● 01.18.12

● Links 18/1/2012: Btrfs In Linux 3.3, Oxygen-gtk3 1.0, Woz Says Android Better Than hypePhone

Posted in News Roundup at 6:06 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linux operating system and other open software projects are under threat because they’ve failed to develop the sympathy for users manifested by companies such as Apple, according to luminary Bruce Perens.

• Perens created the Open Source Definition and was founder or co-founder of projects including the Open Source Initiative and the Linux Standard Base, to name just two.

• In his keynote address to the Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2012 conference in Ballarat yesterday he delivered a blunt warning.

Desktop

• Measuring at less than 100mm wide and 17mm thick with a dinky 3″ screen, the Ben NanoNote might just be the world’s smallest Linux laptop for the traditional definition of the word.

Kernel Space

• The Linux 3.0.y kernel has been deemed to be the new longterm kernel support release. Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has pledged to maintain the 3.0.y branch for at least the next two years. The first Linux 3.0 kernel was released in July 2011. Since then, it has been updated 17 times, with the most recent release being the 3.0.17 kernel that Kroah-Hartman released on January 12.

• Do you have what it takes for that Linux job with an HPC vendor you’ve got your eye on? Brent Welch, the director of software architecture at Panasas, talks about the role Linux plays in HPC at Panasas and the in-demand technical skills supercomputing suppliers need from job applicants.

• Last year, Panasas, a provider of high performance parallel storage solutions for technical applications and big data workloads, moved into new corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and expanded its team by more than 50 percent in areas such as engineering and sales. Panasas hasn’t been the only supercomputing-focused company growing and hiring recently. In fact, high performance computing (HPC) vendors across the industry are hiring, but they are running up against a shortage of skilled talent.

• On the same day as talking about Microsoft’s new Resilient File System, the pull request for Btrfs in the Linux 3.3 kernel was sent in and subsequently pulled. This file-system update does bring a few notable changes.

• Btrfs with Google Snappy compression support didn’t make it for Linux 3.3 (it was a last-minute request and there’s at least LZO and Gzip file-system compression already available), but there are some notable changes. However, the 3.3 changes also aren’t as noticeable as the beefy Btrfs changes found in Linux 3.2.

Applications

• Prepping for a Linux certification exam? Helping the kids with schoolwork? No matter what the subject is, Anki can help you commit it to memory. The flexible open source study system is based around the flashcard concept, but with support for audio, video, and more, and the program can adapt to your learning style.

• Using Anki, you can make your own custom decks of “flashcards” for any subject: arithmetic, foreign languages, the state bar exam, obscure Perl syntax — you name it. The card format is flexible, supporting multimedia, text, and even embedded LaTeX for complex equations. The study tool allows you to fully configure your sessions, including optional time limits, slowly or quickly adding new cards to the set you review, and altering the order in which material is presented.

• The standard image management software on Linux machine is F-soft (a play in the word f- stop) it is the default photo management software for the Gnome desktop. For KDE the default photo management software is Dig cam, Tagging, Categorization, color codes and making folder and management of large collections of photos is prime work for F-Spot. Tagging feature has much variation. Apply top from across different categories use filters across multiple tags. Rate individual and multiple photos. Filter by both tags and ratings you can search and extract the EXIF data embedded in an image.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Pure role-playing games on Linux are surprisingly few and far between! At least, if you stick to the repositories, it sure seems that way. I also looked at the Linux Game Tome, but even though 189 games are listed as “Roleplaying”, many are roguelikes or MMORPGs. Quite a few of what remain are either shareware or just not very complete.

• One place to find more commercial RPGs is the cross-platform Desura gaming client. It’s free to install and sign up for, but the games range in price from $2.99 to $22.99 or more. It looks like 26 roleplaying games are currently available. I have played a few hours of the demo for Eschalon, Book 1 (a few years ago) and it’s quite good. Another website that features role-playing games is the Linux Game Database.

• Back in the 25th century, Earth launched a generation ship into deep space, with the goal of establishing the first interstellar colony. It dropped out of contact and disappeared, never reaching its destination.

• Thousands of years later, it has finally been found.

Desktop Environments

• The first release of KDE’s Oxygen widget theme, ported to GTK 3.X applications, has been uploaded to kde ftp servers on Tuesday January 17 2012 and is available for download here. It is called oxygen-gtk3.

• This release is still experimental, notably due to the small amount of GTK 3 applications it has been tested on. Still, since snapshots of the running git repository were already being circulated around for some time, we deemed it appropriate to release the current code, if only because it would make book-keeping and bug tracking easier. Also, we expect rapid progress as bug reports are being filled by users.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• In a short post today Jean-Manuel Croset said that recent events have lead the failing company to postpone any final decisions for a week. Earlier this month a letter to shareholders stated that Mandriva would have to close its doors by January 16 without an influx of capital.

• January 16 came and went without word while anxious users paced the floors over at the Mandriva Forums. Then earlier today Croset published his post. Unfortunately, it’s a little short on detail.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• art of my focus this cycle is to see where we can make power saving improvements for Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS. There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence of specific machines or power saving features behaving poorly over the past few cycles. So, armed with a 6.5 digit precision multimeter from Fluke I’ve been measuring the power consumption on various laptops in different test scenarios to try and answer some outstanding questions:

• * Is it safe to enable Matthew Garrett’s PCIe ASPM fix? * Are the power savings suggested by PowerTop useful and can we reliably enabled any of these in pm-utils? * How accurate are the ACPI battery readings to estimate power consumption? * Do the existing pm-utils power.d scripts still make sense? * Which is better for power saving: i386, i386-pae or amd64? * How much power does the laptop backlight really use? * Does halving the mouse input rate really save that much more power? * Should we re-enable Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM)? * Are there any misbehaving applications that are consuming too much power? * What are the root causes of HDD wake-ups * Which applications and daemons are creating unnecessary wake events? * How much does the MSR_IA32_ENERGY_PERF_BIAS save us?

Flavours and Variants

• BeOS was a much loved and highly advanced desktop operating system that ceased active development in 2001. ZevenOS is a Ubuntu 11.10 based system (with a bit of help from Xubuntu) that attempts to recapture some of the BeOS look and feel.

Devices/Embedded

• Ideum announced a “multitouch wall” that responds to as many as 32 simultaneous touches and will support Linux in March. The MT65 Presenter has a 65-inch screen with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, a 2.2GHz Core i7-2720QM processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (solid state disk), and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card, according to the company.

• A system suitable for embedded, educational and R&D applications has been developed based on ARM and minimal hardware (no PSU) for $15, about the price of a box of copy-paper. The idea is to have a complete stack from circuit-board layout, CPU and OS completely open and produced by cooperation with Free Software proponents and Chinese hardware design and production.

Phones

Android

• Although he still carries the iPhone 4S as his main handset, Steve concedes that Android is making serious headway over Apple.

• With the announcement of the Motorola Droid 4 Verizon’s looking to push its predecessor off of store shelves and quickly. They’re now offering the 3G-only Motorola DROID 3 for just $99. It’s a decent deal for a great phone if you don’t care for 4G.

Free Software/Open Source

• The reason why I asked Francesco permission to publish his outburst is to stimulate the whole FOSS community to share thoughts and experiences on this topic, to find out how general the problem he signals is in 2012. Personally, I still remember hearing, during a Linux Day in Rome almost ten years ago, somebody commenting a talk about the FOSS used in, and developed by, the Bank of Italy asking to himself: “so, in order to develop FOSS you must belong to a big organization?”

• What do you think? Do you agree with Francesco? What is your experience in similar cases? How general is Francesco’s conclusion? Besides, do you too, think that current FOSS products for schol management lack usability?

• Wearing a suit when the rest of the 500-strong lecture theatre were dressed in shorts, jandals, and old conference T Shirts, Bruce Perens introduced himself by announcing his clothes as a lesson: Linux needs to be more outward facing.

• Open-source software developers face greater risks today than they ever have, to the point where the constraints inherent in proprietary software now represent a risk to democracy, according to one of the movement’s leading figures.

• An open-source tool from the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security hunts for Duqu using telltale signs left behind by the Tilde-D creation toolkit.

• SourceDelight: The Droid Comic Viewer for Android systems that reads CBR & CBZ files has gone “open source” after its millionth download, to improve the software.

Web Browsers

• Sometimes, you need to see what a technology can do before you can fully appreciate it. Take, for instance, CSS 3D and Three.js. It’s one thing to hear about doing 3D elements for Web sites, and another to see them integrated into a well-designed site. Take, for example, Steven Wittens’ Acko.net redesign.

Mozilla

• Mozilla dramatically slowed the update pace of Firefox 9, the browser it shipped late last month.

Databases

• If your organization seems to be a good fit for Hadoop, you can download the open source software that comprises the data framework and try it out with relative ease.

BSD

• Say the words “free and open source operating system”, and Linux is probably what springs to most people’s minds.

• What many don’t even realise, however, is that there’s another free and open source operating system out there that’s also based on Unix and that’s also widely used on servers around the world. It’s called FreeBSD, and a brand new version of the software was just released on Thursday.

Public Services/Government

• The Kepler space observatory slowly trails further and further behind the Earth as it orbits the Sun, scanning a sliver of the galaxy in search of Earth-like planets. A specially designed telescope, 0.95 meters in diameter, the Kepler instrument, per NASA, “stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission—3.5 or more years.”

Openness/Sharing

• The HYPE Open Source Community is now open to anyone interested in hydrology, for cooperative code development. The community was successfully launched recently.

Programming

Leftovers

• Well, Google has fired back and called the accusations “nonsense.”

• “This is just nonsense,” wrote a Google spokeswoman. “Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads…We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day.”

Security

• The Apache Tomcat developers are advising users of the 7.0.x, 6.0.x and 5.5.x branches of the Java servlet and JSP container to update to the latest released versions 7.0.23, 6.0.35 and 5.5.35. Recent investigations revealed inefficiencies in how large numbers of parameters and parameter values were handled by Tomcat.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• I have no idea what that is about, but it seems important. And in fact it is, the amendments concern “delegated acts”, where the Commission could take regulatory action without prior consultation of the legislator. We really should really look up Article 270 of the Lisbon Treaty regime…

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• There is nothing wrong with your Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. The reason you won’t be able to use Wikipedia, Reddit, or numerous other Web sites on January 18th is that these Web sites have decided to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA).

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is warning students to do their online research before midnight Wednesday when the world’s largest online encyclopedia will block access to its English language site for 24 hours. Wikipedia’s worldwide blackout to its English-language site is part of a larger online protest against the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts being considered by Congress.

• Google will join Wednesday’s anti-SOPA and anti–PROTECT IP Act (aka PIPA) protest by noting its opposition to the bills on its home page.

• “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the internet,” a Google spokeswoman told The Reg in an email. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page.”

• I’ll be updating this post throughout the day with more images of sites that have joined the SOPA blackout. Leave a comment with any site you’d like to be added to the gallery, which will remain here after the blackout is over.

• Some of the Internet’s leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

• “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokesman told Ars. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page.”

• In recent weeks, Canadians have been subjected to a steady stream of reports asserting that Canada has become the world’s leading source of movie piracy. Pointing to the prevalence of illegal camcording – a practice that involves videotaping a movie directly off the screen in a theatre and transferring the copy on to DVDs for commercial sale – the major Hollywood studios are threatening to delay the Canadian distribution of their top movies.

• Tomorrow, a number of very high profile websites will go dark in protest of the proposed U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act. Though the White House has since made it clear that the President will not support the bill, the fact that it was proposed at all is an indicator of the threat the Internet faces. And, according to this post from Michele Neylon, SOPA may not be quite dead yet.

ACTA

• We welcome the decision to release the European Parliament legal service’s opinion on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). We have compared the legal service’s opinion with multiple academic opinions on ACTA and some civil society analyses.

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