● 01.16.13

● Links 16/1/2013: Kororaa 18 Coming, Embedded Linux Conference Videos

Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• It’s been a long time coming, but Bcache might finally be merged soon into the mainline Linux kernel. Bcache provides a block-layer SSD cache for Linux with write-back and write-through support for solid-state drives.

• Bcache allows for one or more solid-state drives (SSDs) to act as a cache for slower rotational hard disk drives. Write-back and write-through caching models are supported by Bcache while also working at the block level so it supports any file-system, unlike L2Arc with the ZFS file-system.

Graphics Stack

• In addition to killing the Xorg R300g state tracker target, on Sunday Marek Olšák pushed a number of other changes into the vintage “R300g” open-source graphics driver.

• Aaron Plattner at NVIDIA is still working on the open-source “PRIME Helpers” patches for the Linux kernel. This is work towards ultimately better handling PRIME/DMA-BUF for NVIDIA Optimus Technology on Linux.

Applications

• For those who aren’t aware Elementary is the top level building block for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). The EFLs reached their first stable release almost a year ago, but aside from E17 there haven’t been very many applications written using these libraries to date. Today I would like to highlight a few applications that are being developed using Python and Elementary that have reached a usable state.

Instructionals/Technical

• There’s a popular saying, almost an axiom, but one that is definitely provable within the limits of this universe, that if there’s a file that cannot be played in VLC, it is not meant to be played. Audio or video, VLC eats them all, no matter what encoding, what format, no matter if it’s a preview file downloaded in eMule or an online stream.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• During the holiday season, we all tend to drop our usual work tasks and take some time out and spend more time gaming. I am guilty of this and have well and truly caught up on lost gaming time over the past couple of weeks.

• And I hope you have too. Now is an exciting time for Linux and gaming as we are currently in the middle of a transition of traditional native gaming to a format of several different types. Where will the future of gaming go? And more importantly, what will it mean for Linux gamers? Currently, there are several different paths that have forked from the traditional method of installing games on to the operating system. Let’s examine what options we currently have and what could possibly be around the corner.

• Oceania is a new Kickstarter-backed MMORPG game being developed atop the visually impressive Unigine Engine. Native Linux support for this massively multiplayer online role playing game is being planned.

• Planned for release next week, on 23 January, is “The Cave” game and there will be a native Linux port when it debuts on Valve’s Steam platform.

• The Cave is a platform-adventure game being developed for all major computer platforms plus game consoles. The game is highly-anticipated amongst gamers since it’s original work and its development was led by a game designer known for several classic games from LucasArts.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Since late 2011 there has been Emscripten, the interesting project that allows generating JavaScript out of LLVM Bitcode. Emscripten thus allows for C/C++ code — and in effect anything else that can be lowered down into LLVM Bitcode — to be turned into JavaScript and run from a modern web-browser. Another project that has since come about is Emscripten-Qt, which is a port of the Qt tool-kit to JavaScript and HTML5 for use by web-browsers.

• The ultimate goal of Emscripten-Qt is to get any Qt application written in C++ to be translated to JavaScript/HTML5 for running in modern web-browsers. In a new blog post, it’s been shared by the lead Emscripten-Qt developer that the performance of this open-source translator is much improved, the keyboard support has been improved, and now there’s also a demo page for showcasing Qt on the web.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In GNOME 3.8 many improvements already have arrived, and by watching all the previous releases, Gnomers this time will surprise us with a magnificent desktop. Gnome 3.8 focuses on Settings and Allan Day wrote once again a superb article of all changes.

• Is everything looking cool? Nope, there are many things that aren’t ready yet and this time we will look the case of GNOME Software Center (GSC).

Distributions

• I am an artist and the sole maintainer of Dream Studio, a free and open source creative system. Though most of the software is maintained by others who maintain their own Ubuntu PPAs, which are included with Dream Studio by default (which is, itself, based on standard desktop Ubuntu), I create the default themes and overall look of Dream Studio, package the various multimedia categories, create the installer disc (and Dream Studio for Ubuntu), and write a couple of the programs and scripts included with the distribution.

• I’ve been a professional musician for 12 years and recording music for 17. I’ve also been creating graphics like band logos, concert posters, T-shirt designs, and CD packages for 10 years, and making music videos for the last 5. I feel I have a pretty good idea of what artists want in a creative studio, and because I believe in open source, I want to share the tools I use personally with the whole world, as so much software has been shared with me.

• If you’ve heard anything at all about Linux, you’ve probably heard of Linux distributions – often shortened to “Linux distros.” When deciding to use Linux – on a desktop computer or server – you’ll first need to choose a distro.

• Today I’m glad to announce a new development version of ROSA GNOME Editon – ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME Edition Beta. ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME Edition is fully community edition distro, that is not officially supported by ROSA. This distro is intended for people who love GNOME 3 and want to use it instead of official desktop based on Plasma Desktop.

• SolusOS is a desktop distribution based on Debian. It is co-founded by a couple of guys who were involved with Linux Mint Debian Edition.

• The sixth alpha of SolusOS 2 was released yesterday, with the final stable edition scheduled for release at an unspecified date. This is my first look at this distribution, and if you this article is your own introduction to it, here are the main features it brings to the table:

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Red Hat Family

• Online jewelry seller Ice.com Inc. this summer upgraded its e-commerce platform with open source software from vendor Red Hat, giving the retailer direct access to the software’s base code, which Ice can edit to make site changes or add features and functions. The move has enabled Ice’s in-house technology team to build new applications in weeks rather than months, without additional development expenses, and is already saving the retailer at least $250,000 in annual software and support fees, says Jason Ordway, Ice’s chief information and operations officer.

• Open source technology is everywhere. It’s in your phone, your laptop, and it may run even the website where you’re reading this article. Thousands of companies have placed open source software at the center of their business. But how do they make money from something being given away for free?

• Red Hat is the global leader in open source software solutions — and has a clear strategy in how to generate revenue. They package the popular open source operating system Linux as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and deliver it to enterprises with a promise of 10 years of support. Open source projects like Linux can literally change every day, so that’s a tall order.

• Red Hat peps up performance of multimedia applications on remote desktops with SPICE (Simple Protocol For Independent Computing Environments).

• A customer of mine recently switched from VMware Server to KVM, but they wanted better networking, which required installing and operating the Open vSwitch. Since they are using RHEL 5 (and I am using RHEL 6) we had to do some magic to install open vswitch. For RHEL 6 it is pretty simple. So here are the steps I took. All these were accomplished with a reference from Scott Lowe’s posts (and with Scott’s help via Twitter).

Fedora

• The Fedora Project released the latest version of the Fedora operating system today after being plagued by months of delays. Fedora 18 brings many new features and software updates to the table, the most visible of which being its implementation of the latest GNOME release.

• Much anticipated, Fedora 18, otherwise known as ‘Spherical Cow’ has finally arrived – here’s what to expect.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• For kicking off a new week of Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is a round of ARMv7 performance benchmarks using Linaro 12.12. The Linaro 12.12 release from December was compared to Ubuntu 12.10, Linaro 12.10, Fedora 17, and Arch Linux on the PandaBoard ES with its Texas Instruments OMAP4460 Cortex-A9 SoC.

Flavours and Variants

• Overall, it worked out well. But when we moved abroad, we bought a Canon PIXMA multifunction printer. Although it’s OK for what it is, there were a couple of problems with it. My wife could only print in colour and she couldn’t use the scanner, even with Canon’s drivers and software. I figured out that it was a problem with the device not playing nicely with Linux Mint 13 (or earlier versions).

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• According to Horace Dediu, unit sales of tablets will exceed that of PCs this year.

Android

• Google has promised a world of entertainment with its Google TV platform, claiming it can bring most any multimedia content to users’ TVs, through thousands of user-installable Android apps plus a full-featured Web browser. In this in-depth review, we’ll see how close Vizio’s Co-Star Google TV adapter box comes to meeting those high expectations.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The Nibbio Full-HD has a WUXGA (1920 x 1200 pixels) screen, a quad-core Exynos 4412 chipset complete with 2 gigs of RAM (making it Note II-worthy), 32 GB of internal storage and two cameras on each side (2 MP on the back and a VGA front-facing one).

Free Software/Open Source

• Open-source storage software is software that is available for download, typically at no cost, that can provide valuable data services to traditional storage hardware. These services include features we have grown accustomed to, such as thin provisioning, snapshots and cloning. Prior to open-storage software, these services typically came with the storage array that you purchased and were specific to that vendor’s products. Open-source storage software offers the advantage of letting you use commodity storage hardware.

Events

• The twelfth annual Samba eXPerience (SambaXP) conference will take place in Göttingen, Germany from 14 to 17 May under the auspices of the services company SerNet. The program of the international developer and user conference will feature Samba 4 as its main theme and on the second conference day, the developers will also celebrate the release at the official Samba 4 release party. The latest version of the open source file sharing and directory server was released in December.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google released their first beta of the forthcoming Chrome 25 web-browser today. The prominent addition to this web-browser update is supporting the Web Speech API, a JavaScript API for web developers to tap speech recognition and speech synthesis capabilities into the web-browser, including text-to-speech output.

Mozilla

• Developers like Mozilla, Google, Microsoft or Opera software need information on how their products are used and how well the underlying technologies work. The data that is gathered can provide the developing company with important information about optimizations in regards to stability, performance or functionality.

Healthcare

• Salvatore Iaconesi has brain cancer. And he’s doing something about it that most don’t: taking it into his own hands. And the hands of hundreds of others, as they all work together to cure his disease (and offer hope to others).

Business

• Algarvio is interesting because he fits the original mold of the open-source developer: he writes code because he loves it, and not because he gets paid to do so. It’s easy to overlook such developers, given years of analysis (by me and others) highlighting how GNOME, Linux, Apache, Mozilla and others are fueled by developers paid to contribute open-source code.

• These days, Canonical, Zarafa and Zentyal are specifically positioning their solution as an alternative to Microsoft’s defunct Small Business Server.

Semi-Open Source

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• HACKTIVISTS for Anonymous have released the documents for which the late internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz could have faced prison.

Standards/Consortia

• This week brought the release of IJG’s libjpeg v9 library, which brought noticeable lossless JPEG compression improvements so that it can even surpass PNG images on the compress lossless image size. While the improvements are nice, backwards incompatible changes with this JPEG library are causing concern for some users and developers.

• On the libjpeg-turbo mailing list is a lengthy message about concerns over libjpeg v9 from the libjpeg-turbo maintainer. For those out of the loop, libjpeg-turbo is a fork of libjpeg that brings SIMD instructions and other performance enhancements to provide for faster JPEG encoding/decoding. The libjpeg-turbo fork isn’t some uncommon fork, but it’s used by Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and many other software projects. This forked JPEG library also is found in use within Fedora.

Leftovers

• There are many anti-trust exhibits and other articles on the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco and how it went from the original SDK released at the end of 1989 to “Microsoft Munchkins” and other unethical attacks that was worse than the Joint Development Agreement between IBM and Microsoft (where they worked on OS/2 together) ever was, which is part of why it took 10 years after Intel introduced the 386 before 32-bit programming became popular.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Brezinski was deeply involved in the U.S. aspects to support Osama Bin Laden against the Russians in Afghanistan.

• Let’s start with the CIA’s 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, whose democratically elected government had nationalized the country’s oil industry. It couldn’t be oilier, involving BP in an earlier incarnation, the CIA, British intelligence, bribery, secretly funded street demonstrations and (lest you think there’d be no torture in the film) the installation of an autocratic regime that went on to create a fearsome secret police that tortured opponents for decades after. All of this was done in the name of what used to be called “the Free World.” That “successful” coup was the point of origin for just about every disaster and bit of “blowback” — a term first used in the CIA’s secret history of the coup — in U.S.-Iranian relations to this day. Many of the documents have been released, and what a story it is.

• That the CIA became the star: Is this art or entertainment?

• The Dolley Madison Boulevard entrance to CIA Headquarters was rendered impassable the morning of Saturday, Jan. 12, as more than three dozen people in orange prison jumpsuits and black hoods over their heads lined up to protest actions taken by the intelligence agency in recent years.

• #Members of Witness Against Torture planned the rally, their third at the CIA headquarters in recent years. In addition to the protesters in prison garb, others gathered to speak and pass out information about the activities they’re against.

• #”I wish this is something we could do every day, that would shut this place down,” said Jack McHale of Burke, who had been fasting for the past week as part of the group’s protest.”

• In an April 30 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, he claimed that the drone strikes were legal under the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the all-purpose pseudo-legal justification for war crimes and violations of the US Constitution used repeatedly by the Bush administration.

• The “substance” behind the criticism is, among other things, the fact that the specific drone war Obama is running is utterly lacking in transparency; bereft of adequate Congressional oversight; deadly to an unknown number of people; indefensible in its broad definition of militants; making enemies of countless foreigners, and killing “countless” innocent men, women and children. How does one literally acknowledge all those facts and then call the case of drone critics “substanceless”? The scary thing is that I think I actually know the dubious answer.

• [...]

• They’ve created for themselves a fake Catch-22.

• The use of drones by the U.S. to drop deadly explosives on innocent women and children in Pakistan and Afghanistan is a continuing abomination that has no place in a civilized society. These war crimes, which do nothing but create thousands of additional enemies for us, are carried out in secrecy and hidden for the most part from news broadcasts. If the people of this country could see with their own eyes the horrors being inflicted on these poor people who have never done anything against us, they would be outraged and demand that these actions end immediately.

Cablegate

• I doubt whether Henderson knows anything about Assange’s accusers’ political views. And would Henderson be putting pen to paper to criticise Assange if he was a right-wing blogger? No mention of the significant differences between the British and Swedish justice systems. Nor about the very different definitions of rape in Sweden.

• Henderson loves his left-wing conspiracy theories. David Hicks in my view was no left-winger but people supported him for his being denied justice in a military hell hole for five years. Nothing to do with his politics.

• Henderson’s claim that the absence of supporters outside the Ecuadorian embassy early on a cold Sunday morning suggested ”his celebrity status was diminishing” was plain silly.

• An Army private charged with sending U.S. secrets to WikiLeaks contends that lengthy delays have violated his right to a speedy trial.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs bankers delaying their bonus payments to avoid higher income tax rates have been condemned by Bank of England Governor Sir Mervyn King.

• King lashed out at the unconfirmed plans by Goldman in an appearance at the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee alongside other senior BoE staff.

• In recent days I’ve been tweeting critically about Republican leaders’ use of the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations. Someone asked me “In your world, how will spending ever get cut?”

• It’s a good question. I share Republicans’ (and most Americans’) concerns about our unsustainable long-term budget outlook, and so I can certainly see why people would see the GOP’s tactics as a reasonable response to a serious problem. To understand why I think the Republicans’ approach is illegitimate, it’s important to distinguish the kind of garden-variety government shutdown that occurred during the Clinton administration (and almost happened in April 2011) from what would happen if the United States government reached the debt ceiling, as it almost did in August 2011 and might do in February or March of this year.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Modern politics is often dominated by single-issue groups and parties, as recently seen in the UK with the fuel protests. This is seen by many as a counter to the power which big business wields, often overriding elected governments

• Needless to say, big businesses are well aware of this and have tried on several occasions to use the same technique for their own ends.

Privacy

• The House Judiciary Committee could move to regulate the use of drones to conduct surveillance over U.S. skies during this Congress.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights/Aaron Swartz

• For the major music labels the sales of recorded music represent the majority of their revenue, but a different picture emerges when looking at the income of individual musicians. A new survey among 5,000 U.S. musicians of different genres shows that on average only six percent of all revenue comes from recorded music. The research concludes that copyright law mostly affects the revenue of the highest-income musicians in a direct fashion.

• The RIAA is certain, piracy has a devastating impact on the music industry.

• It’s striking how similar his actions were to things I’ve done. About 10 years ago I “freed” maps produced by the U.S. Census that were legally in the public domain but were only distributed on CDs that cost $1500. I paid the money and put them on my own web site. If anyone ever thought to prosecute me it didn’t happen, and some anonymous technician at the Census kindly sent me updates for free for years afterward which I would put online. Now, the Census distributes that data on its own web site and I don’t have to.

• The Westboro Baptist Church had plans to stage a protest at the funeral of revered online activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last week at the age of 26, but those plans were apparently derailed by Anonymous’ threat to retaliate. As the Atlantic reports, Anonymous countered the church’s planned picketing by organizing “Operation Angel,” an online movement that called upon Swartz sympathizers to protect his funeral with a human shield.

• A powerful indictment of our justice system, the Swartz case exemplifies the sick hypocrisy of persecuting information activists while corrupt corporations and bankers get off easy.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.