arduino Due, a vastly more powerful and capable version of the wildly popular Arduino microcontroller. This new Arduino is aimed at more complex applications, such as robotics, where the faster processor and increased input/output capability can enable builds which are simply impractical with the standard Arduino.
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Programming
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LVM (currently released as LVM2), the “logical volume manager”, is a flexible storage manager for the Linux kernel. It allows you to add, remove and resize partitions to suit your needs. Instead of having to predict how your disk space is going to be use when your install a new server, you dedicate a good amount of disk space to LVM and then can make changes to how that storage is allocated when you need.
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The ARM 64-bit compiler port (AArch64) of the GNU Compiler Collection is now ready for merging to trunk.
Marcus Shawcroft of ARM Holdings has requested their AArch64 branch of GCC now be merged to trunk for providing mainline ARM 64-bit support in the de facto standard for open-source compilers. “We would like to request the merge of aarch64-branch into trunk.”
The AArch64 GCC port is broken down into just ten patches.
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.
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Finance
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KKR & Co. (KKR), TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners (GS), which took the former TXU Corp. private five years ago in the largest leveraged buyout in history, have paid themselves $528.3 million in fees, even as the electricity provider teeters toward a near-term bankruptcy or restructuring.
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ONLINE BOOKSELLER Amazon has been accused of working the UK tax system and charging publishers 20 percent VAT on digital books while actually paying only three percent.
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Mark the name of R. Glenn Hubbard, the man who will make your life miserable if Mitt Romney is elected president. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the swindlers who has profited mightily from the nation’s economic pain.
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Censorship
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In response to the BPI’s call to block three websites before Christmas, Jim Killock Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:
“Web blocking is an extreme response. The orders are often indefinite and open ended, and will be blocking legitimate uses. The BPI and the courts need to slow down and be very careful about this approach.
“The BPI seem to be trying to speed things up and that is not good. It will lead to carelessness and unneeded harms.
“As an approach, censorship is a bad idea. It leads to more censorship, and is unlikely to solve the problem it seeks to address.
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Twitter has put itself out there as being a strong defender of free speech, arguing that it’s not just a principled stand, but one that provides the company with a competitive advantage. Standing up for free speech is good — not just for people, but for Twitter too.
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As another individual is sentenced to jail time for causing offense, it seems that at present a week doesn’t go by where outrage over a joke or insensitive comment isn’t splashed across the front pages.
There have been two notable cases in October: Barry Thew, who wore a T-shirt bearing the message “One less pig; perfect justice” and “Killacopforfun.com haha”, was sentenced to jail for eight months under the Public Order Act and Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail after posting “grossly offensive” jokes on his Facebook page about missing April Jones under the Malicious Communications Act 2003. It is worth noting on the same day and in the same court that Woods was sentenced, a man was fined £100 and ordered to pay £100 compensation for racially abusing a woman to her face.
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Privacy
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As Glyn recently wrote about, while governments around the world are busy diving further and further into their citizens personal communications over their cell phones and the internet, the implementation of cryptography has been slow to catch up. We could point to several reasons for this, but chief among them appears to be the difficulty in encryption for the average user. Now, an ex-Navy SEAL and security defense contractor is looking to change that.
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Civil Rights
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Instead, we have the reverse. This morning, Kiriakou plead guilty, though to a much lesser charge — that of “revealing an undercover operative’s identity.” Similar to the Drake case, they found narrow grounds for a guilty plea. The plea document and the associated “statement of facts” are embedded below for your horror. They tell… uh… a very one-sided view of the story, leaving out all the pesky little details about torture. Kiriakou was more or less forced into taking the deal after a judge had ridiculously ruled that you didn’t have to intend to harm the US to be guilty under the Espionage Act. How is it possibly espionage against a country if you don’t intend to harm that country?
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IT’S BEEN SEVEN MONTHS since I’ve been inside a prison cell. Now I’m back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man’s cell. Like the cell I go back to in my sleep, this one is built for solitary confinement. I’m taking intermittent, heaving breaths, like I can’t get enough air. This still happens to me from time to time, especially in tight spaces. At a little over 11 by 7 feet, this cell is smaller than any I’ve ever inhabited. You can’t pace in it.
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DRM
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News spread quickly on the web today of the predicament faced by a woman in Norway, Linn, who has lost all access to the eBooks she legitimately purchased from Amazon. The story first emerged on a friend’s blog, where a sequence of e-mails from Michael Murphy, a customer support representative at Amazon.co.uk were posted. These painted a picture some interpreted as Amazon remotely erasing a customer’s Kindle, but in conversation with Linn I discovered that was not what had happened – something just as bad did, though.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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In case you missed the last two years on the internet and don’t know what ‘Tebowing’ is, it’s essentially genuflecting in prayer on one knee and bowing your head onto your clenched fist.
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We’ve been covering the absolutely ridiculous lawsuit of educational software firm Jenzabar against documentary filmmakers Long Bow for a few years now. The short version is that Long Bow made a documentary about some of the activists from the Tiananmen Square uprising, that was somewhat critical of them — including a protest organizer named Ling Chai. Chai later moved to the US and founded an educational software company called Jenzabar. She has regularly played up her history as a Tiananmen Square organizer in getting PR for the company. The filmmakers called into question some of her actions back during the protests, and also set up a webpage, associated with the movie, critical of Chai. Chai sued for defamation — which was quickly thrown out. However, she also had Jenzabar sue for trademark infringement, because the page about her on Long Bow’s site mentioned Jenzabar in the title and in the meta tags.
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Copyrights
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The awesome folks over at Planet Money recently did a podcast about why Korean pop music (K-Pop) is taking over the world, using (obviously) Gangnam Style as exhibit number one. Of course, you could argue that one faddish song is not proof that they’re taking over the industry, so there’s a bit of journalistic hyperbole at work here — but the larger point comes clear in the podcast: the US’s music industry was built for the 20th century — a world of scarcity, limited distribution channels, hyperfocus on music and a strong reliance on copyright — but the Korean pop music landscape is focused on a much more 21st century strategy.
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After three days, the WIPO intersessional negotiations on copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities adjourned. On July 26, 2012, the SCCR negotiating text (SCCR 24/9) was 26 pages long, with 4051 words, and included 56 brackets, and 20 alternatives. The Final document on Friday (copy here) evening was 26 pages, with 47 brackets, and 22 alternatives.
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Send this to a friend
10.23.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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We’re giving away a brand new one of these brilliant laptops designed to optimally run Linux worth almost $1000 to one very lucky reader!
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Samsung’s Chromebook hasn’t even officially shipped yet, but a developer by the name of Olof Johansson has already managed to load up Ubuntu on the $249 laptop.
Personally, I’m somewhat surprised that Ubuntu made it onto the device before Android, but I suppose Google’s wildly popular mobile OS is next in line – hopefully in the form of Jelly Bean (4.2).
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What’s the first application you open when you turn your PC on? The chances are it’s the browser. We ran a poll among our Facebook and Google+ fans and 99% respondents said the browser was the first app that they would open. I am curious how many of these users use the ‘rest’ of the PC?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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This week, the 20th week in our 30-week series profiling Linux kernel developers, we talk to H. Peter Anvin. His Linux story starts in 1992 and involves a hospital stay, stolen OS/2 manuals and a computer hardware order made by pay phone.
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Linux Kernel 3.7 may still be in development, but that of course doesn’t mean development has halted on 3.6.y, with an updated version out now
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AMD today is lifting the lid on their Piledriver-based 2012 FX “Vishera” processors. Just weeks after the “Bulldozer 2″ Trinity APUs were launched, the new high-end AMD FX CPUs are being rolled out. Being benchmarked at Phoronix today under Linux is the new AMD FX-8350 processor.
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Graphics Stack
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Wayland 1.0 will be released as soon as today, but this doesn’t mark the death of X11 and Wayland beginning to secure major traction on the Linux desktop.
Kristian Høgsberg, Wayland’s creator that began coding this likely eventual X.Org Server replacement back in 2008 and was first publicly covered on Phoronix, has always reinforced since earlier this year when planning the 1.0 release that this won’t mark a point of domination on the Linux desktop. Wayland 1.0 simply marks the point at which Wayland developers will ensure backwards compatibility with the Wayland core protocol and API. If your tool-kit or application is targeting the 1.0 API/protocol, it will work with future versions rather than in the pre-1.0 state where there was significant breakage without notice.
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The AMD Catalyst 12.10 Linux graphics driver for x86 and x86_64 architectures is available from the download link offered here.
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Kristian Høgsberg after developing the project the past four years officially announced version 1.0 for Wayland. As described earlier on Phoronix, Wayland 1.0 doesn’t mark the point that Wayland is complete and ready to replace the X11 Server as there’s still a lot of work left to do but it marks the point at which there is API/protocol stability in terms of all future releases being backwards-compatible with the Wayland 1.0 release. Regardless of there being a lot of work left until Wayland is common to the Linux desktop, Wayland is exciting many users although it means real bad news for some users.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Frederic Peters had the pleasure of announcing the first maintenance release of the GNOME 3.6 desktop environment, on October 18th.
GNOME 3.6.1 is a necessary upgrade for all users of GNOME 3.6, brining lots of small improvements, updated translations, as well as numerous bug fixes.
“The first update to GNOME 3.6 series is now available. As usual it provides bug fixes, translations updates and tiny improvements, in order to make our stable release even more stable and useful.”
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Here’s a topic guaranteed to start controversy. Which Linux distribution is best? It all depends on your criteria for judging. Even then the topic is highly subjective. Here are a few nominees for “best distro” in specific categories.
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Last week, when I went in search of a distribution with which to experiment, I thought the choice seemed obvious: Qubes OS. The Qubes project is working to produce a Xen- and Linux-based operating system with a strong focus on security. As the project’s website says, “Qubes is an open source operating system designed to provide strong security for desktop computing. Qubes is based on Xen, X Window System, and Linux, and can run most Linux applications”. Qubes, which comes from Invisible Things Lab, takes an unusual approach to security where the user’s desktop system is divided into separate domains. Each domain gets its own virtual machine. A person might have a few of these different domains, such as one for work-related applications and files, another for casual web browsing & e-mail and perhaps another for security-sensitive tasks like on-line banking.
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Maybe it was my own mistake. Maybe I did not read well enough before trialling ROSA. The truth is, it makes no difference. You do not need and should not need to spend time learning about operating system before using them. The whole idea is to get a seamless, transparent behavior and a pleasant experience, and if this means having to figure out what is free and what is not, and somehow know that your Wireless card firmware might be considered non-free by some vague standard, then thank you, but no thank you.
If you’re looking for five years of support, you’re better off with Ubuntu. Shame really, because I was rather looking forward to testing ROSA. Finally, something new, something fresh. A system that does not come from the English-speaking world, which means a different mentality, five years, Mandriva baseline, they all sound like a damn good recipe for awesome fun. Alas, no. Not since Trisquel was I this disappointed. Another potential gem, killed by politics. Lastly, I cannot tell you how good or bad this distribution really is, because I didn’t get to test it properly. My hunch tells it’s a fairly decent one, but we shall never know now. Well, I might test the non-free version one day, but my goodwill for today is spent. Take care.
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Arch and Gentoo are rolling community distributions that emphasise self-help and choice for the adventurous user. Richard Hillesley investigates…
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For kicking off a new week of Linux benchmarks, here are some results of a high-end Intel Extreme Edition workstation when comparing the bare metal host and KVM virtualization performance between Ubuntu 12.10 and the earlier Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS release and then the RHEL-based CentOS 6.3.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Epitome Travel Solutions (India) Pvt. Ltd. (ETS), a unique Indian travel organization that offers diverse travel-related solutions and services to corporations and individuals, has selected Red Hat as its trusted solutions partner and implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its core enterprise platform. The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its enterprise platform has made Epitome Travel Solutions’ core business more agile, increased performance and enhanced customer satisfaction.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has suffered more than a little flack over the years for what some critics call a lack of openness in Ubuntu development. But if one agrees with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, the truly closed platforms are Ubuntu’s competitors, especially Red Hat. At least, that’s what Shuttleworth had to say recently on his blog. Here’s the full story.
Criticism of Canonical’s standards has often centered around issues such as the proprietary licenses that govern some of its software, such as the server side code for the Ubuntu One file syncing service. The company has also irked users for introducing major changes to Ubuntu, like the Unity interface, without soliciting much community feedback first.
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For users who want GNOME 3 rather than Unity, a group of developers has now made the first GNOME 3 desktop remix of the Ubuntu Linux distribution available. Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 is based on the recent release of Ubuntu 12.10 and even uses a GNOME package management tool.
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Will 2013 be the Year of the Linux Tablet? Personally, I’m not about to bet any cash on it just yet. But if Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has his way, Linux developers increasingly will be turning their attention to mobile, tablet and TV platforms over the coming year. Here’s what he had to say.
There’s been plenty of talk in the open source channel about bringing Linux to new types of hardware devices such as phones, tablets and TVs. And some major open source applications — the Unity, GNOME Shell and Plasma Active interfaces, to name a few — are being designed with mobile hardware in mind at least as much as traditional PCs.
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The Ubuntu team is very pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.10 for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.
There is no longer a traditional CD-sized image, DVD or alternate image, but rather a single 800MB Ubuntu image that can be used from USB or DVD. Users who previously installed using LVM or full-disk encryption via the alternate CD will find that these installation targets are supported by the consolidated image in 12.10.
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Let’s cut right to the chase: Ubuntu 12.10 is a totally, 100%, utterly, completely acceptable release.
It has some new features. It has some bug fixes. In almost every way, it is very, very similar to Ubuntu 12.04 – which makes a great deal of sense, considering that the two releases are only six months apart.
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One week to go! We’re looking forward to UDS. For me personally it will be my first and I’m thrilled to check out all the interesting sessions and hear your stories about Ubuntu and design. There will also be a very exciting design track in which we hope to work together on many cool topics, such as fonts, Juju GUI, Danish toys, the theater and many more!
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Late last week, Mark Shuttleworth set off a series of heated debates about just how transparent the development process for Ubuntu should be. Specifically, he wrote this regarding the next 13.04 version of Ubuntu: “Mapping out the road to 13.04, there are a few items with high “tada!” value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled. While we won’t talk about them until we think they are ready to celebrate, we’re happy to engage with contributing community members that have established credibility (membership, or close to it) in Ubuntu, who want to be part of the action.” The question is, why is everyone interpreting this as the end of an open Ubuntu development model?
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Flavours and Variants
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After comparing between Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04.1, where the verdict was mixed, next in line is Kubuntu. Like Gnome 3 shell, even KDE is going through a lot of transformation and users are bearing brunt of it. KDE 4.8.5 actually made me prefer XFCE as my primary desktop. However, KDE 4.9.2, I heard, has fixed a lot of the previous bugs and instability. KDE as a desktop is, possibly, the closest to Windows 7, offering similar looks and menu as well as previews as in the Microsoft OS. The changes in KDE have been incremental and it has retained the same look and feel, unlike Gnome, where even the look and feel have changed!
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Phones
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Ballnux
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The rumors were bang on target! For past several weeks, our RRS feeds were full of leaks and speculations about new Google LG Nexus flagship phone. Now suddenly the focus shifted to India, where Amit Gujral, head, Mobile Product Planning, LG India, in an interview with IBNLive stated “Google will unveil the LG Nexus on October 29 and the phone will be available in the Indian markets by the end of November.”
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Amazon just dropped us an email to let everyone know that their Kindle Fire HD is a worldwide best-seller. Yeah, like that’s a surprise to anyone.
In all seriousness, the Android-based tablet has become the retailer’s #1 best-selling product across all of Amazon worldwide. Also, today sees the roll out of a an over-the-air update to add in the Kindle FreeTime feature that lets parents control what a child is able to see on the Kindle Fire HD as well as how long they can use the tablet.
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Android
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An alleged live photo of Sony Xperia C650X Odin has emerged, thus giving us a glimpse of the tech giant’s upcoming Android powerhouse. The device has previously made an appearance in a leaked user agent profile.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Google isn’t ceding the tech media spotlight to Apple and Microsoft. As Apple gets set to unveil its iPad mini, and as Microsoft revs up for its Surface launch, Google is lubricating the rumor mill with some hints about an expanded Nexus line — perhaps a 32 GB 7-inch tablet, one with 3G, and maybe a 10-inch version. A new Nexus smartphone could be in the works too, perhaps running an updated Android OS.
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A year ago the Nitobi developers and Adobe contributed the PhoneGap software to the Apache Software Foundation to incubate as the Apache Cordova project; now the foundation has graduated the mobile development platform as a top level project. The news came from the project’s Twitter feed, but the project’s web site has not yet been updated to reflect the new status. This isn’t unusual as the graduation vote by the ASF’s board merely signals that the project can announce its new status in its own time.
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Programmer Vladimir Yuzhikov has released a Windows only application SmartDeblur that can do some really impressive things with removing blur from images after the fact. Released on his website earlier this month, the open source project can recover a pretty spectacular amount of information from an otherwise illegible photograph.
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Events
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After being in a position where it had no host for the 2014 Australian national Linux conference, better known as LCA, Linux Australia now finds that it has to decide between two bids.
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Databases
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Language in the Senate Armed Service Committee’s fiscal 2013 national defense authorization bill report regarding Defense Department utilization of an open source NoSQL database may have unintentional bad side effects.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Project Releases
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Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative/addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel, etc
Here is a short summary of the improvements and new features in this version 3.1.
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Openness/Sharing
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One tiny flaw in one gene in one little girl. That explains why Beatrice Rienhoff, 8, is so lean and leggy.
But it took the communal contributions of many researchers — in an open-ended, open-source scientific search, led by her father — to solve Bea’s singular mystery.
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Open Access/Content
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Open Hardware
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Hardware Hacks is the section on The H that collects stories about the wide range of uses of open source in the rapidly expanding area of open hardware. Find out about interesting projects, re-purposing of devices and the creation of a new generation of deeply open systems. In this edition, the Gertboard starts shipping, the open source-powered R10 quadcopter reaches its funding goal, the Arduino Due ARM-based board is now available for purchase, and using a Rasperry Pi as a Tor relay.
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Programming
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We’ve been talking about the first Humble eBook Bundle, which launched recently, and has taken off really successfully. Over the weekend, it zoomed past $1 million in money raised. As author John Scalzi (whose book Old Man’s War is included in the bundle) noted, if Humble Bundle purchases were counted by the NY Times every one of the authors would be on the best seller list. Think about that for a second.
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Health/Nutrition
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In 2008, farmers grew more than enough to feed the world, yet more people starved than ever before—and most of them were farmers. Harper’s magazine contributing editor Frederick Kaufman investigates the connection between the global food system and why the food on our tables is getting less healthy and less delicious even as the world’s biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever. In Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, he moves down the supply chain like a detective solving a mystery, revealing the forces undermining our food system.
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Finance
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Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) director, will come before Rakoff in Manhattan federal court on Oct. 24 to be sentenced for leaking stock tips to Galleon Group LLC co-founder Raj Rajaratnam. Prosecutors say Gupta, convicted by a jury in June, deserves as long as 10 years in prison. Gupta seeks probation.
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DRM
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A couple of days a go, my friend Linn sent me an e-mail, being very frustrated: Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation. This is DRM at it’s worst.
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Amazon’s cloud service experienced another widespread outage today, which caused cascading effects and brought down several popular websites. The unfortunate truth that the outage proves is that once again, it is never a good idea to have all of your eggs in one basket. Outsourcing your infrastructure to a single company, even a multi-tiered, scalable, cloud service like Amazon is the modern day equivalent to having a single computer host your database. While the components that make up the service are intended to be highly available and resistant to errors, the truth is that a single third-party service used alone equates to a single point of failure.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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If you thought that aggressive enforcement of copyright was only for the RIAA, think again. The ABA is just as intent about enforcing copyright interests in its ethics opinions. But whether you agree with the RIAA’s tactics or not, at least its copyright enforcement activity is intended to protect RIAA’s constituents; artists, musicians and record companies who lose money when their music is misappropriated. By contrast, the ABA’s policy of copyrighting ethics opinions — the source of authority that govern lawyers’ conduct and inform many state bodies regulating lawyers — and locking them behind a paywall hurts lawyers and the public.
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10.22.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Windows 8 will be unleashed, Kraken-like, on an awaiting public on Oct. 26, which is this Friday. For US$79.99 — let’s just round that up to US$80 — one can get the latest version of the Windows operating system which, by many reports, is not ideal yet not as bad a some of the other products Redmond has forced upon the public in the past.
A CrunchBang user with the handle merelyjim posted this thread on the CrunchBang forum under the title, “No thanks. I got Linux” where he thinks that this $80 can be better spent elsewhere — like on your current distro or your favorite FOSS program.
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Desktop
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I was already a big Chromebook fan before I got my hands on Samsung’s just-released ARM-powered Chromebook. Now, after a weekend with it and with its amazing price of $249 I think it’s going to find a few million more fans. Indeed, as of October 21st, the ARM-based Chromebook is Amazon’s best selling computer.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has reaffirmed that at this point he doesn’t intend to pull KVMTool into the mainline Linux kernel.
KVMTool is the lightweight QEMU-free native KVM tool. KVMTool has been developed by several open-source developers for nearly two years.
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For those not over in the Czech Republic this weekend for the Linux events going on here, here are some more data points for the AMD A10-5800K “Trinity” APU to look at under Linux.
I have already delivered many A10-5800K Linux benchmarks including articles looking closely at the integrated Radeon HD 7660D graphics on Linux and the AMD Trinity memory performance. I have also done initial tests of compiler tuning for the AMD Piledriver cores, a.k.a. the “Bulldozer 2″ micro-architecture.
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Earlier this month Samsung introduced a new Linux file-system, F2FS, that was designed for mobile devices with flash memory. Initial testing of F2FS yields very positive results against EXT4 and NILFS2.
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The company’s Robert Morell submitted a patch to remove the GPL license from the dma buffer interface in the Linux kernel so it can be used in Nvidia’s driver. Not everybody is happy, especially Alan Cox, who has been involved in Linux development since 1991 and was most influential when he maintained the version 2.2 of the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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For those wondering about the outcome of the Linux graphics driver development book that was worked on back in September prior to XDC2012, the book continues to be worked on a bit for those interested in reading it.
If you want to read this basic Linux graphics driver development book, it’s being housed in Git and can be seen from this Git repository. As can be seen from the log, the recent activity to it was pushed just 11 days ago.
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Intel Linux Driver Still Working To Address Tearing
Open-Source Intel developers have long been working towards a tear-free Linux desktop with proper vsync support. For Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware there’s still been some tearing issues, but they hope to soon finally have it solved.
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Wayland continues to be a topic that draws a lot of interest from Linux desktop end-users, based upon the turnout to a session regarding the Wayland/Weston Display Server Framework at LinuxDays in Prague.
Egbert Eich spoke on Saturday during the openSUSE Conference, which was co-hosted with LinuxDays in the Czech Republic. Egbert was speaking again about Wayland, just as he has done before at LinuxTag and other events.
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Applications
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A new release of GLX-Dock/Cairo-Dock is now available with new features, including better integration of the Ubuntu Unity desktop.
GLX-Dock 3.1 is the new release and it brings in better integration of Unity, all configuration windows have been merged into a single window, progress bars in several applets, the music applet can control players from the system tray, icon separation in the taskbar, improvements to the advanced configuration panel mode, a rewritten messaging menu, and various bug-fixes / enhancements.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I’ve always loved music – as do both of my parents. They have excellent, but divergent tastes in music. With my Mum I share a love of Sandy Denny, Jeff Lynne and George Harrison, with my father there was a shared affection for Eric Coates, Henry Hall and G. F. Handel. And when you mix the two together you get my love of Maestoso, Mike Oldfield, Kevin Ayers and Barclay James Harvest.
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Games
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id Software released “Doom 3 BFG Edition” this week, a revised version of the Doom 3 game that came eight years after the original release of Doom 3. The engine source-code for Doom 3 BFG, which is still a modified id Tech 4 engine, is already approved for open-sourcing.
Doom 3 BFG Edition features improved graphics, better sound, a checkpoint save system, support for 3D displays, and features various other refinements. Doom 3 BFG is still being powered by id Tech 4 and not the newer id Tech 5 engine as used by the Rage game and the forthcoming Doom 4 title.
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When online travel agent Orbitz admitted in June that it was steering Mac users on its site toward higher-priced hotel rooms, many were angry. But another company is finding that Mac users will pay more than Windows users for an identical product – even when allowed to choose how much they pay.
Orbitz wasn’t showing Mac users higher prices than it showed others for the same room: It found they would choose different, more expensive, products, spending up to US$30 more per night than PC users.
But it’s not just Mac users that outspend Windows users: Linux users do too, according to Humble Bundle, a company that organises time-limited sales of bundles of games, music and ebooks and splits the proceeds with their creators and with charities.
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Yesterday when mentioning that Doom 3 BFG Edition is already cleared for a GPL open-source release, I mentioned it was unlikely id Software would be providing a native Linux client for this brand new game. Those fears have now been confirmed with id Software saying they have no plans for a Linux version.
Doom 3 BFG Edition is a major overhaul of the original eight-year-old Doom 3 first person shooter. Doom 3 BFG is still based upon the id Tech 4 engine that is well supported under Linux and there was a great native Linux client for the original Doom 3, but now times are different at id Software.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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One of the events being co-hosted alongside LinuxDays is a Gentoo mini-conference. A session held this morning concerned the state of Linux 3D graphics drivers and gaming for Gentoo Linux.
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Red Hat Family
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LG played a prank on an elevator passengers to show how life-like are their IPS monitors. Companies do every kind of crazy things to showcase their products, so why are we covering it? You will enjoy even more when you see those scared passengers upon realization that GNU/Linux played a critical role in that prank.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If you take an interest in the Linux world you have probably already noticed that Ubuntu 12.10 has been released. The new version of the popular Linux distribution comes with a set of new and improved features, of which at least have been controversially discussed by the community. Integration of Amazon results in searches is probably the most controversial feature of this release. The feature pulls deals from Amazon when the search is being used, and money is earned for Ubuntu when users click on those results and start to buy on Amazon. The feature can be disabled in under the Privacy settings.
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Canonical sell a variety of Ubuntu-branded merchandise through their online store, but is the latest item – the “Ubuntu Speaker” – worthy of bearing the brand?
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So, yes, the device is obviously perfectly capable of running touch-based operating systems other than the default Android.
Of course, as Liliputing’s Brad Linder notes, this is hardly the first time we’ve seen Ubuntu or another Linux flavor running on an ARM-based mobile device. Indeed, the OS was booted up on Google’s Nexus S smartphone back in January 2011.
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Many users when they wished to upgrade their Ubuntu 12.04 up to 12.10, they encountered a problem concerning their graphics. This problem appeared only to AMD Radeon GPU users and especially to those who had Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 or HD 2000 graphics card.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Android
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While device manufacturers are trying hard to provide Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update to its newer products and letting the older products to get stuck with ICS or even Gingerbread, Motorola is trying to implement a different strategy. Instead of keeping the customers crying for the updates which they feel will take a significant time if they are to provide Jelly Bean to the older devices, Motorola is asking the customers to trade up to a newer Motorola Smartphone.
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While iPhone fans brag about their beloved devices, Android fans will grin knowingly and take comfort because there are several solid reasons to stick with — or switch to — their Google-powered phones.
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The experience is similar to PC and desktop, where users can switch workspaces, launch apps and do more. The experience is smooth, with no visible loss of speed, though Ubuntu is mostly targeted for desktop computers rather than tablets.
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The technology industry today is a fight between Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said Wednesday night at an event at the 92nd Street Y.
His interviewers, AllThingsD editors Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, pressed him on a name he omitted: Microsoft.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The online community is calling out for a tablet based on an open platform they can alter freely. The upcoming Vivaldi tablet, based around Linux, may be the first to answer this call, and the community response has been so large they had to close pre-orders.
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In many cases, open source security software can fill the gap when funding for heavy, commercially supported, closed-source security tools is hard to come by. For SMBs, having a few open source security tools in their back pocket to meet specific security challenges can be a godsend.
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It appears that Samsung is preparing to open-source some code pertaining to their Exynos ARM SoC.
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Events
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That was what you may have heard 10 months ago, if you listened to the rumormongers. Certainly there were a lot of rumors being spread. (Or should we call it FUD?) Whatever you call it, the whispers continued, in a negative propaganda campaign that the open source community should be ashamed to be associated with. Even just a few weeks ago I heard from one LibreOffice lead that he was certain that the Apache OpenOffice podling would never graduate and that we’d fail, give up, shut down the project and give the OpenOffice trademarks to LibreOffice. I’m sorry to disappoint, but this kind of FUD has an expiration date, and that date is now.
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While this was the first LinuxDays to happen and had high hopes considering it pulled in multiple distributions (aside from Gentoo and openSUSE, there were also Fedora and Ubuntu members too), the event itself turned out to be rather a disappointment; this just wasn’t my opinion but it seemed to be the consensus from most that I talked to as well.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s busy Firefox developer community submitted Bugzilla bug number 800,000 on October 10.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Just over one month after VirtualBox 4.2 arrived, Oracle has released the first update to its open source desktop virtualisation system, which should improve its overall stability and fix various regressions. Version 4.2.2 of VirtualBox includes fixes for the recent Linux 3.7-rc1 kernel (both for Linux hosts and guests) and addresses a problem that stopped virtual machines (VMs) from booting under Mac OS X 10.8.2.
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Just three weeks ago at JavaOne, Oracle was still saying that the JavaFX RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform would become fully available as open source software by the end of the year. Now, JavaFX project architect Richard Bair has adjusted that schedule and moved the release date to February 2013.
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CMS
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It is the era of open source content management systems. The rise of open source software is like a boon for all middle or small scale business organization, because of the advanced age of internet. In this age of internet, a website needs to be strong enough for gaining the optimum attention of widely spread online community.
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Education
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Business
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Business intelligence software continues to be a hot market in this difficult economic climate. This type of software takes a company’s raw data from its databases and turns it into signposts and mappings that helps firms make better business decision-making with the objective of generating additional revenue.
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Online backup provider Carbonite has announced that it is acquiring open source backup company Zmanda and will incorporate Zmanda’s offerings into its Carbonite Business products. The acquisition will see the end of the Zmanda name.
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Semi-Open Source
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As some more benchmarks from the Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-100 ARM Server — a.k.a. the “5-Watt Linux Server” — to share this weekend, here is a ARMv7 Cortex-A9 GCC compiler performance comparison.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The public sector’s global use of open source technology is growing.
Famed tech speaker Clay Shirky has been filmed for a TED talk saying that Germany is now publishing its laws on the GitHub online open source hosting repository and that the US state of Utah is also making its legislation available in Github so that individuals can see how the laws are being amended over time.
So as we see positive signs here in the UK that the public sector is beginning to embrace open source, where should we look to for pointers?
The choice of the Drupal Content Management System (CMS), an open source solution, as the platform for the Cabinet Office and the London.gov.uk site is a case in point, as is the Department of Health’s use of open source to work with EU partners.
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Asia’s public sector agencies welcome the cost-effectiveness and customization abilities with open source software (OSS), but emphasize proprietary software should still be considered during procurement decision-making.
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Since the landing of NASA’s rover, Curiosity, on Mars on August 11th (Earth time), I have been following the incredible wealth of images that have been flowing back. I am awestruck by the breadth and beauty of the them.
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Openness/Sharing
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One tiny flaw in one gene in one little girl. That explains why Beatrice Rienhoff, 8, is so lean and leggy.
But it took the communal contributions of many researchers — in an open-ended, open-source scientific search, led by her father — to solve Bea’s singular mystery.
Most medical research is secret and proprietary. At Saturday’s Open Science Summit in Mountain View, however, Bea’s father, Hugh, described a needle-in-a-haystack quest made possible by the pitchforks of so many.
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An open-source robot, size compatible with the RoboCup Humanoid League’s Teen Size class, has been launched by the University of Bonn.
It comes from the team, led by Professor Sven Behnke, that won the Louis Vuitton Cup for “Best Humanoid” in this year’s RoboCup and is based on the same NimbRo model with its distinctive white head.
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Open Access/Content
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For one day, Minnesota’s Office of Higher Education felt the Internet’s indignation as word spread that it was cracking down on free online college courses offered through Coursera and other websites. The bizarre bureaucratic decision was first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education on Thursday morning, and it became Internet-wide news after my blog post about it Thursday evening went viral, thanks in part to the user-generated news board Reddit.
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Programming
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OpenGL support is becoming an increasing hard requirement on the Linux desktop. Even if your hardware comes up short, more desktops are requiring GL support, which means falling back to the CPU-based LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver.
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GitHub, the social coding service, has been plagued by two days of distributed denial-of-service attacks. No report yet on who is behind the attacks or why, but it must be some sort of geek infighting, because GitHub is the preferred clubhouse of the open source community. Not exactly the enemy of Guy Fawkes. As web designer Freddy Montes put it on Twitter, “DDOS attack to @github is like hiting your mom on Mother’s Day.”
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Git maintainer Junio C Hamano has announced the latest feature release of the open source version control system. Git 1.8.0 includes several new features, refined command syntax and a large number of fixes since version 1.7.12, which was the last feature release of the software from 19 August.
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Finance
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A judge refused to dismiss a $1.07 billion lawsuit against Goldman Sachs Group that accuses it of selling risky debt that it intended to lose value to an Australian hedge fund, causing the fund to become insolvent.
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Privacy
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Cloud services are great, but they pose a number of challenges for users. For example, users may legitimately fear that vendors will “lock-in” their users by holding user data hostage, forcing users to keep using their services instead of better competitors because it’s too painful to forego or transfer the existing data. To ameliorate this concern, there has been a push to demand that cloud service providers offer users a data export feature that makes it easier to take their data to competitive vendors. For example, earlier this year the European Union proposed revising its data privacy rules to require mandatory data portability (see Article 18). However, those favoring the proliferation of data export tools should consider another audience that will find the tools quite useful: litigators seeking to do discovery of cloud users.
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Workplace computers contain so much personal information nowadays that employees have a legitimate expectation of privacy in using them, the Supreme Court of Canada said in a major ruling Friday.
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Civil Rights
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The police have been going through a rough patch recently. First they were implicated in the phone-hacking scandal – though they managed to escape most of the blame when we collectively came to the surprising conclusion that it was more serious for tabloid journalists to neglect the public interest than officers of the crown. But while they deflected a lot of that responsibility, their attempts to deflect it over Hillsborough have been catastrophically counterproductive. And as senior officers have been caught dining with Murdochs or maligning the dead, officers on the ground have been getting shot and called plebs. Or not called plebs, depending on who you believe.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In a welcome gesture on October 16, Dr. Richard Stallman made a public note supporting the Swedish Pirate Party’s position regarding trademarks, patent monopolies, and copyright monopolies.
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We’ve already seen newspapers in Belgium and Germany argue that Google needs to pay them for linking to them in Google News. And we just wrote about how French newspapers were looking for the same ridiculous handout. But a bunch of Brazilian newspapers have taken the issue even further, and colluded to all pull out of Google News together (well, 90% of all newspapers in Brazil). They’re demanding that Google pay them to link to them. Of course, I’m curious if any of those newspapers has ever hired an SEO expert to try to get them better search rankings…
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Copyrights
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YouTube’s bias toward claimants; the lack of practical means for ordinary users to fight back realistically against false claims; the tightening of automatic detection systems with an attendant increase in false positives; the lack of meaningful appeal and escalation mechanisms; and the failure to incorporate a sufficient range of signals, extenuating circumstances, and associated proportionality into penalties, are rapidly turning YouTube into a very unfriendly place for anyone but the media elite.
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A rumour is circulating that at the next negotiating round on the Treaty of the Visually Impaired at the World Intellectual Property Organization the members of the European Blind Union will attend the meeting with black pirate flags and one pirate patch over each eye.
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Las Vegas copyright company Righthaven LLC appears eager to comply with the latest court order entered against it Tuesday, as noncompliance could cost its CEO a fine of $500 per day.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen in Las Vegas, ruling during a hearing, ordered Righthaven to turn over to a creditor hard drives from its computers so the creditor could determine if Righthaven has any assets that can be liquidated for the benefit of Righthaven’s creditors.
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A few years ago, we were surprised to find out that the judge in The Pirate Bay case in Sweden had ties to the copyright lobby pushing the case. There were additional issues, after it was discovered that at least one of the lay judges (sort of like a jury, but not quite) on the case was employed by Spotify, and might have business reasons not to be completely objective. Even more ridiculous? When the court reviewed whether or not there was bias, the original judge making the review ended up having to be removed… for bias, after it came out at she, too, was involved with the same pro-copyright groups that the original judge was associated with. While the courts eventually said there was no meaningful bias, a new high profile case in Sweden may reopen the issue.
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10.20.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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This could be the best PC on the planet for some people:
* It’s highly mobile and, folded, protects its screen,
* It will last 6h on a small battery, 2 cells,
* keyboard, 2gB RAM, 16gB SSD, Wifi, and HDMI out
* It has a dual-core Xynos ARM CPU clocked at 1.7gHz
* It’s Chrome OS, not that other OS, and
* If you do everything on the web, it works for you.
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Google has announced the launch of a new Chromebook laptop running Chrome OS, the company’s minimalist Linux-based operating system built around the Chrome web browser. Unlike previous Chromebooks, which were all powered by x86 Intel Atom or Celeron CPUs, the new laptop uses an ARM-based processor, specifically the dual-core Samsung Exynos 5250 system-on-a-chip (SoC) running at 1.7GHz.
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Server
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Notice that the rate of growth of GNU/Linux is nearly double that of that other OS and at that rate,
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Ben Skeggs of Red Hat pushed a number of new DRM commits into the Nouveau driver development repository today, including new support for Z compression.
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The Unigine Engine has been revised with a number of new features and impressive capabilities. One of several new features is “real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics”, which may be a mouthful but is for delivering even more beautiful graphics.
About the real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics, Unigine Corp says, “A new, real-time global illumination based on precomputed spherical harmonics allows to render high-detail diffuse lighting with interreflections and angle-dependent specular highlights. It is fully interactive: soft environment light illuminates both static geometry in the scene and dynamic objects moving around it…The stunning lightmap-like quality is achieved by using automatically generated LightProb…Global illumination is available across all APIs and is well scalable performance-wise… As you can see, GI makes a huge difference: it brings a truly photorealistic visual quality to a scene.”
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The YellowDog (Yum) package manager for Fedora will soon have an successor marked as the next Generation Yum using hawkey/libsolv (maintain by SUSE) for backend.
DNF a Yum fork, promises better performance, easier bindings to other languages other than Python (Yum) and a clear package manager API. This will benefit PackageKit and therefore Gnome Software, at least in a Fedora installation.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Linux Mint team has released a bug fix of Cinnamon desktop and Nemo file browser. This is a maintenance release, which means no new features have been added, but a variety of bigs have been fixed which will make the desktop experience even smoother. Some of the major bugs that have been fixed are:
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Ubuntu GNOME Remix, a Linux distribution which aims to become an official Ubuntu flavour, uses GNOME Shell as the default “shell” and tries to provide a “mostly pure GNOME desktop experience built from the Ubuntu repositories”.
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If you are a longtime Windows user, then switching to Linux is quite a challenging task. Not that Linux is difficult or something, it’s just that many users get perplexed as to which distribution to choose. This is actually where the problem begins for most users. They go to various sites and forums, ask for questions and different people recommend various distributions.
That said, it’s quite obvious that most of the time new users go for Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution at the moment. They choose it either because one of their friends recommended it to them or they heard something good about it from news, blogs, or forums. In both cases, it’s evident that Ubuntu has been, and will be the first choice for most of the new users.
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Ubuntu’s latest release and controversies have dominated the news this week, but it wasn’t the only distribution making announcements. Fedora 18 is running behind schedule, but developers are already looking ahead. The Mandriva foundation has a name and Mageia has officially changed its schedule.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Leave it to Ubuntu/Canonical’s Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life Mark Shuttleworth to completely ruin a perfectly good release day for Ubuntu 12.10 and its arguably superior derivatives like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu and Edubuntu.
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No matter how you got this news, what I want to announce is the same: I want to stop the development and maintenance of Ubuntu Tweak. This means you will not be able to use “Apps” (Since it is a web service), I will not response for the bug report, the last commit of the code will be: Add cache support for Apps, only available in Ubuntu 12.10, so sad…
You may ask why I made this decision to stop the development of Ubuntu Tweak, I may write 10,000 words to describe how I start this project, how I feel happy from this project, how I feel bad from this project…But I just want to say: If making free software is not free any more, why still doing this?
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For those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu Linux 12.10 versus Microsoft Windows 7 when using the same system and the Catalyst graphics driver, here are new Phoronix benchmarks of an AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card when running a variety of OpenGL workloads from Ubuntu 12.10, Kubuntu 12.10 (the KDE desktop version of Ubuntu 12.10 to avoid the Unity desktop overhead), and Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64.
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Canonical released Ubuntu Linux 12.10 yesterday, which brought tighter integration with Amazon in system search results, a move that has raised some criticism from the community. According to Canonical, Amazon integration in Dash is something users expect and the firm will integrate other online services in future Ubuntu releases.
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Ubuntu Linux 12.10 includes innovations such as document search capabilities that allow users to easily find documents whether they are stored on their computers or in the cloud.
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While the larger Ubuntu community was busy downloading, installing and enjoying the latest edition of Ubuntu yesterday, a post by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth ruffled some feathers.
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Popular Ubuntu configuration utility Ubuntu Tweak has officially ended support for its long-running project today. Ubuntu Tweak has been a mainstay application on newbie machines since the days of Dapper Drake, and between then and now has gain a lot of respect within the community regardless of being merely a front-end for already trivial tasks.
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In the wake of the release of Ubuntu 12.10, Mark Shuttleworth has announced a new style of development for Ubuntu 13.04, the next major version of the Linux distribution. Referring to “a few items with high ‘tada!’ value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled,” Shuttleworth said that there will be a new process where the new features will not be talked about “until we think they are ready to celebrate”. Before that time the company says it will only engage with “contributing community members that have established credibility”.
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The Ubuntu Manual Team has announced that the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal version of the Ubuntu Manual, “Getting Started with Ubuntu 12.10″PDF has been published. The 143 page manual provides an introduction to Ubuntu covering topics such as how to try out a LiveCD, how to install the distribution, using the Ubuntu desktop, working with Ubuntu, managing hardware and peripherals, managing software and updates, and offering pointers for further research and reading.
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In announcing Ubuntu 13.04 is the Raring Ringtail, Mark Shuttleworth encouraged attendees going to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen to bring along their Nexuis 7 tablet. At that point it could be deduced they would be bringing Ubuntu Linux to this popular Google tablet, but now it’s confirmed.
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You’re listening to your tunes or watching a video on your Android phone and you’re not too happy with the tinny, low audio. So you wander over to your new Ubuntu Boombero Speaker and place your device on top and suddenly Mr Bombastic is filling the room with big base vibes. Well now it’s a reality.
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Flavours and Variants
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Yesterday marked the release of Ubuntu 12.10, the latest version of the most popular Linux distribution. What’s interesting now is that GNOME and Ubuntu are back together after 18 months.
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The first stable release of Ubuntu Gnome Remix has arrived with a lot of promises for long-time Gnome users. Ever since Ubuntu switched to Unity, it became harder for Gnome users to get the pure Gnome 3.x experience on top of their preferred operating system. Quite a lot of users moved to other distributions and we saw the rise of derivatives like Linux Mint which seems to have become the favorite distro of seasoned GNU/Linux journalists like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
As a long time Gnome+Ubuntu user, I was personally excited about this release. However, before I picked this review, I reminded myself that ‘this is the first release of Ubuntu Gnome Remix’ so treat it as the first release. At time tend to start judging things in their beta or alpha stages, which is simply unfair. So, before we bring UGR under the microscope keep in mind that this is the very first release and Gnome 3.x is still going through heavy development so my criticism of this release should be taken too seriously.
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The first generation all-in-one Internet TV, Boxee tried to do everything you could do with TV and the Internet…and it wasn’t very good at doing anything. Oh sure, if you put in the sweat equity you could do great things with it. At day’s end, though, the Boxee was a device for hardcore Internet TV geeks. The new Boxee, which will be available in some U.S. markets on November 1st for $99 and a monthly $14.99 service fee, also tries to do a lot, but it’s meant for Joe TV-Watcher instead of Joe Techie.
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The differentiator for the Raspberry Pi mini computer is price. It’s not the most powerful single-board computer around but it’s not trying to be. The platform-makers’ big idea was to make a device that kids could learn to code on — meaning it needed to be powerful enough to do cool stuff like play BlueRay-quality video, but cheap enough that kids wouldn’t have to share it with the rest of the family. And at $35 for the current model B — and $25 for the forthcoming model A (which has less memory, fewer USB ports and no Ethernet) — it’s already got a disruptive price-tag.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony has been generously providing ICS updates to its Xperia line up of phones, even the low range and older ones. To make things merrier for Xperia owners, Sony has shared some details regarding upgrade plans for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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With the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Google Nexus already firmly entrenched, and Apple potentially lining up to lay waste to all competitors, it’s certainly a curious time to be launching the Iconia Tab A110. Acer can point out that unlike the Kindle Fire HD and also Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD, the A110 will run Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android. It also comes with an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and a microSD card slot, which you might need because the A110 only includes 8GB of on-board storage.
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Like other Linux distributions, we take a range of upstream components and assemble them together into an integrated system. Throughout this integration work our community actively participates in a range of different areas – development, testing, bug-fixing, translations, documentation, and more.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has been steadily moving forward with its Boot to Gecko, Firefox OS and smartphone initiatives, and now the company’s long awaited app store is available in a preview edition for Android developers. A Mozilla blog post on The Future of Firefox includes instructions for how Android users can get the preview edition of Firefox Marketplace through Mozilla’s Aurora channel. This app store will play a key role in Mozilla’s serious efforts to become entrenched in the world of smartphones and open mobile operating systems, even though it is Android-focused for the moment.
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Today, a powerful new Popcorn Maker demo makes its debut on TED.com, showcasing Popcorn’s potential to change the way the world tells stories on the web.
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SaaS
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It never fails: stand by the computer service desk in any retail store and the stories you overhear make the repair desk the technology equivalent of the local tavern.
If something’s gone wrong with someone else’s computer, you’re bound to hear about it. And, oftentimes, you’ll hear how supposedly protective measures to help safeguard your computing life have been circumvented or defeated.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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At the LibreOffice Conference, currently taking place in Berlin, The Document Foundation has released version 3.5.7 of its open source LibreOffice productivity suite, fixing more than 50 bugs. The seventh maintenance update to the 3.5.x branch corrects problems that caused the application to crash, including one that occurred when pasting data into more than one sheet in the Calc spreadsheet program. A number of bugs related to RTF and SmartArt import, ODF and DOC export, and program crashes when using tables were also fixed.
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Healthcare
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The nonprofit Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) organization recently held its first annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop. Seong K. Mun, PhD, President and CEO of OSEHRA, talked about goals for the workshop and OSEHRA in general before it began. This was first time that the OSEHRA community to meet and develop their skills with open source health IT training and educational workshops.
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Business
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Open source services provider Sirius Corporation has provided a combination of OpenSource and proprietary software for Ysgol Maesydderwen school, near Swansea.
Funded by Powys County Council, the Welsh school received installation of a new infrastructure, new desktops and laptops for both pupils and staff and 100 iPads for class activities and projects.
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Funding
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Quadcopters are all the rage right now for amateur drone projects and hobby flying, and it’s no wonder; a quadcopter has outstanding speed, maneuverability, and payload capacity. They are as fun to fly as they are useful, but unfortunately they tend to be something else: prohibitively expensive.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As those who have read my previous entries know, I quit my job of three years as senior software engineer at Creative Commons to pursue the free software project I’ve been running, MediaGoblin. I’d explain a bit further what MediaGoblin is but actually there’s no reason to: we’re in the middle of running a fundraising campaign, and we put a video together that explains everything wonderfully already. So what you really ought to do is click through to:
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Public Services/Government
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It’s another of controversial tenders tracked down by Foundation of Free and Open Source Software experts in the scope of “Monitoring of public procurement for software and hardware in units of government and local administration and intervention in case of detecting irregularities”. This time their attention was brought by tender for “Equipment for Regional Centre for Transferring Modern Technologies in Mielec” issued by District Starosty. Announcement has been issued in Official Journal of the European Union – TED: 292946-2012. Estimated value of the tender is over 200 thousand €. Time limit for receipt of tenders is due on 22.10.2012. Documentation of this tender is available here: District Starosty in Mielec.
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Openness/Sharing
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Nevermind Apple’s maps misfire, the free, volunteer-made OpenStreetMap, may end up reigning supreme anyway, as companies increasingly choose it for map data over Google. But as the project grows, it’s becoming harder and harder for its members to agree on what direction to go in next. Part 1 in a 3-part series.
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Programming
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GitHub, a leading repository of open-source code, has been hit by two days of denial-of-service attacks.
The attacks, which shut the service down temporarily on Thursday, and which slowed it down today before things returned to normal, were an odd turn of events for a site that’s a favorite among coders, and an increasingly popular place to find programming talent.
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Health/Nutrition
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Copyrights
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The French seem to have an appetite for regulating the Internet, and for going after Google in particular. A new proposed law would force Google to make payments when French media show up in news searches; but Google has responded, in a letter to French ministers, that it “cannot accept” such a solution and would simply remove French media sites from its searches.
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10.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Google is releasing it’s latest Chromebook next Monday for the savoury price of $249.
This time round it has an ARM chip instead of Intel (lower cost?) is powered by a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual Processor (making it the very first device to use ARM’s new Cortex-A15 architecture) and is filled to the brim with everything Google.
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Chromebooks are not for everybody, it’s important to make that clear. Folks who need certain programs may find being constrained to web apps in Chrome to be a liability. I work online in Chrome on every system I use so the Chromebook is tailored for my work routine.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Earlier this week I posted new Reiser4 file-system benchmarks that compared the non-mainline file-system against EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS. Continuing in the Linux file-system performance theme, in this article are more Btrfs benchmarks from that same system but when using the early Linux 3.7 development kernel and trying out different Btrfs mount/tuning options.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA has issued a stable Linux graphics driver update in the 304.xx series to address outstanding bugs.
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Intel admits that it botched the early Haswell Linux support, which has been worked on publicly since March although the actual Haswell hardware won’t begin shipping until H1’2013. Intel has had the support now within their DDX driver, Mesa, and Intel DRM driver, but the DRM driver is still being problematic.
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The X.Org Foundation has finally updated their Wiki page to reflect that they aren’t only about the X Window System.
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Two patches from Intel’s Ian Romanick for their open-source Mesa DRI driver will now enable S3TC extensions always plus floating-point textures. These two features previously were not enabled by default out of patent fears.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In Basque (the primary language of Bilbao), the letter K is used to change verb case and also to make plurals of some words. For the hard C sound, Basque uses the letter K.
Lots of Basque words include K: Kaixo (hello), teKnologiaK (technologies), Kalitatea (quality), BerriKuntza (innovation), asKatasuna (freedom), Kultura (culture), Kidetasuna (fellowship), Komunitatea (community), esKuluze (generous), etorKizuna (future), eusKera (Basque language). The letter K is at home in Euskal Herria (Basque Country).
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New Releases
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Last month, during my experiments with Linux distros, I mentioned that on Snowlinux 3 Crystal, touchpad doesn’t work. Even I couldn’t get the touchpad settings on my Asus Eee-PC 1101HA. Possibly, the developers too noted the same and last week, the updated Snowlinux 3.1 with touchpad support got released. I did a live-boot on my Asus K54C laptop with 2.2 GHz Intel 2nd Gen Ci3 processor and 2 GB DDR3 RAM and later installed on the same.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat will equip students of Singapore Management University with skills and certification through the Red Hat Academy programme.
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Red Hat will equip students of Singapore Management University with skills and certification through the Red Hat Academy programme.
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Red Hat has released the third beta of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 platform, expected to be generally available later this year.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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There’s much to admire in Canonical’s Quantal Quetzal, which continues to refine and improve the Unity desktop, but you’d be forgiven if you missed the positives thanks to the late injection of a little Bezos since Ubuntu 12.04.
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The big day has arrived — in the Ubuntu world, at least. The latest version of the operating system, 12.10, has officially hit the virtual shelves. In case you missed, here’s what you can look forward to — or plan to complain about, as the case may be — in the new release.
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The dash to Copenhagen combined with a dash across the Atlantic has me righteously ramfeezled, but the roisterous reception we got at the OpenStack summit (congrats, stackers, on a respectable razzmatazz of rugible cloud enthusiasm) made it worthwhile. A quick shout out to the team behind the Juju gooooey, that puts a whole new face on cloud agility – rousing stuff.
Nevertheless, it’s way past time to root our next rhythmic release in some appropriate adjective.
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In a twist that is sure to raise eyebrows and cause no end of neckbeard scratching, Canonical founder and Ubuntu’s de facto spiritual leader, Mark Shuttleworth, has announced that key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret.
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Ubuntu 12.04 and Unity interface has been criticized for poor gaming performance as many users were finding higher frame rate in 3D games while using other desktop environments like Gnome Shell, Unity2D and Classic Gnome.
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Ubuntu 12.10 has arrived; the first major version of Ubuntu since the release of the well-received Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. At the start of the release cycle, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth defined quality as the watchword for Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”. Fabian Scherschel looks at the new desktop release to see how well his definition stood up to six months of development.
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The move, which he writes about on his blog, will sure to create a firestorm in the Ubuntu community, which has in the past rained criticism on Unity, the interface Canonical developed for Ubuntu two years ago. You can read the full story about Unity here. Ubuntu is built on the Debian Linux distribution.
The news comes on the day that Canonical introduced Ubuntu 12.10, with a number of cool enhancements that were all developed in the open.
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First up, Google unveiled a $250 chromebook running Arm, rather than the X86 that most of them have been so far. The 11.6″ device will have 6.5 hours of battery life, weigh 2.5 lbs, have a 100Gb hard drive plug Google Drive integration, and an HDMI port. What more could you want from a $250 device?
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Canonical has released both the server and desktop editions of 12.10 Ubuntu, which offers a glimpse of how this Linux distribution will evolve in the next few years.
Ubuntu 12.10 “effectively sets out the future direction of how Ubuntu will develop over the next two years,” said Steve George, who is Canonical’s vice president for communications and products. “The Internet has become an intrinsic part of user’s experience so we’ve been focusing on integrating online and offline services.”
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Canonical is bowed but undaunted after the bashing it took from Penguins over its recent integration of Amazon searches with its Linux desktop.
The company has promised further integration between web and desktop as it today released Ubuntu 12.10.
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Dear Softpedians and Ubuntu fanatics all over the world, we are proud to announce (yes, we are the first again) today, October 18th, that the final and stable release of Ubuntu 12.10 is here, available on mirrors worldwide (see the download links at the end of the article).
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Canonical has just released the new version of Ubuntu 12.10, also known as Quantal Quetzal. If you decide to download the new version from Ubuntu’s official webpage, you will notice a rather provocative message. Above the download button, a slogan appears urging the users to install Ubuntu 12.10 instead of Microsoft Windows 8, not because of Ubuntu’s superiority but just to avoid the drama of Metro UI. In a matter of fact, it says “Avoid the pain of Windows 8. The all-new Ubuntu 12.10 is out now“.
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After yesterday publishing the first extensive benchmark results for the Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 ARM Servers in the form of the 1.1GHz and 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 nodes running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.10, here are more benchmarks to share today from the “5-Watt ARM Server” on Linux.
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I am not going to talk about whether that message was OK or not as Mark Shuttleworth clarified “That banner was totally un-Ubuntu and was changed as soon as someone senior saw it. Apologies.”
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Some features of Ubuntu 13.04 won’t be openly developed by the Ubuntu Linux community but rather in a more covert approach by Canonical and select Ubuntu developers. Mark Shuttleworth calls these new features “some sexy 13.04 surprises” but he was sure to reinforce that the overall Ubuntu Linux development approach isn’t changing.
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Flavours and Variants
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Xubuntu, the Xfce Ubuntu flavor, has been released today along with the other Ubuntu flavours. It’s a great alternative for those who do not want to use GNOME Shell or Unity and prefer a more traditional layout.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Then what about the Kyocera Rise, priced at $149 and a service plan from Public Mobile starting at $35 per month with unlimited talk, text, data and Siren Music. (It allows users to download music without per-song costs or limits on data usage and is available on the go with no computers, no syncing or extra devices required.)
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We’ve known it was coming for months, but the Acer Iconia Tab A110 finally has a due date and a pricetag. It’s going on sale October 30th, and it’ll only cost you $230. That puts it squarely in Nexus 7 territory.
But what does that extra $30 get you? Well, more. And less.
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Nagging questions shadow the impending launch of Windows 8, threatening to scuttle Microsoft’s plans to reinvent itself for the age of mobility. Will desktop users graciously accept the redesigned Modern interface? Will the Windows Store have enough apps to entice would-be Surface RT buyers? Can Windows 8 breathe life into sagging PC sales?
Microsoft’s future success depends on its ability to make serious, quantifiable, no-nonsense headway in the mobile market, but it’s not the only company with a massive stake in the ultimate fate of Windows 8. The new operating system will also have a major impact on Google. Just look at the list of Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet and hybrid partners—Samsung, Asus, Toshiba, and the rest. They all make Android tablets, too.
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(Unfortunately the video I recorded on the day was too dark and difficult to hear, so I figured there was no point in uploading it. Sorry about that!)
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Open Office has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.
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The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), which was officially launched in June, has signed an agreementPDF with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to settle a dispute over its Open Source Hardware (OSHW) logo. Following concerns that the logo OSHWA was using to denote the open hardware nature of devices was too similar to the OSI’s trademark, both organisations worked out an agreement that clarifies the difference between the logos and the areas they are applied in.
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In the past, we’ve had people pull code right out of our master branch. There were a few problems with this technique for deployment; pulling out of the active branch of development meant that a podmin had no idea as to how stable the latest code for a pod could be. Secondly, we think that setting up a pod should be easier, as people shouldn’t have to mess around with a terminal and lots of config files to enjoy the benefits of a decentralized social web.
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Events
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SaaS
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Databases
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10gen, the company set up by the creators of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, has been on a roll recently, creating business partnerships with numerous companies, making it a hot commercial proposition without creating any apparent friction with its open source community. So what has brought MongoDB to the fore?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Today the Apache Software Foundation announced that Apache OpenOffice ™ is a top level project, and I really wish to congratulate with the Apache OpenOffice Community to have achieved this important milestone.
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What’s a conference without a release announcement? The Document Foundation didn’t find out today because it announced the release of LibreOffice 3.5.7. 3.5.7 is “the seventh and possibly last version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family, which solves additional bugs and regressions, and offers stability improvements over LibreOffice 3.5.6.”
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Oracle chief operating officer Mark Hurd says the company really is enthusiastic about open source, big Data and the cloud
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Oracle customers are facing a big data problem, and Hadoop is the answer – reluctant as Oracle is to admit it.
Speaking at the Oracle product and strategy update in London yesterday, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that the company’s customers are growing their data up to 40% a year, putting tremendous pressure on IT budgets.
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There was a time when OpenOffice was where I spent a good chunk of my work day. Those days are now in the past, as I’ve moved on and so has every single major Linux distribution. We’ve all moved to a faster more agile open source office suite. We have moved to LibreOffice.
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Education
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While Thomas Edison is often lauded as the most prolific American inventor, his mother, Nancy Edison, and how she fostered an open education and an open mind in her son is often overlooked. When a headmaster labelled Edison as being ‘addled,’ slow, and unteachable, his mother disagreed and decided to withdraw her son from school and teach him at home. She knew her son was a bright, curious, creative child who thought divergently yet was often disorganized, disruptive, and hyperactive; today he would most likely be diagnosed as having ADHD.
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Healthcare
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Business
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I’ve been updating the computational analytics platform on my Wintel notebook the last few days. I’d fallen behind several versions on each of the main tools and decided to get them all back in synch at once. The good news for hackers like me is that there are so many freely-available, open source analytics products to choose from. The bad news is that it takes a focused effort to stay up to date on the latest largesse.
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Funding
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International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (Icfoss) at Technopark will now support pre-incubation programmes.
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BSD
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The developers at the NetBSD Project have released version 6.0 of NetBSD, a major update to their BSD-based operating system that includes a wide range of upgrades and enhancements. Among the notable changes are scalability improvements on multi-core systems, support for thread-local storage (TLS) and a new Logical Volume Manager (LVM).
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Developers from ARM Holdings have published their initial ARMv8 patch for the GNU Compiler Collection for the 32-bit “AArch32″ compiler port.
ARM developers had already been working on their 64-bit ARM / AArch64 compiler port, which was officially approved just days ago. The latest ARM open-source compiler patch is ARMv8 in the AArch32 port with basic functionality.
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Project Releases
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Version 2.0.4 of the VLC Media Player has been released by the VideoLAN project. While the minor version number change may not reflect it, the new release is described as a major update by its developers as it fixes numerous regressions and introduces support for the IETF’s Opus lossy audio compression format. It also brings several other improvements and platform-specific changes.
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Public Services/Government
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France’s Ministry for Economy and Finance recently awarded a support contract for open source, worth between 15 to 19 million euro. The four-year contract was won by a consortium comprising 25 companies, including many small and medium sized enterprises. “It is the biggest such contract so far”, announces the company heading the consortium, French open source IT service provider, Linagora.
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The United Kingdom’s government unveiled its new central services and information website, GOV.UK, this week Tuesday. The site is completely built on open source, saving the government some 70 million GBP (about 86 million euro) compared to the previous site, according to Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office. He expects the site to achieve further savings “as more departments and agencies move to on the platform”.
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Programming
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I recently sat down with Chris DiBona to talk about the 15th anniversary of Slashdot. In addition to discussing the joys of heading an email campaign against spamming politicians, and the perils of throwing a co-worker’s phone into a bucket, even if you think that bucket is empty, we talked about the growth of Google Summer of Code. Below you’ll find his story of how a conversation about trying to get kids to be more active with computers in the summer has led to the release of 55 million lines of code.
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Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn’t do jack. If you want to know who is responsible for the modern world you have to look at the people working at Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s. The people who created UNIX. It was from that invention that we have the modern world. UNIX led to Linux which led to Android. UNIX led to the BSD family of operating systems which led to Apple OSX. UNIX led to the C programming language in which most system-level software today is written. Ever wonder why URLs use forward slashes? It’s because UNIX was instrumental in the creation of the Internet.
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Security
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Finance
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On Monday morning, Grand Central Publishing will release Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, a memoir penned by former Goldman employee Greg Smith, based on his op-ed for the New York Times entitled, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.” When Smith’s piece came out last March, few if any senior executives inside the bank were pleased, in part because it came as a total shock. No one at Goldman had known Smith was planning to have his resignation letter printed in the paper. No one had known he had issues with the firm’s supposedly new and singular focus on making money at all costs. No one, at least at the top, even knew who Greg was. Obviously all this left the bank at a competitive disadvantage in terms of fighting back and for the time being, Smith appeared to be handing Goldman its ass. Getting cocky, even. Perhaps thinking to himself, “When all of this is over, I could be named the new CEO of Goldman Sachs.” As anyone who has ever won a bronze medal in ping-pong at the Maccabiah Games will tell you, however, winners are determined by best of threes. And that anyone going to to the table with Goldman Sachs should be prepared for things to get ugly.
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In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.
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Censorship
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One of the great things about online news sites is that they are so easy to set up: you don’t need a printing press or huge numbers of journalists — you just start posting interesting stories to the Web and you are away.
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Privacy
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Lately, Mike Janke has been getting what he calls the “hairy eyeball” from international government agencies. The 44-year-old former Navy SEAL commando, together with two of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, was always bound to ruffle some high-level feathers with his new project—a surveillance-resistant communications platform that makes complex encryption so simple your grandma can use it.
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Copyrights
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Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (shown above in his Twitter image) is out of jail and ready to start his next venture—but from the looks of things it’s not much different than his last.
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The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a copyright case later this month that could have serious unintended consequences for the nation’s art museums: If a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals is upheld, every museum in the U.S. that exhibits modern art created overseas could potentially be infringing copyright.
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