● 10.24.12

● Links 24/10/2012: First GNOME 3.6 Update

Posted in News Roundup at 1:57 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Besides bringing new features and bug-fixes, this SysVinit replacement is also now at the version intended for Fedora 18. Systemd 195 will be borught into Fedora 18 while anything from here will just be back-ported fixes. Systemd 196 is what will then begin the Fedora 19 development cycle.

• When Linus Torvalds visited Aalto University in June, the visit resulted in the Linux pioneer giving Nvidia the finger — an outburst that became the university’s most watched YouTube clip. Torvalds made a follow-up visit on Tuesday, but promised students there would be “no fingers this time”.

Graphics Stack

• Just minutes after writing about how Intel keeps releasing open-source Linux code for Haswell, their next-generation hardware for 2013, they ended up pushing out their initial video acceleration (VA-API) support code.

Applications

• One area of physics that is hard to wrap your head around is relativity. Basically, relativity breaks down into general and special relativity. General relativity deals with large masses and high energies, and it describes how space-time is warped by these. Special relativity deals with what happens during high velocities. Many odd and counter-intuitive effects happen when speeds get close to the speed of light, or c. The problem is that these types of conditions are quite far outside normal experience, so people don’t have any frame of reference as to what these effects would look like—enter Lightspeed.

Proprietary

• For those that do any sort of video editing, you’ve probably heard of LightWorks. LightWorks has been the editing software of choice for films such as 28 Days Later, Hugo, The King’s Speech, Pulp Fiction, and tons more. There’s a reason why — LightWorks was designed by editors, for editors.

• But pimping this software title isn’t what this article is about. What I wanted to highlight was how the developers have been working to bring this software title to the open source flagship platform.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• A software engineer from Valve will be speaking next week in Copenhagen about the Valve Linux efforts during the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

• Andrew Bliss is the Valve employee who was just slotted into the UDS-R schedule to speak on Monday afternoon in Copenhagen. The talk can be found here, but there’s no details beyond stating “Drew Bliss – Valve.”

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As we saw last week, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth envisions the advent of Ubuntu phones, tablets and TVs in the near future. But the open source world’s best hope for conquering emerging hardware arguably lies in Plasma Active, a young project which has quietly been making huge progress lately in the world of mobile platforms. Will it beat Ubuntu?

• It’s pretty likely that Canonical’s efforts for bringing Ubuntu to mobile hardware will involve Unity, the company’s homegrown interface designed to work well on traditional and mobile screens alike. And if it creates a version of Ubuntu targeted at mobile devices, the platform will almost certainly be a spin of the standard Ubuntu flavor, not a new operating system built from the ground up.

• Less than one day after the official release of Wayland 1.0 there is a new Wayland compositor that emerges. This new compositor for Wayland is dubbed “Green Island” and leverages Qt, QtQuick, and QML for creating a new and unique Linux desktop experience.

• Pier Luigi announced Green Island this morning on the wayland-devel list. “I would like to share with you my work on a Wayland compositor and desktop shell made with QtQuick and QtCompositor and is using a set of components for QML to draw panels and widgets.”

• KDevelop 4.4.0 was released today as the latest version of the KDE-focused integrated development environment (IDE), but it’s hardly worth getting excited over.

• The new feature to KDevelop 4.4.0 is a QML/Plasma-based welcome screen. The welcome screen should help newcomers, but isn’t any revolutionary new feature for KDevelop. Beyond the welcome screen, there isn’t much else.

GNOME Desktop

• There’s a silly sentence. I am projecting what I feel ought to be true, like so many other bloggers out there, except that I am neither a blogger, nor wrong. The thing is, I want to talk to you about where the Linux desktop, I repeat desktop, is heading in the coming few years. A hunch, based on years of being absolutely right on everything. Read my past articles, and thou shalt be convinced utterly.

• So what now? All right. In 2011 or so, more or less, the Linux world suffered a split, with the Gnome 2 desktop being torn apart and replaced with a mutation called Gnome 3. This led to much dissatisfaction in the community, and two alternative projects were born, one called Cinnamon, the other MATE. The former uses the Gnome 3 technology, but makes it more presentable and usable, while the latter is Gnome 2 reincarnated. The Pauli exclusion principle tells us you cannot have so many desktops around. So which one will survive into the next decade?

• The GNOME Project has released the first update to version 3.6 of its open source Linux and Unix desktop environment. GNOME 3.6.1 is a maintenance update that includes a variety of minor changes, improvements and translation updates.

Distributions

New Releases

• Today we are happy to announce the last DEFT release: the 7.2. This is the last 32bit release but we will support bugfix until 2020.

Red Hat Family

• LINUX VENDOR Red Hat knows that most of its customers do not care whether their operating system software is open source but instead simply look for the best bang for the buck.

• Red Hat has a significant chunk of the enterprise Linux market and while the firm challenges Microsoft and proprietary Unix operating systems in the enterprise market, it also supports a number of open source projects. While open source software has several benefits, Red Hat says most of its customers are not interested in whether the source code is available for inspection.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Starting with this article, we’re going to introduce you guys to a lot of Web Apps for the recently released Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.

• As you already know, in the past we’ve introduced lots of Unity Lens and Unity Scopes for the Ubuntu Linux distributions, since Canonical invented the Unity interface.

• Samsung introduced the latest generation Chromebook just a few days back. This is the ARM-based model, or more than likely — the one people know as the one that is selling for $249. Of course, given the price, the Chromebook is more than tempting. But low price aside, we realize that Chrome OS is not going to work for everyone. Me personally, I am still rocking a Cr-48 with Chrome OS and loving it.

Flavours and Variants

• There are a wide variety of Linux distributions, but there are also a wide variety of distributions based on other Linux distributions. The official Ubuntu release with the Unity desktop is only one of many possible ways to use Ubuntu.

• Most of these Ubuntu derivatives are officially supported by Ubuntu. Some, like the Ubuntu GNOME Remix and Linux Mint, aren’t official. Each includes different desktop environments with different software, but the base system is the same (except with Linux Mint.)

• This is my fourth review of the Quantal series with Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu already reviewed. Lubuntu, the fastest of them all but the one with the most boring look. Nope! Like the other three, in my article, I’ll compare the latest release with Lubuntu 12.04 (no there was no 12.04.1 like others!). However, a reminder – the previous release was not a Long Term Release (with 3-5 years of support). Support is for 18 months in both and it makes sense here to upgrade to the latest distro, possibly.

• Lubuntu, an official Ubuntu flavour starting with version 11.10 which uses LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment by default, has reached version 12.10.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

• Bringing the Chinese technology community around to the philosophy that software licenses should be honored will take time, said Cedric Thomas, CEO of OW2. “Building an awareness for open source in China is the initial goal. Piracy is a way to obtain software. That’s the way the Chinese see it. So we are trying to show them a way to use free software in business as a legal activity.”

• West Virginia: a state made up entirely of the Appalachian Mountain range. Whether you’re there to experience the beautiful New River Gorge, or to watch the Mountaineers play at home, the mountainous theme never subsides. The Appalachian region has the Most Beautiful award locked down, however its height and elevation face a slightly different opponent. Towering over the city of Morgantown, WV, home to West Virginia University and the Mountaineers, stands a fierce competitor. An engineering marvel, over ten stories tall. The Engineering Science Building!

• Coinciding with today’s opening of EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich has welcomed Google as a new strategic member of the open source organisation. The Foundation is responsible for operating the open source Eclipse development environment and various associated projects. As a strategic member, Google will provide the organisation with eight full-time developers to work on Eclipse technology and donate $250,000 per year.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS

• Platfora, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed “big data” startup, unveiled the product it has been baking for over a year at the Strata conference.

• The Silicon Valley-based company publicly launched its technology that crunches raw data in Hadoop, the open source framework, and turns it into intelligence for business users.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice’s graduation to a top-level project at Apache now clears he way for faster cloud innovation, especially as Microsoft Office 365′s debut nears. Plans for “Cloud Apache OpenOffice” will be discussed at ApacheCon Europe in weeks

Business

Semi-Open Source

• SunGard’s Infinity Process Platform is now available from the Eclipse Stardust project, an open source business process management (BPM) suite designed to help improve the infrastructure behind many of the finance industry’s key operations.

Project Releases

• Nearly eight months after being feature frozen, version 2.6.0 of key-value store database Redis is now available and brings with it several new features such as support for Lua scripting. Written in ANSI C, Redis is an open source RAM-based, persistent, data structure server that can be networked in a master-slave configuration to replicate data.

Public Services/Government

• Open source can provide schools with high quality, well-functioning IT solutions at low cost, according to a case study done by VTT, a Finnish government research institute. The researchers looked at the use of Linux and other open source applications by the Kasavuoren Secondary School in Kauniainen, a municipality near Helsinki.

• U.S. government agencies have long used open-source software. Now, some agencies are embracing the collaborative development model of open-source software development and are releasing code back to the wider community.

Openness/Sharing

• Iceland residents voted overwhelmingly in favour of a new Constitution written by a Constitutional Council of 25 citizens who gathered feedback through social media.

Open Hardware

• Today marks the official release of the long-awaited Arduino Due, a vastly more powerful and capable version of the wildly popular Arduino microcontroller. This new Arduino is aimed at more complex applications, such as robotics, where the faster processor and increased input/output capability can enable builds which are simply impractical with the standard Arduino.

Programming

• LVM (currently released as LVM2), the “logical volume manager”, is a flexible storage manager for the Linux kernel. It allows you to add, remove and resize partitions to suit your needs. Instead of having to predict how your disk space is going to be use when your install a new server, you dedicate a good amount of disk space to LVM and then can make changes to how that storage is allocated when you need.

• The ARM 64-bit compiler port (AArch64) of the GNU Compiler Collection is now ready for merging to trunk.

• Marcus Shawcroft of ARM Holdings has requested their AArch64 branch of GCC now be merged to trunk for providing mainline ARM 64-bit support in the de facto standard for open-source compilers. “We would like to request the merge of aarch64-branch into trunk.”

• The AArch64 GCC port is broken down into just ten patches.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

Security

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.

Finance

• KKR & Co. (KKR), TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners (GS), which took the former TXU Corp. private five years ago in the largest leveraged buyout in history, have paid themselves $528.3 million in fees, even as the electricity provider teeters toward a near-term bankruptcy or restructuring.

• ONLINE BOOKSELLER Amazon has been accused of working the UK tax system and charging publishers 20 percent VAT on digital books while actually paying only three percent.

• Mark the name of R. Glenn Hubbard, the man who will make your life miserable if Mitt Romney is elected president. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the swindlers who has profited mightily from the nation’s economic pain.

Censorship

• In response to the BPI’s call to block three websites before Christmas, Jim Killock Executive Director of the Open Rights Group said:

• “Web blocking is an extreme response. The orders are often indefinite and open ended, and will be blocking legitimate uses. The BPI and the courts need to slow down and be very careful about this approach.

• “The BPI seem to be trying to speed things up and that is not good. It will lead to carelessness and unneeded harms.

• “As an approach, censorship is a bad idea. It leads to more censorship, and is unlikely to solve the problem it seeks to address.

• Twitter has put itself out there as being a strong defender of free speech, arguing that it’s not just a principled stand, but one that provides the company with a competitive advantage. Standing up for free speech is good — not just for people, but for Twitter too.

• As another individual is sentenced to jail time for causing offense, it seems that at present a week doesn’t go by where outrage over a joke or insensitive comment isn’t splashed across the front pages.

• There have been two notable cases in October: Barry Thew, who wore a T-shirt bearing the message “One less pig; perfect justice” and “Killacopforfun.com haha”, was sentenced to jail for eight months under the Public Order Act and Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail after posting “grossly offensive” jokes on his Facebook page about missing April Jones under the Malicious Communications Act 2003. It is worth noting on the same day and in the same court that Woods was sentenced, a man was fined £100 and ordered to pay £100 compensation for racially abusing a woman to her face.

Privacy

• As Glyn recently wrote about, while governments around the world are busy diving further and further into their citizens personal communications over their cell phones and the internet, the implementation of cryptography has been slow to catch up. We could point to several reasons for this, but chief among them appears to be the difficulty in encryption for the average user. Now, an ex-Navy SEAL and security defense contractor is looking to change that.

Civil Rights

• Instead, we have the reverse. This morning, Kiriakou plead guilty, though to a much lesser charge — that of “revealing an undercover operative’s identity.” Similar to the Drake case, they found narrow grounds for a guilty plea. The plea document and the associated “statement of facts” are embedded below for your horror. They tell… uh… a very one-sided view of the story, leaving out all the pesky little details about torture. Kiriakou was more or less forced into taking the deal after a judge had ridiculously ruled that you didn’t have to intend to harm the US to be guilty under the Espionage Act. How is it possibly espionage against a country if you don’t intend to harm that country?

• IT’S BEEN SEVEN MONTHS since I’ve been inside a prison cell. Now I’m back, sort of. The experience is eerily like my dreams, where I am a prisoner in another man’s cell. Like the cell I go back to in my sleep, this one is built for solitary confinement. I’m taking intermittent, heaving breaths, like I can’t get enough air. This still happens to me from time to time, especially in tight spaces. At a little over 11 by 7 feet, this cell is smaller than any I’ve ever inhabited. You can’t pace in it.

DRM

• News spread quickly on the web today of the predicament faced by a woman in Norway, Linn, who has lost all access to the eBooks she legitimately purchased from Amazon. The story first emerged on a friend’s blog, where a sequence of e-mails from Michael Murphy, a customer support representative at Amazon.co.uk were posted. These painted a picture some interpreted as Amazon remotely erasing a customer’s Kindle, but in conversation with Linn I discovered that was not what had happened – something just as bad did, though.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• In case you missed the last two years on the internet and don’t know what ‘Tebowing’ is, it’s essentially genuflecting in prayer on one knee and bowing your head onto your clenched fist.

• We’ve been covering the absolutely ridiculous lawsuit of educational software firm Jenzabar against documentary filmmakers Long Bow for a few years now. The short version is that Long Bow made a documentary about some of the activists from the Tiananmen Square uprising, that was somewhat critical of them — including a protest organizer named Ling Chai. Chai later moved to the US and founded an educational software company called Jenzabar. She has regularly played up her history as a Tiananmen Square organizer in getting PR for the company. The filmmakers called into question some of her actions back during the protests, and also set up a webpage, associated with the movie, critical of Chai. Chai sued for defamation — which was quickly thrown out. However, she also had Jenzabar sue for trademark infringement, because the page about her on Long Bow’s site mentioned Jenzabar in the title and in the meta tags.

Copyrights

• The awesome folks over at Planet Money recently did a podcast about why Korean pop music (K-Pop) is taking over the world, using (obviously) Gangnam Style as exhibit number one. Of course, you could argue that one faddish song is not proof that they’re taking over the industry, so there’s a bit of journalistic hyperbole at work here — but the larger point comes clear in the podcast: the US’s music industry was built for the 20th century — a world of scarcity, limited distribution channels, hyperfocus on music and a strong reliance on copyright — but the Korean pop music landscape is focused on a much more 21st century strategy.

• After three days, the WIPO intersessional negotiations on copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities adjourned. On July 26, 2012, the SCCR negotiating text (SCCR 24/9) was 26 pages long, with 4051 words, and included 56 brackets, and 20 alternatives. The Final document on Friday (copy here) evening was 26 pages, with 47 brackets, and 22 alternatives.

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