● 02.16.13

● Links 16/2/2013: New Fuduntu, Sabayon Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 10:36 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Microsoft should use a Linux base for an OS. Right, now I’ve got the awful part of saying it out the way I’ll go into detail about how and why I think this would be such a good idea. For everyone. Yes, including Microsoft.

• OK, here goes. I’m not going to go into the ideals and fundamentals of open-source, freedom, free software and all the stuff that Linux represents, that’s everywhere else, and I really don’t have time. For this post I’m only interested in the ideals. Henceforth I present my case m’lud.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Steam for Linux has already garnered quite a few interesting games, but some of them will stand out due to their quality. We compiled a list of the most interesting titles that are working right now and have the most potential.

• The list is not put together in any particular order, but it does respect one condition. All the games mentioned here are working and are not in Beta, with one guilty exception.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Canonical’s Ubuntu Phone has got a lot of people excited about it. I am also excited about Ubuntu Phone but having learned from Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android hype last year, I am being a bit careful this time.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Testing and even using not-ready-yet technology of tomorrow is something that characterizes almost any Gnome user out there.

• Many of us want to see the new exciting changes that the 3.8 release will bring, test the new features and see how the new version our favorite DE is evolving in almost real time.

• This post is about two months late and just one day after IGNOME Valentine’s Day ..and is pure gossip

• The girl on the left, is Karen Sandler and she is my personal favorite Gnomer for 2012!

• This hasn’t to do anything about good or bad developers or how significant their contribution is in GNOME. Therefore I am not including people as Bastien Nocera, Matthias Clasen, Emmanuele Bassi, Florian Mullner and others. As a matter of fact I am including only people I have talked with. The order is totally random, with the exception of Karen and Jasper, which I place them in first position

Distributions

• It’s been a while since I looked at Chakra, so I was thinking now might be a good time to do that. Plus, KDE 4.10 just came out with a whole bunch of new features and fixes, so I wanted to check that out too. So this is the subject of today’s review.

• I’ve tried Chakra a number of times before. It was originally derived from Arch, but since a couple years ago it has been developed in a fully independent manner. It uses a “semi-rolling” release model, in which applications like Mozilla Firefox and other front-end features like KDE are updated on a rolling basis, while core system components are held to be more stable.

New Releases

• The Zorin OS Team have released Zorin OS 6.2 Lite, the latest evolution of the Zorin OS Lite series of operating systems, designed specifically for Windows users utilizing old or low-powered hardware. This release is based on Lubuntu 12.04.2 and uses the LXDE desktop environment to provide one of the fastest and most feature-packed interfaces for low-spec machines. This new release includes newly updated software out-of-the-box. We also include our innovative Zorin Look Changer, Zorin Internet Browser Manager, Zorin OS Lite Extra Software and other programs from our earlier versions in Zorin OS 6.2 Lite.

Gentoo Family

• The 11′th iteration of Sabayon has been released, as Fabio Erculiani announced on the official Sabayon page, stating that “this is a release you cannot miss!”

• Those who don’t know, Sabayon Linux is a Gentoo-based rolling-release Linux distribution created by Fabio Erculiani that pursues the “Out of the box” thinking that’s available in both x86 and x64 architectures. It comes in many flavours and is available for users of all the leading Desktop Enviroments like KDE, GNOME, MATE, XFCE, and others.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat has announced the release of version 1.1 of OpenShift which brings a number of enhancements and updates. OpenShift Enterprise 1.1 features a fully supported developer console that enables application deployment via a web browser, in addition to OpenShift Enterprise’s CLI and Eclipse IDE interfaces.

Fedora

• Valve gave the best Valentine Day gift to its fans (to be precise Linux fans) by launching the Steam for Linux client officially. The company is endorsing Ubuntu Linux at the moment as it finds easier to focus on one product when it is experimenting.

• I am usually quick to write an article or something on the latest Ubuntu or Fedora release. But for Red Hat’s new Fedora 18 operating system, I thought I’d hold off a little and read some other users opinions before I make my own final call of judgement. Reading others opinions and reviews prompted me to check it out for myself due to the mixed reactions that I read. To be blunt,

• Fedora 18 is a horrible release. Let me explain the issues that I encountered with the latest update.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As was promised, enthusiasts and developers will be able to flash Ubuntu onto their Galaxy Nexus’ before the end of the month. Canonical has announced that the Developer Preview of the new operating system will be released on February 21st. The surprise, however, is that the company has added support for the Nexus 4, and users with the latest Nexus phone will be able to download and flash Ubuntu onto their devices on the 21st as well. Additionally, the source code for the operating system and the tools needed to flash phones will come out on that date.

• Canonical is working on creating a pleasant experience on Ubuntu Phone, which is expected to be released later this year. The company made a call for collaboration on core apps and according to Mika Meskanen of Canonical the response has been great. This response encouraged the team to help those developers and designer who are working on core apps.

• Canonical — the company behind the Ubuntu project — announced that the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu will be available for the Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 4 on Feb. 21, 2013.

• Canonical says the Touch Developer Preview is designed for enthusiasts and developers — giving them a chance to “familiarize themselves with Ubuntu’s smartphone experience and develop applications on spare handsets.”

• Even better, Canonical will install the new OS on the phones of developers who want it and are attending Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona Feb. 25-28.

Flavours and Variants

• Remember the perfect grade that Fuduntu got in my earlier review? Well, it’s not gonna happen this time. There are three reasons for that. One, it’s too easy to enable the Testing repository and screw your system. Two, the package manager needs more rework, namely being more flexible and responsive, having fewer issues with the locking, allowing easier, friendlier and more robust search, and allowing a smooth, seamless installation of the graphics drivers without the user having to resort to any command line tricks and tweaks. Lastly, the Nvidia driver installation was not flawless.

• At the end of the day, I was having a badass distro that was fast, light, beautiful, and modern, but the cost was some pain, several hours of time lost, and the knowledge that a pristine setup is impossible. Overall, Fuduntu 2013.1 did what I needed, and I had my Nvidia drivers in place. I do not regret my decision to include this distribution in my setup, and the decision stays. But there’s more work needed, especially under the hood, to make sure that nothing goes wrong in multi-boot setups, blessed with tons of proprietary drivers. All that said, Fuduntu 2013.1 is still an awesome product.

• To conclude this review, yes, another revolution did happen. I am running a Fedora-based distribution in my setup. It’s bleeding edge, it’s fast, modern, light, elegant, and comes with a mighty punch of programs, including Steam and Netflix. That’s nothing you can sneeze at. Fuduntu 2013.1 promises to be a big player in the Linux arena, and it sure has the capability to stand alongside Ubuntu and friends without feeling antiquated or complex or anything of that sort. The ultimate question of long-term support and relevance remains, the ability to remain flexible and adapt to changes, as well as iron out all and any bugs in the user space that could lead to systems being unbootable, botched or both. If this can happen, then Fuduntu 2013.1 could very well become No.1 Linux distro. for now, with this test concluded, it gets 9/10. Almost perfect. So damn close.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• I always had high hopes for the Palm WebOS. I even owned a Palm Pre briefly, but returned it when I found the signal at my house was too low. Even though the mobile operating system had fewer features, I always thought that WebOS was superior to Android, at least in terms of usability and design. I’m still jealous of how you could swipe up to view all open apps as “cards”, and swipe between them to choose your next app. Unfortunately, it is not always the best technology that wins the market, and now ZDNet is predicting that HP is dropping WebOS in favor of Android.

Android

• According to screenshots unearthed by SlashGear from a Korean messageboard, Samsung looks like it is building a smartwatch, probably but not certainly on an Android foundation…

• MTV has partnered with mobile handset maker Swipe Telecom to release its first co-branded smartphone called the MTV Volt in India.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Computer History Museum has made available the source code of version 1.0.1 of Photoshop for non-commercial use. Adobe Photoshop is the magic software which redefined the image manipulation. This 20 year old software which was first written for Apple’s Mac in pascal has become a verb.

• A few years ago, I was given the opportunity to spend my days working with and talking about Open Source software. It was exhilarating while it lasted, but after a few years, I had to return to product-based professional services to make a living.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• If the arrival of Windows 8 opened new doors for Linux in the world of desktop operating systems last fall, then it seems fair to say that the recent arrival of Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365 has surely done something similar for free and open source office suites.

Education

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• We’ve written a few times now about an important case involving fair use within university libraries and their “e-reserves.” It involves some academic publishers (Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications) suing the Georgia State University for daring to allow professors to designate content such that it can be checked out electronically, just like they would with physical content. The publishers demand to be paid extra for such things, because the key to things going digital, to them, is the ability to get paid multiple times for what used to be free. The court eventually came out with a detailed and complex ruling that found most of the e-reserves to be fair use. We had some concerns about some seemingly arbitrary “tests” that the judge came up with, but on the whole were encouraged by the strong fair use support.

Open Hardware

• In the underground world of robotic tentacle makers, there are two rules: 1) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making and 2) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making. Both of those rules have been shattered by Matthew Borgatti, a robotics designer who has created a life-like, 3D-printed tentacle that flails around quite disturbingly using Arduino boards and a set of mini air compressors.

Standards/Consortia

• The article of Klimburg overlooks that ITU-T is a multistakeholder organisation and European players embark on a cybersovereignty approach, simply because the multistakeholderism of the US does not give them a fair share, still they cannot support an expansion of power for ITU world governance: In a world with more than 200 nations “world governance” leads to hypocrite political corruption, nurtures a political class that at best trickles down the “capacity building and technical assistance” in their nation.

Leftovers

Science

Security

• Kevin Mitnick, who once gained notoriety as America’s most wanted computer hacker, now heads a thriving Internet consultancy tasked with helping keep Sunday’s presidential elections in Ecuador secure.

• “Eighteen years ago I was busted for hacking. I do the same thing today but with full authorization. How cool is that?” Mitnick wrote on his @kevinmitnick Twitter account on the eve of the vote.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Appearing on the radio Thursday with host Tavis Smiley, professor Cornel West argued that President Barack Obama is, like Presidents George W. Bush and Richard Nixon before him, a “war criminal” uniquely responsible for the deaths of “over 200 children.”

• West’s words were in response to a question about the administration’s seeming preference for killing terrorism suspects from the air rather than risking American lives to take them prisoner and hold them for an indefinite amount of time in military custody. A legal whitepaper obtained by NBC News recently exposed the Obama administration’s once-secret justification for the program, which authorizes a deadly airstrike if intelligence officials believe it may take out any “senior operational leaders” of al Qaeda or “associated forces,” even if that includes an American

• *Brian Bentley, 49, doesn’t agree with what Christopher Dorner — the ex-cop at center of a massive manhunt for the killings of three people—has done, but he certainly understands it. As a former LAPD officer, Bentley, who is now an author, says that a Dorner-like situation was just a matter of time.

• Mary and Rick Todd were anxious about entering the apartment where their oldest son had lived and died. Late last June the couple had flown from Montana to Denver to Los Angeles to a colonial-era house in the Chinatown district of Singapore to try to make sense of an unthinkable loss: Shane Todd, a young engineer who had just wrapped up an 18-month stint with a government research institute known as IME, was dead – an apparent suicide, according to the Singapore police. Mrs Todd felt her heart pounding as she climbed the narrow staircase to his apartment and thought about what the police had told her a day earlier.

• [...]

• The Todds agree that Shane’s hard drive may be a critical piece of evidence in how he died and could shed fresh light on the vulnerabilities of technology safeguards. But they question how the Singapore police have so far investigated Shane’s death, so they won’t hand over the drive. They are offering, instead, to send a copy of the contents of the drive. In return, they want the Singapore police to send them a copy of all files on Shane’s laptops, which are still in police custody. And again, they are asking the Singapore authorities to invite the FBI to help investigate how their son died.

• With each hearing before the Guantanamo military commission, it becomes more evident that privileged legal communications defense attorneys are supposed to be able to have with their clients are being violated.

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi are all on trial for their alleged involvement in the September 11th attacks. Their lawyers have challenged alleged eavesdropping on communications during commission proceedings, in holding cells and in meeting facilities.

• [...]

• …FBI had installed listening devices in the facilities where they have been holding attorney-client meetings.

• The act of killing is an unnatural act for everyone.

• An MSNBC film, hosted by Rachel Maddow and based on Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s book, finds new evidence that Bush scammed the nation into war.

• Three Libyan doctors, visiting Boston and Seattle to begin a health-care partnership with U.S. physicians, say they were detained and interrogated as soon as they arrived in the U.S.

• The administration of President Barack Obama refuses to acknowledge to a court that the CIA actually has a drone program that exists. This act is repellent in one respect because the administration’s nominee for CIA chief, John Brennan, sat before senators and answered questions about the program during his confirmation hearing. It is also detestable and fraudulent because President Obama continues to assert his administration is the most transparent and ethical administration in the history of the United States, even as it vigorously fights a major Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in court that would further reveal the legal basis for the administration’s claimed authority to target and execute persons abroad without charge or trial.

• A training document released in response to a civil liberties organization’s lawsuit and obtained by The Huffington Post reveals that the government considers an “analyst’s wisdom” the ultimate arbiter of whether data on American citizens can be classified as “terrorist information” and retained forever.

• “Only a CT (counter-terrorism) analyst can determine whether data constitutes terrorism information,” the electronic training course for new National Counterterrorism Center analysts states. “There is no requirement that the analyst’s wisdom be rock solid or infallible.”

• Don’t Americans have “the right to know when their government believes it’s allowed to kill them”? As Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., put it last week, you’d think that’s “not too much to ask.”

• For three years now, thanks to Obama administration leaks, we’ve known that the president claims the right to summarily execute American citizens far from any battlefield. He even joked about it at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2010, telling the Jonas Brothers to stay away from his daughters: “Two words for you: ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming.” (Oh, Barack — you slay me.)

• The Congressional Research Service (CRS), which normally publishes stellar reports, just did one on Criminal Prohibitions on the Publication of Classified Defense Information.

• The current gun control debate is focused, not surprisingly, on the carnage from rapid-firing assault weapons, like the one used in the Connecticut school massacre. But beneath the surface lies a disturbing reality: nearly two-thirds of the 30,000 gun deaths each year are not the work of deranged mass shooters but the suicides of troubled individuals with easy access to firearms, often in quiet family homes.

• John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s nominee to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, didn’t officially acknowledge the CIA’s role in the use of drones in the targeted killing of suspected terrorists overseas during his testimony last week, a Justice Department lawyer contended in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit this week.

• This is disingenuous. First of all, Obama is empowered to declassify anything that he likes. More to the point, even U.S. senators with direct oversight responsibility have complained about the White House’s failure to answer multiple, specific information requests, as the John Brennan hearings illustrated. The problem isn’t just that this information isn’t on the front page of the New York Times. For example, Senator Ron Wyden isn’t even permitted to know in how many countries America is killing people!

Cablegate

• It is the degree of choice for the Westminster elite, claiming six cabinet members and three Labour leadership contenders among its alumni. Why does Oxford’s politics, philosophy and economics course dominate public life?

• The full cost to Scotland Yard of preventing Julian Assange from escaping from the Ecuador embassy was disclosed yesterday as £2.9 million.

• The figure, released after a Freedom of Information Act request by The Times, includes £2.3 million diverted from normal policing duties and £600,000 in extra overtime.

• …campaigned against fracking and honored Julian Assange..

• The Evangelos Florakis Naval Base explosion in Mari occurred on 11 July 2011, when 98 containers of explosives that had been stored for 2½ years in the sun on the Evangelos Florakis Naval Base near Zygi self-detonated. The resulting explosion killed 13 people, and damaged all of the buildings in Zygi, the island’s largest power station, then responsible for supplying over half of Cyprus’ electricity.

• The containers of explosives on the base had been seized by the US Navy in 2009 after it intercepted a Cypriot-flagged, Russian owned vessel, the MV Monchegorsk, travelling from Iran to Syria in the Red Sea. According to US diplomatic cables leaked through WikiLeaks, the US pressured Cyprus to confiscate the shipment, as it was apparently in violation of UN sanctions on Iran. [1] The Cyprus Navy was given responsibility for the explosives, and it moved them to the Evangelos Florakis a month later.

• British police have already spent some $4.5 million in patrolling for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, eight months into his confinement at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, Scotland Yard says.

• Sam Castro, the co-founder of the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance, spoke with the VOR’s John Robles about Julian Assange’s Australian Senate bid, internal Australian politics and the rules and current condition of Australian government policies, the public’s support of Mr. Assange and the soon-to-be-official WikiLeaks Party and what has happened to Australia and the Australian people since the United States of America pulled Australia into the endless “War on Terror”. Her viewpoint from the inside of Australia is both refreshing and informative as she details everything from surveillance to foreign policy.

Finance

• Hedge fund star David Einhorn wants to force Apple Inc to share some of its huge cash reserves with investors, but his lawsuit rests on a U.S. securities rule that has little legal precedent.

• U.S. securities regulators filed suit on Friday against unknown traders in the options of ketchup maker H.J. Heinz Co, alleging they traded on inside information before the company announced a deal to be acquired for $23 billion by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc and Brazil’s 3G Capital.

• The suit, in federal court in Manhattan, cites “highly suspicious trading” in Heinz call options just prior to the Feb. 14 announcement of the deal. The regulator has frequently in past filed suit against unnamed individuals where it has evidence of wrongdoing, but is still trying to uncover the identities of those involved.

• But compare this rapid arrest of “small men” with the LIBOR scandal, where banks indisputably rigged, deliberately and repeatedly rigged, the basis of many trillions of dollars worth of financial transactions. It was deliberate dishonesty, fines on the banks have added up to billions, but not one of the fraudulent bankers who did it has been arrested – even though it is known who they are and there is a ton of documentary evidence. Not one arrest. Not one. Just as nobody has been arrested in this country for the fraudulent sub-prime packages and interest rate swaps that led ordinary, and even very poor, people to have to pay out huge proportions of their income to “bailout” the bankers.

• How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it

• Someone drank too much coffee this morning before a Senate Banking Committee hearing and decided to “do the job we hired her for” and ask the question the rest of us have been “asking for years.” That someone is my new favorite senator, Elizabeth Warren. Someone go on another Starbucks run for her, pretty please?

• In our last episode of that ongoing Washington soap opera, “As the Door Revolves,” we introduced you to former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White, pursuer of drug lords and terrorists, who left government to become a hot shot Wall Street lawyer defending such corporate giants as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, General Electric and Microsoft. Oh yes — and former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, currently appealing his insider trading conviction.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Oxford Union has dubbed fake applause onto the videos of John Bolton’s address to the Union. It has not done this for any other speaker.

Privacy

• This week, CISPA was reintroduced in the House of Representatives. EFF is joining groups like ACLU and Fight for the Future in combating this legislation.

• Yesterday the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office presented a proposal for the purchase of a drone in a public hearing with the Board of Supervisors Public Protection Committee in Oakland, California. EFF joined the ACLU of Northern California and several other public interest groups in testifying against a drone purchase until the Sheriff’s Office adopts a substantive, binding privacy policy—with no loopholes—that protects citizens from undue surveillance.

• A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool, commonly referred to as a “Stingray,” being used by the FBI in cases around the country. Recently, more information on the device has come to light and it makes us even more concerned than before.

• For now, while journalists can take some steps to protect themselves and their sources, they are limited by the nature of their cellphones. At a panel in May, investigative journalist Matthew Cole, who works on U.S. national security and intelligence issues, demonstrated how he conducts his work using an elaborate protocol taught to him by digital security expert Chris Soghoian. Cole uses two cellphones; they are bought anonymously; they are never used together; and one always has its battery removed, to prevent it from accidentally being activated and to ensure the two numbers are never linked.

• The company, which makes the microchips found inside most personal computers, has launched an entirely new division, Intel Media, to make and market the Orwellian streaming-television product.

Civil Rights

• Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tougher enforcement, said ICE “wouldn’t have to do a hail Mary to juice the numbers” if it hadn’t ordered its agents to halt efforts to deport some illegal immigrants.

• The past two weeks have brought us 3 bombshell exhibits on why the military commissions at Guantanamo are an utter faiure. First,we learned that the audio and video feeds at the trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and 4 others mysteriously went out as the defense was presenting a motion, to the surprise of even the judge. (It turned out the “Original Classification Authority” (read: CIA) was the culprit.

• Then we learned that the government has been eavesdropping on attorney-client privileged communications through a microphone disguised as a smoke detector.

DRM

• Nearly seven million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners have cracked Apple’s restrictions on their devices…

• Macmillan agreed Friday to let retailers reduce the costs of its e-books, the Justice Department said, leaving Apple to face price-fixing charges at trial.

Intellectual Monopolies

• ACTA and SOPA may have flopped, but minor setbacks like that won’t stop the onslaught of abuses from the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries looking to use the international treaty process to try to pressure everyone to keep ratcheting up protectionist laws concerning copyright, patents and trademarks. Obviously, we’ve been talking about the still worrisome TPP agreement involving a bunch of Pacific Rim countries, but it’s not stopping there. Back in October, we warned that the US and EU were preparing a new trade agreement as well, and the preliminary plans noted that it would include a “high level of intellectual property protection, including enforcement.”

Copyrights

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