● 02.07.13

● Links 7/2/2013: October Release for Ubuntu Phones, New Chromebooks

Posted in News Roundup at 9:31 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Arctic has introduced a Linux-powered system specifically designed to run XBMC’s popular Media Center app.

• It was deep in the heart of 1996 and I’d had enough of Windows. After a bit of Alta Vista searching, I discovered something that would completely change my life. That something? Linux. It was Caldera Linux 1.0 and it was a challenge. You’re probably assuming I was studying computer science in the dank basement of some elite university (maybe writing my dissertation on super computers or UNIX). Wrong. I was an actor and a writer. Strange bedfellows, but I was also a big fan of the underdog. That was enough to spur on a curiosity that would, eventually, land me a gig writing with Techrepublic. At the time, there were few tech writers who had a firm enough grasp of the Linux operating system. And honestly, I got lucky. How? I connected with a guru. His name was Mark and he introduced me to AfterStep and the command line. Had it not been for that connection, I probably would have given up on trying to keep my modem consistently connected to the network. With Mark’s help, I wrote my first bash script that kept watch on my system to retain my network connection. Luck? Maybe. But I like to chalk it up to fate.

Desktop

Server

• IBM’s Power server architecture has typically been thought of as a technology for really large enterprises and huge data center deployments. IBM now sees a wider deployment future for Power.

Kernel Space

• Project PIANO was merged today into the Coreboot code-base, which is for mainline TianoCore boot support.

• TianoCore is the open-source implementation of UEFI from Intel. TianoCore itself doesn’t provide for any hardware initialization support but does complement Coreboot quite nicely for completing the stack.

Graphics Stack

• An AMD Catalyst “13.2 Beta 3″ driver has surfaced on the Internet for Linux users relying upon this binary blob for graphics acceleration on Radeon and FirePro graphics hardware.

• While there’s been early code available for several months, Mesa support for OpenGL Geometry Shaders still isn’t ready for merging into mainline Mesa.

• While Mesa 9.1 has picked up many features over the past six months, OpenGL Geometry Shaders won’t be found in the release due out by late February.

• With the Green Island Compositor, the Hawaii Desktop is looking to be the very first Wayland-friendly desktop environment for Linux.

Applications

Proprietary

• According to ExtremeTech, Microsoft is taking a “meaningful look” at releasing a full Linux port of Office in 2014. That would be quite something and it makes perfect sense. It’s apparent that Office, as proprietary software, will not regain the luster of its enterprise glory years. Open sourcing Office gives the company a window, no pun intended, into collaborating with a developer community outside the .NET universe.

• In case you haven’t noticed, rumors are circulating around the web that Microsoft has plans to release a version of its Office suite of productivity applications for Linux. The rumor appears to have gotten started at a Linux conference in Germany, and Microsoft has not said anything about it. The question is, do Linux users really want Office?

• This latest rumor about Office joins other ones that claim that versions of Office for the iPad, iPhone and Android are imminent. While Microsoft remains mum, there are some users of all these platforms who would welcome a version of Office for them, and there are businesses standardized on Linux and allowing Android on smartphones that would likely buy licenses for Office on these platforms.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows “Apps” on Linux, Mac OSX, BSD and soon Android on ARM devices.

• I reported that you can now run an Android operating system on Windows x86 devices so I guess it is fair that Android users can run Windows programs (not the Operating system) on their devices.

Games

• Id Software technical guru John Carmack has said he doesn’t expect to provide Linux support for any future games.

• Although there are a lot of people saying that the Android-based Ouya gaming console will be hindered by not having cutting-edge games available for it as it launches, the console continues to generate major buzz, and has been seen in videos all around the web. Ouya is billed as “a new kind of video game console” and first became famous for drawing millions of dollars in crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• QupZilla is a not often spoke of web-browser that is written in Qt and supports Qt5 while using the WebKit rendering engine.

• The Calligra team announced today the availability of Calligra 2.6 – the latest release of the office suite. While there have been feature enhancements and bug fixes like usual, this release introduces a new app called Calligra Author. It is designed keeping in mind a distraction free writing mode which is basically a word processing tool but designed specifically for activities like book writing.

• The Calligra developers have released version 2.6 of their office suite for the KDE desktop and its mobile-focused Calligra Active version, which is QML-based. Calligra 2.6 is the first production version of the modular office package that includes Calligra Author, a writing and editing tool specifically for e-book creation. With Calligra Author, the developers hope to meet the needs of groups like novel authors who want to write long texts but do not need complicated formatting. The tool is also supposed to take into account the unique aspects of e-books.

• The KDE team has announced the release of much awaited 4.10, which caused some ruckus within the Arch community. This is an important release for the KDE user-base as it not only brings massive performance enhancements but also introduces many new features.

• KDE keeps the desktop relevant and powerful as it doesn’t force an interface designed for phones or tablets on desktop users. KDE offers different GUI environments for different form factores. There is Plasma Desktop for desktop computers,Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and “Plasma Active” for smartphones and tablets. So a desktop or tablet user doesn’t have to make any compromise.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Yet another development version of the upcoming GNOME Boxes 3.8, a sophisticated application to easily and quickly access remote or virtual systems on the controversial and popular GNOME 3 desktop environment, has been announced last evening, February 5.

• GNOME Online Accounts 3.7.5 has been released earlier today, February 6, and it brings fixes for 8 bugs found in previous releases, as well as numerous updated translations.

Distributions

New Releases

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• Fedora 18 was published a month ago and now it is available in versions for the ARM architectures known as ARMv5tel and ARMv7hl in the Linux space. The Fedora Project is providing pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3).

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The open-source operating system for PCs and TVs is making its way to mobile. Look for the first phones to arrive in the fall.

• Smartphones running the open source Ubuntu operating system will be available to customers beginning in October 2013, according to Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd. Canonical provides services for corporate customers using Ubuntu open source software. Application developers will have access to the smaartphone operating system, which is optimized for the Galaxy Nexus handset manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co. , in late February.

• One of Linux’s biggest players is heading to mobile. The new Ubuntu has a gesture heavy interface and will be entering the the market amid a number of mature operating systems. We have reservations about how it will fair in the crowded mobile market but are interested to see how Canonical’s open-source OS develops. Follow along here as Canonical works to bring mobile Ubuntu into consumers’ hands.

Devices/Embedded

• An even cheaper Raspberry Pi has gone on sale in Europe with less stuff on it so the tiny ARM-compatible Brit-puter can consume even less power.

• The Model A Pi was touted during the hype-gasm surrounding the Raspberry Pi’s launch in February last year. But it was the Model B circuit board that went on sale first, and went on to sell a million units to date, whereas the A-series is now available.

Phones

Ballnux

• While LG’s current flagship, the Optimus G, has been selling in the US for a while, and hitting Europe and China, we’ve been hearing about an upcoming upgrade, the Optimus G Pro, for a while now, and even saw the handset confirmed in promo materials with renders.

• Over in Japan the G Pro version for NTT DoCoMo actually got announced recently with a 5″ Full HD display, and 3,000 mAh battery, but there was speculation for another one in the pipeline, with a larger, 5.5″ display.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• A group of journalists are announcing the launch of their breakthrough open source solution for the problem many writers and journalists have of how to take data in PDFs or images and easily convert it to a spreadsheet or other usable format.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

SaaS/Big Data

• Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them available to other developers. Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them.

CMS

• Drupal 8 will continue the open source project’s move beyond being purely a content management platform, Drupal’s creator, Dries Buytaert, told the inaugural DrupalCon Sydney, held in Coogee.

• The next version of Drupal, Drupal 8, is due to enter feature freeze on 18 February, followed by a code freeze on July 1. Drupal 8 will be released at the end of the year or “whenever it’s ready”, Buytaert said. So far more than 4700 patches have been submitted for Drupal 8, by more than 1000 contributors, he said.

Business

• I had the privilege to interview Ray Stoeckicht, the co-founder of an exciting new free software/open souce company creating Zurmo. Zurmo is a “social CRM”: a program aimed at making CRM fun (if you know something about CRM, you will know that the word “fun” never seems to associate with CRM).

• Anturis is an IT-monitoring service for the small business market (SMB) that launched this week at the Parallels Summit with the intent of providing a service that fits between enterprise software and open source offerings. It looks like a decent service, but its critiques of open source offerings are disingenuous.

Funding

BSD

• New features and other enhancements for the performance benchmarking of *BSD operating systems have been committed with the forthcoming release of Forsand.

• It was just last week that Phoronix Test Suite 4.4-Forsand Milestone 1 was released along with some impressive new/updated benchmarks (Wine benchmarks too) while ready for testing today is the second development milestone release.

Public Services/Government

• Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore has successfully incorporated open source software into its curriculum. Heng Yiak Por, lecturer, School of information technology, and Cyrus Guo, a third year student pursuing his Diploma in information Security at Nanyang Polytechnic, share their views about open source in education.

Openness/Sharing

• Open-source approaches now appear to be migrating from the fringe to the mainstream in the education market.

Open Access/Content

• Advocates of open publishing fret that misunderstandings lead scientists to choose restrictive licenses.

Leftovers

• He towered over his kingdom through tumultuous decades. Yet when Cambodia’s “king father” Norodom Sihanouk finally ceded power, experts say, it was not to his heir but to strongman premier Hun Sen. Since his death in October in Beijing, Cambodia has paid homage to the man who was king, prime minister, head of state, then king once more, before stepping down in favour of his son Sihamoni in 2004.

• Forrest, 48, a military-history buff, went from living on food stamps as a teenager to advising Time Warner Inc. and United Airlines Inc. as a corporate litigator. She then took a seven-figure pay cut on the path to her dream job as a judge, and was appointed to U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 2011.

• Within months, Forrest blocked Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta from enforcing part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012, rejecting arguments that she should defer to congressional and executive authority in national- security matters. The plaintiffs in the case said the law permits the military to arrest U.S. citizens for exercising their freedom of speech and of the press.

Security

• In the end, any employee who clicked on the link had their machine infected with malware that exploited an IE zero-day vulnerability. Microsoft had just issued a patch three days before the attack.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Pakistani security officials said that the attack, which took place in Spin Wam tribal region, also left damage in various surrounding houses.

• The drones hovered over the area after the strikes and for of fears of another drone targeting by the US authorities, locals were reluctant to leave their house and rescue efforts were delayed. After the drones disappeared, the locals started rescue efforts and recovered five bodies from the debris.

• Local people retrieved the bodies, the sources said, adding the dead could not be identified.

• The first US drone strike of February 2013 follows six attacks conducted in January, in which 42 militants were killed and seven were injured in both North and South Waziristan.

• he official said that soon after the drone attack, other militants surrounded the site and shifted the dead bodies and injured to unidentified location, adding that the identity of the victims could not be ascertained.

• killing five unidentified people.killing five unidentified people.

• At least five suspected militants were killed Wednesday when a U.S. drone targeted a suspected militant compound in Pakistan’s volatile tribal region, Pakistani intelligence officials said. There were no immediate reports of civilian casualties.

• what kind of action constitutes “imminent threat.” At present, the government’s definition is a little cryptic.”

• Obama decried George W. Bush’s use of presidential war powers…

• Stanley McChrystal, the retired general, has warned that drone strikes are so resented abroad that their overuse could jeopardize America’s broader objectives. The secretary of state, John Kerry, spoke at his confirmation hearing of the need to make sure that “American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone.”

• ?

• Secrets cannot be bottled up in the dark forever. Today, some stunning secrets that both the Obama and Bush Administrations hoped would never see the light of day are fizzing out of their containers.

• There is absolutely no way the targeted killing program can operate under these incredibly authoritarian presumptions and reasonably considered to follow international law.

• The leaked Justice Department memo detailing the Obama administration’s legal rationale for killing US citizens without charge or trial or judicial review or any publicly available evidence of their guilt has raised a lot of questions.

• One of them, which doesn’t get fleshed out in the memo, is whether this kingly authority to play Judge, Jury, and Executioner and deprive Americans of their life without due process of law applies only to Americans abroad or also to citizens that are inside the United States. The memo does say that one prerequisite to putting an American on the kill list is if their capture is “not feasible.” Presumably that wouldn’t happen in the US, but since it isn’t specified in the memo, nobody has really been able to give an informed opinion on this. And even if the authority is not currently used in this way, unless there is an explicit prohibition in the current legal rendering, it could conceivably be used this way in the future.

• With its air strikes against targets inside Syria last week, Israel announced its formal entry into the Syrian crisis. The Israeli targeting of Iran has thus entered the Syrian theater.

• According to McClatchy, the Israeli strikes on January 30 targeted anti-aircraft missiles at a military base outside of Damascus. The missiles, according to Israeli intelligence sources, were headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

• The Israeli attack on Syria last week confirms the observations I made in my post on Syria in August; namely that: 1) the US has assured Israel in advance that, whatever transpires from the US-backed rebellion, Israel will get the net benefit of a weakened Syrian state, open to at-will Israeli incursion; 2) for both Israel and the US, the object of this game is to utterly destroy the Syrian state, to make it disappear as a military and political force in the region; and 3) “chemical weapons” were introduced into the narrative as a flimsy excuse for military attacks by the US or Israel whose actual objective will be to destroy, tout court, the Syrian state’s military capability, and its ability to provide any significant resistance to future Israeli attacks or any significant material support to other targets of Israeli aggression — like Iran, Hezbollah, or any other Palestinian resistance groups.

• Israel has not officially confirmed the fact of an air raid on a research center in Syria. Washington has not provided an official confirmation to this either. The UN Security Council has not condemned the attack. Syria has become a “whipping boy”, whom Iran and Israel use to flex their muscles to each other at the time when Turkey tries to establish itself in its pan-Turkism.

• According to sources at the Pentagon that refer to The Times, the night raid on January 30 was sanctioned by the U.S. in order to prevent “the transfer of arms from the regime of Bashar al-Assad to his ally – Lebanon – and then to Shiite organization Hezbollah,” which controls the Gaza Strip.

• Detention facilities in which detainees were held at the behest of the CIA include the ISI detention facility in Karachi, which was allegedly used as an initial detention and interrogation point before detainees were transferred to other prisons.

• CodePink director and co-founder Medea Benjamin spoke with VoR about the recently exposed US Justice Department white paper rationalizing and making legal the execution of Americans. She talks about the illegality of drone assassinations, recounts her recent trip to Pakistan, where CodePink peace activists apologized to the Pakistani people, who she says were more than a little shocked to hear Americans saying “Your lives and your children are worth as much as ours.” CodePink is one of the most active and most publicly heard peace groups which has been protesting the illegal use of drones and the assassination machine that the US Executive Branch and the CIA have become.

• President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, has been interviewed in connection with U.S. prosecutors’ probes into unauthorized leaks of government secrets to the news media, documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday said.

• South Africa has been named in a new report on “Globalising Torture” as one of 54 countries that collaborated with the US in secret CIA detentions and extraordinary renditions of terrorist suspects.

• Under pressure from the United States and Israel…

Cablegate

• Wikileaks believes that the Union doctored the live stream footage, claiming that the video footage that was playing behind Assange during his speech was censored.

Finance

Privacy

• Meet the groundbreaking new encryption app set to revolutionize privacy and freak out the feds.

• The report itself contained some new insights into the legislation that would require details of of everyone’s emails, web use and social media messages to be recorded.

Civil Rights

• Fairfax investigative journalists Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker had a small win in a Melbourne court yesterday. Their barrister told the court that a previous ruling agreeing that the magistrate had the right to order the disclosure of their confidential source has been appealed.

• Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, attorney for CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou, Jesslyn Radack, filmmaker Michael Moore, RevolutionTruth Executive Director and NDAA Case Coordinator Tangerine Bolen and journalist Alexa O’Brien, each supporters or plaintiffs in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit challenging the controversial indefinite detention provision set forth in § 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), will address the U.S. government’s assault on civil liberties under the NDAA in a discussion at 5pm this Wednesday, February 6th at The Culture Project, 45 Bleecker St, NYC.

• The Justice Department is scrambling to answer pointed inquiries from a congressional committee about U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz’s prosecution of Internet whiz Aaron Swartz, raising the specter of a brutal Beltway hearing that could call her judgment into question as she pursues high-profile cases, including her Probation Department probe.

• Argument in the government’s appeal against the provision of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which grants the military the authority to indefinitely detain US citizens, took place this morning at the Second Circuit United States Court of Appeals.

• The lawsuit was filed in 2012 by a group of journalists and activists that includes journalist Chris Hedges, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, writer Noam Chomsky, RevolutionTruth.org co-founder Tangerine Bolen, Occupy London co-founder Kai Wargalla, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and US Day of Rage founder and journalist Alexa O’Brien.

• A federal appeals court homes in on what’s at stake in the indefinite detention statute lawsuit

• The NDAA allows the military to indefinitely detain anyone who “substantially supported” al Qaeda or its allies. At issue during the Wednesday hearing was whether US citizens are included under that definition — and what exactly it means to “substantially” support al Qaeda. Three judges from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals peppered both sides with questions during the oral arguments, but seemed reluctant to wade into the constitutional issues that civil liberties advocates have raised.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Early yesterday morning, I saw that Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post had a story up about the years-long fight for white spaces entitled: Tech, telecom giants take sides as FCC proposes large public WiFi networks. It struck me as odd, because so much in the article seemed… wrong or misleading. The main part about efforts to finally do something with the old TV spectrum isn’t anything new at all. We first wrote about the FCC “proposing” this back in 2004 and have covered it a few times since. The FCC has been trying to use some of that TV spectrum for better, more efficient and more useful endeavors. It’s been an ongoing battle that feels like it’s never going to end. The short version is that TV broadcasters got a ton of free spectrum many years ago (just look at how giant chunks of the spectrum chart belong to TV broadcasters). A big part of the move to digital TV was to force broadcasters to give up a chunk of wasted, valuable spectrum that can be turned into (among other things) some useful wireless services. TV broadcasters hate this and have been fighting it in a variety of ways.

• The latest version of this plan is for the FCC to do a multi-part, multi-directional “auction” process for a chunk of spectrum currently held by the broadcasters. Part of that auction would be to offer incentives to broadcasters to cough up the spectrum. And then part of it would be auctioning off whatever spectrum broadcasters agree to dump. Finally, part of it would also include designating some portion of the spectrum for unlicensed uses.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This supposedly deprives the author or artist of those millions of people’s money. One group has acquired over 50 million media items, and makes each of them available to approximately 20 million people — which must be a tremendous hit to creative professionals’ wallets. This notorious institution is called the New York Public Library.

• Commissioner De Gucht is currently in Canada, trying to conclude CETA, the Canada-EU Trade Agreement. Meanwhile, he has started negotiating with the US on TAFTA, a new US-EU “trade agreement”. La Quadrature du Net recalls that there is still no credible evidence to suggest that ACTA-like criminal sanctions and repressive copyright provisions damaging a free Internet were removed from CETA, and it is likely that they will appear in TAFTA. Karel De Gucht, who several times lied openly to the public and the European Parliament during the ACTA debate, might once again push for repressive measures undermining fundamental freedoms, under the cover of trade agreements. Citizens must remain watchful and denounce this growing trend.

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