● 09.30.12

● Links 30/9/2012: Slackware 14.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• 1. Linux is not windows

• Linux Foundation events are studded with Linux and open source community leaders, as well as some eccentric personalities. What better place than one of these events to sit down and talk to the people who are making innovation happen in software development and cloud computing?

• We took advantage of this unique opportunity at LinuxCon North America where we were able to talk to folks like Amir Michael of Facebook and the OpenCompute project; Josh Berkus with PostgreSQL; Sam Ramji, former Microsoft executive and today VP at Apigee; Erica Brescia, CEO at BitRock; and Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier of CloudStack, among others. We asked each of these insightful people what they’re working on, what inspires them about Linux and open source software, and to which technologies or trends they’re paying particular attention.

• Recently, we compared Raspberry Pi, Allwinner and CuBox Linux hardware boards. Then, some folks from our open source community shared with us their experiences with Raspberry Pi and Makey Makey. There is much enthusiasm over turning ordinary items into new inventions and doing mundane tasks in completely new ways.

• The launch of the Raspberry Pi has been a huge success story, and promises to get cheap computers into the hands of kids and hobbyists around the world. But it has also had another effect–it has inspired others to look into alternative methods of developing cheap computing platforms.

• One company taking inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Foundation is Adapteva, which focuses on semiconductor technology and has developed a very efficient multicore microprocessor architecture. Now they intend to use that architecture to offer up a $99 supercomputer with the help of Kickstarter.

• The Parallella is a new pocket sized computer based on the Epiphany multicore chips developed by semiconductor start-up Adapteva.

• The automotive industry took a major step forward in its commitment to open source yesterday, as announced by the Linux Foundation. The Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL) is a new group that will facilitate industry collaboration for Linux development.

• Major automotive companies like Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Toyota are some of the first carmakers to participate in AGL. Other members include Aisin AW, DENSO Corporation, Feuerlabs, Fujitsu, HARMAN, Intel, NEC, NVIDIA, Reaktor, Renesas, Samsung, Symbio, Texas Instruments Incorporated, and Tieto.

• To sound this clever yourself, check out the aptly named nonsense. In essence, nonsense is a clever generator of, well, nonsense. Just extract the archive bundle into a directory of your choosing and you are ready to go. No compiling and no nonsense (pardon the circular reference). Nonsense is a Perl script that works with a collection of templates. If you look in the directory you just created, you’ll see an executable file called nonsense and a number of data files as well as a few HTML templates.

Desktop

• The Cr OS developers announced on September 14th, that the Chrome OS Linux has changed its name and it will be known as Cr OS Linux from now on.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• While Reiser4 isn’t mainline in the Linux kernel tree, it can at least now be patched to work on the Linux 3.5 kernel. Previously this controversial file-system would work on the Linux 2.6.39 kernel, then ported to Linux 3.2, and now it’s wound up compatible with the Linux 3.5 kernel

• Linux 3.6 can cut off the power to PCIe chips and ATA ports. A new userspace driver framework is designed to provide faster access to individual PCI/PCIe devices for virtualised systems.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman announced last night, September 14, the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.5 kernel series.

Graphics Stack

• There’s new improvements within the wonderful open-source APITrace utility for better profiling OpenGL games/applications.

• According to reports from ITworld and ZDNet, Intel has said that it is now planning a variant of the Atom Z2760 (code-named Clover Trail) System-on-Chip (SoC) that will run Linux or Android-based operating systems. The chip was originally designed specifically for Windows 8 tablets. However, the company hasn’t provided any further product details or intended target markets.

Applications

• The top utility will need little introduction to seasoned Linux users. top is a small utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It allows users to monitor the processes that are running on a system. top has two main sections, with the first showing general system information such as the amount of time the system has been up, load averages, the number of running and sleeping tasks, as well as information on memory and swap usage. The second main section displays an ordered list of processes and their process ID number, the user who owns the process, the amount of resources the process is consuming (processor and memory), as well as the running time of that process. Some versions of top offer extensive customization of the display, such as choice of columns or sorting method.

• Learning a new language can provide life changing opportunities and enjoyment. There are so many reasons to learn a foreign language whatever your nationality, to improve employment potential, intellectual curiosity, make travel more enjoyable, sharpen cognitive and life skills, make lifelong friends, and many more. Whilst it is widely acknowledged that it is easier to begin learning a second language at a tender age, starting a new language at any age is eminently worthwhile.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Most of you probably think about Source as only a game engine – but Chris Smith is actually working on a web series called “Aura” that is made with Source SDK and other tools such as Faceposer – which is used for the lip syncing onto character models, Garry’s mod – for backgrounds and Sony Vegas for editing.

• Hey! Great news! 4 games have been added to the Humble Indie Bundle 6! As always, if you already bought the bundle, you can download those new games immediately! Some of those games have already been included into previous bundles. Let’s take a look at these “new” games!

• Listen as your minions clash with the heroes in the fight between Good and Evil.

• Orcs are grunting. Villagers are screaming. Slimes are…sliming.

• The biggest change is the addition of sound, which brings the real-time battles to life. Every clink of treasure collected, every clash of a knight’s swords, and every cry of anguish from your vanquished foes no longer requires your imagination. And with catchy music by the talented William Riordan, this easy-to-play strategy game is even more enjoyable.

• Faster Than Light (FTL) is a spaceship simulation and roguelike game. The player have to manage a spaceship, survive and explore vast galaxies.

• FTL was on Kickstarter and it raised more than $200k back in April. The actual target was mere $10k but the level of interest was so much that they manged to get about 2000% funding.

Desktop Environments

• I get why they called it Gigolo. It’s the Xfce utility that “mounts anything without complaining.”

• The things it mounts include ftp and sftp over the network, WebDAV and Windows shares. I’d rather not use it at all, but in Xfce’s Thunar file manager, you still need Gigolo to access these remote filesystems.

GNOME Desktop

• As part of a facelift, the Nautilus file manager has gained and lost a number of features. The Boxes VM tool and the GNOME Disks utility, which are also of interest for Cinnamon and Unity, have matured. The account manager now allows programs to access Facebook friends and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

• The user observation hackfest was an attempt from the part of Gnome developers to learn more about what users want.

Distributions

• This distribution we chose to show you today sure is an interesting combination. According to their Distrowatch page, it’s a combination of features from Mandriva, on which is based, Fedora and Ubuntu, and can be used at school, work or home. Are these rather bold statements true? Stay tuned to find out. You don’t need to have any special knowledge, just 10 minutes of your time is all we’re asking. If you have questions on how to try blackPanther or you already tried it and have an opinion, please visit our linux forums and share!

• After reading a comprehensive review at dedoimedo.com on the latest release of Voyager 12.04 I decided to do a short video review of this Linux OS Distribution. I chose to install this distribution to my hard drive. I have always been a great fan of Xubuntu, so I was excited to see what Voyager would look like and compare it’s performance to Xubuntu.

• Finnix is a live CD rescue distro, and it’s one for the CLI-junkies because it doesn’t come equipped with a desktop.

• First released in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, Linux is an open-source operating system derived from the UNIX OS. The philosophy of such open-source operating systems is that they are community-driven; Linux evolves to meet the demands and wishes of its users. There are many great Linux distributions to choose from, each boasting their own advantages and niches. Some designed to be very user-friendly, others intended to give power users greater control over their systems. Here are five of the most highly rated Linux distributions on offer today.

New Releases

• Slackware 14.0 is has been released. A post on slackware.com said, “the long wait is finally over and a new stable release of Slackware has arrived!” The official announcement said, “We are sure you’ll enjoy the many improvements.”

• The developers behind the Superb Mini Server (SMS) Linux server operating system proudly announced earlier today, September 18th, the immediate availability for download of the Superb Mini Server 2.0.0 release.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• The ancient alchemists tried to turn iron into gold. While they didn’t succeed, they did leave us with a wonderful metaphor. Last week I experienced something akin to alchemy when I installed Fedora 17 onto a donated Dell Dimension 3000 tower computer.

• I then created two extra users for this computer, grabbed some spare USB keyboards and USB mice, and plugged an extra keyboard and mouse into each of two Plugable multiseat devices (which sell for $65 each). With bated breath, I plugged each Plugable device into a USB port on that free computer. Voila! Like magic, a computer that had no value to someone else suddenly turned into a fully-functioning three-seat computer.

• Get your first taste of the Spherical Cow, and help test the new features expected to come to Fedora 18, such as a new Hot Spot feature and updated Samba

• The Alpha release of the upcoming Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) Linux operating system has been announced earlier today, September 18th, featuring KDE 4.9.

Debian Family

• It’s an ominous name for an ominous fruit: the black raspberry. As the owner of a new Raspberry Pi, I realized that I was going to have to, at some point, open the box and do something with it.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical announced today, September 18th, that the Ubuntu Open Week for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) will take place between 24th and 26th October, 2012, on the usual Ubuntu IRC channel, #ubuntu-classroom.

• Along with RedHat, Rackspace and many others, Canonical has been steadily marrying its cloud strategy to the open source OpenStack platform. In February of last year, we discussed how Canonical was deepening its relationship with OpenStack, and it has kept doing so. Now, in a new blog post, Canonical’s Mark Baker notes that Canonical has released the Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack, for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu.

• Cinnamon, the GNOME Shell fork used by default in Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon Edition), has reached version 1.6, getting many new features: a new 2D session, workspace OSD, new applets and lots more!

• Ubuntu 12.04 includes a desktop interface that is a strong departure from previous versions. One of the most striking differences upon logging into the system is the launcher. The launcher is a vertical bar that, by default, resides along the left side of the screen. It is similar to the dock in Mac OS X and aims to make your user experience more efficient and intuitive.

• Canonical has reminded folks that Ubuntu 11.04 will no longer be supported after October 28th, 18 months after its launch

• Dear Ubuntu users, the time has come to say goodbye to the Natty Narwhal release of the popular Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu 11.04, as on October 28th it will reach end of life.

Flavours and Variants

• Pear Linux is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu, but unlike its parent distribution, which uses the Unity desktop interface, Pear Linux features a modified GNOME Shell called Pear Shell decked out to look like a MacOS X desktop. Not that it is a succeeded, but it is good attempt. Apple has nothing to worry about. The latest edition is Pear Linux 5. Code-named Sunsprite, it is based on Ubuntu 12.04, using (Linux) kernel 3.2.

Devices/Embedded

• Semiconductor start-up Adapteva has announced plans to create an open-source experimentation board with a massive amount of parallel processing power, and it’s found a novel way to raise the funds it needs: Kickstarter.

Phones

• Following the roadmap laid out back in January, HP has delivered Open webOS 1.0 to the masses as planned. Last month saw the release of two betas, one for desktop Linux and the other for assorted devices thanks to OpenEmbedded integration, and today we’re seeing the finalized versions of each. Improving on the last go around, the OpenEmbedded version (Open webOS OE) now has a user interface to match the the Linux-style Open webOS Desktop, which itself has the same user interface as webOS 3.0 on the HP TouchPad.

• An alpha release of the Tizen 2.0 SDK with source-code was released this week.

Android

• The flow of notable new Android apps quietened down a bit on the Google Play store this week, which is why this post has dropped down to a list of 10 rather than 20 – see the note at the bottom for a bit more on that.

• An Android control code vulnerability originally reported as a Samsung problem in fact appears to affect most smartphones and UMTS tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0.x) or earlier versions of Android. Google updated the dialling software code in version 4.1.1 so that control codes are no longer executed automatically.

• A look at Recon Instruments’ MOD Live Heads-Up Display and the ease of creating and programming useful, on-person computing devices.

• If you had the chance to watch (or were even one of the lucky attendees at) the Google I/O 2012 opening keynote, you may recall the exciting moment when Sergey Brin proclaimed the arrival of the Google Glass prototypes to the attendees. Alas, Glass prototype pre-orders cost a cool $1,500 for some future delivery date. This led many developers, including me, to reassess their desire to build an Android-centric, HUD-based application.

• Motorola Mobility has just launched a fairly interesting Android powered computer over in China that hosts a ton of different home entertainment options. The “HMC3260″ boasts of a 18.5 inch LED touchscreen that will be able to play TV shows, movies, games, browse the web, and with it being powered by Android, it will be able to run Android apps as well. Motorola had apparently partnered up with a cloud service provider called WASU to load the Android computer up with content.

Free Software/Open Source

• I had the privilege of working with David Tilbrook almost 25 years ago. He was the first person with whom I ever worked that clearly articulated proper software construction discipline for collaborative endeavours and captured a summary of it under the title, Washing Behind Your Ears: Principles of Software Hygiene.

• David articulated these practices pre-World Wide Web. We weren’t yet living in a world where the Web had so completely removed the friction of time and space from sharing and collaborating on software that even the early Internet enabled.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As mainstream users came to equate Internet Explorer’s logo with the Web, Microsoft worked to lock in its advantage with increasingly proprietary technology like ActiveX. It surely would have done so, too, but for the seemingly futile Mozilla browser, née Firefox. Born in the ashes of Netscape’s failed browser business 10 years ago this month as Phoenix, Firefox 1.0 is arguably the most important technology developed in the last 50 years.

• This year’s Mozilla Festival will gather more than 800 passionate people with diverse backgrounds and skill-sets. The goal: push the frontiers of the open web, learn together, and make things that can change the world.

Databases

• The new MariaDB release numbers are explained in this article.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Some forks die off quickly. Other linger and a precious few actually prosper and excel beyond their origins. I personally would put the LibreOffice project and its masters in the Document Foundation in the latter category.

• The two key developers of OpenOffice — Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice — are opening up a wee bit about their next versions. And yes, Office 2013, the cloud, social networks and tablets are on the minds of the open source office suite developers.

• Apache OpenOffice 3.5, slated for delivery in the first quarter of 2013, will offer better interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007-2013 XML formats, as well as enhanced performance, stability, usability and more language support, according to the OpenOffice.org blog.

• MartUX is a new OpenIndiana/Illumos-based Solaris distribution for reviving SPARC hardware support.

CMS

• The Joomla developers have released version 3.0 of their open source CMS. The major version jump is justified as Joomla 3.0 offers many new features along with standard templates for the web site and administration interface that comply with the responsive web design guidelines, producing good results on large screens as well as on mobile devices. The basic Joomla platform was updated to version 12.2 and the web-based install has been reduced to three steps and is now simpler to use. It also includes several sets of sample data that are now available during installation.

Healthcare

Business

Semi-Open Source

• It is good to have your architectural decisions validated by someone else, even better when that validation blows you out of the water. If you’ve chosen to go with NGINX for your load balancing needs, give yourself a pat on the back. WordPress.com made the same decision, and is now pushing 70,000 transactions per second and over 15 GBs through their NGINX load balancers, as explained by a guest post on High Scalability by Barry Abrahamson from Automattic.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

Project Releases

• Developer Sebastian Bergmann has released new versions of his PHPUnit utility and related tools. The open source unit testing framework for PHP has been updated to version 3.7.0, while the PHP_CodeCoverage, PHPUnit_MockObject and DbUnit components were made available as version 1.2.0.

Public Services/Government

• The move to free and open source in public administrations requires political support, a committee from the German Parliament was told last Friday. Peter Hofmann, project leader of the move to free software by the city of Munich, said politicians need to be aware of the benefits of this type of software. He and other experts called for a national policy favouring its use.

• This project aimed to encourage the distribution of Ubuntu Linux instead of FreeDOS on new low-cost computers in order to provide consumers with free and open source software and thereby also reduce piracy. Many low cost computers that do not include Microsoft Windows are instead distributed with an operating system that is called FreeDOS which is free clone of the 30+ year old pre-Windows operating system, MSDOS.

• The Gigabit City Summit is set to host a diverse, dynamic range of speakers on the topics of open government, big data, and innovation on Tuesday, September 25, 2012 from 7:00 am to 9:00 am CDT.

• Co-chairs for this session are Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer for the City of San Francisco, and Nigel Jacob, from Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics.

• What’s it like to work for your state government? What kinds of software are approved for use? How far do you think openness in government trickles down?

• I’ve been asked questions likes these as a Geographic Information Systems Technician with the State Department of Health and Human Services in North Carolina, where I spend most of my day looking at maps. And currently, open source solutions are not approved for use in my department, but there does appear to openness in my midst.

• Two news items over the last week signalled to me that the benefits of open source, open data, and other artifacts of the meshed Internet society are making it through to policy makers. A new section of the White House website and a speech by a European Commission political prove that progress is under way. But when it comes to legal support, both stop short of advocating real open innovation.

Openness/Sharing

• Blender movies have always amazed us all with its interesting little stories and sophisticated visual graphics. While Elephants Dream was of sci-fi kind with mind-bending ideas and graphics, Bug Buck Bunny was a light-hearted comedy. The third one, Sintel, also had splendid graphics to back-up its unique storyline (watch all the official Blender movies till date). Tears of Steel is different though. It is not a full-fledged end-to-end animation movie per se like its predecessors. Tears of Steel is more like a normal movie with impressive visual effects.

• Following a highly successful Kickstarter project and over a year of development, HexBright, billed by its creator as the “world’s first open source Arduino flashlight,” is now in production with initial shipments planned for December.

• Peak hurricane season is always a reminder that natural disasters are never easy to handle. If there’s anything we can take away from them it’s that planning and preparedness can save the lives of those risk. The World Bank and OpenGeo find themselves at the unique cross section of disaster management and enabling technology. OpenGeo’s software is built to share information on on the web, which is a critical component of any disaster management plan. Various implementations of our software have been used to facilitate strategic disaster management planning.

• For people wanting to learn about Creative Commons and its application in different sectors, there is a sea of materials available online. In particular, Creative Commons international affiliates create a huge number of educational resources that cross language and cultural boundaries.

• A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my work sorting through some of these resources to identify some of the best, focusing on Creative Commons license use for public sector information, for publishing content on a variety of digital platforms, and for generating revenue. As promised, today I’ll highlight some of the resources I’ve discovered.

• HFOSS, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software, is a movement inspired first by the December 2004 Asian tsunami, and then by other humanitarian needs in the health, civic, finance and academic sectors (especially for women and people of color).

Open Data

• In July this year, two UNC-Chapel Hill professors trained 16 motivated Congolese students in the art of beat making. They called their group The Congo Beat Making Lab and collaborated with Yole!Africa to strengthen a larger goal they all share: to connect people (including musicians) around the world.

• Apple Juice Kid (professor, producer, DJ, and drummer) and Pierce Freelon (professor and MC), developed the Beat Making Lab curriculum at UNC-Chapel Hill to connect students with music and students with students. They took this curriculum to Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the results were remarkable—this short documentary features a full song and video the group produced using free, open source music-making software.

• It’s very easy to ascertain that ‘open is good’, but is there a clear business case for opening up your data? That’s been a key question at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, and not one with easy answers.

Open Hardware

• Open hardware platforms like the Arduino have turned device development into a hobbyist enterprise in recent years, but the $20 price tag of a microcontroller board seems a lot less tantalizing when one adds in the costs of testing and debugging it. At LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego, David Anders addressed this issue and offered some guidance on finding and selecting tools for open hardware development, the majority of which are open hardware themselves.

Programming

• While Onyx Neon still occupies a lot of my attention, I’ve been working with a local company called Big Blue Marble to develop small web-based businesses. This has taken me through a crash course in things like search engine optimization and statistics that I hadn’t figured I’d ever need to know.

• (Half the fun of small business is realizing that there’s something you should have started doing months ago, that no one available has any experience with it, and that one of you has a week to get to a basic level of competence with it before you move on to the next crisis. The other half is realizing that the next time you tackle a problem like this, you’ll be that much better at it.)

• JSR 310, the long-running Java Specification Request for a date and time API to replace the existing complex and hard to work with date and time support, has been added to the feature list for OpenJDK 8 and Java 8. Expected to arrived in January 2013′s milestone 6 release, the inclusion of JSR310 in Java 8 is the result of work done over the summer to simplify and refine the API so that it could be included.

• Slashdot has been sold again. Dice Holdings, the company behind the Dice.com career site, announced today that it had purchased Slashdot, as well as the SourceForge and FreeCode websites, from Geeknet for $20 million in cash. According to a statement from Geeknet—the company formerly known as SourceForge, VA Software, and VA Linux—the sale price was approximately equal to what the three sites have brought in over the last year.

Standards/Consortia

• Earlier this month, the IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) signed a joint agreement to affirm and adhere to a set of principles that establish what they call The Modern Paradigm for Standards.

• For those who have lived in the technical standards world, you will find nothing overtly revolutionary in the Paradigm affirmed by these leading standards development organizations (SDOs). Indeed, the principles appear almost boilerplate from prior descriptions of voluntary, industry standards.

• The W3C web standards consortium has presented a first Public Working Draft for integrating a Web Cryptography API into browsers. The JavaScript API will provide features such as hashing, key generation and verification, as well as encryption and decryption. For example, it will enable web applications to check a user’s identity in more secure ways than are currently possible between browsers and HTTP servers.

Leftovers

• Shiver me timbers! If it be doughnuts ye be craving, head to yon Buford Krispy Kreme on Sept. 19 and jabber like a pirate. Krispy Kreme is celebrating the international Talk Like a Pirate Day by giving away a free doughnut to anyone who comes into the store and talks like a pirate. Anyone who dresses in full pirate regalia will get a dozen free doughnuts.

Finance

• Two Associations (the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association) sued the CFTC stating that position limits on the number of contracts would damage their business. A federal judge ruled against the CFTC.

• It is passing strange that those who brought down the financial system in 2008 still cannot see why they should be regulated so that another crisis will be averted.

Censorship

• Google’s added The Pirate Bay to its Instant and Autocomplete search blacklist, meaning that users need to type the words out in full before the search engine lists the site.

Privacy

Civil Rights

• As one reads the letters from victims of TSA patdowns released last week, strong patterns emerge. Nearly every letter uses one of these turns of phrase: demeaning, degrading, dehumanizing, humiliating, violated, traumatized, sexually assaulted.

• Business iPad users beware. Your halcyon days of loading whatever the heck you want onto your tablet may be coming to an end.

• Apple is set to introduce a couple of new features that will give corporate IT new ways to lock down the iOS 6 operating system, which powers the iPad and the iPhone, according to Zenprise, a mobile device management company that was briefed on the features by Apple.

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