● 04.15.13

● Links 15/4/2013: Underwater Linux, More Android Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) wants to simplify the process of certifying Linux-based devices to the IEC’s Safety Integrity Level 2 specs. Now, the group is asking interested parties to sign a letter-of-intent, through which various system components would be pre-certified on a cost-shared basis.

• Seems with Raspberry Pi, creativity sees no limit. Recently, a group of National University of Singapore engineering undergraduates has created an autonomous underwater vehicle, with the help of the Pi for memory-intensive functions and Arduino for precise control. And they call it “Coconut Pi”.

• I can appreciate someone who casts aside all other considerations in their quest for freedom from interference. We owe a debt to people like that. But not everyone needs to live up to that kind of standard. The differences in the nature of Linux and Windows software are instructive and eye-opening. I can use my experience with Windows to describe why I believe Linux is mostly just better than Windows.

• Microsoft software is tinged by the behavior of its maker and its fans. Otherwise, there would be no impulse to question why someone would use software from multiple sources.

• Twenty years plus since being created, Linux remains a terrifying word in the global lexicon. Probably not as bad as it was for farmers watching cars take over the countryside in the early decades of the 20th century, but close. It’s an operating system all right, but one that does not warm the cockles of your heart. It’s the bastion of nerdy and geeky and difficult, and you are better off leaving it alone, to its bearded users. Which makes me think, why is the beard a status of sagacity in our society? Throw in a smoking pipe, and you have a PhD in trustworthiness. That’s how it works. And yet, even though Linux is an obvious choice among the people of science, academy and industry, the popular desire to emulate the prototype intellectual status is in low demand. For most folks, the hardship of becoming a Linux user outweighs the benefits. (Image credit: Wikipedia.org)

• Because of this phenomenon, if you happen to burrow your face into the job-seeking networks, you will see the string Linux featuring tall and mighty. There’s quite a bit of demand for Linux system administrators and engineers, global recession and all notwithstanding. True, you will find a wealth of other occupations, professions and skill being hawked to the lowest bidder, but Linux is sort of a star.

• Earlier this week, Liquid Robotics unveiled the latest in its line of “Wave Glider” autonomous aquatic craft, due to ship in the third quarter, billing it as “the world’s first hybrid wave and solar propelled unmanned ocean robot.” In addition to its energy harvesting marvels, the 9.5-foot, Wave Glider SV3 is also notable for being the first Linux-powered Wave Glider. With its Linux- and Java-based Regulus operating system, the floating robot is far more adept at autonomous navigation than the Wave Glider SV2, and can now coordinate with its siblings in fleet operations.

Desktop

• And now after more than two years in the experimental stage, the ZFS file system for Linux is ready for widespread use.

• I am a member of the GNOME foundation and an MS in Computer Science student. I contribute to GNOME’s Documents application, co-organize monthly Linux user group meetups and GNOME hackfests in Chicago, and help out with the Chicago Python Workshop. I’m working as a web developer while I complete my degree.

Server

• Top-Cheap-Web-Hosting.com named the award winner of the best Linux hosting 2013 for personal and small business based on the web hosting cost, technology, features, reliability, speed and technical support.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The last episode was for absolute beginners, this one is for Geeks. I try to explain (and understand on the way) how images are stored in PNG and JPEG files. PNG (pronounced “PING”) does this lossless, the image can be retrieved in the same quality as the original. PNG works wonders with graphics with a lot of lines and clear colour areas, comics and logos for example, but it creates monster files out of photos and similar images. JPEG looses details, aquires artefacts and generally mangles the image. But it has so beautifully small files and the losses are in most cases invisible – except in the area where PNG is good. So both have their niche to live in.

• Kevin Wisher and Pegwole join Chad Wollenberg this episode. We discuss TLLTS 500th show, MakerFaire in Munich Germany, and we discuss network administration and how to utilize different utilities such as nmap and wireshark to do analysis on the packets causing problems. Make sure to catch Chad on Linux For the Rest of Us next week!

• In this episode: We’ve got oodles of Google news, Nvidia’s new Optimus driver, Dell selling Ubuntu games PCs and our own discoveries. Plus a new podcast challenge and the Open Ballot.

Kernel Space

• Listening to Tony Awtrey sing Pie Jesu from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem is awe inspiring. The classically trained tenor has a euphonious voice capable of taking your breath away. He’s also a Linux developer and Chief Scientist in the defense industry.

• Lennart Poettering announced systemd 201 on Monday afternoon. Features of systemd 201 include journalctl sub-command updates, improvements to reading the crypttab file, a “systemctl status” command for showing various bits of useful status information, improvements to the systemd libraries, and much more.

• So, clearly, it’s different strokes for different folks and while change is good, the contention over whether systemd is really a good thing remains hotly debated. One thread concerning ‘The Bad’ in the Arch Linux community is fairly representative of the concern for adoption of systemd. Arch Linux has a loyal following of pragmatic users who enjoy working at a component level because of how it allows one to truly learn the ‘build your own’ Desktop. The result is a clean, lean system and their is purity in that. So, they might be the most vocal of all critics and rightly so.

• Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.

• Things seem to be moving along swimmingly with ongoing development surrounding systemd, at least as far as Lead Developer Lennart Poettering is concerned who has outlined the plans for moving the project forward with hopefully full upstream community participation in lock step.

• Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, is faster for some OpenGL games when running on the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.9 kernel.

• Early this morning I published some new Nouveau benchmarks from Mesa 9.2-devel. After that testing, from the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics, I then compared recent Linux kernel releases. The Linux 3.9 Git kernel as of yesterday was compared to the vanilla mainline releases of Linux 3.8, 3.7, and 3.6.

• While some patches have turned up in the past, the mainline Linux kernel has yet to have support for Apple’s infrared remote control found on their computers since 2005. Fortunately, it looks like a new Apple IR driver is taking shape.

• Based upon the earlier work of James McKenzie, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Bastien Nocera, Benjamin Tissoires has now provided a new patch ushering in the “AppleIR” driver for the Linux kernel.

• One of the areas of hardware power management that can yield a surprising amount of power-savings but is often overlooked comes down to the system memory. Fortunately, new Linux kernel patches continue to be written for improving the Linux kernel RAM power management.

• On modern hardware with DDR3 and similar, there’s power management functionality for putting unused DIMMs into a low-power state when the RAM hasn’t been accessed for a period of time. While this is a hardware feature, with the operating system being made aware of such information, better decisions could be made by the kernel and in particular the memory management subsystem, e.g. first touching RAM that is actively being used rather than storing data on a DIMM currently in a low-power state. Other benefits can also come from making the kernel and memory subsystem power-aware.

• The Linux 3.7 kernel brought ARM multi-platform support and now with the Linux 3.10 kernel it may be extended to support the Samsung Exynos SoC family.

• The ARM multi-platform feature allows for having support for multiple ARM SoCs/platforms within a single Linux kernel image. Traditionally, the ARM Linux kernel situation has been a fragmented mess and needing separate kernel images for different Systems-on-a-Chip. With the Linux 3.7 kernel and this multi-platform support, it became possible to have one kernel for covering Calxeda Highbank, Versatile Express, Altera, PicoXcell, and other SoCs.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa 3D can now use the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) of modern Radeon graphics chips; this decoder is more efficient with common video formats than software that decodes using the main processor or the graphics processor’s shaders. The UVD support arrived with extensions that were created by AMD developer Christian König and have recently been added to Mesa 3D (1, 2). Therefore, it should become part of the next Mesa 3D generation that will probably be versioned as 9.2 or 10.0; once released, this generation is expected to be integrated into the Linux distributions’ development branches quickly, because Mesa 3D is an important component for these distributions’ 3D support for current graphics chips.

• After showing off early Mesa 9.2 benchmarks with Nouveau and Nouveau improvements with the Linux 3.9 kernel, our latest NVIDIA Linux benchmarks from one of our Lenovo ThinkPad laptops is comparing the NVIDIA vs. Nouveau driver performance on Ubuntu 13.04.

• For those deciding between the Nouveau (the open-source default NVIDIA driver on Ubuntu) and the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver that can easily be installed from Ubuntu’s package repository, here’s some new benchmarks. Overall though, these new benchmarks aren’t terribly surprising… NVIDIA’s binary driver still largely wins by a landslide, in large part because the Nouveau driver still lacks proper GPU re-clocking support.

• Developer Thierry Reding has released patches for the Linux kernel that enable the use of 3D acceleration features on Tegra processors. According to Reding, the patches are, however, not fully mature and are based on changes from other developers, in some cases from NVIDIA, which have not yet been merged into the Linux kernel.

• Mesa 3D can now use the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) of modern Radeon graphics chips; this decoder is more efficient with common video formats than software that decodes using the main processor or the graphics processor’s shaders. The UVD support arrived with extensions that were created by AMD developer Christian König and have recently been added to Mesa 3D (1, 2). Therefore, it should become part of the next Mesa 3D generation that will probably be versioned as 9.2 or 10.0; once released, this generation is expected to be integrated into the Linux distributions’ development branches quickly, because Mesa 3D is an important component for these distributions’ 3D support for current graphics chips.

• Building upon last week’s RadeonSI tiling patches for exposing this performance-boosting feature on the latest generation of AMD Radeon HD graphics hardware is the xf86-video-ati work. With a new patch, 2D tiling can be turned on for Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs on the open-source Linux driver.

• Published last week and still baking were the “RadeonSI” tiling changes as they affect the Linux kernel with the Radeon DRM, the libdrm library, and the RadeonSI Mesa Gallium3D driver. Jerome Glisse has now put out the small xf86-video-ati patch for flipping on 2D color tiling within the Radeon X.Org driver.

• While the X.Org Foundation and other projects under its umbrella like Mesa and Wayland benefited from Google’s Summer of Code initiative for several years, last year it wasn’t accepted to participate in GSoC 2012. The list of accepted organizations for GSoC 2013 was announced today and X.Org/Mesa/Wayland again isn’t part of the acceptance list.

• Version 1.1 of Wayland and the Weston reference compositor will soon be released. The first major post-1.0 updates to Wayland/Weston bring a number of exciting features to this next-generation Linux display server.

• Kristian Høgsberg has been preparing to get Wayland/Weston 1.1 out the door, which originally he hoped to have done by the end of March. However, a few remaining issues lingered, but now those are getting addressed.

• The 2013 X.Org Board of Director election results are now in for the four new board members responsible for stewarding the X.Org Foundation and related projects like Mesa and Wayland.

• The four new board members though aren’t a surprise since there was only four candidates running for the four open spots this year… Those elected were Alan Coopersmith (110 votes), Peter Hutterer (86 votes), Martin peres (66 votes), and Stuart Kreitman (63 votes).

Benchmarks

• While the release of Mesa 9.2/10.0 is still a ways away, for those users of the Nouveau reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver, here are some early benchmarks for reference compared to the stable Mesa 9.0 and 9.1 series.

• The benchmarks being put out this morning are just some ThinkPad W510 numbers from an Intel Core i7 720QM system with NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics. Ubuntu 13.04 was in use with the Linux 3.8 kernel and Unity 7.0 desktop. Being compared were Mesa 9.2 (master), 9.1, and 9.2 branches of Mesa Git.

• For those of you wondering the performance impact of using mount options for tuning the Btrfs file-system on the soon-to-be-out Linux 3.9 kernel, here’s some benchmarks of common Btrfs mount options.

• There were Btrfs tuning benchmarks on the Linux 3.7 kernel offered on Phoronix, but with this next-generation Linux file-system still being in a state of flux, new benchmarks were conducted this week from a Linux 3.9 Git kernel.

Applications

• Yes, it’s been almost a decade with us. And as it usually is with versions 1.0.0 after such a long time, it doesn’t actually bring anything breadth-taking. But there of course have been some fixes and improvements since version 0.9.7, and in fact even one larger feature found its way in, out-of-the-box support for the Clang compiler, including support for its plugins. Written by yours truly, after finding out about this compiler and finding out it was pretty difficult to get it to work with 0.9.7 icecream at least in some way. And also being the reason for repeatedly bugging Coolo about another icecream release .

• There are many who believe and say that you don’t need antivirus software on Linux, and it is true that Linux is far less of a target of malware than Windows, and a fair bit harder to infect as well. Additionally Linux users typically rely on central repositories to get their software instead of hunting for it on the world wild web, making it less likely for them to encounter malware, although it is not inconceivable for repositories to be compromised as well.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• If you are a Linux user and happen to be a gamer at the same time, chances are you already know that Steam is now available for Linux. If not, it’s time to come out of that solitary confinement cell of yours. Steam was initially released as an invitation-only beta for Ubuntu 12.04 and greater back in November last year.

• Krakow, 12.04.2013: Following numerous requests from players DRAGO Entertainment is pleased to announce the Mac and Linux versions of Grimlands. To celebrate the developer has also released the second part of the Making Of video series that focuses on vehicles and crafting.

• “We always planned to bring Grimlands to more platforms besides the Windows PC”, explains Lucjan Mikociak from DRAGO Entertainment, “but the amount of requests from the Mac- and Linux communities has convinced us to make these versions happen in 2013. And there are even more versions planned down the road.”

• After popular titles such as Counter Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) and Shank 2, Don’t Starve becomes the latest entrant into the Linux gaming scene. And as always, Steam for Linux facilitated the arrival. Don’t Starve is basically an endless wilderness survival game. Game’s goal is to survive for the longest time, while avoiding starvation, insanity, and hostile enemies.

• Atom Zombie Smasher is a real-time strategy game developed by independent developer Blendo Games. In it, the player attempts to rescue as many citizens as possible from an oncoming zombie horde using helicopter rescue units and an array of military units to protect the citizens and defeat the zombies.

• It is official now: Grimlands the mix of Shooter and MMORPG with an open, post-apocalyptic world will also be available for Linux and Mac OS X!

• Grimind is a 2D physics-based horror-themed adventure platformer. You are cast into forgotten caves and ancient crypts, and demonstrate your skills in passing obstacles and solving non-trivial puzzles to escape these chilling and lonely environments.

• While ioquake3 projects continue to thrive as open-source projects spun off from the id Tech 3 game engine, when it comes to the open-source Doom 3 (id Tech 4) engine, there is barely any public activity.

• The Spearmint Game Engine, which aims to be a more impressive and feature-rich version of ioquake3, as well as Watermint, a “realistic” fork of Spearmint, are still actively being pursued.

• The 14th alpha release of the visually impressive Unvanquished open-source game has been released. Notable to this month’s alpha update are enhancements to the game engine’s OpenGL 3.x renderer.

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the latest installment to Valve’s Counter-Strike franchise, is being tested on Linux and might soon be released to the general public.

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of Valve’s more recent titles that was officially released last August as their fourth CS title. Counter-Strike: GO improves some of the assets found within Counter-Strike: Source and also offers a wealth of new content, engine improvements, and other enhancements.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• In my previous article I’ve tried to investigate the RAM memory requirements for running some of the most common light window managers and desktop environments available in the Linux world. Prompted by a number of readers, I’ve decided to include also the big, well-known memory hogs that grab most of the Linux market, i.e. KDE, Unity and Gnome 3.

• Over the last few days I was wondering what is a “lightweight” desktop. And I must say I couldn’t come up with an answer to that question.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We’re delighted to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC), for the ninth consecutive year. GSoC has been valuable in bringing new developers into the KDE Community and other free and open software projects. And it has been successful at achieving the goal of creating quality code for the use and benefit of all.

• Bugs are inevitable in complex software, and digiKam is no exception. So what should you do when you’ve discovered a bug in your favorite photo management application? As a non-programmer, the best thing you can do is to file the bug with the KDE bug tracking system (digiKam is managed as part of the KDE project). Submitting bugs can be considered a tedious task, but this greatly helps the developers to improve digiKam, and the KDE bug tracking system makes it relatively easy to file bugs and issues.

• We are pleased to announce that KDE will take part in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) this year. OPW started in 2006 with an intention to reach talented women who are passionate about technology, but who may be uncertain about how to start contributing to free and open software projects. Since its beginning, OPW has included commercial and non-profit organizations that are leaders in free and open software.

• KDE and openSUSE developer Will Stephenson is working on a slimmed down version of KDE that he calls KLyDE, short for K Lightweight Desktop Environment. In a blog entry about the project, Stephenson says that he thinks: “KDE is not intrinsically bloated”, but that most distributions of the open source desktop environment would, by default, install almost all of the software developed within the project. In his opinion, this leads to an overwhelming number of applications, widgets and options being presented to users. With KLyDE, Stephenson wants to create a modular distribution of KDE that can be reduced to the bare bones of what is necessary for a desktop environment.

• While Qt 5.1 is just around the corner, Digia released Qt 5.0.2 today as the second stable point release update. Qt 5.0.2 incorporates more than 600 improvements in 17 different modules of Qt 5.0.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Distributions

• Some of you will still remember the early days of SolusOS. Every community member was involved in testing and feedback, and we put out ISO after ISO with sequential improvements. It was fun, and it worked.

• XP’s end of life-support is in sight and not everybody wants Windows 8. So, what are your other choices?

• While Cinnamon is a great user interface and we’ve had a lot of fun implementing it, it’s become too much a burden to maintain/update going forward. We’d like to remain faithful and compatible to our parent distro, Arch Linux, and further support of Cinnamon would strain that by causing incompatibilities/hacks in the entirety of the Gnome packageset. It is almost impossible to maintain software developed by Linux Mint in a rolling release as we are. They’re 1 year behind with upstream code. Arch Linux is going to have soon Gnome 3.8 and Cinnamon is not compatible with it. The Cinnamon team still have to migrate some of their tools to fully work with Gnome 3.6.

New Releases

• We are happy to announce the release of Manjaro 0.8.5. We worked hard to make this release the best Manjaro experience featuring Openbox 3.5.0 and Xfce 4.10. A graphical installer got added and a Manjaro settings manager handling user accounts, keyboard layouts, locales and translation packages is also included. Pamac got enhanced and is now translated to several languages. A special thanks flies out to Carl Duff for his great beginners guide, which makes it easy to install and start Manjaro Linux for everyone!

• ClearOS Community 6.4.0 is now available! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, this release introduces a new reports engine, a storage manager, an antimalware file scanner, RADIUS, a basic POP/IMAP server, and mail retrieval.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Getting hit by this seasonal flu has not been exactly fun. I’ve been doing my best to keep up with my work and studies but, at this busy hour, I’m glad it’s me who gets the virus and not my computer. Starting my work from scratch AND recovering from the flu would be a lot worse.

• Mageia 3 Beta 4 was released two weeks ago with a note saying live images to come. Well, by last week, I’d given up. But, low and behold, Claire Robinson posted a little announcement today saying she hopes they were worth the wait. Hmmm, good question.

• Black smoke is bellowing, church bells are ringing, trumpets are blowing… well, bloggers are blogging at least. The OpenMandriva canon have pondered, discussed, argued, researched, star gazed, and flung spaghetti on the wall; but they’ve finally decided. They’ve reached a decision as to the new logo and face of the OpenMandriva Association (and assuming the still officially unnamed distribution too). Thank goodness, it’s a pretty one.

• As you might have guessed, the logo above is the winner. The announcement said of it, “after internal voting, this was the most voted and consensual proposal.” The following is the official soon-to-be-copyrighted logo for the OpenMandriva Association.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat and the JBoss Community recently announced that they will be releasing a single compiled binary under the EAP.Alpha terminology, rather than posting a community release on the community site and a separate EAP early release on the Red Hat site. This naming change has confused some members of the community, but rest assured the EAP.Alpha release is still under the LGPL as per previous JBoss Community releases.

• Open source leads the data center, says John Mark Walker, Gluster Community leader at Red Hat. OK, what’s next? This is the question Walker plans to address in his keynote on Monday at Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, though he hints at the answer in this Q&A.

• Support calls are extremely important for a billion dollar company like Red Hat. However, you won’t often hear about the CEO of company himself taking support calls. Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst does that. He takes support calls for customers.

Fedora

• Last week the Fedora Board had an open, public meeting in IRC to discuss Fedora’s user base / target audience. Robyn announced the topic ahead of time and invited folks to join in. You can read the full meeting minutes, but I’ve gone through them and tried to pull out all of the interwoven threads of discussion and summarize it here for you as well.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu wants to be the Google of your desktop. Yes, it really does. It wants you to be able to search for anything right from your desktop without even opening your browser. Sounds crazy right? On one side, you have Google letting you place all your world in your web browser, Ubuntu, on the other hand, tends to pull you away from the web and instead brings the web to your desktop. Now, as convenient as both ideas sound, many users are afraid of extremes. I, for example, would not like moving my whole life to a web browser much like Google Chromebook proponents do.

• With Canonical’s Mir Display Server for future releases of Ubuntu Linux, they are supporting Android’s graphics layer and drivers rather than inventing their own solution, trying to push X.Org drivers, or demanding mobile graphics drivers modelled after the desktop Linux graphics stack. Why did they do this? Here’s an explanation.

• The second edition of Ubuntu’s online developer summit, UDS 13.05, was announced yesterday. The virtual developer summit will run through May 14-16, from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC. The summit is divided into five tracks – App Development, Community, Client, Server & Cloud and Foundations.

Flavours and Variants

• I recently came across Emmabuntus in Distrowatch, it is a Xubuntu 12.04.2 LTS based distro which comes with a large number of pre-installed applications. You can say it to be Ultimate Edition for Xubuntu. Naturally, I was inclined to try it out – to check if it is just mindless collection of applications or the developers have used their judgement in selecting those apps.

• Trisquel 6.0 LTS was recently released so it’s time to give it another look. Trisquel is a popular distro for users that prefer to use only free software. You won’t find proprietary software included in Trisquel, it’s dedicated to the idea of truly free software.

• Ubuntu 13.04 beta 2 has been released, so I thought I’d check it out for a sneak peek.

• The ISO file I downloaded weighed in at 825.5 MB. Note that Ubuntu 13.04 is a live distro, so you can try it without having to do an install on your system. I recommend this if you just want a quick look at it, while you wait for the final release.

• I havent tried any new distro for months. So on the occasion that a new version of Fuduntu got released, I decided to download then install it on my Samsung netbook. As a matter of fact, I had used an older version of Fuduntu last year and somehow liked it. However a problem occurred that the downloading speed was terribly slow back then, it just took me forever to upgrade system and install new packages. So I had to ditch Fuduntu for Linux Mint and havent tried Fuduntu again since then. But after installing and using the new Fuduntu for over a day, I can say that it is different now with many improvements.

• Fuduntu Linux, based on Fedora distribution released its Fuduntu 2013.2 version recently which has a user-friendly, rolling-release with RPM package management and the classic GNOME2 desktop environment. This release comes with many new features, application and bug fixes. It has released with two flavors. A Full version with lots of software installed by default and a new Lite version which uses 3-4GB less hard drive space depending on architecture. It supports Steam gaming and Netflix video streaming. XBMC, the popular media center developed by the XBMC Foundation is also now available in Fuduntu 2013.2 distribution.

• Fuduntu, the Linux based operating system earns its name by its ambition to fit somewhere in-between Fedora and Ubuntu. It had started a few years ago as a netbook-friendly OS. It had at that time, featured some desktop environment tweaks, which had sure improved performance on Eee PC netbooks with slow SSDs and small screens. Fuduntu has come a long way since then. The OS that straddles the line between Fedora and Ubuntu, uses the RPM package management system found in Fedora, but the design and usability get their tinge from Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• VersaLogic announced a rugged, credit card-sized COM Express Mini module based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom E6x0T processor. The Linux-ready VL-COMm-26 is also available as part of a “Falcon” subsystem that sandwiches the module with an I/O board of the same size.

• In a post on the company’s blog today, Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood announced that more than 5 million of the company’s iconic Roku players have now shipped. Wood provides a brief history of the Roku player, from its modest 2008 launch as “the Netflix player,” to the point where it offers “about 750 channels,” including games.

• The hype of Raspberry Pi still going strong. But a new single board tiny computer just joined the game and currently raising fund on Kickstarter. It is UDOO ( pronounced “you do”) , and it can run both Android and Linux.

Phones

Ballnux

• We’ve learned that Boost Mobile will be adding the highest-end model, the F7, to its LTE lineup in short order. It will be the carrier’s third LTE-capable device, following the HTC One SV and Boost/ZTE Force. Featuring a 4.7-inch, 720p display, 1.5GHz dual core processor, and eight-megapixel camera, the F7 (Boost codename: LG FX1) should prove a popular addition to the prepaid carrier’s handset portfolio.

• Samsung has unveiled two new smartphones that push the envelope of screen size in the smartphone space.

• Dubbed Mega, the two devices Samsung showed off today come with the customer’s choice of a 5.8-inch screen or a 6.3-inch option. Both devices come with Android 4.2 (Jelly Ben) and a dual-core processor. The higher-end 6.3-inch option comes with a 1.7GHz processor, while the 5.8-inch version has a 1.4GHz chip. Both handsets have 8-megapixel rear-facing cameras and 1.9-megapixel front-facing cameras.

Android

• ZTE today introduced its latest Android smartphone, the Intel-powered GEEK, however there’s nary a release date or detail about market availability. Running Android Jelly Bean, the ZTE GEEK features a 5-inch 720p HD display, 8GB internal storage, 1GB RAM, an 8-megapixel camera, and 1-megapixel front-facing camera.

• Chinese manufacturers have long stood for their capacity to blast away affordable devices that might perform well but come with sub-par quality and uninspiring design. That has been the cliche, and Huawei seems to have had enough of it.

• It covers apps and games, with the prices referring to the initial download: so (Free) may mean (Freemium) in some cases. The equivalent iOS roundup will be published later in the day. For now, read on for this week’s Android selection.

• This handy list of top-rated Android apps lets you remotely access any computer from your Android device. Remote access is useful when you need to collaborate with co-workers, help a friend with a PC problem or grab files from your desktop.

• In today’s fast paced world, we don’t have time for anything to slow us down. We constantly rely on our technology to help us get through the day. Whether it’s a way to get directions, emergency, mobile games or just a plain old phone call, smartphones are one of the leading and most developed tech we have. Unfortunately smartphones constantly get bogged down by old apps that continue to run in the background, which slows your device way down.

Free Software/Open Source

• Profound Logic has open sourced its User Interface application development tool framework citing user and developer flexibility among its key reasons for doing so. Profound UI version 4.5 will now also benefit from improved integration between the IBM i and other compatible platforms.

• Networking giant Cisco Systems is no stranger to the world of open source software. In 2009, Cisco was identified as one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and its core IOS XE operating is based on Linux as well.

• The developers of the Funf open source Java-based sensor framework for mobile phones have released version 0.4 of their software. Most changes in this version, the developers say, are under the hood and affect the architecture of the framework. Changes include a new pipeline interface, a redesigned configuration process, and changes that mean that Funf now runs as a single service instead of spawning a service for each sensor probe.

• Kaldin is an open-source web-based examination software that supports creation and management of various types of online assessments – exams and tests.

• proxmox_logoMy journey in finding the best platform for web scale applications has brought me to ProxMox, an open source virtual environment that combines OpenVZ containers and KVM virtualization in a single pane of glass. ProxMox has the best balance between management and performance optimization using containers. We spent today bringing up a four node cluster, and it was dead easy.

• I love the architectural concept of containers. They allow you to slice up a single hardware server into multiple, independent environments, while still allowing full access to the hardware. It is not really virtualization, because none of the hardware resources are virtualized like they are with KVM or VMware. The ProxMox management layer is actually a base install of Debian running a modified OpenVZ Red Hat kernel. The base install weighs in at right around 1GB, and is so thin that there is only a 1-3% processing overhead incurred.

• Since 2003 the open source Metasploit framework has been actively developed and used as a penetration testing tool for IT security. While ease-of-use was not top of mind in the early days of Metasploit, that is changing with the latest Metasploit 4.6 Pro release.

• “In the industry, there is a shortage of security folks and that puts a lot of pressure on the people that are working in security today,” said Christian Kirsch, product manager for Metasploit at Rapid7. “With the Metasploit Pro 4.6 release, there is the concept of wizards to make things easier.”

• The free and open source software community operates on a very simple principle: obey the license which the software is released under. But what happens when the rules of engagement set down in FOSS licenses like the GNU GPL are ignored? What do you do if a rival developer or company takes your code and doesn’t pass on the freedoms afforded by your original license?

• This is a fear that every FOSS developer has had at one point or another, and it only gets stronger as your project gains momentum and grows. It’s something that has kept untold lines of code closed up; arguably the biggest argument against opening up the source of a particular piece of software.

Events

• I interviewed a few FOSS (free and open source software) conference organizers to round up a handy list of suggestions to help you write a better conference talk proposal. But first, here’s my pep talk to women who have never submitted a conference talk proposal before:

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• In a huge announcement from Mozilla, the nonprofit entity behind the Firefox browser and other open source tools has detailed significant changes to its executive management. CEO Gary Kovacs, who has been running Mozilla for three years, will step down later this year, and there is a search on for a Kovacs replacement. Kovacs will remain on Mozilla’s board of directors, and there are other executive shifts as well, during a time of transition for the company.

• The latest Aurora and Beta releases of the open source Firefox browser show privacy features are at the top of the feature list for the browser. Currently in Beta, Firefox 21 now includes a new user interface for the Do Not Track (DNT) system and Firefox 22, available in the Aurora test channel, has the new cookie policy, announced in February, implemented.

SaaS/Big Data

• Network World – Less than a year ago the cool thing for IT vendors to do was jump on the OpenStack bandwagon.

• Everyone was hopping on: Red Hat, IBM, and even VMware signed on as partners to the open source cloud computing platform, joining Rackspace, HP, Cisco and Dell that were already backing the project. All these companies had a unified goal, says Marc Brien, an analyst at Domicity, who tracks the movers and shakers of the cloud world. They wanted to stave off the fast-growing dominance of Amazon Web Services in the cloud.

• The OpenStack vs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud battle will stretch across the United States next week. Indeed, cloud consultants and integrators will flock to OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. (April 15-18), while Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) partners and customers will gather for an AWS Summit in New York (April 17-18). Terry Wise, head of AWS’s wordwide partner ecosystem, will be on hand for the conference. For channel partners, it’s nearly time to choose sides

• There is some skepticism about whether vendors and channel partners providing Hadoop services are yet bringing in the revenue they need to make it a viable business case, but according to a new report from TechNavio, the big bucks are ahead. And not that far ahead, really.

• There have been reports that the OpenStack cloud computing platform is becoming overly fragmented for some time, and now it appears that the OpenStack Foundation is going to take aim at some players in the OpenStack space who don’t seem to be following interoperability guidelines. ITWorld, among other sites, has reported on comments from Josh McKenty, CTO of Piston Cloud and an OpenStack Foundation board member, who points out that HP and Rackspace, in particular, need to shore up their OpenStack interoperability efforts.

• Very steadily, Piston Cloud has gained a reputation as a company with some smart strategies surrounding the OpenStack open cloud computing platform and how it can serve enterprises. In February, the company also announced that it had raised $8 million in Series B financing follows a $4.5 million Series A round in July, 2011.

• This week, the company has delivered its “turnkey” Enterprise OpenStack 2.0 distribution, which looks like a relatively easy way to start dabbling with an OpenStack cloud deployment.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6. This version, available for those more conservative users, is said to have arrived with over 50 bug fixes, many of which were backported from LibreOffice 4 and most of which were quite juicy. It’s always recommended to upgraded to the latest release.

• The Document Foundation has released a new update of the LibreOffice suite, LibreOffice 3.6.6. This release fixes over 50 bugs and other improves the software’s stability greatly. As it is a bug fix release, no new features have been added and all users are advised to update to this release as soon as possibile.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• While planning next week I started to notice a plussy (the symbol of FSFE‘s Fellowship) in my calender.

• An updated version of the GNUnet C tutorial is available. Developers starting to hack on GNUnet are strongly encouraged to have a look there. It covers basic installation, writing services, APIs and clients, descibes how to connect peers even on a large scale and much more…

• Benchmarks for sharing this weekend are looking at the performance of GCC 4.7, GCC 4.8, LLVM/Clang 3.2, and the latest LLVM/Clang 3.3 development code. How does the performance of the newly released GCC 4.8.0 compare to the yet-to-be-released LLVM/Clang 3.3? It’s interesting.

Project Releases

• VideoLAN has released a new update of popular open-source media player, VLC. This version is an important release, and all users are advised to update to this release as soon as possibile. Some of the notable changes in this release are:

• * fixes some regressions of the 2.0.x branch of VLC. * introduces support for Matroska v4 files. * introduces an important number of fixes for MKV, Ogg, AVI, WMV, HTTPS and subtitles support.

• A new development release of Wine v1.5.28 is out. Among other new stuff in this release are: built-in FixedSys fonts, new icon for the joystick control panel, and postscript driver improvements. This release fixes 21 bugs, including some graphics issue with Guild Wars 2 and Bioshock Infinite. In fact, it has been confirmed that this years blockbuster game Bioshock Infinite works with Wine 1.5.28.

Public Services/Government

• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been reforming itself into a more outward-facing organisation and has now taken another step in that process by announcing that it will be hosting a “small open source license clinic” at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in May. The event is designed to bring together individuals, organisations and government agencies to help all better understand the nature of open source licences. Discussions will also look at identifying problems unique to government. Although a small event, it is the first of what will, hopefully, be many, as the OSI pursues its “non-profit educational mission”.

• The Dutch government will use open source software for developing its e-ID card solution. The e-ID plans were presented to the Dutch Parliament by Ronald Plasterk, Minister of the Interior last week Wednesday. The ministry is considering to use a chip card similar to the German government, according to a spokesperson for the minister. It has also looked at the smart card system developed by the Belgian government. “Apparently the German approach for smart card allows a few more options that we’re interested in, but it is too early to tell.”

Licensing

• You don’t see many discussions about free software licenses any more. Once a burning issue, licenses and their implication hardly seem to be mentioned these days. Increasingly, we seem to be moving into a post-license era, and the implications for free and open source software are potentially troubling.

• The reasons for this apparent shift of interest aren’t hard to find. To start with, most of the important license issues have already been resolved. It’s hard to imagine any licensing issue today that would be as significant to the community at large as the release of the OpenOffice.org code in 2000, or of the discussion of the third version of the GPL in 2005-07.

Openness/Sharing

• If you’ve been to your local hacker/makerspace and there weren’t many women, did you stop and wonder about that? I hope so, but unfortunately a common reaction is to think, “I guess women just aren’t into building stuff.” As one of the few women directors of a U.S. makerspace, I know that this just isn’t true. In this and future posts I’d like to share my perspective on the problem, and what I think can be done about it.

Open Data

• Karen Cranston (@kcranstn) is an evolutionary biologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. NESCent promotes the synthesis of information, concepts, and knowledge to address significant, emerging, or novel questions in evolutionary science and its applications. They collect new data under a Creative Commons license (CC0) to free scientific data and make it more widely available.

Open Hardware

• Designed by Bitcraze, the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter is an open source development kit to make your own tiny drones. It’s $173 from Seeed Studio Depot and looks like great fun to make and fly! “Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter Kit 10-DOF with Crazyradio”

• Lakshmi Mandyam, ARM director of Server Systems and Ecosystems, said on last week that ODMs are looking to standardize on both a single operating system and a single chip architecture across their product stacks. In other words, they want a single chip that can scale from a smartphone to a server and one OS like Linux to rule them all. Vendors are finding this idea “very interesting”.

• A project to build a compact, low cost, open-hardware SBC (single board computer) has turned to Kickstarter for funding its way to production. The 110×85 mm UDOO board runs Linux or Android on an ARM i.MX6 Freescale applications processor, and also has a built-in Arduino Due-compatible subsystem.

Programming

• Now, five years later, I’m incredibly proud to be part of a company with 158 team members dedicated to helping our 3.5 million users collaborate across 6 million repositories. It’s been a wild ride and I couldn’t be happier with the amazing community of people who use and love GitHub every day.

• While the PHP-GTK project has basically been dead for years, to provide GTK2 bindings to the PHP programming language, there have been several other projects worked on in more recent times to advance the GNOME support for the PHP programming language.

• With version 5.5 of the common PHP server-side language due for release soon, here’s some interesting benchmarks showing off the performance of PHP 5.5 compared to the earlier 5.4, 5.3, and 5.2 releases of this popular scripting language.

Standards/Consortia

• ABI Research forecasts that by the end of 2013, about 1.4 billion devices in the wild will be equipped with HTML5-compatible browsers. Despite this tantalizing opportunity for new HTML-enabled web apps, however, the “vast majority” of developers continue to create “native model” apps rather than web apps, reports the analyst firm.

Leftovers

• The BBC has been accused of “tying itself in knots” after agreeing to play a five second clip of a song mocking the death of Baroness Thatcher days before her funeral.

• Peter Zatko, the computer hacking expert better known by the handle Mudge, says he’s leaving his job as a program manager at DARPA to join Google. He announced the change overnight on Twitter.

• Released last month by Facebook was their open-source HipHOp “HHVM” 2.0 virtual machine. Benchmarks of HHVM at Phoronix show that the code does live up to Facebook’s performance claims.

• For several years now Facebook has been experimenting with making PHP faster through various techniques. Facebook heavily relies upon the PHP server-side scripting language and for handling their immense traffic, they need PHP to be as fast as possible.

Security

• Tatu Ylonen, author of the SSH protocol, isn’t afraid of criticising his own work: he’s calling for a new version of the Secure Shell to make it more manageable and get rid of the problem of undocumented rogue keys.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The panicky style of reporting on North Korea doesn’t seem to be changing much, if you glance at the front pages of the big papers this morning. The Washington Post headline (4/12/13) blares, “N. Korea Thought to Have Warhead, ” while over at the New York Times (4/12/13) it’s “Pentagon Says Nuclear Missile Is in Reach for North Korea.”

• But both pieces, if read carefully, undermine the alarmism–and make you wonder why the stories are on the front page.

• I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV — at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.

• Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem — a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

• CIA’s Directorate of Operations recruited CIA officers for a “project to insert small teams of assassins into other countries to hunt down and kill people that the Bush administration had marked for death.”

• ONE balmy evening Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was relaxing with his family on his father-in-law’s rooftop in the village of Zanghara, south Waziristan.

• The last drone strike occurred in the agency on March 22, when US drones targeting a vehicle in Datta Khel killed four militants.

• He said there was no way to ascertain the identity of the slain men as their bodies were mutilated.

• The town had witnessed another drone strike on March 22 that killed four militants.

• An eyewitness said that the compound caught fire after the strike leaving all the bodies burnt.

• This suggests Obama is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted,” Zenko said. Other sources said some of these strikes killed militants who weren’t affiliated with al-Qaeda at the behest of Pakistan.

Cablegate

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has released a database of diplomatic records by Henry Kissinger, who ran American foreign policy under two presidents. Why does the former diplomat interest liberals like Assange?

• …working to overthrow the government and defend US corporate interests in the Andean country.

• Despite this, a report in the Sydney Morning Herald said that the Australian embassy in Washington is closely monitoring the prosecution of former US Army private Bradley Manning for leaking the information to WikiLeaks publisher Assange.

• Among the cables, a series of diplomatic communications exposes the relationships between the Vatican and a number of dictatorial regimes, from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla to Spain’s Francisco Franco.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Finance

• Goldman Sachs has explored a sale of its metals warehousing business Metro International, three sources with knowledge of the matter said, just three years after the investment bank bought the firm for $550m.

• These are the confessions of an outsourcer. She has spent more than a decade helping some of Canada’s biggest financial institutions shed workers and replace them with low-wage help.

• She has made a good living doing this. But she now thinks that contracting out middle-class jobs — the very practice she aided — is short-sighted and morally wrong.

• Goldman’s directors, who were already among the best-compensated corporate directors in the country, will receive an additional 500 shares, for 3,000 shares a year in compensation, according to a regulatory filing submitted Friday.

• It is difficult to be empathic and honest when the banks, the justice system and the government conspire together to cover up fraud in the mortgage servicing and securitization systems. Lavalle is one of those persons who insists on pursuing the truth to the best of his ability as shown in his report gong back to frauds beginning in the 1990s.

• Goldman Sachs committed accounting control fraud and forgery through robo-signing and only ever had to pay a small fine for its gigantic frauds.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• You get a sense that media on this side of the Atlantic are more fond of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher than their British counterparts. And this reminds me that who gets to the top of the journalistic establishment probably has a lot to do with what they think of Thatcher’s hard-right policies.

• When it comes to elite media and political circles, there’s no doubt that these two very controversial political figures were treated the same way when they died: with gushing, uncritical celebration of their lives.

• No, the problem would seem to be that many in the British public–damn them!–have bitter memories of life under Thatcher. One has to assume that this is especially baffling to Burns, who believes Thatcher restored the country’s self-confidence.

• The American Legislative Exchange Council, which for decades has been known by the acronym “ALEC,” is asking members to stop calling it ALEC since the name is now associated with a “distant, mysterious, Washington alphabet organization of unknown intentions.”

• “You may have noticed we are limiting the use of the acronym ‘ALEC,’” wrote Bill Meierling, ALEC’s recently-hired Senior Director of Public Affairs in a March 13 email sent to ALEC members and obtained through an open records request.

Censorship

• An anonymous online post on a Facebook page called Humber Epic Hookup Fails bragging about an apparent sexual assault has outraged Humber College, its students and the police.

• In the post, the anonymous male claims that he met a girl at the end of the night, when “she could barely walk,” and brought her home where she was “stumbling all over the driveway.”

Privacy

• Today’s Daily Telegraph reports on the ‘rush’ from public bodies to gain access to the data collected under the Home Office’s Communications Data Bill.

• According to information uncovered by Big Brother Watch, “Council staff, health and safety inspectors and even Royal Mail want to harness the Government’s proposed “Snoopers’ Charter” to monitor private emails, telephone records and internet use.”

• It had been thought that only police, intelligence agencies and the taxman would be able to use the Communication Data Act, which will also allow scrutiny of social network sites including Twitter and Facebook.

• But dozens of public sector organisations have applied to use the powers. They include nine Whitehall departments, NHS trusts, the Environment Agency, the Charity Commission and the Pensions Regulator. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has argued that the legislation is vital to combat terrorism and other serious offences.

• oogle has wired its worldwide fleet of servers up with monitoring technology that inspects every task running on every machine, and eventually hopes to use this data to selectively throttle or even kill processes that cause disruptions for other tasks running on the same CPU.

• The search giant gave details on how it had developed the planet-spanning technology in a technical paper (PDF) due to be published next week – and its contents will be of major interest to anyone running massive Linux-based infrastructure clouds.

• Should text messages carry the same privacy protections as phone calls when it comes to government snooping? That’s the latest privacy issue that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is tackling, as it urges the Washington State Supreme Court to recognize that text messages are “the 21st Century phone call” and require that law enforcement officers obtain a warrant before reading texts on someone’s phone. The case is only the latest in a string of debates about the U.S. government and alleged electronic privacy invasion.

Civil Rights

• In the last three months alone, the House has released three different cybersecurity bills and has held over seven hearings on the issue. In addition, the House Judiciary Committee floated changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—the draconian anti-hacking statute that came to public prominence after the death of activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz. Politicians tout this legislation as necessary to protect against foreign threats every single time they introduce a bill with “cyber” somewhere in the text. And it comes as no surprise that every hearing has opened up with a recap of computer security attacks faced by the US from China, Iran, and other foreign countries.

• State lawmakers continue to advance legislation seeking to prohibit Michigan law enforcement agents and National Guard members from assisting the federal government in the potential detention of U.S. citizens without trial.

• Just days ago, an anniversary passed which should never be forgotten. On April 1, 1942, an order was issued by Lt. General J.L. DeWitt which began the forced evacuation and “internment” of people of Japanese descent.

DRM

• Since version 2.0, experimental Blu-ray support has been a feature of VLC. However, playback of disc protected by AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is not supported. VLC also does not support of BD+ discs because Sony, the developer of the Blu-ray copy protection, only provide encryption keys to licensees.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Public Domain Review is a proponent of this message and actively supports other institutions in opening up their digital works to the public domain. Today, the public domain is in danger of being locked up by private companies and institutions who want to try to resell access and reproduction rights to the copies that they make.

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