● 08.28.13

● Links 28/8/2013: OpenBEL and Linux Foundation, 30-Year GNU Anniversary Planned

Posted in News Roundup at 3:09 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Today in Open Source: Is Linux boring? Plus: How to Find Android tablet apps, and Crunchbang Linux is a minimalist’s dream distro!

• There are many people out there that want to start malware analysis and reverse engineering, but don’t know where to start, so this article intention is to show everybody interested in malware analysis a Linux lightweight distro for doing malware analysis with reverse engineering tools. This distribution is called REMnux, it is based on Ubuntu and it is maintained by Lenny Zelster, a business and tech leader with extensive experience in information technology and security.

Desktop

• As soon as Apple launched their Haswell-based MacBook Air I purchased the “ultrabook” for its long battery life, great build quality, and impressive design. However, running Linux on the 2013 MacBook Air has been a pain. It wasn’t running cleanly but it looks like the major kernel booting problem comes down to a UEFI interaction issue.

• At the beginning I had plans to write one document, but later I understood that this document will be very big and I will write it very long time (having regard my current load). So I decided to write a several posts on this theme. This is the first post from the series. In this post I will concentrate on shortcomings of current GNU/Linux distros, in the second post I will try to write what should be done, to create a really usable GNU/Linux distro which can be a rival for proprietary systems.

• The thought of using Linux as a manager in a highly Windows- and Mac-centric corporate environment isn’t something to be taken lightly. Integrating with Active Directory, wrangling email with Microsoft Exchange, and taming quirky Microsoft office documents can be a challenge even with a well-equipped Mac. I decided to make a change after using a Mac at Rackspace for six years.

• Canonical is in talks with Dell on making a version of Ubuntu supported by the Chinese government available as a pre-installed OS on the PC maker’s upcoming products destined for the Chinese market.

• Dell is a global partner for Canonical, and so the two companies are discussing using its Ubuntu Kylin OS in the future, said Leonard Tsai, Canonical’s Asia Pacific president, on Wednesday.

Server

• The next generation of applications will be smarter — with built-in data, mobile and social capabilities — and it will be built on private clouds that run on Linux servers, says Arvind Krishna, general manager of development and manufacturing in the Systems & Technology Group at IBM. What’s still unclear, however, is the business model for delivering these future applications, he says.

• Twenty-one years after its introduction, Linux has reached unprecedented levels of deployment within enterprise environments, according to a recent study commissioned by enterprise Linux provider SUSE.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode talks about the new verified teams paradigm for local community teams, mentions the release of 12.04.3, and talks about what is coming up at Ohio Linux Fest. Where the leader disappeared to over the weekend is also mentioned in passing.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation, champion of all things open-source, has just announced a new collaboration with OpenBEL, an open-source platform for sharing scientific data.

• Final release of Linux 3.11 is expected within a week, Torvalds said in a message echoing his 1991 post about the project

• That made porting to further platforms far easier, and has helped drive the uptake of Linux across an incredible range of platforms, from supercomputers to smartphones to embedded systems – “just about anything else out there under the sun,” as Linus puts it. Had Linux remained trapped on the original Intel chipset, it would probably never have become the leading operating system it is today.

• As Linus’ comments show, porting was never carried out with that aim in mind, and happened in an almost casual way. But then the same can be said about Linux in general, including that first, famously diffident post of 22 years ago.

• Linux just turned 22 and the open source revolution it sparked is just getting started, two experts suggest.

• Can the development model that is used to build Linux be extended for the life sciences? A new collaborative project will aim to answer that question.

• The Linux Foundation is growing its roster of collaboration projects by expanding from the physical into the biological realm with the OpenBEL (Biological Expression Language). The Linux Foundation, best known as the organization that helps bring Linux vendors and developers together, is also growing its expertise as a facilitator for collaborative development projects.

Graphics Stack

• The DRM compositor back-end for Wayland’s Weston now has a patch that provides hardware-accelerated screen capturing support by using VA-API with drivers that support this video decode/encode acceleration mechanism.

Applications

• Linux is blessed with a good range of open source education software. The purpose of this article is to identify top notch open source software targeted at instructors and educational institutions. Educational establishments are constantly examining ways to reduce their overheads and save money, yet retain the delivery of high quality educational courses. Open source software solutions represent a way of fully embracing technology without causing a hole in the institution’s finances.

• I admit I spend most of my time with pacman and its evil twin, yaourt. But neither of those is a real console application, for managing packages in Arch. yaourt might spice things up, but it’s no more a console “application” than pacman is.

Proprietary

• SDG Systems announced today the expansion of their professional service offerings, including broad Android and Linux software development services. The services now offered for Android and Linux include operating system (OS) porting and customization, mobile app development and application porting. SDG has long been a leader in OS porting to rugged mobile computers. In June, 2013, SDG Systems completed the implementation of Android (AOSP) 4.1 (“Jelly Bean”) on the Trimble Juno T41 rugged mobile computer. The implementation included support for enhanced GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3.75G cellular voice and data, barcode scanning and other technologies. SDG Systems is a strategic partner with Trimble MCS for Android and offers in-depth Android technical support and consulting services.

• WhatsApp and Viber are two of the finest and incredibly popular apps out there for Android. WhatsApp is my preferred way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Viber is not so far behind either. Since video and voice call features are also available in Viber, it’s a more complete package. Very recently, Viber team had made their desktop plans very clear and Windows and Mac version were released soon enough. Now its Linux’s turn, though Viber for Linux is available in 64 bit binaries only at the moment.

Instructionals/Technical

• One of the features that Portage provides is to have post-processing done on request of the administrator for certain packages. For instance, for the dev-db/postgresql-server package we can call its pkg_config() phase to create the PostgreSQL instance and configure it so that the configuration of the database is stored in /etc/postgresql-9.2 rather than together with the data files.

Games

• Nordic Games has announced that the second chapter of The Raven: Legacy of A Master Thief entitled “Ancestry of Lies” is now available for PC, Mac and Linux.

• Frogatto & Friends is an old-school 2D action/adventure platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog. Give it a try! We’re trying to push 2D platforming, pixel-art, and music into uncharted territory.

• Paranautical Activity the awesome looking FPS/Roguelike game from CodeAvarice is planning to add Co-Op multiplayer to jump in the game with friends! So this will make an already fun game far more awesome.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Enlightenment’s Wayland ambitions are becoming a reality with Enlightenment E19 set to support operating as its own Wayland compositor using some interesting technology.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• From now on you can imagine that I’m starting every post with “I’ve fixed something”, since code works pretty stable, but sometimes I come across small issues and fix them.

• In this article, I explain changes to the plugin loading mechanism in KDE Frameworks 5. The article is intended for a technical audience with some affinity to KDE development.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The latest Gnome Shell release vn 3.9.90 is the first 3.10 beta marking the feature work wrapping up and heading to code-freeze state.

• The development team of Baobab (also known as Disk Usage Analyzer), a graphical utility to analyze disk usage in the GNOME desktop environment, announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download of the first Beta release of the upcoming Baobab 3.10 software.

• I’m Emmanuele Bassi, and I’ve been working on GNOME and GNOME-related technologies for the past 10 years, both as a hobbyist and as a paid software engineer. I am part of the team working on the core GNOME platform (GLib, GTK+, and Clutter, plus other libraries); I have been elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors for three years and I’m currently working as its secretary. I am also lead architect for Endless Mobile, a start up using GNOME technology.

• While traditionally the middle-click mouse button has been a convenient way to paste rather than Ctrl + V on Unix-like systems, GNOME designers are looking to change it up for their desktop.

• The GNOME developers announced a few days ago that the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package, a daemon run by all GNOME sessions to provide live access to configuration settings and the changes done to them, is available for download and testing.

• I was talking to Seif Lotfy at GUADEC about the gnome-music design, and this is a design proposal that has come out of that. It’s not proposing to add anything new, it’s just re-purposing the things that are already there.

• GNOME’s burgeoning suite of core apps are making me excited for the future of the Linux desktop.

• Controlling, changing settings, fine tuning and bringing the system closer to your needs is a vital thing and a point of special attention for Gnome users and developers. Gnome’s default tool for completing the important task of setting your system is constantly evolving to fit user needs and make our life easier with more options, better functionality and greater abilities.

• With 29 days left untill version 3.10 gets officially released, we already have reached the point where it’s all about bug fixing from now on and what a better timing for us to revisit Gnome’s Goals situation, see what the stage of completion is and compare the data with what the situation was on the beginning of this year.

Distributions

• Manjaro 0.8.7 was released this morning, the latest update for the very nice and easy to use Linux distribution derived from Arch Linux.

• Manjaro developers have been preparing for this release for the past two months and it was finally realized today.

New Releases

• On behalf of the Manjaro development team I’m happy to announce our new stable release of Manjaro Linux ‘Ascella’. The last two months was a blast for us. Summer feeling and good people helped us to put this one together.

• The Core Update comes with a lot of feature enhancements for IPsec, smaller fixes for OpenVPN and fixed two denial-of-service attacks in the Squid web proxy.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Wallpaper contests are among my favorite things and today the OpenMandriva bunch announced the latest for their upcoming Lx release. The theme is “The Flavor of Freedom,” so warm up your GIMP, Inkscape, or whatever you use and get your submissions in.

Red Hat Family

• In trading on Tuesday, shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) crossed below their 200 day moving average of $50.67, changing hands as low as $50.50 per share. Red Hat Inc shares are currently trading off about 1.9% on the day. The chart below shows the one year performance of RHT shares, versus its 200 day moving average:

• I’m a words guy. This summer, I was an intern for the content team—part of the marketing services group at Red Hat. They kept me busy writing copy for ads, editing Red Hat content, brainstorming on different projects, and even scripting videos. They don’t have me writing like a businessman, but like the Shadowman.

• Red Hat has carved out a strong reputation for its profitable Linux-focused strategy and the top-notch support it provides for enterprise customers, but there is no question that the company is betting on future growth in the cloud computing space. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is positioned to serve as the foundation for OpenStack-powered cloud deployments. Today Red Hat announced its new Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and expanded training in support of its OpenStack technology.

Fedora

• Earlier this month I attended the first Fedora Flock, in Charleston, SC. This replaced the older Fedora Users and Developers conferences, none of which I had participated in prior. Other than certain difficulties with my return flight, this was a fun and interesting event, and I do hope Fedora has more of them going forward.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Despite the recent failure of the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign, developers are still doing some neat things with Ubuntu mobile. Over at XDA Developers, some aspiring developers have managed to port the operating system on to the Sony Xperia Tablet Z. However, the developer does warn that it is a very experimental port of the OS, and encourages members to make backups before trying it out.

• Its has been revealed this week that a copy of the Ubuntu Touch operating system has been successfully ported to the Sony Experia Z Tablet.

• Last week we had a look at the LXLE 12.04.3 Paradigm Linux Distro, and now we thought you would be interested to learn more about the latest Ubuntu 12.04.3 system update, which you can see in the visual above.

• The Ubuntu Edge project didn’t reach its goal of collecting 32 million dollars to finance the production of their smartphone but Canonical is nevertheless congratulated on the response they received.

• How many people really pledged for a phone? And was offering an $820 phone for $600 at the start a good or bad idea?

• Canonical has a very dedicated team building the Mir display server, and they are updating it on a constant basis. Version 0.0.10 has just been released.

• Canonical promised that Mir would be available as default for the released of Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) and now the company is searching testers that are willing to improve the overall experience.

• App Grid is a new lightweight Ubuntu Software alternative that tries to make application discovery easier by using a grid view which includes app screenshots and ratings.

• My experience with Ubuntu started in 2007 when i was doing the internship of my second year in Computer Engineering, the first week was really boring, the second week and while i was trying to fix the DVD driver, i opened the drawer then i found a Green CD of “OpenSUSE”, i booted with the live CD, the OS was a bit complicated and not easy to play with.

• Unity is the graphical environment that we ship in a default Ubuntu installation. Released for the first time about three years ago, Unity is focused on simplicity and consistency across multiple devices. In this article I am going to cover the history of Unity and how Unity 8 is driving a new era of code and design convergence in Ubuntu.

Flavours and Variants

• I have installed a week ago with Elementary Luna, if you like GNU/Linux operating Linux, then you should have heard about Elementary Luna but if not, I will tell you that Elementary Luna is a new GNU/Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 12.04, the last Long term Ubuntu released.

Devices/Embedded

• Win Enterprises announced a Mini-ITX single-board computer for digital imaging and other embedded applications, built around quad- and dual-core AMD Embedded R-Series APUs clocked at up to 2GHz. The Linux-friendly MB-73330 SBC features up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM, three HDMI ports and a DisplayPort, dual SATA 6.0 ports, eight USBs, dual gigabit Ethernet, and multiple PCIe and Mini-PCIe expansion options.

• Aaeon announced the availability of a Linux-friendly PC/104-Plus single board computer based on the AMD 615MHz G-Series T16R processor.

Phones

Ballnux

• A Samsung executive confirmed to The Korea Times that it will unveil its Galaxy Gear smartwatch on Sept. 4, along with the Galaxy Note 3 phablet, but quashed rumors of a flexible display. The Android-powered smartwatch, rumored to include a dual-core processor and a camera, will be the first of many Samsung and Apple smartwatches that will lead a surging 36 million unit a year market by 2018, predicts Juniper Research.

Android

• We don’t know what number or name the next version of Android will be, but if all signs are pointing in the right direction we’ll likely see Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie here soon from Google. There’s no question they’re hard at work on the next major release, possibly set for later this year, and today we’re seeing some interesting tidbits on the Kernel side.

• Intel has released the Intel C++ Compiler v13.0 for Android OS, its first attempt at delivering an optimizing C/C++ compiler designed specifically for Google’s mobile platform.

• One of the big selling points of the Android ecosystem is that the operating system is open source. That means handset manufacturers can modify it to work on their handsets and tablets, or enterprising individuals can customize it to work on their own hardware.

Free Software/Open Source

• Complaints of stricture over structure, signs of technical prowess on the wane — the best days of the Apache Software Foundation may be behind

• Apache is great for many things, not so for others. Its proponents misunderstand its weaknesses, and its detractors misunderstand its strengths

• I have always been interested in science, technology and (most of all) computers. These are things that I always loved, even though they were sometimes difficult. I loved math and science class in school; I read science-fiction and fantasy novels in all of my spare time. I was the nerdy kid at school that was bullied and mocked. It would have been so easy to just give in and be “like everyone else”. I could have stopped reading. I could have played more sports.

• [...]

• This is the sentiment that drove me into my open source career.

• Ask just about any person you meet whether they are using open source software (OSS) and the chances are good you will be met by a blank stare. Yet, people might be surprised when you tell them that they are either using it on the mobile device they own or on their social media platform of choice.

SaaS/Big Data

• The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) promises to enable an agile infrastructure that’s orchestratable through automated policies. Avaya is now formally defining its approach to SDDC, which will make use of the open source OpenStack cloud platform.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• This year the LibreOffice Conference will take place in Milano, Italy. Come and join us for this excepional event from the 25th to the 27th of September 2013. Learn about migrations to LibreOffice, LibreOffice existing deployments, writing extensions and much more. Participate in hacking sessions and community workshops and most of all, meet the LibreOffice community face to face for a few days of exchange and fun!

Education

• Shai Reshef dreams of making quality education affordable and accessible to everyone, and he sees the Internet as the road to get there. Reshef is the founder of University of the People (UoPeople), which bills itself as the world’s first tuition-free, degree-granting, non-profit online university.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCL has moved to the git version control system. The 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 branches and tags are identical in cvs and git. Henceforward, modifications will be made to git only. As of the present writing, git contains a merge of experimental into master, and a port of most 2.6.x improvements into master. This will form the basis of a 2.7.0 release sometime in the future.

• The FSF is pleased to announce that we can begin accepting GPG-signed assignments from contributors residing in the United States.

• This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.

• It’s been 30 years since the GNU manifesto was penned. What began as frustration over a printer driver has grown into a massive social movement. The GNU system itself has exploded; not only is it a fully free operating system, but it has expanded to include an entire universe of software. Now, GNU is on the threshold of another amazing leap, and we want you to be a part of it.

Project Releases

• Beyond making a whole lot of Intel X.Org driver changes and some recent yet-to-be-merged performance improvements, Chris Wilson has put out a new release of the Cairo graphics library.

• The Calligra team has released version 2.7.2, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active in the 2.7 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.7.1 and we recommend everybody to update.

• I am fully occupied this week and the next with training my new helpdesk team, so it took me a bit by surprise when Willy Sudiarto Raharjo tweeted that there was a version 1.0 of Calibre since this morning. Kovid Goyal, developer of Calibre, published the news in a blog post. It’s nearly seven years since Kovid started with Calibre – this was the time when the first E-ink based ereader device, SONY PRS-500, hit the market. At first, Calibre was merely a library which was able to convert e-book formats into Sony’s LRF format. It got ‘upgraded’ with a graphical user interface to manage Kovid’s growing ebook library.

Public Services/Government

• The Australian government is seeing a lot more demand for open-source support, according to chief technology officer John Sheridan.

Openness/Sharing

• David Bollier is no stranger to politics. The author, activist and independent commons scholar worked for Ralph Nader in the late-’70s and early-’80s, he’s a policy strategist and he has participated in or founded numerous public interest projects. But, over the years, he found himself increasingly disillusioned with political activism.

Programming

• PHP is not a young language. As of 2013, it’s 18 years old; that’s old enough to vote. Many upstart languages have appeared over the years to try and unseat PHP as the “lingua franca” of web applications but it still commands over 80% of the web market. One reason for PHP’s popularity is no doubt the ease with which new developers can get started with it, but just as important is the fact that PHP has been evolving for all those 18 years.

• Github is a nice site, and I routinely monitor a couple of projects there.

Leftovers

• When the Google ChromeCast was announced it was an instant hit and all the units were ‘sold’ immediately. One of the core features of ChromeCast was the ability to play local content. This $35 device seemed to hold much more potential than the AppleTV and other such devices the market.

• Groklaw is “truly the canary in the coal mine,” suggested blogger Martin Espinoza. “When it is no longer possible to tell the truth online sufficiently for it to exist, none of us have the freedom of speech. The corporations which have bought our government are in the process of buying our silence and obedience as well, and the cost is turning out to be remarkably low.”

• Your ideas are stolen… from someone else.

• We caught up with the pioneers who brought us the Unix operating system and asked them to share some memories of the early days of Unix development.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Obama administration gave green signal to a chemical weapons attack plan in Syria that could be blamed on President Bashar al Assad’s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country, leaked documents have shown.

• Horrific scenes of dead and injured civilians in Syria have been a part of the conflict there over the past several years, but the reports of a chemical attack of some sort last week in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta have led U.S. policymakers and the Obama White House to threaten to attack in a matter of days.

Finance

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• “The task is not done, the journey is not complete,” said Martin Luther King III on Saturday’s 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.

• A small GOP lobby shop tied to the Tea Party and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, and which was active in the state’s recent recall elections, was awarded $500,000 in taxpayer dollars in what some are calling a backdoor, sweetheart deal cooked up by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair, outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder.

Privacy

• facebook_logo-300x99Today Facebook has published it’s first transparency report, detailing law enforcement and national security requests from countries around the world. Britain requested data on 1,975 occasions, covering 2,337 users. In 32% of cases, Facebook declined to provide any data.

• …comparing the release of classified information about government spying to the assassination of Martin Luther King…

Civil Rights

• Some media figures applaud the criminalization of investigative reporting

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