● 02.20.12

● Links 20/2/2012: Linux 3.3 RC4, VLC 2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 12:14 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It’s Friday. That’s the perfect day to have uncovered this weird gem: This week, Rebecca Black got her own version of Linux, RebeccaBlackOS.

• She’s not the first teenybopper to get her own open source operating system either. RebeccaBlackOS follows Hannah Montana Linux and Justin Bieber Linux.

• According to Reuters, Li said Baidu was looking to work with more smartphone vendors to expand the reach of its Linux-based Yi mobile platform.

Desktop

• They don’t seem to have alphabetical order in mind but they certainly do give space to GNU/Linux. So much for the FUD that GNU/Linux is somehow not ready for consumers. Look at all computers sorted by “Best Sellers”…

• My thoughts on why businesses and individuals need to start thinking about switching away from proprietary (and high maintenance) software like Windows, and look at open source and free software inste… Read more »ad like GNU/Linux. All articles are based on real world and everyday experiences with Windows and GNU/Linux, for both business and personal use. Recently I’ve had the pleasure of replacing yet another Windows XP computer with Fedora Linux (version 16). The user is a relative of mine, and finally became tired of dealing with malware every month or so by simply browsing the web. So at his request I put Fedora Linux on the PC and wiped XP away from it for good. He had already used GNU/Linux on other PCs.

• As stated in a previous post, I came across some issues with Fedora 16 and Gnome 3 with a previous deployment, but this time I knew what to expect. After installing Fedora 16 which took about 25 minutes or so from start to finish, I immediately changed Gnome to Fallback Mode to keep the desktop environment familiar to Gnome 2. My personal thought is that the Gnome 2 look and feel is much better suited for a desktop PC.

Server

• CSC reports that the new contract authorizes a transition from the current mainframe environment to a new z Linux platform, which the vendor claims will: lower costs through enhanced operational and energy efficiency; improve service through a simplified, integrated environment; and augment risk management via strengthened resiliency and security features.

• The SGI ICE 8400 platform with AMD processors is a completely open platform optimized for HPC workloads and runs an off-the-shelf Linux operating system for application compatibility. Although the ICE platform is able to comfortably support multi-petaflop sized installations, design considerations allow cost effective solutions down to a half rack. Single- or dual-plane integrated InfiniBand can be cabled into four different topologies, including hypercube, enhanced hypercube, all to all, and fat-tree, allowing flexible network customization for a variety of workloads.

Kernel Space

• The proper fsck utility for the Btrfs file-system remains M.I.A. while a contribution from an independent developer introduces LZ4 compression support to this next-generation Linux file-system.

• Last month at SCALE 10x the lead developer of Btrfs, Chris Mason, told the crowd that an error-fixing Btrfs.fsck tool was imminent since the file-system is going production-ready in Oracle Linux (Mason is an Oracle engineer) and had a deadline of 14 February.

• Here, I’m going to introduce an alternative load distribution algorithm for Linux kernel scheduler. This technique is named as “The Barbershop Load Distribution Algorigthm” or BLD for short and will be refered as BLD from here on. As it’s name implies, it only tries to distribute the load properly by tracking lowest and highest loaded rq of the system. This technique never tries to balance the system load at idle context, which is done by the current scheduler. The motivation behind this technique is to distribute load properly amonst the CPUs in a way as if load balancer isn’t needed and to make load distribution easier.

• This was the conclusion of the 2012 Linux Jobs Report released yesterday, which surveyed more than 2,000 hiring managers. The survey was conducted by IT job specialist Dice together with The Linux Foundation. The latter is a non-profit foundation set up to promote, protect and advance Linux.

• CUPS 1.6, which is currently in development, will no longer include some features used in many Linux distributions. An Intel developer has presented patches that may allow the kernel to use an efficient power management feature by default.

Graphics Stack

• The initial code push has taken place for the Lima Project, which is the open-source ARM Mali graphics driver that’s under development.

• The Lima stack development is sponsored by Codethink and its lead developer is veteran X.Org developer Luc Verhaegen. Phoronix was the first to break the news on the project last month.

• The xf86-video-openchrome driver has seen its first proper release in quite a while. The xf86-video-openchrome 0.2.905 release has support for new hardware and features.

• The OpenChrome driver is rarely worked on today by the small open-source VIA community, but the new 0.2.905 release that’s now available introduces VX900 support, VX855 X-Video support, X.Org Server 1.12 compatibility, and assorted bug-fixes/tweaks.

• After several attempts that ultimately failed, this weekend Eugeni Dodonov published a patch-set as “Another chapter in RC6 saga…” where he hopes the Sandy Bridge RC6 power-savings (and performance boosting) support is finally reliable to enable by default.

• For those that aren’t familiar with Intel RC6 at this stage, you must read more Phoronix articles as it’s been routinely covered in past months. To get up to speed, read SNB RC6 On Linux 3.1 Is Both Good & Bad where it outlines the power-savings abilities of this hardware feature, which allows the Intel graphics processor to be dropped into a lower-power state. At the same time as conserving precious energy, RC6 can also boost graphics performance as Phoronix benchmarks have shown in other articles.

• After laying out plans earlier this month at FOSDEM for releasing Wayland 1.0 this year, Kristian Høgsberg has now written a more detailed message to the Wayland developers that outlines some of the TODO list and other plans for making Wayland 1.0.

• One of the less talked about features of Mesa 8.0 is its ability to handle MLAA, which is short for Morphological Anti-Aliasing. But how does MLAA on the open-source graphics drivers affect the OpenGL performance and is it worth it for boosting the image quality through this anti-aliasing technique? In this article are some benchmarks of MLAA under Mesa 8.0.

• Morphological Anti-Aliasing support for Mesa was worked on last summer as part of the 2011 Google Summer of Code with X.Org. Lauri Kasanen was the student developer responsible for bringing MLAA to Mesa. Unlike many GSoC projects, he was successful in his summer project. In fact, he had MLAA Mesa code ready for testing in July well before the August deadline. In August the support was ready for merging, which also included the Gallium3D post-processing support and ROUND support for the various drivers.

Applications

• VLC Media Player 2.0 is a major upgrade to the extremely popular video player, which comes with the ability to open more formats, experimental Blu-Ray support, faster decoding on multi-core CPUs and mobile hardware, and professional High-Definition and 10-bits codecs.

• At Broadcast Video Expo (BVE) 2012 Facilis Technology , a leader in advanced shared storage solutions for post-production and content creation, will debut version 5.5 of its TerraBlock Shared Storage System featuring the Facilis Shared File System for Linux. Delivering improved compatibility, value, scalability and performance, the new software release also includes integrated server spanning and mirroring, Adobe Premiere Pro project sharing and a new capacity expansion product called TX16.

• Linux has a few solid RSS readers, but there is one app that stands out from the pack: the feature-filled, customizable RSSOwl.

Instructionals/Technical

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The KDE 4.0, the latest version of KDE desktop environment, was released recently. On this occasion, we reached out to the founder of KDE project, Matthias Ettrich who started the KDE project back in 1996. Almost 12 years down the line, he’s now working at Trolltech, hacking Qt. Here is what the KDE-Man had to say…[The interview was conducted in 2008. KDE is gaining popularity so we wanted to refresh the memories.]

• I have switched Linux Mint 12 KDE to the Netbook desktop, and as always it looks nice and is a pleasure to use

Distributions

• After trying the openSUSE beer at FOSDEM, which is specially brewed at a small Bavarian brewery near the Nürnberg SUSE office and where many of their developers reside, I began wondering if other Linux distributions were represented by beer, what beers would they be? Continue on for this enjoyable weekend article where the leading Linux distributions are described in terms of beer.

• Sabayon 8 XFCE is a Gentoo based distribution that comes with XFCE desktop version 4.8 and makes Gentoo a whole lot easier. Gentoo Linux is a more advanced based distribution that has been around a long time which is focused more on advanced users with compiling your own packages (programs) in order to run.

• Sabayon, takes a different approach and takes the hard part out of Gentoo and makes it easy with the latest version in Sabayon 8.Sabayon comes as an installable LiveDVD and is available in 32 bit and 64 bit flavours. Installation did not take that long and was not complicated. The configuration was pretty easy and had you setup your keyboard, select your timezone and so forth.

• Like a lot of stories, there is more to it than meets the eye. And while on the surface, this is a story about a Linux distribution, there are some life lessons that can be found in it.

• As with many other people, my life saw a lot of dramatic changes in the year 2001. For me, it started in January 2001. I should have been keeping in mind the words of wisdom from the world champion athlete Dan Millman. He wrote The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and other books. One of his statements is all accidents can be attributed to one of three reasons:

New Releases

• · Announced Distro: Finnix 104 · Announced Distro: Scientific Linux 6.2 · Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• There are not so many distributions in the Linux galaxy which have names directly showing the purpose of the distribution’s creation. I honestly do not think that Bodhi is going to enlighten anybody or Fedora can stay on your head. As opposed to these, PCLinuxOS directly says that it is a Linux operating system intended to be used on PCs.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has announced key steps towards more open and interoperable cloud computing with the promotion of its Deltacloud API to a top-level Apache project and an extension of its partnership with Amazon Web Services that enables hybrid cloud operation of Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.

• The moves were announced as part of a Red Hat webcast where the company hammered home the need for an open approach to cloud computing that allows customers to expand easily, enables portability between clouds, and avoids a lock-in to proprietary architectures.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It is always exciting when new versions of Unity are released since they bring along bug fixes and new features. Well Unity 5.4 was released on Friday. Let’s go through some the features and bug fixes it comes with.

Devices/Embedded

• “Open source” is a term most often applied to software, and it’s become increasingly common in both the business and consumer worlds.

• Energy Micro and Pengutronix will be demonstrating µClinux for Cortex-M3, embedded Linux running on the energy friendly EFM32 Gecko range of microcontrollers at this year’s Embedded World Show. This new port of µClinux features the latest version 3.2 Linux kernel, and gives embedded designers all of the cost and time-to-market benefits of using an open source embedded operating system, while maintaining low current consumption of just 1.6mA when in idle mode. Energy Micro, the energy friendly microcontroller and radio company, assisted and supported Pengutronix to complete the port to the Giant Gecko MCU range, the industry’s leading family of low-energy microcontrollers.

Phones

Android

• Google’s Latest release of Android version 4.0 typically referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich has definitely changed the way in which people visualize smartphone. Essentially the most spectacular thing concerning the Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich is it provides almost as good consumer experience in smartphones as in tablets.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The recently announced KDE Spark Tablet has an ARM Mali 400 as its graphics processor, which right now is backed by a closed-source user-space driver but that’s changing thanks to the Lima driver that’s providing a reverse-engineered open-source ARM Mali driver. Here’s a demo of the Lima driver’s Limare stack running on the KDE Spark Tablet hardware.

• Conclusion: The Nook Color hardware makes a nice tablet with a really sharp screen at a reasonable price. There seems to be a catch about the version of the Nook Color that you get. Apparently some will NOT boot from the SD card. Research this before tryin it. My Nook Color has Model# BNRV200 and Software 1.2.0. More here. Apparently, you want a Nook Color with a ROM (Software) version prior to 1.4.

Free Software/Open Source

• I just want to show how you could join the 2012 International Mother Language Day by celebrations by contributing to a FOSS project with your friends and relatives. In this century ICT plays manor role in various fields including education sector. There are many tools have been localized but most of them not let you in to the project to contribute as a localizer. So where you could contrinute to a softwrae on behalf of your own language or community?

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has released an experimental version of the Chromium web browser with support for the company’s new Dart programming language. Dart, which is Google’s attempt to improve on JavaScript, has thus far not enjoyed much support outside of Google, but the company continues to push forward with its own efforts.

• The new development preview version of the Chromium browser, the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser, contains the Dart Virtual Machine. This release, which Google is calling “Dartium,” can be downloaded from the Dart language website. At the moment it’s available only for Mac OS X and Linux. Google says a Windows version is “coming soon.” Keep in mind that this is a preview release and intended for developer testing, not everyday use.

Mozilla

• Mozilla, the folks behind the Firefox web browser, launched a project last year to create a totally open mobile operating system, and now that dream is nearly a reality. Boot to Gecko (B2G) is built entirely with standards-compliant web technologies like HTML and JavaScript. It gets its name from the Gecko rendering engine in Firefox, which is also the platform that will run B2G. Android has a number of things in common with B2G, for instance it is open source, and uses some of the same underlying technology. Designing the entirety of a mobile operating system on web standards is a risky proposition, but B2G does have some advantages over Android.

Project Releases

• The VLC team has announced the release of VLC 2.0, code named, Twoflower. VLC 2.0 is a major upgrade for VLC. The latest version of VLC offers faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bits codecs.

• Just weeks after the first release candidate, the VideoLAN developers have officially released version 2.0 of the VLC media player for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. VLC media player 2.0, code-named “Twoflower”, is a major reworking of the VLC application, bringing playback improvements and experimental support for playing Blu-ray discs, albeit without menus.

• The lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, has released version 1.3 of the Cinnamon desktop environment. This is the first major update of the user interface based on code from the GNOME shell and which was first considered “stable” with version 1.2. In Cinnamon 1.3, all panel components are applets which means, for example, that users can remove a menu or window list and replace it with alternative third-party applets. All applets can also be moved using drag & drop so that users have even more control over where to position them.

Public Services/Government

• The European parliament is currently consulting on a wide-ranging draft European Commission regulation on European standardisation. Voting in the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, which is spearheading the legislation, is set to take place in March. The initiative is intended to create a comprehensive, effective, broadly applicable standardisation system. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has criticised the proposal as paving the way for standards which are poorly compatible with open source software.

• A reform of the existing piecemeal European standardisation framework is, according to an FFII paper on the Commission’s proposal, long overdue. Their analysis claims that current regulations are not designed for specifications for software interfaces or data formats. According to the FFII, the proposal would mean accepting standards from international consortia licensed under FRAND (Fair Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) terms and conditions.

Standards/Consortia

• There’s a big stink going on right now. Someone found out that Google was setting “third party cookies” (for their advertising servers) in Apple’s Safari browser, which defaults to not loading third party cookies (which I’ll get to in a moment). Now it appears that someone using Safari on a Mac that expected privacy somehow, is suing Google. (The PC World article on the first link has a more accurate technical description of what’s going on) In short, someone found a bug in Safari, and now Google is being sued and is under investigation by Congress. We know how much Congress can be expected to know about the internet based on their hilarious to horrifying attempts to regulate it as many of them uttered things like “I don’t know how this here internet thing works, but they tell me….” or the late Senator Ted Steven’s infamous “series of tubes” comment. To say nothing of the fact that Congress flip flops between mandatory tracking for all and bullshit “consumer privacy concerns” such as this one. (For those concerned with the former, the bill is called HR 1981, but a more fitting name would be HR 1984) If this was a bug in Firefox, it would be fixed. If it was a bug in Chrome, it would be fixed. Somehow, Microsoft and Apple users seem to think they can use proprietary secret software when they’re not allowed to know how it works. Software, which has a history of many bugs, with vendors that typically take weeks/months/years to patch them once they’re made public. These companies also slip back doors into the software for various government agencies. Apple was recently caught with a back door that they put into iTunes, it remained there for 3 years, undetected, which facilitated man in the middle attacks. (A government could use this to run a counterfeit iTunes server and load malicious software onto the victim’s computer. The article calls it a flaw, but we know what was really going on, and that it was likely just moved.).

Leftovers

Security

Finance

• A smiling former Goldman Sachs computer programmer was freed from prison Friday after a surprise ruling from a federal appeals court reversed his conviction on charges he stole computer code.

• “Justice occasionally works,” declared the beaming programmer, Sergey Aleynikov.

• He said he “just jumped all over the place” at 6 a.m., the moment he read and repeatedly reread an email from his lawyer informing him that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan had reversed his conviction. The words were, he said, “‘We won!’”

• According to an article in the Arab News, Shariah-committed imams declined to issue its religious approval (fatwa) for the Goldman Bond derivative because the “use of proceeds” to fund Goldman’s non-Islamic business is forbidden, according to Shariah finance laws.

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