● 07.08.11

● Links 8/7/2011: Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 2, Harmony Agreements 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:09 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb

• Randal’s presentation at FISL 12

Kernel Space

• According to a Google+ post (what are we going to call those? Geeps?) Cyanogen himself is working on porting the Linux 3.0 kernel to Android-powered devices running on the msm7x30 chipset.

• Linux-KVM mentions QED, the new QEMU Enhanced Disk format. This new disk format for QEMU/KVM is designed to be much faster than QCOW2 and other existing disk formats available to virtualization users.

• We are putting together a historical gallery celebrating Linux’s last 20 years for LinuxCon in Vancouver. This gallery will be a walk down memory lane that should be fun for everyone, but we need your help! A few samples of what we already have collected: the original books Linus used to learn programming, a video booth where you can leave your story of Linux, pictures and videos from the history of Linux, a timeline of major Linux accomplishments, CDs and boxes of early Linux distributions, computers used to do early hacking, memorabilia from IBM’s Peace/Love/Linux campaign and much more.

• Six years later than originally expected, the kernel now contains all the essential components for Xen Dom0 operation. In Linux 3.0, the developers are tackling various problems in the ARM code, reboot code and UEFI code; however, Torvalds has slightly disappointedly given up on the code size optimisations.

Applications

• A good solid scan of the open source newswires this week left me jumping around the web ultimately landing on the website for Juice. An open source ‘Media Aggregator’ program, Juice allows the user to download audio files from anywhere on the Internet to your desktop.

• If you are vehemently cross-platform and open source focused, then you’ll be pleased to know that Juice is 
platform-independent, so you can use it from virtually any computer and play the files on any MP3 device.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• For many years, some “Tech pundits” and “critics” have claimed “Desktop Linux is dead”, of course that statement is incorrect as we have companies like Canonical thrusting their Linux flavour into the mainstream with more people experiencing Linux on their desktop. As indi development moves forward in leaps and bounds too (which many hugely successful titles) we see in most cases a Linux flavour is catered for within their releases.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• You’ll need both kdepim and kdepim-runtime, and please make sure to have the most recent Akonadi, Soprano, kdelibs4, kdepimlibs4.6 and friends.

• Also shared-desktop-ontologies (SDO) 0.6.x is required — kdepim 4.6.1 will not build against newer versions of SDO.

• Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the fourth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.6 series. 4.6.5 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.6 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.6.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.6.5 Info Page. The changelog lists more, but not all improvements since 4.6.4. Note that the changelog is incomplete. For a complete list of changes that went into 4.6.5, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.6.5 also ships a more complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported languages. To find out more about the KDE Workspace and Applications 4.6, please refer to the 4.6.0 release notes and its earlier versions.

• Back in March we looked at KDE’s new Plasma project for portable devices. At the time it offered some interesting effects and a new work flow philosophy. But as far as new interfaces might go, it wasn’t totally alien. However, as developers sometimes do, they want to take it even further.

• Martin Graesslin blogged today of some of the new ideas on which he and his fellow hackers have been working. Primarily, many features of KWin can be eliminated in order to reduced size and increase performance. One of the new functions was to add build option that allowed developers to remove undesirable bloat such as XRender compositing support. Another is the removal of window decorations.

GNOME Desktop

• Mailnag is an application that notifies you about new emails you receive via the new GNOME 3 notifications system. It works with both POP3 and IMAP servers (and yes, it works with Gmail too) and looks pretty much like Popper (it’s actually a Popper fork).

Distributions

• Pardus developers delayed the release of Pardus 2011.1 for a week. Now it will be released on July 10, 2011 if everything goes well. All the way, Pardus!

• BackTrack is a well-known specialized Linux distribution focusing on security tools for penetration testers and security professionals, but it now offers a lot in terms of forensics…

• [...]

• BackTrack is filled with a collection of more than 300 open source security tools, which you can find organized in different submenus of the “Backtrack” menu: “Information Gathering”, “Vulnerability Assessment”, “Exploitation Tools”, “Privilege Escalation”, “Maintaining Access”, “Reverse Engineering”, “RFID Tools”, “Stress Testing”, “Forensics”, “Reporting Tools”, “Services”, and “Miscellaneous”. Each submenu is further subdivided into subcategories. The developers have added a nice touch to menu items of commandline utilities: when you click on such a menu item, it opens a terminal window with the tool showing its usage, e.g. with the –help option.

• You see, Sabayon 6.0 comes almost fully packed with software. It is kind of different from what I have seen in Sabayon 5.5 XFCE.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the July 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Meemaw and Andrew Strick. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Setting up my Canon MP250 multifunctional in Fusion Linux was the easiest of all other distros I’ve tried since I bought it. It fetched the driver automatically and also what I think to be a custom PPD, because I now have a bunch of options that are not available in Canon’s official Linux driver. Well done, Fusion, very well done! My multimedia USB keyboard works flawlessly as well. My camera, my Galaxy Mini, USB sticks, USB card readers, all were quickly and correctly recognized.

Debian Family

• With Debian Squeeze out, it is time for me to install the latest that the Debian community has to offer. I find that the installation is very straightforward so I will just post screen captures where the user would need to interact with the installation for bare bones configuration. So here we go….

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• This is the Unity weekly report for 6 July. The last week the team spent some time hacking on Unity in Dublin, Ireland, which included a quick meet and greet with the local team. The main things that happened this week were mostly plumbing and GTK3 porting, which is now complete. Other than compiz modal dialogs there’s no new crazy bling this week, just boring foundationy bling and a bunch of hacking:

• Firstly, here’s a video demoing Unity, Unity 2D and GNOME Shell (GNOME Shell is not installed by default!) in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot alpha 2:

• The Ubiquity installer is getting much smarter and understandable with every incremental release. People new to Linux (who fear messing up their existing OS while doing a dual-boot installation), and those who don’t understand what swap space is, or how much they need of it, will like Ubiquity. This installer is quite impressive; it guides you at every step, letting you know what’s happening, what you might want to do, and how it can be done. It detects whether you’re installing on a system with an existing Windows installation, or upgrading from an earlier Ubuntu install, etc. It also has an expert partitioning option for experienced Linux users. Once you enter the required choices, the installer begins copying files in the background, while you fill in additional information like the time zone, user details and more. The migration assistant, too, works flawlessly, and migrates your documents, pictures, user settings and so on without any hassle. You can also choose to install third-party software like Flash, MP3 codecs, Java, etc. Installation is not much speedier. Boot time from a live USB was less than a minute on a Core2Duo laptop, and two minutes on my netbook.

Devices/Embedded

• McCain says it will supply San Francisco with a new Linux-based traffic controller computer that meets the latest Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) standards. Built around a Freescale PowerQUICC II Pro processor, the “2070LXN2 NEMA” offers several keypads, an 8×40 display, plus Ethernet, USB, serial, and SDLC connections, says the company.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• WebOS is, of course, based on Linux, and its official launch on HP’s new TouchPad this week marks its official debut in the tablet space.

• Android/Linux shipped on 1/3 as many tablets shipped as iPads in Q2 of 2011 but it is expected that Android/Linux will ship on 1/2 as many devices as iPad in Q3. At this rate, the iPad will be overtaken in the Christmas rush or at the latest, in Q1 of 2012.

Free Software/Open Source

Harmony

• The Harmony agreements reached a significant milestone this week, as they were tagged 1.0 and left the “beta” stage. As someone who has previously taken position regarding contributor licensing agreements, I was asked this week what my thoughts on Harmony are.

• First off, let me say that I have not followed the Harmony process closely. Indeed, the process, which was semi-open, but operated under Chatham House Rules (any participant can quote what was said in a meeting, but cannot name the person who said it), is one of the major issues I have seen people take with Harmony. The lack of a clearly identified team taking responsibility for the contents and standing behind the agreement texts is unfortunate, but I think it’s an issue completely independent of their content and the project’s goals.

• Harmony, the Canonical-led effort to provide a comprehensive suite of contributor agreements for open source projects, has quietly released its version 1.0, a year after Canonical general counsel Amanda Brock announced the initiative on opensource.com. During most of that year, Harmony’s construction took place out of the public view, in deliberations that were cloaked by the Chatham House Rule.

• Despite my admiration, respect and affection for those who have been driving Harmony, I cannot endorse the product of their work. I believe Harmony is unnecessary, confusing, and potentially hazardous to open source and free software development.

• Much advertising is designed to convince us to buy or use of something that we don’t need. When I hear someone droning on about some new, wonderful thing, I have to worry that these folks are actually trying to market something to me.

• Very soon, you’re likely to see a marketing blitz for this thing called Project Harmony (which just released its 1.0 version of document templates). Even the name itself is marketing: it’s not actually descriptive, but is so named to market a “good feeling” about the project before even knowing what it is. (It’s also got serious namespace collision, including with a project already in the software freedom community.

• Project Harmony markets itself as fixing something that our community doesn’t really consider broken. Project Harmony is a set of document templates, primarily promulgated and mostly drafted by corporate lawyers, that entice developers to give control of their software work over to companies.

• My analysis below is primarily about how these agreements are problematic for individual developers. An analysis of the agreements in light of companies or organizations using them between each other may have the same or different conclusions; I just haven’t done that analysis in detail so I don’t know what the outcome is.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Telemetry makes its debut in the Aurora channel this week and we’re encouraging all of our Aurora people to send the anonymous performance and resources data to Mozilla so that we can work on the problems out on the real Web rather than just the things that synthetic tests can identify.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Healthcare

• One of my favorite bumper stickers reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

• That’s sort of how I feel about the health care debate. If more Americans paid attention to the fate of neighbors and loved ones who have fallen victim to the cruel dysfunction of our health care system, they would see through the onslaught of lies and propaganda perpetrated by special interests profiting from the status quo.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• I’m a programmer, a developer, a hacker. I’m mostly involved with the Open Source community and I try to promote open source development as much as I can. Unfortunately, most of the time when I tell someone that I’m a “developer”, they don’t understand the concept, and when I start talking about open source, they understand me even less.

• The world is full of people with different background, with deferent references and we don’t always understand each other. As most of you who read my blog would probably know, I’m involved in the PS3 hacking scene, and I see a lot of misinformed people, and I read a lot of things that don’t make any sense to me. This is because most people don’t understand the world that we (developers/hackers) come from and things tend to be misinterpreted.

Project Releases

• Remember the days of DOS gaming, piles of floppy disks, messing around to get your 14.4k modem working?

Public Services/Government

• The Brazilian government has signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities. The letter asserts that the ODF standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the government. As Brazil is one of the biggest users of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice with an estimated million public computers running the free/open source office suites, the govenment aims to make the national contribution to the projects more effective.

Leftovers

Security

• Well, another “Patch Tuesday” approaches with 22 serious fixes since the last batch, one month ago. If they are fixing 2/3 of a bug per day, how many are the bad guys finding per day? It could be dozens. “7″ has been around for about two years, 24 months. Hundreds of serious bugs have been fixed and many of them were around on Day One just waiting to be found. We could have years more of this bug-fixing and many hundred more exploits to go before “7″ is given a decent burial.

Cablegate

• By the time WikiLeaks arrived in Tunisia, several incidents had already taken place, such as the death of Mohamad Bouazi, the vegetable-seller who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzi. There had been opposition to the regime for a long time, but now people took to the streets.

• It was a Tunisian group that created a web page called “Tunileaks” where they published all the reports on Tunisia from WikiLeaks, which point to the corruption of the former authorities.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Coming on the heels of a neighboring state fracking ban in New Jersey, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, will make a momentous announcement at a press conference this morning: the moratorium on drilling for methane gas in New York’s Marcellus Shale play is over, according to the New York Times.

• Fracking, more formally known as hydraulic fracturing, is the ecologically lethal process through which methane gas is procured (the industry term being “natural” gas), and during which numerous cases of groundwater contamination have been documented. Though hyped by the methane gas industry and President Barack Obama as “America’s Clean Energy Future,” other than mere water contamination, it has been scientifically documented by researchers at Cornell University that the entire emissions process for methane gas is dirtier than that of coal.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• At the end of May, as the Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee (JFC) worked day after day and late into the night voting on changes and amendments to the state budget bill, Joint Finance Co-Chair Alberta Darling (R-River Falls) quietly slipped a small provision into the massive budget bill that has received little attention.

• British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known.

• Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK.

• Now-former Fox News personality Glenn Beck closed “The Glenn Beck Program” Thursday night with what amounted to an hour-long monologue — technically 42 minutes, minus commercials, by his own estimate. (There were clips, and he exchanged a few words with his crew, but none of them were miked, and his was essentially the only voice heard.) To the extent that I can make it out, I don’t hold with Beck’s brand of what looks like politics, but which is actually something more amorphously free-ranging, a vision, a view, a knitting of not always connected facts, faux facts and buzzwords into a worried, world-entangling web. But as a television personality there is no denying him, even as he cuts loose, or has been cut loose, or both, from his high-profile, cable-TV pulpit-playground.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• Apple’s claim that it owns the trademark “app store” has been dismissed by a US court.

• The computer giant was seeking a preliminary injunction to stop Amazon calling its “app store” the “Appstore”.

• Apple claimed that “App Store” was a distinctive mark, even though the words app and store are well-known and well-understood.

Clip of the DayFarewell to Novell Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.