● 05.08.13

● Links 8/5/2013: Linux in Space, Android’s Growing Tablet Domination

Posted in News Roundup at 5:15 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Three Android-powered NASA “PhoneSat” nanosatellites deorbited and burned up in the atmosphere on April 27 after successfully completing their six-day mission. Meanwhile, the Android- and Linux-powered STRaND-1 nanosat, which was launched by the U.K.’s Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. and Surrey Space Centre on Feb. 25, is still orbiting, but has yet to phone home.

• Despite the risks of space, a growing number of organizations are developing tiny, low-cost nanosatellites built with Linux, Android, and Arduino gear. Like the NASA and Surrey missions, many are using open source designs.

• When Austin startup TrackingPoint calls their product “Precision Guided Firearms – PGFs” they are serious about it living up to the name. We are talking about customized hunting rifles, such as the .300 Winchester Magnum, that have been fitted with scopes out of a sci-fi movie.

• Coverity has called Linux the “benchmark of quality” in its newly published 2012 Coverity Scan Open Source report. The company annually brings together millions of lines of code from open source and, using the same defect-scanning technology that it uses with its enterprise customers, scans that code for problems to produce data on defect densities.

• Linux use in the enterprise is increasing as the Linux Foundation verified last month in its Enterprise End User Survey.

• In fact, more than 80 percent of respondents plan to increase the number of Linux servers in their organizations over the next five years. And 75 percent reported using Linux in the last two years in new applications, services and Greenfield deployments.

• Android TV sticks with Rockchip RK3066 dual-core processors available sell for as little as $42. But these little boxes let you turn a TV or monitor into a computer capable of running thousands of Android apps. Or if you really want to use an RK3066 stick as a computer you can install Ubuntu.

Desktop

• Quck, when did the first Chromebooks (portable computers running Google’s Chrome OS platform) arrive? The answer is that the initial Chromebooks went on sale in June of 2011, nearly two years ago.

• It’s no secret that Chrome OS has not been the same striking success for Google that the Android OS has been. But at the same time, many users have taken notice of the low prices that these portables are offered at, and the many freebies that they come with. For example, the Acer C7 Chromebook, shown here, sells for only $199.

• I currently run Fuduntu Linux on my main desktop PC. Until just recently I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows 7, but I finally wiped Windows (hadn’t actually needed it for a long time) and installed Fuduntu, which came really highly recommended. I’m loving it so far. Meanwhile I also have a Samsung Chromebook and an Android phone. We have a bunch of other laptops in my family, but my 12-year-old son is constantly installing new distros on them (he got the Linux Diversity collection for Christmas), so I couldn’t tell you what’s on them at the moment.

• That’s a much better deal for you than that other OS which forbids all of those things. Oh, sure, you can run that other OS but there are restrictions like a limit of 20 machines networked before having to pay extra, not sharing the software with a friend nor having more than one person at a time using it. That prevents you from getting the value you paid for in the hardware you buy. A computer knows no limits. Why accept such limitations in the software you use? As well, GNU/Linux is much easier to maintain as a few clicks updates all software in the operating system and the applications rather than you having a bunch of applications vulnerable to attack and having to do lots of re-re-reboots. Then there’s malware… In more than a decade of use of GNU/Linux on hundreds of PCs, I have never seen any malware on GNU/Linux while a high percentage of machines running that other OS have malware sapping resources.

• You know you want GNU/Linux as an option when you shop for computers. Insist on it and the retailers will supply it. The manufacturers will ship it.

• On the whole, PC gaming is typically a Windows-only affair. Both Mac and Linux users have had a significantly more limited selection of games to choose from and also a more limited hardware selection too.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• A new version of the Linux kernel has been released. Numbered at version 3.9, the new release has some nifty new features, including support for SSD caching, new processor architectures, power management improvements aimed at tablets and phones, support for Chomebooks and support for Android development.

• A new Linux kernel 3.4 has been released, according to a post from Linux fellow Linus Torvalds.

• Often a huge barrier for aficionados of both Tux and Android; they now play nicely as Linux kernel brings support for development on Google’s OS along with SSD caching and other Jelly Bean-sweet improvements.

• CHIP DESIGNER AMD said it is working to get IOMMU v2.5 support in the Linux kernel ahead of the first heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) chip that will come out later this year.

• AMD’s upcoming Kaveri chip will be the first to support HSA, which enables the CPU and on-die GPU to access system memory. The firm told The INQUIRER that it is working with the Linux community to get IOMMU v2.5 supported in the kernel in time for the launch of its Kaveri chip.

• Support for the emerging 64-bit ARM Architecture, a.k.a. ARM64 or AArch64, will see better support with the Linux 3.10 kernel.

• Ten weeks to the day after the arrival of version 3.8, Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Monday released version 3.9 of the Linux kernel.

• “This week has been very quiet, which makes me much more comfortable doing the final 3.9 release, so I guess the last -rc8 ended up working,” wrote Torvalds in the announcement email early Monday. “Because not only aren’t there very many commits here, even the ones that made it really are tiny and not pretty obscure and not very interesting.”

• Along with an assortment of other power management improvements to land with the Linux 3.10 kernel, a cpufreq driver for ARM’s big.LITTLE is being introduced. There’s also a cpufreq driver for the Exynos 5440 quad-core and the new AMD frequency sensitivity feedback support.

• I am pleased to announce The Linux Foundation is funding three Linux kernel internships through the Outreach Program for Women administered by the GNOME Foundation. These internships have a $5,000 stipend and come with a $500 travel grant to attend and speak at LinuxCon this fall. This is a great opportunity to work with a mentor and get started with kernel development, which as many articles report, is a great way to land a high-paying job.

• Linux creator Linus Torvalds last night announced the release of version 3.9 of the kernel. Available for download at kernel.org, Linux 3.9 brings a long list of improvements to storage, networking, file systems, drivers, virtualization, and power management.

• The developers of the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) have released version 7.6 of their tool. Among GDB’s new features are native as well as target configurations for ARM’s new AArch 64 architecture and the addition numerous new commands and options.

• A Phoronix reader, Emmanuel Deloget, has written in to share an interview he carried out on his personal blog of various ARM SoC GPU driver developers. The drivers covered include Lima (ARM Mali), GRATE (NVIDIA Tegra), Videocore (Broadcom), Freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno), and etna_viv (Vivante) hardware.

• The Linux Foundation offers a variety of ways to get Linux training, including online Linux training courses for those who are not able to travel to a Linux Foundation event or one of our classroom Linux training options. We recently caught up with embedded systems engineer Adrian Remonda of the FuDePAN Foundation to ask about his experience in the Linux Kernel Internals & Debugging course (LF320).

• From data centers to embedded sensors, energy use is one of the toughest issues facing computing. The Linux kernel community has already made great progress in boosting energy efficiency, but there’s still more work to be done to optimize Linux systems, with one area of focus on power-aware scheduling.

• Beyond knowing about the graphics driver changes coming for the Linux 3.10 kernel, the ALSA/sound kernel driver changes for the soon-to-open merge window are becoming more clear too.

• Systemd 202 has been released and it begin experimental work on supporting kdbus, the implementation of D-Bus within the Linux kernel. There’s also other fixes and features to this new systemd release.

• With the release of the Linux 3.9 kernel being imminent, here’s a recap of the most interesting features coming to this next Linux release.

Graphics Stack

• The DRM graphics driver pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.10 kernel.

• If you have been keeping track of Phoronix content, the pull request shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Key changes for the open-source Linux graphics drivers on the kernel-side come down to:

• Michel Dänzer of AMD has provided a set of patches that should provide for the necessary patterns and intrinsics for AMD to round out GLSL 1.30 support within their RadeonSI open-source Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards.

• One month after releasing the very first NVIDIA 319.xx Linux driver beta, NVIDIA has now released their 319.17 driver as a certified Linux driver that supports an assortment of new features.

• The NVIDIA 319.12 Beta for Linux introduced support for Optimus-like functionality, initial support for RandR 1.4, improved EFI support, new hardware support, performance fixes, and a whole lot of other work.

• This new Weston back-end supports SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) remote rendering protocol as used by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on the desktop. There’s been a lot of SPICE driver activity as of late with a QXL KMS driver and talk of a potential Gallium3D wrapper driver. This new driver though isn’t out of Red Hat.

• The RadeonSI Linux driver that supports the Radeon HD 7000 series and future HD 8000 series of graphics cards can now handle compressed textures and 2D tiling.

• One week after a desktop developer meet-up, the lead developer of the KWin window manager, Martin Gräßlin, has written about the history of using KDE/KWin on the Wayland Display Server.

• Martin’s blog post began by talking indirectly about Canonical abandoning Wayland in favor of Mir for future releases of Ubuntu Linux, Wayland support for KWin has been a primary goal of Martin’s for the past two years, it took a while for Wayland 1.0 to have a stable and reliable API/ABI, and then earlier this year plans were talked about the KDE/Qt5/Wayland combination.

• An extensive list of plans for the Wayland/Weston 1.2 release were shared by the project’s founder, Kristian Høgsberg.

• On the Wayland mailing list, Kristian laid out his Wayland 1.2 vision. Key points from his e-mail include:

• - New major releases on a quarterly basis (every 4 months) while a six month cadence was talked about long ago in the past. Kristian explains, “The motivation for this is that we have a lot of new features and new protocol in the works and a time-based release schedule is a good way to flush out those features. Instead of dragging out a release while waiting for a feature to become ready, we release on a regular schedule to make sure the features that did land get released on time.”

• At least three commits seeking to improve the performance of Intel’s open-source 3D/OpenGL Mesa driver were merged on Monday.

• On the same day as bringing GL2 to Intel’s i915 Mesa driver, Eric Anholt committed a set of improvements to the Intel i965 driver that supports back from the i965 hardware up through the latest Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Valley View graphics processors. The performance improvements committed today come down to:

Benchmarks

• While nearly all modern Intel/AMD x86 hardware is 64-bit capable, among novice Linux users the question commonly is whether to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version of a given distribution. We have previously delivered benchmarks showing Ubuntu 32-bit vs. 64-bit performance while in this article is an updated look in seeing how the 32-bit versus 64-bit binary performance compares when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel.

• One week after delivering updated Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux, we have to share this morning similar results for the open-source and reverse-engineered “Nouveau” Linux graphics driver compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. While the Nouveau driver has come a long way and does support the latest Fermi and Kepler GPUs, it’s not without its share of shortcomings. Eleven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were used in this latest Phoronix comparison.

Applications

• My last several articles have covered lots of software for doing research in the sciences. But one important area I haven’t covered in detail is the resources available for teaching the next generation of computational scientists. To fill this gap, you can use the code provided through the Open Source Physics project. This project is supported by the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and it offers several different packages for doing simulations and analysis.

• Linux and other operating systems are blessed with powerful tools to retrieve and recover valuable data. However, it is not always possible to recover data on a running system. Sometimes the machine will not even boot. This might arise if the boot loader has become corrupted, there is damage to a partition, or vital operating system files have been lost. Alternatively, loss of access to the system might simply arise from a user forgetting their login password. Not being able to use the computer can be incredibly stressful. Of course, some individuals will be happy to get a computer engineer to run a diagnostic on the computer and repair the computer. However, there will inevitably be a delay in getting the machine up and running, together with a hefty invoice.

• SFXR was once one of the coolest little sound toys out there. It generates retro 8-bit sound effects – at random, with a bunch of sliders and buttons to play with. If you’re familiar with my last post exploring MIDI music production (and the techno-flavored files I was producing) you’ll see where this is going: Adding old-skool lo-fi sound effects to music tracks, quite probably using Audacity to monkey around with them.

• We try out the best photo editors on Linux

• Overdrive is one of the largest technology companies that lays down the infrastructure for libraries to loan out digital books. If you have an Android, Windows 8, or iOS device, you can read books right within its dedicated Overdrive app. Up until now, if you were a Linux user, you were often a forgotten minority.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Road Redemption takes the motorcycle combat-racing gameplay, pioneered by the Road Rash series, to the next level.

• Even if you don’t normally play video games, it’s a sure bet that you’ve heard of Atari’s 1972 arcade hit Pong. You’ve probably even played it, either in one of its many ports or in one of those arcades that also sells beer. But you’ve probably never seen it quite like this.

• As we reported in the last few days about it coming out, it has now happened! Salvation Prophecy is now available on Linux from Desura!

• Some colleagues of mine are asking users if they would pay for Linux. Given that folks pay for Windows and Mac, why wouldn’t they pay for Linux? Some of the answers so far are quite interesting. Perhaps they’re not as you’d expect.

• OpenXcom one of my favourite Open Source projects has a brand spanking new website and new release where it allows you to play the whole game!

• Linux users rejoice! Valve’s popular interactive puzzle title, Portal, is now available on Linux via the Steam client. Although the Steam Store doesn’t show the game as available for Linux yet, you can install a beta version via your Steam Library if you already own the game on any of the other platforms. Phoronix is also stating that Portal 2 will also be publicly available on Steam for Linux soon.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE Project has announced today, May 7, the immediate availability for download and update of the third maintenance release of the KDE Software Compilation 4.10 environment for Linux systems.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• While many of you, GNOME fans, are still enjoying the newly released GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, the GNOME developers are working hard on the next major version, GNOME 3.10, due for release this Autumn.

• Cinnamon, the popular GNOME Shell fork developed by the Linux Mint crew, has released a major update to their software stack.

• GOCL has been introduced, a new GLib/GObject wrapper to OpenCL for GNOME applications. This new wrapper library seeks to make it easier for GNOME software to take advantage of OpenCL.

• Desklets, a new screensaver and a Spices management component are among the major improvements of the just released Cinnamon 1.8. Like KDE plasmoids and Android widgets, these desklets can be positioned on a desktop screen’s background to display information. The new version includes three default desklets: a launcher, a clock and a photo frame; further community-developed desklets are available on the project’s web page.

Distributions

• The now defunct Fuduntu team has come together to create a new distribution which they initially called FuSE Linux which was complementing Fedora and openSUSE. The distribution will be based on openSUSE, one of the most popular GNU/Linux based distribution which also contributes heavily to core open source technologies such as the Linux Kernel, Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice and much more.

• Usually we say enterprises are the home for Linux operating systems across the globe. Apart from being used inside the companies for managing servers and databases, today Linux operating systems have turned out to be quite user-friendly that they are now used across homes.

New Releases

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS was born as a set of RPMs for Mandrake Linux. Remember Mandrake Linux? It was one of the first distros to aim for ease-of-use and user-friendliness with nice tools for system administration, a slick graphical installer, and a full complement of drivers and multimedia codecs. My first Linux was Red Hat 5, but Mandrake (initially based on Red Hat) was the first distro that gave me video acceleration and good video quality, and didn’t choke on my fancy Promise Ultra66 IDE controller. That’s right, 66 screaming megabytes per second transfer speed, which was double the poky 33MB/s of the onboard controllers of that era. Our modern SATA buses deliver gigabytes per second, but back then megabytes were enough, and we liked it that way.

Red Hat Family

• After tallying the votes in a naming contest that kicked off in October 2012, leading Linux vendor Red Hat has announced that the product formerly known as the JBoss Application Server (AS) will henceforth be known as WildFly.

• Red Hat OpenStack, the open source company’s next big product, will grab a massive spotlight during Red Hat Summit (June 11-14, Boston). For channel partners and cloud services providers (CSPs), the summit could provide new clues about when Red Hat OpenStack will actually launch, and which CSPs and enterprises will be among the first customers to embrace the new platform.

• The GlusterFS distributed filesystem community is expanding to take in a range of other storage-related, and generally Gluster-related, projects. The change was announced by Red Hat, who acquired Gluster Inc, the company behind the cloud/cluster-oriented distributed filesystem, in October 2011. Since then, Red Hat has maintained the Gluster Community at Gluster.org while marketing the GlusterFS software as its Storage Server.

Fedora

• An alpha version of Fedora 19 has been released, so it’s a good time to take a sneak peek at what Fedora 19 will have to offer users. As always you should note that alpha releases like Fedora 19 should be considered for testing purposes and fun only. You should not rely on it as your daily desktop distro.

• Fedora developers are running another “Graphics Test Week” and are seeking your help in evaluating the open-source Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau graphics drivers.

Debian Family

• Just short of two weeks after the big release of Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’, I had Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ arrive on my desk for testing. I have a huge amount of respect for Debian, as do most other Linux users. It’s been around since the very beginnings of the Linux revolution in 1993, just short of 20 years. And it’s contributions to GNU, Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) and Linux over its many years make Debian one of the real-true grandfathers of Linux and is most probably the most respected Linux operating systems to date.

• Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) is out and it’s time for another review of this venerated linux project.

Derivatives

• The recent release of Debian 7.0, also known as “Wheezy”, has triggered distribution updates of CrunchBang and aptosid. CrunchBang project leader Philip Newborough has moved CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf”, which has been in development for over a year and according to Newborough is likely to be “the most thoroughly tested #! release to date”, to stable status. Newborough, who is also known under his online handle of “corenominal”, has rebuilt the images of CrunchBang 11 for the occasion of the Wheezy release and the new images can be downloaded from the CrunchBang site.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• It’s the end of April, so that means that there’s a new release of Ubuntu. Well, actually, no – it means that there are eight of them. Don’t like standard Ubuntu’s Mac-OS-X-like Unity desktop? Here’s where to look.

• The stable release of Ubuntu 13.04 became available for download today, with Canonical promising performance and graphical improvements to help prepare the operating system for convergence across PCs, phones, and tablets.

• “Performance on lightweight systems was a core focus for this cycle, as a prelude to Ubuntu’s release on a range of mobile form factors,” Canonical said in an announcement today. “As a result 13.04 delivers significantly faster response times in casual use, and a reduced memory footprint that benefits all users.”

• I can clearly remember the day when Canonical announced Ubuntu for Android. My first reaction was – finally, the true convergence is here! The ability to turn smartphone into a full-blown PC is something we’ve been hearing about for quite some time now. And Canonical was first to make that dream into a reality. Except that the mentioned software was never released to the general public. Instead, the company decided to pitch OEMs and allow them to pre-install the application on their devices. Bad idea, considering the tight relations major OEMs have with carriers.

• The Linux kernel zRAM module allows for creating RAM-based compressed block devices and for common situations can reduce or eliminate paging on disk. The zRAM feature can be particularly beneficial for systems with limited amounts of system memory. It’s quite easy to setup zRAM on Ubuntu Linux, so in this article are some before and after benchmarks.

• For some cursory benchmarks this weekend, from an old Apple Mac Mini with 1GB of system memory and Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 processor and i945 graphics, benchmarks were conducted atop Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.8 kernel. A variety of system benchmarks were carried out immediately after a clean Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail” development installation and then again after setting up zRAM.

• The Canonical developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 13.04 based Ubuntu Touch images. These “Raring Ringtail” images, available for the Galaxy Nexus (codename: maguro), Nexus 4 (mako), Nexus 10 (manta) and Nexus 7 (grouper) – the four officially supported devices – have been described by some as “beta” images, but are in fact regression test images to ensure the transition from basing Ubuntu Touch on 12.10 to 13.04 goes smoothly.

• Ubuntu 13.04 is an upgrade that’s a downer. Not that Raring Ringtail is a total failure — it’s just that it lacks any real electricity. Yes, it is easy to use and comes preloaded with lots of apps. However, hardcore Linux enthusiasts will give this distro a pass and wait for the next long-term release.

• Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth has really big, plans to put Ubuntu on your smartphone, on your tablet and (via OpenStack). What he doesn’t offer is details on revenue.

Flavours and Variants

• Good news for KDE fans, Kubuntu 13.04 is now available for free download. This release brings the latest stable release of KDE’s Plasma Workspaces and Applications 4.10 which brings a new screen locker, Qt Quick notifications, color correction in Gwenview and faster indexing in the semantic desktop.

• The release of Ubuntu 13.04 is less than a week away, bringing with it some refinements to the Unity interface that users either love or hate. But Ubuntu with Unity is far from the only choice for Linux lovers or those looking to avoid Windows and OS X.

• Linux system developer Canonical launched the new UbuntuKylin operating system, targeting the Chinese market.

Devices/Embedded

• There is no denying that Raspberry Pi is at the top of the heap when it comes to mind-share — and profit-share — of small computers. The Raspberry Pi has revolutionized not only the way we think about small computers, but has also given us a glimpse into a future of nearly disposable, single-duty, utilitarian appliances. But the Pi does have it’s competitors, many of which we’ve reported on here at The Powerbase. One of those competitors is the Beagle Board, and for it, a fully bootable SNES appliance has been made.

• While we wait for the giants to play their hands, a number of Android-powered smartwatches are already on the market, and there’s at least one (Leikr) that runs Linux. The accompanying slideshow reveals devices of note, as well as two intriguing open source, Kickstarter-funded watches that don’t run a formal OS but offer hooks to Linux and Android: the MetaWatch Frame and the Pebble.

• Adlink announced a pair of resistive touchpanels that run Linux, Android, or Windows 7 on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3715 ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The 7-inch, 1024 x 600-pixel SP-7W61 and the 10.4-inch, 800 x 600 SP-1061 are equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, serial, and USB connectivity, and consume only 5.9 to 6.1 Watts.

• Via Technologies announced a tiny, low-power Pico-ITX SBC with optional 3G connectivity and battery power support, aimed at in-vehicle and mobile applications. The VAB-600 is based on an 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-chip (SOC) with on-chip graphics acceleration, offers Ethernet, WiFi, and 3G connectivity, operates from 0 to 60° C, and runs either embedded Linux or Android 4.x.

• Abalta Technologies announced an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) solution that inexpensively mirrors browser content from smartphones or tablets to Linux-enabled “head” units. The company’s Weblink IVI demo consists of a client app running on a Raspberry Pi-based simulated head unit acting as a remote touchscreen for WiFi- or USB-connected smartphones running a companion server app.

• Abalta says its Weblink client/server technology can work with any touchscreen or button-controlled IVI display and can be integrated with existing IVI equipment. The Weblink IVI demo setup runs a Linux Weblink client application on a $25 Raspberry Pi Model A single-board computer (SBC).

• STMicroelectronics has released ready-to-use software drivers for communication with Linux systems,

• STMicroelectronics has released ready-to-use software drivers for communication with Linux systems.

• There’s a new player in the low-cost, ARM-based, mini-computer space. The BeagleBone Black is a $45 device which can run Linux or Android software and which can be used as a barebones computer or as the brains of a hardware project such as a robot, a home automation system, or more.

Phones

• Today, Samsung is announcing a 7-inch tablet running Android 4.1 called the Galaxy Tab 3, but to our eyes, it doesn’t look much different from the current 7-inch Tab 2. The previous Tab’s 1 GHz dual-core processor gets upgraded to a 1.2GHz chip, and the newer tablet offers 16GB of internal storage as an option — its predecessor was limited to 8GB — but the 3-megapixel rear camera and 1.3-megapixel front camera stay the same. The resolution of the Tab 3′s LCD is also unchanged at 1024 x 600, which isn’t much of a match for the 1280 x 800 display on the Nexus 7. So far there aren’t any details on price, but Samsung says the Wi-Fi-only Tab 3 will be available beginning in May, followed by a 3G model for making calls and browsing the web untethered sometime in June.

• Finnish mobile startup Jolla has appointed another new CEO and has added the former lead from HP’s now defunct WebOS group to its board.

Android

• The recent Google app store software update has turned Barnes & Noble’s HD e-reader into a good, low-end Android tablet.

• Weight and activity trackers are an emerging trend, assisted by wearable devices like Nike’s FuelBand, the Fitbit, and Withings’ Smart Body Analyzer — but they don’t come cheap. Smartphone apps may have helped users track their fitness for a little or no cost, but until recently there was no easy way of measuring your weight and automatically uploading that data to your chosen fitness service.

• Shezhen, China-based Promate Technologies claims to have created the world’s first tablet-projector. The “LumiTab” sports a modest 1024×600 7-inch IPS screen, runs Android 4.2, and uses a Texas Instruments digital-light-processing (DLP) chip to render “incredibly sharp 1080p HD images” on walls and projection screens, according to the company.

• Not satisfied with the speed of your Android tablet? Just wait a while…and then purchase a new model with one of the three yet-to-be-released processors featured here.

• In the last Android tutorial, we looked at handling a touchscreen event. This only handled a single pointer, though. Android can handle multiple pointers at the same time, reflecting what happens when you have more than one finger on the screen at the same time. This is how multi-touch gestures (like pinch-zoom) work.

• Combining the GPS, timing and audio-processing available in Android/Linux, the problem comes down to maths and geometry. So, Android/Linux does save lives.

• Jelly Bean is now the only version of Android that is experiencing growth, which is good news for developers because it suggests that the ecosystem is getting less fragmented.

• Apple posted its March-quarter earnings on Tuesday afternoon, which means the flood gates are open for market research firms looking to detail the global smartphone and tablet markets in Q1 2013. Strategy Analytics was among the first to start pushing out numbers and tablets took center stage in a report released late on Tuesday. While Apple managed a great quarter where iPad sales are concerned, it wasn’t enough to stave off the growing army of low-cost Android slates and Apple saw big losses this past quarter in terms of global market share.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• A new version of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) operating system has been released. The Fedora-based Linux distribution now supports the forthcoming OLPC XO-4 Touch laptop.

• Barnes & Noble won’t be shutting down its own content and apps store — though we imagine most users will prefer to get apps through Google Play than through B&N. Apps previously purchased through the Nook store will still be available. The two tablets will also be upgraded to use the Chrome browser and, as full participants in the Google Play ecosystem, also get access to Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. The decision sets the Nook apart from Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, which are decidedly not part of the Google Play ecosystem and instead rely on Amazon’s own app store.

• Mobile PC shipments are expected to hit 762 million by 2017, thanks to demand for tablets and touch-screen notebooks, according to NPD DisplaySearch.

Free Software/Open Source

• Human beings are still worth cherishing, even if the computer can do it all, argues Simon

• The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has initiated a competition with a $50,000 prize to develop an essential component for the OpenFlow software defined networking (SDN). The ONF is dedicated to promoting SDN, where the routing of traffic in a network is independent of the underlying hardware using the OpenFlow protocol. OpenFlow is at the heart of many plans for software defined networking; for example, the recently announced OpenDaylight project uses the protocol as part of its architecture. The Open Networking Foundation’s board members include Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Goldman Sachs, and Microsoft, and it has an industry-wide membership.

• Open-source software throws a wrench into traditional software evaluation criteria. Here’s what to look for and what you’ll be expected to contribute.

KVM

• IBM is not at all new to virtualization, but with its shift last month to an open source cloud architecture, the company has put a fresh effort into boosting market share for KVM, the open source Linux “Kernel-based Virtual Machine” for x86 servers.

• KVM and open virtualization are being rapidly adopted as end users look for lower-cost, enterprise hypervisors. One the major use cases for KVM is to virtualize and consolidate Linux workloads, and the pre-integration of KVM in major Linux distributions makes it easy for Linux enterprise end users to adopt KVM.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Google has made changes to the developer edition of Chrome running on Windows, shuffling around categories on its Chrome Web Store. Now, the “Apps” category only means the new class of packaged apps that are installed in Chrome. Packaged apps are written in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS and designed to behave much more like native apps, most notably by having the ability to run without an internet connection.

Mozilla

• Firefox 20.0 — and a couple earlier versions I think — has a nifty little feature of its “Inspector” tool that allows you to view HTML elements as 3D objects. This lets you to graphically see the DOM structure and how elements lay against one another. As soon as the feature appeared I knew what I wanted to do with it, I wanted to use it for something it wasn’t intended for: 3D Modeling.

SaaS/Big Data

Databases

• Version 4.0 of phpMyAdmin, the popular web-based administration tool for MySQL databases, has been released. This latest version introduces a reworked user interface that replaces the somewhat dated HTML frames with a new tree style navigation implemented with JavaScript. Aside from the new user interface, the developers have also fixed a number of bugs and have made the documentation for the software more accessible.

CMS

• The type of brute force attack that’s being used in this case is fairly common and is relatively easy to defend against.

Business

• Tristan Barnum, a former Digium leader, has joined Telcentris as VP of marketing. Barnum is well-known as a pioneer of Asterisk, the open source IP BPX, within business circles and the IT channel. So what is Barnum up to at Telcentris? Here are some educated guesses from The VAR Guy.

• Identity and access management (IAM) is an integral part of online security across every industry. It is the power of effective IAM solutions that give responsible enterprises the ability to validate the identity of an individual and control their access in the organization, protecting data, information, and privacy of its employees and customers.

BSD

• We knew it was coming and now DragonFlyBSD 3.4 has been officially released. DragonFlyBSD 3.4 brings with it a new packaging system, a new USB stack, a new default compiler, performance improvements, and more.

Public Services/Government

• Governments of all sizes can benefit themselves and their constituents by using GNU/Linux operating systems on servers and PCs and Android/Linux operating systems on tablets and smartphones. Similarly, Apache web server, PostgreSQL database, SugarCRM customer relations, WordPress blogging, and LibreOffice are key applications capable of industrial strength information technology at the lowest cost. The Government of the United Kingdom runs its whole public domain on WordPress. The UK plans to replace much of its bureaucracy with a network of servers cutting the cost of transactions by as much as fifty times over person to person interaction. The UK plans to make Free Software (Open Source, in their terminology) the default for all changes in IT. Typically, it costs about half as much money to run IT with Free Software as with non-free software. Often savings are immediate with less need to upgrade hardware or to fight malware.

• The Swiss government is studying if it can organise procurement of open source services similar to the way it is done for Sweden’s public administrations. The Swiss government’s Federal IT Steering Unit FITSU funded the translation into German of Sweden’s open source procurement framework.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• At Open Source Junction 4 we invited attendees to present their hardware projects. Some were open source hardware, while some used consumer hardware components in conjunction with open source software to provide an innovative solution to a problem.

• Not all businesses can stand behind their products, and even fewer can stand on top of them. At LulzBot, it’s not uncommon to find the multi-talented and seriously committed team mounting their 3D printers upside down or bumping along Colorado mountain roads with a functioning 3D printer in tow—all in the interest of testing the durability and strength of their product under the most extreme conditions. And that’s only part of what makes LulzBot different.

• May 6th, 2013 will stand out in the memory of anyone involved in the 3D printing community as the day that the mass media, for better or for worse, really took notice of this rapidly evolving field. That’s because as of right now, anyone in the United States can legally download and print their own fully functioning handgun.

• Open Home Control Many open source home automation projects have relied on driving proprietary devices, but the newly created Open Home Control project aims to change that by creating a framework for hardware devices that can be integrated with open sourced home automation platforms such as the respected openHAB software.

Programming

• While LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler already has feature complete C++11 support and the developers have already been working on C++14 features, there are some open projects where the GCC alternative is in need of some assistance.

• As pointed out within the latest SVN trunk for the Clang compiler code-base in their documentation (or within the Git mirror), there’s several open work items that could use some development help. Here’s some of the highlights for the most pressing Clang projects seeking some love:

• This April marks both the eighth anniversary of Git and the fifth anniversary of GitHub, so it should come as no great surprise that the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) system has been the focus of extra attention this month.

• One of the prominent features to be introduced with the LLVM 3.3 release this summer is the SLP Vectorizer. Introduced in the LLVM 3.2 release was the LLVM Loop Vectorizer for vectorizing loops while the new SLP Vectorizer is about optimizing straight-line code by merging multiple scalars into vectors.

Standards/Consortia

• The move will enable better applications and analytics for the so-called Internet of things. Cisco, Eclipse Foundation, Eurotech, IBM, Kaazing, M2Mi, Red Hat, Software AG, and Tibco, members of the OASIS open standards consortium, will develop one version of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol.

Leftovers

Science

• Robots inspired by the animal kingdom are already being designed to mimic plenty of creatures, from speedy cheetahs to slithering serpents. Now, researchers are welcoming yet another bio-inspired robot to join the menagerie: a ‘bot built to emulate the movements of baby sea turtles.

Hardware

• Some of these characteristics are no doubt because China is still a rapidly growing market for IT but some derive from frugality and energy of the society. No one in China assumes a free lunch. No one assumes it is OK to waste resources.

Health/Nutrition

• A federal safety official says that 79 gallons of “very slightly radioactive water” from a leaky tank at the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant spilled into Lake Michigan.

• Peru is the first country in the Americas to ban genetically modified foods, putting its food policy closer to that of Europe, than the United States or many of its South American neighbors.

Security

• Some researchers doubt the effectiveness of Stuxnet. That seems almost immaterial. Where the wide publicity given to Chinese attacks ensures a bogeyman, the success of Stuxnet—and the low cost of developing such weapons—has become a model for other countries to follow.

• The hacker collective “Hack the Planet” (HTP) has claimed responsibility for an attack on MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) computer systems in late January, in which it claims to have briefly taken control of the university’s domain, redirected email traffic, and obtained administrator access to all .edu domains. HTP also claims to have compromised web servers for other sites, including security tool Nmap, network security service Sucuri, IT security company Trend Micro, and network analysis tool Wireshark.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Political motive revealed after Cambridge University first claimed scientist’s non-attendance was on medical grounds

• Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

• Congress isn’t actually stopping him.

• With both the CIA and MI6 secretly providing ‘ghost money’ bribes to the Afghan political establishment, it’s likely that Afghans will increasingly support a resurgent Taliban and the drug trade will be further propped up.

• Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has recently been criticized for taking ‘ghost money’ from the CIA and MI6. The sums are unknown – for the usual reasons of ‘national security’ – but are estimated to have been in the tens of millions of dollars. While this is nowhere near the eye-bleeding $12 billion shipped over to Iraq on pallets in the wake of the invasion a decade ago, it is still a significant amount.

• And how has this money been spent? Certainly not on social projects or rebuilding initiatives. Rather, the reporting indicates, the money has been funneled to Karzai’s cronies as bribes in a corrupt attempt to buy influence in the country.

• CIA spooks regularly review spy fiction for a classified in-house journal, rating John le Carré above American writers for his veracity, reports Jon Stock.

• Fox News is falsely suggesting a new Weekly Standard article proves the CIA didn’t link the Benghazi attacks to an anti-Islam YouTube video. In fact, CIA talking points obtained by the conservative magazine actually demonstrate the intelligence community believed there was a link between the attacks and reactions to the video.

• Conservative writer Stephen Hayes’ piece for The Weekly Standard reported that an initial September 14 draft of talking points by the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis stated that members of an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group were involved in the Benghazi attacks, but that point was later removed by administration officials. Hayes provided images of various versions of the CIA’s talking points, including a bullet in “Version 1″ stating: “We believe based on currently available information that the attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex.”

• The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has continuously refused to refer to Chechen and Islamic Emirate terrorists operating in Russia as «terrorists». NSA analysis reports of signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts of Russian police, Federal Security Bureau (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Russian military communications, including radio, landline and cellular telephone, fax, text message, and fax, have, since 2003, referred to Chechen and North Caucasus terrorists as «guerrillas». Prior to that year, TOP SECRET Codeword internal NSA directives stated that Chechen terrorists were to be called «rebels».

• He said an arms cache in the house exploded but did not identify the suspects killed.

• …strike was the second in less than a week against suspected members…

• BRYANT: Now, I really have no clue what I’m doing with my life. Going to school at the university through the GI Bill trying to figure out the next step of my life at the moment.

• MCEVERS: You’ve been diagnosed with PTSD, posttraumatic stress, yeah?

• BRYANT: Yes.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The European Commission is on the verge of a trade war with China over the import of solar panels worth 21bn euros (£18bn) a year.

Finance

• Earlier this month I wrote about Bitcoin Mining coming to the open-source Radeon Linux GPU driver. In the weeks since, Tom Stellard of AMD has made more improvements to the AMD R600 LLVM back-end that benefit the performance of Bitcoin mining.

Censorship

• Internet activity in Syria dropped off sharply on Tuesday afternoon, according to various sources.

• Internet monitoring firm Renesys tweeted this afternoon that it confirmed a “loss of Syrian Internet connectivity 18:43 UTC. BGP routes down, inbound traces failing.”

• Google later tweeted “Google services inaccessible in Syria,” with a link to its Transparency Report, which showed a complete drop in activity from the region shortly before 3 p.m. Eastern (left).

• The CIA on Tuesday selected a man to become the agency’s next director of the National Clandestine Service, a key position that involves overseeing spy operations around the world, over the woman currently serving in the role on an acting basis.

• News organizations acknowledged on Tuesday that the officers’ identities are hardly a secret in Washington. But they typically withhold the names of undercover officers as a matter of policy and did so in this case, with The Washington Post, Associated Press and The New York Times choosing not to identify the man. Similarly, the woman — who would have been a controversial choice given her ties to torture tactics used in interrogations during the Bush years — remains undercover and was not identified Tuesday or in articles on her interim role a couple months back.

• OpenDNS CTO Dan Hubbard appeared on Bloomberg TV this morning to discuss the technology behind Syria’s recent Internet outage. He discusses the likelihood of government involvement vs. technical failure, and shares details on how online behavior differed after Syria’s Internet came back online.

Privacy

• “A German court rejected eight out of 15 provisions in Apple’s general privacy policy and terms of data use on Tuesday, claiming that the practices of the Cupertino, Calif. company deviate too much from German laws (Google translation of German original). According to German law, recognized consumer groups can sue companies over illegal terms and conditions. Apple asks for ‘global consent’ to use customer data on its website, but German law insists that clients know specific details about what their data will be used for and why.”

• ORG, our supporters, Liberty, Privacy International, No2ID and Big Brother Watch will be celebrating a victory today, with the withdrawal of the Snoopers’ Charter from the government’s legislative programme.

• The draft Communications Data Bill has been vetoed by Nick Clegg and is not set to feature in Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech, which has been welcomed by civil liberties campaigners.

• But a senior Liberal Democrat has accused his leader of putting party politics above national security. David Thompson reports.

• The EU Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) provides an obligation for providers of publicly available electronic communications services and of public communications networks to retain traffic and location data for six months up to two years for the purpose of the investigation, detection, and prosecution of serious crime. Considering potential uses and misuses of retained data such as traffic analysis, social network analysis, and data mining, this paper examines the suitability, necessity, and proportionality of the interference with the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection as guaranteed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Civil Rights

• Members of the Anonymous “hacktivist” collective have launched OpGtmo, a full-bore campaign aimed at convincing the U.S. government to shut down the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

• THEY were labelled traitors and barred from state employment, but yesterday the Irish government formally apologised for its treatment of thousands of men who deserted the Irish army to fight in the Second World War.

• An estimated 60,000 men from Ireland served in the British Army, Royal Navy or RAF between 1939 and 1945. Of those, nearly 5,000 deserted the Irish armed forces to join the fight against Nazi Germany.

• Document shows agency requested removal of interrogation scene with dog, and shots of operatives partying with AK47

• Screenwriter Mark Boal asked to take out scenes showing Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

• Lawyer who drafted White House drone policy says US would rather kill suspects than send them to Cuban detention centre

• …sparked an international outcry and a fierce domestic debate…

• Witness testimony undermines administration claims that only al-Qaida leaders are drone targets

• Pursuing criminal hacking groups is high on the FBI’s list of priorities—but the bureau is adopting some hacking techniques of its own. And a Texas judge isn’t happy about it.

• On Monday, a judge denied an FBI request to install a spy Trojan on a computer in an unknown location in order to track down a suspected fraudster. The order rejecting the request revealed that the FBI wanted to use the surveillance tool to covertly infiltrate the computer and take photographs of its user through his or her webcam. The plan also included recording Internet activity, user location, email contents, chat messaging logs, photographs, documents, and passwords.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• People seem really good at forgetting history. While most people realize that Google bought YouTube early on in that company’s existence, they tend to forget that this was, in part, because YouTube was beating the pants off of Google’s own online service called Google Video. The big difference? Google Video’s launch focused very much on selling videos and using annoying DRM that had to check in with a server any time you wanted to watch. It was a complete and total failure, which probably cost an even larger amount when you realize it made Google more desperate to buy YouTube.

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