● 03.07.12

● Links 7/3/2012: NVIDIA Joins Linux Foundation, Android Easily Beats iOS in the US

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Noah’s on my radar because of this post he wrote about how operating systems are becoming irrelevant. The piece points out how Noah was able to effortlessly switch from OS X to Linux. I appreciated the post because it wasn’t about the politics of free and open source software. Instead, he was writing about getting to choose the best tools for the job, an idea that sometimes gets misplaced in our conversations about Linux.

• Part of “Technological Evangelism” according to M$ is to denigrate competitive brands. In the FLOSS world, unfortunately, there is too much of that. One item is the holding down of the “Linux” brand. Two popular examples are Android/Linux and Ubuntu GNU/Linux. S

Kernel Space

• Canonical announced on March 6th, in a security notice, that a new Linux OMAP4 kernel update for its Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system is now available, fixing six security vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various developers.

Graphics Stack

• X.Org Server 1.12 is now officially available with X Input 2.2, which is the X Input extension update that formally introduces multi-touch support.

• While the release of X.Org Server 1.12 wasn’t as drawn out as MythTV 0.25, this release is coming about a month late due to Keith Packard, the xorg-server release manager, taking a bicycling trip through New Zealand. However, it’s now available following the revised release plans (and the developers are now hitting targets much better than in the past).

• Yesterday AMD officially launched the Radeon HD 7800 “Pitcairn” series as the latest hardware in their Southern Islands family to reside between the Radeon HD 7700 series and their flagship Radeon HD 7900 cards. Unfortunately, the open-source support for these latest AMD GPUs remains unavailable.

• Besides the recent talk about using Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe for Mozilla Firefox, there’s another interesting technical discussion happening now about using Mesa on the web to emulate the full OpenGL API using the WebGL API.

• Earlier today was the first round of comments by David Airlie regarding the finishing and up-streaming of his X.Org GPU hot-plugging support. This allows for new GPUs to be dynamically added to a running X.Org Server environment.

• Airlie has been working on the GPU hot-plugging support for a number of months, but recently it’s finally come together. In particular, he’s been playing with the USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapters. David has written a DisplayLink KMS driver to top off DisplayLink’s other code and open-source support. This could also be adapted to work with dynamically hot-plugging/unplugging other graphics processors too.

• NVIDIA will be joining the Linux Foundation, per an announcement coming out in the morning. But for open-source Linux fans, will this be a reason to rejoice about NVIDIA potentially moving forward with open-source drivers? Don’t break out the champagne quite yet.

• Besides the open-source AMD Radeon support for OpenCL finally taking shape, there’s more good open-source OpenCL news: a newly open-sourced LLVM OpenCL back-end.

• Back in August I wrote about an OpenCL, GLSL back-end for LLVM that may soon open up. The work was the result of a German student writing the LLVM OpenCL back-end as part of his university thesis. OpenCL is generated from LLVM bit-code, similar to how the Emscripten project is generating JavaScript from LLVM bit-code. This work is what’s finally being opened up.

Applications

• Most people today are used to having a nice, intuitive graphical environment when they sit down to use a computer. Gone are the days of using a DOS machine or being lucky enough to have a dial-up account at 300 baud on a UNIX mainframe. Today, most people expect to be able to point and click their way to work nirvana, even when that work is being done on some other machine over a network. In this article, I look at some of the available options, what the relative costs and benefits are, and hopefully by the end, you should have enough information to make a choice as to what would be the best option for you.

• Although my primary interest was distance, I was intrigued by Smart Tools as it brings together the accelerometer, camera, calculator and screen to make redundant a slew of classic and expensive tools. I’m giving this app my first ever five out of five because I couldn’t find fault with its ingenuity or functionality.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• CodeWeavers has today unveiled CrossOver XI as their latest Wine-based commercial software to run Windows programs under Linux and Mac OS X systems. Besides being based upon Wine 1.4, there’s several other fundamental differences with this new product.

Desktop Environments

• LXDE at first blush closely resembles other X window managers tweaked for popular Linux distros. But the LXDE Project picks up with functionality where the Xfce Desktop leaves off. The default graphics in LXDE might be a turnoff for some users, but the goal is not to have lots of eye candy that bloats the concept of a lightweight desktop.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The Rekonq developers have announced the release of version 0.9 of their WebKit-based web browser for the KDE desktop. The stable update to the lightweight alternative to the Konqueror browser includes several new features, such as a revamped URL bar.

Distributions

New Releases

• Speaking at this year’s CeBIT Open Source ForumGerman language link, Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper presented version 7.0 of his popular Live Linux distribution. The new release is a special “CeBIT Edition” which is based on Debian “Wheezy” and uses the 3.2.4 Linux kernel. Available as a LiveDVD, it now uses UTF-8 encoding, and can run on both 32- and 64-bit systems.

• The next major version of venerable Live Linux distro Knoppix is slowly making it’s way out the door over the next couple of days, includes some major updates to compatibility and performance

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Debian Family

• Look at the steepness of the bug-count for the next release (green curve) at Debian. Even as the count of packages in the repository rises, the rate at which bugs are getting killed in the release-cycle keeps rising. This shows the power of FLOSS. By using a modular layered approach, a thousand people can change the world faster than tens of thousands working in the darkness of M$. It’s beautiful that you can have the benefits of a package manager that keeps all your systems updated for applications as well as the OS at very low cost. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It works for you.

• Clang, the C/C++ front-end compiler for LLVM, is progressing quite quickly and is capable of building the Debian archives quite well, at least for a majority of the packages and on popular architectures.

• A Debian developer’s side project has been to see how well it would work to re-build the Debian archive (the entire distribution) using LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler rather than GCC. Apple has rated LLVM/Clang as being production-ready and it continues to find new uses, especially with the recent LLVM 3.0 release. But how well does LLVM/Clang work for building the massive Debian package-set?

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The HUD or “Head-Up display” is an interactive way to search inside currently running application menus. This tool becomes handy, specially for applications with many menus and a lot of options, and you hardly remember where is the required options you want to execute. We have seen earlier HUD running on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin with Unity interface. Now it’s available for Unity 2D user interface as well.

• The first beta of Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, was made available today. The 12.04 release, which is the next major version of the popular Linux distribution, will officially launch in April. It’s a long-term support release, which means that it will receive updates and support for five years.

• Precise will introduce some noteworthy improvements to Unity, Ubuntu’s user interface shell. The biggest enhancement to Unity in 12.04 is the HUD, a new keyboard-driven user interface for accessing menu items. Version 12.04 will also bring better hardware support, such as improved power management for certain hardware configurations, and updated software.

• Microsoft wants you to love Metro. Apple is bringing iOS and Mac OS X closer together with every release. But, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its parent company Canonical, thinks that if you want “real desktop user experience innovation” … “before it shows up in Windows or MacOS,” you need to check out Ubuntu 12.04’s forthcoming Head Up Display (HUD).

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Announced last week on the blog of Matt Kwan, an Australian PhD student, was an X Server for Android. “For the past few months I’ve been implementing an X11 server to run natively under Android. In the near future I may have need for a serializable user interface, so to get a better understanding of how they work I decided to implement the de facto standard, X11. Well, it turns out the X protocol is bigger than I thought, but through sheer bloody-mindedness I got it finished. And it might actually be useful.”

• The Free Software Foundation in Europe is taking a swipe at Android with a campaign to help punters wrestle their phones and data from Google’s paws.

• The foundation has flagged up seven pieces of software or services it reckons you’ll want to use with your Android handset and possibly help develop. These will stop you being “spied on” and give you more freedom, the FSFE says.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Business

Semi-Open Source

• The heart of Sencha’s technology stack is Ext JS, a JavaScript library that originally emerged from Yahoo’s YUI project. Sencha maintains Ext JS and distributes it under a dual-licensing model. The code is available under the terms of the GPLv3 for use in open source software, but adopters will need to purchase a commercial license to use it in a proprietary setting.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• According to the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Android mobile OS and applications for it impinge on personal freedoms, and something needs to be done about this state of affairs. The foundation is encouraging community members to adopt numerous applications and services that it sees as preserving freedom, and encouraging developers to take Android alternatives to the next level. Here are the details.

Licensing

• A recent controversy about the legal aspects of software licensing put Rob Landley in the middle of an argument, but Landley says his real focus is on code, especially his ToyBox project – a reworking of the concepts of a project he once maintained, the Swiss-army knife of commands that is BusyBox. The H had a chance to talk with him about ToyBox, BusyBox and why he likes to work on these multifunctional monolithic utilities.

Standards/Consortia

• While technocrats in Westminster and Brussels cringe over the question of open document formats, the US military is planning a generation of open source helicopters.

• This is not just a generation of helicopters. It is the next generation of US military helicopter. It’ll be built on open standards, and will actively court open source systems suppliers.

• The US Army issued an official request for information on the proposal last week, formally kick-starting a procurement that will make the pedestrian kerfuffle over document formats in civvy street seem, well, pedestrian.

• It has already shone an unforgiving light on the question of royalties – one that has undermined every civil administration that has attempted to implement an open standards policy in Europe.

• Weapons manufacturers and US forces made an unequivocal declaration for royalty-free standards in January through the FACE (Future Airborne Capabilities Environment) Consortium they formed in response to US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s call for a “common aircraft architecture and subsystems”.

• “The FACE Standard is an open, nonproprietary technical specification that is publicly available without restrictive contracts, licensing terms, or royalties,” the Consortium announced from its base at The Open Group, the industry association responsible for the POSIX open Unix specification.

• “In business terms, the open standards specified for FACE mean that programmers are freely able to use them without monetary remuneration or other obligation to the standards owner,” it said.

Leftovers

Security

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Good news! The sewage treatment plant in Calabasas, California has been giving away free sludge! Free sludge, you say? That potent stew of human and industrial sewage sludge laced with flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, pharmaceutical residues, phthalates, industrial solvents, resistant pathogens, and perfluorinated compounds? “Composted” sludge, which can bioaccumulate in plants grown in sludge-contaminated soil? Oh, goodie.

Finance

• Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a costly mistake from the start.

• On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said.

• A report released today by Goldman Sachs says that if push comes to shove, the federal government will pay its lenders before it pays Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. Debt service “should be seen as the top claim on government resources in most cases,” says the Goldman analysis.

Civil Rights

• The Mexican legislature today adopted a surveillance legislation that will grant the police warrantless access to real time user location data. The bill was adopted almost unanimously with 315 votes in favor, 6 against, and 7 abstentions. It has been sent to the President for his approval.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Pinterest is a social site for image sharing around themes that launched in closed beta in March 2010. As the site proceeded through an invite system and finally registration requests, it gained a considerable following and was one of Time’s “50 Best Websites of 2011.” In January 2012, it drove more referral traffic to retailers than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined and became the fastest site to ever break 10 million unique visitors. As its popularity increases, so have concerns about whether its users aren’t just sharing their favorite things, but engaging one another in the web’s largest copyright infringement platform.

ACTA

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