● 10.22.12

● Links 22/10/2012: Linux Tablet Vivaldi, Return of Copyright News

Posted in News Roundup at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Windows 8 will be unleashed, Kraken-like, on an awaiting public on Oct. 26, which is this Friday. For US$79.99 — let’s just round that up to US$80 — one can get the latest version of the Windows operating system which, by many reports, is not ideal yet not as bad a some of the other products Redmond has forced upon the public in the past.

• A CrunchBang user with the handle merelyjim posted this thread on the CrunchBang forum under the title, “No thanks. I got Linux” where he thinks that this $80 can be better spent elsewhere — like on your current distro or your favorite FOSS program.

Desktop

• I was already a big Chromebook fan before I got my hands on Samsung’s just-released ARM-powered Chromebook. Now, after a weekend with it and with its amazing price of $249 I think it’s going to find a few million more fans. Indeed, as of October 21st, the ARM-based Chromebook is Amazon’s best selling computer.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has reaffirmed that at this point he doesn’t intend to pull KVMTool into the mainline Linux kernel.

• KVMTool is the lightweight QEMU-free native KVM tool. KVMTool has been developed by several open-source developers for nearly two years.

• For those not over in the Czech Republic this weekend for the Linux events going on here, here are some more data points for the AMD A10-5800K “Trinity” APU to look at under Linux.

• I have already delivered many A10-5800K Linux benchmarks including articles looking closely at the integrated Radeon HD 7660D graphics on Linux and the AMD Trinity memory performance. I have also done initial tests of compiler tuning for the AMD Piledriver cores, a.k.a. the “Bulldozer 2″ micro-architecture.

• Earlier this month Samsung introduced a new Linux file-system, F2FS, that was designed for mobile devices with flash memory. Initial testing of F2FS yields very positive results against EXT4 and NILFS2.

• The company’s Robert Morell submitted a patch to remove the GPL license from the dma buffer interface in the Linux kernel so it can be used in Nvidia’s driver. Not everybody is happy, especially Alan Cox, who has been involved in Linux development since 1991 and was most influential when he maintained the version 2.2 of the Linux kernel.

Graphics Stack

• For those wondering about the outcome of the Linux graphics driver development book that was worked on back in September prior to XDC2012, the book continues to be worked on a bit for those interested in reading it.

• If you want to read this basic Linux graphics driver development book, it’s being housed in Git and can be seen from this Git repository. As can be seen from the log, the recent activity to it was pushed just 11 days ago.

• Intel Linux Driver Still Working To Address Tearing Open-Source Intel developers have long been working towards a tear-free Linux desktop with proper vsync support. For Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge hardware there’s still been some tearing issues, but they hope to soon finally have it solved.

• Wayland continues to be a topic that draws a lot of interest from Linux desktop end-users, based upon the turnout to a session regarding the Wayland/Weston Display Server Framework at LinuxDays in Prague.

• Egbert Eich spoke on Saturday during the openSUSE Conference, which was co-hosted with LinuxDays in the Czech Republic. Egbert was speaking again about Wayland, just as he has done before at LinuxTag and other events.

Applications

• A new release of GLX-Dock/Cairo-Dock is now available with new features, including better integration of the Ubuntu Unity desktop.

• GLX-Dock 3.1 is the new release and it brings in better integration of Unity, all configuration windows have been merged into a single window, progress bars in several applets, the music applet can control players from the system tray, icon separation in the taskbar, improvements to the advanced configuration panel mode, a rewritten messaging menu, and various bug-fixes / enhancements.

Instructionals/Technical

• I’ve always loved music – as do both of my parents. They have excellent, but divergent tastes in music. With my Mum I share a love of Sandy Denny, Jeff Lynne and George Harrison, with my father there was a shared affection for Eric Coates, Henry Hall and G. F. Handel. And when you mix the two together you get my love of Maestoso, Mike Oldfield, Kevin Ayers and Barclay James Harvest.

Games

• id Software released “Doom 3 BFG Edition” this week, a revised version of the Doom 3 game that came eight years after the original release of Doom 3. The engine source-code for Doom 3 BFG, which is still a modified id Tech 4 engine, is already approved for open-sourcing.

• Doom 3 BFG Edition features improved graphics, better sound, a checkpoint save system, support for 3D displays, and features various other refinements. Doom 3 BFG is still being powered by id Tech 4 and not the newer id Tech 5 engine as used by the Rage game and the forthcoming Doom 4 title.

• When online travel agent Orbitz admitted in June that it was steering Mac users on its site toward higher-priced hotel rooms, many were angry. But another company is finding that Mac users will pay more than Windows users for an identical product – even when allowed to choose how much they pay.

• Orbitz wasn’t showing Mac users higher prices than it showed others for the same room: It found they would choose different, more expensive, products, spending up to US$30 more per night than PC users.

• But it’s not just Mac users that outspend Windows users: Linux users do too, according to Humble Bundle, a company that organises time-limited sales of bundles of games, music and ebooks and splits the proceeds with their creators and with charities.

• Yesterday when mentioning that Doom 3 BFG Edition is already cleared for a GPL open-source release, I mentioned it was unlikely id Software would be providing a native Linux client for this brand new game. Those fears have now been confirmed with id Software saying they have no plans for a Linux version.

• Doom 3 BFG Edition is a major overhaul of the original eight-year-old Doom 3 first person shooter. Doom 3 BFG is still based upon the id Tech 4 engine that is well supported under Linux and there was a great native Linux client for the original Doom 3, but now times are different at id Software.

Distributions

New Releases

Gentoo Family

• One of the events being co-hosted alongside LinuxDays is a Gentoo mini-conference. A session held this morning concerned the state of Linux 3D graphics drivers and gaming for Gentoo Linux.

Red Hat Family

• LG played a prank on an elevator passengers to show how life-like are their IPS monitors. Companies do every kind of crazy things to showcase their products, so why are we covering it? You will enjoy even more when you see those scared passengers upon realization that GNU/Linux played a critical role in that prank.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• If you take an interest in the Linux world you have probably already noticed that Ubuntu 12.10 has been released. The new version of the popular Linux distribution comes with a set of new and improved features, of which at least have been controversially discussed by the community. Integration of Amazon results in searches is probably the most controversial feature of this release. The feature pulls deals from Amazon when the search is being used, and money is earned for Ubuntu when users click on those results and start to buy on Amazon. The feature can be disabled in under the Privacy settings.

• Canonical sell a variety of Ubuntu-branded merchandise through their online store, but is the latest item – the “Ubuntu Speaker” – worthy of bearing the brand?

• So, yes, the device is obviously perfectly capable of running touch-based operating systems other than the default Android.

• Of course, as Liliputing’s Brad Linder notes, this is hardly the first time we’ve seen Ubuntu or another Linux flavor running on an ARM-based mobile device. Indeed, the OS was booted up on Google’s Nexus S smartphone back in January 2011.

• Many users when they wished to upgrade their Ubuntu 12.04 up to 12.10, they encountered a problem concerning their graphics. This problem appeared only to AMD Radeon GPU users and especially to those who had Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 or HD 2000 graphics card.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• While device manufacturers are trying hard to provide Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update to its newer products and letting the older products to get stuck with ICS or even Gingerbread, Motorola is trying to implement a different strategy. Instead of keeping the customers crying for the updates which they feel will take a significant time if they are to provide Jelly Bean to the older devices, Motorola is asking the customers to trade up to a newer Motorola Smartphone.

• While iPhone fans brag about their beloved devices, Android fans will grin knowingly and take comfort because there are several solid reasons to stick with — or switch to — their Google-powered phones.

• The experience is similar to PC and desktop, where users can switch workspaces, launch apps and do more. The experience is smooth, with no visible loss of speed, though Ubuntu is mostly targeted for desktop computers rather than tablets.

• The technology industry today is a fight between Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Google chairman Eric Schmidt said Wednesday night at an event at the 92nd Street Y.

• His interviewers, AllThingsD editors Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, pressed him on a name he omitted: Microsoft.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The online community is calling out for a tablet based on an open platform they can alter freely. The upcoming Vivaldi tablet, based around Linux, may be the first to answer this call, and the community response has been so large they had to close pre-orders.

Free Software/Open Source

• In many cases, open source security software can fill the gap when funding for heavy, commercially supported, closed-source security tools is hard to come by. For SMBs, having a few open source security tools in their back pocket to meet specific security challenges can be a godsend.

• It appears that Samsung is preparing to open-source some code pertaining to their Exynos ARM SoC.

Events

• That was what you may have heard 10 months ago, if you listened to the rumormongers. Certainly there were a lot of rumors being spread. (Or should we call it FUD?) Whatever you call it, the whispers continued, in a negative propaganda campaign that the open source community should be ashamed to be associated with. Even just a few weeks ago I heard from one LibreOffice lead that he was certain that the Apache OpenOffice podling would never graduate and that we’d fail, give up, shut down the project and give the OpenOffice trademarks to LibreOffice. I’m sorry to disappoint, but this kind of FUD has an expiration date, and that date is now.

• While this was the first LinuxDays to happen and had high hopes considering it pulled in multiple distributions (aside from Gentoo and openSUSE, there were also Fedora and Ubuntu members too), the event itself turned out to be rather a disappointment; this just wasn’t my opinion but it seemed to be the consensus from most that I talked to as well.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla’s busy Firefox developer community submitted Bugzilla bug number 800,000 on October 10.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Just over one month after VirtualBox 4.2 arrived, Oracle has released the first update to its open source desktop virtualisation system, which should improve its overall stability and fix various regressions. Version 4.2.2 of VirtualBox includes fixes for the recent Linux 3.7-rc1 kernel (both for Linux hosts and guests) and addresses a problem that stopped virtual machines (VMs) from booting under Mac OS X 10.8.2.

• Just three weeks ago at JavaOne, Oracle was still saying that the JavaFX RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform would become fully available as open source software by the end of the year. Now, JavaFX project architect Richard Bair has adjusted that schedule and moved the release date to February 2013.

CMS

• It is the era of open source content management systems. The rise of open source software is like a boon for all middle or small scale business organization, because of the advanced age of internet. In this age of internet, a website needs to be strong enough for gaining the optimum attention of widely spread online community.

Education

Business

• Business intelligence software continues to be a hot market in this difficult economic climate. This type of software takes a company’s raw data from its databases and turns it into signposts and mappings that helps firms make better business decision-making with the objective of generating additional revenue.

• Online backup provider Carbonite has announced that it is acquiring open source backup company Zmanda and will incorporate Zmanda’s offerings into its Carbonite Business products. The acquisition will see the end of the Zmanda name.

Semi-Open Source

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• As some more benchmarks from the Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-100 ARM Server — a.k.a. the “5-Watt Linux Server” — to share this weekend, here is a ARMv7 Cortex-A9 GCC compiler performance comparison.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

• The public sector’s global use of open source technology is growing.

• Famed tech speaker Clay Shirky has been filmed for a TED talk saying that Germany is now publishing its laws on the GitHub online open source hosting repository and that the US state of Utah is also making its legislation available in Github so that individuals can see how the laws are being amended over time.

• So as we see positive signs here in the UK that the public sector is beginning to embrace open source, where should we look to for pointers?

• The choice of the Drupal Content Management System (CMS), an open source solution, as the platform for the Cabinet Office and the London.gov.uk site is a case in point, as is the Department of Health’s use of open source to work with EU partners.

• Asia’s public sector agencies welcome the cost-effectiveness and customization abilities with open source software (OSS), but emphasize proprietary software should still be considered during procurement decision-making.

• Since the landing of NASA’s rover, Curiosity, on Mars on August 11th (Earth time), I have been following the incredible wealth of images that have been flowing back. I am awestruck by the breadth and beauty of the them.

Openness/Sharing

• One tiny flaw in one gene in one little girl. That explains why Beatrice Rienhoff, 8, is so lean and leggy.

• But it took the communal contributions of many researchers — in an open-ended, open-source scientific search, led by her father — to solve Bea’s singular mystery.

• Most medical research is secret and proprietary. At Saturday’s Open Science Summit in Mountain View, however, Bea’s father, Hugh, described a needle-in-a-haystack quest made possible by the pitchforks of so many.

• An open-source robot, size compatible with the RoboCup Humanoid League’s Teen Size class, has been launched by the University of Bonn.

• It comes from the team, led by Professor Sven Behnke, that won the Louis Vuitton Cup for “Best Humanoid” in this year’s RoboCup and is based on the same NimbRo model with its distinctive white head.

Open Access/Content

• For one day, Minnesota’s Office of Higher Education felt the Internet’s indignation as word spread that it was cracking down on free online college courses offered through Coursera and other websites. The bizarre bureaucratic decision was first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education on Thursday morning, and it became Internet-wide news after my blog post about it Thursday evening went viral, thanks in part to the user-generated news board Reddit.

Programming

• OpenGL support is becoming an increasing hard requirement on the Linux desktop. Even if your hardware comes up short, more desktops are requiring GL support, which means falling back to the CPU-based LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver.

• GitHub, the social coding service, has been plagued by two days of distributed denial-of-service attacks. No report yet on who is behind the attacks or why, but it must be some sort of geek infighting, because GitHub is the preferred clubhouse of the open source community. Not exactly the enemy of Guy Fawkes. As web designer Freddy Montes put it on Twitter, “DDOS attack to @github is like hiting your mom on Mother’s Day.”

• Git maintainer Junio C Hamano has announced the latest feature release of the open source version control system. Git 1.8.0 includes several new features, refined command syntax and a large number of fixes since version 1.7.12, which was the last feature release of the software from 19 August.

Leftovers

Finance

• A judge refused to dismiss a $1.07 billion lawsuit against Goldman Sachs Group that accuses it of selling risky debt that it intended to lose value to an Australian hedge fund, causing the fund to become insolvent.

Privacy

• Cloud services are great, but they pose a number of challenges for users. For example, users may legitimately fear that vendors will “lock-in” their users by holding user data hostage, forcing users to keep using their services instead of better competitors because it’s too painful to forego or transfer the existing data. To ameliorate this concern, there has been a push to demand that cloud service providers offer users a data export feature that makes it easier to take their data to competitive vendors. For example, earlier this year the European Union proposed revising its data privacy rules to require mandatory data portability (see Article 18). However, those favoring the proliferation of data export tools should consider another audience that will find the tools quite useful: litigators seeking to do discovery of cloud users.

• Workplace computers contain so much personal information nowadays that employees have a legitimate expectation of privacy in using them, the Supreme Court of Canada said in a major ruling Friday.

Civil Rights

• The police have been going through a rough patch recently. First they were implicated in the phone-hacking scandal – though they managed to escape most of the blame when we collectively came to the surprising conclusion that it was more serious for tabloid journalists to neglect the public interest than officers of the crown. But while they deflected a lot of that responsibility, their attempts to deflect it over Hillsborough have been catastrophically counterproductive. And as senior officers have been caught dining with Murdochs or maligning the dead, officers on the ground have been getting shot and called plebs. Or not called plebs, depending on who you believe.

Intellectual Monopolies

• In a welcome gesture on October 16, Dr. Richard Stallman made a public note supporting the Swedish Pirate Party’s position regarding trademarks, patent monopolies, and copyright monopolies.

• We’ve already seen newspapers in Belgium and Germany argue that Google needs to pay them for linking to them in Google News. And we just wrote about how French newspapers were looking for the same ridiculous handout. But a bunch of Brazilian newspapers have taken the issue even further, and colluded to all pull out of Google News together (well, 90% of all newspapers in Brazil). They’re demanding that Google pay them to link to them. Of course, I’m curious if any of those newspapers has ever hired an SEO expert to try to get them better search rankings…

Copyrights

• YouTube’s bias toward claimants; the lack of practical means for ordinary users to fight back realistically against false claims; the tightening of automatic detection systems with an attendant increase in false positives; the lack of meaningful appeal and escalation mechanisms; and the failure to incorporate a sufficient range of signals, extenuating circumstances, and associated proportionality into penalties, are rapidly turning YouTube into a very unfriendly place for anyone but the media elite.

• A rumour is circulating that at the next negotiating round on the Treaty of the Visually Impaired at the World Intellectual Property Organization the members of the European Blind Union will attend the meeting with black pirate flags and one pirate patch over each eye.

• Las Vegas copyright company Righthaven LLC appears eager to comply with the latest court order entered against it Tuesday, as noncompliance could cost its CEO a fine of $500 per day.

• U.S. Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen in Las Vegas, ruling during a hearing, ordered Righthaven to turn over to a creditor hard drives from its computers so the creditor could determine if Righthaven has any assets that can be liquidated for the benefit of Righthaven’s creditors.

• A few years ago, we were surprised to find out that the judge in The Pirate Bay case in Sweden had ties to the copyright lobby pushing the case. There were additional issues, after it was discovered that at least one of the lay judges (sort of like a jury, but not quite) on the case was employed by Spotify, and might have business reasons not to be completely objective. Even more ridiculous? When the court reviewed whether or not there was bias, the original judge making the review ended up having to be removed… for bias, after it came out at she, too, was involved with the same pro-copyright groups that the original judge was associated with. While the courts eventually said there was no meaningful bias, a new high profile case in Sweden may reopen the issue.

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