● 11.29.12

● Links 29/11/2012: Splashtop, 15 Years of KDE

Posted in News Roundup at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Ever been 500 miles away from your Ubuntu Linux server and the only computing device you had to manage it was an Android smartphone or an Apple iPad? Splashtop is working on the program. for you: Splashtop Streamer for Linux.

• The beta Splashtop Streamer, when used with Splashtop 2 a remote desktop app. for Android devices, iPad, and iPhone and iPod Touch, will enable you to connect remotely to Ubuntu 12.04 systems. It does not support, at this time, other versions of Linux or Ubuntu. Splashtop 2 already supports Mac OS X and Windows.

• Splashtop for Ubuntu Linux is being released today and it claims to be 10x faster than VNC plus offering a host of other features.

Desktop

• I guess today is “Cyber Monday” or something like that? I’m looking for a reasonably priced laptop for my 13 year old daughter and saw that I had an email from Dell with some offers in it.

Kernel Space

• In Linux it is often said that every device is a file. To most of us a file is something just there. The kernel boys and girls actually tweak the bits right down to the hardware to make the magic of a file somewhere becoming accessible to the system, mounting the file.

• Last week, one developer found a recent version of Linux mounted files considerably slower than it usually did. He noticed because he mounted a lot of file-systems. When careful timing was done the difference was measured. Indeed mounts were an order of magnitude slower. By repeating the measurements for several versions and finally versions with and without certain patches/changes, the cause was found. Then discussion broke out about how to fix both issues, why the change had been made and how to do it differently.

Graphics Stack

• The Mesa state tracker as used by the Gallium3D hardware drivers has support for handling the creation of OpenGL 3.1 Core Profiles.

• Last week I shared some early benchmarks of the Samsung Chromebook while running Ubuntu Linux. The Samsung Chromebook is very interesting since it’s one of the few readily available computers on the market employing an ARM Cortex-A15 processor rather than Cortex-A9 or other models. The Cortex-A15 found in the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC proved to be very powerful and this Chromebook was quite a good deal with it being trivial to load Ubuntu Linux (and other distributions) while costing only $250 USD for this ARM-based laptop. In the past week I have carried out additional ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks, including a comparison of its performance the the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core ARM “Cardhu” tablet and several Intel Atom/Core x86 systems.

Applications

• Frogr is a handy Gnome application that allows you to manage your Flickr account right from the Linux desktop. It supports some basic features like uploading photos, adding descriptions, setting tags as well as managing sets and groups.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Dear Esther, a unique first person adventure game powered by Valve’s Source Engine, will soon be released as a native Linux client. Currently the company is seeking out testers to try out the Linux port.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Ubuntu and even Windows have been moving away from the traditional drop down menus which appear in application windows. Ubuntu borrowed the concept of Global Menus from OSX and integrates the menu items with the top panel. These menus appear, for the corresponding application or window, when a user takes the mouse to the top panel. Windows has split these menu items between what they call ribbon. Even applications like Google’s Chrome has switched from the traditional menus.

• Yesterday (November 27, 2012) was the 15th birthday of KDE e.V. (eingetragener Verein; registered association), the legal entity which represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. We published interviews with two of the founding members (Matthias Ettrich and Kalle Dalheimer) on the why, what and when of KDE e.V. in the beginning. Today, emeritus board member Mirko Böhm shares his thoughts in the video interview (transcript included). Tomorrow there will be interviews with current e.V. Board members.

• My favorite desktop environment just turned 15. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) has come a long way. There were good times and bad times, and I temporarily abandoned it during one of those bad times. But like many KDE users at that time, I was convinced that I had a good reason to.

• Lars Knoll has laid out his plans for branching the Qt 5.0 code-base and seeing the long-awaited update to the popular open-source toolkit see the light of day before year’s end.

• “Qt 5.0 is getting closer, and we’re still working to get the final release out before the end of the year. To make this easier and also allow new development towards 5.1 to happen again, we’ll branch the qt repositories during this weekend in preparation for the Release Candidate,” begins a new mailing list message by Knoll.

Distributions

• In preparation for the imminent release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.2-Randaberg, final validation testing was done on a variety of Linux operating systems in Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud. Many of the official Linux images were benchmarked from the c1.xlarge High-CPU Extra Large Instance, including Amazon Linux AMI 2012.09, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 11.

New Releases

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fedora 18 release may have been stuck by a lot of delays, but developers are already planning to release Fedora 19 in May next year. Fedora 18 beta was released just a few days back and it’s currently in testing stage. After some major bugs have been fixed, the final Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow” will be is expected to be released in January 2013.

• After almost two months’ delay, the Fedora Project has released the first and final beta of Fedora 18. The distribution, which is code-named “Spherical Cow”, includes the MATE desktop – a continuation of the classic GNOME 2 interface – in its repositories for the first time. Fedora 18′s default edition uses GNOME 3.6.2 as its interface and a separate KDE Spin provides the KDE Software Collection 4.9.3; Xfce 4.10 and version 1.6.7 of Linux Mint’s Cinnamon are also available from the distribution’s repositories.

• There is a significant amount of people unhappy with the direction of GNOME 3 who do not enjoy KDE and find LXDE too weak in features or who just like the look and feel of the old GNOME 2 desktop. Here are their options in Fedora 18, as they can be seen in the recently released Beta.

• Fedora 18 was not released on schedule, but knowing how the Fedora project operates, this was no surprise, because unlike other distributions, a new Fedora edition is almost never released until all major issues have been fixed.

• What makes this delay unique is the stable release will not hit public download mirrors until next year. And I think this marks the first time that a Fedora edition has been pushed back this far. But now that a beta edition has been released, here are some screen shots from test installations of the KDE and GNOME 3 editions.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Last week was Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, but for the last few weeks I have been on paternity leave, so I didn’t get a chance to blog about it. I just wanted to take a few minutes to offer some thanks.

• Choosing people for Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day is always tough as we have so many wonderful people who actively participate in our community. From our developers to docs writers to translators to testers to advocates and more, everyone puts their brick in the wall to build a strong, competative, and proficiant Ubuntu. We would be nothing without your contributions.

• Ubuntu may be lucky enough to become the first Linux distribution ready for gaming, thanks to Windows 8 and move from companies like Valve. Valve’s move inspired Nvidia to improve performance of Ubuntu with their driver updates. To improve the performace of Ubuntu itself (which is slow and sluggish due to Unity) , an Ubuntu developer Timo Jyrinki has written a patch for Compiz that will allow better full screen performance of games in Unity.

• The Compiz 0.9.8.6 update soon coming to Ubuntu 12.10 will enable “Unredirect Fullscreen Windows” by default in an effort to boost the OpenGL gaming performance of the Linux distribution when using the Unity desktop.

Flavours and Variants

• Bodhi Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution that features the Enlightenment desktop and a noticeably lack of included applications. It’s main goal is to offer a light-weight high-performing base on which to build your ideal desktop system. It recently turned two years old and founder Jeff Hoogland is looking back.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Coming off an abysmal quarter and generally lackluster performance of late, the phone maker could use a good marketing push.

• The question is, does Apple’s tablet market share – or Android’s for that matter – actually matter? Apple is certainly selling more of the darn things, but after a brief year’s relief, sales of Android alternatives are rising even more quickly.

• According to ABI Research, a market watcher, Apple’s share of the world tablet market fell in Q3 2012 to 55 per cent, the lowest share Apple has ever had since launching the iPad in 2010.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• As you’ll see in a moment, the answer to the question of which tablet is best is highly dependent on your own personal priorities relative to price, performance, screen resolution, and other issues. To get the ball rolling, let’s compare the four tablets’ out-of-box homescreens.

• Shortly after the iPad’s introduction in 2010, there were predictions that Android would eventually overtake Apple’s market share in the tablet market the same way that Android smartphones had done with the iPhone. But early predictions tended to favor 2015 or 2016 as the crossover point at which Android tablets (from a variety of OEMs) would actually overtake iPad sales in terms of broad market share. Others still saw Apple dominating even longer – a 2011 Gartner study suggested Apple would keep 47 percent of the market in 2015, with Android coming up with just 38 percent.

Free Software/Open Source

• An explosion in the number of open source technologies and projects is driving the new paradigm of application development in the mobile, cloud and big data era.

• Of course, one would have to live under a rock not to notice the huge “app” industry around smartphones and tablets.

• But Android is not the only open source game in town driving the innovation. jQuery, Phonegap, Hadoop, Sencha , Apache Cordova, dojo, Ehcache, Riak, Munin and OpenStack are among the many key open source technologies driving the new wave of innovation across the consumer space and enterprise markets, according to Forrester Research.

• NYSE Technologies has announced the launch of the OpenMAMA Enterprise Edition as a part of its Open Platform which also features the Open Market Data Model (OpenMDM) and an upcoming OpenMAMA Enterprise Edition certification program.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla is a non-profit organization with a mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, and we are dedicated to building the Web as a powerful platform for compelling app experiences.

Databases

• The developers of MongoDB at 10gen have announced that they are making MongoDB’s APIs report failed writes by default. The previous default behaviour of the open source NoSQL database had been to return from API calls as soon as possible, without reporting errors, because the design of MongoDB was predicated on the API working with an HTTP-based web server and a pattern was developed of checking for write errors for an entire page being loaded.

• EnterpriseDB is gaining customers with its cheap database alternative to wares offered by much larger companies such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

• For the past eight years, Bedford, Mass.-based EnterpriseDB has been selling add-ons for a free, open-source database management software called PostgreSQL.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced its 2012 Giving Guide, a resource for people looking for ethical electronics gifts this holiday season.

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

Open Access/Content

• As a child I remember being fascinated by science, and developed an overwhelming urge to learn how everything worked. I loved science fiction, seeing authors explore the very edges of possible futures, extrapolating out the possibly feasible to its very limits. As I grew older and began a degree in Physics, I became even more certain I wanted to be a scientist and had a vision of what real science was all about. I remember the first few months of my PhD work being quite disappointing, learning that papers often lacked the necessary details to reproduce key reactions, or that I didn’t have access to certain papers due to their age or the journal they had been published in.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• EFSA has now released its final assessment of the Seralini study. It has not changed any of its initial critical responses to the study, which Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) rightly characterizes in its new report (see the extracts below) as resembling “more a compilation of other’s criticisms than an attempt to clarify the issue in the public interest; more like a prosecution than an evaluation.”

• CEO also notes that the final report’s conclusions are in stark contrast with the conclusions of at least two of the national regulatory agencies that were also involved in the assessement of Seralini’s study which have called for additional research and a review of current risk assessment guidelines.

Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• When U.S. intelligence officials testified behind closed doors two weeks ago, they were asked point blank whether they had altered the talking points on which U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice based her comments about the Benghazi attacks that have turned into a political firestorm.

• Who within the Obama administration deleted mention of “terrorism” and “al-Qaeda” from the CIA’s talking points on the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi?

• It isn’t the only unanswered question in the wake of the tragedy, but it’s proven to be one of the most confounding.

• The covert strikes are unpopular in Pakistan, where the government in public denounces them as a violation of sovereignty, but US officials believe they are a vital weapon against Islamist militants.

• Parliamentary Ombudsman Petri Jääskeläinen plans to examine suspicions of Finland’s possible role in secret prison flights arranged by the CIA.

Cablegate

• Giant US financial intermediary Visa is partly relying on the Gillard government’s claims that WikiLeaks acted “illegally” to justify its ongoing financial blockade of the whistleblower and media outlet, new material obtained by WikiLeaks has revealed.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Volatility in climate has drawn the attention of policy makers for a decade. But as so often is the case, a dramatic event like superstorm Sandy – the largest storm to hit New York since the colonial era – has punctured the psyche of the densely populated East Coast, including the New York-Washington, DC axis where U.S. policy is made.

Finance

• There is something appealing to human beings about a small individual taking on a powerful adversary, and most people are aware of the David and Goliath story where a small insignificant boy took on and defeated a powerful giant because his unwavering faith gave him courage and conviction that right would overcome might. For the past eleven-and-a-half years, one American with unwavering faith in the judicial system has taken on a modern day giant without respite based on a belief that justice is due diligence and that in America, right overcomes might. However, in this circumstance, the system that exists to ensure justice prevails has conflated power with right and gave an already powerful giant a wall of separation from the law, and yet one small individual continues battling for justice against a behemoth.

• On September 17, the German Labor Ministry sent a draft report “on Poverty and Wealth” to the other ministries to be rubber-stamped. Only the final report, once sanctified by Chancellor Angela Merkel, would be made public. The draft was supposed to remain hidden. But it seeped to the surface almost immediately. And it was hot. Too hot.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Several Wisconsin legislators are attending this week’s conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) at the Grand Hyatt in Washington D.C., and likely doing so on corporate-funded “scholarships,” which the Center for Media and Democracy believes violate state ethics and lobbying laws. The three-day meeting, held November 28-30, will bring state legislators together with corporate lobbyists and special interests to craft “model” bills – many of which will likely be introduced in the ALEC-majority Wisconsin legislature in the session that begins in January.

• Fox News was publicly skewered and filleted this week by one of their own guests, Thomas E. Ricks, an expert on military and defense policy and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. His interview was abruptly and unceremoniously ended after he calmly tagged Fox as “a wing of the Republican Party.”

• This week in Washington, DC, Jeb Bush’s “Foundation for Excellence in Education” (FEE) is meeting just five blocks away from the post-election conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the controversial corporate bill mill working on profitizing public education among other legislative changes, but the ties between the two groups are even closer.

Censorship

• For a while, Techdirt has been tracking Iran’s continuing efforts to throttle its citizens’ access to troublesome materials online. These have included blocking all audio and video files, and even shutting down Gmail, albeit temporarily. But stopping people accessing sites in this way is not the only approach

Civil Rights

• Wearing the wrong color socks, talking back and being late landed young Cedrico Green in jail. The Justice Department says there are many more students like him.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• After a long battle with the international arm of the MPAA, Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has called it quits. The site had been operating under adverse conditions, not least almost total censorship by a court-ordered ISP blockade in the UK. Add to this a climate of fear driving individuals providing vital services away from the site, plus legal action against PayPal aimed at Newzbin2′s UK-based payment provider, and the site’s operators have decided to shut down.

• If you’re watching an illegally downloaded movie, someone could be watching you.

• A forensic software company has collected files on a million Canadians who it says have downloaded pirated content.

• And the company, which works for the motion picture and recording industries, says a recent court decision forcing Internet providers to release subscriber names and details is only the first step in a bid to crack down on illegal downloads.

• Creative Commons is celebrating 10 years of helping artists, writers, technologist, and other creators share our knowledge and creativity with the world. We’ve been able to maximize our digital creativity, sharing, and innovation. For example, governments are using Creative Commons for their open data portals.

• A new copyright bill pending approval by the German Parliament would require search engines and other commercial actors to pay a license for using headlines or short snippets from their articles. The publishers essentially want a piece of the revenue generated by the inclusion of their news items in search results. The publishers argue that German copyright laws are insufficient and don’t allow them to use the copyright laws in a systematic manner against the widespread re-use of that information.

• Prenda Law, one of the law firms involved in the ongoing mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US, is using a recent TorrentFreak article to threaten alleged BitTorrent downloaders. While we generally encourage people to promote our content, being used as a tool in extortion-type letters is not something we’re happy with. As a result we saw no other option than to troll the copyright troll.

• We heard rumors of this a couple weeks ago from people involved in some of the six strikes program at various ISPs, but the six strikes effort, already delayed from its original planned starting date of July until around now, has been pushed back again until “the early part of 2013.”

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