● 07.06.12

● Links 6/7/2012: Mandriva Name Changes; Next GPL

Posted in News Roundup at 7:16 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Scientists working at CERN, Geneva have announced the discovery of Higgs boson which is considered to be one of the most important scientific feats in understanding the creation of Universe.

• Higgs boson is a a new subatomic particle that enables particles in atoms to gather mass, the basic building blocks of the universe. It is called ‘God particle’ because its existence is fundamental to the creation of the universe.

• Last night I’m afraid to say I failed the LINUX community.

• My wife’s Aunty and Uncle came up from Glasgow to Aberdeenshire to visit my mother in law for a few nights and en route stayed at our house for a meal.

• After the meal my wife’s Uncle asked whether he could use our PC to check his emails etc. My wife asked my son to give the Uncle his laptop to use which is running Windows 7 but I saw the instant opportunity to demonstrate the power of LINUX by letting him loose on my laptop running Mageia 2.

• Now the reason I am running Mageia 2 is that I had an unfortunate incident last weekend whilst playing with the partitions on my laptop whereby I accidentally destroyed the version of Zorin I was running previously. This however was not I thought an issue because I had set up Mageia meticulously with the KDE 4 plasma desktop and I think it looks really impressive. I have even installed Compiz to add some whizzy effects. Add to this the Chromium browser and you would think you have a really good setup to demonstrate to a non Linux user.

• One CERN physicist, though, went out of his way to give Linux some credit where credit is due, and posted a complimentary thanks to the operating system on Reddit.

• After Linux was founding wanting over last weekend’s leap second server hiatus, some better news – it helped CERN physicists track down the mysterious Higgs Boson.

Desktop

• Dell has today made a number of resources live for developers that might be interested in their new system under the Spunik Project, which sees Dell and Canonical partnering to create developer specific Ultrabooks.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• It seems that among Linux enthusiasts, Intel is gaining market-share thanks to their increasingly powerful integrated graphics backed by a fully open-source driver while NVIDIA is losing ground.

• While the GLX_ARB_create_context and GLX_ARB_create_context_profile extensions were already pulled into the GLX code for X.Org Server 1.13, with the merge window being extended to allow the landing of Airlie’s RandR 1.5 work, a few more GLX extensions have now landed too.

• Daniel Vetter has pushed out new -next and -testing branches for Intel’s open-source Linux graphics DRM driver with a few highlights worth noting.

• It has been fourteen years since the ATI Rage 128 graphics cards were released, but some within the open-source community are still using this vintage graphics hardware and even advancing the ATI driver.

• It has been fourteen years since the ATI Rage 128 graphics cards were released, but some within the open-source community are still using this vintage graphics hardware and even advancing the ATI driver.

• With XAA 2D acceleration finally being killed within the X.Org driver, the old DDX drivers that don’t have EXA support are basically left to use the ShadowFB acceleration on the CPU. XAA hasn’t accelerated much modern software and it was just time to kill off the old hardware support.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Whether or not you are going on a vacation this summer, it is always good to take a break. And if you are using Linux, what is better than playing video games under the sun? (Except going out, of course.) So, in continuation with Travis’ work, let me present you five more games to distract yourself during the summer. From action to reflection, and through racing, these games are assured to bring you the fun that you deserve. And to add to the cocktail, all of them are completely free!

Desktop Environments

• People who strongly resist data indicating that human-induced climate change could spell catastrophe aren’t ignorant about science or numerical reasoning. Quite the opposite, a new study finds: High science literacy actually boosts the likelihood that certain people will challenge what constitutes credible climate science.

• Who will be receptive to climate science, the study found, depends more on cultural factors such as attitudes toward commerce, government regulation and individualism than on scientific literacy.

• “Simply improving the clarity of scientific information will not dispel public conflict” over climate, the study’s authors conclude online May 27 in Nature Climate Change.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Dolphin project is looking for more developers, bug reporters, documentation writers and forum volunteers.

GNOME Desktop

• The GNOME project have released the third update to the development cycle heading for GNOME 3.6. This is an unstable release and though usable, its mainly for testing and hacking purposes. The major changes in this release are a new API framework for Evolution Data Server, new widgets in GTK+ and a new Empathy interface to integrate well with the Gnome 3 style.

• Those of us who type in Latin characters may easily overlook what it takes to get text into windows or command lines in other writing systems. Entry of characters not found on one’s keyboard requires the use of an input method (IM) which turns multiple keystrokes into characters. There are plenty of capable projects, but they often lack deep integration into the desktop environment or widget toolkit. In April, GNOME developer Rui Matos proposed a feature for the upcoming GNOME 3.6 release that would integrate the IBus framework into the core GNOME desktop, tackling this precise challenge. IBus is a framework that allows the user to select — and switch between — multiple IMs. The plan spawned considerable debate, not only on the merits of IBus, but on the wisdom of tightly integrating a single component into the desktop environment. Complicating matters is the divide between the bulk of the GNOME developer community and those users who depend on input methods, primarily from the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) language communities.

• Alan Baghumian announced last night, July 4th, the immediate availability for download of the first test version of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0 operating system.

• Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. In 2010 it replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based major Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu. Shotwell’s power is its simplicity, ease of use and speed.

Distributions

• The ARM platform is exploding like a mad wet cat out of the bath. Here are four good distros cram-full of ARM fun.

• Linux has had ARM support since forever, but it’s been bumpy. There are hundreds of vendors of ARM devices (see Tiny Pluggable Linux ARM Computers Are Red-Hot for a sampling), all shoving their own personal hacked code out the door as fast as possible. This made Linux support complicated and unwieldy, to the point that Linus Torvalds threatened to stop accepting ARM changes in the mainline Linux kernel.

• I’ve been a fan of #! ever since I tried version 9.04.01. It’s quite lightweight, yet the UI doesn’t feel antiquated, and it’s quite well-stocked with features that normal users would find useful. Two months ago, the first testing images of version 11 “Waldorf” went online, so I am previewing that now.

• #! is a Debian-based Openbox distribution. It used to be based on Ubuntu, and at one point, it gained [and then later lost] an Xfce edition. It aims to be quite lightweight yet have the niceties of other distributions with more mainstream DEs.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Last week when Schulz posted his diagram of the general structure of the new Mandriva foundation, he used the name OpenMDV as a placeholder for the new community distribution. It sounded liked like a good name to me, I even liked the spelling. However, Schulz being the community minded sort he is, decided to put it to an open vote. So, now, you too can help pick the name of the new Mandriva community distribution.

• Mandriva is going through a complete overhaul. The company recently decided to turn this once #1 GNU/Linux distribution into a community driven distribution. Now, they are seeking a name change for the distribution (and the foundation governing the development of Mandriva) to separate its identity from the company Mandriva S.A.

Red Hat Family

• RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux receiving a major update approximately every two years, RHEL 7 is due to be released sometime in 2013.

• Tim Burke, vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, noted that key themes for RHEL 7 will include data center operational efficiency, virtualization and cloud enhancements as well as advancements in the integrated developers’ tools.

• From Deltacloud to OpenStack to a new public cloud offering, Red Hat is on a mission to accelerate the cloud while keeping it open

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Aren’t you frustrated at having to wait for all of an operating system’s services to load before you get to a usable desktop? Experienced Linux users would know that the system initialization of a Linux system, until recently, (by default, unless you know how to customize it) starts several services (some of which are either unnecessary to the user OR some are not needed instantaneously on startup, e. g. printing). Sounds familiar?

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Just a quick reminder that in just over a week we will be hosting the Community Leadership Summit 2012 in Portland, Oregon on from Sat, July 14, 2012 – Sun, July 15, 2012. The event happens the weekend before the OSCON conference, so this is a great opportunity to attend both events.

• The Community Leadership Summit 2012 brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community.

• Since last year when spotting a major Linux kernel power regression and subsequently finding the cause of the power problem that affected a large number of mobile Linux users, plus other regressions, it’s been fun to look at the Linux power performance situation. How though is the latest Ubuntu Linux code performing when it comes to power efficiency? Here are some early tests of Ubuntu 12.10.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Sotiris Makrygiannis, MeeGo’s Head of Development has announced that the entire MeeGo team will be parting ways with Nokia.

• MeeGo announced this just after releasing the MeeGo PR1.3 update for the Nokia N9, which was the first and last MeeGo phone by Nokia. The Finnish mobile manufacturer will be now concentrating fully on the development of Windows Phones with the help of Microsoft.

• MeeGo was very closely involved in the launch of various handsets by the Nokia, such as N770, N800, N810, N900, N950 and the N9. MeeGo, as you know, is a Linux-based open source operating system designed for various hardware platforms such as netbooks, desktops, tablets, and mobile computing. It is currently being spearheaded by the Linux Foundation.

Android

• According to reports, Amazon is working on its own Smartphone running a forked version of Android. Amazon already has its own Kindle Fire tablet which runs on Android. However, Amazong has cut Google out of its platform as user’s can’t buy content or apps from Google Play Store. On the contrary Google allows Amazon to sell their content on Android devices. So, an Android powered Amazon phone can be a lucrative market for Amazon as it has the entire ecosystem in place.

• Long time ago I argued that Linux is not an OS the way many people think. Most people, when they say “Linux”, think of a singular operating system like Windows and Mac OS X when it in fact refers to a multitude of distributions each of which practically qualifies as its own OS. I argued that a better way to present “Linux” is as a brand representing a rather sizable family of operating systems with a common core: the Linux kernel. Back then I actually called it a “market of operating system components” out of which various Linux based operating systems are made.

• Jean-Baptiste Queru, Technical Lead on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and man after my own heart announced the return of the Nexus S 4G (Sprint) back into the main AOSP tree. In a post in the Android building group on Tuesday, Queru stated, “We’ve been able to resolve the issues around Nexus S 4G, and we can now properly distribute its CDMA and WiMAX binaries. That allows Nexus S 4G to work with AOSP just as well as Nexus S”. As a Nexus S user on Sprint, I can say that I did a few virtual cartwheels, but what is the current status of all Nexus phones within AOSP?

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• Blender was created as a rewrite by a Belgian company and spun off in its own company Not a Number Technologies. They expanded too fast and went bankrupt. Blender lives on under the umbrella of a non-profit organization The Blender Foundation. A failure it is not. About every two years, the organization produces a new animated movie and continues to thrive on donations and other revenue.

• While many banks still ponder the benefits of using open source technology for their coding needs, nascent BankSimple has gone full steam ahead.

• For the past couple of months, I’ve been playing with a laptop from ZaReason, a small, GNU/Linux-based system builder founded in Oakland, CA (though it has expanded to New Zealand). ZaReason’s deal is that they build computers themselves, using components that are guaranteed to have free and open drivers, and pre-install your favorite free/open operating system at the factory. They offer full support for the hardware and the software, and promise that they’ll never say, “Sorry, that component just doesn’t work right under Linux.” So unlike buying a ThinkPad or other commercial laptop and installing a free operating system on it (which can be a bit of a gamble, and will shortly become more of one, see below), ZaReason’s machines arrive ready to run. And unlike buying a commercial laptop from a freedom-friendly vendor like Emperor Linux (who’ll sometimes warn you that certain features of your hardware aren’t supported), ZaReason can promise you that every single capability of every single component in your system will just work.

• Amid the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s future — which some say is aimed at restricting what developers can do with the real-time information network, in an attempt to monetize it more easily — a number of critics have proposed duplicating the network using open-source tools and principles. This idea, which has also been proposed in the past by blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer, seems to have a lot of merit: after all, if a short-messaging utility like Twitter is a useful service for society to have, then why not recreate it as an open-source project? The only problem is that others have tried to do exactly that, and have mostly failed to achieve any traction. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with Twitter.

• Google is handing over control of its GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for browser application development to a steering committee. A release candidate of GWT 2.5, the final Google-directed release, is also available and features compiler optimizations.

• Days after Human Rights Watch revealed that the Syrian government was putting political detainees through 20 torture techniques in 27 locations around the country, EFF learned that open source developer Bassel Khartabil has been detained by Syrian authorities.

• Processing bioimaging data has just become easier, thanks to new open-source software for multidimensional image visualisation, processing and analysis, developed by a team of German and Finnish researchers. In the making for the last 10 years, the so-called BioImageXD software is facilitating the analysis of cell and tissue functions, including how molecules move on cell surfaces and how they bond together. Presented in the journal Nature Methods, the study was funded in part by a grant under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

• Simply put – it represents a real chance to have a single market data abstraction that clients can commit to, resulting in significant benefits arising from code reuse, reduced support and better tooling when compared to supporting the multiple platforms that many organisations have today. In addition, they will be able to turn to a large number of vendors externally who are committing to OpenMama.

Events

• The Drupal team has announced the dates for DrupalCon scheduled to be held in Munich this August. The conference will cover topics like Coding and Development, Community, Frontend, Business and Strategy, Site Building and other aspects of creating and maintaining a website in over 80 sessions.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS

• Version 3.1 brings enterprise-grade cloud computing to open source

• Customer relationship management (CRM) software is generally hard to get excited about, but Jeff Strachan a founder of Footprints Recruiting[1], an English as a second language (ESL) placement agency, verges on evangelical. And little wonder: Being burdened with a legacy system built using forms in Microsoft Outlook and being burnt by the lock-in of proprietary software would be enough to make an open source evangelist out of most people.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

CMS

• Open source refers to software that it is distributed freely and additionally offers access to the product’s design – essentially opening the source code to collaboration and further ingenuity from outside developers. Horton has taken note of the growing popularity of this type of web development software and has embraced open source CMS as valuable resources for offering clients better marketing and advertising tools.

Semi-Open Source

• Dutch company Intermesh has announced the availability of version 4.0 of its Group-Office groupware solution. The open source Community edition of the suite of online applications includes address book, email, calendar, task and notes functionality, as well as file sharing, email templates and a newsletters module. Support and other features such as projects, a helpdesk system, and synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices are available in the commercial Professional version.

• Do you ever wonder if and how you could call a halt to your performance review process? Do you think traditional processes are marred by the distribution curve (and forced rankings), huge time investments and low impact on performance improvements? Maybe you agree that your processes have their faults, but you think that it’s not sensible to abolish performance appraisals altogether or replace them with coaching sessions.

Licensing

• While you were getting ready to stick a fork in a burger for the Independence Day holiday, Red Hat employee Richard Fontana was making a fork of the GPL. Fontana previously worked at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a nonprofit law firm providing pro bono legal services to free and open source projects. He’s now the open source licensing and patent counsel at Red Hat, but he’s been careful to explain that the GPL fork is a personal project.

• Red Hat is now officially a storage vendor. The open source operating system vendor released it first commercially supported storage system, dubbed Red Hat Storage 2.0, this week at the company’s annual user conference event.

• Red Hat Storage 2.0 first appeared as a beta in April of this year. The solution is built of top of Gluster, a company Red Hat acquired October of 2011 for $136 million.

Openness/Sharing

• Spurred by the progress of the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) scheme, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is planning to expand its scope of work to include more areas like drug development and delivery.

• The OSDD programme, which has emerged as a new platform for innovation in the domain of affordable healthcare, will expand to cover Open Source Drug Discovery, Open Source Drug Development, Open Source Drug Delivery, Open Source Disease Diagnostics during the current Plan period, sources said.

• The White House is in the process of creating an open source version of its “We the People” online petition platform, says Chris Vein, deputy federal chief technology officer.

• The effort will fulfill one of its objectives under the National Action Plan it revealed as a member of the international Open Government Partnership. One OGP member country, Latvia, plans to use the platform as soon as it’s available, said Vein June 20 at NASA’s Open Source Summit in Washington, D.C.

Hardware

• It’s call OpenROV, an open source robotic submarine designed to bring the inner Jacques Cousteau out of even the greenest landlubber ashore.

Programming

• The results of this years Eclipse Open Source Developer Survey include some interesting finding about what motivates participation in open source projects and motivates developers to build apps in their free time.

• Compared to previous years, the survey noted that corporate policies are becoming more positive towards open source participation with only 0.6% of respondents choosing the “Does not allow the use of any open source software” to describe their organizations policy.

Leftovers

• An Apple App Store server spat out broken copies of several high-profile titles this week, the iPad maker has admitted.

• Updates for popular software including Instapaper and Angry Birds in Space were corrupted when downloaded, causing the programs to crash when fanbois attempted to use them.

• Instapaper dev Marco Ament chronicled his nail-gnawing frustration after a flood of punters blamed him for the error even though he was powerless to fix it. Deleting the app and installing it from scratch fixed the problem on individual devices, but Apple’s cock-up meant a new version of Instapaper received a rash of one-star reviews.

Finance

• The US Federal Deposit Insurance and Federal Reserve released public summaries of plans for quick liquidation of nine of the world’s largest banks in the case of an emergency, without government bailouts.

• Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• With millions of small business owners in the United States, why can multiple news outlets find only one small business owner to say that federal health care reform will negatively impact business?

• When national news outlets want to know how ordinary small business owners feel about the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), they apparently all turn to just one man: Joe Olivo, owner of Perfect Printing in New Jersey. In recent weeks, Olivo has been quoted by both NPR and NBC News as a representative small business owner concerned that the ACA will make him reluctant to hire more employees.

Censorship

• But shortly after my purchase, Cisco pushed a firmware update to this router that limited owners’ ability to administer the devices ourselves. The update led me (and many others) to install an older version of the firmware in order to regain all the control we had in the first place. More on just how to do that in a bit. First let’s explain what Cisco did, and why many people are upset.

Civil Rights

• WikiLeaks has started publishing 2.5 million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies.

• The emails date from August 2006 to March 2012 and come from 680 “Syria-related entities”, including the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture, WikiLeaks said.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Defending the Internet — and the corporations that invest in it — from government regulation is the new “End the Fed,” Paul advisors tell BuzzFeed exclusively.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Philip Matesanz, a 21 year old student of applied computer science and the sole owner of the YouTube-mp3.org website, has ignored “cease and desist” letters from Google and has instead launched a public campaign against the company.

• Matesanz operates an mp3 conversion service which extracts the audio tracks from content hosted on YouTube. After being threatened with a court case, he consulted legal professionals and now claims that Google had no right to block his website from accessing YouTube. He has also launched a petition which has already collected 334,361 signatures.

• When the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Oracle couldn’t block the sale of used software over the Internet, did it open the door to sales of used e-books, digital music, and video?

• In a twist that will surprise no one except the RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, and other anti-piracy lobbies, the amount of BitTorrent traffic has stayed the same or increased in Europe following the blockade of The Pirate Bay in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries.

ACTA

• If you watched the stream of the plenary session in the European Parliament yesterday, you will know that what we saw was an incredible parade of politicians from all parties denouncing ACTA – with one exception. The centre-right EPP Group is asking for a decision on ACTA to be postponed until after the European Court of Justice hands down its judgement on the compatibility of the treaty with EU law. That’s likely to take a year or two, and amounts to a massive delaying tactic, as I’ve explained before.

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