● 08.22.12

● Links 22/8/2012: Linux 3.4 Longterm, PowerTOP 2.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “What an excellent way to make use of old PCs,” said Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack, referring to Robert Litt’s free computer lab project. “Of course, the next thing he needs to do is start teaching the kids how to install and maintain these things. As a geek who spent his early teen years piecing together old computers just to have something to work on, I know how good a learning experience it would be.”

• The cloud. It’s the talk of the town and has been growing for awhile now.

• I use desktop and laptop computers for everything from business tasks like creating spreadsheets, databases entry, document creation and so much more. On the personal side, the computer gets used for entertainment (or distraction) schoolwork, research, and communication. More than ever, the computers get used for communication.

• Hackers are being invited to take part in a Linux security challenge next week that is sponsored by the UK government and Sophos.

• The government has been running a Cyber Security Challenge (CSC) scheme since 2010, in an attempt to draw more young people into the computer security business.

• A competition has been launched to address the “critical” Linux security skills gap.

• The majority of internet infrastructure is based on Linux, but Linux security experts are “scarce”, according to Cyber Security Challenge UK, which runs a number of competitions to encourage new talent to enter the cyber security industry.

Desktop

• Now that Chromebooks–portable computers based on Google’s Chrome OS–are proliferating, including many online ads for them from Google, some interesting reviews are rolling in. In a post called “Chrome OS: The Cloud-Only Problem is Coming Home to Roost,” I pointed out that the achilles heel of Chrome OS-based computers is that they force the user to work with data and applications in the cloud, when many users demand some level of local storage and application functionality.

• Google’s Chrome OS is slowly but surely shaping up as a decent operating system for those users who live inside a browser. The latest stable release of Chrome OS brings minor, but important, design changes to this cloud based operating system.

• Buying Linux-loaded computers online can be a safe but often pricey option. A better strategy Simple Strategies for Enhancing eCommerce Profitability. Click to download white paper. is buying a Windows PC off the shelf and installing a Linux distro in a separate partition on the hard drive yourself. The Linux installer will automatically create a dual boot GRUB 2 startup screen. Since the Linux OS is free, why not have both available even if you never need to boot into Windows?

Server

• Codethink, a Linux consulting company headquartered in the UK, has launched a new ARM-based server product called the Baserock Slab. Each individual node includes eight quad-core ARM CPUs. Two nodes can fit in a single 1U slot, for a total of 64 cores per rack unit.

Kernel Space

• Currently I’m maintaining the following stable kernel trees for the following amount of time:

• * 3.0 – for at least one more year * 3.4 – for at least two years * 3.5 – until 3.6.1 is out

• Linux 3.4 is to be the next major stable kernel and will be maintained for a time of at least 2 years. This makes it suitable for deployment in servers and enterprise which need a long term support OS running for long.

• Jon Masters summarizes the latest goings on in the Linux kernel community, including the release of the 3.5 kernel, and an unfortunately embarassing incident for Microsoft’s virtualization team.

• Linux users should test the latest kernel from time to time – if they don’t, they shouldn’t be surprised if something important gets broken the next time a major update is released.

• Kernel developer Johannes Berg maintains wireless code in the kernel as well as the iwlwifi driver. Like many developers, he got involved with Linux to fix a hardware problem with his computer and never looked back. Catch him next week at LinuxCon North America, where he’ll be speaking about “Design Challenges and the Future of the Linux Wireless Stack.” The interview is part of a weekly series of profiles that can all be read at our 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks site.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman plans to maintain Linux kernel 3.4, which was released in May, for at least two years. Previously designated as a stable kernel, this announcement promotes version 3.4 to the status of long-term kernel. The stable and long-term kernel maintainer has also announced that Linux 3.0, which has been maintained for a while as a long-term kernel, will continue to be maintained for at least another year. Linux 3.5 will follow the usual scheme, with the Linux Foundation Fellow maintaining it as a stable kernel until the release of Linux 3.6.1.

• Intel’s Open Source Technology Center has announced the release of PowerTOP 2.1, which includes support for Intel GPUs and cores without P-states. The project is now using the Transifex localisation platform and includes new translations of the UI into nine languages; the developers plan to include even more localisations for the 2.2 release.

• PowerTOP has also gained a new manual page, and several minor improvements and bug fixes. An option to suppress output to the terminal will make it easier for users to use the tool in scripts and automated test setups. The developers have also been working towards better ARM support with the addition of more ARM assets.

Graphics Stack

• After bringing EXA acceleration to the ATI Rage R128 driver, Connor Behan has shared his experiences doing this as a first time X.Org driver developer.

• In a blog post entitled Tales Of A First Time Driver Developer, the student developer has shared his experience in bringing EXA acceleration to the R128 driver following the XAA support being killed.

Applications

• Helicon Remote is an excellent Android app for Nikon DSLR users as it extends the features and capabilities of the camera.

• If you are an ownCloud user and waiting for an app that lets you read RSS feeds from websites, here comes an app finally perfect for your needs. The app is still in alpha stage so do expect some rough edges, but works and does what it says.

• The official rationale for the new design is that the current “graphical UI is really starting to show its age, both to the users and to the developers. Adding new features (especially for new storage technologies) is difficult, and there’s no apparent overall design to the user experience.” From a purely end-user perspective, I disagree with the “there’s no apparent overall design to the user experience,” because the current UI offers a far more coherent user-experience than this new one.

Proprietary

• Arasan has demonstrated its SD 3.0 Hardware Validation Platform (HVP) running at more than 90MB/s sustained read and more than 70MB/s sustained write using a Linux storage device benchmark.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• The Wine development release 1.5.11 is now available.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): – Multi-channel support in the ALSA driver. – Removal of the big X11 lock. – Support for pair positioning adjustments in Uniscribe. – More I/O stream implementations in the C++ runtime. – Various bug fixes.

Games

• Google Summer Of Code is at its end and most projects have reached pencils down stage when changes will be freezed. A hell lot of apps have got major improvements during this period and some of them have also got a full redesign. Among them, a game that has got some major change is a Linux Sudoku game.

• The “sophisticated, professional, open-source” flight simulator FlightGear has reached version 2.8.0. This version includes many new features, enhancements and bugfixes. The AI has been largely improved with JSBSim flight dynamics model improvemnts.

• The Liberated Pixel Cup has been going on since April as a free-as-in-freedom game development competition being hosted by the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, and OpenGameArt. For those more (or equally) interested in the license of the game rather than quality, here are some reviews of the different Liberated Pixel Cup submissions.

• The official release of Valve’s much-anticipated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive title is set to happen on the 21st of August. In anticipation of the launch, Valve has released a new CS:GO trailer.

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the latest game in Valve’s wildly-successful Counter-Strike franchise built atop their impressive Source Engine. CS:GO has been in beta for a number of months already while next week will mark its official release. This first person shooter is initially being released for Windows, OS X, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, but a native Linux version will very likely come once Valve begins shipping their Steam client and Source-based games for Linux.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Calligra Productivity Suite developers had announced plans to develop a new writing tool for authors and novelist called Calligra Author. They have finally announced plans and progress so that we get an idea of how this software will be actually like.

• The SFLPhone team and Savoir-Faire Linux, a Montreal Open Source consulting company, are pleased to announce the availability of SFLPhone 1.2.0, the first version since the KDE client was moved to KDE infrastructure. Our team is proud of joining the KDE family as part of Playground, and looking forward to being part of Extragear soon. SFLPhone KDE and SFLPhone Qt have been in development for the better part of a decade, aiming to provide the KDE environment with a professional software phone app. Recently, we have been working hard to bring the application to the status of KDE first class citizen. Thank you to the Oxygen and l10n community members for showing such an interest in our application and helping us improve it.

• This edition is based on KDE 4.8.4. It is a DVD edition with a selection of the most popular applications like firefox 14.0.1, thunderbird 14.0, gimp 2.8 or Calligra 2.4.3, k3b 2.0.3, amarok 2.5.0 kept mostly vanila !

• Nepomuk has a very decentralized architecture where the different components exist as different processes. They are all variants of the same executable – nepomukservicestub. This servicestub loads appropriate service plugin. The main reason for doing this was stability. If one of the components crashes, then it doesn’t take all the other components with it.

GNOME Desktop

• *

• Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal) is scheduled to release this October. Canonical has plans to bring its own version of Nautilus due to differences with Gnome developers.

• An interview about GNOME OS, the consequences of Canonical leaving, the purported removal of features and the future role of Linux distributions

• Few days ago I was talking with Jack -Scionicspectre- Gandy, who is a new Gnome contributor, and he was explaing me about the work he does together with Cosimo Cecchi for improving GTK2 Apps look.

Distributions

• Fans of Linux may recall the “31 Flavors of Fun” project I wrote about last month through which ambitious developer Todd Robinson planned to “create, and release, a complete desktop operating system each and every day for the period of 31 days” over the course of August.

• We have been using Zorin OS since version 3.0 in our business and on our personal computers. I purchased several copies of Ultimate to support Zorin and because of the value added software on the Ultimate DVD. The look changer and splash screen themer are what I call value added. Also, the fact that we can configure our wireless without a wired connection has changed the way we use Linux.

• If the Zorin Team can think of “value added” programs to add to the Zorin DVD, I am convinced they will sell more DVD’s and that would help fund Zorin OS.

• Chakra Linux, a semi rolling KDE Linux distro based on Arch Linux is dropping support for i686 platform. What it means that 32 bit PCs will no longer be able to install Chakra Linux in their machines.The move came in respect to the fact that Chakra Linux is mostly focused on being a modern distribution. As x86_64 architecture is dominant on market now, it will be convenient to focus on on that architecture only. Also, maintaining two sets of packages is a tough work, given it is a open source project always short of volunteers.

New Releases

• Lars Torben Kremer proudly announced yesterday, August 19th, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of the Snowlinux 3 Xfce Edition operating system.

• Calculate Linux is a Gentoo based distribution that includes three different versions: Calculate Directory Server, Calculate Linux Scratch and Calculate Linux Desktop.

• A new version of the desktop edition was released yesterday featuring the Gnome Shell 3.2 as the default desktop environment with many interesting and useful additions and tweaks!

• Well, I wasn’t going to do any reviews until later this year, but several of a recent flurry of releases caught my attention and my interest and I made some time for checking them out. One of them is Calculate Linux. Others have reviewed it before and found themselves inundated with offers of Russian brides and other advertisements of the more vile kind, but I won’t let that put me off because, as I can reveal, I like the product itself very much.

• Robert Shingledecker announced a couple of days ago, on August 18th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the third Release Candidate of the upcoming Tiny Core 4.6 Linux operating system.

Gentoo Family

• Following this weekend’s news about Link-Time Optimization support for the Linux kernel, in the discussion that spawned, building the Linux kernel with the LLVM/Clang compiler was once again brought up.

• Going back two years there has been work to build the Linux kernel with LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler and then as of earlier this year a more concerted effort to building the Linux kernel with Clang — that work was led by Qualcomm’s Innovation Center but emerging since have been i586 and x86_64 targets in addition to ARM. For centralizing these resources there is now the LLVM Linux kernel Linux Foundation page that collects the necessary information and patches for building the Linux kernel with the Apple-sponsored compiler rather than GCC.

Red Hat Family

• I’ve seen what to me are disturbing patterns in what’s happening with Red Hat’s influence on core components used by Linux distributions. The latest came just after I discovered that some Flash-based DRM schemes are now using HAL for enforcement. As consolekit has always behaved like a broken DRM scheme, denying the user permission to use their own system, I wondered what was next now that HAL is deprecated – consolekit?

Fedora

• While the feature freeze is now in effect for Fedora 18, the Spherical Cow has been fed some feature freeze exceptions to enrich this forthcoming Linux distribution.

• At today’s Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting the following features were approved while now into the freeze window:

• I had a dilemma last week: whether to start my approach to Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle from the KDE or GNOME spin of this operating system. The decision was to take on the KDE release first. I was not disappointed by it, but I was not overly impressed.

Debian Family

• Stefano Zacchiroli sent his monthly report on DPL activities. Stefano reported about the ongoing discussion with the FSF about Debian Freeness, as well as an important discussion about the trademark policy draft and the logo relicensing.

• I have been using a pre-release version (Wheezy) of Debian GNU/Linux on my PCs for months with great satisfaction. How is that possible with hundreds of known bugs in the repository? Simple. The repository holds many thousands of packages and I have only a couple of thousand installed. The odds are in my favour. In fact, if you filter for “ignore bugs not in Wheezy” and “base system”, the bug-count is only 26:

• Debian Bugs Search.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Users can now see a referrals invite link in their Ubuntu One web dash.

• To put that in layman’s terms, this is the section of the page where it says ‘Get more storage free!’ on the right.

• Last week I delivered OpenGL/3D benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.10 when comparing the performance of the default Unity desktop to the now-defunct Unity 2D environment. Canonical’s decision to kill Unity 2D means that for those now forced to use the Compiz-based Unity may experience lower frame-rates, high power consumption with Unity-over-LLVMpipe, and other differences. Additional testing has shown how Unity is affecting the 2D graphics performance.

• If you are a movie buff, deciding on which movie to watch next often becomes a tedious task. You scrounge through multiple websites, reviews, and then search for that movie on Netflix or order it from your local library. Ubuntu users though, especially the ones who want everything at their fingertips, can make the most out of Unity’s Dash to find out more about the movies they’re planning to watch. By installing a couple of lenses, you can save yourself the trouble of visiting multiple websites just to know more about that movie.

• After announcing the opening of sponsorship for the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit 2012 event, Canonical announced yesterday, August 19th, that the registration is now open for everyone.

Flavours and Variants

• I wrote last week about one of the twin sisters born by the Linux Mint team: Linux Mint 13 Maya Cinnamon. That is a distribution which features Cinnamon, the Mint team’s in-house development of a desktop environment with GNOME3 roots, but without the controversial GNOME Shell.

• BlankOn is an Ubuntu-based distribution developed by the Indonesian Linux Mover Foundation and BlankOn developer team.

• A few days ago the development team of BlankOn released the new version 8.0, that features their own desktop shell for Gnome 3 called Manokwari. That sounds interesting but is it really? Let’s find out!

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi just doesn’t know how to not stay in news. This story comes from an unusual space — using Raspberry Pi to turn a DSLR into a fully functioning PC. Photographer cum hacker David Hunt has succeeded in cramming the Raspberry Pi in a broken Canon 5D Mark II battery grip.

• Pico Technology’s DrDAQ single-board data logger adds 17 I/O channels to a Raspberry Pi.

• When connected to the Raspberry Pi single-board computer, it forms a data logging system that can be integrated into a Linux application.

Phones

Ballnux

• We hear the name ‘LG‘ often these days. Yesterday, the Optimus Vu was the star of the show, and today we heard about a mysterious device, codenamed as ‘Optimus G‘.

Android

• Acer today announced a pair of Android smartphones with entry-level specs and budget-friendly price points. The two handsets, the Liquid Gallant and Liquid Gallant Duo, are identical across the board save for the dual-SIM capability of the latter.

• MetroPCS may hand the major carriers some competition, with its new 4G LTE plan for budget-conscious consumers.

• Karl Fogel, board member of the Open Source Initiative and QuestionCopyright staffer, recently posted a “modest proposal” on his personal blog. Karl suggests that mobile application marketplaces, most notably on Android, should make it obvious what license an application is released under before the user installs it.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• The mighty animation studio has decided to share its Subd evaluation code as used on its latest feature Brave. Download the software yourself for free!

• More than two months ago, we took a look on the 29 new things that this Google summer of code would bring to the Gnome desktop environment and its various components.

• Today it is the “pencils down” for everyone as we finally reached the end of this magnificent program. Interns and mentors have done a great job providing new exciting things to the Gnome users benefit.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• More than two years ago, Mozilla promised that it would catch up with Google’s Chrome performance in JavaScript. Today, JavaScript is not as much as a problem anymore as it was in 2010, but Mozilla has not forgotten its promise. IonMonkey is breathing down Chrome’s neck.

SaaS

• Led by Hadoop vendor MapR Technologies, the open-source effort will seek innovative ways to push Hadoop data queries through more quickly for users.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• If you’re like many of us here at OStatic, you’ve probably been using the LibreOffice suite of applications for some time now. And, without a doubt, this suite has become very impressive both in terms of its overall capabilities and in terms of the speed with which problems are addressed. New releases of the suite clean up lots of bugs, with community support behind the effort. But there is a new and aggressive program that has just been introduced to crack down further on bugs in LibreOffice. Dubbed HardHacks, it should make the suite much better–and do so quickly.

• Seems Oracle is on its way to close sourcing the widely used relational database management system – MySQL. It was acquired by Oracle from Sun Microsystems in 2010 and is used in millions of websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and even Google.

• Vagrant, the open source developer environment generation tool, is being re-engineered to no longer be dependent on VirtualBox, Oracle’s open source desktop virtualisation platform. Vagrant allows the creation of “boxes” which contain all the assets needed to provision a fresh virtual machine. With a single command, Vagrant can create a machine from a box and bring it up. Vagrant was designed for developers who need to bring up multiple virtual machines, repeatably and easily in a testing environment. Vagrant 1.0 appeared in March this year.

• Oracle has been accused of hiding MySQL test cases and obfuscating revision history by MariaDB VP Sergei Golubchik. In a blog post entitled “Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL become closed source”, Golubchik says they noticed that, according to the release notes, a number of bugs had been fixed in the most recent MySQL 5.5.27 release, but there were no test cases associated with any of the bug fixes – indeed, there are no tests associated with bug 61579 or 60926. When he asked on the MySQL internals mailing list, he was unable to get a response from Oracle as to whether this was new policy or an oversight.

• In a new initiative, “LibreOffice HardHacks”, the LibreOffice developers are being called on to take on the harder bugs in the LibreOffice code. Bjoern Michaelsen announced the programme, which is complementary to an earlier successful project “LibreOffice Easy Hacks”, which set out to get the “low hanging fruit” bugs, the ones that would be easy to resolve and would bring new developers on board.

Funding

• The Kickstarter fund for Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation has surpassed $500,000, which puts it over halfway to the $900,000 goal with 25 days remaining.

• [...]

• The RTS will now be on Mac OSX and Linux, in addition to Windows, with Linux being heavily requested by supporters.

• Education software business rSmart received $10.75 million in venture funding to help broaden its appeal for open-source solutions aimed at colleges and universities.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Version 7.5 of the GNU Debugger (GDB) has been released by the GNU Project Debugger development team and brings with it new targets and features. One of the most notable changes in the latest release of the standard debugger for the GNU software system is the addition of support for Go, Google’s alternative language for systems programming; the open source debugger already works other programming languages including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran and Java.

• With the recent interest regarding Link-Time Optimization support within the Linux kernel by GCC, here are some benchmarks of the latest stable release of GCC (v4.7.1) when benchmarking several common open-source projects with and without the performance-enhancing LTO compiler support.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Google’s translation:

• “The municipality of Vieira do Minho definitively adopted productivity software LibreOffice”.

• The Swiss canton of Waadt(Vaud) and the country’s Supreme Court are among this year’s winners of the CH Open Source Awards. The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open announced the awards last week Tuesday.

• The advocacy organisation writes in a statement that the ‘Portail eGov du canton de Vaud’ was awarded for its involvement in the open source community and its vision on using open source. “The price is to support the Canton of Vaud”, ch/open says, hoping it will serve as an incentive for other cantons.

• A special award was given to the Swiss Supreme Court. Ch/open chairman Matthias Günter says the court earned the award for its “pioneering of the use of open source, even as many other public administrations are increasing their use of open source, consciously or not.”

Openness/Sharing

• Without genuinely valuable services for your customer, you have no revenue. I am aware that “value” is an overused word. Having spent many years of my career in marketing, I have been guilty of saying “what’s the value proposition?” more than a few times. But now, having been in the driver’s seat selling services for open source software applications, I can provide a more specific definition of value, particularly as it applies to application software (in contrast with infrastructure software).

• New Zealand brewing company Yeastie Boys added a gold medal for design to the growing swag of international gongs they have recently won for their leftfield ales, when they were awarded gold for their open source Digital IPA in the Packaging Class at the Sutton Group Brewers Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards last week.

Open Data

• In March 2012 I reported in a post entitled “Open by design” a paper by Harlan Yu and David Robinson entitled “The New Ambiguity of Open Government“. A discussion of the paper has now appeared on the World Bank blog by Anupama Dokeniya entitled “Opening Government Data. But Why?” [A thank you to Jacques Raybaut at en.europa-eu-audience for the heads-up]. This is also even more relevant given the UK Public Accounts Committee report back so recently which was linked to and commented upon in Transparent e-gov.

Open Hardware

• John sez, “MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as CNC mills and 3D printers. The project will also include open source avionics software to enable state-of-the-art digital flight instruments and display capabilities. Basically we are designing an aircraft that can be built on a CNC mill at home, or at a makerspace which is easy to assemble and quick to build. The plans and instructions will be available for free to anyone that wants them!”

Programming

• Go’s unique approach to OO steps around many problems found in other languages by preferring composition to inheritance.

Leftovers

• A filmmaker is trying to make a film about basketball great Wilt Chamberlain’s college years at Kansas. However, his estate appears to be threatening the filmmaker if he goes ahead, claiming such things as publicity rights over Chamberlain’s image…

Security

• Systemd can now secure log information on system processes stored in its journal, using a procedure known as Forward Secure Sealing (FSS). This prevents attackers who have obtained administrator privileges from clearing traces of their activity from the journal without deleting it in its entirety. A verification key is used to secure the data and, to prevent modification, it has to be stored externally. Instead of writing the key down, users can optionally save it to a smartphone via a QR code.

Finance

• Twenty-six U.S. companies paid their CEOs more than they paid the federal government in taxes in 2011, according to a new study from The Institute for Policy Studies.

• The twenty-six top-earning CEOs noted in the study, titled CEO Hands in Uncle Sam’s Pocket, were paid an average of $20.4 million last year by companies that are profuse with profit, yet pay little or no federal taxes. The list includes well-known corporations such as AT&T, Boeing, Viacom, Motorola, Walmart, Halliburton, and Exxon Mobil. It also includes Citigroup and AIG, both of which still exist due to taxpayer bailouts.

• The National Security Agency may not be the first organization that comes to mind when you think of contributors to open source software projects. But over the last few years, as we reported last month, the agency created and open sourced an rather interesting software platform known as Apache Accumulo. Basically, it’s a “NoSQL database” for handling massive data sets securely.

Privacy

• Tell someone that you know how to go off-radar on the Internet and, as a rule, they won’t believe you. They imagine shadowy intelligence agencies have state-of-the-art technology and can see everything you do. Bkut they would be wrong.

• No doubt they do have amazing technology, but it is perfectly possible to hide yourself on the Internet, to send and receive emails that nobody can intercept or read, to upload and download securely, to visit banned websites, blog anonymously, and do anything you want without being followed, profiled or analysed. Those that know how use the Deep Web.

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