● 01.25.12

● Links 25/1/2012: KDE 4.8, Pandora is Back, Open webOS 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Google is betting that slow and steady will prove a winning strategy for its ChromeOS platform, and is reporting some successes for the system in the education sector.

• It has been a little over a year since Google first showed off ChromeOS, and around six months since the first commercial systems were released for sale by Samsung and Acer. There’s new hardware scheduled for later this year, but the operating system – indeed the very notion of a browser-based operating system – appears to have found little traction in the wider industry.

Server

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• It’s not an easy decision for a solution provider to give up a vendor well established in its clients’ environments, but when that vendor is Microsoft and the application is their e-mail, the decision may be even harder.

• Yet for Ray Lund and Nick Hoague, who each run solution provider businesses outside Denver, the time had come.

• For Lund, owner of Lund Computer Services, Northglenn, Colo., the decision was made when he walked into a client’s site for the fourth time in a month after its Exchange server had gone down again.

Kernel Space

• Another one of the interesting talks that was recorded from Linux.Conf.Au in Ballarat, Australia last week was the presentation by Matthew Garrett. He went over the good and bad of UEFI support under Linux.

• Of the Linux.Conf.Au 2012 presentations already covered on Phoronix have been that of the XFS file-system and Ubuntu’s plans for ARM, but the Phoronix-recommended presentation to watch today is the UEFI talk by Matthew Garrett.

• The NVM Express working group has announced the release of Windows and Linux PCIe SSD drivers based on the NVM Express standard.

Graphics Stack

• The S3 Chrome 600 series / VIA VT3456 (VX11) still hasn’t been officially announced, but here are some benchmarks of the forthcoming chipset from a VIA Nano quad-core system.

• These leaked results are coming in the same manner as the months-early AMD Interlagos numbers, the yet-to-be-out Trinity, early Ivy Bridge numbers, and other pre-production benchmark results from engineering samples… An engineer — either unintentionally or willingly (it may have been very well intentional this time seeing as it was just days after I was ranting about the poor Chrome driver support) — within VIA China pushing out some early results when validating a system under Linux using the Phoronix Test Suite. While nearly every major IHV/ISV is using the Phoronix Test Suite (and/or related components like OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoromatic), it seems a select few companies/engineers always enjoy using it to spread early performance results to the world by uploading their Phoronix Test Suite benchmark results to the collaborative OpenBenchmarking.org platform, which is another Phoronix product.

• A NVIDIA Linux engineer is trying to work on code that could lead to official Optimus support under Linux, but there’s a catch… And it falls outside of NVIDIA Corp as the fate of this multi-GPU notebook feature could now fall with the Linux kernel developers.

• While there’s been some rudimentary Optimus hacks for Linux to use notebooks that offer an integrated graphics processor and a discrete GPU (to offer maximum performance when needed but to fall-back to only powering the IGP when in a low-power mode), NVIDIA Corp hasn’t provided any official Optimus support under Linux. Now there’s talk of possible support, but it’s potentially to be blocked by Linux kernel developers.

• AMD has unleashed the first Catalyst Linux binary driver update of 2012, but does Catalyst 12.1 bring anything interesting or just more breakage?

• The AMD Catalyst 12.1 discussion has already begun today within the forums when apt readers realized the binary drivers for Windows and Linux surfaced on AMD’s website.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Today, videogame publisher Iceberg Interactive and UNIGINE Corp., are pleased to announce that the naval strategy game ‘Oil Rush’ for PC, Mac and Linux, has gone gold. The game will be available for digital download starting today on various portals throughout the world. Iceberg Interactive will release the boxed retail version of Oil Rush on 24 February 2012 in the UK, Benelux and Scandinavia, with German speaking territories to follow with a fully localized version on 23 March 2012.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform. Version 4.8 provides many new features, and improved stability and performance.

• As expected, the KDE developers have published version 4.8.0 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). The major update to the open source K Desktop Environment includes changes to the KDE Platform itself as well as the KDE Applications and Plasma Workspaces.

GNOME Desktop

• Clement Lefebvre, lead developer of Linux Mint, has announced the first “fully stable” version of its new GNOME 2.x-like “Cinnamon 1.2″ fork of the GNOME 3.x desktop environment is now available for not only Mint, but for Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, OpenSUSE 12.1, Arch Linux, and Gentoo.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Enterprise MRG is a next-generation IT infrastructure incorporating Messaging, Realtime and Grid functionality that offers increased performance, reliability, interoperability and faster computing for enterprise customers. In June 2011, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0, which featured advances in performance, scalability and management. The 2.0 update added support for the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 available at release with 6.1 and also extended the cloud readiness of the product.

• Not everyone is unhappy about the slump in global economy. Red Hat, an enterprise Linux company, is hoping that the slowdown in the US and the crisis in Europe will help it to gain greater traction with corporates who are struggling with cuts in discretionary spending.

Fedora

• Many Fedora Docs project contributors enjoy writing on the wiki using the WYSIWYG editor that is provided by MediaWiki. This is great for contributors but not so much when we are trying to pull all this information into DocBook for formal release. The solution was simple: Ian had to fix mw-render.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Umm, I’m not completely sure I want an “intenterface.”

Devices/Embedded

• Remember the Pandora? Back when the likes of the PS Vita and the Nintendo 3DS remained conceptual sketches in top secret bunkers, this open-source handheld paired up a clamshell form factor with analogue game controls, a QWERTY keyboard and a dream.

• Texas Instruments announced a Linux-based evaluation module featuring the digital light processing technology from its DLP Pico Projectors. The DLP LightCrafter combines an ARM9-based, 300MHz DaVinci TMS320DM365 processor, a 20-lumen RGB LED light engine and projector, as well as TI’s 0.3-inch, WVGA DLP chipset, enabling up to 4000 binary patterns per second, says TI.

• Coverity is readying an evaluation edition of a security analysis package pre-configured for Wind River Workbench and Wind River Linux. Coverity Static Analysis for Wind River Workbench integrates security within the embedded development process, identifying vulnerabilities as code is written, according to Wind River.

Phones

• This morning, HP gave further details of its contribution of the webOs platform to the open source community. I find these details and the timeline associated with the release to be positive developments, both for Linux and for the wider mobile markets.

• The WebOS stack represents a rich set of components that combined together create a comprehensive platform for mobile devices. The highlight of today’s announcement has to be the open sourcing of Enyo, the application framework for webOS. This is a powerful framework that app developers can use to build applications that will work across different platforms including iOS, Android, webOS and so on.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Rasmus Berg Palm has released his JavaScript dashboard framework jSlate as GPLv3 licensed open source. jSlate allows users to create dashboards which retrieve their data from any web-accessible service. The system, which runs as a service on the jslate.com web site, allows users to create dashboard visualisations based on Highcharts JS interactive JavaScript charts and D3 data-driven documents. Each dashboard element is represented as a window which contains the visualisation and behind each is a JavaScript script which can be edited by the user to completely customise the chart to their needs.

• At its best Open Source software is about accelerating the pace of innovation by enabling unconnected groups to collaborate across organisational borders. It is a software development process that allows people to freely share ideas and implementations among a community of peers while still focusing on their own local needs and business drivers

• Today’s interview is with Ivan Idris, author of NumPy 1.5 Beginner’s Guide a book for developers or scientists with a little Python experience and wanting to test NumPy’s capabilities. We talk about the book, how it came to be and the experience writing it. Enjoy!

Events

• Failure is a word that, understandably, carries a negative connotation. Nobody wants to fail, really. But failure, if you’re doing anything worthwhile, is inevitable. What’s important is to plan for failure, learn from it, try to avoid damage and do your best to recover gracefully. That was the topic of Selena Deckelmann’s keynote, “Mistakes Were Made,” Sunday morning at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE).

• The conference will be held from January 28 to February 2, which includes the Australia Day public holiday. This is not unusual as it happened in Brisbane in 2011 too.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google earlier this week updated the Chrome Stable channel to 16.0.912.77 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame, patching four privately reported vulnerabilities in its browser. How come only four, you ask, when the headline clearly mentions five? Actually the fifth was patched a couple of weeks back, but Google mistakenly failed to include it in the release notes.

Mozilla

• A single SpiderMonkey runtime (that is, instance of JSRuntime) — and all the objects, strings and contexts associated with it — may only be accessed by a single thread at any given time. However, a SpiderMonkey embedding may create multiple runtimes in the same process (each of which may be accessed by a different thread).

BSD

• Following several months of development, the GhostBSD project has announced the release of version 2.5 of its BSD distribution. According to its developers, this update to GhostBSD is the result of many parts of the system being “updated, tweaked and fine-tuned”.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• A Raleigh City Council committee gave its stamp of approval to a resolution that could make public city data easier to access and change the way the city buys software.

• The Technology and Communications Committee, a new group of city councilors created late last year, approved the Open Source Government resolution Tuesday night. It will go to the full council next week.

Openness/Sharing

Programming

• Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software, services and support for the open source R language, awarded $20,000 to contestants in an event designed to highlight the business usefulness of R.

• Hadoop is an open source software framework that enables organizations to process huge amounts of data, huge as in petabytes. R is an open source software programming language popular with statisticians who have long used it for data mining and creating predictive models.

Leftovers

• Google’s efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced “speedy”) protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that’s already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation into the next-generation standard would improve its chances of being generally adopted.

Security

• It seems like every year, near the closing of the year, Windows viruses and malware seem to creep up from nowhere. Late 2011 was no exception. Beginning in November, Windows viruses and malware started to appear and we experienced a few get through on Windows 7 64-bit with full Symantec Endpoint Protection running, with users running Internet Explorer. Yep, they slipped right on through multiple layers of protection. Meanwhile others mentioned an increase of other popups and strange behaviour with fake “Windows repair” utilities and such. Needless to say, for those supporting Windows, it made for an ever increasing need for extra time to put out these fires. Things seem to have settled down after the new year.

Finance

• Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.

• A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based.

• For the second time in a recent presidential debate where he seeks to answer his opponents’ charges about his firm’s years of quite profitable (and, according to most sources, completely legal although an issue he has found tough to defend in today’s “bubble burst” real estate market) consulting engagements with Freddie Mac, former Speaker Newt Gingrich has now twice misstated facts about credit unions so severely in his attempt to deal with these GSE-oriented questions that it has to be either an intentional effort to mislead or he does not understand what credit unions are.

• Either is troublesome for credit unions. And, now that he has done it two times in two separate debates, it cannot be a mere oversight on his part. One of those problems, lack of candor or lack of comprehension, must be the case. And the record must be set straight.

• Sorry, Mr. Speaker, credit unions are not GSEs. Period.

Privacy

• Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, remains the most outspoken public personality against “non-free” software and recently lashed out against commercial software services that restrict “freedom”.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Rogers Communications is breaking the law by deliberately slowing down certain types of Internet traffic, says Canada’s telecom regulator.

• In a letter made public Jan. 20, the CRTC gives Rogers two weeks to show it’s complying with the rules.

DRM

• Last week, Apple announced ebook authoring software called iBooks Author. As you would expect from Apple, the software is completely proprietary—but the license includes some terms that are so restrictive, they shock even Apple’s fans.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• My post this week on the behind-the-scenes demands to make Bill C-11, the current copyright bill, more like SOPA has attracted considerable attention with mainstream (National Post, La Presse) and online media (Mashable, Wire Report) covering the story. The music industry alone is seeking over a dozen changes to the bill, including website blocking, Internet termination for alleged repeat infringers, and an expansion of the “enabler” provision that is supposedly designed to target pirate sites. Meanwhile, the Entertainment Software Association of Canada also wants an expansion of the enabler provision along with further tightening of the already-restrictive digital lock rules.

• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had fighting words for Motion Picture Association of America chairman Christopher Dodd, calling the former Senator and current lobbyist out on his recent threats and pronouncing that the MPAA should fire its chief.

• “Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” Dodd said to Fox News recently. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

• Over the years, I’ve definitely found that there are plenty of folks working inside the major record labels (and big studios) who really do get what’s going on. The problem is often that their voices are drowned out by others (usually the older guard) who are pretty stubborn in their anti-innovation, anti-consumer ways. It’s always nice, however, when someone from the inside pops up and says something sensible in public, and those folks deserve kudos. The latest is Craig Davis, EMI’s VP of Urban Promotions.

• IN THE former Soviet Union, in the late 1950s and 60s, many books that questioned the political system began to be circulated privately in mimeographed form. Their authors never earned a penny in royalties. On the contrary, they were persecuted, denounced in the official press, and sent into exile in the notorious Siberian gulags. Yet they continued to write.

• WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, the Free Press Action Fund called on Congress to return campaign donations from the Motion Picture Association of America.

• In an interview last week, MPAA President Chris Dodd, a former U.S. senator, threatened to cut off campaign donations to members of Congress who vote against legislation the MPAA supports.

• While many in the press have really enjoyed claiming that the SOPA/PIPA fight has been about Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley, we’ve been pointing out for a while just how silly that is. Months ago, we pointed out that it’s a strange “fight” when one side (Silicon Valley) appears to give the other side all the weapons it needs to succeed (only to watch Hollywood then aim those weapons at its own feet). It’s been pointed out time and time again that Hollywood has a habit of looking a gift horse in the mouth… and accusing it of piracy, when it later turns out to be the answer to Hollywood’s prayers.

ACTA

• As we noted in our post about people just discovering ACTA this week, some had put together an odd White House petition, asking the White House to “end ACTA.” The oddity was over the fact that the President just signed ACTA a few months ago. What struck us as a more interesting question was the serious constitutional questions of whether or not Obama is even allowed to sign ACTA.

• In case you haven’t been following this or don’t spend your life dealing in Constitutional minutiae, the debate is over the nature of the agreement. A treaty between the US and other nations requires Senate approval. However, there’s a “simpler” form of an international agreement, known as an “executive agreement,” which allows the President to sign the agreement without getting approval. In theory, this also limits the ability of the agreement to bind Congress. In practice… however, international agreements are international agreements. Some legal scholars have suggested that the only real difference between a treaty and an executive agreement is the fact that… the president calls any treaty an “executive agreement” if he’s unsure if the Senate would approve it. Another words, the difference is basically in how the President presents it.

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