● 04.19.14

● Links 19/4/2014: Slow Easter News Day

Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• eRacks primarily focuses upon pushing high-end, rackmount servers that run various Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, et al) along with popular BSD operating systems like NetBSD and FreeBSD. However, eRacks also offers a limited range of branded laptops/notebooks, firewall servers, and other products. Their newest laptops from eRacks are Linux-loaded versions of the ASUS Zenbook laptops and ultrabooks.

Desktop

• A lot of work is ongoing in Collabora to make Wayland usable on Raspberry Pi. The main bottleneck to the task is the lack of a functional Wayland shell for the Pi. Or at least it was till now. Marco Barisione announced Maynard, Raspberry Pi’s own Wayland shell, in his blog.

• The foundation of the new shell is Tiago Vignatti‘s gtk-shell which is extended to implement Maynard. It’s still a work in progress but the initial looks are stunning. The current course is a tiled approach as you can see from the image below.

• One of these new features added today is a way to control the volume of the Chrome OS media player with the Arrow keys. Chromebooks come with master volume keys built into the keyboard, but now this new basic feature allows you to push the up and down arrow keys to change the volume of the Chrome Media Player itself.

Server

• Are SSD storage, gobs of memory and more CPU power enough for a smaller player in the cloud computing industry to unseat the likes of Rackspace (RAX) and Amazon Web Services? Linode, the hosting provider previously known for its Linux-based virtual personal server (VPS) offerings, thinks so, and has announced a $45 million investment to overhaul its cloud services toward this end.

Kernel Space

• Linux, arguably the world’s most emblematic open-source project, provides a counterpoint to OpenSSL’s problems. Volunteers all over the world submit seven changes to Linux every hour, and millions of lines of code improvements and fixes are voluntarily added to the software every year. Over 180 major companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, IBM and Samsung, every year contribute around half a million dollars to the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit that supports the Linux system.

• So what explains the discrepancy between the inattention to OpenSSL and the great fortune of Linux? Good old lack of awareness, experts say.

• Open-source advocates and participants say Linux has simply had the benefit of strong brand ambassadors and better name recognition than OpenSSL.

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• For our latest AM1 platform testing with the Athlon 5350 Kabini APU is comparing its Radeon R3 Graphics against an assortment of discrete NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards while running Ubuntu 14.04 Linux. For this comparison there’s thirteen graphics processors being compared with the latest Linux GPU drivers.

• These regressions are a bit frightening but we are still in the process of conducting further tests — both bare metal and in the public clouds — to try to figure out more closely what’s going on. However, for most users I wouldn’t hold off on upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS since it will ultimately be needed for the longest support within enterprise environments, for desktop users there are plenty of new features, the hardware enablement is much better on 14.04 LTS, the open-source graphics stack is much better, and there’s many other non-performance advantages in using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Applications

• Most of the Calibre updates released until now have been rather substantial, with very few exceptions. Even if the releases are on a weekly basis, the developer always finds some fixes or improvements to implement.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 1.7.17 is now available.

Games

• That’s right folks Valve are bringing the easter cheer lighting the way for another 34 Linux games to come out on Steam!

• Randy mentioned in a Tweet on Friday night, “It seems reddit wants a Linux port of Borderlands 2. I’ll probably chat with some folks on twitter about that this weekend.”

• While that seems rather positive for Linux gamers, in a follow-up Tweet, Pitchford mentioned, “who said there will be a Linux port – I just want to learn more about customer interests there.”

• Picture this with me: there was a time when gaming on Linux was a niche within a niche, a small space of escape from coding, reading mailing lists, and actual work (I kid). Tux Kart, Secret Maryo Chronicales, text-based adventures, and hours of Frozen Bubble. If you wanted Steam, it was off to WINE, often struggling to make some games even launch correctly. As time marched on we wondered when gaming on Linux might finally take off. In the past 12 months, it’s been one heck of a ride. Steam for Linux is poised to make major noise this year in gaming.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Distributions

New Screenshots of Ubuntu-based Distros

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The first release candidate to the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 release has now taken place.

Red Hat Family

• Jim Whitehurst takes aim at Linux rivals and explains that growth is coming from new workloads, not migrations.

• Red Hat is the first pure-play open-source Linux vendor to surpass $1 billion in annual revenue, and it has a solid plan to keep growing its business in the years ahead. That’s the key message delivered by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst during the company’s annual Analyst Day event held on April 16.

• Just in time for the release of Icehouse, the latest and greatest version of the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, Dell and Red Hat (RHT) have partnered to deliver new private cloud OpenStack deployment solutions for the enterprise. They have also expanded their collaboration on all types of cloud solutions, public, private and hybrid through development of a new OpenShift PaaS product.

• Red Hat is hosting its annual summit this week – this year in San Francisco – where the company is seemingly basking in the glory of making more than a billion dollars off a free open source project.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• As you may know, a new Ubuntu Touch version has been released yesterday, along with the release of Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. Due to the fact that it is already stable enough, it still lacks a lot of important features, already present on iOS and Android.

Flavours and Variants

• I chose Xubuntu because it is part of the excellent and popular Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. The 12.04 LTS (long-term support) release, codename Precise Pangolin, receives updates and security fixes until April 2017. The interim releases are supported only for 9-18 months. It’s nice and lightweight for older computers, and it has a good straightforward user interface. The Ubuntu installer is the easiest and most streamlined of any distro, and Ubuntu updates and upgrades are reliable. Ubuntu is popular and has the backing of its parent company Canonical, so it’s not likely to disappear anytime soon. Xubuntu doesn’t look much like Windows XP, but it has the same basic layout: an applications menu, and a panel that shows notifications and open apps. You can find everything with just a little bit of poking around and clicking stuff.

• I know, my fellow Linux fans, I know, what about Linux Mint? Mint is a wonderful distro. And so is Mageia, and Fedora, and PCLinuxOS, and openSUSE, and Bohdi, and so many more. Linux is a feast of riches. OSDisc.com offers many Linux distros on USB sticks, so feel free to go nuts and use whatever one you want.

Devices/Embedded

• Fon has launched a Kickstarter project for a Linux-based “Gramofon” device that streams music from multiple mobile devices, and also acts as a WiFi hotspot.

• The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive computer-on-a-module that’s kind of like a cross between a Raspberry Pi and a Arduino board. You can use it as the brains of a low-power computer, or as the heart of a robot, home automation system, or other hardware project.

• Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, BeagleBone Black is a cheap ARM mini-computer, being something between a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.

Phones

Android

• Koushik Dutta! Let’s be honest, it’s not a common name, and neither is he a common person. I say this because he is one of the premier developers for the Android platform and is the mastermind behind the now famous AllCast app and the timeless ClockworkMod recovery. Koushik has been a member of Cyanogen Inc, and did work on their ROMs, while also working along with Oppo for the N1 and also OnePlus for the yet to be released One.

• The Wall Street Journal reports that Google (GOOGL) is working on an ambitious idea to create open hardware platform smartphones that consumers can easily customize by themselves.

Free Software/Open Source

• As open source software continues to develop, many companies have begun to see the incredible value that it could bring to their organizations.

• THE QUALITY of open source code has overtaken that of proprietary code for the first time, according to a survey.

• A few months after ReactOS announced plans for a Cloud OS, the open-source project aiming for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows platforms, is now trying to spin a community edition of its operating system.

• As Day 2 begins, I wanted to take the time to remember all the way back to yesterday on theCUBE. It may have been only 24 short hours ago, but the conversations had with some of the top executives, regarded by John Furrier as luminaries in their field, really highlighted the overall maturity of Linux and the open source community as both the future of the Cloud and that community seem to have converged this year.

• With strong roots in the Microsoft ecosystem, Telerik has always been part of the commercial software landscape. But starting today Telerik, a provider of application development tools, is embracing open source. The company today announced Telerik Kendo UI Core, an open source implementation of the JavaScript framework and user interface tools that Telerik created for its cross-platform application development environments.

• Infoblox Inc. (NYSE:BLOX), the automated network control company, today introduced Infoblox Virtual Appliance Software for XenServer, bringing the full range of Infoblox enterprise-grade network control technologies to the open-source XenServer virtualization platform.

• Box has made its identity as a cloud company with generous file management features. The company showed another generous side by contributing to the Open Source movement with its own repository.

• Although I might give Mr Seggelmann the benefit of the doubt, the NSA’s track record for veracity in the wake of Edward Snowden’s astonishing leaks is not been of the best, and I am not inclined to do the same for them. But that’s another article. Here I want to concentrate on what is perhaps the most interesting facet of this story for readers of this column: the fact that the OpenSSL code suffering from Heartbleed is open source.

• Enterprise cloud storage and collaboration firm Box announced this week that the company is open sourcing a range of internal initiatives to “give back” to the coding communities that have contributed to its success.

• Doug Fisher, VP & GM, Software Services Group, Intel, took a trip down the memory lane of being a part of the open source community since its beginning and discusses his takes on the matter with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman, live from the 2014 Red Hat Summit.

• Social media networks need to be streamlined otherwise you will get lost. A common problem that has been solved by a lot of social media dashboard startups already and SocioBoard is another startup trying to grab a pie from the existing market. The Mumbai based startup calls itself an open source product in social media space, the first of its kind globally from India. There have been Indian startups in the past that have tried to crack the space, they have had to face challenges. So it was interesting to give SocioBoard a spin.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• If you go to the Chrome Web Store and search for ‘new tab page’ or ‘startpage,’ you will find at least 30 different apps and extensions claiming to be the best. However, you do not have time to sift through all of them, so you settle for the one with the best reviews. Usually, the app or extension with the best reviews is the one I would suggest. However, when it comes to your new tab page, you cannot just pick the one with the highest reviews, and if you still use Google‘s standard new tab page, it is time for you to install a different one.

SaaS/Big Data

• One notable thing about Icehouse is that it introduces a new database-as-a-service feature, focused on building and managing relational databases, called Trove. Trove is starting to get a lot of notice, and Tesora is among the companies with a stake in Trove’s success. The company is focused on Database-as-a-Service technology.

• With yesterday’s official release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS I set out to do some benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS in the public cloud. Unfortunately, that testing was drawn out due to the variable performance out of instances/droplets in the public cloud that are even of the same instance type.

• IT executives laid out the challenges and opportunities created by cloud computing, open source, and other disruptive technologies during this week’s Red Hat summit in San Francisco.

CMS

• Today Jahia is the #1 Open Source alternative to proprietary CMS vendors for upper tier digital projects. Over the years, we’ve focused on building a content platform that delivers true technology convergence: business user and developers work in harmony to deploy digital projects (Portals, multichannel, multi site, Multilanguage corporate sites, extranets, intranets and even full digital applications) securely and seamlessly.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Activists of the Free Software Movement of India say you had better switch to free software that can easily substitute the proprietary, costly licences of Microsoft. “When you migrate, it involves a lot of cost on hardware upgrades and migration. Besides buying the OS copy of a higher version, users need to upgrade their hardware so that their systems can support the new OS,” Y Kiran Chandra, General Secretary of the Free Software Movement of India, told Business Line.

• Microsoft is running “Windows 8 Campus Tour” events at many US universities. We’re inviting free software supporters, associated with the universities in question, to mount simple nondisruptive protests at these events.

• I am happy to announce the next release of GNU Dap.

Public Services/Government

• The Red Hat Summit, celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Continuing its commitment to live coverage of tech events, SilconANGLE’s theCUBE is there, hosted by SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier.

Openness/Sharing

• Julius writes, “With people like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales backing them up, the Blender Foundation’s first full feature length film looks like one of those things that’s just bound to happen by itself. Except right now it isn’t. Having successfully collected over $630 000 in funding from over 3500 individual pledgers (setting a new world record for animated film), Project Gooseberry needs more to become what it promises to be — a historic open content film production.”

• OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the first annual conference in Albania organised to promote software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, a global movement that originally started more than 25 years ago.

Open Hardware

• You may have heard of 3D printers—they’ve been all over the news. But you may not know that they represent real opportunity for small business owners. While 3D printers have been around since the 1980s in manufacturing (they were more commonly known as industrial robots), the big change came just a few years ago, when affordable models for hobbyists hit the market. Savvy small business owners take note: we’re witnessing the start of an affordable technological revolution, and it’s just the beginning.

• Supposing you’ve had several fingers chopped off in the recent past and you understand how to operate a scissors, Robohand may well have a solution for you. The company began with a fellow by the name of Richard van As, a fellow who lost his fingers in a carpentry accident in 2011. Searching for the past several years for a solution to his problem, as a good carpenter never gives up, he discovered a future partner with whom he’d eventually found Robohand.

• Customizable clothing has been inching its way into society for a while now, but with the kick off of Milan Design Week, a new company has unveiled an opportunity to customize your own designer furniture.

• A Linux programmer from the Slovak Republic has created an open-source project to help engineers and students to learn about advanced hardware design and how to port Linux to your own ARM board.

• It is the idea of Robert Feranec at the Fedevel Academy and colleague Martin Murin who has created the iMX6 Rex module based on a Freescale i.MX6 1.2GHz quad-core processor.

• Getting started with home wind energy projects can set you back a pretty penny if you buy a finished product, but if you’re a little bit handy and don’t mind scrounging for materials and getting creative in the garage or backyard, you can try your hand at building one of these DIY wind turbines for about $30 in materials. After all, it is #iheartrenewables week!

Programming

• A major version bump between v1.x.x series and the upcoming v2.0.0 means there are a handful of backward incompatible UI improvements, but for most people, all the tricky preparation for the transition would have been already done for you and the upcoming release just flips the default. Unless you were living in a cave and have stayed with an ancient version of Git (e.g. one before 1.8.2 that was released more than a year ago) for all these times, that is—those of you may want to double check the backward compatibility notes section at the beginning of the draft release notes.

Leftovers

Science

• A suspected meteorite explosion has been recorded by citizens of the northern Russian city of Murmansk.

Security

• Released GnuTLS 3.3.1 which is a bug fix release on the next stable branch of GnuTLS.

• libgnutls: Enforce more strict checks to heartbeat messages concerning padding and payload.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Soon after the 2004 US coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, I heard Aristide’s lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami. He began his talk with a riddle: “Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?” The answer: “Because there is no US Embassy in Washington D.C.” This introduction was greeted with wild applause by a mostly Haitian-American audience who understood it only too well.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, has been found not guilty of obstructing a public highway and a public order offence during high-profile anti-fracking protests.

• A coalition of genetically modified organism (GMO), pesticide, grocery and agriculture corporate trade groups are fighting mandatory labeling efforts at the state and local level by pushing preemption measures in Congress and at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Finance

• In an interview with journalist Bill Moyers set to air Friday, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman celebrates both the insights and warnings of French economist Thomas Piketty whose new ground-breaking book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that modern capitalism has put the world “on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy—a society of inherited wealth.”

• The conclusions that Piketty puts forth in the book, Krugman tells Moyers, are revelatory because they show that even people who are now employing the rhetoric of the “1% versus the 99%” do not fully appreciate the disaster that global wealth inequality is causing.

• Many homeless people in Columbia, South Carolina are facing an arduous choice: vacate downtown or be arrested.

• Super-flexible working results in financial insecurity for supermarket workers and create potential for abuse by managers

Censorship

• Remember when the word “blog” was first being bandied about? That was back in the early 2000′s when free web hosting from Geocities and Angelfire was still a big deal. Then the idea began taking off, especially after bloggers exposed Jeff Gannon of “Talon News” as James Guckert.

• It was a sordid affair that left CNN and other so called “mainstream” outlets in the dust as it proved how irrelevant they were becoming.

• Unfortunately, people in positions of power aren’t dealing with this new media very well. Neither are businessmen such as Christopher Comins. He attempted to sue a blogger because they posted about him shooting two dogs in a field. Comins claimed that bloggers such as Matthew Frederick VanVoorhis didn’t count as media since he was a blogger.

Privacy

• As cloud service companies battle it out for supremacy, one file sharing service sets itself apart by skipping the cloud altogether. It’s called BitTorrent Sync, and starting this week, it’s going to be available through Netgear’s native app store.

• This is a fantastic example of how to conduct an academic discussion of a really contentious subject. It brings together academics and NSA people to talk calmly about what’s happened and what it means. The participants are Yochai Benkler, Bruce Schneier, and Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center and John DeLong and Anne Neuberger of the National Security Agency. The conversation is expertly moderated by the Berkman Faculty Director Terry Fisher.

DRM

• Yeah, because law enforcement really cares quite a bit about whether or not your smartphone is stolen…unless it’s law enforcement stealing your phone from you in the first place because you’ve used the camera on it to protect yourself from police state activity by taking incriminating photos and videos of said law enforcement.

• Well, now they won’t even have to physically take your phone from you, because apparently they’ll be able to just push a button and remotely wipe it clean of all data.

• On an aside, someone tried to break into my house and it took a whole day for the cops to even bother to show up…like they really give a crap about whether or not your phone is stolen.

• As with every other trendy new technology advertised as making consumer’s lives just Jetsons-level awesome, there’s an obvious flipside that can be used (abused) for quite the opposite.

• By the way, the 2014 CTIA Board of Directors and Officers include the higher ups (Presidents, CEOs and VPs, etc.) from most of the major communications companies including Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Blackberry, AT&T, Sprint, Qualcomm, LG Electronics, Samsung, T-Mobile, Motorola, U.S. Cellular, Nokia and Apple.

• And remember, many of these companies are the same ones the NSA taps to track all your online communications and populate their databases with your data.

Intellectual Monopolies

• If I may we will start with Knock Off Nigel. For those that don’t live in the UK and maybe missed this treat, its an advert showing the evils of Copyright infringement, or it tries too. With an unsophisticated attempt to create a stigma around Copyright Infringement, because the creators seem to have been of roughly GCSE level, it created a cult following for its catchy jingle and cheesy character. Shamefully previous campaigns failed too, with the Channel 4 Series “IT Crowd” even getting in on the act of mocking the creators of these “adverts”.

• Eli Lilly bet its entire business model on patents years back, rather than on creating useful products that people want to buy. Lately it’s been having trouble getting new patents, and is reacting extremely poorly to the fact that its last-gasp efforts to get new patents aren’t working. As we’ve noted, a few years back, Canada rejected some patent applications for some Eli Lilly drug after the Canadian patent board “determined that the drug had failed to deliver the benefits the firm promised when obtaining the patent.” In other words, after realizing that the drug is not useful, Canada rejected the patent.

• Jack Kloppenburg (left), professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, Irwin Goldman (center), chair of the Department of Horticulture, and Claire Luby (right), graduate student in the UW’s Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics program, fill envelopes with non-patented seeds in the Horticulture office in Moore Hall.

• Twenty-nine broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetable and grain varieties have been made public through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI).

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