● 10.02.12

● Links 2/10/2012: Linux Kernel 3.6, Debian 6.0.6

Posted in News Roundup at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I think this shows the Government of Canada is a little behind the curve in GNU/Linux and needs to open up to the standards of some European governments like Germany. Germany created their own GNU/Linux desktop for government use back in 2006. Germany isn’t spreading FUD about security of GNU/Linux. TFA from Canada was produced in 2010 using M$’s office suite and Adobe’s Distiller on that other OS.

• First off, I had never planned to do a review of any DJ software. I’ve never been a DJ, nor have I ever had the desire to be a DJ. But you know what they say; Never say never. So, how did I come to learn about Mixx, and how did I end up with a real use for it? I’ll tell you.

• It all started when my wife’s co-worker decided to get married. There was a little drama surrounding the entire ordeal and long story short, the bride had lost a bridesmaid. Though the bride only knew my wife for a short time, she thought she would ask her to fulfill those needs and balance the wedding party. My wife graciously accepted.

Server

• While IBM’s Watson expert system isn’t ready to take over the world ala Skynet, it’s certainly “smart” enough to beat the world’s best two Jeopardy players. The company isn’t treating this as a trivial exercise; they’re also hard at work turning Watson technology into medical expert systems for cancer research and treatment, as they explained at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego last month.

Kernel Space

• This week is the annual migration of Linux kernel developers from all over the world to the Linux Kernel Summit, which is taking place in San Diego and is co-located with LinuxCon and CloudOpen. This group of developers are among the very best in the world, and we’re excited to bring you a profile this week that introduces you to another participant in and contributor to the world’s largest collaborative development project. Martin Petersen is profiled in this week’s 30 Linux Developers in 30 Weeks series.

• Linus Torvalds has released version 3.6 of the Linux kernel. A major new feature for desktops and laptops is hybrid sleep, long supported by both Mac OS X and Windows. This involves writing the contents of the RAM to the hard drive prior to suspending to RAM, thus ensuring that the system is able to awake from suspend in the event of a power interruption.

• Laurent Pinchart, a.k.a. The Media Controller Guy, is a Linux kernel developer working on video capture and display. Here he tells us about the lucky introduction that got him involved in Linux and recalls the time a Taiwanese company tried to pay him $50,000 for the free software he developed. As are many of the developers we’ve profiled in our 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks series, Pinchart is motivated to work on Linux by more than money.

• Jon Masters summarises the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community, including the 2012 Kernel Summit and the closing of the 3.6 merge window

• The Linux 3.7 kernel will feature support for the ARM 64-bit architecture (ARM64), which is officially known as AArch64.

• The Linux 3.6 kernel is one day old but there’s already lots of interesting ARM work happening for 3.7. ARM Xen virtualization support is going into the Linux 3.7 kernel, per the pull request this morning that Konrad has accepted as the Xen kernel maintainer, and now we have AArch64.

Graphics Stack

• X Server 1.13 has been released by the X.Org project with improved support for hot-pluggable, hybrid graphics hardware. This includes DisplayLink hardware which is connected using USB, and hybrid graphics technologies such as NVIDIA’s Optimus, a feature that is primarily used in notebooks. Optimus enables the dedicated GeForce GPU on demand and works with the GPU in the CPU.

Applications

• Slidewall is a free utility for Linux systems that will rotate your desktop background at an interval you set, and choose from a folder full of images or from Wallbase when siwtching your wallpaper for something new

• If you’re learning a foreign language, there is always the need to go beyond the standard textbooks and listening materials. Resources like CDs,DVDs, and even movies in that particular language help you become a good listener and communicator. Also, these days, there are plenty of software available that help you learn better and faster. On Linux too, there are many such applications that can push you further in your linguistic endeavors without you having to pay a single penny. Here is a list of the best ones.

• Business intelligence tools comprise the important software that helps in the strategic planning process of a corporation. Using them, you can gather, store, access, and analyze corporate data. The data collected by corporations are huge and to keep track of them, you need business intelligence software. You can use these tools in customer profiling, customer support, market research, product profitability, market segmentation, statistical analysis, and more.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

• Running Windows programs on Linux is largely a myth. No matter how much we geeks may try to portray the transition between Windows and Linux to be a painless procedure, it is far from being anything simple or smooth. Now and then, programs come to life that try to dispel this myth. One of them is CrossOver by Codeweavers.

• A new development branch of Wine has been released that features improved support for Shader Compiler, GIF and JavaScript. Also, it includes better handling of URL cache and usual set of bug fixes.

• It may occur that the user needs to run a Windows application or game in Ubuntu and it finds that it cannot install windows programs.

Games

• Will gaming prove to be a key to increased usage for Linux? Valve’s decision to cater its gaming platform to the OS could be a step in that direction. “Linux-based games consoles are clearing the way to push Linux gaming into the mainstream,” said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza.

• When Valve announced to the world that the Steam Linux client for its digital distribution service was in the works, everybody rejoiced. But what can we realistically expect from a Linux client launched so late in the game?

• Last year I wrote an article very much extolling what a great game the last in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series ‘Call of Pripyat’ was. Balanced, well-thought out game play, great graphics and so on. Like so many teenage and not any longer so teenage boys I absolutely love post-apocalyptic games and movies and this series falls right in there.

• Whether you’ve been an Android tablet user since the days of Honeycomb on the Motorola XOOM, or you just opened up your brand new Nexus 7, one thing is for sure: you’ve been looking for software which really shows off what your tablet is capable of.

Desktop Environments

• Xfce 4.10 is the latest release of the excellent Xfce desktop, full of useful incremental improvements and no shocking surprises.

• Workflow and efficiency are everything. I want my Linux graphical environment to be the way I like it, and not an obese system hog. I have a lot of favorite Linux desktop environments (Fluxbox, KDE4, Ratpoison, E17, Razor-qt) and Xfce is always near the top.

• The other day, I received an announcement about a new distribution. That’s not unusual; I receive announcements about new software each week. But what struck me about this one was that, while the announcement mentioned a few new features, it gave no reason why I should care about them as either a reviewer or a user. As a result, it failed to interest me in the distribution, and the sender of the announcement might have saved his efforts.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The effort towards a Qt library for Android is progressing, with a fourth and final alpha release being sent out the door – despite confidence in the platform having steadily eroded since Nokia dumped it.

• Qt is a library of cross-platform APIs which enables even complicated apps, such as VLC’s VideoLAN, to run across operating systems. Nokia bought the owning company, Trolltech, back in 2008, then dumped the technology earlier this month. The move left Qt with an uncertain future, but seemingly a future which includes Android.

• With GLX set to be deprecated in the not too distant future and EGL being in use with OpenGL ES on mobile platforms, KDE’s KWin compositing window manager now has support for using desktop OpenGL over EGL instead of GLX.

• As some of you might have noticed, display management in KDE is not really something we could be proud of. It does not work as expected, it lacks some features and it’s not really maintained. Time to change it, don’t you think? Smilie:

GNOME Desktop

• With the recent release of GNOME 3.6, developers and distributions are making updated versions of their packages available and applications such as Firefox are getting improved integration into the GNOME desktop.

• Integrated Application Search inside Gnome Shell is one more exciting feature we will see in Gnome next release in March, 27. The work has started from 3.5 cycle and Gnome Shell can already search for our cloud files (ie G. Docs).

• gThumb may look like yet another image viewer, but behind its unassuming appearance hides a rather capable application that can help you to manage photos efficiently.

• I’m taking this opportunity to relay two pieces of Cinnamon news to the Linux Mint community.

• BleachBit is a general purpose cleaning application that covers almost every application or component of your system that stores any kind of data, taking hard disk space and risking the unintended sharing of personal data over the internet.

• The application is unfortunately still using gtk2, but other than that it is completely simple to understand and use in daily basis.

• Rythmbox is a free and open source Gnome music player that features a simple UI and fast playback. With Ubuntu One Music integration, you can also buy and download new tracks in Ubuntu.

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

• We are not used to such surprises! Same day with the release of Gnome 3.6,we also get a Live Media to try it out! The image is based as always in the next Fedora release -Spherical Cow.

• We tested Gnome 3.6 by downloading the live image and here are a list of changes we loved, and hopefully, you will love too.

• First and foremost, the Activities overview, looks more cleaner and the space for workspaces has been reduced

Distributions

• I recall in 2009, I had only a desktop for all my computing needs – a desktop bought in 2003 and post SP3 update, struggled to run Windows XP, plagued with virus problems, slowness and often crashing. Every 2 months, I had to re-install Windows XP! I still persisted with XP, thinking Linux was for the geeks and not my cup of tea. Finally, in 2010 I gathered courage to try out Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and I was amazed by the speed and stability it rendered to my old computer. After that there was no looking back! I installed Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty” thereafter which performed amazingly well on it. Now all the four systems that I have, run on Linux only!

• Today I am doing a quick video review of Hanthana Linux 17 “LXDE”. Hanthana is a Linux based operating system and a Fedora remix suitable for desktop and laptop users. Hanthana comes to you in the form of a LiveDVD for regular PC (i686 & x86_64 architectures) systems. You can run Hanthana Operating System directly from the LiveDVD and check out each and every feature before installing it on your hard disk.

New Releases

• Among the new features of version 1.2.0 of QEMU is support for passing through PCI devices to hardware-virtualised Xen guests. The open source system emulator is used in both the KVM and Xen virtualisation platforms, but can also be used independently. The new release can migrate active guest systems to different hosts (live migration) even if the guests use USB storage media and pass-through devices. In addition, live migration is said to be more reliable for guest systems that use large amounts of RAM.

• Version 1.2 of the QEMU processor emulator has been released. “Even though this was the shortest release cycle in QEMU’s history, it contains an impressive 1400 changesets from 180 unique authors.”

• Fuduntu, the distro with a pun for a name, has released its latest quarterly update. Version 2012.4 was released today with the usual “small incremental distribution improvements” including “several changes, new features, and improvements.”

Red Hat Family

• As JavaOne 2012 gets started this week, Red Hat is using the occasion to announce some shake ups for its venerable Java-based JBoss product line.

• There’s a lot of yummy sauce, but it’s a little hard to find the actual meat of the news buried within the commercial Linux vendor’s announcement today. Here’s what we do know.

• Probably the biggest potential news is the intent to “increase access and availability to JBoss for developers,” according to Stephen Yi, Director, Strategy & Product Management at Red Hat. Specifically, Yi is referring to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), which currently is under the GNU Lesser GPL for development, but requires a Red Hat support subscription for production use.

Fedora

• FreeIPA has a couple of new features that are showing up in Fedora 18. Support for SELinux Confined User labelling will be covered in a future blog… In this blog I will be talking about better integration with Windows environments.

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• Today we are pleased to announce the arrival of the next generation of desktop operating systems, OS4 OpenDesktop 13. With this release we bring a lot of new functionality and bug fixes to the OS4 family. OS4 OpenDesktop 13 is the most capable Linux desktop featuring an easy to use interface and including a vast array of hardware support, wifi support along with all the multimedia codecs, Blu Ray and DVD Playback. OS4 OpenDesktop 13 is the premier Linux distribution for the home or business user. Our unprecedented commitment to cloud computing and internet technologies makes OS4 OpenDesktop 13 the best platform for consumption of cloud services.

• Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well engineered platform and you don’t have to start to build up your PDC and your clients from GNU/scratch; I’ve already done this once and I can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much hassle.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A tentative launch date for Ubuntu 13.04 has already appeared on the “R” schedule, just weeks before Ubuntu 12.01 “Quantal Quetzal” becomes a proper release on October 18. Naturally dates are subject to change, and so far Ubuntu 13.04 has yet to be named.

• “Making money on the consumer desktop as an open source vendor is hard, as Canonical is finding out,” offered Chris Travers, a blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project. “This current approach is an attempt to monetize users by collecting Amazon affiliate revenue, making Ubuntu the second-largest adware OS after Android — and even Google has trouble monetizing Android.”

• A tentative launch date for Ubuntu 13.04 has already appeared on the “R” schedule, just weeks before Ubuntu 12.01 “Quantal Quetzal” becomes a proper release on October 18. Naturally dates are subject to change, and so far Ubuntu 13.04 has yet to be named.

• Unless you’ve been living devoid of Internet access recently, chances are good that you’ve heard about the addition of Amazon affiliate links on the Unity Dash in Ubuntu 12.10 beta.

• When Mark Shuttleworth first made the announcement, his goal was clearly to inject new revenue into the Ubuntu project, in a non-intrusive manner. And at its core, the idea was sound: as the Unity Dash is used to search for stuff, the Amazon affiliate links will display with the native results presented.

• Take a quick look around the Ubuntu forums and IRC channels and you can miss the pattern: it’s mostly men. That is not to say that there is no diversity in the open source community, only that you need to look a little deeper to find it.

• According to a recent survey, only 12% of professionals in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are women. So I felt especially lucky to “sit-down” with Ubuntu Women members Elizabeth “Lyz” Krumbach and Cheri Francis over a Google+ hangout to discuss the work they are doing with the organization.

• With the recent release of the Unity 6.6 desktop for Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2, benchmarks were done to see how the OpenGL gaming performance compares to that of Unity 6.4 from the earlier beta state of the Quantal Quetzal, plus the respective Compiz versions. At least for Intel Ivy Bridge graphics under some workloads, it looks like the Unity/Compiz updates are slowing down the GL performance even further.

• There are many things that comprise a successful Linux distribution, but there may be none more important than trust. Before you build a production Linux system, you have to trust that the distribution isn’t going to contain malicious code or back doors or any number of other potentially major problems. Since the advent of Linux, this really hasn’t been an issue.

• Ubuntu 12.10: More to Um Bongo Linux than Amazon ads A new Lens in the Unity Dash will poll Amazon to find results relevant to your search terms. And yes, if you click the link and buy the item Ubuntu-maker Canonical gets a small percentage of the income, much like Mozilla makes a bit of money for allowing you to search Google from Firefox. Here’s what the new Lens looks like:

Flavours and Variants

• An Ubuntu based distro, wattOS uses Openbox and is optimised to be lightweight, low-power, and able to run on older machines

Devices/Embedded

• This is the best time to get into electronics because we have an abundance of high-quality hardware for cheap and great software for free. Arduino, Beagleboard, and Raspberry Pi give us hundreds of inexpensive hardware components to play with. On the software side check out the new Fritzing project. Fritzing lets inexperienced electronics noobs make great-looking schematics and circuit diagrams, and even design and build their own printed circuit boards.

Phones

• Smartphones are so popular here that it’s difficult to avoid seeing one, and in China, these devices are poised to become even more widespread.

• This year, China will account for 26.5 percent of all smartphone shipments, compared to 17.8 percent in the United States, according to a forecast by the International Data Corporation, a research firm.

• China has surpassed the United States in smartphone sales in the past. However, only in the first quarter of this year did it become clear that the smartphone gap between China and the United States would become a “long-lasting gulf that won’t be bridged,” said Kevin Restivo, a senior research analyst with IDC.

• Verizon’s Lowell McAdam believes Samsung has the capability to create a successful third mobile operating system.

Android

• Today we have news for you of a really interesting insight about Android and iPhone apps that comes from a tech enthusiast and Android user. Despite the fact that Android smartphones have a bigger share of the market, with recent statistics showing Android at 52.2% and Apple’s iOS at 33.4%, this particular Android device owner is honest enough to say that he prefers iPhone apps. Taking in mind the usual Android vs. iOS debate and the fierce loyalty it evokes in many people, that’s quite an admission.

• When CyanogenMod team had announced that their new OTA update system would be available “soon”, they really meant it. The feature is already available in all the nightly builds since 30th September. The new option has been added in the settings menu as CM Updater. It will automatically check for updates and install them, similar to over the air updates that are received from carriers and manufacturers.

• There’s some great news for CyanogenMod fans. The CM team has decided to drop ROM manager which was the de facto standard of getting CyanogenMod updates. Now you must be wondering how CyanogenMod will be updated then. Fear not, the CM team is going to build its own updating method.

• Ahead of the IFA show, the company upsizes its Android device for playing music, video, and games. It’s edging closer toward Nexus 7 mini-tablet territory.

• X-Plane 9 is claimed to be the best flight simulator available on Android and now you can enjoy the experience for free, after it dropped the $2.99 price tag. The app is available on a freemium model, you will initially get 10 different types of aircraft with the free download but there are in-app purchases available for 43 more planes.

• Until self-driving cars become mainstream, it’s best to keep eyes on roads and hands off phones. With this in mind, Samsung’s debuting Drive Link, an app that balances in-car essentials with driver safety, complete with approval from the no-nonsense Japanese Automotive Manufacturers Association. It’s all about the bare essentials — navigation, hands-free calling and audiotainment from your phone-based files or TuneIn.

• The YubiKey Neo hardware token represents an interesting new concept for one-time passwords on NFC-capable Android smartphones. Rather than typing them in, the token uses the near field communication (NFC) standard to send generated one-time passwords to a smartphone. To unlock items such as the password safe application LastPass, the YubiKey key fob token is simply brushed across the back of the phone after logging in.

• Google’s Nexus 7 tablet has a killer spec sheet, an enviable operating system, and cutthroat price. But all of those combined can’t do for the tiny champ what Google’s actions today will. And that might just be enough to help it beat back the rumored iPad Mini.

• Google takes great pride in maintaining the sanctity of its homepage. It’s a pristine white canvas, a zen garden of searching calm. Because of that cache—and the extraordinary number of visitors it draws—its value to advertisers is literally priceless. As in, Google has never sold it to an advertiser.

• The Pocket TV is a thumb-size micro-computer that connects to the HDMI port of any TV and converts it into an Android Smart TV

• The AV-Comparatives test lab has examinedPDF 13 security programs for Android smartphones. The study found that all of the test candidates offer reliable protection against 75 virus families; detection rates were always at least 93 per cent. In total, the experts unleashed more than 18,000 infected apps on the test devices. None of the security programs produced any false alarms; however, testing involved only 200 widely used benign apps.

• Ice Cream Sandwich is now running on 20.9 percent of all Android-based devices, according to new data from Google.

• I am a big fan of the Kobo eReader Touch and use it as my primary eInk device because the form factor is so compelling and I can read all of my EPUB content on it. With Amazon’s Kindle press event, I am not sure that Kobo’s announcedment today of several new devices was timed well. However, it is likely that I will preorder one of them. They announced the new Kobo Mini, Kobo Glo, and Kobo Arc with preorders available now.

• You must be wondering that Samsung has been at the forefront of Android smartphone market, with its highly successful devices which have even surpassed iPhone’s sales figure, then why am I going against Samsung Manufacturing the next Nexus device, like the last two years. Well here are my points:

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Toys”R”Us has taken a good long look at the increasingly crowded Android tablet market and decided it wants a minuscule sliver too. So starting October 1st, every child’s favorite store will start selling a seven-inch, $150 Android device called the Tabeo (Tabby-oh? Tabe-e-oh?) targeted at younger users.

• Displaying a new processor design, MIPS Technologies hopes to challenge ARM’s reach in the high-end mobile device market.

• Zareason technologies have launched a new open and hackable Android tablet – ZaTab. The tablet costs $349 and is a beast in sheer power and performance.

• The 7 inch tablet segment is a hotly contested market and now Acer has joined the race with its Iconia A110 tablet which has been released in UK. The tablet looks similar to the very popular flagship model from Google the Nexus 7. In fact, it carries specs similar to the Google offering.

• This number doesn’t appear to count any non-Google Android tablets like the Kindle Fire, B&N Nook, or any of the other Android tablets that don’t come with Google Apps (and thus are not activated through Google).

Free Software/Open Source

• With today’s announcement, the Apache Wicket project has jumped from version 1.5.8 to version 6.0 for the latest release of its web framework for Java. The version number change is due to a switch to semantic versioning and because there are changes to the Wicket API. One of the headline changes is that Wicket now requires Java 6 at a minimum, so updaters may have to look at upgrading their Java runtimes.

• “Did you use open source code to save time and the virus was hidden in it?” one character asked another on a recent episode of the Disney show “Shake It Up.” Was it the work of an uninformed children’s show screenwriter who simply tried to make up a line that would sound vaguely like high-level techno-talk? Or is Disney really anti-FOSS?

• There you go. You won’t find a more truthful article anywhere. Now, I am aware this lovely essay will be buried deep in the search annals because it is not politically correct or written to cater to pseudo-journalistic websites that have to mind what they say lest they lose sponsorships and suchlike. I cannot possibly change the world on my own, but at the very least, I can share truth with my users, and hope they will carry it around, so the truth is known.

• As much as I’m good with words, I am somewhat at loss in expressing my absolute disdain, loathing and dislike for the forced plastic cultural phenomena imposed on the world by those who shout the stupidest and loudest. Even if Microsoft products merit attention, and some definitely do, like EMET, the quality of technology is drowned in the diarrhea-like dross of marketing religion and exaggeration. I am most offended by the fact people silently accept this instead of going This Is Sparta against all this bullcrap.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• We are using a new facility, introduced in Linux 3.5 and developed by Will Drewry called Seccomp-BPF.

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s Mark Côté has reminded us that the arewefastyet page, which the browser maker launched prior to the introduction of Firefox 4, is still alive and is now tracking the progress of Mozilla IonMonkey JIT.

SaaS

• ownCloud was launched at Camp KDE in January 2010 by its founder, Frank Karlitschek. (Mr. Karlitschek is now the CTO of ownCloud, Inc.) The goals of ownCloud, as laid out at the KDE conference, are ambitious: easy cloud setup and management, and ubiquitous access to your data from multiple devices wherever that data may be — on local storage, hosted storage, or even on social networks. ownCloud also wants to give us the ability to mash up and connect data from different providers, while maintaining privacy and security. While they’re at it, I’d like them to provide pink unicorns and rainbows too, which seem about as probable as everything else ownCloud is promising.

• nginx is still neck-and-neck with Microsoft’s IIS on global surveys of web servers, but it’s racking up significant wins in the cloud along the way.

• Back in April, nginx looked ready to take the number two web-server spot in market share for top servers across all domains, according to the April Netcraft Web Server Survey. That was supposed to happen last month, actually. But that trend has apparently stalled, according to the latest Netcraft survey, as IIS remains in the number two spot with a recent climb in use that nginx was unable to pass.

Databases

• With the rise of NoSQL, it’s easy to assume that old-school relational databases are simply living out their dinosaur dreams for legacy applications. But a funny thing happened on the way to the SQL cemetery: PostgreSQL became cool again. Yes, PostegreSQL.

• Monty Program’s MariaDB team has announced the first availability of MariaDB Galera, a clustering solution that is the result of a partnership between the MariaDB team and Codership. The alpha release, which should not be used for production systems, includes a merge of MariaDB 5.5.25 with Galera Cluster from Codership in a combination that is said to offer a read/write scalable system, synchronous multi-master replication and guaranteed data consistency.

• At the MySQL Connect conference in San Francisco, Oracle has presented the release candidate for the next version of its open source relational database, MySQL. For MySQL 5.6, the developers have focused on adding features to InnoDB, for example, implementing full-text searches that were previously only available in the non-transactional MyISAM, and on improving server performance by improving database’s optimiser.

• The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces PostgreSQL 9.2, the latest release of the leader in open source databases. Since the beta release was announced in May, developers and vendors have praised it as a leap forward in performance, scalability and flexibility. Users are expected to switch to this version in record numbers.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle, claiming to be intent on shining more attention on MySQL, announced at its annual conference this weekend the first release candidate of MySQL 5.6.

• The database giant seems to be taking its time on moving the open source database forward. The first preview of MySQL 5.6 was made available in July of 2011.

• The proposal, as part of JSR 355, to combine the previously separate Executive Committee (EC) for Java SE (Standard Edition) and Java EE (Enterprise Edition) and the Java ME (Micro Edition) Committee has now received the approval of the Java Community Process.

• If you are like me, you prefer LibreOffice over (Apache) OpenOffice because (1) It has a better open source license. (2) It has more community support. (3) It is more rapidly developing and releasing updates.

CMS

• Word on the street is, Drupal is hiring. Well, Drupal shops to be exact. But the lack of experienced Drupal developers and themers is hurting the ecosystem.

• Chances are, you’ve recently visited a website running Drupal. (This is one of them.) How many projects out there want to be using Drupal but don’t have the in-house talent? Or they’ve contacted a Drupal shop and found out they’re all booked up with other projects for the next for weeks and even months!

• The Joomla community has released version 3.0 of the popular Content Management System (CMS), and the big news is that Joomla now optimizes content created in it for mobile platforms. This represents the new frontier for all CMS systems, and there are many other new additions in Joomla 3.0.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira’s organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.

• A patch has emerged that provides “AutoFDO” support for the GCC compiler for automated feedback-directed optimizations.

Project Releases

• The very first release of the FreedomBox software has been announced. “This 0.1 version is primarily a developer release, which means that it focuses on architecture and infrastructure rather than finish work. The exception to this is privoxy-freedombox, the web proxy discussed in previous updates, which people can begin using right now to make their web browsing more secure and private and which will very soon be available on non-FreedomBox systems.”

• Codethink announces version 1.1 (aka Secret Volcano) of its Baserock Embedded Linux software. Baserock is a Linux build system for the development of embedded, industrial or bare-metal, server-based Linux systems.

• While we have been looking towards an FFmpeg 1.0 release for nearly one year, the version 1.0 release of the popular FFmpeg library was finally tagged after being in development for more than one decade.

Openness/Sharing

• Inkscape is a magnificent open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Open Access/Content

• We’ve written before about companies that help get digital textbooks into the hands of students, and efforts to bring low-cost textbooks into K-12 classrooms. Now, California, one of the largest economies in the world, has signed a new bill to provide versions of popular textbooks to college students for free. This move is effectively like open sourcing popular textbooks, and is a progressive step from a state that is well-known for its broken university system.

Open Hardware

• What happens when a prime example of the open-source hardware movement locks down its products?

Programming

• The latest version of the Python language, Python 3.3.0, has arrived. This is the first major version to have language changes since the language moratorium expired, and as such brings new syntax to the language in the form of “yield from” which allows developers to delegate work to a sub-generator (PEP 380). The changes also bring back the Python 2 style Unicode literal syntax for strings, which will make more code from Python 2 valid in Python 3 (PEP 393).

• The Eclipse Foundation has quietly made the first service release (SR1) for Eclipse 4.2 Juno available. The publication saw no apparent announcement or release notes from the Eclipse Foundation, although it was planned to ship at the end of September. The SR1 release is designed to fix serious problems with the June release of Eclipse 4.2. The J-Development blog noted that around 80 bugs had been fixed in the release.

Standards/Consortia

• HTML5 promises great things for smartphone developers, but is yet to deliver in full. That leaves developers with a tricky choice: to build for openness or go with what works now.

Leftovers

Security

• The White House confirmed but sought to downplay a report by a conservative website on Sunday that it had been the victim of a cyberattack, volunteering to POLITICO that no harm had been done.

• The Washington Free Beacon reported that Chinese hackers had attacked a computer system in the White House Military Office.

Finance

• The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavoured sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light, until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The draft chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on Intellectual Property—as of its current leaked version [PDF], article 16—insists that signatories provide legal incentives for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to privately enforce copyright protection rules. The TPP wants service providers to undertake the financial and administrative burdens of becoming copyright cops, serving a copyright maximalist agenda while disregarding the consequences for Internet freedom and innovation.

• I’ve often written in regards to the open-wifi defence. No more so when it pertains to allegations of filesharing when infringing material is being shared. I am fully expecting the UK to push through a law (“unthrottled” of course because the Government will give in to Hollywood et al and their pressure).

• I am awaiting the day when we see the creation of an offence “Failure to take reasonable steps to secure your WIFI”. We already have a semi-similar law in the UK that says if you leave your keys in the car with the engine running, you commit an offence, so legislating against WIFI and insecurity would not be such a surprising move. Of course it will be win-win for government who will scoure the streets locating connections and sending out penalty notices for “offenders”. I am convinced this is coming.

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