● 09.10.14

● Links 10/9/2014: Brian Stevens in Google, Ubuntu 14.10 Expectations

Posted in News Roundup at 2:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Over the years, we’ve heard from countless Microsoft Windows fans as to why they believe using Linux was nearly impossible. These folks would cite everything – from poor hardware compatibility to a lack of popular software. And I suppose at one time, some aspects of this were true.

• But in 2014 when people still claim that using newbie friendly distributions like Ubuntu are too difficult, this nonsense needs to be put to rest once and for all. This article is but a small step in what I hope will be a wake up call for naysayers.

Server

• Apache Mesos had its first annual conference in collaboration with LinuxCon North America this year. I attended the conferences because its one of the major open source events of the year and also because I volunteered to be part of MesosCon program committee.

• Mumbai based startup Flockport today announced the launch of Flockport.com, the first Linux container (LXC) sharing website that will offer users popular web applications in portable containers that can be deployed in seconds.

• Flockport containers give users cloud like flexibility of application instances that can be deployed on demand. Flockport.com will let users and developers download and share LXC containers.

Kernel Space

• With the X99 burned-up motherboard problem of last week appearing to be behind us with no further issues when using a completely different X99 motherboard, here’s the first extensive look at the Core i7 5960X Haswell-E processor running on Ubuntu Linux.

• While Intel’s Skylake isn’t arriving until the second half of 2015 as the successor to Broadwell, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center has already published their initial Linux enablement for Skylake with its HD Graphics “Gen 9″ display hardware.

Applications

• Springseed is a simple note-taking app for Linux that features full Markdown language support.

Proprietary

• Vallum Software today announced it has reached an agreement with the GMI Foundation to develop a series of Linux and UNIX based agent programs to extend its existing Windows management platform support. This new change will expand the support of GMI and the Vallum Halo Manager to allow in-depth management of Linux and UNIX platforms using the well-tested General Management Interface specification, currently available for all types of Windows platforms.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• A new Beta version of the Steam distribution platform has been released and it looks like the developers are working very hard to implement all sorts of new features and to fix some of the problems that appeared since the previous stable update.

• Robocraft, a free-to-play robot vehicle shooter developed and published by Freejam on Steam, now also has a Linux version.

• It seems they are only counting Steam, so their original tweet seems a little baiting to get a reaction and more sales. Not a bad thing to try to get more sales, but maybe they should actively engage with the Linux community like some other developers do?

• Chasm is the excellent looking RPG Platformer from Discord Games that will be launching into early access soon, and luckily the Linux release will come too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Enlightenment camp most recently released E19 RC3 as the latest development version of their lightweight but powerful window manager. E19 is a huge update in that it has its standalone Wayland compositor, better HiDPI support, and many other features. E19 is quite a feature-packed release.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Akademy is in full swing here in Brno in the Czech Republic. The days are now filled with BoF sessions to discuss given topics and make decisions in person much faster than would be possible online. Here is the wrapup session from Tuesday which covered the outcomes from sessions on Solid, Plasma Media Centre, Inqlude, UI design, Frameworks and more. (Apologies for the rotation, YouTube says it is working on fixing it.)

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Cinnamon desktop environment is actually made of numerous components, and the screensaver is only one small part. This package has just received a very interesting new feature that should arrive very soon.

• Linux Mint project lead Clement Lefebvre announced that support for custom date and time format has been added to the Cinnamon screensaver. This will let users add date and time formats of their choice or even leave it unused to have a clean screensaver with just the background wallpaper. They can even use any random string of their choice. The last option is not something very new as even now away message strings can be edited to show any random message but this adds to the customization options.

• Those running GNOME on Arch Linux should be pleased that with the upcoming GNOME 3.14 release that the GNOME Software application should finally play well with PackageKit’s Pacman back-end.

• Those running GNOME on Arch Linux should be pleased that with the upcoming GNOME 3.14 release that the GNOME Software application should finally play well with PackageKit’s Pacman back-end.

Distributions

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• On August 28, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens announced that he was leaving Red Hat after being at the company for the last 12 years. At the time, we didn’t know where he was headed.

• Now we do.

• Stevens is now working at Google as the Vice-President of Cloud Platforms.

• Could be a very interesting role for Stevens and one that certainly has great potential as Google’s cloud efforts compete against Amazon, Microsoft and the multiple OpenStack based players.

• Back on August 27 when Red Hat announced that CTO Brian Stevens had left the building and was no longer in their employ, rumors began flying as people began to wonder what happened. His resignation came without warning and Red Hat wasn’t forthcoming with anything, other than a terse message wishing him well, so it’s only natural that some people began to suspect that some kind of shakeup was in play. Indeed, I was pretty sure that he hadn’t left voluntarily but had been pushed through the door.

• Red Hat, the leading Open Source company with over a billion dollars in revenues every year, has announced the release of Red Hat Satellite 6.

• Satellite 6 is a comprehensive solution providing complete lifecycle management of Red Hat systems with provisioning software distribution, patch and configuration management, together with subscription management across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Fedora

• Fedora developer Vratislav Podzimek has announced a new partition tool built from storage and configuration management tools used in Fedora’s Anaconda installer. The new tool, known as blivet-gui, is based on the blivet Python library used in Anaconda. The new tool could eventually become a replacement for GParted and other open source partition tools.

• FAD Phnom Penh 2014 will take place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from 15-16 November 2014 at Development Innovations. The idea of organizing the FAD Phnom Penh 2014 is to gather Fedora Ambassadors from ASIA-PACIFIC (APAC) Region together to work on activities.

Debian Family

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Debian Project are partnering up to provide a database for hardware products that don’t need any proprietary drivers to work.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has announced in a security notice that a CUPS vulnerability has been found and fixed in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

• Canonical has released some details in a security notice about a number of QEMU vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.

• New versions of Ubuntu family come out every six months, April and October each year. Every forth of them, released in April on even year, is a “long-term support” version. It means users get updates for their LTS systems longer than for non-LTS. The current version of Ubuntu 14.04 is LTS. It is so stable that many Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint and Zorin decided to remain on 14.04 base and not upgrade it until the next LTS version.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi is considered to be one of the most versatile mini PCs in existence, and proof of this is the recent integration of this device as an in-car computer for a Ford Focus.

• The number of things that you can do with a Raspberry Pi seems to be infinite. We’ve seen the system integrated in all sorts of projects, from simple household control to a management system for a microbrewery. It might sound strange that such a small device can do so many things, but it looks like it’s even a lot more versatile than we can imagine.

Phones

• These are certainly exciting times for Samsung Electronics and Tizen fans, with release the Tizen based Gear S, amongst other devices like the Gear VR. We were hoping to see Gear Glass, samsung’s rival product to Google Glass, at IFA 2014 this year, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.

Ballnux

• The Tizen Samsung Gear S is a thing of beauty and has already been adorned with Swarovski crystals, but fashion doesn’t stop there. Samsung has teamed up with Diesel Black Gold on a bracelet that will be shown off at the Spring ’15 show later on today. The Diesel Black Gold’s interpretation is said to be decidedly more downtown with an up-to-date feel. The inspiration was by the creative director Andreas Melbostad and the material of choice was Leather.

Android

• A teardown of Motorola’s new flagship Moto 360 smartwatch reveals it is powered by a four-year-old processor – the same silicon that powered the company’s first smartwatch released in 2011 – and a battery with 10 percent less capacity than the advertised specs.

• Instagram, Grindr, OkCupid and many other Android applications fail to take basic precautions to protect their users’ data, putting their privacy at risk, according to new study.

• Amazon has at long last released a version of its video player for Android devices, according to a report Tuesday from The Next Web. The app release negates some of the video advantage that used to be reserved for Amazon-branded Android products like the Kindle Fire, but it rounds out the list of platforms where Amazon can appear.

Free Software/Open Source

• Though Linux and now many other technology companies have amply demonstrated how communities of volunteers and users can add significant value to development and support efforts, the decision to embrace a comparable strategy by non-tech companies involves a bigger leap—and bold new leadership willing to wade into some unfamiliar territory. Whereas a “hacker culture” inclines tech oriented users to join with others to solve common problems, and leaders to embrace that approach for their companies, it’s not nearly so automatic for, say, executives who deal with making cement, selling coffee, or marketing the trading of stocks and bonds. In fact for many non-technical leaders today, “embracing the crowd” (or a community of volunteers, or networks of customers, etc.) is still a big unknown, often seeming to be fraught with unmanageable costs and risks.

• On a personal note, I am committed to the challenge of getting more girls on side, both at credativ and through backing members of the Open Source Consortium. I entered this arena with a Cultural Studies degree, which gave me a good grounding in philosophising, but only limited commercial insight. Contrary to any initial fears I might have had about being ostracised as a woman without any specialised technical knowledge in a male dominated environment, I’ve found it to be accepting and rewarding. From a fairly nonchalant initial association – attending Open Source Consortium meetings; helping organise annual Software Freedom Day events; interacting with Linux User Groups and online forums – I’ve become passionate about challenging the widely-held misconceptions about this world.

• “I didn’t think there was a place for me at Code for Philly,” she said late last month to the crowd at the showcase for Girl Develop It’s Summer of Open Source Fellowship. “I thought it was going to be a lot of intense tech guys working in Rails.”

• Cisco has a point here. With the aggregated model of networking, customers have “one throat to choke”. One vendor delivers both hardware and software and thus there is no doubt who is to blame when something goes wrong. But it’s hard to argue this point as a continuing factor as enterprise IT rapidly moves towards a distributed, disaggregated and composible paradigm across the board. Enterprise IT is becoming, by definition, a more distributed operation.

• The original SourceForge project site for Bitcoin has been compromised along with an original email address of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder(s) of the project.

• The open source movement has brought good things to the lives of countless people around the world. But have you ever wondered how it all got started? Check out this infographic that walks you through the birth of open source in the 1950s to today’s thriving open source world.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• New public key pinning feature will help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

SaaS/Big Data

• To be clear, the open source CloudStack platform that Apache now oversees is a different branch from the commercial one that Citrix oversees. The open source version from Apache is moving forward, but it’s unclear what Citrix may be making of the momentum that OpenStack has.

• The cloud is a big place. There’s no one technology, no one source of information, and no one topic that can cover everything. But to me, that’s what is exciting about it. It’s a place where having a multidisciplinary background is not only helpful, it’s essential.

• Like the idea of chewing on terabytes data using Google’s MapReduce but think it’s too slow, too hardware-hungry and too complicated?

• A fledgling big-data analytics venture reckons it’s got the answer – a Hadoop programming framework built using Java it claims is 20 times faster than using ordinary Hadoop and that it claims uses less data-centre hardware. It’s easier to program, too, they claim.

Databases

• The NHS has ripped the Oracle backbone from a national patient database system and inserted NoSQL running on an open-source stack.

• Spine2 has gone live following successful redevelopment including redeployment on new, x86 hardware. The project to replace Spine1 had been running for three years with Spine2 now undergoing a 45-day monitoring period.

• FoundationDB has announced the general availability of SQL Layer, and ANSI SQL engine that runs on top of their key-value store. The result is a relational database backed up by a scalable, fault-tolerant, shared-nothing, distributed NoSQL store with support for multi-key ACID transactions.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Office suites are important productivity tools that many of us depend on day in and day out. Fortunately, we have a range of office options to choose from in Linux. Some are open source and some are not, but all are useful in their own right. Linux Links has a useful roundup of five free office suites.

CMS

• Drupal is a powerful and flexible open source content management system that powers a large number of sites on the Internet. Drupal’s flexibility means that sites built with Drupal can vary widely in form and function. In most cases, this flexibility is a benefit, but it can sometimes also be overwhelming. Growing a Drupal powered website from Drupal Core to a finished, customized site, by selecting from a wide variety of modules and themes, can be a complicated and time consuming process.

Healthcare

• As a clinical consultant representing a proprietary software supplier in healthcare, you may be surprised to hear that I believe the attention that open source software is receiving is positive.

• This is not because open source can solve all of the current IT challenges within the healthcare service, but because it has the potential to drive a new level of innovation throughout the industry.

• PwC has joined forces with Medsphere, DSS, Inc. and General Dynamics Information Technology to vie for the coveted U.S. Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) electronic health record contract, and plans to merge “open source” software with commercial applications in its proposal, PwC has announced.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Those of you who follow MediaGoblin closely likely know of Deb Nicholson, our community manager. This post is a bit late, but nonetheless, I wanted to share something exciting that happened…

• John Sullivan, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, has commented on Apple’s much anticipated launch of the iPhone 6, Apple Pay, and the brand new product line: the Apple Watch.

• While GCC has had Cilk Plus multi-threading support since last year that made it into GCC 4.9, with the upcoming GCC 5 release will be full support for Intel’s Cilk Plus specification.

• GCC’s C and C++ front-ends will have full Cilk Plus support for task and data parallelism. Cilk Plus is similar in concept to OpenMP with being a C/C++ programming language extension that adds multi-threaded parallel computing support. Cilk Plus provides the cilk_for, cilk_spawn, and cilk_sync programming keywords for simple yet effective parallel programming.

Openness/Sharing

• New devices like the Nest thermostat, the Dropcam camera, and various wearables do a pretty good job of talking to the internet, letting you easily monitor and use them through online dashboards. But such tools would be so much more useful if they also traded information on their own. It’s nice if you car tires let you know when they’re low via a web dashboard. But it’s even nicer if they can tell an air compressor exactly how much air they need and whose bank account to bill for it.

Open Data

• At the Open Education Working Group we are interested in all aspects of open education, from Open Education Resources (OERs) and new learning and teaching practices, to open source tools and open licenses.

Programming

• The Apache Infrastructure team has gotten Git migrations down pat. Just ask the Apache Hadoop project, which moved from Subversion to Git in less than 10 days.

Leftovers

• Today we finally had the launch of new iProducts, the two new iPhone models and the Apple Watch (aka iWatch). This blog talks about the more relevant Apple move. Not the significant upgrade to its popular iPhone line (I will discuss those in a later blog posting). This is about the other new iThing, the Apple Watch. What will eventually be known rather as the iFlop.

• Basically, there are two kinds of credit card transactions: card-present, and card-not-present. The former is cheaper because there’s less risk of fraud. The article says that Apple has negotiated the card-present rate for its iPhone payment system, even though the card is not present. Presumably, this is because of some other security features that reduce the risk of fraud.

• The Free Software Foundation encourages users to avoid all Apple products, in the interest of their own freedom and the freedom of those around them.

Security

• OpenSSL has been having a rough go of it for some time thanks to Heartbleed and a handful of other critical vulnerabilities. Not only did those bugs put commerce and communication at risk, but they opened many people’s eyes as to how omnipresent the open source crypto implementation is.

Finance

• Keith Skeoch, Executive Director of Standard Life, is on the Board of Reform Scotland, the neo-conservative lobby group which wants to abolish the minimum wage, privatize the NHS and pensions, and still further restrict trade unions.

• The UK as a rule is very quick to jump on a “welfare state” bandwagon when the public feels someone is getting an easy ride. Thankfully I’ve never needed welfare/benefits at any point in my life, but I fully support the facility to be there for those in need. The press make a very good job of demonizing those on benefits and whilst there are a minority of cases where there has been abuse/fraud of the system, the vast majority of people don’t get the “easy life” that is promoted in the press and certainly are not in that position by choice. Talking of the easy life though, there’s one family who every tax payer in the UK already pay a lot of money for. There’s one family who not only get the best in life – an almost private health care service from the NHS, get driven around, have their own security and will never want for anything in their lives. Who? The Royal Family of course.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• I had honestly hoped that yesterday’s story about the Huffington Post finally retracting its series of totally bogus articles (mostly written by Shiva Ayyadurai or his colleagues and friends, but a few by its actual “journalists”), pretending to argue that V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai had “invented email,” would be the end of this story. Ayyadurai has built up quite a reputation around this false claim, even though it’s been debunked over and over and over again.

Privacy

• NEXT time you settle in for a night of television, pay attention to the adverts. Do they seem a little more personal than usual? If so, you are not alone – TV networks are increasingly using techniques borrowed from online advertising to show different ads to different people in the hope of better targeting customers.

• It used to be that everyone watching a channel saw the same ad at the same time, with perhaps some variation depending on your location. Now your neighbour with children could see a toy ad, while you get one for luxury cars. This week it was revealed that some US networks have started targeting people based on their voting record as political parties attempt to scoop up swing voters.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• A consortium of technology companies, many of which depend on speedy and dependable access to their websites, are launching a very public protest today against controversial proposed changes to net neutrality regulations. The Internet Association and companies ranging from Reddit to Mozilla to Automattic will use rotating “still loading” icons on protest banners to conjure up images of the slow Internet speeds they envision if the FCC does away with existing net neutrality regulations. Clicking on the banners will take users to information about net neutrality.

• Twitter, Netflix and Reddit will take part in an “internet slowdown” protest in favour of net neutrality on Wednesday.

• They are among dozens of firms worried that proposed new regulations will mean extra charges for fast internet access.

• The Internet Slowdown is a SOPA-like protest to raise awareness about net neutrality in the US. The movement’s aim is for you to ring up your lawmakers to to support net neutrality in future bills that they vote on regarding net neutrality.

• To illustrate the point of the “fast lane/slow lane” approach proposed by the Federal Communications Commission, some of the biggest tech players today are leading a symbolic “Internet Slowdown” on their websites in what could be the largest virtual political protest since the 2012 blackouts in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

• IBM, Cisco, Intel, and Sandvine ask US not to regulate broadband as a utility.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Rightscorp, a prominent piracy monitoring firm that works with Warner Bros. and other copyright holders, wants Grande Communications to reveal the identities alleged pirates linked to 30,000 IP-addresses/timestamp combinations. Unlike other providers the Texas ISP refused to give in easily, instead deciding to fight the request in court.

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