● 07.06.14

● Links 6/7/2014: Deepin 2014, Calligra 2.8.5

Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Like all things Linux and open source, users are spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting a desktop environment (or DE). But this choice that many perceive as freedom, others may also see as a little bewildering and confusing.

• Right after making the soul-shaking decision of switching operating systems and installing an unknown system – by hand no less – a new Linux user is then greeted with weird sounding desktops to choose from with names like Gnome (a mini-desktop perhaps?), KDE (Isn’t that a double-glazing firm?) and Xfce (No idea). What veteran users herald as Linux’s crown jewels, to the innocent newcomer it’s like stumbling into a sci-fi convention where everyone is discussing a new TV series that you’ve never heard of but apparently it’s been around for years.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The last Pixman stable release happened in November of 2013 while out this weekend is finally a new Pixman release.

• While it’s been more than a half-year since the last stable Pixman release, the changes for the new v0.32.6 release aren’t particularly compelling but still worth pointing out.

Applications

• Whether you’re producing podcasts or creating highly sophisticated sound recordings, one of these open source apps will suit your needs.

• There are several programs for video ripping and transcoding in Linux, allowing to choose from a wide number of formats and containers for the output video files. This is an overview of six applications which allow you do transcode videos.

• Mobile phone users should not regard their computer only as the means of recharging their phone, or transferring files to and from the phone’s storage. There’s a lot more than you can do with your Linux box. This article illustrates some good open source tools that let you manage your mobile phone.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Aeon Command has been on Linux for quite some time now, but it’s finally on Steam with hopes of getting more interest. The game is really quite good too, so be sure to check it out.

• VCMI is an ambitious project that aims to recreate the entire Heroes III engine and add new features, and has been in the works for a few years, and up to now it is in good shape.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma NM is going to be part of kde-workspace and as you may know NMQt is a dependency for Plasma NM. Plasma 5 release is approaching and since we may not get NMQt ready for KF5 in time we decided to ship a snapshort of NMQt with kde-workspace so that Plasma NM compiles. In the future we will remove the snapshot and rely on the NMQt in KF5.

• This is the last but one update to the 2.8 series of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active released to fix recently found issues. The Calligra team recommends everybody to update.

• Why is 2.8.4 skipped? Shortly before 2.8.4 release we discovered bug that sneaked in 2.8.2 version and decided to skip the 2.8.4 entirely and quickly release 2.8.5 instead with a proper fix. The bug is related to not showing file formats in Save dialogs.

• The KDE Community has announced the release of Calligra 2.8.5. “This is the last (and last but one) update to the 2.8 series of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active released to fix recently found issues. The Calligra team recommends everybody to update,” says Jarosław Staniek of Calligra community.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Students from tertiary institutions in seven Asian Pacific countries are invited to attend the 4th Regional Red Hat Challenge – a knowledge-based technology competition.

Debian Family

• I can set the display backlight to zero via software, which saves me a lot of battery life and also offers a bit of anti-spy-acroos-my-shoulder support. WLAN and bluetooth work nicely.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ KDE and Xfce editions were released late last month, just a few weeks after the main editions (Cinnamon and MATE) were put out. This release will have the same lifespan as the distribution which is based on, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, so it will be supported until 2019, for no less than five years.

• Linux Deepin Project has been officially renamed as “Deepin Project”.

• Deepin Linux 2014 is now available as the popular Chinese-developed derivative to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that features its own lightweight desktop powered using HTML5 and Go with Compiz. The updated desktop in Deepin 2014 is called Deepin Desktop Environment 2.0.

Devices/Embedded

• The connected car is shifting into high gear, and the Linux Foundation wants an open-source platform in the pole position. The non-profit consortium recently announced the debut of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a customizable, open-source automotive software stack with Linux at its core.

• A common, Linux-based software platform for the ‘connected car’ is one step closer, with the release of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) this week.

• AGL claims to be the industry’s only ‘fully open’ automotive platform, allowing carmakers to use a standardised single base upon which to build their own user experiences.

Phones

Android

• The app allows you to code through HTML, JavaScript and Dart – Google’s JavaScript-like language, so there is no Java at this time, but you do get Git support.

• In the next few months, Google will get some competition from Microsoft, Apple and a few startups in this space. For better or worse, none of them know as much about you as Google does, so it’ll be hard for them to replicate the Google Now experience. That should give Google a bit of an edge against the competition — unless the iWatch turns out to be so amazing that people will buy it even if it just shows the time and phone notifications.

• Taking a look back at the week in news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit focuses on Samsung’s new Galaxy handsets; Android tops the US market share; the Android ‘L’ changes; Google Play Services’ update for Android Wear support; Android Wear apps arrive in the Play Store; the battle for the home screen continues with Aviate; and what happens next in the smartphone world.

Leftovers

Science

• Hong Kong has one of the world’s best subway systems. It has a 99.9 per cent on time record – far better than London Underground or New York’s subway. It is owned and run by MTR Corporation, which also runs systems in Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Beijing. MTR is now planning to roll out its AI overseer to the other networks it manages.

Health/Nutrition

• And efforts to make the most of precious farmland have been hampered by decades of urban sprawl, which has accelerated since Y 2011 when the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak led to a security vacuum.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A cellphone video depicting a California Highway Patrol office punching a woman along the side of a freeway Tuesday evening has the agency investigating accusations of excessive force.

• The Washington Post has published an exclusive report about the US National Security Agency’s surveillance activities, but withheld information of “considerable intelligence value,” including a secret overseas nuclear project.

• In reacting to Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine, President Obama has reassured exposed NATO members Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia of firm U.S. support. But he has shown little inclination to show needed leadership by putting another integral element of NATO policy on the agenda of September’s Cardiff summit — enlargement of the alliance.

• If Official Washington were not the corrupt and dangerous place that it is, the architects and apologists for the Iraq War would have faced stern accountability. Instead, they are still around – holding down influential jobs, making excuses and guiding the world into more wars, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes.

• A 41-minute documentary has been produced and is online, “Ukraine Crisis Today,” interviewing “terrorists” (as our side calls them) who have been bombed by the Ukrainian Government. We — that is, the United States — installed this Ukrainian government, on February 22nd, in a coup (falsely presented as a democracy movement, but run actually by the U.S. CIA and two Ukrainian fascist parties) against Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych. The government that we installed is now bombing the areas of Ukraine where the voters had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych, in Ukraine’s last national election, which took place during February 2010. Our side calls the residents of the Yanukovich-supporting areas “terrorists.” Those are the people our Ukrainian regime bombs.

• The mainstream U.S. media continues to sell the American people a one-sided storyline on the Ukraine crisis as the Kiev regime celebrates a key military victory at Slovyansk, an eastern city at the center of ethnic Russian resistance to last February’s violent coup that ousted elected President Yanukovych.

• Halliburton, which offers a myriad of services, including oil field work, plus construction work, benefits when countries are “bombed to the stone age,” since those same countries need to be rebuilt. Angelo Young describes the war-profiteering in Cheney’s Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion On Iraq War…

Transparency Reporting

Finance

• At the beginning of 2014, 13 states increased their minimum wage. Of these 13 states, four passed legislation raising their minimum wage (Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island). In the other nine, their minimum wage automatically increased in line with inflation at the beginning of the year (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state).

• It might sound like an oxymoron, but this is a positive article about public services. So effectively has the coalition rebranded an economic crisis caused by private greed as the consequence of public ownership, that nationalisation has come to be seen as a universally discredited hangover from bad old Labour. So while current Labour is considering taking back parts of the rail network into public ownership the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, last weekend was intoning the neoliberal catechism: “I don’t want to go back to the nationalisation of the 1970s.”

Censorship

• Files which may be linked to child abuse claims seem to have been lost “on an industrial scale” at the Home Office, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee has said.

• The Home Office has said its own review last year found that 114 potentially relevant files could not be located.

• Keith Vaz MP said it was “a huge surprise” that so much potential evidence had gone missing.

• Lord Tebbit said he hoped any review would be conducted quickly.

• Number 10 has rejected calls for an over-arching public inquiry into historical child abuse claims.

• Newspapers are now accusing Google of censoring their articles every time that a search result is being removed in relation to one of their articles. However, what the very lazy journalists are not doing is testing the search results to see if any of the key figures are likely to have gained the redaction, at least not before telling the world about it.

• A law against being annoying in public was recently approved by the British House of Commons and sent to the House of Lords, which vetoed it. This was no surprise since Lords themselves are horribly annoying, with their castles and silly titles. (For example, does “Lord Privy Seal” means what it says, which is “Lord Toilet Sea-Mammal”?)

• We will all die, and we will all be forgotten, in the end. I’m still unsophisticated enough to find that sad. But society seems fairly stoical about it, to say the least. These days thousands are campaigning for “the right to die” and “the right to be forgotten” as if they’re genuinely worried it might otherwise not happen.

Privacy

• Noticeably absent from the trial and much of the media attention are the phone companies. Did they know their networks could be so systematically abused? Did they care?

• Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) on Sunday formally lodged its protest with the United States over the spying of the largest political party by the National Security Agency (NSA), a private TV channel reported.

• Berlin Letter: Spy scandals have returned a Cold War atmosphere to the German capital

• In the US, Germany’s NSA scandal doesn’t make the headlines.

• A suspected German double agent has worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), German newspaper “Bild am Sonntag” reported on Sunday.

• The case was first uncovered on Friday. A 31-year-old employee of Germany’s Foreign Intelligence Service (BND) was reportedly detained Thursday in suspicion of having spied on a German investigation committee inquiring into U.S. surveillance on behalf of an American intelligence service.

• I’ve heard it whispered in certain literary quarters that American novelists have failed to adequately respond to a post-9/11 world. That their fiction lacks sufficient imagination and indignation towards their government and its policies. I think this is a whisper of weak foundations. While the terror of drones, the NSA and the NRA are certainly worthy of tomes, I’m actually more intrigued with the terror of ordinary life. And few American writers I know capture this as masterfully as Joshua Ferris.

• Nadim Kobeissi wants to bulldoze that steep learning curve. At the HOPE hacker conference in New York later this month he’ll release a beta version of an all-purpose file encryption program called miniLock, a free and open-source browser plugin designed to let even Luddites encrypt and decrypt files with practically uncrackable cryptographic protection in seconds.

• For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn’t have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts.

• Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by the Washington Post.

• “Every single American embassy is an intelligence collection facility. The really second in charge of every embassy is the CIA station chief,” Scott Rickard, former US intelligence linguist, said in a Saturday interview with us.

• Pakistan’s main opposition, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), has formally protested to the United States ambassador in Islamabad over media reports that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on the party in 2010 when it was ruling the country, the party’s spokesman said Sunday.

• Apparently, the NSA has been watching some networks to try to build up their user profile data. The government agency has been targeting the Tor anonymising system to spy on its users.

• An alleged double agent did not spy on Germany’s parliamentary NSA inquiry, according to the panel’s chairman. The suspect is accused of selling sensitive documents to a US intelligence agency.

• They mailed copies of the documents they lifted to Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, who broke the story. NBC News reporter Carl Stern later uncovered the FBI’s illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which sought to destroy, discredit and harass civil rights and anti-war groups and activists.

• In honor of the Fourth of July, let’s talk a little about how horrifically paranoid and counterproductive the US government has become. And I’m not even talking about Congress! Instead I mean our old friend the No Such Agency, who, it turns out, have been singling out for special treatment anyone who displays any interest in tools which might make the NSA’s life more difficult.

• The former secretary of state tells The Guardian in a video interview that if whistle-blower Edward Snowden is “serious” about joining the debate over “the tension between privacy and security,” he can come home. “But that’s his decision,” she adds.

• To Clinton, the likely 2016 presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Snowden broke the law; however, as a lawyer she holds that “he has a right to mount a defense. And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defense and a public defense, which can of course affect the legal defense.” She claims, however, to be unaware of what the former NSA contractor would be charged with upon return since the indictments are “sealed.”

• But this revelation about the NSA is something that appears investors are not paying enough attention to. I’m relatively certain, global buyers of network gear have a different perspective. Obviously, the NSA could have been intercepting gear from all the network providers, but being France based is certainly a positive for Alcatel’s forward orders. No matter how the spotlight has shown on the matter or the fact that Cisco did not appear to work in concert with the NSA, wouldn’t you agree that global buyers of gear, especially those sensitive to privacy, will be more likely to turn to the France based Alcatel-Lucent now, or the Sweden based Ericsson (ERIC)?

Civil Rights

• The regime has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers, creating a humanitarian catastrophe—which is all but ignored by the US political-media establishment.

• His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.

• One of the standard criticisms of Edward Snowden is that he should have tried harder to air his concerns via proper channels. This is fairly laughable on its face, since even now the NSA insists that all its programs were legal and it continues to fight efforts to change them or release any information about them. Still, maybe Snowden should have tried. What harm could it have done?

• An award-winning American journalist says the US government’s spying operations targeting the entire Muslim community is misguided and “smacks of what was done in Nazi Germany.”

• A number of Jewish suspects have been arrested over the murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammad Abu Khdair, whose death sparked days of violent protests.

• Initial autopsy findings from the body of an East Jerusalem youth who Palestinians believe was kidnapped and killed by far-right Jews showed that he was burned alive, the Palestinian attorney-general has been reported as saying.

• Security concerns are complicating the release of a controversial report on “enhanced interrogations techniques,” with officials fearing the document could inflame the Arab Street and put Americans in danger.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• It’s the latest development in the tick-tock of two stories: the reactions of the world’s governments to the Snowden revelations that the NSA has their entire populations (and leaders) under deep surveillance; and Russia’s steady march to a totalitarian Internet that’s like Iran’s halal Internet, with Putin-authoritarian characteristics.

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