● 08.06.14

● Links 6/8/2014: Linux 3.17 Features, Ubuntu in India

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Today in Linux news, Christine Halls strolls down memory lane to a time when real men still wrote their own drivers and backups were for sissies. Tecmint.com has six cool distributions for your older PC and a couple of favorites were spotted out in the world doing real work. One blogger writes of his year without Windows and there are several interesting gaming notes. We have all this and lots more on this Monday, August 04, 2014.

• His numbers for browsers are even more startling. Even those who use that other OS to visit these sites are using M$’s browser only a few percent, 9% on Wikipedia but only 2.7% on Distrowatch. The world of FLOSS and */Linux has come a long way and the popularity of Free Software amongst the technologically literate is spreading to the mainstream of ordinary users of IT. Two of the greatest lock-ins that M$ developed are fading rapidly.

• The Age of the Connected Car is dawning. The Linux Foundation is positioning an open source Linux OS to take the front seat in steering carmakers to adopting Automotive Grade Linux, or AGL, as the engine driving all in-car electronics.

• Today’s automobile has from 60 to 100 sensors to control everything from climate to airbags and dozens of vehicle components. Carmakers expect that number to double as cars get smarter. The so-called “smartcar” will use these sensors to do much more than give the driver a hands-free option for changing lanes, breaking and parking.

• Today’s new cars have options for Internet connectivity and can connect to applications for entertainment, vehicle service and maintenance. These connected cars can use apps on smartphones and tablets to provide driving services such as directions, traffic reports, motel and restaurant locators, and much more. They can do it independently of any hard-wired navigational or entertainment system the carmaker provides.

Desktop

• There’s no denying the power and utility value of the cloud. We all use it and it’s certainly something that most Linux users can appreciate. However, I disagree with the basic premise of the article that Linux “Linux needs…a major win in the desktop arena.” Why? Linux is alive and well, and doing just fine without having tons of desktop market share.

• I’m not sure where this obsession with market share comes from, but I think it’s an altogether unhealthy thing. And it’s particularly bad when you consider that mobile devices have been chipping away steadily at desktop usage across all platforms. I’d much rather see Linux offer more mobile device options than trying to go on some quixotic quest to gain desktop market share when most users are moving away from the desktop anyway.

• The author uses Chromebooks as an example, and I can understand his affection for them. For what they do they are fine computing devices, and their popularity can’t be questioned at this point (as always see Amazon’s list of bestselling laptops to see just how popular they are right now). But we already have Chromebooks, so why do we need a Linux “cloudbook?”

• Running on the latest Chrome OS Dev version? Google recently published a few new changes to the Gallery and Files apps.

Server

• Docker sells its platform-as-a-service business to cloudControl to ensure that “dotCloud PaaS customers have a good home with an experienced PaaS provider.”

• The popular open-source Docker container virtualization technology was born inside a company originally known as dotCloud. Docker Inc. today announced that it is shedding its legacy and selling the dotCloud business to German platform-as-a-service vendor cloudControl. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.

• Let me start by saying this is absolutely not a Docker bashing article. I actually love Docker, and I think it is an outstanding piece of software that will have great success. But I have to confess, I’m not sure that it deserves the virtualization moniker that so many in the industry are hanging on it.

• Docker is more popular in enterprise data centers and clouds now than ice-cream on a hot summer day in a day-care center. So, it comes as no surprise that openSUSE, SUSE’s community Linux distribution, has adopted Docker as well.

• Cumulus® Linux® 2.2 brings greater flexibility, simplified operations and end-to-end resiliency along with a new hardware architecture and new ecosystem solutions

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation has opened submissions for its 2014 Linux Training Scholarship Program to fund classes in topics including embedded Linux and Yocto.

• The Linux Training Scholarship Program awards free tuition to Linux Foundation training courses for the most promising Linux developers, IT professionals, and students who lack the ability to attend. Last year, nearly 700 applications were received for the Linux Training Scholarship Program, says the not-for-profit Linux Foundation (LF). The average age of the submitter was said to be 25 years-old.

• Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.16 codenamed ‘Shuffling Zombie Juror’, which brings many notable improvements.

• The Linux Foundation has announced a host of onsite exciting activities to go along with information-packed keynotes, co-located events, conference sessions and more taking place at LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America August 20-22, 2014 at the Sheraton, Chicago.

• The modern data center is rapidly evolving, with the advent of cloud computing bringing new technologies, tools and best practices. As enterprises seek to understand and take advantage of emerging areas in virtualization and the cloud such as software-defined networking and storage, microservers and containers, many are seeking third-party consultants and services to ease the transition.

• Daynix is a software development and consulting company based in Israel that helps companies navigate this new world of cloud infrastructure and virtualization. Its services range from hypervisors and paravirtualized devices development to cloud infrastructure. The company also works closely with open source communities on cloud-related technologies, which are rooted in Linux.

• Following a rather quiet week and ‘nothing particularly exciting’ after release of Linux 3.16-rc7, Linus Torvalds has pushed out Linux 3.16 final.

• You’ll be excited by 3.16 if you’re keen to run Linux on Samsung’s Exynos or other ARM SoCs. Those keen on ARM CPUs as data centre alternatives to x86 will be pleased to note work to help Xen virtual machines suspend and resume. There’s also a boot-from-firmware feature on ARM.

• The Samsung supported Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) will sport some new functionality with the Linux 3.17 kernel release.

• The work that was ongoing for months to provide DMA-BUF cross-device synchronization and fencing is finally landing with the Linux 3.17 kernel.

• The patches by Maarten Lankhorst for DMA-BUF cross-device synchronization were up to eighteen revisions and are now finally in a condition to be merged with Linux 3.17 via the driver core subsystem pull. DMA-BUF has now proper fence and poll support along with other new functionality that affects many different kernel drivers. For Phoronix readers, one of the benefits of DMA-BUF cross-device synchronization is to reduce tearing when sharing buffers between multiple GPU DRM drivers.

• Over 200,000 lines of code is being removed from the Linux 3.17 kernel in the staging subsystem due to the removal of a bunch of old, unmaintained drivers.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman shared that with the staging driver patches for Linux 3.17, there’s over 39,000 new lines of code while over 254,000 lines have been removed. The big code delta comes from 14 different drivers being removed that were “obsolete and no one was willing to work on cleaning them up.”

• The Radeon DRM driver changes have been published for queuing into drm-next before hitting the mainline Linux 3.17 kernel tree.

• Among the exciting work to be found for the AMD Radeon graphics kernel driver in Linux 3.17 include:

• - Good Hawaii support for the AMD Radeon R9 290 series. The R9 290/290X should now work with the open-source driver at long last, but besides Linux 3.17 you’ll need newer microcode files and also the latest Gallium3D code. Once 3.17-rc1 has been tagged, I’ll move ahead with my open-source Radeon Hawaii benchmarks on the R9 290.

• - Support for a new firmware format to make updates easier to manage.

• The HID (Human Interface Device) pull request was sent in this morning for the Linux 3.17 merge window.

• Jiri Kosina’s HID pull request for Linux 3.17 features the following prominent work:

• - The Sony HID driver features improved support for the SIXAXIS device support. The SIXAXIS gamepad line was part of the original Sony PlayStation 3.

Graphics Stack

• After last week running new Nouveau vs. NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics benchmarks, here’s the results when putting AMD’s hardware on the test bench and running both their latest open and closed-source drivers. Up today are the results of using the latest Radeon Gallium3D graphics code and Linux kernel against the latest beta of the binary-only Catalyst driver.

• Similar to the NVIDIA GeForce tests of last week, on the open-source side was the Linux 3.16 kernel with Mesa 10.3-devel and other updated graphics user-space using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64. When benchmarking the proprietary Catalyst 14.6 Beta driver from mid-July, we had to pull back to the Linux 3.14 kernel for kernel compatibility with this binary blob release.

Applications

• Browsers have been a hot topic lately here in the Linux blogosphere, not just because of all the woes plaguing Tor in recent weeks, but also because of the increasingly worried mumbling about Firefox’s future.

• As you may know, Telegram is a popular instant messaging service, similar to WhatsApp. While there isn’t any official Linux client, there are three unofficial solutions: Sigram, Telegram Desktop and Unity Webapps Telegram.

• QEMU, a generic open source emulator and virtualizer that can run OSes and programs made for a different machine, is now at version 2.1.0.

• QEMU supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. The developers have made a huge number of improvements and changes in this release, and it looks like we might see a stable build soon.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Microïds, the indie publisher specializing in adventure titles, and noted game designer Paul Cuisset today announced that their new adventure game, Subject 13 , has reached its initial Kickstarter goal and PC, Mac, mobile, and Linux versions will be developed. To celebrate this news, Microïds released the first gameplay video to show some of the environments and puzzles players will explore to progress in the scenario.

• Unvanquished, a free, open source first-person shooter combining real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has just received its 30th Alpha release and the developers have celebrated by implementing some new, exciting features.

• A new Steam Beta update has been made available by Valve and it looks like the developers are still finding things to fix and features to implement.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• One thing that MATE has in common with both Enlightenment and Awesome is the general peppiness. Everything in MATE is just plain snappy and light on resource usage. And you could say that memory/CPU usage isn’t a huge deal with modern hardware. But, in my testing on this i5 with 8 gigs of RAM, MATE is so much more responsive than GNOME Shell, KDE or Unity that it’s just plain silly.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Qt Creator 3.2 rolls in new functionality while this release candidate delivers on the last of the fixes and tacking on some extra features. Among the extras found in Qt Creator 3.2 RC1 include more panes that are searchable, QBS plug-in now supports adding/removing files from projects, and the C++ code mode lhas received additional fixes.

• Famous digital photo management application for KDE and Linux digiKam 4.2.0, which includes an image editor for photo corrections and manipulation, is now available for download.

• As usual, we have worked hard to close your reported issues since the previous stable release 4.1.0. A list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.2.0 is available through the KDE Bugtracking System.

• As part of the core Plasma team I have spent a long time helping in the migration to make everything QtQuick2.0 based, making sure we get the most out of the OpenGL backing.

• This weekend I wanted to make some sort of demo which shows the power of this in the form of an interactive wallpaper.

• I am happy to announce the new luajit2 backend for Cantor, that will be released with KDE 4.14. If you haven’t heard of Cantor yet, it is a KDE application that provides a notebook-like frontend for various programming languages, with a mathematical and scientific focus.

• I’ve wrote a simple plugin for KTextEdit (Kate, KDevelop, and other programs that uses the KDE text editor component) that provides code completion for Go, by using gocode as backend.

• Besides these application the VDG is also working with developers (or without) on an image viewer and a video player. Besides that we want to make slight improvements to key areas of Plasma 5 e.g. the system tray. As you can see there’s still much to do, but we’re pleased with the progress made so far.

• Every backer who pledged 25 euros or more had a chance to vote for their favorite feature — and the now the votes are in and have been tallied up! Here are the twelve features that Dmitry will be working on for Krita 2.9:

• First, many of us will be taking off this week for Randa, Switzerland. Many sprints are taking place simultaneously, and the most important to me is that we’re writing another book. Book sprints are fun, and lots of work! As well as the team in Randa, a few people will be helping us write and edit from afar, and I’ll be posting a link soon so that you can help out as well.

• Qt Creator 3.2 RC1, a cross-platform IDE (integrated development environment) tailored to the needs of Qt developers and part of the Qt Project, is now available for download and testing.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Sonar GNOME 2014.1, a Linux distribution based on Manjaro and Arch Linux and developed specifically for people with various impairments, has been released and is now available for download.

• One of the many interesting things covered in Jiří’s coverage of this years GUADEC was GNOME Builder — an IDE that will focus purely on GNOME applications, with a goal of making it “Dead Simple”. Jiří’s post about day 4 at GUADEC covers the content of Christian Hergert’s talk about Builder (including him announcing the brave step of quitting his day job to work on it). While there are other IDEs in Fedora (like Adjuta and Eclipse) that can be used for development on the GTK+GNOME stack, none of these are focused purely on development of this type.

Distributions

Screenshots

Arch Family

• Arch Linux is one of the best GNU/Linux based distributions out there which give ‘full’, and I mean total, control to its users. There is no company behind it which may have to make compromises with what its users want vs what it needs to be able to monetize from the product; Arch is purely community driven project.

Red Hat Family

• A number of other analysts have also recently weighed in on RHT. Analysts at RBC Capital raised their price target on shares of Red Hat from $64.00 to $70.00 in a research note on Friday. Separately, analysts at Susquehanna upgraded shares of Red Hat from a neutral rating to a positive rating in a research note on Friday. They now have a $70.00 price target on the stock, up previously from $57.00. Finally, analysts at TheStreet upgraded shares of Red Hat to a buy rating in a research note on Wednesday, July 9th. Four analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eighteen have assigned a buy rating to the company. The company presently has a consensus rating of Buy and a consensus target price of $63.48.

• Ancient Greece had its Great Explainers, one of whom was Plato. The open source community has its Great Explainers, one of whom is Michael Tiemann.

• Several thousand feet in the air, in a conference room on the 10th floor of Red Hat’s Raleigh, NC headquarters, Tiemann is prognosticating. The place affords the kind of scope he relishes: broad, sweeping, stretched to a horizon that (this morning, anyway) seems bright. As the company’s VP of Open Source Affairs explains what differentiates an open source software company from other firms in a crowded market, he exhibits the idiosyncrasy that has marked his writing for decades: the tendency to pepper his exposition of open source principles with pithy maxims from a diverse range of philosophers, politicians, political economists, and popular writers. It’s a habit borne, he says, of the necessity of finding something that resonates with the many skeptics he’s confronted over the years—because necessity, he quips (quoting Plato, of course), is the mother of all invention.

Fedora

• Fedora.next, the major revamping of Fedora Linux, is shaping up to feature tight integration with container-based virtualization for the cloud, according to a recent discussion among developers of the open source operating system, which forms the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

• While Fedora 21 will be arriving later than anticipated, on the plus side is that the 64-bit ARM support is coming along well and the (indirect) delay gives developers extra time for polishing up this first Fedora Linux release with great AArch64 support.

• With the Fedora 21 Alpha freeze looming in the rear view mirror, although the object wasn’t as close as it would appear, I thought it was high time that I gave a brief overview of the state of ARM aarch64 in Fedora. Some might assume the silence means not a lot has been happening but this is extremely far from the truth!

• On the hardware side of things, Peter also recently blogged about some of the ARM hardware support that the newly released 3.16 Linux kernel will provide, including support for the NVIDIA Jetson TK1, Samsung EXYNOS, Qualcomm MSM 8×60, 8960 and 8974, APM X-GENE, and AMD Seattle. He also reports that the graphics driver support for ARM systems is also improving with nouveau, freedreno and etnaviv all possibly being supported on some specific ARM devices.

• We previously reported about Final Term, a new terminal emulator for Fedora that features many nifty features including context menus, reflow, smart command completion and 24-bit colour in the terminal. Final Term is not yet in the official Fedora repositories, as it is still under heavy development, and the UI is still slightly buggy. That said, the COPR repo that provides Fedora packages for Final Term was recently updated (and has been periodically since it was created) with the new development versions from upstream. So if you still want to try out this new terminal, jump over to the COPR page, and follow the instructions there.

• After a rousing introduction by Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Matthew Miller, Flock kicked off with a keynote by journalist Gijs Hillenius. In the keynote, Hillenius discussed free and open source adoption in European public institutions.

• The title of the keynote, “Free and Open Source Software in Europe: Policies & Implementations” was slightly misleading – Hillenius only discussed public/governmental adoption of FOSS, and didn’t really discuss corporate adoption or use by individuals. This is not surprising, Hillenius focuses on use of open source for public administrations for the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR). Still, he provided an interesting picture of adoption by public European institutions.

Debian Family

• VolksPC has taken to Indiegogo this week to launch to launch a crowd funding campaign to help take its low cost solid state Linux PC into production.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Toshiba Electronics has introduced two starter kits for early development of web applications using the Toshiba TZ5000 Application Processor Lite (ApP Lite) series.

• The RBTZ5000-2MA-A1 and RBTZ5000-6MA-A1 starter kits provide drivers for internet applications using HTML5.

• Both kits provide drivers for video playback using Wireless LAN and HDMI output, with the RBTZ5000-2MA-A1 on Ubuntu Linux, and the RBTZ5000-6MA-A1 on an Android 4.4 platform.

• The Intel Graphics Installer for Linux, a tool that allows users to easily install the latest graphics and video drivers for their Intel graphics hardware, is now at version 1.0.6 and is ready for download.

• The developers have identified some security issues with the GNU C Library and an update has been pushed into the repositories.

• “Stephane Chazelas discovered that the GNU C Library incorrectly handled locale environment variables. An attacker could use this issue to possibly bypass certain restrictions such as the ForceCommand restrictions in,” reads the security notice.

• India is the fastest growing market for open source operating system Ubuntu, helped by tie-ups with top PC vendors and the increasing adoption of cloud-based applications in the country.

• The Linux-based operating system grew 50% year-over-year in India. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has partnered with Dell and HP to bundle the OS with certain models of their laptops offered in India.

Flavours and Variants

• Deepin 2014 is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds. The download image for the distribution is approximately 1.5 GB in size. Booting from the project’s live media brings up a menu we can navigate with either the keyboard or the mouse pointer. The menu asks us to select our preferred language from a list. Once our language has been selected the system boots to a desktop interface with a starry sky in the background. On the desktop we find an icon for launching the project’s system installer. At the bottom of the screen we find a quick-launch bar filled with icons for commonly accessed applications. There are also buttons for bringing up the distribution’s application menu and settings panel on this launch bar.

• ExTiX 14.1.2 64-bit, a distribution based on the recently launched operating system from Canonical, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, has been officially released.

• The developer rebased the distribution on the newer Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) a while ago and this new build is mostly about updates and fixes. Users are provided with a GNOME 3.10 desktop and GNOME Classic 3.10. For users who want a lighter system, Razor-qt 0.5.2 is also available in ExTiX Light.

Devices/Embedded

• NI unveiled a rugged 4-slot “CompactDAQ” system for data acquisition and control (DAQ), with real-time Linux, an Atom E3825, and optional sensor modules.

• Usually, when you have a choice of Windows or Linux, the Windows version costs more. In the case of the National Instruments (NI) CompactDAQ cDAQ-9134 Controller, however, it’s the Linux version that costs $500 more, at $4,999. That’s because it’s a special real-time Linux variant called NI Linux Real-Time, also available on NI’s CompactRIO cRIO-9068 controller and sbRIO-9651 computer-on-module, both of which are based on the Xilinx Zynq-7020 system-on-chip. The cDAQ-9134 instead runs on a dual-core, 1.33GHz Intel Atom E3825 SoC.

• Our brand new sister magazine RasPi is here! Issue #1 is out today, available to download through Apple’s App Store. It’s jam-packed full of amazing content and only costs 69p/99¢.

• Each month we’ll be walking you through a big Pi project, showing off some of the best work in the community, sharing your tweets, letters and emails, and of course giving you a whole bunch of tutorials to teach you how to get the most from your Raspberry Pi and make amazing things with it.

Phones

Ballnux

• Until now, as with most new versions of software, new code for a new version of OpenSUSE had been bottled up for group testing at a beta or milestone stage.

• In the OpenSUSE world, this milestone stage had taken place in something called the “Factory”.

Android

• August is here and just like clockwork CyanogenMod have released a new version of CM11. For those of you unaware CyanogenMod recently changed the way in which they list downloads. Until recently CM was always released as either stable, snapshot (mostly stable) or nightlies (experimental and buggy) versions. However CM11 over the last few months have used an ‘M’ release system which instead simply refers to ‘milestone’. The M releases are technically snapshots but are considerably more stable than nightlies and are considered to be suitable for main or daily usage.

• Ugoos is prepping an Android 4.4 “S85″ media player dongle with a quad-core Amlogic S805 Cortex-A5 SoC clocked to 1.5GHz, and a quad-core Mali-450 GPU.

• Ugoos has spun a variety of Android media player boxes and dongles over the last few years, including a UT3 box, featuring Rockchip’s quad-core, Cortex-A17 RK3288 system-on-chip with a 16-core Mali-T760 GPU, now selling for $130. Before that was the Ugoos UT2, with the quad-core, Cortex-A9 RK3188 SoC clocked to 1.6GHz, with a Mali-400 GPU. Last year, the Chinese company introduced a dongle-style UM2 stick, running on the same RK3188 and Mali-400 GPU.

• Google’s dominance of the smartphone market has reached new heights, with its Android operating system now accounting for a record 84.6 percent share of global smartphone shipments, according to research by Strategy Analytics.

• The growth in Android phones during the second quarter of this year came at the expense of BlackBerry, Apple iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone, the research firm said Wednesday.

• Another month, another release to mark the occasion – today we fire off the builds for CM11 M9. The M9 build incorporates changes from June 31st through its branch date on Sunday July 27th.

Free Software/Open Source

• The authors of Duplicati, an open-source file backup client, discuss the impetus for the creation of their project, keeping data secure in the cloud, and backup integrity with incremental data storage.

• The report noted that GSA is already using the Github open source community alongside the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, while the U.S. Geological Service is exploring the community to facilitate software development crowdsourcing.

• Sweetch, which lets users secure a parking space for a flat fee of $5 and sell one for $4, was one of several apps mentioned by name in the cease and desist letter from City Attorney Dennis Herrera to fellow parking app MonkeyParking, TechCrunch reports.

• Image being able to move an object in an image maintaining its perspective as if you are physically holding the object and moving it around? Let me give the example of a chair in a picture. How would you feel if you are able to turn it around or “even upside down in the photo, displaying sides of the chair that would have been hidden from the camera, yet appearing to be realistic”?

• Zimbra’s Olivier Thierry talks about the three C’s that open source firms must support, the need to be market driven in tech, and how his firm’s solutions address security and data privacy issues.

• Collaboration is a core component of modern business, and over the years, collaborative efforts have resulted in some of the world’s most groundbreaking innovations, in the areas of technology, medicine and engineering. The opportunities are seemingly endless when people unite and work together, whether within a single organization or across many.

• But what if this collaborative ethos is extended to include practically every human being on earth? Are there any limitations on what can be accomplished?

SaaS/Big Data

• MapR’s Big Data platform, based on open source Apache Hadoop, gained the endorsement of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has included the company’s software as the first Hadoop distribution in the new AWS Partner Network (APN) Competency Program.

• ownCloud is one of the most important free software project considering our move to the ‘cloud’ is inevitable. Most of us use more than one computing devices (I have 8) and we want to be able to access some of our data from any device we want and thus the need of cloud based syncing and storing solutions. However, the moment you use 3rd party cloud services such as Dropbox, iCloud, Drive or OneDrive you lost control and ‘ownership’ of your data. At the same time you expose your otherwise private data to these companies and law-enforcement authorities.

• Sure you could join everyone else and put your data on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, or you could use the latest ownCloud 7 to run your own private cloud.

• OpenStack recently celebrated its fourth birthday and it seems as we pass this milestone, it’s a healthy, vibrant and growing project. It has been embraced by players big and small including such industry luminaries as IBM, Microsoft, HP, Red Hat, SAP and many others. It’s all good for OpenStack.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The developers from The Document Foundation have released a new stable build in the 4.2.x version of LibreOffice, just a few days after the main branch of the suite, 4.3, made its grand appearance.

• “The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.2.6 ‘Still,’ the seventh and last minor release of the most solid version of the software, ready for enterprise deployments and conservative users. LibreOffice 4.2.6 arrives just one week after the successful launch of LibreOffice 4.3 ‘Fresh,’ the most feature rich version of the office suite,” reads the official announcement.

• Just before summer began, Oracle unveiled the beta version of Solaris 11.2, which is only the second point release of Solaris since version 11 of the platform appeared in 2011. The really notable thing about the beta was that Oracle began positioning Solaris as “a modern cloud platform that melds efficient virtualization, application-driven software-defined networking (SDN) technology and a full OpenStack distribution.”

Education

• When Opensource.com said they wanted to do a series of articles on how having an open source job has changed us, this story came to mind. Can you think of any other industry that would do this kind of thing for a “competing” company? I can’t! But then again BibLibre and ByWater aren’t competitors, we see ourselves as partners. Everyone who works on or with Koha is a member of the worldwide community and as such works together toward a common goal: making Koha awesome.

BSD

• At the end of September, OpenBSD distribution will move to a new distributor. As a result the old stock (CDs, Tshirts and posters) will become unavailable.

• Although the NUC is a tiny computer, it’s packed with power. The model I purchased has a 1.3GHz i5 with four cores. I added 16GB’s of RAM (the maximum) and a 250GB mSATA SSD. The NUC comes standard with gigabit Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports. There is also a mini PCI Express slot for adding wifi, if wanted. Since the NUC was going to be living on my desk, I decided against the wifi for now. The NUC has integrated Intel graphics (Intel® HD Graphics 5000) which as an OpenBSD user is exactly what I wanted. It’s also capable of driving a high resolution display, and since I had recently acquired one of the beautiful Monoprice 27″ IPS 2560 x 1440 displays from Massdrop* it was a perfect fit.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• With the launch of the Libreboot project, users now have an easy-to-install, 100% free software replacement for proprietary BIOS/boot programs. This project is important; currently, many computer-makers notoriously deny free software developers the information they need to develop free replacements for the proprietary software they ship with their products. In some cases, manufacturers do not even share enough information for it to be possible to install a free operating system.

• I started the development of version 0.4.0 of FisicaLab. And what better to start with a new icon. I’m not a graphical designer, so I wanted keep this simple. To start I used one of the icons at module of dynamics of circular motion, the icon of final system. The three particles and the lines (I think these are called “kinetic lines” in comics, but I’m not sure) represent a system in movement. The “f” is not only for FisicaLab but also for “final state of the system”.

• The original author of Net::Gnats has transferred maintainer status to me since it is planned that the next version of Gnatsweb will be leveraging this module.

Project Releases

• At the request of the maintainer of the recent added RcppMLPACK package, it adds the Boost.Heap library. Boost.Heap implements priority queues which extend beyond the corresponding (and somewhat simpler) class in the STL. Key features of the Boost.Heap priority queues are mutability, iterators, ability to merge, stable sort, and comparison.

Licensing

• Micah-Shalom Kesselman recently started working at the FSF as one of this summer’s licensing interns. In this post, he writes about his interest in free software and what his goals are for his internship.

Openness/Sharing

• Ross Mounce is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bath studying the use of fossils in phylogeny and phyloinformatics, completing his PhD at the University of Bath last year. Ross was one of the first Panton Fellows and is an active member of the Open Knowledge Foundation, particularly the Open Science Working Group. He is an advocate for open science, and he is actively working on content mining academic publications to reuse scientific research in meta-analyses to gain higher level insights in evolutionary patterns.

Open Hardware

• Pardon the noise. We’ve been banging around for a few months in our workshop, toiling away at our latest creation: What is open hardware?, a new resource page. And it’s finally finished!

Programming

• Parse today released the Parse PHP SDK, which you can download yourself from GitHub. The Facebook-owned company says the release is its first SDK for a server-side language as well as the first to be “truly open-source.”

Leftovers

Security

• So today we will show, how you can manage many yubikeys for many notebooks using privacyIDEA. privacyIDEA is an authentication system for two factor authentication – usually with OTP devices. In a recent version privacyIDEA started to not only answer authentication request, but it was also enhanced to be able to define client machines and add information, which authentication device could be used for an application on a client machine.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The Army will lay off about 500 majors as part of its ongoing downsizing effort, the service has announced.

• The military branch used involuntary separation boards to determine to determine where the number of soldiers exceeded future force requirements. The Army announced earlier this year it planned to select from a pool of 19,000 captains and majors to reduce the size of its force in the post-war era. The service laid off 1,100 captains earlier this summer.

• If the GOP position sounds contradictory, that’s because it’s less about the Constitution than cleavages within the party. There are real questions about Obama’s abuses of power — say, the spying on Americans by the National Security Agency or the use of drones to kill U.S. citizens overseas — but the opposition party has left those largely untouched. The planned lawsuit was a bone thrown to conservatives to quiet their impeachment talk. The legislation restricting Obama’s executive authority on immigration was a similar effort to buy off conservatives who had been encouraged to rebel by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas..

• The decision by Western countries, especially the United States, to make Yemen their main military base lead to al-Qaeda getting stronger in the region, a representative of Yemen’s National Dialogue Committee (NDC) said in an interview with Rossiya Segodnya news agency.

• From 2004 to July, 2014, between 2,340 and 3,790 people have been killed by U.S. RC (Remote-Controlled) aircrafts, stated a study from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism released here today.

• As of open sources, the institution estimated that more than a third of those killed were civilians and about 200 children, while at least 1,100,000 citizens have been seriously wounded.

Finance

• New York’s Department of Financial Services has presented draft regulations for bitcoin trade that are an absolute heap of bullshit, and that’s even before going into what the proposal actually says. The propsed regulations require a so-called “BitLicense” in order to trade in bitcoin with residents of New York and with everybody else in the world. The problem is, that’s an absolute joke from a legal standpoint, completely ignoring the very concept of a jurisdiction.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox announced today that it had withdrawn its bid to acquire the Time Warner entertainment conglomerate.

• In a statement, Murdoch said, “Time Warner management and its Board refused to engage with us to explore an offer which was highly compelling. Additionally, the reaction in our share price since our proposal was made undervalues our stock and makes the transaction unattractive to Fox shareholders.”

Privacy

• The temporary asylum of the US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who has been hailed as a hero by a majority or ‘well-informed’, expired yesterday. Russia has not yet confirmed the extension of his asylum, as the country is preparing for a war with Ukrain.

• Former Rep. Ron Paul has taken his push for clemency for Edward Snowden to a new level, announcing he’s collected more than 37,000 signatures in the past five months — about a third of what he says he needs to get a White House response.

• With the recent news that Germany has expelled our CIA director in Berlin after the CIA paid two Germans to spy on two German government employees, we can see very clearly that our American intelligence agencies are out of control.

• If you believe in getting a decent outcome, then you should adjust your methods of achieving it to those that are most likely to find success.

• Leaked documents published by ‘The Intercept’ reveal continued cooperation between the NSA and Israeli intelligence agencies.

• “In the CIA people view liaison relationships as a pain in the ass but necessary,” says Valerie Plame, the CIA undercover agent whose identity was infamously disclosed by aides to President George W Bush soon after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Liaison relationships are the CIA’s term for cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, and, given that not even the world’s mightiest spy outfit can go anywhere it likes, the CIA maintains plenty of such liaisons.

• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says that John Brennan, the director of the CIA who has finally admitted that he lied when he angrily and repeatedly insisted that the agency did not spy on staff members of the Senate committee charged with oversight US intelligence agencies, “has a lot of work to do,” before she can forgive him for lying to and spying on her committee.

• The Coalition government led by Prime Minister Tony Abbott today announced controversial legislation mandating data retention for telecommunications companies, to be put to the parliament before the end of the year, while simultaneously abandoning anti-discrimination changes.

• A report by two organizations committed to the protection of civil liberties is raising new and valid concerns about how government surveillance programs have created an impediment to free speech and freedom of the press. The report gives additional weight to efforts in Congress to end the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate gathering of telephone records.

• Many examples of extraterritoriality grow out of America’s archipelago of military bases around the world, where Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA) allow service members exemption from local laws, even when they commit crimes against host country people. The U.S. also stations Customs and Border Patrol agents in other nations, denying boarding on U.S.-bound flights from Canada, for example, to Canadian citizens otherwise still standing in their own country. Imagine the outcry in America if the Chinese were to establish military bases in Florida exempt from U.S. law, or if the Russians choose which Americans could fly out of Kansas City Airport. Never mind drone strikes, bombings, deployment of Special Forces, invasions and CIA-sponsored coups.

• The snowballing NSA revelations have already severely damaged U.S. credibility and relationships around the world; nations remain shocked at the impunity with which America dug into their private lives. NSA spying has also cost American tech firms $180 billion in lost revenues, as “We’re not an American company” becomes a sales point.

• GCHQ accrediting some university degreesThe NSA’s British counterpart, GCHQ, is now accrediting certain university degrees from some of the top colleges in the United Kingdom, including Oxford. The accreditations are provided with some online security degrees, and they are essentially the GCHQ’s stamp of approval which could help students find jobs at the government agency once they graduate.

• Judge Andrew Napolitano spoke on Fox Business about the role that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) played in the arrest of a Florida sex offender. He talked about the lengths that the world’s biggest Internet search engine can go to protect itself from indictment as a conspirator in unlawful activities.

• German newspapers recently reported that the NSA targets people who research privacy and anonymity tools online—for instance by searching for information about Tor and Tails—for deeper surveillance. But today, researching something online is the near equivalent to thinking out loud. By ramping up surveillance on people simply for reading about security, freedom of expression easily collapses into self-censorship; speech is chilled; people may become afraid to research and learn.

• In fact, lots of them are spending their summer breaks grappling with student data. What to gather. How to use it. And how to protect it.

• There was broad convergence of views and interests between the US and India when John Kerry, accompanied by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and other senior American officials, visited India last week, despite India’s decision not to ratify the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA).

• The TFA, which was agreed upon by all WTO member states in Bali last year, had to be ratified by all signatories by July 31 to come into force. The deal was designed to reduce trade barriers by lowering import tariffs and standardizing customs, and was expected to boost trade and add up to an estimated 1 trillion USD to the global economy.

• The new Indian government, led by Modi, made a U-turn, vetoing the trade deal over disagreements on New Delhi’s food subsidies. The failure to reach an accord overshadowed Kerry’s three-day hop-over to New Delhi for an annual Strategic Dialogue meeting between the two countries.

• National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake says Australia’s looming national security reforms makes him ‘shudder’, labelling them ambiguous and a plot to stamp out legitimate public-interest whistleblowing.

• Apple’s been hit with a class action suit [PDF] in the US for using the location service function on its iPhones to track customers without notice to, or consent from, customers when it comes to their whereabouts being tracked, recorded, sent to Apple, and potentially provided to third parties.

• A Californian woman, Chen Ma, filed the suit on behalf of Apple’s 100-million-plus iPhone users in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

• She accuses the company of violating iPhone users’ privacy by not only being able to pinpoint their locations but also to “record the duration that users stay at any given geographical point and periodically transmit” the data to Apple’s database.

• When twenty-six year old Austrain law student Max Schrems filed a lawsuit against Facebook claiming damages because it allowed the NSA to spy on him, as in the average user, he helped to open up a potential world of hurt for the company.

• Because, now, there are over 11,000 people joining the class action lawsuit against Facebook after the first weekend of the campaign “Europe vs Facebook.” People are joining from Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and the UK. The objective? €500 or the equivalent of £398 at current exchange rates.

• “We want to show to the US industry that they have to respect [European] fundamental rights if they want to do business in Europe,” Schrems said in an interview. “We love the technology, but we want to be able to use things without permanent worry for our privacy. Right now you have two options: live like in the stone age, or take action. We decided for the second.”

Civil Rights

• In the dreadful nationalistic war between rival Imperial powers, the Belgian Empire was probably the most evil of all. To commend its resistance is ridiculous. Joseph Conrad’s great “Heart of Darkness” and “Congo Diary”, and the formal revelation by British Consul Roger Casement of the dreadful enslavement and abuse of the Congo population to provide vast profits to the Belgian crown, provide lasting testimony to the malignity of the Belgian Empire.

• The same consideration rules out other countries which have the Queen as Head of State. Otherwise New Zealand might have been a good choice. A similar size to Scotland, a thriving democracy and a population very heavily of Scottish descent.

• O’Reilly portrays himself as the moral and intellectual authority on how to solve the problems he says plague black communities and black culture, decrying “race hustlers” and prescribing harmful “solutions” to issues like the mass incarceration of black men.

• After reading the recent story about a ‘correctional officer’ intimidating a network news reporter for accidentally filming an empty prison at Wilton, NY, I googled ‘empty prison’.

• The stark admission by the CIA’s inspector general that the agency had broken into a classified computer network used by its overseers at the Senate Intelligence Committee violates the core principle of separation of powers of governmental branches enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Along with the CIA’s illegal rendition, detention, and torture of suspected terrorists and the NSA’s secret monitoring of Americans’ phone traffic, it shows that U.S. spy agencies are in danger of going rogue and need to be severely disciplined. Such intelligence organizations are supposed to defend the republic and not undermine it.

• There are still plenty of loopholes in Mr. Leahy’s bill, and it’s not hard to see where they came from. “In developing this legislation,” says Mr. Leahy, “I have consulted closely with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the NSA, the FBI, and the Department of Justice — and every single word of this bill was vetted with those agencies.” That’s hardly reassuring.

• If you’ve managed to get over your own NSA-induced, Snowdenian fear of typing, here’s another important privacy question: Do you trust that bag of potato chips you’re holding? The word out of MIT is that you probably shouldn’t. Nearby potted plants should also be treated with suspicion. What makes these everyday items a threat to your (conversational) personal data? It’s just that MIT announced on Monday that its researchers, along Microsoft and Adobe, have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct sound simply by analyzing video of the vibrations of objects around you.

• Several African-American Secret Service agents who claim the agency denied them promotions because of their race can sue the government as a group, according to the latest court ruling in a 14-year-old lawsuit.

• A new version of a computer-based cyber-security training course from the Pentagon still classifies disillusionment with U.S. foreign policy as a “threat indicator” that a federal employee might be a spy.

• That training, available online and still being used as recently as last week, has been administered to millions of military and civilian employees throughout the federal government. Little seems to have changed since HuffPost reported on an earlier version of the same training course last year — even though a spokesman said then that the training was being “updated.”

• Here’s what exercising your First Amendment rights gets you in certain parts of the US. Photographer Jeff Gray has been filming cops and photographing public structures, as well as documenting the reactions of law enforcement to his activities.

• A certain percentage of police officers are “bad cops,” just like a certain percentage of the human race is composed of thuggish sociopaths. That’s an unfortunate fact of life. Whether the percentage of bad cops is greater than the percentage in non-law enforcement positions is still open for discussion, although there’s a lot about a cop’s job that would attract thuggish sociopaths: power, better weapons, nearly nonexistent accountability, etc.

• Ross Ulbricht claimed he couldn’t have laundered money, as Bitcoin isn’t money. Alleged Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s defense attorney Joshua Dratel has asked the court to suppress nearly all of the evidence collected against his client. Should the motion be successful, it would likely put a substantial damper on the government’s efforts to prosecute Ulbricht.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The federal government remains locked in a battle with two telephone companies, demanding they refund what the government argues is $3.5 million in wrongfully charged late-payment fees.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In an emergency motion (PDF) filed Friday, TV-over-Internet startup Aereo submitted its most detailed legal arguments yet as to why it should be allowed to be a cable company. It also asked, based on those arguments, to resume operations until a final decision was reached.

• A series of ads created by a New Zealand-based ISP has been rejected by Sky TV on copyright grounds. The ban on the ads, which contain references to a VPN-like service providing access to geo-blocked content such as Netflix, has been decried as “unjustified and petty” by ISP Slingshot.

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