● 07.19.12

● Links 19/7/2012: Linux and Higgs-Boson, Kororaa 17 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Microsoft Windows has long been the operating system of choice for corporate level desktop PCs, but times change. There are a number of drivers that are pushing Linux into the domain of the end user device from the enterprise server space; such as tablets, smartphones and the 20 million desktop PCs and countless server installations using the free Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Desktop

• Portland, OR: Sputnik started, Barton George, Dell’s project Sputnik lead and director of web vertical marketing. told me at OSCon as a six-month exploratory pilot to create an Ubuntu Linux-based developer laptop, It’s not just an idea now. Dell is taking Project Sputnik from pilot to product this fall.

• I’ve been putting off writing about the Telikin because, arguably, any PC is suitable the older audience that the Telikin is aimed. I set my Dad up with a Linux machine and then a Mac Mini and he’s been surfing Drudge and listening to Polka like a champ for almost a decade now. Why spend $699 when you can feasibly hook Grandma up with a PC for $400 or so at Best Buy?

Server

• Big Blue is fleshing out its PowerLinux line of Linux-only servers, and last week put out a variant of the Power 730 box with a single socket and a lower price tag than the current two-socket boxes that were announced back in April along with a PowerLinux version of a two-socket Flex System node.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: Steam’d Penguins. New hope for MeeGo. Buy loads of Raspberry Pis. Redphone is now open source. Project Sputnik has entered beta. Ouya open source console breaks Kickstarter records. Hear our on topic discoveries, your own opinions in the Open Ballot and some ranting and raving.

• Remember Meego? It was the open-source phone project from Intel and Nokia that was going to displace Apple’s iPhone. And it’s not dead yet.

• Despite Nokia’s defection to Windows 7 and Intel’s difficulties finding new partners for the open-source project, the beauty of open source is that the code always lives on … in this case, with a small group of former Nokia employees and open-source diehards, Jolla Group, who have now amazingly, incredibly, unbelievably struck a distribution deal with a Chinese retail chain: D.Phone Group.

Kernel Space

• Systemd developer Lennart Poettering has extended the init system for Linux to include seccomp (Secure Computing Mode) support. Seccomp is a security extension in the Linux kernel that restricts the system calls a process can make – placing the process into a sandbox. Google uses seccomp to run the Flash plugin in a secure environment in the 64-bit version of the Chrome web browser for Linux.

• For Linux users, the problem surfaced in FUTEX, the software responsible for queueing critical processes and setting locks. For Java users, the FUTEX Linux kernel bug was much more pronounced than in other Linux applications, according to bug reports on popular mailing lists and Internet programming question site, Stackoverflow.com.

• Indeed, the fundamental problem came from the FUTEX queues’ time signatures being out of sync with the CPU clock, and thus, FUTEX calls began eating up large quantities of CPU time. Linux contributor Jan Engelhardt was the first to report the issue to the Linux Kernel Mailing list, where he reported FUTEX timing out soon after the leap second was inserted.

• In the end, the fix was remarkably simple: using GNU date on the command line, an administrator had but to reset the system time. This fix reportedly repaired all FUTEX problems.

Graphics Stack

• Intel’s Linux graphics driver is finally onto supporting 8x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA), assuming you’re using the latest-generation Ivy Bridge graphics hardware.

• Back in May was when Intel provided initial MSAA support within their Mesa DRI driver for 2x and 4x MSAA support on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware. In July they then tackled CMS MSAA support for Ivy Bridge, which is Compressed Multi-sample Surface Multi-Scene Anti-Aliasing.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• After years of rumours and leaked clients, there is finally a confirmation from Valve that they are indeed looking towards Linux as their next platform.

• For those who are unfamiliar with Valve, it is the operator of Steam, the biggest digital retailer of games. It is also the creator of the popular Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead franchises. This is indeed good news not only for Linux users, but for Linux as a platform as well.

• It was pointed out in our forums today while discussing Valve on Linux that Croteam has shared today that Serious Sam 3 is running on Linux.

• Steam on Linux may be a lot closer than you think, with the announcement of Steam for Ubuntu just the tip of the iceberg

• Linux Tycoon is a management game set in the world of the Linux distributions. We will have to create our distribution with the goal of making it the most used and famous in the world.

• This game is the free version of Dink Smallwood, a game first created in 1997 by Seth Robinson. It gained a strong fan base, and was re-released for Windows and Linux in 2006 with several bug fixes. There have been many fan-made mods – you could call them unofficial DLC – that add brand new quests or storylines to the game. The fan site Dink Network has a large list of these D-mods, rated and reviewed. There are 7 pages full of them, and you can download and install them using the DFarc program that is in the Ubuntu repository (So it’s available for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, and other Ubuntu-based distros). I am not sure what other distros carry this game in their repositories.

Desktop Environments

• After a few weeks in GNOME 3, which I actually like, I decided to give Xfce 4.8 a try as the desktop environment on my recently upgraded Debian Wheezy laptop.

• Above is a screenshot of the bare desktop. I’ve made a number of tweaks to the default Xfce configuration. Xfce in Debian generally requires a bit more configuration than distributions for which Xfce is the primary desktop environment such as Xubuntu, Linux Mint Debian, etc.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Calligra team has released a new release candidate of Calligra productivity suite. This is mainly a bug fix release and is more stable than the previous beta release. You can read the release announcement here.

GNOME Desktop

• Elegance Colors is a dark Gnome Shell theme made by me. The cool thing about Elegance Colors is that it is Chameleonic. If you ever used Ubuntu’s Unity, then you will see how it changes colors depending on the wallpaper color.

• Apart from taking color from the wallpaper, Elegance Colors can also pick color from the GTK theme or use a user defined color.

• Matthias Clasen routinely posts previews to upcoming GNOME releases and recently he did it again. In a post on his personal blog, Clasen, a GNOME developer, highlighted some of the new features coming to GNOME 3.5.4. He is joined by Alex Diavatis, of www.worldofgnome.org, who offers a closer look at some of the new features as well.

• Some hours ago Cosimo Cecchi pushed Nautilus 354 on Git. This is a nice release because we get the first major UI changes. Not all Gnome stack has jumped to 354 yet, so we are going to review each App separately.

Distributions

New Releases

• Linux Deepin, one of the most active distributions in China, have released a new version. The version 12.06 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS but unlike Ubuntu, it ships with Gnome shell rather than Unity. Gnome has got some major tweaks with extensions that make it more user friendly and appealing. Some of the new plugins added are given below:

• Warren Woodford posted a one sentence announcement of an early alpha for the next MEPIS release, 11.9.60. Woodford has always been a man of a few words, but there are no hints whatsoever as to what one might expect. So, our only choice is to boot it, if it’ll boot.

• Version 3.0 of the open source Apache Geronimo Java application server has been released with official support for version 7 of the programming language. The server has been fully certified for Java EE 6 since November 2011 and version 4.3 of the OSGi industry standard is now also supported. The developers have updated components of various other Apache technologies such as the BVal Bean Validation implementation and the Derby database.

Red Hat Family

• Oracle is on a bit of a marketing attack against CentOS, the free Linux distribution that derives from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

• To see Oracle promote its own Linux distribution and attack a rival is pretty much a joke. It can only be viewed as the hubris we have come to expect from Oracle.

Fedora

• For those not liking the GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, or one of the other desktop environments already available on Fedora 17, Ubuntu’s Unity is now available.

• Chris Smart proudly announced earlier today, July 16th, the immediate availability for download of the final and stable release of the Kororaa 17 Linux operating system.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Nautilus 3.5.4 has been uploaded to the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal repositories today, bringing some very important changes like a new GNOME 3 style toolbar, new “gear” menu, symbolic monochrome icons for the sidebar and others.

• Before I explain how does Dash look like and work, let’s review what you saw last time with one little addition I forgot to mention. I hope you don’t mind.

• Jockey was the program that was used to install additional drivers. From Ubuntu 12.10, it will be replaced by ubuntu-drivers-common and will be presented with a new inteface. The announcement comes from Marti Pitt’s post on the ubuntu-devel mailing list. This update is meant to provide a nicer and simpler GUI and a software that is more robust than Jockey.

• Also, the mirror selection menu will look like this, and will allow you to download software and updates from fastest detected server.

• The PS3 Media Server development team announced a few hours ago, July 18th, the immediate availability for download of the PS3 Media Server 1.60.0 application, bringing assorted bug fixes and general improvements.

• With yesterday’s updates, Canonical made some changes to the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system, regarding the Date and Time Indicator.

• Nothing can beat the open source or Free Software community when it comes to re-using the resources instead of reinventing the wheel. Though not everyone will agree as the general tendency within the open source community is to create a whole new wheel to push your own cart. A majority of open source projects are suffering from duplication.

• Luckily, we just noticed a great example of such collaboration (or using resources by different competing projects) within the distro community.

• José Antonio Rey proudly announced a few hours ago, July 17th, that the Ubuntu on Air! project is now live.

• Ubuntu on Air is an idea discussed by some Ubuntu developers and contributors at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), during the IRC Workshops sessions, which consists on a series of broadcasts via Google+ Hangouts.

Flavours and Variants

• Zorin OS is an operating system designed to make the “Gateway to Linux”. This is because it has a familiar Windows interface, complete with panel customizations, start menu, and even a Look Changer to change the Windows style.

• David Tavares, the developer of Pear Linux, has announced today, July 16th, that the fifth iteration of the Pear Linux operating system is now available for download.

• The latest edition of Pear Linux, Pear Linux 5, has been released. Code-named Sunsprite, based on Ubuntu 12.04, and using (Linux) kernel 3.2, Pear Linux 5 ships with a modified GNOME Shell called Pear Shell.

Devices/Embedded

• If you need more than one Raspberry Pi, the one per customer rule has finally been lifted, opening the way for bulk purchases

• According to the foundation, the new distribution is optimised for the Raspberry Pi’s floating point hardware, which increases its performance and speeds up, among other things, the web browsing experience on the device. The foundation recommends that users who are currently using the older Debian image should switch to Raspbian immediately to take advantage of the performance improvements. The Raspbian images are available from the Raspberry Pi project’s download page.

• The Raspberry Pi is tiny $35 computer with a 700 MHz ARM11 processor and 256MB of RAM. While it won’t run Windows, it can run a variety of Linux-based operating systems including Debian, Fedora, and even Raspbmc — an operating system designed around the XBMC Media Center application.

• OPEN SOURCE media player project XBMC has announced an Android port that doesn’t require users to jailbreak or root their devices.

• XBMC has become one of the most popular open source media players for home theatre PCs and has long been the must-have software addition for Apple TV. However as more firms decide to load set-top boxes with Google’s Android operating system, the XBMC project started working with Piyos to port the software over to the Android operating system.

• The Raspberry Pi foundation has announced it will lift the purchasing restrictions on its $35 Linux computer. The organization’s manufacturing partners will soon make the board available for bulk purchase.

Phones

• A deep dive into the innards of a typical mobile phone and how little you know about what’s going on inside, even when there’s an open source operating system running on it.

• MeeGo’s saviour in the making — is certainly ambitious, perhaps insanely so. The Finnish startup made up of a crack team of ex-Nokians is already committed to release not one but two MeeGo-powered smartphones, launching a new handset brand along the way. It’s early days, of course, the company doesn’t even have its own website yet, but today news comes of a tie-up with Chinese mobile phone retailer D.Phone that begins to hint at how this might just work.

Android

• To root or not to root? This is a question that obsesses many Android phone owners. Un-rooted Android phone owners may feel excluded from some of life’s greater technical, gaming or social pleasures. But before jumping from a stock Android phone to one that has been customized, here are a few considerations.

• The Oppo Finder may lay claim to being the thinnest smartphone in the world; it also turns out it’s a bit of a bruiser. A video has been posted showing the handset being used to hammer nails into a block of wood.

• While the phone is unlikely to retire the hammer – a couple of nails fail to fully bite the wood – the Oppo Finder appears to be left without a scratch on it. This is despite the screen as well as the side of the phone being used with some force.

• With the Nexus 7 now available, Android tablets are no longer poor iPad copycats. They’re real and affordable devices that also happen to be really good. But to make it even better, you’ll need to get some apps. Here’s our first edition of the best Android tablet apps.

• The XBMC development community has announced that it has been working on an Android version of the popular open source media centre software. The Android port is said to include the full functionality of the desktop versions of the software, so, unlike the iOS version of XBMC, the Android application is not only a remote and content directory, but also a full blown media centre. The developers say that the application is mostly aimed at Android-powered set-top boxes but will also work on tablets and phones.

• ARM-based processors may dominate the Android space right now. But Google’s mobile operating system can also run on phones, tablets, and other devices with x86 or MIPS-based processors.

• Security company Whisper Systems has announced that the code for its RedPhone application is now available as open source. RedPhone is an app for Android smartphones that encrypts VoIP calls using the ZRTP open standard. It integrates with the system’s dialler for what the developers describe as a “frictionless call experience”.

• Android, the ever popular Linux-based mobile operating system, has managed to work its way into smartphones, tablets, and embedded devices. Interestingly, the next step for Android seems to be taking over the digital camera market. Historically, digital cameras use proprietary firmware that is specific to the manufacturer’s products. Standardized (and more open) camera OSes have tried in the past and failed to catch on, but Android may just be the open operating system that cameras have been waiting for.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Google began shipping pre-orders to the Asus-manufactured Nexus 7 on July 13, featuring Android 4.1 and a $199 (8GB) price aimed directly at Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Judging from the early reception, the Fire has met its first major rival in the 7-inch tablet market: Nexus 7 inventory is sold out, and new orders won’t ship for at least another week on Google’s online site, and possibly until August at retailers, according to CNET.

• Chinese PC maker Lenovo could take the top spot as the world’s biggest PC maker in a matter of weeks. But its lack of tablet experience in the post-PC world and low profit margins could hit the firm.

• That’s according to Cowen analyst Kevin Kopelman, who today cut his forecast on the company’s revenue, as well as sales of its Kindle e-reader and Kindle Fire tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• A few months back, Tim O’Reilly and Hari Ravichandran, founder and CEO of Endurance International Group (EIG), had a discussion about the web hosting business. They talked specifically about how much of Hari’s success had been enabled by open source software. But Hari wasn’t just telling his success story to Tim, but rather was more interested in finding ways to give back to the communities that made his success possible. The two agreed that both companies would work together to produce a report making clear just how much of a role open source software plays in the hosting industry, and by extension, in enabling the web presence of millions of small businesses.

• We hope you will read this free report while thinking about all the open source projects, teams and communities that have contributed to the economic succes of small businesses or local governments, yet it’s hard to measure their true economic impact. We combed through mountains of data, built economic models, surveyed customers and had discussions with small and medium businesses (SMB) to pull together a fairly broad-reaching dataset on which to base our study. The results are what you will find in this report.

• The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of version 1.2 of Apache Tika. The metadata and structured text content extractor started its life as a sub-project of Apache Lucene and was elevated to Top-Level Project status within the foundation in 2010.

• Usually when we think of a pivot, we think of a company that has decided to drop its core offering and market a different product or service. Obvious Corporation put ODEO up for sale and focused on Twitter. BRBN shuttered its location check-in service and became Instagram. But Nodeable‘s pivot isn’t that sort of pivot.

• Today Nodeable launched a new service called StreamReduce, a cloud-hosted real-time big data analytics product. StreamReduce is based on the same architecture as Nodeable’s existing IT operations monitoring tool. The company is keeping its current service, but is expanding its scope by marketing beyond its current base of developers and system administrators.

• Bristol City Council is using an open source electronic document management system to overhaul its record keeping and improve staff access to documents online.

• The OpenID Foundation introduces a message bus with identity capabilities as part of plan to create venue where ID technology can be vetted, open sourced and made available to enterprises, Web site operators and others.

• Qantas has launched social-flavoured vacation booking website Hooroo using the cloud and open-source software.

• Hooroo suggests food, hotels and activities in destinations around Australia, and lets users create profiles showing where they’ve been and want to go. Visitors can book travel and accommodation through the website. Users can opt into an e-mail newsletter with deals and suggestions, and earn Hooroo credit that can be used for booking discounts.

• A long time ago, when Web 2.0 was just Web 1.0, we had to ask people for directions, copy them down, and hope we had a foldable map to help us find our way. Then along came MapQuest, followed by Google Maps in 2005. Today, it seems impossible to imagine finding our way without handheld phones and Web-based maps.

Events

• David Eaves (read his opensource.com posts) is an open government and open data expert with a background in negotiation theory. In his OSCON 2012 keynote today, Eaves described how the broad open source community has spent a lot of time wrestling with the art of community management and told attendees how he believes negotiation theory could be applied to improve those communities.

• “Social capital is our capital,” he said. While companies generally have financial or intellectual capital, open source communities depend mostly on social capital–in other words, the people who make the project an interesting place to be and a good project to contribute to.

• To generate interest from developers, Boston-based Akiban Technologies has released as open source its flagship database software, called Akiban Server. The company also released a connector for replicating a MySQL database within Akiban, and forged a partnership with platform hosting provider Engine Yard.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that the Call For Papers for this year’s upcoming ApacheCon Europe event is now open. The ASF’s official European user conference will take place from 5 to 9 November at the Rhein-Neckar Arena in Sinsheim, Germany.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• *

• Among the other updates is Pointer Lock API that allows better control of mouse in first person shooter games. Also, Firefox 14 supports native fullscreen mode in Mac OS X Lion.

• If you are in Ubuntu, you will get this update from the Ubuntu Software Center. For others, you can download Firefox 14 from this link.

SaaS

• Fast forward to today, and OpenStack now has the support of major IT vendors including Cisco, HP, Dell, AT&T, IBM, Red Hat, Canonical and SUSE. For the entire length of the project’s history, OpenStack has been an x86 based technology but that is now set to change.

• It’s been a busy month already in the world of the open cloud, not least because of OpenStack’s two-year anniversary this week. For those interested in that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) framework, the OSCON conference includes several sessions on this topic.

• Apple uses the ARM architecture for its chip sets on its iPhones and tablets. Now we are seeing the first uses for ARM-powered architectures on servers to power cloud environments.

• OpenStack turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process.

• Rackspace(a rax) — which helped give birth to OpenStack in July 2010 — rolled out some stats to show OpenStack momentum and to push its OpenStack-as-Linux comparision. For example, in the 84th week of the project, there were 166 entities contributing to the effort whereas it took Linux 828 weeks to hit 180 active contributors, according to Rackspace’s tally.

Education

Healthcare

Funding

• Basho, the company behind the open source NoSQL database Riak and the proprietary cloud storage system Riak CS, today announced a $11.5 million Series F round of funding lead by Georgetown Partners. The majority, $6.1 million, of this round comes from a new investor: IDC Frontier, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan (no relation to the analyst firm).

Project Releases

• You can store your passwords in a highly-encrypted database, which is locked with one master password or key file.

Licensing/Law

• I’m hoping in the next few months (possibly weeks) to practise what I preach: I’m working with a client, Emerge Open, to release a suite of legal documents under a creative commons licence, provisionally BY-SA (attribution-share alike, which means that anyone can take the documents and use them for any purpose, provided that if they republish, they have to credit us as the authors, and also release any amendments they make under the same liberal licence).

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Make Your Own Pocketable Arduino KitArduino’s are already pretty small, but they’re still not conducive to travelling. Instructables user sath02 wanted to take his electronics tinkering on the road with him, so he built a pocket sized Arduino kit.

Leftovers

Security

• In its planned July Critical Patch Update (CPU), Oracle has released a total of 87 security updates to fix various vulnerabilities across a number of its product families. The updates affect products including Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle Database 10g and 11g, and MySQL. One of the holes was given the highest possible CVSS score of 10.0; it was closed in the JRockit Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which is part of Oracle Fusion.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

ACTA

• In an era when effective global cooperation seems to be in short supply, the failure to approve a major international treaty would hardly seem to be cause for celebration. But the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a milestone for European democracy. Rarely has a debate on an international treaty been so intense and engaged so many people across Europe and beyond.

• ACTA, negotiated by a group of industrialized countries to fight counterfeiting and enforce intellectual-property rights, provoked widespread criticism from civil-society organizations for the lack of transparency in the process used to formulate it. In the European Parliament, we tried to redress these shortcomings. Over the past four months, we held countless meetings, hearings, workshops and online conversations with civil-society representatives and all of the concerned parties, to make sure all opinions were properly heard.

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