● 11.28.10

● Links 28/11/2010: Pwnage Radio Launched, Fedora 3-14 Benchmarks

Posted in News Roundup at 7:14 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• This week I’ve had two more colleague that want Linux also. Both with XP. I guess it was because they saw a not experienced user doing so well with Linux. Soon both computer will soon boot Ubuntu instead of XP.

• I wanted to post about that, but I was preparing my yearly report for the Professor Assembly and, therefore, had no time… but it occurred to me that I would use the chance to contribute by showing all professors how a computer running on Linux works. So, although they had a Vista 7 Starter laptop ready for the reports, I asked permission to use my modest netbook running Mandriva.

• All my colleagues displayed their reports using the Vista 7 laptop and one professor suffered the embarrassment of MS PowerPoint 2007 not responding as she expected. I cannot say that was an “atypical behavior”: all of us have seen something like that happen time and again. I felt bad for her due to the fact that she told me that she slept till late because she invested a lot of time to create a beautiful PowerPoint presentation for the occasion.

• When my turn came, I had my netbook ready and woke it up from hibernation (Yes! It DOES work in Mandriva 2010.1), unplugged the VGA cable from the laptop and plugged it to my netbook. As a good OS should behave, Mandriva picked up the signal and let me configure the display in a matter of five seconds. The picking up of the signal made me a little anxious because, prior to the meeting, they had to change the projector because 7 Starter did not let them change the display size of the screen (How about that!) and I had everything ready with the previous device.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Things to expect on Pwnage Radio

• - Discussion of Free Software and Open Source products of personal interest to me.

• - Discussion of Apple, Steve Jobs, Oracle and Microsoft.

• - Discussion about the Fedora Project and other Fedora related news.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Being brought up from the discussion surrounding the RadeonHD driver being vandalized, which wound up just being a prank by two X.Org developers to torment one of the former RadeonHD developers, was a discussion why more companies don’t contribute back to X.Org. Do companies think the X.Org code is too hard? That it’s not worth the time? Is it all politics?

• Here’s the beginning of this new thread. Reasons expressed by other developers range from Microsoft F.U.D. to vendors just wishing X.Org would go away, provide the vendors with a competitive advantage by not pushing their patches upstream, to their code just being in a poor and unreliable state. There’s also the matter that with the modularized X.Org state, it’s easier to keep and maintain an out-of-tree DDX driver than it is maintaining an out-of-tree kernel driver on Linux.

• Wayland has received quite a number of new patches in the past month from a variety of different developers, including the ability to run Wayland off a Linux frame-buffer, but now this weekend it has picked up another interesting feature: the ability to run another Wayland compositor instance within itself. There’s now patches out there for running a nested/session compositor of Wayland on top of an existing Wayland Display Server that in turn is running on a X11/DRM compositor and communicating with the hardware.

Applications

• Have you been burned before and lost important data? Or do you lose sleep because of the fear of one day joining the ranks of those who have? Fear not, worried and jaded souls – there’s a range of Linux backup tools that can help.

• Using it, you can either supply the video file and let it search the subtitles or you can directly search them by the movie name. Either way, life becomes easier. One little thing though, you will need to have an account at opensubtitles.org because its needs to log in as an authenticated user.

• As long as we are talking about audio players, I always suggest Amarok, but most people are not looking for an all in on solution. They just want to play a few songs or play list sometimes and hence require only a simple and light audio player which can do all of it. Muine is one such music player for Gnome.

Instructionals/Technical

My recent personal experiences

Games

• While open-source game engines are beginning to progress in terms of features and graphics capabilities — thanks in large part to id Software making open their older game engines — as a whole the open-source game engines and other “indie” game engines are far behind their commercial counterparts. There is the Unreal Development Kit that is available for non-commercial use, but now Unigine Corp is getting behind a game development competition to spur Linux game development efforts.

• One of the biggest drawbacks of running Linux is the lack of games made for the platform. Penguspy is a web site specifically designed to help Linux users find games that work on their system.

• Three Linux gaming sites, Linux Game Publishing, TuxGames, and the Linux Game Tome have had a considerable amount of downtime of late due to a catastrophic hardware failure.

• Even though I’m no fan of the multiplayer (zero-)gravity-shooter genre, I enjoy playing M.A.R.S., which features AI enemies and wingmen, various weapon types, upgrades and a pretty cool game mode, where a huge cannon will shoot at the planet of the enemy team of whoever is holding the remote to it. I also think it’s darn pretty.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Clementine – KDE4 port of Amarok 1.4 – full review Kubuntu comes with Amarok 2.2.0, but if you’re happier with the look and feel of the older Amarok 1.4, Clementine is the perfect replacement. It offers an interface similar to the one of the KDE3 version of Amarok, and currently it integrates a pretty fair amount of features. Clementine comes with a file browser, radio support, Last.fm song submission, sortable playlists, cover manager, equalizer, cross-fading, tray icon integration, OSD, music library. Considering it isn’t included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories, here is a tutorial I’ve put up a while ago to install it.

• This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, The man from the future Nuno Pinheiro.

• Last weekend I could announce that KWin compiles with OpenGL ES headers. This weekend I was able to proceed even more: I got the first windows composited using OpenGL ES 2.0. Not everything is working and there is still lot’s of work to be done and it has not yet been tried on actual devices (yes you can use OpenGL ES on a desktop), but nevertheless it’s a very important step.

GNOME Desktop

• I found the coolest tool, Universal Subtitles. With Universal Subtitles you can easily transcribe a talk, add subtitles or captions or translate any video on the web.

• I’ve been trying to transcribe my Would you do it again for free? talk forever and I always give up – I can’t type fast enough to keep up and manually pausing required more hands than I have. Universal Subtitles let me type and automatically paused and let me catch up whenever the video got ahead of me. Then I could go back and edit, adjust the timing, etc. Now I could also go back and translate the subtitles into other languages.

Distributions

Reviews

• Yesterday, I upgraded to 2.6.36 and there were two error messages at boot time. One was about tomoyo-init scripts and the other was about HDA-Intel being unknown hardware. The former is harmless and the later was easy to resolve using the wiki. There still remain two things about Arch that annoy me:

• * an okular issue with deja vu files; and * false positives with rkhunter.

• Yet again, they are mostly upstream issues. Thus, Arch linux is a nice distribution; but it may not be the best choice for new users.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• There are a few areas where Fedora 14 is slower than its predecessors are, but overall Fedora 14 is doing better or on par performance-wise to earlier releases.

• Recently (as it does from time to time) the question of professionalism and good behavior in Fedora’s support channels has come up again. Personally I spend a lot of time helping out on irc in #fedora, so thats the channel I can most speak about, however, I am also somewhat active on the fedora users list and somewhat rarely look at fedoraforums.

• First a bit of history: I was at Fudcon (version 10 in Boston, 2008). I had been involved with fedora for years at that point, but I hadn’t really ever spent a lot of time in #fedora or working with support channels. In the State of Fedora talk at the end of the day, Paul Frields noted that he had dropped into #fedora and had a very poor experence. People were cursing, being abusive and all around unhelpfull. So, this seemed to me a great chance to step up and help out there. I found that for the past many number of years, the channel had basically 2 active and very overworked operators, and a smaller group of helpers. So, we formed the irc-support-sig, got more operators setup, tried to setup guidelines and encourage people to help. There are some great folks involved, spending a lot of their time and energy helping others now. I would personally say the channel is a great deal better now than it was in the past. Is it perfect? By no means.

• Fedora is quite popular distro and now I am going to depict experience with Fedora 14. I feel it not for novice user so I provide a easy to use Codec installation for novice user.

Debian Family

• In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC. Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

• Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Unity (which now shows up as a plugin in CompizConfig Settings Manager) has finally been made default in Ubuntu (desktop) 11.04 Natty Narwhal yesterday, as you can see in the Ubuntu meta changelog. That means that if you download the latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal daily build and boot from it, you should get Unity without having to install / enable anything. The same changelog mentions that Screen has been removed from the desktop version.

• We’ve got issue 43 out with more of the great FCM goodness that you’ve come to enjoy. This month, we’ve got stuff like:

• * Command and Conquer. * How-To : Program in Python – Part 17, Virtualize Part 6 – Debian & Xen, and Editing Photos With Raw Therapee. * Review – Conky & Untangle. * Top 5 – Backup Ideas. * Readers Survey 2010 Comments & Replies! * plus: Interviews, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!

• With the release of Ubuntu 9.10 late last year Canonical introduced PPAs, which is short for Personal Package Archives. A PPA allows anyone that has signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct to easily distribute software they have packaged to Ubuntu users. This revolutionary idea allows those who do not have the capability to establish their own repository to easily provide package updates to their users. Want the latest version of Openshot or PiTiVi? Then simply add a PPA to your system that packages up to date versions of these softwares and you will be set to go!

• The latest Ubuntu 10.10 operating system, codenamed “Maverick Meerkat” is being touted as an alternaive best-of-breed Linux-based OS for Filipino PC users.

• Rather than just a simple update from Ubuntu 10 (Lucid Lynx), the Ubuntu 10.10 is set as an “evolutionary” step in visuals and system performance benefits, which are seamlessly integrated to ensure maximum productivity for the user.

Flavours and Variants

• Yesterday, fresh from my success at building/installing Firefox 4 Beta 7 on my Ubuntu boxes, I decided to try it on my old laptop. This thing is pretty ancient – a Dell Latitude D610, I’m guessing about six or seven years old. It was running Mint 9, which is basically Ubuntu 10.04 with some slight modifications, so I thought the FF4 build and install process would be pretty much the same as on the two Ubuntu 10.10 machines I’d already installed it on.

Free Software/Open Source

• As a result, we expect our websites will be shutting down on 17th December. We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services (such as the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation & Symbian Ideas) is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. Preparing this content will take some time, hence it will not be distributable before 31st January 2011. A charge may be levied for media and shipping.

• The 451 Group’s annual report on the state of the open source business world is out. Already the title: Control and Community suggests they are once again on top of what has been going on this year. Analyzing about 300 open source related businesses they not only “get it right”, but were actually able to uncover some facts even I was unaware of and this impressed me a lot. If an analyst can dig up statistics to back up something that I already “intuitively” know in my heart, that is a useful service. But if they can make me go “ah, I didn’t know that” on a topic I consider myself quite an expert in, the I’m impressed!

Events

• CeBIT, held in Hanover, Germany each year, is the largest IT trade show in the world. Companies come from all over the world to show their goods and services to each other, and to make deals. For several years now Linux New Media, the publishers of various Linux magazines around the world has sponsored a “Linux Park” at CeBIT.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Now there is one other trick that GNU SIP Witch in particular can do which will make this methodology and both anonymous and verified secure calling over VoIP much more widely available. GNU SIP Witch can choose to act as a media proxy. It can do this by rewriting the SDP to goto SIP Witch managed RTP ports. Doing so, these ports could take in unencrypted RTP streams and encrypt using media cipher keys that GNU SIP Witch computes. This would be done if the calling party or the called party do not already independently support secure calling on their own. This means any existing SIP VoIP application, including SIP phone devices, can suddenly be used to make entire secure calls without any modification. Moreover, SIP Witch can selectively use secure calling depending on if the endpoints are on the same subnet or not, or placed at each workstation as a local proxy and assure all call traffic, including internal traffic is always secure, especially if there is concern with internal espionage. This maximizes the range of secure deployment scenarios and all without requiring the introduction of new secure VoIP user agents.

Project Releases

• We’re pleased to announce the 1.4 release of PyPy. This is a major breakthrough in our long journey, as PyPy 1.4 is the first PyPy release that can translate itself faster than CPython. Starting today, we are using PyPy more for our every-day development.

• Lightspark 0.4.5 is nearing release with its new graphics engine. The release candidate for Lightspark 0.4.5 just came this Saturday, boasting this new graphics engine that more heavily leverages Cairo for graphics drawing and offloading more of the workload to the graphics processor for this free software project aiming to implement the latest Adobe Flash/SWF specification. Besides faster and smoother playback (and lower CPU utilization in most cases) with this new graphics engine, this open-source Flash player also now has better input support.

Government

• As you may know the OKF is working on an EU funded project called LOD2. Part of the project aims to bring together openly licensed, machine-readable datasets from local, regional and national public bodies throughout Europe. It will also provide free/open source tools and services for those interested in reusing open government data.

• I’m Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re delighted to have such great a group of people here and many thanks to all of you that have come, especially if you’ve travelled a long way.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• A stellar pair of reverse engineers, bushing and pytey from iPhone DevTeam/Team Twiizers, have launched a Kickstarter fundraiser to back OpenVizsla, a open/hackable hardware-based USB protocol analyzer.

Leftovers

• The former prime minister said it was true that “people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion”.

• But Mr Blair, who converted to Catholicism after leaving government in 2007, said it was also true that religion inspires acts of extraordinary good.

• This poll will remain open until Sunday December 12, 2010 (approximately 19:00 UTC). Afterwards, the results will be merged onto the FutureHaikuFeatures wiki page on the Haiku Project’s Development Tracker.

• The United Nations has again passed the resolution forbidding “defamation of religion.”

Science

• What superpowers have been developed? Full scale war between the developed world and other strong militaries hasn’t happened since World War 2. The only way we would find out what powers have been developed would be by risking nuclear war. So maybe we’ll never know what powers have been developed.

Security

• As many people have found, Twitter is a fantastic tool for spreading important news rapidly.

• In the past it’s been used to share information about fires in Los Angeles, emergency landings in the Hudson River, and most recently helping aid be transported effectively to disaster stricken Indonesians.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Rob Ford ran a campaign for Mayor of Toronto based on the concept of respect for taxpayers. Now he’s mayor-elect, taking office in December. Is Rob Ford really going to show respect for taxpayers, or was it all a sham just to get elected?

• Now admittedly Rob Ford’s campaign was about financial respect. He has for years complained about city hall wasting taxpayer money. But what use is ‘financial respect’, if he shows no respect for the people themselves?

• Specifically I’m talking about the policing situation during the G8 and G20 meetings which ran from June 25 to June 27, 2010 (further information on the G8 and G20 summits can be found at the G8 Information Center and the G20 Information Center, both of which sites are operated by the University of Toronto, and of course the Wikipedia G8 and G20 pages.).

• During the G8 and G20 meetings, it became apparent that there is a rogue element of the Toronto Police Service. This rogue element took advantage of security concerns to abuse the public that they are sworn ‘To Serve and Protect’ (the Toronto Police Service slogan), and to breach the values exposed in the Toronto Police Service’s Mission Statement. I don’t believe that this rogue element is a large portion of the force. I’ve known too many cops, and the vast majority take their charge seriously. But there are always a few bad apples, and you cannot store rotten apples with good apples, or the rot will spread to the good ones as well.

• One of the most worrisome things is happening on the web right now and with increasing frequency. Domains are being seized by the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security under the auspices of ICE. Not only are they being seized but it is happening without any notification but also apparently with the assistance of ICANN.

• As first reported by the BBC, The Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is seeking the authority to close domains engaged in certain “criminal” activities, which includes not just website domains, but domain registrations such as email, and perhaps phones, too*. The police have submitted a plan to Nominet, a company which oversees all .uk web addresses. And more than a few liberal minds in London, numerous IT lawyers among them, are concerned.

• Flyingfish knows he’s allowed to photograph TSA checkpoints from public areas in the airport. He knows this because it is the TSA’s publicly stated position.

• But a refused-to-identify-himself TSA agent and a state trooper at Hartford’s Bradley International Airport don’t know this, so they detained Flyingfish, told him he was in big trouble — that he had, in fact, committed a “federal offense.”

• The UK Government has issued Defence Advisory Notices to editors of UK news outlets in an attempt to hush up the latest bombshell from whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks.

• DA Notices, the last of which was issued in April 2009 after sensitive defence documents were photographed using a telephoto lens in the hand of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick as he arrived at No 10 Downing Street for a briefing, are requests not to publish, and therefore not legally enforceable.

• Which means there are no ‘official’ repercussions for ignoring the notices, but they are generally adhered to.

• The news came to light in two Tweets from WikiLeaks one of which said, “UK Government has issued a “D-notice” warning to all UK news editors, asking to be briefed on upcoming WikiLeaks stories.”

• The United States has been in contact with Turkey over new files to be released on the Internet by WikiLeaks, Turkish officials said Friday, stressing Ankara’s commitment to fighting terrorism.

• According to media reports, the planned release by the whistle-blowing website includes papers suggesting that Turkey helped Al-Qaeda militants in Iraq, and that the United States helped Iraq-based Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey.

• The US administration and key allies around the world are braced for the release of a vast quantity of sensitive diplomatic files on whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

• In Washington, the State Department denounced the leak of classified material as “irresponsible” and warned that it would place lives at risk.

• A Somali-born teenager plotted “a spectacular show” of terrorism for months, saying he didn’t mind that children would die if he bombed a crowded Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, according to a law-enforcement official and court documents.

• He never got the chance. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested Friday in downtown Portland after using a cell phone to try to detonate what he thought were explosives in a van, prosecutors said. It turned out to be a dummy bomb put together by FBI agents.

• I just realized that I may not be as fully informed about the role of Homeland Security as I should be, when this morning I read in a small piece on Neowin about DHS seizing over 70 domains for their proximity to sites known for piracy.

• I did not know this had anything to do with the purview of DHS, as I was under the mistaken impression that the stated purpose of the department was the physical security of persons and property in the United States of America.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• BP ignored the advice of safety critical software in an attempt to save time before the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to a presentation slide prepared by US investigators.

• The companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill made several risky decisions to save time — and consequently money — ahead of the disaster, according to a document that was pulled at the last minute from a presentation of the president’s oil spill commission earlier this month.

Finance

• Often, the most provocative ideas arise after swigs of whiskey. This is especially true when a Rolling Stone reporter is around — and, as I recently learned, it’s all but guaranteed when that Rolling Stoner is Matt Taibbi, aka the heir to the magazine’s gonzo throne.

• I had the chance to hang with Taibbi last week after he spoke to a Denver audience about his new book, “Griftopia,” which argues that Wall Street’s bubble-bailout cycle has been one of the greatest — and least prosecuted — crimes in history. His presentation was serendipitously timed, coming the same week as a local Bonfire of the Vanities-esque scandal was underscoring the speculator class’s privilege. In Colorado’s own Bonfire of the Rockies, a local prosecutor had just reduced hit-and-run charges against a fund manager because the prosecutor said a felony would have “serious job implications” for the Sherman McCoy in question.

• FURIOUS consumers are demanding compensation after a NAB computer bungle delayed millions of wages, pensions, family payments and business transactions across Australia.

• Tens of thousands of anxious people could still be without cash for the weekend because of backlogs from the shambles.

• The IT nightmare left some families destitute, throwing grocery and Christmas shopping, birthday party plans and even holidays into chaos.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject to unanswered right wing narratives. If I believed that there was a chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be gravely concerned. If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be against health care reform. If I believed that man-made global warning did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that environmental efforts were responsible for unemployment I’d be against cap and trade. If I believed that prisoner abuse would make my family significantly less likely to be killed by terrorists, my thinking about torture would be different. And if I believed that the problems with the economy had been caused by too much government instead of too little, that my personal freedom was threatened by the government instead of large corporations, I’d probably be in a tea party supporter and a Republican.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• OpenDNS was founded in 2006 and quickly made a lot of fans around here due to their fast, reliable DNS servers and DNS services. It has been a profitable business; in 2008 it was estimated that OpenDNS generates a whopping $20,000 per day off of their DNS redirection relationship with Yahoo. Every DNS outage over the last four years effectively acted as an advertisement for OpenDNS, and the company has grown substantially — now serving roughly 20 million users.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• YouTube will begin paying French artists when their works show up on the site, thanks to a new deal with three French royalty societies. The agreement only affects videos viewed in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, but it does cover clips and movies uploaded to YouTube from 2007 all the way through 2013.

• The UK’s High Court has ruled that news monitoring agencies will have to pay publishing companies to use their web content, effectively re-classifying headlines as separate literary works subject to copyright.

• The moves follows a legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency, owned by eight of the UK’s largest newspaper groups, and Meltwater, a news monitoring agency. Although cutting agencies like Meltwater pay the NLA a fee for reproducing full-length articles, this case was supposed to clarify the limits of the NLA’s licensing scheme.

• The High Court of England and Wales has decided on an interesting test copyright case regarding linking and news aggregation by public relations firms. The case is that of Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Meltwater Holding BV [2010] EWHC 3099 (Ch). The claimants in the case are the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), an industry association for several newspapers in the UK, and several other individual newspapers. The defendants are Dutch PR firm Meltwater, and the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), the industry body for PR consultants in the UK.

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