● 11.21.12

● Links 22/11/2012: New KDE, GNOME 3.x Update

Posted in News Roundup at 8:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• A couple of years ago I helped a small business convert their old virus infected Windows XP computer into a Linux Mint 11 (Katya) Xfce. This was done after a long time of trying to help them keep that machine running at a half-decent speed – the virus being the last straw that finally had them make the switch to Linux. Amazingly, well maybe not to the Linux faithful but to most people, this transition not only went smoothly but was actually extremely well received. Outside of a question or two every couple of months I have heard of no issues whatsoever. Sadly Linux Mint 11 has recently reached its end of life stage and so the time has come to find a replacement.

Desktop

• Google has pushed an update for its dev channel brining it to version, 25.0.1324.1, (Platform versions 3196.1.0 for most platforms and 3196.2.0 for Samsung Chromeboxes) for all Chrome OS devices.

• This build brings numerous improved features to Chrombooks including support for extended desktop and mirrored displays.

Server

• An advanced Linux malware strain can automatically hijack websites hosted on compromised servers to attack web surfers with drive-by-downloads.

• The software nasty targets machines running 64-bit GNU/Linux and a web server, and acts like a rootkit by hiding itself from administrators. A browser fetching a website served by the compromised system will be quietly directed via an HTML iframe to malicious sites loaded with malware to attack the web visitor’s machine.

Kernel Space

• Choosing the right filesystem for a particular job can be a difficult task. We tested seven candidates and found some interesting results to make an administrator’s choice easier.

Graphics Stack

• Various improvements to the major open-source Linux graphics drivers will be landing with the Linux 3.8 kernel in the months ahead.

• David Airlie updated his “drm-next” Git repository last night with all of the latest code bits ready to be merged for the Linux 3.8 kernel when its merge window opens in the next few weeks following the Linux 3.7 release. He also sent out an email confirmation.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• While this week marks one year since the Doom 3 (id Tech 4) game engine was open-sourced under the GPL, there still isn’t too much adoption by open-source game developers. The few forks of the id Tech 4 code-base also aren’t seeing frequent activity.

• The ioDoom3 project was announced by the ioquake3 developers immediately following id Software’s announcement of the Doom 3 source-code drop. While backed by developers of ioquake3 and on Icculus.org where the the ioq3 engine continues to be wildly-used and deployed in various open-source titles, the ioDoom3 project hasn’t taken off nearly as much.

• Earlier today I was exchanging tweets with Terry Cavanagh (creator of VVVVVV) about his new game Super Hexagon, which has just had Windows and MacOS versions announced.

Desktop Environments

• WMO figures show levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke a new record last year, at 390.9 parts per million

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• ven if you have no prior experience with this type of software, KMyMoney is a win-win solution. The interfaces used in most of those other Linux finance and banking tools are much more cumbersome. KMyMoney has a much lower learning curve. Finance and banking apps each have their diverse purposes, and one size definitely does not fit all users.

• Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

GNOME Desktop

• In my test of the Fedora 18 Alpha release, I was left thinking the “connect to server” feature in the Nautilus file manager disappeared in versions 3.5.x and 3.6.x of the GNOME desktop environment.

• Thanks to readers, I learned that “connect to server” has moved to a separate application that you call from the shell with the not-so-friendly name Nautilus-connect-server, as seen in the image above.

Distributions

New Releases

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is moving ahead with its OpenStack-centric cloud computing plans. The company has been steadily working on an enterprise-class version of the OpenStack platform. It will arrive in a fully supported version early next year, but you can already get a preview edition, based on the “Essex” OpenStack release. And now, Red Hat has announced the availability of its new OpenStack Technical Preview based on “Folsom.”

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The Linux Mint team today announced the release of version 14, codenamed “Nadia.” Today’s release ships in MATE and Cinnamon desktop varieties for 32 and 64-bit architectures. “After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience.”

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Finnish startup reveals Sailfish OS UI for the first time and announces deal with ST-Ericsson

• Jolla has signed a deal with Finland’s 3rd largest mobile operator DNA to market the MeeGo based smartphones in the Finnish market. According to Mobile Business Briefings, “The firm has struck a deal with Finland’s number-three mobile operator DNA, which has agreed to market Jolla smartphones based on its MeeGo-based ‘Sailfish’ platform in Finland “as soon as they enter the market.””

• Jolla has also partnered with ST-Ericsson for its chipsets. Sailfish OS already supports multiple chipset and further support is continuously being built for all the major chipsets. The company already has a deal with Chinese D.Phone to distribute Jolla powered devices in China.

Android

• The 32GB version of Google Nexus 10 is now in stock. I just ordered mine. The tablets (and Nexus 4) were sold out within a few minutes of going on sale. It did leave bruised experience for those who were waiting for these devices.

• Smartphones and tablets powered by Google’s Android software are devouring the mobile gadget market, eating into Apple’s turf by feeding appetites for innovation and low prices, analysts say.

• The Android operating system powered nearly three out of four smartphones shipped worldwide in the recently ended quarter as the mobile platform dominated the market, according to industry trackers at IDC.

• A thorn in the side of many free software loving Android users, the Chinese MIUI ROM has long been accused of riding on the success of Android without fully complying with the free and open source licenses which it’s based on. MIUI’s developer, Xiaomi, has managed to cultivate a considerable fanbase for their ROM, adding insult to injury for many opponents. Xioami has even been so bold as to put their own phone into production, running (naturally) their license-violating software.

• Motorola Mobility has announced a new Intel Atom smartphone for the Chinsese market, the MT788.

Free Software/Open Source

• OSSEC is Free Software, a GPL-licensed, host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) that operates on a client-server model. Its development is sponsored by Trend Micro, a software security outfit based in Tokyo, Japan.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla is currently preparing the release of Firefox 17.0 stable which will be later out today if no last minute issues emerge that delay the roll out of the update to all users of the stable version of the browser. We look at what’s new in Firefox 17 back when the Aurora channel got updated to the version, and the majority of features mentioned in that initial article made their way into the stable version as well. Aurora releases are about 12 weeks ahead of stable releases so that some things can change along the way.

• Mozilla is out today with the Firefox 17 open source browser release, providing new user-facing features as well as improved security.

• Among the key highlights of the release is the SocialAPI that Mozilla first began testing at the end of October. The SocialAPI provides a new type of integration capability for Firefox, enabling a very vibrant user experience for social networking services.

• The first social network that Firefox is integrating with is Facebook, with more to come in the future. The initial beta period for the SocialAPI was a critical part of the development process.

CMS

• Open source Learning Management Systems have become extremely popular in recent years, but what does open source mean? Open Source technology is technology where the source code is “open”, that is, the code is available to the public and free to be modified. Improvements can be made by developers and it can be spread or sold to the wider community. So, why should an organization choose an open source Learning Management System as opposed to a homegrown or proprietary Learning Management System?

Public Services/Government

• They’ve done it. Freiburg, Germany, has voted 25 to 20 with 2 abstentions to upgrade M$’s office suite rather than OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice. The twits were using M$ Office 2K and OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, both obsolete versions… The vote could have been closer because 2 of the “yes” votes were Greens. It could have been 24 to 23 against…

• The German city of Freiburg will end its use of open source suite OpenOffice and is switching back to using a proprietary alternative The city also abandon’s its default use of the Open Document Format, confirms Green Party city council member Timothy Simms.

Openness/Sharing

Programming

• ARM’s AArch64 back-end for LLVM to handle the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture is working, but there’s still more work ahead of the hardware’s general availability in about one year’s time.

• There’s AArch64 in GCC’s code-base with version 4.8 following months of development and its approval by the steering committee. Initial AArch64 architecture support was also merged into the Linux 3.7 kernel. However, on the LLVM/Clang side there hasn’t been much public-facing news.

Leftovers

Hardware

• This year’s Black Friday is expected to be the catalyst for tablets to pass notebook shipments for the first time in North America, a trend which we expect to continue for the foreseeable future .

Health/Nutrition

• Every year for the past 13 years, biotechnology giant Monsanto Company has sued about 11 farmers per year for patent infringement of their genetically modified corn and soybean seeds. Many of these farmers have had to pay a settlement to the corporation even when their fields were accidentally contaminated with GM seeds from a neighboring farm. Monsanto simply outspends the defendants, dedicating $10 million a year and 75 staffers for the sole purpose of investigating and prosecuting farmers. Farmers who have sued Monsanto back have been soundly defeated.

Security

• Greek police have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing the personal data of roughly two thirds of the country’s population, police officials in Athens said on Tuesday.

• The 35-year old computer programmer was also suspected of attempting to sell the 9 million files containing identification card data, addresses, tax ID numbers and license plate numbers. Some files contained duplicate entries, police said.

• The United States used U.S.-Israeli spy software to hack into the French presidential office earlier this year, the French cyber-warfare agency has concluded, according to the newsmagazine l’Express.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• What we learned on the eve of the AUSMIN talks is that a document I have asked about at Senate Estimates and in Senate question time does in fact exist. This document outlines the roles and rights and responsibilities of the United States forces to be stationed in Australia, and it is not being made public, according to the government, and will not be made public. We know this thanks to a freedom of information request made by Fairfax journalist Dylan Welch, a request that was of course denied. That means that everything we know about the formal legal mechanics of the most significant deployment of foreign troops and equipment on Australian soil since the Second World War is instead contained in the Status of Forces Agreement signed with the US government in May 1963. I have asked a number of times in Defence estimates whether this document would be reviewed or amended, figuring that basing US Air Force fighters and bombers at Tindal, a Marine Corps contingent at Robertson, increased access to ports and air weapons ranges all over the country would surely require amendments to a document that went to press in the middle of the Cold War effectively to cover intelligence facilities only. With a straight face I was told the document would not be reviewed, and now we know why-an entirely new document has been drafted. At least the ambiguities in the Status of Forces Agreement are right out in the open; this current 2012 legal agreement is secret. The government has no intention of releasing it, apparently by request of the United States. My observation on this, apart from the evident insult to Australian sovereignty that our government is uncritically accommodating, is that this is the age of the leak.

• As representatives of the people, members of the cabinet have no duty to present their vision for the futures of the country, and they can continue with this bloody cycle, with no end in sight. But we, as citizens and human beings, have a moral duty to refuse to participate in this cynical game. That is why I have decided to refuse to be inducted into the Israeli Army on the date of my call-up order, November 19, 2012.

• Analysis shows full extent of climate sceptic’s financial interests in oil industry and places committee role under further scrutiny

Cablegate

Finance

• “We pay our taxes!” independent booksellers are telling customers across the country in the latest fightback against Amazon.

• A new high-street campaign from the Booksellers Association refers, tongue in cheek, to MPs’ quizzing last week of executives from Amazon, Starbucks and Google over their tax affairs. The companies were accused of diverting hundreds of millions of pounds of profit to tax havens – Amazon was alleged by MPs to avoid UK taxes by reporting its European sales through a unit based in Luxembourg.

• Former prime minister sentenced to 10 years in prison for graft as Croatia attempts to root out corruption ahead of EU entry

Censorship

Privacy

• Fashion brands are deploying mannequins equipped with technology used to identify criminals at airports to watch over shoppers in their stores. Retailers are introducing the EyeSee, sold by Italian mannequin maker Almax SpA, to glean data on customers much as online merchants are able to do.

• Five companies are using a total of “a few dozen” of the mannequins with orders for at least that many more, Almax Chief Executive Officer Max Catanese said. The 4,000-euro ($5,130) device has spurred shops to adjust window displays, store layouts and promotions to keep consumers walking in the door and spending.

Civil Rights

• Charges dropped against Rimsha Masih, who was accused of burning pages of the Qur’an, after protests from Islamic clerics

• With more and more WalMart workers joining protests and threatening to join a nationwide walkout on Black Friday, the company has filed a complaint with the National Relations Board arguing that workers seeking a decent wage and reasonable working conditions have “created an uncomfortable environment and undue stress on Walmart’s customers, including families with children.” So if the lousy syntax wasn’t bad enough, the company that by some estimates pays its CEO more in one hour than it pays its retail employees in a year – a wage so low that most of its employees with kids live below the poverty line – is saying they’re worried about families with children? R-i-g-h-t. They also threaten to hold those uppity workers “accountable.” Accountable?! Now there’s an idea. More on why this strike matters. And a reminder: If you’re shopping, go local.

• Sen. Patrick Leahy has abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power — including warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail accounts — than they possess under current law.

• The Vermont Democrat said today on Twitter that he would “not support such an exception” for warrantless access. The remarks came a few hours after a CNET article was published this morning that disclosed the existence of the measure.

• A vote on the proposal in the Senate Judiciary committee, which Leahy chairs, is scheduled for next Thursday. The amendments were due to be glued onto a substitute (PDF) to H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.

Internet/Net Neutrality

DRM

• “3. Complete control by device owners Device owners must be in complete control of (able to manage and monitor) all the trusted computing security systems of their devices. As part of exercising control over their devices, device owners must be able to decide how much of this control to delegate to their users or administrators. Delegating this control to third parties (to the device manufacturer or to hard- or software components of the device) requires conscious and informed consent by the device owner (i.e., also with full awareness of possible limits on availability due to measures taken by the third party to whom control options were delegated).

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Supreme Court of Canada this morning shocked the pharmaceutical industry by voiding Pfizer’s patent in Canada for Viagra. The unanimous decision provides a strong reaffirmation of the policy behind patent law, namely that patents represent a quid pro quo bargain of public disclosure of inventions in return for a time limited monopoly in the invention. The Supreme Court describes it in this way:

• The patent system is based on a “bargain”, or quid pro quo: the inventor is granted exclusive rights in a new and useful invention for a limited period in exchange for disclosure of the invention so that society can benefit from this knowledge. This is the basic policy rationale underlying the Act. The patent bargain encourages innovation and advances science and technology.

Copyrights

• While the Canadian Minister of trade is in Brussels this week to finalize CETA, and as Ministers just answered to the letter sent to the French government by La Quadrature du Net, still no evidence confirm that repressive measures were removed from the current text.

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