● 03.09.12

● Links 9/3/2012: KDE 4.8.1, New Wine

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• In a recent interview with Alice Hill, from job search site Dice.com, The Linux Foundation established that Linux skills are very highly valued in the job market, which is backed up my a lot of corroborating data.

• Pinweel, a group photo sharing service, launched in February 2012. Lead back-end developer Michael De Lorenzo explains how Pinweel is different than other photo sharing services and how Linux and open source are built into the backend.

• A little over an hour ago, I was giving the final read on what was originally this blog item, under a different title and with a metric ton or two of humor, cutting criticism and the high quality of commentary that you’d expect from this blog. It was in derisive and cutting response to what Mark Shuttleworth considers “innovation” as outlined in this morning’s ZDNet blog item by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

• Having the ability to use the English language to slice and dice the ridiculous with the accuracy of a Benihana chef with a complete set of Ginsu knives — whether it’s an idea or a person or both — is both a blessing and a curse. The Mark served up some pretty meaty fastballs right in my wheelhouse — a baseball metaphor now that we’re in spring training — and if he puts them where I can hit them, they’re gone. And I tattooed them, right into the next time zone.

• The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has announced the launch of a new Linux Essentials certification program aimed at those new to the world of Linux and open source software. According to the LPI, the “first-of-its-kind” program has been developed over the last two years in collaboration with various government organisations, academic partners, publishers, private trainers and IT professionals.

Desktop

• On September 19, 2011, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of three months spent working in the cloud.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, which has emerged as a true leader in encouraging technology companies, open source community members, developers and others to work together to brighten Linux’s future, is holding its sixth annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in April. The event will take place at the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco from April 3 to 5, and if you’re able to make it, the roundup of speakers is particularly notable this time around.

• Towards the end of last year a new effort was initiated to mainline more of the Android changes inside the Linux kernel. Work has been progressing on that front and with the Linux 3.4 kernel more of these changes will land.

Graphics Stack

• Here’s a video by James Simmons, the community developer that’s near single-handedly been working on providing VIA kernel mode-setting (KMS) support and in-kernel memory management (via a GEM-ified TTM implementation), talking about the Linux KMS and GEM/TTM infrastructures for those wishing to learn more about Linux graphics driver programming.

• AMD has released their belated Catalyst 12.2 Linux driver today. Unfortunately, it’s not too exciting of a release.

• Their download page is still reflecting Catalyst 12.1 from January, but there’s already many Phoronix readers discussing the 12.2 release.

• The X.org developers have released version 1.12.0 of X Server. The update adds support for multi-touch, allowing it to recognise and manage input from multiple fingers on touch screens and touchpads; the feature has been implemented using inputproto 2.2 (X Input Protocol extension), which Peter Hutterer released earlier this month. In his announcement, the lead developer of X Server’s multi-touch support refers to four blog postings in which he discusses the details of the implementation’s functionality and characteristics (1, 2, 3, 4). GTK+ maintainer Matthias Clasen announced that, a few days ago, the code to support the new multi-touch infrastructure was incorporated into a pre-release version of GTK+ 3.4, which is due to be finalised in April; Qt has offered multi-touch support for some time and will soon also be able to access the new X Server’s features.

• Here’s the first bits of information following Phoronix tests of the “Southern Islands” AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card running under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with the Linux 3.2 kernel and the AMD Catalyst driver.

• Following the release of X.Org Server 1.12 earlier in the week, the evdev input driver has been updated and released. The two big features for this common input X.Org driver is to take advantage of multi-touch and smooth scrolling, which is now supported by the latest X Input extension updates.

Applications

• Audience is a new media player written in Vala that “brings the lessons learned from the web home to the desktop”.

• In June of last year Phoronix delivered the news that the Skype protocol was reverse-engineered and that there was already a working open-source code example for interfacing with Skype to send messages. While it seemed promising at first for potentially resulting in an open-source Skype client, the Microsoft-owned Skype vowed to take action. In the end they did go after the open-source / reverse-engineering work and now it looks like the project is dead, or at least terminally dormant.

Proprietary

• CodeWeavers, through Jon Parshall, proudly announced last night in a press release that the CrossOver XI software has been officially released for both Linux and Macintosh platforms, bringing initial support for Microsoft Office 2010.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• Wine software allows you to run Microsoft Windows applications on Linux/Unix operating systems. Recently many release candidate of wine 1.4 released in the past few weeks, and here comes the final stable release of Wine 1.4 after 20 Months of development. The latest stable release Wine 1.4 brings several improvements to graphics rendering, added a new DIB graphics engine, improved Direct3D, support for many new applications and over than 16,000 individual changes. Check What’s new in Wine 1.4 and installation instructions down below.

• As free and open source software continues to become more powerful and more prevalent, there’s less and less need to choose anything else.

• This release represents 20 months of development effort and over 16,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new DIB graphics engine, a redesigned audio stack, and full support for bidirectional text and character shaping.

Games

• Every once in a while there is some news on Unity3D Linux web player support. Sometimes it excites us and most of the times the situation seems all the more dismal.

• Few months back, we also reported that Unity3D Linux support is not a priority and that the chances are bleak. Now finally, the situation has been cleared in a conversation between Richard Cuddy and Graham (from Unity3D) that happened last December.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• Today saw the announcement of a new chapter in the KDE 4.8 series. I was already very pleased with the point release 4.8.0 – it is amazing how the developers managed to keep their desktop environment stable when transitioning from 4.7 to 4.8. And the first maintenance release 4.8.1 brings us bug fixes and more.

• Thanks to the fact that the KDE team makes the sources available to packagers ahead of the public announcement, I am again able to provide you with Slackware KDE 4.8.1 packages on time, and they are up for the taking!

GNOME Desktop

Distributions

• Linux Deepin is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, but using a modifed GNOME 3 shell, not Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. It was founded by Liu Wenhuan, who is also a co-founder of Wuhan Linux User Group (LUG), a LUG in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, China.

• Linux Deepin is the third distribution reviewed on this website that makes use of a heavily-tweaked GNOME 3 desktop. The others are Pear OS (now known as Comice OS) and KahelOS. (See KahelOS 111111 review, Pear OS Linux Panther 3 review and Pear Linux Comice OS 4 beta 1 review.)

• Like most desktop distributions today, Linux Deepin is made available for download as a Live ISO installation image. Deepin’s, both the 32- and 64-bit images, weigh in at about 650 MB. Thus they are Live CD images. The boot menu is shown below.

New Releases

• It’s not gravity that makes the Linux Planet go around, it’s the continuous process of never-ending code development.

• antiX is the very fast and light-weight Linux distribution for old computer system. It is based on MEPIS and Debian. It can be uses on your old machines like 64 MB P2 processor but recommended is 128 MB of RAM. It can be also use as a rescue CD as it is very light-weight.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Although you can use other DEs with PCLOS, it is eminently a KDE system that you can rely on. I have been using it both in a desktop and a laptop computer since version 2011.6 and I am completely satisfied by its performance.

• User satisfaction is not a coincidence. Texstar, the founder of PCLinuxOS, puts a lot of effort in addressing bugs, polishing the distribution and, in short, making a Linux distro that you can count on for every possible task you want a computer to perform. In fact, he has worked so passionately that right now he is on a sick leave: he posted an announcement saying that doctors told him to rest.

Gentoo Family

• Sabayon’s Gentoo heritage might prove a difficult pill to swallow for some, but Russell Barnes explains why that definitely shouldn’t put you off Sabayon 8…

Red Hat Family

• Curious to know how the performance of enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Scientific, etc) evolves over time? Here’s a look at the performance of Scientific Linux 5.7, the recently released Scientific Linux 6.2, and then Fedora 16 as representative of what will eventually work its way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The popular Knoppix Live DVD Linux distribution was presented last evening, March 6th, at the CeBIT 2012 event by its German developer, Klaus Knopper.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 12.04 is coming in April, but eager users can check out the beta version today. “Precise Pangolin” includes a new quick search feature called the HUD, some new privacy settings and a few tweaks to the Unity interface.

• Oxford Archaeology, as its name implies, is no high-tech newbie. The company, self described as an expert in excavation and heritage management, was founded in 1973 in Oxford, England and has been expanding globally ever since. Clients include the United Kingdom’s Royal Household, Ministry of Defence and Highways Agency as well as UNESCO, British Petroleum, Oxford University and the Ministries of Culture for France, Turkey and Nepal.

• Is it just me, or is there a whiff of desperation these days around Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial arm? By that I mean that Canonical increasingly seems to focused on reaching profitability, and nothing else. The de-emphasis on community, the constant introduction of new services, and the increasing market speak are all in marked contrast to the Canonical of five or even three years ago.

• Since Ubuntu is a privately-held company, its financial position is a matter of speculation. In 2009, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth stated that the company was “creeping toward $30 million,” the point of profitability, but that was before many of its current services were introduced. Consequently, you won’t find many — if any — analysts who believe that Canonical is profitable today.

• In little more than a month, the latest release of Ubuntu, 12.04 LTS, will be upon us. As we’ve already noted, it brings a lot of new features to the desktop. But since PCs are only a fraction of the Ubuntu universe, we’d be remiss not to take stock of the updates that 12.04 will usher in on servers, the cloud and beyond. Here’s a look.

• With today’s updates, Canonical updated the Ubuntu One user interface in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

• The Qt version of the Ubuntu One control panel was updated a few weeks back, but today Canonical also changed the GTK interface with the same beautiful design used in the Qt one.

• One of the missions of the Canonical Hardware Enablement (HWE) Team is to track and drive code changes from OEM enablement projects into future Ubuntu releases and upstream. We have a concept of n+1 fixes which we do our best to make sure that those bugs are corrected in our next (that is, n+1) release.

• The Dash search is an integral part of Unity. Users use the dash to search applications, files and other content online (eg. Ask-ubuntu lens). Until now, the file lens only showed files which were opened recently with the help of Zeitgeist. However, users have long wanted to search for files not opened recently through the dash. This long anticipated feature was not present for 2 cycles. That is all about to change with Ubuntu 12.04. Alan Pope, an employee of Canonical has announced a call for testing the new file lens which can now search for all files on your hard disk regardless of whether it has been opened or not.

Devices/Embedded

• Launched today, the global “Raspberry RoadTest” Challenge poses the question: “What innovation will you create using the amazing Raspberry Pi computer?” Designers and enthusiasts can enter the challenge by signing up on the Raspberry RoadTest page on the element14 Community and submitting ideas for the innovations they would create using this credit card-sized computer. The winner will be chosen on “Pi Day” – 14th March 2012.

• The Raspberry Pi foundation has suffered a production setback that could delay delivery of the organization’s $35 Linux computer. The manufacturer accidentally used ethernet jacks without integrated magnetics, built-in transformers that provide DC-isolation and help filter noise.

• The wrong jacks have been soldered to the Raspberry Pi boards and will have to be removed and replaced before the product can ship to end users. According to the foundation, the ethernet jacks are relatively easy to replace. The problem is that sourcing a sufficient quantity of the right ethernet jacks might take some time. This will be the second time that the Raspberry Pi project has suffered a minor delay due to component sourcing difficulties.

Phones

Android

• Yesterday on Twitter, I asked whether anyone could identify a particular point on a basic time series chart plotting of Google’s publicly disclosed Android daily activation figures. No one provided the answer I had in mind, though Corey Gilmore came close. In the field’s defense, they had little chance of success initially because the first chart provided applied the datapoint to the wrong point on the timeline, meaning that they were scrutinizing the wrong month for clues (mea culpa, guys). Here’s the chart, which plots the number of daily Android activations by time:

• At the RSA Conference last week, the US National Security Agency (NSA) released specificationsPDF for their secure Android-based phone network called Project Fishbowl. Similarly, the German government is now switching their secure smartphone solutions from Windows Mobile and Symbian to Android.

• Asus hopes its close partnership with Google will lead it to be the first company to offer devices running Android Jelly Bean – version 5.0.

• Asus prides itself on its Android upgrade efficiency, as it was the first to provide tablets running Honeycomb and the first to push the Ice Cream Sandwich update to its tablets.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The facts are otherwise:

• * in their SEC filing for Q4 2011, Apple report 15.433 million iPads shipped, 111% above the previous year in the same quarter, * DisplaySearch reports 31.7 million tablets shipped in Q4 2011 * Apple’s share of tablet shipments is 15.433/31.7X100 = 48.7%

• Great new display, check; faster processor, check; 4G mobile connection, check; better camera, check. Price, still starts $499 for a 16GB Wi-Fi model and $629 for 4G. Hmmm… How about a $199 Android-powered Nook Tablet instead?

• Still, where have all the Linux netbooks gone? Back in 2008, they were available from major retailers across North America before the netbook market began to shift to Windows. Now those Linux netbooks are nowhere to be found in North America retail stores, and somewhat difficult to find online. Here’s some perspective from System76 President Carl Richell.

• Amazon plans to launch two new tablet PCs, a 7-inch model and another 10-inch model, in the second half of 2012, a move which could cast a shadow on the future development of e-book readers, according to industry sources.

• Apple and Microsoft are getting all the ink in the tablet wars these days but no doubt Android tablets will be matching if not outselling iPads within a year or so.

• People seem to forget that Google is the new owner of Motorola Mobility and plans to release a Xoom-like tablet running Android 4.X sometime in mid 2012, company chairman Eric Schmidt has said publicly.

• In the frenzy to post about iPad, I thought it would be useful to report that on Amazon.com’s most popular list, the top 3 are

• * Kindle Fire, * ASUS Transformer, and * Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Free Software/Open Source

• If you are a open source software developer or a content writer you can use Zanata to translate your software strings, User interface text/String, software documentation and localized into any languages.

• Zanata is an open-source translation manager that enables a community of translators to work on localising software and documentation using nothing more than a web browser.

• A new survey from Netcraft has Apache, Nginx, and Google’s web servers all up, with Microsoft IIS market share dropping down, raising questions about the health of Microsoft’s related offerings.

• The Netcraft results are always interesting, because there’s always a little something for everyone. Depending on how the data is presented, a given hosted domain could be up, down, or off in the ninth dimension. So, care must be taken when qualifying the survey results.

Events

• The Open Source Project Lounge at this year’s CeBIT – taking place in Hannover, Germany until 10 March – is as diverse as ever, with a variety of free and open source (FOSS) projects and organisations being represented by both developers and community members alike. Despite primarily being a commercial show where space is expensive, each year, projects have the opportunity to apply for free booth space, and this year, the Open Source Project Lounge is in the corner of Hall 2. The H had the opportunity to attend this, the world’s largest ICT event, and catch up with a number of the projects’ representatives.

• The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit is a great time to, well, collaborate. But it’s also a really good opportunity to learn.

• We’re offering three courses at this year’s Collaboration Summit, each in a different area, to help build skills while rubbing elbows with other top kernel developers.

• Advanced Linux Performance Tuning is a deep dive into proven tools and methods used to identify and resolve performance problems, resulting in system that is better optimized for specific workloads. This is particularly for those who write or use applications that have unusual characteristics, that behave differently than kernel performance heuristics anticipate. It is a hands-on course that assume some familiarity with basic performance tools. This course is offered on Monday, April 2nd.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• When Mozilla announced the Boot-to-Gecko, all-HTML cell phone last week at Mobile World Congress — along with a plan to partner with Telefonica Digital to build really cheap smart phones running the Mozilla system — I wondered if it was really possible to bring such a cheap phone to market, regardless of the underlying system running the phone.

• A couple week ago, Adobe announced that is was abandoning Flash on Linux to Google. The idea being that Chrome integrates Flash and Google can be the place where Linux users go for Flash.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Education

BSD

Project Releases

• Exactly two years after its first release, the Vagrant project has announced the first stable version of its open source development environment generation tool. Vagrant 1.0 allows developers to easily set up virtual machines for development and testing purposes using Oracle’s VirtualBox and a single configuration file.

Openness/Sharing

• Could the surgeon who saves your life be a robot? The answer to that could be yes, if the developers of the Raven II robotic surgeon have their way. Raven II comes with a surgical robot featuring two robotic arms, a camera for viewing the operational field, and a surgeon-interface system for remote operation of the robot. “The system is powerful and precise enough to support research on advanced robotic surgery techniques, including online telesurgery,” say U.C. Santa Cruz researchers who helped develop it (shown here). The code for Raven II is open source, and this robot is only one of several open source robots poised to advance healthcare.

Programming

• The 3.3.0 version of the Python programming language has entered the testing phase with its first alpha release. This version marks the lifting of a two-year moratorium on changes to the language’s syntax. Proposed by Guido van Rossum as Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 3003, the moratorium was designed to enable non-CPython implementations of the language to catch up to the core implementation after the Python 3.0 release.

• I am a professor of mathematical modeling at the University of Oslo, but for the last 10 years I have been on 80% leave to work at Simula Research Laboratory, which carries out long-term basic research in ICT. At Simula, my main responsibility is to be the manager of a Norwegian Center of Excellence, named Center for Biomedical Computing. Our aim is to develop mathematical methods and software tools to study biomedical phenomena and thereby help clinicians in improving diagnostics and treatment. I am an active scientist and participate in several of the center’s projects. More information is found on cbc.simula.no.

Standards/Consortia

• CEBIT 2012 Jeff Jaffe sees enormous potential in the specification for every major industry, despite some early performance challenges. More on the future of the Open Web standard

Leftovers

Security

• On Sunday morning, 4 March, Egor Homakov exploited a flaw in how the Ruby on Rails web framework handles mass assignments that allowed him to write a posting, delete a posting or push changes into source code on any GitHub project. Homakov had previously created an issue regarding mass assignment security on the rails issue tracker on GitHub; this was closed by the developers saying that it was the application developers’ responsibility to secure their applications. Homakov then decided to demonstrate the issue using the nearest Ruby on Rails application, GitHub.

• Slowly but surely, the Pwn2Own hacker contest has become an important fixture in the world of testing the security of software applications, operating systems and hardware devices. Just prior to last year’s Pwn2Own competition, Apple dropped a series of important updates to its Safari browser and iOS platform, but that didn’t stop Charlie Miller from exploiting a Safari vulnerability to hack into an iPhone’s address book. The results from the 2012 Pwn2Own hacker contest are now in, and one of the major software applications to lose to the hackers this year was Google Chrome.

• “Nobody likes the idea of having to practically beat their operating system into submission,… but this is the reality with Linux,” asserted Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “One good idea layered over another good idea added to another good idea sometimes ends up with really bad results. We don’t all want to be ‘protected from ourselves’ by more and more features that assume the user is a dummy. There’s another OS for that.”

Censorship

• Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in the world. The country tests the law by obtaining a court order to seize key assets of a Canadian company, whose operations with hundreds of employees takes a major hit. The Canadian government is outraged, promising to support the company in its efforts to restore its operations.

• That is the opening of my technology law column this week (Toronto Star version, homepage version) which continues by noting this scenario became reality last week, though the product was not asbestos and the Canadian government has yet to respond. The case involves Bodog.com, a Canadian-owned online sports gaming site and the country doing the seizing was the United States. Supporting online gaming operations will undoubtedly make governments somewhat squeamish, but the broader implications of last week’s seizure touch on millions of websites and Internet companies who now find themselves subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Civil Rights

• In a presidential primary season marked by the rise of “Super PACs” and an explosion of corporate spending in elections, Vermont voters have raised their voices against special interest money in politics. On Super Tuesday, 63 out of a possible 65 towns in Vermont called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C. and to address the issue of corporate personhood and money in politics.

• The 2010 Citizens United decision, which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders labeled “one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever handed down,” struck down bipartisan clean election laws and declared that Congress could not limit so-called “independent” spending. After Citizens United, the 2010 fall elections were the most expensive in U.S. history, with more spending by outside groups than from the candidates themselves. The 2012 election cycle is on track to be the most expensive yet.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• During last week’s public workshop on ACTA, held in presence of Commissioner Karel De Gucht and moderated by MEP Vital Moreira, chairman of the INTA committee1, the manifest tension made it obvious: the Parliament and the Commission are now afraid of citizens,and of the streets. What we saw during the workshop was a parody of debate, where speakers were either members of the Commission, academics, or among the few of the remaining ACTA proponents (including the chairman of a pro-ACTA lobby2!). Nobody from authors, artists or citizen groups were allowed on the panels, despite La Quadrature’s demand to participate.

• Here’s a clip of a Danish TV show discussing ACTA, which Denmark has fiercely advocated in favor of. It starts with the head of a rightsholder society and the Danish trade minister quoting dodgy statistics about the extent and cost of piracy, and then demonstrates that these statistics are patently false, and finally, brings out those responsible for quoting them and gets them to admit their errors.

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