● 07.15.12

● Links 15/7/2012: Chromebooks, Linux Devices, and PCs for Senior Citizens

Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Little Linux computers have attracted a lot of interest from hobbyists this year. The $35 Raspberry Pi ARM board, which met with huge demand when it launched in February, is a compelling solution for affordable embedded projects. But what if you need more power than the 700MHz ARM11 board can offer?

• Desktop Linux will be ready for the masses, the old adage goes, when your grandma can use it — which is arguably not yet the case. If the WOW! Computer is any indication, though, Linux’s time has come. At least, that’s what the machine’s engineers, who have used open source software to develop a computer specially targeted at the senior population, seem to think.

• I generally am skeptical of products and services that needlessly embed punctuation marks into their names. Yahoo! is bad enough. But obnoxious appellations aside, the WOW! — which is identical in form and price to the Telikin Elite, although the WOW! is marketed separately by partner company FirstStreet — represent an intriguing concept, particularly for the open source channel.

• What’s value of linux being modular if it needs so many duplicate and different versions of the same libraries.

Desktop

• Google is establishing some “zones” in Best Buy and a few other outlets, buy it may end up being compelled to follow Apple and Microsoft with a chain of retail stores worldwide.

Kernel Space

• Entangle allows for tethered camera control and capturing from most Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras under Linux. The camera’s shutter can be triggered from the open-source program on Linux, there’s support for live previews, automatic downloading and display of photos, and controlling of all camera settings from the computer. Basically you can remotely control the camera’s setting and proceed to take photos via the camera’s USB connection. This software is licensed under the GNU GPLv3+ and is built atop libgphoto, so it’s a bit catered towards GNOME.

• The kernel now better isolates containers and suspicious code. Event logging has been optimised and two important Android functions were merged.

• Every time you boot a CD or DVD, thank Peter Anvin for making it possible. And, as a key Linux contributor that’s not all Peter has done in his long Linux career.

Graphics Stack

• Following yesterday’s article about Radeon Gallium3D HyperZ support defeating open-source developers, Jerome Glisse has clarified the situation after trying to make this code work properly for more than a half-year.

• The xf86-video-intel driver, the open-source X.Org driver for Intel’s graphics processors on Linux, is now being built with Sandy Bridge New Acceleration (SNA acceleration) by default. This means of acceleration is generally much faster than the long-standing UXA mode for both old and new hardware.

• The xf86-video-intel driver, the open-source X.Org driver for Intel’s graphics processors on Linux, is now being built with Sandy Bridge New Acceleration (SNA acceleration) by default. This means of acceleration is generally much faster than the long-standing UXA mode for both old and new hardware.

• Chris Wilson enabled the compilation of SNA by default in a Git commit this afternoon. While that’s happened, it’s not being used by default. The SNA support and the different generational SNA back-ends are being compiled and built into the driver, but for now at least, it requires setting the AccelMethod within the xorg.conf to SNA rather than UXA or GLAMOR.

• Jerome Glisse has published a new patch to enable HyperZ support for the AMD Radeon (R600g) Gallium3D driver. While this patch could be pushed to Mesa, it’s not being enabled by default as it’s still causing some GPU lock-ups and developers can’t seem to figure out the cause. Jerome is now moving onto other work.

• A message hit the Mesa development mailing list today entitled r600g: hyperz, from veteran open-source ATI/AMD contributor Jerome Glisse of Red Hat. He’s posted a new R600g HyperZ patch, but it looks like it might be his last.

• NVIDIA released the 304.22 Linux x86/x86_64 graphics driver beta this morning, which has a number of new features and fixes. There’s 27 official changes to be exact.

Applications

• Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame-by frame, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• In Managua this morning, the Debian game team presented a BoF described as “Fun and games are an essential part of any operating system and the games team aims to bring these to Debian and our users. This BoF aims to help achieve that. Come meet the games team, discuss our past, present, plans and future directions.”

• With Valve Software’s ambitious plans for Linux, they have just picked up another Linux development all-star. Their latest hire has been working on Linux games for more than a decade, is a former Loki Software developer, and he’s the creator of SDL.

• On the same day as announcing he’s joining Valve Software, Sam Lantinga announced that it’s time to unleash Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) 2.0 on the masses.

• The latest Valve hire looks like he’ll still be leading SDL’s development while working for the Bellevue company. In his latest mailing list thread entitled SDL 2.0 blockers?, he shared, “I talked with Ryan [Gordon] and Gabriel and we all agree that it’s time to unleash SDL 2.0 on the masses. Before we do that I want to get as many blocking issues resolved as soon as possible. The timing on this is interesting, because my computer is on a truck, but I think if we get the hot issues known publicly, then we’ll be able to get them fixed more quickly and folks on the list can help bang them out.”

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE was represented at the SouthEast LinuxFest again this year with a booth showing off our latest software. The Calligra Suite, Kontact, Telepathy, and Plasma Workspaces were featured. Krita particularly intrigued many people. As a result, many copies of the Comics with Krita training DVD were handed out along with the accompanying comic book, Wasted Mutants and Wisdom Mountain.

• The next major update to the open source K Desktop Environment is on schedule: the KDE developers have published the second and final release candidate for version 4.9.0 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). Aimed at developers and testers, KDE 4.9 RC2 already includes all of the planned enhancements and feature changes; as expected at this stage, the developers have focused on “further polishing”, as well as finding and fixing any last minute bugs.

• KDE just lost support for tiling windows with the feature being removed from the KWin window manager code-base.

• The KDE Project announced a few minutes ago, July 11th, that the second and last Release Candidate of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.9 desktop environment is available for download and testing.

GNOME Desktop

• The Gnome developers are working on a DBus daemon that will keep you safe from phishing and malware infected sites. Yann Soubeyrand, a developer working on this daemon as his GsoC project, said that the main goal of this daemon is to “ add a way to advertise the user about possible tentative of phishing when browsing”.

Distributions

• Having been a user of Zorin 5 up until recently I decided last weekend to download a copy of Zorin 6 and tonight I decided to install it. (Well my wife is watching Geordie Shore, what else am I to do?).

New Releases

• Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing.

Gentoo Family

• I gave an introductory talk on Gentoo at a local BarCamp called MinneBar a couple of months back, and the videos were just posted online. The sound isn’t perfect but it’s perfectly understandable. Oddly, this is the first time I’ve ever given a formal talk on Gentoo in nearly 10 years of working on it.

Red Hat Family

• The Delhi High Court has restrained a local IT service provider from using the trademark ‘Red Hat’ as their corporate name after Red Hat Inc., world’s leading open source software company, filed a trademark infringement suit.

• Justice Manmohan Singh directed Red Hat Infocom Private Limited to stop using the trademark. The court ordered the company to change the mark ‘Red Hat’ by 31 December 2012.

Debian Family

• Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 is definitely on its way. It still may be months and months from release, but another major decision is in the can. We learned recently that the initial freeze has begun and now Wheezy has its theme.

• Earlier this week at DebConf there was a discussion about Debian derivatives so that Debian’s offspring could share their experiences and also for the Debian developers to share various derivative-related initiatives. Some friction between Debian and distributions based upon it (namely Ubuntu) were exposed.

• For those not aware. Emdebian is a smaller, lighter flavor of Debian Linux intended for use on embedded devices. At DebConf this week they talked a bit about this initiative.

• Emdebian is essentially Debian but a binary distribution for embedded hardware where limited RAM and disk space are critical. Embdebian works with regular Debian tools but effectively re-works upstream Debian so that the packages are smaller by taking greater control over package dependencies, included files/content, and other tweaks.

• Besides Android as the dominant Linux-based mobile platform, Ubuntu, Tizen, Maemo/MeeGo, webOS, Firefox OS, and various other Linux platforms have aspired to compete in the mobile space. In addition, Debian wants to remain relevant in the mobile space.

• On the last day of DebConf 12 in Managua, Nicaragua, there was a mobile session this morning. The purpose of the session was how to “keep Debian relevant for mobile devices.”

• Debian developers are looking forward to work with Ubuntu, as reported by Phoronix. This topic was brought up in DebConf this year.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu has come a long way in these 8-9 years. The Linux-based distribution which started in 2004 has created a unique identity of its own which sets it apart from the ‘traditional’ and often negative image of Linux distributions.

• I was talking to a new friend the other day and when I mentioned Linux he said “I tried it in 2006 and it was very hard to use. All those command lines and things.” He never tried it again. Unfortunately people still carry that impression of Linux, even in 2012. I showed him my Ubuntu desktop and his remark was : “Is this Linux?”

• According to reports the company is in talks with Canonical to join their OEM program. Niam Computers are aiming to sell 500 desktops and 1000 laptops powered by Ubuntu in the financial year 2012.

• Canonical announced yesterday, July 11th, on the Ubuntu One blog that they will completely remove support for Facebook from the Ubuntu One cloud storage.

• Fans of Ubuntu Linux may recall a project launched by Dell back in May to create an Ubuntu-loaded laptop specifically for developers.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• A thriving home-brew community is already putting the credit card-sized PC to use in drones and robots. The device’s designer, Eben Upton, wants to see it in rockets and satellites, too

• The Raspberry Pi is a dirt cheap mini-computer with a Broadcom BCM2835 700 MHz ARM11 with Broadcom VideoCore graphics. A basic model with 2 USB ports, HDMI and Ethernet sells for about $35, and the developers plan to offer an even cheaper $25 model without Ethernet soon.

• Owing to its low cost, Raspberry Pi has become extremely popular among developers and enthusiasts. Arthur Amarra aka Algorhythmic has created a voice controlled robotic arm powered by Raspberry Pi, Debian and open source software.

• Arthur says, “Due to its small size and low power requirements, the Raspberry Pi is an excellent platform for the Julius open-source speech recognition system. This opens up almost limitless possibilities for voice command applications.”

• Although most people consider the Raspberry Pi to be a lightweight desktop computer, the small form factor device can also function as an embedded system to take on tasks such as performing metering, control or regulatory functions. Developer Arthur Amarra, who also goes by the name of Algorhythmic, has written a blog posting describing how he used a Raspberry Pi as a voice control system for a robot arm.

Phones

Android

• HTC was quick on the draw with quad-core smartphones, getting its One X to market well in advance of Samsung and LG’s quad-core entries. Since then, we’ve seen models like the Droid Incredible 4G LTE arrive, but nothing really up there on the same level as the One X. Well, HTC may be planning to one-up itself with its model PM63100, revealed through some benchmark figures and sporting some decent hardware.

• Ouya is a new Android open source video game console, developed through ingenious research and sponsorship from Kickstarter donors who like the idea of indie game development.

• The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the most-anticipated wide-bodied jet of all time: Boeing has taken a total of 859 orders since 2004, and so far it has only delivered 14 planes. By end of 2013 it intends to ramp up production to 10 units per month, but even then, most customers still have a wait time of between 5 and 10 years. This isn’t a story about the Dreamliner’s composite body, or the fact that it uses 20% less fuel than a 767, though: Inside all 859 of those planes, each and every seat will be outfitted with an Android-powered entertainment system.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The Taiwanese firm predominantly makes smartphones but a spokesperson for HTC told PC Advisor a tablet will ‘definitely’ arrive. It’s not clear when this will happen but it will be the first tablet from HTC to launch in the UK since May last year.

Free Software/Open Source

• Patrick Gray, writing in TechRepublic, has some theories about why open source computing has yet to live up to some expectations. In the abstract, people may love the idea of the openness and freedom in technology. In practice, however, “vendors and consumers alike voted with their wallets for closed systems.” He cites the appeal of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

• France-based e-commerce platform provider PrestaShop seeks to expand in the U.S. Having opened a Miami office in 2011, it provides software for about 6,000 U.S. e-commerce stores—roughly six times as many as last year.

• The web hosting review site Top-Cheap-Web-Hosting.com announced the best Ruby on Rails hosting provider for 2012, based on ruby on rails hosting features, loading speed, reliability, technical support and price.

• The first 30 minutes of the workshop will present an overall of goals of the foundation, the philosophy and advantages of open source software and how it hall be implemented in Fiji.

• “Linux has the same features of operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh,” said SFF President, Mr Kush Singh.

• Samsung, in an apparent attempt to encourage hackers and developers and trying to give them a head start with the ongoing roll out of the OTA updates, have released the source codes of the Sprint Epic and AT&T’s Skyrocket on their download pages. The updates are available currently on their download pages for anyone interested.

• Although it’s popular these days to pooh-pooh the advertising-supported, for-profit SourceForge in favor of GitHub, the SourceForge folks want to remind you that the forge still hosts more than 300,000 projects and serves up a good 4 million downloads a day.

• There are a number of reasons why a closed-source project is turned into an Open Source project by its parent company or developer. Among them lack of interest by the parent company or developer, a drop in popularity, not enough resources to continue development, having been bought by another company, or a change of hearts. It is not really clear from the announcement why Digsby is going down the Open Source route but judging from the frequency of blog posts on the official site, it could be a bit of everything sans the being bought by another company part.

• There’s a very exciting open-source announcement coming soon that will please an increasing number of ARM Linux users and fans of open-source graphics drivers.

• This forthcoming announcement, which isn’t being detailed yet but will be yet another Linux graphics exclusive for Phoronix the near future, is something entirely different from the other recent open-source ARM Linux graphics advancements. As something until then. let’s recap the existing open-source ARM graphics activities:

• - The Lima driver project that’s sponsored by Codethink and led by Luc Verhaegen as a reverse-engineered open-source ARM Mali graphics driver. Here’s the latest update on Lima from LinuxTag Berlin back in May.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• A normal web user may login and use to tens to hundreds of sites everyday. This is a hectic task and also one may remain in doubt as how his/her data is being used in each of these networks. To simplify this login system and to give users better control over their data, Mozilla has introduced a new product in the market, Persona.

• In early February of last year, we noted that for the very first time, Mozilla had pledged to move to a rapid release cycle for the popular Firefox browser. “Can’t wait,” responded one reader. It was clear at the time that Mozilla was making the move to better respond to competition from Google Chrome, which was already on its own rapid release cycle.

• Fast-forward to today, and Chrome’s market share is about equal to or possiby greater than Firefox’s, depending on whose numbers you believe. And, Mozilla has had to wrestle with problems related to its rapid release cycle. Now, one former Firefox developer is saying that Firefox’s woes can be blamed on the cycle itself.

• With the announcement that version 0.3 of Mozilla’s Rust has been released, the alternate procedural, concurrent, OO and functional style is continuing its rapid evolution. Designed as a safe alternative to C or C++, as it is being developed, Rust is being used to create an experimental parallel browser called Servo. Version 0.1 of Rust was introduced in January 2012 after being created as a side project by Graydon Hoare in 2006 and revealed to the world in 2010. Version 0.3 includes over 1,900 changes from April’s version 0.2, as the developers work through the roadmap that will lead to a 1.0 release of the language.

SaaS

• Large enterprises are putting a lot of money and effort into making sure they have the latest and greatest in Hadoop and other big data infrastructure tools, but it turns out their IT teams are far from prepared to actually use those tools once they are in place.

• That’s one observation from Jeremy Howard, president and chief scientist of Kaggle, which uses crowdsourcing techniques to provide statistical and data analytic services for clients.

Databases

• Other open source databases may have more name recognition, but PostgreSQL is seeing strong growth — as is the company EnterpriseDB, which helped develop it

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• For some interesting benchmarks to share before the start of the weekend, here’s some recent test results conducted at Phoronix that’s comparing Oracle Solaris 11 Express, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Wheezy, and Fedora 17.

CMS

• Drupal is possibly one of the most popular open-source CMS in the world, and probably one of the largest free software community with over 800,000 members. During the last year, the Drupal business has experienced exceptional growth, both financially and socially.

Healthcare

• At the healthcare track, this year we will be sharing the latest news and upcoming plans for OSEHRA, the Open Source Electronic Health Records Agent.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• There’s a proposal within the GCC development camp to change the CFLAGS under which the GNU Compiler Collection is built when in a release mode.

• Dimitrios Apostolou proposed on Wednesday to the GCC development list Change default BOOT_CFLAGS for release builds.

Public Services/Government

• Public administrations in the Italian region of Calabria should increase their use of free and open source software, says Emilio De Masi, regional president for the IdV party (Italia dei Valori, Italy of Values). He drafted a law to encourage the use of this type of software.

• The IT department of the Finnish city of Tampere will try out OpenOffice, a free and open source office suite. The free suite of office productivity tools will be installed alongside the proprietary office suite currently used by the city staff. The IT department warns against high expectations.

Openness/Sharing

• It’s one thing to like open source, but it’s another thing to live open source. Sam Muirhead, a 28-year old filmmaker who lives in Berlin, is making headlines for an unusual pledge he has made: He has sworn that beginning August 1st, he will spend one year living totally open source. And he doesn’t just mean he will use open source technology. He means that his beer, the paper he uses–everything he uses–will be open source.

Standards/Consortia

• I am not an accountant. However, as a Graham and Dodd value investor over the years, I’ve picked up some of the fundamental principles. A key one is the Matching Principle, that revenues and expenses should be booked in a way that clarifies the underlying business performance, rather than based purely on the timing of cash transactions. In some cases this requires the use of special accounts, for things like depreciation, where the lifetime of a fixed asset (say factory machinery) extends beyond a single revenue cycle.

• A similar technique is used when dealing with deferred expenses. For example take the case of a nuclear power plant. A plant has a useful lifetime, but when that end date arrives there is a clean up cost. The property is not immediately usable for other purposes, but must undergo an expensive remediation. From an accounting perspective there is an asset retirement obligation, a form of deferred expense. This deferred expense is recognized on the books as a liability based on the present value of the expected clean up cost, which is then depreciated.

Leftovers

• If you are a Google plus use, there are two things you would be most annoyed about. One is there is no way to see the private messages sent to you if you plan to respond to them two days later. Second is the new Google+ Event. I was bombarded by the event invite the moment it was announced.

• Oracle turned its attention away from its Android patent fight with Google on Monday to battle Hewlett-Packard over Oracle’s decision to stop making new versions of database software that works with HP’s Itanium-based servers.

Security

Finance

• Andrew Williams, a former spokesman for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is headed to Goldman Sachs at the end of July, the Financial Times reports. That’s only increased the speculation that Geithner may head to Goldman next year.

• Williams, currently director of media relations at General Electric, is the second of Geithner’s top spokesmen to decamp to Goldman. Richard “Jake” Siewert, also a former spokesman for Geithner, left the Treasury Department a few months ago to lead Goldman Sachs’ public relations department.

• Starting tomorrow banks will begin to tell investors how they did in the second three months of 2012. Overall, the indications are that the quarter will be a disappointment. But, surprisingly, Goldman Sachs (GS) may emerge as the biggest loser. Expectations for the once-vaunted investment bank have fallen more than rivals.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• When Idaho state legislators proposed a seemingly uncontroversial bill to ban access to commercial tanning beds by minors earlier this year, IdahoReporter.com took up the issue with force.

• The state news website, an affiliate of the conservative Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and overseen by the free market Idaho Freedom Foundation, posted six stories on the proposal between Feb. 16 and March 22, when the bill was voted down in a state Senate Committee.

• In the vast ecosystem of corporate shills, which one is the most effective? Propaganda works best when it is not perceived as propaganda: nuance, obfuscation, distraction, suggestion, the subtle introduction of doubt—these are more effective in the long run than shotgun blasts of lies. The master of this approach is Malcolm Gladwell.

• Malcolm Gladwell is the New Yorker’s leading essayist and bestselling author. Time magazine named Gladwell one of the world’s 100 most influential people. His books sell copies in the millions, and he is in hot demand as one of the nation’s top public intellectual and pop gurus. Gladwell plays his role as a disinterested public intellectual like few others, right down to the frizzy hairdo and smock-y getups. His political aloofness, high-brow contrarianism and constant challenges to “popular wisdom” are all part of his shtick.

DRM

• There was some surprise in the comments of yesterday’s post over the fact that the United Kingdom has effectively outlawed encryption: the UK will send its citizens to jail for up to five years if they cannot produce the key to an encrypted data set.

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