● 10.18.12

● Links 18/10/2012: Ubuntu 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’ is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 7:13 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• A while back I sent a pack of spies into China but they were so distracted by touristy things that they forgot/neglected to report back on GNU/Linux on retail shelves in China.

• I don’t read Chinese but the pictures seem consistent with reports of stores selling GNU/Linux in China. I don’t believe the stories that these machines are intended for illegal copies of XP. That may have been the case a few years ago but there’s a whole new generation of users getting PCs now that have never used XP and for whom smart phones and tablets are OK.

• It seems safe to say that most FOSS fans are sick to death of hearing about both of them, of course, but recently the always-insightful team over at TuxRadar posed yet another interesting question. Specifically, “What can Linux really steal from Apple?” was the title of the latest Open Ballot poll posted on the thought-provoking site, and there’s no doubt it’s provoked a lot of thinking.

Server

• For all the political discord over climate change, one thing everyone can probably agree on is that when you’re throwing computational resources at modeling weather, the more the merrier.

• Think of the new computer that just came online at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming as a kind of dream come true from a meteorological standpoint, then, because it represents a mammoth increase in raw crunch-prowess, dedicated to studying everything from hurricanes and tornadoes to geomagnetic storms, tsunamis, wildfires, air pollution and the location of water beneath the earth’s surface.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The native of Pune, India, encountered Linux for the first time as an engineering student, running it as an occasional alternative to Windows. But he didn’t fully embrace it as an operating system until he began teaching microprocessors and operating systems as a graduate student and assistant professor at the Sandip Institute of Technology & Research Centre in Nashik, India.

• Going straight into the educational sector after graduating from college meant Kute didn’t gain the real-world experience that comes from working in the industry, he said. Converting to Linux has helped him get hands on with research and development and greatly increased his understanding of computer systems.

• “I got inspired by various Linux & Open source developers & users. As it follows my ideology that, `Windows of knowledge are wide and open!” said Kute, via email. “I am passionate about programming and especially, C Programming! Linux has given me everything that I wanted in programming. As Linux is (an) open source operating system, I can study everything about a computer that I want to know.”

• VMware developers continue to work on mainlining more of their Linux kernel code to support their virtualization platform in the name of improving the “out of the box” experience for Linux VM guests. The latest work has been on pushing forward VMCI and VSOCK for the mainline Linux kernel.

• While the work hasn’t hit the Linux 3.7 kernel and is still undergoing review, VMware has been pushing VMCI, the Virtual Machine Communication Interface, and VSOCK, VMCI Sockets, as being worthy of mainline for Linux.

• While Intel is quick to work on enabling future hardware within their open-source graphics driver stack for Linux, the early support is often buggy and problematic on the early code before the hardware is released. Intel now intends to conceal this early hardware support — for Valley View and Haswell right now — behind a run-time variable for toggling the support.

Graphics Stack

• With the NVIDIA 310.14 Beta driver introduced at the beginning of this week there are some OpenGL performance improvements in general plus an experimental threaded OpenGL implementation that can be easily enabled. In this article are benchmarks from the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 with this new Linux driver release.

• For those curious about the size of the X11 API in relation to Wayland, it’s about fifteen times bigger.

Applications

• Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. There are many nice themes available for conky that can display clock, CPU usage, ram usage, swap, disk, net and more, Infinity is one of these themes built using lua and provide a great look to your desktop.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• FlightGear is one of the most amazing and most important open source projects in existence. With a huge community around it, and a group of talented aviation lovers to develop it, FlightGear is the greatest and most open way to travel our world!

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Last weekend from friday 12th till sunday 15th i attended the KDE PIM meeting in Berlin. I never had attended to any KDE meeting yet and i never went to a place that far away. I went there with a main focus on learning a lot about Akonadi, how it works and what it’s goal actually is. Obviously also to meet the people behind akonadi and just to socialize a bit with people that share a common interest: KDE.

GNOME Desktop

• The more I think about it, GNOME’s renaming of applications with clear words describing their function is a good thing to do.

• The file manager Nautilus is now called Files.

• The web browser Epiphany is now called Web.

• I believe that Totem will eventually be Movies (or something like that).

• Sure it makes it hard to manage these applications when you don’t have them installed.

Distributions

New Releases

• Since the announcement that he has secured some major corporate sponsors for taking up the development of Slax again Tomas M has been hard at work. You can read about the ongoing updates on his blog if you want to follow how the next Slax is taking shape.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat are hosting a “Developer Day” at London South Bank University on the 1st of November. The day’s sessions cover various aspects of development using Red Hat supported technologies including developing to target multiple RHEL versions, using KVM for application virtualisation, and the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Fedora

• Aside from generally releasing late another de facto tradition for the Fedora Project has been unique codenames for each release. It looks like the Fedora 19 codename will continue in this manner.

• While Fedora 18 is still more than one month away and we don’t even know the Fedora 19 codename yet, one F19 feature is being talked about already. Fedora 19 might replace rsyslog with systemd’s journald as the default process for system logging.

• The Fedora Project have pushed back the Fedora 18 Beta by a week, which will carry over to the release date of the RC and Final version

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As is true of Cisco, RedHat, Rackspace and many other companies, 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. Recently, Canonical 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. And now, at this week’s OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the arrival of Ubuntu 12.10 with Folsom–the latest version of OpenStack.

• Unity is expanding everyday with its new sets of lenses. These lenses allow you to do everything and anything. One of the latest lenses in entertainment category is the Unity movie lens.

• On October 18th, Ubuntu 12.10, the latest and greatest version of this popular Linux distribution arrives. On the eve of its arrival, it’s looking pretty good, but it’s far from flawless.

• There’s an independently maintained “low-jitter” version of the Linux kernel targeting Ubuntu, which claims to be faster, but is that really the case?

• In response to the recent Linux 3.7 + Mesa 9.1-devel Running On Ubuntu 12.10 article, a Phoronix reader was quick to promote his specially-configured kernel for Ubuntu.

• With Unity 2D having been dropped from Ubuntu 12.10, another consequence of this controversial decision is that the Ubuntu TV work must be ported to Unity (3D).

• The early Ubuntu TV work was using Unity 2D as the basis for its interface, but now it must be ported to the standard Unity code-base with Compiz. While hopefully the performance won’t be too bad for Unity on Ubuntu TV, it’s a large undertaking.

• Canonical has released both the server and desktop editions of 12.10 Ubuntu, which offers a glimpse of how this Linux distribution will evolve in the next few years.

• Mark Shuttleworth, father of the popular Ubuntu operating system, proudly announced a few minutes ago, October 17th, the name and the goals for the next version of Ubuntu OS.

• The Ubuntu Manual team is proud to announce a new edition of the comprehensive Ubuntu Manual, this time for the Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.

• Just in time for the Ubuntu 12.10 release on October 18th, the Ubuntu Manual is now ready and available for download right now, right here (see the download link at the end of the article).

• Ubuntu 12.10 contains more controversial changes than expected. If you can live with or work around those changes, it remains a powerful and useful desktop Linux operating system.

• After running with other alliterative codenames such as Oneiric Ocelot, Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal, Canonical has announced the latest in its line of fauna-inspired Ubuntu releases — Raring Ringtail. With version 13.04 CEO Mark Shuttleworth plans to start seriously laying the groundwork for phone, tablet and TV interfaces, which he hopes to have in place for the next LTS release in April of 2014 (14.04).

• In releasing updates to its client and server Ubuntu Linux distributions today, Canonical will enable users to turn off a search option in its client product that has raised some eyebrows over privacy issues. A whistleblower, however, remains unimpressed with Canonical’s handling of the situation.

• Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has introduced a new web interface for the company’s software deployment tool Juju at the OpenStack Developer Summit in San Diego. In a blog post, Ubuntu Cloud Community Liaison Jorge Castro has pointed to a test installation of the tool, which can be used to get a feel for the new interface.

Flavours and Variants

• The Kubuntu community is proud to announce the release of 12.10, the Quantal Quetzal. This is the first release to burst free from the limits of CD sizes giving us some more space for goodies on the image.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Enthusiasm for HP’s (Palm) webOS remains quite high, even if the industry heavyweight is no longer actively promoting the open source OS.

Android

• Chad Versace of Intel released Waffle 1.1.0 on Monday, which is a cross-platform library for deferring selection of the OpenGL API and windowing system until run-time. Waffle makes it easy to switch between X11 with GLX or EGL, Wayland with OpenGL ES 2.0, and other windowing / GL API options.

• Google is to be credited for improving its Android operating system by leaps and bounds over the past four years. You know who also deserves loads of credit? Independent developers who care a lot about their phone experience, and yours, too. They’ve quietly filled in missing features and fixed annoyances in Android while nobody was looking—but now’s the time to look at what their fixes can do for you.

• One of the best things about Android Jelly Bean is how clean the interface is. It’s polished, it’s pretty, and it looks good on phones and tablets. Flickr user Knight Hawk2 wanted that same experience on his desktop, and now you can have the same look and feel on your desktop too.

• In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of Android media players ranging from basic, sub-$100 mini-PCs and HDMI sticks from China to a smaller number of more advanced, primarily Google TV devices. Building upon a foundation established by Google TV, Apple TV, media-savvy game consoles such as Microsoft’s Xbox, as well as numerous Linux-based players like Roku, the media players let users stream and download video and other multimedia from the Internet for playback on TV. Some offer built-in support for online video services such as Netflix, while most simply project Android onto a TV screen, letting users browse the web, run apps and sign up for services via specialized remotes.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is on the verge of releasing a major new operating system. Uncertain what prospects the new platform holds for them, hardware vendors are exhibiting renewed interest in shipping alternative operating systems, such as Linux, on their machines. Is it early 2007 again? Not quite, but it kind of seems that way in light of Asus’s introduction of a new Ubuntu netbook. Here’s the scoop.

• The company’s slate will come with a single-core processor, but won’t be developed with help from Asus, according to Digitimes.

Free Software/Open Source

• Many ordinary people have little idea how software is created let alone how FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) is created. Martin Owens has a good explanation in terms that anyone should understand, complete with pictures…

• Following discussions about the Open Source and Open Source Hardware logos, OSI and the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) have worked together to compose a co-existence agreement on behalf of their representative communities. We are pleased to announce that this document (PDF) has been approved and signed by both parties!

Events

• With a background on negotiation theory, David brings a fresh and interesting perspective on the behavioral norms of open source communities.

• In this talk, David emphasizes the importance of “soft skills” when managing communities. Soft skills relate to the human, sociological, and psychological aspects of fostering particular types of behaviors in an environment where contributors are volunteers, and therefore follow the motivation of the gift economy: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Such motivations are in opposition to the stick-and-carrot motivators of mechanistic behavior that is commonly found in the barter economy.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS

• Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, the thought police are back. For years, the open source community was torn apart by fractious debates over what “open” meant and who was open enough. As we’ve moved beyond name calling to focus on getting work done, the same old debate has shifted to cloud computing, with a new crop of pundits and evangelists wrangling over who is the cloudiest of them all.

• The Apache Hadoop developers have voted on and released the second alpha of Apache Hadoop 2.0, which goes by the version number 2.0.2. The distributed computing and storage framework’s latest developments include significant improvements to the high availability variant of HDFS and a more stable version of YARN, which has already been tested against a 2000 node cluster. The release notes offer a high level of detail about all the changes made.

Databases

• Most applications in the cloud rely on a database. While the cloud is all about the ability to elastically scale and resize compute capacity, scaling and resizing databases in the cloud hasn’t always been that simple.

• 10gen, the company set up by the creators of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, has been on a roll recently, creating business partnerships with numerous companies, making it a hot commercial proposition without creating any apparent friction with its open source community. So what has brought MongoDB to the fore?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Over 2 million downloads in September, over 540 developers, a community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continents, over 100 languages (representing 95% of the world population) LibreOffice Conference, Berlin, October 17, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces that the German city of Munich is migrating to LibreOffice, following a growing trend of migrations and adoptions worldwide. “After a careful risk-assessment, Munich city council has decided to migrate to LibreOffice. In favour of that decision, among others, was the greater flexibility of the project regarding consumption of open source licenses. In addition, Munich wants to rely on a large and vibrant community for any Open Source product it employs,” says Kirsten Böge, head of public relations.

• The city of Munich, which has long been a big user for Linux and open source software, has shifted its migration-to-OpenOffice plans and is now starting to deploy LibreOffice instead.

• That’s the news from The Document Foundation’s Italo Vignoli, who touted the announcement as part of a cheerleading roundup on the Foundation’s mailing list today.

Healthcare

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Linux 3.7 kernel introduces support for 64-bit ARM, a.k.a. AArch64. In further enabling 64-bit ARM support under Linux, the GCC Steering Committee has now officially accepted the AArch64 port of the GNU Compiler Collection. 64-bit ARM now has a compiler!

• GCC 4.8 is set to support more of the C++11 ISO standard and it also starts working on very early support for “C++1y”, the next C++ standard that is still years away.

• Besides supporting new hardware optimizations, potential Unified Parallel C support, a conversion to C++, and many other changes, GCC 4.8 improves its support for the C++11 ISO standard.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• Export control regulations shouldn’t necessarily be an obstacle to the release of unclassified government open source code, said David Wheeler, a research staff member of the Institute for Defense Analyses. He spoke Oct. 15 during the Mil-OSS WG4 conference in Arlington, Va.

Licensing

• Digia recently acquired the full Qt business from Nokia, Juhapekka Niemi, director, Digia, Qt, talks to Electronics Weekly about how the mobile software business will develop and grow in a market where open source has growing popularity.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

Open Access/Content

• In an effort to move forward in online education, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a proposal to create an open-source website allowing students of 2013 to download popular and expensive textbooks for free.

• It’s about time a government takes a step in the right direction. In these times, students need all the help they can get when it comes to paying for college. Universities today continue to hike up the price of tuition to cope with a continuing lack of government funding.

Programming

Leftovers

Security

• Questioning in the closed sessions has suggested a scenario under which a network CSP (i.e. ISP, such as BT) would be requested to store encrypted data-streams between their customers and third-party CSPs (such as Google). The implication that, under RIPA or equivalent, third-party CSPs would be requested to retrospectively decrypt this captured data.

• Security concerns typically provide the chief source of rain for the cloud parade, as worries about data leakage and other cyber maladies have caused federal IT managers to think twice about cloud computing. Indeed, more than 50 percent of respondents to an 1105 Government Information Group survey declared that cloud solutions lack sufficient security.

• The government is looking for ways to assuage that anxiety and spark cloud adoption because federal data center consolidation efforts — not to mention the Obama administration’s cloud-first policy — rely on the technology. Therefore, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) brings together officials from the General Services Administration, Department of Homeland Security and Defense Department, among others, to provide a standardized approach for determining the security of cloud-based services.

• Security firm ReVuln has analysed the browser protocol that Steam servers use to execute commands via users’ browsers. During the analysis, the company’s researchers discovered security issues that could potentially allow attackers to infect PCs with malicious code such as spyware.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts is currently among the closest in the country, with the most recent polls showing a razor-thin lead by Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, who hopes to unseat Republican incumbent Senator Scott Brown this November. The Massachusetts race is unique among national Senate races, as outside money is playing a significantly diminished role thanks to a pledge signed by both candidates that has helped keep outside spending on television, radio, and Internet ads in check.

Censorship

Internet/Net Neutrality

• When the world’s governments convene for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), they will debate whether to expand the mandate of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to include aspects of internet policy. Specifically, WCIT delegates will approve changes to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), an international treaty traditionally concerned with telecommunications interoperability, and these negotiations have the potential to affect the internet’s openness and the exercise of human rights online.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• It’s been five years since Stephanie Lenz, angry that a video of her son dancing to a Prince song was taken down from YouTube, reached out to the lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ultimately, Lenz worked with EFF lawyers to sue Universal Music, the company that initiated the takedown.

• Arguing against the takedown of a 29-second home video portraying a toddler dancing might have been a slam dunk from a PR perspective; legally speaking, it’s been anything but. EFF was looking for a case that was so obviously an example of “fair use” that the content owner who initiated the takedown could actually be forced to pay damages, under a little-used section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 512(f). But the bar is very high to get that type of relief. That became crystal clear at the most important hearing in the case thus far, held today in San Jose.

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