● 03.14.12
● Links 14/3/2012: GIMP 2.7.5, Microsoft Has Massive RDP Hole
Posted in News Roundup at 8:51 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux
Server
- Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has once again lit the fuse of another explosive discussion. This time he came out with some data. “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.” Mark then presents us with this chart from w3techs.com.
Kernel Space
- Besides the DRM work already piling up for Linux 3.4, there’s more. The Samsung developers responsible for the Exynos graphics driver have sent in their “-next” pull request, which brings several new features, including the basis of 2D acceleration for this open-source ARM graphics driver. There’s also a virtual display driver that could be used for handling wireless displays.
- For those that don’t closely follow the various development lists, at the end of February a Silicon Motion developer came to the DRI list announcing he had “a kernel driver for all our graphics chips” that he was looking to mainline. It sounds nice, but in the end it’s a let-down and the most you’ll probably get out of it is a few laughs.
- Following last weeks release of the new X.Org EvDev input driver that introduces support for multi-touch and smooth scrolling, the updated Synaptics input driver is now available for Linux users. Key features, of course, are multi-touch and ClickPads support.
- With the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel being imminent and the Linux 3.4 kernel drm-next already offering lots of changes, here are some Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks comparing the Linux 3.2 kernel to a near-final Linux 3.3 kernel and then the drm-next kernel that’s largely a 3.3 kernel but with the DRM driver code that will work its way into Linux 3.4.
- The results of our Linux file system fsck testing are in and posted, but the big question remains: What do the results tell us, what do they mean, and is the performance expected? In this article we will take a look at the results, talk to some experts, and sift through the tea leaves for their significance.
Applications
- This will be the last in the unstable GIMP 2.7 series. GIMP 2.7.5 is considered somehow a beta version for 2.8 or even a release candidate. It has exactly the same features and functionality which 2.8 will have. The devs want to really release in (late?) March. No more real bugs are blocking the release (Michael Natterer and others have fixed them all in the last weeks). The last big missing thing was the lack of support for the PDB paint API which has also been fixed now! So all the important stuff is completed.
- I am fond of programs that do not impose standards on me. The Mirage image viewer follows that philosophy. The image editing preferences let me select the default scaling quality, whether or not to auto-save or prompt for action, and the saving quality to apply. But since its focus is on file viewing and not file controlling, Mirage starts with a clean slate.
Games
- Pushed publicly yesterday was the test profile to run benchmarks of the popular Half-Life 2 game under Linux. As a result, coming out soon will be benchmarks of Half-Life 2 on Linux with an assortment of graphics cards and drivers.
Desktop Environments
GNOME Desktop
- Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: it comes with a panel at the bottom by default (optionally, you can use 2 panels or a panel at the top) that supports autohide, panel applets, a classic system tray, GNOME2-like notifications and so on, but using GNOME 3.
Distributions
New Releases
Gentoo Family
- If you consider yourself a fairly advanced Linux user, I would (as one who has used nearly every Linux distribution worth talking about) highly recommend Sabayon Linux. At least from my own experience using it, Sabayon is the best Linux distribution overall. Here are some of the reasons why:
Red Hat Family
- European groupware and collaboration software maker Zarafa has intergrated its Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) with ClearOS Professional, made by Salt Lake City-headquartered ClearCenter, a hybrid IT platform provider that works closely with managed services providers (MSPs).
Fedora
- Yesterday I tried and successfully built b2g on Fedora 16 x86_84, targeting the emulator. These are my notes on how to do it as the instructions to setup the build environment are very Ubuntu centric.
- The prebuilt binaries expect to be on a 32-bits system. So we are gonna need to install 32-bits packages. Also there is a requirement to have adb to boostrap (it is built afterwards). Fortunately you can skip installing the SDK for the bootstrap and use the Fedora package android-tools that provides adb.
- Yup, it’s Test Day time again. We did start up quite late this cycle, it feels like, but we’re stacking them deep each week to make up for it!
Debian Family
Derivatives
Canonical/Ubuntu
- Landing today within Ubuntu’s 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” repository is Weston, the reference compositor for the Wayland Display Server. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won’t have a full-on Wayland preview as was originally hoped for last November.
- When you think of Ubuntu Linux, what do you think of? I would guess you think about the Linux desktop. While Ubuntu is certainly a big player—maybe the biggest—when it comes to the Linux desktop, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu wants you to know that “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.”
Devices/Embedded
- Widespread interest in the Raspberry Pi, a tiny but complete Linux computer that can be bought for as little as $25, caught the device’s designers completely off guard, Reuters reported this week.
- The news that a first production run of 10,000 sold out in less than a day, Eben Upton said, left the Raspberry Pi Foundation “punch-drunk” over the degree to which their expectations had been outstripped.
Phones
Android
Free Software/Open Source
- Some of the Labs projects are open source, others are merely peeks into the stats behind Gravity’s service. For example, check out the metrics page. It’s good if you want to see the live metrics of Gravity Network data, number of signals processed on a given day, or number of requests that Gravity is processing per second.
- In what is undoubtedly Africa’s largest open source project, source code for the well-established and highly regarded Cubit Accounting platform has been released under GPL v3 as Accounting-123.com.
- The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) has opened up its tender for a new EDRMS platform to include open source options, promising to consider these equally alongside proprietary software.
Web Browsers
Mozilla
- Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 11, a new version of the popular open source Web browser. The update brings several noteworthy new user-facing features and a number of technical improvements under the hood.
- When Firefox 10 was released in January, the browser gained a new suite of tools for Web developers. Mozilla continued to work on the browser’s integrated development tools and has issued several major improvements in Firefox 11. One of the most significant new tools for Web developers is a new Style Editor.
SaaS
- Rackspace has recently added some more open source talent to its cloud services and hosting team.The recent recruit is Andrew Shafer (pictured] co-founder of Puppet Labs and former VP of Engineering at CloudScaling. Shafer will help Rackspace’s Cloud Builders and OpenStack teams develop products and bring them to market more quickly.
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
Education
- Australia is ranked first among English-speaking counties and second in the world in leading a global, digital, open education revolution. Australia follows closely behind top-ranked South Korea –a nation with a bold policy goal of all textbooks and the entire school curriculum available in digital formats by 2015. In February 2012, the Australian government released a new version of their My School website. Users can now search nearly 10,000 Australian schools for statistical information and other details on a particular school, or to compare similar schools. The website provides a range of measures, including the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, to help parents with school enrollment.
Business
Semi-Open Source
BSD
- On behalf of NetBSD developers, I’m happy to announce the availability of a public beta of NetBSD 6.0, for your testing pleasure.
Public Services/Government
Openness/Sharing
- Applying open source methodology to disease research could speed up the process of drug discovery, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.
- Senior lecturer at the university’s School of Chemistry, Dr Matthew Todd, told Computerworld Australia that the current method of drug discovery is extremely competitive and mostly carried out behind closed doors to protect certain ideas and any commercial benefits down the track.
Open Access/Content
- A bill that would fund a library containing open source textbooks for the 50 most popular lower division courses at state colleges and universities has been proposed by State Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg on Feb. 8.
Programming
- This week on Federal Tech Talk, Host John Gilroy is joined by Greystones Group CEO Sheila Duffy and Director of Technology Services Mary-Sara Camerino.
- Most listeners are familiar with Vivek Kundra’s 25 initaitives for reducing cost of federal IT. Two of these concepts are agile software development and using open source software.
Leftovers
Security
- Microsoft has released six security bulletins to close a total of seven holes in its products. According to the company, one of the bulletins (MS12-020), rated as critical, addresses two privately reported vulnerabilities in its implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
- The first of these is a “critical-class” issue in RDP that could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system. Although RDP is disabled by default, many users enable it so they can administer their systems remotely within their organisations or over the internet. All supported versions of Windows from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are affected.
Finance
- Siewert is expected to inherit the portfolio of Lucas van Praag, a long-time Goldman executive who ran the public relations department and developed a reputation for his sharp wit and barbed emails to reporters he believed had misrepresented the bank. Van Praag is expected to leave within weeks.
Censorship
- A couple weeks ago, we noted that with all of these questionable domain seizures going on, it was a shame that ICANN wasn’t speaking out against such questionable abuses of the domain system. We thought its silence was a sign of its impotence to actually take a stand. Turns out we may have actually overestimated ICANN’s willingness to stand up for the internet. You see, late last week it put out a “Thought Paper on Domain Seizures and Takedowns.”
- The Doe Defendants registered the alias “NHLiberty4Paul” at YouTube and Twitter and posted a YouTube video attacking Jon Huntsman. The video ends “American Values and Liberty – Vote Ron Paul.” The Does acted without Paul’s permission–so much so that Paul sued them for violations of the Lanham Act and defamation. After filing the lawsuit, Paul sought to unmask the Does.
- Owners of online marketplaces can breathe a little easier this week: on Tuesday, a state-level appeals court issued a decision flatly rejected a dangerous court precedent that threatened not only online auction sites but social networks, message boards, and every other platform for online expression.
Privacy
Intellectual Monopolies
- The India Controller General Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks has just (March 12, 2012) issued an order granting a compulsory license to patents on the cancer drug sorafenib/Nexavar, in the matter of NATCO Vs. BAYER. A copy of the decision is attached below, and is also available from the government’s web site here: http://ipindia.nic.in/
- KEI filed an affidavit in the case, which is available here. http://keionline.org/node/1359. The Bayer price in India for sorafenib was 69 thousand USD per year. A survey of prices on sorafenib is available here: http://keionline.org/prices/nexavar. Bayer’s main defense of the pricing was its program of discounts to lower income patients, and the fact that CIPLA was selling an infringing product at a lower price (Bayer is suing CIPLA, and asking for damages and injunctions).
- No sooner had the Department of Justice announced its plan to investigate Apple and five of the Big Six publishers for e-book price-fixing than a representative of those benefiting most from this (alleged) collusion boldly stepped into the fray. Scott Turow, bestselling author and president of the Author’s Guild, has issued one of the most profoundly self-serving and wrongheaded statements ever to grace the pages of a legacy industry’s website. There’s a ton to unpack here, so let’s get right to it.
- I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to not bring to your attention. It’s not really related to tech, though, so bear with me.
- People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out of touch with reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be.
Trademarks
- For us this was never about a trade mark but being able to use Scrolls as the name of our game which we can – Yey.
Copyrights
- In the wake of the Internet blackout that led to the dramatic death of two controversial online piracy bills, a new warning has entered the Hill vernacular: “Don’t get SOPA’d.”
- Lawmakers are tiptoeing around issues that could tick off tech heavyweights such as Google or Amazon. They don’t want a legislative misstep to trigger the same kind of online revolt that killed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate in January.
- Every time you think we’re done seeing totally ridiculous arguments about file sharing, the old really silly ones pop back up. Musician Logan Lynn has written a pretty silly rant on Huffington Post entitled Guess What? Stealing Is Still Wrong. And, indeed, it is. But nowhere in the article does he actually discuss stealing. He discusses infringement. In silly black and white terms that assumes that every single download is absolutely a lost sale, that no one who downloads ever gives him any money and that his biggest fans are criminals.
- Home Secretary Theresa May has approved the extradition to the US of a student accused of copyright infringement.
ACTA
- Now that the EU’s ratification of ACTA has departed from the original script of everyone just waving it through, the European Commission is clearly trying to come up with Plan B. Some insights into its thinking can be gained from the minutes (pdf) of a recent Commission meeting, pointed out to us by André Rebentisch.
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