● 08.01.12

● Links 1/8/2012: KDE Releases 4.9, Wine 1.5.10, MATE 1.4

Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• uring the night of 31 July to 1 August, various servers that provide time information via NTP (Network Time Protocol) incorrectly announced that clients should apply a leap second. On Tuesday evening, Marco Marongiu pointed to this issue on one of the NTP project’s mailing lists. Now, reports from users whose systems applied a leap second at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – 2am CET – can be found in places such as a Mythtv forum, on Twitter, on Google+ and on the NTP project’s mailing lists.

Desktop

• In the 21 years or so since its inception, Linux has gained some amazing enthusiast street cred, but failed time and again to enter the mainstream. This year, however, may afford it an opportunity it’s never had before: to gain the momentum necessary to join the big boys in the operating system world. If that happens, Linux devotees the world over — from users to developers to even Linus Torvalds himself — may have Microsoft and Windows 8 to thank.

• So what does this all have to do with Linux you might ask? Well, Gabe Newell of Valve, has come out stating that his company is porting its Steam software for use on Linux and he is hoping that they will have over 2,500 games available to be playable on the Linux OS. Now while most of us are not able to play games at work, this type of exposure for Linux should do nothing but help the open source community. But again, even though his feelings are that Windows 8 will be a huge failure, we have to keep in mind that when Sony released the Playstation 3, he came out and spoke about the difficulties of working with Sony’s device, a stance that he seems to recently have gone back on.

• Linux-based operating system has proven to be more reliable and rugged for day-to-day activity especially security purposes, when placed at par with other operating system.

• The Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution with the defining component – Linux kernel is generally seen by hackers as tough to crack.

• I had ordered the Apple MacBook Pro 2012 model with Retina Display after being tempted by its impressive 2880 x 1800 display and other attractive features. Unfortunately, when Linux is running bare metal on the hardware it’s not running too good at the moment. My full review of the Retina MacBook Pro with Linux will come in early August, but there’s a few tid-bits to share now for those tempted shoppers.

Server

• System administrators at the USENIX LISA 2011 conference (LISA is a great system administration conference, by the way) in Boston in December got to hear Michael Perrone’s presentation “What Is Watson?”

• Michael Perrone is the Manager of Multicore Computing from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The entire presentation (slides, video and MP3) is available on the USENIX Web site, and if you really want to understand how Watson works under the hood, take an hour to listen to Michael’s talk (and the sysadmin Q&A at the end).

Kernel Space

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, July 30th, the immediate availability for download of the seventh maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.4 kernel series.

• In this week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile, we talk to Alan Cox. We learn how he originally got involved in Linux and why it remains important to him. He also gives us a bit of music education.

• A developer has begun working on a new audio sub-system for the Linux kernel, which he is referring to as KLANG, the Kernel Level Audio Next Generation. KLANG was conceived after the developer became frustrated by ALSA, OSS4, and PulseAudio.

• Following yesterday’s news of a massive power regression within the Linux 3.5 kernel, James Bottomley has uncovered the kernel commit causing excessive power usage.

Graphics Stack

• While the open-source Linux graphics drivers may not be up to scratch with the proprietary Linux graphics drivers from NVIDIA and AMD in terms of features, power efficiency, and performance, Linux isn’t the only operating system with less than desirable OpenGL drivers. I’ve been surprised by the OpenGL issues under OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” with the Retina MacBook Pro.

• We’re now going into eight months since the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series “Southern Islands” graphics cards first launched. In that time the Catalyst Linux support has been stable and fine, but the open-source driver support is still unusable.

• There has been the DRM/KMS support already for the Southern Island GPUs within the mainline kernel, so there is kernel mode-setting support, but not much more. There is the new RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to provide the user-space 3D/OpenGL driver support, but that isn’t yet in a working state. Getting RadeonSI up and running is the main blocker right now for usable Radeon HD 7000 series open-source support. There isn’t even 2D acceleration support yet since its using GLAMOR and so first the 3D code-paths must actually work.

• The xf86-video-intel driver has picked up thousands of lines of new code today with the integration of a BRW assembler in order to compile shader programs on the fly and to remove inefficiencies and mistakes from current Intel shaders.

• With talk of a massive power regression in the recently released Linux 3.5 kernel, yesterday I began benchmarking some different systems with varying versions of the Linux kernel looking for any new kernel power regressions on different hardware.

• It turns out that minutes after writing AMD Open-Source S.I. Botched, Hope For The Future, a number of “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver commits landed in mainline Mesa.

• The NVIDIA 304.30 Linux graphics driver is available this Monday afternoon. There’s several exciting changes to this latest NVIDIA Linux driver for the 304 series that’s still in beta.

• The 304.30 beta comes less than a month after the first hefty NVIDIA 304 Linux driver beta that brought DKMS installer support, RandR improvements, and much more. However, due to the hacking of NvNews, the NvNews Linux forums being eliminated, and NVIDIA not yet putting up their own Linux forums (their developers are certainly welcome here too), this is a rather quiet release. The NVIDIA 304.30 Linux driver isn’t also yet mentioned on NVIDIA.com until later in the week, but Hardy Doelfel of the NVIDIA Linux team was kind enough to write in about today’s driver release.

Applications

• In my entomological work I often need to compare two images of bugs side-by-side.

• Comparisons are surprisingly hard to do with either of the image viewers I normally use, namely Eye of Gnome and Ristretto. First I open two instances of the viewer and adjust their window sizes and positions for easy side-by-side comparison. I then open one image in one viewer window, and the other image in the other window. If I want to zoom in or out, or pan across the images, I have to do this independently in each viewer window. If I don’t save this two-instance arrangement on a dedicated workspace using ‘Save session on exit’, I’ll have to repeat the setting-up next time.

• Dia is a diagram and chart editor. Its user interface may be less attractive than those of other applications, but the results are no less stunning, and you cannot beat the open source price — free. Its drawing canvas looks a lot like the view you see in apps such as Paint, Powerpoint, OpenOffice Impress, LibreOffice Draw and GIMP.

Proprietary

• Blackmagic Design today announced the release of DaVinci Resolve 9 public beta, a major new update to the world?s most advanced color correction tool featuring a completely redesigned user interface to optimize workflow speed. DaVinci Resolve 9 public beta is now available for free download to existing full featured DaVinci Resolve customers, as well as the free DaVinci Resolve Lite!

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• A leading PC-user rights campaigner has voiced concern about video games developer Valve’s move to sell Linux-based versions of its products.

• Valve’s plan to release “nonfree” games that include DRM in Steam on Linux is “unethical,” according to Richard Stallman, a longtime advocate for free software and founder of the Free Software Foundation.

• Stallman believes that software owners should have the freedom to modify and distribute the software as they please, and he takes umbrage with Valve’s use of DRM. The Free Software Foundation offers Windows 7 and OS X as examples of “nonfree” software that limits the rights of users. Free software — like the Linux platform on which Steam will be available — is not simply free of charge, but also allows users “freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve” it.

• Valve co-founder and current managing director Gabe Newell recently made it pretty clear how much he really hates Windows 8. Two weeks ago, Valve officially announced that they would be porting their Steam distribution service to Ubuntu and would be working to natively support Valve games on Linux, starting with Left 4 Dead 2. Their drive behind the project: Newell’s belief that Windows 8 will be a “catastrophe” for PC users.

• As you might have guessed, I spend a shameful amount of money on the recent Steam sale. It happened pretty much exactly as I said it would: money left my wallet gradually in sub $10 increments over the course of the week. Like a fucking conga line made out of $5 bills, stretching from my shaking, sweaty palms to the coffers of Valve. I don’t even know if I will ever even play all of these games. But I did install and play Dead Space 2 because… Well, because you play a fucking engineer.

• Ouya the open source gaming console which has currently raised nearly $6 million over on the Kickstarter website, has revealed that on top of securing support from the OnLive gaming service. It’s now also signed a deal to bring Final Fantasy III to the console, its Kickstarter page has revealed today.

Desktop Environments

• The MATE development team has released version 1.4 of its desktop environment, adding support for sharing files via Bluetooth and further improving the Caja file manager. This update to the fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME now allows users to open bookmarks in the Caja side pane using the enter and space keys, and, in the file conflict dialogue, a button to show the differences between files has been added; the toggle button for the text-based location bar has been restored.

• Fans of Linux in general and Linux Mint in particular are no doubt already familiar with MATE, the GNOME 2-like desktop that was first included in Linux Mint 12 as an alternative for users wary of GNOME 3.

• In the latest Update Pack to Linux Mint Debian (UP4) released in March, MATE 1.2 and Cinnamon 1.4 were made available as well as an option called “gnome2-frozen” which allowed users to stick to Gnome 2 and skip the Update Pack altogether.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Now this is one of the things that you wouldn’t expect — Years after I left KDE behind me, today I’m back using it.. and honestly I feel again at home. I guess the whole backend changes that got through KDE4 were a bit too harsh for me at the time, and I could feel the rough edges. But after staying with GNOME2, XFCE, then Cinnamon.. this seems to be the best fit for me at this point.

• Why did I decide to try this again? Well, even if it doesn’t happen that often, Cinnamon tends to crash from time to time, and that’s obnoxious when you’re working on something. Then there is another matter, which is that I’m using a second external monitor together with my laptop, as I’m doing network diagrams and other things on my dayjob, and for whatever reason the lockscreen provided by gnome-screensaver no longer works reliably: sometimes the second display is kept running, other times it doesn’t resume at all and I have to type blindly (with the risk that I’m actually typing my password on a different application), and so on so forth.

GNOME Desktop

• Following the controversial information this weekend about some viewing GNOME as fading into abyss and losing relevance on the desktop, Christian Schaller has shared his views on the future of GNOME. In general he is very optimistic about the future of GNOME.

• In a talk given at the annual GUADEC developer conference, GNOME developers Xan López and Juan José Sánchez have set ambitious goals for the open source desktop project proposing the release of GNOME 3.12 as GNOME 4.0 in March 2014 and the creation touch enabled versions of GNOME for mobile devices.

• This year’s GUADEC was one of the best that I have ever attended. I have never seen the GNOME community so energised. New contributors were more visible than ever before, and all of them were fantastically enthusiastic and motivated. It is always a wonderful experience to see newcomers be inspired by our community. Our outreach efforts are more successful than ever.

Distributions

• Today I’ll present you 5 Linux distribution focused on computer security, in this list I’ve not put 2 distro I’ve already talked about: Backtrack and Damn Vulnerable Linux.

• The 5 Linux distribution are: DEFT (Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit), QubesOs, Pentoo, Lightweight Portable Security and CAINE.

• After providing benchmarks last week of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on different Amazon EC2 instance types, up today are more benchmarks from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Rather than just tossing out a lot of Amazon EC2 numbers of the different instance types to judge their performance, this article offers benchmarks of different Linux distributions on the same cloud. Tested here are Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Amazon Linux AMI 2012.03, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

• There’s been no end in sight to the controversy over Linux desktop environments, and with new contenders including Unity, GNOME 3, and Cinnamon–to name just a few–users now face more choices than ever before.

• There is a new Linux distribution released almost every week, sometimes, even every day. The latest is one called Stella, and the first version is Stella 6.3. Stella is a desktop-focused remix of CentOS, and Stella 6.3 is based on CentOS 6.3.

• If you are familiar with CentOS, you know that out of the box, it is not really designed as a desktop distribution. Stella changes all that, as it is primarily aimed at desktop users, while retaining the core enterprise features and capabilities of CentOS.

• Programs bundled with Stella include Firefox and Thunderbird ESR 10.0.6, the Pidgin IM client, version 2.6.9 of the GIMP image editor, LibreOffice 3.4.5 and the Transmission BitTorrent client. Stella includes additional third-party repositories such as Fedora’s Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) and the ELRepo RPM repository for Enterprise Linux packages. Two repositories – nux-dextop and nux-libreoffice – contain the additional desktop components, applications and the LibreOffice productivity suite that have been added to Stella.

New Releases

• The Pentoo Team has announced last evening, July 30th, the public Beta release of the Pentoo 2012 operating system based on Gentoo Linux.

• Pentoo 2012 Beta comes after three years of hard work to bring you all the latest and greatest tools for your daily penetration testing tasks.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• We have 5 computers in our household. My dad, my wife, and I have a laptop each, and my mom uses a desktop that sits in my parents’ bedroom. There is also a laptop that sits connected to our living room television. With the exception of this computer, we run Linux on all our computers. My mom and my wife use Kubuntu on their computers, while my dad and I have ArchLinux/KDE. The day before yesterday I realized that I hadn’t run updates on my dad’s laptop in a while so in haste, I issue the following at the terminal:

Red Hat Family

• The developers behind the Stella Linux operating system have announced last evening, July 30th, that version 6.3 of the Stella distribution is now available for download.

• Stella 6.3 follows the release of CentOS 6.3, an open source clone of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating system, and includes all the cool new stuff found in RHEL 6.3.

• Pat Riehecky announced last evening, July 30th, that the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Scientific Linux 6.3 operating system is now available for download and testing.

• Scientific Linux 6.3 RC1 comes with the LibreOffice office suite, which replaced the depricated OpenOffice.org application. Moreover, various packages were updated in this release, including yum-conf, OpenAFS 1.6.1, rpmfusion-free-release 6.1, yum-conf-rpmfusion 0.1, gtk2-immodules 2.18.9, gtk2-immodule-xim 2.18.9, ibus-gtk 1.3.4, procps 3.2.8 , and pacemaker 1.1.7.

Fedora

• A Fedora developer has proposed adding the packages for the MATE Desktop Environment – a fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME – into the repositories for Fedora 18, which is due for release in early November. The proposal was approved at yesterday’s meeting of Fedora’s Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). This is, however, conditional on the developers involved merging the desktop components into Fedora’s package repositories on time, otherwise the MATE desktop will have to wait for a future Fedora version. Since Fedora’s rules allow new packages to be added to the update repositories, MATE – which has come to the fore primarily through Linux Mint – could find its way into all currently maintained Fedora versions.

Debian Family

• The Debian Release Team, through Adam D. Barratt, announced a few days ago on their mailing list that the next major release of the Debian operating system will be named Jessie.

• If you’ve ever stumbled upon http://www.debian.org/trademark , you might be aware that, as a project, we’ve been working on a proper trademark policy since quite a while.

• I’m happy to attach a first complete draft of such a policy, and I’m looking for comment on it.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• At the request of many Phoronix readers following the release of updated Arch Linux media, here are some new Arch Linux benchmarks. However, this is not just Arch vs. Ubuntu, but rather a larger Linux distribution performance comparison. In this article are benchmark results from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Fedora 17, Slackware 14.0 Beta, and Arch Linux.

• We started an Open Discussion section on Muktware, where readers can suggest topics for discussion (the idea is to use these discussions as base to create stories ). The second topic was about the target audience of Ubuntu. The OP (original poster) wrote about his own dilemma to pin-point the core market of Ubuntu, which generated some heat. I think that’s an important topic for various reasons. I, being a FOSS/Ubuntu advocate, often come across the same question as the OP was asking. What is the target audience of Ubuntu?

Flavours and Variants

• If you’ve read my very recent review of Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce, you’ll know how pleased I was with it. Given that my latest long-term review of Kubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” just ended, I needed something new, so this was going to be it. Follow the jump to see what this is like over the course of 7-10 days.

Devices/Embedded

• Three months on, my Raspberry Pi is still proving a delight. I have settled on the Raspbian distribution as my tinkerer’s habitat, giving me access to the floating-point unit in the glibc libraries (especially libm.so).

• A little over six weeks ago I posted a very early image of Bodhi for the RaspBerry Pi. Today I am happy to let everyone know that I have published what I consider to be a “beta” quality image:

Phones

• It’s been an emotional journey for fans of webOS, but there was a glimmer of hope for those who owned the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, or HP Veer in the form of Open webOS.

• HP has disappointed and infuriated webOS device owners with the news that its official Open webOS platform – the open-source reincarnation of Palm’s ill-fated OS – will not run on any existing devices. The news, confirmed by the Open webOS team, means those with a TouchPad, Pre, Pixi or other Palm/HP device won’t be able to use HP’s version of webOS moving forward; the company claims that’s because of a lack of driver support for the specific hardware used.

Android

• The power of open source is the ability to be able to see everything that was done for the operating system. A source code allows many coders to see the inner workings of programs, and eventually someone out there will be able to improve the code, or fix some bugs thanks to the open source.

• Our friends over at AndroidPolice made quite the discovery recently, and it has to do with multiple user accounts within Android. Not only would it be a great feature to have, it appears that Google might be preparing for it, as AP has found several instances within AOSP that could lead to multiple user accounts. You can check out their full post on it here, but we want to know your thoughts on this. I can think of a few scenarios in which multiple user accounts would be very useful, one being that family tablet that we all seem to share. Of course, another is the business addict that likes to separate work and home, while still using one device. And how about the little brother you have that always wants your phone? The possibilities are nearly endless.

• The A10 Media PC is small computer with an Allwinner A10 processor designed to turn any TV into a PC. It ships with Google Android 4.0 software, but thanks to the A10 chip, it should also support Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems.

• Step forward Ars Technica and a report that Near Field Comms (using ACR122U and SCL3711 card readers) have been the route to hack Google Android and Linux-based MeeGo operating systems…

• A senior official at a Linux distribution reminds us that open source isn’t just for servers and Android handsets

• Here’s some big news for fans of the diminutive Raspberry Pi devices (one is shown here): Android 4.0 (the Ice Cream Sandwich version) is headed for a port that will become available on the

• Raspberry Pi knows how to create buzz. The extremely successful Open Source project has now salivated it’s users by porting Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to this $25 device.

• Raspberry Pi developer Naren is working on this port and has succeeded in smoothly running hardware-accelerated graphics and video on this device. The only missing part is the audio support.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• A slide pack allegedly showing details of Sony’s new tablet has surfaced. One of the more interesting parts of the leak is that Sony will unify its Xperia branding for both smartphones and tablets. It sounds like Sony will use the Xperia brand for all mobile technology and this new product could be the first ‘Xperia Tablet’ to be released.

• Officially announced earlier this month, the Archos 9.7 Carbon is available for purchase now both in the US, and the UK.

• US customers can buy the tablet here, for only $249.99. If you’re in the UK, go here to get the device for £229.99.

• Remember that Android gaming-tablet, the Wikipad, that we talked about last May? No? I don’t blame you, I’d forgotten all about it too. But when last we heard about it, it was a 7″ glasses-free 3D enabled Android tablet that had an add-on that gave it physical controls for gaming, and it was going to be powered by cloud-gaming service Gaikai.

• I was more than a bit skeptical about the Wikipad but I’m slowly coming around, based on new information and some changes in the gaming-scape.

• First, on the hardware itself, yesterday VentureBeat shared some exclusive specs. The hardware of the tablet (setting aside the controller attachment) seems solid. The Wikipad is now a 10.1″ tablet with a 1280×800 IPS display. Inside is a Tegra 3 T30 chip running at 1.4 Ghz. That makes it a bit faster than the Google Nexus 7 and a bit slower than the ASUS Transformer Prime Infinity 700. The Wikipad includes a gig of RAM and at least 16 GB of storage; that last figure might be adjusted upwards before launch. The Wikipad will be lighter than the iPad 3 (560 grams vs 652 grams). It’ll run Android Jelly Bean.

• Educational initiative OLPC (One Laptop per Child), which attracted headlines in 2005 for its $100 laptop – at the time an incredibly low price – has announced the first details of its next generation of devices. The XO-4 Touch will use touchscreen technology from the Swedish company Neonode.

Free Software/Open Source

• Netflix has released its Chaos Monkey tool to open source. Chaos Monkey is a testing utility that randomly shuts down virtual machine instances across large systems, ensuring that system is built with a great degree of resilience. Chaos Monkey’s is built in Amazon Web Service’s system, but its design is flexible enough for it to be used with cloud providers other than Amazon and with other instance groupings, Netflix said.

• Netflix has released Chaos Monkey, which it uses internally to test the resiliency of its Amazon Web Services cloud computing architecture, making available for free one of the tools the video streaming company uses to keep its massive cloud computing architecture running.

• The first time I spoke with Kevin Fleming, was back in 2006 about a new collaboration that Asterisk built at the time with Zimbra. I had spoke with Mark Spencer, the founder of Asterisk many times before, but Fleming was the ‘new’ guy, taking on a leadership role in the open source Asterisk VoIP project.

• Launched in May, Inktank is one of the newest companies to enter the still very new open source cloud computing industry. But it’s got a great head start as the enterprise support arm of the Ceph storage system. The one-time doctoral thesis of founder Sage Weil, Ceph has been incubating as an open source project with L.A.-based web hosting company DreamHost over the last eight years.

• “The founders and the community realized that in order for companies to adopt Ceph and use it, it needed to have commercial support available,” said Ross Turk, VP of community at Inktank. “The technology created a necessity for the company, instead of a company creating technology to make money.”

• We all love open source Wireshark for packet capture right?

• Apparently, that isn’t always the case. Researcher Robert Deaton took the stage at Defcon to announce a new open source effort that could one day possibly unseat Wireshark.

• Deaton said that every team at the Defcon CTP (Capture the Packet) contest uses Wireshark. That said he argued that in his view it’s the wrong tool for the job.

• Azavea, an award winning geospatial analysis (GIS) software development company and the Center for Security and Crime Science at Temple University announce the release of ACS Alchemist, an open source tool that enables the extraction of up to 100 variables of the American Community Survey (ACS). The data is extracted directly into a format convenient for display on maps or for use in advanced spatial analysis and modeling. The source code for ACS Alchemist is being released under the GNU General Public License and is available for download at: https://github.com/azavea/acs-alchemist.

• Azul Systems has announced a new programme for open source developers that will allow them to use its Zing JVM for development, qualification and testing of their open source applications. Zing JVM, which runs on commodity x86 servers, is a heavily optimised Java virtual machine with a high performance, pauseless garbage collection system.

Web Browsers

• So it’s simply a matter of choosing your preferred application for this task… and this is a decision often influenced by pre-installed options on a user’s preferred choice of hardware and therefore platform.

• If you don’t get on with Internet Explorer, then there’s always Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox — and even Flock, Maxthon, Deepnet Explorer and Phaseout 5.

Chrome

• Google Chrome version 21.0.1180.60 (21.0.1180.57 for Mac and Linux) is out, fixing 15 security vulnerabilities in the search giant’s browser. Strictly from a security perspective, you should upgrade as soon as possible.

Mozilla

• As we reported in early July, Mozilla has pulled back on further development of its long-standing Thunderbird email platform, despite the fact that it has more than 20 million users. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has a blog post up about the topic.

SaaS

• While Hadoop is all the rage in the technology media today, it has barely scratched the surface of enterprise adoption. In fact, if anything, we are still only on the first few steps of the Big Data marathon, a race that Hadoop seems set to win despite its many shortcomings.

• Rackspace switched on its OpenStack-powered cloud on Tuesday, making the end of a two-year journey and the beginning of the long struggle for relevance to the cloud-enabled enterprise.

• The availability of OpenStack-backed Cloud Databases, Cloud Servers and a Control Panel for US customers (a UK launch is slated for the 15 August), gives developers access to a range of rentable infrastructure based on the open-source OpenStack system.

• The company’s OpenStack era launches with a portfolio of cloud services. Current customers can migrate over time.

• If one of the major selling points of the cloud is that it makes data available from anywhere at anytime, it’s only natural for users to expect to be able to access it from mobile devices as well as traditional PCs. For users of ownCloud, the open source data-sharing platform, that’s now easier than ever thanks to the release of ownCloud apps for Android and iOS. Here’s the scoop and what it means for the open source channel.

• The apps, which run on Android devices, iPhones and iPads, allow users to interact fully with data stored in an ownCloud-based infrastructure. Besides browsing and downloading files, they can also upload, delete and modify data. Here’s a look at the software in action:

Databases

• Oracle is making a pitch to buy Xsigo Systems, as it continues to add products and services to its already burgeoning array of enterprise products.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The LibreOffice developers have made LibreOffice 3.6.0 RC4, the latest pre-release version of the office suite, available, after having to skip a release candidate. The last release candidate was RC2, and examining the release notes shows that RC3 wasn’t published. This was because the LibreOffice Windows build system failed and broke a number of Windows builds, making them unrunnable; a problem which was picked up by the LibreOffice Q&A teams before publication.

CMS

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• From August 21. to 26. there is Campus Party in Berlin. I was asked beforeif I can make suggestions for good speakers from the Free Software community.That is what I did. So beside the already announced keynote speakers like Jon “maddog” Hall, MarkSurman (Mozilla Foundation), and Rainey Reitman (EFF) to following talks will take place in the Free Software track…N

Public Services/Government

• The folks behind CONNECT, based on feedback from community members going through ONC onboarding, have made version 3.3.1 available.

• CONNECT essentially uses National Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) standards and protocols for secure health information exchange. ONC issued the latest full release, that being 3.3, on March 16 of this year, with improved performance, usability, and higher exchange volume features.

• Describing this week’s 3.3.1 release as a patch, the group explained that it carries two main features. The first, which was a request from the Social Security Administration, enables users to tap both PurposeOfUse and PurposeForUse, dependent on the end-point, whereas CONNECT 3.3 supported one or the other.

Openness/Sharing

• There is no doubt that there is tremendous goodwill, not to mention countless exciting experiments, when it comes to making the world of work more deeply human—designed to promote more freedom, equity, and engagement, and passion. Why, then, can those words sound so cheap and drained of their juice when we hear them repeated over and over by leaders of all stripes? Probably because they’re spoken so much more often than they’re ever enacted.

• That’s why it’s so very refreshing to spend time with a leader who is relentlessly inventive and impressively effective as a champion of the fullest expression of humanity at work. We aim too low, says Ricardo Semler, the irrepressible force behind Brazil’s Semco Group. “We constantly talk about passion—serving customers passionately, filling in forms passionately—but what if we created the conditions for people to feel exhilaration, to get involved to the point they shout ‘yes!’ and give each other high fives because they did if their way and it worked?” What if, instead of assuming passion will just show up when we invoke it, we focused on designing organizations to unleash human flourishing?

• Movim is the latest in decentralised social networks to hit the scene, the most well-known being Diaspora. It’s entirely open-source code, built using PHP, SQL, HTML5 and CSS. The main sentiment behind the project is that you should be the one who has control over your data.

Open Data

• Fewer than half of all registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) users have contributed to the open source project’s mapping data according to a new study by researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Of the mapping platform’s 500,000 registered members, approximately 38% had contributed data at least once. The study, which examined activity of registered OSM users up to December 2011, found that more than 24,000 users (about 5% of the total) had contributed at least 1,000 edited nodes.

• The Arduino has come to define the hands-on microcontroller, for education and for practical applications. But the associated software tools are very much tied to the traditional desktop. Codebender is hoping to change that by taking Arduino development into the cloud while keeping it open source.

Programming

• PathScale is working on a new project that is internally dubbed “DogFood”, it’s a new integrated development environment (IDE) based upon Qt Creator but with a greater focus on C++ and other new development concepts.

• In response to Nokia shutting down their Brisbane office and getting rid of those developers where several key Qt components are developed, C. Bergström shared that PathScale is hiring.

Standards/Consortia

• It doesn’t have to be that way. Scott Davis, founder of ThirstyHead, a training and consulting company, argued at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) that HTML5 Video is ready to go today.

• Davis opened by saying that, unlike closed video standards, HTML5 video can play on a wide variety of devices – everything from smartphones to HDTVs. It achieves this by not supporting any single video format or container. With this multiple-choice approach, HTML5 makes a “standard” by defining a standard way to embed video in webpages using the video element.

Leftovers

• IT WORLD CANADA CURATED Developers can use Sencha’s Touch 2 framework to build applications that can be deployed on the Web or offered through an app store

Health/Nutrition

• After a series of court defeats over the past few years, Monsanto and friends are trying to use Congress to make an end-run around the courts and current law. Lawsuits brought by opponents of genetically engineered (GE) crops resulted in the temporary removal of two products — Roundup Ready Alfalfa and Roundup Ready Sugarbeets — from the market. If the biotechnology industry and the legislators they support have their way, future GE crops will not suffer the same fate.

• Genetically engineered crops are plants that have had genes from other species inserted into their DNA. “Roundup Ready”crops like alfalfa and sugarbeets fall in a class of GE crops called “herbicide tolerant” crops, which are engineered to survive exposure to Monsanto’s bestselling herbicide Roundup. Farmers spray their entire fields with Roundup, killing only the weeds. Monsanto profits by selling both the seeds and increased quantities of Roundup herbicide.

• n case you had any doubt that California’s Prop 37 — which would require labeling of food containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) — is a significant threat to industry, a top food lobby has now made it perfectly clear.

• In a recent speech to the American Soybean Association (most soy grown in the U.S. is genetically modified), Grocery Manufacturers Association President Pamela Bailey said that defeating the initiative “is the single-highest priority for GMA this year.”

Security

Finance

• The Wall Street Journal has long led the struggle against freer more efficient markets. Whatever its rhetoric, its policies favor crony capitalism. The latest example is the July 23, 2012 article: by Francesco Guerrera entitled “Too Many Cops on the Bank Beat.”

• He begins the article with this question, which foreshadows the alternate reality the article inhabits. Bank examiners are not nannies and bankers are not children. The metaphor demonstrates the author’s lack of seriousness.

• It’s easy for Americans to labor under the delusion that other parts of the the world have less obvious forms of corruption or its milder form, conflict of interest, than our revolving door system (one of my favorites was when the NY Fed staffer tasked to overseeing AIG left….to AIG).

• And ex banking, that actually is true in most advanced economies. But as a reminder of how backs get scratched in Europe, we have Mario Draghi. The former head of the Bank of Italy, now ECB chairman, was responsible for European operations for Goldman from 2002 to 2005, and predictably has no memory of the currency swaps deal that enabled Greece to camouflage the size of its budget deficit. The new contretemps involves his membership in the Group of Thirty (aka G30), which despite its grand claims, is a bank lobbying group, even as he is serving as the head of the ECB. An alert reader pointed me to the story in Der Spiegel (German version only) and Google translate does a serviceable job.

Civil Rights

• Isn’t it amazing that the first sentence there (“I respect the vice president”) can precede the next one (“He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not”) without any notice or controversy? I realize insincere expressions of respect are rote ritualism among American political elites, but still, McCain’s statement amounts to this pronouncement: Dick Cheney authorized torture — he is a torturer — and I respect him. How can that be an acceptable sentiment to express? Of course, it’s even more notable that political officials whom everyone knows authorized torture are walking around free, respected and prosperous, completely shielded from all criminal accountability. “Torture” has been permanently transformed from an unspeakable taboo into a garden-variety political controversy, where it shall long remain.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• n a US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling, Verizon was ordered to stop charging users an additional fee for using their 4G smartphones and tablets as Wi-Fi hotspots, aka tethering.

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