● 06.16.14

● Links 16/6/2014: First RC of Next Linux, Tizen Spreading

Posted in News Roundup at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Both Linux and the BSDs are free and open-source, Unix-like operating systems. They even use much of the same software — these operating systems have more things in common than they do differences. So why do they all exist?

• There are more differences than we can cover here, especially philosophical differences about the way one should build an operating system and license it. This should help you understand the basics, though.

Desktop

• Two years ago, Samsung made the first great Chromebook. It was thin, and light, and had good battery life, but most of all it was a different kind of computer. Chrome OS wasn’t like Windows, which can do absolutely everything on earth including a laundry list of things that only confuse and overwhelm most users. It was designed to be simple, functional, and focused. “It’s just a web browser” wasn’t a problem, it was progress.

• As Samsung releases its successor, the Chromebook 2, things have changed. Cheap laptops can be even thinner, even faster, even more powerful, even longer-lasting; the Chromebook 2 is all four. The opportunity has grown, too: these 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch laptops enter a market in which most of what most people do all day lives inside a web browser anyway. We can do basic word processing and number-crunching with Google Docs or Office Online; we store all our files in Dropbox or OneDrive. Chrome OS feels more native than ever, but in a very real way we’ve caught up to Google’s vision more than it’s caught up to us.

• While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively.

Server

• The Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight project for promoting open source software-defined networking (SDN) continues to grow. Extreme Networks (EXTR), Flextronics and Oracle (ORCL) are now among the initiative’s members.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds will most likely be releasing the Linux 3.16-rc1 kernel today, now that the merge window has been open for two weeks and the feature pull requests are coming to an end. Here’s a concise look at the new features and improvements to be found with the Linux 3.16 kernel.

• Dr. Greg Wettstein and his dog Izzy have announced the release of the Hugepage Block Device Driver for the Linux kernel.

Graphics Stack

• The latest OpenGL 4 extension being enabled for the Nouveau “NVC0″ Gallium3D driver is GL_ARB_viewport_array.

• Version 1.3.2 of Intel’s VA-API driver for open-source video encode/decode using modern Intel HD Graphics GPUs has been released.

Applications

• Unlike Google Drive and may other Windows and Mac friendly tools, Copy treats Linux well. Copy provides a native Linux UI to sync folders to its cloud storage.

• Synergy project was started way back in 2001. It is used in situations where several PCs are used together, with a monitor connected to each, but are to be controlled by one user. The user needs only one keyboard and mouse on the desk. Just a few weeks ago, Synergy version 1.5 (stable) was released. Though Synergy was Windows only earlier, it is now cross-platform and works seamlessly on Mac OSX and Linux as well.

• It is hard to keep up with the weather at times. If you are living in a place where the weather is unpredictable, knowing if it is going to rain or not makes a huge difference to you. That’s why you need to keep yourself updated about the weather from time to time.

• If you are using Ubuntu or other Linux distro, this isn’t hard to do. Linux offers a plethora of options for users to keep an eye on the weather. Here is a selection of some of the best weather applications for your Linux desktop.

• One area on the Linux desktop that remains surprisingly conservative is email – email clients and webmail alike. While most if not all of the formats and protocols used are true open standards, you would think there could be a broad range of clients and webmails for Linux out there. Let me correct that: webmails are in a league of their own and I will not enter the webmail vs. email clients discussion. Many things are changing in that field, but one must differentiate between the actual email service, like GMail, your corporate mail, the webmail software (Roundcube, Horde, Citadel, Squirrel, etc.), the groupware platform (Kolab, Blue Mind, OBM, eGroupWare, and many others) and what lands and gets edited, if you’ve chosen so, in your email client, meaning the actual software program running distinctly from your web browser and handling anything from emails to calendars and contacts. Today I will focus on the email clients on the Linux desktop. I do not pretend that my list is exhaustive; it is but a personal selection; I have also excluded email client such as Mutt, mu4e, VM, RMail, Ner, Wanderlust, etc. as I will only be speaking of graphical email clients on Linux, at least the ones I’ve tried.

• I won’t spend too much time talking about trek. The game has been around since the practical dawn of the technology age, and if you haven’t played it yet, you’d do better to try it than listen to me yap about it.

Instructionals/Technical

• Copy is a cloud-based file storage, sync and sharing platform, similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, which has clients available for Linux (including Raspberry Pi), Windows, Mac OS X as well as iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

• SysPeek is a system monitor AppIndicator that displays CPU, memory, swap and disk usage as well as network traffic.

Games

• Aspyr Media have quite clearly proven themselves at porting to Linux with a port that works this well, but the bigger news is that they may have more to come.

• War Thunder contains aircraft, vehicles, and ships from the pre-World War 2 era to the Korean war and maps are largely based upon real battles in the past. War Thunder so far in its open beta period has been a highly praised online combat game and now it looks like it’s coming over to Linux, per the YouTube video embedded below.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Standard Linux circulations regularly default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these give clients an instinctive and attractive desktop, and also offering a verity of media inbuilt softwares, system programs, games, utilities, web development tools, programming tools and so on. These two desktops center all the more on giving clients a cutting edge computing environment with all the accessories emphasized in Windows OS, instead of minimizing the measure of system resources they require.

• If you are using Ubuntu (or other) and exhausted of utilizing Unity desktop constantly? At that point, you ought to look at different choices accessible that can swap unity for you. I have gathered 7 desktop environments that are great and you beyond any doubt would need to utilize them once you are finished with this article.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Below is a pop-up for a new message – now granted not much of a change BUT the work is being done on the layout of the thing. Essentially the Icons size in comparison with the Header and the subheader.

• You may have heard that KDE Plasma Next won’t support anymore the old X11,Xembed-based systemtray icons. (More information here)

• Years ago, we developed a nicer, model/view based alternative in which is the shell that actually draws the systemtray icon, allowing better integration with the workspace, it’s a specification that is now shared between KDE and Ubuntu Unity. All KDE applications use it already, Qt4/Qt5-only application will use it depending on a small patch (and soon Qt5 will do out of the box)

• Some features take time to implement, and it’s great to see them finally working. Bug fixes and incremental improvements, on the other hand, are quickier to do but less exciting when taken individually. It’s only the sum of many fixes and small improvements that can make a difference.

• I’m writing from a warm and sunny Berlin, having attended my first Qt Contributors Summit. It is always nice to meet the Qt developer team, and to get a chance to hang out with the Pelagicorians from our Munich office.

• Starting from today, there is a new category in kde-look.org explicitly for Plasma 5 QML2-based plasmoids.

• Kglobalaccel is a service which is supposed to get started through dbus. My installation prefix is “/opt/kf5″ and so the service file gets installed to “/opt/kf5/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.kglobalaccel.service” – that looks fine. After some investigation I figured out that dbus-daemon looks in $XDG_DATA_DIRS as a search path. Our startkde script adjusts $XDG_DATA_DIRS to include /opt/kf5/share before launching the dbus daemon. But when looking at the environment of the running dbus-daemon one could see the problem: it doesn’t use the set environment variable. The reason is obvious: dbus is nowadays started before the desktop environment gets started.

• During the first week of our Kickstarter campaign we collected more than 6500 eur, which is about 43% of the goal. That is quite a good result, so we decided to start implementing the features right now, even though the campaign is not finished yet

• It was about a month when we last updated Krita Lime. And it is not because we had leisure time and did nothing here In reverse, we got so many features merged into master so it became a bit unstable for a short period of time. And now we fixed all the new problems so you can see a nice build of Krita with lots of shiny features!

• After the successful release of Krita 2.8, the advanced open source digital painting application, the we’re kicking off the work on the next release with a kickstarter campaign!

• Running a kickstarter campaign can be quite exhausting! But that doesn’t mean that coding stops — here is one new Krita 2.9 feature that we prepared earlier: painting with exposure and gamma on HDR images. HDR (high-dynamic-range) images have greater dynamic range of light than ordinary images. If you make one with your camera, you’ll combine a set of images made from the same subject at different exposures. If you want to create a HDR image from scratch, you can create one in Krita by selecting the 16 or 32 bit float RGB colorspace.

• We’re glad to announce that the contest has been a success with over 50 submitted wallpapers.

Distributions

• At some point or other 23 of the 32 nations have had a Linux distribution. As you can see by the list I have had to name some discontinued distros and this is the nature of Linux.

Screenshots

Arch Family

• I have used a lot of rolling release distros in last 5 years, but, for production purpose, till recently, I mostly relied on only a few – Linux Mint, Debian and Ubuntu LTS. Primarily because the so-called “install it once only” promise hardly worked for most of the rolling release distros and they inevitably break or become unbootable after a couple of major upgrades. However, my experience with Manjaro Linux and Chakra Linux in the past 12 months have successfully changed that impression. These two Arch based distros survived 4 major upgrades and still running great, even with a whole lot of customization and niche packages that I installed.

Red Hat Family

• Anyway. So yeah, the CentOS Project has been working feverishly AND they have been, unlike in the past, doing everything out in the open… transparency it is called. Yesterday they announced they had the packages building. Then someone on the centos-devel mailing list said they had a Docker CentOS 7 container image. I gave that a try. Then the centos-devs said they had the first build attempt completed although they have NOT gone through all of the packages yet and removed Red Hat’s branding… so it’s a very preliminary build. Then they announced they had a network install CD (~ 341MB). I gave that a try and it worked great.

• Governments should invest in open source cloud to avoid getting trapped with a vendor and their offerings when they need to meet policy requirements or the time comes to update to new technology, Red Hat says.

• At a time when Microsoft’s developer release cycle is markedly rapid (and arguably quite impressive), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 development is now strategically targeted to be a “consumable OS” full of simplicity.

• “It’s the opposite of OpenStack, where new releases come to market every six months,” said Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat Inc., open-source OS developer. “Only hypercritical changes merit new version numbers. Otherwise, you’d drive IT guys crazy updating their deployments.”

Fedora

• Never ever trust someone that will say that Rawhide works flawlessly (or the opposite!), and that’s because Fedora is a very famous OS for giving two kinds of experiences. From perfection to the totally catastrophe. A small bug is enough to get you there.

• Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for June 10th, 2014:

• It’s been more than a year since I’ve had a successful build of Chromium that I was willing to share with anyone else, but last night I pushed out a Fedora 20 x86_64 build of the current stable Chromium. Here’s where you can go and get it:

Debian Family

• For some tests the performance doesn’t deviate much between Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD given that both have a similar user-land. For our many source-based computational tests, the main factor to point out is that both GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD versions of 7.5 Wheezy have GCC 4.7 while the latest testing versions of these open-source operating systems are using the GCC 4.8 stable series.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A while back it was decided to create a separate Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn ISO running Unity8 on Mir, including the new core apps…

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• This is just a quick note to say that for the next 7 days I will be releasing a number of Lubuntu based articles to celebrate the release of Lubuntu 14.04.

• Windows XP is dead. Some people may not be aware of this fact but I’m telling you now “That parrot is dead”.

• Microsoft ended support for Windows XP on April 8th 2014 but what does end of support mean? Does it mean it doesn’t work anymore?

• Actually, Windows XP will continue to work perfectly well for quite some time but the trouble is that any remaining security holes will remain unplugged and that leaves a huge opportunity for the cyber criminals to exploit any individual or organisation that remains on that platform.

Devices/Embedded

• A start-up is working on a Raspberry Pi-based network attached storage device that can be used to set up a private cloud.

• DoodleBorg is] running off six motorcycle starter motors. It’s using mini all-terrain vehicle wheels and has a custom chassis made out of six-millimetre thick steel that has been laser cut. It has two motorcycle batteries, and six of our wonderful PicoBorg reverse control boards which are capable of five amps per channel, ten amps in total. We’ve got them connected up, one per motor so we can individually control each of the wheels. This means we can make alternate wheels go in all sorts of directions if we want them to. There are some big crazy switches on the front that serve emergency power-offs too.

Phones

Ballnux

• Now Samsung’s announcing its newest tablet line, the Galaxy Tab S, available in 8.4-inch and 10.5-inch sizes. The Galaxy Tab S models are thinner, lighter, and faster than earlier efforts, and they have new Super AMOLED displays that Samsung says easily outperform their LCD-equipped counterparts. But one major thing remains the same: Samsung is very much still trying to beat the iPad.

• Tizen is being heralded as the “OS of Everything”, and you can really see it in action on the Samsung Gear 2, Smart camera’s, and Smart TV’s . We have previously mentioned the Tizen based Samsung WW9000 washing machine, but here are some more details regarding some of its features.

• At the Tizen Developer Conference, Onstar a General Motors subsidiary company, were showing off their car remote control solution, but with a little twist as it was working on a Samsung Gear 2, to control a lovely looking Chevrolet.

Android

• KitKat made the best of Android accessible to more people than ever, but what will the next version do?

• Android/Linux is growing rapidly in Kenya while Series 40 is dropping fast.

Free Software/Open Source

• Mesosphere has closed new funding to expand the open-source Apache Mesos software for managing large compute clusters

• Perforce has released an open source version of P4CLI, its command-line interface to the company’s P4D versioning engine. In line with this release, the firm has also open sourced a version of P4Web, its web-based versioning client.

• Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You spoke to Jim Thompson, CTO, TCIS, Unisys and L.N.V Samy, VP, Engineering, GTC, Unisys, about the firm’s operations in India.

• Open source is more than a type of software license. If you believe GitHub, it’s also a successful paradigm for collaborative software development. Will enterprise dev shops join the party?

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• I just accidentally discovered a feature I didn’t even know existed. What feature? I’ll call it the Firefox Resolution Tester feature although I’m sure that is NOT the real name of it. I don’t know how long it has been a feature of Firefox… maybe for a long time… but like I said… I just found it in Firefox 30. How do you access it? Hit CONTROL-SHIFT-m. That’s it.

• Finally, Mozilla team officially released Firefox 30 for all major operating systems and the binary packages are now available for download. This release is not a major release, but still comes with few features, including support for Linux version of GStreamer 1.0.

SaaS/Big Data

• Another scalable database platform for the OpenStack cloud has entered the open source fold. This week, Tesora made its database-as-a-service (DBaaS) software available to the open source community.

• One briefing highlighted an HP Labs project aimed at reinventing enterprise computer architecture. The other briefing highlighted how HP is going “all in” on OpenStack. The OpenStack press briefing was the more important one.

• Hewlett-Packard’s Atalla division rolled out new encryption offerings designed to make encryption easier and faster to deploy on-site and in the cloud.

• Does a day go past without a Hadoop update right now? — clearly not.

CMS

Healthcare

• The nation’s largest open source EHR system has received a substantial boost to its code base. The Indian Health Service (IHS), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services, has contributed its open source EHR technology, Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS), to the VistA code base hosted by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA).

• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service (IHS) has contributed an open-source version of its Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) to the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) Technical Journal. This will complement the current open-source EHR capabilities of the VistA code base now hosted by OSEHRA.

Funding

• In early June the open source search business arguably came of age when Elasticsearch closed on a $70M tranche of Series C investment funding. Elasticsearch is supported by both an open source search community and a commercial search business. In November 2012 the company received $10M in a Series A investment funding which was followed by a further $24M in a Series B funding in February 2013 — making the total of investment funding now $104M.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCC 4.9 was released at the end of April so this weekend I ran some fresh compiler benchmarks of the latest GCC 4.10 compiler snapshot to see if there’s been any performance improvements thus far in the 4.10 development cycle, although GCC 4.10 will not be released until 2015.

Openness/Sharing

• Open science is one way today to deliver science to societies around the world. And, it can include open education, open research, open source, and open culture.

• Years ago, in a graduate computer science course, I was tasked with implementing an algorithm for “variational image segmentation by motion detection.” The algorithm was, as they say, a doozy. Tersely described over the course of half a dozen papers, it had dozens of subroutines, which when implemented grew to span thousands of lines of MATLAB code. But there was one subroutine, mysteriously called the “numerical upgrading” routine, whose description was mysteriously absent from the scientific record. Without this small but vital routine, the whole marvelous image segmenting machine just sputtered and ground to a halt. Crash! Panic! Woe.

• We live in an age where almost anything can be created – or replicated – for a fraction of the cost of a commercial product. For a couple of grad students wishing for some brain signal recording equipment back in 2011, their wish became a matter of original creation, eventually resulting in an open source community for neural technology and a device which is made at a fraction of the cost of its next least-expensive competitor.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• A German farmer has revealed shocking GMO company tactics to silence him in an exclusive interview with RT Op-Edge.

• German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land.

Security

• “Could we – could I – make the gadgets that the agency uses to monitor and locate mobile phones, tap USB and Ethernet connections, maintain persistent malware on PCs, communicate with malware across air gaps, and more, by just using open source software and hardware?” he asked himself.

• Only 48 percent of respondents to a recent survey indicated that they test or validate third-party software to ensure it’s not vulnerable to SQL injection.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Western intervention has been the curse of the Middle East for over 100 years. The cure for the crisis in Iraq is not more intervention, says John Rees, but ending this disastrous history of meddling.

• Secret prisons, drone bases, surveillance stations, offices where extraordinary rendition is planned: Trevor Paglen takes pictures of the places that the American and British governments don’t want you to know even exist

• NBC and ABC’s Sunday news shows turned to discredited architects of the Iraq War to opine on the appropriate U.S. response to growing violence in Iraq, without acknowledging their history of deceit and faulty predictions.

• This week a Sunni Iraqi militant group (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) seized control of several Iraqi cities and is focusing their sights on taking control of Baghdad and the rest of the country. The United States is still debating a response to the escalating violence, and has reportedly moved an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf.

• More than 750 cutouts of policemen have been bought by UK forces at a cost of more than $85,000. The 2D police constable cutouts are aimed at deterring shoplifters who would mistake them for real officers from afar…but no one knows if they really work.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The waters surrounding the Balearic party island are a world heritage site – and conservationists, politicians and tourist chiefs are adamant that plans to drill in the sea must be stopped

• Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes talks about her new book, which imagines that current inertia in the face of climate change will puzzle academics for centuries to come

Finance

• In the sweltering mid-day Washington, DC heat yesterday, a small group of members of Congress and community leaders gathered outside of the capitol building.

• Solemnly, as if at a funeral, they read a handful of stories written by a few of the more than 3 million Americans who are longterm unemployed (a category defined as being unemployed for six months or more and still looking for work). Since December 2013, when Congress let emergency unemployment compensation, or EUC, expire—a program that offers minimal financial support to the longterm unemployed—they have been without the help they need to get back on their feet.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Spouting off about stuff you know nothing about is traditionally considered unwise. But as the Republican war on science intensifies, ignorance has started to become not only less of a handicap, but a point of pride. In the face of expertise and facts, being belligerently ignorant—and offended that anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than knowledge—has become the go-to position for many conservative politicians and pundits. Sadly, it’s a strategy that’s working, making it harder every day for liberals to argue the value of evidence and reason over wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice.

Civil Rights

• One man was crushed to death after getting caught between a conveyor system in December 2013 while sorting packages, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration said yesterday. OSHA cited five companies for violations at the Amazon facility in Avenel, New Jersey, including the contractor responsible for the sorting operation, and four staffing agencies that hired temporary employees to work at the warehouse. Amazon wasn’t cited by the government for the death.

• According to the mainstream Western version of events, thousands of Chinese university students began their sit-in protest demanding democracy and transparency from the Communist government in April and into May 1989 in the huge Tiananmen Square, directly across from the historic Forbidden City edifice in central Beijing. They defiantly faced off against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army. On May 20, 1989, the CCP imposed martial law and ordered truckloads of soldiers to Beijing to take back the square from protesters. The Western account has it that then, on June 3 into June 4, PLA soldiers opened fire and killed “up to 1000 student protesters.”

• A federal judge today ordered the Department of Justice to hand over key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the “FISA court”) so the judge can directly review whether information about mass surveillance was improperly withheld from the public.

• To be in Brazil for the World Cup should be every football fan’s dream, but as exhilarating as it is, it’s impossible for any sane supporter not to feel the competition has been tainted.

• [...]

• According to Samy, police are using a new law aimed at organised crime to hold and question individuals. “These activists are being accused of being part of a criminal organisation. The law passed last year created special procedures for crimes involving three or more people, and was aimed at organised crime, but it is now being used to criminalise, and eventually punish, protesters.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• WordPress has had it with copyright holders who abuse the DMCA takedown process to censor perfectly legal content. Through a lawsuit they demand $10,000 in compensation to cover the damage they, and one of their users suffered through a false DMCA takedown notice.

• If you’ve ever downloaded something via BitTorrent, odds are you’ve used (or seen) an app called Vuze. It’s one of the internet’s most prolific BitTorrent clients, and it’s used for downloading countless terabytes of copyright-protected material every day. The developers of Vuze have hit back at the online piracy epidemic, condemning copyright theft and promoting legal torrents.

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