● 11.24.12

● Links 25/11/2012: Fedora Progress, GMO Misses

Posted in News Roundup at 10:02 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education once hoped storage systems supporting the long-promised parallel Network File System technology would be the answer to its bandwidth woes. But, in April 2011, the Institute gave up the wait and purchased a proprietary system from Panasas Inc. to give its distributed scientific applications running on clustered servers the direct, parallel access to storage they needed.

• After having a few more days to run and benchmark the Samsung Chromebook, it continues to be a very interesting notebook computer. For $250 USD this notebook packs a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, which bears a dual-core 1.7GHz ARMv7 Cortex-A15 processor and delivers rather good performance results. Here’s some more performance numbers when loading up the Chromebook with Ubuntu Linux.

Server

• But in an interview James Gudeli, vice-president of business development, said future versions will come only on Linux.

Audiocasts/Shows

• I try to use GNU/Linux solutions whenever I can. However, one exception to this rule is the printing process in my home. I have one printer, and it is connected to my Windows 7 machine. As GNU/Linux becomes more popular in homes and businesses, it is becoming more common to see mixed GNU/Linux-Windows environments. Printing from GNU/Linux to Windows 7 using Samba did NOT work for me reliably, but I have found a method that works 100% of the time. In The Linux Week in Review 49, I’ll explain how to set up a 100% dependable GNU/Linux-to-Windows 7 printing network. The video at the end of TLWIR 49 demonstrates the entire setup process from beginning to end.

Kernel Space

• Another season, another Linux kernel. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes as kernel developers churn out new releases every two or three months. Within the next few weeks, Linux 3.7, the latest version of the code at the core of most mainstream open source operating systems — on Android phones as well as PCs and servers — will likely see its official release. And unlike some kernel updates, it will introduce a host of new features that end users may want to know about.

• We don’t cover Linux kernel development too frequently on The VAR Guy because it’s not something most end users are likely to care about or understand. Unless you’re deeply interested in how your computer works “under the hood” — and kudos to you if you are — chances are you don’t want to read about the latest innovations in Linux memory management or file systems.

Graphics Stack

• The Gdev open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time implementation is still being actively developed while PathScale’s “PSCNV” fork of the Nouveau driver hasn’t seen new commit activity in months.

• For those wanting to bring Wayland to proprietary/embedded platforms, Pekka Paalanen has written a long and detailed technical post about doing so.

• More code was pushed to Nouveau’s Linux kernel repository for their open-source DRM graphics driver. There’s improvements to NVE0/Kepler, a new Falcon engine base class, and a number of other changes that have piled up.

• It’s been nearly one year since AMD began rolling out their Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” graphics cards and while there is AMD Catalyst Linux driver support, the open-source driver support for this latest-generation AMD graphics hardware is still a disappointing mess.

• Pinchart — the developer who earlier this year called for deprecating the Linux frame-buffer — has been working on Renesas Mobile SoC display controller support when coming to realize that the Linux kernel already has several driver-based panel support solutions. In talking with other driver developers, he conceived the Generic Panel Framework for display devices. He didn’t want to use the kernel’s LCD framework because it’s tied to FBDEV and he wants this framework to be agnostic towards any subsystem whether it be DRM, FBDEV, or other areas.

• Released last week was NVIDIA’s Linux 4 Tegra R16.2, even after the R16.1 release barely got any publicity at all. The NVIDIA downloads area is still reflecting the old L4T R15 release from June, but while stumbling across the page today after wanting to load up new software on the NVIDIA Tegra 3 “Cardhu” tablet, I was pleased to see R16 is actually available.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Wine

Games

• Frank let everyone know via the Steam For Linux group that the Steam Beta has been expanded!

• “We’re making good progress finding and fixing issues that our users have reported so we’re expanding the beta by 5000 before the long holiday (US) weekend kicks in. New limited beta testers will have an email notification in their inbox.

• Have a great weekend everyone!”

Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop

• Earlier this month it was decided that GNOME 3.8 would get rid of the GNOME Shell Fallback mode used for running the desktop environment in a way similar to the GNOME 2 “classic” environment while also not requiring any 3D GPU/driver configuration. Earlier today there was basically a call for forking the GNOME Classic/Fallback code so it could live on, but now it’s been announced that some of the user-interface/experience elements will be brought to the GNOME 3.x world in a manner that’s more easy for users to optionally enable.

• With fallback mode due to be scrapped in the forthcoming GNOME 3.8 release, the development team wants to allow users to easily recreate the classic desktop using an included set of extensions. The existing fallback mode, which is used on systems without 3D acceleration, provides a GNOME 2-like interface with a task bar and application menu.

• It would be difficult to imagine a more vivid testament to many Linux users’ dislike of the new-style GNOME 3 desktop than the many alternative options that have sprung up in response.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Red Hat has announced that they’ve initiated a new project to bootstrap Fedora on the ARMv8 64-bit low-power architecture.

• The Fedora Project held a Thanksgiving Day Go/No-Go meeting for the long-delayed Fedora 18 Beta. The developers decided that the beta is finally in a condition where it’s ready to ship.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 12.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• Jolla, the Finnish company that was formed by many ex-Nokia employees that were responsible for their MeeGo work and the Nokia N9 smart-phone until Nokia jumped in bed with Microsoft for the Windows Phone, finally showcased its Linux OS today: Sailfish, a fork of MeeGo Linux.

• Sailfish uses the core distribution of Mer, implements the MeeGo API, its own in-house interface, and heavily promotes the use of HTML5 along with Qt and QML.

• Jolla, the mobile operating system start-up founded by Nokia refugees, has finally unveiled Sailfish, the smartphone operating system based on Linux.

• The company had been in “stealth mode” for almost a year before it launched in the summer, and has finally demonstrated a working prototype of Sailfish at the Slush start-up event in Helsinki, Finland today.

Android

• Replicant, a fully free version of the Android OS has released images 4.0 to give users the Ice Cream Sandwich experience. Also they have added support new devices i.e. the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S2. The new image also improves the hardware support on older devices that it already supported. Also improvements have been made to the telephony system which has become more stable and reliable.

• For those of you who are not familiar with Replicant, it is a project to provide totally free version of the Android OS. Android is a free Operating System but there are several components on the software stack like the device drivers that are proprietary. The Replicant project aims to replace these and provide a complete free Android Operating System.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Open Access/Content

• I recently had lunch with as staunch an advocate for open access as you’ll ever meet (I won’t name him, because it would be rude to attribute casual remarks to him without permission). We were talking about plans to mandate free and open publication of publicly funded scientific research. In the USA, there’s the Federal Public Research Act, and in the UK, there’s the coalition government’s announcement that publicly funded research should be made available at no cost, under a Creative Commons licence that permits unlimited copying.

• We’d been talking about Ben Goldacre’s excellent new book, Bad Pharma, in which Goldacre documents the problem of “missing data” in pharmaceutical research (he says about half of the clinical trials undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry are never published). The unpublished trials are, of course, the trials that show the pharma companies’ new products in unflattering lights – trials that suggest that their drugs don’t

Programming

• The benchmarks in this article are of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS loaded up on the Samsung Chromebook with the Linux 3.4 kernel. The GCC 4.6.3 compiler was compared to GCC 4.7.2 with a number of C, C++, and Fortran benchmarks. The same compiler flags were maintained within the test profiles during the benchmarking process. In a future article will be LLVM/Clang compiler benchmarks as well as performance results from the Cortex-A15 compiler tuning.

Leftovers

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Overall, Gordon stated that the criticism of the West Bank courts goes overboard and that the system tries hard to treat Palestinians decently and to give them a fair trial.

• The use of schools and other education institutions for military purposes by armed forces and non-state armed groups during wartime endangers students and their education around the world, said the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack in a study released today.

• The 77-page study, “Lessons In War: Military Use of Schools and Other Education Institutions during Conflict”, examines the use of schools and other education institutions for military purposes by government armed forces and opposition or pro-government armed groups during times of armed conflict or insecurity. Schools are used for barracks, logistics bases, operational headquarters, weapons and ammunition caches, detention and interrogation centers, firing and observation positions, and recruitment grounds.

• PIX11 viewer and parade-goer found that confetti that fell on him and friends had detectives’ social security numbers, bank info and unveiled undercover officers’ identities

• President Obama began his first term with a dramatic change of course for the CIA, issuing orders on his second day in office to close the agency’s secret prisons and ban harsh interrogation techniques.

• As Obama approaches a second term with an unexpected opening for CIA director, agency officials are watching to see whether the president’s pick signals even a modest adjustment in the main counterterrorism program he kept: the use of armed drones to kill suspected extremists.

• Just like it did in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA and U.S. military act on bad intel when designating targets for drone attacks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• More than 1,000 coal-fired power plants are being planned worldwide, new research has revealed.

• The decision to reuse or recycle an old desktop computer takes some consideration, but letting an old PC turn to electronic waste should never be an alternative.

• Blogging about climate change, or anything, can get repetitive fast. The reports come out and the news is tweaked, maybe, but familiar—the Arctic is still melting, average global temperatures are still rising, the oceans are still acidifying. This was the warmest month record ever recorded. No, this one was. No this. This.

• After the 1992 super-hurricane Andrew, South Florida was in a state of shock, similar to coastal New Jersey and New York today. Andrew was a compact, category five hurricane. In South Dade where the impact was strongest, the morning after the storm, sun and blue skies prevailed. The strike zone looked like a bomb had gone off.

• Civic leaders quickly rallied under the proud banner, “We Will Rebuild”. How would South Florida rebuild? the blue ribbon panel asked. Twenty years later, the coastal areas of New Jersey and New York are facing a similar question after Superstorm Sandy. This time, the answers may be very different.

• Twenty years ago in Florida, talk of sea level rise and climate change was in the margins. The subject had a place in the corner, where Chicken Little’s nursed their wounds, far from sight and off the political radar.

Finance

• Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence. Social Security is fiscally fit, prudently managed and does not add to the deficit because by law it must be completely detached from the federal operating budget. Obviously, it is needed more than ever in a time of increasing job insecurity and disappearing pensions. It helps our economy thrive and boosts the productivity of working Americans. And yet the sharks are in a frenzy to shred it in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” discussions.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Several opinion columns praising Russia and published in the last two years on CNBC’s web site and the Huffington Post were written by seemingly independent professionals but were placed on behalf of the Russian government by its public-relations firm, Ketchum.

• The columns, written by two businessmen, a lawyer, and an academic, heap praise on the Russian government for its “ambitious modernization strategy” and “enforcement of laws designed to better protect business and reduce corruption.” One of the CNBC opinion pieces, authored by an executive at a Moscow-based investment bank, concludes that “Russia may well be the most dynamic place on the continent.”

Censorship

• The arrest of two women on Monday over a comment on Facebook has sparked off widespread anger in India.

• One of the women had criticised the shutdown of Mumbai in her post, after the death of politician Bal Thackeray, while the other “liked” the comment.

• The women, accused of “promoting enmity between classes”, were released on bail after appearing in court.

Privacy

• After a student protested a pilot RFID tracking system in San Antonio, lawyers are now moving to stop expulsion.

• John Jay High School sophomore Andrea Hernandez was expelled from her high school after protesting against a new pilot program which tracks the precise location of all attending 4,200 students at Anson Jones Middle School and John Jay High School, according to Infowars.

• Students learn how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.

GMO

• A second species of worm has evolved to withstand pesticides in genetically modified crops, the latest escalation of the natural arms race spurred on by GMOs. “Armyworms” — so called because their infestation of fields resembles a military onslaught — were able to eat DuPont-Dow corn containing a pesticide protein without adverse effects, according to a field trial conducted in Florida this year.

• It has come to our attention that Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed healthcare organization in the United States, has advised its members against GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in food.

• In its Northwest Fall 2012 newsletter, Kaiser suggested membership limit exposure to genetically modified organisms.

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