● 06.18.11

● Links 18/6/2011: Linux 3.1 Prospects, OLPC Infographic

Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Make no mistake about it. I like my Samsung Series 5 Chromebook a lot. I think it will become a major challenge to Windows on light-duty business desktops… eventually.

• This looks promising for GNU/Linux even in business.

Server

• The ARM onslaught attack on the datacenter proceeds apace, as ARM server vendor Calxeda (formerly Smooth Stone) announces that it’s teaming up with Canonical and nine other software vendors to form a “Trailblazer Initiative” aimed at creating a full-blown ARM server ecosystem.

Kernel Space/Compilers

• Yesterday we delivered the news that PathScale was open-sourcing their high-performance EKOPath compiler suite, which in previous days was talked about on Phoronix under the Dirndl codename when showing how fast this compiler was in relation to GCC. The community indeed is excited for EKOPath now being open-source (GPLv3) and in the Phoronix Forums are currently 15+ pages of comments. In this news posting are some more EKOPath details from the forums and some of what Christopher Bergström, PathScale’s CTO, has relayed in our community portal.

• Pekka Enberg has announced the release of the second version of the “Native Linux KVM Tool”. It offers SMP support, Virtio network communication via TAP-based interfaces and access to the host file system via Virtio-9p. Experimental GUI support using SDL and VNC has also been added.

• With these additions the KVM tool has, in a short time, acquired many functions that are needed in typical scenarios and were still missing in the first version. Like Qemu-Kvm, the Native Linux KVM Tool handles the emulation of hardware components such as graphics and network chips, because the KVM hypervisor itself doesn’t deal with those tasks.

• Xen made virtualisation a popular issue on Linux servers and seemed for a long time to be the open source virtualisation technology of choice. But the Xen developers lost that advantage by setting the wrong priorities. KVM was able to take over some key positions and, with a large number of promoters, is now in a better position.

• Originally created as part of a research project in the late 1990s, the Xen hypervisor was open sourced in 2002; the first official release of Xen 1.0 was made in 2004. From then on, virtualisation on Linux servers quickly moved into the centre of attention. Soon, there were the first serious indications that it would not be long before Xen support became part of the Linux kernel. Virtualisation was considered a important future market.

• Testing storage systems or any aspect of IT systems is definitely not an easy task. It takes careful planning, testing and hardware for proper benchmarks. Even if we are trying to be careful, it can be easy to forget, omit (either by design or as an accident), or misconfigure systems and benchmarks. Hence, the results are, unfortunately, less useful and maybe don’t meet the original requirements. Henry and I often call these Slimy Benchmarking Tricks (SBTs). The end result is that good tests or benchmarks are difficult to do well. Perhaps as a consequence, much of the benchmarking we see today is of very poor quality, to the degree that it is virtually useless and more often than not, entertaining (and sometime frustrating).

• Earlier this week we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the AMD A8-3500M “Llano” Fusion APU. The results for this next-generation, quad-core Fusion chip were impressive with the graphics and compute power being several times faster than the common AMD E-350 Fusion APU. In that article we just had two other systems the A8-3500M performance was being compared to, but here are some more Linux benchmarks comparing Llano to other systems running Ubuntu 11.04.

Applications

• Free Open FTP Face is a lightweight graphical (GTK+) FTP client written in python. It is multiplatform, emphasizes on simplicity and ease of use, while providing a rich set of convenience features.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The first major release of Oxygen-gtk has been uploaded to kde ftp servers on Wednesday June 15 and is available for download here.

• This release comes with many improvements over the 1.0 series, which include:

• * animations (smooth glow on mouse-over and focus for virtually all widgets, similar with what exists for the Qt version), controlled using the same configuration options as the Qt version, via oxygen-settings;

GNOME Desktop

Distributions

• Actually, Puredyne is not a project grown on the empty space. I would say it has dad and even granddad. Dad is… dynebolic. Yes, Puredyne project was inspired by Dynebolic. They have lots in common. And most important, both are oriented to creative people.

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the forthcoming start of a new round of IRC Training Sessions, which will be held on IRC by experienced community members. There will be two different series of sessions:

Derivatives

• The first concrete outcome from the Debian derivatives census is the creation of Planet Debian Derivatives. For those of you who are interested in the activites of distributions derived from Debian, it aggregates the blogs and planets of all the distributions represented in the derivatives census. The list of feeds will be expanded semi-automatically as more distributions participate in the census and maintainers of census pages add new blog and planet URLs. Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert for doing the nessecary setup procedures for the addition of the new sub-planet to Planet Debian. I’m glad that it was accepted alongside the sole language-based sub-planet (Planet Debian Spanish).

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Arian van Gend is an Ubuntu user who has started a project to gather community ideas for Unity with the intent to present it to the Unity design team. But before doing that, he wants some feedback from you.

Flavours and Variants

• So yesterday, I wrote a post asking if I should switch away from Linux Mint to a different distribution. Many comments suggested that I stay with Linux Mint, but upgrade to the newest version. A few others suggested Pinguy OS or Ultimate Edition. Still others suggested…Slackware, of all things.

Devices/Embedded

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• The Sourcefabric developers have released an update to their open source Airtime radio software that adds a number of improvements which make it easier to install and upgrade to new versions. Airtime is a server application which allows users, from any modern web browser, to upload audio, create playlists with drag and drop, incorporate track transitions, build complete shows and then schedule them for transmission.

• [...]

• The developers recommend using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a computer with at least 512 MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor.

• BoxeeBoxTips.com is pleased to announce our second “Win a Boxee Box” contest. The contest begins immediately and runs through midnight (PDT) on July 31, 2011.

• Hope this name is not too unfamiliar! Just for those hearing this for the first time, Tomahawk is a cross platform open source media player and it can play music regardless of where the music content is stored. It is gaining popularity as a media player among the Ubuntu community too. Tomahawk recently announced the release of a new version –the Tomahawk Media Player 0.1.

• Software developers on the outskirts of the e-discovery field are working on several open-source projects to make the electronic search-and-analysis process into a cost-free, standards-based proposition.

• Independent projects are underway from a contract programmer in Houston, a team of information management experts throughout Europe and Australia, and a search engine consulting firm in Virginia. Their mutual goal: to help companies get respectable e-discovery software and make the technology feasible for every size of lawsuit and budget.

• [...]

• Starting points for that kind of software stack are Apache-licensed components such as the Lucene indexing and searching program interface, Mahout machine-learning tool, Nutch data crawler, Solr enterprise search package and Tika document filtering utility, he explained.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Over the past seven years, we’ve come to expect Firefox Web browser releases to bring major new interface changes, improved performance, and browsing tools. But since Mozilla decided to follow Google’s frequent release strategy, we’ll have to temper our expectations for new Firefox releases. Version 5 of Mozilla’s volunteer-crafted browser software brings a lot of fixes, but pretty much zilch when it comes to interface advancements or new user tools.

Databases

• The open source NoSQL Apache CouchDB database is set to get a major performance boost thanks to commercial services vendor Couchbase.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Microsoft seems to have a tough ride ahead, they seem to have lost the patent case for its Office suite. Now open source tools from Open Office.Org and LibreOffice Suites are competing aggressively with MS Office for market share. The main reason is the Open Source tag associated with the first two choices. It is inexpensive and enjoys backing from a large community of developers. Today let us take a look at the latest release from the LibreOffice Suite- the LibreOffice 3.4.

• This week we saw the release of a stable version of LibreOffice with the 3.3.3 release, which in my mind is a big deal. Sure they just put out LibreOffice 3.4 recently, but putting out new releases (in a way) is almost easier than doing the nitty, gritty of maintaining ‘older’ releases.

• Keeping two (or more) software tracks on track is no easy task for any open source project, but it seems to be one that the Document Foundation is pulling off with flying colors.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has added another organization — the Evergreen project joins the SFC as the 27th member project. Since we’re halfway through 2011, I took the opportunity to check in with Conservancy executive director Bradley Kuhn to see how things are going with the organization.

Licensing

• The community edition will be released under the GNU Affero GPL v3 license.

Programming

• In the end, we are happy to bring Git tooling to the Eclipse community and the Indigo release. I hope by the time this next year, the eclipse.org community has fully migrated to Git. It should be a hard requirement to join the Juno simultaneous release in my opinion.

Leftovers

Science

• Sarah Palin may now dismiss global warming as a “bunch of snake oil science,” but just a few years ago, back when she was governor of the state melting into the sea, she was inclined to care about the subject. It’s well-known that she established a task force to address climate change in the state, but later flip-flopped on the issue. Yet as one exchange in the trove of emails released by the state of Alaska last week shows, Palin at one point actually took climate science quite seriously.

• In an email exchange from July 2007, Palin discussed global warming with her brother, Chuck Heath Jr., who was taking part in a climate change study program for science teachers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the state’s environment commissioner. Heath wrote:

Security

• Bitcoin, the decentralized virtual currency whose value has skyrocketed in recent weeks, faced a key test Monday as a veteran user reported that Bitcoins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen from his computer.

Cablegate

• The government’s recent declassification of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers corrects a 40-year mistake. But the motive may have had more to do with defending a current wrong than righting an old one.

• Several months ago, the White House directed federal agencies to warn employees and contractors that viewing classified documents made public via WikiLeaks violated “applicable laws and…policies.”

• After it was pointed out that this notice could be equally applied to the Pentagon Papers – long available on public bookshelves and a staple of modern history courses despite their continued “secret” status – the government announced that they would be declassified.

• (Most Americans probably didn’t even realize the Pentagon Papers still were officially secret. Until that announcement, people familiar with the case expressed surprise to me that this was so.)

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

• Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

• Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• It always amazes me how large corporations can never get enough money and constantly surpass the line between good business sense to complete corporate greed. For over a decade, Internet Service Providers have been providing unlimited Internet usage at a relatively reasonable price. Today, these same corporations no longer provide unlimited Internet usage and have imposed draconian data caps. They have moved from unlimited data transfer to a mere 80 gigabyte limit for $65 per month and an additional 1 gigabyte will cost you $1.50, even though it only costs $0.03 for the ISP to transfer it over their networks.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In a major breakthrough on the WIPO negotiations on copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities, at around 1pm today, a non-paper “resulting from informal discussions among Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, the European Union and its Member States, Mexico, Paraguay and the United States of America” was distributed at the WIPO SCCR 22.

Copyrights

• The League of Canadian Poets has lined up in support of the recent Writers’ Union of Canada resolution recognizing the lack of control over how licensing revenue is managed and the inability of Access Copyright to represent creator interests. As a result, the TWUC plans to investigate operational separation of creators’ and publishers’ interests in collective licensing. The LCP passed a resolution expressing support for the TWUC motion with plans to send a representative to the joint signatory committee investigating creator copyright.

• The battle over competing visions of educational copyright licensing in Canada is coming to a conclusion. One on side, there is Access Copyright, which argues that a comprehensive collective licence is an essential part of an institutional copyright policy. On the other, are the Canadian education institutions, who believe that a more flexible, cost-effective alternative lies in relying on the combination of purchasing works, site licences, open access, fair dealing, and transactional licensing. Having first faced a proposal for a massive increase in Access Copyright licensing fees and later weeks of costly, unnecessary Copyright Board interrogatories, the educational institutions are clearly ready to break away from the Access Copyright comprehensive licence.

ACTA

• As Canada and the European Union continue their negotiations on a trade deal, a source has provided a copy of the EU proposal for the criminal intellectual property provisions. The IP criminal provisions was the one aspect left out of early drafts (the CETA leak from last year is available here). The initial EU proposal uses the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’s criminal provisions as the model. This includes ACTA Article 23 on Criminal Offences (criminal provisions for wilful trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy on a commercial scale), ACTA Article 24 on Penalties (including imprisonment), ACTA Article 25 on Seizure, Forfeiture, and Destruction, and ACTA Article 26 on Ex Officio Criminal Enforcement. Several of these provisions would require domestic legislative change in Canada that were not found in Bill C-32 (suggesting that an IP enforcement bill will be introduced sometime in the near future).

• We’re now a few weeks into “open season” on the final final version of ACTA, so expect to see random stories planted by certain folks about how “important” it is to sign the document and “live up to our international obligations.”

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